One day there came up the river a bateau from Tadoussac, bringing the news that the ice was all out of the St. Lawrence. "It will not be long time, now," said Bird, "before we begin to see you' countrymen. The steamboats come to Haha Bay in the last of June."

Northwick responded to the words with no visible sensation. His sphinx-like reticence vexed Bird more and more, and intolerably deepened the mystification of his failure to do any of the things with his capital which Bird had promised himself and his fellow-citizens. He no longer talked of going to Chicoutimi, that was true, and there was not the danger of his putting his money into Markham's enterprise there; but neither did he show any interest or any curiosity concerning Bird's discovery of the precious metal at Haha Bay. Bird had his delicacy as well as Pere Etienne, and he could not thrust himself upon his guest, even with the intention of making their joint fortune.

A few days later there came to Pere Etienne a letter, which, when he read it, superseded the interest in Northwick, which Bird felt gnawing him like a perpetual hunger. It was from the cure at Rimouski, where Pere Etienne's family lived, and it brought word that his mother, who had been in failing health all winter, could not long survive, and so greatly desired to see him, that his correspondent had asked their superior to allow him to replace Pere Etienne at Haha Bay, while he came to visit her. Leave had been given, and Pere Etienne might expect his friend very soon after his letter reached him.

"Where is Rimouski?" Northwick asked, when he found himself alone with the priest that evening.

"It is on the St. Lawrence. It is the last and first point where the steamers touch in going and coming between Quebec and Liverpool." Pere Etienne had been weeping, and his heart was softened and emboldened by the anxiety he felt. "It is my native village—where I lived till I went to make my studies in the Laval University. It is going home for me. Perhaps they will let me remain there." He added, by an irresistible impulse of pity and love, "I wish you were going home, too, Mr. Warwick!"

"I wish I were!" said Northwick, with a heavy sigh. "But I can't—yet."

"This is a desert for you," Pere Etienne pressed on. "I can see that. I have seen how solitary you are."

"Yes. It's lonesome," Northwick admitted.

"My son," said the young priest to the man who was old enough to be his father, and he put his hand on Northwick's, where it lay on his knee, as they sat side by side before the fire, "is there something you could wish to say to me? Something I might do to help you?"

In a moment all was open between them, and they knew each other's meaning. "Yes," said Northwick, and he felt the wish to trust in the priest and to be ruled by him well up like a tide of hot blood from his heart. It sank back again. This pure soul was too innocent, too unversed in the world and its ways to know his offence in its right proportion; to know it as Northwick himself knew it; to be able to account for it and condone it. The affair, if he could understand it at all, would shock him; he must blame it as relentlessly as Northwick's own child would if her love did not save him. With the next word he closed that which was open between them, a rift in his clouds that heaven itself had seemed to look through. "I have a letter—a letter that I wish you would take and mail for me in Rimouski."

"I will take it with great pleasure," said the priest, but he had the sadness of a deep disappointment in his tone.

Northwick was disappointed, too; almost injured. He had something like a perception that if Pere Etienne had been a coarser, commoner soul, he could have told him everything, and saved his own soul by the confession.

About a month after the priest's departure the first steamboat came up the Saguenay from Quebec. By this time Bird was a desperate man. Northwick was still there in his house, with all that money which he would not employ in any way; at once a temptation and a danger if it should in any manner become known. The wandering poor, who are known to the piety of the habitans as the Brethren of Christ, were a terror to Bird, in their visits, when they came by day to receive the charity which no one denies them; he felt himself bound to keep a watchful eye on this old Yankee, who was either a rascal or a madman, and perhaps both, and to see that no harm came to him; and when he heard the tramps prowling about at night, and feeling for the alms that kind people leave out-doors for them, he could not sleep. The old hunter neglected his wild-beast traps, and suffered his affairs to fall into neglect; but it was not his failing appetite, or his broken sleep alone that wore upon him. The disappointment with his guest that was spreading through the community, involved Bird, and he thought his neighbors looked askance at him: as if they believed he could have moved Northwick to action, if he would. Northwick could not have moved himself. He was like one benumbed. He let the days go by, and made no attempt to realize the schemes for the retrieval of his fortunes that had brought him to that region.

The sound of the steamboat's whistle was a joyful sound to Bird. He rose and went into Northwick's room. Northwick was awake; he had heard the whistle, too.

"Now, Mr. Warwick, or what you' name," said Bird, with trembling eagerness, "that is the boat. I want you take you' money and go hout my 'ouse. Yes, sir. Now! Pack you' things. Don't wait for breakfast. You get breakfast on board. Go!"



VIII.

The letter which Pere Etienne posted for Northwick at Rimouski was addressed to the editor of the Boston Events, and was published with every advantage which scare-heading could invent. A young journalist newly promoted to the management was trying to give the counting-room proofs of his efficiency in the line of the Events' greatest successes, and he wasted no thrill that the sensation in his hands was capable of imparting to his readers. Yet the effect was disappointing, not only in the figure of the immediate sales, but in the cumulative value of the recognition of the fact that the Events had been selected by Northwick as the best avenue for approaching the public. The Abstract, in copying and commenting upon the letter, skilfully stabbed its esteemed contemporary with an acknowledgment of its prime importance as the organ of the American defaulters in Canada; other papers, after questioning the document as a fake, made common cause in treating it as a matter of little or no moment. In fact, there had been many defalcations since Northwick's; the average of one a day in the despatches of the Associated Press had been fully kept up, and several of these had easily surpassed his in the losses involved, and in the picturesqueness of the circumstances. People generally recalled with an effort the supremely tragic claim of his case through the rumor of his death in the railroad accident; those who distinctly remembered it experienced a certain disgust at the man's willingness to shelter himself so long in the doubt to which it had left not only the public, but his own family, concerning his fate.

The evening after the letter appeared, Hilary was dining one of those belated Englishmen who sometimes arrive in Boston after most houses are closed for the summer on the Hill and the Back Bay. Mrs. Hilary and Louise were already with Matt at his farm for a brief season before opening their own house at the shore, and Hilary was living en garcon. There were only men at the dinner, and the talk at first ran chiefly to question of a sufficient incentive for Northwick's peculations; its absence was the fact which all concurred in owning. In deference to his guest's ignorance of the matter, Hilary went rapidly over it from the beginning, and as he did so the perfectly typical character of the man and of the situation appeared in clear relief. He ended by saying: "It isn't at all a remarkable instance. There is nothing peculiar about it. Northwick was well off and he wished to be better off. He had plenty of other people's money in his hands which he controlled so entirely that he felt as if it were his own. He used it and he lost it. Then he was found out, and ran away. That's all."

"Then, as I understand," said the Englishman, with a strong impression that he was making a joke, "this Mr. Northwick was not one of your most remarkable men."

Everybody laughed obligingly, and Hilary said, "He was one of our least remarkable men." Then, spurred on by that perverse impulse which we Americans often have to make the worst of ourselves to an Englishman, he added, "The defaulter seems to be taking the place of the self-made man among us. Northwick's a type, a little differentiated from thousands of others by the rumor of his death in the first place, and now by this unconsciously hypocritical and nauseous letter. He's what the commonplace American egotist must come to more and more in finance, now that he is abandoning the career of politics, and wants to be rich instead of great."

"Really?" said the Englishman.

Among Hilary's guests was Charles Bellingham, a bachelor of pronounced baldness, who said he would come to meet Hilary's belated Englishman, in quality of bear-leader to his cousin-in-law, old Bromfield Corey, a society veteran of that period when even the swell in Boston must be an intellectual man. He was not only old, but an invalid, and he seldom left town in summer, and liked to go out to dinner whenever he was asked. Bellingham came to the rescue of the national repute in his own fashion. "I can't account for your not locking up your spoons, Hilary, when you invited me, unless you knew where you could steal some more."

"Ah, it isn't quite like a gentleman's stealing a few spoons," old Corey began, in the gentle way he had, and with a certain involuntary sibilation through the gaps between his front teeth. "It's a much more heroic thing than an ordinary theft; and I can't let you belittle it as something commonplace because it happens every day. So does death; so does birth; but they're not commonplace."

"They're not so frequent as defalcation with us, quite—especially birth," suggested Bellingham.

