"I ain't goin' to have you do that long," he said—"workin' at that rate for no more money. That Mrs. William Pendergrass that lets out these hoods is as bad as any factory boss in the country."

"Well, she got the chance," said Fanny, "and they won't let out the work except that way; they can get it done so much cheaper."

"Well, you sha'n't have it, anyhow," said Andrew, smiling mysteriously.

"Why, you ain't goin' to work again, be you, Andrew?"

"You wait."

"Well, don't you talk the way poor Jim did. Eva wasn't going to crochet any more hoods, and now Jim's out of work again. Eva told me yesterday that she didn't know where the money was comin' from. Jim's mother owns the place, and it ain't worth much, anyhow, and they can't take it from her in her lifetime, even if she was willing to let it go. Eva said she was goin' to try again for work herself in the shop. She thought maybe there might be some kind of a job she could get. Don't you talk like Jim did about his good-for-nothin' mining stock. I've been glad enough that you had sense enough to keep what little we had where 'twas safe."

"Ain't it most time for Ellen to be comin' home?" asked Andrew, to turn the conversation, as he felt somewhat guilty and uncomfortable, though his eyes were jubilant. He had very little doubt about the success of his venture. As it is with a man who yields to love for the first time in his life, it was with Andrew in his tardy subjection to the hazards of fortune. He was a much more devoted slave than those who had long wooed her. He had always taken nothing but the principal newspaper published in Rowe, but now he subscribed to a Boston paper, the one which had the fullest financial column, though Fanny exclaimed at his extravagance.

Along in midsummer, in the midst of Ellen's vacation, the mining stock dropped fast a point or more a day. Andrew's heart began to sink, though he was far from losing hope. He used to talk it over with the men who advised him to buy, and come home fortified.

All he had to do was to be patient; the fall meant nothing wrong with the mine, only the wrangle of speculators. "It's like a football, first on one side, and then on the other," said the man, "but the football's there all the same, and if it's that you want, you're all right."

One night when Nahum Beals and Atkins and John Sargent were in, Andrew repeated this wisdom, concealing the fact of its personal application. He was anxious to have some confirmation.

"I suppose it's about so," he said.

Then John Sargent spoke up. "No, it is not so," he said—"that is, not in many cases. There isn't any football—that's the trouble. There's nothing but the money; a lot of fools have paid for it when it never existed out of their imagination."

"About so," said Nahum Beals. Andrew and Atkins exchanged glances. Atkins was at once sympathizing and triumphant.

"Lots of those things appear to be doing well, and to be all right," said Andrew, uneasily. "The directors keep saying that they are in a prosperous condition, even if the stock drops." He almost betrayed himself.

John Sargent laughed that curious, inflexible laugh of his. "Lord, I know all about that," said he. "I had some once. First one thing and then another came up to hinder the working of the mine and the payments of dividends. First there wasn't any water, an unprecedented dry season in those parts, oldest inhabitants for evidence. Then there was too much water, no way to mine except they employed professional divers, everything under water. Then the transportation was to pay; then, when that was remedied, the ore didn't come out in shape to transport in the rough and had to be worked up on the premises, and new mills had to be built and new machinery put in, and a few little Irish dividends were collected for that. Then when they got the mills up and the machinery in, they struck another kind of ore that ought to be transported; then there came a landslide and carried half the road into a canon. So it went on, one thing and another. If ever that darned mine had got into working order, right kind of ore, water enough and not too much, roads and machinery all right, and everything swimming, the Day of Judgment would have come."

"Did you ever get anything out of it?" inquired Andrew.

"Anything out of it?" repeated the other. "Yes, I got enough worldly wisdom never to buy any more mining stock, after I had paid assessments on it for two years and the whole thing went to pieces."

"It may come up yet," said Andrew.

"There's nothing to come up," said John Sargent. He had been away from Rowe a year, but had just returned, and was again boarding with Atkins, and all the family lived on his board money. Andrew and Nahum Beals were smoking pipes. Andrew gently, like a philosopher, who smokes that he may dream; Nahum with furious jets and frequent removals of his pipe for scowling speeches. John Sargent did not smoke at all. He had left off cigars first, then even his pipe. He gave the money which he saved thereby to Mrs. Atkins as a bonus on his board money.

The lamp burned dimly in the blue fog of tobacco smoke, and the windows where the curtains were not drawn were blanks of silvery moonlight. Ellen sat on the doorstep outside and heard the talk. She did not understand it, nor take much interest in it. Their minds were fixed upon the way of living, and hers upon life itself. She could bring her simplicity to bear upon the world-old question of riches and poverty and labor, but this temporal adjunct of stocks and markets was as yet beyond her. Her mother had gone to her aunt Eva's and she sat alone out in the wide mystery of the summer night, watching the lovely shift of radiance and shadows, as she might have watched the play of a kaleidoscope, seeing the beauty of the new combinations, and seeing without comprehending the unit which governed them all. The night was full of cries of insistent life and growth, of birds and insects, of calls of children, and now and then the far-away roar of railroad trains. It was nearly midsummer. The year was almost at its height, but had not passed it. Growth and bloom was still in the ascendant, and had not yet attained that maturity of perfection beyond which is the slope of death.

Everywhere about her were the revolutions of those unseen wheels of nature whose immortal trend is towards the completion of time, and whose momentum can overlap the grave; and the child was within them and swept onward with the perfecting flowers, and the ripening fruit, and the insects which were feeling their wings; and all unconsciously, in a moment as it were, she unfolded a little farther towards her own heyday of bloom. Suddenly from those heights of the primitive and the eternal upon which a child starts and where she still lingered she saw her future before her, shining with new lights, and a wonderful conviction of bliss to come was over her. It was that conviction which comes at times to all unconquered souls, and which has the very essence of truth in it, since it overleaps the darkness of life that lies between them and that bliss. Suddenly Ellen felt that she was born to great happiness, and all that was to come was towards that end. Her heart beat loud in her ears. There was a whippoorwill calling in some trees to the left; the moon was dim under a golden dapple of clouds. She could not feel her hands or her feet; she seemed to feel nothing except her soul.

Then she heard, loud and sweet and clear, a boy's whistle, one of the popular tunes of the day. It came nearer and nearer, and it was in the same key with the child's thoughts and dreams. Then she saw a slender figure dark against the moonlight stop at a fence, and she jumped up and ran towards it with no hesitation through the dewy grass; and it was the boy, Granville Joy. He stood looking at her. He had a handsome, eager face, and Ellen looked at him, her lips parted, her face like a lily in the white light.

"Hulloo," said the boy.

"Hulloo," Ellen responded, faintly.

Granville extended one rough, brown, boyish hand over the fence, and Ellen laid her little, soft hand in it. He pulled her gently close, then Ellen lifted her face, and the boy bent his, and the two kissed each other over the fence. Then the boy went on down the street, but he did not whistle, and Ellen went back to the doorstep, and, looking about to be sure that none of the men in the sitting-room saw, pulled off one little shoe and drew forth a sprig of southernwood, or boy's-love, which was crushed under her foot.

That day Floretta Vining had told her that if she would put a sprig of boy's-love in her shoe, the very first boy she met would be the one she was going to marry; and Ellen, who was passing from one grade of school to another, had tried it.



Chapter XIV

The high-school master was a distant relative of the Lloyd's, through whom he had obtained the position. One evening when he was taking tea with them at Cynthia Lennox's, he spoke of Ellen. "I have one really remarkable scholar," he said, with a curious air of self-gratulation, as if he were principally responsible for it; "her name is Brewster—Ellen Brewster."

"Good land! That must be the child that ran away five or six years ago, and all the town up in arms over it," said Mrs. Norman Lloyd. "Don't you remember, Cynthia?"

"Yes," replied Cynthia, and continued pouring tea. Cynthia was very little changed. In some faces time seems to engrave lines delicately, once for all, and then lay by. She was rather more charming now than when one had looked at her with any expectancy of youth, since there was now no sense of disappointment.

"I remember that," said Norman Lloyd. "The child would never tell where she had been. A curious case."

"Well," said the school-master, "leaving that childish episode out of the question, she has a really remarkable mind. If she were a boy, I should advise a thorough education and a profession. I should as it is, if her family were able to bear the expense. She has that intuitive order of mind which is wonderful enough, though not, after all, so rare in a girl; but in addition she has the logical, which, according to my experience, is almost unknown in a woman. She ought to have an education."

"But," said Risley, "what is the use of educating that unfortunate child?"

"What do you mean?"

"What I say. What is the use? There she is in her sphere of life, the daughter of a factory operative, in all probability in after-years to be the wife of one and the mother of others. Nothing but a rich marriage can save her, and that she is not likely to make. Milk-maids are more likely to make rich marriages than factory girls; there is a certain savor of romance about milk, and the dewy meadows, and the breath of kine, but a shoe factory is brutally realistic and illusionary. Now, why do you want to increase the poor child's horizon farther than her little feet can carry her? Fit her to be a good female soldier in the ranks of labor, to be a good wife and mother to the makers of shoes, to wash and iron their uniforms of toil, to cook well the food which affords them the requisite nourishment to make shoes, to appreciate book-lore, which is a pleasure and a profit to the makers of shoes; possibly in the non-event of marriage she will make shoes herself. The system of education in our schools is all wrong. It is both senseless and futile. Look at the children filing past to school, and look at their fathers, and their mothers too, filing past to the factory. Look at their present, and look at their future. And look at the trash taught them in their text-books—trash from its utter dissociation with their lives. You might as well teach a Zulu lace-work, instead of the use of the assagai."

"Now look here, Mr. Risley," said the school-master, his face flushing, "is not—I beg your pardon, of course—this view of yours a little narrow and ultra-conservative? You do not want to establish a permanent factory-operative class in this country, do you? That is what your theory would ultimately tend towards. Ought not these children be given their chance to rise in the ranks; ought they to be condemned to tread in the same path as their fathers?"

