yourself, you would share his fortunes, no matter how humble--and then
I will tell you the truth.”

And I told him; indeed, it was sweet to make the confession, with no
one to share it but the crickets in the beach grass, and a belated bird
calling to her mate, and when I had satisfied his craving to be loved,
I claimed his promise.

“Now what have you to tell me?” I demanded, for he had stung my woman’s
curiosity.

“Only that Holford is no longer my name,” he said, smiling; “at least
only a part of it. Several years ago, by a strange turn of fortune,
I----”

He stopped abruptly, for mamma appeared on the top of the sand hill and
fluttered down upon us like an avenging angel.

“Kate!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here? And who is this person
with whom you are on such intimate terms that he holds your hands while
he talks to you? My daughter seems unable to answer me,” she continued,
turning to my lover; “perhaps you will favor me with some account of
yourself?”

“With pleasure,” he said, his eyes dancing wickedly. “Miss Russell
could not tell you my name because she doesn’t know it herself. I
am----”

And here he was again interrupted by uncle Barton sliding down the sand
hill and landing heavily.

“Great Scott!” he grumbled, “I’ve a ton of sand in each shoe! I hope
I did not hurt you, sir--why, can it be? What the devil are you doing
here, Battleford? Do you know my sister, Mrs. Russell? This is Lord
Battleford, Julia, whom I met at Nassau.”

At this point his wits revealed to him that Lord Battleford was the
castaway sailor whose attentions to me had alarmed Bridget into writing
to my mother for help, and he turned upon the young gentleman with
rancor.

“You don’t seem to need any introduction to my niece, Lord Battleford,”
he said, loftily, while his face flushed with turkey-cock rage, “and
I beg to inform you that I think it a deuced ungentlemanlike thing
on your part to compromise a girl with clandestine meetings and
flirtations in the absence of her family, and I tell you plainly the
whole thing has got to stop.”

“Not so fast, if you please, Mr. Hay,” said my sailor, laughing. “I
have won a wife who likes me for what I _am_ irrespective of what I
_have_, and I hope you and Mrs. Russell are not going to spoil our
romance by refusing your consent. Speak up, Kate,” he said, turning
to me; “tell these discreet people that I am something better than a
title--a man you have learned to love.”

And so I had to make a second confession of the state of my heart, and
mamma succumbed in two minutes to Battleford’s charms--or those of his
title--but I heard Uncle Barton still scolding as he helped her up the
sand dune.

“Oh, yes, he’ll make a she-earl of Kate--countess, I mean--but he’ll
take her away from us, and I fancy you will yet regret the day you
trusted her out of your sight, when the ocean lies between us and our
little girl.”

But she didn’t! For in giving me to Battleford she not only had me
often with her, but gained the dearest of sons.

MRS. EVREMOND

By

Mrs. John Van Vorst

& Marie Van Vorst

When Mrs. Evremond found herself actually in her carriage it seemed
to her that it would never go fast enough, although Heaven knows she
was indifferent to the speed of her vehicles as a rule, there being
no reason why she should hasten--no place she especially cared to
arrive at, no excitement or element of it in her quiet life. But this
afternoon she was conscious of every rotation of the wheels.

When the Arc de Triomphe had been passed and in and out among
automobiles and tramways her little yellow-wheeled brougham crossed
the Etoile and began the descent, suddenly, with the inconsequence
marking a woman’s emotions as clearly as it stamps her reasonings,
Mrs. Evremond decided the coachman was driving at a ridiculous rate.
After all, she hoped never to reach the Place de la Concorde--never to
traverse the Pont Royal and leave for the Latin Quarter and the other
side of the river--the _insouciant_ world of the Bois and American
Paris. She had no desire to find the obscure street in which her
husband had his studio--which street was, however, the direction she
had given her footman, and it was toward No. 15 bis, Passage du Maine,
that with such useless speed she was being driven.

They reached and passed the Elysée Palace Hotel. Mrs. Evremond blew
through the tube at her side, the brougham drew up to the curb, stopped
and she got out.

“You may go home. I shall not need you again to-day,” she directed,
and, turning to the avenue, she began to walk down the Champs
Elysées. She might at least be mistress of her own gait; walk with
short, feverish little steps or retard her pace to keep harmony
with her alternate rapid or halting reflections, for her mind, as
she walked, went back over the past six months of her married life
with a persistence, a clearness, that denoted how important were the
details, how ineffaceable were the marks her experiences had made
upon her, how intensely she felt what she had lived, how seriously
she had taken life, how absorbed she was in the man to whom she had
attached herself--how desperately she loved her husband. The vividness
with which she thought of him had the precision of a fresh image. The
impulsive rush of herself toward the harbor her conception of him made
proved, by its very force and freshness, that thinking of him like this
was a new thing. She had lived with him, existed by his side, for six
years, and had never thought about him, around him, as she did to-day.

She gasped. “Perhaps if I had thought about him a little more and loved
him a little less, _this_ might not have happened!”

The happening, so distressing to her, which had caused her, at an
unusual hour, to ring for her carriage, dress and fly from the house on
an expedition she knew to be close to ill-breeding in its likeness to
melodrama and its distinct opposition to codes of expedient, had been
finding a letter--the world-worn story that comes to each woman with a
new pang.

As Mrs. Evremond reached the Rond Point, she asked herself: “What am I
really going to do? What do I expect to see and find, and how shall I
act when I find it?”

Women constantly commit the platitude--if such an expression can be
used--of thinking they are acting on certain occasions contrary to
their characters, out of gear with their codes. Mrs. Evremond was not
an impulsive temperament. Unaccustomed to crises or events that called
for the quick decision of more brilliant and self-sufficient minds, she
had found herself face to face with a problem, and was acting with a
precipitation that made her dizzy, and a promptitude that suggested she
had been brought into contact with just such difficulties many times
before.

The well-bred gentlewoman had seized, without second thought, the
letter lying open at her feet, read it, gasped over it, paled over it,
hated and disbelieved it--crushed it in her hand, and, with the now
crumpled sheet between glove and palm, she was on her way to verify its
purport; to make sure of the fact which women, if they would but know
it, are many times happier in ignoring; to prove to herself what? That
her husband was unfaithful to her; that she must either “cease to love
him”--by the operation of one of those unbalancing _coups de foudre_
which, we are told, turn honey to gall and love to hate in the human
breast at one revolution--or that with the discovery she must also
acknowledge, no matter _what_ he did, she would love him still, and
would, therefore, curse an enlightenment which should only give her a
useless bitter grief to suffer for the rest of her life.

She stopped still at the Place de la Concorde. She never walked alone
in the streets of Paris at this hour, and the aspect of the city was
new to her. In the early winter twilight the Place shone through the
mingled mists of evening, and the golden hazy scintillations haloing
the yellow lamps. The sunset had left the sky over the Tuileries still
red, and above the river the heavens darkened and grew cold, but the
bridge lights beckoned. Her hands were in her muff, her cheeks red
with exercise, and her eyes, which had wept more tears in the last
few hours than they would acknowledge to have seen for many months,
stung in the sharp air. She stood irresolute. Behind her the Champs
Elysées stretched to the apex at the Arc. It would be a quiet, restful
walk home. Should she not take it, return and force herself to learn
the lesson--that it is folly to be too wise? As she clasped her
hands together in her muff the letter crushed upon her palm; she set
her lips, drew a sharp breath, and resumed her walk, turning across
to the Pont de la Concorde, traversing it quickly, a graceful, agile
pedestrian among the many foot passengers, unobserving of the admiring
eyes of those whose chase is beauty.

After a very long walk, Mrs. Evremond gained the boulevard she sought,
turned into a dark little street, into a still darker alley.

The old _concierge_ met her at the _loge_, a peasant _gardienne_,
blear-eyed and wearing the white cap of her province. She blinked at
madame, and under the thick lace veil Mrs. Evremond had worn to shield
her emotion from the curious, the old woman did not recognize her
tenant’s wife.

“Monsieur told me that he is expecting madame,” she said, familiarly.
“He will not be long. Madame will go in----”

Without reply, she passed the woman and went up to her husband’s room.

Expecting her? No, that she knew was not the case--he was expecting
another; even the old _portière_ was in his wretched secret, while she
alone, perhaps, of all Paris had been ignorant.

As she crossed the threshold of the studio she seemed to enter the
apartment of a perfect stranger, so far away from her the last few
hours had served to put him. The room was cold. She opened the door
of the little stove, and, finding the fire laid, put a match to the
kindling; in a moment the sharp crackling of the wood met her ears with
a friendly domestic voice whose language was to her ears cruelly that
of the hearth and home. If what the missive implied were true, her
husband had loved another woman for many months. He had met her here
in this place which the wife looked upon as sacred to his art; whose
precincts she had respected with fidelity, believing them devoted to
his work, and fearing to be obtrusive.

The studio had indeed been sacred, but to an unlawful love.

Her first impulse was to throw her muff down, unwind the fur from her
neck and make herself as comfortable as she could in the gloom of the
spacious room; but instead she walked restlessly about, taking in the
details of decoration, the attractive disorder, with unseeing eyes.
Behind that large screen Maurice’s models dressed and undressed--women
of the people, women of the streets, of course, of the lowest, most
degrading type; face to face with them, alone with them, he had passed
hours of his life with them for years. She had never been jealous of
them, she had never thought of them; she had regarded them in the same
light with easels, and paint, and studio equipment.

Why had she not been jealous of them? They were women, and if Maurice
was so unattached that he was either a prey or a victim, or a seeker
of such affairs as this which she now believed she had discovered,
why should she not take it for granted that there were many and
varied experiences of which she had been the unconscious dupe? She
shuddered--anger and distrust whispered her to hate her husband, to
despise his weakness and never to forgive him.

In her lonely promenade she peopled the room with incidents and scenes
which did her wrong, and proved to what extent she had unnerved
herself, what rein she gave to jealousy and fear. She had lighted
a lamp, and in its light took out the crumpled piece of paper from
her glove and re-read it again. It was a love letter, the warm and
confident letter of a woman who loves to the man who loves her. At its
close it gave him rendezvous for half-past five o’clock at 11 bis,
Passage du Maine.

As Mrs. Evremond’s eyes followed the lines among the wrinkles of the
crumpled page, her eyes brimmed over again with tears, her knees
trembled, she felt herself actually ready to fall. With the return
of her tears came a softening of her anger--a relief of her unnerved
state, of her suffering--for a second she wept silently. At the moment
when her control was beyond her power she thought she heard a sound on
the stairway, and her heart stopped beating very nearly--the blood
flew to her face.

A sense of shame overcame her--shame for herself, for him and for the
other woman. What a horrible thing to follow and spy upon her husband!
What scene did she meditate? What tirade should spring to her lips? It
showed, indeed--the fact of her presence--how degrading was the whole
matter, if it could bring her to this. And the woman who bravely had
come all the way from her home to find out what she dreaded, now that
enlightenment was at hand, longed to run from it, and wished herself a
thousand miles away. _If it were true, she would rather die than know._
If it were not true, how she would loathe herself for her presence here!

The steps ceased, and in the consoling silence Mrs. Evremond regained
her natural balance--and swung true. She turned from the table near
which she had been standing, and more hurriedly than she had entered
left the studio--almost ran past the _loge_ of the old _concierge_, and
unseen by her slipped out of the open gate, called a passing cab and
crept into it, guiltily, closing the door upon what she felt was her
dishonor.

Whereas Mrs. Evremond’s life was made up of monologue reflection, of
days of solitude and lately of lonely evenings, Mr. Evremond was seldom
alone. Weariness and ennui possessed him as soon as he was face to face
with his thoughts in solitude, and he, therefore, arranged his life, in
as much as possible, to avoid his ego, which, for some reason or other,
he cared never to entertain _en tête-à-tête_!

He gave rendezvous for the morning hours to his men friends, so that
even while he painted he was attended by one or another of a dozen
intimates, who amused and diverted him. When these failed, he would
even call in the curtain hanger or a carpenter for some impromptu
task, and the necessity of sharing the burden of his personality he
attributed to his sociability. It was innocent enough that the mere
noise of a carpenter’s plane, the tap, tap, of an upholsterer’s
hammer, should be company to him, yet this need of another’s presence
had been the demoralization of his character. So long as there was
somebody with him, he put off the moment of reckoning with himself, the
salutary confession productive of the efforts which count in a man’s
life. And so the inward voice of conscience had been drowned by the
voice of human companions.

Evremond was pleased with the world and disgusted with himself. Good
health and a love of beauty caused him perpetual enjoyment, whereas
his moral insensibility, the deadening of his ego, deprived him of all
happiness. He had too long stifled his yawns with a smile to be capable
now of tears or laughter, and his attitude was a menace to his wife’s
contentment. In the best hours of Mrs. Evremond’s married life, she had
felt between her husband and herself that breach of solitude which, no
matter by whom, _must be filled_.

She was six years younger than her husband, whom, without knowing, she
loved passionately and timidly. Silent as he was, indifferent, as a
rule, and always preoccupied, nevertheless he depended upon her. She
was the blank page at the end of a book, the instant’s repose for the
emotions--she was a habit--she was his wife.

Evremond was at the close of an affair; on his part, an affair not
of business, but of the heart. For the past three months he had made
desperate love to a woman not his wife. She had denied him nothing. And
now it was over. Their meetings had taken place at her house and his
own studio, he had seen her in her own boudoir, he had driven with her
in the broad light of day through hidden alleys in the Bois. They had
made sentimental journeys to the Louvre. Together they had sat in the
public gardens of the Tuileries. For three long months they had amused
themselves and each other. And now the affair was ended. Evremond
was ready to yawn upon it already. Already the memory was becoming
indistinct, blent with memories of other adventures so like to this
one that it would require a useless effort to distinguish it. But this
time there was something different in the ending of the romance, the
happy ending reserved for sensitive readers.

This afternoon at five they had met and parted in his studio, a
sundering of friendship by mutual consent, with adieux into which
both had tried to put feeling enough to justify the hours they had
consecrated to each other.