"No," Corey went on, "every fact of this sort is preceded by the slow and long decay of a moral nature, and that is of the most eternal and tragical interest; and"—here Corey broke down in an old man's queer, whimpering laugh, as the notion struck him—"if it's very common with us, I don't know but we ought to be proud of it, as showing that we excel all the rest of the civilized world in the proportion of decayed moral natures to the whole population. But I wonder," he went on, "that it doesn't produce more moralists of a sanative type than it has. Our bad teeth have given us the best dentists in the world; our habit of defalcation hasn't resulted yet in any ethical compensation. Sewell, here, used to preach about such things, but I'll venture to say we shall have no homily on Northwick from him next Sunday."

The Rev. Mr. Sewell suffered the thrust in patience. "What is the use?" he asked, with a certain sadness. "The preacher's voice is lost in his sounding-board nowadays, when all the Sunday newspapers are crying aloud from twenty-eight pages illustrated."

"Perhaps they are our moralists," Corey suggested.

"Perhaps," Sewell assented.

"By the way, Hilary," said Bellingham, "did you ever know who wrote that article in the Abstract, when Northwick's crookedness first appeared?"

"Yes," said Hilary. "It was a young fellow of twenty-four or five."

"Come off!" said Bellingham, in a slang phrase then making its way into merited favor. "What's become of him? I haven't seen anything else like it in the Abstract."

"No, and I'm afraid you're not likely to. The fellow was a reporter on the paper at the time; but he happened to have looked up the literature of defalcation, and they let him say his say."

"It was a very good say."

"Better than any other he had in him. They let him try again on different things, but he wasn't up to the work. So the managing editor said—and he was a friend of the fellow's. He was too literary, I believe."

"And what's become of him?" asked Corey.

"You might get him to read to you," said Bellingham to the old man. He added to the company, "Corey uses up a fresh reader every three months. He takes them into his intimacy, and then he finds their society oppressive."

"Why," Hilary answered with a little hesitation, "he was out of health, and Matt had him up to his farm."

"Is he Matt's only beneficiary?" Corey asked, with a certain tone of tolerant liking for Matt. "I thought he usually had a larger colony at Vardley."

"Well, he has," said Hilary. "But when his mother and sister are visiting him, he has to reduce their numbers. He can't very well turn his family away."

"He might board them out," said Bellingham.

"Do you suppose," asked Sewell, as if he had not noticed the turn the talk had taken, "that Northwick has gone to Europe?"

"I've no doubt he wishes me to suppose so," said Hilary, "and of course we've had to cable the authorities to look out for him at Moville and Liverpool, but I feel perfectly sure he's still in Canada, and expects to make terms for getting home again. He must be horribly homesick."

"Yes?" Sewell suggested.

"Yes. Not because he's a man of any delicacy of feeling, or much real affection for his family. I've no doubt he's fond of them, in a way, but he's fonder of himself. You can see, all through his letter, that he's trying to make interest for himself, and that he's quite willing to use his children if it will tell on the public sympathies. He knows very well that they're provided for. They own the place at Hatboro'; he deeded it to them long before his crookedness is known to have begun; and his creditors couldn't touch it if they wished to. If he had really that fatherly affection for them, which he appeals to in others, he wouldn't have left them in doubt whether he was alive or dead for four or five months, and then dragged them into an open letter asking forbearance in their name, and promising, for their sake, to right those he had wronged. The thing is thoroughly indecent."

Since the fact of Northwick's survival had been established beyond question by the publication of his letter, Hilary's mind in regard to him had undergone a great revulsion. It relieved itself with a sharp rebound from the oppressive sense of responsibility for his death, which he seemed to have incurred in telling Northwick that the best thing for him would be a railroad accident. Now that the man was not killed, Hilary could freely declare, "He made a great mistake in not getting out of the world, as many of us believed he had; I confess I had rather got to believe it myself. But he ought at least to have had the grace to remain dead to the poor creatures he had dishonored till he could repay the people he had defrauded."

"Ah! I don't know about that," said Sewell.

"No? Why not?"

"Because it would be a kind of romantic deceit that he'd better not keep up."

"He seems to have kept it up for the last four or five months," said Hilary.

"That's no reason he should continue to keep it up," Sewell persisted. "Perhaps he never knew of the rumor of his death."

"Ah, that isn't imaginable. There isn't a hole or corner left where the newspapers don't penetrate, nowadays."

"Not in Boston. But if he were in hiding in some little French village down the St. Lawrence—"

"Isn't that as romantic as the other notion, parson?" crowed old Corey.

"No, I don't think so," said the minister. "The cases are quite different. He might have a morbid shrinking from his own past, and the wish to hide from it as far as he could; that would be natural; but to leave his children to believe a rumor of his death in order to save their feelings, would be against nature; it would be purely histrionic; a motive from the theatre; that is, perfectly false."

"Pretty hard on Hilary, who invented it," Bellingham suggested; and they all laughed.

"I don't know," said Hilary. "The man seems to be posing in other ways. You would think from his letter that he was a sort of martyr to principle, and that he'd been driven off to Canada by the heartless creditors whom he's going to devote his life to saving from loss, if he can't do it in a few months or years. He may not be a conscious humbug, but he's certainly a humbug. Take that pretence of his that he would come back and stand his trial if he believed it would not result in greater harm than good by depriving him of all hope of restitution!"

"Why, there's a sort of crazy morality in that," said Corey.

"Perhaps," said Bellingham, "the solution of the whole matter is that Northwick is cracked."

"I've no doubt he's cracked to a certain extent," said Sewell, "as every wrong-doer is. You know the Swedenborgians believe that insanity is the last state of the wicked."

"I suppose," observed old Corey, thoughtfully, "you'd be very glad to have him keep out of your reach, Hilary?"

"What a question!" said Hilary. "You're as bad as my daughter. She asked me the same thing."

"I wish I were no worse," said the old man.

"You speak of his children," said the Englishman. "Hasn't he a wife?"

"No. Two daughters. One an old maid, and the other a young girl, whom my daughter knew at school," Hilary answered.

"I saw the young lady at your house once," said Bellingham, in a certain way.

"Yes. She's been here a good deal, first and last."

"Rather a high-stepping young person, I thought," said Bellingham.

"She is a proud girl," Hilary admitted. "Rather imperious, in fact."

"Ah, what's the pride of a young girl?" said Corey. "Something that comes from her love and goes to it; no separable quality; nothing that's for herself."

"Well, I'm not sure of that," said Hilary. "In this case it seems to have served her own turn. It's enabled her simply and honestly to deny the fact that her father ever did anything wrong."

"That's rather fine," Corey remarked, as if tasting it.

"And what will it enable her to do, now that he's come out and confessed the frauds himself?" the Englishman asked.

Hilary shrugged, for answer. He said to Bellingham, "Charles, I want you to try some of these crabs. I got them for you."

"Why, this is touching, Hilary," said Bellingham, getting his fat head round with difficulty to look at them in the dish the man was bringing to his side. "But I don't know that I should have refused them, even if they had been got for Corey."



IX.

They did not discuss Northwick's letter at the dinner-parties in Hatboro' because, socially speaking, they never dined there; but the stores, the shops, the parlors, buzzed with comment on it; it became a part of the forms of salutation, the color of the day's joke. Gates, the provision man, had to own the error of his belief in Northwick's death. He found his account in being the only man to own that he ever had such a belief; he was a comfort to those who said they had always had their doubts of it; the ladies of South Hatboro', who declared to a woman that they had never believed it, respected the simple heart of a man who acknowledged that he had never questioned it. Such a man was not one to cheat his customers in quantity or quality; that stood to reason; his faith restored him to the esteem of many.

Mr. Gerrish was very bitter about the double fraud which he said Northwick had practised on the community, in having allowed the rumor of his death to gain currency. He denounced him to Mrs. Munger, making an early errand from South Hatboro' to the village to collect public opinion, as a person who had put himself beyond the pale of public confidence, and whose professions of repentance for the past, and good intention for the future, he tore to shreds. "It is said, and I have no question correctly, that hell is paved with good intentions—if you will excuse me, Mrs. Munger. When Mr. Northwick brings forth fruits meet for repentance—when he makes the first payment to his creditors—I will believe that he is sorry for what he has done, and not till then."

"That is true," said Mrs. Munger. "I wonder what Mr. Putney will have to say to all this. Can he feel that his skirts are quite clean, acting that way, as the family counsel of the Northwicks, after all he used to say against him?"

Mr. Gerrish expressed his indifference by putting up a roll of muslin on the shelf while he rejoined, "I care very little for the opinions of Mr. Putney on any subject."

In some places Mrs. Munger encountered a belief, which she did not discourage, that the Northwick girls had known all along that their father was alive, and had been in communication with him; through Putney, most probably. In the light of this conjecture the lawyer's character had a lurid effect, which it did not altogether lose when Jack Wilmington said, bluntly, "What of it? He's their counsel. He's not obliged to give the matter away. He's obliged to keep it."

