PART III.

A RETURN.

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VII.

WHAT THE STROKE OF A BELL CAN DO.

IT was in the latter part of June, and the day was so perfect that it seemed like wanton waste to use the hours for study or work. The roses, which were always plentiful in the Fisher garden, had probably passed their prime, but their perfume was still in the air, and there were enough lingering buds on the thorny stalks to tempt Polly into their midst. She had gathered quite a bouquet, and was turning toward the house when she heard her name called. Blushing delightfully, she stopped.

Young Unwin was leaning over the wall that separated the two gardens.

“Polly, Polly!” he called. “Come here, dear, I have something of real importance to say to you.”

His tone was graver than usual, and her gay spirits were dashed, yet the dimples remained in her cheeks and the saucy gleam in her eye, as drawing near, she paused, with a mock curtsey, just out of his arm’s reach on her side of the wall.

“Well, what is it, Mr. Persistency?” said she, a delicious smile robbing her words of any sting they might otherwise have contained. “This is the third time to-day you have summoned me to this wall.”

“Once to give you a rare flower, which had just opened in the conservatory. Once to see if you appreciated this lovely day, and once,—O Polly, my father is anything but well to-day.”

Her face, which had been brimming with mirth sobered instantly.

“Is he going to die?” she inquired, with alarm.

“I fear so, dear, and so it becomes our duty to tell him our wishes and expectations. Are you willing to go with me to his bedside? We should love each other more dearly for his blessing.”

“Do you think”—the words came with difficulty,—“that he will give us his blessing?”

“I think so; he has always seemed to like you, has he not?”

“Yes, but——”

“I know what you mean, Polly; and it would be sheer hypocrisy for me not to acknowledge what every one knows, that my father is a very proud man and that he is likely to have ambitious hopes for his son. But are they not likely to be realized by our marriage? When you have taken up your abode in the old Izard mansion, you will be quite an eligible match even for Squire Unwin’s son.” A tender, yet half-sarcastic smile took the edge off these words, and showed the little maiden how dearly she was loved. Whereupon she shook her pretty head.

“But I am so lacking in accomplishments, Clarke, and he so admires an accomplished woman. Why, I barely know one language well, and your stepmother, I hear, speaks three.”

“All of which she will teach you, dear. Accomplishments are easily acquired. In five years you will be a model of learning and culture.”

She laughed. “I look like it, do I not? See. I have not even bought myself a new dress. I have had other things to think of.”

“I like you in that rose pink gingham, but my father has a great fondness for white. Haven’t you a white dress, Polly?”

“You know I have,” she pouted. “Didn’t you tell me last Sunday that——”

“Ah, I remember. Yes, yes, put that dress on and come round by the front gate; I will be there to meet you.”

“But Mrs. Unwin? You have not told me whether she is likely to approve. I should not want her to greet me coldly.”

“My mother? My darling mother? I never think of her as a stepmother, Polly dear. Oh, she knows all about it and is ready to welcome you as a daughter.”

The young girl, with a sudden lift of her head, smiled joyously and seemed to gather courage at once.

“I will go,” she frankly declared. “And yet I dread to meet him. Is he so very sick, and will his looks frighten me?”

“It may be,” answered Clarke, “but I shall be there to make it as easy for you as possible. Do not think of my father, but of me and my love.”

She sighed with joy and ran off, as free a thing as the sun shone upon; and he watching her felt his heart soften more and more to her womanly sweetness.

“My father will feel her charm,” he murmured, and hastened up the garden walk to the gate where he had promised to wait for her.

Clarke Unwin was no ordinary man. He was the thoughtful son of a proud reserved father, and he had an aim in life quite apart from the accumulation of wealth, which had so distinguished the elder man. He was ambitious of becoming a famous electrician and had already shown sufficient talent in this direction for his friends to anticipate great results from his efforts. He had a scheme now on hand which only needed the small capital which his father had promised him to become, as he believed, a practical reality. Indeed, negotiations had already been entered into for his entrance into a firm of enterprising men in Cleveland, where his energy would have full scope. All that he needed was the money which they required as a guaranty against failure, and this money, some five thousand dollars or so, had, as I have said, been promised to him, though not yet advanced, by his indulgent parent.

To sound that father’s mind on this and on the still dearer subject of his marriage, young Unwin had prevailed upon Polly to enter this house of sickness. At the door they were met by a sweet-faced lady, who took Polly in her arms before seating her in a little ante-room.

“I must ask you to remain here for just a few minutes,” said she. “It would be a shock to Mr. Unwin to see you without any preparation. Clarke will have a talk with his father first, and then come back for you. Let me hope it will be with a welcome that will make amends to you for your long years of orphanage among us.”

“You are very good,” came from the trembling lips of the young girl. Mrs. Unwin’s grace and unconscious dignity always abashed her.

“Clarke informs me that you are not lacking in that same desirable quality,” whispered the other lady, and with a smile which gave an air of pathos to her faded yet beautiful face, she turned away and followed her son out into the hall. As they passed along she impetuously stopped and faced him. Grace Unwin had been a mother to Clarke for thirteen years, and she loved him devotedly.

“Clarke,” said she, “I dread this ordeal most unaccountably. Your father has had something on his mind of late. Do you know of any trouble weighing upon him besides this dreadful one of leaving us?”

“No,” rejoined the wondering youth. “He has never confided in me, mother, as much as he has in you. If you know nothing—”

“And I do not,” she murmured.

“You must have been deceived by your affection. He is not the man to brood over petty troubles, or to be cast down by matters he could regulate with a word.”

“I know it, yet he has not appeared natural to me for some time. Long before the physician told him that his disease was mortal, his actions betrayed a melancholy which has always been foreign to his nature, and for the very reason that he has succeeded in hiding it from you, I feel that it has its seat in something vital.”

“And have you never asked him what it was, dear mother? You who are such a tender nurse and so adored a wife must have moments when even his reserve would yield to such gentle importunities as yours.”

“It would seem so, but I have never dared to broach the subject. When your father chooses to be silent, it is difficult for any one to question him.”

“Yes, mother; and yet I must dare his displeasure to-day. I must know his mind about Polly.”

“Yes, that is right, and Heaven’s blessing go with you. I shall be outside here in the hall. If you strike the bell once I will fetch in Polly; if you strike it twice, I will come in alone; if you do not strike it at all, I will remain where I am, praying God to give you patience to meet the disappointment of your life.”

The man whose reticent nature had aroused this conversation was just waking from a fretful sleep when his son entered. He was a tall, spare man with an aristocratic air and a fine head, who was wont to walk the streets as if the whole town belonged to him, and who had been spoken of as “the Squire” from his earliest manhood. Now his proud head lay low, and his once self-satisfied countenance wore a look that caused a pang to strike the heart of his son, before the unrest visible in his whole figure could find vent in words.

“What is it, father? You look distressed; cannot something be done to relieve you?”

The man who had never been known to drop his eyes before anyone slowly turned his face to the wall.

“There is no help,” he murmured; “my hour has come.” And he was silent. Clarke moved uneasily; he hardly knew what to do. It seemed cruel to disturb his father at this moment, and yet his conscience told him he would be wrong to delay a communication that would set him right in his own eyes. The father settled the matter by saying abruptly: “Sit down, I have something to say to you.”

Clarke complied, drawing a chair close up to the bedside. He knew that one of his father’s peculiarities was a dislike to raising his voice. For a moment he waited, but the father seemed loath to speak. Clarke therefore remarked, after a certain time had passed:

“Nothing you can say to me will fail of having my respectful attention. If I can do anything to relieve your cares—” The look which his father here turned upon him startled him from continuing. Never had he seen such an expression in those eyes before.

“Can you go so far as to forgive?” the old man asked.

“Forgive?” echoed Clarke, hardly believing his ears. “What is there I have to forgive in you? The benefits you have bestowed upon me, the education I have received and your fatherly care?”

“Hush!” the half-lifted hand seemed to entreat and a shadow of the old commanding aspect revisited the ashy countenance before him. “You do not know all that has happened this last year. I have ruined you, Clarke, ruined your mother; and now I must die without having the opportunity of retrieving myself.”

Surprised out of his usual bearing of profound respect, Clarke sprang to his feet.

“Do you mean,” he asked, “that your money is gone; that you are dying a bankrupt?”

The old man—for Frederick Unwin was twenty years older than his wife—grew so pale that his son became seriously alarmed.

“You are sick—fainting,” he cried; “let me call someone.” But a glance from his father’s commanding eye held him where he stood.

