"Don't ask me. I'm one of the hair-hung and breeze-shaken majority. I should most probably have punched his head."

"Well, that's jest what I did. I says, says I, 'Jim, whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and jest at this time present, I'm the instrument.' And when the dust got settled down, Jim he druv' home with that ther' piebald, allowin' he wasn't such an all-fired bad hawss after all. But lookee here, Tom-Jeff, this ain't sellin' you the finest saddle-hawss in the valley. What do ye say about Saladin?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Tom. "I don't love horses very much. You know what the Bible says: A horse is a vain thing for safety. Is this bay going to make me lose my temper and knock his pinhead brains out the first time I put a leg over him?"

"No-o-o, suh! Why, he's as kind and gentle and lovin as a woman. You jest natchelly couldn't whup this here bay, Tom-Jeff!"

"All right, Japhe; I was only deviling you a little. Take him up to the Woodlawn stables and tell William Henry Harrison to give him the box stall. I'll try him to-morrow morning, if the weather is good."

Brother Japheth's business was concluded, and the architect who was building the latest extension to the pipe-pit floor was heading across the yard to consult the young boss. Pettigrass paused with his foot in the stirrup to say, "Old Tike Bryerson's on the rampage ag'in; folks up at the valley head say he's a-lookin' for you, Tom-Jeff."

"For me?" said Tom; then he laughed easily. "I don't owe him anything, and I'm not very hard to find. What's the matter?"

He thought it a little singular at the time that Japheth gave him a curious look and mounted and rode away without answering his question. But the building activities were clamoring for time and attention, and his father was waiting to consult him about a run of iron that was not quite up to the pipe-making test requirements. So he forgot Japheth's half-accusing glance at parting, and the implied warning that had preceded it, until an incident at the day's end reminded him of both.

The incident turned on the fact of his walking home. Ordinarily he struck work when the furnace whistle blew, riding home with his father behind old Longfellow; but on this particular evening Kinderling, the architect, missed his South Tredegar train, and Tom spent an extra hour with him, discussing further and future possibilities of expansion. Kinderling got away on a later train, and Tom closed his office and took the long mile up the pike afoot in the dusk of the autumn evening, thinking pointedly of many things mechanical and industrial, and never by any chance forereaching to the epoch-marking event that was awaiting him at the Woodlawn gate.

His hand was upon the latch of the ornamental side wicket opening on the home foot-path when a woman, crouching in the shadow of the great-gate pillar, rose suddenly and stood before him. He did not recognize her at first; it was nearly dark, and her head was snooded in a shawl. Then she spoke, and he saw that it was Nancy Bryerson—a Nan sadly and terribly changed, but with much of the wild-creature beauty of face and form still remaining.

"You done forgot me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked; and then, at his start of recognition: "I allow I have changed some."

"Surely I haven't forgotten you, Nan. But you took me by surprise; and I can't see in the dark any better than most people. What are you doing down here in the valley so late in the evening?" He tried to say it superiorly, paternally, as an older man might have said it—and was not altogether successful. The mere sight of her set his blood aswing in the old throbbing ebb and flow, though, if he had known it, it was pity now rather than passion that gave the impetus.

"You allow it ain't fittin' for me to be out alone after night?" she said, with a hard little laugh. "I reckon it ain't goin' to hurt me none; anyways, I had to come. Paw's been red-eyed for a week, and he's huntin' for you, Tom-Jeff."

Then Tom recalled Japheth's word of the morning.

"Hunting for me? Well, I'm not very hard to find," he said, unconsciously repeating the answer he had made to the horse-trader's warning.

"Couldn't you make out to go off somewheres for a little spell?" she asked half-pleadingly.

"Run away, you mean? Hardly; I'm too busy just at present. Besides, I haven't any quarrel with your father. What's he making trouble about now?"

She put her face in her hands, and though she was silent, he could see that sobs were shaking her. Being neither more nor less than a man, her tears made him foolish. He put his arm around her and was trying to find the comforting word, when the heavens fell.

How Ardea and Miss Euphrasia, going the round-about way from one house to the other to avoid the dew-wet grass of the lawns, came fairly within arm's-reach before he saw or heard them, remained a thing inexplicable. But when he looked up they were there, Miss Euphrasia straightening herself aloof in virtuous disapproval, and Ardea looking as if some one had suddenly shown her the head of Medusa.

Tom separated himself from Nan in hot-hearted confusion and stood as a culprit taken in the act. Nan hid her face again and turned away. It was Miss Dabney the younger who found words to break the smarting silence.

"Don't mind us, Mr. Gordon," she said icily. "We were going to Woodlawn to see if your father and mother could come over after dinner."

Tom smote himself alive and made haste to open the foot-path gate for them. There was nothing more said, or to be said; but when they were gone and he was once more alone with Nan, he was fighting desperately with a very manlike desire to smash something; to relieve the wrathful pressure by hurting somebody. Let it be written down to his credit that he did not wreak his vengeance on the defenseless. Thomas Jefferson, the boy, would not have hesitated.



"You were going to tell me about your father," he said, striving to hold the interruption as if it had not been, and yet tingling in every nerve to be free. "Did you come all the way down the mountain to warn me?"

She nodded, adding: "But that didn't make no differ'; I had to come anyway. He run me out, paw did."

"Heavens!" ejaculated Tom, prickling now with a new sensation. "And you haven't any place to stay?"

She shook her head.

"No. I was allowin' maybe your paw'd let me sleep where you-uns keep the hawsses—jest for a little spell till I could make out what-all I'm goin' to do."

He was too rageful to be quite clear-sighted. Yet he conceived that he had a duty laid on him. Once in the foolish, infatuated long-ago he had told her he would take care of her; he remembered it; doubtless she was remembering it, too. But her suggestion was not to be considered for a moment.

"I can't let you go to the stables," he objected. "The horse-boys sleep there. But I'll put a roof over you, some way. Wait here a minute till I come back."

His thought was to go to his mother and ask her help; but half-way to the house his courage failed him. Since the breach in spiritual confidence he had been better able to see the lovable side of his mother's faith; but he could not be blind to that quality of hardness in it which, even in such chastened souls as Martha Gordon's, finds expression in woman's inhumanity to woman. Besides, Ardea and her cousin were still in the way.

He swung on his heel undecided. On the hillside back of the new foundry there was a one-roomed cabin built on the Gordon land years before by a hermit watchman of the Chiawassee plant. It was vacant, and Tom remembered that the few bits of furniture had not been removed when the old watchman died. Would the miserable shack do for a temporary refuge for the outcast? He concluded it would have to do; and, making a wide circuit of the house, he went around to the stables to harness Longfellow to the buggy. Luckily, the negroes were all in the detached kitchen, eating their supper, so he was able to go and come undetected.

When he drove down to the gate he found Nan waiting where he had left her; but now she had a bundle in her arms. As he got out to swing the driveway grille, the house door opened; a flood of light from the hall lamp banded the lawn, and there were voices and footsteps on the veranda. He flung a nervous glance over his shoulder; Ardea and her cousin were returning down the foot-path. Wherefore he made haste, meaning not to be caught again, if he could help it. But the fates were against him. Longfellow, snatched ruthlessly from his half-emptied oat box, made equine protest, yawing and veering and earning himself a savage cut of the whip before he consented to place the buggy at the stone mounting-step.

"Quick!" said Tom, flinging the reins on the dashboard. "Chuck your bundle under the seat and climb in!"

But Nan was provokingly slow, and when she tried to get in with the bundle still in her arms, the buggy hood was in the way. Tom had to help her, was in the act of lifting her to the step, when the wicket latch, clicked and Ardea and Miss Euphrasia came out. They passed on without comment, but Tom could feel the electric shock of righteous scorn through the back of his head. That was why he drove half-way to the lower end of the pike before he turned on Nan to say:

"What's in that bundle you're so careful of? Why don't you put it under the seat?"

She looked around at him, and dark as it was, he saw that the great black eyes were shining with a strange light—strange to him.

"I reckon you wouldn't want me to do that, Tom-Jeff," she answered simply. "Hit's my baby—my little Tom."

He was struck dumb. It often happens that in the fiercest storm of gossip the one most nearly concerned goes his way without so much as suspecting that the sun is hidden. But Tom had not been exposed to the violence of the storm. Nan's shame was old, and the gossip tongues had wagged themselves weary two years before, when the child was born. So Tom was quite free to think only of his companion. A great anger rose and swelled in his heart. What scoundrel had taken advantage of an ignorance so profound as to be the blood sister of innocence? He would have given much to know; and yet the true delicacy of a manly soul made him hold his peace.

Thus it befell that they drove in silence to the deserted cabin on the hillside; and Tom went down to the foundry office and brought a lamp for light. The cabin was a mere shelter; but when he would have made excuses, Nan stopped him.