"But isn't it very inconsistent," Mrs. Munger urged, "after all he used to say against Mr. Northwick?"

"I suppose it's a professional, not a personal matter," said Wilmington.

"And then, their putting on mourning! Just think of it!" Mrs. Munger appealed to Mrs. Wilmington, who was listening to her nephew's savagery of tone and phrase with the lazy pleasure she seemed always to feel in it.

"Yes. Do you suppose they meant it for a blind?"

"Why, that's what people think now, don't they?"

"Oh, I don't know. What do you think, Jack?"

"I think they're a pack of fools!" he blurted out, like a man who avenges on the folly of others the hurt of his own conscience. He cast a look of brutal contempt at Mrs. Munger, who said she thought so, too.

"It is too bad the way people allow themselves to talk," she went on. "To be sure, Sue Northwick has never done anything to make herself loved in Hatboro'—not among the ladies at least."

Mrs. Wilmington gave a spluttering laugh, and said, "And I suppose it's the ladies who allow themselves to talk as they do. I can't get the men in my family to say a word against her."

Jack scowled his blackest. "It would be a pitiful scoundrel that did. Her misfortunes ought to make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a man."

"Well, so it does. That is just what I was saying. The trouble is that they don't make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a woman," Mrs. Wilmington teased.

"I know it doesn't," Jack returned, in helpless scorn, as he left Mrs. Munger alone to his aunt.

"Do you suppose he still cares anything for her?" Mrs. Munger asked, with cosey confidentiality.

"Who knows?" Mrs. Wilmington rejoined, indolently. "It would be very poetical, wouldn't it, if he were to seize the opportunity to go back to her?"

"Beautiful!" sighed Mrs. Munger. "I do like a manly man!"

She drove home through the village slowly, hoping for a chance of a further interchange of conjectures and impressions; but she saw no one she had not already talked with till she met Dr. Morrell, driving out of the avenue from his house. She promptly set her phaeton across the road so that he could not get by, if he were rude enough to wish it.

"Doctor," she called out, "what do you think of this extraordinary letter of Mr. Northwick's?"

Dr. Morrell's boyish eyes twinkled. "You mean that letter in the Events? Do you think Northwick wrote it?"

"Why, don't you, doctor?" she questioned back, with a note of personal grievance in her voice.

"I'm not very well acquainted with his style. Then, you think he did write it? Of course, there are always various opinions. But I understood you thought he was burned in that accident last winter."

"Now, doctor!" said Mrs. Munger, with the pout which Putney said always made him want to kill her. "You're just trying to tease me; I know you are. I'm going to drive right in and see Mrs. Morrell. She will tell me what you think."

"I don't believe you can see her," said the doctor. "She isn't at all well."

"Oh, I'm sorry for that. I don't understand what excuse she has, though, with a physician for her husband. You must turn hom[oe]opathy. Dr. Morrell, do you think it's true that Jack Wilmington will offer himself to Sue Northwick, now that it's come to the worst with her? Wouldn't it be romantic?"

"Very," said the doctor. He craned his head out of the buggy, as if to see whether he could safely drive into the ditch, and pass Mrs. Munger. He said politely, as he started, "Don't disturb yourself! I can get by."

She sent a wail of reproach after him, and then continued toward South Hatboro'. As she passed the lodge at the gate of the Northwick avenue, where the sisters now lived, she noted that the shades were closely drawn. They were always drawn on the side toward the street, but Mrs. Munger thought it interesting that she had never noticed it before, and in the dearth of material she made the most of it, both for her own emotion, and for the sensation of others when she reached South Hatboro'.

Behind the drawn shades that Mrs. Munger noted, Adeline Northwick sat crying over the paper that Elbridge Newton had pushed under the door that morning. It was limp from the nervous clutch and tremor of her hands, and wet with her tears; but she kept reading her father's letter in it, and trying to puzzle out of it some hope or help. "He must be crazy, he must be crazy," she moaned, more to herself than to Suzette, who sat rigidly and silently by. "He couldn't have been so cruel, if he had been in his right mind; he couldn't! He was always so good to us, and so thoughtful; he must have known that we had given him up for dead, long ago; and he has let us go on grieving for him all this time. It's just as if he had come back from death, and the first he did was to tell us that everything they said against him was true, and that everything we said and believed was all wrong. How could he do it, how could he do it! We bore to think he was dead; yes, we bore that, and we didn't complain; but this is more than any one can ask us to bear. Oh, Suzette, what can we say, now? What can we say, after he's confessed himself that he took the money, and that he has got part of it yet? But I know he didn't! I know he hasn't! He's crazy! Oh, poor, poor father! Don't you think he must be crazy? And where is he? Why don't he write to us, and tell us what he wants us to do? Does he think we would tell any one where he was? That shows he's out of his mind. I always thought that if he could come back to life somehow, he'd prove that they had lied about him; and now! Oh, it isn't as if it were merely the company that was concerned, or what people said; but it's as if our own father, that we trusted so much, had broken his word to us. That is what kills me."

The day passed. They sent Mrs. Newton away when she came to help them at dinner. They locked their doors, and shut themselves in from the world, as mourners do with death. Adeline's monologue went on, with the brief responses which she extorted from Suzette, and at last it ceased, as if her heart had worn itself out in the futile repetition of its griefs.

Then Suzette broke her silence with words that seemed to break from it of themselves in their abrupt irrelevance to what Adeline had last said. "We must give it up!"

"Give what up?" Adeline groaned back.

"The house—and the farm—and this hovel. Everything! It isn't ours."

"Not ours?"

"No. That letter makes it theirs—the people's whose money he took. We must send for Mr. Putney and tell him to give it to them. He will know how."

Adeline looked at her sister's face in dismay. She gasped out, "Why, but Mr. Putney says it's ours, and nobody can touch it!"

"That was before. Now it is theirs; and if we kept it from them we should be stealing it. How do we know that father had any right to give it to us when he did?"

"Suzette!"

"I keep thinking such things, and I had better say them unless I want to go out of my senses. Once I would have died before I gave it up, because he left it to us, and now it seems as if I couldn't live till I gave it up, because he left it to us. No, I can never forgive him, if he is my father. I can never speak to him again, or see him; never! He is dead to me, now!"

The words seemed to appeal to the contrary-mindedness that lurks in such natures as Adeline's. "Why, I don't see what there is so wrong about father's letter," she began. "It just shows what I always said: that his mind was affected by his business troubles, and that he wandered away because he couldn't get them straight. And now it's preyed so upon him that he's beginning to believe the things they say are true, and to blame himself. That's the way I look at it."

"Adeline!" Suzette commanded, with a kind of shriek, "Be still! You know you don't believe that!"

Adeline hesitated between her awe of her sister, and her wish to persist in a theory which, now that she had formulated it for Suzette's confusion, she found effective for her own comfort. She ventured at last, "It is what I said, the first thing, and I shall always say it, Suzette; and I have a right."

"Say what you please. I shall say nothing. But this property doesn't belong to us till father comes back to prove it."

"Comes back!" Adeline gasped. "Why, they'll send him to State's prison!"

"They won't send him to State's prison if he's innocent, and if he isn't—"

"Suzette! Don't you dare!"

"But that has nothing to do with it. We must give up what doesn't belong to us. Will you go for Mr. Putney, or shall I go? I'm not afraid to be seen, if you don't like to go. I can hold up my head before the whole world, now I know what we ought to do, and we're going to do it; but if we kept this place after that letter, I couldn't even look you in the face again." She continued to Adeline's silence, "Why, we needn't either of us go! I can get Elbridge to go." She made as if to leave the room.

"Wait! I can't let you—yet. I haven't thought it out," said Adeline.

"Not thought it out!" Suzette went back and stood over her where she sat in her rocking-chair.

"No!" said Adeline, shrinking from her fierce look, but with a gathering strength of resistance in her heart. "Because you've been thinking of it, you expect me to do what you say in an instant. The place was mother's, and when she died it came to me, and I hold it in trust for both of us; that's what Mr. Putney says. Even supposing that father did use their money—and I don't believe he did—I don't see why I should give up mother's property to them." She waited a moment before she said, "And I won't."

"Is half of it mine?" asked Suzette.

"I don't know. Yes, I suppose so."

