Again Mar moved a little in his creaking chair, but halted this side
speech. Hildegarde, busily repacking, turned her blonde head toward her
mother, saying: “Ingratitude! Why, he’s perfectly devoted to papa! That’s
why I like Mr. Galbraith.”

“Devoted, is he? Well, he’s got odd ways of showing it. When he was a
troublesome, inquisitive little pest, he used to reveal his devotion by
coming twice every year to turn our house upside down, and get our boys
into every conceivable mischief. Glad enough to plant himself here then,
when nobody else would be bothered with him. But his devotion to your
father doesn’t carry him the length of coming to see him nowadays. Why,
it’s fourteen years since Jack Galbraith darkened these doors, and—”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were to darken them very soon,” said
Mr. Mar.

“What!” said Mrs. Mar, so surprised she allowed the rocking-chair to slow
down.

Hildegarde stood transfixed, with the top of the ottoman arrested, half
shut.

“Yes,” said Mr. Mar, steadily, and in complete good faith, as he slipped
the diagram into the envelop. “I’m expecting him out here this spring.”

“Jack is coming!” Hildegarde said to her heart. “Wonderful Jack is
coming! Dear Jack! Dear, _dear_ Jack! Oh, the beautiful world!”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Mar, beginning slowly to rock again, “and what’s he
coming for _this_ time?”

“Perhaps, as Hildegarde is fantastic enough to think, he may be coming to
see me,” Mar answered.

His wife’s laugh had a tang of shrewdness. “You’ll find he has business
of some sort to attend to in California, if he _does_ come!”

“Just now you were complaining that he didn’t attend to business
anywhere.”

“My complaint—no, my regret—is, that gratitude isn’t in the Galbraith
blood.”

“You have no good reason for saying that.” He spoke with uncommon
emphasis.

But Mrs. Mar’s spirit rose to meet him. “I have the excellent reason that
I know enough about the father as well as the son to form an opinion. I
don’t forget how your ‘greatest friend’ died, leaving you his executor
and leaving you nothing else. Not a penny piece out of all that money.”

“I don’t see why my friends should leave me money—”

“No, nor why you should get it any other way! Don’t let me hurry you,
Hildegarde, but if you’ve quite finished mooning about in the corner
there, I’d like to mention that it’s exactly twelve and a half minutes
since I called you in to your German, and there’s the Missionary Society
at half past four, and choir practice at seven, and before we can turn
round Mrs. Cox will be here about electing the new secretary to the
Shakspere Club, and if I’d known you were going to squander my time like
this I’d have stopped to make Harry his last Washington pie before—”

“Yes, mama. Now I’m settled.”

Hildegarde took the seat opposite her mother and silently applied the
seersucker patch. While Mr. Mar, behind the screen of a much-hunched
shoulder, copied with infinite care the “eye-sore” map, Mrs. Mar knitting
all the while at lightning speed, rolled out the German uninterruptedly,
till a ring at the bell was followed by sounds of Mrs. Cox being shown
into the parlor.

Mrs. Mar had known no one so well in Valdivia all these years as Mrs.
Elihu Cox. Mrs. Elihu was considered “a very bright woman,” and it was
no doubt so, since even Mrs. Mar did not demur at her renown. They met
seldom, outside of church, the Shakspere Club, or the Mission Society,
yet each had admitted things to the other that neither had admitted to
any one else. Even to-day, when there was definite business to arrange,
they talked of other matters than the vacant secretaryship. They
presented each other with views upon domestic service, education, and
husbands.

“I left Mr. Cox supremely happy,” said his spouse, in that tone of
humorous scorn by which many women try to readjust the balance between
the sexes. “Yes, supremely happy, clearing out his desk. He does it once
a month. Nothing Mr. Cox does brings him so near absolute bliss, except
wandering about the place with a hammer and nails.”

Both women smiled at the inveterate childishness of the lords of creation.

And then, on a sudden, Mrs. Cox was grave. One might laugh at the odd
ways of men with any woman. It is the universal bond that binds the
sex together; the fine lady feels it no less when she condoles with
her washer-woman upon a stay-at-home husband,—“Yes, yes, a man in the
house all day is dreadfully in the way,”—and their identity of sentiment
bridges the difference in fortune. But Mrs. Mar was one with whom you
might not only laugh over the foibles of the opposite sex, you might even
be grave with her on the same ground—a rarer privilege to the educated
woman.

“That monthly orgy, that’s such unalloyed delight to Mr. Cox, used to be
a time of great interest to me, too,” admitted Mrs. Cox.

“Really!” The president of the Valdivia Shakspere Society could hardly
believe it of her friend.

“Yes. You see, there’s always a great clearance made—a general getting
rid of all sorts of accumulations. I used to watch every time when he
came to the lower left-hand drawer—” Mrs. Cox smiled faintly as one
pitiful of some long-past pain.

“Well, what was the matter with the lower left-hand drawer?”

“That was where he kept a faded photograph of Ellie Brezee. I used to
watch to see if _that_ time he was going to throw it away. He never did.”

“Who was Ellie Brezee?”

“A sister of Colonel George Brezee—the one that died. That was before you
came to California. Mr. Cox was engaged to Ellie when he was nineteen.
But, thank goodness, my concern about it is among the things that I’m
done with. I don’t any longer sit at home, now, with the tail of my
eye on the lower left-hand drawer while Ellie Brezee comes out for her
monthly airing.”

“Oh, you disposed of Ellie?”

“No, oh, no.”

“He finally threw the picture away himself?”

“No. Only now, I know he never will.”

They were silent a moment. “I never _said_ anything, of course; and he
never made any secret about it. I didn’t think it any disloyalty to me
that he should keep it. At the same time”—she dropped her voice—“the pain
the sight of that faded face was to me for years—you think it supremely
silly, I suppose. But then _your_ husband doesn’t hoard up the memory
of some girl that’s been dead and buried for twenty years, so you can’t
understand.”

“Yes, I can understand,” Mrs. Mar answered, with an eye that saw through
the wall the reconnaissance map of Norton Sound.

CHAPTER V

Jack Galbraith replied to Mr. Mar’s letter by return of post. He
apologized for not writing more at length, but he was up to his eyes
in proof-correcting. He was seeing through the press—(“Yes, yes, but
all that was singularly irrelevant”)—book about his experiences (“Hum!
hum!”), “extreme northern Siberia.” (“_Siberia_, forsooth!”); no white
man had ever been there before. (“And to think he _might_ have spent that
time in Alaska!”) He was “making a genuine contribution to science”—oh,
yes, quite so—“most travelers too imperfectly equipped.” (“He couldn’t
have had my letter when he wrote this.”) The implication was, of course,
that Galbraith’s own equipment left nothing to be desired. He even
touched airily upon his claims to be considered geographer as well as
navigator, electrician, geologist, philologist, biologist, and the
Lord knows what, beside. Yes, Jack had a large way of envisaging human
endeavor, especially his own. But certainly their letters had crossed.
Hum! he had “covered areas in science never before exploited by a single
man.” The result Mar should presently see. For Galbraith would leave
word that a copy of the great work should be sent to his old friend.
It would be two years before he himself could see the thing in book
form. (“What’s this?”) “Off again, to join an expedition!” And wasn’t
it strange? He was going to the arctic as Mar was recommending. Not
precisely to Norton Bay, but (“Then he _had_ got the letter!”) “with the
Swedish explorer Nordenskjöld to see if by good luck” they could find the
North Pole. And why shouldn’t they “come home via Norton Bay?” he asked,
with irresponsible arrogance, adding, characteristically: “I’ll mention
it to the Swede. Perhaps we’ll crawl over the crown of the world and
coast down the shore of Alaska till we come up against your Anvil Rock.
If we do, I promise to go and see after the gold-mine for you. Thank you
for saying I’m to have my share—but thank you most of all for telling me
such a mighty fine story when I was a kid. It had a great deal to do with
the shaping of my ambition, and the direction of my multifarious studies.”

And this was Galbraith’s good-by.

These events had taken place nearly two years before Bella Wayne began
her meteoric career at the Valdivia School for Young Ladies.

If Hildegarde had recovered somewhat from her disappointment at Jack’s
failure to visit California, her father had not ceased silently to
lament, and secretly to contemn Galbraith’s wounding flippancy in his
choice of a route to Alaska.

When Madeleine Smulsky’s family took her away to live in Wyoming,
Hildegarde would have been even more desolate but for her espousal
of Bella Wayne’s cause, and consequent preoccupation with that not
altogether satisfactory protégée.

For Miss Bella had “ways” that were distinctly rasping. She was
abominably selfish, and her big family of brothers and sisters had
spoiled her from the day she could toddle.

She was, besides, the uncomfortable kind of little girl in whose eyes
you always saw reflected whatever was amiss with you. You might have on
a hat of ravishing beauty, but if your belt had worked up and your skirt
had worked down, Bella’s glance ignored your highly satisfactory top
and fastened on your middle. Not until after she had known Bella Wayne
for some months did Hildegarde begin to divine her own shortcomings in
the matter of dress. No gulf of years, or respect for high standing in
the school, deterred Bella from letting Miss Mar know that she could
never, never wear with success a checked shirt-waist. Why not? Because.
And for the same excellent reason, Miss Mar must have her things made
plainer. No puffing; no shirring. “_I_ can wear ‘fluffery,’ but you
can’t. You’re much too like an old goddess or Boadicea, or some whacking
person like that,” which was tepid and discreet in comparison with many
of her deliverances. She would ask you a highly inconvenient question as
soon as wink, and her own frankness was a thing to make you cold down
your back. An eye that nothing escaped, the keenest of little noses for
a secret, a ruthless finger for any sensitive spot—that was Bella Wayne
at twelve. It was the second time that she was being so kindly helped by
Miss Hildegarde, and yet more than at the reduction of “those disgusting
fractions” Bella looked at her new friend, bent so low over the slate
that her sole ornament, a silver locket, swung against the dado of
dragons, without whose scaly support Bella could never hope to bring her
mind down to mathematics for a moment. She reflected that she had never
seen Miss Mar without that locket. Was there anything inside it? Her
fingers itched to open it and see. It was suspended round the smooth neck
on a narrow velvet ribbon. Bella, supposed to be following the course of
reasoning by which it was to be demonstrated that “since 100 pounds of
coal cost $0.33 per hundredweight, 385 pounds (which are equal to 3.85
times 100 pounds) will cost 3.85 times $0.33,” she was in reality making
mental calculation of a quite different character, as she studied the
little black velvet bowknot that rested on the milk-white nape of Miss
Mar’s neck, just underneath a flaxen ring of hair. One end of the bow was
longer than the other.

“Five times three are fifteen. Five and carry one—see, Bella?”

“Yes.” What Bella saw, with that look of luminous intelligence, was that
the silver locket was sliding into Miss Mar’s lap.

“Eight times three—oh!” But before Hildegarde could close her fingers on
the fallen trinket, Bella had snatched it up and carried it away behind
the syringas.

“Give me back my locket!” called Hildegarde. “Give it back this minute!”

Bella made off to a remoter fastness. Hildegarde pursued her. But
Hildegarde never could catch anybody, and Bella was already the champion
runner of the school. “Bella, I never show that to anybody. I won’t
forgive you if you open it.”

“Oh, I _must_ see why you say that!” Bella stopped and tried the
fastening. Hildegarde rushed at her, but Bella fled at each approach. At
last the big girl stopped breathless, and tried moral suasion. The little
girl only laughed, and standing just out of reach had the effrontery to
open the locket and make unseemly comment upon what she found within.

“My gracious! _Isn’t_ he a sweet? Where does he live? Does he go to
church? I’m sure _I’ve_ never seen this bee-yew-tiful young man before.
Girls, do you want to look at Miss Mar’s sweetheart. Come and see this
darling duck!” She summoned the laughing group that had been looking on.

But Bella only pretended to show them. Every time anybody came near,
she covered the face with her thumb. But Hildegarde, lacking the small
satisfaction of knowing that, worn out with the race and scarlet with
indignation, breathless, outraged, pursued the fleet little villain from
group to group, and after the bell rang, from garden to hall. In vain.

When Bella appeared at the breaking up of school that day, and restored
the locket, Miss Mar received it in a lofty silence, refusing even to
look at a little girl so ill-mannered and ungrateful.

But the next day Bella, much subdued by one of her recurrent attacks of
homesickness, red-eyed, a little pinched-looking and woebegone, begged
pardon so prettily, that Miss Mar’s heart was melted.

“And I didn’t really show it to the others. Ask anybody. I wouldn’t
do _that_. Oh, no!” And then betraying the true ground of this pious
self-control, “Is it your brother?”

“No.” Hildegarde bent her head over the slate.

“Who is it?”

“A friend of my father’s.”

“Do you love him dreadfully?”

“Of _course_ not. I never saw him.”

“What makes you wear his picture?”

“I only put it in the locket because I hadn’t anything else the right
size. That’s all.”

“Then why did you make such a fuss when I—”

“Because I thought it very rude of you to look into somebody else’s
locket without permission. And it _might_ have been something that
mattered.”

There was that in the unconverted look on the little face which made
Hildegarde hot to her ear-tips.

But Bella said not a word, only smiled with that returning interest in
life that so readily revives in the breast of the shrewd observer. And
without a “please” or a “will you?” Bella handed the big girl her slate,
with its two days’ accumulation of fractions and of dragons. Hildegarde’s
sensibilities were once more so outraged that for a moment she hesitated
to accept the task so coolly put upon her.

“I believe you’re a little monster,” said Miss Mar, in her slow way. “I
don’t see why I should trouble myself about you or your arithmetic.”

“I know why,” returned Bella, unmoved.

“Why?”

“Because you’re the nicest of all the big girls.”

Hildegarde tried to conceal the fact that she was somewhat softened by
this tribute. “I’m not really the nicest,” she said, trying to be modest.

“Well, perhaps you’re not the nicest, but you’ve got the longest
eyelashes. It’s a good thing they aren’t as light as your hair, isn’t
it?”

“Well, I don’t know. Fives into—”

“Yes, you do, you know you’d cry your eyes out if your winkers were as
nearly white as your hair is. What do you do to make your eyelashes so
long?”