After she had gone he lingered in the familiar room. A long glass
screen reflected the dying embers that had fallen red against the iron
hearth of the stove. A certain perfume brought with a rush to his mind
moments that now became intolerable to him. As he impatiently put the
scenes from him, between the stove and the mirror, the mirror in which
Evremond could not, try as he would, imagine himself alone, he saw a
small gray spot on the polished floor. A handkerchief--no, a glove! He
stooped, picked it up, and, as though in defiance of the bolder odors
of heavier scent that hung in the air, a faint breath like an appeal
came from the bit of _suède_ which held still the imprint of a woman’s
hand. His heart seemed to stop as he turned the object over in his
hand. It was a small gray glove, distinctly not the property of the
woman to whom he had said good-by.

He picked it up and smoothed it out; there was something in it--a bit
of crumpled paper over whose ruffled surface ran the words of love and
the appeal which had brought him to his last rendezvous. He could not
believe his eyes! This was his wife’s glove! It meant, then, that she
had found the letter which he had evidently carelessly let fall, and
she had read the ridiculous sheet of paper whose words and expressions
gave him now a sort of wearied nausea. She had come to the studio
to confirm her doubts, she had seen them enter together, of course.
She knew everything, then, everything--everything except that it was
over--all that should never have been was ended. But that would not
clear him in her eyes.

Much disturbed and sick at heart, he went out into the streets and
walked slowly along, somewhat like a man in a dream, lighting one
cigarette after another, following, as it were, the leading of the tiny
light that faded and glowed at the end of the paper cylinder. He walked
on until the small house in which he lived near the Avenue du Bois was
not more than fifteen minutes distant, then he wandered away from it,
his thoughts following an irregular route.

As Mrs. Evremond got into her cab without giving an address, the
coachman waited for a second, then leaned down from his box and asked
her where he should drive her.

Home--she had none! Why, the term was a farce! It had meant a place
shared by her husband and herself--he had dishonored it, blighted it
forever in her eyes. She would go at once to her mother’s, and from
there write him her conditions--they were hers to make, she knew--he
would not put forth any plea; she would never see him again.

She gave the coachman an address in Passy, and the speaking of the
number and street out into the dark put finality to what she did. He
received it with a “_Bien, madame_,” as casual and cheerful as if she
had given him a point of happy meeting instead of neutral ground on
which to decide for misery. She sank back in the _fiacre_, white and
shaking, and watched the lights of the interminable streets mark her
as she passed, and the unconcerned passersby, whom she envied in their
apparent freedom from an hour of agony.

She had been betrayed; horribly, cruelly, disloyally left for another
woman. At first the jealous bitterness of it obscured all other
feeling. She was only conscious of a desire to escape--to put miles
between herself and her husband and to be free. He had then not loved
her for long, and she had believed herself cherished. Now she believed
she had only been uneasily watched. No doubt, even the few occasions
on which he had showed her marked affection--notably after some
unintended indifference on her part--were to be attributed to his
uneasiness, to the assuaging of his conscience. That to such caresses
she had been dupe was a fatal obstacle to any reconciliation.

It was her hour to choose between her rights as a wife and her divine
right as a woman, and as she mused, hidden in the corner of the little,
rattling carriage, Mrs. Evremond saw only the first. The reality from
which she was fleeing brought its flood of indignant shame to her face,
and she began to despise the ignorance which had placed her in the way
of being so easily deceived. She scorned her trust in her husband, and
the beautiful qualities of confidence and belief grew to appear as the
most pitiable dupes--a rage of humiliation filled her as she realized
her blindness during the most poignant moments of her husband’s
treachery. Her constancy, her very loyal love, made her pitifully
ridiculous in her own eyes.

That a man’s betrayal has power to waken such heat of passion and
base humiliation as this in a gentle breast is too unfortunately the
case. Evremond’s excuses for tardy entrances, his evading of little
attentions to herself which would have involved the devotion of several
hours, how puerile and trifling they seemed!--how bald and flagrant
they appeared to her illumined understanding! Worst of all it was to
feel that whatever love she had innocently shown her husband during
these few months had for him no value; had only served to assure him
that his wife was suspicionless--at ease; that she was successfully
duped, and he might more fearlessly continue on his way. She would set
him free--leave him to love whatever woman he chose without the sin of
a dishonored vow. He would be at liberty--there would be no trace of
her left in his life. And for herself? What would it mean for her? She
must well think of it now.

With the completeness a supreme moment of grief alone is capable to
accomplish, she saw in a flash her past filled with Maurice and her
future without him. With an audible cry, quickly stifled, she leaned
forward in the little vehicle, and stretched her hands before her as if
she would seize the first, then shrank back, covering her face as if
she would shut out the latter.

“I don’t believe he loves her more than me!” she cried, to her wounded
soul. “I don’t _believe_ it; there is something in me still that tells
me he cares for me--and there is _nothing_ in me to tell me that I do
not love my husband--nothing to help me to take the stand of pride and
jealousy. I love him--and I always shall.”

Ah, she loved him! There was no doubt about that. And how deeply
inevitably it shamed her now to acknowledge it. Her history is the
repetition of many a woman’s, and of women less one-minded, less
unselfish, more warped by petty jealousies, whose frequency has become
habit. But this, the first jealous hour of Mrs. Evremond’s life, was
met by a storm of love, in which it was beaten down to the ground as,
with a rush, came over her the accumulated tenderness of years, never
checked, spontaneously allowed to live in her heart, if never shown
to her husband. Instantly purged by its holiness--spiritualized by
its unselfishness--she began to wonder if the fault did not lie with
herself.

“It is never one-sided,” she thought. “He really loved me very much
once--why should he stop loving me? If I have not been able to keep my
husband’s love, part, at least, of the fault must be mine?”

It is rare that when a height is reached, after a painful climb, that
the vision is dimmed; the reward of the struggle is sight. Whether or
not she fatuously blamed herself, whether or not a stronger-minded
woman, zealous for her rights and keen to the sense of hurt honor,
would be able to detect _any_ fault in the years of the gentle life,
the wife, examining herself, believed she saw clear.

She had too readily accepted as a matter of course the idea that
devotion promised at the altar is a commodity given over in sacred
form and secure from all assaults; hers without future effort. She
had slipped into married life too easily, too calmly, and now she
thought stupidly, without varying, or seeking to amuse, distract
or entertain--without eternally charming the man whom she had once
charmed. For her restless and vacillating husband--he was this in her
eyes as she mused--she had discovered nothing new in six years. She
was a fixture to him--an article of furniture, one with the home,
indispensable perhaps as the home itself, but only because, like
inanimate things, she had been useful and had made no claim. If she now
sought him in judicial manner and demanded confession, renunciation,
and all the rest of it, what power remained with her still? Having
brought her this far in her musings, the _fiacre_ drove up and stopped.
Looking out she saw the _grille_ and the iron lamps hanging lit on
either side the posts of the gate, and back of it the garden and her
mother’s home. But the sight of this destination brought only a chill
to her and no comfort. It was no welcome asylum; she had no desire to
fly to her mother’s arms, to weep and pour out her grief. She felt no
need of a confidant. She wanted to find some basis of her unchanged
loyalty to rest upon--a natural resting place--some strength to take
her to her own door.

Her grief, her contemplation of the disaster to her faith in her
husband, had left her shaken in all but her love. She loved him, and
any life without him was intolerable for her to face. “But,” she
reflected, “however much I may prefer a future with him to no matter
what life without him, it does not follow that he would decide in the
same way.” Yet for some intangible reason she believed it.

She had arrived at the hour which presents itself sooner or later in
the life of every married woman, the hour of combat whose issue decides
the limit for all future relations.

If she should go to him to-night--wounded vanity recalcitrant--she
might stipulate conditions that should forever sunder their lives.
Sunder their lives she believed for a passing fantasy, for a weakness,
for a caprice on his part. If, on the contrary, she went to him with
forgiveness, the very fact that there _was_ such need, that he was
forced to receive it, would leave a scar. It requires more grace to
forget forgiveness than to forgive. She knew her husband’s nature--it
would rankle and corrode. She shrank from the ordeal of an explanation,
of any rôle that would link her with this _liaison_.

At all events, descent here at the friendly home was impossible. She
gave her own address, Rue Leonard de Vinci, and directed a return
through the Bois de Boulogne. The coachman, thinking he was driving
a disappointed lady from a _rendezvous manqué_, said: “_Très bien,
madame!_” with less cheerfulness than he had shown at the first
instructions. Turning briskly through Passy to La Muette, and entering
the Bois at that gate, he drove her along at a jogging pace toward
home. Home--it had become this once again; not as yet destroyed and
marred by torturing questions and recriminations--never, please God, so
to be by her! If it had any sacredness, she would try to save it still;
if the link were not too fragile, she would mend it; if there were a
hearthstone left she would, if she might, kindle some warmth upon it
still.

“Perhaps,” she mused, “happiness is ended for my husband and me; at all
events, I will not seek its destruction. Perhaps he wants to leave me
and be free. He must prove it to me. He has not proved it yet. Perhaps
I can learn to be to him more than any other woman can ever be--can
charm him to me again as I did when I was a girl. I can try with all my
heart.”

She let down the glass of the little window and leaned out. The air
was sweet with the smell of the damp winter woods--the trees clustered
like phantoms close to the road--there had been an ice storm, and the
glistening tops of the pines shone in the night like fairy trees in
crystal urns. A few stars were out, big and bright in a sky faintly
blue; as Mrs. Evremond lifted her face to them they seemed to shine on
her as never before. She looked up into the heavens with a childlike
sweetness, and perhaps, in her hope and her goodness, with as pure a
faith as prayer ever carried. She was possibly deserted definitely by
the man she loved. She had been betrayed by him. She had never suffered
in her life as to-day. She could never so suffer again.

We all possess the power to make those who love us suffer just so far.
Evremond had come all at once to the high-tide mark of his limit. He
could never cause her such keen pain again, and he paid the penalty.
She loved him not less but differently, with a tenderness that comes
only when we have ceased to lean--to repose; with a protection that
only comes when we are conscious of weakness; with renunciation that
only comes when we see and accept the destruction of the ideal, the
death of illusion, and take up with courage the reality and embrace it
instead.

“He shall never know that I know,” she murmured, “unless he wishes to.
He has a right to his life; he has a right to love where he likes, not
by law, but because of his nature. If he loves me still, if he wants
to go on as we are, he will make me feel it to-night. I shall know
to-night, and for all our future he shall decide.”

Mrs. Evremond was a methodical woman of reasonable habits, and not
given to tardy wanderings about shops or prolonged absences from her
home. She was on this night very late indeed. The long time Evremond
waited for her confirmed his most unpleasant fears. He had come in
about six and gone to the salon to wait her probably speedy entrance.
Then, with the nervous impatience of a person who had every reason to
dread, and every reason to hope for, the arrival of the expected, he
watched the clock mercilessly mark hour after hour. At eight--never had
she been out so late before--he said, definitely:

“She has left me--there is no doubt about it. She knows everything, and
she never wants to see me again.”

Such a fact as the termination of their married relations, in the most
extreme moments of his interest in another, he had never thought of--he
had never wished for. He had always considered his wife suited to him,
understanding his idiosyncrasies, patient and a pleasant background,
but never had he supposed that the naked truth of the loss of her--or
the risk of the loss of her--would fill him with dismay.

Not caring to suggest significance in her absence by questioning the
servants, he waited in the salon without giving orders to retard the
dinner. Every passing cab that showed evidence of drawing up to the
curbstone made him go to the window, only to see the vehicle roll
unconcernedly past. His wife had left the house at five o’clock in her
carriage, which had been sent back from the Champs Elysées; this was
all he knew save that she had been to his studio half an hour before
his rendezvous, and had there dropped her glove with the compromising
letter. The end, then, of his conventional commonplace married life was
to be a kind of tragedy; the public were to have their taste offended
by his delinquencies--or to remain indifferent to the subject.

At all events, the poignancy of the affair was reserved for himself
alone. Consistent with his self-absorbed nature, he pictured but one
sufferer. He allotted to his wife righteous anger, disgust and a
jealous pride--which, nevertheless, he justified--and nothing else.
With surprise and vexation he discovered that he was suffering, and,
unused to pain of any kind, annoyed and ill at ease with his conscience
and his fate, he could have snapped at his irritation like an animal at
a tantalizing wound.

If she were, indeed, gone, then his home was wrecked in consequence of
his passing passion for a woman he had always thought in no wise equal
to the wife whom he had dishonored, whom he, nevertheless, discovered
he treasured and valued and could not lightly lose. What folly--what
poor logic--what false judgment! Neither logic nor judgment entered
into the case, and he knew it, nor did an overwhelming temptation of
a grand passion justify even remotely his behavior in his eyes; he
admitted his weakness, his facile drifting, when he took no means to
stem the tide, his half-cynical pastime. It looked to have cost him
dear.

As sentiments whose characters have changed in the unalterable
and fickle moment of time, when love is love no more and desire
non-existent, become as unpleasant and safe as they were secret and
dangerous, so he thought of his late friendship with anger and held
it cheap, a priceless imitation for which perhaps he had given a pure
jewel in stupid exchange.

If she did not come in by nine o’clock he would go to her, to her
mother’s, where she had undoubtedly taken refuge in the sudden storm
that had driven her from her own doors. Once there, facing her,
what should he say? She was so simple, so direct, so honest, so
unworldly. He was too intelligent not to comprehend all that occasion
would require of his duplicity, subtleties, to dupe her, to make her
believe--what? He could _not_ make her now believe anything but the
truth. Her entire confidence had spared him hitherto the necessity of
lying to her. He owed her that.

As he said this to himself, the debt of everything that he owed came
very practically to his mind. All the peace he had known; agreeable
and courteous companionship whenever he had sought it; the grace and
comfort of a well-ordered household; and, if anything further, he had
for a long time been too careless to foster it, unheedful of its value.
If she were only a habit, she was a fixed one, more steadfast than any
other hitherto formed. What should he say to her? Since he could not
trick her to regard the situation with anything but disgust and anger,
he would tell her the truth and plead weakness without love and beg her
forgiveness. His nature twinged at this, a burning flush made him hot
all over. A distaste of the cowardice in such confessions nauseated
him. If she forgave him, if he made a clean breast of it in loyalty to
her and disloyalty to the other, things would never be the same again.
Between them there would always be his weakness and her nobility.
Before humiliations such as these some natures do not shrink. Evremond
shivered at it with all his sensibility and pride.

