did. I felt between the two men as if I were hardly able to keep the

peace, and as if on the slightest provocation, George would fly out. It was absurd, of course, but the air seemed to be full of unfriendliness.

"I suppose we need not be very long over business," I said, trying with desperation to speak brightly. "I've been over the papers, Tom, and I can assure you they are all right. I'm something of a lawyer, you know."

George interposed, as stiffly as possible, that he must urge me to have the instrument read aloud, in order that I might realize what I was doing. I assured him I knew perfectly what the paper was, even if it were called an instrument.

"Ruth is entirely right," Tom put in emphatically. "There is not the slightest need of dragging things out."

"I can understand that you naturally would not want any delay," George retorted sharply.

Tom turned and looked at him with an expression which made George change color, but before anything worse could be said, I hurried to ask Tom to ring for Rosa to act as a witness. I looked in my turn at George, and I think he understood how indignant I was.

"It's outrageous for you to burden yourself with his brat," George muttered under his breath as Tom went across the room to the bell-rope.

"You forget that you are speaking of my daughter," I answered him, with the most lofty air I could manage to assume.

He turned on his heel with an angry exclamation, and no more objections were made. George never showed me this unpleasant side of his character before in all the years I have known him. For the moment he behaved like a cad, like nothing else than a cad. Something very serious must have been troubling him. He must have been completely unstrung before he could be so disagreeable.

Rosa came in, and the signing was done. After the business was finished George lingered as if he wished to speak with me. Very likely he wished to apologize, but my nerves were not in tune for more talk with him, and in any case it was better to ignore all that had been unpleasant.

"You have no more business, have you, George?" I asked him directly. "Tom of course will want to see the daughter he has given away. I didn't let him see her first for fear he'd refuse to part with her."

George had no excuse for staying after that, and he was just leaving the room when Rosa reappeared with Tomine. The darling looked like a cherub, and was in a mood truly angelic. George scowled at her as if the dear little thing had done him some wrong, and hurried away. I do not understand how he could resist my darling, or why he should feel so about her. It is, I suppose, friendship for me; but he should realize a little what a blessing baby is to my lonely life.

Tom stood silent when Rosa took Thomasine up to him. He did not offer to touch the tiny pink face, and I could fancy how many thoughts must go through his mind as he looked. While he might not regret the dead woman, indeed, while he could hardly be other than glad that Julia was not alive, he must have some feeling about her which goes very deep. I should think any man who was not wholly hard must have some tenderness toward the mother of his child, no matter who or what she was. It moves even me, to think of such a feeling; and I could not look at Tom as he stood there with the living child to remind him of the dead mother.

It seemed a long time that he looked at baby, and we were all as quiet as if we had been at prayer. Then Tom of his own accord kissed Tomine. He has never done it before except as I have asked him. He came over to me and held out his hand.

"I must go back to haying," he said. Then he held my hand a minute, and looked into my eyes. "Make her as much like yourself as you can, Ruth," he added; "and God bless you."

The tears came into my eyes at his tone, and blinded me. Before I could see clearly, he was gone. I hope he understood that I appreciated the generosity of his words.

July 3. I am troubled by the thought of yesterday. George went away so evidently out of sympathy with what I had done, and very likely thinking I was unfriendly, that it seems almost as if I had really been unkind. I must do something to show him that I am the same as ever. Perhaps the best thing will be to have his wife to tea. My mourning has prevented my doing anything for them, and secretly, I am ashamed to say, this has been a relief. I can ask them quietly, however, without other guests.

July 8. I feel a little as if I had been shaken up by an earthquake, but I am apparently all here and unhurt. Day before yesterday Cousin Mehitable descended upon me in the wake of her usual telegram, determined to bear me away to Europe, despite, as she said, all the babies that ever were born. She had arranged my passage, fixed the date, engaged state-rooms, and cabled for a courier-maid to meet us at Southampton; and now I had, she insisted, broken up all her arrangements.

"It's completely ungrateful, Ruth," she declared. "Here I have been slaving to have everything ready so the trip would go smoothly for you. I've done absolutely every earthly thing that I could think of, and now you won't go. You've no right to back out. It's treating me in a way I never was treated in my whole life. It's simply outrageous."

I attempted to remind her that she had been told of my decision to stay at home long before she had made any of her arrangements; but she refused to listen.

"I could bear it better," she went on, "if you had any decent excuse; but it's nothing but that baby. I must say I think it's a pretty severe reflection on me when you throw me over for any stray baby that happens to turn up."

I tried again to put in a protest, but the tide of Cousin Mehitable's indignation is not easily stemmed.

"To think of your turning Cousin Horace's house into a foundling hospital!" she exclaimed. "Why don't you put up a sign? Twenty babies wouldn't be any worse than one, and you'd be able to make a martyr of yourself to some purpose. Oh, I've no patience with you!"

I laughed, and assured her that there was no sort of doubt of the truth of her last statement; so then she changed her tone and begged me not to be so obstinate.

Of course I could not yield, for I cannot desert baby; and in the end Cousin Mehitable was forced to give me up as incorrigible. Then she declared I should not triumph over her, and she would have me know that there were two people ready and just dying to take my place. I knew she could easily find somebody.

The awkward thing about this visit was that Cousin Mehitable should be here just when I had asked the Westons to tea. I always have a late dinner for Cousin Mehitable, although Hannah regards such a perversion of the usual order of meals as little less than immoral; and so George and his wife found a more ceremonious repast than I had intended. I should have liked better to have things in their usual order, for I feared lest Mrs. Weston might not be entirely at her ease. I confess I had not supposed she might think I was endeavoring to impress her with my style of living until she let it out so plainly that I could not by any possibility mistake her meaning. She evidently wished me to know that she saw through my device; and of course I made no explanations.

It was an uncomfortable meal. Cousin Mehitable refused to be conciliating. She examined the bride through her lorgnette, and I could see that Mrs. Weston was angered while she was apparently fascinated. George was taciturn, and I could not make things go smoothly, though I tried with all my might. By the time the guests went, I felt that my nerves were fiddlestrings.

"Well," Cousin Mehitable pronounced, as soon as the door had closed behind them, "of all the dowdy frumps I ever saw, she is the worst. I never saw anybody so overdressed."

"She was overdressed," I assented; "but you behaved horribly. You frightened her into complete shyness."

"Shyness! Humph!" was her response. "She has no more shyness than a brass monkey. That's vulgar, of course, Ruth. I meant it to be to match the subject."

I put in a weak defense of Mrs. Weston, although I honestly do find her a most unsatisfactory person. She is self-conscious, and somehow she does not seem to me to be very frank. Very likely, moreover, she had been disconcerted by the too evident snubs of my unmanageable cousin.

"If I snubbed her," was the uncompromising rejoinder with which a suggestion of this sort was met, "I'm sure I am not ashamed of it. To think of her saying that you evidently wanted to show Tuskamuck how to do things in style! Does she think any person with style would let her into the house?"

I thanked her for the compliment to me.

"Oh, bother!" she retorted. "You are only a goose, with no sense at all. To think you once thought of marrying that country booby yourself!"

I was too much hurt to reply, and probably my face showed my feeling, for Cousin Mehitable burst into a laugh.

"You needn't look so grumpy about it," she cried. "All's well that ends well. You're safely out of that, thank heaven!"

I felt that loyalty to George required that I should protest, but she interrupted me.

"Don't be a humbug, Ruth," she said; "and for pity's sake don't be such a fool as to try to humbug yourself. You're not a sentimental schoolgirl to moon after a man, especially when he's shown what his taste is by taking up with such a horror as Mrs. Weston."

"I am fond of him," I asserted, stubbornly enough.

She seized me by the shoulders, and looked with her quick black eyes into mine so that I felt as if she could see down to my very toes.

"Can you look me in the face, Ruth Privet, and tell me you really care for a man who could marry that ignorant, vulgar, dowdy woman just for her pretty face? Can you fool yourself into thinking that you haven't had a lucky escape from a man that's in every way your inferior? You know you have! Why, can you honestly think now for a moment of marrying him without feeling your backbone all gooseflesh?"

Fortunately she did not insist upon my answering her, but shook me and let me go. I doubt if I could have borne to have her press her questions. I was suddenly conscious that George has changed or that my idea of him has altered; and that if he were still single, I could not marry him under any circumstances.

Cousin Mehitable went home this morning, but her talk has been in my mind all day.

It comes over me that I have lost more than George. His loving another did not deprive me of the power or the right to love him, and his marriage simply set him away from my life. In some other life, if there be one, I might have always been sure he would come back to me. I cannot help knowing I fed his higher nature, and I helped him to grow, while his wife appeals to something lower, even if it is more natural and human. I felt that in some other possible existence he would see more clearly, and she would no longer satisfy him. Now I begin to feel that I have lost more than I knew. I have lost not only him, but I have lost--no, I cannot have lost my love for him. It is only that to-night I am foolish. It is rainy, dreary, hopeless; and seeing Mrs. Weston through Cousin Mehitable's eyes has put things all askew.

Yet why not put it down fearlessly, since I have begun? If I am to write at all it should be the truth. I am beginning to see that the man I loved was not George Weston so much as a creature I conjured up in his image. I see him now in a colder, a more sane light, and I find that I am not looking at the man who filled my heart and thought. He has somehow changed. This would be a comfort to some, I suppose. I see now how Mother felt about him. She never thought him what he seemed to me, and she always believed that sooner or later I should be disappointed in him. I should not have been disappointed if I had married him--I think! Yet now I see how he is under the influence of his wife--But no, it is not her influence only; I see him now, I fear, as he is when he is free to act his true self, unmoved by the desire to be what I would have had him. He was influenced by me. I knew it from the very first, and I see with shame how proud of it I was. Yet it gave me a chance to help him, to grow with him, to feel that we were together developing and advancing. Oh, dear, how cold and superior, and conceited it sounds now it is on paper! It truly was not that I thought I was above him; but it is surely the part of a woman to inspire her lover and to grow into something better with him. Now it seems as if whatever George did he did for me, and not because of any inner love for growth. He appears now less worthy by just so much as what he was seems to me higher than what he is. I have lost what he was. It is cruel that I cannot find the George I cared for. It is hard to believe he existed only in my mind.

July 9. I have been reading over what I wrote last night. It troubles me, and it has a most self-righteous flavor; but I cannot see that it is not true. It troubles me because it is true. I remember that I wondered when George tired of me if the same would have come about if we had married. Am I so changeable that if I had been his wife I should have tried him by my severe standards, and then judged him unworthy? I begin to think the Pharisees were modest and self-distrustful as compared to self-righteous me. It is terribly puzzling. If I were his wife I should surely feel that my highest duty was to help him, to bring out whatever is best in him. I think I should have been too absorbed in this ever to have discovered that I was idealizing him. Now I am far enough away from him to see him clearly. The worse part of him has come out; and very likely I am not above a weak feminine jealousy which makes me incapable of doing him justice. I believe if I had been his wife I might have kept him--Yet he was already tired of my influence!

Such speculations are pretty unprofitable work. The only thing to keep in mind now is that he is my friend, and that it is for me to do still whatever I can for him. I confess that Cousin Mehitable is right. I am no longer sorry I did not marry George, but I still care for him sincerely, and mean to serve him in every way possible.

July 12. Miss Charlotte came in this morning while I was playing with Tomine, and hailed me as a mother in Israel. She is a great admirer of baby, but she declines to touch her.

"I'm too big and too rough," she says. "I know I should drop her or break her, or forget she isn't a plant, and go to snipping her with my pruning-shears. You'd better keep her. You've the motherly way with you."

It must please any woman to be told that she has the motherly way, and just now I certainly need it. Miss Charlotte came to talk with me about Kathie. The poor child has been growing more and more morbid all summer, and I do not see what is to be done for her. I have tried to comfort and help her, but as her troubles are religious I am all but helpless.

Miss Charlotte went over the Cove yesterday on one of her roving tramps in the woods,--"bushwhacking," as she calls it,--and found Kathie roaming about in Elder's Cut-down, wringing her hands and crying aloud like a mad thing.

"You can't tell what a start it gave me, Ruth," she said. "I heard her, and I thought of wild beasts and wild Indians, and all sorts of horrors. Then when I saw her, I didn't know her at first. Her hair was all tousled up, and she wrung her hands in the craziest way."

"Did you speak to her?" I asked.

"I couldn't. She ran away as soon as I called to her. She'll end in a lunatic asylum if you don't get hold of her."

I could only shake my head.

"What can I do, Miss Charlotte?" I asked her. "The trouble is she is half crazy about sin and judgment, and things of that sort that I don't even believe in at all. What can I say? You don't want me to tell her her father's religion is a mistake, I suppose."

Miss Charlotte smiled serenely, and regarded me with a look of much sweet kindliness.

"You're a fearful heathen, Ruth," was her response, "but you have a fine wheedling way with you. Couldn't you persuade her she's too young to think about such things?"

"I've tried something of the kind, but she says she is not too young to die. She is like a child out of an old memoir. She isn't of our time at all. We read of that sort of a girl, but I supposed they all died a hundred years ago."

"I doubt if there ever were such girls," Miss Charlotte returned with candor; "except once in a very great while. I think the girls of the memoirs were very much like the rest of us most of the time. They probably had spells of being like Kathie. The difference is that she is at boiling point all the time."

"Of course it's her father," I said thoughtfully.

"Yes," she assented. "He's such a rampant Methodist."

I could not help the shadow of a smile, and when she saw it Miss Charlotte could no more help smiling in her turn.

"Of course you think it's a case of the pot's calling the kettle black," she said, "but the Methodists do make such a business of frightening folks out of their wits. We don't do that."

I let this pass, and asked if she couldn't make some practical suggestion for the treatment of Kathie.

"I can't tell you how to dilute her Methodism," she returned with a shrewd twinkle in her eye. "You must know the way better than I do."

I am troubled and perplexed. I have so many times wondered what I ought to do about talking to Kathie. I have always felt that the fact her father trusted her with me put me on my honor not to say things to her of which he would not approve. It seemed unwise, too, for the child to have any more turmoil in her brain than is there already; and I know that to make her doubt would be to drive her half distracted. The question is whether she has not really begun to doubt already, and needs to be helped to think fearlessly. She is a strange survival from another century. Our grandmothers used to agonize over sin, it is claimed, although I think Miss Charlotte is probably right when she says they were after all a good deal like us. At any rate they were brought up to dread eternal punishment, but it is astonishing to find anybody now who receives this as anything but a theory. Belief in the old creeds would seem impossible in these days except in a conventional and remote fashion; and yet Kathie takes it all with the desperation of two hundred years ago. If she were to listen to a suggestion of using her creed less like a hair-shirt, she would feel she had committed an appalling transgression. She is only a baby after all, and heaven knows what business she has with creeds anyway. I would as soon think of giving Tomine dynamite bombs to play with.

I said something of this sort to Miss Charlotte, and she agreed with me that Kathie ought not to brood over theologic questions, but she thought even a child ought, as she put it, instinctively falling into the conventional phraseology of the church, to make her peace with God. I am so glad that nobody ever put it into my childish head that I could ever be at war with God.

Peter has made a leap to the table, and set his foot on my wet writing. Evidently he thinks it foolish to waste time in this sort of scribbling; but I do wish I knew what I can do and what I ought to do.

July 15. Deacon Daniel Webbe came this afternoon to see his granddaughter. Mrs. Webbe--had forbidden him, I was about to write, but perhaps that is not fair. He only said she thought he had better not come, and he tried clumsily to hint that he hoped I would not betray him. It was touching to see him, he was so much moved by the beauty and the daintiness of baby, and by all the thoughts he must have had about Tom. He said little, only that he spoke with a good deal of feeling of how good it is in Tom to stay at home and take charge of the farm; but tears were in his patient eyes, and he looked at Tomine with a glance so pathetic that I had to go away to wipe my own.

I find that having baby here naturally keeps my thoughts a good deal on Tom and his possible future. I can't help the feeling that I owe him some sort of reparation for the devotion he has given me all these years. Surely a woman owes a man something for his caring for her so, even if she cannot feel in the same way toward him. Tom has always been a part of my life. We were boy and girl together long before I knew George. When the Westons moved here, I must have been ten or twelve years old; and I never knew George until Father took him into the office. It was the winter Father had first been ill, and he had to have an assistant at once. I remember perfectly the excellent reports Father got from some office in Boston where George had been, and these decided him. He had been inclined not to like George at the beginning. I think I first became interested in George through defending him.

George always seemed rather to prefer that I should not know his people, and this struck me as strange. The less admirable they were the more Tom would have insisted upon my knowing them. Dear old Tom! How many times he has told me of his own faults, and never of his good deeds. He is certainly one of the most stubbornly honest creatures alive.

Tom and George are about as different as two mortals could be. George has very little of Tom's frankness, and he has not much of Tom's independence. Father used to declare that George would always be led by a woman, but would never own it to himself. I wonder if this is true. He is being led now by his wife. I fancy, though, he has no idea of such a thing. Tom would lead wherever he was.

I have rambled far enough away from Deacon Daniel and the baby. I do hope Tomine will have her father's honesty. If she have that, other things may be got over. Deacon Daniel spoke of her having her father's eyes, and she could hardly have Tom's eyes and not be straightforward.

July 20. Mr. Saychase has taken to frequent pastoral visitations of late. He probably feels now that the moral welfare of baby is involved he must be especially active. I wish he did not bore me so, for he comes often, and I do wish to be friendly.

To-night he seemed rather oddly interested in my plans for the future.

"I hope that you mean to remain in Tuskamuck," he said. "Some folks think you are likely to move to Boston."

I told him that I had no such intention, and reminded him that baby made a new bond between me and the place.