"I would have those little paths which intersect every unoccupied field in this locality worn by the feet of these men and their children after them unto the third and fourth generation," said Risley. "If not, where is our skilled labor?"

"Oh, Mr. Risley," said Mrs. Lloyd, anxiously, "you wouldn't want all those dear little children to work as hard as their fathers, and not do any better, would you?"

"If they don't, who is going to make our shoes, dear Mrs. Lloyd?" asked Risley.

Mrs. Lloyd and the school-master stared at him, and Lloyd laughed his low, almost mirthless laugh.

"Don't you know, Edward," he said, "that Mr. Risley is not in earnest, and speaks with the deadly intent of an anarchist with a bomb in his bag? He is the most out-and-out radical in the country. If there were a strike, and I did not yield to the demands of the oppressed, and imported foreign labor, I don't know that my life would be safe from him."

"Then you do approve of a higher education?" asked the school-master, while Mrs. Lloyd stared from one to the other in bewilderment.

"Yes, if we and our posterity have to go barefoot," said Risley, laughing out with a sudden undertone of seriousness.

"I suppose everybody could get accustomed to going barefoot after a while," said Mrs. Lloyd. "Do you suppose that dear little thing was barefooted when she ran away, Cynthia?"

Risley answered as if he had been addressed. "I can vouch for the fact that she was not, Mrs. Lloyd," he said. "They would sooner have walked on red-hot ploughshares themselves than let her."

"Her father is getting quite an old man," Norman Lloyd said, with no apparent relevancy, as if he were talking to himself.

All the time Cynthia Lennox had been quietly sitting at the head of the table. When the rest of the company had gone, and she and Risley were alone, seated in the drawing-room before the parlor fire, for it was a chilly day, she turned her fair, worn face towards him on the crimson velvet of her chair. "Do you know why I did not speak and tell them where the child was that time?" she asked.

"Because of your own good sense?"

"No; because of you."

He looked at her adoringly. She was older than he, her beauty rather recorded than still evident on her face; she had been to him from the first like a fair, forbidden flower behind a wall of prohibition, but nothing could alter his habit of loving her.

"Yes," said she. "It was more on your account than on my own; confession would be good for the soul. The secret has always rankled in my pride. I would much rather defy opinion than fly before it. But I know that you would mind. However, there was another reason."

"What?"

She hesitated a little and colored, even laughed a little, embarrassed laugh which was foreign to her. "Well, Lyman," said she, finally, "one reason why I did not speak was that I see my way clear to making up to that child and her parents for any wrong which I may have done them by causing them a few hours' anxiety. When she has finished the high-school I mean to send her to college."



Chapter XV

When Ellen was about sixteen, in her second year at the high-school, her own family never looked at her without a slight shock of wonder, as before the unexpected. Her mates, being themselves in the transition state, received her unquestioningly as a fellow-traveller, and colored like themselves with the new lights of the journey. But Ellen's father and mother and grandmother never ceased regarding her with astonishment and admiration and something like alarm. While they regarded Ellen with the utmost pride, they still privately regretted this perfection of bloom which was the forerunner of independence of the parent stalk—at least, Andrew did. Andrew had grown older and more careworn; his mine had not yet paid any dividends, but he had scattering jobs of work, and with his wife's assistance had managed to rub along, and his secret was still safe.

One day in February there was a half-holiday. Lloyd's was shut for the rest of the day, for his brother in St. Louis was dead, and had been brought to Rowe to be buried, and his funeral was at two o'clock.

"Goin' to the funeral, old man?" one of Andrew's fellow-workmen had asked, jostling him as he went out of the shop at noon. Before Andrew could answer, another voice broke in fiercely. It belonged to Joseph Atkins, who was ghastly that day.

"I ain't goin' to no funerals," he said; "guess they won't shut up shop for mine." Then he coughed. His daughter Abby, who had been working in the factory for some time then, pressed close behind her father, and the expression in her face was an echo of his.

"When I strike, that's what I'm going to strike for—to have the shop shut up the day of my funeral," said she; and the remark had a ghastly flippancy, contradicted by her intense manner. A laugh went around, and a young fellow with a handsome, unshaven face caught her by the arm.

"You'd better strike to have the shop shut up the day you're married," said he; but Abby flung away from him.

"I'll thank you to let me alone, Tom Hardy," she said, with a snap; and the men laughed harder.

Abby was attractive to men in spite of her smallness and leanness and incisiveness of manner. She was called mighty smart and dry, which was the shop synonym for witty, and her favors, possibly because she never granted them, were accounted valuable. Abby Atkins had more admirers than many a girl who was prettier and presumably more winning in every way, and could have married twice to their once. But Abby had no wish for a lover. "I've got all I can do to earn my own living and the living of them that belong to me," said she.

That afternoon Andrew Brewster stayed at home. After dinner Eva Tenny and her little girl came in, and Ellen went down street on an errand.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster was crossing her yard to her son's house when she saw Ellen passing, and paused to gaze at her with that superb pride which pertains to self and is yet superior to it. It was the idealized pride of her own youth. When she proceeded again against the February gusts, it was with an unconscious aping of her granddaughter's freedom of gait. Mrs. Zelotes wore an old red cashmere scarf crossed over her bosom; she held up her black skirts in front, and they trailed pointedly in the rear; she also stood well back on her heels, and when she paused in the wind-swept yard presented a curious likeness to an old robin pausing for reconnoitre. Fanny and Eva Tenny in the next house saw her coming.

"Look at her holding up her dress in front and letting it drag in the back," said Eva. "It always seemed to me there was somethin' wrong about any woman that held up her dress in front and let it drag behind."

Eva retained all the coarse beauty of her youth, but lines of unalterable hardness were fixed on her forehead and at her mouth corners, and the fierce flush in her cheeks was as set as paint. Her beauty had endured the siege; no guns of mishaps could affect it, but that charm of evanescence which awakens tenderness was gone. Jim Tenny's affection seemed to be waning, and Eva looked at herself in the glass even when bedecked with tawdry finery, and owned that she did not wonder. She strained up her hair into the latest perkiness of twist, and crimped it, and curled her feathers, and tied her ribbons not as much in hope as in a stern determination to do her part towards the furbishing of her faded star of attraction. "Jim don't act as if he thought so much of me, an' I dun'no' as I wonder," she told her sister.

Fanny looked at her critically. "You mean you ain't so good-lookin' as you used to be?" said she.

Eva nodded.

"Well, if that is all men care for us," said Fanny.

"It ain't," said Eva, "only it's the key to it. It's like losin' the key and not bein' able to get in the door in consequence."

"It wa'n't my husband's key," said Fanny, with a glance at her own face, faded as to feature and bloom, but intensified as to love and daily duty, like that of a dog sharpened to one faithfulness of existence.

"Andrew ain't Jim," said Eva, shortly.

"I know he ain't," Fanny assented, with emphasis.

"But I wouldn't swap off my husband for a dozen of yours," said Eva.

"Well, I wouldn't swap off mine for a thousand of yours," returned Fanny, sharply; and there might have been one of the old-time tussles between the sisters had not Eva's violent, half-bitter sense of humor averted it. She broke into a hard laugh.

"Good Lord," she said, "I dun'no' as I should want a thousand like Jim. Seems to me it would be considerable care."

Fanny began to speak, but checked herself. She had heard rumors regarding Jim Tenny of late and had flown fiercely with denial at the woman who told her, and had not repeated them to her sister.

She was thinking how she had heard that Jim had been seen driving in Wenham with Aggie Morse several times lately. Aggie Morse had been Aggie Bemis, Jim's old sweetheart. She had married a well-to-do merchant in Wenham, who died six months before and left her with considerable property. It was her own smart little turn-out in which she had been seen with Jim.

Eva was working in the shop, and Jim had been out of employment for nearly a year, and living on his wife. There was a demand for girls and not for men just then, so Jim loafed. His old mother cared for the house as well as she was able, and Eva did the rest nights and mornings. At first Jim had tried to help about the house-work, but Eva had interfered.

"It ain't a man's work," said she. "Your mother can leave the hard part of it till I get home." Eva used to put the money she earned surreptitiously into her husband's pockets that he might not feel his manly pride injured, but she defeated her own ends by her very solicitude. Jim Tenny began to reason that his wife saw his shame and ignominious helplessness, else she would not have been so anxious to cover it. The stoop of discouragement which Eva used to fear for his shoulders did not come, but, instead, something worse—the defiant set-back of recklessness. He took his wife's earnings and despised himself. Whenever he paid a bill, he was sure the men in the store said, the minute his back was turned, "It's his wife's money that paid for that." He took to loafing on sunny corners, and eying the passers-by with the blank impudence of regard of those outside the current of life. When his wife passed by on her way from the shop he nodded to her as if she were a stranger, and presently followed her home at a distance. He would not be seen on the street with her if he could avoid it. If by any chance when he was standing on his corner of idleness his little girl came past, he melted away imperceptibly. He could not bear it that the child should see him standing there in that company of futility and openly avowed inadequacy. The child was a keen-eyed, slender little girl, resembling neither father nor mother, but looking rather like her paternal grandmother, who was a fair, attenuated woman, with an intelligence which had sharpened on herself for want of anything more legitimate, and worn her out by the unnatural friction. The little Amabel, for Eva had been romantic in the naming of her child, was an old-fashioned-looking child in spite of Eva's careful decoration of the little figure in the best childish finery which she could muster.

Little Amabel was reading a child's book at another window. When Mrs. Zelotes entered she eyed her with the sharpness and inscrutable conclusions therefrom of a kitten, then turned a leaf in her book.

When Mrs. Zelotes had greeted her daughter-in-law and Eva, she looked with disapproval at Amabel.

"When I was a little girl I should have been punished if I hadn't got up and curtsied and said good-afternoon when company came in," she remarked, severely.