“Not,” he acknowledged, “that I am too beastly proud to own up, but
that I dread the result to us both. _Que faire?_”

At nine o’clock, his nerves on the rack, his control gone, he
telephoned to the little hotel, 75 Rue Docteur Blanche.

“Mrs. Evremond has not been at her mother’s for several days--who
wished to know? Was there anything wrong?”

“Nothing.”

He put up the receiver--a new thought seized him horribly. Why had
he supposed this the one and only solution--the quiet solution to
his wife’s problem, the sequence to her discovery? What if she had
suddenly, surprisingly, taken it to heart, and it had unnerved her? He
had not thought of her or her feelings. She loved him--she had loved
him, he knew it well--dearly.

“What if she had----” he exclaimed, aloud, white with emotion. Then:
“Nonsense,” he exclaimed, “she is not hysterical--she is control
itself.”

What was she? Really, what did he know of her accurately; when had he
seen her obliged to face any crisis in her quiet life?

He rang violently, and when the man came in, asked:

“When did madame go out, did you tell me? Tell me again.”

“At five. Charles drove madame a little way on the Champs Elysées, and
was then dismissed.”

She had been gone then five hours. There was no house of an intimate
friend to which she could have gone for advice or even familiar
confidence. She had no _intimes_, no enthusiasms; she lived, and he
knew it, for him and her home absolutely. She had built a simple,
healthful existence around him.

In this, his first solitude, his first long soliloquy, the state of
Evremond’s mind altered as did his countenance. He grew stilled,
almost appalled, at what might come to his knowledge now, at any
moment, and facts magnified by his vivid imagination became ghosts to
him--every one.

He went from the salon to her rooms--the pretty rooms of the woman of
wealth and good taste, where every article of toilet and furniture
spoke charmingly of the mistress. Mrs. Evremond’s dinner dress lay out
on the bed; her maid stood in the window looking out. With a word about
madame’s being very late to-night, she left the room discreetly.

Neither dressing table nor bureau nor secretary had any letter for
him. There was no evidence of a hasty departure, no melodramatic
chaos in the tranquil rooms that, with bright wood fires and shut-in
invitingness, waited her return. She had gone out, as usual, but not as
usual had she returned.

These rooms, to whose voices he had been for months deaf and
indifferent, spoke to him now so insistingly that he turned away from
them, not able to bear their appeal.

Back in the salon the clock marked the quarter after nine--at half-past
he would go out to the prefecture of the police--and what then? Did
this mean that he discarded the idea of a voluntary flight from him?
No--she was, of course, safe. She had simply left him without a word or
sign. He could do nothing--but suffer and wait.

In her withdrawal, in his certainty of loss of her, she grew infinitely
precious in his eyes and, above all the rest of the world, for the
first in a long time she took her rightful place. If anything sinister
had occurred he knew the whole face of life would be altered for him
forever. If she had left him, he determined to move heaven and earth to
win her back to him--and just here he turned sharply at the opening of
the salon door.

He sprang toward her--his white and drawn face wore a look of fear and
suffering that at the sight of her altered to a welcome and relief, and
with a tenderness such as had never greeted Emily Evremond in her life
before, he cried her name:

“_Emily!_” He stammered it and stopped. The face of his wife was so
different to what he would have looked for it to be, her coming was so
little what he had planned for, that he had no words at command.

“I am late. I am awfully late--I did not realize it was half-past nine.
Have you dined, Maurice?”

She laid her muff and furs down. She had only one glove on--a gray
_suède_ glove; she drew it slowly off, her other hand was bare.

“_Dined!_” echoed her husband. “Why, I’ve been waiting for you here
since six o’clock. I’ve been horribly anxious. Emily, where on earth
have you been?” He might have said, “Where in heaven?” for her face was
heavenly. He knew her for a pretty woman, a graceful woman, but the
face of his wife, as she stood looking at him, quiet, unemotional, was
of a divinity that made him marvel. He felt more infinitely far away
from her than if she had not returned to him.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I had some things to do, and I did not realize
the time. You must be starved, Maurice.”

What things--what had she done and planned further to do? That tears
and reproaches and accusations were not in the rôle she had given
herself, he saw. Any opening of the subject by him he felt would be a
grave mistake. If she said nothing he would ignore that she knew. She
did not, of course, know yet that he had found her glove, even if she
had purposely left it--how could she be sure that he would return?
Perhaps she did not know that she had lost it, or where. His heart
leaped at the respite--the little respite it was--his color came back,
and the possibility of a natural attitude.

She had gone over to the mirror and was taking off her hat tranquilly,
instead of going to her own room. She arranged her hair deftly and
lightly with a touch here and there. Maurice watched her, and the
light on her hands and on the jewels of her engagement ring and the
plain round of her wedding ring. Her hands were small; on one hand all
day she had worn a gray glove, and between it and her palm had lain the
letter with its cruel flaunting to her of his treachery and his sin.
And she returned to him like this--gentle, controlled!

He drew a deep breath. “What pluck!” he thought. “What a woman!” He
adored her, and all that her unspoken forgiveness meant, all that her
grace conceded, worked in him a change--a conversion. Maurice Evremond
was a different man to the one who had left her that very morning--she
had won her husband.

And she, for her part, was under the spell of his greeting. She wanted
never to forget his face until its pallor and its transfiguration,
until its significance, were fixed upon her heart. He had believed her
gone--and he cared. He answered her question unconsciously without
speaking a word. If he loved her ever so little, she would win the
rest. She would supersede any other woman in the world with him. She
turned with a smile to find his eyes fixed on her.

“Let’s go in to dinner as we are, Maurice, it’s so late.”

Evremond came to her, put his arms around her; for the thousandth part
of a second he felt her shrink. He drew her close. Under his touch her
face suffused like a bride’s. He saw now, as he held her, the marks of
tears on her eyes; the illuminating of her spirit had concealed them
until now, but the human touch brought her to life.

The sharp drawing of the cord, as the curtains were pulled back between
salon and dining room, made them start apart as the _maitre d’hôtel_
summoned them to a repast already two hours late.

“_Madame est servie._”

The DOG STAR

By Joseph C. Lincoln

It commenced the day after we took old man Stumpton out codfishin’. Me
and Cap’n Jonadab both told Peter T. Brown that the cod wa’n’t bitin’
much at that season, but he said cod be jiggered. “What’s troublin’ me
jest now is landin’ suckers,” he says.

So the four of us got into the _Patience M._--she’s Jonadab’s
catboat--and sot sail for the Crab Ledge. And we hadn’t more’n got our
lines over the side than we struck into a school of dogfish. Now, if
you know anything about fishin’ you know that when the dogfish strike
on it’s “good-by, cod!” So when Stumpton hauled a big fat one over the
rail I could tell that Jonadab was jest ready to swear. But do you
think it disturbed your old friend, Peter Brown? No, sir! He never
winked an eye.

“By Jove!” he sings out, starin’ at that blamed dogfish as if ’twas
a gold dollar. “By Jove!” says he, “that’s the finest specimen of a
Labrador mack’rel ever I see. Bait up, Stump, and go at ’em again.”

So Stumpton, havin’ lived in Montana ever sence he was five years old,
and not havin’ sighted salt water in all that time, he don’t know but
what there is sech critters as “Labrador mack’rel,” and he does go at
’em, hammer and tongs. When we come ashore we had eighteen dogfish,
four sculpin and a skate, and Stumpton was the happiest loon in
Ostable County. It was all we could do to keep him from cookin’ one of
them “mack’rel” with his own hands. If Jonadab hadn’t steered him out
of the way while I sneaked down to the Port and bought a bass, we’d
have had to eat dogfish--we would, as sure as I’m a foot high.

Stumpton and his daughter, Maudina, was at the Old Home House, at
Wellmouth Port. ’Twas late in September, and the boarders had cleared
out. Old Dillaway--Ebenezer Dillaway, Peter’s father-in-law--had
decoyed the pair on from Montana because him and some Wall Street
sharks were figgerin’ on buyin’ some copper country out that way that
Stumpton owned. Then Dillaway was too sick, and Peter, who was jest
back from his weddin’ tower, brought the Montana victims down to the
Cape with the excuse to give ’em a good time alongshore, but really
to keep ’em safe and out of the way till Ebenezer got well enough to
finish robbin’ ’em. Belle--Peter’s wife--stayed behind to look after
papa.

Stumpton was a great tall man, narrer in the beam, and with a
figgerhead like a henhawk. He jest enjoyed himself here at the Cape.
He fished, and loafed, and shot at a mark. He sartinly could shoot.
The only thing he was wishin’ for was somethin’ alive to shoot at, and
Brown had promised to take him out duck shootin’. ’Twas too early for
ducks, but that didn’t worry Peter any; he’d a-had ducks to shoot at if
he bought all the poultry in the township.

Maudina was like her name, pretty but sort of soft and mushy. She had
big blue eyes and a baby face, and her principal cargo was poetry. She
had a deckload of it, and she’d heave it overboard every time the wind
changed. She was forever orderin’ the ocean to “roll on,” but she
didn’t mean it; I had her out sailin’ once when the bay was a little
mite rugged, and I know. She was jest out of a convent school, and you
could see she wasn’t used to most things--includin’ men.

The fust week slipped along, and everything was serene. Bulletins from
Ebenezer more encouragin’ every day, and no squalls in sight. But ’twas
almost too slick. I was afraid the calm was a weather breeder, and sure
enough, the hurricane struck us the day after that fishin’ trip.

Peter had gone drivin’ with Maudina and her dad, and me and Cap’n
Jonadab was smokin’ on the front piazza. I was pullin’ at a pipe, but
the cap’n had the home end of one of Stumpton’s cigars harpooned on the
little blade of his jackknife, and was busy pumpin’ the last drop of
comfort out of it. I never see a man who wanted to git his money’s wuth
more’n Jonadab. I give you my word, I expected to see him swaller that
cigar remnant every minute.

And all to once he gives a gurgle in his throat.

“Take a drink of water,” says I, scared like.

“Well, by time!” says he, p’intin’.

A feller had jest turned the corner of the house and was headin’ up in
our direction. He was a thin, lengthy craft, with more’n the average
amount of wrists stickin’ out of his sleeves, and with long black hair
trimmed aft behind his ears and curlin’ on the back of his neck. He
had high cheek bones and kind of sunk-in black eyes, and altogether he
looked like “Dr. Macgoozleum, the Celebrated Blackfoot Medicine Man.”
If he’d hollered: “Sagwa Bitters, only one dollar a bottle!” I wouldn’t
have been surprised.

But his clothes--don’t say a word! His coat was long and buttoned up
tight, so’s you couldn’t tell whether he had a vest on or not--though
’twas a safe bet he hadn’t--and it and his pants was made of the
loudest kind of black-and-white checks. No nice quiet pepper-and-salt,
you understand, but the checkerboard kind, the oilcloth kind, the kind
that looks like the marble floor in the Boston post office. They was
pretty tolerable seedy, and so was his hat. Oh, he was a last year’s
bird’s nest _now_, but when them clothes was fresh--whew! the northern
lights and a rainbow mixed wouldn’t have been more’n a cloudy day
’longside of him.

He run up to the piazza like a clipper comin’ into port, and he sweeps
off that rusty hat and hails us grand and easy.

“Good-mornin’, gentlemen,” says he.

“We don’t want none,” says Jonadab, decided.

The feller looked surprised. “I beg your pardon,” says he. “You don’t
want any--what?”

“We don’t want any ‘Life of King Solomon’ nor ‘The World’s Big
Classifyers.’ And we don’t want to buy any patent paint, nor sewin’
machines, nor clothes washers, nor climbin’ evergreen roses, nor
rheumatiz salve. And we don’t want our pictures painted, neither.”

Jonadab was gittin’ excited. Nothin’ riles him wuss than a peddler,
unless it’s a woman sellin’ tickets to a church fair. The feller
swelled up until I thought the top button on that thunderstorm coat
would drag anchor, sure.

“You are mistaken,” says he. “I have called to see Mr. Peter Brown; he
is--er--a relative of mine.”

Well, you could have blown me and Jonadab over with a cat’s-paw. We
went on our beam ends, so’s to speak. A relation of Peter T.’s; why, if
he’d been twice the panorama he was we’d have let him in when he said
that. Loud clothes, we figgered, must run in the family. We remembered
how Peter was dressed the fust time we met him.

“You don’t say!” says I. “Come right up and set down, Mr--Mr.----”

“Montague,” says the feller. “Booth Montague. Permit me to present my
card.”

He dove into the hatches of his checkerboards and rummaged around, but
he didn’t find nothin’ but holes, I jedge, because he looked dreadful
put out, and begged our pardons five or six times.

“Dear me!” says he. “This is embarrassin’. I’ve forgot my cardcase.”

We told him never mind the card; any of Peter’s folks was more’n
welcome. So he come up the steps and set down in a piazza chair like
King Edward perchin’ on his throne. Then he hove out some remarks about
its bein’ a nice morning’, all in a condescendin’ sort of way, as if
he usually attended to the weather himself, but had been sort of busy
lately, and had handed the job over to one of the crew. We told him all
about Peter, and Belle, and Ebenezer, and about Stumpton and Maudina.
He was a good deal interested, and asked consider’ble many questions.
Pretty soon we heard a carriage rattlin’ up the road.

“Hello!” says I. “I guess that’s Peter and the rest comin’ now.”

Mr. Montague got off his throne kind of sudden.

“Ahem!” says he. “Is there a room here where I may--er--receive Mr.
Brown in a less public manner? It will be rather a--er--surprise for
him, and----”

Well, there was a good deal of sense in that. I know ’twould surprise
_me_ to have such an image as he was sprung on me without any notice.
We steered him into the gents’ parlor, and shut the door. In a minute
the horse and wagon come into the yard. Maudina said she’d had a
“heavenly” drive, and unloaded some poetry concernin’ the music of
billows, and pine trees, and sech. She and her father went up to their
rooms, and when the decks was clear Jonadab and me tackled Peter T.

