mind. She wondered if it was her aunt's death. "I suppose you thought
a good deal of my aunt who died," she ventured, timidly.

Sylvia regarded her with quick suspicion. She paled a little. "I
thought enough of her," she replied. "She had always lived here. We
were distant-related, and we never had any words, but I didn't see
much of her. She kept herself to herself, especially of late years.
Of course, I thought enough of her, and it makes me feel real bad
sometimes--although I own I can't help being glad to have so many
nice things--to think she had to go away and leave them."

"I know you must feel so," said Rose. "I suppose you feel sometimes
as if they weren't yours at all."

Sylvia turned so pale that Rose started. "Why, what is the matter?
Are you ill?" she cried, running to her. "Let me get some water for
you. You are so white."

Sylvia pushed her away. "There's nothing the matter with me," she
said. "Folks can't always be the same color unless they're painted."
She gave her head a shake as if to set herself right, and turned
resolutely towards Rose's trunk. "Can you unpack, yourself, or do you
want me to help you?" she asked.

Rose eyed the trunk helplessly, then she looked doubtfully at Sylvia.
A woman who was a relative of hers, and who lived in a really grand
old house, and was presumably well-to-do, and had no maids at
command, but volunteered to do the service herself, was an anomaly to
her.

"I'm afraid it will be too much trouble," she said, hesitatingly.
"Marie always unpacked my trunk, but you have no--"

"I guess if I had a girl I wouldn't set her to unpacking your trunk,"
said Sylvia, vigorously. "Where is your key?"

"In my bag," replied Rose, and she searched for the key in her
dark-blue, gold-trimmed bag. "Mrs. Wilton's maid, Anne, packed my
trunk for me," she said. "Anne packs very nicely. Mr. Wilton and her
sister, Miss Pamela Mack, did not know whether I ought to put on
mourning or not for Cousin Eliza, but they said it would be only
proper for me to wear black to the funeral. So I have a ready-made
black gown and hat in the trunk. I hardly knew how much to bring. I
did not know--" She stopped. She had intended to say--"how long I
should stay," but she was afraid.

Sylvia finished for her. "You can stay just as long as you are a mind
to," said she. "You can live here all the rest of your life, as far
as that is concerned. You are welcome. It would suit me, and it would
suit Mr. Whitman."

Rose looked at Sylvia in amazement as she knelt stiffly on the floor
unlocking her trunk. "Thank you, you are very kind," she said,
feebly. She had a slight sensation of fear at such a wealth of
hospitality offered her from a stranger, although she was a distant
relative.

"You know this was your own aunt's house and your own aunt's things,"
said Sylvia, beginning to remove articles from the trunk, "and I want
you to feel at home here--just as if you had a right here." The words
were cordial, but there was a curious effect as if she were repeating
a well-rehearsed lesson.

"Thank you," Rose said again, more feebly than before. She watched
Sylvia lifting out gingerly a fluffy white gown, which trailed over
her lean arm to the floor. "That is a tea-gown; I think I will put it
on now," said Rose. "It will be so comfortable, and you are not
formal here, are you?"

"Eh?"

"You are not formal here in East Westland, are you?"

"No," replied Sylvia, "we ain't formal. So you want to put on--this?"

"Yes, I think I will."

Sylvia laid the tea-gown on the bed, and turned to the trunk again.

"You know, of course, that Aunt Abrahama and mamma were estranged for
years before mamma died," said Rose. She sat before the white
dressing-table watching Sylvia, and the lovely turn of her neck and
her blond head were reflected in the glass above the vase of flowers.

"Yes, I knew something about it."

"I never did know much, except that Aunt Abrahama did not approve of
mamma's marriage, and we never saw her nor heard of her. Wasn't it
strange," she went on, confidentially, "how soon after poor mamma's
death all my money came to me?"

Sylvia turned on her. "Have you got money?" said she. "I thought you
were poor."

"Yes, I think I have a great deal of money. I don't know how much. My
lawyers take care of it, and there is a trustee, who is very kind. He
is a lawyer, too. He was a friend of poor Cousin Eliza's. His name is
McAllister. He lives in Chicago, but he comes to New York quite
often. He is quite an old gentleman, but very nice indeed. Oh yes, I
have plenty of money. I always have had ever since mamma died--at
least, since a short time after. But we were very poor, I think,
after papa died. I think we must have been. I was only a little girl
when mamma died, but I seem to remember living in a very little,
shabby place in New York--very little and shabby--and I seem to
remember a great deal of noise. Sometimes I wonder if we could have
lived beside the elevated road. It does not seem possible that we
could have been as poor as that, but sometimes I do wonder. And I
seem to remember a close smell about our rooms, and that they were
very hot, and I remember when poor mamma died, although I was so
young. I remember a great many people, who seemed very kind, came in,
and after that I was in a place with a good many other little girls.
I suppose it was a school. And then--" Rose stopped and turned white,
and a look of horror came over her face.

"What then?" asked Sylvia. "Don't you feel well, child?"

"Yes, I feel well--as well as I ever feel when I almost remember
something terrible and never quite do. Oh, I hope I never shall quite
remember. I think I should die if I did."

Sylvia stared at her. Rose's face was fairly convulsed. Sylvia rose
and hesitated a moment, then she stepped close to the girl and pulled
the fair head to her lean shoulder. "Don't; you mustn't take on so,"
she said. "Don't try to remember anything if it makes you feel like
that. You'll be down sick."

"I am trying not to remember, and always the awful dread lest I shall
comes over me," sobbed the girl. "Mr. McAllister says not to try to
remember, too, but I am so horribly afraid that I shall try in spite
of me. Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela don't know anything about it. I
never said anything about it to them. I did once to Mr. McAllister,
and I did to Cousin Eliza, and she said not to try, and now I am
telling you, I suppose because you are related to me. It came over me
all of a sudden."

Rose sobbed again. Sylvia smoothed her hair, then she shook her by
the slender, soft shoulders, and again that overpowering delight
seized her. "Come, now," she said, "don't you cry another minute. You
get up and lay your underclothes away in the bureau drawers. It's
almost time to get supper, and I can't spend much more time here."

Rose obeyed. She packed away piles of laced and embroidered things in
the bureau drawers, and under Sylvia's directions hung up her gowns
in the closet. As she did this she volunteered further information.

"I do remember one thing," she said, with a shudder, "and I always
know if I could remember back of that the dreadful thing would come
to me." She paused for a moment, then she said, in a shocked voice:
"Mrs. Whitman."

"What is it?"

"I really do remember that I was in a hospital once when I was
little. I remember the nurses and the little white beds. That was not
dreadful at all. Everybody petted me, but that was when the trying
not to remember began."

"Don't you think of it another minute," Sylvia said, sternly.

"I won't; I won't, really. I--"

"For goodness' sake, child, don't hang that heavy coat over that lace
waist--you'll ruin it!" cried Sylvia.

Rose removed the coat hurriedly, and resumed, as Sylvia took it out
of her hand: "It was right after that Cousin Eliza Farrel came, and
then all that money was left to me by a cousin of father's, who died.
Then I went to live with Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela, and I went to
school, and I went abroad, and I always had plenty, and never any
trouble, except once in a while being afraid I should remember
something dreadful. Poor Cousin Eliza Farrel taught school all the
time. I never saw her but twice after the first time. When I grew
older I tried to have her come and live with me. Mrs. Wilton and Miss
Pamela have always been very nice to me, but I have never loved them.
I could never seem to get at enough of them to love."

"You had better put on that now," said Sylvia, indicating the fluffy
mass on the bed. "I'll help you."

"I don't like to trouble you," Rose said, almost pitifully, but she
stood still while Sylvia, again with that odd sensation of delight,
slipped over the young head a lace-trimmed petticoat, and fastened
it, and then the tea-gown. The older woman dressed the girl with
exactly the same sensations that she might have experienced in
dressing her own baby for the first time. When the toilet was
completed she viewed the result, however, with something that savored
of disapproval.

Rose, after looking in the glass at her young beauty in its setting
of lace and silk, looked into Sylvia's face for the admiration which
she felt sure of seeing there, and shrank. "What is the matter? Don't
I look nice?" she faltered.

Sylvia looked critically at the sleeves of the tea-gown, which were
mere puffs of snowy lace, streaming with narrow ribbons, reaching to
the elbow. "Do they wear sleeves like that now in New York?" asked
she.

"Why, yes!" replied Rose. "This tea-gown came home only last week
from Madame Felix."

"They wear sleeves puffed at the bottom instead of the top, and a
good deal longer, in East Westland," said Sylvia.

"Why, this was made from a Paris model," said Rose, meekly. Again
sophistication was abashed before the confidence of conservatism.

"I don't know anything about Paris models," said Sylvia. "Mrs.
Greenaway gets all her patterns right from Boston."

"I hardly think madame would have made the sleeves this way unless it
was the latest," said Rose.

"I don't know anything about the latest," said Sylvia. "We folks here
in East Westland try to get the _best_." Sylvia felt as if she were
chiding her own daughter. She spoke sternly, but her eyes beamed with
pleasure. The young girl's discomfiture seemed to sweeten her very
soul.

"For mercy's sake, hold up your dress going down-stairs," she
admonished. "I swept the stairs this morning, but the dust gathers
before you can say boo, and that dress won't do up."

Rose gathered up the tail of her gown obediently, and she also
experienced a certain odd pleasure. New England blood was in her
veins. It was something new and precious to be admonished as a New
England girl might be admonished by a fond mother.

When she went into the south room, still clinging timidly to her lace
train, Horace rose. Henry sat still. He looked at her with pleased
interest, but it did not occur to him to rise. Horace always rose
when Sylvia entered a room, and Henry always rather resented it.
"Putting on society airs," he thought to himself, with a sneer.

However, he smiled involuntarily; the girl was so very pretty and so
very unlike anything which he had ever seen. "Dressed up as if she
were going to a ball, in a dress made like a night-gown," he thought,
but he smiled. As for Horace, he felt dazzled. He had scarcely
realized how pretty Rose was under the dark-blue mist of her veil. He
placed a chair for her, and began talking about the journey and the
weather while Sylvia got supper. Henry was reading the local paper.
Rose's eyes kept wandering to that. Suddenly she sprang to her feet,
was across the room in a white swirl, and snatched the paper from
Henry's hands.

"What is this, oh, what is this?" she cried out.

She had read before Horace could stop her. She turned upon him, then
upon Henry. Her face was very pale and working with emotion.

"Oh," she cried, "you only telegraphed me that poor Cousin Eliza was
dead! You did not either of you tell me she was murdered. I loved
her, although I had not seen her for years, because I have so few to
whom my love seemed to belong. I was sorry because she was dead, but
murdered!"

Rose threw herself on a chair, and sobbed and sobbed.

"I loved her; I did love her," she kept repeating, like a distressed
child. "I did love her, poor Cousin Eliza, and she was murdered. I
did love her."

Chapter IX

Horace was right in his assumption that the case against Lucinda Hart
and Hannah Simmons would never be pressed. Although it was proved
beyond a doubt that Eliza Farrel had swallowed arsenic in a
sufficiently large quantity to cause death, the utter absence of
motive was in the favor of the accused, and then the suspicion that
the poison might have been self-administered, if not with suicidal
intent, with another, steadily gained ground. Many thought Miss
Farrel's wonderful complexion might easily have been induced by the
use of arsenic.

At all events, the evidence against Lucinda and Hannah, when sifted,
was so exceedingly flimsy, and the lack of motive grew so evident,
that there was no further question of bringing them to trial. Still
the suspicion, once raised, grew like a weed, as suspicion does grow
in the ready soil of the human heart. For a month after the tragedy
it seemed as if Sylvia Whitman's prophecy concerning the falling off
of the hotel guests was destined to fail. The old hostelry was
crowded. Newspaper men and women from all parts of the country
flocked there, and also many not connected with the press, who were
morbidly curious and revelled in the sickly excitement of thinking
they might be living in the house of a poisoner. Lucinda Hart sent in
her resignation from the church choir. Her experience, the first time
she had sung after Eliza Farrel's death, did not exactly daunt her;
she was not easily daunted. But she had raised her husky contralto,
and lifted her elderly head in its flowered bonnet before that
watchful audience of old friends and neighbors, and had gone home and
written her stiffly worded note of resignation.

She attended church the following Sunday. She said to herself that
her absence might lead people to think there was some ground for the
awful charge which had been brought against her. She bought a smart
new bonnet and sat among the audience, and heard Lucy Ayres, who had
a beautiful contralto, sing in her place. Lucy sang well, and looked
very pretty in her lace blouse and white hat, but she was so pale
that people commented on it. Sylvia, who showed a fairly antagonistic
partisanship for Lucinda, spoke to her as she came out of church, and
walked with her until their roads divided. Sylvia left Henry to
follow with Rose Fletcher, who was still staying in East Westland,
and pressed close to Lucinda.

"How are you?" she said.

"Well enough; why shouldn't I be?" retorted Lucinda.

It was impossible to tell from her manner whether she was grateful
for, or resented, friendly advances. She held her head very high.
There was a stiff, jetted ornament on her new bonnet, and it stood up
like a crest. She shot a suspicious glance at Sylvia. Lucinda in
those days entertained that suspicion of suspicion which poisons the
very soul.

"I don't know why you shouldn't be," replied Sylvia. She herself cast
an angry glance at the people around them, and that angry glance was
like honey to Lucinda. "You were a fool to give up your place in the
choir," said Sylvia, still with that angry, wandering gaze. "I'd
sung. I'd shown 'em; and I'd sung out of tune if I'd wanted to."

"You don't know what it was like last Sunday," said Lucinda then. She
did not speak complainingly or piteously. There was proud strength in
her voice, but it was emphatic.

"I guess I do know," said Sylvia. "I saw everybody craning their
necks, and all them strangers. You've got a lot of strangers at the
hotel, haven't you, Lucinda?"

"Yes," said Lucinda, and there was an echo in her monosyllable like
an expletive.