Amabel was not a favorite outside of her own family. People used to stare aghast at her unexpected questions and demands delivered in a shrill clarion as from some summit of childish wisdom, and they said she was a queer child. She yielded always to command from utter helplessness, but the why of obedience was strongly alert within her. The child might have been in some subtle and uncanny fashion the offspring of her age and generation instead of her natural parents, she was so unlike either of them, and so much a product of the times, with her meekness and slavishness of weakness and futility, and her unquenchable and unconquerable vitality of dissent.

Ellen adored the little Amabel. Presently, when she returned from her errand down-town, she cried out with delight when she saw her; and the child ran to meet her, and clung to her, with her flaxen head snuggled close to her cheek. Ellen caught the child up, seated herself, and sat cuddling her as she used to cuddle her doll.

"You dear little thing!" she murmured, "you dear little thing! You did come to see Ellen, didn't you?" And the child gazed up in the young girl's face with a rapt expression. Nothing can express the admiration, which is almost as unquestionable as worship, of a very little girl for a big one. Amabel loved her mother with a rather unusual intensity for a child, but Ellen was what she herself would be when she was grown up. Through Ellen her love of self and her ambition budded into blossom. Ellen could do nothing wrong because she did what she herself would do when she was grown. She never questioned Ellen for her reasons.

Mrs. Zelotes kept looking at the two, with pride in Ellen and disapproval of her caresses of the child. "Seems to me you might speak to your own folks as well as to have no eyes for anybody but that child," she said, finally.

"Why, grandma, I spoke to you just a little while ago," returned Ellen. "You know I saw you just a few minutes before I went down-town." Ellen straightened the child on her knees, and began to try to twist her soft, straight flaxen locks into curls. Andrew lounged in from the kitchen and sat down and regarded Ellen fondly. The girl's cheeks were a splendid color from her walk in the cold wind, her hair around her temples caught the light from the window, and seemed to wreathe her head with a yellow flame. She tossed the child about with lithe young arms, whose every motion suggested reserves of tender strength. Ellen was more beautiful than she had ever been before, and yet something was gone from her face, though only temporarily, since the lines for the vanished meaning was still there. All the introspection and dreaminess and poetry of her face were gone, for the girl was, for the time, overbalanced on the physical side of her life. The joy of existence for itself alone was intoxicating her. The innocent frivolities of her sex had seized her too, and the instincts which had not yet reached her brain nor gone farther than her bounding pulses of youth. "Ellen is getting real fond of dress," Fanny often said to Andrew. He only laughed at that. "Well, pretty birds like pretty feathers, and no wonder," said he. But he did not laugh when Fanny added that Ellen seemed to think more about the boys than she used to. There was scarcely a boy in the high-school who was not Ellen's admirer. It was a curious happening in those days when Ellen was herself in much less degree the stuff of which dreams are made than she had been and would be thereafter, that she was the object of so many. Every morning when she entered the school-room she was reflected in a glorious multiple of ideals in no one could tell how many boyish hearts. Floretta Vining began to imitate her, and kept close to Ellen with supremest diplomacy, that she might thereby catch some of the crumbs of attention which fell from Ellen's full table. Often when some happy boy had secured a short monopoly of Ellen, his rival took up with Floretta, and she was content, being one of those purely feminine things who have no pride when the sweets of life are concerned. Floretta dressed her hair like Ellen's, and tied her neck-ribbons the same way; she held her head like her, she talked like her, except when the two girls were absolutely alone; then she sometimes relapsed suddenly, to Ellen's bewilderment, into her own ways, and her blue eyes took on an expression as near animosity as her ingratiating politic nature could admit.

Ellen did not affiliate as much with Floretta as with Maria Atkins. Abby had gone to work in the shop, and so Ellen did not see so much of her. Maria was not as much a favorite with the boys as she had been since they had passed and not yet returned to that stage when feminine comradeship satisfies; so Ellen used to confide in her with a surety of sympathy and no contention. Once, when the girls were sleeping together, Ellen made a stupendous revelation to Maria, having first bound her to inviolable secrecy. "I love a boy," said she, holding Maria's little arm tightly.

"I know who," said Maria, with a hushed voice.

"He kissed me once, and then I knew it," said Ellen.

"Well, I guess he loves you," said Maria. Ellen shivered and drew a fluttering sigh of assent. Then the two girls lay in each other's arms, looking at the moonlight which streamed in through the window. God knew in what realms of pure romance, and of passion so sublimated by innocence that no tinge of earthliness remained, the two wandered in their dreams.

At last, that afternoon in February, Ellen put down little Amabel and got out her needle-work. She was making a lace neck-tie for her own adornment. She showed it to her grandmother at her mother's command. "It's real pretty," said Mrs. Zelotes. "Ellen takes after the Brewsters; they were always handy with their needles."

"Can uncle sew?" asked little Amabel, suddenly, from her corner, in a tone big with wonder.

Eva and the others chuckled, but Mrs. Zelotes eyed the child severely. "Little girls shouldn't ask silly questions," said she.

Andrew passed his hand with a rough caress over the small flaxen head. "Uncle Andrew can't sew anything but shoes," said he.

Little Amabel's question had aroused in Mrs. Zelotes a carping spirit even against Ellen. Presently she turned to her. "I heard something about you," said she. "I want to know if it is true. I heard that you were walking home from school with that Joy boy one day last week." Ellen looked at her grandmother without flinching, though the pink was over her face and neck.

"Yes'm, I did," said she.

"Well, I think it's about time it was put a stop to," said Mrs. Zelotes. "That Joy boy!"

Then Fanny lost her temper. "I can manage my own daughter, Grandma Brewster," said she, "and I'll thank you to attend to your own affairs."

"You don't seem to know enough to manage her," retorted Mrs. Zelotes, "if you let her go traipsin' round with that Joy boy."

The warfare waged high for a time. Andrew withdrew to the kitchen. Ellen took little Amabel up in her own chamber and showed her her beautiful doll, which looked not a day older, so carefully had she been cherished, than when she first had her. Ellen felt both resentment and shame, and also a fierce dawning of partisanship towards Granville Joy. "Why should my grandmother speak of him so scornfully?" she asked herself. "He is a real good boy."

That night was very cold, a night full of fierce white glitter of frost and moonlight, and raging with a turbulence of winds. Ellen lay awake listening to them. Presently between the whistle of the wind she heard another, a familiar pipe from a boyish throat. She sprang out of bed and peeped from her window, and there was a dark, slight figure out in the yard, and he was looking up at her window, whistling. Shame, and mirth, and also exultation, which overpowered them both, stirred within the child's breast. She had read of things like this. Here was her boy lover coming out this bitter night just for the sake of looking up at her window. She adored him for it. Then she heard a window raised with a violent rasp across the yard, and saw her grandmother's night-capped head thrust forth. She heard her shrill, imperious voice call out quite distinctly, "Boy, who be you?"

The lovelorn whistler ceased his pipe, and evidently, had he consulted his own discretion, would have shown a pair of flying heels, but he walked bravely up to the window and the night-capped head and replied. Ellen could not hear what he said, but she distinguished plainly enough her grandmother's concluding remarks.

"Go home," cried Mrs. Zelotes; "go home just as fast as you can and go to bed. Go home!" Mrs. Zelotes made a violent shooting motion with her hands and her white head as if he were a cat, and Granville Joy obeyed. However, Ellen heard his brave, retreating whistle far down the road. She went back to bed, and lay awake with a fervor of young love roused into a flame by opposition swelling high in her heart. But the next afternoon, after school, Ellen, to Granville Joy's great bliss and astonishment, insinuated herself, through the crowd of out-going scholars, close to him, and presently, had he not been so incredulous, for he was a modest boy, he would have said it was by no volition of his own that he found himself walking down the street with her. And when they reached his house, which was only half-way to her own, she looked at him with such a wistful surprise as he motioned to leave her that he could not mistake it, and he walked on at her side quite to her own house. Granville Joy was a gentle boy, young for his age, which was a year more than Ellen's. He had a face as gentle as a girl's, and really beautiful. Women all loved him, and the school-girls raised an admiring treble chorus in his praise whenever his name was spoken. He was saved from effeminacy by nervous impulses which passed for sustained manly daring. "He once licked a boy a third bigger than he was, and you needn't call him sissy," one girl said once to a decrying friend. To-day, as the boy and girl neared Mrs. Zelotes's house, Granville was conscious of an inward shrinking before the remembrance of the terrible old lady. He expected every minute to hear the grating upward slide of the window and that old voice, which had in it a terrible intimidation of feminine will. Granville had a mother as gentle as himself, and a woman with the strength of her own conviction upon her filled him with awe as of something anomalous. He wondered uneasily what he should do if the old lady were to hail him and call him to an account again, whether it would be a more manly course to face her, or obey, since she was Ellen's grandmother. He kept an uneasy eye upon the house, and presently, when he saw the stern old face at the window, he quailed a little. But Ellen for the first time in her life took his arm, and the two marched past under the fire of Mrs. Zelotes's gaze. Ellen had retaliated, not nobly, but as naturally under the conditions of her life at that time as the branch of a tree blows east before the west wind.



Chapter XVI

Ellen, when she graduated, was openly pronounced the flower of her class. Not a girl equalled her, not a boy surpassed her. When Ellen came home one night about two months before her graduation, and announced that she was to have the valedictory, such a light of pure joy flashed over her mother's face that she looked ten years younger.