“Peter,” says Jonadab, “we’ve got a surprise for you. One of your
relations has come.”

Brown, he did looked surprised, but he didn’t act as he was any too
joyful.

“Relation of _mine_?” says he. “Come off! What’s his name?”

We told him Montague, Booth Montague. He laffed.

“Wake up and turn over,” he says. “They never had anything like that in
my fam’ly. Booth Montague! Sure ’twa’n’t Algernon Coughdrops?”

We said no, ’twas Booth Montague, and that he was waitin’ in the
gents’ parlor. So he laffed again, and said somethin’ about sendin’
for Laura Lean Jibbey, and then we started.

The checkerboard feller was standin’ up when we opened the door.
“Hello, Petey!” says he, cool as a cucumber, and stickin’ out a foot
and a ha’f of wrist with a hand at the end of it.

Now, it takes consider’ble to upset Peter Theodosius Brown. Up to
that time and hour I’d have bet on him against anything short of an
earthquake. But Booth Montague done it--knocked him plumb out of water.
Peter actually turned white.

“Great----” he began, and then stopped and swallered. “_Hank!_” he
says, and set down in a chair.

“The same,” says Montague, wavin’ the starboard extension of the
checkerboard. “Petey, it does me good to set my lamps on you.
Especially now, when you’re the reel thing.”

Brown never answered for a minute. Then he canted over to port and
reached down into his pocket. “Well,” says he, “how much?”

But Hank, or Booth, or Montague--whatever his name was--he waved his
flipper disdainful. “Nun-nun-nun-no, Petey, my son,” he says, smilin’.
“It ain’t ’how much?’ this time. When I heard how you’d rung the bell
the first shot out the box and was rollin’ in coin, I said to myself:
‘Here’s where the prod comes back to his own.’ I’ve come to live with
you, Petey, and you pay the freight.”

Peter jumped out of the chair. “_Live_ with me!” he says. “You Friday
evenin’ amateur night! It’s back to ‘Ten Nights in a Barroom’ for
yours!” he says.

“Oh, no, it ain’t!” says Hank, cheerful. “It’ll be back to Popper
Dillaway and Belle. When I tell ’em I’m your little cousin Henry and
how you and me worked the territories together--why--well, I guess
there’ll be gladness round the dear home nest; hey?”

Peter didn’t say nothin’. Then he fetched a long breath and motioned
with his head to Cap’n Jonadab and me. We see we weren’t invited to
the family reunion, so we went out and shut the door. But we did pity
Peter; I snum if we didn’t!

It was ’most an hour afore Brown come out of that room. When he did he
took Jonadab and me by the arm and led us out back of the barn.

“Fellers,” he says, sad and mournful, “that--that plaster cast in a
crazy-quilt,” he says, referrin’ to Montague, “is a cousin of mine.
That’s the livin’ truth,” says he, “and the only excuse I can make is
that ’tain’t my fault. He’s my cousin, all right, and his name’s Hank
Schmults, but the sooner you box that fact up in your forgetory, the
smoother ’twill be for yours drearily, Peter T. Brown. He’s to be Mr.
Booth Montague, the celebrated English poet, so long’s he hangs out at
the Old Home; and he’s to hang out here until--well, until I can dope
out a way to get rid of him.”

We didn’t say nothin’ for a minute--jest thought. Then Jonadab says,
kind of puzzled: “What makes you call him a poet?” he says.

Peter answered pretty snappy: ”’Cause there’s only two or three jobs
that a long-haired image like him could hold down,” he says. “I’d call
him a musician if he could play ’Bedelia’ on a jews’-harp; but he
can’t, so’s he’s got to be a poet.”

And a poet he was for the next week or so. Peter drove down to
Wellmouth that night and bought some respectable black clothes, and the
follerin’ mornin’, when the celebrated Booth Montague come sailin’ into
the dinin’ room, with his curls brushed back from his forehead, and his
new cutaway on, and his wrists covered up with clean cuffs, blessed
if he didn’t look distinguished--at least, that’s the only word I can
think of that fills the bill. And he talked beautiful language, not
like the slang he hove at Brown and us in the gents’ parlor.

Peter done the honors, introducin’ him to us and the Stumptons as
a friend who’d come from England unexpected, and Hank he bowed and
scraped, and looked absent-minded and crazy--like a poet ought to. Oh,
he done well at it! You could see that ’twas jest pie for him.

And ’twas pie for Maudina, too. Bein’, as I said, kind of green
concernin’ men folks, and likewise takin’ to poetry like a cat to fish,
she jest fairly gushed over this fraud. She’d reel off a couple of
fathom of verses from fellers named Spencer or Waller, or sech like,
and he’d never turn a hair, but back he’d come and say they was good,
but he preferred Confucius, or Methuselah, or somebody so antique that
she nor nobody else ever heard of ’em. Oh, he run a safe course, and he
had _her_ in tow afore they turned the fust mark.

Jonadab and me got worried. We see how things was goin’, and we didn’t
like it. Stumpton was havin’ too good a time to notice, goin’ after
“Labrador mack’rel” and so on, and Peter T. was too busy steerin’
the cruises to pay any attention. But one afternoon I come by the
summerhouse unexpected, and there sat Booth Montague and Maudina, him
with a clove hitch round her waist, and she lookin’ up into his eyes
like they were peekholes in the fence ’round paradise. That was enough.
It jest simply _couldn’t_ go any further, so that night me and Jonadab
had a confab up in my room.

“Barzilla,” says the cap’n, “if we tell Peter that that relation of his
is figgerin’ to marry Maudina Stumpton for her money, and that he’s
more’n likely to elope with her, ’twill pretty nigh kill Pete, won’t
it? No, sir; it’s up to you and me. We’ve got to figger out some way to
git rid of the critter ourselves.”

“It’s a wonder to me,” I says, “that Peter puts up with him. Why don’t
he order him to clear out, and tell Belle if he wants to? She can’t
blame Peter ’cause his uncle was father to an outrage like that.”

Jonadab looks at me scornful. “Can’t, hey?” he says. “And her
high-toned and chummin’ in with the bigbugs? It’s easy to see you never
was married,” says he.

Well, I never was, so I shet up.

We set there and thought and thought, and by and by I commenced to
sight an idee in the offin’. ’Twas hull down at fust, but pretty soon I
got it into speakin’ distance, and then I broke it gentle to Jonadab.
He grabbed at it like the “Labrador mack’rel” grabbed Stumpton’s hook.
We set up and planned until pretty nigh three o’clock, and all the next
day we put in our spare time loadin’ provisions and water aboard the
_Patience M._ We put grub enough aboard to last a month.

Just at daylight the mornin’ after that we knocked at the door of
Montague’s bedroom. When he woke up enough to open the door--it took
some time, ’cause eatin’ and sleepin’ was his mainstay--we told him
that we was plannin’ an early-mornin’ fishin’ trip, and if he wanted to
go with the folks he must come down to the landin’ quick. He promised
to hurry, and I stayed by the door to see that he didn’t git away. In
about ten minutes we had him in the skiff rowin’ off to the _Patience
M._

“Where’s the rest of the crowd?” says he, when he stepped aboard.

“They’ll be along when we’re ready for ’em,” says I. “You go below
there, will you, and stow away the coats and things.”

So he crawled into the cabin, and I helped Jonadab git up sail. We
intended towin’ the skiff, so I made her fast astern. In ha’f a shake
we was under way and headed out of the cove. When that British poet
stuck his nose out of the companion we was abreast the p’int.

“Hi!” says he, scramblin’ into the cockpit. “What’s this mean?”

I was steerin’ and feelin’ toler’ble happy over the way things had
worked out.

“Nice sailin’ breeze, ain’t it?” says I, smilin’.

“Where’s Mau--Miss Stumpton?” he says, wild like.

“She’s abed, I cal’late,” says I, “gittin’ her beauty sleep. Why don’t
_you_ turn in? Or are you pretty enough now?”

He looked fust at me and then at Jonadab, and his face turned a little
yellower than usual.

“What kind of a game is this?” he asks, brisk. “Where are you goin’?”

’Twas Jonadab that answered. “We’re bound,” says he, “for the Bermudas.
It’s a lovely place to spend the winter, they tell me,” he says.

That poet never made no remarks. He jumped to the stern and caught hold
of the skiff’s pointer. I shoved him out of the way and picked up the
boat hook. Jonadab rolled up his shirt sleeves and laid hands on the
centerboard stick.

“I wouldn’t, if I was you,” says the cap’n.

Jonadab weighs pretty close to two hundred, and most of it’s gristle.
I’m not quite so much, fur’s tonnage goes, but I ain’t exactly a canary
bird. Montague seemed to size things up in a jiffy. He looked at us,
then at the sail, and then at the shore out over the stern.

“Done!” says he. “Done! And by a couple of ‘come-ons’!”

And down he sets on the thwart.

“Is there anything to drink aboard this liner?” asks Booth Hank
Montague.

Well, we sailed all that day and all that night. Course we didn’t
reelly intend to make the Bermudas. What we intended to do was to
cruise around alongshore for a couple of weeks, long enough for the
Stumptons to git back to Dillaway’s, settle the copper bus’ness and
break for Montana. Then we was goin’ home again and turn Brown’s
relation over to him to take care of. We knew Peter’d have some plan
thought out by that time. We’d left a note tellin’ him what we’d done,
and sayin’ that we trusted to him to explain matters to Maudina and her
dad. We knew that explainin’ was Peter’s main holt.

The poet was pretty chipper for a spell. He set on the thwart and
bragged about what he’d do when he got back to “Petey” again. He said
we couldn’t git rid of him so easy. Then he spun yarns about what him
and Brown did when they was out West together. They was interestin’
yarns, but we could see why Peter wa’n’t anxious to introduce Cousin
Henry to Belle. Then the _Patience M._ got out where ’twas pretty
rugged, and she rolled consider’ble, and after that we didn’t hear much
more from friend Booth--he was too busy to talk.

That night me and Jonadab took watch and watch. In the mornin’ it
thickened up and looked squally. I got kind of worried. By nine o’clock
there was every sign of a no’theaster, and we see we’d have to put
in somewheres and ride it out. So we headed for a place we’ll call
Baytown, though that wa’n’t the name of it. It’s a queer, old-fashioned
town, and it’s on an island; maybe you can guess it from that.

Well, we run into the harbor and let go anchor. Jonadab crawled into
the cabin to git some terbacker, and I was for’ard coilin’ the throat
halyard. All to once I heard oars rattlin’, and I turned my head; what
I see made me let out a yell like a siren whistle.

There was that everlastin’ poet in the skiff--you remember we’d
been towin’ it astern--and he was jest cuttin’ the painter with his
jackknife. Next minute he’d picked up the oars and was headin’ for the
wharf, doublin’ up and stretchin’ out like a frog swimmin’, and with
his curls streamin’ in the wind like a rooster’s tail in a hurricane.
He had a long start ’fore Jonadab and me woke up enough to think of
chasin’ him.

But we woke up fin’lly, and the way we flew round that catboat was a
caution. I laid into them halyards, and I had the gaff up to the peak
afore Jonadab got the anchor clear of the bottom. Then I jumped to the
tiller, and the _Patience M._ took after that skiff like a pup after a
tomcat. We run alongside the wharf jest as Booth Hank climbed over the
stringpiece.

“Git after him, Barzilla!” hollers Cap’n Jonadab. “I’ll make her fast.”

Well, I hadn’t took more’n three steps when I see ’twas goin’ to be a
long chase. Montague unfurled them thin legs of his and got over the
ground somethin’ wonderful. All you could see was a pile of dust and
coat tails flappin’.

Up on the wharf we went and round the corner into a straggly kind of
road with old-fashioned houses on both sides of it. Nobody in the
yards, nobody at the windows; quiet as could be, except that off ahead,
somewheres, there was music playin’.

That road was a quarter of a mile long, but we galloped through it so
fast that the scenery was nothin’ but a blur. Booth was gainin’ all the
time, but I stuck to it like a good one. We took a short cut through a
yard, piled over a fence and come out into another road, and up at the
head of it was a crowd of folks--men and women and children and dogs.

“Stop thief!” I hollers, and ’way astern I heard Jonadab bellerin’:
“Stop thief!”

Montague dives headfust for the crowd. He fell over a baby carriage,
and I gained a tack ’fore he got up. He wa’n’t more’n ten yards ahead
when I come bustin’ through, upsettin’ children and old women, and
landed in what I guess was the main street of the place and right
abreast of a parade that was marchin’ down the middle of it.

Fust there was the band, four fellers tootin’ and bangin’ like fo’mast
hands on a fishin’ smack in a fog. Then there was a big darky totin’ a
banner with “Jenkins’ Unparalleled Double Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company,
Number 2,” on it in big letters. Behind him was a boy leadin’ two
great, savage-lookin’ dogs--bloodhounds, I found out afterward--by
chains. Then come a pony cart with Little Eva and Eliza’s child in it;
Eva was all gold hair and beautifulness. And astern of her was Marks,
the Lawyer, on his donkey. There was lots more behind him, but these
was all I had time to see jest then.

Now, there was but one way for Booth Hank to git acrost that street,
and that was to bust through the procession. And, as luck would have
it, the place he picked out to cross was jest ahead of the bloodhounds.
And the fust thing I knew, them dogs stretched out their noses and took
a long sniff, and then bu’st out howlin’ like all possessed. The boy,
he tried to hold ’em, but ’twas no go. They yanked the chains out of
his hands and took after that poet as if he owed ’em somethin’. And
every one of the four million other dogs that was in the crowd on the
sidewalks fell into line, and such howlin’ and yappin’ and scamperin’
and screamin’ you never heard.

Well, ’twas a mixed-up mess. That was the end of the parade. Next
minute I was racin’ across country with the whole town and the Uncle
Tommers astern of me, and a string of dogs stretched out ahead
fur’s you could see. ’Way up in the lead was Booth Montague and the
bloodhounds, and away aft I could hear Jonadab yellin’: “Stop thief!”