Sylvia nodded sympathizingly. "Some of them write for the papers, I
suppose?" said she.

"Some of them. I know it's my bread-and-butter to have them, but I
never saw such a parcel of folks. Talk about eyes in the backs of
heads, they're all eyes and all ears. Sometimes I think they ain't
nothing except eyes and ears and tongue. But there's a lot besides
who like to think maybe they're eating poison. I know I'm watched
every time I stir up a mite of cake, but I stir away."

"You must have your hands full."

"Yes; I had to get Abby Smith to come in and help."

"She ain't good for much."

"No, she ain't. She's thinkin' all the time of how she looks, instead
of what she's doing. She waits on table, though, and helps wash
dishes. She generally forgets to pass the vegetables till the meat is
all et up, and they're lucky if they get any butter; but I can't help
it. They only pay five dollars a week, and get a lot of enjoyment out
of watching me and Hannah, and they can't expect everything."

The two women walked along the country road. There were many other
people besides the church-going throng in their Sunday best, but they
seemed isolated, although closely watched. Presently, however, a
young man, well dressed in light gray, with a white waistcoat,
approached them.

"Why, good-day, Miss Hart!" he said, raising his hat.

Lucinda nodded stiffly and walked on. She did not speak to him, but
to Sylvia. "He is staying at the hotel. He writes for a New York
paper," she informed Sylvia, distinctly.

The young man laughed. "And Miss Hart is going to write for it, too,"
he said, pleasantly and insinuatingly. "She is going to write an
article upon how it feels to be suspected of a crime when one is
innocent, and it will be the leading feature in next Sunday's paper.
She is to have her picture appear with it, too, and photographs of
her famous hotel and the room in which the murder was said to have
been committed, aren't you, Miss Hart?"

"Yes," replied Lucinda, with stolidity.

Sylvia stared with amazement. "Why, Lucinda!" she gasped.

"When I find out folks won't take no, I give 'em yes," said Lucinda,
grimly.

"I knew I could finally persuade Miss Hart," said the young man,
affably. He was really very much of a gentleman. He touched his hat,
striking into a pleasant by-path across a field to a wood beyond.

"He's crazy over the country," remarked Lucinda; and then she was
accosted again, by another gentleman. This time he was older and
stouter, and somewhat tired in his aspect, but every whit as genially
persuasive.

"He writes for a New York paper," said Lucinda to Sylvia, in exactly
the same tone which she had used previously. "He wants me to write a
piece for his paper on my first twenty-four hours under suspicion of
crime."

"And you are going to write it, aren't you, Miss Hart?" asked the
gentleman.

"Yes," replied Lucinda, with alacrity.

This time the gentleman looked a trifle suspicious. He pressed his
inquiry. "Can you let us have the copy by Wednesday?" he asked.

"Yes," said Lucinda. Her "yes" had the effect of a snap.

The gentleman talked a little more at length with regard to his
article, and Lucinda never failed with her ready "yes."

They were almost at the turn of the road, where Sylvia would leave
Lucinda, when a woman appeared. She was young, but she looked old,
and her expression was one of spiritual hunger.

"This lady writes for a Boston paper," said Lucinda. "She came
yesterday. She wants me to write a piece for her paper upon women's
unfairness to women."

"Based upon the late unfortunate occurrence at Miss Hart's hotel,"
said the woman.

"Yes," said Lucinda, "of course; everything is based on that. She
wants me to write a piece upon how ready women are to accuse other
women of doing things they didn't do."

"And you are going to write it?" said the woman, eagerly.

"Yes," said Lucinda.

"Oh, thank you! you are a perfect dear," said the woman. "I am so
much pleased, and so will Mr. Evans be when he hears the news. Now I
must ask you to excuse me if I hurry past, for I ought to wire him at
once. I can get back to Boston to-night."

The woman had left them, with a swish of a frilled silk petticoat
under a tailored skirt, when Sylvia looked at Lucinda. "You ain't
goin' to?" said she.

"No."

"But you said so."

"You'd say anything to get rid of them. I've said no till I found out
they wouldn't take it, so then I began to say yes. I guess I've said
yes, in all, to about seventeen."

"And you don't mean to write a thing?"

"I guess I ain't going to begin writing for the papers at my time of
life."

"But what will they do?"

"They won't get the pieces."

"Can't they sue you, or anything?"

"Let them sue if they want to. After what I've been through lately I
guess I sha'n't mind that."

"And you are telling every one of them you'll write a piece?"

"Of course I am. It's the only thing they'll let me tell them. I want
to get rid of them somehow."

Sylvia looked at Lucinda anxiously. "Is it true that Albion Bennet
has left?" she said.

"Yes; he was afraid of getting poisoned. Mrs. Jim Jones has taken
him. I reckon I sha'n't have many steady boarders after this has
quieted down."

"But how are you going to get along, Lucinda?"

"I shall get along. Everybody gets along. What's heaped on you you
have to get along with. I own the hotel, and I shall keep more hens
and raise more garden truck, and let Hannah go if I can't pay her. I
shall have some business, enough to keep me alive, I guess."

"Is it true that Amos Quimby has jilted Hannah on account of--?"

"Guess so. He hasn't been near her since."

"Ain't it a shame?"

"Hannah's got to live with what's heaped on her shoulders, too," said
Lucinda. "Folks had ought to be thankful when the loads come from
other people's hands, instead of their own, and make the best of it.
Hannah has got a good appetite. It ain't going to kill her. She can
go away from East Westland by-and-by if she wants to, and get another
beau. Folks didn't suspect her much, anyway. I've got the brunt of
it."

"Lucinda," said Sylvia, earnestly. "Folks can't really believe you'd
go and do such a thing."

"It's like flies after molasses," said Lucinda. "I never felt I was
so sweet before in my life."

"What can they think you'd go and poison a good, steady boarder like
that for?"

"She paid a dollar a day," said Lucinda.

"I know she did."

"And I liked her," said Lucinda. "I know lots of folks didn't, but I
did. I know what folks said, and I'll own I found things in her room,
but I don't care what folks do to their outsides as long as their
insides are right. Miss Farrel was a real good woman, and she had a
kind of hard time, too."

"Why, I thought she had a real good place in the high-school; and
teachers earn their money dreadful easy."

"It wasn't that."

"What was it?"

Lucinda hesitated. "Well," she said, finally, "it can't do her any
harm, now she's dead and gone, and I don't know as it was anything
against her, anyway. She just set her eyes by your boarder."

"Not Mr. Allen? You don't mean Mr. Allen, Lucinda?"

"What other boarder have you had? I've known about it for a long
time. Hannah and me both have known, but we never opened our lips,
and I don't want it to go any further now."

"How did you find out?"

"By keeping my eyes and ears open. How does anybody find out
anything?"

"I don't believe Mr. Allen ever once thought of her," said Sylvia,
and there was resentment in her voice.

"Of course he didn't. Maybe he'll take a shine to that girl you've
got with you now."

"Neither one of them has even thought of such a thing," declared
Sylvia, and her voice was almost violent.

"Well, I don't know," Lucinda said, indifferently. "I have had too
much to look out for of my own affairs since the girl came to know
anything about that. I only thought of their being in the same house.
I always had sort of an idea myself that maybe Lucy Ayres would be
the one."

"I hadn't," said Sylvia. "Not but she--well, she looked real sick
to-day. She didn't look fit to stand up there and sing. I should
think her mother would be worried about her. And she don't sing half
as well as you do."

"Yes, she does," replied Lucinda. "She sings enough sight better than
I do."

"Well, I don't know much about music," admitted Sylvia. "I can't tell
if anybody gets off the key."

"I can," said Lucinda, firmly. "She sings enough sight better than I
can, but I sang plenty well enough for them, and if I hadn't been so
mad at the way I've been treated I'd kept on. Now they can get on
without me. Lucy Ayres does look miserable. There's consumption in
her family, too. Well, it's good for her lungs to sing, if she don't
overdo it. Good-bye, Sylvia."

"Good-bye," said Sylvia. She hesitated a moment, then she said:
"Don't you mind, Lucinda. Henry and I think just the same of you as
we've always thought, and there's a good many besides us. You haven't
any call to feel bad."

"I don't feel bad," said Lucinda. "I've got spunk enough and grit
enough to bear any load that I 'ain't heaped on my own shoulders, and
the Lord knows I 'ain't heaped this. Don't you worry about me,
Sylvia. Good-bye."

Lucinda went her way. She held her nice black skirt high, but her
plodding feet raised quite a cloud of dust. Her shoulders were thrown
back, her head was very erect, the jetted ornament on her bonnet
shone like a warrior's crest. She stepped evenly out of sight, as
evenly as if she had been a soldier walking in line and saying to
himself, "Left, right; left, right."

Chapter X

When Sylvia reached home she found Rose Fletcher and Horace Allen
sitting on the bench under the oak-trees of the grove north of the
house. She marched out there and stood before them, holding her
fringed parasol in such a way that it made a concave frame for her
stern, elderly face and thin shoulders. "Rose," said she, "you had
better go into the house and lay down till dinner-time. You have been
walking in the sun, and it is warm, and you look tired."

She spoke at once affectionately and severely. It seemed almost
inconceivable that this elderly country woman could speak in such
wise to the city-bred girl in her fashionable attire, with her air of
self-possession.

But the girl looked up at her as if she loved her, and answered, in
just the way in which Sylvia liked her to answer, with a sort of
pretty, childish petulance, defiant, yet yielding. "I am not in the
least tired," said she, "and it did not hurt me to walk in the sun,
and I like to sit here under the trees."

Rose was charming that morning. Her thick, fair hair was rolled back
from her temples, which had at once something noble and childlike
about them. Her face was as clear as a cameo. She was dressed in
mourning for her aunt, but her black robe was thin and the fine
curves of her shoulders and arms were revealed, and the black lace of
her wide hat threw her fairness into relief like a setting of onyx.

"You had better go into the house," said Sylvia, her eyes stern, her
mouth smiling. A maternal instinct which dominated her had awakened
suddenly in the older woman's heart. She adored the girl to such an
extent that the adoration fairly pained her. Rose herself might
easily have found this exacting affection, this constant
watchfulness, irritating, but she found it sweet. She could scarcely
remember her mother, but the memory had always been as one of lost
love. Now she seemed to have found it again. She fairly coquetted
with this older woman who loved her, and whom she loved, with that
charming coquettishness sometimes seen in a daughter towards her
mother. She presumed upon this affection which she felt to be so
staple. She affronted Sylvia with a delicious sense of her own power
over her and an underlying affection, which had in it the protective
instinct of youth which dovetailed with the protective instinct of
age.

It had been planned that she was to return to New York immediately
after Miss Farrel's funeral. In fact, her ticket had been bought and
her trunk packed, when a telegram arrived rather late at night. Rose
had gone to bed when Sylvia brought it up to her room. "Don't be
scared," she said, holding the yellow envelope behind her. Rose
stared at her, round-eyed, from her white nest. She turned pale.

"What is it?" she said, tremulously.

"There's no need for you to go and think anything has happened until
you read it," Sylvia said. "You must be calm."

"Oh, what is it?"

"A telegram," replied Sylvia, solemnly. "You must be calm."

Rose laughed. "Oh, Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela are forever sending
telegrams," she said. "Very likely it is only to say somebody will
meet me at the Grand Central."

Sylvia looked at the girl in amazement, as she coolly opened and read
the telegram. Rose's face changed expression. She regarded the yellow
paper thoughtfully a moment before she spoke.

"If anything has happened, you must be calm," said Sylvia, looking at
her anxiously. "Of course you have lived with those people so many
years you have learned to think a good deal of them; that is only
natural; but, after all, they ain't your own."

Rose laughed again, but in rather a perplexed fashion. "Nothing has
happened," she said--"at least, nothing that you are thinking
of--but--"

"But what?"

"Why, Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela are going to sail for Genoa
to-morrow, and that puts an end to my going to New York to them."

A great brightness overspread Sylvia's face. "Well, you ain't left
stranded," she said. "You've got your home here."

Rose looked gratefully at her. "You do make me feel as if I had, and
I don't know what I should do if you did not, but"--she frowned
perplexedly--"all the same, one would not have thought they would
have gone off in this way without giving me a moment's notice," she
said, in rather an injured fashion, "after I have lived with them so
long. I never thought they really cared much about me. Mrs. Wilton
and Miss Pamela look too hard at their own tracks to get much
interest in anybody or anything outside; but starting off in this
way! They might have thought that I would like to go--at least they
might have told me."

Suddenly her frown of perplexity cleared away. "I know what has
happened," she said, with a nod to Sylvia. "I know exactly what has
happened."

"What?"

"Mrs. Wilton's and Miss Pamela's aunt Susan has died, and they've got
the money. They have been waiting for it ever since I have been with
them. Their aunt was over ninety, and it did begin to seem as if she
would never die."

"Was she very rich?"

"Oh, very; millions; and she never gave a cent to Mrs. Wilton and
Miss Pamela. She has died, and they have just made up their minds to
go away. They have always said they should live abroad as soon as
they were able." Rose looked a little troubled for a moment, then she
laughed. "They kept me as long as they needed me," said she, with a
pleasant cynicism, "and I don't know but I had lived with them long
enough to suit myself. Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela were always nice
to me, but sometimes--well, sometimes I felt so outside them that I
was awfully lonesome. And Mrs. Wilton always did just what you knew
she would, and so did Miss Pamela, and it was a little like living
with machines that were wound up to do the right thing by you, but
didn't do it of their own accord. Now they have run down, just like
machines. I know as well as I want to that Aunt Susan has died and
left them her money. I shall get a letter to-morrow telling me about
it. I think myself that Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela will get married
now. They never gave up, you know. Mrs. Wilton's husband died ages
ago, and she was as much of an old maid as Miss Pamela, and neither
of them would give up. They will be countesses or duchesses or
something within a year."

Rose laughed, and Sylvia beamed upon her. "If you feel that you can
stay here," she said, timidly.

