hurrying waiters. About a long silver-laden table some twenty men
and women, cool in lawn and lace and white flannel, were seated,
eating and talking gaily. At the head was a large, tall man in a
snowy vest; evidently the host, by his smiling, interested attention
to everybody's wants. At his right was a vacant chair, and toward
this Joan of Arc directed her steps. She had caught Caroline's hand
in hers, and, as Bluelegs bent and whispered in the tall man's ear,
she added:

"I think, doctor, if the little girl stays by me she will feel less
shy, perhaps."

"Certainly, certainly--by all means. A good thought, Miss Aitken, a
good thought," he answered in a rich, kind voice. He shook hands
with Caroline warmly.

"So you find our grounds attractive?" he asked politely.

She nodded, a little shyly. All this company, so freshly dressed, so
ceremoniously served, so utterly unconscious of her presence,
embarrassed her a little. For not one of the ladies and
gentlemen--there were no children--paid the slightest attention to
her arrival, even when a place was made for her by Joan and a mug of
milk procured. They talked, or, as she noticed now, sat, many of
them, listless and silent, playing with their rings and bracelets,
answering only with monosyllables the questions of the large,
cordial doctor.

"Where is Marie Antoinette?" she whispered to her friend, who seemed
nearer, suddenly, than these cold table-mates.

"She does not eat with us," said Joan, helping her to chicken and
green peas, and beginning her own meal.

The doctor turned to them, having recommended some asparagus to the
stolid lady at his left.

"I am glad to see your appetite so good, Miss Aitken," he observed,
lowering his voice a little, "at this rate we shall have no excuse
for keeping you much longer."

"You have had none for six months," she replied curtly.

"I am sorry you feel so bitterly," he said, "but you know I can not
agree with you there. You will think more kindly of me some day, I
hope, when time has freed your mind of its prejudice."

"When will that be?" she asked, meeting his eyes full for a moment.

"I wrote only this morning to your uncle, stating your gradual but
steady improvement, and assuring him that in my opinion--subject, of
course, to circumstances--it would be a matter of a few months more
only," he said. "Does not that make your feelings a little--only a
little more tender--"

"What did you say?" a shrill voice interrupted, "say that again,
please."

Caroline had beguiled the woman next her, a frail, anemic little
creature with pathetic eyes, into a halting conversation.

"I said," she repeated, buttering her roll thickly and
appreciatively with fresh, clover-scented butter, "I said that no
weather was too hot for me. I love it."

("Now, really, I _am_ pleased," the big doctor murmured to the girl
beside him. "Mrs. Du Long hasn't seemed so interested for days. In
fact, she's been quite silent; I was alarmed about her. It's the
child's influence.")

"--Uncle Joe said," Caroline went on, the roll at her mouth, "and he
said I was a regular little snake."

She heard a guttural, growling sound beside her, lifted her eyes
innocently, and for one flashing, doubtful second beheld the
swollen, distorted face, the bulging eyes, the back-drawn snarling
lips beside her. She did not see the plunging fork above her head,
so quickly did Joan's arm intervene between her and it; she did not
hear its impact against the big doctor's plate nor the gurgling
voice of what had been the sad-eyed little woman beside her, for her
head was buried in Joan's stifling skirt.

"Kill the snake! Kill the snake!" some one--or something--yelled,
and then a grip of iron caught her arm and the voice of Bluelegs
said sternly:

"Look straight ahead of you--don't turn your head! Don't turn, Miss
Aitken--you can do nothing--they have her safe. The guards are
here."

The room, indeed, seemed full of gardeners; a bell rang noisily near
by.

"But the others--the others!" Joan gasped.

"They are all right--it won't trouble them," he answered quietly;
and as Caroline and the girl looked fearfully where they were
bidden, they saw the men and women eating placidly, talking with
each other or sitting listless, staring idly at four liveried men
who fought furiously with one small, snarling creature. Like the
cruel witnesses in dreams, they sat, and the waiters served them
swiftly and handed the dishes between their shoulders, as deaf as
they. And suddenly they became terrible to Caroline, and the castle
menacing, a thing to flee from.

"Step out this way," said Bluelegs, when the sounds of struggle had
died away, "and take the child through the grounds, will you,
please? Try to occupy her thoughts, and your own, too, if you can.
This is one of the unfortunate things that rarely happen, but when
they do--Yes, indeed, Mr. Ogden, it was certainly fine asparagus--I
am glad you enjoyed it. No, she was only a little indisposed--she'll
soon be well again. The heat of the sun, undoubtedly. Don't be
alarmed, Miss Arliss, she will have every attention."

The gardeners had vanished from the steps where they went down, and
none were seen in the grounds. Joan of Arc clutched Caroline's
waist.

"Now--now!" she said, between her teeth; "now is the time not to
faint! I never fainted--never. Come and show me that hole in the
fence. There is no one about. But don't run."

They hurried across the sunlit, smiling terrace.

"What was the matter?" Caroline queried fearfully, "was she--was
she--"

"Yes," said Joan brusquely. "Yes. Don't think about it. Don't run
and don't think. Only find the hole."

They stood beside it. No one was near them; no one called to them.
Silently Caroline slid under the sharp prongs. Joan of Arc put her
hands under her skirt a moment and a white ruffled petticoat slipped
around her feet. She adjusted it over her dress and pulled herself
with difficulty through. As she stood erect in the soiled, stained
petticoat, Caroline saw her knees, tremble under it, and she
drooped against the fence, white-cheeked.

"Don't faint," she said severely to Caroline.

With shaking hands she tied the petticoat under her dress again and
they crouched through the underbrush to the outer walk. Caroline
reached for her wheel and the two peered fearfully up and down the
empty road.

"I can't--I can't," the girl moaned, "my dress is so black--they can
see it from the hill. Oh, what shall I do? I thought I could, and I
can't!"

The measured trot of a pair of horses sounded on the road. An empty
station wagon came rapidly toward them; groom and driver regarded
them curiously.

The girl straightened herself and raised her hand with a pretty,
imperious gesture.

"One moment, please," she said, "but are you going to the village?"

"Yes, Miss," said the driver, "to the station. Was there anything--"

She opened a bag at her side and took out carelessly a small gold
piece.

"My little friend here," she said, in an even, low voice, "was
showing me this beautiful building and grounds and I utterly
neglected to note the time. I fear I have lost my train, if we try
to walk back. If you could take us--"

"Certainly, Miss," said the driver. "William, put the young lady's
wheel on top. Was it the express you wanted, Miss? I'm to meet
it--the 2.08. Party from Boston."

They climbed in, the bicycle settled noisily into the trunk-rack on
top, and the big chestnuts pounded down the hill.

Joan stared straight before her. Presently she drew a pair of black
gloves from her little bag and put them on. Her lips moved steadily,
and Caroline knew from her closed eyes that she was praying.

They drew into the neat station as the train Snorted itself in. The
girl handed the gold piece to the driver.

"Divide it, please," she said calmly. "I am much obliged."

She walked to the drawing-room car, and signaled the black porter.

"I shall be safe to-night," she said softly, to the child by her
side, "and I won't tell you my name, because it will not be mine
much longer. But what is yours? Tell me quick!"

"All _aboard_! Next stop One Hund' Twent'-_fifth_ Street!" some one
called, hoarsely.

Caroline looked dazed. She tried to speak sensibly, but her tongue
played tricks with her, and the tension of her feelings was too much
for her. As the girl paused a second on the platform, and the train
shuddered for its start, Caroline called above the escaping steam:

"I'm Mary Queen of Scots--I am! I am!"

The white face of Joan of Arc broke into a wavering smile.

"You dear little idiot," she called, chokingly, "I'll find you out
yet! You'll see! Good-by--God bless your Majesty."

And while she might, Caroline ran beside the window, waving her hand
at that tearful, happy face.

VIII

A WATCH IN THE NIGHT

The village clock boomed out the first strokes of eleven. Solemn and
mellow, the waves of sound flowed over the sleeping streets; the
aftertones vibrated plaintively. Caroline stirred restlessly,
tossing off the sheet and muttering in her dreams. The tears had
dried on her hot cheeks; her brows were still knitted.

"Four! Five! Six!" the big bell tolled.

Caroline sat up in bed and dropped her bare, pink legs over the
edge. Her eyes were open now, but set in a fixed, unseeing stare.

"Seven! Eight!"

She fumbled with her toes for her leather barefoot sandals and
slipped her feet under the ankle straps.

"Nine! Ten!" moaned the bell.

She moved forward, vaguely, in the broad path of moonlight that
poured through the wide-open window, and ran her hands like a blind
girl over the warm sill, lifting her knee to its level.

"Eleven!"

Before the murmuring aftertones had lost themselves in the night,
Caroline was out of the window. She stole lightly along the tin
roof, warm yet with the first intense heat of June, dropped easily
to the level of the kitchen-ell, and, slipping down onto the massive
trunk of the old wistaria, fitted accustomed feet into its curled
niches and clambered down among the warm, fragrant clusters. Steeped
in the full moon, it sent out its cloying perfume like a visible
cloud; her white nightgown glistened ghostlike through the leaves.