"Well, I guess your father will be pleased enough," she said. She was hard at work, finishing women's wrappers of cheap cotton. The hood industry had failed some time before, since the hoods had gone out of fashion. The same woman had taken a contract to supply a large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the neighborhood, paying them the smallest possible prices. This woman was a usurer on a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned usury. Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for which his wife toiled during every minute which she could snatch from her household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh against it. "That woman is cheating you," he would say, to be met with the argument that she herself was only making ten cents on a wrapper. Looked at in that light, the wretched profit of the workers did not seem so out of proportion. It was usury in a nutshell, so infinitesimal as almost to escape detection. Fanny worked every minute which she could secure on these wrappers—the ungainly, slatternly home-gear of other poor women. There was an air of dejected femininity and slipshod drudgery about every fold of one of them when it was hung up finished. Fanny used to keep them on a row of hooks in her bedroom until a dozen were completed, when she carried them to her employer, and Ellen used to look at them with a sense of depression. She imagined worn, patient faces of the sisters of poverty above the limp collars, and poor, veinous hands dangling from the clumsy sleeves.

Fanny would never allow Ellen to assist her in this work, though she begged hard to do so. "Wait till you get out of school," said she. "You've got enough to do while you are in school."

When Ellen told her about the valedictory, Fanny was so overjoyed that she lost sight of her work, and sewed in the sleeves wrong. "There, only see what you have made me do!" she cried, laughing with delight at her own folly. "Only see, you have made me sew in both these sleeves wrong. You are a great child. Another time you had better keep away with your valedictories till I get my wrapper finished." Ellen looked up from the book which she had taken.

"Let me rip them out for you, mother," she said.

"No, you keep on with your study—it won't take me but a minute. I don't know what your father will say. It is a great honor to be chosen to write the valedictory out of that big class. I guess your father will be pleased."

"I hope I can write a good one," said Ellen.

"Well, if you can't, I'd give up my beat," said the mother, looking at her with enthusiasm, and speaking with scornful chiding. "Why don't you go over and tell your grandmother Brewster? She'll be tickled 'most to death."

Ellen had not been gone long when Andrew came home, coming into the yard, bent as if beneath some invisible burden of toil. Just then he had work, but not in Lloyd's. He had grown too old for Lloyd's, and had been discharged long ago.

He had so far been able to conceal from Fanny the fact that he had withdrawn all his little savings to invest in that mining stock. The stock had not yet come up, as he had expected. He very seldom had a circular reporting progress nowadays. When he did have one in the post-office his heart used to stand still until he had torn open the envelope and read it. It was uniformly not so hopeful as formerly, while speciously apologetic. Andrew still had faith, although his heart was sick with its long deferring. He could not actually believe that all his savings were gone, sunken out of sight forever in this awful shaft of miscalculation and misfortune. What he dreaded most was that Fanny should find out, as she would have to were he long out of employment.

Andrew, when he entered the house on his return from work, had come to open a door into the room where his wife was, with a deprecating and apologetic air. He gained confidence when, after a few minutes, the sore subject had not been broached.

To-night, as usual, when he came into the sitting-room where Fanny was sewing it was with a sidelong glance of uneasy deprecation towards her, and an attempt to speak easily, as if he had nothing on his mind.

"Pretty warm day," he began, but his wife cut him short. She faced around towards him beaming, her work—a pink wrapper—slid from her lap to the floor.

"What do you think, Andrew?" she said. "What do you s'pose has happened? Guess." Andrew laughed gratefully, and with the greatest alacrity. Surely this was nothing about mining-stocks, unless, indeed, she had heard, and the stocks had gone up, but that seemed to much like the millennium. He dismissed that from his mind before it entered. He stood before her in his worn clothes. He always wore a collar and a black tie, and his haggard face was carefully shaven. Andrew was punctiliously neat, on Ellen's account. He was always thinking, suppose he should meet Ellen coming home from school, with some young ladies whose fathers were rich and did not have to work in the shop, how mortified she might feel if he looked shabby and unkempt.

"Guess, Andrew," she said.

"What is it?" said Andrew.

"Oh, you guess."

"I don't see what it can be, Fanny."

"Well, Ellen has got the valedictory. What's the matter with you? Be you deaf? Ellen has got the valedictory out of all them girls and boys."

"She has, has she?" said Andrew. He dropped into a chair and looked at his wife. There was something about the intense interchange of confidence of delight between these two faces of father and mother which had almost the unrestraint of lunacy. Andrew's jaw fairly dropped with his smile, which was a silent laugh rather than a smile; his eyes were wild with delight. "She has, has she?" he kept repeating.

"Yes, she has," said Fanny. She tossed her head with an incomparable pride; she coughed a little, affected cough. "I s'pose you know what a compliment it is?" said she. "It means that she's smarter than all them boys and girls—the smartest one in her whole class."

"Yes, I s'pose it does," said Andrew. "So she has got it! Well!"

"There she comes now," said Fanny, "and Grandma Brewster."

Andrew borrowed money to buy a gold watch and chain for a graduating gift for his daughter. He would scarcely have essayed anything quite so magnificent, but Fanny innocently tempted him. The two had been sitting in the door in the cool of the evening, one day in June, about two weeks before the graduation, and had just watched Ellen's light muslin skirts flutter out of sight. She had gone down-town to purchase some ribbon for her graduating dress—she and Floretta Vining, who had come over to accompany her. "I feel kind of anxious to have her have something pretty when she graduates," Fanny said, speaking as if she were feeling her way into a mind of opposition. Neither she nor Andrew had ever owned a watch, and the scheme seemed to her breathless with magnificence.

"Yes, she ought to have something pretty," agreed Andrew.

"I don't want her to feel ashamed when she sees the other girls' presents," said Fanny.

"That's so," assented Andrew.

"Well," said Fanny, "I've been thinkin'—"

"What?"

"Well, I've been thinkin' that—of course your mother is goin' to give her the dress, and that's all, of course, and it's a real handsome present. I ain't sayin' a word against that; but there ain't anybody else to give her much except us. Poor Eva 'd like to, but she can't; it takes all she earns, since Jim's out of work, and I don't know what she's goin' to do. So that leaves nobody but us, and I've been thinkin'—I dun'no' what you'll say, Andrew, but I've been thinkin'—s'pose you took a little money out of the bank, and—got Ellen—a watch." Fanny spoke the last word in a faint whisper. She actually turned pale in the darkness.

"A watch?" repeated Andrew.

"Yes, a watch. I've always wanted Ellen to have a gold watch and chain. I've always thought she could, and so she could if you hadn't been out of work so much."

"Yes, she could," said Andrew—"a watch and mebbe a piano. I thought I'd be back in Lloyd's before now. Well, mebbe I shall before long. They say there's better times comin' by fall."

"Well, Ellen will be graduated by that time," said Fanny, "and she ought to have the watch now if she's ever goin' to. She'll never think so much of it. Floretta Vining is goin' to have a watch, too. Mrs. Cross says her mother told her so; said Mr. Vining had it all bought—a real handsome one. I don't believe Sam Vining can afford to buy a gold watch. I don't believe it is all gold, for my part. They 'ain't got as much as we have, if Sam has had work steadier. I don't believe it's gold. I don't want Ellen to have a watch at all unless it's a real good one. It seems to me you'd better take a little money out and buy her one, Andrew."

"Well, I'll see," said Andrew. He had a terrible sense of guilt before Fanny. Suppose she knew that there was no money at all in the bank to take out?

"Well, I'll buy her one if you say so," said he, in a curious, slow, stern voice. In his heart was a fierce rising of rebellion, that he, hard-working and frugal and self-denying all his life, should be denied the privilege of buying a present for his darling without resorting to deception, and even almost robbery. He did not at that minute blame himself in the least for his misadventure with his mining stock. Had not the same relentless Providence driven him to that also? His weary spirit took for the first time a poise of utter self-righteousness in opposition to this Providence, and he blasphemed in his inner closet of self, before the face of the Lord, as he comprehended it.

"Well, I have a sort of set my heart on it," said Fanny.

"She shall have the watch," repeated Andrew, and his voice was fairly defiant.

After Fanny had gone into the house and lighted her lamp, and resumed work on her wrapper, Andrew still sat on the step in the cool evening. There was a full moon, and great masses of shadows seemed to float and hover and alight on the earth with a gigantic brooding as of birds. The trees seemed redoubled in size from the soft indetermination of the moonlight which confused shadow and light, and deceived the eye as with soft loomings out of false distances. There was a tall pine, grown from a sapling since Ellen's childhood, and that looked more like a column of mist than a tree, but the Norway spruces clove the air sharply like silhouettes in ink, and outlined their dark profiles clearly against the silver radiance.

To Andrew, looking at it all, came the feeling of a traveller who passes all scenes whether of joy or woe, being himself in his passing the one thing which remains, and somehow he got from it an enormous comfort.

"We're all travellin' along," he said aloud, in a strained, solemn voice.

"What did you say, Andrew?" Fanny called from the open window.

"Nothin'," replied Andrew.



Chapter XVII

Ellen had always had objective points, as it were, in her life, and she always would have, no matter how long she lived. She came to places where she stopped mentally, for retrospection and forethought, wherefrom she could seem to obtain a view of that which lay behind, and of the path which was set for her feet in advance. She saw the tracked and the trackless. Once, going with Abby Atkins and Floretta in search of early spring flowers, Ellen had lingered and let them go out of sight, and had sat down on a springing mat of wintergreen leaves under the windy outstretch of a great pine, and had remained there quite deaf to shrill halloos. She had sat there with eyes of inward scrutiny like an Eastern sage's, motionless as on a rock of thought, while her daily life eddied around her. Ellen, sitting there, had said to herself: "This I will always remember. No matter how long I live, where I am, and what happens to me, I will always remember how I was a child, and sat here this morning in spring under the pine-tree, looking backward and forward. I will never forget."

When, finally, Abby and Floretta had run back, and spied her there, they had stared half frightened. "You ain't sick, are you, Ellen?" asked Abby, anxiously.

"What are you sitting there for?" asked Floretta.