“No, no; it is from shame, Clarke, possibly from grief. You have been on the whole a good boy, and I have taken pride in you. To leave you with your hopes dashed, and the care of a mother on your hands, is a humiliation I never expected. I—I have lost all, Clarke, and am, besides, in debt. I have not five hundred dollars to give you, let alone five thousand. You will have to take up with some lesser position, some clerkship with a salary, reserving to yourself the right to curse a father who was so shortsighted as to invest his whole fortune in a mine that petered out before the machinery was paid for.”

Clarke, to whom the prospect thus opened meant the demolition of more than one dream, sat dazed for a moment in a state of despair, not noticing that his arm had struck the bell on the small table beside which he was sitting, making it ring out in one clear, low note.

“There is even a mortgage on this house,” the wretched father went on. “I thought the amount so raised might bridge me over my present difficulties, but it is gone like the rest, and now it only remains for me to be gone, too, for you to understand into what a position I have put you by my folly and ignorance.”

“Father I would not let any one else speak of you so in my hearing. You meant to better your position, and if you made mistakes, we—that is, my mother and myself, must try and retrieve them.”

“But your chances with Stevens and Wright? Your excellent plan for—” The son suppressed the sigh that rose to his lips and resolutely lifted his head.

“That dream is over,” he said. “I shall think no more of my own advancement, but only of supporting my mother by any humble means that offers.”

“You have not confidence enough in your schemes to borrow the money you want?”

“I will never borrow.”

The old man, weakened by illness and shaken by the break he had just made in an almost life-long reserve, uttered a deep sigh. Clarke, whose thoughts were with Polly as much as they were with his surrendered hopes, re-echoed this sound of despair before saying:

“I have always cherished a certain sort of pride, too. I could not feel free under a burden of debt incurred for something whose value is yet to be tested. I cannot be beholden to any one for a start which is as likely to lead to failure as to success.”

“Not if that person is your promised wife?” burst from trembling and eager lips behind him, and Polly, accompanied by Mrs. Unwin, who had mistaken the ring of the bell for the signal which had been established between herself and Clarke, stepped into the room, and advanced with timid steps but glowing cheeks into the presence of the equally astonished son and father.

“Polly!” sprang involuntarily from the lover’s lips, as he rose and cast a doubtful glance toward his father. But the latter, roused by the fresh young face turned so eagerly toward him, had lost his white look, and was staring forward with surprised but by no means repelling glances.

“What does she say?” he murmured. “This should be Polly Earle, to whom some kindly friend has just left twenty thousand dollars. Does she love you, Clarke, and was the word she just used ‘wife’? I’m getting so dull of hearing with this ceaseless pain, that I do not always understand what is said in my presence.”

Clarke, delighted with the eagerness apparent in his suffering father’s look and manner, took the young girl by the hand and brought her forward. “This is the woman whom I chose for my wife when I thought my prospects warranted me in doing so. But now that I have little else than debts to offer her, I have scruples in accepting her affection, dear as it is and disinterested as she shows herself. I would not seem to take advantage of her youth.”

“But it is I,” she broke in gayly, “who am likely to take advantage of your disappointments! I heard by mistake, I think, something of what your father has had to say to you, and my only feeling, you see, is one of delight that I can do something to show my gratitude for all that you and others have done for me in the years when I was a penniless orphan. Is that a wrong feeling, Mr. Unwin, and will you deny me the privilege of—” She could say no more, but her eyes, her lips, her face were one appeal, and that of the most glowing kind. Clarke’s eyes dropped lest they should betray his feelings too vividly, and Mrs. Unwin, who had thrown her arm around Polly, turned her face toward her husband with such an expression of thankfulness that he did not know which caused him the greater surprise, his wife’s sudden beauty or the frank yet timorous aspect of this hitherto scarcely noted young girl in the presence of the two great masters of the world, Love and Death.

“Come here!” he finally entreated, holding out one shaking hand toward Polly. She tossed her hat aside like a wild creature who recoils from any sort of restraint, and coming up close to the bed, fell on her knees by his side.

“So you love Clarke?” he queried.

Her eyes and cheeks spoke for her.

“Love him well enough to marry him even now, with all his debts and disabilities?”

Still her looks spoke; and he went calmly on: “Then, my little girl, you shall marry him, and when you see him prosperous and on the high road to success in his chosen field of labor,—think that his father blesses you and that by your loyalty and devotion you took away the sting from an old man’s death.”

A sob and a smile answered him, and Clarke, to whom this scene was the crowing glory of his love, turned and took his mother in his arms, before stooping to raise his young betrothed. It was the happiest hour in this family’s history, but it was the precursor of sorrow. That night Mr. Unwin died.

VIII.

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL.

THERE were two topics of interest agitating the town. One was the appearance of a new hermit in the old cave on the mountain side, and the other, the sale of the Unwin mansion and the prospective removal of Frederick Unwin’s widow and son into the haunted house of the Earles. The latter occasioned the greater amount of talk. That this move on their part was but the preliminary step to a marriage between Clarke and the young heiress had been known for some time. But to see a house so long deserted reopened, its doors and windows thrown wide to the sun, and the smoke rising once more from its desolate chimneys, was an event calculated to interest all who had felt the indescribable awe surrounding a place abandoned by human life while yet possessing all the appointments of a home.

Polly, who for some reason had given up her former plan of renting the big Izard place, was full of business and glowing with the excitement of what was considered by many in the town a rather daring venture. Even Dr. Izard, who was not wont to show emotion, looked startled when he heard of her intentions, and seemed disposed to forbid the young girl letting a house so given over to damp and mildew. But when she urged the necessity of providing Mrs. Unwin with an immediate home and hinted at the reluctance which that lady had shown to living at the other end of the village, he relented and merely insisted that the place should be thoroughly aired and renovated before Mrs. Unwin went into it. As he was not that lady’s physician, had never been even a visitor at the Unwin mansion, he could say no more. But Polly needed no further hint, and went back to her own humble home with the most generous projects in her head for Mrs. Unwin’s future comfort and happiness.

It was a great day in Hamilton when she and Clarke and five or six interested neighbors first threw open the creaking front door of the Earle cottage and let the sunlight stream into its hushed interior. To her, who had never been permitted to enter the place since she had been taken from it fourteen years before, it was an event merely to press her foot on the worm-eaten carpets and slide her fingers along the walls that had once felt the touch of her parents’ garments. Each room was a revelation, each corner a surprise. She glided from hall to chamber and from chamber to hall like the spirit of a younger age introduced into the memorials of a long-departed one. Her fresh cheek, from which even awe could not quite banish the dimples, looked out of place and yet strangely beautiful amid the dim surroundings of the stiffly-ordered rooms and old-fashioned furnishings.

With an instinct natural enough under the circumstances, she had wished to be the first to enter the house and cross the threshold of each apartment. But Clarke was not far behind her. In front of the portrait of her father she paused and drew her friends around her.

“Oh!” she cried; “it was wrong to keep this from me; I should have been brought up under the influence of that face.” But as she further contemplated it, her first enthusiasm faded and an indescribable look of vague distrust stole into her rosy countenance, and robbed it of half its joyousness. “I—I wish there was a picture of my mother here,” she whispered to Clarke, whose arm she had nervously seized. “She had a beautiful face, they say, all gentleness and goodness.”

“Perhaps we shall find one upstairs,” he suggested, turning to open more windows.

“Oh, it is cold,” she murmured, and moved with quite an unaccustomed air of gravity toward the staircase. Her mother’s room, with its many suggestions of days which were not entirely forgotten by her, seemed to restore her mental balance, shaken by that short contemplation of her father’s portrait. She wept as her eyes fell upon the bed where she had last seen the outstretched form of her dying mother; but her tears were tender and quite unlike, both in their source and effect, the shuddering recoil which had seized her after she had gazed a few minutes at her father’s pictured face.

The book which a certain hand had hesitated to touch not so very long ago, she took up, and opening with some difficulty the pages which time and dampness had glued together, she showed Clarke these words, written on one of the blank leaves in front:

“Ah! what is life! ’Tis but a passing touch upon the world; A print upon the beaches of the earth Next flowing wave will wash away; a mark That something passed; a shadow on a wall, While looking for the substance, shade departs: A drop from the vast spirit-cloud of God, That rounds upon a stock, a stone, a leaf, A moment, then exhales again to God.”

“My mother’s writing, I know! What a difference in our dispositions! Where do you suppose I got my cheerful temperament from? Not from my father?” And again she faintly shuddered.

“Your father’s desk is in the other room,” commented somebody. Looking up she laid the book softly down and prepared to leave the one spot in the house of which she had any remembrance. “I shall hate to see this dust removed, or these articles touched. Do you think I could be allowed to do the first handling? It is so like a sacrilege to give it over to some stranger.”

But Clarke shook his head. “I have let you come with us into this damp house because it seemed only proper that your eyes should be the first to meet its desolation. I shall not let you remain here one moment after we are gone. If I were willing, Dr. Izard would not be; so do not think of it again.”

The name of the doctor seemed to awaken in her a strange chain of thought.

“Ah, Dr. Izard! He was standing beside my father when he closed my mother’s eyes. Why did he not come with me this morning to see me open the house? I begged him to do so but he declined quite peremptorily.”

“Dr. Izard does not like me,” remarked Clarke sententiously.

“Does not like you? Why?” queried Polly innocently, pausing on the threshold they were crossing.

“I do not know: he has always avoided me, more than he has other people, I mean—and once when I spoke to him, the strangest expression crossed his face.”

“I do not understand. He has always been very kind to me. Are you sure that you like him?”

“I am indifferent to him; that is, I admire him, as everyone must who has eyes and an understanding. But I have no feeling toward him; he does not seem to have any place in my life.”

“He has in mine,” she reluctantly admitted. “I often go to him for advice.”

“Was it by his advice,” whispered Clarke, bending till his mouth touched her ear, “that you gave me your heart?”

The little hand that lay on his arm drew itself slowly out and fell quite softly and significantly on her heaving breast.

“No,” said she. “I have another adviser here, fully as powerful as he can ever be.”

The gesture, the accent were so charming that he was provoked at the peering curiosity of the persons accompanying them. He would have liked to kiss those rosy lips for the sweetest thing they had ever said.

Had the midnight visitor of a few weeks back known what a careless crowd would soon invade these hidden premises he might not have been so wary in his movements. When Polly reached her father’s desk, she found one or two neighbors there before her.

“Oh, look at this curious old inkstand!” exclaimed one.

“And at this pile of note-books standing just where Ephraim Earle must have laid them down!”

“And at this pen with the ink dried on it!”

“And at this ridiculous little China shepherdess pursing up her lips as if she knew the whole mystery but would not tell!”

Polly, whose ears had been more or less closed by the episode with Clarke just above mentioned, seemed scarcely to hear their words. She stood by her father’s work-table with her hand on her father’s chair, in a dream of love that moistened her down-cast eyes and awakened strange, tremulous movements in the corners of her sensitive lips. But soon the tokens of past ambition and of interrupted labor everywhere apparent, began to influence her spirits, and her looks showed a depression which was nothing less than startling to Clarke. Even the neighbors observed it and moved chattering away, so that in a few minutes Polly and Clarke were left standing alone in this former scene of her father’s toil and triumphs.

“What is the matter, my darling?” he now asked, seeing her turn away from the very objects he supposed would interest her most.

“I do not know,” she answered. “I do not like this room; I do not like the effect it has upon me.” Had the gliding visitant whose shadow had last fallen on these walls left some baleful influence behind him, or was the cause of her distrust of deeper origin and such as she hardly dared admit to herself?

“The air is close here,” remarked Clarke; “and the presence of all this dust is enough to stifle anyone. Let us go down into the garden and get a breath of fresh air.”

She pointed to the open windows. “How can it be close with all this light pouring in? No, no, it is not that; I am simply frightened. Did you ever stop to think?” she suddenly inquired, “what I should do or how I should feel if—_if my father came back_?”

“No,” he replied startled. “No one supposes him to be alive. Why should you have such morbid thoughts?”

“I do not know.” She laughed and endeavored to throw off the shadow that had fallen upon her. “You must think me very superstitious, but I would not walk down that rear passage for anything; not even with you, I should expect to encounter a tall, military-looking figure, with a face pleasing enough at first sight, but which would not bear close scrutiny. A face like the painted one below,” she added, with an involuntary shudder.

“But that is not a bad face; it is only a keen and daring one. I like it very much. I remember my mother has always said you inherited your beauty from your father.”

But this seemed to irritate her indescribably. “No, no,” she cried, shaking her head and almost stamping her little foot. “I don’t believe it and I won’t have it!” Then, as if startled by her own vehemence, she blushed and dragged him away toward the door. “He may have been handsome, but I have not eyes like his, I am sure. If I could only see how my mother looked.”

In the hall below they paused. There was much to be said concerning the contemplated alterations to be made in the house, but she did not seem to take any interest in the matter. Evidently the effect of her visit upstairs had not entirely left her, for just as they were turning toward the door she gave an involuntary look behind her, and laughing, to show her sense of the foolishness of her own words, she cried:

“So we did not meet my father’s ghost after all. Well now, I may be sure that his interest is in other scenes and that he will never come back here.” As she spoke a shadow crossed the open doorway.

“Do not be too sure of anything!” interposed a voice, and a strange but by no means attractive looking man stepped calmly into the house and paused with a low bow before her.

IX.

ASK DR. IZARD.

POLLY uttered a sharp cry and stared at the intruder blankly. He was tall and military looking and had a smooth, well-shaven face. But his clothes were in rags and his features, worn by illness and coarsened by dissipation were of a type to cause a young girl like her to recoil.

“Who is this man?” she cried at last, “and what is he doing here?”

“It is the new hermit! The man who has taken up with Hadley’s old quarters,” exclaimed one of the neighbors from the group about Polly. “I saw him yesterday in the graveyard.”

“Yes, and there is his dog, Piper. He follows every old tramp who comes into town. Don’t you remember how he tagged at the heels of that old beggar with a long beard, who went through here a month ago?”

“This fellow looks as if he were strong enough to work,” whispered one of the women.

“I shan’t give any of my stale victuals to a man with an arm strong enough to fell an ox,” murmured another.

Here Clarke, who had only waited for an opportunity to speak, now advanced to the man standing in the doorway. As he did so he noticed that the wayfarer’s attention was not fixed upon the persons before him, but upon the walls and passages of the house they were in.

“Have you come here begging?” he inquired. “If so you have made a mistake; this is a disused house which we have been opening for the first time in years.”

“I know its every room and its every corner,” answered the haggard-looking tramp imperturbably. “I could tell you what lies under the stairs in the cellar, and point out to you the books which have been stacked away in the garret: That is, if no other hand has disturbed them since I placed them there fifteen years ago.”

A cry of astonishment, of despair almost, answered these words. It came from the blanching lips of Polly. Clarke trembled as he heard it, but otherwise gave no sign of concern. On the contrary he eyed the intruder authoritatively.

“Tell me your name!” he demanded. “Are you——”

“I will not say who I am, here, with the sunlight streaming on my back and no friendly eye to recognize my features. I will only speak from under the portrait of Ephraim Earle; I want a witness to the truth of my statements and in that canvas I look for it.”

And neither heeding Clarke’s detaining hand, nor the almost frantic appeal which spoke in the eyes of the young girl whose question he had at last answered, he stalked into the parlor and paused directly beneath the portrait he had named.

“Cannot you see who I am?” he asked, rearing his tall head beside the keen-faced visage that looked down from the wall.

“The same man grown older,” exclaimed one.

“Ephraim Earle himself!” echoed another.

“Come back from the dead!”

“The moment the house was opened!”

“Are you Ephraim Earle?” demanded Clarke, trembling for Polly in whose breast a real and unmistakable terror was rapidly taking the place of an imaginary one.

“Since I must say so, yes!” was the firm reply. “Where is my daughter? She should be on hand here to greet me.”

“I have no words of welcome. I never thought of my father being like this. Take me away, Clarke, take me away!” So spoke the terrified little one, clinging to one of her best-known neighbors for support.

“I will take you away,” Clarke assured her. “There is no need of your greeting this man till he has proved his claim to you. A girl’s heart cannot be expected to embrace such a fact in a moment.”

“Oh, it’s Ephraim Earle fast enough,” insisted one old woman. “I remember him well. Don’t you remember me, old neighbor?”

“Don’t I?” was the half hearty, half jeering answer. “And I wish I had a pair of your green and white worsted socks now.”

“It’s he, it’s he!” vociferated the delighted woman. “When he was a young man I sold him many a pair of my knitting. To be sure I use blue now instead of green, but they were all green in his day, bless him!” As this prayer was not repeated by her companions in the room, upon whom his reckless if not sinister appearance had made anything but a happy impression, he came slowly from under the picture and stood for a moment before the dazed and shrinking Polly.

“You are not glad to see me,” he remarked, “and I must say I do not wonder. I have lived a hard life since I left you a crying child in your mother’s room upstairs, but I am your father, for all that, and you owe me respect if not obedience. Look up, Maida, and let me see what kind of a woman you have grown to be.”

At this name, which had been a pet one with her parents and with them alone, the neighbors stared and Polly shrank, feeling the iron of certainty pierce deep into her soul. She met his eyes, however, with courage and answered his demand by a very natural reproach.

“If you are my father, and alas! I see no reason to doubt it, I should think you would feel some shame in alluding to a growth which you have done nothing to advance.”

“I know,” he admitted, “that you have something with which to reproach me; the secret of those days is not for ears like yours. I left you, but—never ask me why, Maida. And now, go out into the sun. I should not like to have my first act toward you a cruel one.”

Dazed, almost fainting, doubting whether or no she was the victim of some horrible nightmare, she let herself be led away to where the sun shone down on the lilacs of the overgrown garden. But no sooner did she realize that the man of her dread had been left in the house with her neighbors than she urged Clarke to return at once to where he was.

“Let him be watched,” she cried; “follow him as he goes about the house. It is his; I feel that it is his, but do not let us succumb to his demands without a struggle. He has such a wicked face, and his tones are so harsh and unfatherly.”

Clarke, who had come to a similar conclusion, though by other means than herself, hastened to obey her. He found the self-styled Earle in the midst of the group of neighbors, chattering freely and answering questions with more or less free and easy banter. Though privation spoke in every outline of his face and form, and poverty in every rag of his dress, his bearing gave evidences of refinement, and no one, not even Clarke himself, doubted that if he were put to the test he would show himself to be at least the wreck of the once brilliant scholar and man of resources. He was drawing the whole crowd after him through the house and was hazarding guesses right and left to prove the excellence of his memory.

“Let us see,” he cried, as they one and all paused at the top of the staircase, before entering the rooms on the upper floor. “I used to keep my books here—such ones as I had not discarded and stacked away in the topmost story. And I used to pride myself on knowing where every volume was kept. Consult the shelves for me now and see if on the third one from the bottom and nearer to the left than to the right there is not a volume of Bacon’s Essays. There is? Good! I knew it would be there if some one had not moved it. And the ten volumes of Shakespeare—are they not on the lower shelf somewhere near the middle? I thought so. A capital old edition it is, too; printed by T. Bensley for Wynne & Scholey, Paternoster Row. And Gibbon’s _Rise and Fall_, with a volume of Euripides for a companion? Yes? And on the topmost shelf of all, far out of the reach of any hand but mine, a choice edition of Hawthorne—my favorite author. Do you see them all? I am glad of that; I loved my books, and often when very far away from them used to recall the hour when I had them under my eye and within reach of my hand.”

“I wonder if he used to recall the child he left, tossed helpless upon the mercies of the town?” murmured one of the neighbors.

“Is my desk here, and has it been touched?” he now asked, proceeding hastily into the workroom. “Ah, it all looks very natural,” he remarked; “very natural! I can scarcely believe that I have been gone more than a day. Oh, there’s the model of the torpedo I was planning! Let me see,” and he lifted up the half-completed model, with what Clarke could not but call a very natural emotion, looking it over part by part and finally putting it down with a sigh. “Good for those days,” he commented, “but would not answer now. Too complicated by far; explosive agencies should be more simple in their construction.” And so on for half an hour; then he descended and walked away of his own accord to the front door.

“I have seen the old place!” he blandly observed, “and that is all I expected. If my daughter sees fit to acknowledge me, she will seek me in the wild spot in which I have made for myself a home. Here I shall not come again. I have not returned to the place of my birth to be a bugbear to my only child.”

“But,” cried some one in protest, “you are poor and you are hungry.”

“I am what fate and my own folly have made me,” he declared. “I ask for no sympathy, nor do I feel disposed to urge my natural rights.”

“If you are Polly Earle’s father, you will be fed and you will be clothed,” put in Clarke hotly. “There is a meal for you now at the tavern, if you will go there and take it.”

But the proud man, pointing to his dog drew himself up and turned scornfully away. “He can procure me as much as that,” said he. “When my daughter has affection and a child’s consideration to show me, then let her come to Hadley’s cave. Food! Clothing! I have had an apology for both for fourteen years, but love—never; and all I want just now is love!”

Polly, who was not many steps off, heard these words and, moved by fear or disgust, dropped her hands which she had instinctively raised at his approach. He saw and smiled grimly, then with a bow that belied his aspect and recalled the old days when a bow passed for something more than a perfunctory greeting, he moved sternly down the walk and out through the stiff old gate into the dusty highroad.

Half a dozen or more of the most eager witnesses of this extraordinary scene followed him down the hill and into town, anxious no doubt to set the town ablaze with news of Ephraim Earle’s return and of his identity with the newly arrived hermit at Hadley’s cave.

X.

AN INCREDIBLE OCCURRENCE.

DR. IZARD had of late presented a more cheerful appearance. His step was lighter and his face less generally downcast. He even was seen to smile one morning at the antics of some children, an unprecedented thing in his history, one would think, from the astonishment it caused among the gossips.

He had been called away several times during the month and the card with the word “absent” on it was very often to be seen hanging beside his door. People grew tired of this, though they knew it meant fame and money to the doctor, and the newly-fledged physician from Boston, whose office was at the other end of the town, prospered in consequence. But Dr. Izard only seemed relieved at this and came and went, as I have said, with a less gloomy if not positively brightened countenance.

He had always kept for himself one solitary place of resort in the village. Without this refuge life would often have been insupportable to him. It was—strange to say, for the Izards had always been aristocratic—the humble house of the village shoemaker, a simple but highly respected man who with his aged wife had been, from sheer worth of character, a decided factor in town for the last twenty-five years.

The little house in which he lived and plied his useful trade stood on the hill-side a few yards above the Fisher cottage, and it was in his frequent visits to this spot that Dr. Izard had seen so much of Polly. The window in which he usually sat overlooked the Fisher garden, and as his visits had extended over years he had ample opportunity for observing her growing beauty from the time she was a curly-headed imp of four to the day she faced the world a gay-hearted damsel of eighteen.

It had been a matter of some mystery in the past why Dr. Izard, with his trained mind and refined tastes, affected this humble home and sought with such assiduity the companionship of this worthy but by no means cultured couple. But this, together with other old wonders, had long lost its hold upon public attention, no one thinking of inquiring any longer into the cause of a habit that had become so fixed it was regarded as part of the village’s history. One effect, however, remained. No one thought of entering the shoemaker’s shop while Dr. Izard sat there. It would have been thought an intrusion by both guest and host.

Mr. and Mrs. Fanning, who had themselves long ceased to wonder at his preference for their society, invariably stopped their work when he entered and greeted him with the same words of welcome they had used fourteen years before when he had unexpectedly taken a seat in the shop without having been summoned for professional purposes. After which necessary ceremony they turned again to their several labors and the doctor sat down in his especial seat, which, as I have said, was in one of the windows, and lapsed into the silence he invariably maintained for half his stay. The time chosen for his visit was usually at nightfall, and whether it was that the charms of nature were unusually attractive to him at that hour, or whether something or somebody in the adjoining gardens secretly interested him, he invariably turned his eyes outward, with an expression that touched the heart of the old lady who watched him and caused many a glance of secret intelligence to pass between her and her equally concerned husband.

Not till it was quite dark and the lights had been lit in the shop, would the doctor turn about—often with a sigh too unconscious to be repressed—and face again the humble couple. But when he did so, it was to charm them with the most cordial and delightful conversation. There was even sparkle in it, but it was only for this aged pair of workers, whose wit was sufficient for appreciation, and whose hearts responded to every effort made to interest them by their much revered visitor. After a quarter of an hour of this hearty interchange of neighborly comment, he would leave the house, to come again a few evenings later.

But one evening there was a break in the usual order of things. The doctor was sitting, as he had sat a hundred times before, in his chair by the window, and Mr. Fanning was hammering away at his bench and Mrs. Fanning reading the _Watchman_, when there came a sound of voices from the front and the door burst open to the loud cry of—

“O Mrs. Fanning, Mrs. Fanning! Such news! Ephraim Earle has come back! Ephraim Earle, whom we all thought dead ten years ago!”

Mrs. Fanning, who with all her virtues dearly loved a bit of gossip, and who knew, or thought she did, everything that was going on in town, ran without once looking round her to the door, and Mr. Fanning, who could not but feel startled also by an event so unexpected and so long looked upon as impossible, started to follow her, when something made him look back at the doctor. The sight that met his eyes stunned him, and caused him to pause trembling where he was. In all the years he had known Dr. Izard he had never seen him look as he did at that moment. Was it surprise that affected him, or was it fear, or some other incomprehensible emotion? The good old man could not tell; but he wished the doctor would speak. At last the doctor did, and the hollow tones he used made the aged shoemaker recoil.

“What is that? What are they talking about? They mentioned a name? Whose name? Not Polly’s father’s?”

“Yes,” faltered his startled companion. “Ephraim Earle; they say he has come back. Shall I go and see?”

The doctor nodded; it seemed as if he had no words at his command, and the shoemaker, glad to be released, hastened hobbling from the room. As his half bent figure vanished, the doctor, as if released from a spell, looked about, shuddered, grasped the table nearest to him for support, and then burst into a laugh so strange, so discordant, and yet so thrilling with emotion, that had not a dozen men and women been all talking together in the hall it would have been heard and commented on. As it was he was left alone, and it was not till several minutes had elapsed that Mrs. Fanning came rushing in, followed by her dazed and somewhat awestruck husband.

“O doctor, it is true! It is true! I have just seen him; he is standing at the Fisher’s corner. Polly is up at the house—You know she was to open it to-day. They say she is more frightened than pleased, and who can wonder? He looks like a weather-beaten tramp!”

“No, no,” shouted some one from the room beyond, “like a gentleman who has been sick and who has had lots of trouble besides.”

“Come and see him!” called out a shrill voice, over Mrs. Fanning’s shoulder. “You used to know him, doctor. Come and see Ephraim Earle.”

The doctor, with a curl of his lips, looked up and met the excited eyes that were contemplating him, and slowly remarked:

“Your wits have certainly all gone wool-gathering. I don’t believe that Ephraim Earle has returned. Some one has been playing a trick upon you.”

“Then it’s the ghost of Ephraim Earle if it’s not himself,” insisted the other, as the whole group, losing their awe of the doctor in the interest and growing excitement of the moment, came crowding into the shop.

“And a very vigorous ghost! He is bound to have his rights; that you can see.”

“But he won’t annoy his daughter. Did you hear what he said to the child, up there by the lilac bushes?” And then they all chattered, each striving to give his or her own views of the situation, till a sudden vigorous “Hush!” brought them all to an abrupt standstill and set them staring at the doctor with wide-open eyes and mouths.

“You are all acting like children!” protested that gentleman, with his white face raised and his eyes burning fiercely upon them. “I say that man is an impostor! Why should Ephraim Earle come back?”

“And why shouldn’t he?” asked another.

“Answer us that, Dr. Izard. Why shouldn’t the man come back?”

“True, true! Hasn’t he a daughter here?”

“With money of her own. Just the same amount as he once ran off with.”

“I tell you again to be quiet.” It was still the doctor who was talking. “If you are daft yourselves, do not try to make other people so! Where is this fellow? I will soon show you he is not the man you take him to be.”

“I don’t know how you will do it,” objected one, as the group fell back before the doctor’s advancing figure. “He’s as like him as one pea is like another, and he remembers all of us and even chattered with Mother Jessup about her famous worsted socks.”

“Fools!” came from beneath the doctor’s set lips as he strode from the door and passed rapidly into the highway. “Here, you!” he cried, accosting the man who was the centre of a group some rods away, “come up here! I want to speak to you.”

XI.

FACE TO FACE.

THE stranger, thus hailed, turned as the doctor’s voice rang down the road, and acknowledging the somewhat rough summons with a bow of mock affability, stepped obligingly up the hill. The neighbors who had flocked into the street to watch the meeting, saw the doctor’s lip curl as the wretched figure advanced. This man, Ephraim Earle? Why had he called these credulous creatures fools? They were simply madmen. But in another moment his countenance changed. The miserable fellow had paused and was standing a few feet off with what could not be called other than a look of old comradeship. He spoke first also and with quite a hearty ring to his naturally strident voice.

“Well, Oswald, old boy, this is a pleasure! Now don’t say you don’t remember me—” for the doctor had started back with an irrepressible gesture of disgust that to some eyes was not without its element of confusion, “I know I am changed, but no more so than you are, if you have led a more respectable life than I.”

“Scoundrel!” leaped from Dr. Izard’s white lips. “How dare you address me as if we were, or ever had been, friends! You are a brazen adventurer, and I—”

“And you are the perfectly irreproachable physician with a well-earned fame, and a past as free from shadow as—well, as your face is free from surprise at this unexpected return of one you probably thought dead.”

Confounded by this audacity and moved by many inner and conflicting emotions, Dr. Izard first flushed, then stood very still, surveying the man with a silent passion which many there thought to be too emphatic a return for what sounded to them like nothing more than an ill-judged pleasantry. Then he spoke, quietly, but with a sort of gasp, odd to hear in his usually even and melodious voice.

“I do not know you. Whatever you may call yourself, you are a stranger to me, and no stranger has a right to address me with impertinence. What _do_ you call yourself?” he suddenly demanded, advancing a step and darting his gaze into the other’s eyes with a determination that would have abashed most men whether they were all they proclaimed themselves to be or not.

A playful sneer, a look in which good-natured forbearance still struggled uppermost, were all that he got from this man.

“So you are determined not to recognize Ephraim Earle,” cried the stranger. “You must have good reasons for it, Oswald Izard; reasons which it would not be wise perhaps for one to inquire into too curiously.”

It was an attack for which the doctor was not fully prepared. He faltered for an instant and his cheek grew livid, but he almost immediately recovered himself, and with even more than his former dignity, answered shortly:

“Now you are more than impertinent, you are insolent. I do not need to have secret reasons for repudiating any claims you may make to being Polly Earle’s father. Your face denies the identity you usurp. You have not a trait of the man you call yourself. Your eyes——”

“Oh, do not malign my eyes,” laughed the stranger. “They are faded I know and one lid has got a way of drooping of late years, which has greatly altered my expression. But they are the same eyes, doctor, that watched with you beside the bed of Huldah Earle and if they fail to meet you with just the same mixture of trembling hope and fear as they did then it is because youthful passions die out with the years and I no longer greatly care for any verdict you may have to give.”

A frown hard to fathom corrugated the doctor’s forehead and he continued to survey in silence the bold face that declined to blench before him.

“So you persist—” he remarked at length. “Then you are a villain as well as an impostor.”

“Villain or impostor, I am at least Ephraim Earle,” asserted the other; adding as he noted the doctor’s fingers tighten on the slight stick he carried, “Oh, you need not show your hatred quite so plainly, Dr. Izard. I do not hate you, whatever cause I may have to do so. Have I not said that my old passions are dried up, and even signified that my coming back was but a whim? _Curraghven-hoodah_, Oswald, you weary me with your egotism. Let us shake hands and be comrades once more.”

The audacity, the superiority even, with which these words were said, together with the cabalistic phrase he used—a phrase which Dr. Izard was ready to swear even at that moment of shock and confusion, was one known only to himself and Polly’s father,—had such an effect upon him that he reeled and surveyed the speaker with something of superstitious fear and horror. But at the malicious gleam which this momentary weakness called up in the eye of his antagonist, he again regained his self-command, and stepping firmly up to him, he vociferated with stern emphasis:

“I repeat that you are an impostor. I do not know you, nor do I know your name. You say you are Ephraim Earle, but that is a lie. I knew that man too well to be deceived by you. You have neither his eyes, his mouth, nor his voice, I will say nothing of his manners.”

“Oh,” spoke up a voice from behind, “he looks like Ephraim Earle. You cannot say he does not look like Ephraim Earle.”

The doctor turned sharply, but his antagonist, who neither seemed to ask nor need the support of any one or anything but his own audacity, responded with a mocking leer:

“No matter what I look like. He says he cannot be deceived by my eyes, my mouth, or my voice. That is good. That sounds like a man who is sure of himself. But friends—” Here his voice rose and the menace which he had hitherto held in abeyance became visible in his sharpened glance—“he can be deceived by his own prejudices. Dr. Izard does not want to know me because he was Huldah Earle’s attending physician, and her death, as you all know, was very sudden and _very peculiar_.”

Venomous as the insinuation was, it was a master-stroke and won for its audacious author the cause for which he had been battling. The doctor, who had worked himself up into a white heat, flushed as if a blood-vessel was about to burst in his brain, and drawing back, stepped slowly from before the other’s steady and openly triumphant gaze. Not till he reached the outskirts of the crowd, did he recover himself, and then he halted only long enough to cry to the jostling and confused crowd he had just left:

“He looks like a tramp and he talks like a villain. Be careful what credit you give him, and above all, _look after Polly Earle_.”

XII.

AT HOME.

IT was now nearing eight o’clock, and as Dr. Izard strode on through the village streets, seeing no one and hearing no one, though more than one person respectfully accosted him, the twilight deepened so rapidly that it was quite dark when he passed the church and turned up the highroad to his own house.

It was dark and it was chilly, else why should so strong a man as he shiver? So dark that the monuments over the wall were hardly to be discerned, and he had to fumble for the gate he usually found without trouble. Yet when his hand finally fell upon it and he mechanically lifted the latch he did not pass through at once but lingered, almost with a coward’s hesitation, finding difficulty, as it seemed, in traversing the dismal path before him to the no less dismal door beyond and the solitude that there awaited him.

But he passed the gate at last, and groped his way along the path towards his home, though with lingering footsteps and frequent pauses. Dread was in his every movement, and when he stopped it was to clutch the wall at his side with one hand and to push the other out before him as though to ward off some threatening danger, or avert some expected advance. In this attitude he would become rigidly still, and several minutes would elapse before he stumbled on again. Finally he reached his door, and unlocking it with difficulty threw himself into the house, shuddering and uttering an involuntary cry as a spray of the swaying vine clung to him.

Ashamed of his weakness, for he presently saw what had caught him by the arm, he drew a deep breath, and tried to shut the door. But it would not close. Some obstruction, a trivial one no doubt, had interposed to stop it, and he being in an excited state pushed at it with looks of horror, till his strength conquered and he both shut and locked the door.

He was trembling all over when he had accomplished this, and groping for a chair he sat down in it, panting. But no sooner had he taken his seat than the dim panes of the window struck his sight, and bounding to his feet he drew down the shade as if he would shut out the whole world from his view, and the burying-yard first of all.

Quite isolated now and in utter darkness, he stood for a few minutes deeply breathing and cursing his own fears and pusillanimity. Then he struck a light, and calmed by the sight of the familiar interior, sat down at his desk and tried to think. But though he was a man of great intellectual powers, he seemed to find it difficult to fix his thoughts or even to remain quiet. Involuntary shudders shook his frame, and from time to time his eye glanced fearfully towards the door as if he dreaded to see it open and admit some ghostly visitor.

Suddenly he leaped to his feet, went to a mirror and surveyed himself. Evidently the result was not encouraging for he uttered an exclamation of dismay and coming back to the desk, took up a book and tried to read. But the attempt was futile. With a low cry he flung the book aside, and rising to his feet began to talk, uttering low and fearful words from which he seemed himself to recoil without possessing the power of stopping them. The name of Ephraim Earle mingled often with these words, and always with that new short laugh of his so horrible to hear. And once he spoke another name, but it was said so softly that only from the tears which gushed impetuously from his eyes, could it be seen that it stirred the deepest chords of his nature.

The clock, which lagged sorely that night, struck eleven at last, and the sound seemed to rouse him, for he glanced toward his bed. But it was only to cry “Impossible!” and to cast a hunted look about the room which seemed like a prison to him.

At length he grasped the green door and began to pull at its hasps and fastenings. Careless of the result of these efforts he shook a small heathen god from its pedestal so that it fell rattling to the floor and lay in minute pieces at his feet. But he did not heed. Recklessly he pulled open the door, recklessly he passed into the space beyond. But once out of the room, once in another atmosphere than that peopled by his imagination, he seemed to grow calmer, and after a short survey of the narrow hall in which he found himself and a glance up the tiny, spiral staircase rising at his right, he stepped back into the office and took up the lamp. Carrying it with him up the narrow staircase he set it down in the hall above, and without looking to right or left, almost without noting the desolation of those midnight halls, he began pacing the floor back and forth with a restless, uneven tread, far removed from his usual slow and dignified gait.

At early morning he was still pacing there.

XIII.

A TEST.

“O Clarke, wait: there is the doctor now.” It was Polly who was speaking. She had come as far as the church in her search after Dr. Izard and had just seen him issuing from his own gate.

“He has a bag in his hand; he is going on one of his journeys.”

“No, no,” she protested, “I cannot have it.” And bounding forward she intercepted the doctor, just as he was about to step into his buggy. “O doctor, you are not going away; you are not going to leave me with this dreadful trouble; don’t, don’t, I pray!” The doctor, who in his abstraction had not noted her approach, started at the sound of her voice, and turning showed her a very haggard face.

“Why,” she cried, stepping back, “you are ill yourself.”

“No,” he answered shortly, drawing himself up in his old reserved manner. “I had but little sleep last night, but I am not ill. What do you want, Polly?”

“O don’t you know what I want? You, of all the town, have said he was an impostor! To you then I come as to my only hope; speak, speak, is he not my father?”

The doctor with a side glance at Clarke, who had remained in the background, drew the girl’s hand within his arm and led her a few steps away. But it seemed an involuntary movement on his part, for he presently brought her back within easy earshot of her lover.

“He does not look to me like Ephraim Earle,” he was saying. “He has not his eyes, nor does his voice sound familiar. I do not see why any one acknowledges him.”

“But they can’t help it. He knows everybody, and everything. I—I thought you had some good reason, Dr. Izard, something that would make it easy for me to deny his claims.”

“You—” The doctor’s sleepless night seemed to have had a strange effect upon him, for he stammered in speaking, he who was always so cold and precise. “You thought—” he began, but presently broke into that new, strange laugh of his, and urging Polly towards her lover, he addressed his questions to the latter. “Does this man,” he asked, “make a serious claim upon the Earle name and its rights?”

Clarke, who was always sensible when in Dr. Izard’s presence of something intangible but positive acting like a barrier between them and yet who strangely revered the doctor, summoned up his courage and responded with the respect he really felt.

“Yes,” said he; but with a certain reserve, “that is our best reason perhaps for believing him. He promises not to molest Polly, nor to make any demands upon her until she herself recognizes her duty.”

The frown which darkened the doctor’s face deepened.

“He is a deep one, then,” said he, and stood for a moment silent.

“If he is an impostor, yes,” assented Clarke; “but Lawyer Crouse, who talked with him half an hour last night, accepted him at once, and so did Mr. Sutherland.” Mr. Sutherland was the Baptist minister.

“The fools!” muttered the doctor, as much in anger as amazement; “has the whole town reached its dotage?”

Clarke, who seemed surprised at the doctor’s vehemence, quietly remarked:

“You were Mr. Earle’s best friend. If you say that this man is not he, there would of course be many to listen to you.”

But the doctor, resuming his accustomed expression, refused an answer to this suggestion, at which Polly’s face grew very pale, and she grasped his arm imploringly, saying as she did so:

“I cannot bear this uncertainty, I cannot bear to think there is any question about this matter. If he is my father, I owe him everything; if he is not——”

“Polly,”—The doctor spoke coldly but not unkindly, “marry Clarke, go with him to Cleveland where he has the promise of a fine position, and leave this arrant pretender to settle his rights himself. He will not urge them long when he finds the money gone for which he is striving.”

“You bid me do that? Then you _know_ he is not my father.”

But the doctor instead of answering with the vigorous yes she had expected, looked aside and carelessly murmured:

“I have said that I saw no likeness in him to the man I once knew. Of course my judgment was hurried, our interview was short and I was laboring under the shock of his appearance. But if everybody else in town recognizes him as Ephraim Earle, I must needs think my opinion was warped by my surprise and the indignation I felt at what I considered a gross piece of presumption.”

“Then you do not know,” quoth poor Polly, her head sinking lower and lower on her breast.

“No,” cried the doctor, turning shortly at the word and advancing once more toward the buggy.

But at this move she sprang forward and sought again to detain him.

“But you will not go and leave me in this dreadful uncertainty,” she pleaded. “You will stay and have another talk with this man and satisfy yourself and me that he is indeed my father.”

But the stern line into which the doctor’s lip settled, assured her that in this regard he was not to be moved; and frightened, overawed by the prospect before her, she turned to Clarke and cried:

“Take me home, take me back to your mother; she is the only person who can give me any comfort.”

The doctor who was slowly proceeding to his horse’s head, looked back.

“Then you don’t like my advice,” he smiled.

She stared, remembered what he had said and answered indignantly:

“If this poor, wretched, wicked-eyed man is my father—and I should never have doubted it if you had not declared him an impostor before all the town people—then I would be a coward to desert him and seek my happiness in a place where he could not follow me.”

“Even if he is as wicked as his looks indicate?”

“Yes, yes, even if he is wicked. Who can say what caused that wickedness.”

The doctor, fumbling with the halter, stopped and seemed to muse.

“Did you ever see your father’s picture hanging in the old cottage?”

“Yes, I saw it yesterday.”

“Did that have a wicked look?”

“I do not think it had a good look.” This was said very low but it made the doctor start.

“No?” he exclaimed.

“It made me feel a little unpleasant, as if something I could neither understand nor sympathize with had met me in my father’s smile. It made him more remote, and prepared me for the heartless figure of the man who in the next few minutes claimed me as his daughter.”

“Strange!” issued from the doctor’s lips; and his face, which had been hard to read from the first, became more and more inscrutable.

“My mother, who is as wise as she is gentle, advises Polly to give up the cottage to her father; but not to live in it with him till his character is better understood and his intentions made manifest.”

“Then your mother sees this man in the same light as others do?”

“She certainly considers him to be Ephraim Earle. It is not natural for her to think otherwise under the circumstances.”

“I do indeed stand alone,” quoth the doctor.

“When I told her,” pursued Clarke, “what you had said, she looked amazed but she said nothing to show that she had changed her opinion. I do not think any one was really affected by your words.”

Something in the tone in which this was said showed where Clarke himself stood. A bitter smile crossed the doctor’s lip, and he seemed more than ever anxious to be gone.

“I shall be away,” he said, “several days. When I come back I hope to see this thing settled.”

“I hate him,” burst from Polly’s lips. “I am terrified at my thoughts of him, but in my inner consciousness I know him to be my father, and I shall try and do my duty by him; shall I not, Clarke?”

Clarke, who had felt himself almost unnecessary in this scene, grasped at the opportunity which this appeal gave him and took her tenderly by the arm.

“We will try and do our duty,” he corrected, “praying Providence to help us.”

And the doctor, with a glance at them both, sprang into his buggy and was driving off when he rose and flung back at Polly this final word of paternal advice:

“He is the claimant; you are the one in possession. Let him prove himself to be the man he calls himself.”

Clarke, dropping Polly’s arm, sprang after the doctor.

“Wait! one moment,” he cried. “What do you call proof? You who knew him so well in the past, tell us how to make sure that his pretensions are not false.”

The doctor, drawing up his horse, paused for a moment in deep thought.

“Ask him,” he finally said, “to show you the medal given him by the French government. As it has never been found in his house, and as it was useless to raise money upon, he should, if he is Ephraim Earle, be able to produce it. Till he does, I advise you to cherish doubts in his regard, and above all to keep that innocent and enthusiastic young girl out of his clutches.”

And with a smile which would have taken more than Clarke’s experience with the world to understand, much less to explain, the doctor whipped up his horse and disappeared down the road towards the station.

XIV.

GRACE.

THE doctor did not return in a few days nor in a few weeks. Two months passed before his gate creaked on its hinges and the word ran through the town, “Dr. Izard is back!”

He arrived in Hamilton at nightfall, and proceeded at once to his office. There was in his manner none of the hesitation shown at his last entrance there, and when by chance he passed the mirror in his quick movements about the room he was pleased himself to note the calmness of his features, and the quiet air of dignified reserve once more pervading his whole appearance.

“I have fought the battle,” he quietly commented to himself; “and now to face the new order of things!”

He looked about the room, put a few matters in order, and then stepped out into the green space before his door. Glancing right and left and seeing nobody in the road or in the fields beyond the cemetery, he walked straight to the monument of Polly’s mother and sternly, determinately surveyed it. Then he glanced down at the grave it shaded, and detecting a stray leaf lying on its turf, he picked it up and cast it aside, with a suggestion of that strange smile which had lately so frequently altered his handsome features. After which he roamed through the churchyard, coming back to his door by another path. The chill of early September had touched many of the trees about, and there was something like dreariness in the landscape. But he did not appear to notice this, and entered in and sat down at his table with his former look of concentration and purpose.

Evening came and with it several patients; some from need, some from curiosity. To both kinds he listened with equal calmness, prescribing for their real or fancied complaints and seeing them at once to the door. At ten o’clock even these failed to put in an appearance, and being tired, he was about to draw his shade and lock his door when there came a low knock at the latter of so timid and so hesitating a character that his countenance changed and he waited for another knock before uttering his well known sharp summons to enter.

It came after a moment’s delay, and from some impulse difficult for himself to explain, he proceeded to the door, and hastily opened it. A tall, heavily veiled figure, clad in widow’s weeds, stood before him, at sight of which he started back, hardly believing his eyes.

“Grace!” he ejaculated; “Grace!” and held out his arms with an involuntary movement of which he seemed next moment ashamed, for with a sudden change of manner he became on the instant ceremonious, and welcoming in his visitor with a low bow, he pushed forward a chair, with mechanical politeness, and stammered with intense emotion:

“You are ill! Or your son! Some trouble threatens you or you would not be here.”

“My son is well, and I—I am as well as usual,” answered the advancing lady, taking the chair he offered her, though not without some hesitation. “Clarke is with the horses in front and I have ventured—at this late hour—to visit you, because I knew you would never come to me, even if I sent for you, Oswald.”

The tone, the attitude, the whole aspect of the sweet yet dignified woman before him, seemed to awaken an almost uncontrollable emotion in the doctor. He leaned toward her and said in tones which seemed to have a corresponding effect upon her: “You mistake, Grace. One word from you would have brought me at any time; that is, if I could have been of any service to you. I have never ceased to love you—” He staggered back but quickly recovered himself—“and never shall.”

“I do not understand you,” protested Mrs. Unwin, half rising. “I did not come—I did not expect—” her agitation prevented her from proceeding.

“I do not understand myself!” exclaimed he, walking a step away. “I never thought to speak such words to you again. Forgive me, Grace; you have a world of wrong to pardon in me; add another mark of forbearance to your list and make me more than ever your debtor.” She drooped her head and sitting down again seemed to be endeavoring to regain her self-possession.

“It was for Clarke,” she murmured, “that I came.”

“I might have known it,” cried the doctor.

“He would not speak for himself, and Polly, the darling child, has become so dazed by the experiences of these last two months that she no longer knows her duty. Besides, she seems afraid to speak to you again; says that you frighten her, and that you no longer love her.”

“I never have loved her,” he muttered, but so low the words were not carried to the other’s ears.

“Have you learned in your absence what has taken place here in Hamilton?” she asked.

Rousing himself, for his thoughts were evidently not on the subject she advanced, he took a seat near her and composed himself to listen, but meeting her soft eyes shining through the heavy crape she wore, he said with a slight appealing gesture:

“Let me see your face, Grace, before I attempt to answer. I have not dared to look upon it for fourteen years, but now, with some of the barriers down which held us inexorably apart, I may surely be given the joy of seeing your features once more, even if they show nothing but distrust and animosity toward me.”

She hesitated, and his face grew pale with the struggle of his feelings, then her slim white hand went up and almost before he could realize it, they sat face to face.

“O Grace,” he murmured; “the same! always the same; the one woman in all the world to me! But I will not distress you. Other griefs lie nearer your heart than any I could hope to summon up, and I do not know as I would have it otherwise if I could. Proceed with your questions. They were in reference to Clarke, I believe.”

“No, I only asked if you had kept yourself acquainted with what has been going on in Hamilton since you left. Did you know that Ephraim Earle was living again in the old house, and that Polly is rapidly losing her fortune owing to his insatiable demands for money?”

“No!” He sprang to his feet and his whole attitude showed distress and anger. “I told her to make the fellow give her a proof, an unmistakable proof, that he was indeed the brilliant inventor of whose fame we have all been proud.”

“And he furnished it, Oswald. You mean the medal which he received from France, do you not? Well, he had it among his treasures in the cave, and he showed it to her one day. It was the one thing, he declared, from which he had never parted in all his adventurous career.”

“You are dreaming! he never had _that_! Could not have had _that_! It was some deception he practised upon you!” exclaimed the doctor, aghast and trembling.

But she shook her lovely head, none the less beautiful because her locks were becoming silvered on the forehead, and answered: “It was the very medal we saw in our youth, with the French arms and inscription upon it. Dr. Sutherland examined it, and Mr. Crouse says he remembers it well. Besides it had his name engraved upon it and the year.”

The doctor, to whom her words seemed to come in a sort of nightmare, sank into his chair and stared upon her with such horror that she would have recoiled from him in dismay had he been any other man than Oswald Izard, so long loved and so long and passionately borne with, notwithstanding his mysterious words and startling inconsistencies of conduct.

“You do not know why this surprises me,” he exclaimed, and hung his head. “I was so sure,” he added below his breath, “that this was some impostor, and not Ephraim Earle.”

“I know,” she proceeded, after a moment, as soon, indeed, as she thought he could understand her words, “that you did not credit his claims and refused to recognize him as Polly’s father. But I had no idea you felt so deeply on the subject or I might have written to you long ago. You have some reasons for your doubts, Oswald; for I see that your convictions are not changed by this discovery. What is it? I am ready to listen if no one else is, for he is blighting Polly’s life and at the same time shattering my son’s hopes.”

“I said—I swore to Polly that I had no reason,” he declared, gloomily dropping his eyes and assuming at once the defensive.

But she with infinite tact and a smile he could not but meet, answered softly: “I know that too; but I am better acquainted with you than she is, and I am confident that you have had some cause for keeping the truth from Polly, which will not apply to me. Is there not something connected with those old days—something, perhaps, known only to you, which would explain your horror of this man’s pretensions and help her possibly out of her dilemma? Are you afraid to confide it to me, when perhaps in doing so you would make two innocent ones happy?”

“I cannot talk about it,” he replied with almost fierce emphasis. “Ephraim Earle and I—” He started, caught her by the arm and turned his white face toward the door. “Hush!” he whispered, and stooped his ear to listen. She watched him with terror and amazement, but he soon settled back, and waving his hand remarked quietly:

“The boughs are losing their leaves and the vines sometimes tap against the windows like human fingers. You were saying——”

“_You_ were saying that Ephraim Earle and you——”

But his blank looks showed that he had neither understood nor followed her. “Were you not good friends?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” he answered hastily; “too good friends for me to be mistaken now.”

“Then it is from his looks alone that you conclude him to be an impostor?”

The doctor did not respond, and she, seeming quite helpless to move, sat for a minute silently contemplating his averted face.

“I know you did not talk with him long. Nor have I attempted to do so, yet in spite of everybody’s opinion but your own I have come to the same conclusion as yourself, that he is not Polly’s father.”

The doctor’s lips moved, but no words issued from them.

“That is why I press the matter; that is why I am here to pray and entreat you to save Polly and to save my son. _Prove this man a villain_, and force him to loose his hold upon the Earle estate before Polly’s money is all gone!”

“Is it then a question of money?” asked the doctor. “Two months have passed and you are afraid that he will dispose of twenty thousand dollars!”

“He has already disposed of ten of them and the rest——”

“Disposed of ten thousand dollars!”

“Yes, for old gambling debts, pressing matters which Polly could not let stand without shame.”

“The wretch!” leapt from the doctor’s lips. “Was there no one to advise her, to forbid——”

“You were gone and Clarke was afraid of seeming mercenary. I think the girl’s secret terror of her father and her lack of filial affection drove her to yield so readily to his demands for money.”

An inarticulate word was the doctor’s sole reply.

“And that is not the whole. Clarke’s career is endangered and the prospect of his carrying out his plans almost gone. Mr. Earle—I have called him so—does not hesitate to say that he must have five thousand dollars more by next October. If Polly accedes to this demand, and I do not think we can influence her to refuse him, Clarke will have to forego all hopes of becoming a member of the Cleveland firm, for he will never take her last five thousand, even if she urges him to it on her knees.”

“It is abominable, unprecedented!” fumed the doctor, rising and pacing the room. “But I can do nothing, prove nothing. He has been received as Ephraim Earle, and is too strongly intrenched in his position for me to drive him out.”

The absolutism with which this was said made his words final; and she slowly rose.

“And so I too have failed,” she cried; but seeing his face and noting the yearning look with which he regarded her, she summoned up her courage afresh and finally said: “They have told me—I have heard—that this man made some strange threats to you in parting. Is that the reason why you do not like to interfere or to proclaim more widely your opinion of him?”

The doctor smiled, but there was no answer in the smile and she went vehemently on: “Such threats, Oswald, are futile. No one less sensitive than you would heed them for a moment. You are above any one’s aspersion, even on an old charge like that.”

“Men will believe anything,” he muttered.

“But men will not believe that. Do we not all know how faithfully you attended Mrs. Earle in her last illness, and how much skill you displayed? I remember it well, if the rest of the community do not, and I say you need not fear anything this man can bring up against you. His influence in town does not go so far as that.”

But the doctor with unrelieved sadness answered with decision, “I cannot make this man my enemy; he has too venomous a tongue.” And she watching him knew that Polly’s doom was fixed and her son’s also, and began slowly to draw down her veil.

But he, noticing this action, though he had seemed to be blind to many others she had made, turned upon her with such an entreating look that she faltered and let her hand fall in deep emotion.

“Grace,” he pleaded, “Grace, I cannot let you go without one kindly word to make the solitude which must settle upon this room after your departure, less unendurable. You distrust me.”

“Does this visit here look like distrust?” she gently asked.

“And you hate me! But——”

“Do I look as if I hated you?” she again interposed, this time with the look of an angel in her sad but beautiful eyes.

“Ah, Grace,” he cried, with the passion of a dozen years let loose in one uncontrollable flood, “you cannot love me, not after all these years. When we parted——”

“At whose instigation, Oswald?”

“At mine, at mine, I know it. Do not reproach me with that, for I could not have done differently.—I thought, I dreamed that it was with almost as much pain on your side as mine. But you married, Grace, married very soon.”

“Still at whose instigation?”

“Again at mine. I dared not keep you from any comfort which life might have in store for you, and the years which you have spent in happiness and honor must have obliterated some of the traces of that love which bound our lives together fifteen years ago.”

“Oswald, Mr. Unwin was a good husband and Clarke has always been like an own son to me, but——”

“Oh,” interposed the doctor, starting back before the beauty of her face, “don’t tell me that a woman’s heart can, like a man’s, be the secret sepulchre of a living passion for fifteen years. I could not bear to know that! The struggle which I waged fourteen years ago I have not strength to wage now. No! no! woman of my dreams, of my heart’s dearest emotion, loved once, loved now, loved always! tell me anything but _that_,—tell me even that you hate me.”

Her eyes, which had fallen before his, swam suddenly with tears and she started as if for protection toward the door.

“Oh, I must go,” she cried. “Clarke is waiting; it is not wise; it is not seemly for me to be here.” But the doctor, into whom a fiery glow had entered, was beside her before she could reach the threshold. “No, no,” he pleaded, “not till you have uttered one word, one whisper of the old story; one assurance—Ah, now I am entreating for the very thing, the existence of which, I deprecated a few minutes ago! It shows how unbalanced I am. Yes, yes, you can go; but, Grace, if you have ever doubted that I loved you, listen to this one confession. Ever since the day we parted, necessarily parted, fourteen years ago, I have never let a week go by till these last few ones during which I have been away from Hamilton, that I have not given up two nights a week to thinking of you and watching you.”

“Watching me!”

“Twice a week for fourteen years have I sat for an hour in Mrs. Fanning’s west window that overlooks your gardens. Thence, unnoted by everybody, I have noted you, if by happy chance you walked in the garden; and if you did not, noted the house that held you and the man who sheltered your youth.”

“Oswald,”—she felt impelled to speak, “if—if you loved me like this, why did you send me that cruel letter two days after our engagement? Why did you bid me forget you and marry some one else, if you had not forgotten me and did not wish me to release you in order that you might satisfy your own wishes in another direction?”

“Grace, if I could explain myself now I could have explained myself then. Fate, which is oftenest cruel to the most loving and passionate hearts, has denied me the privilege of marriage, and when I found it out——”

“True, you have never married. Cruel, cruel one! Why did you not let me know that you would always live single for my sake; it would have made it possible for me to have lived single for yours.”

The doctor with the love of a lifetime burning in his eyes, shook his head at this, and answered: “That would have shown me to be a selfish egotist, and I did not want to be other than generous to you. No, Grace, all was done for the best; and this is for the best, this greeting and this second parting. The love which we have acknowledged to-night will be a help and not a hindrance to us both. But we will meet again, not very soon, for I cannot trust a strength which has yielded so completely at your first smile.”

“Farewell, then, Oswald,” she murmured. “It has taken the sting from my heart to know that you did not leave me from choice.”

And he, striving to speak, broke down, and it was she who had to show her strength by gently leaving him and finding her own way to the door.

But no sooner had the night blast blowing in from the graveyard struck him, than he stumbled in haste to the threshold, and drawing her with a frenzied grasp from the path she was blindly taking toward the graves, led her from that path to the high road, where Clarke was waiting in some anxiety for the end of this lengthy interview. As the doctor gave her up and saw her taken in charge by her son, he said with a thrilling emphasis not soon to be forgotten by either of the two who listened to them:

“Try every means, and be sure you bid Polly to try every means, to rid yourselves of the bondage of this interloper. If all fails, come to me. But do not come till every other hope is dead.”