"My goodness!" broke in Lydia.

The exclamation came from her extreme surprise, not only at the extraordinary doctrine enunciated, but at the experience, new to her, of hearing convictions spoken of in ordinary conversation. The workman took it, however, for a mocking comment on his sudden fluency. He gave a whimsical grimace, and said, as he began picking up his tools, "Ah, I shouldn't have given in to you. When I get started I never can stop." His expression altered darkly. "But I hate all that sort of thing so! I hate it!"

Lydia shrank back from him, startled, but aroused. "Well, I hate hate!" she cried with energy. "It's horrid to hate anything at all, but most of all what's wrong and doesn't know it's wrong. That needs help, not hate."

He had slung his tool-box on his shoulder before she began speaking, and now stood, ready for departure, looking at her intently. Even in the dim light of the hall she was aware of a wonderful change in his face. She was startled and thrilled by the expression of his eyes in the moment of silence that followed.

Finally, "You've given me something to remember," he said, his voice vibrating, and turned away.



CHAPTER VI

LYDIA'S GODFATHER

Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child's about to weep.

"Oh, dear Godfather!" she cried, as she flung herself on him; "I'm so glad you've come! I never wanted so much to see you!"

He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. "Good gracious, my dear!" he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated, "anybody'd think you were the patient I came to see."

His voice, though high, was very sweet—a quality that made it always sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent, dropping his r's, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his speech. He now looked up at his tall godchild and said without a smile: "If you'll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I'll shake you for being so foolish. You needn't be alarmed about your mother."

Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon him. "Why, how awful!" she accused herself, horrified. "I'd forgotten Mother!"

Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. "I will climb up on a chair to shake you," he continued cheerfully, "if already, in less than twenty-four hours, you're indulging in nerves, as these broken and meaningless ejaculations seem to indicate."

He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but he flowed steadily on.

"I can't diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I do your mother, so you'll have to give me some notion of what's the occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless Lilliputian godfather." He made a confident gesture toward the upper part of the house with his fan. "About your mother—I know without going upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It's not so bad as it seems when you've got the right doctor. I've practiced for thirty years among Endbury ladies. They can't spring anything new on me. I've taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from table-cloths to bare tops, through portiere inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, through art-nouveau prostration and mission furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her."

He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change of manner: "But what's the matter with you?"

Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder. "I—why, I—just—" she hesitated, "why, I don't know what is the matter with me." She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the world.

Dr. Melton's approval of this answer was immense. "Why, Lydia, I'm proud of you! You're one in a thousand. You'll break the hearts of everyone who knows you by turning out a sensible woman if you don't look out. I don't believe there's another girl in Endbury who would have had the nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart, or Weltschmerz, or some such trifle, for a reason." He pulled himself up to his feet. "Of course, you don't know what's the matter with you, my dear. I do. I know everything, and can't do a thing. That's me! Physically, you're upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and mentally it's the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening, now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down—that was enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What's the history of the morning? I hope you slept late."

Lydia shook her head. "No; I was up ever so early.—Marietta came over to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast."

Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of the physician's ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back.

"Marietta's been snapping at you," he diagnosed rapidly.

"Well, a little," Lydia admitted.

The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia's slim fingers in both his firm, sinewy hands. "My dear, I'm going to do as I have always done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems. Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your father. She does it; she's a remarkably forceful woman, but it frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though she won't admit it. So, don't you mind if she's sharp-tongued once in a while. It's when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers."

He fancied that Lydia's eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent, and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child, had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After his laugh he sighed and turned the talk.

"Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an interview with you for next Sunday's Society Notes."

Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. "No; she hasn't appeared yet. I haven't seen her—not since my birthday a year ago, the time she described the supper-table as a 'glittering, scintillating mass of cut-glass and silver, and yet without what could really be called ostentation.' Isn't she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?"

"Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the dragon's teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards."

"Oh, I remember, you don't like her," said Lydia. "She always seems just funny to me—funny and pathetic. She's so dowdy, and reverential to folks with money, and enjoys other people's good times so terrifically."

"She's like some political bosses—admirable in private life, but a menace to the community just the same."

Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. "Flora Burgess a menace to the community!"

The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. "Me and Cassandra!" he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. "Just you wait and see!"

He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.

Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an instant she had the naive, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life; when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity. To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside her head than ever before—as though she had tried to keep track of the revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright his eyes were when he looked at you—as though he were, somehow, seeing you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone about her might have been different from what it was. What else was there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.

Through this vague discomfort there presently pierced a positive apprehension of definite unpleasantness. She would have to tell her mother that she had spent the whole morning talking to Mr. Rankin, and her mother would be cross, and would say such—Lydia remembered as in a distant dream her supreme content with life of only a few hours earlier. It seemed a very bewildering matter to her now.

Ought she so certainly to tell her mother? She lingered for a moment over this possibility. Then, "Oh, of course!" she said aloud, flushing with an angry shame at her moment's parley with deceit.

She heard her mother's door open and turned to see the doctor running down the stairs, his wrinkled little face very grave. "You were right, Lydia, to be anxious about your mother, and I am an old fool! There is no fool like a fluent fool! I'm afraid she's in for quite a siege. There's no danger, thank Heaven! but I don't believe she can be about for a month or more. I'm going to 'phone for a trained nurse. Just see that nobody disturbs her, will you?"

He darted away, leaving Lydia leaning against the newel-post, gasping. The clock in the dining-room chimed the quarter-hour. She cried out to herself, as she climbed the stairs heavily, that she could not stand it to have things happen to her so fast. If all Endbury days were going to be like this one—

She was for a moment brought to a standstill by a realization of depths within herself that she had not dreamed of. She realized, horrified, that on hearing the doctor's verdict her first thought—gone before it was formulated, but still her first thought—had been one of relief that now she need not tell her mother.

It had not occurred to her at all, nor did it now, that she either should or should not tell her father.



CHAPTER VII

OUTSIDE THE LABYRINTH

The Black Rock woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat, burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was richly colored, like that which passes through the stained glass of a great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in the hollows of the brown earth, where the light breezes had drifted them.