Ellen had replied that she was not sick, and had risen and run on, looking for flowers, but the flowers for her bloomed always against a background of the past, and nodded with forward flings of fragrance into the future; for the other children, who were wholly of their own day and generation, they bloomed in the simple light of their own desire of possession. They picked only flowers, but Ellen picked thoughts, and they kept casting bewildered side-glances at her, for the look which had come into her eyes as she sat beneath the pine-tree lingered.

It was as if a rose had a second of self-consciousness between the bud and the blossom; a bird between its mother's brooding and the song. She had caught sight of the innermost processes of things, of her wheels of life.

Ellen waked up on that June morning, and the old sensation of a pause before advance was upon her, and the strange solemnity which was almost a terror, from the feeble clutching of her mind at the comprehension of infinity. She looked at the morning sunlight coming between the white slants of her curtains, an airy flutter of her new dress from the closet, her valedictory, tied with a white satin ribbon, on the stand, and she saw quite plainly all which had led up to this, and to her, Ellen Brewster; and she saw also the inevitableness of its passing, the precious valedictory being laid away and buried beneath a pile of future ones; she saw the crowd of future valedictorians advancing like a flock of white doves in their white gowns, when hers was worn out, and its beauty gone, pressing forward, dimming her to her own vision. She saw how she would come to look calmly and coldly upon all that filled her with such joy and excitement to-day; how the savor of the moment would pass from her tongue, and she said to herself that she would always remember this moment.

Then suddenly—since she had in herself an impetus of motion which nothing, not even reflection, could long check—she saw quite plainly a light beyond, after all this should have passed, and the leaping power of her spirit to gain it. And then, since she was healthy, and given only at wide intervals to these Eastern lapses of consciousness from the present, she was back in her day, and alive to all its importance as a part of time.

She felt the bounding elation of tossing on the crest of her wave of success, and the full rainbow glory of it dazzled her eyes. She was first in her class, she was valedictorian, she had a beautiful dress, she was young, she was first. It is a poor spirit, and one incapable of courage in defeat, who feels not triumph in victory. Ellen was triumphant and confident. She had faith in herself and the love and approbation of everybody.

When she was seated with her class on the stage in the city hall, where the graduating exercises were held, she saw herself just as she looked, and it was with a satisfaction which had nothing weakly in its vein, and smiled radiantly and innocently at herself as seen in this mirror of love and appreciation of all who knew her.



When the band stopped playing, and Ellen, who as valedictorian came last as the crown and capsheaf of it all, stepped forward from the semicircle of white-clad girls and seriously abashed boys, there was a subdued murmur and then a hush all over the hall. Andrew and Fanny and the grandmother, seated directly in front of the stage—for they had come early to secure good seats—heard whispers of admiration on every side. It was admiration with no dissent—such jealous ears as theirs could not be deceived. Fanny's face was blazing with the sweet shame of pride in her child; Andrew was pale; the grandmother sat as if petrified, with a proud toss of her head. They looked straight ahead; they dared not encounter each other's eyes, for they were more self-conscious than Ellen. They felt the attention of the whole assembly upon them. Andrew was conscious of feeling ill and faint. His own joy seemed to overwhelm him. He forgot his stocks, he forgot his borrowed money, he forgot Lloyd's; he was perfectly happy at the sight of that beautiful young creature of his own heart, who was preferred before all others in the sight of the whole city. In truth, there was about Ellen a majesty and nobility of youth and innocence and beauty which overawed. The other girls of the class were as young and as pretty, but none of them had that indescribable quality which seemed to raise her above them all. Ellen still kept her blond fairness, but there was nothing of the doll-like which often characterizes the blond type. Although she was small, Ellen's color had the firmness and unwavering of tinted marble; she carried her crown of yellow braids as if it had been gold; she moved and looked and spoke with decision. The violent and intense temperament which she had inherited from two sides of her family had crystallized in her to something more forcible, but also more impressive. However, she was, after all, only a young girl, scarcely more than a child, whatever her principle of underlying character might be, and when she stood there before them all—all her townspeople who represented her world, the human shore upon which her own little individuality beat—when she saw those attentive faces, row upon row, all fixed upon her, she felt her heart pound against her side; she had no sensation of the roll of paper in her hand; an awful terror as of suddenly discovered depths came over her, as the wild clapping of hands to which her appearance had given rise died away. Ellen stood still, holding the valedictory as if it had been a stick. A little wondering murmur began to be heard. Andrew felt as if he were dying. Fanny gripped his arm hard. Mrs. Zelotes had the look of one about to spring. Ellen had the terrible sensation which has in it a nightmare of inability to move, allied with the intensest consciousness. She knew that she was to read her valedictory, she knew that she must raise that white-ribboned roll and read, or else be disgraced forever, and yet she was powerless. But suddenly some compelling glance seemed to arouse her from this lock of nerve and muscle; she raised her eyes, and Cynthia Lennox, on the farther side of the hall, was gazing full at her with an indescribable gaze of passion and help and command. Her own mother's look could not have influenced her. Ellen raised her valedictory, bowed, and began to read. Andrew looked so pale that people nudged one another to look at him. Mrs. Zelotes settled back, relaxing stiffly from her fierce attitude. Fanny wiped her forehead with a cheap lace-bordered handkerchief. There was a stifled sob farther back, that came from Eva Tenny, who sat back on account of a break across the shoulders in the back of her silk dress. Amabel, anaemic and eager in a little, tawdry, cheap muslin frock, sat beside her, with worshipful eyes on Ellen. "What ailed her?" she whispered, hitting her mother with a sharp little elbow. "Hush up!" whispered Eva, angrily, surreptitiously wiping her eyes. In front, directly in her line of vision, sat the woman of whom she was jealous—the young widow, who had been Aggie Bemis, arrayed in a handsome India silk and a flower-laden hat. Eva's hat was trimmed with a draggled feather and a bunch of roses which she had tried to color with aniline dye. When she got home that night she tore the feather out of the hat and flung it across the room. She wished to do it that afternoon every time she looked at the other woman's roses against the smooth knot of her brown hair, and that repressed impulse, with her alarm at Ellen's silence, had made her almost hysterical. When Ellen's clear young voice rose and filled the hall she calmed herself. Ellen had not folded back her first page with a flutter of the white satin ribbons before people began to sit straight and stare at each other incredulously. The subject of the valedictory, as well as those of the other essays, had been allotted, and Ellen's had been "Equality," and she had written a most revolutionary valedictory. Ellen had written with a sort of poetic fire, and, crude as it all was, she might have had the inspiration of a Shelley or a Chatterton as she stood there, raising her fearless young front over the marshalling of her sentiments on the smooth sheets of foolscap. Her voice, once started, rang out clear and full. She had hesitated at nothing, she flung all castes into a common heap of equality with her strong young arms, and she set them all on one level of the synagogue. She forced the employer and his employe to one bench of service in the grand system of things; she gave the laborer, and the laborer only, the reward of labor. As Ellen went on reading calmly, with the steadfastness of one promulgating principles, not the excitement of one carried away by enthusiasm, she began to be interrupted by applause, but she read on, never wavering, her clear voice overcoming everything. She was quite innocently throwing her wordy bomb to the agitation of public sentiment. She had no thought of such an effect. She was stating what she believed to be facts with her youthful dogmatism. She had no fear lest the facts strike too hard. The school-master's face grew long with dismay; he sat pulling his mustache in a fashion he had when disturbed. He glanced uneasily now and then at Mr. Lloyd, and at another leading manufacturer who was present. The other manufacturer sat quite stolid and unsmiling beside a fidgeting wife, who presently arose and swept out with a loud rustle of silks. She looked back once and beckoned angrily to her husband, but he did not stir. He was on the school-board. The school-master trembled when he saw that imperturbable face of storing recollection before him. Mr. Lloyd leaned towards Lyman Risley, who sat beside him and whispered and laughed. It was quite evident that he did not consider the flight of this little fledgling in the face of things seriously. But even he, as Ellen's clearly delivered sentiments grew more and more defined—almost anarchistic—became a little grave in spite of the absurd incongruity between them and the girlish lips. Once he looked in some wonder at the school-teacher as much as to say, "Why did you permit this?" and the young man pulled his mustache harder.

When Ellen finished and made her bow, such a storm of applause arose as had never before been heard at a high-school exhibition. The audience was for the most part composed of factory employes and their families, as most of the graduates were of that class of the community. Many of them were of foreign blood, people who had come to the country expecting the state of things advocated in Ellen's valedictory, and had remained more or less sullen and dissenting at the non-fulfilment of their expectation. One tall Swede, with a lurid flashing of blue eyes under a thick, blond thatch, led the renewed charges of applause. Red spots came on his cheeks, gaunt with high cheekbones; his cold Northern blood was up. He stood upreared against a background of the crowd under the balcony; he stamped when the applause died low; then it swelled again and again like great waves. The Swede brandished his long arms, he shouted, others echoed him. Even the women hallooed in a frenzy of applause, they clapped their hands, they stood up in their seats. Only a few sat silent and contemptuous through all the enthusiasm. Thomas Briggs, the manufacturer, was one of them. He sat like a rock, his great, red, imperturbable face of dissent fixed straight ahead. Mrs. Lloyd clapped wildly, on account of the girl who had read the valedictory. She had slept through the greater part of it, for it was very warm, and the heat always made her drowsy. She kept leaning towards Cynthia as she clapped, and asking in a loud whisper if she wasn't sweet. Cynthia did not applaud, but her delicate face was pale with emotion. Lyman Risley, beside her, was clapping energetically. "She may have a bomb somewhere concealed among those ribbons and frills," he said to Lloyd when the applause was waxing loudest, and Lloyd laughed.