"_If_ I feel that I can," said Rose. She stretched out her slender
arms, from which the lace-trimmed sleeves of her night-gown fell away
to the shoulder, and Sylvia let them close around her thin neck and
felt the young cheek upon her own with a rapture like a lover's.

"Those folks she lived with in New York are going to Europe
to-morrow," she told Henry, when she was down-stairs again, "and they
have treated that poor child mean. They have never told her a word
about it until now. She says she thinks their rich aunt has died and
left them her money, and they have just cleared out and left her."

"Well, she can stay with us as long as she is contented," said Henry.

"I rather guess she can," said Sylvia.

Henry regarded her with the wondering expression which was often on
his face nowadays. He had glimpses of the maternal depths of his
wife's heart, which, while not understanding, he acquiesced in; but
there was something else which baffled him.

But now for Sylvia came a time of contentment, apparently beyond
anything which had ever come into her life. She fairly revelled in
her possession of Rose, and the girl in her turn seemed to
reciprocate. Although the life in East Westland was utterly at
variance with the life she had known, she settled down in it, of
course with sundry hitches of adjustment. For instance, she could not
rid herself at first of the conviction that she must have, as she had
always had, a maid.

"I don't know how to go to work," she said to Sylvia one day. "Of
course I must have a maid, but I wonder if I had better advertise or
write some of my friends. Betty Morrison may know of some one, or
Sally Maclean. Betty and Sally always seem to be able to find ways
out of difficulties. Perhaps I had better write them. Maybe it would
be safer than to advertise."

Sylvia and Rose were sitting together in the south room that
afternoon. Sylvia looked pathetically and wistfully at the girl.
"What do you want a maid for?" she asked, timidly.

Rose stared. "What for? Why, what I always want a maid for: to attend
to my wardrobe and assist me in dressing, to brush my hair,
and--everything," ended Rose, comprehensively.

Sylvia continued to regard her with that wistful, pathetic look.

"I can sew braid on your dresses, and darn your stockings, and button
up your dresses, and brush your hair, too, just as well as anybody,"
she said.

Rose ran over to her and went down on her knees beside her. "You
dear," she said, "as if you didn't have enough to do now!"

"This is a very convenient house to do work in," said Sylvia, "and
now I have my washing and ironing done, I've got time on my hands. I
like to sew braid on and darn stockings, and always did, and it's
nothing at all to fasten up your waists in the back; you know that."

"You dear," said Rose again. She nestled her fair head against
Sylvia's slim knees. Sylvia thrilled. She touched the soft puff of
blond hair timidly with her bony fingers. "But I have always had a
maid," Rose persisted, in a somewhat puzzled way. Rose could hardly
conceive of continued existence without a maid. She had managed very
well for a few days, but to contemplate life without one altogether
seemed like contemplating the possibility of living without a comb
and hair-brush. Sylvia's face took on a crafty expression.

"Well," said she, "if you must have a maid, write your friends, and I
will have another leaf put in the dining-table."

Rose raised her head and stared at her. "Another leaf in the
dining-table?" said she, vaguely.

"Yes. I don't think there's room for more than four without another
leaf."

"But--my maid would not eat at the table with us."

"Would she be willing to eat in the kitchen--cold victuals--after we
had finished?"

Rose looked exceedingly puzzled. "No, she would not; at least, no
maid I ever had would have," she admitted.

"Where is she going to eat, then? Would she wait till after we were
through and eat in the dining-room?"

"I don't believe she would like that, either."

"Where is she going to eat?" demanded Sylvia, inexorably.

Rose gazed at her.

"She could have a little table in here, or in the parlor," said
Sylvia.

Rose laughed. "Oh, that would never do!" said she. "Of course there
was a servants' dining-room at Mrs. Wilton's, and there always is in
a hotel, you know. I never thought of that."

"She has got to eat somewhere. Where is she going to eat?" asked
Sylvia, pressing the question.

Rose got up and kissed her. "Oh, well, I won't bother about it for a
while, anyway," said she. "Now I think of it, Betty is sure to be off
to Newport by now, and Sally must be about to sail for Paris to buy
her trousseau. She is going to marry Dicky van Snyde in the autumn
(whatever she sees in him)! So I doubt if either of them could do
anything about a maid for me. I won't bother at all now, but I am not
going to let you wait upon me. I am going to help you."

Sylvia took one of Rose's little hands and looked at it. "I guess you
can't do much with hands like yours," said she, admiringly, and with
an odd tone of resentment, as if she were indignant at the mere
suggestion of life's demanding service from this dainty little
creature, for whom she was ready to immolate herself.

However, Rose had in her a vein of persistency. She insisted upon
wiping the dishes and dusting. She did it all very badly, but Sylvia
found the oddest amusement in chiding her for her mistakes and in
setting them right herself. She would not have been nearly as well
pleased had Rose been handy about the house. One evening Henry caught
Sylvia wiping over all the dishes which Rose had wiped, and which
were still damp, the while she was fairly doubled up with suppressed
mirth.

"What in creation ails you, Sylvia?" asked Henry.

She extended towards him a plate on which the water stood in drops.
"Just see this plate that dear child thinks she has wiped," she
chuckled.

"You women do beat the Dutch," said Henry.

However, Rose did prove herself an adept in one respect. She had
never sewed much, but she had an inventive genius in dress, and, when
she once took up her needle, used it deftly.

When Sylvia confided to her her aspiration concerning the pink silk
which she had found among Abrahama's possessions, Rose did not laugh
at all, but she looked at her thoughtfully.

"Don't you think it would be suitable if I had it made with some
black lace?" asked Sylvia, wistfully. "Henry thinks it is too young
for me, but--"

"Not black," Rose said, decisively. The two were up in the attic
beside the old chest of finery. Rose took out an old barege of an
ashes-of-roses color. She laid a fold of the barege over the pink
silk, then she looked radiantly at Sylvia.

"It will make a perfectly lovely gown for you if you use the pink for
a petticoat," said she, "and have the gown made of this delicious old
stuff."

"The pink for a petticoat?" gasped Sylvia.

"It is the only way," said Rose; "and you must have gray gloves, and
a bonnet of gray with just one pale-pink rose in it. Don't you
understand? Then you will harmonize with your dress. Your hair is
gray, and there is pink in your cheeks. You will be lovely in it.
There must be a very high collar and some soft creamy lace, because
there is still some yellow left in your hair."

Rose nodded delightedly at Sylvia, and the dressmaker came and made
the gown according to Rose's directions. Sylvia wore it for the first
time when she walked from church with Lucinda Hart and found Rose and
Horace sitting in the grove. After Rose had replied to Sylvia's
advice that she should go into the house, she looked at her with the
pride of proprietorship. "Doesn't she look simply lovely?" she asked
Horace.

"She certainly does," replied the young man. He really gazed
admiringly at the older woman, who made, under the glimmering shadows
of the oaks, a charming nocturne of elderly womanhood. The faint pink
on her cheeks seemed enhanced by the pink seen dimly through the
ashen shimmer of her gown; the creamy lace harmonized with her
yellow-gray hair. She was in her own way as charming as Rose in hers.

Sylvia actually blushed, and hung her head with a graceful sidewise
motion. "I'm too old to be made a fool of," said she, "and I've got a
good looking-glass." But she smiled the smile of a pretty woman
conscious of her own prettiness. Then all three laughed, although
Horace but a moment before had looked very grave, and now he was
quite white. Sylvia noticed it. "Why, what ails you, Mr. Allen?" she
said. "Don't you feel well?"

"Perfectly well."

"You look pale."

"It is the shadow of the oaks."

Sylvia noticed a dainty little white box in Rose's lap. "What is
that?" she asked.

"It is a box of candy that dear, sweet Lucy Ayres who sang to-day
made her own self and gave to me," replied Rose. "She came up to me
on the way home from church and slipped it into my hand, and I hardly
know her at all. I do think it is too dear of her for anything. She
is such a lovely girl, and her voice is beautiful." Rose looked
defiantly at Horace. "Mr. Allen has been trying to make me promise
not to eat this nice candy," she said.

"I don't think candy is good for anybody, and girls eat altogether
too much of it," said Horace, with a strange fervor which the
occasion hardly seemed to warrant.

"Wouldn't I know he was a school-teacher when I heard him speak like
that, even if nobody had ever told me?" said Rose. "Of course I am
going to eat this candy that dear Lucy made her own self and gave me.
I should be very ungrateful not to, and I love candy, too."

"I will send for some to Boston to-morrow," cried Horace, eagerly.

Rose regarded him with amazement. "Why, Mr. Allen, you just said you
did not approve of candy at all, and here you are proposing to send
for some for me," she said, "when I have this nice home-made candy, a
great deal purer, because one knows exactly what is in it, and you
say I must not eat this."

Rose took up a sugared almond daintily and put it to her lips, but
Horace was too quick for her. Before she knew what he was about he
had dashed it from her hand, and in the tumult the whole box of candy
was scattered. Horace trampled on it, it was impossible to say
whether purposely or accidentally, in the struggle.

Both Rose and Sylvia regarded him with amazement, mixed with
indignation.

"Why, Mr. Allen!" said Rose. Then she added, haughtily: "Mr. Allen,
you take altogether too much upon yourself. You have spoiled my
candy, and you forget that you have not the least right to dictate to
me what I shall or shall not eat."

Sylvia also turned upon Horace. "Home-made candy wouldn't hurt her,"
she said. "Why, Mr. Allen, what do you mean?"

"Nothing. I am very sorry," said Horace. Then he walked away without
another word, and entered the house. The girl and the woman stood
looking at each other.

"What did he do such a thing for?" asked Rose.

"Goodness knows," said Sylvia.

Rose was quite pale. She began to look alarmed. "You don't suppose
he's taken suddenly insane or anything?" said she.

"My land! no," said Sylvia. "Men do act queer sometimes."

"I should think so, if this is a sample of it," said Rose, eying the
trampled candy. "Why, he ground his heel into it! What right had he
to tell me I should or should not eat it?" she said, indignantly,
again.

"None at all. Men are queer. Even Mr. Whitman is queer sometimes."

"If he is as queer as that, I don't see how you have lived with him
so long. Did he ever make you drop a nice box of candy somebody had
given you, and trample on it, and then walk off?"

"No, I don't know as he ever did; but men do queer things."

"I don't like Mr. Allen at all," said Rose, walking beside Sylvia
towards the house. "Not at all. I don't like him as well as Mr. James
Duncan."

Sylvia looked at her with quick alarm. "The man who wrote you last
week?"

"Yes, and wanted to know if there was a hotel here so he could come."

"I thought--" began Sylvia.

"Yes, I had begun the letter, telling him the hotel wasn't any good,
because I knew he would know what that meant--that there was no use
in his asking me to marry him again, because I never would; but now I
think I shall tell him the hotel is not so bad, after all," said Rose.

"But you don't mean--"

"I don't know what I do mean," said Rose, nervously. "Yes, I do know
what I mean. I always know what I mean, but I don't know what men
mean making me drop candy I have had given me, and trampling on it,
and men don't know that I know what I mean." Rose was almost crying.

"Go up-stairs and lay down a little while before dinner," said
Sylvia, anxiously.

"No," replied Rose; "I am going to help you. Don't, please, think I
am crying because I feel badly. It is because I am angry. I am going
to set the table."

But Rose did not set the table. She forgot all about it when she had
entered the south room and found Henry Whitman sitting there with the
Sunday paper. She sat down opposite and looked at him with her clear,
blue, childlike eyes. She had come to call him Uncle Henry.

"Uncle Henry?" said she, interrogatively, and waited.

Henry looked across at her and smiled with the somewhat abashed
tenderness which he always felt for this girl, whose environment had
been so very different from his and his wife's. "Well?" he said.

"Uncle Henry, do you think a man can tell another man's reasons for
doing a queer thing better than a woman can?"

"Perhaps."

"I almost know a woman could tell why a woman did a queer thing,
better than a man could," said Rose, reflectively. She hesitated a
little.

Henry waited, his worn, pleasant face staring at her over a vividly
colored page of the paper.

"Suppose," said Rose, "another woman had given Aunt Sylvia a box of
candy which she had made herself, real nice candy, and suppose the
woman who had given it to her was lovely, and you had knocked a piece
of candy from Aunt Sylvia's mouth just as she was going to taste it,
and had startled her so you made her drop the whole box, and then set
your heel hard on the pieces; what would you have done it for?"

The girl's face wore an expression of the keenest inquiry. Henry
looked at her, wrinkling his forehead. "If another woman had given
Sylvia a box of candy she had made, and I knocked a piece from her
hand just as she was going to taste it, and made her drop the whole
box, and had trampled all the rest of the candy underfoot, what
should I have done it for?" he repeated.

"Yes."

Henry looked at her. He heard a door shut up-stairs. "I shouldn't
have done it," he said.

"But suppose you had done it?"

"I shouldn't have."

Rose shrugged her shoulders. "You are horrid, Uncle Henry," she said.

"But I shouldn't have done it," repeated Henry. He heard Horace's
step on the stair. Rose got up and ran out of the room by another
door from that which Horace entered. Horace sat down in the chair
which Rose had just vacated. He looked pale and worried. The eyes of
the two men met. Henry's eyes asked a question. Horace answered it.

"I am in such a devil of a mess as never man was yet, I believe," he
said.

Henry nodded gravely.

"The worst of it is I can't tell a living mortal," Horace said, in a
whisper. "I am afraid even to think it."

At dinner Rose sat with her face averted from Horace. She never spoke
once to him. As they rose from the table she made an announcement. "I
am going to run over and see Lucy Ayres," she said. "I am going to
tell her an accident happened to my candy, and maybe she will give me
some more."

Henry saw Horace's face change. "Candy is not good for girls; it
spoils their complexion. I have just been reading about it in the
Sunday paper," said Henry. Sylvia unexpectedly proved his ally. Rose
had not eaten much dinner, although it had been an especially nice
one, and she felt anxious about her.

"I don't think you ought to eat candy when you have so little
appetite for good, wholesome meat and vegetables," she said.