"Oh, the baby," he responded, it seemed to me rather blankly. "You mean, I presume, that you contemplate keeping the infant."

"Keeping her?" I responded. "Why, I have adopted her."

"I heard so," Mr. Saychase admitted; "but I did not credit the report. I suppose you will place her in some sort of a home."

"Yes," I answered; "in my home."

He flushed a little, and as he was my guest I set myself to put him at his ease. But I should like to understand why everybody is so determined that Tomine shall be sent to a "Home."

July 21. I went to see old lady Andrews to-day. She was as sweet and dear as ever, and as immaculate as if she had just been taken out of rose-leaves and lavender. She never has a hair of her white curls out of place, and her cheeks are at seventy-five pinker than mine. I like to see her in her own house, for she seems to belong to the time of the antique furniture, so entirely is she in harmony with it. I get a fresh sense of virtue every time I look at her beautiful old laces. I wonder if the old masters ever painted angels in thread laces; if not it was a great oversight. Dear old lady Andrews, she has had enough sorrow in her life to embitter any common mortal; her husband, her two sons, and her near kin are all dead before her; but she is too sweet and fine to degenerate. When sorrow does not sour, how it softens and ennobles.

Old lady Andrews was greatly interested about baby, and we gossiped of her in a delightful way for half an hour.

"It pleases me very much, Ruth," she said at last, "to see how motherly you are. I never had any doubt about you at all except that I wondered whether you could really mother a baby. I knew you would love it, and be kind, of course; but babies ought to have motherliness if they are really to thrive."

I flushed with pleasure, and asked if she meant that she had thought me cut out for an old maid.

"If I did," she answered, with that smile of hers which always makes me want to kiss her on the spot, "I shall never think so again. You've the genuine mother-instinct."

She looked at me a moment as if questioning with herself.

"The truth is," she went on, as if she had made up her mind to say the whole, "you have been for years making an intellectual interest do instead of real love, and of course your manner showed it."

I could not ask her what she meant, though I only half understood, and I wished to hear more. She grew suddenly more serious, and spoke in a lower tone.

"Ruth," she asked, "I am an old woman, and I am fond of you. May I say something that may sound impertinent?"

Of course I told her she might say anything, and that I knew she could not be impertinent. I could not think what was coming. She leaned forward, and put her thin hand on mine, the little Tennant hand with its old-fashioned rings.

"It is just this, Ruth. Be careful whom you marry. I'm so afraid you'll marry somebody out of charity. At least don't think of being a parson's wife."

"A parson's wife?" I echoed stupidly, not in the least seeing what she meant.

"That would be worse than to take up with the prodigal son," she added, not heeding my interrogation; "though it does seem to me, my dear, that you are too good to be just served up like a fatted calf in honor of his return."

I stared at her with bewilderment so complete that she burst into a soft laugh, as mellow as her old laces.

"I am speaking parables, of course, and it's no matter now about the prodigal. I only wanted to suggest that you are not just the wife for Mr. Saychase, and"--

"Mr. Saychase!" I burst out, interrupting her, I think, for the first time in my life. "Why, who ever thought of anything so preposterous?"

"Oh, you innocent!" she laughed. "I knew you'd be the last one to see it, and I wanted to warn you so that he need not take you entirely by surprise. He is my pastor, and a very good man in his way; but he isn't our kind, my dear."

I sat staring at her in a sort of daze, while I suddenly remembered how much Mr. Saychase has been to see me lately, and how self-conscious he has seemed sometimes. I had not a word to say, even in protest, and old lady Andrews having, I suppose, accomplished all she wished in warning me, dropped the subject entirely, and turned back to Thomasine's doings and welfare.

The idea that Mr. Saychase has been thinking of me as a possible helpmate is certainly ludicrous. I believe thoroughly any girl should "thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love," but in this case I do not see how love comes into the question at all. I cannot help feeling that he would intellectually be the sort of a husband to put into a quart-pot, there to bid him drum, and at least he will lose no sleep from a blighted passion for me. Certainly I should be intellectually starved if I had to live with him. He is not naturally a man of much power of thinking, I suppose, and he has never cultivated the habit. One cannot help seeing that whatever his original capabilities they have been spoiled by his profession. A minister, Father said to me once, must either be so spiritual that his creed has no power to restrain him, or a poor crippled thing, pathetic because the desire of rising has made him hamper himself with vows. I think I understand what he meant, and I am afraid Mr. Saychase is of the latter sort: a man who meant well, and so pledged himself always to cling to the belief the church had made for him, no matter what higher light might come into his life. He is to be pitied,--though he would not understand why. He could hardly care for anybody so far from his way of thinking as I am, so old lady Andrews cannot be right there.

July 25. George is having his house enlarged. Mrs. Weston is certainly energetic, with what is perhaps a Western energy. She has been married only about four months. George told me the other day that he meant to make the house larger.

"Gertrude wants a bigger parlor," he explained, rather ill at ease, I thought. "The house is big enough for me, but when a man has a wife things are different."

There was a labored playfulness in his manner which troubled me. He has bought a phaeton and pony for her. I hope that he is not going beyond his means. As for a larger parlor, I am afraid that Mrs. Weston will have to fill it with rather odd people.

July 27. Kathie has shown a new side to her character which troubles me. It is all, I suppose, part of her morbid, unhinged condition, but it is unpleasant. She has conceived a violent jealousy of baby. She refuses to stay in the house if I have Thomasine with me. This afternoon I had sent for her to come over and stay to tea. She came in about five, with a wild look in her eyes which she has almost all the time now. She sat down without saying anything, and began to pull the roses in a bowl on the table to pieces, scattering the petals on the floor.

I laughingly told her that she evidently thought she was in the woods where roses grew wild and there were no rugs. Instead of answering me, or apologizing, she looked at me strangely, and for a moment said nothing.

"Are you going to have baby brought down here this afternoon?" she demanded at last.

I said Tomine was out with Rosa, but that I expected them in soon, as it was almost time for baby's supper.

"Will she come in here?" Kathie asked.

"Oh, yes," was my reply. "You will see her. Never fear."

"Then I may as well go home now," observed this astounding child, rising, and going deliberately toward the door.

"What in the world do you mean?" I cried out, completely taken by astonishment.

"I never will stay in the room with her again," Kathie responded emphatically. "I just hate her!"

I could only stare at her.

"You're all taken up with her now," Kathie continued. "You used to like me, but now it's all that baby. I'm much obliged to you for inviting me to supper, but I can't stay any longer if she's coming."

If anybody could make me understand whether Kathie is sane or not I should have more confidence in attempting to deal with her. To-day I felt as if I were dealing with a mad creature, and that it was idle to try to do anything. It seemed to me it would be a pity to treat the matter too seriously, and I tried to act as if I thought she was merely joking. I laughingly told her that the idea was one of the funniest I ever heard, and that we must tell baby when she came in, to see if we could make the small person laugh. Kathie received my remarks with unmoved seriousness.

"It isn't a joke at all, Miss Ruth," she said, with an uncanny air which was most uncomfortable, but which in some indefinable way gave me for the first time in all my dealings with the girl a sort of hint that she was partly acting. "It is just my wicked heart. I hate"--

I interrupted her briskly.

"Your wicked fiddlesticks, Kathie!" I said. "Don't talk nonsense. What time has been settled on for the church fair?"

She was so taken aback that she had no defense ready, and after a sort of gasp of amazement she answered my question, and said no more about her wickedness. Baby came in with Rosa, and Kathie behaved as usual, only I remember now that she did not offer to touch Tomine. I went upstairs for a moment with Rosa and baby to see if everything was right, and when I went back to the parlor my guest had taken herself off. She had gone without her supper as she had said she should. I confess my first feeling was that she needed to be soundly shaken; but after all when a child is morbidly wrong in her feelings the particular way in which she shows it is not of much consequence. Perhaps she had better be expending her distempered mood on jealousy of baby than on religion. The question is what I had better do; and I confess I do not know how to answer it.

July 28. Mr. Saychase has made his purpose and his ideas entirely clear, and I wish I could think of them with less inclination to laugh. If he could for a single minute know how funny he was, it would do him more good than anything I can think of as likely to happen to him.

He came to call to-night, and so evident was his air of excitement that even Rosa must have noticed it; she was all significant smiles when she ushered him in. I tried to talk about commonplace things, but could get practically no response. For half an hour by the clock we went stumbling on with intervals of silence when I could think of nothing except that I must say something. At last he cleared his throat with a manner so desperate and determined that I knew something dreadful was coming.

"Miss Privet," he said, "I thought I would mention to you that I came to-night for a particular purpose."

It came over me with a sickening sense that old lady Andrews was right, and that it was too late to stop him. I did make a desperate effort to interpose, but he had at last got started, and would not be stayed.

"You must have noticed," he went on, as if he were repeating a lesson, "that I entertain a great respect for your character."

"Indeed, Mr. Saychase," I responded, with a laugh which was principally nerves, "you evidently mean to make me unbearably vain."

"That you could never be," he returned with an air of gallantry I should not have thought him capable of. "Your modesty is one of your greatest charms."

The girl who can hear her modesty praised and not be amused must be lacking in a sense of humor. I laughed aloud before I realized what I was doing. Then, as he looked hurt, I apologized humbly.

"It's no matter," he said graciously; "of course you wouldn't be modest if you knew how modest you are."

This sounded so ambiguous and so like comic opera that in spite of myself I laughed again.

"Come, Mr. Saychase," I begged him, "don't say any more about my modesty, please. We'll take it for granted. Have you seen Aunt Naomi this week? She has had a little return of her bad cold."

"I came over to-night," he broke out explosively, not in the least diverted by my question, "to ask you to marry me."

All I could do was to blurt out his name like an awkward schoolgirl.

"I dare say you are surprised, Miss Ruth," he went on, evidently relieved to have got the first plunge over with, "but that, as we were saying, may be laid to modesty."

I respect Mr. Saychase,--at least I think he means well, and I hated to be the means of making him uncomfortable; but this return to my modesty was too funny, and nearly sent me off into laughter again. My sense of the fun of the situation brought back, however, my self-control.

"Mr. Saychase," I said, as gravely as I could, "I am not so dull as not to feel the honor you have done me, but such a thing is entirely impossible. We had better talk of something else."

"But I am in earnest, Miss Privet," he urged.

I assured him that I was not less so.

"I hope you will not decide hastily," was his response. "I have long recognized your excellent qualities; our ages are suitable; and I think I am right in saying that we both find our highest satisfaction in doing good. Be sure my esteem for you is too great for me to easily take a refusal."

"But, Mr. Saychase," I argued, catching at any excuse to end his importunity, "you forget that I am not a sharer in your beliefs. A clergyman ought not to marry a woman that half his parish would think an atheist."

"I have thought of that," he responded readily, "and knew you must recognize that a clergyman's wife should be a helpmeet in his religious work; but I hoped that for the sake of the work, if not for mine, you might be willing to give up your unhappy views."

There was a sort of simplicity about this which was so complete as to be almost noble. It might be considered an amazing egotism, and it might be objected that Mr. Saychase had a singular idea of the sincerity of my "unhappy views;" but the entire conviction with which he spoke almost made me for the moment doubt myself. Unfortunately for him, a most wickedly absurd remembrance came into my mind of a sentimental story in an old red and gold annual that was grandmother's. A noble Christian chieftain has falled in love with a Moorish damsel, and says to her: "Beautiful Zorahida, only become a Christian, and thou shalt be my bride." Beautiful Zorahida took at once to the proposition, but I am made of more obstinate stuff. I hid the smile the story brought up, but I determined to end this talk at once.

"Mr. Saychase," I said as firmly as I could, "you are kind, but it is utterly impossible that I should change my views or that I should marry you. We will, if you please, consider the subject closed entirely. How soon do you go to Franklin to the annual conference?"

He evidently saw I was in earnest, and to my great relief said no more in this line. He could not help showing that he was uncomfortable, although I was more gracious to him than I had ever been in my life. He did not stay long. As he was going I said I was sure he would not let anything I had said wound him, for I had not meant to hurt him. He said "Oh, no," rather vaguely, and left me. I wonder how many girls ever get an offer of marriage without a hint of love from beginning to end!

July 30. Tomine is more adorable every day. I wish Tom could see her oftener. It would soften him, and take out of his face the hard look which is getting fixed there. He surely could not resist her when she wakes up from her nap, all rosy and fresh, and with a wonder-look in her eyes as if she had been off in dreamland so really that she could not understand how she happens not to be there still. I think the clasp of her soft little fingers on his would somehow take the ache out of his heart. Poor Tom! I wonder how far being sorry for a thing makes one better. Repentance is more than half discomfort, Mother used to say. I always told her that to me it seemed like a sort of moral indigestion which warned us not to eat any more of the forbidden fruit that caused it. Tom is unhappy. He is proud, and he feels the disgrace more than he would own. Any country town is so extremely pronounced in its disapproval of sins of a certain kind that a man would have to be covered with a rhinoceros hide not to feel it; and to stand up against it means to a man of Tom's disposition a constant attitude of defiance.

Sometimes I find myself feeling so strongly on Tom's side that I seem to have lost all moral sense. It is my instinct, the cruelly illogical injustice of my sex perhaps, to lay the blame on poor dead Julia. Only--but I cannot think of it, and how I come to be writing about it is more than I can tell. I do think a good deal about Tom, however, and wonder what the effect on his character will be. He is of a pretty stubborn fibre when once he has taken a determination; and now that he has made up his mind to fight down public opinion here he will do it. The question is what it will cost him. Sometimes it seems a pity that he could not have gone away from home, into a broader atmosphere, and one where he could have expended his strength in developing instead of resisting. Here he will be like a tree growing on a windy sea-cliff; he will be toughened, but I am afraid he will be twisted and gnarled.

I wonder if little Tomine will ever ask me, when she is grown, about her mother. If she does I can only say that I never saw Julia until she was on her deathbed; and that will have to do. Dear little soft baby! The idea of her being grown up is too preposterous. She is always to be my baby Thomasine, and then I can love her without the penalty of having to answer troublesome questions.

VIII

AUGUST

August 1. I said a thing to Tom to-day which was the most natural thing in the world, yet which teases me. He came to pay one of his rare visits to baby, and we were bending over her so that our heads were almost together. I was not thinking of him, but just of Tomine, and without considering how he might take it I declared that I felt exactly as if she were my very own.

"What do you mean?" Tom asked. "She is yours."

"Oh, but I mean as if I were really her mother," I explained, stupidly making my mistake worse.

"Would to God you were!" he burst out. "Would to God you cared enough for me to be now!"

I was of course startled, though I had brought it on myself. I got out of it by jumping up and calling to Rosa to take Tomine and give her her supper. Now recalling it, and remembering how Tom looked, his eyes and his voice, I wonder what I ought to do. I do not know how to make him understand that because George has left me I am no more likely to marry somebody else. I may not feel the same toward George, but nothing follows from that. I own to myself frankly that I respect Tom more than I do George; I can even say that I find more and more as time goes on that I had rather see Tom coming up the walk. The old boy and girl friendship has largely come back between Tom and me; and I am a little, just a little on the defensive on his account against the talk of the village. I think now all is over, and Julia in her grave, that might be allowed to rest. Only one thing I do not understand. I am no more moved by the touch of George's hand now than by that of any acquaintance; I cannot touch Tom's fingers without remembering Julia.

August 2. It is curious to see how Rosa's heart and her religion keep up the struggle. Ran's wife has obstinately refused to die, but has instead got well enough to send Rosa an insulting message; so the hope of finding a solution of all difficulties in Ran's becoming a widower is for the present at least abandoned. Rosa is evidently fond of Ran, and while the priest and her conscience--or rather her religious fear of consequences--keep her from marrying him, they cannot make her give him up entirely. She still clings to some sort of an engagement with Dennis; and she still talks in her amazingly cold-blooded way about her lovers, speculating on the practical side of the question in a fashion so dispassionate that Ran's chance would seem to be gone forever; but in the end she comes back to him. What the result will be I cannot even guess, but I feel it my duty not to encourage Rosa to incline toward Ran, who is really drunken and disreputable. I remind her how he beat his wife; but then she either says any man with spunk must beat his wife now and then when he isn't sober, or she declares that anybody might and indeed should beat that sort of a woman. I can only fall back upon the fact that she cannot marry him without incurring the displeasure of her church, and although she never fails to retort that I do not believe in her religion, I can see that the argument moves her. In dealing with Rosa it is very easy to see how necessary a religion is for the management of the ignorant and unreasonable. In this case the obstinacy of Rosa's attachment may prove too strong for the church, but the church is the only thing which in her undisciplined mind could combat her inclination for a moment.

Sometimes when Rosa appeals to me for sympathy I wonder whether genuine love is not entirely independent of reason; and I wonder, too, whether it is or is not a feeling which must last a whole life long. I seem to myself to be sure that if I had married George I should always have loved him,--or I should have loved the image of him I kept in my mind. I would have defied proof and reason, and whatever he did I should have persuaded myself that no matter what circumstances led him to do he was really noble in his nature. I know I should have stultified myself to the very end, rather than to give up caring for him; and it seems to me that I should have done it with my mental eyes shut. I should have been hardly less illogical about it than Rosa is. What puzzles me most is that while I can analyze myself in this lofty way, I believe I have in me possibilities of self-deception so complete. Whether it is a virtue in women to be able to cheat themselves into constancy I can't tell, and indeed I think all these speculations decidedly sentimental and unprofitable.