As for Ellen, when the storm of applause burst at her feet, she stood still for a moment bewildered. Then she bowed again and turned to go, then the compelling uproar brought her back. She stood there quite piteous in her confusion. This was too much triumph, and, moreover, she had not the least idea of the true significance of it all. She was like a chemist who had brought together, quite ignorantly and unwittingly, the two elements of an explosive. She thought that her valedictory must have been well done, that they liked it, and that was all. She had no sooner finished reading than the ushers began in the midst of the storm of applause to approach the stage with her graduating presents. They were laden with great bouquets and baskets of flowers, with cards conspicuously attached to most of them. Cynthia Lennox had sent a basket of roses. Ellen took it on her arm, and wondered when she saw the name attached to the pink satin bow on the handle. She did not look again towards Cynthia since the old impulse of concealment on her account came over her. Ellen had great boxes of candy from her boy admirers, that being a favorite token of young affection upon such occasions. She had a gift-book from her former school-teacher, and a ninety-eight-cent gilded vase from Eva and Amabel, who had been saving money to buy it. She heard a murmur of admiration when she had finally reached her seat, after the storm of applause had at last subsided, and she unrolled the packages with trembling fingers.

"My, ain't that handsome!" said Floretta, pressing her muslin-clad shoulder against Ellen's. "My, didn't they clap you, Ellen! What's that in that package?"

The package contained Ellen's new watch and chain. Floretta had already received hers, and it lay in its case on her lap. Ellen looked at the package, not hearing in the least the Baptist minister who had taken his place on the stage, and was delivering an address. She had felt her aunt Eva's and Amabel's eager eyes on her when she unrolled the gaudy vase; now she felt her father's and mother's. The small, daintily tied package was inscribed "Ellen Brewster, from Father and Mother."

"Why don't you open it?" came in her ear from Floretta. Maria was leaning forward also, over her lapful of carnations which John Sargent had presented to her.

"Why don't she open it?" she whispered to Floretta. They were all quite oblivious of the speaker, who moved nervously back and forth in front of them, so screening them somewhat from the observation of the audience. Still Ellen hesitated, looking at the little package and feeling her father's and mother's eyes on her face.

Finally she untied the cord and took out the jeweller's case from the wrapping-paper. "My, you've got one too, I bet!" whispered Floretta. Ellen opened the box, and gazed at her watch and chain; then she glanced at her father and mother down in the audience, and the three loving souls seemed to meet in an ineffable solitude in the midst of the crowd. All three faces were pale—Ellen's began to quiver. She felt Floretta's shoulder warm through her thin sleeve against hers.

"My! you've got one—I said so," she whispered. "It isn't chased as much as mine, but it's real handsome. My, Ellen Brewster, you ain't going to cry before all these people!"

Ellen smiled against a sob, and she gave her head a defiant toss. Down in the audience Fanny had her handkerchief to her eyes, and Andrew sat looking sternly at the speaker. Ellen said to herself that she would not cry—she would not, but she sat gazing down at her flower-laden lap and the presents. The golden disk under her fixed eyes waxed larger and larger, until it seemed to fill her whole comprehension as with a golden light of a suffering, self-denying love which was her best reward of life and labor on the earth.



Chapter XVIII

After the exhibition there was a dance. The Brewsters, even Mrs. Zelotes, remained to see the last of Ellen's triumph. Mrs. Zelotes was firmly convinced that Ellen's appearance excelled any one's in the hall. Not a girl swung past them in the dance but she eyed her white dress scornfully, then her rosy face, and sniffed with high nostrils like an old war-horse. "Jest look at that Vining girl's dress, coarse enough to strain through," she said to Fanny, leaning across Andrew, who was sitting rapt, his very soul dancing with his daughter, his eyes never leaving her one second, following her fair head and white flutter of muslin ruffles and ribbons around the hall.

"Yes, that's so," assented Fanny, but not with her usual sharpness. A wistful softness and sweetness was on her coarsely handsome face. Once she reached her hand over Andrew's and pressed it, and blushed crimson as she did so. Andrew turned and smiled at her. All that annoyed Andrew was that Ellen danced with Granville Joy often, and also with other boys. It disturbed him a little, even while it delighted him, that she should dance at all, that she should have learned to dance. Andrew had been brought up to look upon dancing as an amusement for Louds rather than for Brewsters. It had not been in vogue among the aristocracy of this little New England city when he was young.

Mrs. Zelotes watched Ellen dance with inward delight and outward disapproval. "I don't approve of dancing, never did," she said to Andrew, but she was furious once when Ellen sat through a dance. Towards the end of the evening she saw with sudden alertness Ellen dancing with a new partner, a handsome young man, who carried himself with more assurance than the school-boys. Mrs. Zelotes hit Andrew with her sharp elbow.

"Who's that dancing with her now?" she said.

"That's young Lloyd," answered Andrew. He flushed a little, and looked pleased.

"Norman Lloyd's nephew?" asked his mother, sharply.

"Yes, he's on here from St. Louis. He's goin' into business with his uncle," replied Andrew. "Sargent was telling me about it yesterday. Young Lloyd came into the post-office while we were there." Fanny had been listening. Immediately she married Ellen to young Lloyd, and the next moment she went to live in a grand new house built in a twinkling in a vacant lot next to Norman Lloyd's residence, which was the wonder of the city. She reared this castle in Spain with inconceivable swiftness, even while she was turning her head towards Eva on the other side, and prodding her with an admonishing elbow as Mrs. Zelotes had prodded Andrew. "That's Norman Lloyd's nephew dancing with her now," she said. Eva looked at her, smiling. Directly the idea of Ellen's marriage with the young man with whom she was dancing established full connections and ran through the line of Ellen's relatives as though an electric wire.

As for Ellen, dancing with this stranger, who had been introduced to her by the school-master, she certainly had no thought of a possible marriage with him, but she had looked into his face with a curious, ready leap of sympathy and understanding of this other soul which she met for the first time. It seemed to her that she must have known him before, but she knew that she had not. She began to reflect as they were whirling about the hall, she gazed at that secret memory of hers, which she had treasured since her childhood, and discovered that what had seemed familiar to her about the young man was the face of a familiar thought. Ever since Miss Cynthia Lennox had told her about her nephew, the little boy who had owned and loved the doll, Ellen had unconsciously held the thought of him in her mind. "You are Miss Cynthia Lennox's nephew," she said to young Lloyd.

"Yes," he replied. He nodded towards Cynthia, who was sitting on the opposite side from the Brewsters, with the Norman Lloyds and Lyman Risley. "She used to be like a mother to me," he said. "You know I lost my mother when I was a baby."

Ellen nodded at him with a look of pity of that marvellous scope which only a woman in whom the maternal slumbers ready to awake can compass. Ellen, looking at the handsome face of the young man, saw quite distinctly in it the face of the little motherless child, and all the tender pity which she would have felt for that child was in her eyes.

"What a beautiful girl she is," thought the young man. He smiled at her admiringly, loving her look at him, while not in the least understanding it. He had asked to be presented to Ellen from curiosity. He had not been at the exhibition, and had heard the school-master and Risley talking about the valedictory. "I didn't know that you taught anarchy in school, Mr. Harris," Risley had said. He laughed as he said it, but Harris had colored with an uneasy look at Norman Lloyd, whose face wore an expression of amusement. "Perhaps I should have," he began, but Lloyd interrupted him. "My dear fellow," he said, "you don't imagine that any man in his senses could take seriously enough to be annoyed by it that child's effusion on her nice little roll of foolscap tied with her pretty white satin ribbon?"

"She is just as sweet as she can be," said Mrs. Norman, "and I thought her composition was real pretty. Didn't you, Cynthia?"

"Very," replied Cynthia.

"What your are worrying about it for, Edward, I don't see," said Mrs. Norman to the school-master.

"Well, I am glad if it struck you that way," said he, "but when I heard the applause from all those factory people"—he lowered his voice, since a number were sitting near—"I didn't know, but—" He hesitated.

"That the spark that would fire the mine might be in that pretty little beribboned roll of foolscap," said Risley, laughing. "Well, it was a very creditable production, and it was written with the energy of conviction. The Czar and that little school-girl would not live long in one country, if she goes on as she has begun."

It was then that young Lloyd, who had just come in, and was standing beside the school-master, turned eagerly to him, and asked who the girl was, and begged him to present him.

"Perhaps he'll fall in love with her," said Mrs. Norman, directly, when the two men had gone across the hall in quest of Ellen. Her husband laughed.

"You have not seen your aunt for a long time," Ellen said to young Lloyd, when they were sitting out a dance after their waltz together.

"Not since—I—I came on—with my father when he died," he replied. Again Ellen looked at him with that wonderful pity in her face, and again the young man thought he had never seen such a girl.

"I think your aunt is beautiful," Ellen said, presently, gazing across at Cynthia.

"Yes, she must have been a beauty when she was young."

"I think she is now," said Ellen, quite fervently, for she was able to disabuse her mind of associations and rely upon pure observation, and it was quite true that leaving out of the question Cynthia's age and the memory of her face in stronger lights at closer view, she was as beautiful from where they sat as some graceful statue. Only clear outlines showed at that distance, and her soft hair, which was quite white, lay in heavy masses around the intense repose of her face.

"Yes—s," admitted Robert, somewhat hesitatingly. "She used to think everything of me when I was a little shaver," he said.

"Doesn't she now?"

"Oh yes, I suppose she does, but it is different now. I am grown up. A man doesn't need so much done for him when he is grown up."

Then again he looked at Ellen with eyes of pleading which would have made of the older woman what he remembered her to have been in his childhood, and hers answered again.

Robert did not say anything to her about the valedictory until just before the close of the evening, when their last dance together was over.

"I am sorry I did not have a chance to hear your valedictory," he said. "I could not come early."

Ellen blushed and smiled, and made the conventional school-girl response. "Oh, you didn't miss anything," said she.

"I am sure I did," said the young man, earnestly. Then he looked at her and hesitated a little. "I wonder if you would be willing to lend it to me?" he said, then. "I would be very careful of it, and would return it immediately as soon as I had read it. I should be so interested in reading it."