“Nothing. Now pay attention. You reduce thirty-three and a third to
thirds and—”

“Did your mother keep them cut when you were a baby?”

“No, silly.”

“I believe she did.” The next day Miss Bella appeared without eyelashes.
Every individual hair snipped close to the lid.

“I mean to have mine just like Miss Mar’s,” she told the group gathered
about Hildegarde’s desk. “Hers are so immense they _trail_. I’m sure they
must get awfully in the way sometimes.”

“Then I wonder you run such a risk. You’d better have left yours as they
were.”

“Oh, if mine grow out as long as that, of course I shall plait them and
tie them up with blue ribbons.”

But it was not always admiration to which she treated her patron.

She was once twitted quite groundlessly with feeling herself obliged to
“mind” Miss Mar.

“Yes,” she said, laughing a little wickedly. “I _must_, you see. She’s
so massive. Just look at her shoulders. Look at her hips. Even her hair
is massive. See what wobs it goes into.” This conversation took place
in the cloak-room. “Everything about her is so big, it scares a little
person like me. Look at that hat. You’d know it must belong to Miss Mar.
If it was anybody else’s it would be a parasol. But you can tell it’s a
hat because it’s got an elastic instead of a stick. And just look at the
size of that elastic. Why, it’s as broad as my garter.”

Now and then she would startle Hildegarde’s self-possession by an
outburst of torrential affection. And so it came about that in spite of
Bella’s blithe impertinence, Hildegarde even in those early days thought
of her with sympathy as a lonely little being who was in reality very
grateful for a big girl’s friendship. She would follow at Hildegarde’s
heels like a pet dog, walk with her down to the gate every day after
school, and invent one ingenious pretext after another to keep Hildegarde
standing there a moment longer. Sometimes, when at last she said
“good-by,” there was not regret alone but tears as well in Bella’s pretty
eyes.

“It must have been a little girl at boarding-school that found out
Friday was an unlucky day,” she announced on one occasion. “It’s the
miserablest, blackest day of the week. Yes it is, Miss Mar. It’s just
hellish.”

“Why, Bella Wayne! What _awful_ language.”

“Well, you have to get hold of awful language when you’re thinking of an
awful thing. All to-night, and all to-morrow, and all to-morrow night,
and all Sunday, and all Sunday night, to live through before I see you
again!” The small face worked with suppressed emotion, the small mind
with suppressed arithmetic. Both eventually found outward expression.
“Sixty-six hours!” she said, while two tears rolled out of her eyes.
“Sixty-six hours till you’re back here again. I don’t honestly think I
can bear it this time. I shall die. I know I shall. I feel very strange
already. Would you care if I died? W-would you come to the funeral?” She
choked. “W-what would you wear? You’d look p-perfectly bee-yew-tiful in
black. _Do_ wear black. Oh, I _wish_ I was dead. It would be so nice to
see how you look in black.”

Hildegarde was touched to find how wildly delighted the homesick little
girl was at the idea of being invited to spend Saturday afternoon at
the Mars—a little anxious, too, was Miss Mar, lest the occasion should
not come up to such ecstatic expectation. Not that the Mar house was
at all the forlorn and dingy place it had been in the days when Mrs.
Mar struggled alone, with a scant income and three babies. The general
impression was that the Mar boys already contributed generously to the
family resources. But the fact was that their mother was ingeniously
making the very most of what “the boys” added to the common purse. The
amount was as yet quite trifling—“of necessity,” she would have added,
for they were both young men who looked ahead. But it was really to
Hildegarde that the little house owed its air of immaculate freshness and
good taste. If she couldn’t play or sing, she could paint—bookshelves,
the floors, even the woodwork. Several years ago she proved that she
could paper a room. She managed to cover the old furniture with charming
chintz “for a song,” and she made curtains out of nothing at all. No one
could arrange flowers better or grow them half so well. When she was
given money for her clothes, she often spent it on something for the
house. Not fully realizing her genius for domestic affairs, she told
herself the reason she did all this was to make the house pretty “for
when Jack comes back.” He might arrive quite suddenly. He did everything
without warning. I may come home from school any day to find him here!
Oh, it lent a wonderful zest to life to remember that.

Bella was pleased to like Miss Mar’s garden immensely, but even more
she liked Miss Mar’s room, with its white curtains and dimity-covered
toilet-table, and the scant and simple furniture that looked so nice and
fresh since Hildegarde had herself enameled it. When the little visitor
looked round with that quick-glancing admiration and said: “Oh, it’s much
prettier than mine at home.”

“What’s yours like?” asked Miss Mar, politely.

“Oh, it’s all pink silk, and I’m sick of it. What made you think of
having everything white?”

“This, I believe,” said her hostess, nodding at the climbing white rose
that looked in at the window. “But it’s partly that I like things that
wash and that don’t fade.”

“Well, I simply love your house. I’d no _idea_ it would be like this.”

“Why, what did you think it would be like?”

“Oh—a—kind of—no, I shan’t say. You’d misunderstand.”

Hildegarde felt it prudent not to insist. If you did, with this young
person, you were exposed to the most mortifying results.

“Who are these?” Bella demanded, inspecting the pictures.

“My brothers. That’s Trenn and this is Harry.”

“Will they be at tea?”

“No, they’re on a ranch in Tulare County.”

“Why, _we’ve_ got a ranch in Tulare County.” She was still looking
round as if expecting to find something that as yet escaped her eye.
“Where’s—where—a—Show me your—your ribbons and things.”

“I haven’t got any. We can’t afford ribbons in this family.”

“Let me see your collars and ties, then.” Hildegarde opened her top
drawer. In the course of turning over collars and handkerchiefs and
little boxes the silver locket came to light.

“Why don’t you wear it any more?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

Bella leaned her head with its halo of short, brown curls against her
friend, and very softly she beguiled her: “Please, Miss Mar, show me that
friend of your father’s again.”

Hildegarde hesitated a moment and then she opened the locket. Jack
Galbraith’s face smiled out upon the big girl and the little girl.

“Did you say you hadn’t ever seen him?”

“No, he hasn’t been here for sixteen years. Not since he was a little
boy. And he might have been here always, because he was an orphan and his
father was my father’s greatest friend. But some relations of his that
nobody had ever heard of before, they discovered him when he was nine,
and made him come to New York and live with them. But he didn’t like it.
At least—_I_ don’t know—mother thinks _they_ didn’t like it.”

“Why does she think that?”

“Because they let him go away to school. And he spent his vacations
canoeing, climbing mountains, and doing all sorts of queer things rather
than live with his relations. Then he went to Harvard, and then he went
abroad and studied. He’s always studying.”

“Gracious! what makes him do that?”

“Oh, he wants to find out about everything. And he’s doing it. He’s
written a book with things in it nobody ever heard of before. Father says
it’s a work of genius. Mr. Galbraith was coming here two years ago, when
he’d finished the book, only just then—”

“I didn’t think,” Bella interrupted with a sigh, “I didn’t think from his
picture he was so awful old.”

“He isn’t. He’s barely twenty-five.”

But Bella shook her head. “If a person’s over twenty he might just as
well be a hundred.”

“Yes, ordinary people. But it doesn’t matter _how_ old a genius is.
Father’s awfully excited about Mr. Galbraith just now, for he’s been away
a year and a half on an arctic expedition and we’re expecting him back
next summer. We may be hearing from him any day after the middle of June.
Father and I often talk about it when we’re alone together.”

“Why don’t you talk about it when there’s anybody there?”

“Oh, mother’s always so down on Mr. Galbraith.”

“What’s she down on him for?”

“Just because he wants to discover the North Pole.”

“Well, don’t you think yourself that’s rather—”

“No, I don’t.”

“To be wasting two whole years in just hunting round for the Pole? What’s
the good of the Pole, anyway?”

Hildegarde smiled a smile of superiority.

“My geography”—Bella invoked authority that even a big girl must
respect—“my geography says—”

“You’re too young to understand. It’s not the Pole. It’s the glory.”

“What glory?”

“Nobody’s ever yet got there.”

“Why should anybody? Lots of nicer places.”

“A great many people have tried. A good many have died trying—”

“Well, that’s a good reason for not bothering about it any more.”

“Oh, you’re just like—” But filial respect restrained Miss Mar. “I agree
with Mr. Galbraith. He thinks there’s nothing in the world half so
interesting to do.”

“He _must_ be silly.”

“No, he isn’t! He’s splendid—” But Hildegarde snapped the locket to, and
hid it under her best handkerchiefs.

The following Saturday, when Bella asked again to see the locket, Miss
Mar declined to bring it out. Bella begged in vain. She discovered that
her big, gentle friend could be immovable.

To Hildegarde’s dismay, Bella presently dissolved in tears. “Then may I
s-see the work of g-genius?”

“Yes, you may look at his book all you like.” She even let Bella take it
away with her to tide her over Sunday. But Mr. Galbraith’s “Winter among
the Samoyedes” had small success with Miss Wayne. “They make me sick,
those people! I can’t think how anybody likes hearing about their dirty
ways,” and she even cast reflections on Jack for wasting his time over
such “horrors.” However, there was another side to it. “What a relief
it’ll be to him to be with _us_ after the Samoyedes!”

“With _us_!” Hildegarde smiled inwardly.

Sitting by the rose-framed window one Saturday afternoon, talking as
usual about Mr. Galbraith and how soon he might be expected back from the
Pole, Bella suddenly burst out: “I’m tired to death of saying ‘Miss Mar.’
I _do_ wish you’d let me call you ‘Hildegarde.’”

The big girl’s breath was taken away. For the gulf between twelve
and sixteen is a thing hardly passable in that stronghold of class
distinction, a girls’ school. It was rare, indeed, that one of Miss Mar’s
ripe age stooped to help a little girl over a difficulty in her lessons.
It required something of the missionary spirit to take such pity upon
homesickness, as occasionally to give the afflicted one the great treat
of visiting a big girl on Saturday afternoon—but really to go to the
length proposed—

“I shan’t believe you really love me,” the little girl rushed on, “unless
you say yes. Oh, do say yes. _Everything_ depends on it. I’ll promise
always to say ‘Miss Mar’ before people. But if you’ll let me call you
Hildegarde when we’re alone, I’ll _know_ you’re my best friend. And then
I’ll tell you a secret. I’ll tell you two. _Tremendous_ secrets!”

It was finally arranged.

“Now for the tremendous secrets,” said Hildegarde, smiling.

But Bella was portentously grave, even agitated. “Well,” she said,
bracing herself, “my father’s an Englishman. Don’t tell anybody. Cross
your heart and hope you may die if ever you tell the girls.”

“All right. Cross my heart and hope I may die. But how in the world—?”

“It isn’t my fault, you see. And _I’m_ an American all right. I’ve
always wanted to explain to you ever since you were so angelic about
my fractions; it’s because my father’s an Englishman I have to eat milk
pudding. Over there”—Bella flicked a small hand across the American
continent and over the Atlantic deep, to indicate an inconsiderable
island where the natives persist in strange customs—“over there they all
do it. Of course, the minute I’m of age I shall insist on pie.” They
discussed the matter in all its bearings.

“Now about the other secret.”

“Well”—even the daring Bella caught her breath and paused. “No, not
to-day. I’ll keep the tremendousest one for another time. But _do_ get
out the silver locket, _dear_ Hildegarde, and let’s look at it.”

Ultimately she prevailed. The next time Bella came she found a delightful
surprise. The low table was cleared of everything but bowls of roses; and
against the white wall great ferns printed plain their tall and splendid
plumes—leaving free a little space in the middle where, on a gilt nail,
hung the open locket.

Bella was delighted with the whole scheme. “It only wants one thing to
make it perfect. No, I won’t tell you what it is. I’ll bring it next
Saturday.”

“It” proved to be a paper of Chinese joss-sticks, and a little bronze
perforated holder. “We must each burn one to him every week,” she said,
setting up her contribution below the dangling locket.

“I don’t quite know if we ought,” Hildegarde said. “Joss-sticks are
prayers you know—at least the Chinese think so.”

“Well, of course they’re prayers. That’s why I brought them.”

While the two joss-sticks sent up into the rose-perfumed air faint
spirals of an alien fragrance, the two girls sat in front of the
confident young face looking out of the silver locket, and talked
endlessly about the owner.

Hildegarde found it subtly intoxicating to have so keen an auditor—a
sharer even (to the humble extent possible for extreme youth) in the
great pivotal romance of existence.

And then Bella had such wonderful inspirations. It was she who saw
the larger fitness in Mr. Mar’s habit of going fishing on Saturday
afternoons. What was that but an arrangement of the gods that he should
be so effectually out of the way, that Hildegarde might with safety
borrow from his desk the Galbraith letters. Sitting close together on
a square of Japanese matting, in front of the rose table, an anxious
ear listening for Mrs. Mar’s return from the missionary meeting, the
dark head leaned against the fair, while the two girls read and re-read
those precious documents, in an atmosphere charged with incense and a
palpitating joy. One day, arrived regretfully at the end of the letter
they liked best, Bella bent and kissed the signature. Hildegarde’s
heart gave a great jump. The daring of that deed was well-nigh impious.
Hildegarde, when all by herself, had done the same, but that was
different.

“Now you know my other secret,” said Bella, very pink—“the tremendousest
one of all.” When the first shock had died away, Hildegarde was left with
a pitiful tenderness before the disarming frankness of such a confession.
Poor little Bella! Why, Jack didn’t even know of her existence. He never
would, till in some rare idle hour of the glorious future, Hildegarde
should tell him of a little homesick girl she had befriended once at
school.

But Bella could be depended on to break in upon such gracious forecasting
of the future, with a suddenness that made the picture dance, “Which of
us two do you suppose Jack’ll fall in love with?”

Hildegarde, almost paralyzed by the presumption this implied, barely
managed to bring out, “You’re much too little to think of—”

“I shan’t be little always.”

“You’ll always be more than twelve years younger than Mr. Galbraith.”
Hildegarde always said Mr. Galbraith when she wanted to keep the intruder
at a distance.

But Bella advanced as bold as brass. “_Anyhow_ I think he’ll fall in love
with me.”

“Of course a person so modest would be likely to appeal to any gentleman.”