’Twas lively while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. There was a
little hill at the end of the field, and where the poet dove over
t’other side of it the bloodhounds all but had him. Afore I got to the
top of the rise I heard the awfullest powwow goin’ on in the holler,
and thinks I: “They’re eatin’ him alive!”

But they wa’n’t. When I hove in sight Montague was settin’ up on the
ground at the foot of the sand bank he’d fell into, and the two hounds
was rollin’ over him, lappin’ his face and goin’ on as if he was their
grandpa jest home from sea with his wages in his pocket. And round
them, in a double ring, was all the town dogs, crazy mad, and barkin’
and snarlin’, but scared to go any closer.

In a minute more the folks begun to arrive; boys first, then girls and
men, and then the women. Marks come trottin’ up, poundin’ the donkey
with his umbrella.

“Here, Lion! Here, Tige!” he yells. “Quit it! Let him alone!” Then he
looks at Montague, and his jaw kind of drops.

“Why--why, _Hank_!” he says.

A tall, lean critter, in a black tail coat and a yaller vest and
lavender pants, comes puffin’ up. He was the manager, we found out
afterward.

“Have they bit him?” says he. Then he done jest the same as Marks; his
mouth opened and his eyes stuck out. “_Hank Schmults_, by the livin’
jingo!” says he.

Booth Montague looks at the two of ’em kind of sick and lonesome.
“Hello, Barney! How are you, Sullivan?” he says.

I thought ’twas about time for me to git prominent. I stepped up, and
was jest goin’ to say somethin’ when somebody cuts in ahead of me.

“Hum!” says a voice, a woman’s voice, and toler’ble crisp and vinegary.
“Hum! it’s you, is it? I’ve been lookin’ for _you_!”

’Twas Little Eva in the pony cart. Her lovely posy hat was hangin’ on
the back of her neck, her gold hair had slipped back so’s you could see
the black under it, and her beautiful red cheeks was kind of streaky.
She looked some older and likewise mad.

“Hum!” says she, gittin’ out of the cart. “It’s you, is it, Hank
Schmults? Well, p’r’aps you’ll tell me where you’ve been for the last
two weeks? What do you mean by runnin’ away and leavin’ your----”

Montague interrupted her. “Hold on, Maggie, hold on!” he begs. “_Don’t_
make a row here. It’s all a mistake; I’ll explain it to you all right.
Now, please----”

“Explain!” hollers Eva, kind of curlin’ up her fingers and movin’
toward him. “Explain, will you? Why, you miser’ble, low-down----”

But the manager took hold of her arm. He’d been lookin’ at the crowd,
and I cal’late he saw that here was the chance for the best kind of
an advertisement. He whispered in her ear. Next thing I knew she
clasped her hands together, let out a scream and runs up and grabs the
celebrated British poet round the neck.

“Booth!” says she. “My husband! Saved! Saved!”

And she went all to pieces and cried all over his necktie.

And then Marks trots up the child, and that young one hollers: “Papa!
papa!” and tackles Hank around the legs. And I’m blessed if Montague
don’t slap his hand to his forehead, and toss back his curls, and look
up at the sky, and sing out: “My wife and babe! Restored to me after
all these years! The heavens be thanked!”

Well, ’twas a sacred sort of time. The town folks tiptoed away, the
men lookin’ solemn but glad, and the women swabbin’ their deadlights
and sayin’ how affectin’ ’twas, and so on. Oh, you could see that show
would do bus’ness _that_ night, if it never did afore.

The manager got after Jonadab and me later on, and did his best to pump
us, but he didn’t find out much. He told us that Montague b’longed to
the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company, and that he’d disappeared a fortni’t or
so afore, when they were playin’ at Hyannis. Eva was his wife, and the
child was their little boy. The bloodhounds knew him, and that’s why
they chased him so.

“What was you two yellin’ ‘Stop thief!’ after him for?” says he. “Has
he stole anything?”

We says: “No.”

“Then what did you want to get him for?” he says.

“We didn’t,” says Jonadab. “We wanted to git rid of him. We don’t want
to see him no more.”

You could tell that the manager was puzzled, but he laffed.

“All right,” says he. “If I know anything about Maggie--that’s Mrs.
Schmults--he won’t git loose ag’in.”

We only saw Montague to talk to but once that day. Then he peeked out
from under the winder shade at the hotel and asked us if we’d told
anybody where’d he been. When he found we hadn’t, he was thankful.

“You tell Petey,” says he, “that he’s won the whole pot, kitty and all.
I don’t think I’ll visit him again, nor Belle, neither.”

“I wouldn’t,” says I. “They might write to Maudina that you was a
married man. And old Stumpton’s been prayin’ for somethin’ alive to
shoot at,” I says.

The manager give Jonadab and me a couple of tickets, and we went to the
show that night. And when we saw Booth Hank Montague paradin’ about the
stage and defyin’ the slave hunters, and tellin’ ’em he was a free man,
standin’ on the Lord’s free soil, and so on, we realized ’twould have
been a crime to let him do anything else.

“As an imitation poet,” says Jonadab, “he was a kind of mildewed
article, but as a play actor--well, there may be some that can beat
him, but _I_ never see ’em!”

AS IT ENDED

  God planned me for a butterfly,
    But I was marred i’ the making;
  What is it that old Omar says
    Of the Potter’s hand a-shaking?
  Ah, no, not that, the colors ran,
    The form turned out awry,
  And so I’m what they call a man
    Who’d be a butterfly.

            FARRINGDON DAVIS.

_The TEARS of UNDINE_

By

Edith Macvane

In the morning young Glyn lost his steamer, so he was forced to spend
the whole day at Pemaquid; in the afternoon he lost his heart, so he
was forced to stay there for his entire vacation.

This is the way it happened.

After luncheon he went out to sit all by himself on the end of the
pier, with a book on “Recent Developments in Dairy Machinery”; for
Glyn was a young patent lawyer, a very rising one, in the city of New
York; and, as he had failed to find one familiar face in this far-away
Maine resort, it seemed to him that he could do nothing better with
his time of waiting than devote it to his business. So he sat deep in
study, lifting an eye occasionally to the granite cliffs, the dark,
ancient fir trees, and the bay with its distant rim of purple-shadowed
hills; while the old fisherman beside him smoked his pipe placidly, and
the noisy crowd of bathers in by the shore splashed one another with
screams of mirth. The student sighed occasionally, for, though a lawyer
and a good one, he was still young; then he reproved himself for his
sighing, for he aimed to be rather superior, and was also, as a matter
of fact, rather shy.

Suddenly a shower of scattering drops fell cold upon his neck and
glittered upon the page before him. He started and looked up; the sky
was blue and cloudless, his ancient neighbor as placid as the day
itself. Then it seemed to him that he heard a laugh, the merest tinkle
of a laugh, from somewhere below the wharf; and, starting to his feet
and looking downward, he beheld a mermaid floating in the water beneath
him.

She lay slim and green upon the gentle harbor swell, her white arms
outstretched, her eyelids closed, her wet, upturned face framed by the
floating wreaths of dark hair that coiled and rippled in the water
about her. Suddenly she threw up her hands and sank slowly, vanishing
with a cloud of little bubbles. Glyn started back, horror-smitten. He
was not much of a swimmer, even in the warm waters of the Sound; and
this North Atlantic water chilled his very eyes with its icy-green
transparency.

Nevertheless, under the racial impulse of the life-saver, he threw off
his coat and swung his arms preparatory to a jump. Suddenly the hoary
and languid old sea dog by his side reached out a slow, restraining
hand.

“Don’t go wettin’ yourself for nothing young fellah! That girl, she’s a
fish. Watch and see her come up again.”

In a cold perspiration of anxiety the young man waited for a
fulfillment of these words. The suspense seemed endless, till suddenly,
and at an amazing distance, the waters heaved and parted, and the
swimmer’s sleek dark head emerged like a seal’s. Back she came to the
wharf, swimming with strokes like those of an oarsman--easy, long and
sure. At the end of the pier she paused and clung to the foot of the
slippery green steps that ran down the side of the piles, and, resting
her chin upon her clasped arms, she glanced up at the two men above
her like a severe and dripping cherub. The old fisherman returned to
his line, but the student, flinging away his book, ran down the oozy
staircase to meet her.

“May I--may I be of any assistance to you?” he inquired, with eager
politeness.

She continued to look up at him with the same disapproving air. “You
didn’t jump in after me, did you?” she observed, suddenly.

“Well, no,” returned Glyn, somewhat dazed at this greeting. “You see, I
was told that you could swim.”

She glared up at the unobserving fisherman. “That was Ben--old
tattle-tale!” she hissed; then, turning back to the young man, she
inquired, with sudden pathos: “And how should you have felt if I had
never come up again?”

“Like a murderer,” replied Stephen Glyn, solemnly. The answer seemed to
please her, for she relaxed her frown. “Oh, well, you are all right,
anyway,” she was good enough to observe, as she loosed her hold upon
the step and swam slowly away to the shore.

So when the afternoon steamer left Pemaquid, one hour later, it left
without Stephen Glyn.

He told himself that the air of this sea-girt promontory was just the
thing for him: good chance to learn to swim; quiet place, capital
chance to study and get at the bottom of those dairy implements. As
for the girl--she was pretty to look at, to be sure, with her big
green eyes and the glancing motions of her long white hands beneath
the water. But still what did the prettiness of a passing girl matter
to a prosaic fellow like him? “Besides,” as Stephen added, wisely, to
himself, “I’m too old for nonsense, and too young for business--so
what’s the use?”

And so, being in this indifferent frame of mind, he spent an hour in
putting on his newest English flannels and the very latest thing in
pale green shirts, and then, upon descending to the dining room, he
bribed the waiter to give him a seat at the next table to his casual
acquaintance of the pier; merely, as he told himself, out of curiosity
to see how she looked with her hair dry.

In spite of all this indifference, there was a distinct sinking at
Glyn’s heart when at last she came, passed by him, seated herself at
her table without even a glance in his direction. She seemed in high
spirits, she ate with a remarkable appetite, and she talked and laughed
incessantly with the large, pink-faced lady on her right and the jolly
youth in a blue necktie on her left. All Glyn’s honest Harvard blood
rose and boiled within him at the sight of that blue necktie--merely,
he assured himself, at the thought of recent football scores. As for
the girl, what did it matter to him if she let a dozen Yale men tell
her jokes and crack her lobster claws for her?

It must be confessed, however, even by the most disapproving and
indifferent critic, that she was charming to look upon, with her thick
hair--yellow with greenish lights--and her warm, white skin, tanned by
the sun to the pale brown of coffee with cream in it. So after dinner,
when a half dozen other youths had dispossessed the Yale man of his
monopoly, Glyn strolled up to him and inquired whether he had not seen
him at New London the month before.

The Yale man replied to these overtures of friendship with the offer of
his cigarette case, his name and the secrets of his heart. “I’m Martin,
’05,” he confided. “Ever been in New Haven? Best place on earth! I
say, how do you like Pemaquid--how long are you going to stay? There
are some ripping girls here. At least, there’s Elfie May, that girl I
sat next to at the table. Notice her? A queen, isn’t she? And you just
ought to see her swim! But she throws a fellow down so. I guess I’ll
go home to-morrow.” The blithe face drew down into sudden sadness--ah,
poor little Yale man!

“The girl that sat next to you at dinner,” mused Glyn. “Ah, yes. I
think I noticed her--rather good-looking, yes. New York girl?”

“No, Boston. Want me to introduce you?”

“If you will be so kind,” returned Glyn, with elation, and a sudden
softening of his heart toward the blue. Martin went over to the far
end of the piazza, where Miss May sat trailing her indifferent gaze
across her little court of admirers, and laughing lazily at their
witticisms and their compliments. As the Yale man spoke to her, Glyn
saw her glance flash for a brief instant in his direction, and he
started forward to meet his new friend halfway upon his return. But oh,
disappointment! “I’m so sorry,” said the pleasant little chap from New
Haven, “but she says no! I don’t know why, but she said it, just like
that--no!”

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” returned Glyn. “And thank you so much
for taking all that trouble.” He spoke gayly, but his hand trembled as
he tried to strike a light upon the side of his match case. “Here, let
me give you some fire, old chap,” cried his new acquaintance, genially.

That night Glyn did not sleep very well. Not that he cared one scrap
for a snub from a disagreeable, spoiled child! But deep down he
recognized what it was--the regretful ache, the yearning, baffled
tenderness that had newly filled his heart. He writhed in recollection
of the repulse he had received, and then forgot the pain in delight as
that glance came back to him, those eyes raised to him from the water,
eyes so thickly fringed, with dark irids rimmed in clear sea green.

Dawn broke early and brilliant; after that there was no sleep for
the restless newcomer, and suddenly it occurred to him that the best
plan--the most enjoyable and the most independent--would be to hire
a craft and go out for a day’s deep sea fishing, far from the jars
and distractions of the hotel. For though, like many sailors, he had
but little skill in swimming, he was excellent at managing a boat,
and fishing was one of his favorite sports. A descent to the pier, in
the long-shadowed quiet of the early morning, proved this plan easy
of fulfillment. Old Ben, the fisherman of the day before, was there
clearing out his tiny sloop, the _Fried Cod_. For a mildly exorbitant
sum he agreed to let the boat to the New York man for the day, provide
tackle, throw in bait, and give all necessary directions to the
fishing grounds.

So Glyn had a day of long-shore sport, of long waiting, of rolling in a
hot and oily sea, finally of hauling in fat, plobby fish--cod and hake,
which lacked blood to make even a decent fighting struggle for their
lives. Then in the calm of the sunset the _Fried Cod_ drifted back with
the tide into the little harbor on the nose of the rocky promontory.
Her skipper worked lazily at the sweeps, keeping a dazzled eye out
ahead over the glassy reflection of the golden west which fronted
him. Suddenly, as he floated in between the breakwaters, it seemed to
him that he saw the head of a swimmer silhouetted blackly against the
sunlit water, approaching him from the shore in a wake of fire.

“Sloop ahoy!” called a slow, soft voice. Glyn jumped up, his heart
beating, and with a few more vigorous side strokes the swimmer shot to
the side of the little craft and blinked two clear wet eyes up at its
skipper.