"Hit's as good as I been usen to, as you know mighty well, Tom-Jeff. I on'y wisht—"

He was on his knees at the hearth, kindling a fire, and he looked up to see why she did not finish. She was sitting on the edge of the old watchman's rude bed, bowed low over the sleeping child, and again sobs were shaking her like an ague fit. There was something heartrending in this silent, wordless anguish; but there was nothing to be said, and Tom went on making the fire. After a little she sat up and continued monotonously:

"He was liken to me thataway, too; the Man 'at I heard your Uncle Silas tellin' about one night when I sot on the doorstep at Little Zoar—He hadn't no place to lay His'n head; not so much as the red foxes 'r the birds ... and I hain't."

The blaze was racing up the chimney now with a cheerful roar, and Tom rose to his feet, every good emotion in him stirring to its awakening.

"Such as it is, Nan, this place is yours, for as long as you want to stay," he said soberly. And then: "You straighten things around here to suit you, and I'll be back in a little while."

He was gone less than half an hour, but in that short interval he lighted another fire: a blaze of curiosity and comment to tingle the ears and loosen the tongues of the circle of loungers in Hargis's store in Gordonia. He ignored the stove-hugging contingent pointedly while he was giving his curt orders to the storekeeper; and the contingent avenged itself when he was out of hearing.

"Te-he!" chuckled Simeon Cantrell the elder, pursing his lips around the stem of his corn-cob pipe; "looks like Tom-Jeff was goin' to house-keepin' right late in the evenin'."

"By gol, I wonder what's doin'?" said another. "Reckon he's done tuk up with Nan Bryerson, afte' all's been said an' done?"

Bastrop Clegg, whose distinction was that of being the oldest loafer in the circle, spat accurately into the drafthole of the stove, sat back and tilted his hat over his eyes.

"Well, boys, I reckon hit's erbout time, ain't hit?" he moralized. "Leetle Tom must be a-goin' awn two year old; and I don't recommember ez Tom 'r his pappy has ever done a livin' thing for Nan."

Whereupon one member of the group got up and addressed himself to the door. It was Japheth Pettigrass; and what he said was said to the starlit night outside.

"My Lord! that ther' boy was lyin' to me, after all! I didn't believe hit that night when he r'ared and took on so to me and 'lowed to chunk me with a rock, and I don't want to believe hit now. But Lordy gracious! hit do look mighty bad, with him a-buyin' all that outfit and loadin' hit in his pappy's buggy; hit do, for shore!"

A half-hour later, Brother Japheth, trudging back to Deer Trace on the pike, saw the light in the long-deserted cabin back of the new foundry plant; saw this and was overtaken at the Woodlawn gates by Thomas Jefferson with Longfellow and the buggy. And he could not well help observing that the buggy had been lightened of its burden of household supplies.

Tom turned the horse over to William Henry Harrison and went in to his belated dinner somberly reflective. He was not sorry to find that his mother and father had gone over to the manor-house. Solitude was grateful at the moment; he was glad of the chance to try to think himself uninterruptedly out of the snarl of misunderstanding in which his impulsiveness had entangled him.

The pointing of the thought was to see Ardea and have it out with her at once. Reconsidered, it appeared the part of prudence to wait a little. The muddiest pool will settle if time and freedom from ill-judged disturbance be given it. But we, who have known Thomas Jefferson from his beginnings, may be sure that it was the action-thought that triumphed. They also serve who only stand and wait, was meaningless comfort to him; and when he had finished his solitary dinner and had changed his clothes, he strode across the double lawns and rang the manor-house bell.



XXIV

THE UNDER-DEPTHS

The Deer Trace family and the two guests from Woodlawn were in the music-room when Tom was admitted, with Ardea at the piano playing war songs for the pleasuring of her grandfather and the ex-artilleryman. Under cover of the music, Tom slipped into the circle of listeners and went to sit beside his mother. There was a courteous hand-wave of welcome from Major Dabney, but Miss Euphrasia seemed not to see him. He saw and understood, and was obstinately impervious to the chilling east wind in that quarter. It was with Ardea that he must make his peace, and he settled himself to wait for his opportunity.

It bade fair to be a long time coming. Ardea's repertoire was apparently inexhaustible, and at the end of an added hour he began to suspect that she knew what was in store for her and was willing to postpone the afflictive moment. From the battle hymns of the Confederacy to the militant revival melodies best loved by Martha Gordon the transition was easy; and from these she drifted through a Beethoven sonata to Mozart, and from Mozart to Chopin.

Thomas Jefferson knew music as the barbarian knows it, which is to say that it lighted strange fires in him; stirred and thrilled him in certain heart or soul labyrinths locked against all other influences. As Ardea's fingers sought the changing chords he felt vaguely that she was speaking to him, now scorning, now rebuking, now pleading, but always in a tongue that he only half comprehended. He stole a glance at his watch, impatient to come to hand-grips with her and have it over. The suspense could not last much longer. It was past ten; the Major was dozing peacefully in his great arm-chair, and Miss Euphrasia yawned decorously behind her hand.

Ardea lingered lovingly on the closing harmonies of the nocturne, and when the final chord was struck her hands lingered on the keys until the sweet voices of the strings had sung themselves afar into the higher sound heaven. Then she turned quickly and surprised her anesthetized audience.

"You poor things!" she laughed. "In another five minutes the last one of you would have succumbed. Why didn't somebody stop me?"

The iron-master said something about the heavy work of the day, and helped his wife to her feet. The Major came awake with a start and bestirred himself hospitably, and Miss Euphrasia rose to speed the parting guests—or rather the two of them who had been invited. In the drift down the wide hall Ardea fell behind with Tom, whom Cousin Euphrasia continued to ignore.

"I came to tell you," he said in a low tone, snatching his opportunity. "I can't sleep until I have fought it out with you."

"You don't deserve a hearing, even from your best friend," was her discouraging reply; but when they were at the door she gave him a formal reprieve. "I shall walk for a few minutes on the portico to rest my nerves," she said. "If you want to come back—"

He thanked her gravely, and went obediently when his mother called to him from the steps. But on the Woodlawn veranda he excused himself to smoke a cigar in the open; and when the door closed behind the two in-going, he swiftly recrossed the lawns to pay the penalty.

The front door of the manor-house was shut and the broad, pillared portico was untenanted. He sat down in one of the rustic chairs and searched absently in his pockets for a cigar. Before he could find it the door opened and closed and Ardea stood before him. She had thrown a wrap over her shoulders, and the light from the music-room windows illuminated her. There was cool scorn in the slate-blue eyes, but in Tom's thought she had never appeared more unutterably beautiful and desirable—and unattainable.

"I have come," she said, in a tone that cut him to the heart for its very indifference. "What have you to say for yourself?"

He rose quickly and offered her the chair; and when she would not take it, he put his back to the wall and stood with her.

"I'm afraid I haven't left myself much to say," he began penitently. "I was born foolish, and it seems that I haven't outgrown it. But, really, if you could know—"

"Unhappily, I do know," she interrupted. "If I did not, I might listen to you with better patience."

"It did look pretty bad," he confessed. "And that's what I wanted to say; it looked a great deal worse than it was, you know."

"I don't know," she retorted.

"You are tangling me," he said, gaining something in self-possession under the flick of the whip. "First you say you know, and then you say you don't know. Which is which?"

"If you are flippant I shall go in," she threatened. "There are things that not even the most loyal friendship can condone."

"That's the difference between friendship and love," he asserted. "I believe I'd enjoy a little more real confidence and a little less of the dutiful kind of loyalty."

"You ask too much," she said, quite coolly. "Forgiveness implies penitence and continued good behavior."

"No, it doesn't, anything of the kind," he denied, matching her tone. "That is the purely pagan point of view, and you are barred from taking it. You are bound to consider the motive."

"I am bound to believe what I see with my own eyes," she rejoined. "Perhaps you can make it appear that seeing is not believing."

"Of course I can't, if you take that attitude," he complained. And then he said irritably: "You talk about friendship! You don't know the meaning of the word!"

"If I didn't, I should hardly be here at this moment," she suggested. "You don't seem to apprehend to what degrading depths you have sunk."

His sins in the business field rose before him accusingly and prompted his reply.

"Yes, I do; but that is another matter. We were speaking of what you saw this evening. Will you let me try to explain?"

"Yes, if you will tell the plain truth."

"Lacking imagination, I can't do anything else. Nan has had a falling-out with the old scamp of a moonshiner who calls himself her father. She came to me for help, and broke down in the midst of telling me about it. I can't stand a woman's crying any better than other men."

The slate-blue eyes were transfixing him.

"And that was all—absolutely all, Tom?"

"I don't lie—to you," he said briefly.

She gave him her hand with an impulsive return to the old comradeship. "I believe you, Tom, in the face of all the—the unlikelinesses. But please don't try me again. After what has happened—" she stopped in deference to something in his eyes, half anger, half bewilderment, or a most skilful simulation of both.

"Go on," he said; "tell me what has happened. I seem to have missed something."

"No," she said, with sudden gravity. "I don't want to be your accuser or your confessor; and if you should try to prevaricate, I should hate you!"