August 5. Aunt Naomi came to-day, like an east wind bearing depression. She has somehow got hold of a rumor that George is speculating. Where she obtained her information I could not discover. She likes to be a little mysterious, and she pieces together so many small bits of information that I dare say it would often be hard for her to say exactly what the source of her information really was. She is sometimes mistaken, but for anybody who tells so many things she is surprisingly seldom entirely wrong. Besides I half think that in a village like ours thoughts escape and disseminate themselves. I am sometimes almost afraid as I write things down in this indiscreet diary of mine, lest they shall somehow get from the page into the air, and Aunt Naomi will know them the next time she appears. This is to me the worst thing about living in a small place. It is impossible not to have the feeling of being under a sort of foolish slavery to public opinion, a slavish regard to feelings we neither share nor respect; and greater still is the danger of coming to be interested in trifles, of growing to be gossips just as we are rustics, simply from living where it is so difficult not to know all about our neighbors.

Speculation was the word which to-day Aunt Naomi rolled as a sweet morsel under her tongue. Any sort of financial dealing is so strangely far away from our ordinary village ways that any sort of dealing in stocks would, I suppose, be regarded as dangerously rash, if not altogether unlawful; but I do hope that there is nothing in George's business which will lead him into trouble. I know that I am bothering about something which is none of my affair, and which is probably all right, if it has any existence.

"I don't know much about speculation myself," Aunt Naomi observed; "and I doubt if George Weston does. He's got a wife who seems bound to spend every cent she can get hold of, and it looks as if he found he'd got to take extra pains to get it."

"But how should anybody know anything about his affairs?" I asked in perplexed vexation.

She regarded me shrewdly.

"Everybody knows everything in a place like this," she responded waggishly. "I'm sure I don't see how everything gets to be known, but it does. You can't deny that."

I told her that I was afraid we were dreadfully given to gossiping about our neighbors, and to talking about things which really didn't concern us.

"Some do, I suppose," she answered coolly, but with a twinkle from behind the green veil which is always aslant across her face. "It's a pity, of course; but you wouldn't have us so little interested in each other as not to notice the things we hear, would you?"

I laughed, of course, but did not give up my point entirely.

"But so much that is said is nonsense," I persisted. "Here Mrs. Weston has been in Tuskamuck for four or five months, and she is already credited with running into extravagance, and bringing her husband into all sorts of things. We might at least give her time to get settled before we talk about her so much."

"She hadn't been here four or five weeks before she made it plain enough what she is," was the uncompromising retort. "She set out to astonish us as soon as she came. That's her Western spirit, I suppose."

I did not go on with the talk, but secretly the thing troubles me. Speculation is a large word, and it is nonsense to suppose George to be speculating in any way which could come to much, or that Aunt Naomi would know it if he were. I do wish people would either stop talking about George, or talk to somebody besides me.

August 6. Mrs. Tracy came in to call to-day. She makes a round of calls about once in two years, and I have not seen her for a long time. She had her usual string of questions, and asked about me and baby and Tom and the girls and the summer preserving until I felt as if I had been through the longest kind of a cross-examination. Just before she left she inquired if Mrs. Weston had told me that her husband was going to make a lot of money in stocks. I said at once that I seldom saw Mrs. Weston, and that I knew nothing about her husband's business affairs; but this shows where Aunt Naomi got her information. Mrs. Weston must have been talking indiscreetly. I wonder--But it seems to me I am always wondering!

August 7. Kathie has not been near me since she left the house the other evening. It seemed better to let her work out things in her own way than to go after her. I hoped that if I took no notice she might forget her foolishness, and behave in a more natural way. I met her in the street this afternoon, and stopped to speak with her. I said nothing of her having run away, but talked as usual. At last I asked her if she would not come home with me, and she turned and came to the gate. Then I asked her to come in, but she stopped short.

"Is the baby gone?" she demanded.

"No," I answered.

"You know I shall never come into your house again while that baby is there," she declared in an odd, quiet sort of way. "I hate that baby, and he that hates is just like a murderer."

She said it with a certain relish, as if she were proud of it. I begin to suspect that there may be a good deal of the theatrical mixed with her abnormal feeling.

"Kathie," I said, "you may be as silly as you like, but you can't make me believe anything so absurd as that you hate Thomasine. As for being a murderer in your heart, you wouldn't hurt a fly."

She looked at me queerly. I half thought there was a little disappointment in her first glance; then a strange expression as if she unconsciously took herself for audience, since I would not serve, and went on with her play of abnormal wickedness.

"You don't know how wicked I am," she responded. "I am a murderer in my heart."

A strangely intense look came into her eyes, as if a realization of what she was saying took hold of her, and as if she became really frightened by her own assumption. She clutched my arm with a grasp which must have been at least half genuine.

"Oh, Miss Ruth," she said. "I don't know what I shall do. I know I am lost!"

I wanted to shake the child, so completely for the moment did I feel that a lot of her emotion was make-believe, even if unconscious; but on the other hand she was actually beginning to turn pale and tremble with the nervous excitement she had raised by her fear or her theatricals.

"Kathie," I said, almost severely, "you know you are talking nonsense. Come into the house, and have a glass of milk and a slice of cake. You'll feel better after you've had something to eat."

She looked at me with eyes really wild, and without a word turned quickly and ran down the street at full speed, leaving me utterly confounded. I am sure she acts to herself, and that her religious mania is partly theatrical; but then I suppose religious mania always is. Yet it has a basis in what she believes, and with her imaginative, hysterical temperament she has the power of taking up her ideas so completely that she gets to be almost beside herself. When she is so much in earnest she must be treated, I suppose, as if all her self-accusations and agony of mind were entirely real.

August 8. I have been to lay a bunch of sweet-peas on Mother's grave. I wonder and wonder again if she knows when I am so near the place where we left her, the place where it always seems to me some life must yet linger. I have all my life been familiar with the doubt whether any consciousness, any personality survives death; and yet it is as natural to assume that life goes on as it is to suppose the sun will rise to-morrow. I know that my feeling proves nothing; but still instinctively I cling to it.

In any case there is the chance the dead are alive and alert somewhere in the shadows, and if they are they must be glad not to be forgotten. I should not be willing to take the chance, and neglect the grave of one who had been fond of me. Mother loved me as I loved her; and this decides I shall run no risk of her being unhappy after death in the thought that I have forgotten.

I suppose I cling to a feeling that there must be some sort of immortality largely from the loneliness I feel. The idea of never seeing Father or Mother again is more than I could endure. Father used to say that after all each of us is always really alone in this world, and even our best friends can no more come close to us than if they did not exist; but this always seemed to me a sort of cold, forlorn theory. The warmth of human companionship somehow makes it impossible for me to feel anything like this. When I said so to Father, I remember he smiled, and said he was glad I did find it impossible.

One thing I am sure of to the very bottom of my heart: that things are somehow completely right, so that whatever death means it must be part of a whole which is as it should be.

August 10. To-day Tom brought me a bunch of cardinal-flowers. He had been up to the Lake Meadows, he said, and thought I might like them. The whole parlor is alive with the wonderful crimson--no, scarlet, of the great flaming armful of blossoms. Tom used to get them for me when I was a girl, but since those days I have had only a stray spike now and then. They bring back the past, and the life-long friendship I have had with Tom. I wonder sometimes why I have never been in love with Tom. Life never seemed complete without him. In the years he kept away on account of George I missed him sorely, and more than once I have thought of all sorts of ways to bring things back to the former footing; only I knew all the time it was of no use. It is the greatest comfort to have the old friendship back, and now Tom must understand that I have no more than friendship to give him. It would be vexing if he should misunderstand, but I must take care he does not.

August 11. I have been at the Town Hall helping to make ready for a raspberry festival, to raise money for the church. Miss Charlotte came after me, and of course I had to go. She said all that was wanted was my taste to direct about decorating the hall, but I have been told so before, and I knew from experience that taste is expected to work out its own salvation. To be really fair I suppose I should say I cannot stand by and give directions, but have to take hold with my own hands, so it is nobody's fault but my own if I do things. Besides, it is really good fun among the neighbors, with the air full of the smell of cedar, with all the pretty young girls making wreaths and laughing while they work, and with your feet tangled in evergreens and laurel whenever you cross the floor. Miss Charlotte is in her element at such a time. Her great-throated laugh, as strong as a man's, rings out, and she seems for the time quite happy and jolly with excitement.

It came over me to-day almost with a sense of dismay how old I seem to the young girls. They treated me with a sort of respect which couldn't be put into words exactly, I suppose, but which I felt. Somehow I believe the breaking of my engagement has made me seem older to them. Perhaps it is my foolish fancy, but I seem to see that while I was engaged I had still for them a hold on youth which I have now lost. I suppose they never thought it out, but I know they feel now that I am very much their senior.

At a time like this, too, I realize how true it is that I am somehow a little outside of the life of the village. I have lived here almost all my life. Except for the years I was at school, and a winter or two in Boston or abroad I have been generally at home. I know almost everybody in town, by sight at least. Yet I always find when I am among Tuskamuck people in this way that I am looking at them as if I were a spectator. I wonder if this means that I am egotistical or queer, or only that my life has been so much more among books and intellectual things than the life of most of them. I am sure I love the town and my neighbors.

The thing I wish to put down, however, has nothing to do with my feelings toward the town. It is that I am ashamed of the way I wrote the other day about Mr. Saychase. He entered the hall this afternoon just as old Mrs. Oliver came limping in to see the decorations; and the lovely way in which he helped the poor old lame creature made me blush for myself. I almost wanted to go to him and apologize then and there. It would have been awkward, however, first to explain that I had made fun of him in my diary, and then apologize! But he is a good soul, even if he did think I was a sort of nineteenth century Zorahida, to give up Mohammedanism for the sake of wedding a Christian chief.--And here I go again!

August 15. I have been reading to-night a book about the East, and it has stirred me a good deal. The speculations of strange peoples on the great mystery of life and death bring them so close to us. They show how alike all mankind is, and how we all grope about after some clue to existence. On the whole it is better, I think, not to give much thought to what may come after death,--no more thought, that is, than we cannot help. We can never know, and we must either raise vague hopes to make us less alive to the importance of life, the reality of life--I do not know how to say it. Of course all religion insists on the importance of life, but rather as a preparation for another existence. I think we need to have it always before us that what is important is not what will happen after we are dead and gone, but what is happening now because we are alive and have a hand in things. I see this is not very clear, but I am sure the great thing is to live as if life were of value in itself. To live rightly, to make the most out of the life we can see and feel, is all that humanity is equal to, and it is certainly worth doing for its own sake.

The idea which has struck me most in what I have been reading to-night is the theory that each individual is made up of the fragments of other lives; that just as the body is composed of material once part of other bodies, so is the spirit built up of feelings, and passions, and tendencies, and traits of temperament formerly in other individuals dead and gone. At first thought it does not seem to me a comfortable theory. I should not seem to belong to myself any more, if I believed it. To have the temper of some bygone woman, and the affections of another, and the tastes of a third,--it is too much like wearing false hair! It does not seem to me possible, but it may be true. At least it is a theory which may easily be made to seem plausible by the use of facts we all know. If it is the true solution of our characters here, it is pleasant to think that perhaps we may modify what for the present is our very own self so it shall be better stuff for the fashioning of another generation. I should like to feel that when this bunch of ideas and emotions goes to pieces, the bits would make sweet spots in the individuals they go to make part of. I suppose this is what George Eliot meant in the "Choir Invisible," or something like this. As one thinks of the doctrine it is not so cold and unattractive as it struck me in the reading. One could bear to lose a conscious future if the alternative was happiness to lives not yet in being. I should like, though, to know it. But if there weren't any me to know, I should not be troubled, as the old philosophers were fond of saying, and the important thing would be not for me to know but for the world to be better. I begin to see how the doctrine might be a fine incentive to do the best with life that is in any way possible; and what more could be asked of any doctrine?

August 17. Baby was ill night before last, and we three women were smitten to the heart. Hannah went for Dr. Wentworth, and when he came he laughed at our panic, and assured me nothing serious was the matter. It was only a little indigestion caused by the excessive heat. I do not know how I should have behaved if it had not been that Rosa was in such a panic I had to give all my spare attention to keeping her in order. It came to me then what an advantage an officer must have in a battle; he cannot break down because he has to look to his men. Last night I wished greatly Tom were in reach; it would have been dreadful if anything really serious had happened to baby, and he not to know it until it was too late. Yet he could have done nothing if the worst had been true and he had been here. It would have been no comfort to poor little sick Tomine to have one person by her more than another, so long as her nurses were not strangers. A father is nothing to her yet. I wonder when he will be.

Yesterday Tomine was better, and to-night she seems as well as ever; but it will take time for me to be rid entirely of fear. I wonder if she had gone whether her little bunch of vitality would have been scattered through new lives. She can hardly have much personality or individuality yet. Sometimes the universe, the power that keeps going on and on, and which is so unmoved by human pain, strikes me as too terrible for thought; but I cling desperately to Father's idea that nature is too great to be unkind, and that what looks to us like cruelty is only the size of things too big for us to grasp. It is a riddle, and the way I put it is neither so clear nor wise, I suppose, as the theories of countless religious teachers, they and I alike guessing at things human insight is not equal to. I doubt much if it is profitable to speculate in this vein. "Think all you can about life as a good and glorious thing," Father wrote to me once when I had expressed in a school-letter some trouble or other about what comes after death, "but keep in mind that of what came before we were born or will happen after we are dead we shall never in this life know anything, no matter how much we speculate, so dreaming about it or fretting about it is simply building air-castles." I have said over to myself ever since I began to be perplexed that to speculate about another life is to build air-castles.

Baby is well again and I will not fret or dream of what it would mean if she had slipped away from us.

August 20. I must settle myself a little by writing, or I shall be like old Mrs. Tuell, who said that for years she never slept a wink because her nerves wiggled like angleworms all over her inside. I have certainly been through an experience which might make anybody's nerves wiggle.

About half past two o'clock Rosa brought me a note, and said:--

"That Thurston girl left it, and told me not to give it to you till three o'clock; but if I don't give it to you now, I know I'd forget it."

I opened the note without thinking anything about the time. It was written in Kathie's uneven hand, and blotched as if it had been cried over. This is what it said:--

Dear Miss Ruth,--This letter is to bid you good-by. You are the only one in the world I love, and nobody loves me. I cant stand you to love that baby better than me, and God is so angry it dont make any difference what I do now. When you read this I shall be in torment forever, because I am going down to Davis Cove to drownd myself because I am so wicked and nobody loves me. Dont tell on me, because it would make you feel bad and father wouldnt like it to get round a child of his had drownd herself and mother would cry. Yours truly and with a sad and loving good-by forever,

Kathie Thurston.

P. S. If they get me to bury will you please put some flowers on my coffin. No more from yours truly

K. T.

My first impulse was to laugh at this absurd note, but it came over me suddenly that there was no knowing what that child will do. Even now I am bewildered. I cannot get it out of my mind that there is a good deal of the theatrical in Kathie, but I may be all wrong. At any rate I reflected how she has a way of acting so that apparently she can herself take it for real.

I thought it over a while; then I got my hat and started down the street, with the notion that at least it would do no harm to go down to Davis Cove, and see if Kathie were there. As I walked on, recalling her incomprehensible actions, a dreadful feeling grew in my mind that she might have meant what she said, and she would be more likely to try to drown herself because she had told me. A sort of panic seized me; and just then the town clock struck three.

I had got down just opposite the Foot-bridge, and when I remembered that three was the time when I was to have the note, I feared I should be too late, and I began to run. Fortunately, there was nobody in sight, and as I came to the bend in the street I saw George coming, leading Kathie by the arm. She was dripping wet, and half staggering, although she kept her feet. I hurried up to them, too much out of breath with haste and excitement to be able to speak.

"Hullo!" George called out, as I came up to them, "see what a fish I've caught."

"Why, Kathie," gasped I, with a stupidity that was lucky, for it kept George from suspecting, "you've been in the water."

She gave me a queer look, but she said nothing.

"A little more and she'd have stayed there," George put in.

"You are wet too," I said, looking at him for the first time.

"Yes," he returned; "luckily I got off my coat and vest as I ran, so I saved my watch, but everything else is wet fast enough."

"How did it happen?" I asked.

"She was trying to get sugar-pears from those trees by the water," George answered; "and I suppose she lost her balance. I was going along the road and heard her scream."

"Along the road?" I echoed; for I knew Davis Cove is too far from the road for him to have heard a cry.

"She fell in just by the old shipyard on the point," he said.

"The boys were in swimming in the cove," Kathie explained, in a way which was of course unintelligible to George.

"Well," George commented, after a moment in which he seemed to clear up her meaning, "the next time you want sugar-pears you'd better get them when the boys are out of the way, so you needn't go in swimming yourself."

We had been walking along the road as we talked, and by this time had reached the Foot-bridge. I told George he must go home and get on dry clothing, and I would see to Kathie. He demurred at first, but I insisted, so he left us to cross the bridge alone. We walked in silence almost across the bridge, and then I asked her what kept bumping against me as I held her up.

"It's rocks in my pocket," she answered, quite in a matter-of-fact way. "I put 'em there to sink me."

I could have shaken her on the spot, so uncharitable was my mood, but I managed to answer her in a perfectly cool tone.

"Then you had better take them out," I said.

She got her hand into her pocket and fished out three or four pebbles, which all together wouldn't have sunk a three-days-old-kitten; and when these had been thrown over the bridge we proceeded on our drabbled way. My doubts of the genuineness of the whole performance grew in spite of me. I do not know exactly why I am coming so strongly to feel that Kathie is not wholly ingenuous, but I cannot get rid of the idea.

"Kathie," I asked, "did you see Mr. Weston coming when you jumped in?"

She looked up at me with eyes so honest I was ashamed of myself, but when she answered unhesitatingly that she had seen him, I went on ruthlessly to ask if she did not know he would save her.