“Please, may I come aboard for a moment?”

Glyn forgot all past injuries as he bent over the side of the boat,
beaming upon the face upturned to him from its aureole of ripples.

“Oh, I can climb up all right,” she cried, in answer to his offers of
aid, and with a quick, vaulting motion she swung herself up over the
gunwale of the little sloop. Seating herself upon the thwart, she threw
back her long, wet locks from her face, and shot a glance, half serious
and wholly sweet, at the young man before her.

“I’ve been waiting for you all day,” she said, plaintively. “Why didn’t
you come in sooner?”

Glyn regarded her in amazement.

“Well, you could hardly expect me to believe that I was wanted,” he
retorted, in a slightly aggrieved tone, remembering his wrongs of last
night.

She began to laugh softly--a long, noiseless chuckle that moved even
Glyn’s watchful dignity to a smile. “Oh, you mean last night.” Glyn
noticed that her voice was deep and smooth, with just the faintest
suspicion of hoarseness, and deep, mellow tones and overtones that
vibrated richly through its inflections. “Last night, you see, is just
what I want to explain,” she went on. “You see, that little Martin
thing has such a funny way of dropping his jaw when one says no to him,
that I just couldn’t resist. And, besides, you see, I didn’t want to
have him introducing us--little calf! So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just
introduce myself: Elfrida May, that’s my name.”

Glyn looked at her seriously as he set his tiller for a course to the
anchorage near the pier. “Thanks very much,” he returned, “but, if you
don’t mind, I should rather make believe it was Undine.”

“Undine!” she cried. “Who was Undine?”

“You don’t know about poor little Undine? Very well, then, I’ll tell
you her story some time. Now you must let me introduce myself, too.”

“Oh, I know your name, Mr. Glyn,” she cried, artlessly, and, extending
her wet hand, she gave him a hearty grip, like a man’s.

Suddenly her eye roved to the floor of the little cockpit, and her face
took on suddenly its severe lines of the day before. “Ah, they are
dead!” she whispered, in a kind of horrified way; then stooping, she
picked up one of the fish--a small cod, curved in a rigid bow from nose
to tail. She stroked its slippery back tenderly. “Poor little thing!”
she mourned.

Glyn stared at her bewildered. “Don’t you approve of fishing?” he asked.

“No, I don’t!” she replied, with vehemence. “I won’t eat them, even
canned! I’d feel like a cannibal! Poor things! To drown in the lovely
green water--that wouldn’t be bad. But to be pulled out of the sea, and
drown in the air, think how horridly unpleasant! Do you mind if I put
them back again, please?” she asked, anxiously.

“Certainly not,” replied Glyn, though, as a matter of fact, he was
particularly fond of fresh boiled cod, and also proud of his morning’s
catch.

One by one the tender-hearted pirate dropped the motionless things
softly into the sea; they sank heavily, and then rose, floating
with white bellies upturned. Her eyes, as she regarded them, were
surprisingly soft and tender. “Poor things,” she murmured, “they can’t
swim any more, but I am sure that they must rest easier so. Thank you,
Mr. Glyn, for giving them back to me.”

And so their friendship began, in bewilderment and mutual good will.

Now, much can happen in a month, and as July drew near to a close
Stephen no longer tried to disguise from himself the change that had
come into his life. The question that unceasingly knocked at his brain
was no longer “Do I care for her?” but “Does she, oh, can she possibly,
care for me!” The very intensity with which he put this question to
himself made him delay, from day to day, the crucial test of putting
it to the only person that could decide it for him. So he relieved his
feelings by sending every week to Maillard’s for a huge box wrapped in
silver paper; and every morning he waited with impatient heart upon the
pier for the coming of that slim and dancing figure with the long green
silk legs, the cream-white arms and the flying strands of pale yellow
hair, that fell to the hem of the short green petticoat.

Her skill in the water was to him a constant wonder, a constant
delight. His own attempts at diving and swimming he soon gave up,
finding this northern water too cold for him; and so, in spite of
Elfrida’s gibes, he sat on the dock and watched her as she took
backward somersaults and dead-man dives and went down below in search
of sinking clam shells. Her high jump from the piles, holding up her
little skirt with a dainty hand, and winking blithely as she descended,
was a thing long to be remembered for sheer mirth, for frank, childish
joy. Yet it was then that Stephen sighed as he regarded her. After
all, was it a woman he loved, with a warm human heart to respond to
his own; or a careless mermaid, a cold creature, whose sole joy was
thus dancing, plunging, flashing through the foam of the white, curling
waves?

So far as he could judge, there was no real affection in her heart
except this for her friend, the sea. Toward her mother, a heavy, placid
woman with literary pretensions, Elfrida was kind in an impersonal,
far-off sort of way; to the other girls in the hotel--who respected her
for her high dives and hated her for her monopoly of the few men at
Pemaquid--she seemed indifferent, with a kind of mocking politeness;
while toward her little court of admirers she showed a capricious
tyranny, at times almost savage. To these things even the adoring eyes
of Stephen Glyn could not be blind; and one day when, owing to a severe
headache of her mother’s, she was obliged to forego her swim, and
appeared at dinner a muttering thundercloud, it was impossible for even
the most ardent of adorers to pass by these signs without a sigh.

True, she had shown a tender heart toward the lifeless cod and hake;
and sometimes, as she looked at the sea, in the uproar of a summer
squall or in the silvery silence of a fog, Glyn would be startled by
the look that suddenly crept into her eyes.

“Ah!” she breathed one evening, as they sat together watching the
sunset from the pier. “Ah, it wouldn’t be hard to die, would it, if
one could lie at the bottom of the sea?” Glyn grunted uncomfortably in
answer, and tried to look as though he agreed with this sentiment.

The next day, when they were out canoeing together, Elfrida surprised
him by reverting suddenly to one of the first conversations of their
acquaintance. “You said you were going to tell me about Undine,” she
said, “but you haven’t--not a word.”

Glyn sighed as he regarded her. She had been unusually tantalizing,
not to say aggravating, that afternoon, and his honest heart was sore
within him. But what better mood, what better occasion, for relating
the story of the unfortunate water nymph, from the time she first
appeared in the hut of the old fisherman, a light-hearted, soulless
child, to the unhappy hour when, abandoned by the man she loved, she
vanished silently into her native element--“a woman gifted with a
soul, filled with love and heir to suffering.”

It was but recently that Stephen had read the story, and he told it
well, for, though a lawyer, he was in love, and he had a poetical soul.
Elfrida listened in silence, her face turned away, her hand trailing in
the still water beside her. After the story-teller had finished, there
was a pause.

“Well,” said Stephen, disappointed, “didn’t you like it?”

Elfrida glanced up at him--a quick, irresolute glance, quite unlike
her usual frank gaze. She seemed about to speak, but to Glyn’s
disappointment she turned away her head again, so that her face was
hidden from him. With her trailing hand she drew a long, dripping spray
of brown seaweed from the water.

“What did Undine gain, after all,” she said, “by leaving the sea?”

“She learned how to love, and she won a soul,” responded Stephen,
leaning toward her. “Don’t you think that she was the gainer, after
all?”

She suddenly flung away the seaweed. “No, I don’t!” she cried,
passionately. “In the sea she had freedom and happiness! But love--what
did she find it, after all, but a miserable slavery? And she got her
heart broken in the end. No, indeed, you can’t make me pity her--she
was just silly, your Undine!”

Nothing more was spoken as they paddled to the shore. Glyn was hurt,
disappointed; and Elfrida kept her face still turned away.

The next morning, however, Glyn was more disappointed than ever; for
when he came down to breakfast he failed to find the one face that he
desired to see. From Mrs. May he learned that Elfrida had gone out for
a day’s sail with young Martin and two or three others. So he moped
about all day, smoking and trying to read his “Dairy Machinery,” now
sadly rusty. And from time to time he was drawn unwillingly into the
universal discussion on costumes for the coming dance and masquerade.

Toward evening Elfrida and her companions returned. In spite of her
day’s amusement, her face wore its severe expression, and she glanced
at him without a smile as she passed him on the piazza.

“You’ve been here all day, I suppose,” she said, with an inflection of
resentment in her tone. “Just think, a great big man like you afraid to
go into the sea!”

Before Glyn could open his mouth to defend himself she was gone. But
after dinner she came to him with a shy, suspicious air, and a touch of
mystery that was explained by her first words.

“See here,” she said, softly, “this masquerade. I’ve been thinking it
over, and I think if I can manage it, I want to go as Undine, you know.”

Stephen was filled with delight. “And you’ll let me help plan your
dress?” he cried.

Elfie nodded, and offered her ideas on the subject to the approval
of his authority. The young man listened, offered suggestions here
and there, and then, with a sudden backward thought, he remembered
a trinket in his possession--a little pearl bracelet, a trifle, but
beyond anything appropriate to the costume in hand. Within himself he
resolved to send home immediately for it, and to present it to Elfrida
on the night of the dance.

In the days that followed it seemed to him that he saw strangely little
of her, and the little that he did see was less than satisfactory. Her
absence from the piazza, and her refusals to go paddling with him, she
excused on the plea of being busy with her new costume. But even on the
pier at the bathing hour she seemed to shun him, or noticed him only
with jeers and gibes at what she called his laziness.

“Ah, can anybody have a soul that is afraid of the sea?” she cried.
“Come, Mr. Martin, let us race over to the monument!” With a splash and
a flounce the two set out together, the green bathing dress and the
triumphant blue; while Glyn sat alone on the wharf with a leaden heart
and rage at his soul.

This state of affairs had very little altered when at last the day of
the dance arrived. A hundred times in the interim had Stephen resolved
to give up the whole affair and go home; but then he decided to wait
and see this new Undine in the flesh. To his anxiety, the bracelet had
not yet arrived; nor did it come until the last post on the evening
of the dance, after everybody had gone upstairs to dress. In joyful
relief, Stephen slipped the little box in the pocket of his improvised
admiral’s costume, and ran downstairs to the hall to wait for the
coming of his Undine.

Elfrida did not appear till late, when the room was filled with
whirling harlequins and Pompadours and Swiss peasant maidens. The
admiral stood by the door, waiting for her, his little box in his
hand and his heart in his mouth. Finally, as though she had been on
the watch to avoid him, he saw her enter the hall by one of the long
windows opening from the veranda without. In spite of his vexation, he
could not but smile with sheer pleasure at the sight of her, as her
eyes and her white teeth flashed a smile upon the room. In her pale,
sea-green draperies, dragging heavily at the hem with a fragile border
of urchin shells, her creamy neck and shoulders bare, her flowing
yellow hair bound and wreathed with strands of dark, wet seaweed--oh,
she was pretty, indeed! Stephen sprang forward.

“Good-evening, Undine! Here--I have something for you, will you let me
give it to you? A little ornament to complete your costume.”

“You may give it to me later,” she replied, with an indifference that
chilled and baffled him; and he watched her miserably as she swung
off into the two-step with a tall, sunburned youth from Boston--a
conceited-looking pup, Glyn told himself, in a vain attempt at
consolation.

The evening was half over before he managed to get near her again. “Our
dance, Mr. Glyn,” she cried, taking his arm and smiling up at him. Her
eyebrows, which, in spite of her fair hair, were black and thickly
ridged, were arched high in the mocking expression that he hated to see
upon her face. She was in wild spirits, gay with the evening’s success,
fluttered with a reckless and inconsequent laughter that set the
fibers of her lover’s heart quivering painfully.

“Let’s go down on the breakwater,” she said, “instead of dancing. It’s
so hot here.” Bewildered and obedient, Stephen followed her, and a few
moments later they were sitting side by side at the end of the moonlit
pier.

“Doesn’t the water look nice?” cried Elfie, bending over it lovingly.
“For two cents, I’d jump into it this very moment.”

“Please don’t!” expostulated Stephen, in alarm. She turned her bright
eyes toward him.

“What did you say you had for me?” she said.

Half shamefacedly, Stephen drew from his pocket the little box that
he had received a few hours before. “Just a trifle,” he said, “that
I picked up in Swabia a few years ago. See!” He opened the cover and
took out a slender string of fresh-water pearls set in silver, some
milk-white, some shimmering prismatically in the moonlight.

“Oh, how lovely!” cried Elfie, with artless delight. “And they’re for
me?”

“If you’ll take them,” replied Stephen, hurriedly. “You see, they are
perfectly valueless little things--but the reason I wanted you to wear
them was because, you see, they really belong to you. These pearls are
found in one of the headwaters of the Danube, in Undine’s own country.
The peasants say they are the drops that Undine wept after she had
returned heartbroken to her water world. And so they call these pearls
the tears of Undine. Will you have them, Undine?”

He bent toward her tenderly, and she held out her hand with a
constrained gesture. “This Undine doesn’t intend to shed any tears
of her own,” she answered, “and so, I suppose, that these drops will
save her a lot of trouble. Thanks! Yes, do clasp it on. Thank you very
much.” She tried to pull her hand away, but Stephen retained it in his
own.

“I love you. Don’t you care a bit for me, Elfie?” he blurted,
desperately. “Elfie, will you be my wife?”

She snatched her hand away this time, and scrambled to her feet. “Oh,”
she cried, “_don’t_ be silly, _don’t_ be sentimental--here by the
lovely, sensible sea, too!” Stephen rose and stood staring at her, and
she went on with a hurried laugh: “Thank you very much, Mr. Glyn, and
now that I have had a proposal, I shall always be a bachelor-lady, and
shan’t ever have to worry about being an old maid. And the pearls are
lovely, but I never intend to marry anyone--and now, oh, _do_ let’s go
into that dear black water.”

She stood, a lovely, pale figure in the moonlight, embarrassed,
half-laughing, while her green eyes shot out and streamed a reckless
gleam at the young man standing dejected before her. “Do you dare me?”
she cried.

Stephen saw that in her present daredevil mood she was equal to
anything. “No, please don’t!” he cried. “This time of night, in all
those long draperies, it wouldn’t be safe--please don’t!”