"There is nothing for me to confess to you, Ardea," he said soberly, still holding the hand she had given him. "You have known the worst of me, always and all along, I think."

"Yes, I have known," she replied, freeing the imprisoned hand and turning from him. "And I have been sorry, sorry; not less for you than for poor Nancy Bryerson. You know now what I thought—what I had to think—when I saw you with her this evening."

It was slowly beating its way into his brain. Little things, atoms of suggestion, were separating themselves from the mass of things disregarded to cluster thickly on this nucleus of revealment: the old story of his companying with Nan on the mountain; his uncle's and Japheth's accusation at the time; and now the old moonshiner's enmity, Japheth's meaning look and distrustful silence, Nan's appearance with a child bearing his own name, the glances askance in Hargis's store when he was buying the little stock of necessaries for the poor outcast. It was all plain enough. For reasons best known to herself, Nan had not revealed the name of her betrayer, and all Gordonia, and all Paradise, believed him to be the man. Even Ardea ...

She had moved aside out of the square of window light, and he followed her.

"Tell me," he said thickly; "you heard this: you have believed it. Have I been misjudging you?"

"Not more than I misjudged you, perhaps. But that is all over, now: I am trusting you again, Tom. Only, as I said before, you mustn't try me too hard."

"Let me understand," he went on, still in the same strained tone. "Knowing this, or believing it, you could still find a place in your heart for me—you could still forgive me, Ardea?"

"I could still be your friend; yes," she replied. "I believed—others believed—that your punishment would be great enough; there are all the coming years for you to be sorry in, Tom. But in the fullness of time I meant to remind you of your duty. The time has come; you must play the man's part now. What have you done with her?"

"Wait a moment. I must know one other thing," he insisted. "You heard this before you went to Europe?"

"Long before."

"And it didn't make any difference in the way you felt toward me?"

"It did; it made the vastest difference." They were pacing slowly up and down the portico, and she waited until they had made the turn at the Woodlawn end before she went on. "I thought I knew you when we were boy and girl together, and, girl-like, I suppose I had idealized you in some ways. I thought I knew your wickednesses, and that they were not weaknesses; so—so it was a miserable shock. But it was not for me to judge you—only as you might rise or sink from that desperate starting point. When I came home I was sure that you had risen; I have been sure of it ever since until—until these few wretched hours to-night. They are past, and now I'm going to be sure of it some more, Tom."

It was his turn to be silent, and they had measured twice the length of the pillared floor when at last he said:

"What if I should tell you that you are mistaken—that all of them are mistaken?"

"Don't," she said softly. "That would only be smashing what is left of the ideal. I think I couldn't bear that."

"God in Heaven!" he said, under his breath. "And you've been calling this friendship! Ardea, girl, it's love!"

She shook her head slowly.

"No," she rejoined gravely. "At one time I thought—I was afraid—that it might be. But now I know it isn't."

"How do you know it?"

"Because love, as I think of it, is stronger than the traditions, stronger than anything else in the world. And the traditions are still with me. I admit the existence of the social pale, and as long as I live within it I have a right to demand certain things of the man who marries me."

"And love doesn't demand anything," he said, putting the remainder of the thought into words for her. "You are right. If I could clear myself with a word, I should not say it."

"Why?"

"Because your—loyalty, let us call it, is too precious to be exchanged for anything else you could give me in place of it—esteem, respect, and all the other well-behaved and virtuous bestowals."

"But the loyalty is based on the belief that you are trying to earn the well-behaved approvals," she continued.

"No, it isn't. It exists 'in spite of' everything, and not 'because of' anything. The traditions may try to make you stand it on the other leg, it's a way they have; but the fact remains."

She shook her head in deprecation.

"The 'traditions,' are about to send me into the house, and the principal problem is yet untouched. What have you done with Nancy?"

He told her briefly and exactly, adding nothing and omitting nothing; and her word for it was "impossible."

"Don't you understand?" she objected. "I may choose to believe that this home making for poor Nan and her waif is merely a bit of tardy justice on your part and honor you for it. But nobody else will take that view of it. If you keep her in that little cabin of yours, Mountain View Avenue will have a fit—and very properly."

"I don't see why it should," he protested densely.

"Don't you? That's because you are still so hopelessly primeval. People won't give you credit for the good motive; they will quote that Scripture about the dog and the sow. You must think of some other way."

"Supposing I say I don't care a hang?"

"Oh, but you do. You have your father and mother and—and me to consider, however reckless you may be for yourself and Nancy. You mustn't leave her where she is for a single day."

"I can leave her there if I like. I've told her she may stay as long as she wants to."

They had paused in front of the great door, and Ardea's hand was on the knob.

"No," she said decisively, "you will have a perfect hornets' nest about your ears. Every move you make will be watched and commented on. Don't you see that you are playing the part of the headstrong, obstinate boy again?"

"Yet you think I ought to provide for Nan, in some way; how am I going to do it unless I ignore the hornets?"

"Now you are more reasonable," she said approvingly. "I shall ride to-morrow morning, and if you should happen to overtake me, we might think up something."

The door was opening gently under the pressure of her hand, but he was loath to go.

"I wouldn't take five added years of life for what I've learned to-night, Ardea;" he said passionately. And then: "Have you fully made up your mind to marry Vincent Farley?"

In the twinkling of an eye she was another woman—cold, unapproachable, with pride kindling as if she had received a mortal affront.

"Sometimes—and they are bad times for you, Mr. Gordon—I am tempted to forget the boy-and-girl anchorings in the past. Have you no sense of the fitness of things—no shame?"

"Not very much of either, I guess," he said quite calmly. "Love hasn't any shame; and it doesn't concern itself much about the fitness of anything but its object."

And then he bade her good night and went his way with a lilting song of triumph in his heart which not even the chilling rebuff of the leave-taking was sufficient to silence.

"She loves me! She would still love me if she were ten times Vincent Farley's wife!" he said, over and over to himself; the words were on his lips when he fell asleep, and they were still ringing in his ears the next morning at dawn-break when he rose and made ready to go to ride with her.



XXV

THE PLOW IN THE FURROW

One of Miss Ardea Dabney's illuminating graces was the ability to return easily and amicably to the status quo ante bellum; to "kiss and be friends," in the unfettered phrase of Margaret Catherwood, her chum and room-mate at Carroll College.

Wherefore, when Tom, mounted on Saladin, overtook her on the morning next after the night of offenses, she greeted him quite as if nothing had happened, challenging him gaily to a gallop with the valley head for its goal, and refusing to be drawn into anything more serious than joyous persiflage until they were returning at a walk down a boulder-strewn wood road at the back of the Dabney horse pasture. Then, and not till then, was the question of Nancy Bryerson's future suffered to present itself.

For Miss Dabney the question was settled before it came up for discussion. In the Major's young manhood Deer Trace had maintained a pack of foxhounds, and it was the Major's bride, a city-bred Charleston belle, who first objected to the dooryard kennels and the clamor of the dogs. Back of the horse pasture, and a hundred yards vertical above the road Ardea and Tom were traversing, a pocket-like glen indented the mountain side, and in this glen the kennels had been established, with a substantial log cabin for the convenience of the dog-keeper.

Dogs and dog-keeper had long since gone the way of most of the old-time Southern manorial largenesses; but the cabin still stood solidly planted in the midst of its overgrown garden patch, with a dense thicket of mountain laurel backgrounding it, and a giant tulip-tree standing sentinel over a gate hanging by one rusted hinge.

This was what Tom saw when he had followed Ardea's lead up the steep bit of path climbing from the road and the pasture wall, and it evoked memories. Often in the boyhood days, when the Nazarite fit was on, he had climbed to the deserted solitude of the glen to sit on the broad door-stone of the dog-keeper's cabin as a hermit at large,—monarch for the monastic moment of a kingdom as remote as that of John the Baptist in the Wilderness of Sin.

"I thought of it last night," said Ardea, nodding toward the cabin. "It is just the place for Nancy, if she can not, or will not, go back to her father. After breakfast, I shall send Dinah and a man up to set things in order, and she can come as soon as she likes. She won't mind the loneliness?"

Tom shook his head. "I should think not; she has never been used to anything else. I'll bring her and the youngster over in the buggy any time you telephone." He had quite forgotten his lesson of the previous evening.

"Indeed, you will do nothing of the kind," was the quick reply. "Japheth will go after her when we are ready; and if you are prudently wise you will have business in South Tredegar for the next few days."

The blue-grass, seeded once in the dog-keeper's dooryard, had spread to the farthest limits of the glen, and the autumn rains had given it a spring-like start. Tom let Saladin crop a dozen mouthfuls unchecked before he said:

"That looks like dodging; and I don't like to dodge."

"You will have to do many things you don't like before you say your ave atque vale," she remarked. "But you shall be permitted to carry your full share of the burden. I mean to let you give me some money, if you can afford it, and I'll spend it for you."

"Charity itself couldn't be kinder," he asseverated. "And, luckily, I can afford it. But—"

He was looking at her wistfully, and the old longing for sympathy, for the sympathy which has been quite to the bottom of the well where truth lies, was about to cry out against this riveting of the fetters of misunderstanding and false accusation.