"I thought if he was coming I'd got to hurry," she returned, as simply as possible.

I was more puzzled than ever, and I am puzzled still. Whether she really meant to take her life, or whether she only thought she meant it, does not, I suppose, make any great difference; but I confess I have been trying to make out ever since I left her. I would like to discover whether she is consciously trying to fool me or endeavoring as much to cheat herself, or is honest in it all; but I see no way in which I am ever likely to be satisfied.

I asked her to say nothing at home about how her ducking happened, and I satisfied her mother by repeating what George had said. To-morrow I must have it out with Mr. Thurston somehow or other; although I am still completely in the dark what I shall say to him. I hope the old fairy-tales are right when they say "the morning is wiser than the evening."

August 21. The morning is wiser than the evening, for I got up to-day with a clear idea in my mind what I had better do about Kathie. It is always a great comfort to have a definite plan of action mapped out, and I ate my breakfast in a cheerful frame of mind, intending to go directly to see Mr. Thurston while I should be fairly sure of finding him. I reckoned without Kathie, however, who presented herself at the dining-room window before I had finished my coffee, and begged me to come out.

"I can't come in without breaking my word," she said.

I could not argue with the absurd chit in that situation, so I went out into the garden with her and sat down on the bench by the sun-dial. The big red roses Father was so fond of are all in blossom, and in the morning air were wonderfully sweet. It was an enchanting day, and the dew was not entirely dried, so the garden had not lost the freshness it has when it first wakes up. I was exhilarated by the smell of the roses and the beauty of everything, and the clearness of the air. Rosa held baby up to us at the nursery window above, and I waved my hand to her, smiling from pure delight in everything. Kathie watched me with her great eyes, and when I sat down on the bench she threw herself at full length on the grass, and burst out sobbing.

"You do love her better than me!" she wailed. "I came to say how sorry I was, but I'm sorry now that I didn't stay in the water."

I took her by the shoulder, and spoke to her so sternly that I startled her.

"You are not to talk in that way anymore, Kathie," I said. "I am fond of you and I am fond of baby; but if baby were big enough and talked this silly way about you, do you suppose I would allow it? Sit up and stop crying."

I have always been careful not to hurt her feelings; perhaps I have been too careful. She sat up now, and then rose to her feet in a dazed sort of way. I determined to see if anything was to be made out of her mood.

"Kathie," said I, "how much of that performance yesterday was real, and how much was humbug? Tell me the truth."

She grew a little paler and her eyes dilated. I looked her straight in the face, half minded to force her if need be to give me some guidance in what I should do.

"I really meant to drown myself," she answered solemnly, "only when I saw the water and thought of hell I was afraid."

She stopped, and I encouraged her to go on.

"I saw Mr. Weston, and I was scared of him and--and everything, and so I jumped in."

I reflected that very likely the child was more of a puzzle to herself than she was to me, and in any case I had more important ends to gain than the satisfying of my curiosity, so I asked her as gently as I could if she really believed she would be eternally lost if she killed herself.

"Oh, yes, Miss Ruth!" she cried with feverish eagerness.

"Then why do you do it?" I went on. "How do you dare to do it?"

She looked at me with a growing wildness in her face that was certainly genuine.

"I'm lost, anyway," she burst out. "I know I have been too wicked for God to forgive me. I have committed murder in my heart, and I know I was never meant to be saved."

"Stop!" I commanded her. "You are a little, foolish girl, too young even to know what you are talking about. How dare you decide what God will do?"

She regarded me with a look of stupefaction as if I were a stranger whom she had never seen; and indeed I can well believe I seemed one. Then the perversity of her mind came back to the constant idea.

"That's just it," she declared. "That's just my wickedness."

After this I refused to go into the subject any further. I got up and asked her if I should find her father at home. She begged me not to go to see him, and then said with an air of relief that he had gone out to Connecticut Mills to visit a sick woman. I did not stay with her longer. I said I must go into the house, and as she refused to come, I left her, a forlorn little figure, there among the roses, and went in. It seemed hard to do it, but I had made up my mind she had better not indulge in any more talk this morning.

August 22. Cousin Mehitable, in a letter which came this morning, pities me because of my colorless existence; but I begin to feel that life is becoming too lurid. I have to-day bearded--no, Mr. Thurston hasn't any beard; but I have had my interview with him, and I feel as if I had been leading a cavalry charge up a hill in the face of a battery of whatever kind of guns are most disconcertingly destructive.

I am somewhat confused about the beginning of our talk. I got so excited later that the tame beginnings have slipped away; but I know I said I had come to make a proposition about Kathie, and somehow I led up to the child's mad performance the other day. I showed him the note and told him the story, but not until I had made him promise not to mention the matter to the child. When he had finished he was as pale as my handkerchief, his thin, bloodless face positively withered with pain.

"I cannot keep silence about this," he said when I had finished. "I must withdraw my promise, Miss Privet. My Kathie's soul is in danger."

I am sure that I am not ill-tempered, but over Kathie and her father I find myself in a state of exasperation which threatens to destroy all my claims to be considered a sane and temperate body. I had to struggle mightily to keep myself in hand this morning, but at first, at least, I succeeded.

"Mr. Thurston," I said, "I cannot release you. I should never have told you except on your promise, and you cannot honestly break it. Now listen to me. I have no right to dictate, but I cannot stand by and see dear little Kathie going to ruin. I am sure I know what is good for her just now better than you do. She is a good child, only she has gone nearly wild brooding over theologic questions she should never have heard of until she was old enough to judge them more reasonably."

He tried to interrupt me, but I put up my hand to stop him, and went on.

"You know how nervous and high-strung she is, and you cannot think her capable of looking fairly at the awful mysteries with which a creed deals."

"But I have only instructed her in those things on which her eternal salvation depends," he broke in.

"Her eternal salvation does not depend on her being driven into a madhouse or made to drown herself," I retorted, feeling as if I were brutal, but that it couldn't be helped. "The truth is, Mr. Thurston, you have been offering up Kathie as a sacrifice to your creed just as the fathers and mothers of old made their children pass through the fires to Moloch." He gasped, and some thin blood rushed to his face, but I did not stop. "I have no doubt they were conscientious, just as you are; but that didn't make it any better for the children. You have been entirely conscientious in torturing Kathie, but you have been torturing her."

His face was positively gray, and there was a look of anguish in his eyes which made me weak. It would have been so much easier to go on if he had been angry.

"You don't understand," he said brokenly. "You think all religion is a delusion, so of course you can't see. You think I don't love my child, and that I am so wrapped up in my creed I can't see she suffers. You won't believe it hurts me more than it does her."

"Do you think then," I asked him, doing my best to keep back the tears, "that it can give any pleasure to a kind Heavenly Father? I do understand. You have been so afraid of not doing your duty to Kathie you have brought her almost to madness, almost"--

"Don't! Don't!" he interrupted, putting out his hand as if I had struck him. "Oh, Miss Privet, if she had"--

I saw the real affection and feeling of the man as I have never realized them. I had been hard, and perhaps cruel, but it was necessary to save Kathie. I spoke now as gently as I could.

"No matter for the things that didn't happen, Mr. Thurston. She is safe and sound."

"But she meant to do it," he returned in a tone so low I could hardly catch the words.

"Meant?" I repeated. "She isn't in a condition to mean anything. She was distraught by brooding over things that at her age she should never even have heard of. I beg your pardon, Mr. Thurston, but doesn't what has happened prove she is too high-strung to be troubled with theology yet? I am not of your creed, but I respect your feeling about it. Only you must see that to thrust these things on Kathie means madness and despair"--

"But she might die," he broke in. "She might die without having made her peace with her Maker, and be lost forever."

There was anguish in his face, and I know he meant it from the bottom of his heart; but in his voice was the trace of conventional repetition of phrases which made it possible for me to be overcome by exasperation. I looked at him in that mingled fury of impatience and passionate conviction of my ground which must have been the state of the prophets of old when the spirit of prophecy descended upon them. I realize now that to have the spirit of prophecy it is necessary to lose the temper to a degree not altogether commendable in ordinary circumstances. I blazed out on that poor, thin-blooded, dejected, weak-minded, loving Methodist minister, and told him he insulted the God he worshiped; I said he had better consider the text "I will have mercy and not sacrifice;" I flung two or three other texts at him while he stood dazed with astonishment; I flamed at him like a burning-bush become feminine flesh; and fortunately he did not remember that even the Old Nick is credited with being able to cite Scripture for his purposes. I think the texts subdued him, so that it is well Father brought me up to know the Bible. At least I reduced Mr. Thurston to a state where he was as clay in the hands of the potter.

Then I presented to his consideration my scheme to send Kathie away to boarding-school for a year. I told him he was at liberty to select the school, if only it was one where she would not be too much troubled about theology. Of course I knew it would be hopeless to think of her going to a school entirely unsectarian, but I have already begun to make inquiries about the relative reasonableness of Methodist schools, and I think we may find something that will do. To put the child into surroundings entirely new, where her mind will be taken away from herself, and where a consciousness of the keenly discerning eyes of girls of her own age will keep her theatrical tendencies in check, should work wonders. I made Mr. Thurston give his consent, and before I left the house I saw Mrs. Thurston. I told her not to trouble about Kathie's outfit, and so I hope that bother is pretty well straightened out for the present.

August 24. George has taken a violent cold from his ducking, and is confined to the house. I hope that it is nothing serious. It is especially awkward now, for Mr. Longworthy is coming over from Franklin in a day or two to go over his accounts as trustee.

Kathie came over this morning while I was at breakfast, and tapped on the dining-room window. She was positively shining with happiness. I never saw a child so transformed.

"Oh, Miss Ruth," she cried out, as soon as I turned, "oh, won't you come out here? I do so want to kiss you!"

I asked her to come inside, but she said she had promised not to, and rather than to get into a discussion I went out to her. She ran dancing up to me, fairly quivering with excitement.

"Oh, Miss Ruth," she said, "it is too good to be true! You are the most loveliest lady that ever lived! Oh, I am so happy!"

I had to laugh at her demonstrativeness, but it was touching to see her. She was no more like the morbid, hollow-eyed girl she had been than if she had never had a trouble. It is wonderful that out of the family of a Methodist parson should come a nature so exotic, but after all, the spiritual raptures and excesses which have worn Mr. Thurston as thin as a leaf in December must have their root in a temperament of keenly emotional extremes.

"I always wanted to go to boarding-school," Kathie went on, possessing herself of my hand, and covering it with kisses; "but Mother always said we couldn't afford it. Now I am going. Oh, I shall have such a beautiful time!"

I laughed at her enthusiasm, but I tried to moderate her extravagance a little by telling her that at boarding-school she would have to work, and to live by rule, so that she must give up her wild ways.

"Oh, I'll work," she responded, her ardor undampened. "I'll be the best girl you ever heard of. I beg your pardon for everything I've done, and I'll never do anything bad again."

This penitence seemed to me rather too general to amount to much, but that she was so much pleased was after all the chief thing, so I made no allusion to particular shortcomings, I did not even urge her to come into the house, for I felt this was a point for her to work out in her own mind. We walked in the dewy garden, discussing the preparations for her leaving home, and it was droll and pathetic to find how poverty had bred in her fantastic little pate a certain sort of shrewdness. She said in the most matter-of-fact way that it would be nice for her father to have one less mouth to fill, and that she supposed her smaller sisters could have her old clothes. I confess she did not in talking exhibit any great generosity of mind, but perhaps it was not to be expected of a child dazzled by the prospect of having a dream come true, and of actually being blessed with more than one new frock at a time. I am not clear what the result of sending her among strangers will be, and I see that a good deal of care will be necessary in choosing the school. I do believe good must come of it, however; and at least we are doing the best we can.

August 25. I went over to George's this morning to find out whether he is able to see Mr. Longworthy. He was in bed, but insisted upon seeing me. I have had a terrible day. I left him completely broken down with his confession. O Mother! Mother!

August 26. Childishly I cried myself to sleep last night. It is so terrible to feel that a friend has done wrong and proved himself unworthy. I could not help shivering to think of George, and of how he has had night after night to go to sleep with the knowledge of his dishonesty. I settled in my own mind what I could do to cover his defalcation, which fortunately is small enough for me to provide for by going to Boston and selling some of the bonds Aunt Leah left me, and which Mr. Longworthy has nothing to do with. Then I lay there in the dark and sopped my pillow, until somehow, I found myself in the middle of a comforting dream.

I dreamed that I was a little girl, and that I was broken-hearted about some indefinite thing that had happened. I had in my dream, so far as I can recall, no idea what the trouble was, but the grief was keen, and my tears most copious. I was in the very thickest of my childish woe when Father came behind me, picked me up like a feather, and set me down in his lap. I had that ineffable sense of companionship which can be named but never described, and I clung to him with a frantic clasp. He kissed me, and wiped away my tears with soothing words, and then at last he whispered in my ear as a precious secret something so infinitely comforting that my sorrow vanished utterly. I broke into smiles, and kissed him again and again, crying out that it was too good to be true, and he had made me happy for my whole life. So keen was my joy that I awoke, and lay in bed half dreaming still, saying over and over to myself his enchanting words as if they would forever be a safeguard against any pain which life might bring. Gradually I became sufficiently wide awake to realize what this wonderful message of joy was, and found myself ecstatically repeating: "Pigs have four feet and one tail!" Of course I laughed at the absurdity, but the comfort stayed with me all the same, and all day I have gone about with a peaceful mind, cheered by the effect of this supernaturally precious fact of natural history.

I went to Boston and came back without seeing anybody but business men. I saw George a moment on my way from the station, and now everything is ready for Mr. Longworthy to-morrow. Both George and I may sleep to-night in peace.

All the way to and from Boston I found myself going over my whole acquaintance with George, questioning myself about what he has been and what he is. To-night I have been reading over what I have written of him in my diary, and the picture I find of him this year has gone to my heart. I am afraid I have not been kind, perhaps have not been just; for if what I have been writing is true George is--he is not a gentleman. It does not startle me now to write this as it would have done two days ago. I am afraid it will be years before I am able to get out of my remembrance how he looked when he confessed. It seems almost as if I should never be able to think of him again except as I saw him then, his face almost as colorless as his pillow, and then red with shame. He looked shrunken, morally as well as physically. I do not know whether I blamed him more or less because he was so eager to throw the whole blame on his wife's extravagance; I only know that it can hardly have been more cruel for him to tell me of his dishonor than it was for me to hear.

If he had asked me I would have lent him money, or given it to him, for that matter, and done it gladly rather than to have him troubled. To think how he must have been teased and bothered for this pitiful sum, just two or three hundred dollars, before he could have made up his mind to borrow it on my securities! He might have got it honestly, it was so little; but he did not wish anybody to know he needed it. Pride, and folly, and vanity,--I am so hurt that I begin to rail. I will put the whole thing out of my mind, and never think of it again if I can help it.

IX

SEPTEMBER

September 15. At last Kathie is gone. What with having dressmakers and seeing to her, and doing the shopping, and corresponding with the principal of the school, and all the rest of it, I have had my hands full for the last three weeks. I have enjoyed it, though; I suppose it is always a pleasure partaking of the moral for a woman when she can conscientiously give her whole mind up to the making of clothes. I do not doubt the delight of sewing fig-leaves together went for the moment far toward comforting Eve for leaving Paradise. I cannot now help smiling to see how entirely Kathie's fine scruples about breaking her vow not to come into the house were forgotten when I had a dressmaker here waiting to fit her frocks.

I feel a little as if I were trying to be Providence and to interfere in her life unwarrantably now she is gone and there is nothing more to do about it but to await the result. I have done what I thought best, though, and that is the whole of it. As Father used to say, it is not our duty to do the wisest thing, for we cannot always tell what it is, but only to be honest in doing what seems to us wisest. I hope she will do well, and I believe she will.

September 17. Cousin Mehitable writes me from Rome that she is sure I am tired of baby, and had better come over for a couple of months. I cannot tell whether she means what she says, or is only trying to carry her point. She has never had a child near her, and can hardly know how completely a baby takes possession of one. There are many things in the world that I should enjoy, and I should certainly delight in going abroad again, but baby has so taken the first place in my heart and life that everything else is secondary. I wonder sometimes whether after a woman has a child of her own she can any longer give her husband her very warmest love. Perhaps the law of compensation comes in, and if men grow less absorbed in their wives the wives have an equal likelihood of coming to feel that the husband is less a part of their lives than the child. Only if a woman really loved a man--

September 18. It is a childish habit to break off in the middle of a sentence because one does not know how to finish it. I have been turning over the leaves of this book to see if I had done it often, and I have been amused and humiliated to find so many places where I have ended with a dash, like an hysterical schoolgirl. Yet I do not see just what one is to do when suddenly one finds a subject hopelessly too deep. Last night when I got to a place where I was balancing the love of a mother for her husband and for her child, I naturally realized suddenly that I had never had a child, and very likely never really loved a man. The love I had for George seems now so unreal that I feel completely fickle; although I believe I am generally pretty constant. I could not bear to think I am not loyal in my feelings. I have come to be so sure the George I was fond of never existed, though, that I can hardly have the same feelings I had before.

This is the sort of subject, however, which is sure to end in a dash if I go on with it, so it seems wiser to stop before such a catastrophe is reached.

September 19. To-day is Father's birthday. It is always a day which moves me a good deal. I can never be reminded of an anniversary like this without finding my head full of a swarm of thoughts. I cannot think of the beginning or the ending of Father's life without looking at it as a whole, and reckoning up somehow the effect of his having lived. This is the real question, I suppose, in regard to any life. He was to me so wonderful, he was so great a man, that I have almost to reason with myself to appreciate why the world in general does not better remember him. His life was and is so much to me that I find it hard to realize how narrow is the circle which ever even knew of him at all. His books and his decisions keep his name still in the memory of lawyers somewhat, and those who knew him will not easily forget; but after all this is so little in comparison to the fame he might have had.

