"I'm not going to stay here. I told you I see that won't work."

"Don't be hasty. As I said, it's hard lines if this must separate us. I can keep the church. They can't be particular about my status there, because they can't pay me."

"It's mad to think of such a thing; it would be worse for the college than for you."

"If I knew it would be the worse for the college it might not be right to do it" (he spoke as if this had cost him thought), "but there are plenty who can manage a concern like this, now it is fairly established, even if they could not have worked it up as I have."

"I'd like to see them get another man like you!"—loudly—"H'n, if they accepted your resignation they'd find themselves on the wrong side of the hedge! They wouldn't do it, either; it isn't as if you were not known now for what you are. They can't be such fools as to think that where I am, or what I do, can alter you."

"It is not with the more sensible men who are responsible for the college that the choice would ultimately lie, but with the boys' parents. If the numbers drop off—"

"Then the parents are the greatest idiots—"

There was a world of wrath in the words, but the principal of the New College, who felt his position so insecure, laughed.

"Yes, you may fairly count on that. A clever woman, who kept a girls' school, told me once that if she had to draw up rules for efficient school-keeping they would begin:—'1st. Drown all the parents!'—My own experience has led me to think she was not far wrong."

Alec stood looking out of the open window with a thunderous face. For several reasons, some of which he hardly understood, he did not want to leave Chellaston; but he had no intention of ruining his brother. It annoyed him that Robert should seriously propose to retire, and more, that he should let jokes and laughter fall on the heels of such a proposal. He did not know that there are hours to some men, coming not in the heat of party conflict, but in the quiet of daily life, when martyrdom would be easy, and any sacrifice short of martyrdom is mere play. And because he did not know this, he did not believe in it, just as the average man does not. His cogitation, however, was not on such abstruse matters, nor was it long, but its result was not insignificant.

"Put your money into it," he said, "and fight it out! Put part of my money into it, if you like, and let us fight it out together."

Perhaps the sentiment that actuated the suggestion, even as concerned part of his own inheritance, was nothing more than pugilistic; the idea, however, came to Robert Trenholme as entirely a new one. The proceeds of his father's successful trade lay temporarily invested, awaiting Alec's decision, and his own share would probably be ample to tide the college over any such shock to its income as might be feared from the circumstances they had been contemplating, and until public confidence might be laboriously regained. The plan was not one that would have occurred to his own mind—first, because the suggestions of his mind were always prudent; secondly, because such a fight was shocking to that part of his nature which was usually uppermost. It would be far more agreeable to him to turn away from the averted eyes of correct taste than to stand brazenly till he was again tolerated. Still, this very thing he disliked most might be the thing that he was meant to do, and also there is nothing more contagious than the passion for war. Alec's bellicose attitude aroused party spirit in him. He knew the power of money; he knew the power of the prestige he had; he began to realise that he could do this thing if he chose.

"You are a piece of consummate conceit," he mocked. "Do you imagine that with a little money, and a very few personal graces, we two can brow-beat the good judgment of the public?"

"The fun of the fight would be worth the money almost," observed Alec parenthetically. Then he jeered: "Brace up, and put on more style; put your groom in livery; get a page to open your front door; agitate till you get some honorary degrees from American colleges! And as for me, I'll send out my bills on parchment paper, with a monogram and a crest."

"Do you so despise your fellow men?" asked Robert sadly.



CHAPTER VII.

For a day or two previous to the conversation of the brothers about Alec's decision, Alec had been debating in his own mind what, after all, that decision had better be. Never had he come so near doubting the principle to which he adhered as at this time. A few days went a long way in Chellaston towards making a stranger, especially if he was a young man with good introduction, feel at home there, and the open friendliness of Chellaston society, acting like the sun in AEsop's fable, had almost made this traveller take off his coat. Had Robert been a person who had formerly agreed with him, it is probable that when the subject was opened, he would have confessed the dubious condition of his heart, and they would together have very carefully considered the advisability of change of plan. Whether the upshot in that case would have been different or not, it is impossible to say, for Robert had not formerly agreed with him, and could not now be assumed to do so, and therefore for Alec, as a part of militant humanity, there was no resource but to stand to his guns, forgetting for the time the weakness in his own camp, because he had no thought of betraying it to the enemy. He who considers such incidents (they are the common sands of life), and yet looks upon the natural heart of man as a very noble thing, would appear to be an optimist.

However that may be, the conversation ended, Alec's heart stood no longer in the doubtful attitude. There are those who look upon confessions and vows as of little importance; but even in the lower affairs of life, when a healthy man has said out what he means, he commonly means it more intensely. When Alec Trenholme had told his brother that he still intended to be a butcher, the thing for him was practically done, and that, not because he would have been ashamed to retract, but because he had no further wish to retract.

"And the mair fules ye are baith," said Bates, having recourse to broad Scotch to express his indignation when told what had passed.

It was out of good nature that Alec had told the one invalid what had been going on in the other's room, but Bates was only very much annoyed.

"I thought," said he, "that ye'd got that bee out of yer ain bonnet, but ye're baith of ye daft now."

"Come now, Bates; you wouldn't dare to say that to my 'brother, the clergyman.'"

"I know more what's due than to call a minister a fule to his face, but whiles it's necessary to say it behind his back."

"Now I call him a hero, after what he's said to-day."

Alec was enjoying the humour of poking up the giant of conventionality.

"Hoots, man; it's yourself ye regard as a hero! Set yerself up as a Juggernaut on a car and crush him under the wheels!"

"Oh, I'm going to British Columbia. I won't take him at his word; but I'm pleased he had pluck enough to think of taking the bull by the horns."

"But I'm thinking ye just will take him at his word, for it's the easiest—standing there, patting him on the back, because he's given up to you!"

It was as odd a household this as well might be. Alec spent some of his time offering rough ministrations to his lame brother and asthmatic visitor, but more often left them to the sad but conscientious care of Mrs. Martha, preferring to exercise his brother's horses; and he scoured the country, escaping from social overtures he did not feel prepared to meet. To all three men Mrs. Martha was at this time an object of silent wonder. Before the Adventist disturbance she had appeared a very commonplace person; now, as they saw her going about her daily work, grim in her complete reserve, questions which could hardly be put into words arose in their minds concerning her. She suggested to them such pictorial ideas as one gleans in childhood about the end of the world, and this quite without any effort on their part, but just because she had clothed herself to their eyes in such ideas. Bates, who had exact opinions on all points of theology, tackled her upon what he termed "her errors"; but, perhaps because he had little breath to give to the cause, the other two inmates of the house could not learn that he had gained any influence over her or any additional information as to her state of mind.

Bates himself was so incongruous an element in Principal Trenholme's house that it became evident he could not be induced to remain there long. Sufficiently intelligent to appreciate thoroughly any tokens of ease or education, he was too proud not to resent them involuntarily as implying inferiority on his own part. He had, to a certain degree, fine perception of what good manners involved, but he was not sufficiently simple to act without self-conscious awkwardness when he supposed any deviation from his ordinary habits to be called for. Had he not been miserable in mind and body he might have taken more kindly to carpets and china; but as it was, he longed, as a homesick man for home, for bare floors and the unceremoniousness that comes with tin mugs and a scarcity of plates.

For home as it existed for him—the desolate lake and hills, the childish crone and rude hearth—for these he did not long. It was his home, that place; for into it—into the splashing lake and lonely woods, into the contour of the hills, and into the very logs of which the house was built—he had put as much of himself as can be absorbed by outside things; but just because to return there would be to return to his mind's external habitat, he could not now take comfort in returning. All the multiform solace it might have yielded him had been blasted by the girl from the hotel, who had visited him in secret. Before he had seen Sissy again his one constant longing had been to get done with necessary business, financial and medical, and go back to his place, where sorrow and he could dwell at peace together. He would still go, for he cherished one of those nervous ideas common with sick men, that he could breathe there and nowhere else; but he hated the place that was now rife with memories far more unrestful and galling than memories of the dead can ever be.