"I want to see Lucy, too," said Rose. "I am going over there. It is a
lovely afternoon. I have nothing I want to read and nothing to do. I
am going over there."

Henry's eyes questioned Horace's, which said, plainly, to the other
man, "For God's sake, don't let her go; don't let her go!"

Rose had run up-stairs for her parasol. Horace turned away. He
understood that Henry would help him. "Don't let her go over there
this afternoon," said Henry to Sylvia, who looked at him in the
blankest amazement.

"Why not, I'd like to know?" asked Sylvia.

"Don't let her go," repeated Henry.

Sylvia looked suspiciously from one man to the other. The only
solution which a woman could put upon such a request immediately
occurred to her. She said to herself, "Hm! Mr. Allen wants Rose to
stay at home so he can see her himself, and Henry knows it."

She stiffened her neck. Down deep in her heart was a feeling more
seldom in women's hearts than in men's. She would not have owned that
she did not wish to part with this new darling of her heart--who had
awakened within it emotions of whose strength the childless woman had
never dreamed. There was also another reason, which she would not
admit even to herself. Had Rose been, indeed, her daughter, and she
had possessed her from the cradle to womanhood, she would probably
have been as other mothers, but now Rose was to her as the infant she
had never borne. She felt the intense jealousy of ownership which the
mother feels over the baby in her arms. She wished to snatch Rose
from every clasp except her own.

She decided at once that it was easy to see through the plans of
Horace and her husband, and she determined to thwart them. "I don't
see why she shouldn't go," she said. "It is a lovely afternoon. The
walk will do her good. Lucy Ayres is a real nice girl, and of course
Rose wants to see girls of her own age now and then."

"It is Sunday," said Henry. He felt and looked like a hypocrite as he
spoke, but the distress in Horace's gaze was too much for him.

Sylvia sniffed. "Sunday," said she. "Good land! what has come over
you, Henry Whitman? It has been as much as I could do to get you to
go to meeting the last ten years, and now all of a sudden you turn
around and think it's wicked for a young girl to run in and see
another young girl Sunday afternoon." Sylvia sniffed again very
distinctly, and then Rose entered the room.

Her clear, fair face looked from one to another from under her black
hat. "What is the matter?" she asked.

Sylvia patted her on the shoulder. "Nothing is the matter," said she.
"Run along and have a good time, but you had better be home by five
o'clock. There is a praise meeting to-night, and I guess we'll all
want to go, and I am going to have supper early."

After Rose had gone and Sylvia had left the room, the two men looked
at each other. Horace was ashy pale. Henry's face showed alarm and
astonishment. "What is it?" he whispered.

"Come out in the grove and have a smoke," said Horace, with a look
towards the door through which Sylvia had gone.

Henry nodded. He gathered up his pipe and tobacco from the table, and
the two men sauntered out of the house into the grove. But even there
not much was said. Both smoked in silence, sitting on the bench,
before Horace opened his lips in response to Henry's inquiry.

"I don't know what it is, and I don't know that it is anything, and
that is the worst of it," he said, gloomily; "and I can't see my way
to telling any mortal what little I do know that leads me to fear
that it is something, although I would if I were sure and actually
knew beyond doubt that there was--" He stopped abruptly and blew a
ring of smoke from his cigar.

"Something is queer about my wife lately," said Henry, in a low voice.

"What?"

"That's just it. I feel something as you do. It may be nothing at
all. I tell you what, young man, when women talk, as women are
intended by an overruling Providence to talk, men know where they are
at, but when a woman doesn't talk men know where they ain't."

"In my case there has been so much talk that I seem to be in a fog of
it, and can't see a blessed thing sufficiently straight to know
whether it is big enough to bother about or little enough to let
alone; but I can't repeat the talk--no man could," said Horace.

"In my case there ain't talk enough," said Henry. "I ain't in a fog;
I'm in pitch darkness."

Chapter XI

The two men sat for some time out in the grove. It was very pleasant
there. The air was unusually still, and only the tops of the trees
whitened occasionally in a light puff of wind like a sigh. Now and
then a carriage or an automobile passed on the road beyond, but not
many of them. It was not a main thoroughfare. The calls and quick
carols of the birds, punctuated with sharp trills of insects, were
almost the only sounds heard. Now and then Sylvia's face glanced at
them from a house window, but it was quickly withdrawn. She never
liked men to be in close conclave without a woman to superintend, yet
she could not have told why. She had a hazy impression, as she might
have had if they had been children, that some mischief was afoot.

"Sitting out there all this time, and smoking, and never seeming to
speak a word," she said to herself, as she returned to her seat
beside a front window in the south room and took up her book. She was
reading with a mild and patronizing interest a book in which the
heroine did nothing which she would possibly have done under given
circumstances, and said nothing which she would have said, and was,
moreover, a distinctly different personality from one chapter to
another, yet the whole had a charm for the average woman reader.
Henry had flung it aside in contempt. Sylvia thought it beautiful,
possibly for the reason that her own hard sense was sometimes a
strenuous burden, and in reading this she was forced to put it behind
her. However, the book did not prevent her from returning every now
and then to her own life and the happenings in it. Hence her stealthy
journeys across the house and peeps at the men in the grove. If they
were nettled by a sense of feminine mystery, she reciprocated. "What
on earth did they want to stop Rose from going to see Lucy for?"
seemed to stare at her in blacker type than the characters of the
book.

Presently, when she saw Horace pass the window and disappear down the
road, she laid the book on the table, with a slip of paper to keep
the place, and hurried out to the grove. She found Henry leisurely
coming towards the house. "Where has he gone?" she inquired, with a
jerk of her shoulder towards the road.

"Mr. Allen?"

"Yes."

"How should I know?"

"Don't you know?"

"Maybe I do," said Henry, smiling at Sylvia with his smile of
affection and remembrance that she was a woman.

"Why don't you tell?"

"Now, Sylvia," said Henry, "you must remember that Mr. Allen is not a
child. He is a grown man, and if he takes it into his head to go
anywhere you can't say anything."

Sylvia looked at Henry with a baffled expression. "I think he might
spend his time a good deal more profitably Sunday afternoon than
sitting under the trees and smoking, or going walking," said she,
rashly and inconsequentially. "If he would only sit down and read
some good book."

"You can't dictate to Mr. Allen what he shall or shall not do," Henry
repeated.

"Why didn't you want Rose to go to Lucy's?" asked Sylvia, making a
charge in an entirely different quarter.

Henry scorned to lie. "I don't know," he replied, which was the
perfect truth as far as it went. It did not go quite far enough, for
he did not add that he did not know why Horace Allen did not want her
to go, and that was his own reason.

However, Sylvia could not possibly fathom that. She sniffed with her
delicate nostrils, as if she actually smelled some questionable odor
of character. "You men have mighty queer streaks, that's all I've got
to say," she returned.

When they were in the house again she resumed her book, reading every
word carefully, and Henry took up the Sunday paper, which he had not
finished. The thoughts of both, however, turned from time to time
towards Horace. Sylvia did not know where he had gone. She did not
suspect. Henry knew, but he did not know why. Horace had sprung
suddenly to his feet and caught up his hat as the two men had been
sitting under the trees. Henry had emitted a long puff of tobacco
smoke and looked inquiringly at him through the filmy blue of it.

"I can't stand it another minute," said Horace, almost with violence.
"I've got to know what is going on. I am going to the Ayres's myself.
I don't care what they think. I don't care what she thinks. I don't
care what anybody thinks." With that he was gone.

Henry took another puff at his pipe. It showed the difference between
the masculine and the feminine point of view that Henry did not for
one moment attach a sentimental reason to Horace's going. He realized
Rose's attractions. The very probable supposition that she and Horace
might fall in love with and marry each other had occurred to him, but
this he knew at once had nothing to do with that. He turned the whole
over and over in his mind, with no result. He lacked enough premises
to arrive at conclusions. He had started for the house and his Sunday
paper when he met Sylvia, and had resolved to put it all out of his
mind. But he was not quite able. There is a masculine curiosity as
well as a feminine, and one is about as persistent as the other.

Meantime Horace was walking down the road towards the Ayres house. It
was a pretty, much-ornamented white cottage, with a carefully kept
lawn and shade trees. At one side was an old-fashioned garden with an
arbor. In this arbor, as Horace drew near, he saw the sweep of
feminine draperies. It seemed to him that the arbor was full of
women. In reality there were only three--Lucy, her mother, and Rose.

When Rose had rung the door-bell she had been surprised by what
sounded like a mad rush to answer her ring. Mrs. Ayres opened the
door. She looked white and perturbed, and behind her showed Lucy's
face, flushed and angry.

"I knew it was Miss Fletcher; I told you so, mother," said Lucy, and
her low, sweet voice rang out like an angry bird's with a sudden
break for the high notes.

Mrs. Ayres kept her self-possession of manner, although her
face showed not only nervousness but something like terror.
"Good-afternoon, Miss Fletcher," she said. "Please walk in."

"She said for me to call her Rose," cried Lucy. "Please come in,
Rose. I am glad to see you."

In spite of the cordial words the girl's voice was strange. Rose
stared from daughter to mother and back again. "If you were engaged,"
she said, rather coldly, "if you would prefer that I come some other
time--"

"No, indeed," cried Lucy, "no other time. Yes, every other time. What
am I saying? But I want you now, too. Come right up to my room, Rose.
I know you will excuse my wrapper and my bed's being tumbled. I have
been lying down. Come right up."

Rose followed Lucy, and to her astonishment became aware that Lucy's
mother was following her. Mrs. Ayres entered the room with the two
girls. Lucy looked impatiently at her, and spoke as Rose wondered any
daughter could speak. "Rose and I have some things to talk over,
mother," she said.

"Nothing, I guess, that your mother cannot hear," returned Mrs.
Ayres, with forced pleasantry. She sat down, and Lucy flung herself
petulantly upon the bed, where she had evidently been lying, but
seemingly not reposing, for it was much rumpled, and the pillows gave
evidence of the restless tossing of a weary head. Lucy herself had a
curiously rumpled aspect, though she was not exactly untidy. Her
soft, white, lace-trimmed wrapper carelessly tied with blue ribbons
was wrinkled, her little slippers were unbuttoned. Her mass of soft
hair was half over her shoulders. There were red spots on the cheeks
which had been so white in the morning, and her eyes shone. She kept
tying and untying two blue ribbons at the neck of her wrapper as she
lay on the bed and talked rapidly.

"I look like a fright, I know," she said. "I was tired after church,
and slipped off my dress and lay down. My hair is all in a muss."

"It is such lovely hair that it looks pretty anyway," said Rose.

Lucy drew a strand of her hair violently over her shoulder. It almost
seemed as if she meant to tear it out by the roots.

"Lucy!" said her mother.

"Oh, mother, do let me alone!" cried the girl. Then she said, looking
angrily at her tress of hair, then at Rose: "It is not nearly as
pretty as yours. You know it isn't. All men are simply crazy over
hair your color. I hate my hair. I just hate it."

"Lucy!" said her mother again, in the same startled but admonitory
tone.

Lucy made an impatient face at her. She threw back the tress of hair.
"I hate it," said she.

Rose began to feel awkward. She noticed Mrs. Ayres's anxious regard
of her daughter, and she thought with disgust that Lucy Ayres was not
so sweet a girl as she had seemed. However, she felt an odd kind of
sympathy and pity for her. Lucy's pretty face and her white wrapper
seemed alike awry with nervous suffering, which the other girl dimly
understood, although it was the understanding of a normal character
with regard to an abnormal one.

Rose resolved to change the subject. "I did enjoy your singing so
much this morning," she said.

"Thank you," replied Lucy, but a look of alarm instead of pleasure
appeared upon her face, which Rose was astonished to see in the
mother's likewise.

"I feel so sorry for poor Miss Hart, because I cannot think for a
moment that she was guilty of what they accused her of," said Rose,
"that I don't like to say anything about her singing. But I will say
this much: I did enjoy yours."

"Thank you," said Lucy again. Her look of mortal terror deepened.
From being aggressively nervous, she looked on the verge of a
collapse.

Mrs. Ayres rose, went to Lucy's closet, and returned with a bottle of
wine and a glass. "Here," she said, as she poured out the red liquor.
"You had better drink this, dear. You know Dr. Wallace said you must
drink port wine, and you are all tired out with your singing this
morning."

Lucy seized the glass and drank the wine eagerly.

"It must be a nervous strain," said Rose, "to stand up there, before
such a crowded audience as there was this morning, and sing."

"Yes, it is," agreed Mrs. Ayres, in a harsh voice, "and especially
when anybody isn't used to it. Lucy is not at all strong."

"I hope it won't be too much for her," said Rose; "but it is such a
delight to listen to her after--"

"Oh, I am tired and sick of hearing Miss Hart's name!" cried Lucy,
unpleasantly.

"Lucy!" said Mrs. Ayres.

"Well, I am," said Lucy, defiantly. "It has been nothing but Miss
Hart, Miss Hart, from morning until night lately. Nobody thinks she
poisoned Miss Farrel, of course. It was perfect nonsense to accuse
her of it, and when that is said, I think myself that is enough. I
see no need of this eternal harping upon it. I have heard nothing
except 'poor Miss Hart' until I am nearly wild. Come, Rose, I'll get
dressed and we'll go out in the arbor. It is too pleasant to stay
in-doors. This room is awfully close."

"I think perhaps I had better not stay," Rose replied, doubtfully. It
seemed to her that she was having a very strange call, and she began
to be indignant as well as astonished.

"Of course you are going to stay," Lucy said, and her voice was sweet
again. "We'll let Miss Hart alone and I'll get dressed, and we'll go
in the arbor. It is lovely out there to-day."

With that Lucy sprang from the bed and let her wrapper slip from her
shoulders. She stood before her old-fashioned black-walnut bureau and
began brushing her hair. Her white arms and shoulders gleamed through
it as she brushed with what seemed a cruel violence.