It was, for the moment, singularly quiet, so, that, as Lydia walked quickly along the footpath, the pleasant rustle of her progress was the only sound she heard. Under a large chestnut she paused, gathering her amber-colored draperies about her and glancing uncertainly ahead to where the path forked. She looked a yellow leaf blown by some current of the air unfelt by the rest of the forest and caught against the rough bark of the tree. After hesitating for a moment, she drifted slowly along the right-hand path, looking about her with dreamy, dazzled eyes. From time to time, she stopped and lifted her face to the light and color above her, and once she stood a long time leaning against a tree, stirring with the tip of her parasol a heap of burning maple leaves. Under her drooping hat her face was almost vacant in a wide beatitude of harmony with the spirit of day. When she walked on again it was with a lighter and lighter step, as though the silence had come to have a lovely meaning for her which she feared to disturb.

The path turned sharply after passing through a thicket of ruddy brambles, and she found herself in a little clearing which the haze of the upper air descended to fill. The yellow chestnuts stood in a ring about the sunburnt grass. It was like a golden cup filled with some magic, impalpable draught.

Through this she now saw a rough little house, brown as an oak leaf, with a wide veranda, under which, before a work-bench, sat Daniel Rankin. His tanned arms moved rhythmically backward and forward, but his ruddy head was high, and his eyes, roving about the leafy walls of the clearing, caught sight of Lydia as soon as she had turned the corner. She stopped short, with a startled gesture, on the edge of the woods, but remained standing quietly while Rankin sprang up from his seat and walked toward her smiling.

"Oh, Miss Emery," he called welcomingly. "I didn't recognize you for a minute. Every once in a while a young lady or a child loses her way from a picnic in the woods and stumbles into my settlement. I always have to hurry to show them there's no danger of the wild man who lives in that house eating them up." He came up to her now, and put out his hand with a frank pleasure.

"I wasn't afraid," said Lydia; "I was startled for a minute, but I knew right away it must be your house. You described it to me, you know."

"It's very much flattered that you remember its portrait," said the owner. "Won't you honor it some more by sitting down in its veranda for a while? Or must I take you back to your picnic party at once?"

Lydia moved on, looking about her at the piles of boards, half hidden by vines, at the pool of clear water welling up through white sand in front of the house, and at the low rough building, partly covered with woodbine ruby-red against the weather-beaten wood.

"My picnic party's gone home," she explained. "It was only Marietta and her little boy, anyhow. My sister thought it was going to rain, and took the quickest way home. I told Marietta I'd walk across and take the Garfield Avenue trolley line. I must have taken a wrong turn in the path."

They had reached the veranda now, and Lydia sank into the chair which Rankin offered her. She smiled her thanks silently, her face still steeped in quiet ecstasy, and for a long time she said nothing. The quick responsiveness that was at all times her most marked characteristic answered this rare mood of Nature with an intensity almost frightening in its visible joy.

Rankin also said nothing, looking at her reflectively and stroking his close-clipped red beard. Above the faded brown of his work-shirt, his face glowed with color. In the silent interval of the girl's slow emergence from her reverie, his gaze upon her was so steady that when Lydia finally glanced up at him he could not for a moment look away. The limpid unconsciousness of her eyes changed into a startled look of inquiry, as though he had spoken and she had not understood. Then a flush rose to her cheeks, she looked down and away in a momentary confusion, moved in her chair, and began to talk at random.

"So this is where you live. It's lovely. It looks like a fairy story—the little house in the wood, you know—nothing seems real to-day—the woods—it makes me want to cry, they are so beautiful. I've been wondering and wondering what outdoors was looking like. You know poor Mother is sick, and though she's not so awfully sick, and of course we've a trained nurse for her, still I've had to be housekeeper and I haven't had time to breathe. The second girl left right off because of the extra work she thought sickness would make, but it seems to me we've had a million new second girls in the three weeks. It's been awful! I haven't had time to get out at all or to see anybody."

She was quite herself now, and confided her troubles with a naive astonishment, as though they were new to humanity.

"Yes; I've heard ladies say before that it's quite awful," agreed her companion gravely. He swung himself up to sit on his work-bench, his long legs stretched before him, just reaching the ground. "Envy me," he went on, smiling; "I don't have to have a second girl, or a first one, either."

"What do you do?" asked Lydia, not waiting, however, for an answer, but continuing her relieved outpouring of her own perplexities. "It's perfectly desperate at home. I haven't had a minute's peace. This afternoon I just got wild, and said I would get away from it for a minute, and just ran away. Father's nice about it, but he does look something fierce when he comes home and finds another one left. He says that Mother doesn't have to change more than two or three times a year!" She presented this as the superlative of stability.

Rankin laughed again. Lydia felt more and more at her ease. He was evidently thinking of her pretty looks and ways rather than of what she was saying, and, like all of her sisterhood, this was treatment which she thoroughly understood. For the moment she forgot that he was the man who had startled and almost shocked her by his unabashed presentation, in a conversation with a young lady, of ideas and convictions. She leaned back in her chair and put on some of the gracefully imperious airs of regnant American young-ladyhood. "You must show me all about how you live, and everything," she commanded prettily. "I've been so curious about it—and now here I am."

She was enchantingly unconscious of the possibility of her having seemed to seek him out. "What a perfectly beautiful piece of wood you have in that chair-back." She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark piece of oak. "And so this is where you work?"

"I work everywhere," he told her. "I do all that's done, you see."

"You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don't you?" Lydia turned her white neck to glance inside the house.

Rankin's mouth twitched humorously. "You'll never understand me," he said lightly. "I get my meals myself, here."

Lydia turned on him sharply. "You don't cook!" she cried out.

"And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a great while, dust."

The romantic curiosity died out of the girl's eyes into a shocked wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak. Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant "Well!" which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise. Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.

"It's so funny," he explained, "to see the picture of myself I gather from your shocked and candid eyes. I'm so used to my queer ideas nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still seems perfectly crazy to others."

"Well, not crazy." Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. "But it must be horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!" protested Lydia, feeling resentful that her inculcated horror of a man's "lowering himself" to woman's work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying. "But I suppose it's very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I imagine."

There was a humorous glint in his eye, "I cook over the best brand of oil-stove that money can buy," he told her, relentlessly, watching her wince from the sordid image. "I have all the conveniences I can think of. All I'm trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way. It's more work trying to persuade somebody who doesn't want to wait on me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can certainly cook like a house afire."

