The doctor took off his eye-shade and showed his little wizened face rather paler than usual. "That's a combination that would kill me, and your mother not well yet—still, many folks, many tastes."

He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. "Well, Lydia, my dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what are yours going to be like, I wonder?"

"I wonder," she repeated absently.

"Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last night is to your taste?"

Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. "Oh, don't, Godfather!"

"Very well, I won't," he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the instinct of one who knows his womankind.

There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. "Of course that was what I came to see you about," she admitted, her sensitive lips quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; "but now I'm here I find I haven't anything to say. Perhaps you'd better give me a pink pill and send me home to forget all about everything."

Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy hands. "Oh, if I could—if I only could do something for you!" He searched her face anxiously. "What did young Hollister say that makes you so troubled?"

She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. "It wasn't anything he said," she admitted. "He was all right, I guess. Father had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for granted—Oh, you know—the silly way people do—"

"Yes."

"Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go— He didn't say a thing embarrassing or—or hard to answer, but he let me see—all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I'd be to an ambitious man. He said he didn't see why I shouldn't grow into the leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he and his sister live with, you know."

"I suppose he's right," conceded the doctor, reluctantly.

"Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well—you know the way he goes at things—how he makes you feel as though he were a locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab, holding on for dear life?"

Dr. Melton shook his head. "Paul has given me a great variety of sensations," he admitted, "but I can't say that he ever gave me quite this locomotive-cab illusion you speak of."

"Well, he has me, lots of times," persisted Lydia. "It's awfully exciting—you don't know where you're going, and you can't stop to think, everything tears past you so fast and your breath is so blown out of you. You feel like screaming. You forget everything else, you get so—so stirred up and excited. But after it's over there's always a time when things are flat. And this morning, and all day long, I've felt very—different about what he wants and all. I don't believe I'm very well, perhaps—or maybe—" she broke off, to say with emotion, "Oh, Godfather, wouldn't it be too awful if I should turn out to be without ambition." She pronounced the word with the reverence for its meaning that had been drilled into her all her life, and looked at Dr. Melton with troubled eyes.

He thrust his lips out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at her windows. "Oh, Lydia!—Oh, my dear, I'm terribly afraid of your future!"

"I'm a little scared of it myself," she said tremulously, and hid her face on his shoulder.

She was the first to speak. "Wouldn't Marietta just scream with laughter at us?" she reminded him. "We are foolish, too! There's nothing in the world you could lay your finger on. There's nothing anyhow, I guess, but nerves. I wouldn't dare breathe it to anybody else, but you always know how I'm feeling, anyhow. It's as though—here I am, grown up, and there's nothing for me to do that's worth while—even if—even if—Paul—"

The doctor took a sudden resolution. "Why don't you talk to your father, Lydia? Why don't you ask him about—"

He was cut short by Lydia's gesture of utter wonder. "Father? Don't you know that there's a big trial on? He couldn't tell without figuring up, if you should ask him quick, whether I'm fourteen or nineteen—or nine! Mother wouldn't let me, anyhow, even if he could have any idea of what I was driving at. She never let us bother him the least bit when there was something big happening in his lawyering. I remember that time I had pneumonia and nearly died, when I was a little girl, that she told him I had just a cold; and he never knew any different for years afterward, when I happened to say something about it. She didn't want him worried when he needed all his wits for some important business."

The doctor looked at her with frowning intensity, and then down at his papers. He seemed on the point of some forcible utterance, which he restrained with many twitchings of his mouth. Finally he got up and went to a window, staring out silently.

"I think I'll go and look up dear Aunt Julia," said Lydia.

"Very well, my dear," said the doctor over his shoulder. "She's in her room, I think." In exactly the same mild tone, he added, "Damnation!"

"What did you say?" asked Lydia.

He turned toward her, and took up a book from the table. "I said nothing, dear Lydia—I've nothing to say, I find."

Lydia broke into a light, mocking laugh—the doctor's volubility was an old joke—and began to speak, when a woman's voice called, "Oh, Marius, here's Mr.—— why, Lydia, how did you get in without my seeing you?"

She entered the room as she spoke—a middle-aged woman, with large blue eyes and graying fair hair, who evidently did her duty by the prevailing styles in dress with a comfortable moderation of effort. Lydia's mother, as the sister of Mrs. Sandworth's long-dead husband, thought it necessary, from time to time, to endeavor to stir her sister-in-law up to a keener sense of what was due the world in the matter of personal appearance; but Mrs. Sandworth, born a Melton, had the irritating unconcern for social problems of that distinguished Kentucky family. She cared only to please her brother Marius, she said, and he never cared what she had on, but only what was in her mind—a remark that had once caused Judge Emery to say, in a fit of exasperation with her wandering wits, that if she ever had as little on as she had in her mind, he guessed Melton would sit up and take notice.

Lydia now rushed at her aunt, exclaiming, "Oh, Aunt Julia, how good you do look to me! The office door was open and I slipped in that way, without ringing the bell."

"It's four years old, and never been touched, not even the sleeves," said the other deprecatingly.

Her brother laughed. "Who did you say was here—Oh, it's you, Rankin; come in, come in."

The newcomer was half-way across the room before he saw Lydia. He stopped, with a look of extreme pleasure and surprise, which Lydia answered with a frank smile.

"Why, have you met my niece?" asked Mrs. Sandworth, looking from one to the other.

"Oh, yes; Mr. Rankin's my oldest new friend in Endbury. I met him the first day I was back."

"And when I set up the newel-post—"

"And I ran on to his house by accident the day Marietta and I were out with little Pete, when it rained and I borrowed his overcoat and umbrella—"

"And then I had to call to take them away, of course—"

They intoned their confessions like a gay antiphonal chant. A bright color had come up in Lydia's cheeks. She looked very sunny and good-humored, like a cheerful child, an expression which up to that year had been habitual to her. Dr. Melton looked at her without speaking.

"So, you see," she concluded, "not to speak of several other times—we're very well acquainted."

"Well, Marius! Did you ever!" Mrs. Sandworth appealed to her brother.

"Oh, I've known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as well as other weighty matters, a great many times."

Mrs. Sandworth's easily diverted mind sped off into another channel. "Yes, how you do discuss. I'm going to look right at the clock every minute from now on, so's to be sure to remind you of that engagement at Judge Emery's office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and Mr. Rankin get to talking."

"I'll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence."

"Oh, don't mind me," said Lydia.

"They won't—nor anything else," her aunt assured her.

Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he was startled by the younger man's next statement.

"I've got an apprentice," he announced.

"Eh?" queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.

"The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on the railroad. The boy's been bad—truant—street gamin—all that sort of thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a passion for tools—maybe his ancestors were mediaeval craftsmen. Anyhow, he's been working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really learning fast. And he's been so interested he's forgotten all his deviltry. So, yesterday, didn't he and his father and his mother and about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my profession, as they grandly call it."

"Oh, how perfectly lovely!" cried Lydia.

The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. "Of course you know the end of that."

"You mean he'll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts again?"

"Not much! He'll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you'll extend operations and build shops, and in no time you'll go the way of all the world—a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your competitors; forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting special railroad rates for your stuff; can't remember how many children you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright's disease at fifty; leave a million."

Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without smiling. "I've got ten million blue devils on my back to-night," he said.

"So I see—so I see." Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to look into his old friend's face his own grew grave by reflection. "You don't believe all that?"

"Oh, you won't mean to. It'll come gradually." He broke out suddenly, "Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer."

"Answer!" The cabinet-maker's bewilderment was immense. "Have you asked me anything?"

The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman whose inner thoughts are not divined.

"He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense," Rankin appealed to the two women.

Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. "Oh, nobody ever can make out what he's driving at. I never try." She took out a piece of crochet work. "Lydia, they're at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on. Would you make this in shell stitch? It's much newer, of course, but they say it don't wash so well." As Lydia's attention wavered, "Oh, there's not a particle of use in trying to make out what they're saying. They just go on and on."

Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor's back. "I don't, you know, see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a few by hand. I'm no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being too tied up to folks, and I couldn't think of any other way. But I think, now that you've put the idea into my head—I think it would be a good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me—and, by gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions—that girls need very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me time and strength to live—'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway? It's fine."

"Hymn to Adversity," supplied the doctor, who was better read in the poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, "Could you, though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run you, once you got to going?"

"Well, if worst came to worst—" began Rankin, then changing front, he began again: "My great-aunt—"

The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.

"Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up, heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to—"

"You see. You see. That's just what I meant," broke in the doctor.

"Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to the ground, with everything in it."

"She didn't!" broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful attention by the promise of a coherent story.

Rankin laughed. "Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't doubt she would have," he amended.

The doctor grunted, "Huh! But would you!" He went on, "You couldn't compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best advertisement? 'All of my life-strength I've put into the product I offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true."

"Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter, and none of your horrible prophecies would come true."

"Your wife wouldn't let you."—Dr. Melton took up another line of attack—"she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' associates and a fashionable school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town."

Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. "There you step on one of my corns, Doctor"—he did not apologize for the rustic metaphor—"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that. It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her husband's business. Why does she? Because he's satisfied to have her—you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art, just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That idea of the matter is common to them both."

"That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation," said the doctor sardonically. "Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female compatriots."

"I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth while to do—not otherwise."

"Don't you call bringing up children worth while?"

"You bet I do. So much so that I'd have the fathers take their full half of it. I'd have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the women the other way 'round."

The doctor recoiled at this. "Oh, you're a visionary. It couldn't be done."

"It couldn't be done in a minute," admitted Rankin.

The doctor mused. "It's an interesting thought. But it's not for our generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the children. Adults are hopeless. There's never any use trying to change them."

"Oh, you can't fool children," said Rankin. "It's no use teaching them something you're not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through that quick enough! What you're really after, is what they see and learn to go after themselves. If anything's to be done, the adults must take the first step."

"But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous."

"Society's been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who tells me that it's bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it hasn't got me bluffed, anyhow! My wife—if I ever have one—is going to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, my children. I won't have a business that they can't know about, or that doesn't leave me strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!"

The doctor looked wonderingly at the other's kindling face. "Rankin," he asked irrelevantly, "aren't there ever moments when you despair of the world?"

The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he answered, "Why, good heavens, no, Doctor! That's why I dare criticize it so."

The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other's confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of—believe in," he burst out finally. "It comes too late—the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most." He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin followed the direction of his eyes.

"Yes; that's what I mean," said the doctor heavily, rising from his chair. "That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!"

Rankin shook his head. "I think I'm proving that you don't have to go into the labyrinth—that you can live in health and happiness outside."

"There's rather more than that to be done, you'll admit," said the doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.

Rankin colored. "I don't pretend that it's much of anything—what I've done."

The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand nervously over his face. Finally, "But you have done it, at least," he brought out, "and I've only talked. As another doctor has said: 'I've never taken a bribe; but there's a pale shade of bribery known as prosperity.'"

They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth's asking, "Lydia, have your folks got an old mythology book? I studied it at school, of course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn't expect?"

Lydia did not smile. "I don't know whether we have the book or not, but Miss Slater told us the story of the Minotaur. There's a picture of Theseus and Ariadne in Europe somewhere—Munich, I think—or maybe Siena. It was where one of the girls had a sore throat, I remember, and we had to stay quite a while. Miss Slater told us about it then."

The doctor stood up. "Julia, it's nearly half-past now. Who remembered this time? I'm off, all of you. Rankin, see that Lydia gets home safely, will you?"

"Oh, I must go too—now, with you." The girl jumped up. "I didn't realize it was so late. They'll be wondering at home."

"Come along, then, both of you. I'll go with you to the corner where I take my car."

The chill of the night air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin's, the doctor's hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under endless discussion between them.

The doctor flung down, with a militant despondency, "It'd be no use trying to do anything, even if you weren't so slothful and sedentary as you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what the majority want, the majority'll go on wanting it. Hardy says somewhere that it's innate in human nature not to desire the undesired of others."

Rankin sang out a ringing "Aw, g'wan! It's innate in human nature to murder and steal whenever it pleases, and I guess even Hardy'd admit that those aren't the amusements of the majority quite so extensively as they used to be—what? First thing you know people'll begin to desire things because they're worth desiring and not because other folks have them—even so astonishing a flight as that!" he made a boyish gesture—"and what a grand time that'll be to live in, to be sure!"

They were waiting at the corner for the doctor's street car, which now came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, "You're a wild man that lives in the woods. I've doctored everybody in the world for thirty years. Which knows human nature best?"

Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the occupants of the car, "I do! I do! I do!"

The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure, contemplating the young people blackly.

"Whatever do you suppose set him off so?" Rankin wondered aloud as they resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.

"I'm afraid I did," Lydia surmised. "I had a wretched fit of the blues, and I guess he must have caught them from me."

Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered by her phrase. "Ah, he worries a great deal about you," he murmured.

Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night. Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin's face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.

Lydia's voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension—a certainty—they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not frightened, not even conscious of it. "Why should the doctor worry? What is the matter? Marietta says the trouble with me is that I'm spoiled with having everything that I want."

"Have you everything you want?" Rankin's bluntness of interrogation was unmitigated.

Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not shown even to the doctor's loving heart. "It's a weight on my very soul—that there's nothing for me to look forward to—nothing, nothing that's worth growing up to do. I haven't been taught anything—but I know I want to be something better than—perhaps I can't be—but I want to try! I want to try! That's not much to ask—just a chance to try—But I don't even know how to get that. I don't even dare to speak of—of—such things. People laugh and say it's Sunday-schooley fancies that'll disappear, that I'll forget as I get into living. But I don't want to forget. I'm afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don't know—"

They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at each other seriously in the starlight.

Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an instant's pause he said, with a deep emotion, "Oh, perhaps—at least we both want to try—Be Ariadne for me! Help me to find the clue to what's wrong in our lives, and perhaps—" He looked down at her, shaken, drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as shining white as his.

He went on: "You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be—I will take whatever you choose to give—and bless you!"

She had a gesture of humility. "I haven't anything to give."

His accent was memorable as he cried, "You have yourself—you—you! But you are too gentle! It is hard for you—it will be too hard for you to do what you feel should be done. I could perhaps do the things if you would tell me—help you not to forget—not to let life make you forget what is worth doing and learning!"

She put back a mesh of her wind-blown hair to look at him intently, and to say again in wonder, "I'm not anything. What can you think I—what can you hope—"

They were standing now on the walk before her father's house. "I can hope—" his voice shook, "I can hope that you may make me into a man worthy to help you to be the best that's in you."

Lydia put out her hand impulsively. It did not tremble. She looked at him with radiant, steady eyes. He raised the slim, gloved fingers to his lips. "Whether to leave you, or to try to—Oh, I would give my life to know how best to serve you," he said huskily. He turned away, the sound of his steps ringing loud in the silent street.

Lydia went slowly up the walk and into the empty hall. She stood an instant, her hands clasped before her breast, her eyes closed, her face still and clear. Then she moved upstairs like one in a dream.

As she passed her mother's door she started violently, and for an instant had no breath to answer. Some one had called her name laughingly.

Finally, "Yes," she answered without stirring.

"Oh, come in, come in!" cried Marietta mockingly. "We know all about everything. We heard you come up the street, and saw you philandering on the front walk. And for all it's so dark, we made out that Paul kissed your hand when he went away."

There was a silence in the hall. Then Lydia appeared in the door. Mrs. Emery gave a scream. "Why, Lydia! what makes you look so queer?"