He hugged to himself no flattering delusion; in his judgment Sissy had shown herself heartless and cruel; but he did not therefore argue, as a man of politer mind might have done, that the girl he had loved had never existed, that he had loved an idea and, finding it had no resemblance to the reality, he was justified in casting away both, and turning to luxurious disappointment or to a search for some more worthy recipient of the riches of his heart. No such train of reasoning occurred to him. He had thought Sissy was good and unfortunate; he had found her fortunate and guilty of an almost greater degree of callousness than he could forgive; but, nevertheless, Sissy was the person he loved—his little girl, whom he had brought up, his big girl, in whom he centred all his hopes of happy home and of years of mature affection. Sissy was still alive, and he could not endure to think of her living on wholly separated from him. For this reason his mind had no rest in the thought of remaining where he was, or of returning whence he had come, or in the dream of seeking new places. He could think of no satisfaction except that of being near to her and making her a better girl; yet he had promised to have no dealings with her; and not only that, but he now at length perceived the futility of all such care as he might exercise over her. He had thought to shield her by his knowledge of the world, and he had found that she, by natural common sense, had a better knowledge of the world than he by experience; he had thought to protect her by his strong arm, and he had found himself flung off, as she might have flung a feeble thing that clung to her for protection. She was better able to take care of herself in the world than he had been to take care of her, and she did not want his tenderness. Yet he loved her just as he had ever done, and perceived, in the deep well of his heart's love and pity, that she did, in sooth, need something—a tenderer heart it might be—need it more terribly than he had ever fancied need till now. He longed unspeakably to give her this—this crown of womanhood, which she lacked, and in the helplessness of this longing his heart was pining.

"A man isn't going to die because he has asthma," had been the doctor's fiat concerning Bates. He had come to Chellaston apparently so ill that neither he nor his friends would have been much surprised had death been the order of the day, but as the programme was life, not death, he was forced to plan accordingly. His plans were not elaborate; he would go back to the clearing; he would take his aunt back from Turrifs to be with him; he would live as he had lived before.

Would he not sell the land? they asked; for the price offered for it was good, and the lonely life seemed undesirable.

No, he would not sell. It would, he said, be selling a bit of himself; and if there was value in it, it would increase, not diminish, by holding till the country was opened up. When he was dead, his heirs, be they who they might (this he said mysteriously), could do as they would. As for him, he would take a man back from this part of the country to work in Alec's place. His cough, he said, had been worse since he had been beguiled into leaving his wilderness to travel with Alec; the pure air of the solitude would be better than doctors for him.

The journey into which Alec had beguiled him had already had three results: he had sold his lumber at a good price; had found out, by talking with business men at Quebec, what the real value of his land probably was, and would be; and had been put by Dr. Nash into a right way of thinking concerning his disease and its treatment, that would stand him in good stead for years to come; but none of these goodly results did he mention when he summed up the evils and discomforts of the trip in Alec's hearing. If his irascible talk was the index to his mind, certainly any virtue Alec had exercised toward him would need to be its own reward.

He offered to pay Alec his wages up to the time of their arrival in Chellaston, because he had looked after him in his feebleness, and he talked of paying "The Principal" for his board during his sojourn there. When they treated these offers lightly, he sulked, mightily offended. He would have given his life, had it been necessary, for either of the brothers, because of the succour they had lent him; nay more, had they come to him in need a lifetime afterwards, when most men would have had time to forget their benefaction many times over, John Bates would have laid himself, and all that he had, at their disposal; but he was too proud to say "thank you" for what they had done for him, or to confess that he had never been so well treated in his life before.

During his first days in Chellaston he was hardly able to leave his own room; but all the time he talked constantly of leaving the place as soon as he was well enough to do so; and the only reason that he did not bring his will to bear upon his lagging health, and fix the day of departure, was that he could not compel himself to leave the place where Sissy was. He knew he must go, yet he could not. One more interview with her he must have, one more at least before he left Chellaston. He could not devise any way to bring this about without breaking his promise to her, but his intention never faltered—see her he must, if only once, and so the days passed, his mental agitation acting as a drag on the wheels of his recovery.



CHAPTER VIII.

When Alec Trenholme had had the key of the Harmon house in his possession some days, he went one evening, beguiled by the charm of the weather and by curiosity, for the first time into the Harmon garden. He wished to look over the rooms that were of some interest to him because of one of their late inmates, and having procrastinated, he thought to carry out his intention now, in the last hour before darkness came on, in order to return the key that night.

The path up to the house was lightly barred by the wild vine, that, climbing on overgrown shrubs on either side, had more than once cast its tendrils across. A trodden path there was in and out the bushes, although not the straight original one, and by following it Alec gained the open space before the house. Here self-sown magenta petunias made banks of colour against the old brick walls, and the evening light, just turning rosy, fell thereon. He could not see the river, although he heard it flowing behind a further mass of bushes. He stood alone with the old house in the opening that was enclosed by shrubs and trees so full of leaf that they looked like giant heaps of leaves, and it seemed to him that, if earth might have an enchanted place, he had surely entered it. Then, remembering that the light would not last long, he fitted the key to the door and went in.

Outside, nature had done her work, but inside the ugly wall-paper and turned bannisters of a modern villa had not been much beautified by dust and neglect. Still, there is something in the atmosphere of a long neglect that to the mind, if not to the eye, has softening effect. Alec listened a moment, as it were, to the silence and loneliness of the house, and went into the first dark room.

It was a large room, probably a parlour of some pretension, but the only light came through the door and lit it very faintly. All the windows of the house were shut with wooden shutters, and Alec, not being aware that, except in the rooms Harkness had occupied, the shutters were nailed, went to a window to open it. He fumbled with the hasp, and, concluding that he did not understand its working, went on into the next room to see if the window there was to be more easily managed. In this next room he was in almost total darkness. He had not reached the window before he heard some one moving in an adjoining room. Turning, he saw a door outlined by cracks of lamplight, and as it was apparent that some one else was in the house, he made at once for this door. Before he had reached it the cracks of light which guided him were gone; and when he had opened it, the room on whose threshold he stood was dark and silent; yet, whether by some slight sounds, or by some subtler sense for which we have no name, he was convinced that there was some one in it. Indignant at the extinction of the light and at the silence, he turned energetically again in the direction of the window in order to wrench it open, when, hearing a slight scratching sound, he looked back into the inner room. There was light there again, but only a small vaporous curl of light. Connecting this with the sound, he supposed that a poor sulphur match had been struck; but this supposition perhaps came to him later, for at the moment he was dazed by seeing in this small light the same face he had seen over old Cameron's coffin. The sight he had had of it then had almost faded from his memory; he had put it from him as a thing improbable, and therefore imaginary; now it came before his eyes distinctly. A man's face it certainly was not, and, in the fleet moment in which he saw it now, he felt certain that it was a woman's. The match, if it was a match, went out before its wood was well kindled, and all he could see vanished from sight with its light. His only thought was that whoever had escaped him before should not escape him again, and he broke open the window shutters by main strength.

The light poured in upon a set of empty rooms, faded and dusty. A glance showed him an open door at the back of the farthest room, and rushing through this, he opened the windows in that part of the house which had evidently been lately inhabited. He next came into the hall by which he had entered, and out again at the front door, with no doubt that he was chasing some one, but he did not gain in the pursuit. He went down the path to the road, looking up and down it; he came back, in and out among the bushes, searching the cemetery and river bank, vexed beyond measure all the time to perceive how easy it would be for any one to go one way while he was searching in another, for the garden was large.

He had good reason to feel that he was the victim of most annoying circumstances, and he naturally could not at once perceive how it behoved him to act in relation to this new scene in the almost forgotten drama. Cameron was dead; the old preacher was dead; whether they were one and the same or not, who was this person who now for the second time suddenly started up in mysterious fashion after the death? Alec assumed that it could be no one but Cameron's daughter, but when he tried to think how it might be possible that she should be in the deserted house, upon the track of the old preacher, as it were, his mind failed even to conjecture.

The explanation was comparatively simple, if he had known it, but he did not know it. Someone has said that the man most assured of his own truthfulness is not usually truthful; and in the same sense it is true that the man most positive in trusting his own senses is not usually reliable. Alec Trenholme flagged in his search; a most unpleasing doubt came to him as to whether he had seen what he thought he saw and was not now playing hide-and-seek with the rosy evening sunbeams among these bushes, driven by a freak of diseased fancy. He was indeed provoked to a degree almost beyond control, when, in a last effort of search through the dense shrubbery, he skirted the fence of Captain Rexford's nearest field, and there espied Sophia Rexford.

Those people are happy who have found some person or thing on earth that embodies their ideal of earthly solace. To some it is the strains of music; to some it is the interior of church edifices; to the child it is his mother; to the friend it is his friend. As soon as Alec Trenholme saw this fair woman, whom he yet scarcely knew, all the fret of his spirit found vent in the sudden desire to tell her what was vexing him, very much as a child desires to tell its troubles and be comforted.



CHAPTER IX.