At this, Lydia was overcome by that openness to conviction from unexpected sources which gave her mother one of her great anxieties for her. "Well, honestly, do you know," she said unexpectedly, "there is a lot in that. I've thought ever so many times in the last two weeks that if Father would let me wait on the table, for instance, I could get on ever so much easier."

"And I'll just warrant," the man went on, "that I've had more time to myself lately than you have, for all I've my living to earn as well as the housework."

"My goodness!" cried Lydia, repudiating the comparison. "That needn't be saying much for you, for I haven't had a minute—not even to sit with Mother as much as I ought."

"What did you have to do that kept you from that?"

"Oh, you're no housekeeper, that's evident, or you wouldn't ask. A man never has any idea about the amount of work there is to do in a house. Why, set the table, and sweep the parlors, and change the flower vases, and dust, and pick up, and dust—I don't know what makes things get so dusty. We've got an awfully big house, you know, and of course I want to keep everything as nice as if Mother were up. Everybody expects me to do that!"

"I had a great-aunt," began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, "a very wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was considered cracked, so maybe that's why I am a freak, and she was as wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if they ever ran away they'd be spoiled for life, and he got carefuller and carefuller of them. One day he and his father were haying beside a river, and the father, who couldn't swim a stroke, fell in. The horses were frightened by the splash and began to prance, and the son ran to their heads, beside himself with fear. The old man came to the top and screamed, 'Help! help!' and the son answered, fairly jumping up and down in his anguish of mind over his poor old father's fate, 'Oh, help, somebody! Somebody come and help! I can't leave my horses!'"

He stopped. Lydia slid helplessly into the naive question, "Well, did his father drown?" before the meaning of the little parable struck her. She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made at her own expense. "Don't you think you are a good hand at sermon-making!" she mocked him. "It's all very well to preach, but just you tell me what you would have done in my place."

"I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let the dust lie on them—even such an awful thing as that!"

Lydia considered this with honest surprise. "Why, do you know, it never occurred to me I could do that!"

Rankin nodded. "It's a common hallucination," he explained. "I've had it. I have to struggle against it still."

"Hallucination?"

"The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you."

Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. "I wonder," she mused, "if that's why I always feel so much freer and happier in old clothes—that I don't forget that they're for me and I'm not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks get you to thinking that you are for clothes—you're made to show them off." Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood. "Here's your sister's rain," he said instead, pointing across the clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted down to the dry grass. Lydia rose in some agitation. "Why, I didn't really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta's—" She glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk of her ruffled skirt.

Rankin stood up eagerly. "Ah, I've a chance to do you a service. Just step in, won't you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a bachelor's establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn't get wet."

Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, "It wouldn't hurt me to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and I haven't had a chance to show it to anybody yet."

Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence, apparently with surprise.

"Well, how do you like it?" asked the master of the house, throwing some dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. "It's not very tidy, is it?" He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, "There!" he cried in triumph, shaking out a rain-coat, "That will keep your pretty French finery dry."

He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair, peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face. "Why, what's the matter?" he asked.



Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. "I don't know," she said, "what it is. It seems as though I'd been here before. It looks so familiar to me—so good—" She went closer to where, still holding out the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers. She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling which she had no words to express. "Don't you know," she went on, "every once in a while you see somebody—an old man or woman, perhaps, on the street cars, in the street—and somehow the face goes home to you. It seems as though you'd been waiting to see that face again. Well, it's just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very—" She broke off, helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions which made her life so full of invisible incidents.

But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. "You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My rough quarters are glorified for me. I've been fond of them before—they're the background to a good many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but now—" He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of the dried grass under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless bag that sheltered it.

Lydia pointed to it. "You're musical!" she said, as if she had made an important discovery.

Rankin roused himself, followed the direction of her gaze, and shook his head. "No; I can't play a note," he said cheerfully, laying the rain-coat down and going to look over the pile of overshoes in a box; "but I like it. My queer old great-aunt left me that 'cello. It had belonged to her grandfather. I believe being so old makes it quite valuable. The piano belongs to an old German friend of mine who has seen better days and has now no place to keep it. Two or three times a week he comes out here with an old crony who plays the 'cello, and they make music till they get to crying on each other's necks."

"Do you cry, too?" Lydia smiled at the picture.

Rankin came back to the fire with a pair of rubbers in his hand. "No; I'm an American. I only blow my nose hard," he said gravely.

"Well, it must be lovely!" She sighed this out ardently, sinking back in her chair. "I love music so it 'most kills me, but I don't get very much of it. I took piano lessons when I was little, but there were always so many other things to do I never got time to practice as much as I wanted to, and so I didn't get very far. Anyhow, after I heard a good orchestra play, my little tinklings were worse than nothing. I wish I could hear more. But perhaps it's just as well, Mother says. It always gets me so excited. I'm sure I should cry, along with the Germans."

"They would like that," observed her host, "above everything."

"Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but Mother says they are so new you can't tell what they are going to be. She says they may get to be too common."

Rankin looked at her hard. "Would you like one?" He asked this trivial question with a singular emphasis.

"Why, I haven't really thought," said Lydia, considering the matter.

The man looked oddly anxious for her answer.

Finally, "Why, it depends on how much music you can make with them. If they are really good, I should want one, of course."

Rankin smiled, drew a long breath, and fell sober again as if at a sudden thought.

"I don't see any oil-stove," said the girl, skeptically, looking about her.

"Oh, I have a regular kitchen. It's there," he nodded back of him; "and two rooms beside for me and for Dr. Melton or my Germans, or some of my other freak friends when they stay too long and miss the last trolley in to town. Oh, I have lots of room."

"It looks really rather nice, now I'm here and all," Lydia vaguely approved; "though I don't see why you couldn't have gone on more like other folks and just changed some things—not been so awfully queer!"

Rankin was kneeling before her, holding out a pair of rubbers. At this remark he sat back on his heels, and began: "My great-aunt said that there was a man in her town who had such a terrible temper that his wife was in perfect terror of him, and finally actually died of fear. Everybody was paralyzed with astonishment when, two or three years after, one of the nicest girls in town married him. People told her she was crazy, but she just smiled and said she guessed she could get along with him all right. Everything went well for a week or two, and then one day he said the tea was cold and not fit for a pig to drink, and threw the cup on the floor. She threw hers down and broke it all to smash. He stared and glared, and threw his plate down. She set her lips and banged her own plate on the hearth. He threw his knife and fork through the window. She threw hers after, and added the water-pitcher for good measure."