How persistent is an old thought! I should have supposed this idea might have died long ago. Father himself answered it when he told Cousin Mehitable he was entirely satisfied if his part in the progress of humanity was conducted decently and in order; he was not concerned whether anybody knew he lived or did not know. "The thing is that I live as well as I can," he said, "and not that it should be known about. I shan't mind, Cousin Mehitable, whether anybody takes the trouble to praise me after I am dead, but I do think it may make some tiny difference to the race that I did my level best while I was alive."

I can see him now as he stood by the library fire saying this, with his little half whimsical smile, and I remember thinking as he spoke how perfectly he lived up to his theories. Certainly the best thing a man can leave to his children is a memory like that which I have of Father: a memory half love and half respect.

Father's feeling about the part of the individual in the general scheme of things was like certain oriental doctrines I have read since his death; and I suppose he may have been influenced by the writings of the East. He seemed to feel that he was part of a process, and that the lives of those who sometime would come after him might be made easier and happier if he lived well and wisely. I am sure he was right. I do not know how or where or when the accounts of life are settled, or whether it makes any difference to the individual as an individual or not; but I am sure what we do is of consequence, and I wish my life might be as fine, as strong, as noble as was Father's.

September 20. Aunt Naomi came in this forenoon with her catlike step, and seated herself by the south window in the sunshine. The only eye which could be seen clearly was bright with intention, and it was evident at a glance that she had things to say. She was rather deliberate in coming at it. Aunt Naomi is an artist in gossip, and never spoils the effect of what she has to tell by failing to arouse expectation and interest. She leads one on and stirs up curiosity before she tells her news, and with so much cleverness does she manage, that a very tiny bit of gossip will seem a good deal when she has set it forth. It is a pleasure to see anything well done, even gossip; so Aunt Naomi is an unfailing source of amusement to me,--which is perhaps not to my credit.

She made the usual remarks about the weather and asked after baby; she observed that from the way Miss Charlotte breathed when she was asleep in prayer-meeting last night she was afraid she had taken cold; she told me Ranny Gargan's divorced wife was at death's door again, and tried to get from me some sort of information of Rosa's feelings toward the possible widower; then she gradually and skillfully approached her real subject.

"It's strange how folks get over being in love when once they are married," she said, hitching her chair into the sunlight, which had moved a little from her while she talked.

I knew by her careless tone, too careless not to be intentional, that something was coming, but I would not help her. I simply smiled vaguely, and asked where the sewing-circle was to be next week. She was not disconcerted by the question, but neatly turned it to her uses.

"At Mrs. Tobey's," she answered. "I hope we shan't see anything unpleasant across the road."

"What do you mean?" I asked, rather startled at this plain allusion to George's house.

"They say George Weston and his wife do rather queer things sometimes."

I asked her at once to say exactly what she meant, and not to play with it. I added that I did not see why George and his wife should be so much discussed.

"They are talked about because they deserve it," Aunt Naomi returned, evidently delighted by the effect she had produced. "If they will quarrel so all the neighborhood can hear and see, of course people will talk about it. Why shouldn't they? We ought to take some interest in folks, I should think."

I was silent a minute. I wanted to know why she said this, and what George and his wife had been doing to make the village comment, but I would not go on gossiping about them, and I dropped the subject altogether. I made a remark about the Willeyville Fair. Aunt Naomi chuckled audibly, but she did not persist in talking about the Westons.

September 22. Rosa is once more in a state of excitement, and the household is correspondingly stirred. Hannah goes about with her head in the air and an expression of the most lofty scorn on her face; Rosa naturally resents this attitude, both of mind and of body; so I have to act as a sort of buffer between the two.

The fuss is about Ranny again. I begin to feel that I should be justified in having him kidnapped and carried off to some far country, but I hardly see my way clear to measures so extreme. I am astonished to find that Aunt Naomi did not know all the facts about the illness of Ranny's wife; or perhaps she was too much occupied with the affairs of the Westons to tell the whole. Ranny seems this time to have got into real difficulty, and apparently as the result of his latest escapade is likely to pay a visit to the county jail. It seems that while he was pretty far gone in liquor ex-Mrs. Ranny came to plead with him to take her back and marry her over again. She having had the greatest difficulty in getting divorced from him in the first place, one would think she might be content to let well enough alone; but she is evidently madly fond of Gargan, who must be a good deal of an Adonis in his own world, so completely does he sway the hearts of the women, even though they know him to be brutal, drunken, disreputable, and generally worthless. On this occasion Ranny behaved worse than usual, and met his former wife's petition by giving her a severe beating with the first thing which came to hand, the thing unluckily being an axe-handle. The poor woman is helpless in her bed, and Ranny has been taken possession of by the constable.

Rosa refuses to see anything in the incident which is in the least to the discredit of Ranny. I was in the garden this morning, and overheard her defending her lover against Hannah's severe censures upon him and upon Rosa for siding with him.

"Why shouldn't he beat his own wife when she deserved it," Rosa demanded, "and she nothing but a hateful, sharp-nosed pig?"

"She isn't his wife," Hannah retorted, apparently not prepared to protest against a doctrine so well established as that a man might beat his spouse.

"Well, she was, anyhow," persisted Rosa; "and that's the same thing. You can't put a man and his wife apart just by going to law. Father O'Rafferty said so."

"Oh, you can't, can't you?" Hannah said with scornful deliberation. "Then you're a nice girl to be talking about marrying Ranny Gargan, if he's got one wife alive already."

This blow struck too near home, I fear, for Rosa's voice was pretty shrill when she retorted.

"What do you know about marrying anyhow, Hannah Elsmore? Nobody wants to marry you, I'll be bound."

It seemed to be time to interfere, so I went nearer to the window and called to Rosa to come out to baby and me.

"Rosa," I said, when she appeared, flushed and angry, "I wish you wouldn't quarrel with Hannah."

"Then what for's she all the time twitting me about Ranny Gargan?" demanded the girl with angry tears in her eyes. "She don't know what it is to care for a man anyhow, and what for does she be taking me up short when I'm that bad in my mind a'ready I can't stand it? Ranny Gargan's old beast of a wife's got him into a scrape, but that don't make any difference to me. I ain't going back on him."

I established myself on the grass beside the sun-dial, and took baby, sweet and lovely, into my arms.

"I am sorry, Rosa," I said when we were settled comfortably. "I hoped you'd got over thinking about Ranny Gargan. He is certainly not the sort of man to make you happy, even if he were free. He'd never think of sparing you or letting you have your own way."

"Who's wanting to have their own way, Miss Privet?" demanded my astonishing handmaid; and then went on in her usual fashion of striking me breathless when she comes to discourse of love and marriage. "That ain't what women marry for, Miss Privet. They're just made so they marry to be beat and broke and abused if that's what pleases the men; and that's the way they're best off."

"But, Rosa," I put in, "you always talk as if you'd be meekness itself if a husband wanted to abuse you, but I confess I never thought you would be at all backward about defending yourself."

A droll look came into her rosy Irish face, and a funny little touch of brogue into her voice.

"I'd think if he loved me the way he ought to, Miss Privet, he'd be willing to take a whack himself now and then, just in the way of love. Besides," she added, "I'd come it round Ranny when it was anything I really wanted. Any man's soft enough if a woman knows how to treat him right."

I abandoned the discussion, as I am always forced to abandon a talk of this sort with Rosa. I suppose in her class the crude doctrine that it is the right of the man to take and the duty of the woman to give still exists with a good deal of simplicity and force, but it almost stops my breath to hear Rosa state it. It is like a bit of primeval savagery suddenly thrust into my face in the midst of nineteenth-century civilization. The worst of it all is, moreover, to feel the habits of old generations buzzing dizzily in my ears until I have a confused sensation as if in principle the absurd vagaries of Rosa might be right. I am tinglingly aware that fibres which belonged to some remote progenitress, some barbaric woman captured by force, perhaps, after the marriage customs of primitive peoples, retain the instinct of submission to man and respond to Rosa's uncivilized theories. I have a sort of second sense that if a man I loved came and asserted a brutal sovereignty over me, it would appeal to these inherited instincts as right and proper, according to the order appointed by nature. I know what nonsense this is. The sense of justice has in the modern woman displaced the old humiliating subjection,--although if one loved a man the subjection would not be humiliating, but just the highest pleasure. I can conceive of a woman's being so fond of a man that to be his abject slave would be so much the happiest thing in the world that to serve him to her very utmost would be so great a delight as almost to be selfishness.

How Father would have shouted over a page like this! I would not have supposed even Rosa could have spurred me into such an attempt at philosophy, and I hardly believed I knew so many long words. After all I doubt if Rosa and I are so far apart in our instincts; only she has the coolness to put them into words I only imitate, and cannot pretend to rival.

September 24. It is delightful to see how really fond Tom is becoming of baby. I came home from a walk this afternoon, and there in the parlor was Tom down on the floor with Tomine, shaking his head at her like a bear, and making her laugh. Rosa beamed from the background with the most complete approval. He sprang up when I appeared, but I ignored all the strangeness, and only said how glad I was to see him. I think he liked my taking as a matter of course his being there, and very likely this was what made him confess he had been in two or three times to play with baby when he knew that I was not at home.

"I saw you going down the other side of the river," he said, "so I came to keep Thomasine from being lonesome."

I returned that it was not very complimentary to tell me he had tried to avoid me, but that I appreciated how much more fascinating baby was than I, so he need not apologize; and the end of it was that after this nonsense had broken the ice we sat on the floor together to entertain her ladyship. She was pleased to be in the most sunny mood imaginable, and responded to our fooling most graciously. With truly feminine preference, however, she bestowed most of her attention upon the man. She is a more entrancing creature every day; and she certainly has her father's eyes. I compared them this afternoon.

September 26. The reading-room seems really at last to be coming into being. I have found a place for it. It is a kind of square box over the post-office, but with furniture and pictures it can be made rather attractive. I have made out a list of periodicals, and sent to Boston for framed photographs for the walls. To-day I went to talk over the plan with Deacon Richards.

The mill was fragrant with its sweet mealy smell, and Deacon Daniel was as dusty as a moth-miller. As I stood in the doorway waiting for him to come down from the wheel, where he was doing something or other about the hopper, I fell to humming the old rhyme we sang as children when we went by the mill:--

"'Miller, miller, musty-poll, How many bags of wheat you stole?' 'One of wheat and one of rye.' 'You naughty miller, you must die!'"

"That isn't very polite," Deacon Daniel said, coming up behind me before I knew he had left his perch.

I turned and greeted him smilingly, repeating the last line:--

"You naughty miller, you must die!"

"I suppose I must," he assented; "but it won't be for stealing, Miss Ruth."

I love the old mill, with its great beams and its continual sound of dashing water and the chirruping of the millstones grinding away at the corn like an insatiate monster that can never have enough. The smell of the meal, too, is so pleasant, and even the abundant dust is so clean and fresh it seems to belong there. The mellow light through the dim windows and the shadows hiding in every corner have always from childhood appealed to my imagination. I find there always a soothing and serene mood.

"I want your advice, Deacon Richards," I said.

"So as not to follow it?" he demanded. "That's what women generally want of advice."

I assured him I was ready to follow his advice if it were good, and so we talked about the reading-room. I told him it seemed to me that if it was to go on properly it should have a head; somebody to manage it and be responsible for the way in which it was carried on.

"But you will do that yourself," he said.

I answered that it must be a man, for it was nonsense to think of a woman's running a reading-room for men. He looked at me for a moment with his droll grin, and then he was pleased to say that for a woman I had a remarkable amount of common sense. I thanked him for the compliment to my sex, and then asked if he would undertake the business, and promise not to freeze the readers out the way he did the prayer-meetings.

"I'm not the sort of person you want," he answered, chuckling at my allusion to the fire question. "I've sense enough to know that without being a woman. Why don't you ask Tom Webbe?"

I confessed that I had thought of Tom, but--And there I stuck, for I could hardly tell the deacon how I thought gossip had already said enough about Tom and myself without my giving folk any more to talk about.

"I don't know what that 'but' means," he remarked, grinning more than ever, as if he did know perfectly. "Anyway, there's nobody in town who could do it so well. All the men and boys like him, and he has a level head. He's the only one of the young fellows that's been to college, and he ought to know more about books than any of the rest of them. Besides, he needs something to take up his mind."

I felt the deacon was right, and I began to ask myself whether my personal feelings should be allowed to count in such a matter. Still I could hardly make up my mind to take the responsibility of putting Tom at the head of a reading-room I had started. If nothing else were to be considered I did not want my connection with the plan to be too prominent, and gossip about Tom would be just the thing to keep my name always to the front.

"I hope you are sensible enough to do one thing," Deacon Daniel went on, "and that is to have everybody who uses the room pay for it. It needn't be much, but they'll respect it and themselves more if they pay something, and it'll give them the right to grumble."

"I don't want them to grumble," I returned.

"Oh, nobody cares much for anything he can't grumble about," was his reply, with a laugh; "but really they are twice as likely to grumble if you pay for everything than if they help. That's the way we are made."

I told him that he was an old cynic, but I saw in a moment he was right about the value that would be put on a thing which was paid for. If the men feel they are helping to support the reading-room they will take a good deal more interest in it.

"Tom Webbe will manage them all right," the deacon declared. "He'll let them grumble just enough, and make them so contented they'll think they're having their own way while he's going ahead just the way he thinks best. He's the only man for the place."

Perhaps he is; and indeed the more I think about it, the more I see the deacon is right. It would certainly be good for Tom, and that is a good deal. I wonder what I ought to do?

What Deacon Daniel said about the way in which Tom would manage the men has been running through my mind. I wonder that I, who have known Tom so well, never thought before of how great his power is to control people. It showed itself when he was a boy; and if he had carried out his plan to study law it would have been--I do wonder if Tom is working by himself, and if that is the reason he borrowed those law-books?

September 27. Old lady Andrews has solved the question for me. I am so glad I thought to go to her for advice. She suggests that we have a committee, and make Deacon Richards chairman. Then Tom can be put on, and really do the work.

"It wouldn't do at all for you to put Tom Webbe at the head alone, my dear," she said. "It would make talk, and Aunt Naomi would have you married to him a dozen times before the week was over; but this way it will be all right."

I asked her if committees did not usually have three on them, and she answered that Deacon Richards would know.

"I belong to an old-fashioned generation, my dear, and I never can feel that it's quite respectable for a woman to know about committees and that sort of thing. I'm sure in my day it wouldn't have been thought well-bred. But Deacon Daniel will know. He's always on committees at church conferences and councils."

Once more I visited the mill, and told Deacon Daniel of old lady Andrews' suggestion. He agreed at once, and declared the plan was better than that of having one man at the head.

"It'll be much the same thing as far as managing the reading-room goes," he observed, stroking his chin thoughtfully, "but somehow folks like committees, and they generally think they have a better show if three or four men are running things than if there's only one. Of course one man always does manage, but a committee's more popular."

Deacon Daniel was very sure that the committee should have three on it, and when I asked who should be the other man he said:--

"If it were anybody else but you, Miss Ruth, I shouldn't think it was any use to say it, but you'll see what I mean. I think Cy Turner is the man for the third place."

"The blacksmith?" I asked, a good deal surprised. "I'm afraid I don't see what you mean. I don't even know him."

The deacon grinned down on me from his height, and made me a characteristic retort.

"He doesn't look as if he'd kept awake nights on that account."

The blacksmith's jolly round face and twinkling eyes as I had seen him on the street now and then came up before my mind, and I felt the full force of the deacon's irony. I told him that he was impertinent, and asked why he named Mr. Turner.

"Because," he answered, seriously, "what you want is for the folks that haven't any books at home and don't have a chance to read to get interested in the reading-room. If Cy Turner takes hold of it, he'll do more than anybody else in town could do to make it go among just those folks. He's shrewd and good-natured, and everybody that knows him likes him. He'll have all the boys in the reading-room if he has to take them there by the collar, and if he does they'll think it's fine."

I could see at once the wisdom of the deacon's idea. I asked how Tom and the blacksmith would work together, and was assured that Mr. Turner has a most unlimited admiration for Tom, so that the two would agree perfectly. I made up my mind on the spot, and decided to go at once to interview the blacksmith, from whose shop I could hear above the whirring of the mill the blows on the anvil. I had no time on the little way from the mill to the blacksmith shop to consider what I should say to Mr. Turner, and I passed the time in hoping there would be no men about. It made no difference; he was so straightforward and simple, so kindly and human, that I felt at ease with him from the first. He was luckily alone, so I walked in boldly as if I were in the habit of visiting the forge every day of my life. He looked surprised to see me, but not in the least disconcerted. The self-respecting coolness of a New England workingman is something most admirable. Mr. Turner was smutty and dressed in dirty clothes, leather apron and all, but his manners were as good as those of the best gentleman in the land. There is something noble in a country where a common workingman will meet you with no servility and without any self-consciousness. I liked Mr. Turner from the moment I saw his face and heard his voice, rich and cheery, and I was won by his merry eyes, which had all the time a twinkling suggestion of a smile ready to break out on the slightest occasion. I went straight to my errand, and nothing could have been better than the way in which he received my proposition. He had no false modesty, and no over-assurance. He evidently knew that he could do what was required, he was undisguisedly pleased to be asked, and he was troubled by no doubts about social proprieties or improprieties.

"I suppose Mr. Webbe will do most of what work there is to do," I said, "but he will be an easy person to work with on a committee, I should think."