That evening Mrs. Rexford and Sophia had been sitting sewing, as they often did, under a tree near the house. Sophia had mused and stitched. Then there came a time when her hands fell idle, and she looked off at the scene before her. It was the hour when the sun has set, and the light is not less than daylight but mellower. She observed with pleasure how high the hops had grown that she had planted against the gables of the house and dairies. On this side the house there was no yard, only the big hay-fields from which the hay had been taken a month before; in them were trees here and there, and beyond she saw the running river. She had seen it all every day that summer, yet—

"I think I never saw the place look so nice," she said to her step-mother.

Dottie came walking unsteadily over the thick grass. She had found an ox-daisy and a four-o'clock.

"Here! take my pretties," she said imperiously.

Sophia took them.

"They's to be blowed," said Dottie, not yet distinguishing duly the different uses of flowers or of words.

Sophia obediently blew, and the down of the four-o'clock was scattered into space; but the daisy, impervious to the blast, remained in the slender hand that held it. Dottie looked at it with indignation.

"Blow again!" was her mandate, and Sophia, to please her, plucked the white petals one by one, so that they might be scattered. It was not wonderful that, as she did so, the foolish old charm of her school-days should say itself over in her mind, and the lot fell upon "He loves me." "Who, I wonder?" thought Sophia, lightly fanciful; and she did not care to think of the wealthy suitor she had cast aside. Her mind glanced to Robert Trenholme. "No," she thought, "he loves me not." She meditated on him a little. Such thoughts, however transient, in a woman of twenty-eight, are different from the same thoughts when they come to her at eighteen. If she be good, they are deeper, as the river is deeper than the rivulet; better, as the poem of the poet is better than the songs of his youth. Then for some reason—the mischief of idleness, perhaps—Sophia thought of Trenholme's young brother—how he had looked when he spoke to her over the fence. She rose to move away from such silly thoughts.

Dottie possessed herself of two fingers and pulled hard toward the river. Dearly did she love the river-side, and mamma, who was very cruel, would not allow her to go there without a grown-up companion.

When she and her big sister reached the river they differed as to the next step, Dottie desiring to go on into the water, and Sophia deeming it expedient to go back over the field. As each was in an indolent mood, they both gave way a little and split the difference by wandering along the waterside, conversing softly about many things—as to how long it would take the seed of the four-o'clock to "sail away, away, over the river," and why a nice brown frog that they came across was not getting ready for bed like the birdies. There is no such sweet distraction as an excursion into Children's Land, and Sophia wandered quite away with this talkative baby, until she found herself suddenly cast out of Dottie's magic province as she stood beyond the trees that edged the first field not far from the fence of the Harmon garden. And that which had broken the spell was the appearance of Alec Trenholme. He came right up to her, as if he had something of importance to say, but either shyness or a difficulty in introducing his subject made him hesitate. Something in his look caused her to ask lightly:

"Have you seen a ghost?"

"Yes."

"Are you in earnest?"

"I am in earnest, and," added he, somewhat dubiously, "I think I am in my right mind."

He did not say more just then, but looked up and down the road in his search for someone. In a moment he turned to her, and a current of amusement seemed to cross his mind and gleamed out of his blue eyes as he lifted them to hers. "I believe when I saw you I came to you for protection."

The light from pink tracts of sunset fell brightly upon field and river, but this couple did not notice it at all.

"There is no bogie so fearful as the unknown," she cried. "You frightened me, Mr. Trenholme."

"There is no bogie in the case," he said, "nor ghost I suppose; but I saw someone. I don't know how to tell you; it begins so far back, and I may alarm you when I tell you that there must be someone in this neighbourhood of yours who has no right to be here." Then to her eager listening he told the story that he had once written to his brother, and added to it the unlooked for experience of the last half-hour. His relation lacked clearness of construction. Sophia had to make it lucid by short quick questions here and there.

"I'm no good," he concluded, deprecating his own recital. "Robert has all the language that's in our family; but do you know, miss, what it is to see a face, and know that you know it again, though you can't say what it was like? Have you the least notion how you would feel on being fooled a second time like that?"

The word of address that he had let fall struck her ear as something inexplicable which she had not then time to investigate; she was aware, too, that, as he spoke fast and warmly, his voice dropped into some vulgarity of accent that she had not noticed in it before. These thoughts glanced through her mind, but found no room to stay, for there are few things that can so absorb for the time a mind alive to its surroundings as a bit of genuine romance, a fragment of a life, or lives, that does not seem to bear explanation by the ordinary rules of our experience.

That mind is dulled, not ripened, by time that does not enter with zest into a strange story, and the more if it is true. If we could only learn it, the most trivial action of personality is more worthy of our attention than the most magnificent of impersonal phenomena, and, in healthy people, this truth, all unknown, probably underlies that excitement of interest which the affairs of neighbours create the moment they become in any way surprising.

Sophia certainly did not stop to seek an excuse for her interest. She plied Alec with questions; she moved with him nearer the Harmon fence to get a better look at the house; she assured him that Chellaston was the last place in the world to harbour an adventurer.

He was a little loth, for the sake of all the pathos of Bates's story, to suggest the suspicion that had recurred.

"I saw the face twice. It was first at Turrifs Station, far enough away from here; and I saw it again in this house. As sure as I'm alive, I believe it was a woman."

They stood on the verge of the field where the grass sloped back from the river. Sophia held the little child's hand in hers. The dusk was gathering, and still they talked on, she questioning and exclaiming with animation, he eager to enter the house again, a mutual interest holding their minds as one.

He began to move again impatiently. He wanted a candle with which to search the rooms more carefully, and if nothing was found, he said, he would go to the village and make what inquiries he could; he would leave no stone unturned.

Sophia would not let him go alone. She was already on perfectly familiar terms with him. He seemed to her a delightful mixture of the ardent boy and the man who, as she understood it, was roughened by lumberman's life. She lifted Dottie on her shoulder and turned homeward. "I will only be a few minutes getting Harold and some candles; don't go without us, I beg of you," she pleaded.

He never thought of offering to carry the child, or call her brother for her; his ideas of gallantry were submerged in the confusion of his thoughts. He watched her tripping lightly with the child on her shoulder. He saw her choose a path by the back of the white dairy buildings, and then he heard her clear voice calling, "Harold! Harold!" All up the yard's length to windows of house and stable he heard her calling, till at length came the answering shout. In the silence that followed he remembered, with a feeling of wonder, the shudder of distaste that had come over him when he found that the other creature with whom he had been dealing bore a woman's form. He could not endure to think of her in the same moment in which he longed to hear Miss Rexford's voice again and to see her come back. In the one case he could not believe that evil was not the foundation of such eccentricity of mystery; in the other he thought nothing, realised nothing, he only longed for Sophia's return, as at times one longs for cool air upon the temples, for balm of nature's distilling. He never thought that because Sophia was a woman she would be sure to keep him waiting and forget the candle. He felt satisfied she would do just what she said, and even to his impatience the minutes did not seem long before he saw her return round the same corner of the outbuildings, her brother beside her, lantern in hand.

So in the waning daylight the three went together to the Harmon house, and found torn bits of letters scattered on floor and window-sill near the spot where Alec had last seen the unlooked-for apparition. The letters, to all appearance, had belonged to the dentist, but they were torn very small. The three searched the house all through by the light of more than one candle, and came out again into the darkness of the summer night, for the time nothing wiser concerning the mystery, but feeling entirely at home with one another.



CHAPTER X.

Although Mrs. Rexford had been without an indoor servant for several months of the winter, she had been fortunate enough to secure one for the summer. Her dairy had not yet reached the point of producing marketable wares, but it supplied the family and farm hands with milk and butter, and, since the cows had been bought in spring, the one serving girl had accomplished this amount of dairy work satisfactorily. The day after Sophia and Harold had made their evening excursion through the Harmon house, this maid by reason of some ailment was laid up, and the cows became for the first time a difficulty to the household, for the art of milking was not to be learnt in an hour, and it had not yet been acquired by any member of the Rexford family.

Harold was of course in the fields. Sophia went to the village to see if she could induce anyone to come to their aid; but, hard as it was to obtain service at any time, in the weeks of harvest it was an impossibility. When she returned, she went in by the lane, the yard, and the kitchen door. All the family had fallen into the habit of using this door more than any other. Such habits speak for themselves.

"Mamma!"—she took off her gloves energetically as she spoke—"there is nothing for it but to ask Louise to get up and do the milking—the mere milking—and I will carry the pails."

Louise was the pale-faced Canadian servant. She often told them she preferred to be called "Loulou," but in this she was not indulged.

Mrs. Rexford stirred Dottie's porridge in a small saucepan. Said she, "When Gertrude Bennett is forced to milk her cows, she waits till after dark; her mother told me so in confidence. Yes, child, yes"—this was to Dottie who, beginning to whimper, put an end to the conversation.