They turned startled, inquiring, daunting faces upon her. It was the baptism of fire to Lydia. The battle, inevitable for her, had begun. She faced it; she did not take refuge in the safe, silent lie which opened before her, but her courage was a piteous one. In her utter heartsick shrinking from the consequences of her answer she had a premonition of the weakness that was to make the combat so unequal. "It was not Paul," she said, pale in the doorway; "it was Daniel Rankin."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BOOK II

IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB



CHAPTER XI

WHAT IS BEST FOR LYDIA

The girls who were to be debutantes that season, the "crowd" or (more accurately to quote Madeleine Hollister's racy characterization) "the gang," stood before Hallam's drug store, chattering like a group of bright-colored paroquets. They had finished three or four ice-cream sodas apiece, and now, inimitably unconscious that they were on the street corner, they were "getting up" a matinee party for the performance of the popular actress whom, at that time, it was the fashion for all girls of their age and condition to adore. They had worked themselves up to a state of hysteric excitement over the prospect.

A tall brown-eyed blonde, with the physical development of a woman and the facial expression of a child of twelve, cried out, "I feel as though I should swoon for joy to see that darling way she holds her hands when the leading man's making love to her—so sort of helpless—like this—"

"Oh, Madeleine, that's not a bit the way. It's so!"

The first speaker protested, "Well, I guess I ought to be able to do it. I've practiced for hours in front of the glass doing it."

"For mercy's sake that's nothing. So have I. Who hasn't?"

Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, "Lyd has seen her later than anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in London—as if it was anywhere. She says they're crazy about her over there."

"Oh, wild!" Lydia told them. "Her picture's in every single window!"

"Which one? Which one?" they clamored, hanging on her answer breathlessly.

"That fascinating one with the rose, where she's holding her head sideways and—" Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her short, relieved that their collections were complete.

"Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the same hairdresser," Madeleine went on.

They were electrified. "Oh, honestly? Is it her own?" They trembled visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they would have said, "for eternities."

"Every hair," Lydia affirmed, "and naturally that color."

Their enthusiasm was prodigious, "How grand! How perfectly grand!"

They turned on Lydia with reproaches. "Here you've been back two months and we haven't got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known that, all this—"

"Her mother's sick, you know," Madeleine Hollister explained.

"She hasn't been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time."

Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now, instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. "Oh, I must get on," she cried; "I'm down here, you know, to walk home with Father."

They laughed loudly, "Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm for Poppa's society. Where are you going to meet Paul?"

Lydia looked about at the crush of drays, trolley-cars, and delivery-wagons jamming the busy street, "Well, not here down-town," she replied, her tone one of satisfied security.

A confused and conscious stir among her companions and a burst of talk from them cut her short. They cried variously, according to their temperaments, "Oh, there he comes now!" "I think it's mean Lydia's gobbling him up from under our noses!" "I used to have a ride or two behind that gray while Lydia was away!" "My! Isn't he a good-looker!"

They had all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most incredibly narrow openings and sent his vehicle up against the flower-like group of girls, laughing as he drew rein, at the open, humorous outcry against him. A chorus of eager recrimination rose to his ears, "Now, Mr. Hollister, this is the first time Lydia's been out with our crowd since she came home!" "You might let her alone!" "Go away, Paul, you greedy thing!" "I haven't asked Lydia a single thing about her European trip!"

"Well, maybe you think," he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, "that I've been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I haven't heard any more than you have." He threw aside the lap-robe of supple broadcloth, and offered his hand to Lydia. A flash of resentment at the cool silence of this invitation sprang up in the girl's eyes. There was in her face a despairing effort at mutiny. Her hands nervously opened and shut the clasp of the furs at her throat. She tried to look unconscious, to look like the other girls, to laugh, not to know his meaning, to turn away.

The young man plunged straight through these pitiful cobwebs. "Why, come on, Lydia," he cried with a good-humored pointedness, "I've been all over town looking for you." She backed away, looking over her shoulder, as if for a lane of escape, flushing, paling. "Oh, no, no thank you, Paul. Not this afternoon!" she cried imploringly, with a soft fury of protest, "I'm on my way to Father's office. I want to walk home with him. I want to see him. I thought it would be nice to walk home with him. I see so little of him! I thought it would be nice to walk home with him." She was repeating herself, stammering and uncertain, but achieving nevertheless a steady retreat from the confident figure standing by the wagon.

This retreat was cut short by his next speech. "Oh, I've just come from your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said to tell you and your mother that he won't be home to dinner to-night at all. He's got some citations on hand he has to verify."

Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She was panting a little. She shook her head. "Well—anyhow—I want to see him!" she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a frightened child's. "I want to see my father." Paul laughed easily, "Well, you'd better choose some other time if you want to get anything out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks under those circumstances!" He held the picture up to her, relentlessly smiling.

Lydia's lips quivered, but she said nothing.

Paul went on soothingly, "I've only come to take you straight home, anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting turns again. She said to be sure to bring you."

At the mention of her mother's name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. "Oh, if Mother needs me—" she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were leaving.

She said little or nothing in answer to the young man's kind, cheerful talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another, conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks, constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely back from her knees as though for an instant escape.

The young man's pleasant chat stopped. "Look here, Lydia," he said in another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, "look here, don't you forget one thing!" His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy, his eyes full of emotion, "Don't you forget, little Lydia, that nobody's sorrier for you than I am! And I don't want anything that—" he cried out in sudden passion—"Good Lord, I'd be cut to bits before I'd even want anything that wasn't best for you!" He looked away and mastered himself again to quiet friendliness, "You know that, don't you, Lydia? You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life anyone can?"

He leaned to her imploring in his turn.

She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said, as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, "Oh, yes, yes, Paul, I realize how awfully good you're being to me! I wish I could—but—yes, of course I see how good you are to me!"

He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself could make the action. "It makes me happy to have you know I want to be," he said simply, "now that's all. You needn't be afraid. I shan't bother you."

They were in front of the Emery house now. He did not try to detain her longer. He helped her down, only repeating as she gave him her gloved hand an instant, "That's what I'm for—to be good to you."

The wagon drove off, the young man refraining from so much as a backward glance.

The girl turned to the house and stood a moment, opening and shutting her hands. When she moved, it was to walk so rapidly as almost to run up the walk, up the steps, into the hall and into her mother's presence, where, still on the crest of the wave of her resolution, she cried, "Mother, did you really send Paul for me again. Did you really?"

"Why, yes, dear," said Mrs. Emery, surprised, sitting up on the sofa with an obvious effort; "did somebody say I didn't?"

"I hoped you didn't!" cried Lydia bitterly; "it was—horrid! I was out with all the girls in front of Hallam's—everybody was so—they all laughed so when—they looked at me so!"

Mrs. Emery spoke with dignity, "Naturally I couldn't know where he would find you."

"But, Mother, you did know that every afternoon for two weeks you've—it's been managed so that I've been out with Paul."

Mrs. Emery ignored this and went on plaintively, "I didn't see that it was so unreasonable for an invalid to send whoever she could find after her only daughter because she was feeling worse."

Lydia's frenzy carried her at once straight to the exaggeration which is the sure forerunner of defeat in the sort of a conflict which was engaging her. "Are you feeling any worse?" she cried in a despairing incredulity which was instantly marked as inhumanly unfilial by the scared revulsion on her face as well as Mrs. Emery's pale glare of horror. "Oh, I didn't mean that!" she cried, running to her mother; "I'm sorry, Mother! I'm sorry!"

The tears began running down Mrs. Emery's cheeks, "I don't know my little Lydia any more," she said weakly, dropping her head back on the pillow.

"I don't know myself!" cried Lydia, sobbing violently, "I'm so unhappy!"

Mrs. Emery took her in her arms with a forgiveness which dropped like a noose over Lydia's neck, "There, there, darling! Mother knows you didn't mean it! But you must remember, Lydia dearest, if you're unhappy these days, so is your poor mother."

"I'm making you so!" sobbed Lydia, "I know it! something like this happens every day! It's why you don't get well faster! I'm making you unhappy!"

"It doesn't make any difference about me!" Mrs. Emery heroically assured her, "I don't want you to be influenced by thinking about my feelings, Lydia. Above everything in the world, I don't want you to feel the slightest pressure from me—or any one of the family. Oh, darling, all I want—all any of us want, is what is best for our little Lydia!"



