Part 6

Billings set down his burden and crossed to the table. He was a small man, well toward sixty, with his weather-beaten face shrivelled into innumerable tiny, kindly wrinkles. In spite of his years, however, he showed no signs of the mental degeneration which his wife had feared. He came and looked near-sightedly at the card which Ethan held out.

“Why, sir, Lizzie came across that in one of the upstair rooms when she was cleaning up after the folks went away and she put it on the mantel here, thinking maybe it was valuable and they’d send back for it.”

“I see.” Ethan laid it on the table, his eyes still upon it. “I don’t think they’ll want it. Doubtless Miss Devereux has plenty more.”

“Yes, sir; they took a good many, sir, between them.”

“They? Oh, she had a friend with her?”

“Yes, sir. Miss Hoyt. I remember when they was taking those, sir. It was early in the summer, soon after they came. The young ladies they dressed themselves up in those queer things――sort o’ like sheets, they was, sir――” the gardener’s voice became faintly apologetic, as though he had not quite approved of such doings――“and went out on the lawn one forenoon. They got me to cut away a bit of the branches, sir, right here.” Billings indicated the upper left-hand corner of the picture. “She said she had to have more light. It wasn’t much, sir; just a few old twigs; no harm done, sir.”

“Of course not. It was――Miss Devereux asked you?”

“Yes, sir; Miss Laura they called her. A very pleasant young lady, sir.”

“Very pleasant, Billings,” assented Ethan with a sigh.

“You know her, then, sir?”

“I――hardly that; I’ve met her.”

“Yes, sir.” Billings turned toward the fire. “Shall I drop another log on, sir?”

“No, I shall be going to bed very shortly.”

“Very well, sir.” Billings mended the fire, replaced the tongs and stood carefully erect again, chuckling reminiscently. Then finding Ethan’s eyes on him questioningly he said: “she took me, sir, too, with her camery.”

“Really? I should like to see the picture.”

“Thank you, sir. It’s in the kitchen. Shall I fetch it? Lizzie says it’s a very speakin’ likeness, sir, excepting that I was sort o’ took by surprise, so to say, and had no time to spruce up.”

“Yes, bring it in by all means.”

The gardener hurried away and Ethan turned again to the picture. When Billings returned Ethan said carelessly:

“By the way, if your wife asks about this you can tell her I have――er――taken charge of it. Ah, this is the picture, eh? Why, I’d call that excellent, Billings, excellent! Truly, a very speaking likeness. You say Miss Devereux took this?”

“Yes, sir, the same day they was taking the others, sir. I had lopped off the branches and was standin’ by watching, sir, and after she had taken that one there, sir, she said to me: ‘Billings, would you mind if I took’――――”

“Not after she’d taken this, Billings,” interrupted Ethan, in the interests of accuracy. “She didn’t take this one, of course.”

“I beg pardon, Mr. Ethan?”

“Never mind. I only said you didn’t mean that it was after she had taken this one; it was another one you meant.”

“Oh, no, sir, it was that very one, sir. I had just lopped off the branches――――”

“You don’t mean that she took her own picture, surely?” asked Ethan with a smile.

“No, sir.”

“Exactly.”

“It was that one you have there, sir, she took.”

“This one? Now, look here, Billings, let’s get this straightened out while we’re at it. Do you mean that Miss Devereux――mind, I’m talking of _Miss Devereux_――do you mean that Miss Devereux took this photograph I have in my hands?”

“Yes, sir, that’s the one. I had just lopped――――”

“Never mind the lopping,” interrupted Ethan with smiling impatience. “But tell me how she did it.”

“Why, sir, she stood her camery up a little ways off, sir; it had three little legs onto it, sir; and she pressed a little rubber ball, and the camery went ‘click,’ sir, like that, sir,――‘click!’ and――――”

“Yes, yes, but――now look here, how far off was the camera from――from this place, where you had lopped the branches?”

“About twenty feet, sir, maybe.”

“Well, will you kindly, tell me how Miss Devereux managed to squeeze the little rubber ball and get into the picture at the same time?”

“Sir?”

“What I mean is,” answered Ethan patiently, “how could she have been here――” tapping the photograph he held――“and at the camera the same instant?”

That was evidently a poser. Billings scratched the back of his head dubiously. Finally,

“But she wasn’t there, sir!” he explained.

“Wasn’t where? At the camera?”