“No, it’s not my being modest he’ll mind about. It’s other things.”

“What other things?”

“Well—you—of course you’ve got your eyelashes, and you’re in the full
bloom of womanhood. But _I’m_ in the first blush of youth. I think he’ll
like that best.”

[Illustration: “The two girls sat in front of the confident young face
looking out of the silver locket”]

It was the second Saturday in June, and school was breaking up next week.
Mrs. Mar had finished off the Braut von Messina in the dining-room,
and barely begun with the Hindu Mission on the other side of the city.
Hildegarde had retired to her room to watch, not for Bella’s coming
(the window did not command the front), but for Mr. Mar’s going down
the garden with rod and creel. What made him so dilatory to-day? While
Hildegarde wondered, Bella came flying in, shut the door with agitated
care, faced about with cheeks of crimson, hat over one ear and the
whisper, “Hildegarde, I’ve seen him! I’ve seen him! Oh, Hildegarde, he’s
here!” Wherewith she precipitated herself upon her friend’s neck and
hugged her breathlessly.

“Who, who?”

“Why, ‘he.’ _He’s_ here! The only man I ever loved!”

Hildegarde took the dancing dervish by the shoulders. “You don’t mean—”

“Yes, yes, I do. He came in just before me. He’s perfectly glorious.
Just to look at him makes you feel—makes you think you’ve got windmills
shut up inside you. Everything goes whirling round. And when he asked”
(Bella lowered her pipe to a masculine depth): “‘Is Mr. Mar at home?’
it sounded so beautiful, I thought for a moment he was talking poetry.
Oh, Hildegarde! _Hildegarde!_” Again she sunk her ecstacy to whispering
as she followed her friend out into the hall. Together they hung over
the banisters. The visitor was talking more poetry apparently in the
dining-room. The two girls stayed suspended there an eternity. At last
with thumping hearts, upon Bella’s suggestion, they went down into the
entry. “We’ll pretend to be putting on our overshoes. I’ll have Mrs.
Mar’s!” whispered Bella, excitedly, ignoring the fact that the continued
fine weather and dusty streets lent an air of eccentricity to the
proceeding. She stopped after drawing on one big overshoe and shuffled
softly to the dining-room door. She put her eye to the keyhole. No use.
Notwithstanding Hildegarde’s whispered remonstrance, she glued her ear to
the aperture. The door was suddenly opened and Miss Bella fell sideways
into the arms of an astonished young man, who said: “Hello, what’s this?”
Hildegarde, drowned in sympathetic confusion, helped Bella to regain her
equilibrium, while she muttered the explanation “Overshoes!”

“This is my daughter Hildegarde, Mr. Cheviot,” said Mr. Mar, “and this is
our little friend, Bella Wayne.”

“_Ch-Cheviot!_” stuttered the little friend.

The young man with the laughing eyes said: “Anything wrong with the
name?” and having shaken hands with “my daughter Hildegarde,” he departed.

“Did you say his name was Cheviot?” Hildegarde asked her father.

“Yes. The new recruit at the bank. Seems to be an intelligent sort of
fellow.”

With ease and celerity Miss Bella transferred her affections from a
faded photograph, a packet of letters, and a book of travels, to a real
live young man with a square jaw that looked as if he meant business,
but with a ready laugh, too, as if the business were not without its
diverting aspect. Then he had rough brown hair that “fitted” him. Bella
would have told you this was a rarity, most people’s beginning too far
back from the forehead, or growing too much away from the ears, leaving
them with a bare and naked look. Or it grew in a peak. Or it didn’t grow
low enough on the neck and was like a badly made wig, that had slipped
forward. Or worse than anything, it forgot where to stop and grew down
into the collar like Professor Altberg’s, prompting the irreverent Bella
to whisper to her neighbor (while the grave instructor was sitting with
head bent over a Latin exercise): “How far do you think it goes? Do you
suppose he’s hairy _all_ down his back?”

However that might be, Cheviot’s hair fitted him. Moreover, he had, in
Bella’s estimation, a fascinating, if somewhat mocking air toward little
girls, and he helped one little girl gallantly through the dismal Sundays
by the simple process of sitting in church where she could watch him.
Once in a while in coming out, Bella would catch his eye, and he would
laugh and give her a nod. On the rare occasions of his encountering Miss
Bella at the Mars’, he never failed to stop and mimic her first greeting,
“I’m ‘Ch-Cheviot,’ you know. Now what’s the matter with that name?” which
was vastly entertaining, not to say “taking.”

John Galbraith came back to America that autumn, but he stayed in the
East.

Bella didn’t much care what he did now, for she was thirteen, and in
spite of the ugliness of their Hindu protégée Miss Wayne had joined the
Busy Bees. That was because Hildegarde had told her that Louis Cheviot
went to their dances. Bella saw at once the fitness of her doing the
same. The result was that she seldom waltzed less than twice with the
new hero, who, it must be admitted, was a better batsman than dancer.
But nobody could help “getting through” with Bella as a partner, for
she danced divinely. Cheviot should have been better pleased to get her
for his partner, but it was plain that he was unduly preoccupied about
“my daughter Hildegarde.” Several of the young men were. Bella told
herself with a consciousness of native worth, that she had never minded
in the least before. But this was different. She made up her mind that
if “Ch-Cheviot” goaded her much further by this display of misplaced
devotion, she would just take the misguided young man aside some day and
talk to him “as a friend.”

She would tell him about Jack Galbraith.

CHAPTER VI

Bella Wayne’s father had been in the royal navy. His health had given
way about the same time as his patience on the vexed question of
non-promotion. He retired from the service, went with his American wife
and family to California on a visit, became enamoured of the climate,
bought a place, and settled there. The three youngest of his seven
children were born in Tulare County, but for him “home” was still
England, however ungrateful. They all went back every second year to
visit his father in Staffordshire, and when Bella’s two sisters found
English husbands, there were three reasons for the recurrent visit to
the old country. The eldest son, Tom Wayne, had made a fortune on the
New York Stock Exchange and married a girl belonging to one of the old
Knickerbocker families. Tom’s country house on Staten Island proved
highly convenient as a half-way station between England and California.
Mrs. Tom was a very charming person, and a certain portion of Bella’s
satisfaction in going abroad lay in the chance it presented of making a
visit to Staten Island, on the way over and back. Nevertheless, as she
never failed to tell Hildegarde on her return, there was no place to
be compared to California, no friend and no “in-law” who could make up
to her for being away from Hildegarde, and she might have added, from
the neighborhood of that obdurate creature with the cold blue eyes and
the colder heart, Louis Cheviot. Those who thought about it at all were
surprised that the friendship of the two girls was not more interrupted
upon Hildegarde’s graduating from the school, when Bella was less than
fifteen. But not upon community of tasks, rather upon something essential
in the nature of each had their alliance been founded—kept vital by wants
in each that the other could supply, excesses in each that the other
helped to modify. They themselves thought their relation had its deeper
roots in a conviction of the peculiar sanctity of girls’ friendships;
a creed to which Hildegarde’s fidelity effected Miss Bella’s actual
adhesion only by degrees and with notable backslidings.

But even in early days, Bella felt it was highly distinguished to stand
in this relation to one who thought and talked about it as Hildegarde
did. Hadn’t she said in that soft, deliberate way of hers, that it was
capable of being one of the most beautiful things in all the beautiful
world? It was something, she said, no man knew anything about. Why,
they presumed to doubt its possibility even! Ah, they should have known
Hildegarde Mar and Bella Wayne. Men believed that all girls were, at
heart, jealous of all other girls. They thought meanly of the sex. They
pointed to David and Jonathan, to Orestes and Pylades, to instances
innumerable of men’s faithfulness to men. But what bard or legend
celebrates woman’s friendship as toward woman? Well, you see, all the
chroniclers since the beginning of the world have been of the scoffer’s
sex. That was why women’s friendships had never been celebrated—though
men said the real reason was—oh, they spoke blasphemies!—and they hadn’t
known Hildegarde and Bella. It was Hildegarde’s theme, but Bella agreed
to every word. Yes, yes, _their_ friendship would show the world!

For qualities alien to her own, Hildegarde came to look upon her little
friend with an adoring admiration. Bella’s wit and Bella’s originality,
Bella’s entire “mode of being,” were at once tonic and delight. Then,
too, behind her provoking charm was a finished daintiness, which with
her became elevated into a special quality, distinctive, all-pervading,
a certain strangeness of fragility—a physical fineness like the peculiar
fineness of a flower—a something suggesting evanescence, and having the
subtle pathos of the thing that may not, cannot bide.

It would have been hard to say which was of most use to the other in
making clearer the riddle of life, or more radiant the beauty of the
world, or more wonder-waking, the mystery of a young girl’s heart. They
read, and walked, and talked, and worked, together, paying their vaunted
friendship a finer tribute than words, however honestly uttered; for they
grew in each other’s company.

The younger, too, was cured of certain of her more inadmissible “ways,”
while the elder learned from Butterfly Bella many a thing besides the art
of making the most of her beauty.

Not that Hildegarde despised this last. She had none of the comfort of
knowing it was part of her largeness of nature, that she should take more
easily to beautifying her home than to making the best of herself. Indeed
to the end of time, she required guidance in matters of dress. And who so
well qualified as Miss Bella to give advice. She went further: with her
own ingenious little hands she made the most becoming of “shirt-waists,”
trimmed heavenly hats, and firmly forbade fripperies.

“No, no, they’re not for the massive.” She applauded her friend for
not wearing trinkets—she didn’t like to see her even with her maternal
grandmother’s emerald brooch. “No, I don’t like you in ‘didoes’
of any sort. They’re too insignificant for you. You ought to wear
ropes of pearls, or a tiara of diamonds, or better still, something
barbaric—what’s one little lady-like emerald set in a filigree of diamond
chips? Why, it can’t even be seen—on you. Of course the emerald’s a
pretty little stone, and the old setting’s nice. It would shine out on
me, but—well, it’s simply _lost_, you know, on your heroic neck.”

Hildegarde deplored her size, she carried it even with a sense of
humiliation just as she bore with her lack of elegant accomplishments.
It was pretty terrible to have to put up with being such a great
lump—especially with the ethereal Bella always by to point the advantage
of the opposite. Still, there was no blinking the facts. “You’re right, I
believe, didoes of any sort _are_ rather wasted on me,” Hildegarde would
say meekly, “I must have felt that when I hardly ever wore them—though I
liked them. It takes you, Bella, to explain things.”

Nothing was ever allowed to come in the way of their spending their
Saturday afternoons together, and if, as time went on, less was heard
about Jack from Hildegarde, it was only because so very much more was
heard about Cheviot from Bella.

It was a difficult moment when two girls with such lofty ideas of
friendship met for the first time after Cheviot had said to Hildegarde
at a dance: “When are you going to begin to care for me?” She had been so
taken by surprise that she had only smiled and said: “I don’t know,” but
she thought hardly less of Bella at the moment than she thought of Jack.
So the next time that Bella remarked by the way: “Isn’t he perfectly
fascinating?” Hildegarde had hesitated, and she—yes—she was actually
getting red. Bella stared, “Why, are _you_ coming to—to—”

“No; _oh_, no! Only—”

“Only what?”

“It’s dreadfully hard, but I haven’t forgotten our compact. So I suppose
I’ve got to tell you what—what he said to me last night.”

Bella received the information with a half-hysterical pretense of
carrying it off gaily. “Well, what’s there new in that? As if every
soul in Valdivia hasn’t known for perfect ages that he cares about you
frightfully. I don’t mind _you_. Because you’re Hildegarde, and any man
who didn’t love you must—well, there must be something pretty wrong about
him. I shall give him a whole year—maybe even two, to go on like that,
and then when I’m sixteen, or seventeen at the latest, I won’t have it
any longer.”

Hildegarde, enormously relieved, laughed and kissed her. “Oh, you nice,
funny child!”

“Only promise me again, cross your heart and hope you may die, if you
ever keep anything from me about Louis Cheviot.”

Hildegarde complied and life went on as before—only that Hildegarde
showed herself less ready to fall in with Bella’s ecstasies. An instinct
to forestall a possible jealousy made her cavil from time to time.
“Don’t you think his shoulders are too broad for his height?”

“No, I don’t, and look how splendidly he carries them. You have to see
him beside a huge man, like Mr. Mar, before you realize—”

“Yes, yes; _that’s_ true,” Hildegarde hastened to heal the wound.

“And, anyhow, I don’t think it’s kind of you to run Louis down. I am
always very nice about Jack.”

The end of it was that Cheviot came more and more to the Mar house, and
seemed so diverted when he found the lively Bella there, that Hildegarde
gave herself up without reserve to the three-cornered friendship.

He took the girls boating and organized parties to the Tule Lands, and
was altogether a most invaluable ally in the agreeable pursuit of being a
young lady in her first season.

Still, when Bella praised him absolutely without moderation, “Y-yes,”
Hildegarde would respond, “he is _nice_, only—”

“Only what?” says Miss Bella, instantly on the defensive.

“Well, you know I prefer big men.”

“Of course you do. It’s being so massive yourself. But he’s exactly the
right size for me.”

“Oh, yes, and he’s quite the nicest of all the Valdivia boys.”

“Well, that’s going pretty far,” says Bella, with an edge in her voice.

Then the other, with that recurrent though only half-conscious need to
show that after all, she, Hildegarde, wasn’t dazzled—not being in Bella’s
state, _she_ could see blemishes—the older girl would add: “And yet
somehow for all his niceness, and making us always have a good time when
he’s there, to my thinking there’s something terribly unromantic about
Louis Cheviot.”

“Now you only say that,” retorts Miss Bella, with sparkling eyes,
“because he’s in a bank.”

“No—no,” vaguely, “but I don’t believe he’s got any soul.”

“Just because he isn’t hunting the North Pole!”

“No. That isn’t the reason. I assure you it isn’t.”

“Then it _can_ only be because he likes to laugh at everything.”

“He _is_ pretty frivolous,” said Hildegarde, “and he ridicules
friendship. But no, it’s not that, either. It’s because he’s kind of
chilling. To _me_.”

“Chilling to you?” Bella beamed. “Oh, do tell me about that.”