"But you would rather spend it yourself?" she broke in, fancying she had divined his thought. "That cannot be. The one condition on which I shall consent to help is the completest isolation for Nan. You must promise me you will not try to see her. I am hoping against hope that none of the Mountain View Avenue people will find out what you did last night."

"Oh, confound their gossiping tongues!" he railed; adding hastily: "Not that I care so very much what they say, either."

Ardea let her horse pick his way down to the wood road, and when they were approaching the Deer Trace gate: "You haven't promised yet, Tom; and you must, you know."

"Not to see Nan? That's easy. I'll keep out of her way, if you can keep her out of mine. All I care is to know that she is comfortably provided for."

This he said, thinking only of the boy-time obligation voluntarily assumed; but it was quite inevitable that Ardea should mistake the motive.

"It is right and proper that you should care about that," she said judicially. And a little farther along she added: "But I don't like your attitude."

"I don't like it myself," he rejoined heartily. "I never wanted so badly to say things in all my life! But you've nailed the lid on and I can't."

"They are better unsaid," she returned quickly. "Will you take that for your cue in the future?"

"Certainly; it is for you to command," he said lightly, swinging from his saddle to open the pasture gate for her; and so the morning ride came to its end.

Since provincialism is by no means the exclusive distinction of the landward bred, there was an immediate restirring of the gossip pool when the story of Tom's befriending of Nancy Bryerson and her child got abroad in Gordonia and among the country colonists.

In the comment of the simpler-minded Gordonia folk, the iron-master's son had finally "made it up" with Nancy, and here the note of approval was not wholly lacking. There were good-hearted souls to say that boys will be boys, and to express the hope that Tom would go on from this beginning and make an honest woman of Nancy by marrying her.

Quite naturally, the point of view of the country-house people was different; more critical, if not less charitable. Though the social acceptance of the Gordons, as an ancient family, as friends of the Dabneys, and as land-holding neighbors was fairly complete, it still lacked somewhat of the class kinship which breeds leniency and the closed eye to the sins of its own household. But for Tom, personally, as a distinct social improvement on honest Caleb, the welcome into the charmed circle of Mountain View Avenue had been warm enough to make his sudden apparent relapse into the primitive figure as an affront to the colony. Hence, there were rods laid in pickle for the sinner, as when Mrs. Vancourt Henniker gave the footman at Rook Hill a hint that for the present the Misses Henniker were not at home to Mr. Thomas Gordon; and if Tom had known it, there were other and similar chastenings lying in wait for him behind more of the colonial doors.

But Tom did not know it. He was in the crucial month of the panic year, striving desperately to maintain the foothold given to him by the pipe-casting invention, and he had little time for the amenities. So it came about that he escaped for the moment; or, which was quite the same, he did not know he was pursued. Another Northern city, with its full complement of grafting officials, was in the market for some train-loads of water-mains, and again Thomas Jefferson was fighting the old battle of conscience against expediency, this time in the evil-smelling ditches where the dead and wounded lie.

"You are sure you went into it thoroughly, Norman?" he demanded of his lieutenant, when the latter returned from a personal reconnaissance of the field. "The break they are making at us seems almost too rank to be taken at its face value."

"Oh, yes; I dug it up from the bottom," said the henchman. "It's rotten and riotous. The political machine runs the town, and the bosses own the machine. So much to this one, so much to that, so much to half a dozen others, and we get the contract. Otherwise, most emphatically nit."

"That comes straight, does it?"

"As straight as a shot out of a gun. They got together on it, eight of the big bosses, called me in and told me flat-footed what we had to do," said the salesman. "Oh, I tell you, those fellows are on to their job."

"No chance to go behind the returns and stir up popular indignation, as we did in Indiana?" suggested Tom.

"No show on top of earth. The ring owns or controls two of the dailies, and has the other two scared. Besides, they've just had their municipal election."

The Gordon-and-Gordon manager was absently jabbing holes in the desk blotter with the paper-knife.

"Well, we can do what we have to, I suppose," he said, after a hesitant pause. "Say nothing to my father, but make your arrangements to take the train for the North again to-night. I'll meet you in town at the Marlboro at four o'clock."

To prepare for the new exigency, Tom took the afternoon local for South Tredegar. The lump sum required for the bribery was considerably in excess of his balance in bank. Notwithstanding the stringency of the times, he made sure he could borrow; but it was in some vague hope that the moral chasm might be widened to impassibility, or decently bridged for him, that he was moved to state the case in detail to President Henniker of the Iron City National. Mr. Vancourt Henniker could dig ditches, on occasion, making them too vast for the boldest borrower to cross; but Tom's credit was gilt-edged, and in the present instance the president chose rather to build bridges.

"We have to shut our eyes to a good many disagreeable things in business, Mr. Gordon," he said, genially didactic. "Our problem in this day and generation is so to draw the line of distinction that these necessary concessions to human frailty will not debauch us; may be made without prejudice to that high sense of personal honor and integrity which must be the corner-stone of any successful business career. This state of affairs which you describe is deplorable—most deplorable; but—well, we may think of such obstacles as we do of toll-gates on the highway. The road is a public utility, and it should be free; but we pay the toll, under protest, and pass on."

Mr. Henniker was a large man, benign and full-favored, not to say unctuous; and his manner in delivering an opinion was blandly impressive, and convincing to many. Yet Tom was not convinced.

"Of course, I came to ask for the loan, and not specially to justify it," he said, in mild irony which was quite lost on the philosopher in the president's chair. "I wasn't sure just how you would regard it if you should know the object for which we are borrowing, and this high sense of personal honor you speak of impelled me to be altogether frank with you."

"Quite right; you were quite right, Mr. Gordon," said the banker urbanely. "You are young in business, but you have learned the first lesson in the book of success—to be perfectly open and outspoken with your banker. As I have said, the venality of these men with whom you are dealing is most deplorable, but...."

There was some further glozing over of the putrid fact, a good bit of it, and Tom sat back in his chair and listened, outwardly respectful, inwardly hot-hearted and contemptuous. Was this smooth-spoken, oracular prince of the market-place a predetermined hypocrite, shaping his words to fit the money-gathering end without regard to their demoralizing effect? Or was he only a subconscious Pharisee, self-deceived and complacent? Tom's thought ran lightning-like over the long list of the Vancourt Hennikers: men of the business world successful to the Croesus mark, large and liberal benefactors, founders of colleges, libraries and hospitals, gift-givers to their fellow men, irreproachable in private life, and yet apparently stone blind on the side of the larger equities. Could it be possible that such men deliberately admitted and accepted the double standard in morals? It seemed fairly incredible, and yet their lives appeared to proclaim it.

When the president had finished his apology for those who bow the head in the house of Rimmon, Tom rose to take his bit of approved paper around to the cashier's window. The bridge was built, and he meant to cross it; but he was honest enough, or blunt enough, to give his own point of view in a crisp sentence or two.

"I wish I could look at it in some such way as you do, Mr. Henniker, but I can't," he objected. "To me it is just plain bribery; the corrupting of officials who have sworn, among other things, to administer their offices honestly. I'm immoral, or unmoral, enough to yield to the apparent necessity, but it is quite without prejudice to a firm conviction that I am no better than the men I am going to purchase."

Having obtained the sinews of war, he kept the appointment with Norman, and their joint discussion of the business situation made him too late for the early dinner at Woodlawn. To complete the delay, the evening train lost half an hour with a hot box at a point a mile short of Gordonia. Two things came of these combined time-killings: a man in a slouched hat and the brown jeans of the mountaineers, who had been watching the Woodlawn gates since dusk from his hiding-place behind the field wall across the pike, got up stiffly and went away; and Tom reached home just in time to intercept Ardea on the steps of the picturesque veranda.

"Been visiting the little mother?" he asked, when she paused on the step above him.

"Yes—no; I ran over to tell you that we moved Nancy to-day."

"Oh! Well, that's comfortable. She was willing?"

"Y-es: almost, at first; and altogether willing when I told her that I—that she—" There was an embarrassed moment and then the truth came out. "Perhaps I should have asked you first: but she was quite satisfied when I told her that she owed her changed condition to the person whose duty it was to provide for her. You don't mind, do you?"

The question was almost a beseechment; but Tom was thinking of something else.

"No, I don't mind," he said absently, and the under-thought dealt savagely with Nan—with a woman who, for the sake of the loaves and the fishes, and the shielding of the real offender, would suffer an innocent man to go to the social gallows for lack of the word which would have cleared him. He laughed rather bitterly and added, out of the heart of the under-thought: "I'm glad I'm not naturally inclined to be pessimistic."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because, after hearing"—he changed his mind suddenly, and transferred the hard word from Nan to Mr. Vancourt Henniker—"after what I've been hearing this afternoon I find myself more in the notion of weeping with the angels than of laughing with the devils."

"What has happened?" she asked, sympathetically alive to his need in one breath, and keenly apprehensive for her own peace of mind in the next.