“Yes, sir; I mean no, sir. She wasn’t there!” He pointed at the picture.

“Wasn’t here!” exclaimed Ethan. “Then how――hang it, man, but here’s her picture!”

“Beg pardon, Mr. Ethan?” Billings looked both pained and puzzled, and shot a quick look of inquiry at the dinner table.

“I say here’s her picture, you idiot!” repeated Ethan.

“Whose picture, sir?”

“Why, Miss Devereux’s!”

“No, sir.”

“What do you mean by ‘no, sir?’ I say――――”

A light broke upon Mr. Billings.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Ethan,” he explained hurriedly. “I see your mistake, sir, but you said as how you’d met the young lady, and I thought you understood as how that wasn’t her, sir.”

“What? Who?”

“Wasn’t Miss Devereux, sir.”

“Do you mean that this isn’t Miss Devereux here in this picture?” cried Ethan.

“Yes, sir; that is, no, sir. That isn’t her, Mr. Ethan.”

“Isn’t――! Then who is it?”

“Miss Hoyt, sir. I thought you under――――”

Ethan took Billings by the arms and forced him into a chair.

“You sit there and answer my questions, Billings,” he commanded excitedly. He held the photograph before the gardener’s alarmed face.

“Who is this in the picture?”

“Miss Hoyt, sir, as I was telling you――――”

“Nonsense! You’re mistaken, man! Look close; take it in your hands! Don’t answer until you’ve looked at it well. Where are your spectacles?”

“I don’t wear any, sir,” was the dignified reply. “My eyes, Mr. Ethan, are just as clear as ever they were, sir. Why, I can see――――”

“Yes, yes, I beg your pardon, Billings, but I have most particular reasons for wanting to be certain about this! Now――take a good look at it!――now who is she?”

“Miss Hoyt, sir, and if you was to put me in jail the next minute, sir, I wouldn’t say different! No, sir, not if my life was depending on it, sir!”

“And it’s not Miss Devereux?”

“No, sir, nor never was! Why, Mr. Ethan, Miss Devereux, as you must recall, sir, is quite tall and slim, like――like a young birch, sir,――with very dark hair. And Miss Hoyt, sir, as you can see――――”

Ethan planted himself with his back to the fire and lighted a cigarette with trembling fingers.

“Billings,” he said softly, “I’ve been a damned fool!”

“Yes――that is, I can’t believe it, sir,” was the respectful answer. But Billings’ expression said otherwise.

“Now I want you to tell me all you know about Miss Hoyt,” said Ethan. “By the way, what was her first name?”

“Cicely, sir; Miss Cicely Hoyt.”

“Cicely,” repeated Ethan softly. “It just suits her!”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Oh, never mind. Where does she live?”

Billings thought in silence a moment.

“Ellington, sir,” he answered triumphantly, evidently pleased at his powers of memory.

“Where the deuce is that, though?”

“About the centre of the state, sir, I think.”

“This state, do you mean? Massachusetts?”

“Yes, sir, Massachusetts.”

“And she was a friend of Miss Devereux’s?”

“Yes, sir. I gathered as how they went to school together. And Miss Hoyt’s father, sir, died a while back and left her and her mother very poorly off, sir. And the young lady is employed in a library at Ellington, as I understand it, sir, and her mother is there, too, sir.”

“In the library?”

“No, sir, in Ellington. They used to live in Ohio, I believe.”

Ethan was silent a moment, smoking furiously. Then,

“Tell Farrell to come in here at once, Billings. And I’m much obliged for what you’ve told me. Oh, wait, Billings! Throw another log on the fire first. I don’t want it to go out; you and I have got lots to talk about to-night!”

Farrell came speedily.

“Do you know where Ellington, Massachusetts, is?” asked Ethan.

“Yes, sir.”

“How long a run is it?”

Farrell produced a road map from his coat pocket and bent over it under the light.

“Well, Mr. Parmley, I don’t know how the roads are now, sir, but supposing they’re in fair condition we’d ought to do it in about two and half hours.”

“Then if we left here at seven in the morning we’d get to Ellington by noon?”

“Couldn’t help it, sir, barring accidents.”

“There mustn’t be any accidents,” answered Ethan, a bit unreasonably.

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Be ready to leave, then, promptly at seven!”

“Very well, sir.”

Farrell went out and as the door closed softly behind him Ethan, the photograph in his hands, threw himself into the chair before the fire and beamed blissfully at the flames.