She paused a moment in the shadow of the vine, and a great tawny
cat, his orange markings distinct in the moonlight, stole to her,
brushing against her bare ankles caressingly. As he curled and
uncurled his soft tail about her little feet, a sudden impulse
caught her, and she started swiftly through the wide backyard,
bending to a broken gap in the privet hedge, cutting diagonally
across the neighboring grounds, and emerging into a pleasant
country road on the outskirts of the little village, with sleeping
houses sprinkled along its length, well back, mostly, from its edge,
showing here and there a light.

She struck into the soft, dusty road at a quick, swinging pace, the
fruit of much walking, and the big yellow cat pattered at her side.

The night was almost windless; sweet, nameless odors poured up from
the heated summer soil; the shadows of the grasses were outlined
like Japanese pictures on the white roadway. Except for the child
and the cat, no living being moved, as far as the eye could see;
only the burdocks and mulleins swayed almost imperceptibly with
breezes so delicate that the leaf tips of the trees could not feel
them.

A great white moth, blundering against a heavy thistle head, tumbled
against Caroline's elbow and fluttered clumsily into her face. She
started, blinked, drew a long breath, and woke with a frightened
gasp. Before her stretched the pale, curving road; above her the
spangled sky throbbed and glittered; the earth, drenched in
moonlight, beautiful as all lovely creatures caught sleeping,
breathed softly into her face and with every breath put courage into
her heart.

She looked down and saw the yellow cat, stopping, with one lifted
paw, his green, lamplike eyes fixed unwaveringly on hers.

"Why, it's you, Red Rufus!" she whispered, "when did we come here? I
don't remember--"

A bat whirred by: the cat pricked his ears.

"I don't believe we're here at all, Red Rufus," she whispered again.
"We're just dreaming--at least, I am. I s'pose you're only in my
dream. If I was really here, I'd be frightened to death, prob'ly,
but if it's just a dream, I think it's lovely. Let's go on. I never
had a dream like this--it seems so real, doesn't it, Rufus?"

They went on aimlessly up the road. Quaint little night sounds began
now to make themselves heard: now and then a drowsy twitter from the
sleeping nests, now and then a distant owl hoot. A sudden gust of
honeysuckle, so strong that it was like a friendly, fragrant body
flung against her, halted her for a moment, and while she paused,
sniffing ecstatically, the low murmur of voices caught her ear.

The honeysuckle ran riot over an old stone wall, followed an arching
gateway at the foot of a winding path that led to a lighted house on
a knoll above, and flung screening tendrils over an entwined pair
that paused just inside the gate. The girl's white, loose sleeves
fell back from her round arms as she flung them up about her tall
lover's neck; his dark head bent low over hers, their lips met, and
they hung entranced in the bowery archway.

For a moment Caroline watched them with frank curiosity. Then
something woke and stirred in her, faint and vague, but alive now,
and she turned away her eyes, blushing hot in the cool moonlight.

The soft tones of their good-night died into broken whispers; parted
from his white lady, he started on for a few, irresolute steps, then
flung about suddenly and walked back toward the house, after a low,
happy protest. The cooing of some drowsy pigeons in the stable on
the other side of the road carried on the lovers' language long
after they were out of earshot, and confused itself with them in
Caroline's mind.

She wandered on, intoxicated with the mild, spacious night, the dewy
freedom of the fields, the delicious pressure of the warm, velvet
air against her body. Red Rufus purred as he went, rejoicing with
his vagabond comrade. Just how or when she began to know that she
was not asleep, just why the knowledge did not alarm her, it would
be hard to say. But when the truth came to her, the friendly,
powdered stars had been above her long enough to accustom her to
their winking; the tiny, tentative noises of the night had sounded
in her ears till they comforted and reassured her; the vast and
empty field stretches meant only freedom and exhilaration. In a
sudden delirium of joy she slipped between the bars of a rolling
meadow and ran at full speed down its long, grassy slope, her
nightgown streaming behind her, her slender, childish legs white as
ivory against the greenish-black all around her. Beside her bounded
the great cat with shining, gemlike eyes. They rolled down the last
reaches of the slope, and all the Milky Way wondered at them, but
never a sound broke the solemn quiet of the night: the ecstasy was
noiseless.

[Illustration: Caroline danced, bowing and posturing in a bewitched
abandon, around the tinkling, glistening fountain.]

Her face buried in sweet clover, she panted, prone on the grass.

"Let's go right on, Rufus, and run away, and do just as we please!"
she whispered to the nestling cat. "If I can't do like the boys do,
I don't want to stay home--the fellows laugh at me! I'd rather be
whipped than sent to bed like a girl. I _won't_ be a young lady--I
_won't_!"

Rufus purred approvingly.

"If I only had some trousers!" she mourned, softly; "a boy can do
_anything_!"

Across the quiet night there cut a thin, shrill cry: a little,
fretful pipe that brought instantly before the mind some hushed,
white room with a shaded light and a tiny basket bed. Caroline sat
up and stared about her: such cries did not come from open fields.
Hardly a stone's throw from her there was a small knoll, and behind
it what might have been a large, projecting boulder suddenly flashed
into red light and showed itself for a dormer window; a cottage had
evidently hidden behind the little hill. Curiously Caroline
approached it and walked softly up the knoll.

Almost on the top she paused and peered into the unshaded window.
These householders had no fear of peeping neighbors, for only the
moon and the night moths found them out, and the simple bedroom was
framed like some old naïve interior, realistic with the tremendous
realism of the Great Artist.

The high, old-fashioned footboard of the bed faced the dormer
window, and Caroline could see only the upper portion of the woman's
figure as she leaned over a small crib beside her, her heavy dark
hair falling across her cheek, and lifted up with careful slowness
the tiny creature that wailed in it. Beside her, as he supported
himself anxiously on his elbow, the broad chest and shoulders of her
young husband rose above the screening footboard. The mother gazed
hungrily at the doll-like, writhing object, passed her hand over its
downy forehead, smiled with relief into its opening eyes, and gave
it her breast.

Instantly the wail ceased. A slow, placid smile--and yet, not quite
a smile--it was rather an elemental content, a gratified drifting
into the warm current of the stream of this world's being--spread
over the woman's face; the man's long arm wrapped around his
wealth, at once protecting and defiant; his head flung back against
the world, while his eyes studied humbly the mystery that he
grasped. The night lamp behind them threw a halo around the mother
and her child, and the great trinity of all times and all faiths
gleamed immortal upon the canvas of the simple room--its only
spectator a child.

In her, malleable to all the influences of the revealing night,
fairly disembodied, in her detached and flitting presence, the scene
woke dim, coiled memories of an infancy that stirred and pained her
even as it left her forever, and frightened longing for the
motherhood that life was holding for her. No longer an infant, not
yet a woman, this creature that was both felt the helplessness of
one, the yearning of the other, and as she pressed the nestling cat
tightly to her little breast two great, eager tears slipped down her
hot cheeks, and a gulping sob, half loneliness, half pure
excitement, broke into the gentle stillness of the lighted room.

"Who's there?"

The man's voice rang like a sudden pistol shot in the night; before
Caroline's fascinated gaze the gleaming, softly colored picture
faded and vanished into the engulfing darkness, as the lamp went out
and a dark, scudding mackerel cloud flew over the moon.
Instinctively she fled softly down the knoll, instinctively she
dropped behind a bush at the bottom. She heard the rattle of the
window pane as the man pushed himself half out of the window; she
heard him call back to the waiting room behind him!

"It's a cat, dear--I saw it, plain. It's pretty bright out here. But
I thought I saw something white beside it, too. I guess I'll take a
look around outside."

There was a sound of movement behind the window, and, caught in an
ecstasy of terror, Caroline turned at right angles from the fields
and ran to the road that gleamed white, far on the other side of the
cottage. Panting, she won it, crossed it, and fairly safe behind the
low growth of wayside brushes that fringed its other side, she
dashed along, farther and farther from the cottage, more and more
frightened with every gasping breath.

On and on she flew, light as a skimming leaf in the wind, the cat
bounding in easy, flexible curves beside her. Now a little brown
cottage in its plot of land sent them into the road for a moment;
now some tiny pond, a mirror for the sprinkled heavens, broke into
their course, and they skirted it more slowly, peering continuously
into its jeweled depths. With them their hurrying shadows, black on
the road, fainter on the grass, fled ceaselessly, hardly more quiet
than they. A very intoxication of fear, a panic terror almost
delicious, drove Caroline through the night, though after a while
she ran more slowly. Utterly ignorant of where she was, reckless
of where she might go, she swung along under the streaming moon,
no white moth or whispering leaf more wholly a part of the night
than she.