"Yes, marm, he will," the blacksmith responded heartily. "There ain't a squarer fellow alive than Tom Webbe. Tom's been a bit wild, perhaps; but he's an awful good fellow just the same, if you know him. I'm pleased to be on the committee with him, Miss Privet; and I'll do my best. I think the boys'll do about as I want 'em to."

I had only to see Mr. Turner to understand why Deacon Daniel had chosen him. I think the committee--but "oh, good gracious mercy me," as the old woman in the story says, it just occurs to me that I have not said a word to Tom about the whole business!

September 28. It is strange that my only difficulty in arranging about the reading-room should come from Tom, on whom I had counted as a matter of course; but it is fortunate that I had assumed he would serve, for this is what made him consent. When I saw him to-day, and told him what I had done, he at first said he could not possibly have anything to do with the whole matter.

"I thank you, Ruth," he said, "but don't you see I had better not give folks any occasion to think of me at all just now? The gossips need only to be reminded of my being alive, and they will begin all over again."

"Tom," I asked him desperately, "are you never going to get over this bitter feeling? I can't bear to have you go on thinking that everybody is talking about you."

"I don't blame them for talking," was his answer.

I assured him he would have been pleased if he could have heard the way in which Mr. Turner spoke of him yesterday.

"Oh, Cy! he is too good-hearted to fling at anybody."

"But Deacon Richards was just as friendly," I insisted.

"Yes, he would be. It isn't the men, Ruth; they are ready to give a fellow a chance; but the women"--

He did not seem to know how to finish his sentence, and I reminded him that I too was a woman.

"Oh, you," responded Tom, "you're an angel. You might almost be a man."

I laughed at him for putting men above angels, and so by making him smile, by coaxing him, and appealing to his friendliness to back me up now I had committed myself, I prevailed upon him to serve. I am sure it will be good for the reading-room, and I am equally sure it will be good for Tom. Why in the world this victory should have left me a little inclined to be blue, I do not understand.

X

OCTOBER

October 5. I went this afternoon to walk on the Rim road. The day was beyond words in its beauty,--crisp, and clear, and rich with all that vitality which nature seems so full of in autumn, as if it were filling itself with life to withstand the long strain of the winter. The leaves were splendid in their color, and shone against the sky as if they were full of happiness. Perhaps it was the day that made it possible for me to see the red house without a pang, but I think it was the sense of baby at home, well and happy, and learning, unconsciously of course, to love me with every day that goes over her small head. A thin thread of smoke trickled up from the chimney, and I thought I ought to go in to see if the old grandmother was there. I wonder if it is right not to try if the blessed granddaughter might not soften her old heart, battered and begrimed if it be. Nobody answered my knock, however, and so I did not see Mrs. Brownrig, for which I was selfishly glad. She has not been very gracious when I have sent her things, so I was not, I confess, especially anxious for an interview. I went away smiling to myself over a saying of Father's: "There is nothing so pleasant as a disagreeable duty conscientiously escaped."

October 6. I really know something which has escaped the acuteness of Aunt Naomi, and I feel greatly puffed up in consequence. Deacon Richards has been here this evening, and as it was rather cool I had a brisk, cheery fire.

"I do like to be warm," he said, stretching out his hand luxuriously to the blaze. "I never could understand why I feel the cold so. I should think it was age, if it hadn't always been so from the time I was a boy."

I thought of the cold vestry, and smiled to myself as I wondered if Deacon Daniel had ascetic ideas of self-torture.

"Then I should think you would be fond of big fires," I observed.

"I am," he responded, "only they make me sleepy. I'm like a kitten; I go to sleep when I get warmed through."

I laughed outright, and when he asked me what I was laughing at I told him it was partly at the idea of his being like a kitten, and partly because I had found him out.

"It is all very well for you to keep the vestry as cold as a barn so that you can keep awake," I added; "but don't you think it is unfair to the rest of the congregation to freeze them too?"

He looked rather disconcerted a moment, and then grinned, though sheepishly.

"Heat makes other people sleepy too," he said defensively.

I chaffed him a little, and told him I should send a couple of loads of wood to the vestry, and that if it were necessary I would give him a bottle of smelling-salts to keep him awake, but certainly the room must be warmer. I declared I would not have dear old lady Andrews exposed to the danger of pneumonia, even if he was like a kitten. It is really quite as touching as it is absurd to think of his sitting in prayer-meeting shivering and uncomfortable because he feels it his duty to keep awake. In biblical times dancing before the Lord was a legitimate form of worship; it is almost a pity that sleeping before the Lord cannot be put among proper religious observances. Dear Miss Charlotte always sleeps--devoutly, I am sure--at every prayer-meeting, and then comes out declaring it has been a beautiful meeting. I have no doubt she has been spiritually refreshed, even if she has nodded. Father used to say that no religion could be permanent until men were able to give their deity a sense of humor; and I do think a supreme being which could not see the humorous side of Deacon Richards' pathetic mortification of the flesh in his frosty vestry could hardly have the qualifications necessary to manage the universe properly.

October 12. Ranny Gargan has settled the question of marriage for the present at least. He has remarried his first wife to prevent her from bringing suit against him. As Miss Charlotte rather boldly said, he has legitimized the beating by marrying the woman.

Rosa takes the matter coolly. She says she is glad to have things so she can't think of Ranny, for now she can take Dennis, and not bother any more about it.

"It's a comfort to any woman not to have to decide what man she'll marry," she remarked with her amazing philosophy.

"Then you'd like to have somebody arrange a marriage for you, Rosa," I said, rather for the sake of saying something.

"Arrange, is it?" she cried, bristling up suddenly. "What for would I have somebody making my marriage? I'd like to see anybody that would dare!"

The moral of which seems to be that if Rosa is so much of a philosopher that she sometimes seems to me to be talking scraps out of old heathen sages, she is yet only a woman.

October 20. Aunt Naomi had about her when she came stealthily in this afternoon an air of excitement so evident as almost to be contagious. I could see by the very hurry of her sliding step and the extra tightness of her veil that something had stirred her greatly.

"What is it, Aunt Naomi?" I asked at once. "You fairly bristle with news. What's happened?"

She smiled and gave a little cluck, but my salutation made her instantly moderate her movements. She sat down with a composed and self-contained air, and only by the unusually vigorous swinging of her foot showed that she was not as serene as on ordinary occasions.

"Who said anything had happened?" she demanded.

I returned that she showed it by her looks.

"Something is always happening, I suppose."

I know Aunt Naomi well enough to understand that the quickest way of coming at her tidings was to pretend indifference, so I asked no more questions, but made a careless remark about the weather.

"What made you think anything had happened?" persisted she.

"It was simply an idea that came into my head," was my reply. "I hope Deacon Daniel keeps the vestry warm in these days."

Aunt Naomi was not proof against this parade of indifference, and in a moment she broke out with her story.

"Well," she declared, "Tom Webbe seems bound to be talked about."

"Tom Webbe!" I echoed. "What is it now?"

I confess my heart sank with the fear that he had become desperate with the pressure of weary days, and had somehow defied all the narrow conventionalities which hem him in here in this little town.

"It's the Brownrig woman," Aunt Naomi announced. "If you get mixed up with that sort of creatures there's no knowing what you'll come to."

"But what about her?" I demanded so eagerly that I became suddenly conscious of the keen curiosity which my manner brought into her glance. "What has she been doing?" I went on, trying to be cool.

It was only by much questioning that I got the story. Had it not been for my real interest in Tom I would not have bothered so much, but as it was she had me at her mercy, and knew it. What happened, so far as I can make out, is this: The Brownrig woman has been worse than ever since Julia's death. She has been drunk in the streets more than once, and I am afraid the help she has had from Tom and others has only led her to greater excesses. Once Deacon Richards came upon her lying in the ditch beside the road, and she has made trouble more than once, besides disturbing the prayer-meeting.

Last evening Tom came upon a mob of men and boys down by the Flatiron Wharf, and in the midst of them was Mrs. Brownrig, singing and howling. They were baiting her, and saying things to provoke her to more outrageous profanity.

"They do say," observed Aunt Naomi with what seemed to me, I am ashamed to say, an unholy relish, "her swearing was something awful. John Deland told me he never heard anything like it. He said no man could begin to come up to it."

"John Deland, that owns the smoke-houses?" I put in. "What was he doing there? I always thought he was a decent man."

"So he is. He says," she returned with her drollest smile, "he was just passing by and couldn't help hearing. I dare say you couldn't have helped hearing if you'd been passing by."

"I should have passed pretty quickly then; but what did Tom Webbe do?"

She went on to say that Tom had come upon this disgraceful scene, and found the crowd made up of all the lowest fellows in town. The men were shouting with laughter, and the old woman was shrieking with rage and intoxication.

"John Deland says as soon as Tom saw what was going on and who the woman was, he broke through the crowd, and took her by the arm, and told her to come home. She cursed him, and said she wouldn't go; and then she cried, and they had a dreadful time. Then somebody in the crowd--John says he thinks it was one of the Bagley boys that burnt Micah Sprague's barn. You remember about that, don't you? They live somewhere down beyond the old shipyard"--

"I remember that the Spragues' barn was burned," answered I; "but what did the Bagley boy do last night?"

"He called out to Tom Webbe to get out of the way, and not spoil the fun. Then Tom turned on the crowd, and I guess he gave it to them hot and heavy."

"I'm sure I hope he did!" I said fervently.

"He said he thought they might be in better business than tormenting an old drunken woman like that, and called them cowards to their faces. They got mad, and wanted to know what business it was of his, anyway. Then he blazed out again, and said"--

I do not know whether the pause Aunt Naomi made was intentionally designed to rouse me still further, or whether she hesitated unconsciously; but I was too excited to care.

"What did he say?" I asked breathlessly.

"He told them she was his mother-in-law."

"Tom Webbe said that? To that crowd?" cried I, and I felt the tears spring into my eyes. It was chiefly excitement, of course, but the pluck of it and the hurt to Tom came over me in a flash. "What did they do?"

"They just muttered, and got out of the way. John Deland said it wasn't two minutes before Tom was left alone with the old woman, and then he took her home. It's a pity she wouldn't drink herself to death."

"I think it is, Aunt Naomi," was my answer; though I wished to add that the sentiment was rather a queer one to come from anybody who believes as she does.

I do not know what else Aunt Naomi said. Indeed when she had told her tale she seemed in something of a hurry to leave, and I suspect her of going on to repeat it somewhere else. Tom's sin has left a trail of consequences behind it which he could never have dreamed of. I cannot tell whether I pity him more for this or honor him for the courage with which he stood up. Poor Tom!

October 24. An odd thing has happened to the Westons. A man came in the storm last night and dropped insensible on the doorstep. He might have lain there all night, and very likely would have died before morning, but George, when he started for bed, chanced to open the door to look at the weather. He found the tramp wet and covered with sleet, and at first thought that he was either dead or drunk. When he had got him in and thawed out by the kitchen fire, the man proved to be ill. George sent for Dr. Wentworth, and had a bed made up in the shed-chamber, but when he told me this morning he said it seemed rather doubtful if the tramp could live.

"What did Mrs. Weston say?" I asked.

I do not know how I came to ask such a question, and I meant nothing by it. George, however, stiffened in a moment as if he suspected me of something unkind.

"Mrs. Weston didn't like my taking him into the house," he said. "She thought I ought to have sent him off to the poor-farm."

"You could hardly do that last night," I returned, wondering how I could have offended him. "I am afraid the tramp's looks set her against him."

"She hasn't seen him. She'd gone to bed before I found him last night, and this morning he is pretty sick. Dr. Wentworth says he can't be moved now. He's in a high fever, and keeps talking all the time."

It is so very seldom we hear of tramps in Tuskamuck that it is strange to have one appear like this, and it is odd he chose George's house to tumble down at, as it is a little out of the road. Tramps have a law of their own, however, and never do what one would expect of them. I hope his illness will not be serious. I offered to do what I could, but George said they could take care of the man for the present. Then he hesitated, and flushed a little as if confused.

"I am sorry," he said, "it should happen just now, for Gertrude ought not to be troubled when--when she isn't well."

It is a pity, and I hope no harm will come of it, but if Mrs. Weston has not seen the tramp and has not been startled, I do not see why any should.

October 26. If I could be superstitious, I think I should be now; but of course the whole thing is nonsense. People are talking--in forty-eight hours! How gossip does spring and spread!--as if there were something peculiar about that tramp. There is nothing definite to say except that he came to George's house, which is a little off from the main street, and that in his delirium he keeps calling for some person he says he knows is there, and he will surely find, no matter how she hides. The idea of the sick in a delirium is always painful, and the talk about this man makes it doubly so. I am afraid the fact that Mrs. Weston's servants do not like her has something to do with the whispers in the air. Dislike will create suspicion on the slightest excuse, and there can be nothing to connect her with this dying tramp. What could there be? I wish Aunt Naomi would not repeat such unpleasant things.

October 27. I have been with Tom hanging the pictures in the new reading-room, and everything is ready for the opening when the magazines and the books come. Next Wednesday is the first of the month, and then we will have it opened. Tom has already a list of over twenty men and boys who have joined, and lame Peter Tobey is to be janitor. It is delightful to see how proud and pleased he is. He can help his mother now, and the poor boy was pathetic in the way he spoke of that. He only mentioned it, but his tone touched me to the quick.

Tom and I had a delightful afternoon, hanging pictures, arranging the furniture, and seeing that everything was right. Mr. Turner and Deacon Richards came in just as we finished, and the three men were so simple in their interest, and so hearty about it, that I feel as if everything was going forward in just the right spirit. Mr. Turner saw where a bracket was needed for one of the lamps, and said at once he would make one to-morrow. It was charming to see how pleased he was to find there was something he could furnish, and which nobody else at hand could have supplied. We are always pleased to find we are not only needed, but we are needed in some particular way which marks our personal fitness for the thing to be done. Deacon Daniel brought a big braided rug that an old woman at the Rim had made by his orders. He was in good spirits because he had helped the old woman and the reading-room at the same time. Tom was happy because he was at work, and in an atmosphere that was friendly; and I was happy because I could not help it. And so when we locked the room, and came home in the early twilight, I felt at peace with all the world.

Tom came in and had a frolic with Tomine, and when he went he held my hand a moment, looking into my face as if to impress me with what he said.

"Thank you, Ruth," were the words; "I think you'll succeed in making me human again. Good-night."

If I am helping him to be reconciled with the world and himself I am more glad than I can tell.

October 28. The earthquake always finds us unprepared, and to-night it has come. I feel dazed and queer, as if life had been shaken to its foundations, and as if it were trembling about me.

George came in suddenly--My hand trembles so that I am writing like an old woman. If the chief object of keeping a journal is to help myself to be sane and rational, I must have better control over my nerves.

About seven o'clock, as I sat sewing, I heard Hannah open the front door to somebody. I half expected a deacon, as it generally is a deacon in the evening, but the door opened, and George came rushing in. His hurry and his excited manner made me see at once that something unusual had happened. His face was pale, his eyes wild, and somehow his whole air was terrifying.

"What is the matter?" I cried, jumping up to meet him.

He tried to speak, but only gave a sort of choking gasp.

"Has anything happened?" I asked him. "Your wife"--

"I haven't any wife," he interrupted.

The shock was terrible, for I thought at once she must be dead, and I made some sort of a horrified exclamation. Then we stared at each other a minute. I supposed something had happened to her, and that he had from the force of old habit come to me in hope of comfort.

"I never had a wife," he went on, almost angrily, and as if I had disputed him.

I do not know what we said then or how we said it. It was a long time before I could understand, and even now it seems like a bad dream. Somehow he made me understand that the tramp who was sick at their house had kept calling out in his delirium for Gertrude and declaring he had found her, that she need not hide, for he would surely find her wherever she hid. The servants talked of it, and George knew it a day or two ago. I do not know whether he suspected anything or not. Very likely he could hardly tell himself. Finally one of the girls told Mrs. Weston, and she acted very strangely. She wanted to have a description of the man, and at last she insisted on going herself to peep at him, to see what he was like. George happened to come home just at the time Mrs. Weston had crept up to the door of the shed-chamber. Some exclamation of hers when she saw her husband roused the sick man, who sat up in bed and screamed that he knew his wife's voice, and he would see her. George caught her by the arm, pushed the door wide open with his foot, and led her into the chamber. She held back, and cried out, and the tramp, half wild with delirium, sprang out of bed, shouting to George: "Take your hands off of my wife!"

George declares that even then he should not have believed the tramp was really speaking the truth if Gertrude hadn't confirmed it. He thought the man was out of his head, and the worst of his suspicion was that the stranger had known Mrs. Weston somewhere. As soon as the tramp spoke, however, she fell down on her knees and caught George's hand, crying over and over: "I thought he was dead! I thought he was dead!" It must have been a fearful thing for both of them; and then Gertrude fainted dead away at George's feet. The girl who had been taking care of the tramp was out of the room at the moment, but she heard George calling, and came in time to take her mistress away; while George got the tramp back to bed, and soothed him into some sort of quiet. Then he rushed over here. I urged him to go back at once, telling him his wife would want him, and that it might after all be a mistake.

"I don't want ever to set eyes on her again," he declared doggedly. "She's cheated me. She told me I was the first man she ever cared for, and I never had a hint she'd been married. She made a fool of me, but thank God I'm out of that mess."

"What do you mean?" I asked him. "You are talking about your wife."

"She isn't my wife, I tell you," persisted he. "I'll never live with her again."