“Not safe for Undine?” she laughed, defiantly. “Pooh, who’s afraid?”
Stephen put out his hand to restrain her, but she laughed again--one of
her long, silent chuckles. “Such a grand chance to show off. I’m not
going to miss it!” she cried, and, eluding Stephen’s touch, she sprang
like a long, silvery streak over the edge of the breakwater into the
phosphorescent blackness beneath. In wrath and anxiety, the young man
waited until her head emerged in a whirlpool of silvery fire.

“You are quite safe, Elfie?” he called, anxiously.

Her wild, careless laughter answered him. “Come in, the water’s fine.
Come in; oh, come in! I dare you! I dare you!”

She swam off toward the moonlight with powerful side strokes, hardly
diminished by her encumbering drapery. “I dare you!” she cried again.

No flesh and blood, not even of the most prudent young lawyer in New
York, could withstand such a challenge. Heedless of consequences,
Stephen flung himself over into the dark. The water was cold, his
clothes were heavy; but he struck out valiantly. “Come on, oh, come
on!” called the voice, far away on the surface of the water, and he
strained every tendon to follow. A canoe drifted out slowly from
somewhere--he didn’t know where--then it seemed to draw nearer, or
else to disappear--he didn’t know which. The water was icy cold, his
breath drew thick, his limbs, unaccustomed either to the cold or to
the unwonted strain, were wrenched with a sudden muscular agony, and
seemed to pass from his ownership and his control. Still, in the white
moonlight before him, the black streak that he was following moved
steadily along. He cursed himself as an effeminate monkey--“beaten by a
girl!”

Then girls and Undines, farming implements and crystal palaces, whirled
and shimmered dimly before his eyes. All he wanted was to rest--just
a chance to rest! And, throwing out both arms, he gave himself up
helplessly to the water.

II.

It was late the next morning when Martin thrust his cheerful little
face in at the door of Stephen Glyn’s room at the hotel.

“Well, how are you to-day?” cried the newcomer. “Gee, that was a narrow
squeak you had last night, and no mistake!”

Stephen woke with a start, and turned in a dim and growing amazement
at the stiffness of his limbs, the painful heaviness of his breath.
Slowly, as the little Yale man sat chattering by his bed, the troubled
events of the night before came back to him--the foolhardy plunge
from the breakwater, the interval of blank nothingness, the agonized
struggle back into life, the hands working at his chest and his limbs;
then the slow opening of his eyelids under the frightened face of young
Martin, bending over him.

“Yes, I did make an ass of myself, and no mistake,” he mused, aloud, in
a hoarse and broken voice.

“Nonsense!” cried Martin. “A cramp--why, that’s likely to come over
anybody. No one could laugh at you for having a cramp; though Miss
May----” he stopped short, with a half-embarrassed laugh.

“What about Miss May?” asked Stephen, trying to conceal the agitation
he felt.

“Why, nothing. Only, I met her just now going out to sail with some
of the fellows. They all stopped to ask how you were. She didn’t say
a word--stood there looking queer, somehow. So I told them you were
feeling better this morning with all the water pumped out of you; and
she began to laugh; didn’t say a word, just stood and laughed, till,
upon my word, I thought she was going to cry. She’s a funny one and no
mistake--half fish, I call her.”

Glyn was silent. So this was the way that his narrow escape from
drowning appeared to Elfrida--to her for whom he had risked not only
his life, but his dignity as well.

“Can I do anything for you, old chap?” asked the other, with
good-natured solicitude.

“Thanks, I think you have done quite enough for me already.”

“Pshaw!” cried Martin, rising in the alarm of approaching thanks. “It
was nothing. And now I’ve got to be going downstairs. As for you, my
boy, you’d better lie still to-day. You don’t want to get pneumonia out
of this, do you?”

But in spite of timely warnings, in spite of aching limbs and a dizzy
head, it was not very long after this that Stephen rose, dressed
himself and went slowly downstairs. From the few people sitting about
on the piazza waiting for lunch--ladies with toy poodles, old gentlemen
with newspapers--Glyn received congratulations on his escape, and
remarks of a more or less trying facetiousness. Of course Elfrida was
not there; of course she had not yet returned from her sail. And even
if she had, what difference should it make to him?

So he strolled down on the rocks toward the breakwater with a rather
slow and uncertain step. His heart was sore within him. The future
was dim; in the present, one fact only stood out with dreary
distinctness--he had given the best love of his life where return was
not only denied, but, from the nature of things, impossible. As well
toss a rose in a monkey cage as bestow a living heart on a perverse and
freakish child like Elfrida, who regarded the gift merely as the means
of a moment’s amusement, to be picked to pieces and then tossed to the
ground. After all, was she a woman, or, as Martin had said, a wild
creature, half human and half fish, for the possession of whom it was
useless to contend with her cold and tempestuous lover, the sea?

He caught himself almost shaking his fist in a helpless rage of
jealousy at the little green waves that lapped at his feet. “Rubbish!”
he said to himself, in scorn at the fanciful absurdity of his notion.
But then, as the scene of last night came back to him, he shook his
head in mournful bewilderment.

A light clatter of stones on the breakwater above his head roused him
from his reverie. Looking up, he saw a white figure hurrying silently
along. “Good-morning,” he called, with a wild hope that his thoughts
had translated themselves into the wild, living embodiment. There was
no answer. “Miss May, is that you?” he called again.

There was a moment’s pause, then Elfrida’s face, white and severe,
appeared over the stone coping. “I didn’t intend that you should hear
me pass,” she said, frowning. “It was these hateful old stones that
gave me away.”

Glyn’s heart contracted. Was his presence so disagreeable to her,
then, that she chid the very stones that betrayed her presence to
him? Then concern for his own pain was lost in sudden concern for the
unsteadiness of her position.

“Take care, please! Those stones are loose where you are standing, I
can see from below here.”

She smiled willfully. “Thank you, Mr. Glyn, I am quite secure. You see,
this breakwater is a friend of mine. It would never go back on _me_.”

In her words, as in her smile, Glyn found an echo of that laughter
with which earlier in the day she had greeted Martin’s story of his
narrow encounter with death. “Yes,” he replied, with a bitter sinking
of the heart, “I did make rather an ass of myself last night, didn’t I?”

She laughed abruptly, but made no reply. Glyn stood looking up at her
as she stood on the barrier of loose stones above his head--shading her
eyes with the book that she held in her hand, looking out over the sea.
A sense of his own helplessness rocked Glyn’s soul in a sudden rage. He
wanted her, oh, he wanted her, as she stood there, cold and immovable,
defended at every point by her own scornful ignorance of common human
emotion, unassailed even by the twin lords of mankind, Love and Death,
which had so newly brushed closely past her.

Suddenly she started and turned to meet his gaze with half-startled,
inscrutable eyes. “The tide is on the turn,” she said, in a
quick-breathed undertone--then the stone under her foot slipped and
settled, she flung out her arms to steady herself, and barely recovered
her balance as she swayed for an instant on the edge of the rough stone
parapet. In wild anxiety Glyn sprang forward, heedless of her book,
which fell fluttering past his head.

“Take care!” he cried. “Take care!”

She smiled down at him, her lips a little white, but otherwise
perfectly composed. “It’s too bad,” she said. “From the first day I met
you, I am always frightening you to death, Mr. Glyn.”

Was she thinking of his failure of the night before? Glyn’s heart
quivered with mortification. “Yes,” he said; “it’s easy to frighten me,
you see.”

She laughed again--a little, quick, troubled laugh. “But I didn’t come
down here to see you, you know, Mr. Glyn,” she said. “I was going out
on the end of the breakwater to read for a little while, till lunch
time--I didn’t expect to see you, you know.”

Why need she disclaim so eagerly any wish to see him? thought Glyn to
himself. Not much danger of his flattering himself to the contrary. So
he bowed with as much composure as he could muster.

“Certainly,” he replied; “and I am very sorry to have intruded upon
your solitude. But let me see, your book--it fell past me just now, I
think.”

He turned to search among the bowlders which lay strewed about him.
Suddenly Elfrida’s voice came to him, strained and high.

“Mr. Glyn,” she said, “please don’t take any trouble about my book.”

He paused, perplexed. “It’s no trouble, Miss May, I assure you. Look! I
can see it there between the bowlders in the seaweed--a new book, isn’t
it? Here, let me give it to you.”

He took a step toward it. “Mr. Glyn!” cried Elfrida. “You mustn’t--you
mustn’t! I forbid you to touch my book!”

Glyn turned and gazed up at her. She was leaning down toward him from
the rough masonry above, her hands stretched out, her face flushed to
a bright crimson, her eyes sparkling, wide open, filled with anger and
with something else besides--misgiving and something that was almost
like fear.

“Mr. Glyn!” she repeated, violently. “Please go away now, please! And
let me come down and pick up my book myself!”

Glyn looked up at her, at her face, wild, beautiful and threatening,
bent down toward him. So her scorn for him was so deep, her detestation
so entire, that he was not to be permitted to touch so much as the book
that had fallen from her hand.

Now, at last, beyond a doubt, he had his answer. He stood silent
for a moment, looking dumbly first at the half-soaked volume almost
hidden among the seaweed, then at the head above him, so lovely and so
carelessly terrible, bright and golden against the blue background of
the sky.

“Miss May,” he said, “believe me, I had no intention of intruding on
you. I beg your pardon, and--good-by, Elfie!”

Now, the solitary steamer that calls at Pemaquid makes her single trip
in the morning; the overland route to the distant railway station is
so hilly and rough as to be almost impossible to the few aged horses in
the village; hence there are difficulties in the way of anybody who is
resolved to take his departure from Pemaquid immediately after lunch.
“It’s too bad,” drawled old Ben, in sympathetic reply to Stephen’s
eager inquiries, “but, you see, down East here nobody ain’t ever in a
hurry. We hev all the time they is. In the West, of course, I know it’s
different. I suppose, naow, in N’ York you have a train every hour in
the day, don’t you?”

Stephen stood helpless. To remain another day in Pemaquid, after what
had happened, was to him an impossibility; and yet how to escape? His
eye fell on a small fishing schooner at the end of the wharf, the only
boat of seagoing size that the place boasted. Her sails were hoisted
and two men were working at her anchor. A sudden idea came to Stephen.
“Couldn’t I hire that boat,” he said, “to sail me over to Boothbay
Harbor?”

Old Ben began to laugh. “Couldn’t you hire a whale?” he said. “That
boat, she’s the _Twin Sisters_, and she belongs to my brother-in-law,
Jabez Hooper, and he’s sot in his ways, like the old monument over
there. This is the day he’s goin’ swordfishin’ in her; and now he’s
p’inted her nose for ’Tit Menan, it would take more money than you
could find in six pots o’ gold to git him to p’int her to the west’ard
for you instead.”

Stephen grasped eagerly at the idea. A few more weeks away from his
work--what did it matter now, after all, in the emptiness of the dog
days? “Swordfishing? Just the thing! Do you think he’d take me with
him?”

“_As_ a passenger?” asked the cautious Ben.

“A passenger? Certainly. I’ll pay him anything in reason.”

To this proposition the old longshoreman gave a grudging and
indifferent assent; then gleefully pushed out in a dory to arrange
terms with his relative and wrangle about the amount of commission
which his own enterprise was to receive; while Stephen went back to
the hotel to pack up a few necessaries for the trip and arrange with
the landlady for the storage of his luggage till his return.

A hurried inquiry brought forth the information that Martin had gone
out sailing, together with most of the others. “Miss May, she’s gone,
too,” remarked the woman, with the faint and flickering ghost of a
smile. “They’ll all be _real_ sorry to find you turn up missin’ when
they come back, I’m sure of that.”

Glyn left a hastily scribbled note for Martin, and hurried down to the
pier, with strength restored to his limbs and hope to his heart by
this unlooked for and novel means of escape. On the deck of this rough
fishing boat he might escape from the fancied chains which had weighed
him down to the unmanly servitude here in Pemaquid. Here on the sea
he might find “the world of men for a man”; the world of hand-to-hand
struggle with forces unchanged since the earth was made; the wind, the
water, the sharp necessities of the chase. Here, if anywhere, was the
path of deliverance from the chimera of Unfulfilled Desire.

III.

It was nearly three weeks later that the _Twin Sisters_ rounded
Allen’s Island--traveling, as her skipper said, “with a bone in her
mouth”--and set her homeward course across the windy and sparkling
waters of Muscongus Bay. In the stern the steersman flung his weight on
the wheel; in the bow lay Stephen, his hand closed upon the helplessly
fluttering leaves of his “Dairy Machinery,” his eyes fixed upon the
mound of glittering green foam that swept in perpetual advance of the
vessel’s bow.

Through his mind flitted a shifting retrospect of these last weeks upon
the sea--the rushing voyage through rock-sown bays and windy fairways;
the days of creaking rise-and-fall upon the heavy swell of a dead
and scorching sea, or of groping for buoys through the blind white
fog; nights under the starlight, nights when the wild summer rain had
driven him for shelter to the hot and evil-smelling cabin of the little
schooner. And, above all, the ceaseless watch for the great fish that
they had come to hunt, the tense excitement of the signal, the swift
dark flight of the harpoon; then the breathless chase of the flying
keg that marked the flight of the frenzied monster across the sea.
In their wild hunts Stephen had shown a reckless audacity, a rapidly
acquired skill, that gradually commanded the respect of the cynical and
indifferent Captain Jabez himself. “Y’ain’t so bad, for a rusticator,”
was his outspoken praise. Stephen sighed in helpless irritation; after
all, what was the use of pretending to himself that it was the respect
of his fellow man for which he exerted himself in these strenuous
exertions to show nautical strength and skill? What was the use, after
all, of leaving Pemaquid at all, so long as the very sea foam itself
brought him a fantastic vision of white arms flashing from the water,
and each curling green wave recalled to him a pair of eyes deeper and
more transparent than the sea itself?

“Spoony!” hissed Stephen, in fierce self-contempt, when suddenly the
skipper raised a languid cry from the stern.

“There’s the old p’int, Stephen, if you want to see it.”

Sure enough, there were the high brown walls of Pemaquid, bare to the
wind and the surrounding ocean. In spite of himself, Stephen’s heart
leaped up as he regarded it.