CHAPTER XII

A SOP TO THE WOLVES

Six o'clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances, marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back to what was known as the "residential section," a name bestowed on it to the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in which ordinary people lived.

As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth's loyalty had cracked at every seam in order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for everybody—everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt that life in the same house with Lydia's godfather had given her more than her share of misery.

On this dark November evening she was so tired that every inch of her soft plumpness ached. She had not prospered in her shopping. Things had not matched. She let herself into the front door with a sigh of relief at finding the hall empty. She looked cautiously into the doctor's study and drew a long breath, peeped into the parlor and, almost smiling, went on cheerfully upstairs to her room. From afar, she saw the welcoming flicker of the coal fire in her grate, and felt a glow of surprised gratitude to the latest transient from the employment agency who was now occupying her kitchen. She did not often get one that was thoughtful about keeping up fires when nobody was at home. It would be delicious to get off her corset and shoes, let down her hair—there he was, bolt upright before the fire, his back to the door. She took in the significance of his tense attitude and prepared herself for the worst, sinking into a chair, letting her bundles slide at various tangents from her rounded surface, and surveying her brother with the utmost unresignation. "Well, what is it now?" she asked.

He had not heard her enter, and now flashed around, casting in her face like a hard-thrown missile, "Lydia's engaged."

All Mrs. Sandworth's lassitude vanished. She flung herself on him in a wild outcry of inquiry—"Which one? Which one?"

He answered her angrily, "Which do you suppose? Doesn't a steam-roller make some impression on a rose?"

"Oh!" she cried, enlightened; and then, with widespread solemnity, "Well, think—of—that!"

"Not if I can help it," groaned the doctor.

"But that's not fair," his sister protested a moment later as she took in the rest of his speech.

"Heaven knows it's not," he agreed bitterly.

She stared. "I mean that Paul hasn't been nearly so steam-rollery as usual."

The doctor rubbed his face furiously, as though to brush off a disagreeable clinging web. "He hasn't had to be. There have been plenty of other forces to do his rolling for him."

"If you mean her father—you know he's kept his hands off religiously."

"He has that, damn him!" The doctor raged about the room.

A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth's face. "You're just as inconsistent as you can be!" she cried.

"I'm more than that," he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the corner of the room; "I'm heartsick." He shivered, thrust his hands into his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.

One of Mrs. Sandworth's cheerful capacities was for continuing tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every disturbance in the region of the emotions. You had to, she said, to get them done—anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps, loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.

She answered him reasonably, "It wouldn't help Lydia any if I took it off and threw it in the fire, would it? It's my best one, too; the other's at the hairdresser's, getting curled."

"It's not," the doctor broke out—"it's not, Heaven be my judge! that I want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself."

"She has, at last," Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at his forgetting so important a fact.

"She has not!" roared the doctor.

His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. "Marius, you're unkind. What did you tell me she had for—when I'm so tired it seems as if I could lie down and die if I—"

Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plunge through the obscurity of her brain into her heart's warm clarity, and, "Oh, Julia, if you had seen her!" he cried.

She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. "Tell me about it, poor Marius," she said, yearning maternally over his pain.

"I can't—if you had seen her—"

"But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did—"

"I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she'd had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as forbade him the house—"

Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. "Oh, if they've managed to shut Lydia off from seeing him—"

The doctor nodded. "That's what her mother counted on. She said she thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin—her being so different after she'd seen him—so defiant—so unlike Lydia! But now she hadn't seen him for a week, and her mother and Marietta had been 'talking to her'—Julia!—and then Paul had come to see her every evening, and had been just right—firm and yet not exacting, and ever so gentle and kind—and this afternoon when he came Lydia cried and didn't want to go down, but her mother said she mustn't be childish, and Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there with Paul, and there she was now." The doctor started up and beat his thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. "Poor Marius!" she said again.

He drew a long breath. "I did not fly at their throats—I turned and ran like mad down the stairs and into the library. It was Rankin I wanted to kill for letting his pride come in—for leaving her there alone with those—I was ready to snatch Lydia up bodily and carry her off to—" He stopped short and laughed harshly. "I reach to Lydia's shoulder," he commented on his own speech. "That's me. To see what's to be done and—"

"What was to be done?" asked Mrs. Sandworth patiently. She was quite used to understanding but half of what her brother said and had acquired a quiet art of untangling by tireless questionings the thread of narrative from the maze of his comments and ejaculations.

"There was nothing to be done. I was too late."

"You didn't burst in on them while Paul was kissing her or anything, did you?"

"Paul wasn't there."

"Not there! Why, Marius, you're worse than usual. Didn't you tell me her mother said—"

"He had been there—one look at Lydia showed that. She sat there alone in the dim light, her face as white—and when I came in she said, without looking to see who it was, 'I'm engaged to Paul.' She said it to her mother, who was right after me, of course, and then to Marietta."

"Well—!" breathed Mrs. Sandworth as he paused; "so that was all there was to it?"

"Oh, no; they did the proper thing. They kissed her, and cried, and congratulated everybody, and her mother said, with an eye on me: 'Darling, you're not doing this just because you know it'll make us so very happy, are you?' Lydia said, 'Oh, no; she supposed not,' and started to go upstairs. But when Marietta said she'd go and telephone to Flora Burgess to announce it, Lydia came down like a flash. It was not to be announced she told them; she'd die if they told anybody! Paul had promised solemnly not to tell anybody. Her mother said, of course she knew how Lydia felt about it. It was a handicap for a girl in her first season. Lydia was half-way up the stairs again, but at that she looked down at her mother—God! Julia, if a child of mine had ever looked at me like that—"

Mrs. Sandworth patted him vaguely. "Oh, people always look white and queer in the twilight, you know—even quite florid complexions."

The doctor made a rush to the door.

"But dinner must be ready to put on the table," she called after him.

"Put it on, then," he cried, and disappeared.

A plain statement was manna to Mrs. Sandworth. She had finished her soup, and was beginning on her hamburg steak when the doctor came soberly in, took his place, and began to eat in silence. She took up the conversation where they had left it.

"So it's all over," she commented, watching his plate to see that he did not forget to salt his meat and help himself to gravy.

"Nothing's ever over in a human life," he contradicted her. "Why do you suppose she doesn't want it announced?"

"You don't suppose she means to break it off later?"

"I haven't any idea what she means, any more than she has, poor child! But it's plain that this is only to gain time—a sop to the wolves."

"Wolves!" cried poor Mrs. Sandworth.

"Well, tigers and hyenas, perhaps," he added moderately.

"They're crazy about Lydia, that whole Emery family," she protested.

"They are that," he agreed sardonically. "But I don't mean only her family. I mean unclean prowling standards of what's what, as well as—"

"They'd lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would—"

"If they thought she was going in the right direction."

Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. "I wonder what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as she's been!"

"Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could get it."

"But they didn't talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home from here. Marietta said they were 'too sickish!' 'Flat Sunday-school cant about wanting to be good,' and all that sort of thing."

"That certainly wouldn't have tempted Marietta from the path of virtue and sharp attention to a good match," murmured the doctor. "Nobody can claim that there's anything very seductive to the average young lady in Rankin's fanaticism."

"Oh, you admit he's a fanatic!" Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable piece of driftwood which the doctor's tempest had thrown at her feet.

"Everybody who's worth his salt is a fanatic."

"Not Paul. Everybody says he's so sane and levelheaded."

"There isn't a hotter one in creation!"

"Than Paul?"

"Than Paul."

"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him for levity.

"He's a fanatic for success."

"Oh, I don't call that—"

"Nor nobody else in Endbury—but it is, all the same. And the only wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin's heretical brand and not by Paul's orthodox variety. It shows she's rare."

"Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas or convictions."

"That's a horrible conception," he admitted gravely.

"It's which one she's in love with!" Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with solemnity.

The doctor stood up to go. "She's not in love with either," he pronounced. "She's never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or life or experience—how can she be in love?"

"Well, they're in love with her," she triumphed for her sex.