"I'm of age, and I shall give up my half. I'm going to send for Mr. Putney." She went out of the room, and came back with her hat and gloves on, and her jacket over her arm. She had never been so beautiful, or so terrible. "Listen to me, Adeline," she said, "I'm going out to send Elbridge for Mr. Putney; and when he comes I am not going to have any squabbling before him. You can do what you please with your half of the property, but I'm going to give up my half to the company. Now, if you don't promise you'll freely consent to what I want to do with my own, I will never come back to this house, or ever see you again, or speak to you. Do you promise?"

"Oh, well, I promise," said Adeline, forlornly, with a weak dribble of tears. "You can take your half of the place that mother owned, and give it to the men that are trying to destroy father's character! But I shall never say that I wanted you should do it."

"So that you don't say anything against it, I don't care what else you say." Suzette put on her jacket and stood buttoning it at her soft throat. "I do it; and I do it for mother's sake and for father's. I care as much for them as you do."

In the evening Putney came, and she told him she wished him to contrive whatever form was necessary to put her father's creditors in possession of her half of the estate. "My sister doesn't feel as I do about it," she ended. "She thinks they have no right to it, and we ought to keep it. But she has agreed to let me give my half up."

Putney went to the door and threw out the quid of tobacco which he had been absently chewing upon while she spoke. "You know," he explained, "that the creditors have no more claim on this estate, in law, than they have on my house and lot?"

"I don't know. I don't care for the law."

"The case isn't altered at all, you know, by the fact that your father is still living, and your title isn't affected by any of the admissions made in the letter he has published."

"I understand that," said the girl.

"Well," said Putney, "I merely wanted to make sure you had all the bearings of the case. The thing can be done, of course. There's nothing to prevent any one giving any one else a piece of property."

He remained silent for a moment, as if doubtful whether to say more, and Adeline asked, "And do you believe that if we were to give up the property, they'd let father come back?"

Putney could not control a smile at her simplicity. "The creditors have got nothing to do with that, Miss Northwick. Your father has been indicted, and he's in contempt of court as long as he stays away. There can't be any question of mercy till he comes back for trial."

"But if he came back," she persisted, "our giving up the property would make them easier with him?"

"A corporation has no bowels of compassion, Miss Northwick. I shouldn't like to trust one. The company has no legal claim on the estate. Unless you think it has a moral claim, you'd better hold on to your property."

"And do you think it has a moral claim?"

Putney drew a long breath. "Well, that's a nice question." He stroked his trousers down over his little thin leg, as he sat. "I have some peculiar notions about corporations. I don't think a manufacturing company is a benevolent institution, exactly. It isn't even a sanitarium. It didn't come for its health; it came to make money, and it makes it by a profit on the people who do its work and the people who buy its wares. Practically, it's just like everything else that earns its bread by the sweat of its capital—neither better nor worse." Launched in this direction, Putney recalled himself with an effort from the prospect of an irrelevant excursion in the fields of speculative economy. "But as I understand, the question is not so much whether the Ponkwasset Mills have a moral claim, as whether you have a moral obligation. And there I can't advise. You would have to go to a clergyman. I can only say that if the property were mine I should hold on to it, and let the company be damned, or whatever could happen to a body that hadn't a soul for that purpose."

Putney thrust his hand into his pocket for his tobacco; and then recollected himself, and put it back.

"There, Suzette!" said Adeline.

Suzette had listened in a restive silence, while Putney was talking with her sister. She said in answer to him: "I don't want advice about that. I wished to know whether I could give up my part of the estate to the company, and if you would do it for me at once."

"Oh, certainly," said Putney. "I will go down to Boston to-morrow morning and see their attorney."

"Their attorney? I thought you would have to go to Mr. Hilary."

"He would send me to their lawyer, I suppose. But I can go to him first, if you wish."

"Yes, I do wish it," said the girl. "I don't understand about the company, and I don't care for it. I want to offer the property to Mr. Hilary. Don't say anything but just that I wished to give it up, and my sister consented. Don't say a single word more, no matter what he asks you. Will you?"

"I will do exactly what you say," answered Putney. "But you understand, I suppose, don't you, that in order to make the division, the whole place must be sold?"

Suzette looked at him in surprise. Adeline wailed out, "The whole place sold?"

"Yes; how else could you arrive at the exact value?"

"I will keep the house and the grounds, and Suzette may have the farm."

Putney shook his head. "I don't believe it could be done. Perhaps—"

"Well, then," said Adeline, "I will never let the place be sold in the world. I—" She caught Suzette's eye and faltered, and then went on piteously, "I didn't know what we should have to do when I promised. But I'll keep my promise; yes, I will. We needn't sign the papers to-night, need we, Mr. Putney? It'll do in the morning?"

"Oh, yes; just as well," said Putney. "It'll take a little time to draw up the writings."

"But you can send word to Mr. Hilary at once?" Suzette asked.

"Oh, yes; if you wish."

"I do."

"It won't be necessary."

"I wish it."

Since the affair must so soon be known to everybody, Putney felt justified in telling his wife when he went home. "If that poor old girl freely consented, it must have been at the point of the hairpin. Of course, the young one is right to obey her conscience, but as a case of conscience, what do you think of it, Ellen? And do you think one ought to make any one else obey one's conscience?"

"That's a hard question, Ralph. And I'm not sure that she's right. Why should she give up her property, if it was hers so long ago before the frauds began? Suppose he were not their father, and the case stood just as it does?"

"Ah, there's something very strange about the duty of blood."

"Blood? I think Suzette Northwick's case of conscience is a case of pride," said Mrs. Putney. "I don't believe she cares anything about the right and wrong of it. She just wishes to stand well before the world. She would do anything for that. She's as hard!"

"That's what the world will say, I've no doubt," Putney admitted.



X.

The next morning Adeline came early to her sister's bed, and woke her. "I haven't slept all night—I don't see how you could—and I want you shouldn't let Mr. Putney send that letter to Mr. Hilary, just yet. I want to think it over, first."

"You want to break your promise?" asked Suzette, wide awake at the first word.

Adeline began to cry. "I want to think. It seems such a dreadful thing to sell the place. And why need you hurry to send off a letter to Mr. Hilary about it? Won't it be time enough, when Mr. Putney has the writings ready? I think it will look very silly to send word beforehand. I could see that Mr. Putney didn't think it was business-like."

"You want to break your promise?" Suzette repeated.

"No, I don't want to break my promise. But I do want to do what's right; and I want to do what I think is right. I'm almost sick. I want Elbridge should stop for the doctor on his way to Mr. Putney's." She broke into a convulsive sobbing. "Oh, Suzette! Do give me a little more time! Won't you? And as soon as I can see it as you do—"

They heard the rattling of a key in the back door of the cottage, and they knew it was Elbridge coming to make the fire in the kitchen stove, as he always did against the time his wife should come to get breakfast. Suzette started up from her pillow, and pulled Adeline's face down on her neck, so as to smother the sound of her sobs. "Hush! Don't let him hear! And I wouldn't let any one know for the world that we didn't agree! You can think it over all day, if you want; and I'll stop Mr. Putney from writing till you think as I do. But be still, now!"

"Yes, yes! I will," Adeline whispered back. "And I won't quarrel with you, Sue! I know we shall think alike in the end. Only, don't hurry me! And let Elbridge get the doctor to come. I'm afraid I'm going to be down sick."

She crept sighing back to bed, and after a little while, Suzette came, dressed, to look after her. "I think I'm going to get a little sleep, now," she said. "But don't forget to stop Mr. Putney."

Suzette went out into the thin, sweet summer morning air, and walked up and down the avenue between the lodge and the empty mansion. She had not slept, either; it was from her first drowse that Adeline had wakened her. But she was young, and the breath of the cool, southwest wind was a bath of rest to her fevered senses. She felt herself grow stronger in it, and she tried to think what she ought to do. If her purpose of the day before still seemed so wholly and perfectly just, it seemed very difficult; and she began to ask herself whether she had a right to compel Adeline's consent to it. She felt the perplexities of the world where good and evil are often so mixed that when the problem passes from thoughts to deeds, the judgment is darkened and the will palsied. Till now the wrong had always appeared absolutely apart from the right; for the first time she perceived that a great right might involve a lesser wrong; and she was daunted. But she meant to fight out her fight wholly within herself before she spoke with Adeline again.

That day Matt Hilary came over from his farm to see Wade, whom he found as before, in his study at the church, and disposed to talk over Northwick's letter. "It's a miserable affair; humiliating; heart-sickening. That poor soul's juggle with his conscience is a most pathetic spectacle. I can't bring myself to condemn him very fiercely. But while others may make allowance for him, it's ruinous for him to excuse himself. That's truly perdition. Don't you feel that?" Wade asked.