The wind calmed down with the approaching sunset as the _Twin Sisters_
floated slowly in between the breakwaters, recalling to Stephen that
first evening when his boat had been met and boarded by a wandering sea
nymph. This time the mirrored sunset was empty and bare, the harbor was
silent.

“Reckon they’re all busy with their fried lobster an’ hot biscuit, up
to the hotel,” remarked Captain Jabez, sourly, as he surveyed their
catch, laid out upon the deck--seven great swordfishes, black and
shapeless, like elongated kitchen stoves, their skin still glistening
from their icy bed in the vessel’s hold. “I thought we’d git a dozen,”
he remarked, discontentedly. “Mind, I tell you, it’s just my luck. A
catch like that makes me feel like all my folks was sick to home.”

Suddenly from the end of the breakwater a white figure started up, her
eyes shielded with a book, her hair reddened brilliantly by the sinking
sun.

“For the law’s sakes!” exclaimed Captain Jabez. “See, there’s
what’s-her-name, the fish girl, waitin’ to see us land!”

Stephen turned; the world was warm and smiling. Was she really waiting
for him? He waved his hat and cried to her. For a moment she stood,
white, slim and motionless; then, with a single gesture, lifeless and
perfunctory, she turned and walked slowly up to the hotel.

“Of course,” said Stephen to himself, in vain mockery at his own pain.
After all, what did it matter? Tomorrow he would leave it forever, this
cold and alluring coast of Maine; and with paved streets and the rush
of work would come forgetfulness.

Martin welcomed him warmly at the hotel. “Gee, you’re as brown as
a nut,” he said, “and old Jabez says you’re the best hand he ever
had--worth any two of these native loafers about here. Say, come and
sit at my table, and tell us about your trip.”

So, after Glyn had changed to the garb of civilization, he came down
and ate his supper, listening to the merry chatter of the little Yale
man. Elfrida bowed to him as he entered, but left the table soon after
he sat down. “I am going down to the breakwater, to look at those poor
swordfish that you killed,” she said, with some reproach, as she passed
by him. Her face was severe and unsmiling; it seemed to Glyn that she
was paler than usual, and her large eyes were faintly shadowed with
dark circles beneath their lids.

“What’s the matter with Miss May?” he asked Martin, abruptly.

The other turned his eyes from her retreating figure. “Oh, yes, I
forgot you’d been away. We’ve had great excitements since you were
gone, here at little Pemaquid.”

“What was the matter?” cried Stephen, while a thousand terrible
possibilities rose in his mind.

Martin began to laugh. “Oh, nothing very thrilling, that I could see.
But that girl--you know she’s a queen, but she’s half a freak, too--the
good half! Anyone that tries to understand her will have his job cut
out for life.”

Glyn raised his cup of tea carelessly. “But what did you say it was
that happened?”

“Why, this is the way it was--see if it doesn’t make you tired!
Everybody was talking about it. You remember that time last month when
you came so near your end, going in with her the night of the dance,
she never made a sound. And last week, when she lost a little trifling
bracelet in swimming--gee! she burst out crying right there on the pier
before everybody!”

A wild thought flitted into Stephen’s mind. “What kind of a bracelet
was it?” he inquired, with elaborate indifference.

“Nothing very much, to make a girl cry like that--a girl like Elfie,
too, the cold, superior, athletic kind. But, then, she’d been acting
queer for some time, didn’t you notice? No, it was since you went
away--nervous and quiet, and ready to snap your head off if you spoke
to her, always sitting down there on the breakwater, reading--Elfie
reading! Just fancy that! Gee! I never saw a girl change so quick
before.”

Stephen went on with his supper. “Well, did she find her bracelet?” he
inquired, carelessly.

“After the harbor was turned inside out--that’s the excitement, you
see. The whole town was out every day. Then she offered a reward--fifty
dollars; then a hundred. She wanted to send to Portland for divers.
But an old native chap found it at low tide--old Ben, you know, that
is always fishing there on the dock. So she paid him, on the nail--a
hundred plunks. And her mother said she couldn’t have any autumn
clothes, and she said she didn’t care one scrap.”

Stephen lit a cigarette with elaborate pains. “So, I suppose,” he
observed, tentatively, “that it was quite an elaborate bit of jewelry.”

“That’s the joke. A hundred dollars would have bought a dozen like
it--just clam pearls and silver. Say, it’s a peachy evening. Let’s go
and look up some of the crowd, and have a marshmallow toast on the
beach.”

Glyn rose. “I’m sorry, Martin, I have to go down and help my skipper
ashore with our catch. See you later--business, you see.”

“Three cheers for the bold fisherman!” grinned Martin, as Stephen
rushed from the hall with an eagerness which did credit to his sense of
duty toward Jabez.

Twilight was drawing down, damp and dusky, over rocks and harbor, as
Stephen hurried down to the breakwater. With swift precaution, he
stepped along over the loose stones--no one was there. He looked about
in desperate search. Then, in a little rocky nook at the extreme point,
he caught the glint of a familiar yellow head.

“Elfie!” he called, softly, as he hastened toward her. Her white
form rose up; she stood there looking at him, her book still in her
hand--looking at him silently.

As he joined her she laughed, a little, nervous laugh. “Oh, Mr. Glyn,
is that you?” she said. “And have you come to tell me about your
cruise?”

For a moment Stephen stood at a loss. Here before those clear cool
eyes, what Martin had told him seemed so absurd, so impossible. His
eyes fell upon the book in her hand. Suddenly, as he read the title in
the fading light, his heart beat again high and quick.

He put out his hand and gently took the volume from her. “I see that
you have been reading about Undine,” he said, tentatively.

She flushed a bright rose color; it was the second time he had ever
seen her color change. “Ah!” she cried, in a pale reflection of her old
mocking defiance. “The story you told me about--I’m sorry, you know,
but, really, I don’t find it very interesting.”

Stephen looked at her. “Elfie----” he said, but she stretched out
her hand in sudden embarrassment. “Give it back to me, please,” she
whispered. “I didn’t mean to be reading it now. Give it to me, please.”

For a moment Stephen stared at her, bewildered at this sudden intensity
of appeal. With her old impulsiveness, she flung out her arm to snatch
the betraying volume from his grasp. The laces of her sleeve fell back,
and there about her wrist Stephen beheld a bracelet--a string of large,
irregular pearls, rimmed and linked in silver.

He dropped the book and seized the hand in both of his own.

“So you still think of me sometimes, Elfie?”

She glanced up at him, frowning.

“Why did you go away without saying good-by to me last month?” she
asked, with her old air of severity.

“I didn’t want to bother you. I knew you didn’t care.” Beneath the
rigid inquisition of her gaze, Stephen stumbled over his words.

“You thought I didn’t care!” She turned her eyes away from him, and
twisted the bracelet upon her wrist. “Do _you_ care?” she asked,
abruptly.

“Elfrida, you know why I had to come back. You know that I care about
nothing else in the world but just you--dear, dearest little Elfie!”

She stepped back. “And yet,” she said, with a catch in her voice, “you
went away and left me.”

“But, Elfie dear, what else could I do? After you had laughed at me,
after you had refused to let me touch as much as your book when you
dropped it here on the beach!”

She began to laugh brokenly. “Don’t you understand?” she said, softly.
“I wasn’t going to let you know how silly I was. I couldn’t let you see
that I had sent for the book for myself--just because I wanted to read
again the story that you had told to me.”

“Elfie! My own dear Elfie!”

She raised her hand. “No, Stephen, one moment! Listen to me.” She
leaned toward him a little, standing there white and slender in the
gathering dusk, while Stephen listened eagerly. The little waves lapped
and gurgled through the rocky spaces of the breakwater; all about them
was the quiet evening of the sea.

“Last month, when you told me about Undine, I hated you,” she said,
passionately; “because I thought you meant that she was _me_, all the
time. And I was bound to show you that I wasn’t weak and silly like
that, and that I didn’t care a single scrap! And I didn’t care then,
either--not till that night when I was such a beast to you, and made
such a fool of myself, and you almost died--all my fault! So next day I
was so ashamed of myself, I didn’t dare even to speak to you, until I
had told you I was sorry. And just then I was so afraid you’d see that
book, that I made you go away--little fool! As though _that_ made any
difference!” She paused a moment. “And then in the evening I came back
and found that you were really gone away, without a single word!”

She raised her eyes to him slowly, and, to his amazement, he saw that
they were bright with the transparent wetness of tears.

“Do you remember,” she whispered, brokenly, “how--that night--I told
you that I never intended to shed any tears--planning to live like a
little brute? And you gave me these pearls, and told me they were the
tears that Undine had wept, after her soul had been given to her. Oh,
Stephen! There’s not a night since that night that I haven’t cried
myself to sleep thinking of you. So now I know that I have a soul, and
I have a heart. And the heart is all yours, if you want it, Stephen!”

NOW’S THE TIME O’ YEAR

  Now’s the time o’ year when the deep skies seem
  (Look where you will) like the dream of a dream;
  Toss of gold, floss of gold, weed-tip and tree,
  And purple like the twilight for the lone late bee.

  Now’s the time o’ year when the cider-stills run
  Amber--luscious amber--in the round red sun;
  And the bloom on the grape’s like the bloom on the cheeks
  Of a maid at the tryst when a low voice speaks.

  Now’s the time o’ year when the hill-crests call,
  And the clear rill-music has a tinkling fall;
  Piper of the South Wind, play up, play!
  Your hand in mine, love, let us away!

            CLINTON SCOLLARD.

PRIDE of RACE

By P. S. Carlson

At luncheon Bishop Chalmers, ensconced snugly between his hostess,
the handsome widow, Mrs. Patricia Danvers, and her equally charming
daughter, Miss Isabel, sublimated from the seclusion of boarding school
to society two seasons before, listened quietly to the many laudatory
comments on his sermon of the previous evening.

The sermon had been delivered in the large and fashionable city church
of St. Barnabas. Ostensibly it had been on “Charity”; principally it
was a plea for aid for the bishop’s struggling diocese in the South.
The bishop had received the invitation to preach from the rector of
the rich congregation, a classmate at the theological seminary, who
occupied a seat at the left of the hostess.

The rector was wifeless, as was the bishop, and after Mrs. Danvers had
satisfied herself that she had paid due deference to the bishop she
left him to the tender mercies of the daughter.

Mrs. Danvers, Patricia Hardesty that was, had begun life with a
devotion to the church, especially its representatives in this mundane
sphere. Her impoverished family, painfully aware that dollars were
far scarcer than devotion, insisted on her giving up her maidenly
intention of wedding a clergyman and urged on her the necessity of
marrying Horace Danvers, by no means religious, many years her senior
and “interested in cotton.” Now that the cotton had been shelved for
all time by the death of the husband, leaving a magnificent golden
fleece in its stead, her devotion to “the cloth” had reasserted itself.
Witness the bishop as a guest, the presence of the rector.

To the mind of the widow, worldly-minded, even if a devotee, the rector
was the far more desirable prospective _parti_. The bishop was too
small to fit her ideal. Her fancy was for large blond men who, in the
pulpit, have the appearance of Greek gods brought up to date by the
saving grace of the surplice. The rector was one of these.

Although Bishop Chalmers was below medium height, with anything but a
robust figure, he had a striking face. It was clean-shaven, ascetic and
of cameo-like clearness. The nose itself was indicative of ancestry,
the mouth was sensitive yet strong, and his blue eyes were remarkable
for their depth and expression of sadness. His silvery gray hair belied
his age, not yet fifty years. Pride of vocation and of race showed
itself in every feature.

The adoring women of his diocese were accustomed to describe the bishop
as one who was never known to smile.

“When his wife died he lost interest in everything but his life work,”
they were accustomed to say. “He reveres her memory as that of a saint.
Her death cast a shadow over his life, poor little bishop!”

That was not the underlying cause of his sadness. In the ecclesiastical
closet--a sanctum the interior of which none might see--a skeleton was
concealed.

As Mrs. Danvers glanced to her right with uninterrupted speech to the
rector, she smiled with satisfaction to see that the daughter was
cleverly holding the attention of the distinguished guest.

The girl had taken up the subject-thread of conversation where her
mother had dropped it.

“In your sermon I was greatly impressed by the story you told of the
unknown donor who each year sent you the large sum of money for your
diocesan work,” she was saying. “It appears so strange that anyone
should wish to conceal identity where such good work is concerned. You
have no intimation as to his or her identity?” she asked.

The bishop shook his head.

“Not the slightest. The nearest I have approached is to learn the name
of the bankers through whom the annual donation is made. It is a good
seed sown in a fruitful field, and some day the sower will reap harvest
an hundredfold,” he declared, reverently.

Of course Miss Isobel was properly impressed. She said nothing for a
little. She was a bright, butterfly sort of creature, whose veil of
innocence and apparent ingenuousness hid a nature which delighted in
sacrificing dignity and reserve to her mischief-making propensities.
She was of the kind ever ready to revert to the subject of round dances
or divorce with a High Church dignitary.

This idiosyncrasy asserted itself when she said to her listener, with
her well-feigned air of irresponsibility:

“Bishop, I should greatly like to have the pleasure of taking you this
afternoon for a spin in my runabout, had I not an engagement to see the
Derby run. Besides my promise to go, my favorite jockey is to ride in
this race, and I cannot miss the chance of winning or losing kid gloves
or bonbons on his horse. I suppose it is very sinful,” she sighed,
resignedly, glancing with challenging eyes at the bishop.

Emboldened, though disappointed, perhaps, by the fact that he did
not appear shocked or surprised, she continued in a tone wherein
earnestness and raillery were mingled:

“Could you reconcile your conscience so far as to accompany me to such
a sinful place as the race course, bishop?”

For a time, so long that the silence grew painful, the bishop made
no sign that he had heard. She noted a look on his face--was it one
of offended dignity or simple disgust at her daring? She could not
determine. Already she had framed an apology, when he said, without
lifting his eyes:

“Is it really so sinful?” continuing, quickly: “I do not doubt that it
is, and, perhaps, it may strike you as being strange and unworthy of my
calling, but for just once I should like to see the inside of a race
course.”

For some reason the statement struck a chord of sympathy in the girl’s
heart. It was in the nature of a confession.