Sophia did not wait till after dark: it might be an excellent way for Miss Bennett, but it was not her way. Neither did she ask her younger sisters to help her, for she knew that if caught in the act by any acquaintance the girls were at an age to feel an acute distress. She succeeded, by the administration of tea and tonic, in coaxing the servant to perform her part. Having slightly caught up her skirts and taken the empty pails on her arms, Sophia started ahead down the lane.

Just then some one turned in from the road. It was Eliza, and she was in too much haste to take heed of the milking gear.

"Oh, Miss Sophia. I'm so glad I've met you, and alone. We've been so busy at the hotel with a cheap excursion, I've been trying all day to get a word to you. Look here!" (she thrust some crumpled letters into Sophia's hand) "I thought you'd better see those, and say something to the girls. They'll get themselves into trouble if they go on as silly as this. It seems it's some silly 'post office' they've had in a tree between them and that Harkness. I've had that letter from him, and certainly, Miss Sophia, if he's as much to blame as them, he's acted civil enough now. He had a better heart than most men, I believe, for all he bragged about it. He forgot where he had thrown their letters as waste paper, and you'll see by that letter of his he took some trouble to write to me to go and get them, for fear they should be found and the girls talked about."

Sophia stood still in dismay.

"There!" said Eliza, "I knew you'd feel hurt, but I thought you'd better know for all that. There's no harm done, only they'd better have a good setting down about it." She began to turn back again. "I must go," she said, "the dining-room girls are rushed off their feet; but if I were you, Miss Sophia, I wouldn't say a word to anyone else about it. Some one came in while I was getting these letters, but it was dark and I dodged round and made off without being seen, so that I needn't explain. It wouldn't do for the girls, you know—"

Sophia turned the letters about in her hand. One was from Cyril Harkness to Eliza; the others were poor, foolish little notes, written by Blue and Red. Louise came out of the yard and passed them into the field, and Sophia thrust the letters into her dress.

That Eliza should naively give her advice concerning the training of her sisters was a circumstance so in keeping with the girl's force of character that her late mistress hardly gave it a thought, nor had she time at that moment to wonder where the letters had been left and found. It was the thought that the family reputation for sense and sobriety had apparently been in the hands of an unprincipled stranger, and had been preserved only by his easy good-nature and by Eliza's energy, that struck her with depressing and irritating force. Had the girls come in her way just then, the words she would have addressed to them would have been more trenchant than wise, but as Eliza was by her side, retreating towards the road, she felt no desire to discuss the matter with her.

She observed now that Eliza looked worn and miserable as she had never seen her look before, unless, indeed, it had been in the first few days she ever saw her. The crowded state of the hotel could hardly account for this. "I hope, Eliza, that having despised that suitor of yours when he was here, you are not repenting now he is gone."

The girl looked at her dully, not understanding at first.

"Speaking of Cyril Harkness?" she cried; "good gracious, no, Miss Sophia." But the response was not given in a sprightly manner, and did not convey any conviction of its truth.

"You must be working too hard."

"Well, I needn't. I'll tell you a bit of good fortune that's come to me. Mrs. Glass—one of our boarders—you know her?"

"The stout person that comes to church in red satin?"

"Yes; and she's rich too. Well, she's asked me to go and visit her in Montreal in the slack time this next winter; and she's such a good boarder every summer, you know, Mr. Hutchins is quite set on me going. She's promised to take me to parties and concerts, and the big rink, and what not. Ah, Miss Sophia, you never thought I could come that sort of thing so soon, did you?"

"And are you not going?"

Sophia's question arose from a certain ring of mockery in Eliza's relation of her triumph.

"No, I'm not going a step. D'you think I'm going to be beholden to her, vulgar old thing! And besides, she talks about getting me married. I think there's nothing so miserable in the world as to be married."

"Most women are much happier married." Sophia said this with orthodox propriety, although she did not altogether believe it.

"Yes, when they can't fend for themselves, poor things. But to be for ever tied to a house and a man, never to do just what one liked! I'm going to take pattern by you, Miss Sophia, and not get married."

Eliza went back to the village, and Sophia turned toward the pasture and the college. The first breath of autumn wind was sweeping down the road to meet her. All about the first sparks of the great autumnal fire of colour were kindling. In the nearer wood she noticed stray boughs of yellow or pink foliage displayed hanging over the dark tops of young spruce trees, or waving against the blue of the unclouded sky. It was an air to make the heavy heart jocund in spite of itself, and the sweet influences of this blithe evening in the pasture field were not lost upon Sophia, although she had not the spirit now to wish mischievously, as before, that Mrs. and Miss Bennett, or some of their friends, would pass to see her carry the milk in daylight. It was a happy pride that had been at the root of her defiance of public opinion, and her pride was depressed now, smarting under the sharp renewal of the conviction that her sisters were naughty and silly, and that their present training was largely to blame.

The Bennetts did not come by, neither did Mrs. Brown's carriage pass, nor a brake from the hotel. Sophia had carried home the milk of two cows and returned before anyone of the slightest consequence passed by. She was just starting with two more pails when Alec Trenholme came along at a fast trot on his brother's handsome cob. He was close by her before she had time to see who it was, and when he drew up his horse she felt strangely annoyed. Instinct told her that, while others might have criticised, this simple-hearted fellow would only compassionate her toil. Their mutual adventure of the previous evening had so far established a sense of comradeship with him that she did not take refuge in indifference, but felt her vanity hurt at his pity.

At that moment the simple iron semi-circle which the milk maid used to hold her pails off her skirts, became, with Sophia's handling, the most complex thing, and would in no wise adjust itself. Alec jumped from his horse, hung his bridle-rein over the gate-post as he entered the pasture, and made as if to take the pails as a matter of course.

Pride, vanity, conceit, whatever it may be that makes people dislike kindness when their need is obvious, produced in her an awkward gaiety. "Nay," said she, refusing; "why should you carry my milk for me?"

"Well, for one thing, we live too near not to know you don't do it usually."

"Still, it may be my special pleasure to carry it to-night; and if not, why should you help me with this any more than, for instance, in cooking the dinner to-morrow? I assure you my present pastoral occupation is much more romantic and picturesque than that."

But he took the half-filled pails (she had not attempted to carry full ones), and, pouring the contents of one into the other, proceeded to carry it.

"Since it is you who command," she cried, "shall I hold your horse in the meantime?"

With provoking literalism he gave a critical glance at the bridle. "He's all right," he said, not caring much, in truth, whether the cob broke loose or not.

So she followed him across the road into the lane, because it hardly seemed civil to let him go alone, and because he would not know what to do with the milk when he got to the yard. She did not, however, like this position.

"Do you know," she began again, "that I am very angry with you, Mr. Trenholme?"

He wished for several reasons that she would cease her banter, and he had another subject to advance, which he now brought forward abruptly. "I don't know, Miss Rexford, what right I have to think you will take any interest in what interests me, but, after what happened last night, I can't help telling you that I've got to the bottom of that puzzle, and I'm afraid it will prove a very serious matter for my poor friend Bates."

"What is it?" she cried, his latest audacity forgotten.

"Just now, as I came out of the village, I met the person I saw in the Harmon house, and the same I saw before, the time I told you of. It was a woman—a young woman dressed in silk. I don't know what she may be doing here, but I know now who she must be. She must be Sissy Cameron. No other girl could have been at Turrifs Station the night I saw her there. She is Sissy Cameron." (His voice grew fiercer.) "She must have turned her father's hearse into a vehicle for her own tricks; and what's more, she must, with the most deliberate cruelty, have kept the knowledge of her safety from poor Bates all these months."

"Stay, stay!" cried Sophia, for his voice had grown so full of anger against the girl that he could hardly pour out the tale of her guilt fast enough. "Where did you meet her? What was she like?"

"I met her ten minutes ago, walking on this road. She was a great big buxom girl, with a white face and red hair; perhaps people might call her handsome. I pulled up and stared at her, but she went on as if she didn't see me. Now I'm going in to tell Bates, and then I shall go back and bring her to book. I don't know what she may be up to in Chellaston, but she must be found."

"Many people do think her handsome, Mr. Trenholme," said Sophia, for she knew now who it was; "and she is certainly not—the sort of—"

"Do you mean to say you know her?"

"Yes, I know her quite well. I had something to do with bringing her to Chellaston. I never knew till this moment that she was the girl you and Mr. Bates have been seeking, and indeed—" She stopped, confused, for, although it had flashed on her for the first time that what she knew of Eliza's history tallied with his story, she could not make it all match, and then she perceived that no doubt it was in the Harmon house that Eliza had so faithfully sought the letters now held in her own hand. "Really," she continued, "you mustn't go to work with this girl in the summary manner you suggest. I know her too well to think anything could be gained by that. She is, in a sense, a friend of mine."