"Certainly, if you wish," said Ellen, "but I am afraid you won't think it is good."

"Of course I shall. I have been hearing about it, how good it was, and how you broke up the whole house."

Ellen blushed. "Oh, that was only because it was the valedictory. They always clap a good deal for the valedictory."

"It was because it was you, you dear beauty," thought the young man, gazing at her, and the impulse to take her in his arms and kiss that blush seized upon him. "I know they applauded your valedictory because it was worthy of it," said he, and Ellen's eyes fell before his, and the blush crept down over her throat, and up to the soft toss of hair on her temples. The two were standing, and the man gazed at Ellen's pink arms and neck through the lace of her dress, those incomparable curves of youthful bloom shared by a young girl and a rose; he gazed at that noble, fair head bent not so much before him as before the mystery of life, of which a perception had come to her through his eyes, and he said to himself that there never was such a girl, and he also wondered if he saw aright, he being one who seldom entirely lost the grasp of his own leash. Having the fancy and the heart of a young man, he was given like others of his kind to looking at every new girl who attracted him in the light of a problem, the unknown quantity being her possible interest for him, but he always worked it out calmly. He kept himself out of his own shadow, when it came to the question of emotions, in something the same fashion that his uncle Norman did. Now, looking at Ellen Brewster with the whole of his heart setting towards her in obedience to that law which had brought him into being, he yet was saying quite coolly and loudly in his own inner consciousness, "Wait, wait, wait! Wait until to-morrow, see how you feel then. You have felt in much this way before. Wait! Perhaps you don't see it as it is. Wait!"

He realized his own wisdom all the more clearly when Ellen led him to the settee where her relatives sat guarding her graduation presents and her precious valedictory. She presented him gracefully enough. Ellen knew nothing of society etiquette, she had never introduced such a young gentleman as this to any one in her life, but her inborn dignity of character kept her self-poise perfect. Still, when young Lloyd saw the mother coarsely perspiring and fairly aggressive in her delight over her daughter, when poor Andrew hoped he saw him well, and Mrs. Zelotes eyed him with sharp approbation, and Eva, conscious of her shabbiness, bowed with a stiff toss of her head and sat back sullenly, and little Amabel surveyed him with uncanny wisdom divided between himself and Ellen, he became conscious of a slight disappearance of his glamour. He thanked Ellen most heartily for the privilege which she granted him, when she took the valedictory from the heap of flowers, and took his leave with a bow which made Fanny nudge Andrew, almost before the young man's back was turned.

Then she looked at Ellen, but she said nothing. A sudden impulse of delicacy prevented her. There was something about this beloved daughter of hers which all at once seemed strange to her. She began to associate her with the sacred mystery of life as she had never done. Then, too, there was the more superficial association with one of another class which she held in outward despite but inward awe.

Ellen gathered up her presents into her lap, and sat there a few minutes through the last dance, which she had refused to Granville Joy, who went away with nervous alertness for another girl, and nobody spoke to her.

When young Lloyd and Cynthia Lennox and the others left, as they did directly, Fanny murmured, "They've gone," and they all knew what she meant. She was thinking—and so were they all, except Ellen—that that was the reason, because he had to go, that he had not asked Ellen for the last dance.

As for Ellen, she sat looking at her gold watch and chain, which she had taken out of the case. Her face grew intensely sober, and she did not notice when young Lloyd left. All at once she had reflected how her father had never owned a watch in his whole life, though he was a man, but he had given one to her. She reflected how he had so little work, how shabby his clothes were, how he must have gone without himself to buy this for her, and the girl had such a heart of gold that it rose triumphantly loyal to its first loves and tendernesses, and her father's old, worn face came between her and that of the young man who might become her lover.



Chapter XIX

The day after Ellen's graduation there might have been seen a touching little spectacle passing along the main street of Rowe about ten o'clock in the fore-noon. It was touching because it gave evidence of that human vanity common to all, which strives to perpetuate the few small, good things that come into the hard lives of poor souls, and strives with such utter futility. Ellen held up her fluffy skirts daintily, the wind caught her white ribbons and the loose locks of her yellow hair under her white hat. She carried Cynthia Lennox's basket of roses on her arm, and each of the others was laden with bouquets. Little Amabel clasped both slender arms around a great sheaf of roses; the thorns pricked through her thin sleeves, but she did not mind that, so upborne with the elation of the occasion was she. Her small, pale face gazed over the mass of bloom with challenging of admiration from every one whom she met. She was jealous lest any one should not look with full appreciation of Ellen.

Ellen was the one in the little procession who had not unmixed delight in it. She had a certain shamefacedness about going through the streets in such a fashion. She avoided looking at the people whom she met, and kept her head slightly bent and averted, instead of carrying it with the proud directness which was her habit. She felt vaguely that this was the element of purely personal vanity which degrades a triumph, and the weakness of delight and gloating in the faces of her relatives irritated her. It was a sort of unveiling of love, and the girl was sensitive enough to understand it. "Oh, mother, I don't want to have us all go through the street with all these flowers, and me in my white dress," she had said. She had looked at her mother with a shrinking in her eyes which was incomprehensible to the other coarser-natured woman.

"Nonsense," she had said. "Sometimes you have real silly notions, Ellen." Fanny said it adoringly, for even silliness in this girl was in a way worshipful to her. Ellen, with her heart still softened almost to grief by the love shown her on the day before, had yielded, but she was glad when they arrived at the photograph studio. She had particularly dreaded passing Lloyd's, for the thought came to her that possibly young Mr. Lloyd might see her. She supposed that he was likely to be in the office. When they passed the office-windows she looked the other way, but before she was well past, her aunt Eva hit her violently and laughed loudly. Ellen shrank, coloring a deep crimson. Then her mother also laughed, and even Amabel, shrilly, with precocious recognition of the situation. Only Mrs. Zelotes stalked along in silent dignity.

"Don't laugh so loud, he'll hear you," said she, severely.

"It was that young man who was at the hall last night, and he was looking at you awful sharp," said little Amabel to Ellen, squeezing her warm arm, and sending out that shrill peal of laughter again.

"Don't, dear," said Ellen. She felt humiliated, and the more so because she was ashamed of being humiliated by her own mother and aunt. "Why should I be so sensitive to things in which they see no harm?" she asked herself, reprovingly.

As for young Lloyd, he had, ever since he parted with the girl the night before, that sensation of actual contact which survives separation, and had felt the light pressure of her hand in his all night, and along with it that ineffable pain of longing which would draw the substance of a dream to actuality and cannot. He saw her with her coarsely exultant relatives, the inevitable blur of her environments, and felt himself not so much disillusioned as confirmed. He had been constantly saying to himself, when the girl's face haunted his eyes, and her hand in his own, that he was a fool, that he had felt so before, that he must have, that there was no sense in it, that he was Robert Lloyd, and she a good girl, a beautiful girl, but a common sort of girl, born of common people to a common lot. "Now," he said to himself, with a kind of bitter exultation, "there, I told you so." The inconceivable folly of that glance of the mother at him, then at Ellen, and the meaning laughter, repelled him to the point of disgust. He turned his back to the window and resumed his work, but, in spite of himself, the pathos of the picture which he had seen began to force itself upon him, and he thought almost tenderly and forgivingly that she, the girl, had not once looked his way. He even wondered, pityingly, if she had been mortified and annoyed by her mother's behavior. A great anger on Ellen's behalf with her mother seized upon him. How pretty she did look moving along in that little flower-laden procession, he thought, how very pretty. All at once a desire for the photograph which would be taken seized him, for he divined the photograph. However, he said to himself that he would send back the valedictory which he had not yet read by post, with a polite note, and that would be the end.

But it was only the next evening that Robert Lloyd with the valedictory in hand got off the trolley-car in front of the Brewster house. He had proved to himself that it was an act of actual rudeness to return anything so precious and of so much importance to the owner by the post, that he ought to call and deliver it in person. When he regained his equilibrium from the quick sidewise leap from the car, and stood hesitating a little, as one will do before a strange house, for he was not quite sure as to his bearings, he saw a white blur as of feminine apparel in the front doorway. He advanced tentatively up the little path between two rows of flowering bushes, and Ellen rose.

"Good-evening, Mr. Lloyd," she said, in a slightly tremulous voice.

"Oh, good-evening, Miss Brewster," he cried, quickly. "So I am right! I was not sure as to the house."

"People generally tell by the cherry-trees in the yard," replied Ellen, taking refuge from her timidity in the security of commonplace observation, as she had done the night before, giving thereby both a sense of disappointment and elusiveness.

"Won't you walk in?" she added, with the prim politeness of a child who accosts a guest according to rule and precept. Ellen had never, in fact, had a young man make a formal call upon her before. She reflected now, both with relief and trepidation, that her mother was away, having gone to her aunt Eva's. She had an instinct which she resented, that her mother and this young man were on two parallels which could never meet. Her father was at home, seated in the south door with John Sargent and Nahum Beals and Joe Atkins, but she never thought of such a thing as her father's receiving a young man caller, though she would not have doubted so much his assimilating with Robert Lloyd. She understood that the young man might look at her mother with dissent, while she resented it, but with her father it was different.

The group of men at the south door were talking in loud, fervent voices which seemed to rise and fall like waves. Nahum Beals's strained, nervous tones were paramount. "Mr. Beals is talking about the labor question, and he gets quite excited," Ellen remarked, somewhat apologetically, as she ushered young Lloyd into the parlor.

Lloyd laughed. "It sounds as if he were leading an army," he said.

"He is very much in earnest," said the girl.