"An exceedingly small thing, as the world's measurements go. I was in town, and made a business call on Mr. Henniker. He's a member of your church, isn't he?"

"Of St. Michael's in the city," she corrected. "You know I claim membership here at home in St. John's."

"Well, it's all the same. He is what you would call a Christian man, I take it?"

"Why not?" she demanded. "What has he done to make you doubt it?"

"Oh, nothing worth mentioning, perhaps. I needed some money to bribe a lot of political grafters in a Pennsylvania city where I'm trying to sell a bill of water-pipe. I went to Mr. Henniker to borrow it."

"And, of course, he wouldn't let you have it for any such wretched purpose!" she flamed out.

"No, you are mistaken; it's just the other way around. I told him what it was for, hoping rather vaguely, I think, that he'd sit on me and make the crime impossible. But he didn't."

"You don't mean that he lent you the money after you had told him what you purposed doing with it?" It was too dark for him to see her face, but there was something like a breath-catching of horror in her voice.

"I'm sorry it shocks you, but he did. More than that, he took the trouble to try to explain away my scruples; made it seem quite a virtuous thing before he got through. You wouldn't believe it now, would you?"

"But, Tom! you didn't take the money?"

"How could I refuse so good a man? Norman is on his way to Pennsylvania at this present moment, with a letter of credit in his pocket big enough to make the mouth of even a professional grafter water. At least, I hope it is big enough."

She was hurt, shocked, horrified, and he knew it and found pleasure of a certain sort in the knowledge. When a man has done violence to his own best impulses, the thing that comes nearest to the holy joy of penitence is the unholy joy of making somebody else sorry for him. There were unmistakable tears in her voice when she said:

"Tom, why have you told me this—this unspeakable thing?"

"Why—I guess it was because I wanted to ask you how you supposed the Mr. Henniker kind of men square such things with their conscience; or don't they have any conscience?"

"That is not the reason," she faltered.

"You are right," he rejoined quickly. "It was diabolism pure and unstrained. I had hurt myself, and I wanted to pass it along—to hurt some one else. But it is too cold to keep you standing here. Won't you come in again?"

"No; I must go home." And she went down the broad steps.

He drew her arm through his and walked with her, down one grassy slope and up the other. At the manor-house steps he found at last sufficient grace to say: "It was a currish thing to do; will you forgive me, Ardea?"

"I don't know," she said, in a tone that thrilled him curiously. "Such things are hard to forgive. I don't mean your slapping me in the face with it, that is nothing. But to know that you have gone so far aside ... that you have sunk your manhood and all the promise of it...."

He nodded perfect intelligence. "I know; it's hell, Ardea. I've been frizzling in it for the past six months, more or less; ever since I came home with the one sole, single determination to climb out of the panic ditch if I had to make steps of dead bodies or lost souls. I'm doing it, and I'm paying the price. Sometimes I can find it in my heart to curse the mistaken mother-love that gave me to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I'm pagan in all else, but I can't sin like a pagan. Why is it? Why can't I be a smug, peaceful, sound-sleeping scoundrel like other men?"

She was standing on the step above him, as she had stood on the other side of the two dew-wet lawns.

"I have a theory," she rejoined, "but you wouldn't accept it. You'll never be able to do wrong without paying for it. Is it worth while to try?"

"Nothing is worth while—nothing at all. I don't mean that I'm going to quit; I shall doubtless go on trampling and grinding the face of the poor, and the rich, if they come in my way. But at the end of the ends I shall curse God and die, as Job's wife wanted him to."

She put her hands on his shoulders impulsively, and again the tears were in her voice.

"What can I say to help you, Tom? God knows I would do anything that a true friend may do!"

He freed himself of the touch of her hands, but very gently.

"There might have been a thing; but you have made it impossible. No, don't freeze me again—it's the last time. If I could have won your love ... but what is the use of trying to put it in words; you know—you have always known. And now it is too late."

For a single instant Vincent Farley's chance of marrying the Deer Trace coal lands trembled in the balance. Ardea forgot him, forgot Nan, thought of nothing but the passionate yearning that was drawing her like gripping hands toward the man who had bared his inmost heart to her. Again she leaned on him with a touch so light that he scarcely felt it, and her lips brushed his forehead.

"It is not too late for you to be a man, noble, upright, honorable. Let the world find that for which it is looking, my friend—my brother: the strong man armed who can stand where others faint and fall. Oh, I wish I knew how to say the word that would make you the man you were meant to be!"

When it was said, she was gone and the sound of the closing door was in his ears when he turned and went slowly down the driveway and out on the white pike, lying like a snowy ribbon under the December stars. On the highway he hung undecided for a moment; but an hour later, William Layne, driving homeward from South Tredegar, overtook him plodding slowly southward far beyond the head of Paradise; and it was nearing midnight when he won back, pacing steadily past the Deer Trace and Woodlawn gates and holding his way down the pike to Gordonia.

The railway station was his goal; and when he had aroused the sleepy night operator and gained admittance, he sat at the telegraph table to write a message. It was to Norman, addressed to intercept the salesman at the breakfast stop.

"Cancel Pennsylvania date and come in at once to take managership of plant," was the wording of it; and at the breakfast-table the following morning Tom announced his intention of leaving the industrial plow in the furrow while he should go to Boston to complete his course in the technical school.



XXVI

AS WITH A MANTLE

The month of March in the great, southward-reaching bight of the Tennessee River is the pattern and form of fickleness climatic. Normally it is the time of starting sap and swelling buds and steaming leaf beds odorous of spring; the month when the migratory crows wing their flight northward, and Nature, lightest of winter sleepers in the azurine latitudes, stirs to her vernal awakening. None the less, in the Tennessee March the orchardist, watching the high-blown clouds in skies of the softest blue, is glad if the peach buds are slow in responding to the touch of the wooing airs, or, chewing a black birch twig as he makes the leisurely round of his line fence, warns his gardening neighbor that it is too early to plant beans. True, the poplars may be showing a tinge of green, and the buds of the hickory may have lighted their tiny candle flames on the winter-bared boughs; but the "blackberry winter" is yet to come, and there are rigorous possibilities still lingering in the high-flying clouds and the sudden-shifting winds.

It was on the fourth Sunday in the month that Ardea rose early and went fasting to the communion service at St. John's-in-Paradise. Primarily, St. John's was merely the religious factor in Mr. Duxbury Farley's scheme of country-colony promotion, and for the greater part of the year its silver-toned bell was silent and its appeal was mainly to the artistic eye. But latterly St. Michael's, the mother church in South Tredegar, had attained a new assistant rector whose zeal was not yet dulled by apathetic unresponsiveness on the part of the to-be-helped. Hence St. Michael's various missions flourished for the time, and once a month, if not oftener, the bell of St. John's sent its note abroad on the still morning air of Paradise.

On this particular Sunday morning Ardea was early at the church, and she was glad she had decided to wear her cloth gown. It had turned cooler in the night and the azure March sky was hidden behind a gray cloud mass which hung low on the slopes of the mountain. There was no fire in the church heater; and the few worshipers—the Vancourt Henniker girls, the two Misses Harrison, John Young-Dickson, of The Dell, dragged out at the chilly hour by his new wife, and Mrs. Schuyler Farnsworth and her daughter, all of the country-house colony beyond the creek—sat or knelt, and shivered through the service in decorous discomfort.

Miss Dabney was not looking quite as well as usual, as Miss Betsy Harrison remarked to her sister, Miss Willie, in a church whisper. She had grown thinner during the winter, and though the slate-blue eyes were as clear and steadfast as before, there was a strained look in them like that in the eyes of the spent runner. Mountain View Avenue, rurally alert for something to talk about, decided it was trouble rather than ill health. Miss Eva Farley corresponded with Jessica Farnsworth, and there had been European hints of an understanding between Vincent and Ardea. Coupling this with young Gordon's ostentatious devotion, Nan's appearance, and Tom's sudden determination to go back to college, there was the groundwork for a very pretty story which sufficiently accounted for Miss Dabney's changed looks and for her growing reluctance to be included in the country colony's social divagations. She was engaged to one man and in love with another, who was clearly ineligible—this was the Mountain View Avenue summing-up of the matter; and some condemned and some pitied, and all were careful not to step within the barrier of aloofness with which Miss Dabney had of late surrounded herself.

On this Sunday morning of weather portents it chanced to be Ardea's turn to entertain the young minister, or rather to give him his breakfast after the service; and she waited for him in the vestibule after the others had gone. The outer doors were open, and she could see the gray cloud mass feathering on its under side and creeping lower on the slopes of Lebanon in every stormy gust of the chill wind.

"It was prudent to bring your overcoat this morning, Mr. Morelock," she said, when her guest emerged from the vesting-room with his cassock in a neat bundle under his arm. "If I'd had any idea it would turn cold so fast, I should have had the carriage come for us."