Lydia's astonishment at this point was so heartfelt that the raconteur broke off, laughed, and ended hastily, "I spare you the rest of the dinner-service. The upshot of it was that every dish in the house was smashed and not a word spoken. Then the man called for his carriage (he was a rich man—that sort usually is), drove to the nearest china-store, bought a new set, better than the old, took it back, and lived in peace and harmony with his wife ever after. And here is the smallest pair of rubbers I can find, and I shall have to tie these on!"

Lydia watched the operation in silence. As he finished it and rose to his feet again, "What was that all about?" she inquired simply.

"Compromise," he answered. "There are occasions when it doesn't do any good."

"Does it do such a lot of good to go off in the woods by yourself and do your own cooking?" asked Lydia with something of her father's shrewd home-thrusting accent. "What would happen if everybody did that?"

Rankin laughed. "Everybody'd have a good time, for one thing," he answered, adding, more seriously, "The house of Rimmon may be all right for some people, but my head isn't clear enough."

Lydia looked frankly at a loss. She did not belong to the alert, quickly "bluffing" type of young lady. "Rimmon?" she asked.

"He's in the Bible."

"That's a good reason why I've never heard of him," she said ruefully.

"All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard they don't really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully mixed up. And certainly they don't stand any chance of convincing anybody else that there's anything the matter with the standard. What's needed isn't to upset everything in a heap, but to call people's attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are. And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to what Tolstoi did, but—" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia understood with a touching humility.

"Oh, you needn't explain who Tolstoi is. I've heard of him."

"Well, you mustn't imagine I'm anything like Tolstoi!" cried the young man, laughing aloud at the idea, "for I don't take a bit of stock in his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration he fell into in his old age because he'd been denied his fair share of manual work when he was young. If he'd had to split kindlings and tote ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn't have thought there was anything so sanctifying about callouses on your hands!"

"Oh, dear! You're awfully confusing to me," complained Lydia. "You always seem to be making fun of something I thought just the minute before you believed in."

Rankin looked intensely serious. "There isn't an impression I'd be sorrier to give you," he said earnestly. "Perhaps the trouble is that you don't as yet know much about the life I've got out of."

"I've lived in Endbury all my life," protested Lydia.

"There may still be something for you to learn about the lives of its men," suggested her companion.

"If you think it's so wrong, why don't you reform it?" Lydia launched this challenge suddenly at him with the directness characteristic of her nation.

"I have to begin with reforming myself," he said, "and that's job enough to last me a long while. I have to learn not to care about being considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are passing me by; and I don't mind confessing to you that that is not always easy—though you mustn't tell Dr. Melton I'm so weak. I have to train myself to see that they are not really getting up so fast, but only scrambling fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my own way."

The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly personal talk, in which they looked long into each other's eyes.

The clock struck five. Lydia sprang to her feet. "Oh, I must hurry on! I told Marietta to telephone home that I'd be there at six."

She still preserved her charming unconsciousness of the unconventionality of her situation. A European girl, brought up in the strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to make her either painfully embarrassed or secretly delighted with this impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to read "everything" and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful attempts of the family to remember "not to talk too much about things before Lydia," was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United States—that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows. The young man before her smiled at her in as artless an unconsciousness as her own. They might have been a pair of children.

"You've plenty of time," he assured her. "Though I live so far out of the world, the Garfield Avenue trolley line is only five minutes' walk away. Oh, I'm prosaic and commonplace, with my oil-stove and trolley cars. There's nothing of the romantic reactionary about me, I'm afraid." He wrapped the rain-coat about her and took an umbrella.

"Don't you lock up your house when you go away?" asked Lydia.

"The poor man laughs in the presence of thieves," quoted Rankin.

They stood on the veranda now, looking out into the blue twilight. The rain drummed noisily on the roof and the soft swish of its descent into the grass rose to a clear, sibilant note. The wind had died down completely, and the raindrops fell in long, straight lines like an opaque, glistening wall, which shut them off from the rest of the world. Back of them, the fire lighted up the empty chair that Lydia had left. She glanced in, and, moved by one of her sudden impulses, ran back for a moment to cast a rapid glance about the quiet room.

When she returned to take Rankin's arm as he held the open umbrella, she looked up at him with shining eyes. "I have made friends with it—your living-room," she said.

As they made their way along the footpath, she went on, "When I get into the trolley car I shall think I have dreamed it—the little house in the clearing—so peaceful, so—just look at it now. It looks like a little house in a child's fairy-tale." They paused on the edge of the clearing and looked back at the pleasant glow shimmering through the windows, then plunged into the strip of forest that separated the clearing from the open farming country and the main road to Endbury.

Neither of them spoke during this walk. The rain pattered swiftly, varying its monotonous refrain as it struck the umbrella, the leaves, the little brook that ran beside them, or the stony path. Lydia clung to Rankin's arm, peering about her into the dim caves of twilight with a happy, secure excitement. After her confinement to the house for the last fortnight, merely to be out of doors was an intoxication for her, and ever since she had left her sister and begun her wanderings in the painted woods she had felt the heroine of an impalpable adventure. The silent flight through the dripping trees was a fitting end. Except for breaking in upon the music of the rain, she would have liked to sing aloud.

She thought, flittingly, how Marietta would laugh at her manufacturing anything romantic out of the commonplace facts of the insignificant episode, but even as she turned away from her sister's imagined mocking smile, she felt an odd certainty that to Rankin there was also a glamour about their doings. It was as though the occasional contact of their bodies as they moved along the narrow path were a wordless communication.

He said nothing, but as they emerged upon the long treeless road, stretching away over the flat country to where the lights of Endbury glowed tremulously through the rain, he looked at his companion with a quick intensity, as though it were the first time he had really seen her.

It was that man's look which makes a woman's heart beat faster, even if she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been lighted within.

They stood silently waiting for the car which flashed a headlight toward them far down the track. As it drew near, bounding over the rails, humming like a great insect, and bringing visibly nearer and nearer the end of their time together, Lydia was aware that Rankin was in the grasp of an emotion that threatened to become articulate. The steady advance of the car was forcing him to a speech against which he struggled in vain. Lydia began to quiver. She felt an expectancy of something lovely, moving, new to her, which grew tenser and tenser, as though her nerves were the strings of an instrument being pulled into tune for a melody. Standing there in the cold, rainy twilight, she had a moment of the exultation she had thought was to be so common in her Endbury career. She felt warmed through with the consciousness of being lovely, admired, secure, supremely fortunate, just as she had thought she would feel; but she had not been able to imagine the extraordinary happiness that this, or some unrecognized element of the moment, gave to her.