Whatever idea of going back she might have had was lost long ago;
however little she might have meant to range so far, she was now
beyond any turning. No wood creature, no skipping faun or startled
dryad dancing under the moon could have belonged more utterly than
she to the fragrant, mysterious world around her. The bright,
bustling life of every day, its clatter of food and drink, its
smarts and fatigues, its settled routine of work and play, all
seemed as far behind her as some old tale of another life, half
forgotten now.

Just as her pace subsided into a little skipping trot, a thick hedge
sprang up across their path, driving them into the road, and
continued, stiff and tall, along its edge. The pure pleasure of
conquering its prickly stiffness sent Caroline through it, tearing
one sleeve from her nightgown and dragging a great rent in one side
of it. Emerging into a magnificent sweep of clipped turf, where
wide, leafy boughs spread dappled moon shadows, they made for a
whispering, clucking fountain that threw a diamond column straight
toward the stars, only to break at the top into a beaded mist and
clink musically back to its marble basin. Its rhythmic tinkle, the
four ball-shaped box trees at either corner, the carved whiteness of
the marble basin, and the massive pillar-fronted stone house beyond
it, all spread a glamour of fairyland and foreign courts. Caroline
bowed gravely to the cat, and, seizing his feathery paws, danced,
bowing and posturing, in a bewitched abandon around the tinkling,
glistening fountain. The plumy tail of Red Rufus flew behind him as
he twirled, his little feet pattered furiously after Caroline's
twinkling sandals. Stooping over the fountain, she threw a silvery
handful high in the air and ran to catch it on her head.

As she stood at last, panting and dazed with her mad circling, she
was aware of the low murmur of a voice, rising and falling in a
steady measure, reaching out of the dim bulk of the great house,
dark and sunk in sleep before her. For a moment a chill fear struck
to the bottom of her little heart: was some weird spell aimed at
her, some malignant eye spying on her? She stood frozen to the spot,
the tiny drops of sweat cooling on her forehead, while the droning
sounded in her ears. Then, out of the very core of her terror, some
inexplicable impulse urged her on to face it, and she crept, step by
step, the cat tight in her nervous grasp, around the corner of the
great house, toward the sound.

This corner was a wing, set at right angles to the main building,
and as she rounded it she found herself at the edge of an inner
court. In the opposite wing, looking straight across the court, was
a lighted room with a long French window opening directly on the
shaven turf, and in the center of this window there sat in a high,
carved chair a very old woman. She was carefully dressed in deep
black, with pure white ruffles at her neck and around her shrunken
wrists, and a lace cap on her thin, white hair. Her feet were on a
carved foot-stool, and a quaint silver lamp, set on a slender table
at her side, threw a stream of light across the court. Her face,
lined with countless wrinkles, was bent upon a large book in her
lap; from its pages she read in a low, steady voice--the
passionless, almost terrifying voice of great and weary age:

    "_Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all
    generations._

    "_Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou
    hast formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting
    to everlasting thou art God._"

Caroline stared, fascinated, down the path of lamplight. It marked a
bed of yellow tulips with a broad band; they stood motionless, as if
carved in ivory.

[Illustration: Across the court was a lighted room with a long
French window, and in the center of this window there sat in a high,
carved chair a very old woman.]

    "_For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday
    when it is past, and as a watch in the night._"

The grave, steady voice flowed out and mingled with the silver
lamplight; the marble sill of the long window was white like the
sill of a tomb.

    "_We spend our years as a tale that is told._

    "_The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and
    if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is
    their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off,
    and we fly away._"

The hot excitement of this magic night cooled slowly; over
Caroline's bubbling spirit there fell a mild, strange calm. A breath
from the very caverns of the infinite stole out along the path of
that silver lamp, and in the grave, surrendered voice there sounded
for the child upon life's threshold echoes of the final tolling.

Entranced by the measured cadences, Caroline stepped forward
unconsciously and stood, white against the gray stone, full in the
path of the lamp. The heavy, wrinkled lids raised themselves from
the deep-set eyes, and the aged reader gazed calmly at the little
figure across the court. The withered old hands clasped each other.

"Jemmy! O _Jemmy_!"

Caroline never moved.

"It _is_ you, Jemmy!"

The faded eyes devoured the little white figure.

"I thought you'd never come, Jemmy--but I knew they'd send you. I'm
all ready. Don't you think I'm afraid, Jemmy: I'm eighty-four years
old, and I want to go."

Caroline hardly breathed; a nameless awe held her motionless and
silent.

"You see, I don't sleep much any more, Jemmy," the old, toneless
voice went on, "and hardly any at night. They're very kind, all of
them, but I'm--I'm eighty-four years old, and I want to go."

The ivory tulips gleamed under the stars; the silver lamp, burned
lower and lower: its oil was nearly gone.

"And you brought your yellow kitty, too, Jemmy! To think of that!
Did they think I wouldn't know my baby? It's only fifty years, ...
shall I come now, Jemmy?"

The silver lamp went out. In the starlight Caroline saw the lace cap
droop forward, as the the old woman's head settled gently on her
breast. Her hands lay clasped on the great volume; her deep-set eyes
were closed. She read no more from the book, and the child, awed and
sober, stole like a shadow behind the gray wall and left the quiet
figure in the carved chair.

Her feet fell into a tiny graveled path, and she drifted aimlessly
along it, musing on the meaning of what she had heard. Almost she
had persuaded herself that the gray stone building was an enchanted
palace, and herself a fairy messenger sent to break the spell, when
the delight of pushing through a tiny turnstile and finding a
running brook with a waterfall in it close at hand, drove everything
else from her mind. The grounds had completely changed their
character by now: the turnstile marked the end of cultivation, and
the little path, no longer graveled, wound through the wild
woodland. Here and there a boulder blocked the way; the undergrowth
became dense; great clumps of fern and rhododendron sent out their
heavy, rank odors. Now and again the spicy scent of warm pines and
cedars prepared the ear for the gentle, ceaseless rustle of their
stiff foliage; little scufflings and chitterings at the ground level
told of wood-people wakened by the presence of Red Rufus.

A strange whitish bulk that glimmered through the thinning
foreground, too big for even a big boulder, too symmetrical and
quiet for a waterfall, tempted Caroline on, and she pressed forward
hastily, lost in speculation, when a sudden odor foreign to the
woods stopped her short at the very edge of a little glade, and she
paused, sniffing curiously.

A man, bareheaded, with grizzled curly hair, turned suddenly, not
ten feet from her, and stared dumfounded at her, his twisted, brown
cigar an inch from his lips.

The torn-out sleeve of her nightgown had bared one side to her
waist: the great rent that slit the lower half of the garment left
one slender leg uncovered above her white knee. A spray of wild
azalea wreathed her dark tumbled hair, and Rufus, his plumy tail
curled around her feet in the shadow, and his green eyes flaming,
might have been a baby panther. She leaned one hand on the rough
bark of a chestnut and gazed with startled eyes at the man; it
seemed that the forest must swallow her at a breath from a human
throat.

He lifted one hand and pinched the back of the other with it till
his face contorted with the pain.

"Then there _are_ such things!" he said softly; "well, why not?"

He moved forward almost imperceptibly.

"If I were younger, I should know you were not possible," he
muttered, "but now I know that I have never doubted you--really."

Again he took a small step. Caroline, paralyzed with fear and
embarrassment, for she thought he was merely teasing her a little
before he punished her--his pleasant, low voice and whimsical
manners brought her back suddenly to the ordinary world and the
stern facts of her escapade--shivered slightly, but did not attempt
flight.

"It was this extraordinary night that brought you out, of course,"
he went on, again slightly shortening the distance between them,
"you and the little cub. It was a moon out of five thousand, I
admit. Do you live in that chestnut?"

With a sudden agile bound he covered the space between them and
seized her by the shoulder.

"Aha!" he cried, "I have--good heavens, it _is_ a child!"

"Of course I am--I'm Caroline," she murmured writhing under his
grasp.

He pulled her out into the little glade.

"Oh! you're Caroline, are you?" he repeated, thoughtfully; "dear me,
you gave me quite a turn, Caroline. Where did you come from--the big
house?"

"I came from a long way," she said briefly. "I was--I was taking a
walk. Where do you live? Don't you ever to go bed?"

The man chuckled.

"I have been feeling adventures in my bones all day," he said,
"and here they are; a child and a cat. If you will come with
me, Mademoiselle, I will show you where I live."

He led the way gravely to the dim, white object, and Caroline
perceived it to be a tent, pitched by the side of a spring that
poured through a tiny pipe set into the rock. The tent flap was
tied back, and she saw inside it a narrow cot, covered with a
coarse blue blanket, a roughly made table, spread with a game
of solitaire, and a small leather trunk. On the further side of
the tent there smoked, in a rude, improvised oven of stones, a
dying fire. Above it, under a shelf nailed to the tree, hung a
few simple utensils; two or three large stumps had been hacked
into the semblance of seats.

To one of these stumps the man led Caroline, and, seating her, he
turned to the shelf above the fire and fumbled among the pots and
pans there, producing finally a buttered roll, a piece of maple
sugar, and a small fruit tart.