Rose laughed in a forced way. "Why, dear, you brush your hair as if
it had offended you," she said.

"Don't brush so hard, Lucy," said Mrs. Ayres.

"I just hate my old hair, anyway," said Lucy, with a vicious stroke
of the brush. She bent her head over, and swept the whole dark mass
downward until it concealed her face and nearly touched her knees.
Then she gave it a deft twist, righted herself, and pinned the coil
in place.

"How beautifully you do up your hair," said Rose.

Lucy cast an appreciative glance at herself in the glass. The wine
had deepened the glow on her cheeks. Her eyes were more brilliant.
She pulled her hair a little over one temple, and looked at herself
with entire satisfaction. Lucy had beautiful neck and arms,
unexpectedly plump for a girl so apparently slender. Her skin was
full of rosy color, too. She gazed at the superb curve of her
shoulders rising above the dainty lace of her corset-cover, and
smiled undisguisedly.

"I wish my neck was as plump as yours," said Rose.

"Yes, she has a nice, plump neck," said Mrs. Ayres. While the words
showed maternal pride, the tone never relaxed from its nervous
anxiety.

Lucy's smile vanished suddenly. "Well, what if it is plump?" said
she. "What is the use of it? A girl living here in East Westland can
never wear a dress to show her neck. People would think she had gone
out of her mind."

Rose laughed. "I have some low-neck gowns," said she, "but I can't
wear them, either. Maybe that is fortunate for me, my neck is so
thin."

"You will wear them in other places," said Lucy. "You won't stay here
all your days. You will have plenty of chances to wear your low-neck
gowns." She spoke again in her unnaturally high voice. She turned
towards her closet to get her dress.

"Lucy!" said Mrs. Ayres.

"Well, it is the truth," said Lucy. "Don't preach, mother. If you
were a girl, and somebody told you your neck was pretty, and you knew
other girls had chances to wear low-neck dresses, you wouldn't be
above feeling it a little."

"My neck was as pretty as yours when I was a girl, and I never wore a
low-neck dress in my life," said Mrs. Ayres.

"Oh, well, you got married when you were eighteen," said Lucy. There
was something almost coarse in her remark. Rose felt herself flush.
She was sophisticated, and had seen the world, although she had been
closely if not lovingly guarded; but she shrank from some things as
though she had never come from under a country mother's wing in her
life.

Lucy got a pale-blue muslin gown from the closet and slipped it over
her shoulders. Then she stood for her mother to fasten it in the
back. Lucy was lovely in this cloud of blue, with edgings of lace on
the ruffles and knots of black velvet. She fastened her black velvet
girdle, and turned herself sidewise with a charming feminine motion,
to get the effect of her slender waist between the curves of her
small hips and bust. Again she looked pleased.

"You are dear in that blue gown," said Rose.

Lucy smiled. Then she scowled as suddenly. She could see Rose over
her shoulder in the glass. "It is awful countrified," said she. "Look
at the sleeves and look at yours. Where was yours made?"

"My dressmaker in New York made it," faltered Rose. She felt guilty
because her gown was undeniably in better style.

"There's no use trying to have anything in East Westland," said Lucy.

While she was fastening a little gold brooch at her throat, Rose
again tried to change the subject. "That candy of yours looked
perfectly delicious," said she. "You must teach me how you make it."

Mrs. Ayres went dead white in a moment. She looked at Lucy with a
look of horror which the girl did not meet. She went on fastening her
brooch. "Did you like it?" she asked, carelessly.

"An accident happened to it, I am sorry to say," explained Rose. "Mr.
Allen and I were out in the grove, and somehow he jostled me, and the
candy got scattered on the ground, and he stepped on it."

"Were you and he alone out there?" asked Lucy, in a very quiet voice.

Rose looked at her amazedly. "Why, no, not when that happened!" she
replied. "Aunt Sylvia was there, too." She spoke a little
resentfully. "What if Mr. Allen and I had been alone; what is that to
her?" she thought.

"There is some more candy," said Lucy, calmly. "I will get it, and
then we will go out in the arbor. I will teach you to make the candy
any day. It is very simple. Come, Rose dear. Mother, we are going out
in the arbor."

Mrs. Ayres rose immediately. She preceded the two girls down-stairs,
and came through the sitting-room door with a dish of candy in her
hand just as they reached it. "Here is the candy, dear," she said to
Lucy, and there was something commanding in her voice.

Lucy took the dish, a pretty little decorated affair, with what
seemed to Rose an air of suspicion and a grudging "thank you, mother."

"Come, Rose," she said. She led the way and Rose followed. Mrs. Ayres
returned to the sitting-room. The girls went through the
old-fashioned garden with its flower-beds outlined with box, in which
the earlier flowers were at their prime, to the arbor. It was a
pretty old structure, covered with the shaggy arms of an old
grape-vine whose gold-green leaves were just uncurling. Lucy placed
the bowl of candy on the end of the bench which ran round the
interior, and, to Rose's surprise, seated herself at a distance from
it, and motioned Rose to sit beside her, without offering her any
candy. Lucy leaned against Rose and looked up at her. She looked
young and piteous and confiding. Rose felt again that she was sweet
and that she loved her. She put her arm around Lucy.

"You are a dear," said she.

Lucy nestled closer. "I know you must have thought me perfectly
horrid to speak as I did to mother," said she, "but you don't
understand."

Lucy hesitated. Rose waited.

"You see, the trouble is," Lucy went on, "I love mother dearly, of
course. She is the best mother that ever a girl had, but she is
always so anxious about me, and she follows me about so, and I get
nervous, and I know I don't always speak as I should. I am often
ashamed of myself. You see--"

Lucy hesitated again for a longer period. Rose waited.

"Mother has times of being very nervous," Lucy said, in a whisper. "I
sometimes think, when she follows me about so, that she is not for
the time being quite herself."

Rose started and looked at the other girl in horror. "Why don't you
have a doctor?" said she.

"Oh, I don't mean that she--I don't mean that there is anything
serious, only she has always been over-anxious about me, and at times
I fancy she is nervous, and then the anxiety grows beyond limit. She
always gets over it. I don't mean that--"

"Oh, I didn't know," said Rose.

"I never mean to be impatient," Lucy went on, "but to-day I was very
tired, and I wanted to see you especially. I wanted to ask you
something."

"What?"

Lucy looked away from Rose. She seemed to shrink within herself. The
color faded from her face. "I heard something," she said, faintly,
"but I said I wouldn't believe it until I had asked you."

"What is it?"

"I heard that you were engaged to marry Mr. Allen."

Rose flushed and moved away a little from Lucy. "You can contradict
the rumor whenever you hear it again," said she.

"Then it isn't true?"

"No, it isn't."

Lucy nestled against Rose, in spite of a sudden coldness which had
come over the other girl. "You are so dear," said she.

Rose looked straight ahead, and sat stiffly.

"I am thoroughly angry at such rumors, merely because a girl happens
to be living in the same house with a marriageable man," said she.

"Yes, that is so," said Lucy. She remained quiet for a few moments,
leaning against Rose, her blue-clad shoulder pressing lovingly the
black-clad one. Then she moved away a little, and reared her pretty
back with a curious, snakelike motion. Rose watched her. Lucy's eyes
fastened themselves upon her, and something strange happened. Either
Lucy Ayres was a born actress, or she had become actually so imbued,
through abnormal emotion and love, with the very spirit of the man
that she was capable of projecting his own emotions and feelings into
her own soul and thence upon her face. At all events, she looked at
Rose, and slowly Rose became bewildered. It seemed to her that Horace
Allen was looking at her through the eyes of this girl, with a look
which she had often seen since their very first meeting. She felt
herself glowing from head to foot. She was conscious of a deep
crimson stealing all over her face and neck. Her eyes fell before the
other girl's. Then suddenly it was all over. Lucy rose with a little
laugh. "You sweet, funny creature," she said. "I can make you blush,
looking at you, as if I were a man. Well, maybe I love you as well as
one." Lucy took the bowl of candy from the bench and extended it to
Rose. "Do have some candy," said she.

"Thank you," said Rose. She looked bewildered, and felt so. She took
a sugared almond and began nibbling at it. "Aren't you going to eat
any candy yourself?" said she.

"I have eaten so much already that it has made my head ache," replied
Lucy. "Is it good?"

"Simply delicious. You must teach me how you make such candy."

"Lucy will be glad to teach you any day," said Mrs. Ayres's voice.
She had come swiftly upon them, and entered the arbor with a
religious newspaper in her hand. Lucy no longer seemed annoyed by her
mother's following her. She only set the candy behind her with a
quick movement which puzzled Rose.

"Aren't you going to offer your mother some?" she asked, laughing.

"Mother can't eat candy. Dr. Wallace has forbidden it," Lucy said,
quickly.

"Yes, that is quite true," assented Mrs. Ayres. She began reading her
paper. Lucy offered the bowl again to Rose, who took a bonbon. She
was just swallowing it when Horace Allen appeared. He made a motion
which did not escape Mrs. Ayres. She rose and confronted him with
perfect calmness and dignity. "Good-afternoon, Mr. Allen," she said.

Lucy had sprung up quickly. She was very white. Horace said
good-afternoon perfunctorily, and looked at Rose.

Mrs. Ayres caught up the bowl of candy. "Let me offer you some, Mr.
Allen," she said. "It is home-made candy, and quite harmless, I
assure you."

Her fair, elderly face confronted him smilingly, her voice was calm.

"Thank you," said Horace, and took a sugared almond.

Lucy made a movement as if to stop him, but her mother laid her hand
with gentle firmness on her arm. "Sit down, Lucy," she said, and Lucy
sat down.

Chapter XII

Henry Whitman and his wife Sylvia remained, the one reading his
Sunday paper, the other her book, while Horace and Rose were away.
Henry's paper rustled, Sylvia turned pages gently. Occasionally she
smiled the self-satisfied smile of the reader who thinks she
understands the author, to her own credit. Henry scowled over his
paper the scowl of one who reads to disapprove, to his own credit.

Both were quite engrossed. Sylvia had reached an extremely
interesting portion of her book, and Henry was reading a section of
his paper which made him fairly warlike. However, the clock striking
four aroused both of them.

"I think it is very funny that they have not come home," said Sylvia.

"I dare say they will be along pretty soon," said Henry.

Sylvia looked keenly at him. "Henry Whitman, did he go to the
Ayres's?" said she.

Henry, cornered, told the truth. "Well, I shouldn't wonder," he
admitted.

"I think it is pretty work," said Sylvia, angry red spots coming in
her cheeks.

Henry said nothing.

"The idea that a young man can't be in the house with a girl any
longer than this without his fairly chasing her," said Sylvia.

"Who knows that he is?"

"Do you think he is interested in the Ayres girl?"

"No, I don't."

"Then it is Rose," said Sylvia. "Pretty work, I call it. Here she is
with her own folks in this nice home, with everything she needs."

Henry looked at Sylvia with astonishment. "Why," he said, "girls get
married! You got married yourself."

"I know I did," said Sylvia, "but that hasn't got anything to do with
it. Of course he has to chase her the minute she comes within
gunshot."

"Still, there's one thing certain, if she doesn't want him he can
take it out in chasing, if he is chasing, and I don't think he is,"
said Henry. "Nobody is going to make Rose marry any man."

"She don't act a mite in love with him," said Sylvia, ruminatingly.
"She seemed real mad with him this noon about that candy. Henry, that
was a funny thing for him to do."

"What?" asked Henry, who had so far only gotten Rose's rather vague
account of the candy episode.

Sylvia explained. "He actually knocked that candy out of her hand,
and made her spill the whole box, and then trampled on it. I saw him."

Henry stared at Sylvia. "It must have been an accident," said he.

"It looked like an accident on purpose," said Sylvia. "Well, I guess
I'll go out and make some of that salad they like so much for supper."

After Sylvia had gone Henry sat for a while reflecting, then he went
noiselessly out of the front door and round to the grove. He found
the scattered pieces of candy and the broken box quickly enough. He
cast a wary glance around, and gathered the whole mass up and thrust
it into the pocket of his Sunday coat. Then he stole back to the
house and got his hat and went out again. He was hurrying along the
road, when he met Horace and Rose returning. Rose was talking,
seemingly, with a cold earnestness to her companion. Horace seemed to
be listening passively. Henry thought he looked pale and anxious.
When he saw Henry he smiled. "I have an errand, a business errand,"
explained Henry. "Please tell Mrs. Whitman I shall be home in time
for supper. I don't think she knew when I went out. She was in the
kitchen."

"All right," replied Horace.

After he had passed them Henry caught the words, "I think you owe me
an explanation," in Rose's voice.

"It is about this blamed candy," thought Henry, feeling the crumpled
mass in his pocket. He had a distrust of candy, and it occurred to
him that he would have an awkward explanation to make if the candy
should by any possibility melt and stick to the pocket of his Sunday
coat. He therefore took out the broken box and carried it in his
hand, keeping the paper wrapper firmly around it. "What in creation
is it all about?" he thought, irritably. He felt a sense of personal
injury. Henry enjoyed calm, and it seemed to him that he was being
decidedly disturbed, as by mysterious noises breaking in upon the
even tenor of his life.

"Sylvia is keeping something to herself that is worrying her to
death, in spite of her being so tickled to have the girl with us, and
now here is this candy," he said to himself. He understood that for
some reason Horace had not wanted Rose to eat the candy, that he had
resorted to fairly desperate measures to prevent it, but he could not
imagine why. He had no imagination for sensation or melodrama, and
the candy affair was touching that line. He had been calmly prosaic
with regard to Miss Farrel's death. "They can talk all they want to
about murder and suicide," he had said to Sylvia. "I don't believe a
word of it."

"But the doctors found--" began Sylvia.

"Found nothing," interposed Henry. "What do doctors know? She et
something that hurt her. How do doctors know but what anybody might
eat something that folks think is wholesome, that, if the person
ain't jest right for it, acts like poison? Doctors don't know much.
She et something that hurt her."

"Poor Lucinda's cooking is enough to hurt 'most anybody," admitted
Sylvia; "but they say they found--"

"Don't talk such stuff," said Henry, fiercely. "She et something. I
don't know what you women like best to suck at, candy or horrors."

Now Henry was forced to admit that he himself was confronted by
something mysterious. Why had Horace fairly flung that candy on the
ground, and trampled on it, unless he had suddenly gone mad, or--?
There Henry brought himself up with a jolt. He absolutely refused to
suspect. "I'd jest as soon eat all that's left of the truck myself,"
he thought, "only I couldn't bear candy since I was a child, and I
ain't going to eat it for anybody."

Henry had to pass the Ayres house. Just as he came abreast of it he
heard a hysterical sob, then another, from behind the open windows of
a room on the second floor, whose blinds were closed. Henry made a
grimace and went his way. He was bound for Sidney Meeks's. He found
the lawyer in his office in an arm-chair, which whirled like a top at
the slightest motion of its occupant. Around him were strewn Sunday
papers, all that could be bought. On the desk before him stood a
bottle of clear yellow wine, half-emptied.

Sidney looked up and smiled as Henry entered. "Here I am in a vortex
of crime and misrule," he said, "and I should have been out of my
wits if it had not been for that wine. There's another glass over
there, Henry; get it and help yourself."

"Guess I won't take any now, thank you," said Henry. "It's just
before supper."

"Maybe you are wise," admitted the lawyer. He slouched before Henry
in untidy and unmended, but clean, Sunday attire. Sidney Meeks was as
clean as a gentleman should be, but there was never a crease except
of ease in his clothes, and he was so buttonless that women feared to
look at him closely. "It might go to your head," said Sidney. "It
went to mine a little, but that was unavoidable. After one of those
papers there my head was mighty near being a vacuum."

"What do you read the papers for?" asked Henry.

"Because," said Sidney, "I feel it incumbent upon me to be well
informed concerning two things, although I verily believe it to be
true that I have precious little of either, and they cannot directly
concern me. I want to know about the stock market, although I don't
own a blessed share in anything except an old mine out West on a map;
and I want to know what evil is fermenting in the hearts of men,
though I am pretty sure, in spite of the original sin part of it,
that precious little is fermenting in mine. About three o'clock this
afternoon I came to the conclusion that we were in hell or Sodom, or
else the newspaper men got saved from the general destruction along
with Lot. So I got a bottle of this blessed wine, and now I am fully
convinced that I am on a planet which is the work of the Lord
Almighty, and only created for an end of redemption and eternal
bliss, and that the newspaper men are enough sight better than Lot
ever thought of being, and are spending Sunday as they should,
peacefully in the bosoms of their own families. In fact, Henry, my
mental and spiritual outlook has cleared. What in creation is that
wad of broken box you are carrying as if it would go off any minute?"

Henry told him the story in a few words.

"Gee whiz!" said Meeks. "I thought I had finished the Sunday papers
and here you are with another sensation. Let's see the stuff."

Henry gave the crumpled box with the mass of candy to Meeks, who
examined it closely. He smelled of it. He even tasted a bit. "It's
all beyond me," he said, finally. "I am loath to admit that a
sensation has lit upon us here in East Westland. Leave it with me,
and I'll see what is the matter with it, if there's anything. I don't
think myself there's anything, but I'll take it to Wallace. He's an
analytical chemist, and holds his tongue, which is worth more than
the chemistry."

"You will not say a word--" began Henry, but Meeks interrupted him.

"Don't you know me well enough by this time?" he demanded, and Henry
admitted that he did.

"Do you suppose I want all this blessed little town in a tumult, and
the devil to pay?" said Meeks. "It is near time for me to start some
daisy wine, too. I shouldn't have a minute free. There'd be suits for
damages, and murder trials, and the Lord knows what. I'd rather make
my daisy wine. Leave this damned sticky mess with me, and I'll see to
it. What in creation any young woman in her senses wants to spend her
time in making such stuff for, anyway, beats me. Women are all more
or less fools, anyhow. I suppose they can't help it, but we ought to
have it in mind."

"I suppose there's something in it," said Henry, rather doubtfully.

Meeks laughed. "Oh, I don't expect any man with a wife to agree with
me," he said. "You might as well try to lift yourself by your
boot-straps; but I've got standing-ground outside the situation and
you haven't. Good-night, Henry. Don't fret yourself over this. I'll
let you know as soon as I know myself."

Henry, passing the Ayres house on his way home, fancied he heard
again a sob, but this time it was so stifled that he was not sure.
"It's mighty queer work, anyway," he thought. He thought also that
though he should have liked a son, he was very glad that he and
Sylvia had not owned a daughter. He was fond of Rose, but, although
she was a normal girl, she often gave him a sense of mystery which
irritated him.

Had Henry Whitman dreamed of what was really going on in the Ayres
house, he would have been devoutly thankful that he had no daughter.
He had in reality heard the sob which he had not been sure of. It had
come from Lucy's room. Her mother was there with her. The two had
been closeted together ever since Rose had gone. Lucy had rushed
up-stairs and pulled off her pretty gown with a hysterical fury. She
had torn it at the neck, because the hooks would not unfasten easily,
before her mother, who moved more slowly, had entered the room.

"What are you doing, Lucy?" Mrs. Ayres asked, in a voice which was at
once tender and stern.

"Getting out of this old dress," replied Lucy, fiercely.

"Stand round here by the light," said her mother, calmly. Lucy
obeyed. She stood, although her shoulders twitched nervously, while
her mother unfastened her gown. Then she began almost tearing off her
other garments. "Lucy," said Mrs. Ayres, "you are over twenty years
old, and a woman grown, but you are not as strong as I am, and I used
to take you over my knee and spank you when you were a child and
didn't behave, and I'll do it now if you are not careful. You
unfasten that corset-cover properly. You are tearing the lace."

Lucy gazed at her mother a moment in a frenzy of rage, then suddenly
her face began to work piteously. She flung herself face downward
upon her bed, and sobbed long, hysterical sobs. Then Mrs. Ayres waxed
tender. She bent over the girl, and gently untied ribbons and
unfastened buttons, and slipped a night-gown over her head. Then she
rolled her over in the bed, as if she had been a baby, and laid her
own cheek against the hot, throbbing one of the girl. "Mother's
lamb," she said, softly. "There, there, dear, mother knows all about
it."

"You don't," gasped the girl. "What do you know? You--you were
married when you were years younger than I am." There was something
violently accusing in her tone. She thrust her mother away and sat up
in bed, and looked at her with fierce eyes blazing like lamps in her
soft, flushed face.

"I know it," said Mrs. Ayres. "I know it, and I know what you mean,
Lucy; but there is something else which I know and you do not."

"I'd like to know what!"

"How a mother reads the heart of her child."

Lucy stared at her mother. Her face softened. Then it grew burning
red and angrier. "You taunt me with that," she said, in a
whisper--"with that and everything." She buried her face in her
crushed pillow again and burst into long wails.

Mrs. Ayres smoothed her hair. "Lucy," said she, "listen. I know what
is going on within you as you don't know it yourself. I know the
agony of it as you don't know it yourself."

"I'd like to know how."

"Because you are my child; because I can hardly sleep for thinking of
you; because every one of my waking moments is filled with you. Lucy,
because I am your mother and you are yourself. I am not taunting you.
I understand."

"You can't."

"I do. I know just how you felt about that young man from the city
who boarded at the hotel six years ago. I know how you felt about Tom
Merrill, who called here a few times, and then stopped, and married a
girl from Boston. I have known exactly how you have felt about all
the others, and--I know about this last." Her voice sank to a whisper.

"I have had some reason," Lucy said, with a terrible eagerness of
self-defence. "I have, mother."

"What?"

"One day, the first year he came, I was standing at the gate beside
that flowering-almond bush, and it was all in flower, and he came
past and he looked at the bush and at me, then at the bush again, and
he said, 'How beautiful that is!' But, mother, he meant me."

"What else?"

"You remember he called here once."

"Yes, Lucy, to ask you to sing at the school entertainment."

"Mother, it was for more than that. You did not hear him speak at the
door. He said, 'I shall count on you; you cannot disappoint me.' You
did not hear his voice, mother."

"What else, Lucy?"

"Once, one night last winter, when I was coming home from the
post-office, it was after dark, and he walked way to the house with
me, and he told me a lot about himself. He told me how all alone in
the world he was, and how hard it was for a man to have nobody who
really belonged to him in the wide world, and when he said good-night
at the gate he held my hand--quite a while; he did, mother."

"What else, Lucy?"

"You remember that picnic, the trolley picnic to Alford. He sat next
to me coming home, and--"

"And what?"

"There were only--four on the seat, and he--he sat very close, and
told me some more about himself: how he had been alone ever since he
was a little boy, and--how hard it had been. Then he asked how long
ago father died, and if I remembered, and if I missed him still."

"I don't quite understand, dear, how that--"

"You didn't hear the way he spoke, mother."

"What else, Lucy?"

"He has always looked at me very much across the church, and whenever
I have met him it has not been so much what--he said as--his manner.
You have not known what his manner was, and you have not heard how he
spoke, nor seen his eyes when--he looked at me--"

"Yes, dear, you are right. I have not. Then you have thought he was
in love with you?"

"Sometimes he has made me think so, mother," Lucy sobbed.

Mrs. Ayres gazed pitifully at the girl. "Then when you thought
perhaps he was not you felt badly."

"Oh, mother!"

"You were not yourself."

"Oh, mother!"

Mrs. Ayres took the girl by her two slender shoulders; she bent her
merciful, loving face close to the younger one, distraught, and full
of longing, primeval passion. "Lucy," she whispered, "your mother
never lost sight of--anything."

Lucy turned deadly white. She stared back at her mother.

"You thought perhaps he was in love with Miss Farrel, didn't you?"
Mrs. Ayres said, in a very low whisper.

Lucy nodded, still staring with eyes of horrified inquiry at her
mother.

"You had seen him with her?"

"Ever so many times, walking, and he took her to ride, and I saw him
coming out of the hotel. I thought--"

"Listen, Lucy." Mrs. Ayres's whisper was hardly audible. "Mother made
some candy and sent it to Miss Farrel. She--never had any that
anybody else made. It--was candy that would not hurt anybody that she
had."

Lucy's face lightened as if with some veritable illumination.

"Mother perhaps ought not to have let you think--as you did, so
long," said Mrs. Ayres, "but she thought perhaps it was best, and,
Lucy, mother has begun to realize that it was. Now you think,
perhaps, he is in love with this other girl, don't you?"

"They are living in the same house," returned Lucy, in a stifled
shriek, "and--and--I found out this afternoon that she--she is in
love with him. And she is so pretty, and--" Lucy sobbed wildly.

"Mother has been watching every minute," said Mrs. Ayres.

"Mother, I haven't killed him?"

"No, dear. Mother made the candy."

Lucy sobbed and trembled convulsively. Mrs. Ayres stroked her hair
until she was a little quieter, then she spoke. "Lucy," she said,
"the time has come for you to listen to mother, and you must listen."

Lucy looked up at her with her soft, terrible eyes.

"You are not in love with this last man," said Mrs. Ayres, quietly.
"You were not in love with any of the others. It is all because you
are a woman, and the natural longings of a woman are upon you. The
time has come for you to listen and understand. It is right that you
should have what you want, but if the will of God is otherwise you
must make the best of it. There are other things in life, or it would
be monstrous. It will be no worse for you than for thousands of other
women who go through life unmarried. You have no excuse to--commit
crime or to become a wreck. I tell you there are other things besides
that which has taken hold of you, soul and body. There are spiritual
things. There is the will of God, which is above the will of the
flesh and the will of the fleshly heart. It is for you to behave
yourself and take what comes. You are still young, and if you were
not there is always room in life for a gift of God. You may yet have
what you are crying out for. In the mean time--"

Lucy interrupted with a wild cry. "Oh, mother, you will take care of
me, you will watch me!"

"You need not be afraid, Lucy," said Mrs. Ayres, grimly and tenderly.
"I will watch you, and--" She hesitated a moment, then she continued,
"If I ever catch you buying that again--"

But Lucy interrupted.

"Oh, mother," she said, "this last time it was not--it really was
not--_that!_ It was only something that would have made her sick a
little. It would not have--It was not _that!_"

"If I ever do catch you buying that again," said Mrs. Ayres, "you
will know what a whipping is." Her tone was almost whimsical, but it
had a terrible emphasis.

Lucy shrank. "I didn't put enough of _that_ in to--to do much harm,"
she murmured, "but I never will again."

"No, you had better not," assented Mrs. Ayres. "Now slip on your
wrapper and come down-stairs with me. I am going to warm up some of
that chicken on toast the way you like it, for supper, and then I am
coming back up-stairs with you, and you are going to lie down, and
I'll read that interesting book we got out of the library."

Lucy obeyed like a child. Her mother helped her slip the wrapper over
her head, and the two went down-stairs.

After supper that night Sidney Meeks called at the Whitmans'. He did
not stay long. He had brought a bottle of elder-flower wine for
Sylvia. As he left he looked at Henry, who followed him out of the
house into the street. They paused just outside the gate.

"Well?" said Henry, interrogatively.

"All right," responded Meeks. "What it is all about beats me. The
stuff wouldn't hurt a babe in arms, unless it gave it indigestion.
Your boarder hasn't insanity in his family, has he?"

"Not that I know of," replied Henry. Then he repeated Meeks's
comment. "It beats me," he said.

When Henry re-entered the house Sylvia looked at him. "What were you
and Mr. Meeks talking about out in the street?" she asked.

"Nothing," replied Henry, lying as a man may to a woman or a child.

"He's in there with her," whispered Sylvia. "They went in there the
minute Mr. Meeks and you went out." Sylvia pointed to the best parlor
and looked miserably jealous.

"Well," said Henry, tentatively.

"If they've got anything to say I don't see why they can't say it
here," said Sylvia.

"The door is open," said Henry.

"I ain't going to listen, if it is, and you know I can't hear with
one ear," said Sylvia. "Of course I don't care, but I don't see why
they went in there. What were you and Mr. Meeks talking about, Henry?"

"Nothing," answered Henry, cheerfully, again.

Chapter XIII

Rose Fletcher had had a peculiar training. She had in one sense
belonged to the ranks of the fully sophisticated, who are supposed to
swim on the surface of things and catch all the high lights of
existence, like bubbles, and in another sense it had been very much
the reverse. She might, so far as one side of her character was
concerned, have been born and brought up in East Westland, as her
mother had been before her. She had a perfect village simplicity and
wonder at life, as to a part of her innermost self, which was only
veneered by her contact with the world. In part she was entirely
different from all the girls in the place, and the difference was
really in the grain. That had come from her assimilation at a very
tender age with the people who had had the care of her. They had
belonged by right of birth with the most brilliant social lights, but
lack of money had hampered them. They blazed, as it were, under
ground glass with very small candle-powers, although they were on the
same shelf with the brilliant incandescents. Rose's money had been
the main factor which enabled them to blaze at all. Otherwise they
might have still remained on the shelf, it is true, but as dark stars.

Rose had not been sent away to school for two reasons. One reason was
Miss Farrel's, the other originated with her caretakers. Miss Farrel
had a jealous dread of the girl's forming one of those erotic
friendships, which are really diseased love-affairs, with another
girl or a teacher, and the Wiltons' reason was a pecuniary one. Among
the Wiltons' few assets was a distant female relative of pronounced
accomplishments and educational attainments, who was even worse off
financially than they. It had become with her a question of
bread-and-butter and the simplest necessaries of life, whereas Mrs.
Wilton and her sister, Miss Pamela, still owned the old family
mansion, which, although reduced from its former heights of fashion,
was grand, with a subdued and dim grandeur, it is true, but still
grand; and there was also a fine old country-house in a fashionable
summer resort. There were also old servants and jewels and laces and
all that had been. The difficulty was in retaining it with the
addition of repairs, and additions which are as essential to the mere
existence of inanimate objects as food is to the animate, these being
as their law of growth. Rose Fletcher's advent, although her fortune
was, after all, only a moderate one, permitted such homely but
necessary things as shingles to be kept intact upon roofs of old
family homes; it enabled servants to be paid and fuel and food to be
provided. Still, after all, had poor Eliza Farrel, that morbid victim
of her own hunger for love, known what economies were practised at
her expense, in order that all this should be maintained, she would
have rebelled. She knew that the impecunious female relative was a
person fully adequate to educate Rose, but she did not know that her
only stipend therefor was her bread-and-butter and the cast-off
raiment of Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela. She did not know that when
Rose came out her stock of party gowns was so limited that she had to
refuse many invitations or appear always as the same flower, as far
as garments were concerned. She did not know that during Rose's two
trips abroad the expenses had been so carefully calculated that the
girl had not received those advantages usually supposed to be derived
from foreign travel.

While Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela would have scorned the imputation
of deceit or dishonesty, their moral sense in those two directions
was blunted by their keen scent for the conventionalities of life,
which to them had almost become a religion. They had never owned to
their inmost consciousness that Rose had not derived the fullest
benefit from Miss Farrel's money; it is doubtful if they really were
capable of knowing it. When a party gown for Rose was weighed in the
balance with some essential for maintaining their position upon the
society shelf, it had not the value of a feather. Mrs. Wilton and
Miss Pamela gave regular dinner-parties and receptions through the
season, but they invited people of undoubted social standing whom
Miss Farrel would have neglected for others on Rose's account. By a
tacit agreement, never voiced in words, young men or old who might
have made too heavy drains upon wines and viands were seldom invited.
The preference was for dyspeptic clergymen and elderly and genteel
females with slender appetites, or stout people upon diets. It was
almost inconceivable how Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela, with no actual
consultations to that end, practised economies and maintained
luxuries. They seemed to move with a spiritual unity like the
physical one of the Siamese twins. Meagre meals served magnificently,
the most splendid conservatism with the smallest possible amount of
comfort, moved them as one.

Rose, having been so young when she went to live with them, had never
realized the true state of affairs. Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela had
not encouraged her making visits in houses where her eyes might have
been opened. Then, too, she was naturally generous, and not
sharp-eyed concerning her own needs. When there were no guests at
dinner, and she rose from the table rather unsatisfied after her
half-plate of watery soup, her delicate little befrilled chop and dab
of French pease, her tiny salad and spoonful of dessert, she never
imagined that she was defrauded. Rose had a singularly sweet,
ungrasping disposition, and an almost childlike trait of accepting
that which was offered her as the one and only thing which she
deserved. When there was a dinner-party, she sat between an elderly
clergyman and a stout judge, who was dieting on account of the danger
of apoplexy, with the same graceful agreeableness with which she
would have sat between two young men.

Rose had not developed early as to her temperament. She had played
with dolls until Miss Pamela had felt it her duty to remonstrate. She
had charmed the young men whom she had seen, and had not thought
about them when once they were out of sight. Her pulses did not
quicken easily. She had imagination, but she did not make herself the
heroine of her dreams. She was sincerely puzzled at the expression
which she saw on the faces of some girls when talking with young men.
She felt a vague shame and anger because of it, but she did not know
what it meant. She had read novels, but the love interest in them was
like a musical theme which she, hearing, did not fully understand.
She was not in the least a boylike girl; she was wholly feminine, but
the feminine element was held in delicate and gentle restraint.
Without doubt Mrs. Wilton's old-fashioned gentility, and Miss
Pamela's, and her governess's, who belonged to the same epoch, had
served to mould her character not altogether undesirably. She was, on
the whole, a pleasant and surprising contrast to girls of her age,
with her pretty, shy respect for her elders, and lack of
self-assertion, along with entire self-possession and good breeding.
However, she had missed many things which poor Miss Farrel had
considered desirable for her, and which her hostesses with their
self-sanctified evasion had led her to think had been done.

Miss Farrel, teaching in her country school, had had visions of the
girl riding a thoroughbred in Central Park, with a groom in
attendance; whereas the reality was the old man who served both as
coachman and butler, in carefully kept livery, guiding two horses apt
to stumble from extreme age through the shopping district, and the
pretty face of the girl looking out of the window of an ancient coupe
which, nevertheless, had a coat of arms upon its door. Miss Farrel
imagined Rose in a brilliant house-party at Wiltmere, Mrs. Wilton's
and Miss Pamela's country home; whereas in reality she was roaming
about the fields and woods with an old bull-terrier for guard and
companion. Rose generally carried a book on these occasions, and
generally not a modern book. Her governess had a terror of modern
books, especially of novels. She had looked into a few and shuddered.
Rose's taste in literature was almost Elizabethan. She was not
allowed, of course, to glance at early English novels, which her
governess classed with late English and American in point of
morality, but no poetry except Byron was prohibited.

Rose loved to sit under a tree with the dog in a white coil beside
her, and hold her book open on her lap and read a word now and then,
and amuse herself with fancies the rest of the time. She grew in
those days of her early girlhood to have firm belief in those things
which she never saw nor heard, and the belief had not wholly deserted
her. She never saw a wood-nymph stretch out a white arm from a tree,
but she believed in the possibility of it, and the belief gave her a
curious delight. When she returned to the house for her scanty,
elegantly served dinner with the three elder ladies, her eyes would
be misty with these fancies and her mouth would wear the inscrutable
smile of a baby's at the charm of them.

When she first came to East Westland she was a profound mystery to
Horace, who had only known well two distinct types of girls--the
purely provincial and her reverse. Rose, with her mixture of the two,
puzzled him. While she was not in the least shy, she had a reserve
which caused her to remain a secret to him for some time. Rose's
inner life was to her something sacred, not to be lightly revealed.
At last, through occasional remarks and opinions, light began to
shine through. He had begun to understand her the Sunday he had
followed her to Lucy Ayres's. He had, also, more than begun to love
her. Horace Allen would not have loved her so soon had she been more
visible as to her inner self. Things on the surface rarely interested
him very much. He had not an easily aroused temperament, and a veil
which stimulated his imagination and aroused his searching instinct
was really essential if he were to fall in love. He had fallen in
love before, he had supposed, although he had never asked one of the
fair ones to marry him. Now he began to call up various faces and
wonder if this were not the first time. All the faces seemed to dim
before this present one. He realized something in her very dear and
precious, and for the first time he felt as if he could not forego
possession. Hitherto it had been easy enough to bear the slight
wrench of leaving temptation and moving his tent. Here it was
different. Still, the old objection remained. How could he marry upon
his slight salary?

The high-school in East Westland was an endowed institution. The
principal received twelve hundred a year. People in the village
considered that a prodigious income. Horace, of course, knew better.
He did not think that sum sufficient to risk matrimony. Here, too, he
was hampered by another consideration. It was intolerable for him to
think of Rose's wealth and his paltry twelve hundred per year. An
ambition which had always slumbered within his mind awoke to full
strength and activity. He began to sit up late at night and write
articles for the papers and magazines. He had got one accepted, and
received a check which to his inexperience seemed promisingly large.
In spite of all his anxiety he was exalted. He began to wonder if
circumstances would not soon justify him in reaching out for the
sweet he coveted. He made up his mind not to be precipitate, to wait
until he was sure, but his impatience had waxed during the last few
hours, ever since that delicious note of stilted, even cold, praise
and that check had arrived. When Rose had started to go up-stairs he
had not been able to avoid following her into the hall. The door of
the parlor stood open, and the whole room was full of the soft
shimmer of moonlight. It looked like a bower of romance. It seemed
full of soft and holy and alluring mysteries. Horace looked down at
Rose, Rose looked up at him. Her eyes fell; she trembled deliciously.

"It is very early," he said, in a whispering voice which would not
have been known for his. It had in it the male cadences of wooing
music.

Rose stood still.

"Let us go in there a little while," whispered Horace. Rose followed
him into the room; he gave the door a little push. It did not quite
close, but nearly. Horace placed a chair for Rose beside a window
into which the moon was shining; then he drew up one beside it, but
not very close. He neither dared nor was sure that he desired. Alone
with the girl in this moonlit room, an awe crept over him. She looked
away from him out of the window, and he saw that this same awe was
over her also. All their young pulses were thrilling, but this awe
which was of the spirit held them in check. Rose, with the full white
moonlight shining upon her face, gained an ethereal beauty which gave
her an adorable aloofness. The young man seemed to see her through
the vista of all his young dreams. She was the goddess before which
his soul knelt at a distance. He thought he had never seen anything
half so lovely as she was in that white light, which seemed to crown
her with a frosty radiance like a nimbus. Her very expression was
changed. She was smiling, but there was something a little grave and
stern about her smile. Her eyes, fixed upon the clear crystal of the
moon sailing through the night blue, were full of visions. It did not
seem possible to him that she could be thinking of him at all, this
beautiful creature with her pure regard of the holy mystery of the
nightly sky; but in reality Rose, being the more emotional of the
two, and also, since she was not the one to advance, the more daring,
began to tremble with impatience for his closer contact, for the
touch of his hand upon hers.

She would have died before she would have made the first advance, but
it filled her as with secret fire. Finally a sort of anger possessed
her, anger at herself and at Horace. She became horribly ashamed of
herself, and angry at him because of the shame. She gazed out at the
wonderful masses of shadows which the trees made, and she gazed up
again at the sky and that floating crystal, and it seemed impossible
that it was within her as it was. Her clear face was as calm as
marble, her expression as immovable, her gaze as direct. It seemed as
if a man must be a part of the wonderful mystery of the moonlit night
to come within her scope of vision at all.

Rose chilled, when she did not mean to do so, by sheer maidenliness.
Horace, gazing at her calm face, felt in some way rebuked. He had led
a decent sort of life, but after all he was a man, and what right had
he to even think of a creature like that? He leaned back in his
chair, removing himself farther from her, and he also gazed at the
moon. That mysterious thing of silver light and shadows, which had
illumined all the ages of creation by their own reflected light,
until it had come to be a mirror of creation itself, seemed to give
him a sort of chill of the flesh. After all, what was everything in
life but a repetition of that which had been and a certainty of
death? Rose looked like a ghost to his fancy. He seemed like a ghost
to himself, and felt reproached for the hot ardor surging in his
fleshly heart.

"That same moon lit the world for the builders of the Pyramids," he
said, tritely enough.

"Yes," murmured Rose, in a faint voice. The Pyramids chilled her. So
they were what he had been thinking about, and not herself.

Horace went on. "It shone upon all those ancient battle-fields of the
Old Testament, and the children of Israel in their exile," he said.

Rose looked at him. "It shone upon the Garden of Eden after Adam had
so longed for Eve that she grew out of his longing and became
something separate from himself, so that he could see her without
seeing himself all the time; and it shone upon the garden in
Solomon's Song, and the roses of Sharon, and the lilies of the
valley, and the land flowing with milk and honey," said she, in a
childish tone of levity which had an undercurrent of earnestness in
it. All her emotional nature and her pride arose against Pyramids and
Old Testament battle-fields, when she had only been conscious that
the moon shone upon Horace and herself. She was shamed and angry as
she had never been shamed and angry before.

Horace leaned forward and gazed eagerly at her. After all, was he
mistaken? He was shrewd enough, although he did not understand the
moods of women very well, and it did seem to him that there was
something distinctly encouraging in her tone. Just then the night
wind came in strongly at the window beside which they were sitting.
An ardent fragrance of dewy earth and plants smote them in the face.

"Do you feel the draught?" asked Horace.

"I like it."

"I am afraid you will catch cold."

"I don't catch cold at all easily."

"The wind is very damp," argued Horace, with increasing confidence.
He grew very bold. He seized upon one of her little white hands. "I
won't believe it unless I can feel for myself that your hands are not
cold," said he. He felt the little soft fingers curl around his hand
with the involuntary, pristine force of a baby's. His heart beat
tumultuously.