"Yes, yes," Matt assented, with a kind of absence. "But there is something else I wanted to speak with you about; and I suppose it's this letter that's made it seem rather urgent now. You know when I asked you once about Jack Wilmington—"

Wade shook his head. "There isn't the least hope in that direction. I'm sure there isn't. If he had cared anything for the girl, he would have shown it long ago!"

"I quite agree with you," said Matt, "and that isn't what I mean. But if it would have been right and well for him to come forward at such a time, why shouldn't some other man, who does love her?" He hurried tremulously on: "Wade, let me ask you one thing more! You have seen her so much more than I; and I didn't know—Is it possible—Perhaps I ought to ask if you are at all—if you care for her?"

"For Miss Northwick? What an idea? Not the least in the world! Why do you ask?"

"Because I do!" said Matt. "I care everything for her. So much that when I thought of my love for her, I could not bear that it should be a wrong to any living soul or that it should be a shadow's strength between her and any possible preference. And I came here with my mind made up that if you thought Jack Wilmington had still some right to a hearing from her, I would stand back. If there were any hopes for him from himself or from her, I should be a fool not to stand back. And I thought—I thought that if you, old fellow—But now, it's all right—all right—"

Matt wrung the hand which Wade yielded him with a dazed air, at first. A great many things went through Wade's mind, which he silenced on their way to his lips. It would not do to impart to Matt the impressions of a cold and arrogant nature which the girl had sometimes given him, and which Matt could not have received in the times of trouble and sorrow when he had chiefly seen her. Matt's confession was a shock; Wade was scarcely less dismayed by the complications which it suggested; but he could no more impart his misgivings than his impressions; he could no more tell Matt that his father would be embarrassed and compromised by his passion than he could tell him that he did not think Sue Northwick was worthy of it. He was in the helpless predicament that confidants often find themselves in, but his final perception of his impossibilities enabled him to return the fervid pressure of Matt's hand, and even to utter some of those incoherencies which serve the purpose when another wishes to do the talking.

"Of course," said Matt, "I'm ridiculous, I know that. I haven't got anything to found my hopes on but the fact that there's nothing in my way to the one insuperable obstacle: to the fact that she doesn't and can't really care a straw for me. But just now that seems a mere bagatelle." He laughed with a nervous joy, and he kept talking, as he walked up and down Wade's study. "I don't know that I have the hope of anything; and I don't see how I'm to find out whether I have or not, for the present. You know, Wade," he went on, with a simple-hearted sweetness, which Wade found touching, "I'm twenty-eight years old, and I don't believe I've ever been in love before. Little fancies, of course; summer flirtations; every one has them; but never anything serious, anything like this. And I could see, at home, that they would be glad to have had me married. I rather think my father believes that a good sensible wife would bring me back to faith in commercial civilization." He laughed out his relish of the notion, but went on, gravely: "Poor father! This whole business has been a terrible trial to him."

Wade wondered at his ability to separate the thought of Suzette from the thought of her father; he inferred from his ability to do so that he must have been thinking of her a great deal, but he asked, "Isn't it all rather sudden, Matt?" Wade put on a sympathetic, yet diplomatic, smile for the purpose of this question.

"Not for me!" said Matt. He added, not very consequently, "I suppose it must have happened to me the first moment I saw her here that day Louise and I came up about the accident. I couldn't truly say that she had ever been out of my mind a moment since. No, there's nothing sudden about it, though I don't suppose these things usually take a great deal of time," Matt ended, philosophically.

Wade left the dangerous ground he found himself on. He asked, "And your family, do they know of your—feeling?"

"Not in the least!" Matt answered, radiantly. "It will come on them like a thunder-clap! If it ever comes on them at all," he added, despondently.

Wade had his own belief that there was no cause for despondency in the aspect of the affair that Matt was looking at. But he could not offer to share his security with Matt, who continued to look serious, and said, presently, "I suppose my father might think it complicated his relation to the Northwicks' trouble, and I have thought that, too. It makes it very difficult. My father is to be considered. You know, Wade, I think there are very few men like my father?"

"There are none, Matt!" said Wade.

"I don't mean he's perfect; and I think his ideas are wrong, most of them. But his conduct is as right as the conduct of any quick-tempered man ever was in the world. I know him, and I don't believe a son ever loved his father more; and so I want to consider him all I can."

"Ah, I know that, my dear fellow!"

"But the question is, how far can I consider him? There are times," said Matt, and he reddened, and laughed consciously, "when it seems as if I couldn't consider him at all; the times when I have some faint hope that she will listen to me, or won't think me quite a brute to speak to her of such a thing at such a moment. Then there are other times when I think he ought to be considered to the extreme of giving her up altogether; but those are the times when I know that I shall never have her to give up. Then it's an easy sacrifice."

"I understand," said Wade, responding with a smile to Matt's self-satire.

Matt went on, and as he talked he sometimes walked to Wade's window and looked out, sometimes he stopped and confronted him across his desk. "It's cowardly, in a way, not to speak at once—to leave her to suffer it out to the end alone; but I think that's what I owe to my father. No real harm can come to her from waiting. I risk the unfair chance I might gain by speaking now when she sorely needs help; but if ever she came to think she had given herself through that need—No, it wouldn't do! My father can do more for her if he isn't hampered by my feeling, and Louise can be her friend—What do you think, Wade? I've tried to puzzle it out, and this is the conclusion I've come to. Is it rather cold-blooded? I know it isn't at all like the lovemaking in the books. I suppose I ought to go and fling myself at her feet, in defiance of all the decencies and amenities and obligations of life, but somehow I can't bring myself to do it. I've thought it all conscientiously over, and I think I ought to wait."

"I think so, too, Matt. I think your decision is a just man's, and it's a true lover's, too. It does your heart as much honor as your head," and Wade gave him his hand now, with no mental reservation.

"Do you really think so, Caryl? That makes me very happy! I was afraid it might look calculating and self-interested—"

"You self-interested, Matt!"

"Oh, I know! But is it considering my duty too much, my love too little? If I love her, hasn't she the first claim upon me, before father and mother, brother and sister, before all the world?"

"If you are sure she loves you, yes."

Matt laughed. "Ah, that's true; I hadn't thought of that little condition! Perhaps it changes the whole situation. Well, I must go, now. I've just run over from the farm to see you—"

"I inferred that from your peasant garb," said Wade, with a smile at the rough farm suit Matt had on: his face refined it and made it look mildly improbable. "Besides," said Wade, as if the notion he recurred to were immediately relevant to Matt's dress, "unless you are perfectly sure of yourself beyond any chance of change, you owe it to her as well as yourself, to take time before speaking."

"I am perfectly sure, and I shall never change," said Matt, with a shade of displeasure at the suggestion. "If there were nothing but that I should not take a moment of time." He relented and smiled again, in adding, "But I have decided now, and I shall wait. And I'm very much obliged to you, old fellow, for talking the matter over with me, and helping me to see it in the right light."

"Oh, my dear Matt!" said Wade, in deprecation.

"Yes. And oh, by the way! I've got hold of a young fellow that I think you could do something for, Wade. Do you happen to remember the article on the defalcation in the Boston Abstract?"

"Yes, I do remember that. Didn't it treat the matter, if I recall it, very humanely—too humanely, perhaps?"

"Perhaps, from one point of view, too humanely. Well, it's the writer of that article—a young fellow, not twenty-five, yet as completely at odds with life as any one I ever saw. He has a great deal of talent, and no health or money; so he's toiling feebly for a living on a daily newspaper, instead of making literature. He was a reporter up to the time he wrote that article, but the managing editor is a man who recognizes quality; he's fond of Maxwell—that's the fellow's name—and since then he's given him a chance in the office, at social topics. But he hasn't done very well; the fact is, the boy's too literary, and he's out of health, and he needs rest and the comfort of appreciative friendship. I want you to meet him. I've got him up at my place out of the east winds. You'll be interested in him as a type—the artistic type cynicised by the hard conditions of life—newspaper conditions, and then economic conditions."

Matt smiled with satisfaction in what he felt to be his very successful formulation of Maxwell.

Wade said he should be very glad to meet him; and if he could be of any use to him he should be even more glad. But his mind was still upon Matt's love affair, and as they wrung each other's hands, once more he said, "I think you've decided so wisely, Matt; and justly and unselfishly."