“Sometimes he’s positively rude.”

“To _you_?” Bella could have danced.

“To anybody.”

“Oh, but _when_ was he positively rude to you? How black-hearted of you,
Hildegarde, not to tell me that before! You might have known I’d simply
_love_ hearing about that.”

Hildegarde laughed. “Why, I haven’t seen you since Thursday.”

“Was it at your birthday party?”

“Yes, at the birthday party.”

“Well, well, how did he do it? What did he say?”

“It was after we’d all been reading the poem that came with Eddie Cox’s
present. Louis made fun of it.”

“That was only being rude to Eddie.” Bella’s face fell.

“Wait till you hear. I defended it, of course, and said: ‘It isn’t as
easy as it looks to make birthday odes.’ ‘It certainly doesn’t _look_
difficult—to make _that_ kind,’ he said. ‘Then why,’ I said, just to
stand up for Eddie, ‘why have you never written a poem about my airy
tread?’ And Louis said: ‘Well, there may be another reason, but no girl
who stands five foot ten in her stockings and weighs a hundred and fifty
pounds need ask it.’ _That’s_ the kind of thing.”

It was an incident Miss Bella loved to recall. No man could be really in
love with a girl he had said _that_ to.

But some months later, Hildegarde was obliged, according to the code, to
report that Cheviot had been “going on” again.

Bella insisted on having all the “horrid details.”

“It was last night at the taffy pulling. You know how we’d all been
laughing at his stories of Miss Monk meeting the Carters’ black cow—”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, I was laughing so I couldn’t stop, and it was so warm in that room
the candy was melting. You remember he said—”

“Oh, yes,” said Bella, with feeling, “_I_ remember. He said you must come
and pull with him.”

“—out in the porch where the candy and I would cool off.”

“And you went.”

“And he made more jokes on the way out. I begged him not to talk any
more, for I’d got into a silly mood and everything he said made me laugh.
‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘I labor under the fatal disadvantage of the
funny man, but I could make you serious you know.’ And then—then—he had
the impertinence—to kiss me.”

“Oh, Hildegarde!”

“Yes. It was dreadfully grotesque, too—our hands were stuck together by
that great yellow rope of taffy, and I could only stammer and get redder.
But I did say I was not going to forgive him. Nobody had ever been so
rude to me before. Then he got awfully serious and said all kinds of
things—”

“_What_ kind?”

“And at last he asked me what was wrong with Ch-Cheviot—your old joke,
you know.”

Bella clenched her hands. Sacrilege! to present _her_ joke to another
girl! She had always imagined that would be just how he would propose
to her. He would say: “Bella, my beautiful, what’s the matter with
Ch-Cheviot?”

“Well, go on.”

“If I didn’t like him enough he said, what sort of man _was_ I going to
like? And I thought it only fair to give him some idea, so I tried to
soften it by laughing a little—I’d forgiven him by then, you know, for
he’d said _such_ things—”

“What things?”

“Oh, sorry kind of things, and he looked so—so—well, I’d forgiven him.
But I told him plainly that if it ever is a question of the sort of man I
am to care for, it won’t be some one who is just nice and makes me have
a good time. It will be some great, gloomy creature who makes me cry—and
lifts me to the stars. I was laughing, but I meant it—and I said: ‘I’d
worship _that_ kind of man.’”

“What did he say then?”

“Well, he looked sort of down I thought, so I said: ‘You wouldn’t let me
worship you, even if I could.’ ‘I’d let you love me,’ he said.”

“Oh-h. What else?”

“We went in after that.”

“And he was just as funny as ever,” said Bella, clutching at frail
comfort.

“Oh, quite,” agreed Hildegarde.

It was small consolation to Miss Bella that Cheviot was singular in his
obduracy. Before she was eighteen she was uncommonly well accustomed to
seeing the stoutest masculine defenses go down before her. The two Mar
boys had long been her devoted slaves. And Bella had flirted with both
of them impartially, taking what she felt was only a becoming share in
the interest all Valdivia felt in those go-ahead young men, whenever they
came home for a visit. They were pointed to as models. Look how they “got
on”—they did it visibly—while you looked they seemed to have to restrain
themselves from rising out of your sight. They kept Miss Bella supplied
with candy and flowers and they corresponded with her when she went
abroad. Secretly dreading the fascinations of the Britisher, they asked
in scoffing postscripts how the effete nations were getting on. Bella’s
view of all this was that, provided the young men were “nice,” a girl
could hardly have too many of them contending for her favor. It was what
they were there for. Each time she came home, she brought the Mar boys
a scarf-pin apiece, and pleased them still more by invariably demanding
a cent in return. “I can’t _give_ you a thing with a point. Something
dreadful would happen! you must buy them.” That looked, they felt, as if
she were “taking it seriously”—but which was she taking?

The year that Bella was eighteen, after a summer in England, she arrived
at Staten Island just in time to celebrate her birthday. She was full of
joy at getting back.

The conscious approval that she bestowed on the greater splendor of the
American autumn had been generously extended to the profusion of fine
fruit that greets one here at breakfast, to the individual bathrooms,
even to the spacious, drawered, behooked, and shelved clothes-closets
so agreeably numerous in the American house. The same satisfaction with
which she had noted these things consciously revisited her as she trod
the wide, shallow steps of the staircase, that in its descent halted
leisurely upon two broad landings, having each a large unglazed window
opening upon the hall below. The observant young eyes paid a flitting
tribute to the beautiful woodwork of the balusters and the great tall
doors of the rooms she passed, deciding as she went, there’s nothing
nicer than a new American house, unless it’s an old (and a very old)
English one. Even then, to _live_ in, give her the American.

Like so many of the first generation born in “the States,” this child
of an old-world father was more American in tastes and spirit than
any daughter of the Revolution. But, partly as a matter of physical
inheritance, partly, perhaps, because of her frequent visits to England,
she bore about her still a good deal of the peculiar stamp of a certain
type of English girl. As she came trailing slowly down the wide staircase
of Tom Wayne’s country house on Staten Island, the practised eye would
have little difficulty in detecting a difference between the figure on
the stair and the typical “American beauty,” a something less sumptuous
and more distinguished. Her head held not quite so high, and yet in her
carriage something indefinably more aloof. The longer waist, not quite
so ruthlessly stayed and belted, giving an effect of greater ease; the
longer neck, the shoulders a little more sloping, the eyes less eager
and yet with more vision in them—something in the whole, gracious as the
aspect was, a little reluctant and more than a little elusive. The Paquin
gown Bella had brought back and wore to-night for the first time, was
long, and straight, and plainer than prescribed by the New York fashion
of the moment—a gauze, discreetly iridescent, showing over a white satin
petticoat shifting lights of pink, and pearl, and silver, a gown that
shimmered as the wearer walked, and clothed her in glancing light and
soft-hued shadows.

Bella knew that she was very early, and she came down slowly, drawing a
long glove up her slim, bare arm. When she reached the square window on
the lower landing, she stopped, laid the other glove on the sill, and
proceeded to button the one she had on. A slight noise in the hall below
made her lean her arms on the broad, polished sill of the opening, and
look down.

A man stood by a table facing her, but with eyes bent upon the books he
was turning over—a man rather over medium height, sunburnt, with a lean,
clean-shaven face, fair hair, and clean cut mouth and chin. That was all
she had time to take in before he raised his eyes.

“Oh!” ejaculated Bella, involuntarily, and then after meeting a moment
longer the wide, unwinking, upward look, “How do you do!” she said.

“How do you do,” echoed the sunburnt man, and he did not bow nor move;
just stood looking at the picture up there on the wall.

Miss Bella was not as a rule easily embarrassed, but she was conscious
now of feeling a little at a loss.

“I don’t know exactly why I am in such a hurry to say ‘how do you do,’
that I can’t wait till I come down. But I do know you, don’t I?”

“Of course you know me”; but that time he smiled, and Bella said to
herself, how _could_ I have forgotten anybody so—so—

She picked up her glove with the intention of running down. But, I expect
I look rather nice here in the window, she reflected, and instead of
going down instantly she said: “It’s some time since I was here before.”

“Yes, it’s a long time,” he answered. His tone pleased her.

“And I run about the world such a lot, I can’t be expected to remember
everybody’s name just all at once, can I?”

“Oh, the name doesn’t matter.”

“Does that mean you aren’t quite sure of mine?”

“I haven’t the faintest notion of it.”

“Then how do you know—what made you say, ‘Of course I knew you’?”

“Because I was sure you did.”

“Why should I remember you, any more than you should remember me? Are you
somebody very special?”

“_Very_ special.”

“Who?”

“Oh, you’ll hear.”

“How shall I hear?”

“I’ll tell you myself.”

“Well, go on.”

“I can’t, now.”

“Why not?”

“You—you’re too far off.”

“When I come down, you’ll tell me?”

“_Will_ you?—will you ever come down?” He was smiling.

“Why shouldn’t I?” she said, bewildered.

“I never saw it tried before.”

“Never saw me try to come down-stairs!”

“Never, yet.”

Had he been here that time she sprained her ankle? “Do you imagine I’m
lame?”

“On the contrary, I’m ready to believe you have wings. Please fly down.”

“What a very odd person you are! I can’t think how I came to forget—”

He made no answer. Just stood there leaning against the heavy table,
half-smiling and never turning away his eyes.

She caught up her glove and ran down several steps, but just before she
reached the open place where the stair turned abruptly, and the solid
wall gave way to a procession of slender pillars, she stopped, overcome
by a sudden rush of shyness. Behind that last yard of sheltering wall
she waited breathless, while you might count seven, and then turned on a
noiseless foot and fled up-stairs, bending low as she passed the square
windows, so that not even the top of her brown head should be visible to
that very odd man waiting for her down there in the hall.

She reappeared ten minutes later with the first batch of guests, and
while they were speaking to their hostess, the sunburnt man made his way
to Bella, and held out his hand.

“It took you a long time,” he said. “How did you manage it?”

“Manage what?”

“Getting down. You’re the cleverest picture I ever saw on any wall. How
long do they give you?”

“Out of the frame?” she said, catching up his fancy with a laugh. “Oh,
only long enough to find out what you’ve done to make you the special
person you say you are.”

“It’s not what I _have_ done, but what I shall do.”

“Well, I’m very much disappointed. I thought you must be distinguished,
and now I see you’re only conceited.”

He smiled—he was rather wonderful when he smiled.

“Of course, I know perfectly well we’ve met before,” Bella went on, “but
I don’t remember who you are.”

“I’ll tell you some day.”

“Some day? How absurd. Why not now?”

“Because the surprise might be too great.”

She opened her eyes yet wider and laughed as a girl will in recognition
of a point she sees as yet only with the eye of faith. “Didn’t you
promise you’d tell me if I came down?”

“But you haven’t come down. You are still far out of reach.”

“It’s ridiculous of you not to tell me your name.”

“My name wouldn’t mean anything to you—not yet. You wouldn’t know it.”

“What!” She drew back.

“But we have met,” he reassured her hurriedly.

“I felt we must have, but where was it?”

“I can’t quite remember, either. It may have been when you were Queen in
Babylon and I was a Christian slave.”

She drew nearer with lit face. “Oh, do you believe in all those
delightful things?”

“I believe—” he began on a different and lower note and then he stopped
suddenly. Bella’s upturned face silently begged him to go on with his
profession of faith.

But just then, Bella’s brother, having passed a boring guest on to his
wife, came between the two who stood so oblivious of the rest of the
company. The apparition of Tom Wayne brought Bella back to the every-day
world, and to a half-frightened self-criticism, in view of the long
flight she had taken from it in the last few seconds.

Her brother laid an affectionate hand on the shoulder of the sunburnt
man, and said, laughing, to Bella: “You must be careful with this person.
He’s the most desperate flirt.”

Bella winced inwardly, but she disguised the little hurt with smiling
mockery. “Really! I should _never_ have thought it!”

“Oh, yes, goes off with first one heart and then another. And he goes so
far! That’s the worst of him.”

“Where does he go?”

“Lord knows! Let’s see, what God-forgotten place was the last book about?”

“Oh, you write books? Then you _are_ distinguished—”

“You aren’t telling me you didn’t know who it was?” exclaimed her
brother.

“Well, I thought I did, and I’ve been behaving as if I did.”

There was a general movement to the dining-room, but Tom paused long
enough to say with mock formality: “Miss Wayne, Mr. John Galbraith.”

“_Oh!_” ejaculated the girl, growing pink with excitement. “Are you
Hildegarde’s Jack?”

The sunburnt man looked mystified a moment, and then with sudden daring,
“Is your name Hildegarde?” he said.

This was on the twenty-fourth of September. Six days later she began a
letter to her friend.

    “Oh, Hildegarde! Hildegarde! You’re quite right. He’s the most
    wonderful person in the world, and I hope you don’t mind, but
    we are engaged to be married—Jack Galbraith and I! It turns
    out that he’s an old friend of Marion’s family, and after she
    married my brother, when Jack came to see them last winter, Tom
    liked him awfully—of course everybody does that—and since then
    they’ve all three been great friends.

    “And one of the first things he asked me when he heard Tom
    came from near Valdivia, was all about you—I mean your father.
    He says such beautiful things about your father, and how kind
    he was when Jack was a poor, forlorn, little boy. But oh,
    Hildegarde! he’s the most glorious person now you ever saw in
    your life. The old faded photograph isn’t a bit like him. I am
    sending you a new one, and that isn’t like him, either. But I
    am going to get a silver frame for it and I shall be dreadfully
    hurt if you don’t put it on the altar-table, with the old
    locket and the roses—if you’re really glad of our happiness
    you’ll even burn a joss now and then for our sake. I’m
    miserable when I think how little good any photograph of such
    a person is! You can’t imagine what it’s like when he smiles.
    All the whole earth smiles, too. I adore him when he smiles—and
    when he doesn’t. I adore him every minute, except when he talks
    about Franz Josef Land, or something disgusting like that. But
    then he doesn’t do it much—never, except when Mr. Borisoff is
    here. Mr. Borisoff is a man I can’t stop to tell you about,
    only I don’t like him, and I shall let Jack know some day that
    I don’t think he is a good influence.