The car was almost upon them; the blinding glare of the headlight showed their faces with startling suddenness. She saw in Rankin's eyes a tenderness that went to her heart. She leaned to him from the steps of the car to which he swung her—she leaned to him with a sweet, unconscious eagerness. In the instant before the car moved forward, as he stood gazing up at her, he spoke at last.

The words hummed meaningless in Lydia's ears, and it was not until some time after, in the garish white brilliance of the car, that she convinced herself that she had heard aright. Even then, though she still saw his face raised to hers, the raindrops glistening on his hair and beard, even though she still heard the fervor of his voice, she remained incredulous before the enigma of his totally unexpected words. He had said, with a solemn note of pity in his voice: "Ah, my poor child, I am so horribly, horribly sorry for you!"



CHAPTER VIII

THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT

Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work. It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods. Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.

In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.

She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself, and so used was she to the crystallized form in which she had for so many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical "notions," the speculations of her doctor—also a lifelong friend of her husband's—as to what Judge Emery might have become if—the doctor spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon—"he had not had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading Les Miserables, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand a year?" Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs. Emery had rebuked the doctor later for "putting ideas in girls' heads." It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.

Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn, Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not tempered by his occasional amusement at her—an amusement which Mrs. Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous, though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a rule, from the uproar of the engagement.

This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter, he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the older. Of course, he reassured himself, this had scarcely been a fair trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her return, with the added complication of her mother's illness; but, even making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed him most was Lydia's lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful, blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household aesthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to eat.

Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she had suggested seriously, "Why can't we shut up all of the house we don't really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with Mother, now she's sick?"

Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its "best room" darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia's unconscious reversion to type. "Your mother would feel dreadfully to have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form—very green."

Lydia had not insisted; it ran counter to every instinct in Lydia to insist on anything. She had succumbed at the first of his shocked tones of surprise; but the suggestion had shown him a glimpse of workings in her mind which made him uneasy.

However, to-night there were several cheering circumstances. The doctor had left word that, in all probability, Mrs. Emery would be quite herself in ten days—a shorter time than he had feared. Lydia was really charming in a rose-colored dress that matched the dewy flush in her cheeks; the roast looked cooked as he liked it, and he had heard some warm words that day about the brilliancy of young Paul Hollister's prospects. He took a drink of ice-water, tucked his napkin in the top of his vest—a compromise allowed him by his wife at family dinners, and smiled at his daughter. "Your mother tells me that you've had a letter from Paul, saying that he'll be back shortly," he said with a jocosely significant emphasis. "I suppose we shall hardly be able to get a glimpse of you after he's in town again."

At this point, beginning to carve the roast, he had a sinking premonition that it was going to be very tough, and though he heroically resisted the ejaculation of embittered protest that rose to his lips, this magnanimity cost him so dear that he did not think of Lydia again till after he had served her automatically, dashing the mashed potato on her plate with the gesture of an angry mason slapping down a trowelful of mortar. It seemed to him at the moment that the past three weeks had been one succession of tough roasts. He took another drink of ice-water before he gloomily began on his first mouthful. It was worse than he feared, and he was in no mood to be either very imaginative or very indulgent to a girl's whims when Lydia said, suddenly and stiffly, "I wish you wouldn't speak so about Paul. I don't know what makes everybody tease me so about him!"

Her father was chewing grimly. "I don't know why they shouldn't, I'm sure," he said. "Young folks can't expect everybody to keep their eyes shut and draw no conclusions. Of course I understand Paul's not saying anything definite till now, on account of your being so young."

Something of Marietta's unsparing presentation of facts was inherited from her father, though, under his wife's tutelage, he usually spared Lydia when he thought of it. At this time he was speaking almost absently, his attention divided between the exceptions to his rulings taken by the corporation counsel and the quality of his dinner; both disturbing to his quiet. He finally gave up the attempt at mastication and swallowed the morsel bodily, with a visible gulp. As he felt the consequent dull lump of discomfort, he allowed himself his first articulate protest. "Good Heavens! What meat!"

Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her father with horrified eyes. "Father! What a thing to say!" she finally cried out. "You make me ashamed to look him—to look anybody in the face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never—"

Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent, he melted at once. "Now, never mind, Lydia, it won't kill me. Only as soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord's sake have her take you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats."

Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to speak, but at that moment the maid—the latest acquisition from the employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl—went through the dining-room on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair."

The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from one end. "It's for you," she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia and retreating into the kitchen.

Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her father said: "From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I'm sure. Ring the bell for dessert before you open it. Of course you're in a hurry to read the card." He smiled with a tender amusement at the girl, who met his eyes with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and naively read the card aloud: "To the little girl grown up at last—to the young lady I've waited so long to see."

She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it, hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrees, made dishes, were not for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. "Meat's business," he was wont to say, "and dessert's fun. The rest of one's victuals is society and art and literature and such—things to leave to the women."

He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with an effort to his daughter's impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring, "But, Father—you must be mistaken— Why, nobody so much as hinted at such a—"

"That's your mother's doings. She'd be furious now if she knew I'd spoken right out. But you don't want to be treated like a little girl all your life, do you?" He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: "There aren't many girls in Endbury who don't envy my little Lydia, I guess. Paul is considered—"

At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer's caution, he waited a moment outside his wife's room, where he heard Lydia's voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration to quiet the girl's exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest indulgence to his daughter's confusion, but he was not without a humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife, whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content, the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. "Thank the Lord, that's not my job!" he had often said about some knotty point in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that she could not be too thankful for a "husband who was not a meddler."

The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two women with a grin of satisfaction.

"Why, my dear, what is there so terrible in having the handsomest and most promising young man in Endbury devoted to you? You don't need to marry him for years and years if you don't want to—or never, if you don't like him enough." She laughed a little, teasingly, "Perhaps it's all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way. Maybe when he comes to see you he'll tell you about a beautiful girl in Urbana or Cincinnati that he's engaged to—and then what would your silly father say?"