"It's involuntary unselfishness, if it's unselfishness at all," said Matt. He did not go; Wade stood bareheaded with him at the outer door of his study. After awhile he said with embarrassment, "Wade! Do you think it would seem unfeeling—or out of taste, at all—if I went to see her at such a time?"

"Why, I can't imagine your doing anything out of taste, Matt."

"Don't be so smooth, Caryl! You know what I mean. Louise sent some messages by me to her. Will you take them, or—"

"I certainly see no reason why you shouldn't deliver Miss Hilary's messages yourself."

"Well, I do," said Matt. "But you needn't be afraid."



XI.

Matt took the lower road that wound away from Wade's church toward the Northwick place; but as he went, he kept thinking that he must not really try to see Suzette. It would be monstrous, at such a time; out of all propriety, of all decency; it would be taking advantage of her helplessness to intrude upon her the offer of help and of kindness which every instinct of her nature must revolt from. There was only one thing that could justify his coming, and that was impossible. Unless he came to tell her that he loved her, and to ask her to let him take her burden upon him, to share her shame and her sorrow for his love's sake, he had no right to see her. At moments it seemed as if that were right and he could do it, no matter how impossible, and then he almost ran forward; but only to check himself, to stop short, and doubt whether not to turn back altogether. By such faltering progresses, he found himself in the Northwick avenue at last, and keeping doggedly on from the mansion, which the farm road had brought him to, until he reached the cottage at the avenue gate. On the threshold drooped a figure that the sight of set his heart beating with a stifling pulse in his throat, and he floundered on till he made out that this languid figure was Adeline. He could have laughed at the irony, the mockery of the anti-climax, if it had not been for the face that the old maid turned upon him at the approach of his footfalls, and the pleasure that lighted up its pathos when she recognized him.

"Oh, Mr. Hilary!" she said; and then she could not speak, for the twitching of her lips and the trembling of her chin.

He took her hand in silence, and it seemed natural for him to do that reverent and tender thing which is no longer a part of our custom; he bent over it and kissed the chill, bony knuckles.

She drew her hand away to find her handkerchief and wipe her tears. "I suppose you've come to see Suzette; but she's gone up to the village to talk with Mr. Putney; he's our lawyer."

"Yes," said Matt.

"I presume I don't need to talk to you about that—letter. I think,—and I believe Suzette will think so too in the end,—that his mind is affected, and he just accuses himself of all these things because they've been burnt into it so. How are your father and mother? And your sister?"

She broke off with these questions, he could see, to stay herself in what she wished to say. "They are all well. Father is still in Boston; but mother and Louise are at the farm with me. They sent their love, and they are anxious to know if there is anything—"

"Thank you. Will you sit down here? It's so close indoors." She made room for him on the threshold, but he took the step below.

"I hope Miss Suzette is well?"

"Why, thank you, not very well. There isn't anything really the matter; but we didn't either of us sleep very well last night; we were excited. I don't know as I ought to tell you," she began. "I don't suppose it's a thing you would know about, any way; but I've got to talk to somebody—"

"Miss Northwick," said Matt, "if there is anything in the world that I can do for you, or that you even hope I can do, I beg you to let me hear it. I should be glad beyond all words to help you."

"Oh, I don't know as anything can be done," she began, after the fresh gush of tears which were her thanks, "but Suzette and I have been talking it over a good deal, and we thought we would like to see your father about it. You see, Suzette can't feel right about our keeping the place here, if father's really done what he says he's done. We don't believe he has; but if he has, he has got to be found somewhere, and made to give up the money he says he has got. Suzette thinks we ought to give up the money we have got in the bank—fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars—and she wanted I should let her give up her half of the place, here; and at first I did say she might. But come to find out from Mr. Putney, the whole place would have to be sold before it could be divided, and I couldn't seem to let it. That was what we—disputed about. Yes! We had a dispute; but it's all right now, or it will be, when we get the company to say they will stop the lawsuit against father, if he will give up the money he's got, and we will give up the place. Mr. Putney seemed to think the company couldn't stop it; but I don't see why a rich corporation like that couldn't do almost anything it wanted to with its money."

Her innocent corruption did not shock Matt, nor her scheme for defeating justice; but he smiled forlornly at the hopelessness of it. "I'm afraid Mr. Putney is right." He was silent, and then at the despair that came into her face, he hurried on to say, "but I will see my father, Miss Northwick; I will go down to see him at once; and if anything can be honorably and fairly done to save your father, I am sure he will try to do it for your sake. But don't expect anything," he said, getting to his feet and putting out his hand to her.

"No, no; I won't," she said, with gratitude that wrung his heart. "And—won't you wait and see Suzette?"

Matt reddened. "No; I think not now. But, perhaps, I will come back; and—and—I will come soon again. Good-by!"

"Mr. Hilary!" she called after him. He ran back to her. "If—if your father don't think anything can be done, I don't want he should say anything about it."

"Oh, no; certainly not."

"And, Mr. Hilary! Don't you let Suzette know I spoke to you. I'll tell her."

"Why, of course."

On his way to Boston the affair seemed to grow less and less impossible to Matt; but he really knew nothing of the legal complications; and when he proposed it to his father, old Hilary shook his head. "I don't believe it could be done. The man's regularly indicted, and he's in contempt of court as long as he doesn't present himself for trial. That's the way I understand it. But I'll see our counsel. Whose scheme is this?"

"I don't know. Miss Northwick told me of it; but I fancied Miss Suzette—"

"Yes," said Hilary. "It must have cost her almost her life to give up her faith in that pitiful rascal."

"But after she had done that, it would cost her nothing to give up the property, and as I understood Miss Northwick, that was her sister's first impulse. She wished to give up her half of the estate unconditionally; but Miss Northwick wouldn't consent, and they compromised on the conditions she told me of."

"Well," said Hilary, "I think Miss Northwick showed the most sense. But of course, Sue's a noble girl. She almost transfigures that old scoundrel of a father of hers. That fellow—Jack Wilmington—ought to come forward now and show himself a man, if he is one. Any man might be proud of such a girl's love—and they say she was in love with him. But he seems to have preferred to dangle after his uncle's wife. He isn't good enough for her, and probably he always knew it."

Matt profited by the musing fit that came upon his father, to go and look at the picture over the mantel. It was not a new picture; but he did not feel that he was using his father quite frankly; and he kept looking at it for that reason.

"If those poor creatures gave up their property, what would they do? They've absolutely nothing else in the world!"

"I fancy," said Matt, "that isn't a consideration that would weigh with Suzette Northwick."

"No. If there's anything in heredity, the father of such a girl must have some good in him. Of course, they wouldn't be allowed to suffer."

"Do you mean that the company would regard the fact that it had no legal claim on the property, and would recognize it in their behalf?"

"The company!" Hilary roared. "The company has no right to that property, moral or legal. But we should act as if we had. If it were unconditionally offered to us, we ought to acknowledge it as an act of charity to us, and not of restitution. But every man Jack of us would hold out for a right to it that didn't exist, and we should take it as part of our due; and I should be such a coward that I couldn't tell the Board what I thought of our pusillanimity."

"It seems rather hard for men to act magnanimously in a corporate capacity, or even humanely," said Matt. "But I don't know but there would be an obscure and negative justice in such action. It would be right for the company to accept the property, if it was right for Northwick's daughter to offer it, and I think it is most unquestionably right for her to do that."

"Do you, Matt? Well, well," said Hilary, willing to be comforted, "perhaps you're right. You must send Louise and your mother over to see her."

"Well, perhaps not just now. She's proud and sensitive, and perhaps it might seem intrusive, at this juncture?"

"Intrusive? Nonsense! She'll be glad to see them. Send them right over!"

Matt knew this was his father's way of yielding the point, and he went away with his promise to say nothing of the matter they had talked of till he heard from Putney. After that would be time enough to ascertain the whereabouts of Northwick, which no one knew yet, not even his own children.

What his father had said in praise of Suzette gave his love for her unconscious approval; but at the same time it created a sort of comedy situation, and Matt was as far from the comic as he hoped he was from the romantic, in his mood. When he thought of going direct to her, he hated to be going, like the hero of a novel, to offer himself to the heroine at the moment her fortunes were darkest; but he knew that he was only like that outwardly, and inwardly was simply and humbly her lover, who wished in any way or any measure he might, to be her friend and helper. He thought he might put his offer in some such form as would leave her free to avail herself a little if not much of his longing to comfort and support her in her trial. But at last he saw that he could do nothing for the present, and that it would be cruel and useless to give her more than the tried help of a faithful friend. He did not go back to Hatboro', as he longed to do. He went back to his farm, and possessed his soul in such patience as he could.