"Don't say she is a friend of yours—don't!" he said, with almost disgust in his tone.

They had halted in the lane just outside the yard gate, and now he put down the pail and turned his back on the still shut gate to speak with more freedom. As he talked, the brisk air dashed about the boughs of the spindling lilac hedge, shaking slant sunbeams upon the unpainted gate and upon the young man and woman in front of it.

Then, but in a way that was graphic because of strong feeling, Alec Trenholme told the more real part of the story which he had outlined the night before; told of the melancholy solitude in which Bates had been left with the helpless old woman in a house that was bewitched in the eyes of all, so that no servant or labourer would come near it. In talk that was a loose mosaic of detail and generalisation, he told of the woman's work to which the proud Scotchman had been reduced in care of the aunt who in his infancy had cared for him, and how he strove to keep the house tidy for her because she fretted when she saw housework ill-done. He explained that Bates would have been reduced to hard straits for want of the yearly income from his lumber had not he himself "chanced" to go and help him. He said that Bates had gone through all this without complaint, without even counting it hard, because of the grief he counted so much worse—the loss of the girl, and the belief that she had perished because of his unkindness.

"For he loved her, Miss Rexford. He had never had anyone else to care for, and he had just centred his whole heart on her. He cared for her as if she had been his daughter and sister, and—and he cared for her in another way that was more than all. It was a lonely enough place; no one could blame a woman for wanting to leave it; but to leave a man to think her dead when he loved her!"

Sophia was touched by the story and touched nearly also by the heart of the man who told it, for in such telling the hearts of speaker and listener beat against one another through finer medium than that which we call space. But just because she was touched it was characteristic in her to find a point that she could assail.

"I don't see that a woman is specially beholden to a man because he loves her against her will."

"Do you mean to say"—fiercely—"that she was not beholden to him because he taught her everything she knew, and was willing to work to support her?"

"Yes, certainly, she was under obligation for all his kindness, but his being in love with her—that is different."

But Alec Trenholme, like many people, could not see a fine point in the heat of discussion. Afterwards, on reflection he saw what she had meant, but now he only acted in the most unreasonable of ways.

"Well, I don't see it as you do," he said; and then, the picture of suppressed indignation, he took up the pail to go inside and dispose of it.

"I don't know how it can all be," said Sophia considering, "but I'm sure there's a great deal of good in her."

At this, further silence, even out of deference to her, seemed to him inadequate. "I don't pretend to know how it can be; how she got here, or what she has been doing here, dressed in silk finery, or what she may have been masquerading with matches in the old house over there for. All I know is, a girl who treated Bates as she did—"

"No, you don't know any of these things. You have only heard one side of the story. It is not fair to judge."

"She has ruined his life, done as good as killed him. Why should you take her part?"

"Because there are always two sides to everything. I don't know much of her story, but I have heard some of it, and it didn't sound like what you have said. As to her being in the Harmon house—" Sophia stopped.

"Do you mean to say," asked Alec, "that she has been living here all the time quite openly?"

"Yes—that is, she has given a false name, it seems, but, Mr. Trenholme—"

"If she has lied about her name, depend upon it she has lied about everything else. I wouldn't want you to go within ten feet of her."

Although the fallacy of such argument as Alec's too often remains undetected when no stubborn fact arises to support justice, Sophia, with her knowledge of Eliza, could not fail to see the absurdity of it. Her mind was dismayed at the thought of what the girl had apparently done and concealed, but nothing could make her doubt that the Eliza she knew was different from the Sissy Cameron he was depicting. She did not doubt, either, that if anything would bring out all the worst in her and make her a thousand times more unkind to Bates, it would be the attack Alec Trenholme meditated. She decided that she ought herself to act as go-between. She remembered the scorn with which the patronage of a vulgar woman had that evening been discarded, and whether Eliza herself knew it or not, Sophia knew that this nicety of taste was due chiefly to her own influence. The subtle flattery of this pleaded with her now on the girl's behalf: and perceiving that Alec Trenholme was not amenable to reason, she, like a good woman, condescended to coax him for reason's sake. To a woman the art of managing men is much like the art of skating or swimming, however long it may lie in disuse, the trick, once learnt, is there to command. The milk, it seemed, must be taken down the cellar steps and poured into pans. Then a draught of milk off the ice was given to him. Then, it appeared, she must return to the pasture, and on their way she pointed out the flowers that she had planted, and let him break one that he admired.

When they reached the field Sophia proffered her request, which was, that he would leave his discovery in her hands for one day, for one day only, she pleaded. She added that he might come to see her the next afternoon, and she would tell him what explanation Eliza had to give, and in what mood she would meet her unfortunate guardian.

And Sophia's request was granted, granted with that whole-hearted allegiance and entire docility, with a tenderness of eye and lightsomeness of demeanour, that made her perceive that this young man had not been so obdurate as he appeared, and that her efforts to appease him had been out of proportion to what was required.

When he mounted his horse and rode off unmindful of the last pail of milk, for indeed his head was a little turned, Sophia was left standing by the pasture gate feeling unpleasantly conscious of her own handsome face and accomplished manner. If she felt amused that he should show himself so susceptible, she also felt ashamed, she hardly knew why. She remembered that in his eyes on a previous occasion which she had taken as a signal for alarm on her part, and wondered why she had not remembered it sooner. The thing was done now: she had petted and cajoled him, and she felt no doubt that masculine conceit would render him blind to her true motive. Henceforth he would suppose that she encouraged his fancy. Sophia, who liked to have all things her own way, felt disconcerted.



CHAPTER XI.

After tea Sophia took Blue and Red apart into their little bedroom. An old cotton blind was pulled down to shield the low window from passers in the yard. The pane was open and the blind flapped. The room had little ornament and was unattractive.

"How could you write letters to that Mr. Harkness?" asked Sophia, trying to be patient.

"We didn't—exactly," said Blue, "but how did you know?"

"At least—we did," said Red, "but only notes. What have you heard, Sister Sophia? Has he"—anxiously—"written to papa?"

"Written to papa!" repeated Sophia in scorn. "What should he do that for?"

"I don't know," said Red, more dejected. "It's"—a little pause—"it's the sort of thing they do."

Sophia drew in her breath with an effort not to laugh, and managed to sigh instead. "I think you are the silliest girls of your age!"

"Well, I don't care," cried Blue, falling from bashfulness into a pout, and from a pout into tears. "I don't care, so now. I think he was much nicer—much nicer than—" She sat upon a chair and kicked her little toes upon the ground. Red's dimpled face was flushing with ominous colour about the eyes.

"Really!" cried Sophia, and then she stopped, arrested by her own word. How was it possible to present reality to eyes that looked out through such maze of ignorance and folly; it seemed easier to take up a sterner theme and comment upon the wickedness of disobedience and secrecy. Yet all the time her words missed the mark, because the true sin of these two pretty criminals was utter folly. Surely if the world, and their fragment of it, had been what they thought—the youth a hero, and their parents wrongly proud—their action had not been so wholly evil! But how could she trim all the thoughts of their silly heads into true proportion?

"I shall have to tell papa, you know; I couldn't take the responsibility of not telling him; but I won't speak till this press of work is over, because he is so tired, so you can be thinking how you will apologise to him."

Both Blue and Red were weeping now, and Sophia, feeling that she had made adequate impression, was glad to pause.

Red was the first to withdraw her handkerchief from dewy eyes. Her tone and attitude seemed penitent, and Sophia looked at her encouragingly.

"Sister Sophia"—meekly—"does he say in his letter where he is, or—or"—the voice trembled—"if he's ever coming back?"

For such disconsolate affection Sophia felt that the letter referred to was perhaps the best medicine. "I will read you all that he says." And she read it slowly and distinctly, as one reads a lesson to children.

"Dear Eliza."

"He didn't think she was 'dear'" pouted Blue. "He told us she was 'real horrid.'"

Sophia read on from the crumpled sheet with merciless distinctness.

"Come to think of it, when I was coming off I threw all my bills and letters and things down in a heap in the back kitchen at Harmon's; and there were some letters there that those 'cute little Rexford girls wrote to me. They were real spoony on me, but I wasn't spoony on them one bit, Eliza, at least, not in my heart, which having been given to you, remained yours intact; but I sort of feel a qualm to think how their respected pa would jaw them if those billets-doux were found and handed over. You can get in at the kitchen window quite easy by slipping the bolt with a knife; so as I know you have a hankering after the Rexfords, I give you this chance to crib those letters if you like. They are folded small because they had to be put in a nick in a tree, called by those amiable young ladies, a post-office."