She placed painstakingly for her guest the best chair, which was a spring rocker upholstered with crush-plush. The little parlor was close and stuffy, and the kerosene-lamp, with the light dimmed by a globe decorated with roses, heated the room still further. This lamp was Fanny's pride. It had, in her eyes, the double glory of high art and cheapness. She was fond of pointing at it, and inquiring, "How much do you think that cost?" and explaining with the air of one who expects her truth to be questioned that it only cost forty-nine cents. This lamp was hideous, the shape was aggressive, a discordant blare of brass, and the roses on the globe were blasphemous. Somehow this lamp was the first thing which struck Lloyd on entering the room. He could not take his eyes from it. As for Ellen, long acquaintance had dulled her eyes. She sat in the full glare of this hideous lamp, and Lloyd considered that she was not so pretty as he had thought last night. Still, she was undeniably very pretty. There was something in the curves of her shoulders, in her pink-and-white cotton waist, that made one's fingers tingle, and heart yearn, and there was an appealing look in her face which made him smile indulgently at her as he might have done at a child. After all, it was probably not her fault about the lamp, and lamps were a minor consideration, and he was finical, but suppose she liked it? Lloyd, sitting there, began to speculate if it were possible for one's spiritual nature to be definitely damaged by hideous lamps. Then he caught sight of a plate decorated with postage-stamps, with a perforated edge through which ribbons were run, and he wondered if she possibly made that.

"They are undoubtedly perfectly moral people," he told his aunt Cynthia afterwards, "but I wonder that they keep such an immoral plate." However, that was before he fell in love with Ellen, while he was struggling with himself in his desire to do so, and making all manner of sport of himself by way of hindrance.

Ellen at that age could have had no possible conception of the sentiment with which the young man viewed her environment. She was sensitive to spiritual discords which might arise from meeting with another widely different nature, but when it came to material things, she was at a loss. Then, too, she was pugnaciously loyal to the glories of the best parlor. She was innocently glad that she had such a nice room into which to usher him. She felt that the marble-top table, the plush lambrequin on the mantle-shelf, the gilded vases, the brass clock, the Nottingham lace curtains, the olive-and-crimson furniture, the pictures in cheap gilt frames, the heavily gilded wall-paper, and the throws of thin silk over the picture corners must prove to him the standing of her family. She felt an ignoble satisfaction in it, for a certain measure of commonness clung to the girl like a cobweb. She was as yet too young to bloom free of her environment, her head was not yet over the barrier of her daily lot; her heart never would be, and that was her glory. Young Lloyd handed her the roll of valedictory as soon as he entered.

"I am very much obliged to you for allowing me to read it," he said.

Ellen took it, blushing. Her heart sank a little. She thought to herself that he probably did not like it. She looked at him proudly and timidly, like a child half holding, half withdrawing its hand for a sweet. It suddenly came to her that she would rather this young man would praise her valedictory than any one else, that if he had been present when she read it in the hall, and she had seen him standing applauding, she could not have contained her triumph and pride. She was not yet in love with him, but she began to feel that in his approbation lay the best coin of her realm.

"It is very well written, Miss Brewster," said Robert, and she flushed with delight.

"Thank you," she said.

But the young man was looking at her as if he had something besides praise in mind, and she gazed at him, shrinking a little as before a blow whose motion she felt in the air. However, he laughed pleasantly when he spoke.

"Do you really believe that?" he asked.

"What?" she inquired, vaguely.

"Oh, all that you say in your essay. Do you really believe that all the property in the world ought to be divided, that kings and peasants ought to share and share alike?"

She looked at him with round eyes. "Why, of course I do!" she said. "Don't you?"

Robert laughed. He had no mind to enter into an argument with this beautiful girl, nor even to express himself forcibly on the opposite side.

"Well, there are a number of things to be considered," he said. "And do you really believe that employer and employes should share alike?"

"Why not?" said she.

Her blue eyes flashed, she tossed her head. Robert smiled at her.

"Why not?" she repeated. "Don't the men earn the money?"

"Well, no, not exactly," said Robert. "There is the capital."

"The profit comes from the labor, not from the capital," said Ellen, quickly. "Doesn't it?" she continued, with fervor, and yet there was a charming timidity, as before some authority.

"Possibly," replied Robert, guardedly; "but the question is how far we should go back before we stop in searching for causes."

"How far back ought we to go?" asked Ellen, earnestly.

"I confess I don't know," said Robert, laughingly. "I have thought very little about it all."

"But you will have to, if you are to be the head of Lloyd's," Ellen said, with a severe accent, with grave, blue eyes full on his face.

"Oh, I am not the head of Lloyd's yet," he answered, easily. "My uncle is far from his dotage. Then, too, you know that I was never intended for a business man, but a lawyer, like my father, if there had not been so little for my father's second wife and the children—" He stopped himself abruptly on the verge of a confidence. "I think I saw you on your way to the photographer to-day," he said, and Ellen blushed, remembering her aunt Eva's violent nudge, and wondering if he had noticed. She gave him a piteous glance.

"Yes," she said. "All the girls have their pictures taken in their graduating dresses with their flowers."

"You looked to me as if the picture would be a great success," said Robert. He longed to ask for one and yet did not, for a reason unexplained to himself. He knew that this innocent, unsophisticated creature would see no reason on earth why he should not ask, and no reason why she should not grant, and on that account he felt prohibited. That night, after he had gone, Ellen wondered why he had not asked for one of her pictures, and felt anxious lest he should have seen the nudge.

"Well," she said to herself, "if he finds any fault with anything that my mother has done, I don't want him to have one."

Robert stayed a long time. He kept thinking that he ought to go, and also that he was bored, and yet he felt a singular unwillingness to leave, possibly because of his sense that the visit was in a measure forbidden by prudence. The longer he remained, the prettier Ellen looked to him. New beauties of line and color seemed to grow apparent in the soft glow from the hideous lamp. There was a wonderful starry radiance in her eyes now and then, and when she turned her head her eyeballs gleamed crimson and her hair seemed to toss into flame. When she spoke, he was conscious of unknown depths of sweetness in her voice, and it was so with her smile and her every motion. There was about the girl a mystery, not of darkness but of light, which seemed to draw him on and on and on without volition. And yet she said nothing especially remarkable, for Ellen was only a young girl, reared in a little provincial city in common environments. She would have been a great genius had she more than begun to glimpse the breadth and freedom of the outer world through her paling of life. She was too young and too unquestioning of what she had learned from her early loves.

"Have you always lived here in Rowe?" asked Lloyd.

"Yes," said she. "I was born here, and I have lived here ever since."

"And you have never been away?"

"Only once. Once I went to Dragon Beach and stayed a fortnight with mother." She said this with a visible sense of its importance. Dragon Beach was some ten miles from Rowe, a cheap seashore place, built up with flimsy summer cottages of factory hands. Andrew had hired one for a fortnight once when Ellen was ailing, and it had been the event of a lifetime to the family. They hereafter dated from the year "we went to Dragon Beach."

Lloyd looked with a quick impulse of compassionate tenderness at this child who had been away from Rowe once to Dragon Beach. He had his own impressions of Dragon Beach and also of Rowe.

"I suppose you enjoyed that?" said he.

"Very much. The sea is beautiful."

So, after all, it was the sea which she had cared for at Dragon Beach, and not the clam-bakes and merry-go-rounds and women in wrappers in the surf. Robert felt rebuked for thinking of anything but the sea in his memory of Dragon Beach; there was a wonderful water-view there.

All the time they sat there in the parlor, the murmur of conversation at the south door continued, and now and again over it swelled the fervid exhortations of Nahum Beals. Not a word could be distinguished, but the meaning was beyond doubt. That voice was full of denunciation, of frenzied appeal, of warning.

"Who is it?" asked Lloyd, after an unusually loud burst.

"Mr. Beals," replied Ellen, uneasily. She wished that he would not talk so loud.

"He sounds as if he were preaching fire and brimstone," said Robert.

"No, he is talking about the labor question," replied Ellen.

Then she looked confused, for she remembered that this young man's uncle was the head of Lloyd's, that he himself would be the head of Lloyd's some day. All at once, along with another feeling which seemed about to conquer her, came a resentment against this young man with his fine clothes and his gentle manners. Two men passed the windows and one of them looked in, and when the electric-light flashed on his face she saw Granville Joy, and the man with him was in his shirt-sleeves. She saw those white shirt-sleeves swing into the darkness, and felt at once antagonized against herself and against Robert, and yet she knew that she had never seen a man like him.

"I suppose he has settled it," said Robert.

"I don't know," replied Ellen.

"He sounds dangerous."

"Oh, no. He is a good man. He wouldn't hurt anybody. He has always talked that way. He used to come here and talk when I was a child. It used to frighten me at first, but it doesn't now. It is only the way that poor people are treated that frightens me."

Again Robert had a sensation of moving unobtrusively aside from a direct encounter. He looked across the room and started at something which he espied for the first time.

"Pardon me," he said, rising, "but I am interested in dolls. I see you still keep your doll, Miss Brewster."

Ellen sat stupefied. All at once it dawned upon her what might happen. In the corner of the parlor sat her beloved doll, still beloved, though the mother and not the doll had outgrown her first condition of love. The doll, in the identical dress in which she had come from Cynthia's so many years ago, sat staring forth with the fixed radiance of her kind, seated stiffly in a tiny rocking-chair, also one of the treasures of Ellen's childhood. It was a curious feature for the best parlor, but Ellen had insisted upon it. "She isn't going to be put away up garret because I have outgrown her," said she. "She's going to sit in the parlor as long as she lives. Suppose I outgrew you, and put you up in the garret; you wouldn't like it, would you, mother?"

"You are a queer child," Fanny had said, laughing, but she had yielded.

When young Lloyd went close to examine the doll, Ellen's heart stood still. Suppose he should recognize it? She tried to tell herself that it was impossible. Could any young man recognize a doll after all those years? How much did a boy ever care for a doll, anyway? Not enough to think of it twice after he had given it up. It was different with a girl. Her doll meant—God only knew what her doll meant to her; perhaps it had a meaning of all humanity. But the boy, what had he cared for the doll? He had gone away out West and left it.