"You must be hungry," he said simply, and Caroline ate greedily.
After he had brought her a tin cup of the spring water, he selected
a brown pipe from a half dozen on the shelf and began filling it
from a leather pouch that hung on the tree.

"Now let's hear all about it," he said easily.

"I am running away," said Caroline abruptly. At that moment it
really seemed that she had planned her flight from the hour that
left her, tear-stained and disgraced, in her little bed.

"They didn't treat you well?" he suggested, picking out a red ember
from the coals on the point of a knife and applying it to the pipe.

"I'm not to wear my knickers any more," Caroline said, with a gulp,
"and my bathing suit has to have a skirt. I've got to stop p-playing
with the b-boys--so much, that is," she added, honestly.

The man turned his head slightly.

"That seems hard," he said; "what's the reason?"

"I'm 'most twelve," said Caroline; "you have to be a young lady,
then."

"I see," the man said. He looked at her thoughtfully. "I suppose you
_would_ look larger in more clothes," he added.

"That's it," she assured him, "I do. That's just it."

"And so you expect to avoid all this by running away?" he asked,
settling into his own stump seat. "I am afraid you can't do it."

Caroline set her teeth. He regarded her quizzically.

"See here," he went on, "I wish you'd take my advice in this
matter."

They confronted each other in the starlight, a strange pair before
the dying fire. The moon had gone, and the stars, though bright,
seemed less solid and less certainly gold than before. A cool breeze
swept through the wood and Caroline shivered in her torn nightdress.
The man stepped into the tent and returned with a long army cloak.
This he wrapped round her and resumed his seat, with Rufus on his
knee.

"My name," he said, "is Peter. Everybody calls me that--just Peter.
I don't know exactly why it is, but a lot of people--all over--have
got into the way of taking my advice. Perhaps because I've knocked
about all over the world more or less, and haven't got any wife or
children or brothers and sisters of my own to advise, so I take it
out on everybody else. Perhaps because I try to put myself in the
other fellow's place before I advise him. Perhaps because I've had a
little trouble of my own, here and there, and haven't forgotten it.
Anyhow, I get used to talking things over."

A gentle stirring seemed to pass through the woods: the birds spoke
softly back and forth, a squirrel chattered. Again that cool wind
swept over the trees.

"Now, take it this week," the man went on, puffing steadily; "you
wouldn't believe the people just about here who've asked for my
advice. I usually camp up here for a week or so in the summer--the
people who own the property like to have me here--and the first day
I unpacked, up comes a nice girl--I used to make birch whistles for
her mother--to tell me all about her young man. She brought me that
spray of honeysuckle over the pipes--grows over the front gate. She
wants to marry him before her father gets to like him, but she hates
to run away. 'Would you advise me to, Peter?' she says. And I
advised her to wait.

"Then there's my friend the blacksmith. He lives in a queer little
house with dormer windows under a hill, just off the county road.
He's got a new baby, and he was afraid it wouldn't pull through. He
knew I'd seen a lot of babies--black and red and yellow--and _he_
wanted my advice. 'Peter, what'll I do?' he says, 'what'll I do?'

"'Why, just wait, Harvey. He'll live. Just wait,' I told him."

Caroline listened with interest. He might have been talking to his
equal in years, from his tone.

"Then, oddly enough," he continued, "here's my old friend in the big
house up yonder--and she _is_ old--and what do you think she's
worried about? She's afraid she _won't_ die! 'Oh, Peter,' she says
to me--she's fond of me because I'm the same age as a little boy of
hers that died--'it seems to me that I can't wait, Peter! What shall
I do?' she says. And I tell _her_ to wait. 'Dear old friend,' said I
to her last night, 'it will come. It's bound to come. Just be
patient.'"

He paused and knocked his pipe empty.

"Now, as to your case," he said, "I know how you feel. I'm sorry for
you--by the Lord, I'm sorry for you! But what's the use of running
away? You'll keep on growing up, you know. It's one of the things
that doesn't stop. You can't beat the game by wearing knickers, you
know. And then, there'd come a time when you'd want to quit,
anyhow."

She shook her head.

"Really, you would," he assured her, persuasively. "They all do."

"That's what Uncle Joe says," she admitted, "and Aunt Edith. She
changed her mind, she says--"

"Are you talking about Joe Holt?" Peter demanded.

"Yes--do you know him? He lives in a big white house with wistaria
on the side," Caroline cried joyfully.

"I was a senior when he was a freshman," said Peter. "Then he's
taken the Washburn house."

"Do you know Aunt Edith, too?" asked Caroline.

"Yes," said Peter, after a pause, "yes, I know Aunt Edith--or used
to. But I didn't know she--they were up in this country. I haven't
seen her--them for a good while. Does--does she sing yet?"

"Oh, yes, but not on the stage any more, you know," Caroline
explained.

"I see. Does she sing, I wonder, a song about--Oh, something about
'my heart'?"

"'My heart's own heart,' you mean," Caroline said importantly; "yes,
indeed. It's her encore song."

"I see," said Peter again.

He looked into the fire, and there was a long silence. After a while
he shook his shoulders like a water-dog.

"Now, Caroline," he said briskly, "here's the way of this business.
You can't wear knickers until you're one of the boys, and you can't
be one of the boys until you wear knickers. Do you see? So you don't
get anywhere."

Caroline looked puzzled. She was suddenly overcome with sleep, and
the old familiar names and ways tasted of home and comfort to her
soul.

"You're too nice to be a boy, Caroline," said Peter, leaning over
her and brushing her azalea-crowned hair tenderly with his lips. "If
you persist in this plan of running away to be a boy, some boy,
growing up anxiously, somewhere, will never forgive you! Take my
advice, and wait--will you? Say 'Yes, Peter.'"

"Yes, Peter," Caroline murmured, drowsily.

"Good girl! Then I'll take you home with my little donkey. I don't
believe they've missed you yet. You've come four miles, though, you
little gypsy!"

He disappeared behind the trees, and Caroline nodded. Later she woke
sufficiently to find herself and Rufus on the blue blanket on the
bottom of a little donkey cart; Peter stood by the gentle,
long-eared head.

"Thank you, Peter," she murmured, half asleep, "and you'll see Aunt
Edith, won't you?"

"I don't believe so," he said, very low. "Not yet. Tell her Peter
brought you back. Just Peter. But he can't come yet. Get up, Jenny!"

They wound out by an old wood road. A cool spiciness flowed though
the green aisles, and as the tiny donkey struck into a dog trot, the
man striding easily at her head, a far-away cock crowed shrilly and
the dawn gleamed white.

IX

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

"Caroline!" Henry D. Thoreau cocked one brindled ear cannily and
rapped sharply with his tail on the piazza floor, but there was no
other answer to the call. "Caroline!" The insistent voice rang
louder; it was a very determined voice. A sleepy Angora cat scowled
reprovingly at its violence; a gray and pink parrot mimicked its
hortatory note, but after that the midsummer silence settled down
again. Only the bees droned heavily among the heavy August roses.

"Don't nag her, dear; it doesn't do any good," a sleepy contralto,
rich as creamy chocolate, crooned out of a scarlet-fringed hammock.

"That's all very well for you, Edith, you don't have the
responsibility of her. Her father wants her to read a little history
every day, and this is the best time--it's too hot for anything
else."

"Rather hot for history, dear?"

"It's not too hot for the Moonstone, I notice! She's been at that
since breakfast, steadily. Not a word for any one."

"'Moonstone' sounds cool, anyhow," drawled the contralto
appeasingly.

"Oh, Edith! You're as bad as the child herself!"

"She's fourteen, dear."

"Fourteen! What is that?"

"Anything but a child, when it's you, Sis. You talk to her as if she
were ten."

"You'd think she was, if you saw her riding that donkey--a great
girl like her!"

"There it is, dear! One moment she's a baby, the next she's a great
girl! It's hard on her, Sis."

"But, Edith--that donkey!"

"Poor Rose-Marie! I rode him myself--bareback and standing up!--when
I was fifteen--at a circus. Do you remember?"

The voice chuckled unwillingly. "You always were a tomboy, Deedee!
Do you remember Joe's bull fight?"

[Illustration: Caroline was not a hundred yards away, sheltering
under a heavy arbor vitæ, flat on her stomach.]

"And the lemonade stand!" Contralto cried, with a rich swoop of
laughter. Their voices took up a happy canon of gold memories; there
were no more cries for Caroline.

She was not a hundred yards away from the sister aunts, sheltering
under a heavy arbor vitæ, flat on her stomach, her nose glued to the
reprehensible Moonstone: that she had heard the calls and resented
them the scowl between her eyebrows exhibited. Behind her, patiently
at graze, a small, mouse-colored donkey stood, shifting a pair of
quaint panniers from side to side and wagging his scarlet ear
tassels thoughtfully.

The chapter ended, Caroline rose, peered across to the piazza,
nodded to herself at the flow of voices and shrugged her shoulders.