    “But I began to say that you mustn’t think Jack is the least
    solemn as his letters used to sound and as the pictures make
    out. In fact, he began our acquaintance by flirting quite
    desperately, but he says it wasn’t flirting at all. He meant
    all those things! He says they were a profession of faith
    upon a miraculous revelation (that’s me—I’m the miraculous
    revelation!), and it only sounded flirtatious because I didn’t
    realize, as he did, that we had been waiting for one another.

    “He’s waited a good deal longer than I have, poor Jack! He’s
    more than twelve years older than I am; do you remember how you
    used to throw that in my face? But it doesn’t matter the least
    in the world. Besides, you’d never think he was so old—he’s
    such a darling; and he talks like a poet, and a painter, and
    an archangel, all rolled into one. I am so wildly happy I
    can’t write a proper letter, only I do want you to know that
    your mother is mistaken, as we always thought. Jack is a
    saint—simply a saint. When my father behaved quite horridly,
    and said he couldn’t have me marrying a man who went away
    for two or three years on long, scientific expeditions, Jack
    said he wouldn’t do it any more, though I think it cost him
    something to say that. He was quite silent for hours afterward,
    and didn’t even notice I’d done my hair differently. And that
    horrid Mr. Borisoff was in such a rage. He didn’t say anything,
    but oh! he looked. But now he’s gone away, thank goodness, and
    I shall try to make Jack not ever see him again. Then another
    thing, just to show you what a perfect angel Jack is. My mother
    said I was delicate and too young, and things like that, and
    she got father to agree that I was only eighteen and was the
    weakling of the family, and they made up their wicked old
    minds that I mustn’t be married right away as Jack and I had
    arranged. And what do you think? Jack said he would wait for
    me? A whole year! I cried when they settled that, but wasn’t
    he a seraph? Fathers and mothers are very selfish; I shall not
    treat my daughters like that.

    “How Jack and I will ever get through a year of waiting is more
    than either of us know. I am not coming home till the first
    week in December, and Jack’s coming to us for Christmas. And
    then you’ll see him! I hope you are pleased that I’m going to
    marry the man we’ve talked so much about. It seems like another
    bond, doesn’t it? How is Louis Cheviot? I can forgive him now
    for always liking you best. I can’t imagine how I ever looked
    at him. Oh, Hildegarde, Jack is a perfect—well, I never heard
    the word that was beautiful enough to describe him.

    “Good-by, I hear him now out in the garden. Jack is the most
    perfect whistler.

                     “Your loving and devoted

                                                           “BELLA.”

CHAPTER VII

December did not bring Galbraith—nor even Bella.

“Jack found he couldn’t leave that odious Mr. Borisoff to settle up some
business all alone, but my brother Tom has got mama to consent to stay
over Christmas with me in New York at Marion’s. So Jack and I shan’t die,
as we fully intended to if we were separated.”

Just as the girl and her mother, early in the new year, were at last
going home, a cable came from England to say that Bella’s sister, Mrs.
Hilton, had been badly hurt in a carriage accident.

The cable was couched in the most alarming terms—there seemed to be every
prospect of three little children being left motherless. Bella and her
mother took the first ship that sailed.

    “If we have to stay any time, Jack says he will come over.”

They did stay, and Jack was as good as his word. Mrs. Hilton did not die,
but she lay for months in a critical condition, and her mother mounted
guard over the new baby and the three other little people.

Bella meanwhile was amusing herself right royally.

    “I’ve been presented and I’m having a perfect, rapturous time.

    “And now it’s decided we don’t have to wait quite a whole
    year—we are going to be married before we come back to America,
    some time in the summer. Just think of it, Hildegarde! You and
    I not to meet again till I’m married! Oh, do write and say
    you’ll love me just as much as ever.”

Then for a time no more long letters, but a shower of happy little
notes, that descended with tolerable regularity. After that, the wedding
invitation! Ten days’ interval and then two communications by the same
mail. The first:

    “DEAREST HILDEGARDE:

    “Mother and I are just back from a week-end at Tryston. It
    was rather dull. All the men were immensely distinguished and
    at least eighty. I was glad to get back to town. Hengler’s
    Circus has been turned into a skating-rink. We all went
    to a delightful party there last week. The wife of the
    Governor-General of Canada skated most wonderfully. I wish I
    could. Jack didn’t take his eyes off her. Mr. Borisoff has come
    to London. I hate Mr. Borisoff as much as ever, if not worse.

    “I haven’t time for more if I’m to catch this post. But
    I can’t have you thinking I forget you in my happiness.
    Besides, I shall be happier when Mr. Borisoff goes back to his
    fellow-barbarians, and leaves me and Jack alone. The next, I
    promise, shall be a great, long letter. You’ll see! I do love
    you, Hildegarde.

                         “From your loving

                                                           “BELLA.

    “P. S. I wish you were here.”

It struck Hildegarde it was the first time she had said that since Jack
had appeared on the scene.

The other letter was without date or beginning.

    “Jack and I have quarreled. Oh, if you were here!

                                                           “BELLA.”

Immediately after, a mysterious cable, that told simply the date of
Bella’s homeward sailing. Had the quarrel frightened her lover and so
hastened on the marriage? But no, for while Bella was still upon the
sea came a formal notice that the marriage was “postponed.” It had been
mailed some days before the cable was sent.

Hildegarde’s first feeling upon Bella’s return was that since the writing
of that final note from London, and the dispatching of the postponement
notice, the trouble, whatever it had been, was patched up. Impossible to
think there was a cloud in her sky. Not matured at all; only a little
thinner and, save for that, exactly the same Bella—“unthinking, idle,
wild, and young.”

But as the minutes went by and she ran from one familiar thing to another
in garden and house, with greeting and gay comment, spinning out the time
till she and Hildegarde should be alone together, the older girl began to
have her doubts. Was Bella as happy as she pretended, flitting about with
all her “dear Mars?”

Nothing possible to gather from her eagerness to be assured that so far
from being forgotten, she was more than ever an object of interest and
devotion. Nothing new Bella’s little weakness for wanting everybody to
be visibly enlivened by her return from “abroad,” bringing her adorable
frocks (for Bella’s American mama had come into money, and Bella was
helping her to come out of a certain portion), bringing remembrances for
everybody, bringing a whiff of foreign airs, and a touch of something
exciting, exotic, into the lives of stay-at-home folk. Bella had always
been one of those who, however much adored, would like to be adored yet a
little more. She couldn’t bear that any one within reach of her influence
should escape caring about her, and she cast a net uncommon wide. It was
meant to enmesh even Hildegarde’s mother, partly because that lady was so
little lavish in bestowing her affection, but mostly because if you were
much in the Mar house it mattered enormously upon what terms you were
with Mrs. Mar. But, as ill-luck would have it, Bella never thought of the
lady once she was away from her. Though she had brought back scarf-pins
for the boys, and a silver-mounted blackthorn for Mr. Mar, and a quite
wonderful necklace for Hildegarde, there was nothing—nothing at all for
Mrs. Mar—and it was serious.

Bella never realized the awful omission till, having dispensed the other
gifts, she stood with the rest of the family in the garden, not even
asking where Mrs. Mar was, till looking up, she saw that lady at her
bedroom window carefully trying on a new pair of gloves. “Everything
depends on the way they’re put on the first time.” Bella could hear her
saying it, and she looked up smiling and waving her hand, as much as to
say, “Oh, please hurry down! _You’re_ the person I’m pining most of all
to see again.” But, of herself, Miss Bella was silently asking, “What
_am_ I to do! What will happen if she should see she’s the only one I’ve
forgotten?” Bella’s brain worked feverishly. Glancing down, her eye fell
on a gold pencil she was wearing on a chain. Surreptitiously detaching
this latest gift of her mother’s, Bella slipped it in her pocket, talking
all the time; telling Mr. Mar what it felt like to see sunshine, real
Californian sunshine again; offering up to public scorn the English
girl who had disapproved of the unappreciative Californians for rooting
arum lilies out of their gardens, and throwing them away in sheaves,
which Bella admitted was what they did with the “pest.” “Just like your
American extravagance,” the English girl had said.

Oh, it was so perfectly heavenly to be at home again! Bella beamed in her
old conscienceless way at poor Trenn, who found a heady tonic—a hope new
born, in hearing the adored one call the Mar house “home.”

But even while he was savoring the sweetness of that thought, there was
the distracting creature linking her arm in Harry’s, and saying: “Come
away a moment and tell me something I want to know.”

What could a boy like Harry possibly tell Bella that she could want to
know!

Harry’s own huge satisfaction in the incident was cruelly damped upon
Bella’s saying: “Does your mother still love stumps?”

“Stumps! Love s-stumps!” he muttered, in amazement.

“Yes. You haven’t forgotten how she always kept her pencils till they
were so little nobody else could have held on to them.”

“Oh, that kind. Yes. Stumps! I see.”

“Well, does she dote on them as much as ever? Does she pick them out of
the fender, when Mr. Mar has thrown his away? Does she still say: ‘Well,
_I’m_ not so well off that I can put a thing in the fire that’s only
half-used?’ Does she do that the same as ever, or are you all too rich
now?”

Harry laughed. “Oh, we’ll never be so rich that mother won’t use a pencil
to its last grasp.”

“Well, then, I’ve got the very thing for her! A nice gold one—pencil, you
know. But rather a stump, too. See?—just her size!”

Harry looked doubtfully down upon the somewhat massive pencil-case which
Bella had drawn from her pocket and was telescoping in and out. “That’s
an awfully fine one, but I can’t quite imagine mother giving up her—”

“Well, look here,” interrupted Bella, “Mrs. Mar’s a person you can’t take
risks with. Do you mind going up-stairs and showing her this? Just ask
her what she thinks of it—as though I’d brought it to you, you know.”
Harry departed on the errand, while Bella returned to the others, but her
emissary was back directly with a doubtful face, and Mrs. Mar following
not far behind.

“Well?” Bella demanded in an undertone.

“Oh—a—I asked her if she didn’t think it was an awfully fine one, and all
she said was: ‘The Lord was very good. He had delivered her many years
ago from gold pencils.’”

“What on earth does she mean?”

“Haven’t the ghost—’Sh!”

“Oh, how do you do, dear Mrs. Mar!” Bella flew to embrace the lady, who
received the advance with self-possession, but not without a glint of
pleasure.

Harry still stood with the intended tribute in his hand. Mrs. Mar’s eye
fell upon it critically.

“Is it true—a—you don’t think much of gold pencils?” hazarded Bella.

“Oh, if you’re a person of leisure—”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“It’s a pursuit in itself, keeping a gold pencil going.”

“Oh, no. Look. This one goes beautifully.” Bella took it from Harry and
shot it in and out.

“That’s just its wiliness. Wait till you _need_ it.”

“Really this one’s very good. It’s warranted—”

“_I’ll_ warrant it’ll always be wanting a new lead. Especially at the
moment when you can’t possibly stop to niggle about with fitting one
in. Then you’ll put the thing away till you can take an afternoon off
just to get your handsome gold pencil into working order again. And when
you’ve done that and gone thoroughly into the subject, you’ll find there
isn’t a store on the Pacific coast that keeps your size leads. No lead
in any store will ever fit your pencil. Then you’ll write to New York to
a manufactory. Then you’ll wait a month, maybe two. Then, by the time
you’ve got them, you’ll find the pencil has forgotten how to assimilate
leads. It will break them off short and spit them out. If you try to
discipline the pencil, it’ll turn sulky and refuse to open. Or it stays
open and refuses to shut.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Mar, _this_ one—”

“And I assure you, Miss Bella Wayne, that even if you’re under the
special favor of Providence, and none of these things happen, you’ll
still find you can never get the work out of a twenty-dollar gold pencil
that you can out of a five-cent cedar.”

Bella was catching Harry’s eye and trying not to laugh.

“And remember what I tell you,” Mrs. Mar wound up, “you’ll have to treat
that gold pencil as you treat Mrs. Harrington Trennor, with reverence and
awe. If you don’t you’ll be sorry. If you lean on it, it will collapse.
If you do anything but admire it, it will teach you better.” Bella
opened her lips—Mrs. Mar stopped her with, “Unless you come to my way of
thinking, you’ll use that pencil in fear and trembling till the merciful
grave offers you a refuge from your slavery. As I told Harry”—she
buttoned the last button on her new gloves (why hadn’t Bella brought
her anything as sensible as gloves!) and she drew down her cuff with
a business-like air—“the Lord has delivered me from many snares; gold
pencils among the rest!” And she marched off toward the gate.

“Oh, mother,” said Hildegarde, at her side, “how could you! That dear
little Bella brought the beautiful gold pencil for you all the way from
Europe.”

“Do you suppose I didn’t guess that? Good-by!” She looked back and nodded
to Bella. “I’ve got to go to the missionary meeting now, but I’ll see you
at supper.”

“Oh, and you’ll tell me the rest then?” asked the wicked Bella, with an
innocent look.

“The rest!” Mrs. Mar glanced sharply over her shoulder as she laid her
hand on the latch of the gate. “There is no rest for anybody who depends
on a contrivance like that. Whenever I see a person with a gold pencil, I
know it won’t be long before she’s asking me to lend her my wooden stump.
As a rule she likes my wooden stump so well she walks off with it.”

As Mrs. Mar vanished round the corner, Bella gave way to suppressed
chuckles. Impossible to think she had a care in the world greater than a
rejected gold pencil.

“Yes, Hildegarde. I’m coming directly; only Trenn hasn’t given me a spray
of lemon verbena yet, to console me for the scandalous way his mother
treats me. Don’t you remember you _always_ give me lemon verbena when
we’re in the garden?” She showed no impatience when Trenn prolonged the
time-honored process—not a bit of it, went on laughing and chattering
there in the sunshine and telling how they thought in England that the
American girl was only keeping up the transatlantic reputation for
“telling tall stories,” when Bella had said that verbena at home was a
tree, and grew to the second-story window. Then having undone in half an
hour any good of peace regained by the “Mar boys” through her absence and
engagement, Miss Bella found her way up-stairs.

Her vivacity fell visibly from the moment she crossed the threshold of
Hildegarde’s familiar little room. But she commented favorably upon the
new home-worked counterpane, and then, as though without seeing it,
walked past the familiar old altar-table, with its ferny background and
the roses ranged below. There was the big silver locket hung above, like
some peasant’s votive offering at a foreign shrine, and down there in
front of the massed roses was that other picture, that had been new only
a year ago, when Bella’s happiness was born.

She went straight to the window and stood quite silent, looking down upon
Hildegarde’s flower borders. Then without turning round, “Will you do
something for me?”

“What?”

“Take that picture away. The locket, too.”

“Oh, Bella! Is it as bad as that?”

“You’ll put them out of sight?”

“Yes, yes; of course I will.”

“_Now!_” She might as well have said: I won’t turn round until they’re
gone.

Hildegarde opened a drawer. “I’ll put them in here till things come right
again.”

“Things aren’t ever coming right.”

“Bella!”

Not till she heard the drawer shut did the girl turn from the window, and
Hildegarde could see that the small face was quivering.

“Bella, dear!” Her friend swept to her on a sudden wave of pity. “It will
all come right.”

But the younger girl drew back. Although her tears were brimming she
spoke with a certain half-choked hardness: “I’ve hurried mother back as
fast as boats and trains could bring us; just to be with you again, but
not to hear you say that. I wanted to be with you just because you will
know better. Hildegarde—I—I’d like to stay with you awhile. May I?”

“I want nothing so much—we all want you.”

“Trenn, too?” she actually laughed through her tears. What a queer
creature.

“Trenn, too. Only”—Hildegarde glanced from the empty place on the
altar-table, to the shut drawer—“only you’ll be kind enough not to break
Trenn’s heart as well.”

“As well as my own?”

Hildegarde’s face grew hard with the words, “As well as Jack Galbraith’s.”

Bella, too, was grave enough now; “I haven’t broken his heart. But—I’ve
got a crack in my own. Only”—she lifted her pretty eyes with an air
almost of panic—“only nobody else is to know. You”—she came nearer and
laid a nervous hand on Hildegarde’s firm arm—“you must help me to keep
everybody from knowing.”

“Dear,” was all Hildegarde’s answer, but she leaned her cheek against
Bella’s thin face.

“And there’s another thing,” the younger girl went on a little
feverishly, still clinging to Hildegarde’s arm, “I hate talking about it.”

“Of course. Just at first, it must be—”

“No, it isn’t ‘of course’ and it’s not only at first. It’s for always.
Most girls talk their love affairs to tatters. I’ve noticed that. I want
you to help me to—to keep my—” Her voice went out upon a sudden flood of
tears. Hildegarde drew her into the window-seat and sat down beside her.
They were silent for a time, until Bella laid her wet face down on her
friend’s shoulder with, “Mind, Hildegarde! We aren’t to talk about it.
Not even you and I. John Galbraith is too—too—” She raised her head, drew
her small hand across her eyes, and then sprang up and faced the window,
as if some enemy without had challenged her. “It may be that I _don’t_
understand what a great man he is, as Mr. Borisoff says. But, at least, I
know he’s not the sort of person to be chattered over.”

Hildegarde remembered with a sting how for years she had “chattered”
with Galbraith for her theme. And she hadn’t little Bella’s excuse.
Yes, it was always like this. She was for ever stumbling upon something
dignified and fine in Butterfly Bella.

The pretty tear-stained face was lifted to the sunlight, and the childish
red mouth, so used to laughter, was pitifully grave, as Bella, staring up
into the square of sky over Hildegarde’s head said: “He is up there!”

“Jack!” Hildegarde exclaimed in a half-whisper.

“John Galbraith,” said Bella. “He is way up there, and I won’t be the one
to pull him down.”

“Oh-h. I was half afraid you meant he was dead.”

“As good as dead.”

Fear took fresh hold on the older girl. He is going to marry some one
else, Hildegarde said to herself. Yes, yes; as she looked at poor Bella’s
face, she was sure of it. And now the slim little figure had sunk on its
knees. She leaned against her friend for support. But she looked out
across Hildegarde’s shoulder, searching space through tears. Hildegarde
held tight the childish-looking hands, and asked the last question she
was ever to put about the common hero of their girlhood. “Where is he?”
she said.

“He’s gone off with Mr. Borisoff somewhere.”

“You mean you don’t know where?”

“Somewhere in the arctic.” She hid her face in Hildegarde’s lap.

They sat so a long, long time.

In spite of her year’s absence, Bella found nothing much changed in the
Valdivia situation, except that the Mar boys had “got on” more than ever,
and that their father’s form of progress seemed still more strikingly to
consist in “getting on” in years.

It was a long time since his wife had given him the credit for doing more
than his share at the bank with a view to promotion to be head cashier,
or even a “silent partner.” Each time a vacancy occurred some one else
had stepped into it; Louis Cheviot had been the last. But Mrs. Mar
learned through the years that the reason her husband accepted increased
tasks was that he was born to bear burdens, as the sparks to fly upward.
If any extra work was “going,” so to speak, it gravitated unerringly to
Nathaniel Mar. As to the question of his reward, what would be gained by
giving a better position to a man who in any crisis could be depended
on to do all the work of a higher office, and never ask for increased
emolument? The only person who ever hinted such a thing to the Trennors
had been Cousin Harriet. The Trennor Brothers’ success (which was
proverbial in Valdivia) had long extended to avoidance of Cousin Harriet.
Certainly Mr. Mar’s life-long ill-luck brought out more clearly the fact
of his boys’ early prosperity. Not that it was enormous as yet, though
quite sufficient to have enabled them to marry, had they so chosen.

Mrs. Mar’s satisfaction in her sons was checkered by the fact that each
of these otherwise reasonable and enterprising young men clung to his
boyish infatuation for Bella Wayne, long after their boyhood had gone
the way of the years. It certainly did seem as though not till one or
both were cut out by her marrying some one else, would either Trenn or
Harry look at any of the girls Mrs. Mar considered more desirable. Not
that the boys’ mother had been able wholly to escape the general Mar
devotion to the disturber of their peace, but as the seasons passed, and
Bella rejected one swain after another, it became increasingly vexatious
to Mrs. Mar that her sons should not realize and amend the stupidity
of caring about a girl who was more and more under suspicion of being
handicapped by a silly passion for a mad fool who had given up the
substance for the shadow, and had met his due reward—being now these many
months lost in the arctic ice.

Hildegarde’s theory that since the unhappy issue of the love affair,
Bella had greater need of her friend than ever before, and Hildegarde’s
own consequent inaccessibility to others was the cause of some
restiveness on Cheviot’s part. His old friendliness for Bella had
vanished. He spoke of her with a humorous disparagement that did him
ill-service with Hildegarde. But he was grave enough sometimes.

“I never get a word alone with you, nowadays,” he said one night, as he
sat smoking on the steps of the porch at Hildegarde’s feet, while Bella
walked about the garden with Trenn. Hildegarde made some perfunctory
answer, and they sat silent for a time.

The light wind brought up waves of fragrance from the tangle of roses
under Hildegarde’s window, and the little path stretched away to
indefiniteness in the starlight, till it was lost long before it reached
the garden’s end. The limits of the narrow inclosure, so sharply drawn
by day, were nobly enlarged, lost even, at this hour, in the dim reaches
of green turned silver and black, as the moon came over the tops of the
conifers.

Down by the arbor vitæ hedge growing things that Hildegarde had planted
sent their souls to her across the lawn, piercing the heavier air of
roses with arrowy shafts of spicy sweetness.

On such a night no one is alone. Where two go down a darkling walk,
or sit on the steps in the dusk, others gather round them. Invisible
presences—the singers, the beautiful ones, the stern doers of great
deeds—join us common folk, and give us a share in their glory or their
steadfast pain. Hopes of our own, that look too large by day—too dim and
inaccessible, they come walking in our garden at such an hour, beckoning
us or looking, smiling, on. Living men, rumored to be far away, suddenly
stand before us. Women who have been long aloof draw near. All the
barriers go down. Even the dead come home.

John Galbraith was down there, where Bella’s white gown shone among the
trees, and John Galbraith was sitting between those other two on the
steps.

And Cheviot knew it.

Hildegarde was reminded of the visible presence by his saying, in a low
voice, that he understood the reason of his ill-success with her.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Bella told me. Years ago. When she was so little you thought she—”

“Told you what?”

“That you had been in love with John Galbraith since you were sixteen.”

“But you must see that’s absurd. I’ve never even seen him!”

“I wish to God you had! Then you might get over it.”

Hildegarde roused herself to say with equal emphasis, “You are really
talking the greatest foolishness—”

“Haven’t you got his picture in your room this moment?”

“I have the picture he—had taken for Bella.”

“Before he ever met Bella you had a picture of Galbraith. You used to
wear it. Bella said—”

“You seem to forget you’re talking about what happened when I was a
little school-girl, and about an old—a very old friend of my family. We
all have pictures of Mr. Galbraith—and, why, there’s one of you there,
too.”

“On the altar?”

(Oh, Bella! Bella! How could you!) “The one on the flower-table was put
there because Bella asked me to. It’s not there any more. And while it
was, I looked upon it as the future husband of my dearest friend.”

But the description of Bella sounded suddenly ironic. It hurt. For
Cheviot was the man who all along had laughed at girls’ friendships, and
all along he had known that Bella was capable of—

“It isn’t that I couldn’t forgive you for not being in love with me,”
he said. “But for being in love with a photograph and a packet of
letters—_no!_ that wasn’t easy. At the same time I knew well enough that
if your life hadn’t been so narrow, you wouldn’t have been so at the
mercy of this one romantic figure in it. If you’d been able to travel,
or even to go to the university—if you’d had _any_ other door open, you
wouldn’t have looked so long out of that one window.”

A scrap of one of Mrs. Browning’s letters flew across her mind—the dearer
somehow for being a little incoherent, not fitted together at all, yet
finely consequent to the inner spirit—those words: “The pleasantest place
in the house is the leaning out of the window.”

Ah, it was very true of the Mar house.

“And your mother,” Cheviot went on, “always ready to puncture any
home-blown bubble with the needle of her wit; mercilessly critical, for
fear her children should have too low standards; ready to flay anybody
alive in the cause of education. Never letting you rest satisfied for
a moment with the attainable—you must always be reaching out—reaching
out—and when you reached out you touched Galbraith.”

How strangely well he knew—this man. It was odd, but she could never
again think him obtuse, at any rate. That comfort was gone.

“I was even sorry for you while the engagement lasted,” the low voice
went on, unmindful of the uneasy stir of the figure sitting above him in
the dusk. He took the half-smoked cigar from his lips and laid it by the
pillar. Over the edge of the porch the tip shone red. “I saw how hard it
was for you; you had been weaving romances round Galbraith for years—you
had looked upon him for so long as your special property—” Hildegarde
drew back into the deeper shadow. But by his own suffering urged to win
a companion in pain, he persisted: “And you thought if it had been _you_
he had met, it would have been you that he—” Hildegarde’s skirts rustled
as if she were getting up—“Look here, I’ve told you before you’ve got a
genius for truth—I’m treating you on that basis.” She said nothing, but
she sat still. “There was a moment,” Cheviot’s voice was unnaturally low,
“last spring, when I knew I was gaining ground with you. It was the
day I came back from Mexico. I came here straight from the station, and
you—you—” She heard him strike his hands suddenly together in the dusk,
and a curious excitement took hold of her. “When I went home, I found the
invitation to Bella’s wedding. It had been lying there for days. Then I
understood. You had had all those days and nights to get accustomed to
realizing it was the end of the old—where are you going? Can’t you even
bear to have me speak of it this once!”

The white figure was still again.

“Oh, I understood!” He picked up the cigar again. “I felt just the same
as you did. I knew the ghost that had stood so long between us was
suddenly gone. He had moved out of the way, and you could see that I was
there. For those next days you were—you were—I was full of hope. Then
came word that Bella had broken her engagement.”

“No, that the marriage was postponed.”

He waited a moment, seemed about to speak, and then, instead of saying
anything, with a sharp movement he threw his half-smoked cigar across the
whitening silver of the path into the inky blotch the shrubbery made.
Hildegarde’s eyes followed the flying red light till, against a tree
trunk, it fell in a splash of sparks, and was swallowed up in shadow.

“I shan’t forget,” Cheviot went on, still on that low restrained note,
“the look in your face as you said: ‘I never thought they were suited to
one another. It would never have done.’”

“_Did_ I say that?”

“Yes, and I looked up and I saw the ghost was there again, and presently
I saw he wasn’t a ghost any longer, but a real man. An active expectation
on your part—”

“No, no.” The voice was less denial than beseeching.

“Yes, a _plan_.”

The hands that were gripping the wicker chair pulled her quickly to her
feet. “Bella!” she called to the white flicker by the dial. “It’s getting
late!”

Cheviot stood up, too. “On your honor, Hildegarde—” Was it the moonlight
blanched her, or was she indeed so white? His heart smote him—but, “On
your honor can you deny it?” he demanded.

“No,” she said, with sudden passion; “I don’t deny it.” And while her
words should have steeled him, her voice brought a lump to his throat.

“You mean,” he asked, huskily, “to wait till John Galbraith comes back?”

“I know it’s quite mad—but there! A thing can take you like that. You
_can’t_ change.”

CHAPTER VIII

With the precision of clockwork, every day of his life but Sundays,
Nathaniel Mar walked down the main street of Valdivia to the bank. People
who lived out of sight of the City Hall timepiece, set their watches by
the appearance of the lame man with the stick. He never varied the route,
any more than he altered his time, and both had been exactly the same for
twenty-eight years.

The other bank cashiers (few of them over thirty) said that, in their
opinion, Mr. Mar had hung on quite long enough. They did not hesitate to
add that his post would have fallen to a younger man years ago had Mar
not been “a sort of relation.” Even so it was pretty steep that an old
codger of sixty should be blocking up the way like that. A bank was no
place for the superannuated, unless, of course, a man was a director.

So acute was the hearing of the old codger (who was not yet sixty) that
sotto-voce observations of this sort had, from time to time, reached his
ears.