XII.

Suzette came back from Putney's office with such a disheartened look that Adeline had not the courage to tell her of Matt's visit and the errand he had undertaken for her. The lawyer had said no more than that he did not believe anything could be done. He was glad they had decided not to transfer their property to the company, without first trying to make interest for their father with it; that was their right, and their duty; and he would try what could be done; but he warned Suzette that he should probably fail.

"And then what did he think we ought to do?" Adeline asked.

"He didn't say," Suzette answered.

"I presume," Adeline went on, after a little pause, "that you would like to give up the property, anyway. Well, you can do it, Suzette." The joy she might have expected did not show itself in her sister's face, and she added, "I've thought it all over, and I see it as you do, now. Only," she quavered, "I do want to do all I can for poor father, first."

"Yes," said Suzette, spiritlessly, "Mr. Putney said we ought."

"Sue," said Adeline, after another little pause, "I don't know what you'll think of me, for what I've done. Mr. Hilary has been here—"

"Mr. Hilary!"

"Yes. He came over from his farm—"

"Oh! I thought you meant his father." The color began to mount into the girl's cheeks.

"Louise and Mrs. Hilary sent their love, and they all want to do anything they can; and—and I told Mr. Hilary what we were going to try; and—he said he would speak to his father about it; and—Oh, Suzette, I'm afraid I've done more than I ought!"

Suzette was silent, and then, "No," she said, "I can't see what harm there could be in it."

"He said," Adeline pursued with joyful relief, "he wouldn't let his father speak to the rest about it, till we were ready; and I know he'll do all he can for us. Don't you?"

Sue answered, "I don't see what harm it can do for him to speak to his father. I hope, Adeline," she added, with the severity Adeline had dreaded, "you didn't ask it as a favor from him?"

"No, no! I didn't indeed, Sue! It came naturally. He offered to do it."

"Well," said Suzette, with a sort of relaxation, and she fell back in the chair where she had been sitting.

"I don't see," said Adeline, with an anxious look at the girl's worn face, "but what we'd both better have the doctor."

"Ah, the doctor!" cried Suzette. "What can the doctor do for troubles like ours?" She put up her hands to her face, and bowed herself on them, and sobbed, with the first tears she had shed since the worst had come upon them.

The company's counsel submitted Putney's overtures, as he expected, to the State's attorney, in the hypothetical form, and the State's attorney, as Putney expected, dealt with the actuality. He said that when Northwick's friends communicated with him and ascertained his readiness to surrender the money he had with him, and to make restitution in every possible way, it would be time to talk of a nolle prosequi. In the meantime, by the fact of absconding he was in contempt of court. He must return and submit himself for trial, and take the chance of a merciful sentence.

There could be no other answer, he said, and he could give none for Putney to carry back to the defaulter's daughters.

Suzette received it in silence, as if she had nerved herself up to bear it so. Adeline had faltered between her hopes and fears, but she had apparently decided how she should receive the worst, if the worst came.

"Well, then," she said, "we must give up the place. You can get the papers ready, Mr. Putney."

"I will do whatever you say, Miss Northwick."

"Yes, and I don't want you to think that I don't want to do it. It's my doing now; and if my sister was all against it, I should wish to do it all the same."

Matt Hilary learned from his father the result of the conference with the State's attorney, and he came up to Hatboro' the next day, to see Putney on his father's behalf, and to express the wish of his family that Mr. Putney would let them do anything he could think of for his clients. He got his message out bunglingly, with embarrassed circumlocution and repetition; but this was what it came to in the end.

Putney listened with sarcastic patience, shifting the tobacco in his mouth from one thin cheek to the other, and letting his fierce blue eyes burn on Matt's kindly face.

"Well, sir," he said, "what do you think can be done for two women, brought up as ladies, who choose to beggar themselves?"

"Is it so bad as that?" Matt asked.

"Why, you can judge for yourself. My present instructions are to make their whole estate over to the Ponkwasset Mills Company—"

"But I thought—I thought they might have something besides—something—"

"There was a little money in the bank that Northwick placed there to their credit when he went away; but I've had their instructions to pay that over to your company, too. I suppose they will accept it?"

"It isn't my company," said Matt. "I've nothing whatever to do with it—or any company. But I've no doubt they'll accept it."

"They can't do otherwise," said the lawyer, with a humorous sense of the predicament twinkling in his eyes. "And that will leave my clients just nothing in the world until Mr. Northwick comes home with that fortune he proposes to make. In the meantime they have their chance of starving to death, or living on charity. And I don't believe," said Putney, breaking down with a laugh, "they've the slightest notion of doing either."

Matt stood appalled at the prospect which the brute terms brought before him. He realized that after all there is no misery like that of want, and that yonder poor girl had chosen something harder to bear than her father's shame.

"Of course," he said, "they mustn't be allowed to suffer. We shall count upon you to see that nothing of that kind happens. You can contrive somehow not to let them know that they are destitute."

"Why," said Putney, putting his leg over the back of a chair into its seat, for his greater ease in conversation, "I could, if I were a lawyer in a novel. But what do you think I can do with two women like these, who follow me up every inch of the way, and want to know just what I mean by every step I take? You're acquainted with Miss Suzette, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Matt, consciously.

"Well, do you suppose that such a girl as that, when she had made up her mind to starve, wouldn't know what you were up to if you pretended to have found a lot of money belonging to her under the cupboard?"

"The company must do something," said Matt, desperately. "They have no claim on the property, none whatever!"

"Now you're shouting." Putney put a comfortable mass of tobacco in his mouth, and began to work his jaws vigorously upon it.

"They mustn't take it—they won't take it!" cried Matt.

Putney laughed scornfully.



XIII.

Matt made his way home to his farm, by a tiresome series of circuitous railroad connections across country. He told his mother of the new shape the trouble of the Northwicks had taken, and asked her if she could not go to see them, and find out some way to help them.

Louise wished to go instantly to see them. She cried out over the noble action that Suzette wished to do; she knew it was all Suzette.

"Yes, it is noble," said Mrs. Hilary. "But I almost wish she wouldn't do it."

"Why, mamma?"

"It complicates matters. They could have gone on living there very well as they were; and the company doesn't need it; but now where will they go? What will become of them?"

Louise had not thought of that, and she found it shocking.

"I suppose," Matt said, "that the company would let them stay where they are, for the present, and that they won't be actually houseless. But they propose now to give up the money that their father left for their support till he could carry out the crazy schemes for retrieving himself that he speaks of in his letter; and then they will have nothing to live on."

"I knew Suzette would do that!" said Louise. "Before that letter came out she always said that her father never did what the papers said. But that cut the ground from under her feet, and such a girl could have no peace till she had given up everything—everything!"

"Something must be done," said Mrs. Hilary. "Have they—has Suzette—any plans?"

"None, but that of giving up the little money they have left in the bank," said Matt, forlornly.

"Well," Mrs. Hilary commented with a sort of magisterial authority, "they've all managed as badly as they could."

"Well, mother, they hadn't a very hopeful case, to begin with," said Matt, and Louise smiled.

"I suppose your poor father is worried almost to death about it," Mrs. Hilary pursued.

"He was annoyed, but I couldn't see that he had lost his appetite. I don't think that even his worriment is the first thing to be considered, though."

"No; of course not, Matt. I was merely trying to think. I don't know just what we can offer to do; but we must find out. Yes, we must go and see them. They don't seem to have any one else. It is very strange that they should have no relations they can go to!" Mrs. Hilary meditated upon a hardship which she seemed to find personal. "Well, we must try what we can do," she said relentingly, after a moment's pause.

They talked the question of what she could do futilely over, and at the end Mrs. Hilary said, "I will go there in the morning. And I think I shall go from there to Boston, and try to get your father off to the shore."

"Oh!" said Louise.

"Yes; I don't like his being in town so late."

"Poor papa! Did he look very much wasted away, Matt? Why don't you get him to come up here?"

"He's been asked," said Matt.

"Yes, I know he hates the country," Louise assented. She rose and went to the glass door standing open on the piazza, where a syringa bush was filling the dull, warm air with its breath. "We must all try to think what we can do for Suzette."

Her mother looked at the doorway after she had vanished through it; and listened a moment to her voice in talk with some one outside. The two voices retreated together, and Louise's laugh made itself heard farther off. "She is a light nature," sighed Mrs. Hilary.