"Indeed, my dear Miss Dabney, if you could walk to church, I'm sure I can walk home with you," was the ready response; nevertheless, the rather fragile-looking young man shuddered a little in sympathy with the rawness of the wind. He was from well-sheltered New England, and he had not yet acquired the native Southron's indifference to weather discomforts; would never acquire them this side of a consumptive's grave, it was to be feared.

"The attendance was pretty good for such a disagreeable morning, don't you think?" Ardea ventured, trying to make talk as they breasted the gusts together on the Deer Trace side of the pike.

The young missioner shook his head rather despondently. "There are English churchmen among the English and Welsh miners at Gordonia,—quite a number of them," he rejoined. "Not one of them was present."

It was the clear-sighted inner Ardea that smiled. There was little in the stately service and luxurious appointments of the country colony's church to attract the working-men, and much to repel them. She wondered that Mr. Morelock, young as he was, did not understand this.

"The mission of St. John's is hardly to the working people of Gordonia, is it?" she said, more in exculpation than in criticism.

"Oh, my dear young lady! the church knows no class distinctions!" protested the zealous one warmly. "Her call is to rich and poor, gentle and simple, young and old alike; and it is imperative. I must make a round of visitation among these miners at the very first opportunity."

Ardea bent low to the buffet of a stronger blast and fought for a moment with her clinging skirts. When she had breath to say it, she said: "Will you really do that? Then let me tell you how. Come out here some week-day in your roughest clothes, and make your round among the men while they are at work in the mine. They will listen to you then."

"Bless me! what an idea!" he gasped.

"It is not original with me," was the gentle reply. "You will remember that the example was set a good many hundred years ago among the fishermen of Galilee. And, after all, Mr. Morelock, it is the only way. You can not reach down to a living soul on this earth—that is worth saving."

It had begun to rain in spiteful little dashes and squalls, and the clergyman was turning up the collar of his overcoat and buttoning it about his throat. Moreover, the wind had risen to half a gale, and talking was difficult when it was not wholly impossible. But when they reached the Deer Trace gates and the shelter of the driveway evergreens, he had a defensive word ready.

"I can't fully agree with you, you know, Miss Ardea," he said. "Of course, we must not reach down in the Pharisaical sense. But neither must we lower the dignity of the sacred calling."

Her smile was neither disloyal nor cynical; it was merely pitying. She was thinking in her heart of hearts how much this zealous young apostle had yet to learn.

"Do you call it undignified to be a man among men?" she asked; adding quickly: "But I know you don't. And what other way is open to the true brother-helper?"

"There is the church and its ministrations," he began, but she broke in.

"To get the drowning man ashore you have first to go down into the water and lay hold of him, Mr. Morelock. That means personal contact, personal association."

The young man was clearly bewildered. His experience thus far had not been enriched by many intimacies with clear-eyed young women who calmly defined the larger humanities for him.

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand your point of view," he demurred.

"Don't you? I'm not sure that I can explain just what I mean. But it seems to me that really to help any one, you must know that one; not superficially, as people meet in ordinary ways, but intimately. And you can't hope to do that if you hold aloof; if you—if you—pose as a minister all the time." The word was not flattering, but she could lay hold of no other.

"Oh, I hope I don't do that!" he laughed. "But to creep around underground in a sooty coal-mine, a laughing-stock to those who know how to do it—er—professionally—"

"The men have to do it as breadwinners, Mr. Morelock, and the most ribald one of them wouldn't laugh at you. I wouldn't be afraid to promise that you could fill St. John's, forbidding as its atmosphere is to the average working-man, the very next Sunday after such a visitation."

Now this young zealot was a man of imagination, hidebound only in his traditions. Also, he was not above taking ideas where he found them.

"Really, Miss Dabney, I'm not sure but you have hold of the matter at the practical end," he conceded. "I—I'd like to talk with you further about it, when we have time. Do you suppose I could get permission to go into the mines during working-hours?"

"Certainly you could—for the mere asking. We can speak to Mr. Caleb Gordon about it after breakfast, if you wish. My! doesn't that rain sting! I'm glad we are at home."

"Yes; and it is freezing as it falls. At home in New England we should say it was too cold to rain."

"It is never too cold or too anything to rain here," she said; and she let him take her arm to help her up the slippery stone steps to the stately portico.

A moment later the hospitable door of the manor house yawned for them, and the warmth of the Major's welcome, the light and glow of the crackling wood fires, and the solid comfort of surrounding stone walls soon banished the memory of the small struggle with the elements.

"Oh, my deah suh! you are not going back to town this mo'ning!" protested the warm-hearted Major Caspar, as the quartet was rising from the breakfast-table an hour later. "Why, bless youh soul! I wouldn't think of letting you go from undeh my roof in such weatheh as this! Tell him it's his duty to stay, Ardea, my deah; persuade him that he'll neveh have a betteh oppo'tunity to wrestle with the wickedest old sinner in Paradise Valley."

Young Mr. Morelock objected, zealously at first, but less strenuously when Ardea drew the sash curtain and showed him the ice crust already an inch thick, coating tree trunk and twig, grass blade and graveled driveway.

"I doubt very much if the horses could keep their footing; and it is quite out of the question for you to walk to Gordonia," she decided. "We have the long-distance, and you can explain matters to Doctor Channing."

The young man called up St. Michael's rectory and explained first, and smoked companionably with the Major in the library afterward. Further along, there was a one-sided discussion polemical, it being meat and drink to Major Caspar to ensnare a young theologian to his discomfiture in the unaxiomatic field of religion. Ardea was in and out of the library frequently while the discussion was in progress, but she had little to say; indeed, there was scant room for a third when the Major was once well warmed to his favorite relaxation. But Morelock remarked as he might, in the few breathing-spaces allowed him by his host, that Miss Dabney seemed restless and anxious about something, and that she spent much of the time at the windows watching the steady growth of the ice sheet.

After luncheon they all gathered in the deep-recessed window of the music-room which commanded a view of the groved pasture with its background of mountain slope and precipice. The rain was still falling, and the temperature remained at the freezing-point, but the wind had gone down and the slow, measured swaying of the trees under the weight of the thickening armor of ice was portentous of disaster, if the weather conditions should continue unchanged.

But as yet the storm was only in the magnificent stage. Far and near, the outdoor world was a world of cold, white crystal, gleaming pure and unsullied under the gray skies. Even the blackened tree trunks had their shining panoply of silver; and from the eaves of the projecting window a fringe of huge icicles was lengthening drop by drop.

Miss Euphrasia thought of her roses, already in leaf, and refused to be enthusiastic over the supernal beauty of the crystalline stage settings. Major Caspar was anxious about the pasturing stock, and was relieved when Japheth Pettigrass came in sight, leading a slipping, sliding cavalcade of terrified horses to shelter in the great stables. The young clergyman's thoughts were with the ill-housed poor of the South Tredegar parish; and Ardea's—?

Young Mr. Morelock put his private anxieties aside in deference to the growing terror in the eyes of his young hostess. He had known her but a short time, meeting her only as his St. John's-in-Paradise duties gave him opportunity; but from the first she had stood to him as a type of womanly serenity and fortitude. Yet now she was visibly terrified and distressed, and the clergyman wondered. She had never before given him the impression that she belonged to the storm-fearing group of women.

"Can't we have a little music, Miss Ardea?" he asked, after a while, hoping to suggest a comforting diversion.

"You will have to excuse me," she said, in a low voice. "I—I think I am not quite well."

Cousin Euphrasia overheard the admission and recommended the quiet of up stairs, drawn curtains and possets. But Ardea let the suggestion fall to the ground, and a little while afterward Morelock surprised her at her forenoon occupation of going from window to window, with the look of distress rising to sharp agony when the overladen trees began to groan and crack under the crushing ice burden.

"What is it, Miss Dabney?" he said, out of the heart of sympathy, when he came on her alone in the library. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Yes," she rejoined quickly. "The moment the storm subsides even a little, I must go out. My excuse will be a desire to see, a thirst for fresh air—anything; and you must abet me if there is any opposition."

"But I thought you were afraid of the storm," he interposed.

"I? I should be out in it this minute if I thought grandfather wouldn't be tempted to lock me in my room for proposing such a thing. And I must go before dark, whatever happens."

The young man from New England was a gentleman born. He neither asked questions nor raised objections.

"Of course, you may command me utterly," he said warmly. "I'll help; and I'll go with you, if you will let me."

"That is what I want," she said frankly. "Will you propose it? I—I can't explain, even to my cousin."

"Certainly," he agreed; and a little later, when the temperature dropped the necessary three degrees and the rain stopped, he calmly announced his intention of taking Miss Ardea out to see the devastation which, by this time, was beginning to be apparent on all sides.

There was a protest, as a matter of course, quite shrill on the part of Miss Euphrasia, but not absolutely prohibitory on the Major's. Morelock saw to it that his charge was well wrapped; in her haste and agitation Ardea would have overlooked the common precautions. They used the side door for a sally-port, and were soon slipping and sliding almost helplessly across the lawn. Walking was next to impossible, and the crashes of falling branches and trees came like the detonations of quick-firing guns. The minister locked arms with the determined young woman at his side and picked the way for her as he could.

"This is something awful for you," he said, when they had covered half the distance to the nearest pasture wall. "Does the necessity warrant it?"

"It does," she rejoined; and they pressed on in awe-inspired silence to the gate which opened on the pasture grove.

The quarter of a mile intervening between the gate and that side of the inclosure bounded by the lower slope of the mountain was truly a passage perilous. A dozen times in the crossing Ardea fell, and so far from being able to save her, Morelock could do no more than fall with her. Once a great limb of a spreading oak split off with a clashing of ice and came sweeping down to give them the narrowest of escapes; and after that they kept the open where they might.

At a rude rock stile over the limestone boundary wall at the mountain's foot they paused to take breath.

"Is there much more of it?" asked the escort, regretting for the first time in his life, perhaps, that he had so studiously ignored the athletic side of his seminary training.

"The distance is nothing," she panted. "But we must take the path for a little way up the mountain. No, don't tell me it can't be done; it must be done,"—this in answer to his dubious scanning of the glassy ascent.

Again his good breeding asserted itself.

"Certainly it can be done, if you so desire." And he picked up a stone and patiently hammered the ice from the steps of the stile so she could cross in safety.

It was no more than a three-hundred-yard dash up the slope to the dog-keeper's cabin in the little glen, but it was a fight for inches. Every stone, every hand-hold of bush or shrub or tuft of dried grass was an icy treachery. Ardea knew the mountain and the path, and was less helpless than she would otherwise have been; yet she was willing to confess that she could never have done it alone. With all their care and caution they were exhausted and breathless when they topped the acclivity and Morelock saw the cabin in the pocket cove, with the great tulip-tree in the dooryard bending and distorted and groaning like a living thing in agony.

"Isn't it terrible!" he said; but Ardea's glance had gone beyond the tortured tree to the shuttered windows and smokeless chimney of the cabin.

"Oh, let us hurry!" she gasped; but at the gate of the tiny dooryard she stopped in sudden embarrassment. "I can't take you into the house, Mr. Morelock. Will you wait for me here—just a moment?"

He said "Certainly," as he had been saying it from the first. But it was quite without prejudice to a healthy and growing curiosity. The small adventure was taking on an air of mystery which thickened momently, demanding insistently a complete rearrangement of his preconceived notions of Miss Ardea Dabney.

She left him at once and made her way cautiously to the ice-encrusted door-stone. What she saw, when she lifted the wooden latch and entered, was what she had been praying she might not see.

On the small hearth was a heap of white ashes, dead and cold, and the tomb-like chill of the tightly-closed room was benumbing. Asleep in the fireplace corner, his little knees drawn up to his chin and his face streaked with the dried tears, was the three-year-old baby who bore Tom Gordon's name. And on the bed in the recess at the back of the room, her hands clenched and her passionate face a mask of long-continued agony, lay the mother.

Ardea was white to the lips and trembling when she retreated to the door-stone and beckoned to her companion.

"Can you find the way back to Deer Trace alone?" she faltered. "There is trouble here, as I feared there might be—terrible trouble and suffering. Say to my cousin that I must have Aunt Eliza, if she has to crawl here on her hands and knees. Then telephone for Doctor Williams, at Gordonia. He'll come if you tell him the message is from me. Oh, please go, quickly!"



He was waiting only for her to finish.

"Is it quite safe for you here?" he asked.

"Quite; but I shall die of impatience if you don't hurry!" Then her good blood made its protest heard. "Oh, please forgive me! I don't forget that you are my guest, but—"

"Not a word, Miss Dabney. Shall I come back here with the woman or the doctor?"

"No; I'll send for you if—if there is no hope. Otherwise you could do nothing."

He lifted his hat and was gone, and she turned and reentered the house of trouble, bravely facing that which had to be faced.

An hour later, when Doctor Williams, with Mammy Juliet's Pete chopping the way for him up the hazardous path, reached the end of his journey of mercy, there was a bright fire crackling on the hearth, and Miss Dabney was sitting before it, holding little Tom, who was still sleeping. Aunt Eliza, a deft middle-aged negress who had succeeded Mammy Juliet as housekeeper at Deer Trace, was bending over the bed, and the physician went quickly to stand beside her, shaking his head dubiously. A moment afterward he turned short on Ardea.

"You must go home, my dear—at once—and take the child with you. Pete is outside to help you, and my buggy is just at the foot of the path. I can't have you here."

"Can't I be of some use if I stay?" she pleaded.

"No; you'd only hinder. You are much too sympathetic. Don't delay; the minutes may count for lives," and the physician began to unbuckle the straps of the canvas-covered case he had brought with him.

Ardea wrapped the child hastily and gave him to Pete to carry, following as quickly as she could down the path made possible by the coachman's choppings. Happily, the doctor's horse was freshly shod, and the quarter-mile to the manor-house was measured in safety. Ardea left little Tom with Mammy Juliet at her cabin in the old quarters, and went up to the great house to wait anxiously for news. It was drawing on to the early dusk of the cloudy evening when she saw from the window of the music-room the muffled figure of Pete opening the pasture gate for the doctor to drive through. Instantly she flew to the door and out on the steps.

"Go in, child; go in," was the fatherly command. "I've got to stop to take Morelock in. I promised to carry him to the station."

"But Nancy?" she questioned anxiously.

"She will live," said the doctor briefly. And then he added with a frown: "But the child may not—which would doubtless be the best thing possible for all concerned. I'm afraid the woman is incorrigible." Then the professional part of him came to its own again: "You'll have to send somebody up there to relieve Eliza. Care is all that is needed now, but it mustn't be stinted."

There were tears standing in the slate-blue eyes of the listener, but Doctor Williams did not see them. If he had, he would not have understood; neither would he have plumbed the depths of misery in that whispered saying of Ardea's as she turned and fled to her room: "O Tom! how could you! how could you!"



XXVII

SWEPT AND GARNISHED

Thomas Jefferson Gordon, Bachelor of Science, and one of the six prize-men in his class, was expected home on the first day of July; and it was remarked as a coincidence by the curious that Deer Trace manor-house was closed for the summer no more than a week before the return of the Gordon black sheep.

That Tom was a black sheep, a hopeless and incorrigible social iconoclast, was no longer a matter of doubt in the minds of any. Something may be forgiven a promising young man who has been unhappy enough, or imprudent enough, to begin to make history for himself in the irresponsible 'teens; but also the act of oblivion may be repealed. When it became noised about that there were two children instead of one in the old dog-keeper's cabin in the glen, Mountain View Avenue was justly indignant, and even the lenient Gordonians scowled and shook their heads at the mention of the young boss's name. All the world loves a lover, as in just measure it despises a libertine; and there were fathers of daughters among the miner and foundry folk of the town.

On the lips of the transplanted urbanites of the hill houses comment was less elemental, but no less condemnatory. It was no wonder the Dabneys had closed their house and had gone to Crestcliffe Inn to save Ardea the humiliation of having to meet Tom before she was safely married to Vincent Farley. It was what any self-respecting young woman would wish under like trying conditions. The country colony approved; likewise, it commended Miss Dabney's foresight and prudence in causing the Bryerson woman and her two children to disappear from the cabin in the glen; though Mrs. Vancourt Henniker, in secret session over the tea-cups with the elder Miss Harrison, voiced her surprise that Ardea could continue to be charitable in that quarter.

"It is quite beyond me," was the matron's thin-lipped phrasing of it. "When one remembers that this wretched mountain girl has been Ardea's understudy from the very beginning—faugh! it is simply disgusting! I should think Ardea would never want to see or hear of her again."

To such an atmosphere of potential social ostracism Tom returned after the final scholastic triumph in Boston; and for the first few days he escaped asphyxiation chiefly because the affairs of Gordon and Gordon and the Chiawassee Consolidated gave him no time to test its quality.

But after the first week he began to breathe it unmistakably. One evening he called on the Farnsworths; the ladies were not at home to him. The next night he saddled Saladin and rode over to Fairmont; the Misses Harrison were also unable to see him, and the butler conveyed a deftly-worded intimation pointing to future invisibilities on the part of his mistresses. The evening being still young, Tom tried Rockwood and the Dell, suspicion settling into conviction when the trim maidservant at the Stanley villa went near to shutting the door in his face. At the Dell he fared a little better. The Young-Dicksons were going out for an after-dinner call on one of the neighbors, and Tom met them at the gate as he was dismounting. There were regrets apparently hearty; but in recasting the incident later, Tom remembered that it was the husband who did the talking, and that Mrs. Young-Dickson stood in the shadow of the gate tree, frigidly silent and with her face averted.

"Once more, old boy, and then we'll quit," he said to Saladin at the remounting, and the final rein-drawing was at the stone-pillared gates of Rook Hill. Again the ladies were not at home, but Mr. Vancourt Henniker came out and smoked a cigar with his customer on the piazza. The talk was pointedly of business, and the banker was urbanely gracious—and mildly inquisitive. Would there be a consolidation of the allied iron industries of Gordonia when the Farleys should return? Mr. Henniker thought it would be undeniably profitable to all concerned, and offered his services as financiering promoter and intermediary. Would Mr. Gordon come and talk it over with him—at the bank?

Tom found his father smoking a bedtime pipe on the picturesque veranda at Woodlawn when he reached home. Whistling for William Henry Harrison to come and take his horse, he drew up one of the porch chairs and filled and lighted his own pipe. For a time there was such silence as stands for communion between men of one blood, and it was the father who first broke it.

"Been out callin', son?" he asked, marking the Tuxedo and the white expanse of shirt front.

"No, I reckon not," was the reply, punctuated by a short laugh. "The Avenue seems to be depopulated."

"So? I hadn't heard of anybody goin' away," said Caleb the literal.

"Nor I," said Tom curtly; and the conversation paused until the iron-master had deliberately refilled and lighted his corn-cob.

"It's a-plenty onprofitable, Buddy, don't you reckon?" he ventured, referring to the social diversion.

There was a picric quality in Tom's tone when he replied: "The calling act?—I have certainly found it so to-night." Then, more humanely: "But as a means of relaxation it beats sitting here in the dark and stewing over to-morrow's furnace run—which is what you've been doing."

Caleb chuckled. "That's one time you missed the whole side o' the barn, Buddy. I was settin' here wonderin' if a man ever did get over bein' surprised at the way his children turn out."

"Meaning me?" said Tom, knocking the ash from his pipe and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.

"Yes, meanin' you, son. You've somehow got away from me again in these last six months 'r so."

"I'm older, pappy; and I hope I'm bigger and broader. I was a good bit of a kid a year ago; tough in some spots and fearfully and wonderfully raw in others. Do you recollect how I climbed up on the fence the first dash out of the box and read off the law to you about religion and such things?"

"I reckon so," said the iron-master. "And that's one o' the things—I ain't heard you cuss out the hypocrites once since you got back. Have you gone back on the Dutchman and his argyment?"

"Bauer, you mean?—no; only on the nullifying part of it. Bauer's no-religion doctrine is a doctrine of denial, and it's pure theory. What we have to deal with in this world is the practical human fact, and a good half of that is tangled up with some sort of religious belief or sentiment. At least, that's the way I'm finding it."

"It's the way it is," said Caleb sententiously. And after a pause: "I allow it helps some, too; greases the wheels some if it don't do anything more."

"It does much more," was the quick reply. "When you find it in a woman like Ardea Dabney, it raises her to the seventh power angelic. It is only when you find it, or some ghastly imitation of it, in such people as the Farleys...." He changed the subject abruptly. "You said the Dabneys had gone up on the mountain for the summer, didn't you?"

"Yes. I believe they're allowin' to come back in August, in time for the weddin'."

The younger man's wince was purely involuntary. He had been trying latterly to train up to the degree of mental fitness which would enable him to think calmly of Ardea as another man's wife. The effort commended itself as a part of the new broadening process, but it was not entirely successful.

"You wrote me the Farleys would be back this month, didn't you?" he asked.

"The fifteenth," said Caleb; smoking reflectively through another long pause before he added. "And then come the business fireworks. Have you made up your mind what-all you're goin' to do, Buddy?"

"Oh, yes," said Tom, as if this were merely a matter in passing. "We'll consolidate the two plants and the coal-mine, if it's agreeable all around."

The iron-master took a fresh hitch in his chair. Truly, this was a retransformed Tom; a creature totally and radically different from the college junior who had sweltered through the industrial battle of the previous summer, breathing out curses and threatenings.

"Was you allowin' to let Colonel Duxbury climb into all three o' the saddles?" he inquired, keeping his emotions out of his voice as he could.

"That will be for you and Major Dabney to decide," was the even-toned response. "I would suggest a three-cornered alliance: a third to you, another to Farley, and the remaining third to the Major. The pipe foundry can't run without the furnace and, under present conditions, the furnace is pretty largely dependent on the pipe foundry for its market; and neither could run without the Major's coal."

"Yes, that scheme might carry far enough to hit three of us. But whereabouts do you figure out the fourth third for yourself, son?"

"Oh, I'm not in it; or I'm not going to be after the Farleys come back. I made up my mind to that six months ago," said Tom coolly.

"Great Peter!" ejaculated Caleb, stirred for once out of his slow-speaking, reticent habit. But he made amends by remaining silent for five full minutes before he hazarded the query: "Got something else on the string, Buddy?"

"Yes, two or three things," was Tom's immediate and frank rejoinder. "I can have a place as chemist with the steel people at Bethlehem; and Mr. Clarkson is anxious to have me to go to the New Arizona iron country for him."

It was the brightest of midsummer nights, and a late moon was swinging clear of the Lebanon sky-line, but the prospect of close-clipped lawn and stately trees suddenly went dim before the eyes of the old ex-artillery-man.

"You're all I got in this world, son, and I reckon it makes me sort o' narrow. I know in reason it must seem mighty little and pindlin' down here to you, after what you've seen out in the big road, and I ain't goin' to say a word. But if you can sort it round somehow in the mix-up so I can get a few thousand dollars quittin' money out of it—jest enough to keep your mammy and me from gettin' hongry what few years we've got to eat, I'd be mighty proud."

"Oh," said Tom, still unmoved, as it seemed, "we can do better than that, if you want to pull out. But I made sure you'd rather stay in and hold your job. I've a notion you'd find 'retiring' pretty hard work after so many years spent in the furnace yard."

"You're right about that, son; I sure would," agreed Caleb. Then he went back to the main proposition. "What-all makes you restless, Buddy? Is it because Chiawassee and the pipe-makin' ain't big enough for you?"

Tom answered promptly and without apparent reserve.

"The job's big enough, but I don't want to stay here and yoke up with the Farleys; they'd ruin me in a year."

"Get the better of you in the business—is that what you're aimin' to say?"

"Not exactly. I'm still brash enough to believe I could hold my own on that score. But—oh, well; you know what we found out last summer about their business methods. I can do business that way, too; as a matter of fact, I did do a good bit more of it last year than you knew anything about. But I'm out of it now, and I mean to stay out."

A longer interval of silence followed, and at the end of it another query.

"Is that all that's the matter, Buddy?"

"No—it isn't," hesitantly. "I'm seventeen other kinds of a fool, too, pappy."

"Reckon ye couldn't make out to onload the whole of it on to a pair o' right old shoulders, could ye, son Tom?" was the gentle invitation.

"I don't know why I shouldn't tell you. I'm foolish about Ardea; been that way ever since she used to wear frocks and I used to run barefoot. I don't believe I could stand it to stay here and be her husband's business partner."

Caleb was shrouding himself in tobacco smoke and nodding complete intelligence.

"How did you ever come to let her get away from you, son?" he asked.

"That's a large question—too big for me to answer, I'm afraid. I always knew we were meant for each other, and I guess I took too much for granted. Then Vint Farley came along, and I helped his case by pitching into him every time she gave me a chance. Naturally, she leaned the other way; and the European business settled it."

Caleb drew a long breath. "Reckon it's everlastin'ly too late now, do ye, Tom?"

The young man's smile was wintry.

"You said the wedding-day was set, didn't you?"

"Why, yes; toe be sure. Leastwise, your mammy talked like it was. But, lawzee, son! the Gordon stock don't lie down in the harness. Ardee thinks a heap o' you, and if you could jest've made out to keep from gettin' so everlastin'ly tangled with that gal o' Tike—" he stopped abruptly, but not quite soon enough, and the word was as the flick of a whip on a wound already made raw by the abrasion of the closed doors.

"So that miserable story has got around to you at last, has it?" said Tom, in fine scorn. "I did hope they'd spare you and mother."

"She's spared yet, so far as I know," said the father, with a backward nod to indicate the antecedent of the pronoun. Following which, he said what lay uppermost in his mind. "I been allowin' maybe you'd come back this time with your head sot on lettin' that gal alone, son."

Thomas Jefferson was on his feet and a hot anger wave was sweeping him back over the years to other times when things used to turn red under the rage blast. But he got some sort of grip on himself before the words came.

"You've believed all you've heard, have you?—condemned me before I could say a word in my own defense? That's what they've all done."

"I don't say that, son." Then, with a note of fatherly yearning in his voice: "I'm waitin' to hear that word right now, Buddy—or as much of it as ye can say honestly."

"You'll never hear it from me—never in this world or another. Now tell me who told you!"

"Why, it's in mighty near ever'body's mouth, son!" said Caleb, in mild surprise. "You certain'y didn't take any pains to cover it up."

"Didn't take any pains? Why, in the name of God, should I?" Tom burst out. After which he tramped heavily to the farther end of the veranda, refilled and lighted his pipe, and smoked furiously for a time, glooming over at the darkened windows of Deer Trace and letting bitter anger and disappointment work their will on him. And when he finally turned and tramped back it was only to say an abrupt "Good night," and to pass into the house and up to his room.