"I'm real sorry I made you cry, Eliza. It's as well I didn't remain or I might have begun admiring of you again, which might have ended in breaking my vow to be—Only your ex-admirer, CYRIL, P. H——."

"Oh!" cried Blue, her tears dried by the fire of injury, "we never talked to him except when he talked to us—never!"

"There's a postscript," said Sophia, and then she read it.

"P.S. They used to cock their eyes at me when they saw me over the fence. You had better tell them not to do it; I could not bear to think of them doing it to anyone else."

"Oh!" cried Red, "Oh—h! he never said to us that we cocked our eyes. He said once to Blue that the way she curled her eyelashes at him was real captivating."

Sophia rose delivering her final word: "Nothing could be more utterly vulgar than to flirt with a young man who is beneath you in station just because he happens to be thrown in your way."



CHAPTER XII.

When Sophia went to the hotel next morning, Eliza was not to be found. She was not in, and no one knew where she was. Mr. Hutchins was inclined to grumble at her absence as an act of high-handed liberty, but Miss Rexford was not interested in his comments. She went back to her work at home, and felt in dread of the visit which she had arranged for Alec Trenholme to make that day. She began to be afraid that, having no information of importance with which to absorb his attention, he might to some extent make a fool of himself. Having seen incipient signs of this state of things, she took for granted it would grow.

When the expected caller did come, Sophia, because the servant could still do but little, was at work in the dairy, and she sent one of the children to ask him to come into the yard. The dairy was a pleasant place; it was a long low stone room, with two doors opening on the green yard. The roof of it was shaded by a tree planted for that purpose, and not many feet from its end wall the cool blue river ran. A queen could not have had a sweeter place for an audience chamber, albeit there was need of paint and repairs, and the wooden doorstep was almost worn away.

Sophia, churn-handle in hand, greeted her visitor without apology. She had expected that this churn-handle, the evidence of work to be done, would act as a check upon feeling, but she saw with little more than a glance that such check was superfluous; there was no sign of intoxication from the wine of graciousness which she had held to his lips when last she saw him. As he talked to her he stood on the short white clover outside the door's decaying lintel. He had a good deal to say about Bates, and more about Sissy Cameron, and Sophia found that she had a good deal to say in answer.

The churn was a hideous American patent, but light and very convenient. They talked to the monotonous splash of the milk within, and as work was not being interrupted, Alec was at length asked to sit down on the worn doorstep, and he remained there until the butter "came." He had gone up in Sophia's esteem many degrees, because she saw now that any escape of warmer sentiment had been involuntary on his part. She blessed him in her heart for being at once so susceptible and so strong. She fancied that there was a shade of sadness in his coolness which lent it attraction. With that shadow of the epicurean which is apt to be found upon all civilised hearts, she felt that it did her good to realise how nice he was, just as a fresh flower or a strong wind would have done her good. She said to him that she supposed he would not be staying much longer in Chellaston, and he replied that as soon as Bates would go and his brother was on his feet again he intended to leave for the West. Then he begged her to lose no time in seeing Eliza, for Bates had taken to hobbling about the roads, and he thought a sudden and accidental meeting with the girl might be the death of him.

Now this assertion of Alec's, that Bates had taken to walking out of doors, was based on the fact told him by Mrs. Martha and his brother, that the day before Bates had wilfully walked forth, and after some hours came back much exhausted. "Where did you go?" Alec had asked him fiercely, almost suspecting, from his abject looks, that he had seen the girl. He could, however, learn nothing but that the invalid had walked "down the road and rested a while and come back." Nothing important had happened, Alec thought; and yet this conclusion was not true.

That which had happened had been this. John Bates, after lying for a week trying to devise some cunning plan for seeing Sissy without compromising her, and having failed in this, rose up in the sudden energy of a climax of impatience, and, by dint of short stages and many rests by the roadside, found his way through the town, up the steps of the hotel, and into its bar-room. No one could hinder him from going there, thought he, and perchance he might see the lassie.

Years of solitude, his great trouble, and, lastly, the complaint which rendered him so obviously feeble, had engendered in his heart a shyness that made it terrible to him to go alone across the hotel verandah, where men and women were idling. In truth, though he was obviously ill, the people noticed him much less than he supposed, for strangers often came there; but egotism is a knife which shyness uses to wound itself with. When he got into the shaded and comparatively empty bar-room, he would have felt more at home, had it not been for the disconsolate belief that there was one at home in that house to whom his presence would be terribly unwelcome. It was with a nightmare of pain and desolation on his heart that he laid trembling arms upon the bar, and began to chat with the landlord.

"I'm on the look-out for a young man and a young woman," said he, "who'll come and work on my clearing;" and so he opened talk with the hotel-keeper. He looked often through the door into the big passage, but Sissy did not pass.

Now Mr. Hutchins did not know of anyone to suit Bates's requirements, and he did know that the neighbourhood of Chellaston was the most unlikely to produce such servants, but, having that which was disappointing to say, he said it by degrees. Bates ordered a glass of cooling summer drink, and had his pipe filled while they discussed. The one tasted to him like gall, and the fumes of the other were powerless to allay his growing trepidation, and yet, in desperate adventure, he stayed on.

Hutchins, soon perceiving that he was a man of some education, and finding out that he was the oft-talked-of guest of "The Principal," continued to entertain him cheerfully enough. "Now," said he, "talking of people to help, I've got a girl in my house now—well, I may say I fell on my feet when I got her." Then followed a history of his dealings with Eliza, including an account of his own astuteness in perceiving what she was, and his cleverness in securing her services. Bates listened hungrily, but with a pang in his heart.

"Aye," said he outwardly, "you'll be keeping a very quiet house here."

"You may almost call it a religious house," said Hutchins, taking the measure of his man. "Family prayer every Sunday in the dining-room for all who likes. Yes," he added, rubbing his hand on his lame knee, "Canadians are pious for the most part, Mr. Bates, and I have the illeet of two cities on my balconies."

Other men came in and went out of the room. Women in summer gowns passed the door. Still Bates and Hutchins talked.

At last, because Bates waited long enough, Eliza passed the door, and catching sight of him, she turned, suddenly staring as if she knew not exactly what she was doing. There were two men at the bar drinking. Hutchins, from his high swivel chair, was waiting upon them. They both looked at Eliza; and now Bates, trembling in every nerve, felt only a weak fear lest she should turn upon him in wrath for being unfaithful, and summoned all his strength to show her that by the promise with which he had bound himself he would abide. He looked at her as though in very truth he had never seen her before. And the girl took his stony look as if he had struck her, and fell away from the door, so that they saw her no longer.

"Looked as if she'd seen someone she knew in here," remarked Hutchins, complacently. He was always pleased when people noticed Eliza, for he considered her a credit to the house.

The others made no remark, and Bates felt absurdly glad that he had seen her, not that it advanced his desire, but yet he was glad; and he had shown her, too, that she need not fear him.

And Eliza—she went on past the door to the verandah, and stood in sight of the boarders, who were there, in sight of the open street; but she did not see anyone or anything. She was too common a figure at that door to be much noticed, but if anyone had observed her it would have been seen that she was standing stolidly, not taking part in what was before her, but that her white face, which never coloured prettily like other women's, bore now a deepening tint, as if some pale torturing flame were lapping about her; there was something on her face that suggested the quivering of flames.

In a few minutes she went back into the bar-room.

"Mr. Hutchins," she said, and here followed a request, that was almost a command, that he should attend to something needing his oversight in the stable-yard.

Hutchins grumbled, apologised to Bates; but Eliza stood still, and he went. She continued to stand, and her attitude, her forbidding air, the whole atmosphere of her presence, was such that the two men who were on the eve of departure went some minutes before they otherwise would have done, though perhaps they hardly knew why they went.

"Mr. Bates! You're awfully angry with me, Mr. Bates, I'm afraid."

He got up out of his chair, in his petty vanity trying to stand before her as if he were a strong man. "Angry!" he echoed, for he did not know what he said.

"Yes, you're angry; I know by the way you looked at me," she complained sullenly. "You think I'm not fit to look at, or to speak to, and—"

They stood together in the common bar-room. Except for the gay array of bottles behind the bar the place was perfectly bare, and it was open on all sides. She did not look out of door or windows to see who might be staring at them, but he did. He had it so fixed in his faithful heart that he must not compromise her, that he was in a tremor lest she should betray herself. He leaned on the back of his chair, breathing hard, and striving to appear easy.