"Yes," Matt admitted, thinking he would rather like to be of a light nature himself at that moment. "But I don't know that there is anything wrong in it. It would do no good if she took the matter heavily."

"Oh, I don't mean the Northwicks entirely," said Mrs. Hilary. "But she is so in regard to everything. I know she is a good child, but I'm afraid she doesn't feel things deeply. Matt, I don't believe I like this protege of yours."

"Maxwell?"

"Yes. He's too intense."

"Aren't you a little difficult, mother?" Matt asked. "You don't like Louise's lightness, and you don't like Maxwell's intensity. I think he'll get over that. He's sick, poor fellow; he won't be so intense when he gets better."

"Oh, yes; very likely." Mrs. Hilary paused, and then she added, abruptly, "I hope Louise's sympathies will be concentrated on Sue Northwick for awhile, now."'

"I thought they were that, already," said Matt. "I'm sure Louise has shown herself anxious to be her friend ever since her troubles began. I hadn't supposed she was so attached to her—so constant—"

"She's romantic; but she's worldly; she likes the world and its ways. There never was a girl who liked better the pleasure, the interest of the moment. I don't say she's fickle; but one thing drives another out of her mind. She likes to live in a dream; she likes to make-believe. Just now she's all taken up with an idyllic notion of country life, because she's here in June, with that sick young reporter to patronize. But she's the creature of her surroundings, and as soon as she gets away she'll be a different person altogether. She's a strange contradiction!" Mrs. Hilary sighed. "If she would only be entirely worldly, it wouldn't be so difficult; but when her mixture of unworldliness comes in, it's quite distracting." She waited a moment as if to let Matt ask her what she meant; but he did not, and she went on: "She's certainly not a simple character—like Sue Northwick, for instance."

Matt now roused himself. "Is she a simple character?" he asked, with a show of indifference.

"Perfectly," said his mother. "She always acts from pride. That explains everything she does."

"I know she is proud," Matt admitted, finding a certain comfort in openly recognizing traits in Sue Northwick that he had never deceived himself about. He had a feeling, too, that he was behaving with something like the candor due his mother, in saying, "I could imagine her being imperious, even arrogant at times; and certainly she is a wilful person. But I don't see," he added, "why we shouldn't credit her with something better than pride in what she proposes to do now."

"She has behaved very well," said Mrs. Hilary, "and much better than could have been expected of her father's daughter."

Matt felt himself getting angry at this scanty justice, but he tried to answer calmly, "Surely, mother, there must be a point where the blame of the innocent ends! I should be very sorry if you went to Miss Northwick with the idea that we were conferring a favor in any way. It seems to me that she is indirectly putting us under an obligation which we shall find it difficult to discharge with delicacy."

"Aren't you rather fantastic, Matt?"

"I'm merely trying to be just. The company has no right to the property which she is going to give up."

"We are not the company."

"Father is the president."

"Well, and he got Mr. Northwick a chance to save himself, and he abused it, and ran away. And if she is not responsible for her father, why should you feel so for yours? But I think you may trust me, Matt, to do what is right and proper—even what is delicate—with Miss Northwick."

"Oh, yes! I didn't mean that."

"You said something like it, my dear."

"Then I beg your pardon, mother. I certainly wasn't thinking of her alone. But she is proud, and I hoped you would let her feel that we realize all that she is doing."

"I'm afraid," said Mrs. Hilary, with a final sigh, "that if I were quite frank with her, I should tell her she was a silly, headstrong girl, and I wished she wouldn't do it."



XIV.

The morning which followed was that of a warm, lulling, luxuriant June day, whose high tides of life spread to everything. Maxwell felt them in his weak pulses where he sat writing at an open window of the farmhouse, and early in the forenoon he came out on the piazza of the farmhouse, with a cushion clutched in one of his lean hands; his soft hat-brim was pulled down over his dull, dreamy eyes, where the far-off look of his thinking still lingered. Louise was in the hammock, and she lifted herself alertly out of it at sight of him, with a smile for his absent gaze.

"Have you got through?"

"I've got tired; or, rather, I've got bored. I thought I would go up to the camp."

"You're not going to lie on the ground, there?" she asked, with the importance and authority of a woman who puts herself in charge of a sick man, as a woman always must when there is such a man near her.

"I would be willing to be under it, such a day as this," he said. "But I'll take the shawl, if that's what you mean. I thought it was here?"

"I'll get it for you," said Louise; and he let her go into the parlor and bring it out to him. She laid, it in a narrow fold over his shoulder; he thanked her carelessly, and she watched him sweep languidly across the buttercupped and dandelioned grass of the meadow-land about the house, to the dark shelter of the pine grove at the north. The sun struck full upon the long levels of the boughs, and kindled their needles to a glistening mass; underneath, the ground was red, and through the warm-looking twilight of the sparse wood the gray canvas of a tent showed; Matt often slept there in the summer, and so the place was called the camp. There was a hammock between two of the trees, just beyond the low stone wall, and Louise saw Maxwell get into it.

Matt came out on the piazza in his blue woollen shirt and overalls and high boots, and his cork helmet topping all.

"You look like a cultivated cowboy that had gobbled an English tourist, Matt," said his sister. "Have you got anything for me?"

Matt had some letters in his hands which the man had just brought up from the post-office. "No; but there are two for Maxwell—"

"I will carry them to him, if you're busy. He's just gone over to the camp."

"Well, do," said Matt. He gave them to her, and he asked, "How do you think he is, this morning?"

"He must be pretty well; he's been writing ever since breakfast."

"I wish he hadn't," said Matt. "He ought really to be got away somewhere out of the reach of newspapers. I'll see. Louise, how do you think a girl like Sue Northwick would feel about an outright offer of help at such a time as this?"

"How, help? It's very difficult to help people," said Louise, wisely. "Especially when they're not able to help themselves. Poor Sue! I don't know what she will do. If Jack Wilmington—but he never really cared for her, and now I don't believe she cares for him. No, it couldn't be."

"No; the idea of love would be sickening to her now."

Louise opened her eyes. "Why, I don't know what you mean, Matt. If she still cared for him, I can't imagine any time when she would rather know that he cared for her."

"But her pride—wouldn't she feel that she couldn't meet him on equal terms—"

"Oh, pride! Stuff! Do you suppose that a girl who really cared for a person would think of the terms she met them on? When it comes to such a thing as that there is no pride; and proud girls and meek girls are just alike—like cats in the dark."

"Do you think so?" asked Matt; the sunny glisten, which had been wanting to them before, came into his eyes.

"I know so," said Louise. "Why, do you think that Jack Wilmington still—"

"No; no. I was just wondering. I think I shall run down to Boston to-morrow, and see father—Or, no! Mother won't be back till to-morrow evening. Well, I will talk with you, at dinner, about it."

Matt went off to his mowing, and Louise heard the cackle of his machine before she reached the camp with Maxwell's letters.

"Don't get up!" she called to him, when he lifted himself with one arm at the stir of her gown over the pine-needles. "Merely two letters that I thought perhaps you might want to see at once."

He took them, and glancing at one of them threw it out on the ground. "This is from Ricker," he said, opening the other. "If you'll excuse me," and he began to read it. "Well, that is all right," he said, when he had run it through. "He can manage without me a little while longer; but a few more days like this will put an end to my loafing. I begin to feel like work, for the first time since I came up here."

"The good air is beginning to tell," said Louise, sitting down on the board which formed a bench between two of the trees fronting the hammock. "But if you hurry back to town, now, you will spoil everything. You must stay the whole summer."

"You rich people are amusing," said Maxwell, turning himself on his side, and facing her. "You think poor people can do what they like."

"I think they can do what other people like," said the girl, "if they will try. What is to prevent your staying here till you get perfectly well?"

"The uncertainty whether I shall ever get perfectly well, for one thing," said Maxwell, watching with curious interest the play of the light and shade flecks on her face and figure.

"I know you will get well, if you stay," she interrupted.

"And for another thing," he went on, "the high and holy duty we poor people feel not to stop working for a living as long as we live. It's a caste pride. Poverty obliges, as well as nobility."

"Oh, pshaw! Pride obliges, too. It's your wicked pride. You're worse than rich people, as you call us: a great deal prouder. Rich people will let you help them."

"So would poor people, if they didn't need help. You can take a gift if you don't need it. You can accept an invitation to dinner, if you're surfeited to loathing, but you can't let any one give you a meal if you're hungry. You rich people are like children, compared with us poor folks. You don't know life; you don't know the world. I should like to do a girl brought up like you in the ignorance and helplessness of riches."