He saw all about him men, younger than himself, turned out of positions
they had occupied, with usefulness and integrity, for years, and for
no other reason than to make way for some “boy” in his early twenties.
Men of his own standing had from time to time in the past decade raged
hopelessly against this tendency in a nation, where the great god,
Efficiency, demands the fine flower of each man’s life, and looks with
disfavor upon lined faces and whitening hair, even when the capacity for
service is unimpaired. It is part of the doctrine of “_show me_.” There
being any good, or any force not capable of being “shown”—well, it was
doubtful. Best not take chances.

Mar had sympathized with his contemporaries for being elbowed out of
their places, but he had smiled at one or two who had suffered the common
fate of the American clerk, in spite of having dyed their hair, and worn
jaunty pince-nez instead of “good honest spectacles.” Nevertheless,
Mar’s own secret uneasiness—not being assuaged by hair dye or dissipated
by pince-nez—took the form of making him the more ready to be the
Trennor Brothers’ pack-horse, unconsciously the more eager to oblige any
and everybody at the bank, to “show” from Monday morning to Saturday
afternoon how indispensable he was. He knew they could get no one to do
what he did with the same care and assiduity for the same salary. His
astonishment was, therefore, hardly less than his chagrin, when he found
upon his desk, one morning, a letter from the firm “terminating their
long and pleasant connection upon the usual notice.”

In the bitterness of that hour he felt that nothing he ever had suffered
before had mattered so vitally. As long as a man has work he can bear
trouble and disappointment—life without work—it was something not to be
faced. For the work, little by little, had devoured everything else,
narrowed down his friendships, cut off his recreations, produced a
brain-fag that made him unfit even for reading anything but newspapers.

He set instantly about finding another post. The story of the days that
followed—the writing to and interviewing whippersnapper young managers of
flourishing concerns, and of being more or less cavalierly “turned down,”
as the slang phrase went—it would make a book of itself; a tragic and
significant book to boot, and one essentially “American.”

The Mar boys behaved very well. _They_, at least, were not surprised.
They had, in point of fact, expected the occurrence long before.

What they had not expected was that the old man “would take it so mighty
hard.” Why, he could scarcely be more cut up if he were alone in the
world—dependent entirely upon his own exertions—instead of having two
fine go-ahead sons, who were getting on in life so rapidly that it really
wasn’t a matter of vital importance whether the old man did anything or
not; for they had every intention of being good to their father.

They told him so. And he had not shown himself grateful. And _still_ they
meant to be “good” to him. They were “mighty nice young men.”

Nathaniel Mar saw clearly by the time the “notice” was up, that he lagged
superfluous. There was no opening for him anywhere.

The first morning that he had no right to go down to the bank was one of
the most difficult he had known. He went out just the same, at precisely
the same moment, and came in at the usual time. No one knew where he had
spent those hours, but he looked tired and ill when he sat down to the
midday meal. After it was over, he said he thought he would “go up and
lie down.” He had never done such a thing before in his life, at that
hour of the day. The following mornings he spent at his writing-table
in the dining-room, and although there were no screaming children there
now, and the room was bright and pretty, he sat miserably, day after day,
turning over old letters and papers, till in despair he would get up and
take down a book to read. But his thoughts were all “down at the bank.”

Mrs. Mar dashed in and out, called brisk directions to the Chinaman,
who presided now in the kitchen, and when there was nothing else to do,
she would fly at the sewing-machine. This appeared to be the kind of
mechanism which was worked with the whole human body. The hands traveling
briskly along with the moving seam, head going like a mandarin’s, knees
up, knees down, Mrs. Mar pedaled and buzzed away.

Her husband seldom spoke. Having retired within himself directly after
the breakfast things were cleared away, he seemed to be averse from
making the smallest movement while his wife was in the room. He sat
there intensely still, even turning the leaf of his book only at long
intervals, surreptitiously, without a sound. It was as though, by a
death-like stillness, he should prove that he was not there. He was
really down at the bank—his motionlessness seemed to say.

As if Mrs. Mar divined this mental ruse of his, and felt a need to unmask
it, she would look at him sideways, and “What are you doing?” she would
ask briskly.

“Reading.”

“That old Franklin again? Why, you’ve read it three or four times
already!” No answer. “Why don’t you get something up-to-date from the
library?” Still no response. “Content just to sit _and sit_!” she
would comment inwardly. Then aloud, “Don’t they want a manager up at
Smithson’s?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you try for the secretaryship of the New Pickwick?”

“Monty Fellowes has got it.”

“Ah, well, I suppose Monty Fellowes went the length of asking for it.”

Nathaniel Mar had also gone that length, though the post was beneath a
man of his powers. But he could not tell over again at home the tale of
his failures. Better she should think he hadn’t tried.

But, oh, the very look of him sat upon her spirit, and still she looked.

“You’ll be ill if you stay in the house so much. Remember you’ve had a
walk twice a day for going on thirty years.” No answer. His immobility
made it a positive necessity for her to get up and poke the fire
vigorously, or do something with might and main. That was a thing _he_
had never tried in his life—to do something with might and main! And that
was why he was stranded like this now. A man of only fifty-eight! Why,
she herself—Harriet T. Mar—was fifty-nine. And just see how _she_ took
hold of existence—very much as she gripped the poker. Oh, it was a trial
living in the same house, and all day long in the same room with a “logy”
man! He was more sodden with failure every day he lived. Misfortune
acted upon him like an opiate. Ha! If she—Harriet T. Mar—were _ninety_,
misfortune would sting her into action. At the mere thought she sprang up
and stung her husband, or the imperturbable Mongol in the kitchen, or
the gentle Hildegarde. But truth to tell, though that girl _looked_ such
a tender, simple creature, it was as little rewarding to wrestle with
Hildegarde as with Mar, or the stolid Chinaman.

Indeed, the more the mother bustled the quieter grew the girl—not at
first consciously as a form of protest, but by a process of natural
reaction that was largely responsible for Hildegarde’s seeming calm to
the verge of insensibility.

Mrs. Mar never wholly realized how much to the mother’s exuberant energy
the daughter owed her impassive air. These influences playing about
sensitive people produce a curious rhythm in family life. Nathaniel Mar’s
supineness made his wife seize the reins and ceaselessly whip up the
horses of their car. Mrs. Mar’s frantic urging of the pace, the dust and
noise and whip-cracking of her progress, produced not merely a yearning
for peace in Hildegarde’s mind, but a positive physical need to simulate
it. People talk much of the value of good example, forgetting that we are
sometimes shown there is nothing so salutary as a bad example, since out
of example is wrought not merely the impulse toward imitation, but often
a passionate realization of the advantage of “another way.”

There was always in the Mar house one person with an eye upon the
clock—why need you wear a watch?

No need for you to spur on a servant, or make example of a tardy errand
boy. There was always Mrs. Mar to do these things with a swingeing
efficacy. Those who live with the Mrs. Mars of the world do not realize
that they owe their own reputation for sweetness largely to the caustic
temper of some one else. Under Mrs. Mar’s roof you may “cultivate
kindness” and not suffer for it. Away from her drastic influence, you
yourself will have to apportion grace and discipline more evenly.

So various is life that we have sometimes a chance of learning from
people’s vices what their virtues could never so deeply have impressed.

Something of this the “slow” girl arrived at.

The day Mrs. Mar and Hildegarde went off to spend a week down at the
ranch with the Waynes, the two came into the dining-room to say good-by
to Mr. Mar. It was to be “a house-party,” and Cheviot and Mr. Mar had
been asked, too. Cheviot had accepted—“from Saturday night till Monday
morning”—but Mar had declined to go for any length of time whatever.

“A body would think he had affairs too important to leave! Well, good-by,
Nathaniel. Don’t let hot cinders fall on the new hearth-rug. Take care of
yourself, and I _hope_ you’ll have some news for me when I come home.”

Upon their return the following week, he was found sitting in exactly the
same place, in the precise attitude, and one might almost think with the
same old book on his knee open at the self-same page.

“Upon my soul!” ejaculated Mrs. Mar, stopping short on the threshold,
while Hildegarde went forward to kiss her father. “No need to ask if
you’ve found anything to do! You haven’t even remembered to put on a
little coal.” She fell upon the poker and punished the flagging fire.
“Have you been sitting there like that ever since I went away?”

Mar drew himself out from Hildegarde’s embrace, took firm hold on his
walking-stick and rose to his feet. He looked huge, as he towered above
the two women, and rather wonderful, as both of them had often thought of
late. Even the flippant Bella had said, “He’s more and more like Moses
and the Prophets.”

“As to sitting here”—he looked down sternly on his wife—“you may as well
understand, Harriet, that this is the house I propose to sit in till I
go out lying down. Only not in this room. I agree with you as to the
unfitness of that.” He limped over to the kitchen door, opened it, and
said, “John, will you light a fire in the young gentlemen’s bedroom.”

Mrs. Mar stared a moment, and then went up-stairs to take off her things.
It was no secret between her and Hildegarde that “after all” they stood
a little in awe of the head of the house. The girl, however, knowing
herself a privileged character, attempted to smooth things over with a
little jest. She linked her arm in his, and told how her mother, on the
way down in the train, had produced the book rest and a minute pencil
from her traveling-bag, had fastened the rest on the back of the seat in
front of her, to the surprise and inconvenience of the occupants, had set
up the French biography, put on her spectacles, got out her crochet and
read her “Lucien Pérey” and crocheted for dear life (or for the Hindus
rather) every minute of the time that she was being rushed along by the
express to Fern Lea; “and Louis Cheviot leaned over and whispered in my
ear, ‘Your mother’s losing time with her feet.’”

But Mar’s faint smile was pretty grim. “Your mother has all the virtues,
my dear, but she’s a woman of an implacable industry.”

With the help of John Chinaman and the grocer’s boy, that very afternoon
Mr. Mar got his big desk established in “the spare chamber” that had been
Trenn’s and Harry’s room, and still was theirs when one or other of them
was in town,—which was often enough whenever Bella was staying at the
Mars’.

But whether it was that uncomfortable as the old quarters had been, it
disturbed Mar to change them after thirty years, certainly, in spite
of his pronouncement to his wife, he did not “sit” at home as much
after this. He made a habit of going down town after breakfast, to the
San Joaquin Hotel “to read the papers,” really to smoke in peace, and
exchange views on the political situation, or the Cuban atrocities, with
chance travelers or old habitués.

Then came the day when Spanish incompetence and cruelty found a rival
excitement. In a remote region of British North America gold had been
discovered. The veterans in the San Joaquin reading-room pooh-poohed the
notion—all but Nathaniel Mar.

From the beginning he took the Klondike seriously. Not long before
everybody was doing the same. Instead of quickly exhausting itself the
excitement grew. Had diamonds been discovered in Dakota, the matter would
have been a nine days’ wonder, and then died as the easily accessible
fields were reached and appropriated. Paradox as it might appear, it was
owing to the forbidding circumstances under which those pioneers of ’97
found their treasure, that made the appeal “Klondike” so irresistible to
the marvel-loving fancy of the world. The papers overflowed with accounts
of the awful hardship and the huge reward—combination irresistible since
history began. And if any Missourian said “show me!” he _was_ shown. The
actual nuggets and the veritable dust, displayed in a bank window, made
would-be miners of men as they passed, or as they meant to pass and stood
riveted, staring, seeing there a type of what they might attain unto, if
only they had much courage and a little money for an outfit. Who lacked
the first? Who could not, for so alluring a purpose, collect the second?

The trains to the ports of San Francisco, Seattle, Victoria, were
crammed; the north-bound ships overflowed. Unenterprising, indeed, any
store on the Pacific coast that did not advertise some essential to a
Klondike outfit. People talked with as much earnestness of the science of
life under arctic conditions as they before had discussed Spanish misrule
in the South. Even for the vast majority who had no hope of being able
to join the rush, the great problem of transportation and the value of
evaporated food stuffs, obscured many an issue nearer home.

The one man that he was on fairly intimate terms with, yet to whom Mar
had not mentioned the new craze, was Cheviot. It was the kind of thing he
would be certain to scoff at. People at the San Joaquin had noticed that
scoffing at the Klondike annoyed Mr. Mar, and they wondered a little. Mar
had quite made up his mind not to give Cheviot’s skepticism a chance for
expression. If you were unwary you might easily think, “So sympathetic
and understanding a young man can’t help taking fire over this burning
question.” And then Cheviot would show you how easily he could help it.
Watch him playing with his little nephews and nieces and you’d say, “So
kind to children, he will be kind to the childishness in me.” And behold
he wasn’t. He was an “awfully good fellow,” but he expected a man to be
grown up—and few are.

Mar’s anticipation of what would be Cheviot’s views about the new
craze were very much Hildegarde’s own. Her astonishment was therefore
well-nigh speechless, when, on the occasion of his next visit, after ten
minutes’ general conversation in the garden, Cheviot said, “By the way,
Hildegarde, I’ve come to tell you I’m going to the Klondike.”

“You!” and she stared at him in silence till she could reassure herself
by saying, “Nonsense!”

“It may be nonsense, but I’m going.”

“You _can’t_ be in earnest!”

“Quite.”

She stood, watering-pot in hand, her big eyes wider than ever he had seen
them, and a look on her face certainly disturbed, even annoyed.

It wasn’t very nice, this feeling as if the bottom were dropping out of
existence. He had no right to make her feel like that.

Very neatly he switched off the head of a withered flower with his stick,
and began, “The Klondike—”

“It’s rather horrid of you,” Hildegarde interrupted, “but of course I
know—you—you’re only seeing how I’d take it—”

“I shan’t be here to see how you’ll take it.”

She set down the watering can. “You surely won’t dream of doing anything
so foolish—so—so—dangerous.”

He didn’t answer, and she walked beside him down the path to the lower
gate. When they got beyond the group of conifers, she stopped. “You
simply mustn’t.”

“Why do you say that? You don’t care where I go.”

“You know quite well I do.”

He didn’t even look at her, and he shook his head. Then, after a little
pause, “Who knows, you might even come to feel differently about
things—if—if—”

“Do you mean”—Hildegarde drew herself up—“if you came home a millionaire?”

“If I didn’t come home at all.”

“What?”