"I don't know anything about Paul's inner workings, and as for Rankin, I don't know whether he's in love with her or not. He's sorry for her—he's touched by her—"

Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. "Good gracious me! If he's not in love with her, nor she with him, what are you making all this fuss about?"

The doctor thrust out his lips. "I'm only protesting in my usual feeble, inadequate manner, after the harm's all done, at idiots and egotists laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing—the right of youth to its own life—"

"Well, if you call that a feeble protest—!" she called after him.

He reappeared, hat in hand. "It's nothing to what I'd like to say. I will add that Daniel Rankin's a man in a million."

Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so indeed, and added, "But, Marius, she couldn't have married him—really! Mercy! What had he to offer her—compared with Paul? Everybody has always said what a suitable marriage—"

Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.

"But it's so," she insisted.

"He hasn't anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps."

"Marietta's married!" Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the facts of any case under discussion.

"Is she?" queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which his sister found distracting.

"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him again; and then helplessly, "How did we get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia's engagement."

"I was," he assured her.

"And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that's so bad?"

"They've brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn't a weapon to resist them."

"Oh, Ma—" began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.

"Well, then, I will tell you—I'll explain in words of one syllable. Mind you, I don't undertake to settle the question—Heaven forbid! It may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to have—a social position in Endbury's two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord's sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia's got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that's what she wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake."

Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of much painful experience with her brother's conversation. She sank back in her chair and waved him off. "Calculus!" she cried, outraged; "earthquakes! And I'm sure you're as unfair as can be! You can't say her father's obscured any question. You know he's not a dictatorial father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children."

"Yes; that's his principle all right. His specialties are in other lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that."

Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of a situation. "Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren't you glad we haven't any children!"

"Every child that's not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have, should be our child," he said.

He went up to her and kissed her gently. "Good-night," he said.

"Where are you going?"

"To the Black Rock woods."

"Tell him—" she was inspired—"tell him to try to see Lydia again."

"I was going to do that. But she won't be allowed to. It's pretty late now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago—from the time he was born."

"But she's ever so much younger than he," cried Mrs. Sandworth after him, informingly.



CHAPTER XIII

LYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM

The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the Endbury Chronicle, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was heralded, "The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia's party decorations." And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a third comer was introduced into the hall—Mme. Boyle herself, the best dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of the debutante's Paris dresses, the debutante having found the change back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite noticeably thinner.

"It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle's tournoor exactly perfect," Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted her competent, kindly Celtic face.

Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to Lydia's room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. "Oh, Madame, just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!" As she continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her up like wings. In common with many other estimable people, she could not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a sweet taste of victory in her mouth.

She greeted Miss Burgess with the careful cordiality due to an ally of many years' standing, and with a manner perceptibly but indefinably different from that which she would have bestowed on a social equal. Mrs. Emery had labored to acquire exactly that tone in her dealings with the society reporter, and her achievement of it was a fact which brought an equal satisfaction to both women. Miss Burgess' mother was an Englishwoman, an ex-housekeeper, who had transmitted to her daughter a sense, rare as yet in America, of the beauty and dignity of class distinctions. In her turn Miss Burgess herself, the hard-working, good-natured woman of fifty who for twenty years had reported the doings of those citizens of Endbury whom she considered the "gentry," had toiled with the utmost disinterestedness to build up a feeling, or, as she called it, a "tone," which, among other things, should exclude her from equality. When she began she was, perhaps, the only person in town who had an unerring instinct for social differences; but, like a kindly, experienced actor of a minor role in theatricals, she had silently given so many professional tips to the amateur principals in the play, and had acted her own part with such unflagging consistency and good-will, that she had often now the satisfaction of seeing one of her pupils move through her role with a most edifying effect of having been born to it.

Long ago she had taken the Emerys to her warm heart and she had rejoiced in all their upward progress with the sweet unenvious joy of an ugly woman in a pretty, much-loved sister's successes. Lydia was to her, as to Mrs. Emery, a bright symbol of what she would fain have been herself. Miss Burgess' feeling for her somewhat resembled that devout affection which, she had read, was felt by faithful old servants of great English families for the young ladies of the house. The pathetic completeness of her own insignificance of aspect had spared her any uneasy ambitions for personal advancement, and it is probable that the vigor of her character and her pleasure in industry were such that she had been happier in her daily column and weekly five-column Society Notes than if she had been as successful a society matron as Mrs. Emery herself.

She lived the life of a creator, working at an art she had invented, in a workroom of her own contriving, loyally drawing the shutters to shade an unfortunate occurrence in one of the best families, setting forth a partial success with its best profile to the public, and flooding with light real achievements like Mrs. Hollister's rose party (the Mrs. Hollister—Paul's aunt, and Madeleine's). All that she wrote was read by nearly every woman in Endbury. She was a person of importance, and a very busy and happy old maid.

Mrs. Emery had a great taste for Miss Burgess' conversation, admiring greatly her whole-hearted devotion to Endbury's social welfare. She had once said of her to Dr. Melton, "There is what I call a public-spirited woman." He had answered, "I envy Flora Burgess with the fierce embittered envy I feel for a cow"—an ambiguous compliment which Mrs. Emery had resented on behalf of her old ally.

Now, as Mrs. Emery added to her greeting, "You'll excuse me just a moment, won't you, I must settle some things with my decorator," Miss Burgess felt a rich content in her hostess' choice of words. There were people in Endbury society who would have called him, as had the perplexed maid, "the gentleman from the greenhouse." Later, asked for advice, she had walked about the lower floor of the house with Mrs. Emery and the florist, saturated with satisfaction in the process of deciding where the palms should be put that were to conceal the "orchestra" of four instruments, and with what flowers the mantels should be "banked."

After the man had gone, they settled to a consideration of various important matters which was interrupted by an impassioned call of Madame Boyle from the stairs, "Could she bring Maddemwaselle down to show this perfect fit?"—and they glided into a rapt admiration of the unwrinkled surface of peach-colored satin which clad Lydia's slender and flexibly erect back. When she turned about so that Madame could show them the truly exqueese effect of the trimming at the throat, her face showed pearly shadows instead of its usual flower-like glow. As Madame left the room for a moment, Miss Burgess said, with a kind, respectful facetiousness, "I see that even fairy princesses find the emotions of getting engaged a little trying."

Lydia started, and flushed painfully. "Oh, Mother—" she began.

Her mother cut her short. "My dear! Miss Burgess!" she pointed out, as who should deplore keeping a secret from the family priest, "You know she never breathes a word that people don't want known. And she had to be told so she can know how to put things all this winter."

"I'm sure it's the most wonderfully suitable marriage," pronounced Miss Burgess.

A ring at the door-bell was instantly followed by the bursting open of the door and the impetuous onslaught of a girl, a tall, handsome, brown-eyed blonde about Lydia's age, who, wasting no time in greetings to the older women, flung herself on Lydia's neck with a wild outcry of jubilation. "My dear! Isn't it dandy! Perfectly dandy! Paul met me at the train last night and when he told me I nearly swooned for joy! Of all the tickled sisters-in-law! I wanted to come right over here last night, but Paul said it was a secret, and wouldn't let me." A momentary failure of lung-power forced her to a pause in which she perceived Lydia's attire. She recoiled with a dramatic rush. "Oh, you've got one of them on! Lydia, how insanely swell you do look! Why, Mrs. Emery"—she turned to Lydia's mother with a light-hearted unconsciousness that she had not addressed her before—"she doesn't look real, does she!"

There was an instant's pause as the three women gazed ecstatically at Lydia, who had again turned her back and was leaning her forehead against the window. Then the girl sprang at her again. "Well, my goodness, Lydia! I just love you to pieces, of course, but if we were of the same complexion I should certainly put poison in your candy. As it is, me so blonde and you so dark—I tell you what—what we won't do this winter—" She ran up to her again, putting her arms around her neck from behind and whispering in her ear.