"No, but I'm thinking, Sissy—"

"You're dreadfully ill, Mr. Bates, I'm afraid."

"No, but I was thinking, Sissy, I must see ye again before I go. I've that to say to ye that must be said before I go home."

"Home!" She repeated the word like the word of a familiar language she had not heard for long. "Are you going home?"

"Where will ye see me?" he urged.

"Anywhere you like," she said listlessly, and then added with sudden determination, "I'll come."

"Hoots!" he said, "where will ye come?"

"Where?" she said, looking at him keenly as if to gauge his strength or weakness. "You're not fit to be much on your feet."

"Can you come in the bush at the back of the college? It would be little harm for you to speak to me there. When can ye come?"

"To-morrow morning."

"How can ye come of a morning? Your time's not your own."

"I say I'll come." She enunciated the words emphatically as Hutchins's crutches were heard coming near the door. Then she left the room.



CHAPTER XIII.

The wood behind the college grounds and Captain Rexford's pasture had appeared to Bates to be a place possessed only by the winds of heaven and by such sunshine and shadow as might fall to its share. He had formed this estimate of it while he had lain for many days watching the waving of its boughs from out his window, and therefore he had named it to Eliza as a place where he could talk to her. Eliza well knew that this wood was no secluded spot in the season of summer visitors, but she was in too reckless a mood to care for this, any more than she cared for the fact that she had no right to leave the hotel in the morning. She left that busy house, not caring whether it suffered in her absence or not, and went to the appointed place, heedless of the knowledge that she was as likely as not to meet with some of her acquaintances there. Yet, as she walked, no one seeing her would have thought that this young woman had a heart rendered miserable by her own acts and their legitimate outcome. In her large comeliness she suggested less of feeling than of force, just as the gown she wore had more pretension to fashion than to grace.

When she entered the wood it was yet early morning. Bates was not there. She had come thus early because she feared hindrance to her coming, not because she cared when he came. She went into the young spruce fringes of the wood near the Rexford pasture, and sat down where she had before sat to watch Principal Trenholme's house. The leaves of the elm above her were turning yellow; the sun-laden wind that came between the spruce shades seemed chill to her; she felt cold, an unusual thing for her, and the time seemed terribly long. When she saw Bates coming she went to the more frequented aisles of the trees to meet him.

Bates had never been a tall man, but now, thin and weak, he seemed a small one, although he still strove to hold himself up manfully. His face this day was grey with the weariness of a sleepless night, and his enemy, asthma, was hard upon him—a man's asthma, that is a fierce thing because it is not yielded to gracefully, but is struggled against.

"Oh, but you're ill, Mr. Bates," she said, relapsing into that repeated expression of yesterday.

"I'm no so ill as I—I seem," he panted, "but that's neither here—nor there."

This was their greeting. Round them the grass was littered by old picnic papers, and this vulgar marring of the woodland glade was curiously akin to the character of this crucial interview between them, for the beauty of its inner import was overlaid with much that was common and garish. A rude bench had been knocked together by some picnicker of the past, and on this Bates was fain to sit down to regain his breath. Sissy stood near him, plucking at some coloured leaves she had picked up in her restlessness.

"You think of going back to the old place," she said, because he could not speak.

"Aye."

"Miss Bates is keeping pretty well?"—this in conventional tone that was oddly mortised into the passionate working of her mind.

"Oh, aye."

"Why wouldn't you sell it and live in a town?"

"It's the only air there I can be breathing," said he; the confession was wrung from him by his present struggle for breath. "I'm not fit for a town."

"I hear them saying down at the hotel that you're awfully ill."

"It's not mortal, the doctor says."

"You'll need someone to take care of you, Mr. Bates."

"Oh, I'll get that."

He spoke as if setting aside the subject of his welfare with impatience, and she let it drop; but because he was yet too breathless to speak his mind, she began again:

"I don't mind if you don't sell, for I don't want to get any money."

"Oh, but ye can sell when I'm gone; it'll be worth more then than now. I'm just keeping a place I can breathe in, ye understand, as long as I go on breathing."

She pulled the leaves in her hand, tearing them lengthwise and crosswise.

"What I want—to ask of ye now is—what I want to ask ye first is a solemn question. Do ye know where your father's corpse—is laid?"

"Yes, I know," she said. "He didn't care anything about cemeteries, father didn't."

He looked at her keenly, and there was a certain stern setting of his strong lower jaw. His words were quick: "Tell on."

"'Twas you that made me do it," said she, sullenly.

"Do what? What did ye do?"

"I buried my father."

"Did ye set Saul to do it?"

"No; what should I have to do asking a man like Saul?"

"Lassie, lassie! it's no for me to condemn ye, nor maybe for the dead either, for he was whiles a hard father to you, but I wonder your own woman's heart didn't misgive ye."

Perhaps, for all he knew, it had misgiven her often, but she did not say so now.

"In the clearin's all round Turrifs they buried on their own lands," she said, still sullen.

"Ye buried him on his own land!" he exclaimed, the wonder of it growing upon him. "When? Where? Out with it! Make a clean breast of it."

"I buried him that night. The coffin slipped easy enough out of the window and on the dry leaves when I dragged it. I laid him between the rocks at the side, just under where the bank was going to fall, and then I went up and pushed the bank down upon him." She looked up and cried defiantly: "Father'd as soon lie there as in a cemetery!" Although it was as if she was crushing beneath her heel that worship of conventionality which had made Bates try to send the body so far to a better grave, there was still in her last words a tone of pathos which surprised even herself. Something in the softening influences which had been about her since that crisis of her young life made her feel more ruth at the recital of the deed than she had felt at its doing. "I made a bed of moss and leaves," she said, "and I shut up the ledge he lay in with bits of rock, so that naught could touch him."

"But—but I dug there," cried Bates. (In his surprise the nervous affection of his breath had largely left him.) "I dug where the bank had fallen; for I had strange thoughts o' what ye might have been driven to when I was long alone, and I dug, but his body wasna' there."

It was curious that, even after her confession, he should feel need to excuse himself for his suspicion.

"There was a sort of cleft sideways in the rock at the side of the stream; you'd never have seen it, for I only saw it myself by hanging over, holding by a tree. No one would ever have thought o' digging there when I'd closed up the opening with stones; I thought o' that when I put him in."

He got up and took a step or two about, but he gave no gesture or prayer or word of pain. "The sin lies at my door," he said.

"Well, yes, Mr. Bates, you drove me to it, but—"

Her tone, so different from his, he interrupted. "Don't say 'but,' making it out less black. Tell what ye did more."

Then she told him, coolly enough, how she had arranged the bedclothes to look as though, she slept under them: how she had got into the box because, by reason of the knot-hole in the lid, she had been able to draw it over her, and set the few nails that were hanging in it in their places. She told him how she had laughed to herself when he took her with such speed and care across the lake that was her prison wall. She told him that, being afraid to encounter Saul alone, she had lain quiet, intending to get out at Turrifs, but that when she found herself in a lonely house with a strange man, she was frightened and ran out into the birch woods, where her winding-sheet had been her concealment as she ran for miles among the white trees; how she then met a squaw who helped her to stop the coming railway train.

"We lit a fire," she said, "and the Indian woman and the children stood in the light of it and brandished; and further on, where it was quite dark, we had got a biggish log or two and dragged them across the track, so when the train stopped the men came and found them there; and I went round to the back and got on the cars when all the men were off and they didn't come near me till morning. I thought they'd find me, and I'd got money to pay, but I got mixed up with the people that were asleep. I gave the squaw one of your aunt's gold pieces for helping, but"—with a sneer—"the passengers gave her money too. I made sure she'd not tell on me, for if she had she'd have got in jail for stopping the train."

"Puir body," said he; "like enough all she had seen o' men would make her think, too, she had no call to say anything, though she must have known of the hue and cry in the place."

"More like she wanted to save herself from suspicion of what she had done," said Eliza, practically.

She still stood before him on the path, the strong firm muscles of her frame holding her erect and still without effort of her will. The stillness of her pose, the fashionableness of gown and hat, and the broad display of her radiant hair, made a painful impression on Bates as he looked, but the impression on two other men who went by just then was apparently otherwise. They were a pair of young tourists who stared as they passed.

"By Jove, what a magnificent girl!" said one to the other just before they were out of hearing. There was that of consciousness in his tone which betrayed that he thought his own accents and choice words were well worthy her attention.