XIII.

The library was filled with the pallid twilight of a rainy day. Since early morning the summit of Mount Tom, a dozen miles to the westward, had been enveloped in ponderous, leaden clouds, and for two hours past the storm, travelling along the Connecticut Valley, had been deluging the slopes with autumnal ferocity.

Through the rain-drenched windows a cold white light entered, flooding the stack room with its iron tiers of slumbering volumes, and, here at the barrier-like counter, illumining faintly the rebellious brown hair of the girl who, with pen in hand, bent over the pile of catalogue cards. The library was very still, so still that the sibilation of the moving pen sounded portentously loud. Now and then the rustle of a turning leaf or the scraping of feet on the floor came from around the corner of the arched doorway where sat a solitary occupant of the reading room. Save for these two the library was deserted. The hands of the clock above the commemorative tablet pointed to a quarter past twelve and the stack-boy and the assistant librarian had both gone to their luncheons.

A more prolonged scraping of feet, followed by the sound of a moving chair, caused the girl at the desk to raise her head and pause at her work. A little frown of annoyance gathered and then gave place to a smile of humorous resignation as footfalls sounded on the echoing silence. From the reading room emerged a tall, thin youth of about twenty, a youth with a pale, cadaverous face lighted by a pair of patient, contemplative brown eyes which looked strangely incongruous and out of place. He carried two books which he laid apologetically on the counter.

“Excuse me, Miss Hoyt,” he said gently.

“Yes, Mr. Winkley?” she asked, looking up.

“I am very sorry to trouble you, but could you let me have Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy?”

“Have――What did you say, please?” she asked startledly.

“Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, please,” he repeated in his patient voice. She turned hurriedly and disappeared into the stack room. Once out of sight she leaned against one of the cases and laughed silently and hysterically.

“Oh,” she thought, “if he doesn’t stop it and go away I shall have to――to――I shall go crazy!”

Presently, with a final gasp, she brushed the back of her hand across her eyes and went on down the concrete aisle in search of the volume. Out at the counter, the youth, left to himself, watched her while she was in sight and then leaned across to peer at the neatly arranged cards. She had left her handkerchief beside her work. With a timorous glance about him, he reached forward, picked it up and with a quick, vehement movement pressed it to his thin, unsmiling lips. He held it so a moment, his brown eyes staring widely through the rain-bleared window as though beholding visions. Then, as her steps came back toward him, he laid the handkerchief again in its place, straightened himself and waited.

“Here it is, Mr. Winkley,” she said soberly.

“Thank you. I am sorry to trouble you,” he answered gravely.

“It is only what I am here for,” she answered coldly, taking up her pen once more. He remained for an instant looking at the bent head. Then, lifting the Anatomy of Melancholy from the counter, he turned and walked slowly and quite noiselessly back to his table. But as he went the ghost of a sigh trembled across the silence.

The girl raised her head with a despairing glance toward the reading room, jabbed her pen viciously into the ink-stand and went on with her writing. The clock overhead ticked slowly and softly. The rain _swished_ past the windows.

But presently a new sound made itself heard. Dim at first, it grew insistently until the girl heard it and again lifted her head and listened with a new light in her violet eyes.

_Chug-chug, chug-chug-chug, chug-chug!_

Automobiles are not common in Ellington, especially after the summer colony departs, and the approach of this one brought a tinge of color to the soft cheeks and a flutter to the heart of the librarian. So often during the past three months she had listened with straining ears to the panting of an automobile on the road below! Usually the sound had died away again in the distance, and she had told herself, sighing, that she was very glad. But to-day the sounds increased every instant. The _chug-chug_ was slower now and more labored; the car had left the village road and was climbing the circling gravelled drive to the library. Every beat brought an answering beat from her heart.

Oh, it was foolish! she told herself angrily. And she didn’t want it to happen! She hoped it wouldn’t! Resolutely she began her work again, but the noise of the approaching machine seemed to fill the world with a tumult of sound. Then, close at hand, the measured _chugs_ suddenly became hurried and incoherent, as though the intruding monster was violently incensed at being stopped. Then――silence, appalling, portentous! With white face the girl bent closer to her desk, her pen tracing quivering figures and letters. The outer door opened and closed again with a muffled jar. She heard the _swish ... swish_ of the inner doors as they swung inward and back. Firm footfalls sounded on the oaken floor. Very different they were from the soft tread of the library habitué, and there was a determined, resolute character to them that put the brown-haired librarian in a panic. Oh, how she wished that she had fled while there had been time! She no longer doubted; the unexpected, which all along had been the expected, had happened; the thing which she had feared, and always hoped for, had come to pass. The steps came nearer, straight from the doorway, scorning the longer and quieter paths provided by the cocoa-fibre matting. The brown head still bent over the desk. Then the footsteps stopped. A terrible silence fell over the room. There was no help for it.