"Good old Aunt Deedee!" she muttered, "she choked her off! Now, for
heaven's sake, don't bray, Rose-Marie, and perhaps we can get away.
I wouldn't dare get over to the house for a luncheon; we'll have to
get along with sweet-boughs."

She slipped the book into one pannier, a cushion into the other
and threw a worn steamer rug over the little beast's back;
Caroline was a luxurious lounger and rarely traveled without
her sumpter mule and his impedimenta. She led him with practiced
quiet away from the house and paused under the gnarled old
sweet-bough tree: the greenish-yellow, almost translucent globes
dotted the lush, warm grass, their languorous sweet filled the
air. Selecting a dozen thoughtfully, she added them to the
donkey's load, and they went on at a foot pace, through the
slowly reddening Baldwins and seek-no-furthers, the tiny
lady-apples and the king-of-Tompkins-counties, through the
belt of dead, warped fruit trees, blighted and gray--"like
those Doré pictures," she murmured to Rose-Marie--down three,
crumbling brick steps, where the little fellow picked his way
as daintily as a careful lady, and across the dusty road into
a pasture trail that led to a wood stretch, sparse at first,
thicker as one plunged in deeper. The sun filtered through in
delicious diamonds; here and there a resinous pine, steeped in
heat, threw out a cloud of balmy odor; a chipmunk scuttered
across their path, clicking nervously, only to squat on his
haunches and stare beadily at Rose-Marie, taut with quivering
curiosity. Caroline scowled at him.

"Rise of the Dutch Republic!" she muttered angrily. "I think not!"

The chipmunk winked sympathetically.

"Your father says it's as interesting as any novel" (with startling
mimicry of the piazza voice). "I notice _they_ don't read it!"

The chipmunk's place was empty; only a slight stir among the leaves
marked his path.

Caroline's eyes widened, grew dreamy. She leaned her sharp elbows on
Rose-Marie's hairy back and threw her weight on him thoughtfully: he
checked and stood like a table.

"Do you suppose there really are regular roads through the trees,
like the monkeys took Mowgli on?" she queried.

Rose-Marie waved his long, hairy ears meditatively, but said
nothing.

"I don't mean in any fairy way," she explained hastily, "but just
scientifically. It might be. Corners and turns and short-cuts--why
not? they all know them. He may be running home by a back way, now,
to call his children to look at Rose-Marie; it's as good as a whole
circus parade to them, I suppose. And they talk to each other...."

Held in a muse, she leaned against the donkey; the moments slipped
by. She lost all count of time. Her eyes stared emptily at some
sunny flicker, some dappled pattern of leaf work; her ears were
filled with the forest drone, the mysterious murmur made up of so
many nameless instruments that only the Great Conductor can classify
and number them. Time ceased to be.

At length she woke with a start, shook herself coltishly, and they
pushed on. The wood grew thicker; now and then Rose-Marie had to
force his way along the tiny trail; his red tassels caught on the
twigs.

"I'll tell you what," Caroline began, suddenly, "I'm going to try
that wood track to-day and see where it goes, to the very end. It
must go somewhere. Where do they haul the wood from, if there isn't
some place at the end? Come on, Rose-Marie!"

At a point where the trail forked she led the donkey along the wider
and less interesting way. It was ridged and rutty, and Rose-Marie
sniffed disgustedly as he slipped among the gnarled roots; the
apples bumped and slid in the pannier. After a while Caroline
stopped under a tree, ate three of the apples, gave the donkey two,
and resting in an artfully constructed nest of rug and pillow,
dipped refreshingly into the Moonstone.

"That's a kind of luncheon," she remarked philosophically, "and now
we'll start again. I'll go to the end of this, if it takes all day!"

They settled down to a dogged pace and after an hour, during which
the wood grew thinner by imperceptible degrees, found themselves on
a relatively easy track that forked suddenly into a genuine country
road, stretching far to left and right of them. It was a new country
to Caroline; she found no landmarks whatever. The road glared with
heat, the dust was powdery, the shade nowhere, once they had cleared
the wood. She sighed with fatigue and emptiness; it seemed a long
pull, and the harbor far from worth the voyage, when all was said
and done.

"What _did_ we want to get to this nasty hot road for, Rose-Marie?"
she cried pettishly, shifting from one long leg to the other,
shrugging a nervous, bony shoulder. "Oh, what's the sense of
anything, anyway?"

Rose-Marie turned a patient, clear brown eye toward her and shook
his head vaguely. Gnats buzzed about his flexible ears, and with a
swishing fanning motion he displaced them.

"If my back aches," she warned him callously, "you'll have to take
me home, you know! Tired or not. It feels as if it might, any
minute. I never used to get tired, this way."

A half mile along the road, set off to the left, among cool trees
and behind a great well sweep, she perceived suddenly a white farm
house. It stood alone, neighborless and well up on a drained,
southerly slope; smoke rose languidly from one of its chimneys.

"Perhaps they'll give us some milk, Rose-Marie," said Caroline, "and
farms usually have cookies. If there are any children there, you can
give 'em rides to pay for it!"

Rose-Marie nodded and they went on with some spirit. As they turned
into the deep front yard Caroline almost wept with comfort and a
pathetic sense of the wayworn wanderer on the edge of home and
rest, so the place breathed of these. Clear and white with the faded
whiteness of old New England white shingles, it drowsed under its
elms; a fire of nasturtiums smoldered along the broken, flagged path
that led to it; phlox and "Bouncing Bets" crowded up among the once
formal bed of larkspur on each side the sagging flagstone steps,
beneath the simple entrance porch. Old-fashioned green paper shades
hung evenly half way down the clean windows; the door stood
hospitably ajar.

"Just wait there, Rose-Marie, till I find out about things," said
Caroline, tapping lightly on the door. The house was perfectly
silent. She tapped again, and it seemed that something heavy moved
across the floor in a farther room, but there was no answer. Pushing
the door open gently, she stepped in and stood surprised, for she
found herself not in the stiff, unused country "parlor" she had
expected, but a neat bedroom. A quaint four-poster with a fluted
valance, a polished mahogany chest of drawers, a stand by the bed
with a Bible worn to a soft gray and a night lamp on it, some faded
photographs tacked to the white walls--this was an odd reception
room. She hesitated, and again the faint rumbling sound pointed to
some person stirring and she went into the next room.

Here was a clean, kindly kitchen of the best; a swept floor, a
freshly blackened cooking stove, a row of bright tins. It was
carpeted with faded oilcloth, but rag rugs, washed dim and
soft-toned, lay here and there, and the room was so large that the
spread table, standing in an ell, made only a pleasant episode in
it, a certainty of restoring food at needful times.

It was evidently a sitting room as well, in the primitive, clear
fashion that groups all domestic life about the central fire that
feeds it; a stand with books, a sewing basket, oil lamps for evening
reading, all not too far from brick-shaped pans where unmistakable
bread rose under a clean, folded, red cloth. The whole place seemed
waiting, quietly, hospitably waiting, for just such an empty,
discouraged pilgrim as Caroline.

She sank gratefully into a high-backed arm-chair, stuffed to just
the hollow of her tired back, covered with a clean, homely
patchwork, and drew out the faithful Moonstone from under her elbow.

"Someone'll come soon," she assured herself, and slipped into the
story as a hot swimmer slips off his sunny rock into the waiting
blue. Another world, a delicious, smooth element--Romance
itself--received her, and of hunger and heat, thirst and the fatigue
of the road, she knew no more than the blessed dead themselves....

A sharp tap at the farther door disturbed her, and instinctively she
called, "Come in!"

A swift, swishing step brushed across the bedroom and a slender,
angry-eyed young woman poised like a gull before her.

"Can I get something to eat here?"

Her voice was at once imperious, irritated, unsure of itself. It
could not be that the owner of this voice, dressed with that
insolent simplicity that need not consider the costly patience of
the work-women, ringed like a dowager with great audacious squares
of ruby and white diamond, booted and hatted as one who wears and
throws away, with a bag of golden mesh on her wrist to pay the
price of any whim--it could not be that she doubted what answer she
should receive. And yet she did--did, and had before this: so much
was evident at first sight. She was a curious gypsyish type, for all
her _Rue de la Paix_ curvings and slim, inevitable folds and pleats;
a full, drooping mouth in a slender dark face, great brown eyes and
heavy waves of black hair. She looked discontented and ready to make
some one suffer for it.

"Well--can I?" she repeated, as Caroline stared. "I'm ready to pay,
of course."

"I don't know--I don't live here," said Caroline shortly. She felt
untidy and badly dressed beside this graceful thing standing in a
faint cloud of subtle perfume of her own; her sleeves were too short
and her heavy shoes knobby and worn. She wanted furiously to smell
sweet like that; and the golden bag--oh, to feel it, powerful and
careless, on her wrist!

"Can you find out?" said the girl, eyeing the room attentively; "my
car broke down--the man left it in the road and went to Ogdenville
for gasoline. I've got to rest somewhere."