Eliza turned her back to the direction in which the strangers had gone, thus covering the spare man to whom she was talking from their backward glances. Bates, who was looking up at her face with his heart-hunger in his eyes, saw a look of contempt for the passing remark flit across her face, and because of the fond craving of his own heart, his sympathy, strangely enough, went out to the young man who had spoken, rather than to her sentiment of contempt. The angel of human loves alone could tell why John Bates loved this girl after all that had passed, but he did love her.

And perceiving now that she had told what she had to tell, he turned his mind to that something that lay on his mind to say to her. With the burden of the thought he rose up again from his rude seat, and he held up his head to look at her as with effort; she was so tall, that he still must needs look up.

"All's said that need be said, Sissy, between us two." His voice was almost hard because he would not betray his wistfulness. "Ye have chosen your own way o' life, and I willna raise a cry to alter it; I'm no fit for that. If I could shape ye to my pleasure, I see now I'd make a poor thing of it. Ye can do better for yourself if—if"—his square jaw seemed almost to tremble—"if ye'll have a heart in ye, lassie. Forgive me if I seem to instruct ye, for I've no thought in me now that I could make ye better if I tried."

He stopped again, and she saw his weak frame moving nervously; she thought it was for want of breath.

"You're awfully ill, Mr. Bates," she said, in dulness repeating words that she seemed to have got by heart.

Her stupid pity stung him into further speech.

"Oh, lassie, it's not because I'm fond of ye that I say it, for what does it matter about me, but because of all the men in the world that love women. It's God's voice through them to you; and (although I can't rightly frame it into words) because God set men and women in families, and gave them to have affections, I tell ye the soul in which the pride o' life, or pleasure, or the like o' that, takes the place of the affections is a lost soul." Again his harsh mouth trembled, and the words came with effort. "Sissy Cameron, ye've not known a mother nor a sister, and your father was hard, and I who loved ye was worse than a brute, and I can't rightly say what I would; but when I'm gone, look round ye; lassie, at the best women ye know that are wives and mothers, and if ye can't greet at the things they greet at, and if ye laugh at things they don't laugh at, and if ye don't fear to do the things they fear, then, even if your cleverness should make ye queen o' the whole world, God pity ye!"

"Yes, Mr. Bates," she said, just as she used to when she said the catechism to him and he admonished her. She had listened to him with that dull half-attention which we give to good-sounding words when our heart is only alert for something for which we yet wait. She had it firmly in her mind that he was going to say something on which would hang her future fate, that he would either still ask her, in spite of all she had said, to go back with him, or would tell her that he would not have her now, as the American had done. All her sensibilities lay, as it were, numb with waiting; she had no purpose concerning the answer she would make him; her mind was still full of invective and complaint; it was also full of a dull remorse that might melt into contrition; either or both must break forth if he said that which appealed to words in her.

When Bates saw, however, that the little sermon which he had wrung from his heart with so much pain had not impressed her much, he felt as if he had never known until then the sharpest pain of sorrow, for although he did not know what he had hoped for, there had been hope in proportion to effort, and disappointment, the acutest form of sorrow, cut him to the heart. He did not moan or bewail, that was not his way. He stood holding himself stiffly, as was his wont, and pain laid emphasis on the severe and resolute lines upon his face, for a face that has long been lent as a vehicle for stern thoughts does not express a milder influence, although the depths of the heart are broken up.

She looked at his face, and the main drift of what he had said was interpreted by his look; she had expected censure and took for granted that all this was reproof.

"I don't see, Mr. Bates"—her tone was full of bitterness—"that you've got any call to stand there handing me over as if I was a leper."

To which he answered angrily, "Bairn, haven't I told you once and again that take your sin on my own soul?"

"Well then"—still in angry complaint—"what right have you to be looking and talking of me as if nothing was to be expected of me but ill?"

So he believed that it was worse than useless to speak to her. He drew his hand over his heavy eyebrows. He thought to himself that he would go home now, that he would start that day or the next and never see her again, and in the decision he began walking away, forgetting the word "good-bye" and all its courtesy, because oblivious of everything except that thought that he was unfit for anything but to go and live out his time in the desolate home. But when he had got about twenty paces from her he remembered that he had said no farewell, and turned, looked back, and came to her again, his heart beating like a boy's.

She stood where he had left her, sullen, with head slightly bent, and tearing the same leaves. Bates recognised her beauty to the full, as much as any other man could have done, but it only hurt him and made him afraid. He looked at her, timid as a child, yet manfully ignoring his timidity, he tried to smile to her as he said,

"Bairn, I may never see ye in this world again; give your old teacher a kiss."

Eliza stared, then lent her face to be kissed. She was surprised at the gentleness of his sparing caress, so surprised that when she lifted her head she stood stock still and watched him till he was out of sight, for, driven by the scourge of his feeling, he went away from her with quick, upright gait, never looking back.

She watched him till he disappeared into Trenholme's house. When she walked home she did not sob or wipe her eyes or cover her face, yet when she got to the hotel her eyes were swollen and red, and she went about her work heedless that anyone who looked at her must see the disfigurement of tears.



CHAPTER XIV.

In the latter part of that day Bates suffered a fierce attack of his malady. Everyone in Trenholme's house, including the master himself on crutches, became agile in their desire to alleviate the suffering, and he received their ministrations with that civility which denoted that, had conventionality allowed, he would not have received them; for to fling all that is given him at the heads of the givers is undoubtedly the conduct that nature suggests to a man in pain. Having need, however, of some help, Bates showed now, as before, an evident preference for Alec as an attendant, a preference due probably to the fact that Alec never did anything for him that was not absolutely necessary, and did that only in the most cursory way. When Alec entered his room that night to see, as he cheerfully remarked, whether he was alive or not, Bates turned his face from the wall.

"I think it right to tell ye," he began, and his tone and manner were so stiff that the other knew something painful was coming, "I think it right to tell ye that Eliza Cameron is alive and well. I have seen her."

In his annoyance to think a meeting had occurred Alec made an exclamation that served very well for the surprise that Bates expected.

"Her father," continued Bates, "was decently buried, unknown to me, on his own land, as is the custom in those parts of the country. The girl was the person ye saw get up from the coffin—the one that ye were so frightened of."

This last word of explanation was apparently added that he might be assured Alec followed him, and the listener, standing still in the half-darkened room, did not just then feel resentment for the unnecessary insult. He made some sound to show that he heard.

"Then"—stiffly—"she took the train, and she has been living here ever since, a very respectable young woman, and much thought of. I'm glad to have seen her."

"Well?"

"I thought it right to tell ye, and I'm going home to-morrow or next day."

That was evidently all that was to be told him, and Alec refrained from all such words as he would like to have emitted. But when he was going dumbly out of the room, Bates spoke again.

"Ye're young yet; when ye feel inclined to give your heart to any young thing that you've a caring for, gie it as on the altar of God, and not for what ye'll get in return, and if ye get in answer what ye're wanting, thank God for a free gift."

Then Alec knew that Sissy had been unkind to Bates.

The night being yet early, he willingly recognised an obligation to go and tell Miss Rexford that their mutual solicitude had in some way been rendered needless. It was easy for him to find the lady he desired to see, for while the weather was still warm it was the habit in Chellaston to spend leisure hours outside the house walls rather than in, and Alec Trenholme had already learned that at evening in the Rexford household the father and brother were often exhausted by their day's work and asleep, and the mother occupied by the cribs of her little ones. He found the house, as usual, all open to the warm dry autumn evening, doors and windows wide. The dusk was all within and without, except that, with notes of a mother's lullaby, rays of candle light fell from the nursery window. As his feet brushed the nearer grass, he dimly saw Miss Rexford rise from a hammock swung on the verandah, where she had been lounging with Winifred. She stood behind the verandah railing, and he in the grass below, and they talked together on this subject that had grown, without the intention of either, to be so strong a bond of interest between them. Here it was that Alec could give vent to the pity and indignation which he could not express to the man whose sufferings excited these emotions.

In spite of this visit Sophia sought Eliza again the next day. As she entered the hotel Mr. Hutchins begged a word with her in his little slate-painted office, saying that the young housekeeper had not been like herself for some time, and that he was uneasy, for she made a friend of no one.

"Are you afraid of losing her?" asked Miss Rexford coldly, with slight arching of her brows.

He replied candidly that he had no interest in Eliza's joys or sorrows, except as they might tend to unsettle her in her place. Having, by the use of his own wits, discovered her ability, he felt that he had now a right to it.

Sophia went upstairs, as she was directed, to Eliza's bedroom on the highest storey, and found her there, looking over piles of freshly calendered house linen. The room was large enough, and pleasant—a better bedroom than Sophia or her sisters at present possessed. Eliza was apparently in high spirits. She received her guest with almost loud gaiety.