Slowly, reluctantly the girl raised her head.

XIV.

Had they lived in the Age of Stone that meeting might have proved far more interesting for purposes of description. As it was, both being fairly conventional characters of the Twentieth Century, the affair was disappointingly commonplace.

“How do you do, Miss Hoyt?” he asked, smiling calmly and reaching a hand across the counter. And,――――

“Why, Mr. Parmley!” she replied, laying her own hand for an instant in his.

A close observer, and both you and I, patient reader, pride ourselves upon being such, would have noticed, perhaps, that in spite of the commonplace words and the unembarrassed manners, the man’s cheeks held an unaccustomed tinge of color and the girl’s face was more than ordinarily pale. And could we have enjoyed a physician’s privilege of examining the heart-action at that moment we would have straightened ourselves up with very knowing smiles.

“I’ve come,” he said, as the soft hand drew itself away from his, “to return a book. Is this the right place?”

“Yes,” she replied brightly.

“Thank you. I don’t know very much about libraries; I always avoid them as much as possible as being rather too exciting.” He took a small book from the pocket of his coat and laid it on the counter. “I’m afraid there’s a good deal to pay on it. It’s been out quite a while.”

A tinge of color came into her cheeks as she took the volume. It was a copy of “Love Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

“Oh, I’ll let you off,” she answered gayly. “We sometimes remit the fines when the excuse is good.”

“Thank you. My excuse is excellent. I only yesterday discovered the identity of the loaner.”

“Only yesterday?” she asked carelessly, but with quickening heart.

“To be exact, at about eight o’clock last evening.” He dropped his voice and leaned a little further across the barrier. “You see, Miss Hoyt, you fooled me very nicely.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Parmley, you fooled yourself. I told you――at least, I never said I was Laura Devereux.”

“No, you didn’t, but――I wonder why I was so certain you were! If I hadn’t been――――”

“I beg your pardon, Miss Hoyt, but will you please let me have Swinburne’s Poems?”

It was the solitary reader. The girl disappeared into the stack room, leaving the two men to a furtive and, on one part at least, amused examination of each other. The pale youth, however, showed no amusement; rather his look expressed suspicion and resentment. Ethan, unable longer to encounter that baleful glare without smiling, turned his head. Then the librarian came with the desired book.

“Thank you, Miss Hoyt!” said the reader. With a final glance of dawning enmity at Ethan he returned to his solitude. Ethan looked inquiringly at Cicely.

“He’s perfectly awful!” she replied despairingly. “He stays here hours and hours at a time. I don’t believe he ever eats anything. And he calls for books incessantly, from Plutarch’s Lives to――to Swinburne! I think he is trying to read right through the catalogue. And a while ago he came for――what do you think?――The Anatomy of Melancholy!”

Ethan smiled gently.

“I wouldn’t be too hard on him,” he said. “The poor devil is head-over-heels in love with you.”

The phrase brought recollections――and a blush.

“Nonsense! He’s just a boy!” she answered.

“Boys sometimes feel pretty deeply――for the while,” he replied. “And judging from his present line of reading, I’d say that the while hasn’t passed yet.”

“It’s so silly and tiresome!” she said. “He gets terribly on my nerves. He――he sighs――in the most heartbreaking way!” She laughed a little nervously. Then a moment of silence followed.

“Clytie,” he began,――“I am going to call you that to-day, for I haven’t got used to thinking of you as Cicely yet――do you know why I came?”

“To return the book,” she answered smilingly.

“No, not altogether. I came to ask you something.”

“I ought to feel flattered, oughtn’t I? It’s quite a ways here from Providence, isn’t it?”

“Supposing we don’t pretend,” he answered gravely. “We’ve gone too far to make that possible, don’t you think? And I’ve had a beast of a summer,” he added inconsequently. “I thought――do you know what I thought, dear?”

“How should I?” she asked weakly.