Miss Burgess turned to her hostess with her sweet, motherly smile. "Aren't girls the dearest things?" she whispered. "I love to see them so young, and full of their own little affairs. I think it's dreadful nowadays how so many of them are allowed to get serious-minded."

Madeleine was saying to Lydia, "You sly little thing—to land Paul before the season even began! Where are you going to get your lingerie? Oh, isn't it fun? If I go abroad I'll smuggle it back for you. You haven't got your ring yet, I don't suppose? Make him make it a ruby. That's ever so much sweller than that everlasting old diamond. He's something to land, too, Paul is, if I do say it—not, of course, that we've either of us got any money, but," she looked about the handsomely furnished house, "you'll have lots, and Paul'll soon be making it hand over fist—and I'll be marrying it!" She ended with a triumphant pirouette her vision of the future, and encountered Madame Boyle, entering with a white and gold evening wrap which sent her into another paroxysm of admiration. The dressmaker had just begun to say that she thought another line of gold braid around the neck would—when Mrs. Emery, looking out of the window, declared the caterer to be approaching and that she must have aid from her subordinates before he should enter. "I do not want to have that old red lemonade and sweet crackers everybody has, and slabs of ice-cream floating around on your plate. Think quick, all of you! What kind of crackers can we have?"

"Animal crackers," suggested Madeleine, with the accent of a remark intended to be humorous, drawing Lydia into a corner. "Now, don't make Lydia work. She's It right now, and everything's to be done for her. Madame, come over here with that cloak and let's see about the—and Oh, you and Lydia, for the love of Heaven tell me what I'm to do about this fashion for no hips, and me with a figure of eight! Lydia, the fit of that thing is sublime!"

"Maddemwaselle, don't you see how a little more gold right here—"

"Here, Lydia," called her mother, "it wasn't the caterer after all; it's flowers for you. Take it over there to the young lady in pink," she directed the boy.

Madeleine seized on the box, and tore it open with one of her vigorous, competent gestures. "Orchids!" she shouted in a single volcanic burst of appreciation. "I never had orchids sent me in my life! Paul must have telegraphed for them. You can't buy them in Endbury. And here's a note that says it's to be answered at once, while the boy waits—Oh, my! Oh, my!"

"Lydia, dear, here's the caterer, after all. Will you just please say one thing. Would you rather have the coffee or the water-ices served upstairs—Oh, here's your Aunt Julia—Julia Sandworth, I never needed advice more."

Mrs. Sandworth's appearance was the chord which resolved into one burst of sound all the various motives emitted by the different temperaments in the room. Every one appealed to her at once.

"Just a touch of gold braid on the collar, next the face, don't you—"

"Why not a real supper at midnight, with creamed oysters and things, as they do in the East?"

"Do you see anything out of the way in publishing the details of Miss Lydia's dress the day before? It gives people a chance to know what to look for."



"How can we avoid that awful jam-up there is on the stairs when people begin to—"

Mrs. Sandworth made her way to the corner where Lydia stood, presenting a faultlessly fitted back to the world so that Madame Boyle might, with a fat, moist forefinger, indicate the spot where a "soupcon" of gold was needed.

"Please, ma'am, the gentleman said I was to wait for an answer," said the messenger boy beside her.

"And she hasn't read it, yet!" Madeleine was horrified to remember this fact.

"Turn around, Lydia," said Mrs. Sandworth.

Lydia's white lids fluttered. The eyes they revealed were lustrous and quite blank. Madeleine darted away, crying, "I'm going to get pen and paper for you to write your note right now."

"Lydia," said Mrs. Sandworth, in a low tone, "Daniel Rankin wants to speak with you again. Your godfather is waiting here in the hall to know if you'll see him. He didn't want to force an interview on you if you didn't want it. He wants to see you but he wanted you to decide in perfect freedom—"

The tragic, troubled, helpless face that Lydia showed at this speech was a commentary on the last word. She looked around the room, her eyebrows drawn into a knot, one hand at her throat, but she did not answer. Her aunt thought she had not understood. "Just collect your thoughts, Lydia—"

The girl beat one slim fist inside the other with a sudden nervous movement. "But that's what I can't do, Aunt Julia. You know how easily I get rattled—I don't know what I'm—I can't collect my thoughts."

As the older woman opened her lips to speak again she cut her short with a broken whispered appeal. "No, no; I can't—see him—? I can't stand any more—tell him I guess I'll be all right—it's settled now—Mother's told all these—I like Paul. I do like him! Mother's told everybody here—no, no—I can't, Aunt Julia! I can't!"

Mrs. Sandworth, her eyes full of tears, opened her arms impulsively, but Lydia drew back. "Oh, let me alone!" she wailed. "I'm so tired!"

Madame Boyle caught this through the clatter of voices. "Why, poor Maddemwaselle!" she cried, her kindly, harassed, fatigued face melting. "Sit down. Sit down. I can show the ladies about this collar just as well that way—if they'll ever look."

Mrs. Sandworth had disappeared.

Madeleine, coming with the pen and ink, was laughing as she told them, "I didn't know Dr. Melton was in the house. I ran into him pacing up and down in the hall like a little bear, and just now I saw him—isn't he too comical! He must have heard our chatter—I saw him running down the walk as fast as he could go it, his fingers in his ears as if he were trying to get away from a dynamite bomb before it went bang."

"He hasn't much patience with many necessary details of life," said Mrs. Emery with dignity. She turned her criticism of her doctor into a compliment to her brother's widow by adding, "Whatever he would do without Julia to look after him, I'm sure none of us can imagine."

"He is a very original character," said Miss Burgess, discriminatingly.

Madeleine dismissed the subject with a compendious, "He's the most killingly, screamingly funny little man that ever lived!"

"Now, ladies," implored Madame Boyle, "one more row—not solid—just a soupcon—"



CHAPTER XIV

MID-SEASON NERVES

"If I should wait and read my paper here instead of on the cars, do you suppose Lydia would be up before I left?" asked the Judge as he put his napkin in the ring and pushed away from the breakfast table.

Mrs. Emery looked up, smiling, from a letter, "'Of course such a great favorite as Miss Emery,'" she read aloud, "'will be hard to secure, but both the Governor and I feel that our party wouldn't be complete without her. We're expecting a number of other Endbury young people.' And do you know who writes that?" she asked triumphantly of her husband.

"How should I?" answered the Judge reasonably.

"Mrs. Ex-Governor Mallory, to be sure. It's their annual St. Valentine's day house-party at their old family estate in Union County."

The Judge got up, laughing. "Old family estate," he mocked.

"They are one of the oldest and best families in this State," cried his wife.

"The Governor's an old blackguard," said her husband tolerantly.

"The Mallorys—the Hollisters—Lydia is certainly," began Mrs. Emery, complacently.

Lydia's father laughed again. "Oh, with you and Flora Burgess as manager and press agent—! You haven't answered my question about whether if I waited and—"

"No, she wouldn't," said Mrs. Emery decisively. "After dancing so late nights, I want her to sleep every minute she's not wanted somewhere. I have the responsibility of looking after her health, you know. I hope she'll sleep now till just time to get up and dress for Marietta's lunch-party at one o'clock."

The father of the family frowned. "Is Marietta giving another lunch-party for Lydia? They can't afford to do so much. Marietta's—"

"This is a great chance for Marietta—poor girl! she hasn't many such chances—Lydia's carrying everything before her so, I mean."

"How does Marietta get into the game?" asked her father obtusely.

Mrs. Emery hesitated a scarcely perceptible instant, a hesitation apparently illuminating to her husband. He laughed again, the tolerant, indifferent laugh he had for his women-folks' goings-on. "She thinks she can go up as the tail to Lydia's kite, does she? She'd better not be too sure. If I don't miss my guess, Paul'll have a word or two to say about carrying extra weight. Gosh! Marietta's a fool some ways for a woman that has her brains."