"I don't know anything about it," Caroline said coldly. "I'm waiting
for someone to come, myself. There's nobody here. I don't live here
at all."

With that, and because she was embarrassed and cross and hungry, she
opened her book ostentatiously and affected to read busily. The girl
frowned angrily a moment, then gave a foreign little shrug of her
shoulder and settled herself in a low rocking chair near the bread,
her hands loose in her lap. The old clock ticked reprovingly through
the hot and conscious silence of the room, but there was no other
sound. Caroline could not have lifted her eyes to save her life, and
the older girl's lips curled scornfully: her eyelids were sullen.

After a few moments of this intolerable stillness the same low
rumbling sound was heard again, this time moving nearer. Something
was advancing to the kitchen from a farther room, and as they looked
instinctively at the door it pushed open slowly and a sort of foot
rest upon wheels appeared; two large wheels followed, and a woman
pushed her chair into the kitchen. She was a large, good-looking
woman, middle-aged, and not weak, evidently, for she managed her
chair easily with one hand; the other held a slice of pink ham on a
white platter in her lap. Her face, under a placid parting of
grayish fair hair, was rather high colored than of an invalid
pallor, her chest broad and deep, her blue eyes at once kind and
keen. She wore a neat dress of dark-blue print with a prim,
old-fashioned linen collar and a blue bow, a white apron around her
plump waist almost covered the patchwork quilt that wrapped her from
the hips down: a shell comb showed slightly above her crisp hair. As
she faced her two angry guests a smile of unmistakable sincerity and
delight greeted them.

"Well, of all things!" she cried eagerly; "how long, 'you been
here?"

Caroline waited sulkily for her social superior; the girl was
undoubtedly a "young lady." Her errand was soon explained, her
question asked.

"Something to eat?" echoed their delighted hostess. "Well, I should
think so! I'm just getting my dinner. Of course I'm all alone, this
time o' day, but I always say if I'm good enough to cook it well,
I'm good enough to eat it comfortable, and I sit down to table
just's if the family was all here. There's some that believe in a
bite and a bit, when the men folks are out, but I never did. And
then--" she blushed shyly like a girl--"I always want to feel ready
in case anyone should come. Just in case. He says it's foolishness,
but look at you two, now! How'd I feel if I wasn't prepared! And
once--in April, 'twas--a sewing-machine man came. I had ham then,
too."

She beamed on them, frankly overjoyed in their company, and in the
mellow warmth of that honest pleasure the fog and anger in the room
rolled back like mist under a noon sun, and Caroline unbent, named
herself, and mentioned her donkey and their woodland journey.

"You don't say!"

Quick as a flash their hostess was across the room and peering
through the window.

"Well, of all the funny little fellows! I never saw one before, that
I remember. Aren't those red tossels neat, though! I s'pose he's
tame?"

Caroline put him through his paces, as he came like a dog at her
call, and she of the wheel chair applauded like a child at a Punch
and Judy.

"We saw so many of those in Italy," said the older girl. "I rode one
in the Alps."

The woman's face flushed a deep, quick red; she gripped the arms of
her chair and stared at the nervous little jeweled creature before
her as if she were a vision of the night.

"Have you been to Italy?" she cried eagerly, "not really!"

"Me? Oh, yes, I've been all over Europe," said the girl
indifferently. "Why? Do you like it?"

Now it was the woman who echoed, "Me?"

She flashed a whimsical look at Caroline; instinct taught her that
they were two to one, here.

"Why, dear, I've never been out of Lockwood's Corners in my life!"

Simple, rude incredulity pushed out the girl's lip.

"Nonsense!" she said brusquely, "that's ridiculous!"

"Maybe it is," her hostess answered quietly, "but it's true, all the
same. I never have." Gold-bag did not blush for her rudeness, for
the simple reason that she did not realize it, and Caroline suddenly
felt less embarrassed by her. Girls of that age were too old to talk
so pettishly to people not in their own families, and she twiddled
her fingers too much, anyway, and stared too much, or else, again,
she didn't look at one enough.

"You've been to New York, haven't you?" she asked abruptly.

"Never," said the woman. "I've been this way since I was seventeen.
I'm a pretty heavy woman, you know, and they couldn't put me on a
train very well. So--"

"There's plenty of room in a drawing-room car."

"I guess we couldn't afford that," said the woman simply.

There was an awkward pause; Caroline blushed furiously. How horrid
it all was! But their hostess brushed it away in a moment.

"And here you are hungry!" she cried; "the idea! I'll get this ham
right on and fry up some potatoes--I'll do them French! I've got
some fresh raised-doughnuts--I got the prize for them at the county
fair, years ago, so I know they're all right--and some summer apple
sauce; 'tain't much, with summer apples, but I put in lemon peel and
a taste o' last year's cider--it makes a relish, anyhow; and I've
got some fine sweet-pickled watermelon rind. I could have had sponge
cakes, if I'd only known! Would you care to try a cut pie? The
sewing-machine man said he hadn't tasted anything like my squash pie
in years. It was cut, too."

With incredible swiftness she rolled from table to buttery, from
stove to larder. As the pink ham curled and sputtered in its savory
juices, she turned an earnest face to the girl who watched her
curiously.

"Can't you tell us a little about Italy, while we're waiting?" she
begged.

"It's full of fleas," said the traveler carelessly, "and moldy old
places--it's awfully cold, too. I wore my furs a lot of the time. It
smells bad nearly everywhere. Do you stay here in the winter, too?"

"I've stayed here forty-five winters"--she turned the ham
capably--"and I expect to stay as many more as the Lord spares my
life! I was born here. So was father. Grandfather was born right in
the Corners. In eighty-eight we were snowed up a week here. Mr.
Winterpine--that's my husband--had bronchitis, and he couldn't get
out to tend to the stock. Edgar--that was the hired man's name--was
only twenty, and I had to help with one of the cows; I went out in
my chair through a snow tunnel!"

She chuckled reminiscently and her guests listened, fascinated.

"We were caught in a bad storm outside of St. Petersburg, once,"
Gold-bag volunteered. "If it hadn't been for J. G. we'd have gone
out, probably. As it was, the driver lost a finger."

"St. Petersburg, Russia?" the woman inquired respectfully, her
skillet full of potatoes colored like autumn beech leaves.

The girl nodded. "J. G. swore at the man, so he didn't _dare_ die,"
she continued, with a hard little grin; "and we just about pulled
through."

"Who is J. G.?" asked Caroline abruptly.

"J. G. Terwilliger," she answered simply. It was as if one had said
"Edward Seventh" or "Adelina Patti" or "P. T. Barnum."

"Who's he?"

"He's my father, for one thing. I suppose you know who he is as well
as anybody else."

"I never heard of him," Caroline said carelessly, "are you all
ready, now, Mrs. Winterpine?"

"He is the greatest mining expert in the world," the girl declared
emphatically, "and I don't know where you've lived not to know it.
You--" with a look at the woman, "you know him, of course?"

"I don't know anybody of that name, no," the woman admitted; "but
then, you know, we don't know much, 'way off here, about city
people."

"There hasn't been a daily paper for ten days that hasn't had his
name in it," the girl remarked dryly.

Mrs. Winterpine wiped her face, flanked the ham with the potatoes,
assembled an incredible array of sweets and relishes in odd, thick
little glass dishes, and with a wave of her hand indicated her
guests' places.

"We take the _Lockwood's Corners Clarion_," she explained
pacifically.

They addressed themselves to the meal, a strange trio. Caroline,
usually a hopeless chatterbox, fell somehow and inevitably into the
listener's seat. Their hostess could no longer be denied: her thirst
gleamed in her eyes, and flesh and blood could not have withstood
her plea for tidings of those distant, rosy lands whose laden
wharves she could never see, nor ever glimpse their tiled roofs
under foreign sunsets, their white spires beneath mysterious moons.
Their clothes: was it true that the French wore wooden shoes? She
had read that men in Italy walked in gay capes, colored like birds.
Was there water in the streets, and were boats really their
carriages? Did soldiers, red-coated, demand passports? Had her guest
seen the snow tops of green slopes? Did dogs drag milk carts for
white-capped women?

The girl, sulky at first, yielded finally, and in quick, nervous
phrases poured out of her full budget. Taken from her convent
school in California at fifteen, she had roamed the world with the
tireless "J. G." From Panama to Alaska, from Cairo to Christiania,
with her uncreased Paris frocks and the discontented line between
her dark eyes, she had steamed and sailed and ridden; she had
ridden a camel in Algeria, a gelding in Hyde Park, a broncho
on the Western plains.

"Why do you call your father 'J. G.'?" Caroline demanded suddenly.

"Do you like 'Klondike Jim' any better? That's his other name,"
Gold-bag shot at her defiantly.