“I thought you were Laura Devereux, and that day when you didn’t come I went for you and saw you and Vincent on the porch. And afterwards he told me he was engaged to Miss Devereux, and――don’t you see what it meant to me? And yesterday I found out, quite by accident, and――” he reached across and seized her hand with a little laugh of sheer happiness――“I haven’t slept a wink since! I――I thought I’d never get here; the roads were quagmires!”

“Oh, why did you come?” she asked miserably.

“Why? Good Heaven, don’t you know, girl?” He leaned across and she felt his lips on the hand still clasped in his.

“Yes, yes, I know,” she cried. “But――you mustn’t love me! You won’t when I’ve told you!”

“Try me!” he said softly.

“I’m going to. But――I can’t if you have my hand.”

“If I let it go may I have it again?” he asked playfully.

“You won’t want it,” was the grim answer. “When you know what I am really, you――won’t want――ever to see me――again.”

“That’s nonsense,” he answered stoutly. But a qualm of uneasiness oppressed him.

She moved away from the counter until she was out of reach of his impatient hands.

“I meant you to fall in love with me,” she said evenly, looking at him with wide eyes and white face. “I meant you to propose to me. I wanted to――to marry you.”

He reached impetuously toward her with a smothered word of endearment, but she held up a hand.

“Wait! You don’t understand! I――I didn’t care for you. I was tired of being poor and――and of this!” She swept her glance about the bare and silent library. “We used to have money,” she went on, speaking rapidly. “We lived in Ohio then, when father was alive. Then I came east to college. I met Laura there. We were friends almost at once, although she was in the class ahead of me. I never finished, for my father died and left us almost without a cent. I left college and Laura’s father secured me work here. I studied hard and last year they made me librarian. Then mother came east to live here with me. Laura was always kind. When my vacation came I went to visit her there at The Larches. Then you――I met you.”

She paused and dropped her gaze.

“Yes,” he said softly. “And then?”

“You said you had some property and you――you seemed nice and kind. I was so weary of it all. I wanted――oh, you know? I wanted to have money, enough to live decently somewhere else than here in this tomb they call a town. I didn’t care. I set out to make you――like me. I went back there to the pool each day for just that, until――――”

“Well? Until?” he urged, smiling across at her.

“That is all,” she answered.

“And it was all absolutely mercenary? You never cared for me?”

“I’ve told you,” she answered.

“And――that last day, dear? It was the same? You didn’t care then either?”

“Oh, what does it matter what happened afterwards?” she cried agitatedly. “It was what I had done, don’t you see? It was the meanness, the――the shamefulness of it!”

“Well, but this ‘afterward’? What of that?”

“Nothing,” she answered firmly.

Silence fell for a moment. They looked across at each other steadily, she meeting his smile defiantly. Then the color crept up from throat to cheeks and her eyes dropped.

“Dear,” he said gently, “I don’t care what happened before that ‘afterward.’ I loved you from the first moment, but I’m not going to resent it if it took you longer to discover my irresistible charms. Why, hang it all, I’m proud you should have thought me worth marrying even for my money! But ‘afterward,’ dear? When I kissed you? You can’t make me believe there was no love then, Cicely. And it is still ‘afterward,’ and it always will be! Dear, Arcadia is waiting for you. The lotus pool is lonely without you. And so am I, Cicely, Cicely dear!”

“Oh, I knew you would try to forgive me,” she cried miserably. “That is why I――didn’t want you to come. Because after awhile you would remember and――――”

“Cicely!”

“And you’d hate me!”

“Cicely! Look at me, dear! I want you to――――”

Soft footfalls reached them. The pale youth was approaching, his arms laden with books. Ethan bit his lip and fell silent.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Hoyt, but would you mind giving me――――”

Ethan stepped toward him.

“Here,” he said hurriedly, “here’s just what you’re after. It’s no trouble at all.” He forced the “Love Sonnets from the Portuguese,” into the youth’s hands and turned him gently but firmly away from the counter. The youth looked from the book to Ethan.

“How――how did you know?” he stammered resentfully.

“Never mind how, my boy. You’ve got it. Run along.”

After a moment of indecision, of many silent looks of inquiry and dark suspicion, the youth trod softly away again. Ethan looked at Cicely and they smiled together. Then she sank into her chair at the desk and laughed helplessly, and cried a little, too. And Ethan said no word until she had pressed the handkerchief to her eyes and turned toward him again. Then,