He stated this opinion with a detached, impersonal irresponsibility, and began to prepare himself for the plunge into the damp cold of the Endbury January. His wife preserved a dignified silence, and in the middle of a sentence of his later talk, which had again turned on his grievance about never seeing Lydia, she got up, went into the hall, and began to use the telephone for her morning shopping. Her conversation gave the impression that she was ordering veal cutlets, maidenhair ferns, wax floor-polish, chiffon ruching, and closed carriages, from one and the same invisible interlocutor, who seemed impartially unable to supply any of these needs without rather testy exhortation. Mrs. Emery was one of the women who are always well served by "tradespeople," as she now called them, "and a good reason why," she was wont to explain with self-gratulatory grimness.

The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable succession of purchases. After a time he released the door-knob, loosened his muffler, and sat down heavily, his eyes fixed on his wife's back.

After an interval, Mrs. Emery paused in the act of ringing up another number, looked over her shoulder, saw him there and inquired uneasily, "What are you waiting for? You'll catch cold with all your things on. Isn't Dr. Melton always telling you to be careful?"

She felt a vague resentment at his being there "after hours," as she might have put it, so definitely had long usage accustomed her to a sense of solitary proprietorship of the house except at certain fixed and not very frequent periods. She almost felt that he was eavesdropping while she "ran her own business." There was also his remark about Marietta and kites, unatoned for as yet. She had not forgotten that she "owed him one," as Madeleine Hollister light-heartedly phrased the connubial balanced relationship which had come under her irreverent and keen observation. A cumulative sharpness from all these causes was in her voice as she remarked, "Didn't I tell you that Lydia—"

Judge Emery's voice in answer was as sharp as her own. "Look-y here, Susan, I bet you've ordered fifty dollars' worth of stuff since you stood there."

"Well, what if I have?" She was up in arms in an instant against his breaking a long-standing treaty between them—a treaty not tacit, but frequently and definitely stated.

They regulated their relations on a sound business basis, they were wont to say of themselves, the natural one, the right one. The husband earned the money, the wife saw that it was spent to the best advantage, and neither needed to bother his head or dissipate his energies about the other's end of the matter. They had found it meant less friction, they said; fewer occasions for differences of opinion. Once, when they had been urging this system upon their son George, then about to marry, Dr. Melton had made the suggestion that there would be still fewer differences of opinion if married people agreed never to see each other after the ceremony in the church. There would be no friction at all with that system, he added. It was one of his preposterous speeches which had become a family joke with the Emerys.

"Well, what if I have?" Mrs. Emery advanced defiantly upon her husband, with this remark repeated.

Judge Emery shared a well-known domestic peculiarity with other estimable and otherwise courageous men. He retreated precipitately before the energy of his wife's counter-attack, only saying sulkily, to conceal from himself the fact of his retreat, "Well, we're not millionaires, you know."

"Did I ever think we were?" she said, smiling inwardly at his change of front. "If you stand right up to men, they'll give in," she often counseled other matrons. She began to look up another number in the telephone book.

"If you order fifty dollars' worth every morning, besides—"

"Three-four-four—Weston," remarked his wife to the telephone. To her husband she said conclusively, "I thought we were agreed to make Lydia's first season everything it ought to be. And isn't she being worth it? There hasn't a girl come out in Endbury in years that's been so popular, or had so much—" She jerked her head around to the telephone—"Three-four-four—Weston? Is this Mr. Schmidt? I want Mr. Schmidt himself. Tell him Mrs. Emery—"

The Judge broke in, with the air of launching the most startling of arguments, "Well, my salary won't stand it; that's sure! If this keeps up I'll have to resign from the bench and go into practice again."

His wife looked at him without surprise. "Well, I've often thought that might be a very good thing." She added, with good-humored impatience, "Oh, go along, Nathaniel. You know it's just one of your bilious attacks, and you will catch cold sitting there with all your—Mr. Schmidt, I want to complain about the man who dished up the ice-cream at my last reception. I am going to give another one next week, and I want a different—"

"I won't be back to lunch," said her husband. The door slammed.

As he turned into the front walk it opened after him, and his wife called after him, "I'm going to give a dinner party for Lydia's girl friends here this evening, so you'd better get your dinner down-town or at the Meltons'. I'll telephone Julia that—"

The Judge stopped, disappointment, almost dismay, on his face. "I'm going to keep track from now on," he called angrily, "of just how often I catch a glimpse of Lydia. I bet it won't be five minutes a week."

Mrs. Emery evidently did not catch what he said, and as evidently considered it of no consequence that she did not. She nodded indifferently and, drawing in her head, shut the door.

At the end of the next week the Judge announced that he had put down every time he and Lydia had been in a room together, and it amounted to just forty-five minutes, all told. Lydia, a dazzling vision in white and gold, had come downstairs on her way to a dance, and because Paul, who was to be her escort, was a little late, she told her father that now was his time for a "visit." This question of "visiting" had grown to be quite a joke. Judge Emery clutched eagerly at anything in the nature of an understanding or common interest between them.

"Oh, I don't know you well enough to visit with you," he now said laughingly, "but I'll look at you long enough so I'll recognize you the next time I meet you on the street-car."

Lydia sat down on his knee, lightly, so as not to crumple her gauzy draperies, and looked at her father with the whimsical expression that became her face so well. "I'm paying you back," she said gayly. "I remember when I was a little girl I used to wonder why you came all the way out here to eat your meals. It seemed so much easier for you to get them near your office. Honest, I did."

"Ah, that was when I was still struggling to get my toes into a crack in the wall and climb up. I didn't have time for you then. And you're very ungrateful to bring it up against me, for all I was doing was to wear my nose clear off on the grindstone so's to be able to buy you such pretty trash as this." He stroked the girl's shimmering draperies, not thinking of what he was saying, smiling at her, delighted with her beauty, with her nearness to him, with this brief snatch of intimate talk.

"Ungrateful—yourself! What am I doing but wearing my nose off on the grindstone—Dr. Melton threatens nervous prostration every day—so's to show off your pretty trash to the best advantage. I haven't any time to bother with you now!" she mocked him laughingly, her hands on his shoulders.

"Well, that sounds like a bargain," he admitted, leaning back in his chair; "I suppose I've got to be satisfied if you are. Are you satisfied?" he asked with a sudden seriousness. "How do you like Paul, now you know him better?"

Lydia flushed, and looked away in a tremulous confusion. "Why, when I'm with him I can't think of another thing in the world," she confessed in a low, ardent tone.

"Ah, well, then that's all right," said the Judge comfortably.

There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and he looked at Lydia. The girl's face grew more and more absent and brooding.

The door-bell rang. "There he is, I suppose," said her father.

"But isn't it a pity we couldn't make connections?" she asked musingly. "Maybe I'd have liked you better with your nose on, better even than pretty trash."

"Eh?" said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. "What say, Lydia?" he asked.

"Yes, yes, Paul; I didn't hear you come in," called the girl, jumping up and beginning to put on her wraps.

The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his shoulder: "Much obliged to you, Judge, for your good word to Egdon, March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new factory to-day."

The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul bending at Lydia's feet, putting on her high overshoes. "That's quite a contract, isn't it?" he asked, highly pleased.

"The biggest I ever got my teeth into," said Paul, straightening up. "I'm ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn't bring a hack to take her to the dance."

"Oh, I never thought you would," cried Lydia, standing up and stamping her feet down in her overshoes—an action that added emphasis to her protest. "I'd rather walk, it's such a little way. I like it better when I'm not costing people money."

"You're not like most of your sex," said Paul. "Down in Mexico, when I was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: 'If a pretty woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.'"

The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned. "That is hateful—and horrid—and a lie!" she cried energetically, finding that they paid no attention to her protest.

"I didn't invent it," Paul exonerated himself lightly.

"But you laughed at it—you think it's so—you—" She was trembling in a sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.

"Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!" cried her father, laughing. "I see your finish, my boy!"

"Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take it back." Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart's flashing eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.

She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.

"To tell the truth," said Paul, going on with the conversation as though it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be, "every penny I can rake and scrape is going into the house. Lydia's such a sensible little thing I knew she'd think it better to have something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides, such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else."

Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia's inexperience that it was rare to see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fiance.

"The architect and I were going over it to-day," the young electrician went on, "and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all—of course if you agree," he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer. "The effect will be much handsomer—will go with the rest of the house better."

"They'd be lots harder to dust," said Lydia dubiously, putting a spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. "When Titania takes to being practical—" laughed Paul.

Lydia went on seriously. "Honestly, Paul, I'm afraid the house is getting too handsome, anyhow—everything in it. It's too expensive, I'm—"

"Nothing's too good for you." Paul said this with conviction. "And besides, it's an asset. The mortgage won't be so very large. And if we're in it, we'll just have to live up to it. It'll be a stimulus."

"I hope it doesn't stimulate us into our graves," said Lydia, as she kissed her father good-night.

"Well, your families aren't paupers on either side," said Paul.

A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his future father-in-law's finances. Still, it was evident to the most disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behind the Emery's ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen, for all their delicacy.

As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out of his pocket and elaborately made a note. "Fifty-five minutes in eight days, Lydia," he called.

At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia's traveling bag. She looked very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some sort. Didn't he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at the Judge's complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of Lydia's career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes, she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter's interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was so much less zealous in the matter.

When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. "It's my fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly on time. But I walked along with her and detained her."

"It was the sunset," said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps. "It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I just stood! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this winter, but it seems as though I hadn't had time to see one before—over the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and the sun turned it into such loveliness—"

"You've missed your trolley-car," said her mother succinctly.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay, for she asked in a moment, very meekly, "Will it make so very much difference if I don't go till the next one?"

"You'll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car. You'll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this one."

"Oh, I don't care about that," cried Lydia. "If that's all—I'd ever so much rather go alone. I'm never alone a single minute, and it'll rest me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so—they always do."

Her mother's aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said nothing, bringing Lydia's traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.

Dr. Melton cried out at this, "Look here, Susan Emery, you're like the carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his boards all away to shavings."

Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning equaled only by her evident indifference to it.

"I mean—I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good time this winter. You're running her as though she were a transcontinental railway system."

"You can't accomplish anything without system in this world," said Mrs. Emery. She added, "Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering her own life, that she will miss her old mother's forethought and care."

Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother's neck. "I'm so sorry, Mother dear," she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton's professional eye took in the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. "The middle-of-the-social-season symptom," he called it to himself. "I'm so sorry, Mother," Lydia went on. "I will be more careful next time. You are so good to—to—"

"Good Heavens!" said Dr. Melton. "All the child did was to give herself a moment's time to look at a fine spectacle, after spending all a precious afternoon on such a tragically idiotic pursuit as cards."

"Oh, sunsets!" Mrs. Emery disposed of them with a word. "Come, Lydia."

"I'll go with her, and carry her bag," said the doctor.

"You made such a good job of getting her here on time," said Mrs. Emery, unappeased.

The Judge offered to go, as a means of one of his rare visits with Lydia, but his wife declared with emphasis that she didn't care who went or didn't go so long as she herself saw that Lydia did not take to star-gazing again. It ended by all four proceeding down the street together.

"You're sure you remember everything, Lydia?" asked her mother.

"Let me see," said the girl, laughing nervously. "Do I? The Governor's wife is his second, so I'm to waste no time admiring the first set of children. They're Methodists, so I'm to keep quiet about our being Episcopalians—"

"I guess we're not Episcopalians enough to hurt," commented her father, who had never taken the conversion of his women-folks very seriously.

"And it's my pink crepe for dinner and tan-colored suit if they have afternoon tea. And Mrs. Mallory is to be asked to visit us, but not her daughter, because of her impossible husband, and I'm to play my prettiest to the Governor, because he's always needing dynamos and such in the works, and Paul—"

The big car came booming around the corner, and she stopped her category of recommendations. The doctor rushed in with a last one as they stepped hurriedly toward the rear platform: "And don't forget that your host is the most unmitigated old rascal that ever stood in with two political machines at once."

The Judge swung her up on the platform, the doctor gave her valise to the conductor, her mother waved her hand, and she was off.

The two men turned away. Not so Mrs. Emery. She was staring after the car in a fierce endeavor to focus her gaze on the interior. "Who was that man that jumped up so surprised to speak to Lydia?"

"I didn't notice anybody," said the Judge.

Dr. Melton spoke quickly. "Lydia's getting in a very nervous state, my friends; I want you to know that. This confounded life is too much for her."

"She doesn't kill herself getting up in the morning," complained her father. "It is a month now since I've seen her at breakfast."

"I don't let her get up," said Mrs. Emery. "I guess if you'd been up till two every morning dancing split dances because you were the belle of the season, you'd sleep late! Besides," she went on, "she'll be all right as soon as her engagement is announced. The excitement of that'll brace her up."

"Good Lord! It's not more excitement she needs," began Dr. Melton; but they had reached the house, and Mrs. Emery, obviously preoccupied, pulled her husband quickly in, dismissing the doctor with a nod.

She drew the Judge hurriedly into the hall, and, "It was that Rankin!" she cried, the slam of the door underscoring her words, "and I believe Marius Melton knew he was going on that car and made Lydia late on purpose."

Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the day's work found him—overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous energy to answer his wife's tocsin. "Well, what if it was?" he said.

"They'll be an hour and a half together—alone—more alone than anywhere except on a desert island. Alone—an hour and a half!"

"Oh, Susan! If Paul can't in three months make more headway than Rankin can tear down in an hour and a half—"

She raged at him, revolted at the calmness with which he was unbuttoning his overcoat and unwinding his muffler, "You don't understand—anything! I'm not afraid she'll elope with him—Paul's got her too solid for that—Rankin probably won't say anything of that kind! But he'll put notions in her head again—she's so impressionable. And she says queer things now, once in a while, if she's left alone a minute. She needs managing. She's not like that levelheaded, sensible Madeleine Hollister. Lydia has to be guided, and you don't see anything—you leave it all to me."

She was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia's course ran smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother's part. Dr. Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this prophecy, was now moved by his wife's pale agitation to a heart-sickening mixture of apprehension for her and of recollection of his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick. He tried to soothe her. "But, Susan, there's nothing we can do about it," he said reasoningly, hanging up his overcoat, blandly ignorant that her irritation came largely from his failure to fall in with her conception of the moment as a tragic one.

"You could care something about it," she said bitterly, standing with all her wraps on. The telephone bell rang. She motioned him back. "No; I might as well go first as last. It'll be something I'd have to see about, anyway."

As he hesitated in the middle of the hall, longing to betake himself to a deep easy chair and a moment's relaxation, and not daring to do so, he was startled by an electric change in his wife's voice. "You're at Hardville, you say? Oh, Flora Burgess, I could go down on my knees in thanksgiving. I want you to run right out as fast as you can and get on the next Interurban car from Endbury. Lydia's on it—" she cast caution from her desperately—"and I've just heard that there's somebody I don't want her to talk to—you know—carpenters—run—fly—never mind what they say! Make them talk to you, too!"

She turned back to her husband, transfigured with triumph. "I guess that'll put a spoke in his wheel!" she cried. "Flora Burgess's at Hardville, and that's only half an hour from here. I guess they can't get very far in half an hour."

The Judge considered the matter with pursed lips. "I wish it hadn't happened," he mused, as unresponsive to his wife's relief as he had been to her anxiety. "At first, I mean—last autumn—at all."

His wife caught him up with a good humor gay with relief. "Oh, give you time, Nat, and you come round to seeing what's under your nose. I was wishing it hadn't happened long before I knew it had. I breathed it in the air before we ever knew she'd so much as seen him."

"Melton says he thinks the fellow has a future before him—"

"Oh, Marius Melton! How many of his swans have stuffed feather pillows!"

The Judge demurred. "I often wish I could think he was—but Melton's no fool." He added, uneasily, "He's been pestering me again about taking a long rest—says I'm really out of condition."

"Perhaps a change of work would do you good—to be in active practice again. You could be your own master more—take more vacations, maybe."