Then came strange tales of a flaring, glaring mining camp: lights
and liquor and bared knives, rough men and rougher words, and in the
midst a thin, big-eyed little creature in the hand of a burly,
red-shirted miner, with the very gift of gold under his matted hair,
the scent for it in his blunt nostrils, the feel for it in his
callous finger tips. Klondike Jim! He had made for his Klondike as a
bloodhound makes for the quarry; he could not be mistaken. Night and
day she had been with him, his first claim named for her--the
Madeline--his first earnings a gold belt for her childish waist!

And then, money and money and more money. Rivers of it, ponds of it.

"If J. G. said there was copper under Fifth Avenue, they'd dig it up
to-morrow!"

"You must be real proud of him," said Mrs. Winterpine genially.

"I used to be," the girl answered, with her mouth a little awry.

"My dear, my dear!"

"Oh, yes," she cried angrily, pushing back her chair and facing
them; "all very well, but who are we? Who was my mother? Who was my
grandfather? Where did we come from? Will a sapphire bracelet answer
me that, do you think? Who knows us? 'Miss Maddy Money Bags'! How
long do you think I'd stay in that convent? Who does J. G. know?
Hotelmen and barkeeps and presidents of things! If you could see the
counts he wanted me to marry! If you could hear the couriers laugh
at him!"

"But think of all the traveling you've done, dear! What things to
remember! How happy--"

"Happy! I hate it. As J. G. says, I hate it like--well, I just hate
it," she concluded, with propriety, if a little lamely.

Something in the look she cast around the warm, clean kitchen struck
the woman suddenly. "You don't mean you'd rather live here--_here_?"
she exclaimed amazedly.

"Don't you like it?" queried Madeline sharply.

Mrs. Winterpine considered a moment. "You see, it's my home," she
began. The girl's dry laugh interrupted her.

"That's just it. It's your home," she repeated. "We haven't any.
That's the idea. What's the use of traveling if you can't come home?
And we can't, ever. Unless we go back to the Klondike," she added
satirically.

There was a long pause. It seemed that the girl was slowly
undressing herself before them: travel and money and gold bag and
scented linings slipped from her like so many petticoats and left
her thin and cold between them, warm as they were in their solid
homespun of kin and hearth. Lean and empty, a houseless, flitting,
little shadow, she had scoured the world and sat now, envious, by a
kitchen fire. How strange!

Mrs. Winterpine gathered the dishes with accustomed hands and piled
them by a pan of hot, soapy water. Caroline, sobered, rose to help
her with the instinctive courtesy of the home-trained child, but
drew back at her shaken head and waving finger, and followed her
glance toward her other guest, who stared morosely into the
dooryard, her chin in her ringed, brown hand. She was evidently not
far from tears--in a nervous crisis.

"I wonder if you'd help me with these dishes, Madeline?" said the
woman quietly, and with a start the girl rose, stood meekly while a
checked apron was tied about her waist and received the moist,
shining ware from the plump hands without a word. She appeared to
have utterly forgotten Caroline.

After a few moments of rhythmical click and splash, a few journeys
from sink to dresser, the tension broke quietly and the air was
aware of it, as when a threatened thunderstorm goes by above and
dissipates in wind. Feeling this, Mrs. Winterpine began to talk
softly, half to herself it seemed, for her voice took on the tone
of one who is much alone and thinks aloud.

"All my life I've been crazy for travel. I used to read my geography
book till I wore it out nearly; the exports and the imports, you
know? And the pictures of those Arabian men with white turbans, and
the South Sea Islanders riding on surf boards--I can see 'em now.
There was a castle for Germany, with the moon behind it and the
Rhine--do you know 'Bingen on the Rhine'? I love the sound of that.
And the Black Forest! Think of it!"

She paused with a platter dripping in her hand, her eyes fixed; and
so strong was the compulsion of her vision that to Caroline, vibrant
as a wind harp to such suggestion, the splash of the water in the
tin was the very tinkle of Undine's mystic stream and _Kühleborn_,
that wicked uncle-brook dashed in cold floods over the belated
knight in the dark German wood!

"I dreamed once about an Indian temple," the woman went on, "and
you'd really think I'd been there, I saw it so plain. Fat priests
and that big idol that sits cross-legged, all made of brass, and
smiling; and such funny drums and pipes--creepy music. The heathens
brought wreaths and stretched out on their stomachs flat on the
ground. I'd read it somewhere, I guess. I could smell the flowers,
like pond lilies and honeysuckle."

She poured away the dish water, wiped the pan and began rinsing her
towels and cloths in a small wooden tub bound with tin. The girl
moved aimlessly about the room, fingering the worn furniture.

"That clock looks awfully old," she said abruptly, pausing before a
square high Dutch affair with a ridiculous picture of Mount Vernon,
wobbly-columned, let in at the bottom.

"Goodness, yes! That clock--why, that clock was a wedding present to
Lorenzo's great aunt Valeria--she was a Swedenborgian, I believe.
She used to have trances and she could tell you where things were
lost. That chair by the window was her mother's. It's made with
wooden nails, dowels, they call 'em."

"Did she live here, too?"

"Yes, indeed. The Winterpines are great hands to stay in one place.
And the way they come back to die! I'm half Winterpine myself--he
and I were second cousins--and I well remember Uncle Milton
Winterpine coming home from Java to die in his bed. He was a sailor,
and how I used to hang around and coax him to tell me what he'd
seen! I remember how he staggered into the house--Mother Winterpine
was living then.

"'Here, Esther, here's a fifty-pound sack of Old Gov'ment Javvy for
ye, green, and fit for the president's table as soon's it gits
ripe,' he says, 'and you won't have to nurse me long;' and we got
his boots off and helped him to bed. He never left it. He brought me
a parrot, that trip, sort of indigo color and pink. It used to set
me thinking of the hot countries and pineapples and natives, and
those tall trees with all the leaves on top--palms, I guess I mean.
It seems the stars are lower, there, and look bigger; did you ever
see the Southern Cross?"

"Oh, yes. It's like any other stars. The first officer on the P & O
line always asks me to come and see it. Then he proposes. J. G.
plays poker the whole trip. He can't lose. He says it's tiresome."

The strange dialogue went on for what might have been an hour. Far
ports and foreign streets, full sails and thronged inns, the
fountains of paved courts, the market squares of dark and vivid
nations, blossomed from the tongue of this chair-bound woman in her
farmhouse prison; and from the blind, unhappy voyager came halting,
telegraphic phrases: climate and train schedules and over-lavish
fees, miles and meals and petty miseries. No sunset had stained her
hurried way, no handed flowers from shy street children had
sweetened it. And ever and again she returned insistently to the
barnyard interests of the Winterpines!

"See here!" she burst out suddenly, "I'll tell you what I'll do! I
told J. G. that I wouldn't go another step with him--mascot or no
mascot. He wants to go over the Himalayas--to start next week--he
has an idea. But if you'll go, I'll take you! What do you say? My
guest, of course: it don't cost you a penny."

The woman turned utterly white. Where her knuckles gripped the arms
of the chair they showed a bluish tinge.

"Me? Me?" she whispered. Her eyes fell to her helpless knees.

"Oh, you needn't think of that at all," said Madeline. "I knew a man
who didn't _have_ any legs, even, that went round the world and up
the Pyramids. He had money."

The woman looked wildly about. Her eyes fell on Caroline and this
seemed to bring her into some sort of focus again; the color came
back to her face.

"That was lovely for you to think of, dear," she said, breathlessly
yet; "but--but--for a moment I forgot.... I--I didn't think of
Lorenzo!"

"Oh, we'll get a housekeeper for Lorenzo," Madeline said lightly;
"he'll do very well, won't he? One man can't be much to take care
of--you haven't any children?"

The easy, equal tone, the bright, dry impudence of this little air
plant, this rootless, aimless bubble skipping over the bottomless
deeps of life, brought the dazzled woman quickly to herself. She
looked compassionately at the girl.

"No," she said gravely, her hands unconsciously flying to her deep
breast; "we haven't any children. And he's not much to take care
of--for his wife. But he wouldn't care for a housekeeper."

"Oh!" her eyes fell uneasily. "Then we'll take him along!" She
recovered herself.

Mrs. Winterpine sent her chair with a swift push close to the girl
and laid one hand on her hot forehead, pushing back the thick hair.

"What a gen'rous little thing you are!" she cried wonderingly. "But
where were you brought up, child? Lorenzo can't jump and run off to
the Himalaya Mountains like that! It takes him a long time to make
up his mind. He--he don't care for travel, besides. He's a regular
Winterpine. And there's the stock. No. I guess I'll keep on doing my
traveling at home. That book you said you'd send...."

"I'll send a dozen--fifty!" the girl cried impulsively. "I'll bring
them up from New York to-morrow! I'll bring some pictures, too. The
Alps and Venice and the snapshots I took on the Nile! You seem to
know how they look, well enough!"

"Yes, I know, I know...." the woman repeated dreamily.

"Don't you want to go?" Madeline urged curiously.

Again Mrs. Winterpine turned white.

"Then why don't you?"