"Oh, if I could only think that," breathed Lydia, as though she had been reprieved from a death sentence. "Of course! Father was just joking. But he startled me so!"

"He was probably thinking of his horrid law business, darling. When a big trial is on he wouldn't know me from Eve. He says anything at such times."

Judge Emery laughed noiselessly, and quite without resentment at this wifely characterization.

Lydia went on: "It wasn't so much what he said, you know—as—oh, the way he took it for granted—"

"Well, don't think about it any more, dear; just be your sweet natural self when Paul comes to see you the first time—and don't let's talk any more now. Mother gets tired so easily."

Lydia's remorseful outcry over having fatigued her mother seemed a good occasion for Judge Emery's entrance into the room and for his announcement. He felt that she would make an effort to control any agitation she might feel, and indeed, beyond a startled gasp, she made no comment on his news. Mrs. Emery herself was more obviously stirred to emotion. "To-night? Why, I didn't think he'd be in town for several days yet."

"He only got in at five o'clock this afternoon, he said."

The two parents exchanged meaning glances over this chronology, and Mrs. Emery flushed and smiled. "Now, Lydia," she said, "it's a perfect shame I'm not well enough to be there when he comes. It would make it easier for you. But I wish you'd say honestly whether you'd rather have your father there or see Paul alone."

Judge Emery's face took on an aggrieved look of alarm. "Good gracious, my dear! What good would I be? You know I can't be tactful. Besides, I've got an appointment with Melton."

Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering. "Why, you make me feel so—so queer! Both of you!—As though it were anything—to see Paul—when I've known him always."

Her mother seized on the role opened to them by this speech, and said quickly: "Why, of course! Aren't we silly! I don't know what possesses us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father and I are sorry not to be there."

During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, "There he is, dear. Run along and remember me to him." But she pulled Lydia down to her, straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the girl's shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.

After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. "You're just as bad as I am, Sarah. You don't say anything, but—"

"Oh, I know," his wife said; "I can't help it!" She deliberated unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, "It seems as though I couldn't have it so, to be sick just now, when I'm needed so much. This first month is so important! And Lydia's getting such a different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she's getting notions!" She pronounced the word darkly.

"Notions?" Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his wife's obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.

"Oh, don't ask me what kind! I don't know. If I knew I could do something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she was— Do you know, I think it's not good for Lydia to be outdoors too much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like Harry—almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal."

Judge Emery rose and buttoned his coat about his spare figure. "Maybe she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there's one line in my mother's family that was always crazy about the woods. My grandfather on my mother's side used to go off just as regular as the month of May came around, and—"

Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. "Oh, go along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you pass the door. We don't want to really chaperone her. Nobody does that yet—but—the Hollisters are so formal about their girls—well, you stop in, anyhow. It's borne in on me that that'll look better, after all."



CHAPTER IX

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

In the midst of his conference with Dr. Melton, an hour later, it came upon Judge Emery with a clap that he had forgotten this behest of his wife's, plunged deep in legal speculations as he had been, the instant he turned from her door. He brought his hand down on the table.

"What's the matter?" asked the little doctor, peering up at him.

"Oh, nothing important—women's cobwebs. I'm afraid I'll have to go, though. We can take this up again to-morrow, can't we?"

"At your service," said the doctor; but he pulled with some exasperation at a big pile of pamphlets still to be examined.

"It's something about Lydia's receiving a call from Paul Hollister, and her mother wanting me to stop in as I left the house and say good-evening—sort of represent the family—do the proper thing. Don't it tickle you to see women who used to sleigh-ride from seven to eleven every evening in a little cutter just big enough for one and a half, begin to wonder if they hadn't better chaperone their girls when they have callers in the next room?"

He stirred up the pamphlets with a discontented look. "Confound it, I wish I could stay! Which one of those has the statistics about the accidents when the men aren't allowed one day in seven?"

"See here, Emery!" In spite of his evident wish to exhort, the doctor continued sitting as he spoke. He was so short that to rise could have given him no perceptible advantage over the tall lawyer. "See here; do you know that you have a most unusual girl for a daughter?"

"I have heard people say that I have a glimmering notion of her merits," said the other with a humorous gravity.

"Oh, I don't mean pretty, and appealing, and with a good complexion, and all that—and I don't mean you don't spoil her most outrageously. I mean she's got the oddest make-up for a modern American girl—she's simple."

"I don't see anything odd about her—or simple!" Her father resented the adjectives with some warmth.

Dr. Melton answered with his usual free-handed use of language: "Well, it's because, like everybody else old and spoiled and stodgy and settled, you've no eyes in your head when it comes to something important, like young people. Because they're all smooth and rosy you think they're all alike." He rushed on, delivering himself as always with restless vivacity of gesture, "I tell you youth is one of the most wastefully ignored forces in the world! Talk about our neglecting to get the good out of our water-power! The way we shut off the capacity of youth to see things as they are, before it gets purblind with our own cowardly unreason—why, it's as if we tried to make water run uphill instead of turning our mill-wheels with its natural energy."

Judge Emery had listened to a word or two of this harangue and then had looked for and found his hat and coat, with which he had invested himself, and now stood ready for the street, one hand on the knob of the door. "Well, good-night to you," he said pleasantly, as though the doctor were not speaking; "I'll try to see you to-morrow."

Dr. Melton jumped to his feet, laughing, ran across the room and caught at the other's arm. "Don't blame me. Much preaching of true gospel to deaf ears has made me yell all the time. You know you don't really hear me, any more than anyone else."

"There's no doubt about that, I don't!" acquiesced the Judge frankly.

"I will run on, though I know it never does any good. How'd I begin this time? What started me off? What was I saying?"

"You were saying that Lydia was queer and half-witted," said the Judge moderately.

"I said she was simple—and by that I mean she's so wise you'd better look out or she'll find you out. She's as dangerous as a bomb. She has a scent for essentials. She can tell 'em from all our flummery. I'm afraid of her, and I'm afraid for her! Remember the fate of the father in the Erl-King! He thought, I dare say, that he was doing a fine thing for his child, to hurry it along to a nice, warm, dry, safe place!"

Judge Emery broke in, impatient of this fantastic word-bandying. "Oh, come, Melton, I can't stand here while you spin your paradoxes. I've got to get home before young Hollister leaves or my wife won't like it."