"Oh--" he began. Then he stopped suddenly as Rose snatched her hand
away and again gazed at the moon.

"It is a beautiful night," she remarked, and the harmless deceit of
woman, which is her natural weapon, was in her voice and manner.

Horace was more obtuse. He remained leaning eagerly towards the girl.
He extended his hand again, but she repeated, in her soft, deceitful
voice, "Yes, a perfectly beautiful night."

Then he observed Sylvia Whitman standing beside them. "It is a nice
night enough," said she, "but you'll both catch your deaths of cold
at this open window. The wind is blowing right in on you."

She made a motion to close it, stepping between Rose and Horace, but
the young man sprang to his feet. "Let me close it, Mrs. Whitman,"
said he, and did so.

"It ain't late enough in the season to set right beside an open
window and let the wind blow in on you," said Sylvia, severely. She
drew up a rocking-chair and sat down. She formed the stern apex of a
triangle of which Horace and Rose were the base. She leaned back and
rocked.

"It is a pleasant night," said she, as if answering Rose's remark,
"but to me there's always something sort of sad about moonlight
nights. They make you think of times and people that's gone. I dare
say it is different with you young folks. I guess I used to feel
different about moonlight nights years ago. I remember when Mr.
Whitman and I were first married, we used to like to set out on the
front door-step and look at the moon, and make plans."

"Don't you ever now?" asked Rose.

"Now we go to bed and to sleep," replied Sylvia, decisively. There
was a silence. "I guess it's pretty late," said Sylvia, in a meaning
tone. "What time is it, Mr. Allen?"

Horace consulted his watch. "It is not very late," said he. It did
not seem to him that Mrs. Whitman could stay.

"It can't be very late," said Rose.

"What time is it?" asked Sylvia, relentlessly.

"About half-past ten," replied Horace, with reluctance.

"I call that very late," said Sylvia. "It is late for Rose, anyway."

"I don't feel at all tired," said Rose.

"You must be," said Sylvia. "You can't always go by feelings."

She swayed pitilessly back and forth in her rocking-chair. Horace
waited in an agony of impatience for her to leave them, but she had
no intention of doing so. She rocked. Now and then she made some
maddening little remark which had nothing whatever to do with the
situation. Then she rocked again. Finally she triumphed. Rose stood
up. "I think it is getting rather late," said she.

"It is very late," agreed Sylvia, also rising. Horace rose. There was
a slight pause. It seemed even then that Sylvia might take pity upon
them and leave them. But she stood like a rock. It was quite evident
that she would settle again into her rocking-chair at the slightest
indication which the two young people made of a disposition to remain.

Rose gave a fluttering little sigh. She extended her hand to Horace.
"Good-night, Mr. Allen," she said.

"Good-night," returned Horace. "Good-night, Mrs. Whitman."

"It is time you went to bed, too," said Sylvia.

"I think I'll go in and have a smoke with Mr. Whitman first," said
Horace.

"He's going to bed, too," said Sylvia. "He's tired. Good-night, Mr.
Allen. If you open that window again, you'll be sure and shut it down
before you go up-stairs, won't you?"

Horace promised that he would. Sylvia went with Rose into her room to
unfasten her gown. A lamp was burning on the dressing-table. Rose
kept her back turned towards the light. Her pretty face was flushed
and she was almost in tears. Sylvia hung the girl's gown up
carefully, then she looked at her lovingly. Unless Rose made the
first advance, when Sylvia would submit with inward rapture but
outward stiffness, there never were good-night kisses exchanged
between the two.

"You look all tired out," said Sylvia.

"I am not at all tired," said Rose. She was all quivering with
impatience, but her voice was sweet and docile. She put up her face
for Sylvia to kiss. "Good-night, dear Aunt Sylvia," said she.

"Good-night," said Sylvia. Rose felt merely a soft touch of thin,
tightly closed lips. Sylvia did not know how to kiss, but she was
glowing with delight.

When she joined Henry in their bedroom down-stairs he looked at her
in some disapproval. "I don't think you'd ought to have gone in
there," he said.

"Why not?"

"Why, you must expect young folks to be young folks, and it was only
natural for them to want to set there in the moonlight."

"They can set in there in the moonlight if they want to," said
Sylvia. "I didn't hinder them."

"I think they wanted to be alone."

"When they set in the moonlight, I'm going to set, too," said Sylvia.
She slipped off her gown carefully over her head. When the head
emerged Henry saw that it was carried high with the same rigidity
which had lately puzzled him, and that her face had that same
expression of stern isolation.

"Sylvia," said Henry.

"Well?"

"Does anything worry you lately?"

Sylvia looked at him with sharp suspicion. "I'd like to know why you
should think anything worries me," she said, "as comfortable as we
are off now."

"Sylvia, have you got anything on your mind?"

"I don't want to see young folks making fools of themselves," said
Sylvia, shortly, and her voice had the same tone of deceit which Rose
had used when she spoke of the beautiful night.

"That ain't it," said Henry, quietly.

"Well, if you want to know," said Sylvia, "she's been pestering me
with wanting to pay board if she stays along here, and I've put my
foot down; she sha'n't pay a cent."

"Of course we can't let her," agreed Henry. Then he added, "This was
all her own aunt's property, anyway, and if there hadn't been a will
it would have come to her."

"There was a will," said Sylvia, fastening her cotton night-gown
tightly around her skinny throat.

"Of course she's going to stay as long as she's contented, and she
ain't going to pay board," said Henry; "but that ain't the trouble.
Have you got anything on your mind, Sylvia?"

"I hope so," replied Sylvia, sharply. "I hope I've got a little
something on my mind. I ain't a fool."

Henry said no more. Neither he nor Sylvia went to sleep at once. The
moon's pale influence lit their room and seemed disturbing in itself.
Presently they both smelled cigar smoke.

"He's smoking," said Sylvia. "Well, nothing makes much difference to
you men, as long as you can smoke. I'd like to know what you'd do in
my place."

"Have you got anything on your mind, Sylvia?"

"Didn't I say I hoped I had? Everybody has something on her mind,
unless she's a tarnation fool, and I ain't never set up for one."

Henry did not speak again.

Chapter XIV

The next morning at breakfast Rose announced her intention of going
to see if Lucy Ayres would not go to drive with her.

"There's one very nice little horse at the livery-stable," said she,
"and I can drive. It is a beautiful morning, and poor Lucy did not
look very well yesterday, and I think it will do her good."

Horace turned white. Henry noticed it. Sylvia, who was serving
something, did not. Henry had thought he had arrived at a knowledge
of Horace's suspicions, which in themselves seemed to him perfectly
groundless, and now that he had, as he supposed, proved them to be
so, he was profoundly puzzled. Before he had gone to Horace's
assistance. Now he did not see his way clear towards doing so, and
saw no necessity for it. He ate his breakfast meditatively. Horace
pushed away his plate and rose.

"Why, what's the matter?" asked Sylvia. "Don't you feel well, Mr.
Allen?"

"Perfectly well; never felt better."

"You haven't eaten enough to keep a sparrow alive."

"I have eaten fast," said Horace. "I have to make an early start this
morning. I have some work to do before school."

Rose apparently paid no attention. She went on with her plans for her
drive.

"Are you sure you know how to manage a horse?" said Sylvia,
anxiously. "I used to drive, but I can't go with you because the
washerwoman is coming."

"Of course I can drive," said Rose. "I love to drive. And I don't
believe there's a horse in the stable that would get out of a walk,
anyway."

"You won't try to pass by any steam-rollers, and you'll look out for
automobiles, won't you?" said Sylvia.

Horace left them talking and set out hurriedly. When he reached the
Ayres house he entered the gate, passed between the flowering shrubs
which bordered the gravel walk, and rang the bell with vigor. He was
desperate. Lucy herself opened the door. When she saw Horace she
turned red, then white. She was dressed neatly in a little blue
cotton wrapper, and her pretty hair was arranged as usual, with the
exception of one tiny curl-paper on her forehead. Lucy's hand went
nervously to this curl-paper.

"Oh, good-morning!" she said, breathlessly, as if she had been
running.

Horace returned her greeting gravely. "Can I see you a few moments,
Miss Lucy?" he said.

A wild light came into the girl's eyes. Her cheeks flushed again.
Again she spoke in her nervous, panting voice, and asked him in. She
led the way into the parlor and excused herself flutteringly. She was
back in a few moments. Instead of the curl-paper there was a little,
soft, dark, curly lock on her forehead. She had also fastened the
neck of her wrapper with a gold brooch. The wrapper sloped well from
her shoulders and displayed a lovely V of white neck. She sat down
opposite Horace, and the simple garment adjusted itself to her slim
figure, revealing its tender outlines.

Lucy looked at Horace, and her expression was tragic, foolish, and of
almost revolting wistfulness. She was youth and womanhood in its most
helpless and pathetic revelation. Poor Lucy could not help herself.
She was a thing always devoured and never consumed by a flame of
nature, because of the lack of food to satisfy an inborn hunger.

Horace felt all this perfectly in an analytical way. He sympathized
in an analytical way, but in other respects he felt that curious
resentment and outrage of which a man is capable and which is fiercer
than outraged maidenliness. For a man to be beloved when his own
heart does not respond is not pleasant. He cannot defend himself, nor
even recognize facts, without being lowered in his own self-esteem.
Horace had done, as far as he could judge, absolutely nothing
whatever to cause this state of mind in Lucy. He was self-exonerated
as to that, but the miserable reason for it all, in his mere
existence as a male of his species, filled him with shame for himself
and her, and also with anger.

He strove to hold to pity, but anger got the better of him. Anger and
shame coupled together make a balking team. Now the man was really at
a loss what to say. Lucy sat before him with her expression of
pitiable self-revelation, and waited, and Horace sat speechless. Now
he was there, he wondered what he had been such an ass as to come
for. He wondered what he had ever thought he could say, would say.
Then Rose's face shone out before his eyes, and his impulse of
protection made him firm. He spoke abruptly. "Miss Lucy--" he began.
Lucy cast her eyes down and waited, her whole attitude was that of
utter passiveness and yielding. "Good Lord! She thinks I have come
here at eight o'clock in the morning to propose!" Horace thought,
with a sort of fury. But he did not speak again at once. He actually
did not know how to begin, what to say. He did not, finally, say
anything. He rose. It seemed to him that he must prevent Rose from
going to drive with Lucy, but he saw no way of doing so.

When he rose it was as if Lucy's face of foolish anticipation of joy
was overclouded. "You are not going so soon?" she stammered.

"I have to get to school early this morning," Horace said, in a harsh
voice. He moved towards the door. Lucy also had risen. She now looked
altogether tragic. The foolish wistfulness was gone. Instead, claws
seemed to bristle all over her tender surface. Suddenly Horace
realized that her slender, wiry body was pressed against his own. He
was conscious of her soft cheek against his. He felt at once in the
grip of a tiger and a woman, and horribly helpless, more helpless
than he had ever been in his whole life. What could he say or do?
Then suddenly the parlor door opened and Mrs. Ayres, Lucy's mother,
stood there. She saw with her stern, melancholy gaze the whole
situation.

"Lucy!" she said.

Lucy started away from Horace, and gazed in a sort of fear and wrath
at her mother.

"Lucy," said Mrs. Ayres, "go up to your own room."

Lucy obeyed. She slunk out of the door and crept weakly up-stairs.
Horace and Mrs. Ayres looked at each other. There was a look of doubt
in the woman's face. For the first time she was not altogether sure.
Perhaps Lucy had been right, after all, in her surmises. Why had
Horace called? She finally went straight to the point.

"What did you come for, Mr. Allen?" said she.

Suddenly Horace thought of the obvious thing to say, the explanation
to give. "Miss Fletcher is thinking of coming later to take Miss Lucy
for a drive," said he.

"And you called to tell her?" said Mrs. Ayres.

Horace looked at her. Mrs. Ayres understood. "Miss Fletcher must come
with a double-seated carriage so that I can go," said she. "My
daughter is very nervous about horses. I never allow her to go to
drive without me."

She observed, with a sort of bitter sympathy, the look of relief
overspread Horace's face. "I will send a telephone message from Mrs.
Steele's, next door, so there will be no mistake," she said.

"Thank you," replied Horace. His face was burning.

Mrs. Ayres went on with a melancholy and tragic calm. "I saw what I
saw when I came in," said she. "I have only to inform you that--any
doubts which you may have entertained, any fears, are altogether
groundless. Everything has been as harmless as--the candy you ate
last night."

Horace started and stared at her. In truth, he had lain awake until a
late hour wondering what might be going to happen to him.

"I made it," said Mrs. Ayres. "I attend to everything. I have
attended to everything." She gazed at him with a strange, pathetic
dignity. "I have no apologies nor excuses to make to you," she said.
"I have only this to say, and you can reflect upon it at your
leisure. Sometimes, quite often, it may happen that too heavy a
burden, a burden which has been gathering weight since the first of
creation, is heaped upon too slender shoulders. This burden may bend
innocence into guilt and modesty into shamelessness, but there is no
more reason for condemnation than in a case of typhoid fever. Any man
of good sense and common Christianity should take that view of it."

"I do," cried Horace, hurriedly. He looked longingly at the door. He
had never felt so shamed in his life, and never so angrily
sympathetic.

"I will go over to Mrs. Steele's and telephone immediately," said
Mrs. Ayres, calmly. "Good-morning, Mr. Allen."

"Good-morning," said Horace. There was something terrible about the
face of patient defiance which the woman lifted to his.

"You will not--" she began.

Horace caught her thin hand and pressed it heartily. "Good God, Mrs.
Ayres!" he stammered.

She nodded. "Yes, I understand. I can trust you," she said. "I am
very glad it happened with you."

Horace was relieved to be out in the open air. He felt as if he had
escaped from an atmosphere of some terrible emotional miasma. He
reflected that he had heard of such cases as poor Lucy Ayres, but he
had been rather incredulous. He walked along wondering whether it was
a psychological or physical phenomenon. Pity began to get the better