“At least for a long time, like—”

“I certainly hope”—nervously she forestalled the utterance of that
other name—“that you won’t do anything so disappointing to all your
old friends. It’s the kind of fortune-hunting expedition for the
ne’er-do-well. It isn’t for a man like you.”

“Well, I’ve thought it over,” he said, “and I’ve come to the conclusion
that I’m best out of Valdivia for a time. You see, Hildegarde, you’re too
used to me.”

“I’m _not_ ‘too used.’”

“Too certain of me—yes, you are. I’ve been uncommon helpless in the
matter. I’ve got nothing of the actor in me. I can’t be near you, and
inspire you with the smallest doubt as to how things are with me. The one
thing I can do is _not_ to be near. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

She wrinkled up her white forehead with a harassed attempt to keep her
wits about her, and not be betrayed into rash professions. “You can go
away from Valdivia for a while, if that idea is so attractive, without
going to the horrible Klondike.”

“Yes, I could go to Pasadena or some seaside resort, so that I could come
running back, as I did last year from Monterey, on the first hint that
you might be missing me a little. No, all that’s been tried. It doesn’t
work. I must go to some place where I _can’t_ take the first train back;
where I won’t live through the day expecting a letter from you. It isn’t
easy in these times for anybody to be really ‘out of reach.’ When we all
know that we’ve only to go to the nearest telegraph office for news, we
can’t know what it would be like utterly to lose some one—unless death
teaches us. The nearest approach to the sort of thing I mean—this side of
Kingdom Come—is the Klondike.”

“Oh, Klondike, Klondike! I’m sick of the very sound of those two
syllables. There’s something uncanny about them. People have gone mad
since they heard the ugly word, but not you!”—to give her words more than
common emphasis, to insure winning the day, she laid her hand on his arm,
and said again, with soft deliberation—“Not you, Louis.”

“You’d like me to stay here and suffer. Yes, I know that.” Her hand
dropped from his sleeve. “But I shan’t stay here,” he went on unmoved,
“and pretty soon I shan’t suffer—so much.”

From that old, recurrent touch of hardness in his voice and air, she
once again recoiled. “Well, I’ve said all I mean to say. You must please
yourself.”

“Pleasure is of course what one expects in the Klondike.”

They walked in absolute silence back to the porch. Hildegarde went in
at once, saying “good-night” over her shoulder, and quite sure that as
usual he would follow her. But he stayed behind for fully twenty minutes,
talking with Mr. Mar, who was smoking out there in the dusk. Hildegarde
turned up the electric light in the parlor, and moved about the room,
picking up and putting down one book after another. How many of them he
had given her—that provoking person who stayed so long talking to her
father! By and by she heard her own name called. Was that her father? How
curious his voice sounded!

“Yes,” she answered, but made no great haste. When at last she reached
her father’s side, she couldn’t see where Cheviot was. She looked round
in the dim light, and a little sharply, “Has he gone?” she said. As the
words fell on the quiet air, she heard the gate shut. The sound jarred.
It gave her a sensation as of a being abandoned. The house was very quiet
to-night.

“Gone? Yes. Where’s your mother, Hildegarde?” Mar asked with unheard-of
briskness.

“She’s over at the Coxes’.”

“Ah!” A moment’s pause, and then, “To think of Cheviot! Cheviot of all
men! Weren’t you surprised?”

“You aren’t talking about the Klondike?”

“What else should I be talking of?” he demanded unreasonably, for after
all there were other topics.

“Do you think he really means it?” Hildegarde asked.

“_Means_ it?—with a year’s leave granted, and his ticket in his pocket?
He’s been getting ready all this week. That’s why we haven’t seen him.
Sails Wednesday.”

“Not—not really!”

“Off to ’Frisco to-morrow,” said her father, still in that odd brisk
voice—“four days to see about his outfit. He—it’s a queer world!—he said
Trenn had been into the bank this afternoon, and offered to grubstake
him. But Cheviot’s got money. So anything he finds will be his own.
Trenn! H’m! _Trenn!_” he repeated, as though he couldn’t get over it.
Then it seemed to dawn upon him that Hildegarde had been unprepared for
something else than her brother’s part in the affair. “I thought Cheviot
said he’d been talking to you about it—had said good-by.”

“I—I didn’t believe he was in earnest.”

“Why not?” demanded her father a little harshly, and then, perceiving
that her incredulity might have other grounds than disapproval of the
enterprise in itself, he said more gently: “He talks very sensibly about
it, my dear. A man can’t save much at the bank—he may go on for thirty
years and find—Cheviot has seen what that may come to. He gives himself
a nine months’ holiday, with the chance of its turning out the most
profitable nine months of his life. _I_ didn’t discourage him.”

Hildegarde sat down on the step. “Oh, you didn’t discourage him,” she
repeated dully. Behind her own sense of being wronged in some way, as
well as disappointed, she was conscious of an unwonted excitement in her
father.

He, sitting there in the dusk, puffing out great clouds of smoke, was
oblivious of everything except that the old pride of discovery had awaked
in him, and the fever of his youth came back.

“Even Cheviot! And think of _Trenn_!” That Trenn should be looking
about for some one to send to the North on this errand—it touched the
topmost pinnacle of the fabulous. And yet, why not? The country was
aflame. Thousands starting off on an uncertainty to try for the thing he,
Nathaniel Mar, had been certain of.

“Hildegarde, where is your mother?”

“I told you, at the Coxes’.”

“Oh, at the Coxes’.”

“Why, father?”

“Would you like to know the reason I didn’t discourage Cheviot from going
to the—”

“Yes, father,” said the girl dully.

“Then come nearer.”

She moved toward him. Feeling a little dreary, she came quite close. She
laid her head against the one strong knee.

In a vigorous undertone, the voice with new life in it told why Nathaniel
Mar didn’t blame any young man—there was more treasure in the North
than even the Klondiker dreamed. Mar had known it all along—and then
the story. In spite of the girl’s listlessness when he began, he could
feel directly that the thing was taking hold of her. She was intensely
still; that was because she was being “held,” and small wonder! It was a
better story than he had realized. It took hold of him even, who knew it
so well. Before he got to the end, his voice was shaking, and he leaned
forward thirsting to see an answering excitement in the young face at his
knee. But the darkness shrouded it, and he went on. He wished she would
speak or move. Always so still, that girl! Now he was telling her of his
home-coming from that barren coast in the North—explaining, excusing
what, by this new lurid light of the Klondike, seemed inexcusable—his
never going back. He tried to reconstruct for her the obstacles—huge,
insurmountable; the long illness, and the new wife; the post at the bank;
the children, poverty, skepticism and the obscuring dust of the years.
And lo! as he disturbed these ashes, he saw afresh the agonies they
hid—remembered with a growing chill, what had befallen before whenever he
told this story; saw the tolerant smile of the smug young bankers; saw
the dull embarrassment in Elihu Cox’s eye; heard Mrs. Mar leading the
family chorus, “You’ve got to _show_ me!”

Even Hildegarde might ask—he hastened to forestall the dreaded word.
“There was nothing to _show_,” he said, “absolutely nothing to prove it
wasn’t a dream.” And she made no sign that for her either it was more
than fantasy.

He wondered miserably why he had told her. “Of course it was all long
before anybody had heard of the Klondike,” he said, and he drew a heavy
breath. “The theory was, that geologically speaking, gold couldn’t exist
up there, and even people who weren’t geologists agreed it couldn’t be
got out if it _was_ there”—all the confidential earnestness had vanished
out of the voice, and he paused like one very weary. “Nobody believed—”
He tried to go on, and to speak as usual, but memory, master of the show,
brought up Trenn—Trenn with the look he had worn the day his father had
told him the great secret. Mar drew back into the deeper shadow. But the
critical boy face found his father out, and stung him in the dark.

He was an old fool. What had possessed him to rake it all up again. Oh,
yes, he said bitterly in his heart, there was one member of his family
who hadn’t yet smiled and said, “_Show me._ I’m from Missouri.” It was
Hildegarde’s turn.

“Well, my girl,” he ended miserably, “that’s the story that nobody
believed.”

Hildegarde lifted her head and put up her two hands, feeling in the dark
for his. But Mar shrank back. Not from Hildegarde herself could he in
that hour take mere sympathy, craving hopelessly as he did with the long
thirst of years a thing more precious than pity—the thing that he once
had had and had no more.

Like a man who utters his own epitaph, “I lost faith myself,” he said.

“But I have found it, father!” and there was joy as well as the sound of
tears in the thrilling young voice.

“Found—what did you say, Hildegarde?”

“That I believe the gold’s there, waiting!”

“Ah—h—h!” He bent over her with a sound that was almost a sob. “Then I—I
believe it, too!”

CHAPTER IX

Louis Cheviot was one of those who reached the Klondike in the autumn of
’97.

A lucky chance brought him the opportunity of going shares in a lay on
Bonanza, with a man whose fitness for “pardnership” Cheviot had tested
coming over the awful Pass and shooting the Hootalinqua Rapids.

The two had washed out ten thousand dollars apiece by the end of June.
They had the prospect of making an even better thing of it the next year.
Cheviot left his partner to carry on the development of the lease, and
for himself, turned his bronzed face homeward.

He was as certain now as before he had garnered this experience that for
wild life, _qua_ wild life, he had no taste. That it should be so was
partly, strange as it may sound, a result of the cool and balanced mixing
of the elements in him. He had no physical sluggishness to be sloughed
off by harsh impacts, no mental inertia to be hammered into action by
hard necessity, no crust of chrysalis that must be broken before the
winged life might emerge, no essential wildness of spirit that needed
training, no excess of ungoverned ardor that needed cooling in the
northern frosts.

And so it was that he was coming home with little gain but bullion, since
he had gone forth with smaller need than most of the lesson learnt in
chastening the body, or the lightening revelation of some crashing danger.

He could endure hardship with reasonable patience for some reasonable
end, but the gains of civilization were in his eyes too excellent to be
even temporarily abandoned without a sense of heavy deprivation, which
affected him like a loss of common dignity.

Even though he hadn’t one he loved the idea of home. He loved his friends
and all the friendlier aspect of the earth, gardens, ordered communities
of his kind, and all man’s device for socializing life and regulating the
unruliness of nature.

And there was Hildegarde—who had not answered either of his two letters.
Why was that? He felt a contraction of the heart as he refused to allow
himself to formulate surmise; yet if any one had come and said to him,
“Galbraith’s in Valdivia,” he would have felt it no surprise.

Some friends of his were going out by the Yukon River route. He knew
it to be unlikely that he should return to this part of the world. As
well see that more western aspect of it, too, since he might do so in
congenial company.

It was really the company that decided him—that was responsible for a
circumstance that changed the entire course of his own and several other
lives. Instead of going back as he had come, by the shorter way, he found
himself, at the end of July, with seventeen hundred miles of river behind
him waiting at the mouth of the Yukon for the San Francisco steamer.

He heard with surprise that there was a letter for him at the
post-office. The more strange, if true, since his coming to St. Michaels
was less than mere chance—it had been unlikely in the extreme.

However, upon demand, an envelop appeared in the window of the little
post-office. Before ever it reached the hand of the man waiting without,
he recognized Hildegarde’s writing. He tore it open to read a hurried
resumé of what she said she had already written him at length, to Dyea
and to Dawson, and now repeated, on the bare possibility of his taking
the American route home. For her father was just setting out by that same
route to the far North, and by the same ship that carried her letter.
His plan of campaign was not generally known, and all she could say with
certainty was that he would be at St. Michaels some time in August.
And she greatly hoped that if Cheviot should be passing that way, or
even if he found that he could arrange to go there without too great
personal cost, Hildegarde hoped, and even begged, that he would look
out for her father. She “quite approved,” Cheviot read with incredulous
eyes—(Hildegarde! who had thought the expedition mad for a man young
and sound as an oak)—she quite approved her father’s going. At the same
time she did not forget that he was no longer young, and being so lame
was at a disadvantage. “Good Lord! I should say so!” The upshot was that
she “lived upon the hope” that Cheviot would bring her news of Mr. Mar.
The ideal thing would be that they should come home together. If Cheviot
brought that about she would be “unendingly grateful.”

No syllable about Galbraith.

Cheviot went straight to the Alaska Commercial Company’s hotel and looked
through the names registered since the season opened. Not a Mar among
them. So the ship that brought the letter had not brought Mr. Mar—for
this was the only conceivable place he could have stayed in. It was no
small personal relief to Cheviot to conclude that wiser counsels had
prevailed.

The same afternoon it was noised about the office that a steamer had just
been sighted. After all, Mar might only be delayed! While most of the
population rushed down to the beach, Cheviot scribbled a hasty note and
handed it to the clerk.

“If a man of that name should come in on this ship—” he began.

“He hasn’t gone back yet,” interrupted the clerk, studying the
superscription.

“You don’t mean he’s here already?”

“Well, he _was_.”

“When? It can’t be the person I mean?”

“Lame man, about sixty? Yes, yes, remember him perfectly. Couldn’t quite
make him out, for he didn’t seem to care a tinker’s curse about getting
to the Klondike. The boys set him down finally as a sort of a missionary,
because” (with a laugh) “he seemed so ready to go the wrong way.”

“Which way?”

“Up the coast to Golovin Bay.” No, he hadn’t come back. A trader from
Kwimkuk, who had been down for supplies, said Mar was staying up there
at the Swedish Mission. That was all the clerk knew. He was turning the
pages back to the entries of the previous summer. “That’s the man!” And
there was Mar’s unmistakable signature staring Cheviot in the face.

“But that’s ’97,” he said bewildered. He pulled out Hildegarde’s letter,
and looked again at the date. It was a year old.

Shortie Hinkson stopped sweeping out the office to say: “One o’ them
missionary fellers come down here from Golovin Sat’day. No, he ain’t gone
back yit. I seen him only a while ago goin’ by the A.C. office.”

When a few minutes later, among the crowd down by the old Block House,
the missionary was run to earth, Cheviot found him a great tow-headed
Swede, looking as if he had been not so much cut out of wood as hacked
out, and with a very dull implement at that. Close at his elbow, and
appealed to now and then for verification of some statement, was a thin
little dark man, with glittering black eyes and a turn for silence.

The tall missionary was bargaining about some “canned stuff” with the