"I'll go with you, then," cried the little doctor, clapping on his hat. "You sha'n't escape me that way. I'm in full cry after the best figure of speech I've hit on in months."

"Good Lord!" The lawyer looked down laughingly at his friend as the two set off, a stork beside a sparrow. "You and your figures!"

"It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our midst that society-destroying child in The Kaiser's New Clothes."

"Eh?" said Lydia's father blankly.

"You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little child's voice is heard, 'But the Kaiser has nothing on!'"

"I don't know what you're talking about," said the Judge with a patient indifference.

"Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She knows—she'll know! Perhaps you've done well to send her to that idiotic finishing school."

"Don't lay it to me!" cried the Judge, laughing; "I didn't send her—or not send her. If you were married you'd know that fathers never have anything to say about what their daughters do."

"More fools they!" rejoined the doctor pointedly. "But in this case maybe it's all right. She's as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to—"

"Oh, pshaw!" The Judge was vaguely uneasy. "You let Lydia alone. Talk your nonsense about something else. There's nothing queer about Lydia, thank heavens! She's just like all young ladies."

"That's a horrible thing to say about one's own daughter!" cried the doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. "There won't be anything queer about her long, that's fact. In real life the child is never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are clapped over its mouth, and it's hustled, and shaken, and frightened, and scolded, till it thinks there's something the matter with its eyesight. And Lydia's a sweet, gentle child, who'll want to say whatever pleases people she loves—that'll be another bandage over her eyes. And she's not dowered with an innate fondness for shrieking out contradictions at the top of her voice, and unless you've a real passion for that you get silenced early in life."

The lawyer laughed with the good-natured contempt of a large, silent man for a small, voluble one. "That's a tragedy you can't know much about from experience, Melton. No cruel force ever silenced you."

He paused at the walk leading to his house. A big street light glowed and sputtered over their heads. "Come in, won't you, and see Lydia?"

"No; no cruel force has ever silenced me," the doctor mused, putting his hands slowly into his pockets, "but it has bound me hand and foot. I talk, and I talk, but do you ever see me doing anything different from the worst fools of us all?"

"Are you coming in?" The Judge spoke with his absent tolerance of his doctor's fancies.

"No, thank you, as the farmer said to the steeple-climber. I'm going home to my lonely office to give thanks to Providence that I'm not responsible for a daughter."

The Judge frowned. "Nonsense! Look at Marietta."

"I do," said the doctor.

"Well—?" The lawyer was challenging. In the long run the doctor rubbed him the wrong way.

"I hope you make a better job of bandaging Lydia's eyes than you did hers."

The Judge had turned toward the house. At this he stopped and made an irritated gesture. "Melton, you are enough to give a logical man brain fever. You're always proclaiming that parents have no real influence over their children's lives—that it's fate, or destiny, or temperament—and now—you blame me because Marietta's discontented over her husband's small income."

The doctor looked up quickly, his face twitching. "You think that's the cause of Marietta's discontent? By Heaven, I wish Lydia could go into a convent."

Suddenly his many-wrinkled little face set like a mask of tragedy. "Oh, Nat, you know what Lydia's always been to me—like my own—as precious—Oh, take care of her! take care of her! See, Lydia can't fight. She can't, even if she knew what was going on to fight against—" His voice broke. He looked up at his tall friend and shivered.

Judge Emery clapped him on the shoulder with a rough friendliness. "No wonder you do miracles in curing women, Marius. You must know their insides. You talk like a mother in a fit of the nerves over a sick child. In the Lord's name, what has Lydia to fight against? If there was ever a creature with a happy, successful life before her— Besides, don't we all stand ready to do her fighting for her?"

Though the night was cool, the doctor took off his hat and wiped his forehead. He looked up once as though he were about to speak, but in the end he only put his hat back on his head, nodded, and went his way, his quick, light, uneven tread waking a faint echo in the empty street.

As the Judge let himself in at the front door, a murmur of voices from the brightly-lighted parlor struck gratefully on his ear. He was not too late. "How are you, Hollister?" he called as he pulled off his overcoat. "Glad to see you back. Let's hear all about the Urbana experience."

Hollister's dramatic interest in each engagement of his battle for success was infectious. Those who knew him, whether they liked him or not, waited for news of the results of his latest skirmish as they waited for the installments of an exciting serial story.

As the older man entered, the tall, quick-moving young fellow came over to the door and shook his hand with energy. The Judge reflected that nobody but Hollister could so convey the effect that he was being made kindly welcome in his own house; but he did not dislike this vigor of personality. He sat down on the chair which his young guest indicated as a suitable one, and rubbed his chin, smiling at his daughter. "Dr. Melton sent his love to you, but he wouldn't come in."

Paul looked brightly at Lydia. "I should hope not! My first evening with her! To share it with anybody! Except her father, of course!" He added the last as an afterthought, more with the air of putting the Judge at his ease than of excusing himself for an ungraceful slip of the tongue.

The Judge laughed, restraining an impulse to call out, "You're a wonder, young man!" and said instead, "Well, let's hear the news."

Lydia said nothing, but her aspect, always vividly expressive of her mood, struck her father as odd. As he glanced at her from time to time during the ready, spirited narrative of the young "captain in the army of electricity," as he had once called himself, Lydia's father felt a qualm of uneasiness. Her lips were very red and a little open, as though she were breathless from some exertion, and a deep flush stained her cheeks. She looked at Paul while he talked animatedly to her father, but when he addressed himself to her she looked down or away, meeting her father's eyes with a curious effect of not seeing him at all. The Judge, moved by the oblique, harassing intimations he had been forced to hear from the doctor as to the possibility of his not understanding all that was in his daughter's mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests—an apprehension, like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia "safely married." Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could, somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps if some one had not ignored with him—

"I should have been back ten days ago," Paul drew to the end of his story, "but I simply had to wait to oversee those tests myself. Since I've adopted that rule of personally checking the inspector's work, we've been able to report forty per cent. fewer complaints of newly installed dynamos to the general office. And you see in this case, from the accident, what might have happened."

"By the Lord!" cried the lawyer, moved in spite of his preoccupations by the story of danger the other had been relating, "I should think it would turn your hair white every time a dynamo's installed. How did you feel when the fly-wheel broke?"

"The fly-wheel isn't on the dynamo, of course," corrected Paul, "so I don't feel responsible for it in a business way, and that's everything. As for being frightened, why, it's all over so quickly. You don't have time to take in what's happening. You're there or you're not. And if you are, the best thing is to get busy with repairs," he added, with a simple, manly depreciation of his courage. "You mustn't think it often happens, you know; it's supposed never to."

He spoke of the personal side of the matter with a dry brevity which contrasted effectively with the unconscious eloquence with which he had previously brought before their eyes the tense excitement in the new power-house when the wheels first stir to life in incredibly rapid revolutions and the mysterious modern genii begins to rush through the wires. At no time did Lydia's suitor show to better advantage than in speaking of his profession. The alertness of his face and the prompt decision of his speech suited the subject. His mouth fell into lines of grimly fixed purpose which expressed even more than his words when he spoke of the rivalry in endurance, patience and daring in the army of young electrical engineers, all set, as he was, on crowding one another out of the rapidly narrowing road to preferment and the few great golden prizes of the profession.

This evening he was more than usually fervent. Judge Emery thought he detected in him traces of the same excitement that flamed from Lydia's cheeks. "I tell you, Judge, I was wrong when I spoke of the 'army' of electricity. In the army advancement comes only from somebody's death, and with us it's simply a question of who's got the most to give. He gets the most back—and that's all there is to it. The company's bound to have the man it can get the most work out of. If you can do two ordinary men's work, you get two men's pay. See? There's no limit to the application of that principle. Why, our field organizer on the Pacific Coast is only a little older than I, and, by Jove! the work they say he'll turn off is something marvelous! You wouldn't believe it. But you can train yourself to it, like everything else. To be able to concentrate—not to lose a detail—to put every ounce of your force into it—that's the thing."

He brought one hand down inside the other, and sat for a moment in silence as tense with stirring possibilities to the others as to himself. The Judge felt moved to a most unusual sensation, as if he were a loosened bowstring beside this twanging, taut intensity. He felt slightly dismayed to have his unspoken principles carried to this nth power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions, hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled certain remarks of Dr. Melton's.

The young man stirred, looked at Lydia, and smiled brilliantly. "I mustn't keep this little sick-nurse up any later, I suppose," he said; but for a moment he made no movement to go. He and Lydia exchanged a gaze as long and silent as if they had been alone. It occurred to the Judge that they both looked dazzled. When Paul rose he drew a long breath and shook his head half humorously at his host. "You and I will have to look to our guns, during the next season, to hold our own, won't we? I've been making Lydia promise to reserve me three dances at every single ball this winter, and I think I'm heroic not to insist on more—but her first season—!"

Lydia said, with her pretty, light laugh, a little shaking now, "But suppose you're out of town, setting up some new dynamo or something and your three dances come along?"

Paul crossed the room to her, as if drawn irresistibly by the sound of her voice. He stood by her, looking down into her eyes (he was very tall), bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful. "You're to sit out those three dances and think of me, and think of me—of course! I shall be thinking of you."

Lydia's little tremulous air of archness dropped under this point-blank rejoinder. She flushed, and looked at her father. That unimaginative person started toward her as though she had called to him for help, and then, ashamed of his inexplicable impulse, turned away confusedly and disappeared into the hall.

Paul took this movement as a frank statement of the older man's desire to be, for the moment, rid of him. "Oh, I am going, Judge," he called after him, unabashed; "it is just a bit hard to tear myself away—I've been waiting so long for her to get back!" To Lydia he went on, "I've grown thin and pale waiting for you, while you—look at yourself, you heartless little witch!"

He pointed across to a tall mirror in which they were reflected against the rich background of his roses. For a moment both the beautiful young creatures looked each into his own eyes, mysterious with youth's total ignorance of its own meaning. Paul took Lydia's hand in his, and pointed again to their reflections as they stood side by side. He tried to speak, but for once his ready tongue was silent. Judge Emery came back to the door, a weary patience on his white, tired face.

The young man turned away with a sigh and a smile. "Yes, yes, Judge, I'm off. Good-night, Lydia. Don't forget the theater Wednesday night."

He crossed the room with a rapid, even step, shook hands with the Judge, and got himself out of the room with an easy briskness which the older man, mindful of his own rustic youth, was half-inclined to envy.

After he and Lydia were left alone he did not venture a word of comment, lest he hit on the wrong thing. He went silently about, putting out the lights, and locking the windows. Lydia stood where Paul had left her, looking at her bright image in the mirror. When the last bulb went out, the room was in a flickering twilight, the street arc-light blinking uncertainly into the windows. Judge Emery stood waiting for his daughter to move. He could scarcely see her form—her face not at all, but there flashed suddenly upon him the memory of her appealing look toward him earlier. It shook him as it had then. His heart yearned over her. He would have given anything he possessed for the habit of intimate talk with her. He put out his hands, but in the twilight she did not see the gesture. He felt shy, abashed, horribly ill at ease, torn by his tenderness, by his sense of remoteness. He said, uncertainly, "Lydia—Lydia dear—"

She started. "Oh, yes, of course. It's late." She passed, brushed lightly against him, as he stood trembling with the sense of her dearness to him. She began to ascend the stairs. He had felt from her the emanation of excitement, guessed that she was shivering like himself before a crisis—and he could find no word to say.

She had passed him as though he were a part of the furniture. He had never talked to her about—about things. He stood at the foot of the stairs in the darkness, listening to her light, mounting footfall. Once he opened his mouth to call to her, but the habit of a lifetime closed it.

"She will talk to her mother," he told himself; "her mother will know what to say." When he followed her up the stairs he was conscious chiefly that he was immeasurably tired. Melton, perhaps, had something on his side with his everlasting warnings about nervous breakdowns. He could not stand long strains as he used to do.

He fell asleep tracing out the thread of the argument presented that day by the counsel for the defense.



CHAPTER X

CASUS BELLI

Dr. Melton looked up in some surprise from his circle of lamplight as his goddaughter came swiftly into the room. "Your mother worse?" he queried sharply.

"No, no, dear Godfather. I just thought I'd come over and see you for a while. I had a little headache—Marietta's back from Cleveland to-day, and she and Flora Burgess are at the house—"

"You've said enough. I'm thankful that you have this refuge to fly to from such—"

"Oh, Flora's not so bad as you make her out, the queer, kind little old dowdy—only I didn't feel like talking 'parties,' and 'who's who,' to-night—and their being with Mother made it all right for me to leave her."