"Child, child!" cried she of the chair, "didn't I tell you he don't
care for travel? We can't do as we like in this world--we don't live
alone. We're placed. There's a hundred things.... Where were you
brought up?"

Madeline's face flushed a dark, heavy red. Her light confidence
drowned in it; she dropped her eyes.

"In the Klondike!" she said sullenly, "I told you."

A loud, whirring horn cut through the country quiet. A great rattle
of gear and chain stormed along the road.

"There's the machine!" the girl said sulkily; "I must go. It's
fifteen miles to Ogdenville, and a vile road. Good-by--I'll be up
with the books in a day or two."

She moved to the door.

"If I can't come--I change my mind awfully--I'll send them just the
same, and--and--" a curious sense of struggle, a visible effort at
thought for another, an attempt to grasp an alien point of view,
dawned in the defiant dark eyes--"I'll write to you from India, if
you want. Would you like it? I can take snap shots...."

"You're real gen'rous, dear," said her hostess, and wheeling quickly
to her, kissed her warmly.

She was gone in a cloud of dust. Caroline and the woman sat in
silence. At last Rose-Marie yawned pitifully and his mistress got up
with reluctance.

"Good-by, Mrs. Winterpine," she said soberly; "I have to go home.
They'll be anxious about me. But I'll come again."

"Do, my dear," said the other; "this'll be a wonderful summer for
me, with so much company. Wonderful. He'll be interested. But you
run right on: don't let the folks worry. I never had any children,
but I always had my heart set on a daughter. Good-by."

Caroline and the donkey walked slowly off toward the wood, which
cast cool shadows. They vanished into its depths, and Mrs.
Winterpine sat and watched them kindly from her chair, as one
watches off the traveler bound for far and golden countries.

"He'd have liked that young one," she said softly.

The following pages contain advertisements of a few of the
Macmillan novels.

NOVELS, ETC., BY "BARBARA"

(MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT)

_Each, in decorated cloth binding, $1.50_

The Garden of a Commuter's Wife      Illustrated

"Reading it is like having the entry into a home of the class that
is the proudest product of our land, a home where love of books and
love of nature go hand in hand with hearty, simple love of 'folks.'
... It is a charming book."--_The Interior_.

People of the Whirlpool      Illustrated

"The whole book is delicious, with its wise and kindly humor, its
just perspective of the true values of things, its clever pen
pictures of people and customs, and its healthy optimism for the
great world in general."--_Philadelphia Evening Telegraph_.

The Woman Errant

"The book is worth reading. It will cause discussion. It is an
interesting fictional presentation of an important modern question,
treated with fascinating feminine adroitness."--Miss JEANNETTE
GILDER in the _Chicago Tribune_.

At the Sign of the Fox

"Her little pictures of country life are fragrant with a genuine
love of nature, and there is fun as genuine in her notes on rural
character."--_New York Tribune_.

The Garden, You and I

"This volume is simply the best she has yet put forth, and quite too
deliciously torturing to the reviewer, whose only garden is in
Spain.... The delightful humor which pervaded the earlier books, and
without which Barbara would not be Barbara, has lost nothing of its
poignancy."--_Congregationalist_.

The Open Window.       Tales of the Months.

"A little vacation from the sophistication of the
commonplace."--_Argonaut_.

Poppea of the Post-Office

"A rainbow romance, ... tender yet bracing, cheerily stimulating ...
its genial entirety refreshes like a cooling shower."--_Chicago
Record-Herald_.

Princess Flower Hat      _Just Ready_

A Comedy from the Perplexity Book of Barbara the Commuter's Wife.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers  64-66 Fifth Avenue  New York

BY ZONA GALE

Friendship Village

_Cloth, 12mo, $1.50_

"As charming as an April day, all showers and sunshine, and
sometimes both together, so that the delighted reader hardly knows
whether laughter or tears are fittest for his emotions.... This book
especially makes for higher thinking and better living and
emphasizes the existence of these virtues in lowly places as well as
high."--_New York Times_.

"The characters are like an orchestra, each instrument holding a
part of its own, all interwoven to a harmonious whole; an orchestra
of strings, be it added, for even the Proudfits' motor fails to
introduce a note of brass.... With the wholesome pungency of humor
that pervades it all, the book cannot fail to find a welcome."--_New
York Post_.

"There is not a trace of sarcasm or even grotesqueness; her
villagers are not caricatures; they are efficient, useful men and
women whose individualities have been crystallized into distinct
outlines by their limited environments and intimate relations. The
book is happily optimistic, presenting, indeed, the commonplaces of
narrow lives but breathing also the underlying spirit of poetry and
romance."--_Baltimore Sun_.

The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre

_Cloth, 12mo, $1.50_

"To all who know the hidden sources of human joy and have neither
grown old in cynicism nor gray in utilitarianism, Miss Gale's
charming love stories, full of fresh feeling and grace of style,
will be a draught from the fountain of youth."--_Outlook_.

"The achievement is unusual for delicacy, subtlety, and the ...
felicitous tenderness which brood over the book like a golden
autumnal haze which dims the outlines of common things and
beautifies them.... The story is indeed unique in this, that it is
an idyl for the aged--a romance of seventy."--_Chicago Tribune_.

"It is an ideal book for husband and wife to read aloud together....
Its picture of steadfast love in old age is the best kind of
idealism."--_Chicago Record Herald_.

PUBLISHED BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York

Mr. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S NOVELS

_Each, cloth, 12mo, $1.50_

The Choir Invisible

_This can also be had in a special edition illustrated by Orson
Lowell, $2.50_

"One reads the story for the story's sake, and then re-reads the
book out of pure delight in its beauty. The story is American to the
very core.... Mr. Allen stands to-day in the front rank of American
novelists. _The Choir Invisible_ will solidify a reputation already
established and bring into clear light his rare gifts as an artist.
For this latest story is as genuine a work of art as has come from
an American hand."--HAMILTON MABIE in _The Outlook_.

The Reign of Law. A Tale of the Kentucky Hempfields

"Mr. Allen has a style as original and almost as perfectly finished
as Hawthorne's, and he has also Hawthorne's fondness for spiritual
suggestion that makes all his stories rich in the qualities that are
lacking in so many novels of the period.... If read in the right
way, it cannot fail to add to one's spiritual possessions."--_San
Francisco Chronicle_.

The Mettle of the Pasture

"It may be that _The Mettle of the Pasture_ will live and become a
part of our literature; it certainly will live far beyond the
allotted term of present-day fiction. Our principal concern is that
it is a notable novel, that it ranks high in the range of American
and English fiction, and that it is worth the reading, the
re-reading, and the continuous appreciation of those who care for
modern literature at its best."--By E. F. E. in the _Boston
Transcript_.

Summer in Arcady. A Tale of Nature _Cloth, $1.25_

"This story by James Lane Allen is one of the gems of the season. It
is artistic in its setting, realistic and true to nature and life in
its descriptions, dramatic, pathetic, tragic, in its incidents;
indeed, a veritable masterpiece that must become classic. It is
difficult to give an outline of the story; it is one of the stories
which do not outline; it must be read."--_Boston Daily Advertiser_.

_Shorter Stories_

The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky                 $1.50
Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales        $1.50
The Bride of the Mistletoe                        $1.25
A Kentucky Cardinal. _Illustrated_                $1.00
Aftermath. A Sequel to "A Kentucky Cardinal"      $1.00

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

Mr. ROBERT HERRICK'S NOVELS

_Cloth, extra, gilt tops, each, $1.50_

The Gospel of Freedom

"A novel that may truly be called the greatest study of social life,
in a broad and very much up-to-date sense, that has ever been
contributed to American fiction."--_Chicago Inter-Ocean_.

The Web of Life

"It is strong in that it faithfully depicts many phases of American
life, and uses them to strengthen a web of fiction, which is most
artistically wrought out."--_Buffalo Express_.

The Real World

"The title of the book has a subtle intention. It indicates, and is
true to the verities in doing so, the strange dreamlike quality of
life to the man who has not yet fought his own battles, or come into
conscious possession of his will--only such battles bite into the
consciousness."--_Chicago Tribune_.

The Common Lot

"It grips the reader tremendously.... It is the drama of a human
soul the reader watches ... the finest study of human motive that
has appeared for many a day."--_The World To-day_.

The Memoirs of an American Citizen. Illustrated with about fifty
drawings by F. B. Masters.

"Mr. Herrick's book is a book among many, and he comes nearer to
reflecting a certain kind of recognizable, contemporaneous American
spirit than anybody has yet done."--_New York Times_.

"Intensely absorbing as a story, it is also a crisp, vigorous
document of startling significance. More than any other writer
to-day he is giving us _the_ American novel."--_New York Globe_.

Together

"Journeys end in lovers meeting," says the old saw; so all novels
used to end--in marriage. Yet Mr. Herrick's interesting new novel
only begins there; the best brief description of it is, indeed,--a
novel about married people for all who are married.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK