BOOK II

I

Patience watched the dusty hills of San Francisco, the sparkling bay alive with sail and spar, the pink mountains of the far coast range, the brown hills opposite the grey city, willowed and gulched and bare, the forts on rock and points, until the wild lurching of the steamer over the bar directed her attention to the unhappy passengers. In a short while she had not even these to amuse her, nothing but a grey plain and empty decks. At first she felt a waif in space; but soon a delightful sense of independence stole over her, of freedom from all the ills and responsibilities of life. The land world might have collapsed upon its fiery heart, so little could it affect her while that waste of waters slid under the horizon.

The few passengers came forth restored in a day or two. A husband and wife and several children did not interest Patience; neither did the captain’s wife, in whose charge she was. A young girl with a tangle of yellow hair under a sailor hat was more inviting, but she flirted industriously with the purser and took not the slightest notice of Patience. Her invalid mother reclined languidly in a steamer chair and read the novels of E. P. Roe.

The only other passenger was an elderly gentleman who read books in white covers neatly lettered with black which fascinated Patience. She was beginning to long for books. The invalid lent her a Roe, but she returned it half unread. As the old gentleman had never addressed her, did not seem to be aware of her existence, she could hardly expect a similar courtesy from him.

She was glowering upon universal stupidity one morning when he appeared on deck with a carpet bag, from which, after comfortably establishing himself in his steamer chair, he took little white volume after little white volume. Patience’s curiosity overcame her. She went forward slowly and stood before him. He looked up sharply. His black eyes, piercing from their shaggy arches, made her twitch her head as if to fling aside some penetrative force. His very beard, silver though it was, had a fierce sidewise twist. His nose was full nostrilled and drooped scornfully. The spectacles he wore served as a sort of lens for the fire of his extraordinary eyes.

“Well?” he said gruffly.

“Please, sir,” said Patience, humbly, “will you lend me a book?”

“Book? I don’t carry children’s literature round with me.”

“I don’t read children’s literature.”

“Oh, you don’t? Well, not ‘The Chatterbox,’ I suppose; but I have nothing of Pansy’s nor yet of The Duchess.”

“I wouldn’t read them if you had,” cried Patience, angrily. “Perhaps I’ve read a good many books that you haven’t re-read so long ago yourself. I’ve read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott, and,” with a shudder, “Gibbon’s ‘Rome’ and Thiers’ ‘French Revolution.’”

“Oh, you have? Well, I beg your pardon. Sit down, and I’ll see if I can find something for a young lady of your surprising attainments.”

Patience, too pleased to resent sarcasm, applied herself to his elbow.

“Why are they all bound alike?” she asked.

“This is the Tauchnitz edition of notable English and American books. How is this?” He handed her a volume of Grace Aguilar.

“No, sir! I’ve tried her, and she’s a greater bore than Jane Austen.”

“Oh, you want a love story, I suppose?” His accentuation was fairly sardonic.

“No, I don’t,” she said with an intonation which made him turn and regard her with interest. Then once more he explored his bag.

“Will this suit you?” He held out a copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution.”

Patience groaned. “Didn’t I tell you I’d just read Thiers’?”

“This isn’t Thiers’. Try it.” And he took no further notice of her.

Patience opened the volume, and in a few moments was absorbed. There was something in the storm and blare of the style which struck a responsive chord. She did not raise her head until dinner time. She scarcely spoke until she had finished the volume, and then only to ask for the second. For several days she felt as if the atmosphere was charged with dynamite, and jumped when any one addressed her. The owner of the Tauchnitz watched her curiously. When she had finished the second volume she told him that she did not care for anything more at present. She leaned over the railing most of the day, watching the waves. Toward sunset the gentleman called peremptorily,—

“Come here.”

Patience stood before his chair.

“Well, what do you think of it?” he demanded. “Tell me exactly what your impressions are.”

“I feel as if there was an earthquake in my skull and all sorts of pictures flying about, and exploded pieces of drums and trumpets, and kings and queens. I think Carlyle must have been made on purpose to write the French Revolution. It was—as if—there was a great picture of it made on the atmosphere, and when he was born it passed into him.”

“Upon my word,” he said, “you are a degree or two removed from the letters of bread and milk. You are a very remarkable kid. Sit down.”

Patience took the chair beside him. “He made my head ache,” she added. “I feel as if it had been hammered.”

“I don’t wonder. Older heads have felt the same way. What’s your name?”

“Patience Sparhawk.”

“Tell me all about yourself.”

“Oh, there isn’t much to tell,” and she frowned heavily.

“Don’t look so tragic—you alarm me. I’m convinced there is a great deal. Come, I want to know.”

Patience gave a few inane particulars. The old gentleman snorted. “It’s evident you’ve never been interviewed,” he said grimly. “Now, I’ll tell you who I am, and then you won’t mind talking about yourself. There’s nothing so catching as egotism. My name is James E. Field. I own one of the great newspapers of New York, of which I am also editor-in-chief. Do you know what that means? Well, if you don’t, let me tell you. It is to be a man more powerful than the President of the United States, for he can make presidents, which is something the president himself can’t do. He knows more about people’s private affairs than any of intimate relationship; he has his finger on the barometer of his readers’ brain; he can make them sensational or sober, intellectually careless or exacting; he can keep them in ignorance of all that is best worth knowing of the world’s affairs, by snubbing the great events and tendencies of the day and vitiating their brain with local crimes and scandals, or he can illumine their minds and widen their brain cells by not only enlarging upon what every intelligent person should wish to know, but by making such matter of profound interest; he can ignore science, or enlighten several hundred thousand people; he can add to the happiness of the human race by exposing abuses and hidden crime, or he can accept hush money and let the sore fester; he can lash the unrest of the lower classes, or chloroform it; he can use the sledge hammer, the rapier, and the vitriol, or give over his editorial page to windy nothings; he can demolish political bosses, or prolong their career. In short, his power is greater than Alexander’s was, for he is a general of minds instead of brute force.”

“My goodness gracious!” exclaimed Patience. “What sort of a paper have you got?”

He laughed. “Wait until you’ve lived in New York awhile and you’ll find out. Its name is the ‘Day,’ and it has made a president or two, and made one or two others wish they’d never been born. By the way, I didn’t tell you much about myself, did I? The auxiliary subject carried me away. I’m married, and have several sons and daughters, and am off for a rest—not from the family but from the ‘Day.’ I’ve been round the world. That will do for the present. Tell me all about Monterey.”

With consummate skill he extracted the history of her sixteen years. On some points she fought him so obstinately that he inferred what she would not tell. He ended by becoming profoundly interested. He was a man of enthusiasms, which sometimes wrote themselves in vitriol, at others in the milk of human kindness. His keen unerring brain, which Patience fancied flashed electric search lights, comprehended that it had stumbled upon a character waging perpetual war with the pitiless Law of Circumstance, and that the issue might serve as a plot for one of the mental dramas of the day.

“Your experience and the bad blood in you, taken in connection with your bright and essentially modern mind, will make a sort of intellectual anarchist of you,” he said. “I doubt if you take kindly to the domestic life. You will probably go in for the social problems, and ride some polemical hobby for eight or ten years, at the end of which time you will be inclined to look upon your sex as the soubrettes of history. Your enthusiasm may make you a faddist, but your common sense may aid you in the perception of several eternal truths which the women of to-day in their blind bolt have overlooked.”

A moment later he repented his generalisations, for Patience had demanded full particulars. Nevertheless, he gave her many a graphic outline of the various phases of current history, and was the most potent educational force that she had yet encountered. She preferred him to books and admired him without reserve, trotting at his heels like a small dog. His unique and virile personality, his brilliant and imperious mind, magnetised the modern essence of which she was made. There was nothing of the old-fashioned intellectual type about him. He might have induced the coining of the word “brainy,”—he certainly typed it. Although he had the white hair and the accumulated wisdom of his years, he had the eyes of youth and the fist of vigour at any age. One day when two natives looked too long upon Patience’s blondinity, as she and Mr. Field were exploring a banana grove during one of their brief excursions on shore, he cracked their skulls together as if they had been two cocoanuts.

Patience laughed as the blacks dropped sullenly behind. “How funny that they should admire me,” she said. “I’m not pretty.”

“Well, you’re white. Besides, there is one thing more fascinating than beauty, and that is a strong individuality. It radiates and magnetises.”

“Have I all that?” Patience blushed with delight.

He laughed good-naturedly. “Yes, I’ll stake a good deal that you have. You may even be pretty some day; that is, if you ever get those freckles off.”

Inherent as was her passion for nature, she enjoyed the rich beauty of the tropics the more for the companionship of a mind skilled in observation and interpretation. It was her first mental comprehension of the law of duality.

As they approached New York harbour Mr. Field said to her: “I think I’ll have to make a newspaper woman of you. When you have finished your education, don’t think of settling down to any such humdrum career as that of the school-teacher. Come to me, and I’ll put you through your paces. If I’m not more mistaken than I’ve been yet, I’ll turn out a newspaper woman that will induce a mightier blast of woman’s horn. Think you’d like it?”

“I’d like to be with you,” said Patience, on the verge of tears. “Sha’n’t I see you again till I’m eighteen?”

“No, I don’t want to see or hear from you again until you’ve kneaded that brain of yours into some sort of shape by three years of hard study. Then I’ll go to work on a good foundation. You haven’t told me if you’ll take a try at it.”

“Of course I will. Do you think I want to be a school-teacher? I should think it would be lovely to be a newspaper woman.”

“Well, it isn’t exactly lovely, but it is a good training in the art of getting along without adjectives. Now look round you and I’ll explain this harbour; and don’t you brag any more about your San Francisco harbour.”

They entered through The Narrows, between the two toy forts. A few lone sentries paced the crisp snow on the heights of Staten Island, and looked in imminent danger of tumbling down the perpendicular lawns. The little stone windows of the earthen redoubts seemed to wink confidently at each other across the water, and loomed superciliously above the forts on the water’s edge. Long Island, had the repose of a giant that had stretched his limbs in sleep, unmindful of the temporary hamlets on his swelling front. Staten Island curved and uplifted herself coquettishly under her glittering garb and crystal woods. Far away the faint line of the New Jersey shore, looking like one unbroken city on a hundred altitudes, hovered faintly under its mist. The river at its base was a silver ribbon between a mirage and a stupendous castle of seven different architectures surmounted by a golden dome—which same was New York and the dome of a newspaper. Then a faint fairy-like bridge, delicate as a cobweb, sprang lightly across another river to a city of walls with windows in them—which same was Brooklyn. Under the shadow of the arches was a baby island fortified with what appeared to be a large Dutch cheese out of which the mice had gnawed their way with much regularity. The great bay, blue as liquid sapphire, was alive with craft of every design: rowboats scuttled away from the big outgoing steamers; sails, white as the snow on the heights, bellied in the sharp wind; yellow and red ferry boats gave back long symmetrical curves of white smoke; gaunt ships with naked spars lay at rest. On Liberty Island the big girl pointed solemnly upward as if reminding the city on the waters of the many mansions in the invisible stars. Snow clouds were scudding upward from the east, but overhead there was plentiful gold and blue.

Patience gazed through Mr. Field’s glass, enraptured, and promised not to brag. As they swung toward the dock he laid his hand kindly on hers.

“Now don’t think I’m callous,” he said, “because I part from you without any apparent regret. You are going to be in good hands during the rest of your early girlhood, and I could be of no assistance to you; and I am a very busy man. Let me tell you that you have made this month a good deal shorter than it would otherwise have been; and when we meet again you won’t have to introduce yourself. There are my folks, and there goes the gang-plank. Good-bye, and God bless you.”

II

Patience leaned over the upper railing, looking at the expectant crowd on the wharf, wondering when the captain would remember her. She felt a strong inclination to run after Mr. Field. As he receded up the wharf, surrounded by his family, he turned and waved his hand to her.

“Why couldn’t he have been Mr. Foord’s brother or something?” she thought resentfully. “I think he might have adopted me.”

As the crowd thinned she noticed two elderly women standing a few feet from the vessel, alternately inspecting the landed passengers and the decks. One was a very tall slender and graceful woman, possessed of that subtle quality called style, despite her unfashionable attire. In her dark regular face were the remains of beauty, and although nervous and anxious, it wore the seal of gentle blood. Her large black eyes expressed a curious commingling of the spiritual and the human. She was probably sixty years old. At her side was a woman some ten years younger, of stouter and less elastic figure, with a strong dark kind intelligent face and an utter disregard of dress. She carried several bundles.

“Oh, hasn’t she come?” cried the elder woman. “Can she have died at sea? I am sure the dear Lord wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Dear sister, _do_ you see her?”

The other woman, who was also looking everywhere except at Patience, replied in a round cheerful voice: “No, not yet, but I feel sure she is there. The captain hasn’t had time to bring her on shore. The Lord tells me that it is all right.”

“One of those is Miss Tremont,” thought Patience, “I may as well go down. They appear to be frightfully religious, but they have nice faces.”

She ran down to the lower deck, then across the gang-plank.

“I’m Patience Sparhawk,” she said; “are you—” The older woman uttered a little cry, caught her in her arms, and kissed her. “Oh, you dear little thing!” she exclaimed, and kissed her again. “How I’ve prayed the dear Lord to bring you safely, and He has, praise His holy name. Oh, I am so glad to see you. I do love children so. We’ll be so happy together—you and I and Him—and, oh, I’m so glad to see you.”

Patience, breathless, but much gratified, kissed her warmly.

“Don’t forget me,” exclaimed the other lady. She had a singularly hearty voice and a brilliant smile. Patience turned to her dutifully, and received an emphatic kiss.

“This is my dear friend, my dear sister in the Lord, Miss Beale, Patience,” said Miss Tremont, flurriedly, “and she wanted to see you almost as much as I did.”

“Indeed I did,” said Miss Beale, breezily. “I too love little girls.”

“I’m sure you’re both very kind,” said Patience, helplessly. She hardly knew how to meet so much effusion. But something cold and old within her seemed to warm and thaw.

“You dear little thing,” continued Miss Tremont. “Are you cold? That is a very light coat you have on.”

Patience was not dressed for an eastern winter, but her young blood and curiosity kept her warm.

“Here comes the captain,” she said. “Oh, no, I’m all right. I like the cold.”

The captain, satisfying himself that his charge was in the proper hands, offered to send her trunk to Mariaville by express, and Patience, wedged closely between the two ladies, boarded a street car.

“You know,” exclaimed Miss Tremont, “I knew the Lord would bring you to me safely in spite of the perils of the ocean. Every night and every morning I prayed: _Dear_ Lord, don’t let anything happen to her,—and I knew He wouldn’t.”

“Does He always do what you tell Him?” asked Patience.

“Almost everything I ask Him,—that is to say, when He thinks best. Dear Patience, if you knew how He looks out for me—and it is well He sees fit, for dear knows I have a time taking care of myself. Why, He even takes care of my purse. I’m always leaving it round, and He always sends it back to me—from counters and trains and restaurants and everywhere. And when I start in the wrong direction He always whispers in my ear in time. Why, once I had to catch a certain train to Philadelphia, where I was to preside at a convention, and I’d taken the wrong street car, and when I jumped off and took the right one, the driver said I couldn’t possibly get to the ferry in time. So I just shut my eyes and prayed; and then I told the driver that it would be all right, as I had asked the Lord to see that I got there in time. The driver laughed, and said: ‘W-a-a-l, I guess the Lord’ll go back on you this time.’ But I caught that ferry-boat. _He_—the Lord—made it five minutes late. And it’s always the same. He takes care of me, praised be His name.”

“You must feel as if He were your husband,” said Patience, too gravely to be suspected of irreverence.

“Why, He is. Doesn’t the Bible say—” But the car began to rattle over the badly paved streets, and the quotation was lost.

Patience looked eagerly through the windows at purlieus of indescribable ugliness; but it was New York, a city greater than San Francisco, and she found even its youthful old age picturesque. The dense throng of people in Sixth Avenue and the immense shop windows induced expressions of rapture.

“You don’t live here, do you?” she said with a sigh.

“Oh, Mariaville is much nicer than New York,” replied Miss Beale, in her enthusiastic way. “I hate a great crowded city. It baffles you so when you try to do good.”

“Still they do say that reform work is more systematised here, dear sister.”

“Forty-second Street,” shouted the conductor, and they changed cars. A few moments later they were pulling out of the Grand Central Station for Mariaville.

Miss Beale had asked the conductor to turn a seat, and Patience faced her new friends. As they left the tunnel she caught sight of a tiny bow of white ribbon each wore on her coat.

“Why do you wear that?” she asked.

“Why, we’re W. C. T. U’s,” replied Miss Beale.

“Wctus?”

“Temperance cranks,” said Miss Tremont, smiling.

“Temperance cranks?”

“Why, have you never heard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union?” asked Miss Beale, a chill breathing over her cordial voice. “The movement has reason to feel encouraged all through the West.”

“I’ve never heard of it. They don’t have it in Monterey, and I’ve not been much in San Francisco.”

“She’s such a child,” said Miss Tremont. “How could she know of it out there? But now I know she is going to be one of our very best Y’s.”

“Y’s?” asked Patience, helplessly. She wondered if this was the “fad” Mr. Field had predicted for her, then recalled that he had alluded once to the “Temperance movement,” but could not remember his explanation, if he had made any. Doubtless she had evaded a disagreeable topic. But now that it was evidently to be a part of her new life she made no attempt to stem Miss Tremont’s enthusiasm.

“The Y’s are the young women of the Union; we are the W’s. It is our lifework, Patience, and I am sure you will become as much interested in it as we are, and be proud to wear the white ribbon. We have done so much good, and expect to do much more, with the dear Lord’s help. It is slow work, but we shall conquer in the end, for He is with us.”

“What do you do,—forbid people to sell liquor?”

Both ladies laughed. They were not without humour, and their experience had developed it. “No,” said Miss Tremont, “we don’t waste our time like that.” She gave an enthusiastic account of what the Union had accomplished. Her face glowed; her fine head was thrown back; her dark eyes sparkled. Patience thought she must have been a beautiful girl. She had a full voice with odd notes of protest and imperious demand which puzzled her young charge. One would have supposed that she was constantly imploring favours, and yet her air suggested natural hauteur, unexterminated by cultivated humility.

“I should think it was a good idea,” said Patience, with perfect sincerity.

“Oh, there’s dear Sister Watt,” cried Miss Tremont, and she rose precipitately, and crossing the aisle sat down beside a careworn anxious-eyed woman who also wore the white ribbon.

“Come over by me until Miss Tremont comes back,” said Miss Beale, with her brilliant smile. “Tell me, don’t you love her already? Oh, you have no idea how good she is. She is heart and soul in her work, and just lives for the Lord. She sometimes visits twenty poor families a week, besides her Temperance class, her sewing school, her Bible Readings, her Bible class, and all the religious societies, of which she is the most active worker. She is also the Mariaville agent for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and trustee of the Bible Society. You should hear her pray. I have heard all the great revivalists, but I have never heard anything like Miss Tremont’s prayers. How I envy you living with her! You’ll hear her twice a day, and sometimes oftener. She has a nice house on the outskirts of Mariaville. Her father left it to her twenty years ago, and she dedicated it to the Lord at once. It is headquarters for church meetings of all sorts. She has a Bible reading one afternoon a week. Any one can go, even a servant, for Miss Tremont, like all true followers of the Lord, is humble.”

Patience reflected that she had never seen any one look less humble than Miss Beale. In spite of her old frock she conveyed with unmistakable if unconscious emphasis that she possessed wealth and full knowledge of its power.

“You look so happy,” Patience said, her curiosity regarding Miss Tremont blunted for the present. “Are you?”

“Happy? Of course I am. I’ve never known an unhappy moment in my life. When my dear parents died, I only envied them. And have I not perfect health? Is not every moment of my time occupied?—why, I only sleep six hours out of the twenty-four. And Him. Do I not work for Him, and is He not always with me?”

“They are so funny about God,” thought Patience. “She talks as if He were her beau; and Miss Tremont as if He were her old man she’d been jogging along with for forty years or so.—Do you live alone?” she asked.

“Yes—that is, I board.”

“And don’t you ever feel lonesome?”

“Never. Is not He always with me?” Her strong brown face was suddenly illuminated. “Is He not my lover? Is He not always at my side, encouraging me and whispering of His love, night and day? Why, I can almost hear His voice, feel His hand. How could I be lonesome even on a desert island with no work to do?”

Patience gasped. The extraordinary simplicity of this woman of fifty fascinated her whom life and heredity had made so complex. But she moved restlessly, and felt an impulse to thrust out her legs and arms. She had a sensation of being swamped in religion.

“I shouldn’t think you’d like boarding,” she said irrelevantly.

“I don’t like it particularly, but it gives me more time for my work. I make myself comfortable, I can tell you, for I have my own bed with two splendid mattresses,—my landlady’s are the hardest things you ever felt,—and all my own furniture and knick-knacks. And I have my own tub, and every morning even in dead of winter, I take a cold bath. And I don’t wear corsets—”

“Mariaville,” called the conductor.

“Oh, here we are,” cried Miss Tremont. She made a wild dive for her umbrella and bag, seized Patience by the hand, and rushed up the aisle, followed leisurely by Miss Beale.

The snow was falling heavily. Patience had watched it drift and swirl over the Hudson, and should have liked to give it her undivided attention.

As they left the station they were greeted by a chorus of shrieks: “Have a sleigh? Have a sleigh?”

“What do you think, sister?” asked Miss Tremont, dubiously. “Do you think Patience can walk two miles in this snow? I don’t like to spend money on luxuries that I should give to the Lord.”

“Perhaps the sleigh man needs it,” said Patience, who had no desire to walk two miles in a driving storm.

“We’d better have a sleigh,” said Miss Beale, decidedly. “We will each pay half.”

“But why should you pay half,” said Miss Tremont, in her protesting voice, “when there are three of us?”

“I will pay for myself,” said Patience. “Mr. Foord gave me a twenty dollar gold piece, and I haven’t spent it.”

“Oh, dear child!” exclaimed Miss Tremont. “As if I’d let you.”

“Come, get in,” said Miss Beale; “we’ll be snowed under, here.”

And a few minutes later Patience, on the front seat, was enjoying her first sleigh-ride. She slid down under the fur robe, and winking the snow stars from her lashes, looked out eagerly upon Mariaville. The town rose from the Hudson in a succession of irregular precipitous terraces. The trees were skeletons, the houses old, but the effect was very picturesque; and the dancing crystals, the faint music of bells from far and near, the wide steep streets, delighted a mind magnetic for novelty.

They left Miss Beale before a pretty house, standing in a frozen garden, then climbed to the top of a hill, slid away to the edge of the town, and drew rein before an old-fashioned white one-winged house, which stood well back in a neglected yard behind walnut-trees and hemlocks. Beyond, closing the town, were the stark woods. Opposite was a prim little grove in which the snow stars were dancing.

“Here we are,” said Miss Tremont, climbing out. “Welcome home, Patience dear.” She paid the man, and hurried down the path. The door was opened by an elderly square-faced woman, who looked sharply at Patience, then smiled graciously.

“Patience, this is Ellen. She takes good care of me. Come in. Come in.”

The narrow hall ran through the main building, and was unfurnished but for a table and the stair. Miss Tremont led the way into a large double room of comfortable temperature, although no fire was visible. Bright red curtains covered the windows, a neat black carpet sprinkled with flowers the floor. The chairs were stiffly arranged, but upholstered cheerfully, the tables and mantels crowded with an odd assortment of cheap and handsome ornaments. The papered walls were a mosaic of family portraits. In the back parlour were a bookcase, a piano piled high with hymn-books, and a dozen or so queer little pulpit chairs. A door opened from the front parlour into a faded but hospitable dining-room.

Patience for the first time in her life experienced the enfolding of the home atmosphere, an experience denied to many for ever and ever. She turned impulsively, and throwing her arms about Miss Tremont, kissed and hugged her.

“Somehow I feel all made over,” she said apologetically, and getting very red. “But it is so nice—and you are so nice—and oh, it is all so different!”

And Miss Tremont, enraptured, first wished that this forlorn homely little waif was her very own, then vowed that neither should ever remember that she was not, and half carried her up to the bedroom prepared for her, a white fresh little room overlooking the shelving town.

III

The next afternoon a sewing woman came and cut down an old-fashioned but handsome fur-lined cloak of Miss Tremont’s to Patience’s diminutive needs. When Miss Tremont returned home, after a hard day’s work, she brought with her a hood, a pair of woollen gloves, and a pair of arctics; and Patience felt that she could weather a New York winter.

But Patience gave little attention to her clothes. When she was not watching the snow she was studying the steady stream of people who called at all hours, and invariably talked “church” and “temperance.” The atmosphere was so charged with religion that she was haunted by an uneasy prescience of a violent explosion during which Miss Tremont and her friends would sail upward, leaving her among the débris.

Her coat finished, she went in town with Miss Tremont to Temperance Hall. The snow had ceased to fall. The sun rode solitary on a cold blue sky, the ground was white and hard. The bare trees glittered in their crystal garb, icicles jewelled the eaves of the houses. The telegraph wires, studded with pendent spheres, looked like a vast diamond necklace of many strings which only Nature was mighty enough to wear. The hills were snowdrifts. The Hudson, far below, moved sluggishly under great blocks of ice. The Palisades were black and white. Miss Tremont and Patience walked rapidly, their frozen breath waving before them in fantastic shapes. It was all very delightful to Patience, who thrust her hands into her deep pockets and would have scorned to ride. At times she danced; new blood, charged with electricity, seemed shooting through her veins. Miss Tremont’s older teeth clattered occasionally. She bent forward slightly, her brow contracted over eyes which seemed ever seeking something, her long legs carrying her swiftly and with surprising grace. Patience had solved the enigma of her voice after hearing her pray, and she supposed that her eyes were on loyal watch for the miseries of the world.

After a time they descended an almost perpendicular hill to the business part of the town. Beyond a few level streets the ground rose again, wooded and thickly built upon. On the left was another hill, which, Miss Tremont informed her, was Hog Heights, the quarter of the poor.

The streets in the valley twisted and doubled like the curves of an angry python. In the centre was a square which might have been called Rome, since all ways led to it.

Temperance Hall, a building of Christian-like humility, stood on a back street flanked by many low-browed shops. On the first floor were the parlour, reading-room, and refectory, on the second a large hall, on the third bedrooms. The hall was already half full of boys and girls, kept in order by the matron, Mrs. Blair, a middle-aged woman with the expression of one who stands no nonsense.

“Now, Patience,” said Miss Tremont, “you listen attentively, and next time you can take Mrs. Blair’s place.”

The occasion was the weekly assemblage of the Loyal Legion children, who were being educated in the ways of temperance. Miss Tremont opened with the Lord’s Prayer, which she invested with all its meaning; then the children sang from a temperance hymn-book, and the lesson began. Miss Tremont read a series of questions appurtenant to the inevitable results of unholy indulgence, to which Mrs. Blair read the answers, which in turn were repeated by the children. Then they sang “Down with King Alcohol,” a minister came in and made a dramatic address, and the children, some of whom were attentive and some extremely naughty, filed out.

“I only come on alternate Fridays,” said Miss Tremont, as they went downstairs; “Sister Beale takes the other. Come and see our reading-room. These are our boarders,” indicating several prim old maids that sat in the front room by the window.

In the dining-room a half dozen tramps were imbibing free soup. The reading-room was empty.

IV

Before a week had passed Patience was so busy that her old life slept as heavily as a bear in winter. She passed her difficult examinations and entered the High School, selecting the three years course, which included French, German, mathematics, the sciences, literature, and rhetoric.

The recesses and evenings were spent in study, the afternoons in assisting Miss Tremont; occasionally she snatched an hour to write to her friends in California. Besides the temperance work, she had a class in the church sewing school, kept the books of various societies, and occasionally visited the poor on Hog Heights. The work did not interest her, but she was glad to satisfactorily repay Miss Tremont’s hospitality. But had she wished to protest she would have realised its uselessness: she was carried with the tide. It might be said that Miss Tremont was the tide. Her enthusiasm had no reflex action, and tore through obstacles like a mill-race. When night came she was so weary that more than once Patience offered to put her to bed; but the offer was declined with a curious mixture of religious fervour and hauteur. Miss Tremont had none of the ordinary vanity of woman, but she resented the imputation that she could not work for the Lord as ardently at sixty as she had at forty.

When she prayed Patience listened with bated breath. A torrent of eloquence boiled from her lips. All the shortcomings and needs of unregenerate Mariaville, individual and collective, were laid down with a vehement precision which could leave the Lord little doubt of His obligations. The Temperance Cause was rehearsed with a passion which would have thrilled the devil. Sounding through all was a wholly unselfconscious note of command, as when one pleads with the pocket of an intimate friend for some worthy cause.

Patience saw so many disreputable people at this time that her mother’s pre-eminence was extinguished. They had a habit of commanding the hospitalities of Miss Tremont’s barn, sure of two meals and a night’s lodging. Miss Tremont insisted upon their attendance at evening prayers, and Patience assumed the task of persuading them to clean up. Her methods were less gentle than Miss Tremont’s: when they refused to wash she turned the hose on them.

Projected suddenly into the dry bracing cold of an eastern winter she quickly became robust. Before spring had come, her back was straight and a faint colour was in her rounding cheeks. If there had been time to think about it, or any one to tell her, she would have discovered that she was growing pretty. But at this time, despite the distant advances of the High School boys, Patience found no leisure for vanity. Sometimes she paused long enough to wonder if she had any individuality left; if environment was not stronger than heredity after all; if immediate impressions could not ever efface those of the past, no matter how deeply the latter may have been etched into the plastic mind. But she was quite conscious that she was happy, despite the vague restlessness and longings of youth. She loved Miss Tremont with all the sudden expansion of a long repressed temperament endowed with a tragic capacity for passionate affection. In Monterey the iron mould of reserve into which circumstance had forced her nature, had cramped and warped what love she had felt for Mr. Foord and Rosita; but in this novel atmosphere, where love enfolded her, where everybody respected her, and knew nothing of her past, where there was not a word nor an occurrence to remind her of the ugly experiences of her young life, she quickly became a normal being, living, belatedly, along the large and generous lines of her nature.

She had no friends of her own age with whom to discuss the problems dear to the heart of developing woman. The girls at the High School rarely talked during recess, and she left hurriedly the moment the scholars were dismissed for the day. The “Y’s” she persistently refused to join, as well as the young people’s societies of Miss Tremont’s church.

“I’ll be your helper in everything,” she said to her perplexed guardian; “but those girls bore me, and, you know, I really haven’t time for them.”

And Miss Tremont, despite the fact that Patience gave no sign of spiritual thaw, was the most doting of old maid parents. After the first few weeks she ceased to dig in Patience’s soul for the stunted seeds of Christianity, finding that she only irritated her, and trusting to the daily sprinkling of habit and example to promote their ultimate growth.

V

With summer came a cessation of school, Loyal Legion, and sewing school duties; but the Poor took no vacation and gave none. Nevertheless, Patience had far more leisure, and borrowed many books from the town library. She read much of Hugo and Balzac and Goethe, and in the new intellectual delight forgot herself more completely than in her work.

Moreover, the town was very beautiful in summer, and she spent many hours rambling along the shadowy streets whose venerable trees shut the sunlight from the narrow side ways. The gardens too were full of trees; and the town from a distance looked like a densely wooded hillside, a riot of green, out of which housetops showed like eggs in a nest. Over some of the steep old streets the maples met, growing denser and denser down in the perspective, until closed by the flash of water.

The woods on the slope of the Hudson were thick with great trees dropping a leafy curtain before the brilliant river, and full of isolated nooks where a girl could read and dream, unsuspected of the chance pedestrian.

After one long drowsy afternoon by a brook in a hollow of the woods, Patience returned home to find a carriage standing before the door. It was a turnout of extreme elegance. The grey horses were thoroughbreds; a coachman in livery sat on the box; a footman stood on the sidewalk. She looked in wonder. Miss Tremont had no time for the fine people of Mariaville, and they had ceased to call on her long since. Moreover, Patience knew every carriage in the town, and this was not of them.

She went rapidly into the house, youthfully eager for a new experience. Miss Tremont was seated on the sofa in the front parlour, holding the hand of a tall handsomely gowned woman. Patience thought, as she stood for a moment unobserved, that she had never seen so cold a face. It was the face of a woman of fifty, oval and almost regular. The mouth was a straight line. The clear pale eyes looked like the reflection of the blue atmosphere on icicles. The skin was as smooth as a girl’s, the brown hair parted and waved, the tall figure slender and superbly carried. She was smiling and patting Miss Tremont’s hand, but there was little light in her eyes.

As Patience entered, she turned her head and regarded her without surprise; she had evidently heard of her. Miss Tremont’s face illumined, and she held out her hand.

“This is Patience,” she said triumphantly. “I haven’t told you half about the dear child. Patience, this is my cousin, Mrs. Gardiner Peele.”

Mrs. Gardiner Peele bent her head patronisingly, and Patience hated her violently.

“I am glad you have a companion,” said the lady, coldly. “But how is it you haven’t the white ribbon on her?”

Miss Tremont blushed. “Oh, I can’t control Patience in all things,” she said, in half angry deprecation. “She just won’t wear the ribbon.”

Mrs. Peele smiled upon Patience for the first time. It was a wintry light, but it bespoke approval. “I wish she could make you take it off,” she said to her relative. “That dreadful, dreadful _badge_. How can you wear it?—you—”

“Now, cousin,” said Miss Tremont, laughing good-naturedly, “we won’t go over all that again. You know I’m a hopeless crank. All I can do is to pray for you.”

“Thank you. I don’t doubt I need it, although I attend church quite as regularly as you could wish.”

“I know you are good,” said Miss Tremont, with enthusiasm, “and of course I don’t expect everybody to be as interested in Temperance as I am. But I do wish you loved the world less and the Lord more.”

Mrs. Peele gave a low, well modulated laugh. “Now, Harriet, I want you to be worldly for a few minutes. I have brought you back two new gowns from Paris, and I want you, when you come to visit me next week, to wear them. I have had them trimmed with white ribbon bows so that no one will notice one more or less—”

“I’m not ashamed of my white ribbon,” flashed out Miss Tremont, then relented. “You dear good Honora. Yes, I’ll wear them if they’re not too fashionable.”

“Oh, I studied your style. And let me tell you, Harriet Tremont, that fashionable gowns are what you should be wearing. It does provoke me so to see you—”

But Miss Tremont leaned over and kissed her short. “Now what’s the use of talking to an old crank like me? I’m a humble servant of my dear Lord, and I couldn’t be anything else if I had a million. But you dear thing, I’m so glad to see you once more. You do look so well. Tell me all about the children.”

Patience, quite forgotten, listened to the conversation with deep interest. There was a vague promise of variety in this new advent. As she watched the woman, who seemed to have brought with her something of the atmosphere of all that splendid existence of which she had longingly read, she was stirred with a certain dissatisfaction: some dormant chord was struck—as on the day she drove by Del Monte. When Mrs. Peele arose to go, she thought that not Balzac himself had ever looked upon a more elegant woman. Even Patience’s untrained eye recognised that those long simple folds, those so quiet textures, were of French woof and make. And the woman’s carriage was like unto that of the fictional queen. She nodded carelessly to Patience, and swept out. When Miss Tremont returned after watching her guest drive away, Patience pounced upon her.

“_Who_ is she?” she demanded. “And _why_ didn’t you tell me you had such a swell for a cousin?”

“Did I never tell you?” asked Miss Tremont, wonderingly. “Why, I was sure I had often talked of Honora. But I’m so busy I suppose I forgot.”

She sat down and fanned herself, smiling. “Honora Tremont is my first cousin. We used to be great friends until she married a rich man and became so dreadfully fashionable. The Lord be praised, she has always loved me; but she lives a great deal abroad, and spends her winters, when she is here, in New York. They have a beautiful place on the Hudson, Peele Manor, that has been in the family for nearly three hundred years. Mr. Peele is an eminent lawyer. I don’t know him very well. He doesn’t talk much; I suppose he has to talk so much in Court. I’ve not seen the children for a year. I always thought them pretty badly spoiled, particularly Beverly. May isn’t very bright. But I always liked Hal—short for Harriet, after me—better than any of them. She is about nineteen now. May is eighteen and Beverly twenty-four.

“Then there is Honora, cousin Honora’s sister Mary’s child, and the tallest woman I ever saw. Her parents died when she was a little thing and left her without a dollar. Honora took her, and has treated her like her own children. Sometimes I think she is very much under her influence. I don’t know why, but I never liked her. She is Beverly’s age. Oh!” she burst out, “just think! I have got to go to Peele Manor for a week. I promised. I couldn’t help it. And oh, I do dread it. They are all so different, and they don’t sympathise with my work. Much as I love them I’m always glad to get away. Wasn’t it kind and good of her to bring me two dresses from Paris?”

Patience shrewdly interpreted the prompting of Mrs. Peele’s generosity, but made no comment.

Miss Tremont drew a great sigh: “My temperance work—my poor—what will they do without me? Maria Twist gets so mad when I don’t read the Bible to her twice a week. Patience, you will have to stay in Temperance Hall. I shouldn’t like to think of you here alone. I do wish Honora had asked you too—”

“I wouldn’t go for worlds. When do you think your dresses will come? I do so want to see a real Paris dress.”

“She said they’d come to-morrow. Oh, to think of wearing stiff tight things. Well, if they are uncomfortable or too stylish I just won’t wear them, that’s all.”

“You just will, auntie dear. You’ll not look any less fine than those people, or I’ll not go near Hog Heights.”

Miss Tremont kissed her, grateful for the fondness displayed. “Well, well, we’ll see,” she said.

But the next day, when the two handsome black gowns lay on the bed of the spare room, she shook her head with flashing eyes.

“I won’t wear those things,” she cried. “Why, they were made for a society woman, not for an humble follower of the Lord. I should be miserable in them.”

Patience, who had been hovering over the gowns,—one of silk grenadine trimmed with long loops of black and white ribbon, the other of satin with a soft knot of white ribbon on the shoulder and another at the back of the high collar,—came forward and firmly divested Miss Tremont of her alpaca. She lifted the heavy satin gown with reverent hands and slipped it over Miss Tremont’s head, then hooked it with deft fingers.

“There!” she exclaimed. “You look like a swell at last. Just what you ought to look like.”

Miss Tremont glanced at the mirror with a brief spasm of youthful vanity. The rich fashionable gown became her long slender figure, her unconscious pride of carriage, far better than did her old alpaca and merino frocks. But she shook her head immediately, her eyes flashing under a quick frown.

“The idea of perching a white bow like a butterfly on my shoulder and another at the back of my neck, as if I had a scar. It’s an insult to the white ribbon. And this collar would choke me. I can’t breathe. Take it off! Take it off!”

“Not until I have admired you some more. You look just grand. If the collar is too high, I’ll send for Mrs. Best, and we’ll cut it off and sew some soft black stuff in the neck—although I just hate to. Auntie dear, don’t you think you could stand it?”

Miss Tremont shook her head with decision. “I couldn’t. It hurts my old throat. And how could I ever bend my head to get at my soup? And these bows make me feel actually cross. If the dress can be made comfortable I’ll wear it, for I’ve no right to disgrace Honora, nor would I hurt her feelings by scorning her gowns; but I’ll not stand any such mockery as these flaunting white things.”

Patience exchanged the satin for the grenadine gown. This met with more tolerance at first, as the throat was finished with soft folds, and the white ribbon was less demonstrative.

“It floats so,” said Patience, ecstatically. “Oh, auntie, you _are_ a beauty.”

“I a beauty with my ugly scowling old face? But this thing is like a ball dress, Patience—this thin stuff! I prefer the satin.”

“You will wear this on the hot evenings. All thin things are not made for the ball-room. You needn’t look at yourself like that. I only wish I’d ever be half as pretty. Auntie, why didn’t you ever marry?”

Miss Tremont’s face worked after all the years. Memories could not die in so uniform a nature.

“My youth was very sad,” she said, turning away abruptly. “I only talk about it with the dear Lord.” And Patience asked no more questions.

VI

The dressmaker was sent for, and the satin gown divested of its collar. Miss Tremont ruthlessly clipped off the beautiful French bows and sewed a tiny one of narrow white ribbon in a conspicuous place on the left chest. The grenadine was decorated in like manner. Patience wailed, and then laughed as she thought of Mrs. Gardiner Peele. She wished she might be there to see that lady’s face.

Miss Tremont changed her mind four times as to the possibility of leaving Mariaville for a week of sinful idleness, before she was finally assisted into the train by Patience’s firm hand. Even then she abruptly left her seat and started for the door. But the train was moving. Patience saw her resume her seat with an impatient twitch of her shoulders.

“Poor auntie,” she thought, as she walked up the street; “but on the whole I think I pity Mrs. Peele more.”

Her bag had been sent to Temperance Hall, and she went directly there, and to her own room. As the day was very warm, she exchanged her frock for a print wrapper, then extended herself on the bed with “’93.” It was her duty to assuage the wrath of Maria Twist, but she made up her mind that for twenty-four hours she would shirk every duty on her calendar.

But she had failed to make allowance for the net of circumstance. She had not turned ten pages when she heard the sound of agitated footsteps in the hall. A moment later Mrs. Blair opened the door unceremoniously. Her usually placid face was much perturbed.

“Oh, Miss Patience,” she said, “I’m in such a way. Late last night a poor man fell at the door, and I took him in as there was no policeman around. I thought he was only ill, but it seems he was drunk. He’s been awake now for two hours, and is awful bad—not drunk, but suffering.”

“Why don’t you send for the doctor?” asked Patience, lazily.

“I have, but he’s gone to New York and won’t be back till night. The man says he can doctor himself—that all he wants is whisky; but of course I can’t give him that. Do come over and talk to him. Miss Beale is over at White Plains, and I don’t know what to do.”

Patience rose reluctantly and followed the matron to the side of the house reserved for men. As she went down the hall she heard groans and sharp spasmodic cries. Mrs. Blair opened a door, and Patience saw an elderly man lying in the bed. His grey hair and beard were ragged, his eyes dim and bleared, his long, well-cut but ignoble face was greenishly pale. He was very weak, and lay clutching at the bed clothes with limp hairy hands. As he saw the matron his eyes lit up with resentment.

“I didn’t come here to be murdered,” he ejaculated. “It’s the last place I’d have come to if I’d known what I was doing. But I tell you that if I don’t have a drink of whisky I’ll be a dead man in an hour.”

“I can’t give you that,” said Mrs. Blair, desperately. “And you know you only think you need it, anyhow. We try to make men overcome their terrible weakness; we don’t encourage them.”

“That’s all right, but you can’t reform a man when his inside is on fire and feels as if it were dropping out—but my God! I can’t argue with you, damn you. Give it to me.”

“I’m of the opinion that he ought to have it,” said Patience.

The man turned to her eagerly. “Bless you,” he said. “It’s not the taste of it I’m craving, miss; it’s relief from this awful agony. If you give it to me, I swear I’ll try never to touch a drop again after I get over this spree. It’ll be bad enough to break off then, but it’s death now.”

Mrs. Blair looked at him with pity, but shook her head.

“I’ve been here seven years,” she said to Patience, “and the ladies have yet to find one fault with me. I don’t dare give it to him. Besides, I don’t believe in it. How can what’s killing him cure him? And it’s a sin. Even if the ladies excused me—which they wouldn’t—I’d never forgive myself.”

“I’ll take the responsibility,” said Patience. “I believe that man will die if he doesn’t have whisky.”

The man groaned and tossed his arms. “Oh, my God!” he cried.

Mrs. Blair shuddered. “Oh, I don’t know, miss. If you will take the responsibility—I can’t give it to him—where could you get it?”

“At a drug store.”

“They won’t sell it to you—we’ve got a law passed, you know.”

“Then I’ll go to a saloon.”

“Oh, my! my!” cried Mrs. Blair, “you’d never do that?”

“The man is in agony. Can’t you see? I’m going this minute.”

The door opened, and Miss Beale entered. She looked warm and tired, but came forward with active step, and stood beside the bed. A spasm of disgust crossed her face. “What is the matter, my man?” she asked. “I am sorry to see you here.”

“Give me whisky,” groaned the man.

Miss Beale turned away with twitching mouth.

“The man is dying. Nothing but whisky can save him,” said Patience. “If you called a doctor he would tell you the same thing.”

“What?” said Miss Beale, coldly, “do you suppose that he can have whisky in Temperance Hall? Is that what we are here for? You must be crazy.”

“But you don’t want him to die on your hands, do you?” exclaimed Patience, who was losing her temper.

“My God!” screeched the man, “I am in Hell.”

“My good man,” said Miss Beale, gently, “it is for us to save you from Hell, not to send you there.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” His voice died to an inarticulate murmur; but he writhed, and doubled, and twisted, as men may have done when fanatics tortured in the name of religion.

“Good heavens, Miss Beale,” cried Patience, excitedly, “you can’t set yourself up in opposition to nature. That man must have whisky. If he were younger and stronger it wouldn’t matter so much; but can’t you see he hasn’t strength to resist the terrible strain? The torture is killing him, eating out his life—”

“Oh, it is terrible!” exclaimed the matron. “Perhaps it is best—”

“Mrs. Blair!” Miss Beale turned upon her in consternation. Then she bent over the man.

“You can’t have whisky,” she said gently; “not if I thought you were really dying would I give it to you. If it is the Lord’s will that you are to die here you must abide by it. I shall not permit you to further imperil your soul. Nor could that which has not the blessing of God on it be of benefit to you. Alcohol is a destroyer, both of soul and of body—not a medicine.”

The man’s knees suddenly shot up to his chest; but he raised his head and darted at her a glance of implacable hate.

“Damn you,” he stuttered. “Murderer—” Then he extended rigid arms and clutched the bed clothes, his body twitching uncontrollably.

Miss Beale looked upon him with deep compassion. “Poor thing,” she exclaimed, “is not this enough to warn all men from that fiend?” She laid her hand on the man’s head, but he shook it off with an oath.

“Whisky,” he cried. “O my God! Have these women—_women!_—no pity?”

“I’m going for whisky—” said Patience.

Miss Beale stepped swiftly to the door, locked it, and slipped the key into her pocket.

“You will buy no whisky,” she said sternly. “I will save you from that sin.” Suddenly her face lit up. “I will pray,” she said solemnly, “I will pray that this poor lost creature may recover, and lead a better life—”

“I swear I’ll never touch another drop after I’m out of this if you’ll give it to me now—”

“If it be the Lord’s will that you shall live you will not die,” said Miss Beale. “I will pray, and in His mercy He may let you live to repent.”

She fell upon her knees by the bed, and clasping her hands, prayed aloud; while the man reared and plunged and groaned and cursed, his voice and body momentarily weaker. Miss Beale’s prayers were always very long and very fervid. She was not eloquent, but her deep tear-voiced earnestness was most impressive; and never more so than to-day, when she flung herself before the throne of Grace with a lost soul in her hand. A light like a halo played upon her spiritualised face, her voice became ineffably sweet. Gradually, in her ecstatic communion with, her intimate nearness to her God, she forgot the man on the bed, forgot the flesh which prisoned her soaring soul, was conscious only of the divine light pouring through her, the almost palpable touch of her lover’s hand.

Suddenly Patience exclaimed brutally: “The man is dead.”

Miss Beale arose with a start. She drew the sheet gently over the distorted face. “It is the Lord’s will,” she said.

After Patience was in her own room and had relieved her feelings by slamming the door, she sat for a long time staring at the pattern of the carpet and pondering upon the problem of Miss Beale.

“Well,” she thought finally, “_she’s_ happy, so I suppose it’s all right. No wonder she’s satisfied with herself when she lives up to her ideals as consistently as that. I think I’ll label all the different forms of selfishness I come across. There seems to be a large variety, but all put together don’t seem to be a patch to having fun with your ideals. Miss Beale would be the most wretched woman in Westchester county if she’d given that man whisky and saved his life.”

VII

The man was buried with Christian service at Miss Beale’s expense, and her serene face wore no shadow. The following day she said to Patience: “I spent nearly all of the last two nights in prayer, and I almost heard the Lord’s voice as He told me I did right.”

“You ought to write a novel,” said Patience, drily, but the sarcasm was lost. In a moment Patience forgot Miss Beale: the postman handed her two letters, and she went up to her room to read them.

The first she opened was from Miss Tremont.

PEELE MANOR, Friday.

Oh my dear darling little girl, how I wish, _how_ I wish I were with you and my work once more. I ought to be happy because they are all so kind, but I’m not. I feel as if I were throwing away one of the few precious weeks I have left to give to the Lord (arrange for a prayer meeting on Wednesday, the day of my return, and we’ll have a regular feast of manna). Do you miss me? I think of you every moment. You should have seen dear Cousin Honora’s face when I came down to dinner in the black satin. She didn’t say anything, she just _looked_ at the bow, and I felt sorry for her. But I know I am right. Hal giggled and winked at me. (I do love Hal!) Honora Mairs said so sweetly after Cousin Honora had left the room: “Dear Cousin Harriet, I think you are so brave and consistent to wear the little white bow of your cause. It is so _like_ you.” Was not that sweet of her? Beverly has very heavy eyebrows, and he raised them at my ribbon, and turned away his head as if it hurt his eyes. He is a very elegant young gentleman, and his mother says he is a great stickler for form, whatever that may mean. (They speak a different language here anyway. I don’t understand half what they say. Hal talks slang all the time.) I don’t like Beverly as much as I did, although he’s quite the handsomest young man I ever saw and very polite; but he smokes cigarettes all the time and big black cigars. When I told him that five hundred million dollars were spent annually on tobacco, he got up and went off in a huff. May is just a talkative child—I never heard any one talk so much in my life,—and about nothing but gowns and young men and balls and the opera. Beverly talks about horses all the time, and Hal thinks a great deal of society, although she listens to me very sweetly when I talk to her about my work. Yesterday she said: “Why, Cousin Harriet, you’re a regular steam engine. It must be jolly good fun to carry a lot of sinners to heaven on an express train.” I told her it was a freight train, and it certainly is, as you know, Patience dear. She replied: “Well, if you get there all the same, a century more or less doesn’t make any difference. You must be right in it with the Lord.” That was the only time I’d heard the dear Lord’s name mentioned since I arrived, so I didn’t scold her. But Patience, dear, I hope you’ll never use slang. I’ve talked to Hal about you, and she says she’s coming to see you.

Honora doesn’t use slang. She is very stately and dignified, and Cousin Honora (it’s very awkward when you’re writing for two people to have the same name, isn’t it?) holds her up as a model for the girls. Hal and she _fight_. I can’t call it anything else, although Honora doesn’t lose her temper and Hal does. Hal said to me (of Honora) yesterday (I use her own words, although they’re awful; but if I didn’t I couldn’t give you the same idea of her): “She’s a d—— hypocrite: and she wants to marry Beverly, but she won’t,—not if I have to turn matchmaker and marry him to a variety actress. She makes me wild. I wish she’d elope with the priest, but she’s too confoundedly clever.” Isn’t it dreadful—Honora is a Catholic. She became converted last year. Perhaps that’s the reason I can’t like her. But even the Catholic religion teaches charity, for she said to me this morning: “Poor Hal is really a good-hearted child, but she’s worldly and just a little superficial.”

They haven’t any company this week—how kind of Cousin Honora to ask me when they are alone! I wish you were here to enjoy the library. It is a great big room overlooking the river, and the walls are covered with books—three or four generations of them. Mr. Peele is intellectual, and so is Honora; but the others don’t read much, except Hal, who reads dreadful-looking yellow paper books written in the French language which she says are “corkers,” whatever that may mean. I do wish the dear child would read her Bible. I asked her if I gave her a copy if she’d promise me to read a little every day, and she said she would, as some of the stories were as good as a French novel. So I shall buy her one.

We sit in the library every evening. In the morning we sit in the Tea House on the slope and Honora embroiders Catholic Church things, Cousin Honora knits (she says it’s all the fashion), May _talks_, and Hal reads her yellow books and tells May to “let up.” I sew for my poor, and they don’t seem to mind that as much as the white ribbon. They say that they always sew for the poor in Lent. Hal says it is the “swagger thing.” In the afternoon we drive, and I do think it such a waste of time to be going, going nowhere for two hours.

Well, Patience, I shall be with you on Wednesday, praise the Lord. Come to the train and meet me, and be sure to write me about _everything_. How is Polly Jones, and old Mrs. Murphy, and Belinda Greggs? Have you read to Maria Twist, and taken the broth to old Jonas Hobb? Give my love to dear sister Beale, and tell her I pray for her. With a kiss from your old auntie, God bless you,

HARRIET TREMONT.

“Dear old soul,” thought Patience. “I think I know them better than she does, already. She is worth the whole selfish crowd; but I should like to know Hal. Beverly must be a chump.”

VIII

The other letter was from Rosita. Patience had not heard from her for a long while. Three months previously, Mr. Foord had written of Mrs. Thrailkill’s death, and mentioned that Rosita had gone to Sacramento to visit Miss Galpin—now Mrs. Trent—until her uncle, who had returned to Kentucky, should send for her.

Oh, Patita! Patita! [the letter began], what do you think? _I am on the stage._ I had been crazy to go on ever since _that night_. A theatrical man was in Monterey just before mamma’s death, and he told me they were always wanting pretty corus girls at the Tivoli; so after the funeral I told everybody I was going to stay with Miss Galpin until Uncle Jim sent for me—I hated to lie, but I had to—and I went up to San Francisco and went right to the Tivoli. He took me because he said I was pretty and had a fresh voice. I had to ware tights. You should have seen me. At first I felt all the time like stooping over to cover up my legs with my arms. But after a while I got used to it, and one night we had to dance, and everybody said I was the most graceful. The manager said I was a born dancer and actress. The other day what do you think happened? A New York manager was here and heard me sing,—I had a little part by that time,—and he told me that if I took lessons I could be a prima donna in comic opera. He said I not only was going to have a lovely voice, but that I had a new style (Spanish) and would take in New York. He offered to send me to Paris for a year and then bring me out in New York if I’d give him my word—I’m too young to sign a contract—that I wouldn’t go with any other manager. At first my manager, who is a good old sole (I didn’t tell you that I live with him and his wife, and that their awful good to me and stand the fellers off), wouldn’t have it; but after a while he gave in—said I’d have to go the pace sooner or later (whatever that means), and I might as well go it in first class style. His wife, the good old sole, cried. She said I was the first corus girl she’d ever taken an interest in, but somehow it would be on her conscience if I went wrong. But I’m not going wrong. I don’t care a bit for men. There was a bald-headed old fool who used to come and sit in the front row every night and throw kisses to me, and one night he threw me a bouquet with a bracelet in it. I wore the bracelet, for it was a beauty with a big diamond in it; but I never looked at him or answered any of his notes, and Mr. Bell—the manager—wrote him he’d punch his head if he came near the stage door. No, all I want is to act, act, act, and sing, sing, sing, and dance, dance, dance, and have beautiful cloths and jewels and a carriage and two horses. Mr. Soper has told me ten times since I’ve met him that “virtue in an actress pays,” and he’s going to send a horrid old woman with me to Paris, as if I’d bother with the fools anyhow. I’m sure I can’t see what Mrs. Bell cries about if I’m going to be famous and make a lot of money. Anyhow, I’m going. I do so want to see you, Patita dear. Maybe you can come up to the steamer and see me off. I wonder if you have changed. I’m not so very tall; but they all say my figure is good. Mr. Soper says it will be divine in a year or two, but that I may be a cow at thirty, so I’d better not lose any time. Good-bye. Good-bye. I want to give you a hundred kisses. How different our lives are! Isn’t yours dreadfully stupid with that old temprance work? And just think it was you who taught me to act first! Mr. Soper says I must cultivate the Spanish racket for all it’s worth, and that he expects me to be more Spanish in New York than I was in Monterey. He is going to get an opera written for me with the part of a Spanish girl in it so I can wear the costume. He says if I study and do everything he tells me I’ll make a _furore_. _Hasta luego_—Patita _mia_.

ROSITA ELVIRA FRANCESCA THRAILKILL.

P. S.—I’m to have a Spanish stage name, “La Rosita,” I guess. Mr. Soper says that Thrailkill is an “anti-climax,” and would never “go down.”

IX

Patience read this letter with some alarm. All that she had heard and read of the stage made her apprehensive. She feared that Rosita would become fast, would drink and smoke, and not maintain a proper reserve with men. Then the natural independence of her character asserted itself, and she felt pride in Rosita’s courage and promptness of action. She even envied her a little: her life would be so full of variety.

“And after all it’s fate,” she thought philosophically. “She was cut out for the stage if ever a girl was. You might as well try to keep a bird from using its wings, or Miss Beale and auntie from being Temperance. I wonder what my fate is. It’s not the stage, but it’s not this, neither—not much. Shouldn’t wonder if I made a break for Mr. Field some day. But I couldn’t leave auntie. She’s the kind that gets a hold on you.”

She did her duty by Hog Heights during Miss Tremont’s brief holiday, but did it as concisely as was practicable. She found it impossible to sympathise with people that were content to let others support them, giving nothing in return. Her strong independent nature despised voluntary weakness. It was her private opinion that these useless creatures with only the animal instinct to live, and not an ounce of grey matter in their skulls, encumbered the earth, and should be quietly chloroformed.

Despite her love for Miss Tremont, she breathed more freely in her absence. She was surfeited with religion, and at times possessed with a very flood of revolt and the desire to let it loose upon every church worker in Mariaville. But affection and gratitude restrained her.

X

Miss Tremont returned on Wednesday morning. She stepped off the train with a bag under one arm, a bundle under the other, and both arms full of flowers.

“Oh, you darling, you darling!” she cried as she fell upon Patience. “How it does my heart good to see you! These are for you. Hal picked them, and sent her love. Aren’t they sweet?”

“Lovely,” said Patience, crushing the flowers as she hugged and kissed Miss Tremont. “Here, give me the bag.”

Miss Tremont would go to Temperance Hall first, then to call upon Miss Beale, but was finally guided to her home. The trunk had preceded them. Patience unpacked the despised gowns, while listening to a passionate dissertation upon the heavy trial they had been to their owner.

“I think you had a good time all the same,” she said. “You look as if you’d had, at any rate. You’ve not looked so well since I came. That sort of thing agrees with you better than tramping over Hog Heights—”

“It does not!” cried Miss Tremont. “And I am so glad to get back to my work and my little girl.”

“And the Lord,” supplemented Patience.

“Oh, He was with me even there. Only He didn’t feel so near.” She sighed reminiscently. “But I’ve brought pictures of the children to show you. Let us go down to the parlour where it’s cooler, and then we’ll stand them in a row on the mantel. They’re the first pictures I’ve had of them in years.” She caught a package from the tray of her trunk, in her usual abrupt fashion, and hurried downstairs, Patience at her heels.

Miss Tremont seated herself in her favourite upright chair, put on her spectacles, and opened the package. “This is Hal,” she said, handing one of the photographs to Patience. “I must show you her first, for she’s my pet.”

Patience examined the photograph eagerly. It was a half length of a girl with a straight tilted nose, a small mouth with a downward droop at the corners, large rather prominent eyes, and sleek hair which was in keeping with her generally well-groomed appearance. She wore a tailor frock. Her slender erect figure was beautifully poised. In one hand she carried a lorgnette. She was not pretty, but her expression was frank and graceful, and she had much distinction.

“I like her. Any one could see she was a swell. What colour hair has she?”

“Oh, a kind of brown. Her eyes are a sort of grey. Here is May. She always has her photographs coloured.”

“Oh, she’s a beauty!” The girl even in photograph showed an exquisite bit of flesh and blood. The large blue eyes were young and appealing under soft fall of lash. The mouth was small and red, the nose small and straight. Chestnut hair curled about the small head and oval face. The skin was like tinted jade. It was the face of the American aftermath. She wore a ball gown revealing a slender girlish neck and a throat of tender curves.

“She is a real beauty,” said Miss Tremont. “Poor Hal says, ‘she can’t wear her neck because she hasn’t got any.’ Did you ever hear such an expression?”

“Hal looks as if she had a good figure.”

Miss Tremont shook her head. “I don’t approve of all Hal does—she pads. She doesn’t seem to care much who knows it, for when the weather’s very warm she takes them out, right before your eyes, so it isn’t so bad as if she were deceitful about it. Here is Beverly.”

Patience looked long at the young man’s face. This face too was oval, with a high intellectual forehead, broad black brows, and very regular features. The mouth appeared to pout beneath the drooping moustache. The expression of the eyes was very sweet. It was a strong handsome face, high-bred like the others, but with a certain nobility lacking in the women.

“He is said to be the handsomest young man in Westchester County, and he’s quite dark,” said Miss Tremont. “What do you think of him?”

“He is rather handsome. Where is Honora?”

“She never has pictures taken. But, dear me, I must go out and see Ellen.”

Patience disposed the photographs on the mantel, then, leaning on her elbows, gazed upon Beverly Peele. The Composite, Byron, the Stranger, rattled their bones unheard. She concluded that no knight of olden time could ever have been so wholly satisfactory as this young man. Romance, who had been boxed about the ears, and sent to sleep, crept to her old throne with a sly and meaning smile. Patience began at once to imagine her meeting with Beverly Peele. She would be in a runaway carriage, and he would rescue her. She would be skating and fall in a hole, and he would pull her out. He would be riding to hounds in his beautiful pink coat (which was red) and run over her.

She pictured his face with a variety of expressions. She was sure that he had the courage of a lion and the tenderness of some women. Unquestionably he had read his ancestors’ entire library—“with that forehead,”—and he probably had the high and mighty air of her favourite heroes of fiction. In one of her letters Miss Tremont had remarked that he loved children and animals; therefore he had a beautiful character and a kind heart. And she was glad to have heard that he also had a temper: it saved him from being a prig. Altogether, Patience, with the wisdom of sixteen and three quarters, was quite convinced that she had found her ideal, and overlooked its extreme unlikeness to the Composite, which was the only ideal she had ever created. A woman’s ideal is the man she is in love with for the time being.

She went up to her room, and for the first time in her life critically examined herself in the mirror. With May Peele and one or two beauties of the High School in mind, she decided with a sigh that _she_ was no beauty.

“But who knows,” she thought with true insight, “what I’d be with clothes? Who could be pretty in a calico dress? My nose is as straight as May’s, anyhow, and my upper lip as short. But to be a real beauty you’ve got to have blue eyes and golden or chestnut hair and a little mouth, or else black eyes and hair like Rosita’s. My eyes are only grey, and my hair’s the colour of ashes, as Rosita once remarked. There’s no getting over that, although it certainly has grown a lot since I came here.”

Then she remembered that Rosita had once decorated her with red ribbons and assured her that they were becoming. She ran down to the best spare room, and, divesting a tidy of its scarlet bows, pinned them upon herself before the mirror, which she discovered was more becoming than her own. The brilliant colour was undoubtedly improving—“And, my goodness!” she exclaimed suddenly, “I do believe I haven’t got a freckle left. It must be the climate.”

“What on earth are you doing?” said an abrupt voice from the doorway.

Patience started guiltily, and restored the bows to the tidy.

“Oh, you see,” she stammered, “May is so pretty I wanted to see if I could be a little less homely.” Patience was truthful by nature, but the woman does not live that will not lie under purely feminine provocation. Otherwise she would not be worthy to bear the hallowed name of woman.

“Nonsense,” said Miss Tremont, crossly, “I thought you were above that kind of foolishness. You, must remember that you are as the Lord made you, and be thankful that you were not born a negro or a Chinaman.”

“Oh, I am,” said Patience.

XI

Thereafter, Patience roamed the woods munching chestnuts and dreaming of Beverly Peele. Hugo and Balzac and Goethe were neglected. Her brain wove thrilling romances of its own, especially in the night to the sound of rain. She never emerged from the woods without a shortening of the breath; but even Hal did not pay the promised call; nor did Beverly dash through the streets in a pink coat, a charger clasped between his knees.

“Well, it’s fun to be in love, anyhow,” she thought. “I’ll meet him some time, I know.”

Much to her regret she was not permitted to go to New York to see Rosita off. Miss Tremont had a morbid horror of the stage, and after Patience’s exhibition of vanity was convinced that “actress creatures” would exert a pernicious influence.

And, shortly after, Patience received news which made her forget Rosita and even Beverly Peele for a while. Mr. Foord was dead. Patience had hoarded his twenty dollar gold piece because he had given it to her. She bought a black hat and frock with it, and felt as sad as she could at that age of shifting impressions. A later mail brought word that he had left her John Sparhawk’s library, which could stay in the Custom House until she was able to send for it, and a few hundred dollars which would remain in a savings bank until she was eighteen. He had nothing else to leave except his books, which went to found a town library. All but those few hundreds had been sunken in an annuity. Miss Tremont was quite content to be overlooked in the girl’s favour.

By the time Patience was ready to return to Beverly Peele the new term opened, and the uncompromising methods of the High School left no time for romance. Once more her ambition to excel became paramount, and she studied night and day. She had no temptation to dissipate, for she was not popular with the young people of Mariaville. The Y’s disapproved of her because she would not don the white ribbon; and the church girls, generally, felt that except when perfunctorily assisting Miss Tremont she held herself aloof, even at the frequent sociables. And they were scandalised because she did not join the church, nor the King’s Daughters, nor the Christian Endeavor.

The High School scholars liked her because she was “square,” and cordially admired her cleverness; but there were no recesses in the ordinary sense, and after school Miss Tremont claimed her. Even the boys “had no show,” as they phrased it. Occasionally they lent her a hand on the ice; but like all Californians, she bitterly felt the cold of her second winter, and in her few leisure hours preferred the fire.

Sometimes she looked at Beverly Peele’s picture with a sigh and some resentment. “But never mind,” she would think philosophically, “I can fall in love with him over again next summer.” When vacation came she did in a measure take up the broken threads of her romance, but they had somewhat rotted from disuse.

Rosita wrote every few weeks, reporting hard work and unbounded hope. “The _dueña_,” as she called her companion, “was an old devil,” and never let her go out alone, nor receive a man; but she “didn’t care,” she had no time for nonsense, anyhow. She was learning her part in the Spanish opera, which had been written for her, and it was “lovely.”

“It must be a delightful sensation to have your future assured at seventeen,” thought Patience. “Mine is as problematical as the outcome of the Temperance cause. I have had one unexpected change, and may have more. If it were not for Rosita’s letters I should almost forget those sixteen years in California. I certainly am not the same person. I haven’t lost my temper for a year and a half, and I don’t seem to be disturbed any more by vague yearnings. Life is too practical, I suppose.”

Miss Tremont did not visit the Gardiner Peeles this summer: they spent the season in travel. Late in the fall Rosita returned to America. She wrote the day before she sailed. That was the last letter Patience received from her. Later she sent a large envelope full of clippings descriptive of her triumphal début; thereafter nothing whatever. Patience, supposing herself forgotten, anathematised her old friend wrathfully, but pride forbade her to write and demand an explanation.

She noticed with spasms of terror that Miss Tremont was failing. The rush and worry of a lifetime had worn the blood white, and the nerve-force down like an old wharf pile. But Miss Tremont would not admit that she had lost an ounce of strength. She arose at the same hour and toiled until late. When Patience begged her to take care of herself, she became almost querulous, and all Patience could do was to anticipate her in every possible way. But when school reopened she had little time for anything but study. She was to finish in June, and the last year’s course was very difficult.

She graduated with flying colours, and Miss Tremont was so proud and excited that she took a day’s vacation. A week later Patience hinted that she thought she should be earning her own living; but Miss Tremont would not even discuss the subject. She fell into a rage every time it was broached, and Patience, who would have rebelled, had Miss Tremont been younger and stronger, submitted: she knew it would not be for long.

XII

Patience was languid all summer, and lay about in the woods, when she could, reading little and thinking much. Her school books put away forever, she felt for the first time that she was a woman, but did not take as much interest in herself as she had thought she should. She speculated a good deal upon her future career as a newspaper woman, and expended two cents every morning upon the New York “Day.” But she forgot to study it in the new interest it created: she had just the order of mind to succumb to the fascination of the newspaper, and she read the “Day’s” report of current history with a keener pleasure than even the great records of the past had induced. She longed for a companion with whom to talk over the significant tendencies of the age, and gazed upon Beverly Peele’s dome-like brow with a sigh.

Once, in the Sunday issue, she came upon a column and a half devoted to Rosita, “The Sweetheart of the Public,” “The Princess Royal of Opera Bouffe.” The description of the young prima donna’s home life, personal characteristics, and footlight triumphs, was further embellished by a painfully _décolleté_ portrait, a lace night gown, a pair of wonderfully embroidered stockings, and a rosary.

Patience read the article twice, wondering why fame realised looked so different from the abstract quality of her imagination.

“Somehow it seems a sort of tin halo,” she thought. Then her thoughts drifted back to Monterey, and recalled it with startling vividness. “Still even if I haven’t forgotten it, it is like the memory of another life. Its only lasting effect has been to make me hate what is coarse and sinful; and dear auntie, even if she hasn’t converted me, has developed all my good.

“I wonder if Rosita has been in love, and if that is the reason she has forgotten me. But she hasn’t married, so perhaps it’s only adulation that has driven everything else out of her head.” And then with her eyes on the river, which under the heavy sky looked like a stream of wrinkling lead from which a coating of silver had worn off in places, she fell to dreaming of Beverly Peele and an ideal existence in which they travelled and read and assured each other of respectful and rarefied affection.

Early in the winter the influenza descended upon America. Mr. Peele, his wife wrote, was one of the first victims, and the entire family took him to Florida. One night, a month later, Miss Tremont returned from Hog Heights and staggered through her door.

“Oh,” she moaned, as Patience rushed forward and caught her in her arms, “I feel so strangely. I have pains all over me, and the queerest feeling in my knees.”

“It’s the grippe,” said Patience, who had read its history in the “Day.” She put Miss Tremont to bed, and sent for the doctor. The old lady was too weak to protest, and swallowed the medicines submissively. She recovered in due course, and one day slipped out and plodded through the snow to Hog Heights. She was brought home unconscious, and that night was gasping with pneumonia.

There was no lack of nurses. Miss Beale and Mrs. Watt, who had helped to care for her during the less serious attack, returned at once, and many others called at intervals during the day and night.

Patience sat constantly by the bed, staring at the face so soon to be covered from all sight. She wanted to cry and scream, but could not. Her heart was like lead in her breast.

At one o’clock on the second night, she and Miss Beale were alone in the sick room. Mrs. Watt was walking softly up and down the hall without.

Miss Tremont was breathing irregularly, and Patience bent over her with white face. Miss Beale began to sob.

“Is it not terrible, terrible,” she ejaculated, “that she should die like this, she whose deathbed should have been so beautiful,—unconscious, drugged—morphine, which is as accursed as whisky—”

“I am glad of it. It would be more horrible to see her suffer.”

“I don’t want to see her suffer—dear, dear Miss Tremont. But she should have died in the full knowledge that she was going to God. Oh! Oh!” she burst out afresh. “How I envy her! It’s my only, only sin, but I can’t help envying those who are going to heaven. I can’t wait. I do so want to see the beautiful green pastures and the still waters—and oh, how I want to talk with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob!”

Patience flung her head into her lap and burst into a fit of laughter.

XIII

An hour later she went downstairs and turned up all the lights. Mrs. Watt had gone to the next house to telephone for the undertakers. When she returned she went upstairs to Miss Beale. Patience could hear the two women praying. That was the only sound in the terrible stillness. She paced up and down, wringing her hands and gasping occasionally. Her sense of desolation was appalling, although as yet she but half realised her bereavement.

Suddenly she heard the sound of runners on the crisp snow. They stopped before the gate. She ran shuddering to the window. The moon flooded the white earth. Two tall black shadows came down the path. They trod as if on velvet. Even on the steps and porch they made no sound. They knocked as death may knock on a human soul, lightly, meaningly. Patience dragged herself to the door and opened it. The long narrow black men entered and bent their heads solemnly. Patience raised her shaking hand, and pointed to the floor above. The men of death bowed again, and stole upward like black ghosts. In a few moments they stole down again and out and away. Patience rushed frantically through the rooms to the kitchen, where she fell upon Ellen, dozing by the fire, and screamed and laughed until the terrified woman flung a pitcher of water on her, then carried her upstairs and put her to bed.

XIV

A week later Patience wandered restlessly about the lonely house. The hundreds of people that had thronged it had gone at last, even Miss Beale and Mrs. Watt.

She had cried until she had no tears left, and rebelled until reason would hear no more. Her nerves felt blunt and worn down.

Yesterday Miss Tremont’s lawyer had told her that after a few unimportant bequests she was to have the income of the dead woman’s small estate until she married, after which she would have nothing and the Temperance cause all. She was therefore exempt from the pettiest and severest of life’s trials. Miss Tremont had also left a letter, begging her to devote herself to a life of charity and reform. But Patience had at last revolted. She realised how empty had been her part, how torrential the impulsion of Miss Tremont.

The great world outside of Mariaville pressed upon her imagination, gigantic, rainbow-hued, alluring. It beckoned with a thousand fingers, and all her complex being responded. She longed for a talent with which to add to its beauty, and thought no ill of it.

She had sat up half the night thinking, and this morning she felt doubly restless and lonely. She wanted to go away at once, but as yet she had made no plans; and plans were necessary. She was too tired to go to Mr. Field and apply for work; and she knew that her delicate appearance would not commend itself to his approval. She went to the mirror in the best spare bedroom and regarded herself anxiously. Her black-robed figure seemed very tall and thin, her face white and sharp.

“Even red bows—” she began; then her memory tossed up Rosita. “Oh,” she thought, “if I could only see her,—see some one I care a little for. I believe I’ll go—there may have been some reason—her letters may have miscarried—I must see somebody.”

She ran upstairs, put on her outing things, and walked rapidly to the station. The sharp air electrified her blood. The world was full of youth and hope once more. She forgot her bereavement for the hour. She hoped Rosita would ask her to visit her: the popular young prima donna must have drawn many brilliant people about her.

When she reached New York she inquired her way to “Soper’s Opera House,” obtained Rosita’s address, and took the elevated train up town. She found the great apartment house with little difficulty, and was enraptured with its marble floors and pillars, its liveried servants and luxurious elevator.

“I certainly had rich ancestors,” she thought, “and I am sure they were swells. I have a natural affinity for all this sort of thing.”

She was landed at the very top of the house. The elevator boy directed her attention to a button, then slid down and out of sight, leaving Patience with the delightful sensation of having stepped upon a new stratum, high and away from the vast terrestrial cellar.

A trim French maid opened the door. She stared at Patience, and looked disinclined to admit her. But Patience pushed the door back with determined hand.

“I wish to see La Rosita,” she said in French.

“But madame is not receiving to-day.”

“She will see me, I am sure. Tell her that Miss Sparhawk is here.”

The woman admitted her reluctantly, and left her standing in an anteroom, passing between heavy portières. Patience followed, and entered a large drawing-room furnished with amber satin and ebony: a magnificent room, heavy with the perfume of great baskets of flowers, and filled with costly articles of decoration. The carpet was of amber velvet. Not a sound of street penetrated the heavy satin curtains.

An indefinable sensation stole over Patience’s mind, a ghost whose lineaments were blurred, yet familiar. She felt an impulse to turn and run, then twitched her shoulders impatiently, and approaching other portières, parted them and glanced into the room beyond.

It was evidently a boudoir, a fragrant fairy-like thing of rose and lace.

In a deep chair, clad in a _robe de chambre_ of rose-coloured silk, flowing open over a lace smock and petticoat, lay Rosita. Her dense black hair was twisted carelessly on top of her head and confined with a jewelled dagger. One tiny foot, shod in a high-heeled slipper of rose-coloured silk, was conspicuous on a low _pouf_. The flush of youth was in her cheek, its scarlet in her mouth. The large white lids lay heavily on the languorous eyes. In one hand she held a pink cigarette in a jewelled holder. She spoke in a low tantalising voice to a man who sat before her, leaning eagerly forward.

The maid had evidently not succeeded in gaining her attention. Patience, conquering another impulse to run, pushed the hangings aside and entered. Rosita sprang to her feet, the blood flashing to her hair; but her eyes expanded with pleasure.

“Patita! Patita!” she stammered, then caught Patience in her arms. As both girls looked as if about to weep, the man hurriedly departed.

The girls hugged each other as of old; then Rosita divested Patience of her wraps and told the astonished maid to take them out of sight.

“Now that you are here, you shall stay,” she said, “stay a long, long while. Have you had luncheon?”

“No—but I’m not—yes, I am, though, come to think of it. Get me something to eat. Rosita, how good it is to see you again! Why, why didn’t you write to me?”

“O—h; I will tell you, perhaps; but you must have luncheon first. I take a late breakfast, just after rising, so it will be a few minutes before yours is ready.” She rang a bell and gave an order to the maid, then pushed Patience into the deepest and softest chair in the room.

“Now,” she said, smiling affectionately, “lie back and be comfortable; you look tired. Oh, Patita, I am so glad to see you. Isn’t it like old times?”

With a grace which long practice had made a fine art, she sank upon one end of a divan, and back among a mass of cushions. Her white arms lay along the pillows in such careless wise as to best exhibit their perfection; her head dropped backward slightly, revealing the round throat. The attitude was so natural as to suggest that she had ceased to pose.

Patience stared at her, wondering if it could be the same Rosita. All the freshness of youth was in that beautiful face and round voluptuous form, but she looked years and years and years older than the Rosita of Monterey. Patience suddenly felt young and foolish and green. The world that had been so great and wonderful to her imagination seemed to have shrunken to a ball, to be tossed from one to the other of those white idle hands.

“What has changed you so?” she asked abruptly.

Rosita gave the low delicious laugh of which Patience had read in the New York “Day.” She relit her cigarette and blew a soft cloud.

“I will tell you after luncheon. You are the only person I would never fib to. I believe those grey eyes of yours are the only honest eyes in the world. Why are you in black?”

Patience told her, and was drawn on to speak of herself and her life. Rosita shuddered once or twice, an adorable little French shudder, and cast upward her glittering hands, whose nails Patience admired even more than their jewels.

“_Dios de mi alma!_” she cried finally. “What an existence!—I cannot call it life. I should have jumped into the river. That life would drive me mad, and I do not believe that it suits you either.”

She spoke with a Spanish accent, and with the affected precision of a foreigner that has carefully learned the English language. Her monotony of inflection was more effective than animation.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Patience, “and I have no intention of pursuing it. I’m going to be a newspaper woman.”

Rosita gave forth a sound that from any other throat would have been a shriek.

“A newspaper woman! And then you will come and interview me. How droll! I shall have to become eccentric, so that I can furnish you with ‘stories,’ as they call them. I have been pumped dry. When the newspaper women have run out of everything else they come to me, and they love me because I am good-natured, and turn my things upside down for them. I never refuse to see them, so they have never written anything horrid about me. Oh, I can tell you I have learned a great many lessons since I left Monterey. But here is your luncheon. While you are eating it I will do something for you that I have never done for any one else off the stage: I will sing to you.”

The maid placed a silver tray on a little table, and while Patience ate of creamed oysters and broiled partridge, Rosita sang as the larks of paradise may sing when angels awake with the dawn. Once Patience glanced hastily upward, half expecting to see the notes falling in a golden shower. When she expressed her admiration, Rosita’s red lips smiled slowly away from the white sharp little teeth.

“Do you like it, Patita _mia_?” she asked with bewitching graciousness. “Yes, I can sing. I have the world at my feet.”

She resumed her languid attitude on the divan. “_Bueno_,” she said, “now I am going to tell you all about it. People are always a little heavy after eating; I waited on purpose. But you must promise not to move until I get through. Will you?”

“Yes,” said Patience, uncomfortably. “I hope it is nothing very dreadful.”

“That all depends upon the way you look at things. It will seem odd to tell it to you. You used to be the one to do what you felt like and tell other people that if they did not like it they could do the other thing; but I suppose you are W. C. T. U’d.”

“No, I’m not. Go on.”

“Well, I will.” She paused and laughed lightly. “Funny world. We do not usually tell this sort of story to a woman, but you and I are different. _Bueno._

“I went to Paris and studied hard. Yes, I am lazy yet, but I had made up my mind to be a great, great, great success. I had what in insane people is called the fixed idea, and the American in me conquered the Spanish. Everybody praised my voice. No one said it was the greatest voice in the world, nor even better than two or three others over there; but I had no discouragement. I attracted a great deal of attention from men, but the _dueña_ never let them get a word with me, and I did not care. I used to wonder at the stories told about some of the other girls, and did not half understand. Two sold themselves; but why? with a fortune in one’s throat. Others fell in love, and talked about the temperament of the artist, but I could not understand that nonsense either.

“_Bueno_, at the end of the time Soper came over and bought me eight trunks full of the most beautiful clothes you ever saw,—mostly for the stage, but lots for the house and street. He said I was a first-class investment, and worth the outlay. When he heard me sing he shook all over. I ought to tell you that I had been kept on short allowance, and had had very dowdy clothes, which broke my heart.

“_Bueno_, we came home. On the steamer, Soper treated me like a father, but never let me talk to a man. Either he or the _dueña_ was at my heels all the time. He is a coarse-looking man, but I really liked him because he had been so good to me, and there was something very attractive about him. When we reached New York the _dueña_ left us. She said she was going straight to Philadelphia to her home. Soper and I got in another cab and drove to an apartment on Broadway. I did not know until the next day that it was his apartment. That was in the evening. The next morning, while I was at a late breakfast, he sent me a note, saying that he would call in an hour and have a business talk with me. I was practising my scales when he came in, and he clapped his hands and offered me a chair. He drew one up for himself, and then said in a perfectly business-like voice:—

“‘When I ran across you I knew that you only needed training to become a queen of opera bouffe, and to make a fortune for some one besides yourself. I also saw that you were going to become a beautiful woman. I made up my mind that I would own both the woman and the artist. Don’t look like a little tigress—still, I’m glad you can look that way,—you may be able to do Carmen yet. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not a villain, merely a practical man with an eye to beauty. I have no idea of letting you get under the influence of any other man,—not even if you weren’t so pretty. Let me console you by telling you that for the sort of woman you are there is no escape. You were made to drive men mad, and for the comic opera stage. That sort of combination might as well get down to business as early in the game as possible: it saves time.

“‘Had I never discovered you, you would have drifted from company to company, gone the pace with nothing to show for it, and worn out your youth at one-night stands. I saved you from a terrible fate. You know the rest. You know what you owe me. You have developed even beyond my hopes, but—mark you this—I have not advertised you in any way. You are as unknown as on the day you left California. If you mount the high horse and say: ”Sir, you are a villain. Go to, go to!“ I shall merely turn you loose without your trunks. You may imagine that with your voice and beauty you could get an engagement anywhere. So you could—without advertising, without an opera, and without a theatre of your own. Every existing troupe has its own prima donna; you would have to take a second or third rate part,—and unquestionably in a travelling troupe. There is no place for you in New York but the one I propose to create. Lillian Russell practically owns the Casino, and will, unless all signs fail, for many years. She would not tolerate you on the same stage five minutes; neither would any prima donna who had any influence with her manager,—and they mostly have. Your career would be exactly what it would have been if I had not met you,—full of hardships and change and racing about the country; arriving at six in the evening, singing at eight, leave the next morning at four, get what sleep you could on the train. That’s about the size of it. You’d be painting inside of a year, if not wearing plumpers. And what you’re mad at now, you’d be looking upon as a matter of course then, and grateful for the admiration.

“‘Moreover, no success is worth a tinker’s dam that ain’t made in New York,—I think I wrote you that on an average of once a month. If you show that you have horse sense, and will sign a contract with me for five years, I’ll make you the rage in New York inside of two months. Now it is success or failure: you can take your choice. I’ll be here to-morrow at ten.’ And he was gone before I could speak.

“_Bueno_, after I had gotten over being fearfully mad I sat down and thought it all over. I knew that all he said was true. I had heard too much in Paris. He had kept writing me that virtue paid in an actress to keep me straight, but I had heard the opposite about nine hundred times. _Bueno_, I was in a trap. I had made up my mind to succeed. I had even worked for it,—and you know how much that meant with me. I made up my mind that succeed I would, no matter what the price. It is one of two things in this world,—success or failure,—and if you fail nobody cares a hang about your virtue.

“You know I never was sentimental nor romantic. Soper had made a plain business proposition in a practical way that I liked. If he had gone on like a stage lover it would have been much harder. And after all I would be no worse than a society girl who sells herself to a rich husband. So, after turning it over for twenty-four hours—or all the time I was awake—I concluded not to be a fool, but La Rosita, Queen of Opera Bouffe. When he called I merely shrugged my shoulders and said ‘_Bueno_.’ He laughed, and said I would certainly succeed in this world; that the beautiful woman with the cool calculating brain always got there. So—here I am. What do you think of it?”

During this recital her voice had not for one instant broken nor hardened. She told her story in the soft sweet languid voice of Spain; she might have been relating an idyl of which she was the Juliet and Soper the Romeo.

Patience stared at her with wide eyes and dry lips.

“And you have never regretted it?” she asked; “you don’t care?”

Rosita raised her beautiful brows. “Regret? Well, no, I should say not. Have I not realised my dreams and ambition? Am I not rich and famous and happy instead of a scrambling nobody? Regret?—No—rather. What is more, I know how to save. A good many of us have learned that lesson. When I have lost voice and youth I shall be rich,—rich. We do not end in a garret, like in the old days. And I do not drink, and I rest a great deal—it will be a long time before I go off. Besides, there are the beauty doctors—Oh, no, I am not regretting. And Soper is getting tired of me, I am happy to say.”

Patience rose and went into the room where the maid had carried her hat and jacket. It was a bedroom, a white nest of lace and velvet. When she returned she said: “I should like to go home and think it over. I feel queer and stunned. You have taken me so completely by surprise that I can hardly think.”

Rosita coloured angrily.

“You are shocked, I suppose,” she said with a sneer. “I should think—” She paused abruptly. She was still an amiable little soul.

Patience understood perfectly, and turned a shade paler. “I told you that I did not understand how I felt. In fact, I hardly ever know just how I feel about anything. I suppose it is because I have the sort of mind that is made to analyse, and I haven’t had experience enough to know how. And I never judge any one. Why should I? Why should we judge anybody? We are not all made alike. I couldn’t do what you have done, but that is no reason why I should condemn you. That would be absurd. If any one else had told me this story I should only have been interested—I am so curious about everything. But you see you are the only girl friend I ever had, and that is what makes me feel so strangely. Good-bye;” and she hurriedly left the room.

XV

When she reached home she forgot her horror of death chambers, and went to Miss Tremont’s room and flung herself on the bed. She did not cry—her tears had all been spent; but she felt something of the profound misery of the last year in Monterey. During the intervening years she had seen little of the cloven hoof of human nature; the occasional sin over on Hog Heights hardly counted; creatures of the lower conditions had no high lights to make the shadows startling. But to-day the horror of old experiences rushed over her; she was filled with a profound loathing of life, of human nature.

So far, of love, in its higher sense—if it possessed such a part—she had seen nothing; of sensuality, too much. True, she had spent two weeks with Miss Galpin, during that estimable young woman’s engagement; but Miss Galpin took love as a sort of front-parlour, evening-dress affair, and Patience had not deigned to be interested. She had speculated somewhat over Miss Tremont’s early romance, but could only conclude that it was one of those undeveloped little histories that so many old maids cherish.

She recalled all the love stories she had read. Even the masters were insipid when they attempted to portray spiritual love. It was only when they got down to the congenial substratum of passion that they wrote of love with colour and fire. Was she to believe that it did not exist,—this union of soul and mind? Her dreams receded, and refused to cohere. She wondered, with natural egoism, if any girl of her age had ever received so many shocks. She was on the threshold of life, with a mass of gross material out of which to shape her mental attitude to existing things. True, she had met only women of relative sinlessness during these last years, but their purity was uninteresting because it was that of people mentally limited, and possessed of the fad of the unintellectual. Moreover, they had their erotism, the oddest, most unreal, and harmless erotism the world has known in the last two thousand years; and after all quite incidental: her keen eyes had long since observed that the old maids were far more religious than the married women, that the girls cooled perceptibly to the great abstraction as soon as a concrete candidate was approved.

She longed passionately for Miss Tremont. All her old restlessness and doubt had returned with the flight of that ardent absorbing personality. She wished that she could have been remodelled; for, after all, the dear old lady, whatever her delusions, had been happy. But she was still Patience Sparhawk; she could only be thankful that Miss Tremont had cemented her hatred of evil.

She rose abruptly, worn out by conjectures and analysis that led nowhere, and went out into the woods.

“Oh,” she said, lifting her arms, “this at least is beautiful.”

The ground was hard and white and sparkling. The trees were crystal, down to the tiniest twig. They glittered iridescently under the level rays of the sun descending upon the Palisades on the far side of the Hudson. The river was grey under great floating blocks of ice. Groves of slender trees in the hollows of the Palisades looked like fine bunches of feathers. On the long slopes the white snow lay deep; above, the dark steeps were merely powdered, here and there; on the high crest the woods looked black.

She walked rapidly up and down, calmed, as of old, by the beauty of nature, but dreading the morrow and the recurring to-morrows. Suddenly through those glittering aisles pealed the rich sonorous music of the organ. The keys were under the hands of a master, and the great notes throbbed and swelled and rolled through the winter stillness in the divine harmonies of “The Messiah.” Patience stood still, shaking a little. On a hill above the wood a large house had been built recently; the organ must be there.

The diamond radiance of the woods was living melody. The very trees looked to bow their crystal heads. The great waves of harmony seemed rolling down from an infinite height, down from some cathedral of light and stars.

The ugly impressions of the day vanished. The sweet intangible longing she had been used to know in Carmel tower flashed back to her. What was it? She recalled the words of the Stranger. It was long since she had thought of him. She closed her eyes and stood with him in the tower. His voice was as distinct as the notes of the organ. She felt again the tumult of her young half-comprehending mind. Was not life all a matter of ideals? Were not the bad and the good happy only if consistent to a fixed idea? Did she make of herself such a woman as the Stranger had evoked out of the great mass of small feminity, could she not be supremely happy with such a man? Where was he? Was he married? He seemed so close—it was incredible that he existed for another woman. Who more surely than she could realise the purest ideal of her imaginings,—she with her black experience and hatred of all that was coarse and evil? She closed her eyes to her womanhood no longer. It thrilled and shook her. If he would come—She trembled a little.

All men were henceforth possible lovers. Unless the Stranger appeared speedily his memory must give way to the definite. The imperious demands of a woman’s nature cannot be satisfied with abstractions. The ideal which he stood for would lend a measure of itself to each engaging man with whom she exchanged greeting.

XVI

“Miss Patience!” cried a strident voice.

Patience turned with a violent start. Ellen was a large blotch on the white beauty of the wood.

“There’s a young lady to see you. She didn’t give her name as I remember.”

Patience followed the servant resentfully. The world was cold and dull again. But when she recognised the Peele coachman and footman on the handsome sleigh before the door she forgot her dreams, and went eagerly into the house.

A girl was standing before the mantel, regarding through a lorgnette a row of photographs. She turned as she heard footsteps, and came forward with a cordial smile on her plain charming face. She wore a black cloth frock and turban which made Patience feel dowdy as Rosita’s magnificence had not.

“I am Hal,” she said, “and you are Patience, of course. I hope you have heard as much of me as I have of you. Dear old girl, I was awfully fond of her. You look so tired—are you?”

“A little. It is so good of you to come. Yes, I’ve heard a very great deal of you.”

“I’ll sit down, thank you. Let’s try this sofa. I’ve already tried the chairs, and they’re awful. But I suppose dear old Harriet never sat down at all. I wonder if she’ll be happy in heaven with nothing to do.”

Patience smiled sympathetically. “She ought to be glad of a rest, but I don’t believe she is.”

“She thought we were all heathens—dear old soul; but I did love her. What was the trouble? We only had one short letter from Miss Beale. Do tell me all about it.”

Miss Peele had an air of reposeful alertness. She leaned forward slightly, her eyes fixed on Patience’s with flattering attention. She looked a youthful worldling, a captivating type to a country girl. Her voice was very sweet, and exquisitely modulated. Occasionally it went down into a minor key.

“What shall you do with yourself, now?” she asked anxiously, when Patience had finished the brief story. “I am so interested in you. I don’t know why I haven’t called before, except that I never find time to do the things I most care for; but I have wanted to come a dozen times, and when we returned yesterday and heard of the dear old girl’s death I made up my mind to come at once. And I’m coming often. I know we shall be such good friends. I’m so glad she left you her money so you won’t have to work. It must be so horrid to work. I’m going to ask mamma to ask you to visit us. She’s feeling rather soft now over Cousin Harriet’s death, so I’ll strike before she gets the icebergs on. She isn’t pleasant then. I’ll tell her you don’t wear the white ribbon yet—” She broke into a light peal of laughter. “Poor mamma! how she used to suffer. Cousin Harriet’s white bow was the great cross of her life. It will go far toward reconciling her—Don’t think that my parent is heartless. She merely insists upon everything belonging to her to be _sans reproche_. That’s the reason we don’t always get along. What lovely hair you have—a real _blonde cendrée_. It’s all the rage in Paris. And that great coil is beautiful. Tell me, didn’t you find that Temperance work a hideous bore?”

“Oh, yes, but no one could resist Miss Tremont.”

“Indeed one couldn’t. I believe she’d have roped me in if I’d lived with her; but I’m a frivolous good-for-nothing thing. You look so serious. Do you always feel that way?”

Patience smiled broadly. “Oh, no. I often feel that I would be very frivolous indeed if circumstances would permit. It must be very interesting.”

“You get tired of yourself sometimes—I mean I do. Are you very religious?”

“I am not religious at all.”

“Oh, how awfully jolly. I do the regulation business, but it is really tragic to carry so much religion round all the time. I wonder how Cousin Harriet and the Lord hit it off, or if they liked each other better at a distance? I corresponded once with the brother of a school friend for a year, and when I met him I couldn’t endure him. Those things are very trying. I am going to call you Patience. May I? And if ever you call me Miss Peele you’ll be sorry. How awfully smart you’d look in gowns. My colouring is so commonplace. If I didn’t know how to dress, and hadn’t been taught to carry myself with an air, I’d be just nothing—no more and no less. But you have such a lovely nose and white skin—and that hair! You are aristocratic looking without being swagger. I’m the other way. You can acquire the one, but you can’t the other. When you have both you’ll be out of sight.

“What fun it would be,” she rambled on in her bright inconsequential way, “if Bev should fall in love with you and you’d marry him. Then I’d have such fun dressing you, and we’d get ahead of my cousin Honora Mairs, whom I hate, and who, I’m afraid, will get him. Propinquity and flattery will bring down any man—they’re such peacocks. But I’ll bring him to see you. You ought to have a violet velvet frock. I’d bet on Bev then. But, of course, you can’t wear colours yet, and that dead black is wonderfully becoming. Can I bring him up in a day or two?”

“Oh, yes,” said Patience, smiling as she recalled her brief periods of spiritual matrimony with Beverly Peele; “by all means. I’ll be so glad to meet all of you. And you are certainly good to take so much interest in me.”

“I am the angel of the family. Well, I must be off, or I’ll have to dine all by me lonely. None of the rest of the family uses slang: that is the reason I do. May is a grown-up baby, and never disobeyed her mamma in her life. Honora is a classic, and only swears in the privacy of her closet when her schemes fail. Mother—well, you’ve seen mother. As you may imagine, she doesn’t use slang. Papa doesn’t talk at all, and Bev is a prig where decent women are concerned. So, you see, I have to let off steam somehow, and as I haven’t the courage to be larky, I read French novels and use bad words.”

She rose and moved toward a heavy coat that lay on a chair. “Well, Patience—what a funny lovely old-fashioned name you have—I’m going to bring Bev to see you as a last resource. I’ve tried him on a dozen other girls, but it was no go. I’ll talk you up to him meanwhile—I’ll tell him that you are one of the cold haughty indifferent sort, and yet withal a village maiden. He admires blondes, and you’re such a natural one. We’ll come up Sunday on horseback. Now be sure to make him think you don’t care a hang whether he likes you or not—he’s been so run after. Isn’t it too funny? I did not come here on matchmaking thoughts intent, but I do like you, and we could have such jolly good fun together. I’ll teach you how to smoke cigarettes—”

“But Miss Peele—Hal—you know—I don’t want to marry your brother—I have never even seen him—much as I should like to live with you—I’d even smoke cigarettes to please you—but really—”

“Oh, I know, of course. I can only hope for the best, and Bev certainly is fascinating. At least he appears to be,” and she smiled oddly; “but being a man’s sister is much like being his valet, you know. Would you mind helping me into this coat?

“I hate these heavy fur things,” she said petulantly. “Oh, thanks—they don’t suit my light and airy architecture, and I can’t get up any dignity in them at all. I need fluffy graceful French things. You’d look superb in velvet and furs and all that sort of thing. Well, bye-bye,—no,—_au revoir_.”

She took Patience’s face between her hands and lightly kissed her on either cheek.

“Don’t be lonesome,” she said. “I’d go frantic in this house. Can’t I send you some books? I’ve a lot of naughty French ones—”

“No!” said Patience, abruptly, “I don’t want them. Don’t think I’m a prig,” she added, hastily, as a look of apprehension crossed Miss Peele’s face; “but I had a hideous shock to-day, and I don’t want to read anything similar at present—”

“Oh, tell me about it. How could you have a shock in Mariaville?”

“I didn’t. It was in New York—”

“Oh, was it real wicked? Did you have an adventure? Do tell me—Well, don’t, of course, if you don’t want to, only I’m so interested in you. Well, I must, must go;” and despite the furs she moved down the walk with exceeding grace. As she drove off she leaned out of the sleigh and waved her hand.

“Oh!” thought Patience, “I’m so glad she came. It was like fresh air after a corpse covered with sachet bags.” And then she went to the mantel and gazed upon Beverly Peele.

XVII

When Sunday came Patience dressed herself with unusual care. It did not occur to her that people in different spheres of life arose at different hours, and she expected her guests any time after eight o’clock.

Of course she must wear unrelieved black, but after prolonged regard in the becoming mirror of the best spare room, she decided that it rather enhanced her charms, now that a week’s rest had banished the circles from her eyes and cleared her skin.

She had coiled her soft ashen hair loosely on the top of her head, pulling it out a little about her face—she wore no bangs. Her restless eyes were dark and clear and sparkling, her mouth pink. She carried her slender figure with a free graceful poise. The carriage of her head was almost haughty. Her hips had a generous swell. Her hands and teeth were very white.

“I certainly have a look of race,” she thought, “if I’m not a beauty. I’d give a good deal to know that my ancestors really did have good blood in their veins. I don’t care so much for money, but I’d like to be sure of that.”

After breakfast she wandered about restlessly. She had known few moments of peace since Miss Peele’s visit. The train had been fired, and her being was in a tumult. Beverly Peele, the Stranger, and the vague ideals of her earlier girlhood were inextricably mixed. The result was a being before whom she trembled with mingled rapture and terror. Her vivid imagination had evoked a distinct entity, and the love scenes that had been enacted between the girl and this wholly satisfactory eidolon were such as have time out of mind made life as it is seem a singularly defective composition to the wondering mind of woman.

At times she was terrified at the rich possibilities of her nature, so little suspected. The revelation gave her vivid comprehension of woman’s tremendous power for sacrifice and surrender, possibilities of which she had read with much curiosity, but little sympathy. For those women she felt a warm honour, a fierce desire to espouse their cause. For Rosita she had only loathing and contempt.

It was not only passion that was awake. Sentiment, that finer child of the brain, and the sweet faint feeling which assuredly lingers about the region of the heart, whatever its physical cause may be, were there in full measure to lend their potent lashings to that primeval force which is as mighty in some women as in some men. It is doubtful if a woman ever loves a man when in his arms with the same exaltation of soul and passion which she feels for that creation of her brain that he little more than suggests, and that is only wholly hers when the man himself is absent. Imagination in woman is as arbitrary as desire in man, and she is beaten down and crushed by this imperious and capricious brain-imp so many times in her life that the wonder is she is not driven to the hopes and illusions of religion, or to humour, long before the skin has yellowed and the eye paled.

And when the imagination has full sway, when the man has not been beheld, when he has been invested with every quality dear to the heart of the generously endowed woman, when, indeed, all eidola blend, and she has a confused vision of an immense and mighty force bearing down upon her which shall sweep every tradition out of existence and annihilate the material world, then assuredly man himself would do well to retire into obscurity and curse his shortcomings.

It was four o’clock, and she had been through the successive stages of hope, despair, hope, melancholia, hope, and resignation, before she heard the sharp clatter of hoofs on the road. She ran to the dining-room window, her heart thumping, and peered through the blind. They were coming! Hal sat her horse like a swaying reed, but the young man on the large chestnut rode in the agonised fashion of the day. He was of medium height, she saw, compactly and elegantly built, and the beauty of his face had defied the photographer’s art.

Patience ran to the kitchen and told Ellen to answer the bell immediately, then sat down by the stove to compose herself. She was still trembling, and wished to appear cold and stately, as Hal had recommended. When Ellen returned and announced the visitors, she sprang up, patted her hair, pulled down the bodice of her gown, and then, with what dignity she could muster, went forth to meet her fate. She did wish she had a train. It was so difficult to be stately in a skirt that cleared the ground.

As she entered the parlour Mr. Peele was standing by the opposite door. His riding gear was very becoming. Patience noted swiftly that his eyes were a spotted brown and that his mouth pouted under the dark moustache.

Hal came forward with both hands extended. “We have come, you see,” she said, “and we had to make a wild break to do it—had a lot of company; but I was bound to come. Patience, this is Beverly. He’s quite frantic to meet you. It was all I could do to keep him away until to-day.”

The young man bowed in anything but a frantic manner, and stood gracefully until the girls were seated. Then he took a chair and caressed his moustache, regarding Patience attentively.

“Would you mind if Bev smoked?” asked Hal. “He is just wild for a cigar. We had to ride so hard to keep warm that he didn’t have a chance, and he’s a slave to the weed.”

Patience glanced swiftly at the door, half-expecting to see the indignant wraith of Miss Tremont, then, almost reluctantly, gave the required permission. Mr. Peele promptly lit a cigar. Patience wondered if he would ever speak. Perhaps he did not think it worth his while. He looked very haughty.

“We had a perfectly beautiful ride,” said Hal, in her plaintive voice. “I’d rather be on a horse than on an ocean steamer, and I do love to travel. You look ever so much better than you did, Patience. You must have needed a rest.”

Mr. Peele removed his cigar. “Perhaps that was what she had been _im_patiently waiting for,” he remarked.

Patience stared at him. Her eyes expanded. Something seemed crumbling within her.

“Oh, Bev, you do make me so tired,” said his sister. “I tell him eighteen times a day that punning is the lowest form of wit, but he’s incorrigible. I suppose it’s in the blood, and I’m glad it broke out in him instead of in me. It is well to be philosophical in this life—”

“When you can’t help yourself—” interrupted Mr. Peele, easily.

Patience felt it incumbent upon her to make conversation, although her thoughts were dancing a jig.

“You have a beautiful horse,” she said to the young man.

His eyes lit up with enthusiasm. “Isn’t she a beauty?” he exclaimed. “She’s taken two prizes and won a race. She’s the daughter—”

“Patience doesn’t know anything about horses,” interrupted Hal. “What does she care whose daughter Firefly is?”

“Oh, I’m very much interested,” faltered Patience.

“Are you really?” cried Mr. Peele, with a smile so beautiful that Patience caught her breath. “I’ve got the rarest book in the country on horses—beautiful pictures—coloured—I’ll bring it up and explain it to you. Tell you a lot of stories about famous horses.”

“I shall be delighted.”

“Do you ride?”

“I used to ride a pony, but I haven’t been on a horse for so long I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like.”

“That’s too bad. There’s nothing like it. Makes you feel so good. When I have dyspepsia I just jump on Firefly, and I’m all right in less than no time. I take a canter for dyspepsia—although I can’t—er—always feel at home that way. Ahem!”

Patience wanted to tear her hair. It was with an effort that she kept her face from convulsing with disgust. She caught sight of the young man’s intellectual brow, and, without any premonitory consciousness, laughed aloud. Mr. Peele smiled back with the pleasure of appreciated wit, and resumed his cigar.

“Bev isn’t such a fool as he looks,” remarked Hal, airily. “Just have patience with him. We all have our little failings.”

Patience sat as if turned to clay. She could not talk. All her natural animation had deserted her. She wished they would go and leave her alone. But Hal pulled off her riding gloves, and made herself comfortable on the sofa. As she rattled on, Patience noticed how beautiful her nails were. She turned her own hands over so that the palms lay upward.

“Never mind,” said young Peele, in a low tone. “They’re much prettier.”

“What’s that?” cried Hal. “What are you blushing about, Patience? How lovely it is to blush like that. I’ve forgotten how—and I’m only twenty-two. There’s tragedy for you. It’s not that I’ve had so many compliments about my beauty, nor yet about my winning ways,—which are my strong point,—but I found so much to blush about when I was first launched upon this wicked world that I exhausted my capacity. And Bev always did tell such naughty stories—” She paused abruptly. “Dear me! perhaps I’ve made a bad break, and prejudiced you against my brother; and I want you to be good friends so that we can have jolly times together. Perhaps you have an ideal man—a sort of Sir Galahad. I haven’t sounded you yet.”

“Sir Galahad is not my ideal,” said Patience, with the quick scorn of the woman who is born with intuitive knowledge of man. “I could not find anything interesting in an elongated male infant.”

“Oh, how lovely!” cried Hal. “Give me the man of the world every time. I tell you, you appreciate the difference when you have to entertain ’em. And the elongated infant, as you put it, never understands a woman, and she has no use for that species whatever. He doesn’t even want to understand her, and a woman resents that as a personal insult. The bad ones hurt sometimes, but they’re interesting; and when you learn how to manage them it’s plain sailing enough. Mrs. Laurence Gibbs—a friend of mamma’s, awfully good, goes in for charity and all that sort of thing—said the other day that at the rate women were developing and advancing, the standard of men morally would have to be raised. But I said ‘Not much!’ that the development of woman meant that women were becoming more clever, not merely bright and intellectual, and that clever women would demand cleverness and fascination in man above all else; and that Sir Galahads were not that sort. It’s experience that makes a man interesting to us women,—they represent all we’d like to be and don’t dare. If they were like ourselves—if they didn’t excite our imaginations—we wouldn’t care a hang for them. Mrs. Gibbs was horrified, of course, and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. But I said I guessed it was the other way. I’m not clever—not by a long sight,—and if I can’t stand a prig I know a clever woman can’t and won’t.”

“I’m so glad I’m not a prig,” murmured Mr. Peele.

“Oh, you’re a real devil. If you were clever now, you’d have to be shut up to protect society; but as it is, you just go on your good looks, so you’re not as dangerous as some.”

She rattled on, not giving the others a chance for more than a stray remark. Patience, listening with deep curiosity to this new philosophy, became aware of an increasing desire to turn her eyes to the man that had so bitterly disappointed her. A direct potent force seemed to emanate from him. It was her first experience of man’s magnetism, but she knew that he possessed it to a remarkable degree. When he finally shot out an insignificant remark she felt, in the excuse it gave her to turn to him, a sensation of positive relief. He was leaning back in his chair, in the easy attitude of a man that has been too accustomed to luxury all his life to look uncomfortable in any circumstances. With his picturesque garb, his noble, beautiful face, his subtle air of elegance and distinction, he looked the ideal hero of girlhood’s dreams. Patience wondered what Nature had been about, then recalled the many tricks of that capricious dame made famous in history, the round innocent faces of the worst boys in the Loyal Legion class, the saintly physiognomy of a Mariaville minister who had recently fallen from grace.

Peele was watching her out of his half-closed eyes, and as she met them he smiled almost affectionately. Patience averted her head quickly, angry that she had felt an impulse to respond, and fixed her attention on Hal. “Dear old Cousin Harriet,” that young woman was remarking, “how I do wish that I were even sorrier than I am that she is dead. I try to think it’s because I saw so little of her; but I know it’s just because I’m so beastly selfish. I don’t care a hang for anything that doesn’t affect my own happiness—”

“You’re not selfish,” interrupted Patience, indignantly.

“Oh, but I am,” said Miss Peele, with a comical little air of disgust which sat as gracefully upon her as all her varying moods and manners. “I get up thinking what I can get out of the day, and I go to bed glad or mad according to what the day has done for me. I don’t go in for Church work like Honora—dear Honora!—nor am I always doing some pretty little thing for people like May. I suppose you think I’m an angel because I came to see you. I assured myself at great length that it was my duty—but it was plain curiosity, no more nor less; and now I like you awfully, better than any woman I ever met—and I do so want you to come and visit us, but—”

“Couldn’t you come and stay with me?” asked Patience, hurriedly. She had no desire to visit Mrs. Gardiner Peele. “You know you have more or less company, and I should be very quiet for a while. And oh! I should so like to have you.”

“Oh, I’d love to! I’ll come and stay a week. I’m so sick of the whole family, Bev included. We won’t be going anywhere for three months out of respect for Cousin Harriet—mamma is very particular about those things—and I can get away as well as not. I’ll come on Tuesday,—can I? Bev will come up occasionally and see how I’m getting on—won’t you, Bevvy, dear?”

“I’d much rather you would not be here,” said Mr. Peele, calmly.

“Oh—really—well, we’re all young yet. I’m coming all the same. I suppose we must be going. We have to get home to dress for dinner, you know.”

She rose, and drew on her gloves. Her brother stood up immediately and helped her into her covert coat. “Well, Patience,” she said, kissing her lightly, “you’ll see me on Tuesday. I’ll come by train, and wire you beforehand. Mamma’ll raise Cain, but I’ll manage it. It’s only occasionally she’s too much for me. The cold glare of those blue eyes of hers freezes my marrow at times and takes all the starch out of me. It’s awful to have been brought up under that sort of eye. When Honora marries it’s the sort of eye she’ll have. She cultivates the angelic at present. Have I talked you to death, Patience? So good of you to ask me to come.”

Peele held out his hand, and Patience could do no less than lay hers within it. As it closed she resisted an impulse to nestle her own more closely into that warm grasp. He held her hand longer than was altogether necessary, and she felt indignantly that she had no desire to draw it away.

“That’ll do for one day,” said Hal, drily. “Come along, Beverly Peele. We won’t get home for coffee at this rate.”

When they had gone Patience threw herself on the sofa and burst into tears, then laughed suddenly. “I feel like the heroine of a tragedy,” she thought. “And the tragedy is a pun!”

XVIII

Hal arrived on Tuesday afternoon. Patience for twenty-four hours after Beverly Peele’s visit looked upon life through grey spectacles. She had an impression of being a solitary figure on a sandy waste, illimitable in extent. Life was ugly practical reality. It frightened her, and she cowered before it, hating the future, her blood chilled, her nerves blunt, her brain stagnant.

But by Tuesday morning, being young and buoyant, she revived, and roamed through the woods, entirely loyal to the Stranger. She made up her mind that she would find him, that he could not be married. He must have waited for her. “Oh!” she thought, “if I could not believe that something existed in this world as I have imagined it, some man good enough to love and look up to, I believe I’d jump into the river. At least I have heard Him talk. He could not be a disappointment, like that hollow bronze. If there are many men in the world like Beverly Peele I don’t wonder women are in revolt. Women start out in life with big ideals of man, and if they are disappointed I suppose they unconsciously strive to make themselves what they should have found in man. But it is unnatural. It seems to me that man must be able to give woman the best she can find in life, whether he does or not. Something in civilisation has gone wrong.”

“I’ve been so restless,” she said to Hal, as the girls sat on the edge of the bed in the spare room, holding each other’s hand. “If you had not been coming I’d have gone to New York before this and seen Mr. Field, the editor of the ‘Day’—He promised me once he’d make a newspaper woman of me—”

“A what?” cried Hal. “What on earth do you want to be a newspaper woman for?”

“Well, I must be something. I couldn’t live out of Mariaville on my income, and the few hundred dollars Mr. Foord left me, and I don’t know of anything else I want to be.”

“You are going to be Mrs. Beverly Peele,” said Hal, definitely. “Beverly has the worst attack of my recollection. He has simply raved about you. Tell me, don’t you like him?”

Patience said nothing.

Hal leaned forward and turned Patience’s face about. “Don’t you like him?” she asked in a disappointed tone. “Tell me. Please be frank. I hate people who are not.”

“Well, I’ll confess it—I was disappointed in him. You see, I’d thought about him a good deal—several years, if you want to know the truth—and I was sure he was an intellectual man—”

Hal threw back her head and gave a clear ringing laugh. “Bev intellectual! That’s too funny. I don’t believe he ever read anything but a newspaper and horse literature in his life. But we all think he’s bright. I think it my duty to tell you that he has a fearful temper. He’s always been mamma’s pet, and she never would cross him, so he flies into regular tantrums when things don’t go to suit him; but on the whole he’s pretty good sort. Don’t you think he’s good-looking?”

“Oh, wonderfully,” said Patience, glad to be enthusiastic.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll like him when you’ve forgotten the ideal and got used to the real. Do please try to like him, for I’m bent on having you for a sister-in-law.”

“Well, I’ll try,” said Patience, laughing.

“You have no idea,” continued the astute Miss Peele, “how many girls have been in love with him. I’ve known girls that looked like marble statues—the marble statue with the snub nose; that’s our swagger New York type, you know,—well, I’ve seen them make perfect idiots of themselves about him. But so far he’s rather preferred the ladies that don’t visit at Peele Manor. I’ve brought some cigarettes. Can I smoke?”

“You can just do anything you like.”

“Thanks. Well, I think I’ll begin by lying down on this soft bed. It’s way ahead of the chairs and sofa in the parlour.”

She exchanged her frock for a _peignoir_, and extended herself on the bed. Patience sat beside her in a rocking chair, her troubles forgotten.

“By the way,” said Hal, suddenly removing her cigarette, “what was the shock you had the other day? Tell me.”

“Well, I will,” and Patience told the story of Rosita from beginning to end. Hal listened with deep interest.

“That’s a stunner,” she said, “and worth coming to Mariaville for. The little rip. She didn’t tell you half. I’ll bet my hopes of a tiara on that. But she does dance and sing like an angel. And so you were children together? How perfectly funny! Now tell me your history, every bit of it.”

Patience hesitated, then impulsively told the story, omitting few particulars.

Miss Peele’s cigarette was allowed to go out. “Well, well,” she said, when Patience had finished. “Fate did play the devil with you, didn’t she? I’m so glad you’ve told me. I’ll tell the family what I like, and you keep quiet. I have the inestimable gift of selection. You poor child! I’m so glad you fell in with Cousin Harriet; and now you are going to be happy for the rest of your life. Oh, it’s so good to be here in this quiet place. I’m so tired of everybody. Sometimes I get a fearful disgust. The same old grind, year after year. If I could only fall in love; but when I do I know it’ll be with a poor man. I never did have any luck.”

“Wouldn’t you marry him?”

Hal shook her wise young head. “I don’t know. You never can tell what you’ll do when you get that disease; but I do know that I’d be miserable if I did. Money, and plenty of it, is necessary to my happiness. You see we’re not so horribly rich. Papa gives mamma and May and me two thousand dollars each a year, and his income comes mostly from his practice. We haven’t anything else but a little house in town, and Peele Manor—which of course we’ll never sell—and a big farm adjoining. Bev runs that, and has the income from it—about three thousand dollars a year. When he wants more mamma gets it for him, and when he’s married of course he’ll have a lot more. Two thousand stands me in very well now, but as a married woman I want nothing under thirty thousand a year—and that’s a modest ambition enough. You can’t be anybody in New York on less. Oh, dear—life is a burden.”

“Your woes are not very terrible,” said Patience, drily.

“Oh, you’d think so if you were me. We suffer according to our capacities and point of view. What is comedy to one is tragedy to another. If I had to wear the same clothes for two seasons I’d be as miserable as a defeated candidate for the Presidency. Beer makes one man drunk and champagne another. Bev, by the way, never drinks. He’s rather straight than otherwise. What’s your ideal of a man, by the way? Of course you have an ideal.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Patience, vaguely. “A man with a big brain and a big heart and a big arm.”

Miss Peele laughed heartily. “You are not exacting in your combinations, not in the least.”

The week passed delightfully to Patience, although Hal became rather restless toward the end. She arranged Patience’s hair in six different fashions, then decided that the large soft coil suited her best. Patience’s nails were manicured, she was taught how to smoke cigarettes, and select extracts from French novels were read to her. Hal was an accomplished gossip, and regaled her hostess with all the whispered scandals of New York society. She was a liberal education.

Beverly did not call, nor did he write, and Hal anathematised him freely.

“But I have my ideas on the subject,” she said darkly. “Just you wait.”

XIX

On the evening of Hal’s departure, as Patience was braiding her hair for the night, there was a sharp ring at the bell, and a few moments later Ellen came upstairs with a card inscribed “Mr. Beverly Peele.” Patience felt disposed to send word that she had retired, so thoroughly had she lost interest in the young man; but reflecting that he had probably ridden ten miles on a cold night to see her, told Ellen to light all the burners in the parlour, and twisted up her hair.

As she went downstairs she saw a heavy overcoat on the hall table.

“If it had occurred to me that he had come by train,” she thought, “I’d have let him go home again.”

He came forward with his charming smile, looking remarkably handsome in his evening clothes.

“It was kind of you to come,” she said, too unsophisticated to feel embarrassed at receiving a man at night in a house where she lived alone with a servant. “Of course you knew how lonely I must be.”

“Hal is good company, isn’t she?” he asked, holding her hand and staring hard at her. “But I should think she’d miss you more than you’d miss her.”

Patience withdrew her hand abruptly. Her face wore its accustomed cold gravity, contradicted by the eager eyes of youth. “Won’t you sit down? I hope Hal has missed me, but she has hardly had time to tell you so.”

“Hasn’t she? She has had several hours, and I suppose you know by this time how fast she can talk. She’s awfully bright, don’t you think so?”

“Indeed she is.”

“She isn’t a beauty like May, nor intellectual like Honora, but you can’t have everything—that is, everybody can’t.”

“Does any one?” asked Patience, indifferently.

“Hal says you are the cleverest woman she has ever met,—and—”

“I’m afraid Hal is carried away by the enthusiasms of the moment,” said Patience, as he paused. She was highly gratified, nevertheless.

“—you are the prettiest woman I ever saw,” he continued, as if she had not spoken.

“Oh, nonsense!” exclaimed Patience, angrily, but the colour flew to her face.

“I mean it,” and indisputably his eyes spoke admiration. “I’ve thought of no one else since I was here. I haven’t come before, because there’s nothing in calling on your sister, and that’s what it would have amounted to. But, you see, I’m here the very night she left.”

“You are very flattering.” Patience was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable. She realised that the lore gathered from novels was valueless in a practical emergency, and longed for the experience of Hal. “I understand that you are considered fascinating, and I suppose most women do like to be flattered.”

“I never paid a woman a compliment before in my life,” he said, unblushingly. “You don’t look a bit like any woman I ever saw. Hal says you look like a ‘white star on a dark night,’ and that’s about the size of it. You have such lovely hair and skin. I’ve always rather admired plump women, but your slenderness suits you—”

“Oh, please talk about something else! I am not used to such stuff, and I don’t like it. Suppose you talk about yourself.” (She had read that man could ever be beguiled by this bait.) “Are you as fond of travel as Hal is?”

“I never travel,” he said shortly. “When I find a comfortable place I stay in it. Westchester County suits me down to the ground.”

“You mean to say that you can travel and don’t? that you don’t care at all to see the beautiful things in Europe?”

“Oh, my mother always brings home a lot of photographs and things, and that’s all I want of it. I never could understand why Americans are so restless. I’m sick of the very sound of Europe, anyway.”

“Are you fond of New York?”

“New York is the centre of the earth, and full of pretty—interesting things, dontcherknow? I’ve had some gay times there, I can tell you. But I’ve settled down now, and prefer Westchester County to any place on earth. I’d rather be behind or on a horse than anything else.”

“Don’t you care for society?”

“I hate it. One winter was enough for me. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me into a ball-room again. Of course when the house is full of company in summer I like that well enough. I play billiards with the men and spoon—flirt with the girls and the pretty married women; but I’m just as contented when they’ve all cleared out.”

“Do you mean to say that you stay in the country by yourself all winter? What do you do? Read?”

“N-o-o-o. I don’t care much about books. We have a big farm and I run it, and I skate and drive and ride and smoke—Oh, there’s plenty to do. Occasionally I go to town and have a little fun.”

“What do you call fun if you don’t like society,—the theatre?”

“The theatre!” he laughed. “I never sat out a play in my life. Oh, I don’t know you well enough to tell you everything yet. Sometime, I’ll tell you a lot of funny things.”

“Perhaps you enjoy the newspapers in winter,” said Patience, hastily.

“Oh, I read even the advertisements. The papers are all the reading any man wants. There are two or three good sensational stories every day.”

“I don’t read those,” said Patience, disgustedly. This idol appeared to be clay straight up to his hair. “I like to read the big news and Mr. Field’s editorials.”

“Oh, you need educating. I read those too—not Field; he’s too much for me. But I didn’t come here to talk about newspapers—”

“Won’t you smoke a cigar?”

“No, thanks. I smoked all the way down, and in the cab too, for that matter—”

“Are the horses standing out there in the cold? Wouldn’t you like to tell him to take them to the barn?”

“I suppose he can look after his own horses. They’re nothing but old hacks, anyhow.” He leaned forward abruptly and took her hand, pressing it closely. “Oh!” he said. “I’ve been wild to see you again.”

Patience attempted to jerk her hand away, acutely conscious of a desire to return his clasp. She did the worst thing possible, but the only thing that could be expected: she lost her head. “I don’t like you to do that,” she exclaimed. “Let me go! What do you mean, anyhow?”

“That you are the loveliest woman I ever saw. I have been wild about you—” He had taken her other hand, and his face was close to hers. He had lowered his lids slightly.

“And you think that because I am alone here you can say what you like?” she cried passionately. “You would not dare act like this with one of your mother’s guests!”

“Oh, wouldn’t I?” He laughed disagreeably. “But what is the use of being a goose—”

Patience sprang to her feet, overturning her chair: but she only succeeded in pulling him to his feet also; he would not release her hands.

“I wish you would leave the house,” she said, stamping her foot. “If you don’t let me go, I’ll call Ellen.”

“Oh, don’t make a goose of yourself. And I’m not afraid of a servant. I’m not going to murder you—nor anything else. Only,—do you drive all men wild like this?”

“I don’t know anything about men,” almost sobbed Patience, “and I don’t want to. Will you go?”

“No, I won’t.” He released her hands suddenly; and, as she made a spring for the door, flung his arms about her. She ducked her head and fought him, but he kissed her cheeks and brow and hair. His lips burnt her delicate skin, his powerful embrace seemed absorbing her. She was filled with fury and loathing, but the blood pounded in her ears, and the very air seemed humming. The man’s magnetism was purely animal, but it was a tremendous force.

“You are a brute, a beast!” she sobbed. “Let me go! Let me go!”

“I won’t,” he muttered. He too had lost his head. “I’ll not leave you.” He strove to reach her mouth. She managed to disengage her right arm, and clinching her hand hit him a smart blow in the face. He laughed, and caught her hand, holding it out at arm’s length.

“Ellen!” she cried. As she lifted her head to call he was quick to see his advantage. His mouth closed suddenly on hers.

The room swam round her. She ceased to struggle. Her feet had touched that nether world where the electrical forces of the universe appear to be generated, and its wonder—not the man—conquered her. She shook horribly. She felt a tumultuous impulse to spring upon her ideals and beat them in the face.

Heavy footfalls sounded in the kitchen hall.

“There is Ellen!” she gasped, wrenching herself free. The man stamped his foot. He looked hideous.

“Go!” said Patience. “Go, just as fast as you can, and don’t you ever come here again. If you do, it won’t do you any good, for you’ll not see me.”

And she ran upstairs and locked her door loudly.

XX

For some time she walked rapidly up and down, pressing her hands to her hot face. Chaos was in her. She could not think. She only felt that she wanted to die, and preferred the river. She poured water into a basin and plunged her face into it again and again. The water had the chill of midwinter, and sent the blood from her brain; but she felt no cleaner. Still, her brain was no longer racing like a screw out of water, and she sat down to think. It was her trend of mind to face all questions with the least possible delay, and she looked at herself squarely.

“So,” she thought, “I am the daughter of Madge Sparhawk, after all. The horror of that night left me as I was made. Three years with the best woman the sun ever shone on only put the real me to sleep for a time. All my ideals were the vagaries of my imagination, a sort of unwritten book, of the nature of those that geniuses write, who spend their leisure hours in debauchery. I am no better than Rosita. I have not even the excuse of love—if I had—if it had been Him—I might perhaps—perhaps—look upon passion as a natural thing. Certainly it is not disagreeable,” and she laughed unpleasantly. “But I despised this man. He has not the brain of a calf nor the principle of a savage, and yet it is he that made me forget every ideal I ever cherished. If I met Him now, I would not insult him with the gift of myself. . . .

“If Beverly Peele came in here now I verily believe that I should kiss him again. What—what is human nature made of? I have the blood of refined and enlightened ancestors in my veins—I know that. I have seen nothing of sexual sin that did not make me abhor it. Barring my mother, I had the best of influences in Monterey, and I knew the difference. I have—or had—a natural tendency toward all that was refined and uplifting. I was even sure I had a soul. My brain is better, and better furnished, than that of the average woman of my age. And yet, at the first touch, I crumble like an old corpse exposed to air. I am simply a body with a mental annex, and the one appears to be independent of the other.

“Is the world all vile?” she continued, resuming her restless walk. “This man attacked me as if he had no anticipation of a rebuff. And yet I am the friend of his sister, the adopted daughter of his mother’s cousin, and, he has every reason to think, of irreproachable life. If the world—his mother’s world—were not full of such women as he imagined me to be—he would never have taken so much for granted. He acted as if he thought me a fool, and I appear to be remarkably green. I am certainly learning. Oh—the brute! the brute!” And she flung herself on the bed and burst into violent weeping, which lasted until she was so exhausted that she fell asleep without disrobing.

XXI

The next morning her head ached violently. She started for the woods, but turned back. They held her lost ideals. She sat all day by the window, looking at the Hudson, listless, and mentally nauseated.

During the afternoon a special messenger brought a note of abject apology from Beverly Peele. She burnt it half read and told the man there was no answer. There is only one thing a woman scorns more than a man’s insult, and that is his apology.

The next day he called, but was refused admission by the sturdy Ellen. Patience spent the day on Hog Heights. On the following day he called again, with the same result. The next day Hal came.

“What is the row between you and Bev?” she exclaimed, before she had seated herself. “He says you’ve taken a dislike to him, and is in the most beastly temper about it. I never saw him so cut up. He’s sent me here to patch it up and give you this letter. Do tell me what is the matter?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Patience, grimly. “The idea of his sending his sister to patch it up!” And she gave an account of Mr. Peele’s performance, woman-like omitting her own momentary forbearance.

Hal listened with an amused smile. “So Bev made a bad break,” she remarked when Patience had concluded. “I’m not surprised, for he’s pretty hot-headed, and head over ears in love. You mustn’t take life so tragically. I’ve had several weird experiences myself, although I’m not the kind that men lose their head about as a rule; only given the hour and the occasion, some men will lose their head about any woman. Perhaps I should have said New York men. They are a rare and lovely species. They admire God because he made himself of their gender and knew what he was about when he invented woman. I was out on a sleighing party one moonlight night last winter, and on the back seat with a man I’d never seen out of a ball-room before. The way that man’s legs and arms flew round that sleigh made my hair curl. You see, a lot of us are fast, but then plenty of us are not. The trouble is that the men can’t discriminate, as we look pretty much alike on the outside. They’re not a very clever lot—our society men—and they don’t learn much until they’ve been taught. Then when they are forced to believe in your virtue they feel rather sorry for you, and later on are apt to propose—if you have any money. Bev would propose to you if you were living in a tent and clad in a gunny sack. He would have preferred things the other way—it’s so much less trouble—but as he can’t, he won’t stop at any such trifling nuisance as matrimony. Oh, men are a lovely lot! Still, the world would be a pretty stupid place without them. You’ll learn to manage them in time, and then they’ll only amuse you. They are not really so bad at heart—they’ve been badly educated. I know four married women of the type we call ‘friskies,’ whom my mother would shudder at the thought of excluding from her visiting list, and whom I’d bet my new Paquin trunk, several men I know have had affairs with. So what can you expect of a man?”

“Is the world rotten?” asked Patience, in disgust.

“It’s just about half and half. I know as many good women as bad. Half the women in society are good wives and devoted mothers. The other half, girls and married women, old and young, are no better than your Rosita. Sometimes their motives are no higher. Usually, though, it’s craving for excitement. I don’t blame those much myself. The most fascinating woman I know is larky. She as much as told me so. Some of the confessions I’ve had from married women would make you gasp. Well—let’s quit the subject. Promise me you’ll forgive Bev.”

“I shall not. I hate him. I shall never look at him again if I can help it.”

“Oh, dear, dear, you are young! And I do so want you for a sister. May is such a fool, and I do hate Honora.”

“You wouldn’t have me loathe myself for the sake of being your sister, I suppose?”

“Of course I wouldn’t have you marry Bev if you couldn’t like him; but I believe you really do, only things haven’t turned out as you planned in that innocent little skull of yours. Bev is a good fellow, as men go. You’ll get used to him and his kind in the course of time, and then you’ll enjoy life in a calm practical way.”

“Is there no other way?” asked Patience, bitterly.

“Not in my experience. And if you stay here in your woods you’ll get tired of your ideals after a while. You can’t live on ideals—the human constitution isn’t made that way. If it was there’d be no such thing as society. We’d live in caves and bay the moon. So you’d better come into the world, Patience dear, and accept it as it is, and drain it for all it’s worth.”

“Oh, hush! You are too good to talk like that.”

“Good?—what is good? I am the result of my surroundings—a little better than some, a little worse than others. So was Cousin Harriet. So is La Rosita. I’m not cynical. I merely see life—my section of it—exactly as it is. If you become a newspaper woman you’ll probably receive a succession of shocks. As nearly as I can make out they’re about like us—half and half. I became quite chummy with a newspaper woman, once, crossing the Atlantic. She was awfully pretty, and, as nearly as one woman can judge of another, perfectly proper. She related some wild and weird experiences she had had with men. Yours would probably be wilder and weirder, as you appear to be possessed of an unholy fascination; and in a year or two you’ll be a beauty. All you want is a little more figure and style—or rather clothes.”

“Well, if I’m to have wild and weird experiences I prefer to have them with men of brains, not with a lot of empty-headed society men.”

“Don’t generalise too freely, my dear. There are newspaper men and newspaper men,—according to this girl I’ve just told you of. Some are brainy, some are merely bright; some are gentlemen, most are common beyond words. And, as she said—after you’ve worked with man in his shirt sleeves, you don’t have many illusions about the animal left.”

“I have not one, and I lost them in an hour. Your brother is supposed to be a gentleman with a long array of ancestors, and he acted like a wild Indian.”

“My dear, he merely lost his head. That was a compliment to you, and you should not be too hard on a man in those circumstances. He won’t do it again, I’m sure of that. He has some control. I warned him before he came not to pun, and he says he didn’t, not once. Now, tell me one thing—Don’t you like him just a little?”

“No,” said Patience; but she flushed to her hair, and Hal, with her uncanny wisdom, said no more.

XXII

The next day Patience went to the woods for the first time since Beverly Peele’s onslaught. A natural reaction had lifted her spirits out of the slough, and she turned to nature, as ever. She could never be the same again, she thought with a sigh; and once more she must readjust herself. She wondered if any girl had ever done so much readjusting in an equal number of years.

The woods were no longer a scene of enchantment. The ice had melted. The trees were grey and naked again. The ground was slush, and nasty to walk upon.

“But the spring must come in time,” she thought; “and then perhaps I’ll feel new too—but not the same, for like the spring I shall have other seasons behind me.

“But—perhaps—who knows?—I may be the better for knowing myself. I was in a fool’s paradise before. Perhaps I was in danger of becoming an egoist, and imagining myself made of finer fibre than other women. Great writers show that the same brute is in all of us, and I can believe it. Some work it off in religion, but the majority don’t. There seems to be some tremendous magnetic force in the Universe that makes the human race nine-tenths Love—for want of a better name. Circumstances and ancestors determine the direction of it. It seems too bad that Civilisation has not done more for us than to give us the analytical mind which understands and rebels, and no more, at the inheritance of the savage. But now that I know myself, perhaps I can go forward more surely on the path to the higher altitudes of life. I should like to be as good as auntie, and worldly-wise beside.

“I suppose my horrid experience with this man will make me more exacting with all men. I think I could not blunder into matrimony, as some women do. I feel as if I never wanted to see another man, but that impression will pass—all impressions appear to pass. I may even want to meet Him after a time, and perhaps he will forgive. Shouldn’t be surprised if he’d want a good deal of forgiveness himself. Meanwhile I can work, and learn all I can of what life means, anyway. I’ll go to Mr. Field—”

The soft ground echoed no footfalls, but Patience suddenly became aware that some one was approaching her. She turned, and saw Beverly Peele.