He must have seen how he shocked me, and at last he was persuaded to go home. I know I must see him to-morrow, and I have a cowardly desire to run away. I have a hateful feeling of repulsion against him, but that is something to be overcome. At any rate both he and his poor wife need a friend if they ever did, and I must do the best I can.

I cannot wonder George should be deeply hurt by finding that Mrs. Weston had a husband before and did not tell him. She can hardly have loved him or she must have been honest with him. It may have been through her love and fear of losing him that she did not dare to tell; though from what I have seen of her I haven't thought her much given to sentiment. How dreadful it must be to live a life resting on concealment. I have very likely been uncharitable in judging her, for she must always have been uneasy and of course could not be her true self.

October 29. Some rumor of the truth has flown about the town, as I was sure when I saw Aunt Naomi coming up the walk this forenoon. Sometimes I think she sees written on walls and fences the things which have happened or been said in the houses which they surround. She has almost a second sight; and if I wished to do anything secret I would not venture to be in the same county with her.

She seated herself comfortably in a patch of sunshine, and looked with the greatest interest at the mahonia in bloom on the flower-stand by the south window. She spoke of the weather and of Peter's silliness, told me where the sewing-circle was to be next week, and approached the real object of her call with the deliberation of a cat who is creeping up behind a mouse. When she did speak, she startled me.

"I suppose you know that tramp over to the Westons' died this morning," she remarked, so carelessly it might have seemed an accident if her eye had not fairly gleamed with eagerness.

"Died!" I echoed.

"Yes, he's dead," she went on. "He had some sort of excitement yesterday, they say, and it seems to have been the end of him."

She watched me as if to see whether I would give any sign of knowing more of the matter than she did, but for once I hope I baffled her penetration. I made some ordinary comment, which could not have told her much.

"It's very queer a tramp should go to that particular house to die," observed Aunt Naomi, as if she were stating an abstract truth in which she had no especial interest.

I asked what there was especially odd about it.

"Well, for one thing," she answered, "he asked the way there particularly."

I inquired how she knew.

"Al Demmons met him on the Rim road," she continued, not choosing, apparently, to answer my question directly, "and this man wanted to know where a man named Weston lived who'd married a woman from the West called something Al Demmons couldn't remember. Al Demmons said that George Weston was the only Weston in town, and that he had married a girl named West. Then the man said something about 'that used to be her name.' It's all pretty queer, I think."

To this I did not respond. I would not get into a discussion which would give Aunt Naomi more material for talk. After a moment of silence, she said:--

"Well, the man's dead now, and I suppose that's the end of him. I don't suppose Mrs. Weston's likely to tell much about him."

"Aunt Naomi," I returned, feeling that even if all the traditions of respect for my elders were broken I must speak, "doesn't it seem to you harm might come of talking about this tramp as if he were some mysterious person connected with Mrs. Weston's life before she came to Tuskamuck? It isn't strange that somebody should have known her, and when once a tramp has had help from a person he hangs on."

She regarded me with a shrewd look.

"You wouldn't take up cudgels for her that way if you didn't know something," she observed.

After that there was nothing for me to say. I simply dropped the subject, and refused to talk about the affairs of the Westons at all. I am so sorry, however, that gossip has got hold of a suspicion. It was to be expected, I suppose, and indeed it has been in the air ever since the man came. I am sorry for the Westons.

October 30. After the earthquake a fire,--I wonder whether after the fire will come the still, small voice! It is curious that out of all this excitement the feeling of which I am most conscious after my dismay and my pity is one of irritation. I am ashamed to find in my thought so much anger against George. He had perhaps a right to think as he did about my affection for him, though it is inconceivable any gentleman should say the things he said to me last night. Even if he were crazy enough to suppose I could still love him, how could he forget his wife; how could he be glad of an excuse to be freed from her; how could he forget the little child that is coming? Oh, I am like Jonah when he was so sure he did well to be angry! I am convinced I can have no just perception of character at all, for this George Weston is showing himself so weak, so ungenerous, so cruel, that he has either been changed vitally or I did not really know him. I was utterly deceived in him. No; I will not believe that. We have all of us possibilities in different directions. I wish I could remember the passage where Browning says a man has two sides, one for the world and one to show a woman when he loves her. Perhaps one side is as true as the other; and what I knew was a possible George, I am sure.

He came in yesterday afternoon with a look of hard determination. He greeted me almost curtly, and added in the same breath:--

"The man is dead. She's confessed it all. He was her husband, and she was never my wife legally at all. She says she thought he was dead."

"Then there's only one thing to do," I answered. "You can get Mr. Saychase to marry you to-day. Of course it can be arranged if you tell him how the mistake arose, and he won't speak of it."

He laughed sneeringly.

"I haven't any intention of marrying her," he said.

"No intention of marrying her?" I repeated, not understanding him. "If the first ceremony wasn't legal, another is necessary, of course."

"She cheated me," he declared, his manner becoming more excited. "Do you suppose after that I'd have her for my wife? Besides, you don't see. She was another man's wife when she came to live with me, and"--

I stared at him without speaking, and he began to look confused.

"No man wants to marry a woman that's been living with him," he blurted out defiantly. "I suppose that isn't a nice thing to say to you, but any man would understand."

I was silent at first, in mere amazement and indignation. The thing seemed so monstrous, so indelicate, so cruel to the woman. She had deceived him and hidden the fact that she had been married, but there was no justice in this horrible way of looking at it, as if her ignorance had been a crime. I could hardly believe he realized what he was saying. Before I could think what to say, he went on.

"Very likely you think I'm hard, Ruth; and perhaps I shouldn't feel so if it hadn't come about through her own fault. If she'd told me the truth"--

"George!" I burst out. "You don't know what you are saying! You didn't take her as your wife for a week or a month, but for all her life."

"She never was my wife," he persisted stubbornly.

I looked at him with a feeling of despair,--not unmixed, I must confess, with anger. Most of all, however, I wanted to reach him; to make him see things as they were; and I wanted to save the poor woman. I leaned forward, and laid my fingers on his arm. My eyes were smarting, but I would not cry.

"But if there were no question of her at all," I pleaded, "you must do what is right for your own sake. You have made her pledges, and you can't in common honesty give them up."

"She set me free from all that when she lied to me. I made pledges to a girl, not to another man's wife."

"But she didn't know. She thought she was free to marry you. She believed she was honestly your wife."

"She never was, she never was."

He repeated it stubbornly as if the fact settled everything.

"She was!" I broke out hotly. "She was your wife; and she is your wife! When a man and a woman honestly love each other and marry without knowing of any reason why they may not, I say they are man and wife, no matter what the law is."

"Suppose the husband had lived?" he demanded, with a hateful smile. "The law really settles it."

"Do you believe that?" I asked him. "Or do you only wish to believe it?"

He looked at me half angrily, and the blood sprang into his cheeks. Then he took a step forward.

"She came between us!" he said, lowering his voice, but speaking with a new fierceness.

I felt as if he had struck me, and I shrank back. Then I straightened up, and looked him in the eye.

"You don't dare to say that aloud," I retorted. "You left me of your own accord. You insult me to come here and say such a thing, and I will not hear it. If you mean to talk in that strain, you may leave the house."

He was naturally a good deal taken aback by this, and perhaps I should not--Yes, I should; I am glad I did say it. He stammered something about begging my pardon.

"Let that go," interrupted I, feeling as if I had endured about all that I could hear. "The question is whether you are not going to be just to your wife."

"You fight mighty well for her," responded George, "but if you knew how she"--

"Never mind," I broke in. "Can't you see I am fighting for you? I am trying to make you see you owe it to yourself to be right in this; and moreover you owe it to me."

"To you?" he asked, with a touch in his voice which should have warned me, but did not, I was so wrapped up in my own view of the situation.

"Yes, to me. I am your oldest friend, don't you see, and you owe it to me not to fail now."

He sprang forward impulsively, holding out both his hands.

"Ruth," he cried out, "what's the use of all this talk? You know it's you I love, and you I mean to marry."

I know now how a man feels when he strikes another full in the face for insulting him. I felt myself growing hot and then cold again; and I was literally speechless from indignation.

"I went crazy a while for a fool with a pretty face," he went rushing on; "but all that"--

"She is your wife, George Weston!" I broke in. "How dare you talk so to me!"

He was evidently astonished, but he persisted.

"We ought to be honest with each other now, Ruth," he said. "There's too much at stake for us to beat about the bush. I know I've behaved like a fool and a brute. I've hurt you and--and cheated you, and you've had every reason to throw me over like a sick dog; but when you made up the money I'd lost and didn't let Mr. Longworthy suspect, I knew you cared for me just the same!"

"Cared for you!" I blazed out. "Do you think I could have ruined any man's life for that? I love you no more than I love any other man with a wife of his own!"

"That's just it," he broke in eagerly. "Of course I knew you couldn't own you cared while she"--

The egotism of it, the vulgarity of it made me frantic. I was ashamed of myself, I was ashamed of him, and I felt as if nothing would make him see the truth. Never in my whole life have I spoken to any human being as I did to him. I felt like a raging termagant, but he would not see.

"Stop!" I cried out. "If you had never had a wife, I couldn't care for you. I thought I loved you, and perhaps I did; but all that is over, and over forever."

"You've said you'd love me always," he retorted.

Some outer layer of courtesy seemed to have cracked and fallen from him, and to have left an ugly and vulgar nature bare. The pathos of it came over me. The pity that a man should be capable of so exposing his baser self struck me in the midst of all my indignation. I could not help a feeling, moreover, that he had somehow a right to reproach me with having changed. Thinking of it now in cooler blood I cannot see that since he has left me to marry another woman he has any ground for reproaching me; but somehow at the moment I felt guilty.

"George," I answered, "I thought I was telling the truth; I didn't understand myself."

The change in his face showed me that this way of putting it had done more to convince him than any direct denial. His whole manner altered.

"You don't mean," he pleaded piteously, "you've stopped caring for me?"

I could only tell him that certainly I had stopped caring for him in the old way, and I begged him to go back to his wife. He said little more, and I was at last released from this horrible scene. All night I thought of it miserably or I dreamed of it more miserably still. That poor woman! What can I do for her? I hope I have not lost the power of influencing George, for I might use it to help her.

XI

NOVEMBER

November 3. How odd are the turns that fate plays us. Sometimes it seems as if an unseen power were amusing himself tangling the threads of human lives just as Peter has been snarling up my worsted for pure fun. Only a power mighty enough to be able to do this must be too great to be so heartless. I suppose, too, that the pity of things is often more in the way in which we look at them than it is in the turn which fate or fortune has given to affairs. The point of view changes values so.

All this is commonplace, of course; but it is certainly curious that George's wife should be in my house, almost turned out of her husband's. When I found her on the steps the other night, wet with the rain, afraid to ring, afraid of me, and terrified at what had come upon her, I had no time to think of the strange perversity of events which had brought this about. She had left George's house, she said, because she was afraid of him and because he had said she was to go as soon as she was able. He had called her a horrible name, she added, and he had told her he was done with her; that she must in the future take care of herself and not expect to live with him. I know, after seeing the cruel self George showed the other day, that he could be terrible, and he would have less restraint with his wife than with me. In the evening, as soon as it was really dark, in the midst of the storm, she came to me. She said she knew how I must hate her, that she had said horrid things about me, but she had nowhere else to go, and she implored I would take her in. She is asleep now in the south chamber. She is ill, and I cannot tell what the effects of her exposure will be. Dr. Wentworth looks grave, but he does not say what he thinks.

What I ought to do is the question. She has been here two days, and her husband must have found out by this time what I suppose everybody in town knows,--where she is. I cannot fold my hands and let things go. I must send for George, much as I shrink from seeing him. How can I run the risk of having another scene like the one on Friday? and yet I must do something. She can do nothing for herself. It should be a man to talk with George; but I cannot ask Tom. He and George do not like each other, and he could not persuade George to do right to Gertrude. Perhaps Deacon Richards might effect something.

November 5. After all my difficulty in persuading Deacon Richards to interfere, his efforts have come to nothing. George was rude to him, and told him to mind his own affairs. I suppose dear old Deacon Daniel had not much tact.

"I told him he ought to be ashamed of himself," the Deacon said indignantly, "and that he was a disgrace to the town; but it didn't seem to move him any."

"I hope he treated you well," I answered dolefully. "I am sorry I persuaded you to go."

"He was plain enough," Deacon Daniel responded grimly. "He didn't mince words any to speak of."

I must see him myself. I wish I dared consult Tom, but it could not do any good. I must work it out alone; but what can I say?

November 6. Fortunately, I did not have to send for George. He appeared this afternoon on a singular errand. He wanted to pay me board for his wife until she was well enough to go away. I assured him he need not be troubled about board, because I was glad to do what I could for his wife; and I could not help adding that I did not keep a lodging-house.

"I'm willing to be as kind to her while she's here as I can," he assured me awkwardly, "and of course I shall not let her go away empty-handed."

"She is not likely to," I retorted, feeling my cheeks get hot. "Dr. Wentworth says she cannot be moved until after the baby comes."

He flushed in his turn, and looked out of the window.

"I don't think, Ruth," was his reply, "we can discuss that. It isn't a pleasant subject."

There are women, I know, who can meet obstinacy with guile. I begin to understand how it may be a woman will stoop to flatter and seem to yield, simply through despair of carrying her end by any other means. The hardness of this man almost bred in me a purpose to try and soften him, to try to bewitch him, somehow to fool and ensnare him for his own good; to hide how I raged inwardly at his injustice and cruelty, and to pretend to be acquiescent until I had accomplished my end. I cannot lie, however, even in acts, and all that sort of thing is beyond my power as well as my will. I realized how hopeless it was for me to try to do anything with him, and I rose.

"Very likely you are right," I said. "It is evidently useless for us to discuss anything. Now I can only say good-by; but I forbid you to come into my house again until you bring Mr. Saychase with you to remarry you to Gertrude."

He had risen also, and we stood face to face.

"Do you suppose," he asked doggedly, "now I am free I'd consent to marry any woman but you? I'll make you marry me yet, Ruth Privet, for I know perfectly well you love me. Think how long we were engaged."

I remembered the question he asked me when he came back from Franklin after he had seen her: "How long have we been engaged?"

"I shall keep your wife," was all I said, "until she is well and chooses to go. George, I beg of you not to let her baby be born fatherless."

A hateful look came into his eyes.

"I thought you were fond of fatherless babies," he sneered.

"Go," I said, hardly controlling myself, "and don't come here again without Mr. Saychase."

"If I bring him it will be to marry you, Ruth."

Something in me rose up and spoke without my volition. I did not know what I was saying until the words were half said. I crossed the room and rang the bell for Rosa, and as I did it I said:--

"I see I must have a husband to protect me from your insults, and I will marry Tom Webbe."

Before he could answer, Rosa appeared.

"Rosa," I said, and all my calmness had come back, "will you show Mr. Weston to the door. I am not at home to him again until he comes with Mr. Saychase."

She restrained her surprise and amusement better than I expected, but before she had had time to do more than toss her head George had rushed away without ceremony. By this time, I suppose, every man, woman, and child in town knows that I have turned him out of my house.

November 7. "And after the fire a still, small voice!" I have been saying this over and over to myself; and remembering, not irreverently, that God was in the voice.

I have had a talk with Tom which has moved me more than all the trouble with George. The very fact that George so outraged all my feelings and made me so angry kept me from being touched as I might have been otherwise; but this explanation with Tom has left me shaken and tired out. It is emotion and not physical work that wears humanity to shreds.

Tom came to discuss the reading-room. He is delighted that it has started so well and is going on so swimmingly; and he is full of plans for increasing the interest. I was, I confess, so preoccupied with what I had made up my mind to say to him I could hardly follow what he was saying. I felt as if something were grasping me by the throat. He looked at me strangely, but he went on talking as if he did not notice my uneasiness.

"Tom," I broke out at last, when I could endure it no longer, "did you know that Mrs. Weston is here, very ill?"

"Yes," was all he answered.

"And, Tom," I hurried on, "George won't remarry her."

"Won't remarry her?" he echoed. "The cur!"

"He was here yesterday," I went on desperately, "and he said he is determined to marry me."

Tom started forward with hot face and clenched fist.

"The blackguard! I wish I'd been here to kick him out of the house! What did you say to him?"

"I told him he had insulted me, and forbade him to come here again without Mr. Saychase to remarry them," I said. Then before Tom's searching look I became so confused he could not help seeing there was more.

"Well?" he demanded.

He was almost peremptory, although he was courteous. Men have such a way in a crisis of instinctively taking the lead that a woman yields to it almost of necessity.

"Tom," I answered, more and more confused, "I must tell you, but I hope you'll understand. I had a frightful time with him. I was ashamed of him and ashamed of myself, and very angry; and when he said he'd make me marry him sometime, I told him"--

"Well?" demanded Tom, his voice much lower than before, but even more compelling.

"I told him," said I, the blood fairly throbbing in my cheeks, "that I should marry you. You've asked me, you know!"

He grew fairly white, but for a moment he did not move. His eyes had a look in them I had never seen, and which made me tremble. It seemed to me that he was fighting down what he wanted to say, and to get control of himself.

"Ruth," he asked me at last, with an odd hoarseness in his voice, "do you want George Weston to marry that woman?"

"Of course I do," I cried, so surprised and relieved that the question was not more personal the tears started to my eyes. "I want it more than anything else in the world."

Again he was still for a moment, his eyes looking into mine as if he meant to drag out my most secret thought. These silences were too much for me to bear, and I broke this one. I asked him if he were vexed at what I had said to George, and told him the words had seemed to say themselves without any will of mine.

"I could only be sorry at anything you said, Ruth," he returned, "never vexed. I only think it a pity for you to link your name with mine."

I tried to speak, but he went on.

"I've loved you ever since I was old enough to love anything. I've told you that often enough, and I don't think you doubt it. I had you as my ambition all the time I was growing up. I came home from college, and you were engaged, and all the good was taken out of life for me. I've never cared much since what happened. But if I've asked you to love me, Ruth, I never gave you the right to think I'd be base enough to be willing you should marry me without loving me."

Again I tried to speak, though I cannot tell what I wished to say. I only choked and could not get out a word.

"Don't talk about it. I can't stand it," he broke in, his voice husky. "You needn't marry me to make George Weston come up to the mark. I'll take care of that."

I suppose I looked up with a dread of what might happen if he saw George, and of course Tom could not understand that my concern was for him and not for George. He smiled a bitter sort of smile.

"You needn't be afraid," he said. "I'll treat him tenderly for your sake."

I was too confused to speak, and I could only sit there dazed and silent while he went away. It was not what he was saying that filled me with a tumult till my thoughts seemed beating in my head like wild birds in a net. Suddenly while he was speaking, while his dear, honest eyes full of pain were looking into mine, the still, small voice had spoken, and I knew that I cared for Tom as he cared for me.

November 8. I realize now that from the morning when Tom and I first stood with baby in my arms between us I have felt differently toward him. It was at the moment almost as if I were his wife, and though I never owned it to myself, even in my most secret thought, I have somehow belonged to him ever since. I see now that something very deep within has known and has from time to time tried to tell me; but I put my hands to the ears of my mind. Miss Fleming used to try to teach us things at school about the difference between the consciousness and the will, and other dark mysteries which to me were, and are, and always will be utterly incomprehensible, and I suppose some kind of a consciousness knew what the will wouldn't recognize. That sounds like nonsense now it is on paper, but it seemed extremely wise when I began to write it. No matter; the facts I know well enough. It is wonderful how a woman will hide a thing from herself, a thing she knows really, but keeps from being conscious she knows by refusing to let her thoughts put it into words.

To myself I seem shamefully fickle,--and yet it seems also as if I had never changed at all, but that it was always Tom I have been fond of, even when I fully believed it was George. Of course this is only a weak excuse; but at least I have been fond of Tom as a friend from my childhood. He has always commanded me, too, in a way. He has done what I wished and what I thought best; but I have always known he could be influenced only so far, and that if I wanted what he did not believe in he could be as stubborn as a rock. The hardness of his mother shows itself in him as the stanch foundation for the gentleness he gets from his father.

Miss Charlotte came in for a moment to-day, and by instinct she knew that something had made me happy. She was full of sympathy for a moment, and then, I think, some suspicion came into her dear old head which she would not have there.

"Ruth, my dear," she said in her rough way, "you look too cheerful for the head of a foundling asylum and a house of refuge. I hope you've made George Weston promise to marry his own wife,--though if I made the laws it wouldn't be necessary for a man to marry a woman more than once. I've no idea of weddings that have to come round once in so often like house-cleaning."

She was watching me so keenly as she spoke that I smiled in spite of myself.

"No," I told her, "I haven't been able to make him; but Tom Webbe has undertaken to bring him round, so I believe it will be all right."

Whether she understood or not I cannot tell, but from the loving way in which she leaned over and kissed me I suspect she had some inkling of it.

November 9. They are married. Just after dusk to-night I heard the doorbell, and Rosa came in with a queer look on her face to say that Mr. Saychase and Mr. Weston were in the hall. I went out to them at once, and tried to act as if everything had been arranged between us. George was pale and stern. He would not look at me, and I did not exchange a word directly with him while he was in the house, except to say good-evening and good-by. I kept them waiting just a moment or two while I prepared Gertrude, and then I called them upstairs. She behaved very well, acting as if she were a little frightened, but accepting everything without a word. I suspect she is too ill really to care for anything very much. The ceremony was over quickly, and then George went away without noticing his wife further except to say good-night.

Tom came in for a moment, later, to see that everything was well, and of course I asked him how he had brought George to consent. He smiled rather grimly.

"I did it simply enough," he said. "I tried easy words first, and appealed to him as a gentleman,--though of course I knew it was no use. If such a plea would have done any good, I shouldn't have been there. Then I said he wouldn't be tolerated in Tuskamuck if he didn't make it right for his wife. He said he guessed he could fix that, and if other people would mind their own business he could attend to his. Then I opened the door and called in Cy Turner. I had him waiting outside because I knew Weston would understand he meant business. I asked him to say what we'd agreed; and he told Weston that if he didn't marry the woman before midnight we'd have him ridden out of town on a rail. He weakened at that. He knew we'd do it."

I could not say anything to this. It was a man's way of treating the situation, and it accomplished its end; but it did affect me a good deal. I shivered at the very idea of a mob, and of what might have happened if George had not yielded. Tom saw how I felt, I suppose.

"You think I'm a brute, Ruth," he said, "but I knew he'd give in. He isn't very plucky. I always knew that."

He hurried away to go to the reading-room, where he had to see to something or other, and we said nothing about our personal relations. I wonder if I fancied that he watched me very closely to see how I took his account, or if he really thought I might resent his having browbeaten George. He need not have feared. I was troubled by the idea of the mob, but I was proud of Tom, and I could not help contrasting his clear, straightforward look with the way George avoided my eyes.

November 12. Now there are two babies in the house, and Cousin Mehitable might think her prediction that I would set up an orphan asylum was coming true in earnest. In spite of Mrs. Weston's exposure everything is going well, and we hope for the best. I sent George a note last night to tell him, and he came over for a minute. He behaved very well. He had none of the bravado which has made him so different and so dreadful, and he was more like his old self. He was let into his wife's chamber just long enough to kiss her, but that was all. I suppose to be the father of a son must sober any man.

November 20. Tom never comes any more to see me or baby. When I discovered I cared for him I felt that of course everything was at last straightened out; and here is Tom, who only knows that he cares for me, so the case is about as it was before except that now he will never speak. I must do something; but what can I do? When I thought only of getting out of the way of George's marriage it was bad enough to speak to Tom, and now it seems impossible. I can't, I can't, I can't speak to him again!

November 23. Cousin Mehitable and her telegram arrived this time together, for the boy who drove her from the station brought the message, and gave it to her to bring into the house. She was full of indignation and amazement at what she found, and insisted upon going back to Boston by the afternoon train.

"I never know what you will do, Ruth," she said, "so of course I ought not to be surprised; but of all the wild notions you could take into your head, I must say to have Mrs. Weston come here to have her baby is the most incredible."

"You advised me to have more babies, as long as I had one," I interposed.

"I've a great mind to shake you," was her response. "This is a pretty reception when I haven't seen you since I came home. To think I should be cousin to a foundling hospital, and that all the family I have left!"

I suggested that if I really did set up a foundling hospital, she would soon have as large a family as anybody could want, and she briskly retorted that she had more than she wanted now. She had come down to persuade me to go to Boston for the winter, to make up, she said, for my not going abroad with her, and she brought me a wonderful piece of embroidered crêpe for a party dress. She was as breezy and emphatic as ever, and she denounced me and my doings in good round terms.

"I suppose if you did come to Boston," she said, "you'd be mixed up in all the dreadful charities there, and I should never see you."

"But you know, Cousin Mehitable," I protested, "you belong to two or three charitable societies yourself."

"But those are parish societies," was her reply. "That is quite different. Of course I do my part in whatever the church is concerned in; but you just do things on your own hook, and without even believing anything. I think it's wicked myself."

I could only laugh at her, and it was easy to see that her indignation was not with any charitable work I did, but only with the fact I would not promise to leave everything and go home with her.

Before she went home I told her I had a confession to make. She commented, not very encouragingly, that she supposed it was something worse than anything had come yet, but that as she was prepared for anything I might as well get it out.

"If you've decided to be some sort of a Mormon wife to that horrid Mr. Weston," she added, "I shouldn't be in the least surprised. Perhaps you'll take him in with the rest of his family."

I said I did indeed think of being married, but not to him.

"Let me know the worst at once, Ruth," she broke out, rather fiercely. "At my age I can't stand suspense as I could once. What tramp or beggar or clodhopper have you picked out? I know you too well to suppose it's anybody respectable."

When I named Tom, she at first pretended not to know him, although she has seen him a dozen times in her visits here, and once condescended to say that for a countryman he was really almost handsome.

"I know it's the same name as that baby's father's," she ended, her voice getting icier and icier, "but of course no respectable woman would think of marrying him."

"Then I'm not a respectable woman," I retorted, feeling the blood rise into my face, "for I'm thinking of it."

We looked for a moment into each other's eyes, and I felt, however I appeared, as if I were defying anything she could say.

"So he has taken advantage of your mothering his baby, has he?" she brought out at last.

I responded that he did not even suspect I meant to marry him. She stared, and demanded how he was to find out. I answered that I could think of no way except for me to tell him. She threw up her hands in pretended horror.

"I dare say," she burst out, "he only got you to take the baby so that you'd feel bound to him. I should think when he'd disgraced himself you might have self-respect enough to let him alone. Oh, what would Cousin Horace say!"

Then she saw she was really hurting me, and her eyes softened somewhat.

"I shan't congratulate you, Ruth, if that's what you expect; but since you will be a fool in your own obstinate way, I hope it'll make you happy."

I took both her hands in mine.

"Cousin Mehitable," I pleaded, "don't be hard on me. I know he's done wrong, and it hurts me more than I can tell you. I am so sorry for him and I really, really love him. I'm all alone now except for baby, and I am sure if Father were alive he would see how I feel, and approve of what I mean to do."

The tears came into her eyes as I had never seen them. She drew her hands away, but first she pressed mine.

"Ruth," she said, "never mind my tongue. If you've only baby, I've nobody but you, and you won't come near me. Besides, you are going to have him. I can't pretend I like it, Ruth; but I do like you, and I do dearly hope you'll be happy. You deserve to be, my dear; and I'm a selfish, worldly old woman, with a train to catch. Now don't say another word about it, or I'll disinherit you in my will."

So we kissed each other, and she went away with my secret.

November 25. Kathie has come home for her Thanksgiving vacation, and I never saw a creature so transformed. She is so interested in her school, her studies, her companions, that she seems to have forgotten that anybody ever frightened her about her soul; and she is just a merry, happy girl, bright-eyed and rather high-strung, but not in the least morbid. She hugged me, and kissed Tomine, and the nonsense of her jealousy, as of her having committed the unpardonable sin, was forgotten entirely. It is an unspeakable comfort to me that the experiment of sending her away has turned out so well.

Miss Charlotte came in while Kathie was here, and watched her with shrewd, keen eyes as she rattled on about the things she is studying, the games she plays, and the friends she has made. When she had gone, Miss Charlotte looked at me with one of her friendly regards.

"She's made over, like the boy's jackknife that had a new blade and a new handle," was her comment. "I think, my dear, you've saved her soul alive."

I was delighted that she thought Kathie so much improved, though of course I realized I had not done it.

November 26. I have invited George to Thanksgiving dinner. I do hope Gertrude will be able to come downstairs; if she is not I shall have to get through as best I can without her. Miss Charlotte will come, and that will prevent the awkwardness of our being by ourselves.

George comes every day to see his wife, and I think his real feelings, his better side, have been called out by her illness. She is the mother of his son, and she is so extremely pretty and pathetic as she lies there, that I should not think any man could resist her. She is so softened by what she has gone through, and so grateful for kindness, she seems a different person from the over-dressed woman we have known without liking very much.

She told me yesterday a good deal about her former life. She has been an orphan from her early girlhood, largely dependent upon an aunt who wanted to be rid of her. It was partly by the contrivance of her aunt, and partly because she longed to escape from a position of dependence, that she married her first husband. She did not stop, I think, to consider what she was doing, and she found her case a pretty hard one. Her husband abused her, and before they had been married a year he ran away to escape a charge of embezzlement. Word was sent to her soon after that he was drowned. She took again her maiden name, and came East to escape all shadow of the disgrace of her married life. She earned her living as a typewriter, until she saw George at Franklin, where she was employed in the bank. She confessed that she came here to secure him, and she wept in begging my pardon for taking him away from me.

If she can keep to her resolutions and if George will only be still fond of her, things may yet go well with them. Aunt Naomi dryly observed yesterday that what has happened will be likely to prevent Mrs. Weston for a long time to come from trying to make a display, and so it may be the best thing that could have befallen her. So much depends upon George, though!

November 30. The dinner went off much better than I could have hoped. Dr. Wentworth allowed Gertrude to leave her room for the first time, and George brought her down to dinner in his arms. She was given only a quarter of an hour, but this served for the topic of talk, and George was so tender with his wife that Miss Charlotte was quite warmed to him.

The two babies of course had to be produced, but it was rather painful to see how thin and spindling the little Weston baby looked beside my bonny Thomasine. Tomine has grown really to know me. She will come scrambling like a little crab across the floor toward me if I appear in the nursery. Hannah and Rosa are both jealous of me, and I triumph over them in a fashion little less than inhuman.

I am glad Thanksgiving is over, for in spite of all any of us might do to seem perfectly at ease, some sense of constraint and uncomfortableness was always in the background. On the whole, however, we did very well; and Miss Charlotte sat with me far into the twilight, talking of Mother.

XII

DECEMBER

December 1. I dreamed last night a dream which affected me so strongly that I can hardly write of it without shivering. I dreamed that George came with Mr. Saychase to remarry, as I thought, Gertrude. When we all stood by the side of her bed, however, George seized my hand, and announced that he had come to marry me, and was resolved to have no other wife. Gertrude fell back on her pillow in a faint. I struggled to pull away the hand George had taken, but I was powerless. I tried to scream, but that horrible paralysis which sometimes affects us in dreams left me speechless. I felt myself helpless while Mr. Saychase went on marrying me to George before the eyes of his own wife, in spite of anything I could do to prevent it. The determination to be free of this bond struggled in me so strongly against the helplessness which held me that I sprang up in bed at last, awake and bursting into hysterical crying.

The strange thing about it all is that I seem to have broken more than the sleep of the body. It is as if all these years I had been in a drowse in my mind, and had suddenly sprung up throbbingly awake. I am as aghast at myself as if I should discover I had unconsciously been walking in the dark on the edge of a ghastly precipice,--yes, a precipice on the edge of a valley full of writhing snakes! My very flesh creeps at the thought that I could by any possibility be made the wife of any man but Tom. I look back to-day over the long years I was engaged, and understand all in a flash how completely George spoke the truth when he used to complain I was an iceberg and did not know what it was to be in love. He was absolutely right; and he was right to leave me. I can only wonder that through those years when I endured his bodily presence because I thought I loved his mental being, he could endure me at all. He could not have borne it, I see now, if he had been really in love with me himself. I am wise with a strange new wisdom; but whence it comes, or why it has opened to me in a single night, from a painful dream, is more than I can say. I understand that George never loved me any more than I did him. He will go back to Gertrude,--indeed I do not believe he has ever ceased to be fond of her, even when he declared he was tired of her and wanted me to take him back. He was angry with her, and no human being understands himself when he is angry.

Last night after I waked I could not reason about things much. I was too panic-stricken. I lay there in the dark actually trembling from the horror of my dream, and realized that from my very childhood Tom has stood between me and every other man. Now at last I, who have been all these years in a dull doze, am awake. I might almost say, without being in the least extravagant, that I am alive who was dead; I, who have thought of love and marriage as I might have thought about a trip abroad, know what love means. My foolish dream has changed me like a vision which changes a mere man into a prophet or a seer.

I cannot bear that Tom should go on suffering. I must somehow let him know. December 2. Fortune was kind to me this morning, and Tom knows. I had to go to take some flannel to old Peggy Cole, and as I crossed the Foot-bridge Tom came out of Deacon Daniel's mill. He flushed a little when he saw me, and half hesitated, as if he were almost inclined to turn back. I did not mean to let him escape, however, and stood still, waiting for him. We shook hands, and I at once told him I had wanted to see him, so that if he were not in a hurry I should be glad if he would walk on with me.

He assented, not very willingly I thought, and we went on over the bridge together. The sun was shining until the snow-edges glistened like live coals, and everywhere one looked the air fairly shimmered with light. The tide was coming up in the river, and the cakes of ice, yellowed in patches by the salt water until they were like unshorn fleeces, were driven against the long sluice-piers, jostling and pushing like sheep frightened into a corner. The piers themselves, and every spar or rock that showed above the water, were as white as snow could make them. It was one of those days when the air is a tonic, so that every breath is a joy; and as Tom and I walked on together I could have laughed aloud just for joy of the beautiful winter day.

"How cold the water looks," Tom said, turning his face away from me and toward the Rim. "It is fairly black with cold."

"Even the ice-cakes seem to be trying to climb out of it," I returned, laughing from nothing but pure delight. "I suppose that is the way you feel about me, Tom. You haven't been near Tomine or me for ten days, and you know you wanted to get away from me this morning."

He did not answer for a minute. Then he said in a strained voice:--

"It's no use, Ruth; I shall have to go away. I can't stand it here. It was bad enough before, but now I simply cannot bear it."

"You mean," I returned, full of fun and mischief, "that the idea of my offering myself to you was too horrible? You had a chance to refuse, Tom; and you took it. I should think I was the one to feel as if it wasn't to be borne."

He stopped in the street and turned to face me.

"Don't, Ruth," he protested in a voice which went straight to my heart. "If you knew how it hurts me you wouldn't joke about it."

I wanted to put my arms about his neck and kiss him as I used to do when we were babies; but that was manifestly not to be thought of, at least not in the street in plain sight of the blacksmith shop.

"It isn't any joke," said I. "Just walk along so the whole town need not talk about us, please."

He walked on, and I tried to think of a sentence which would tell him that I really cared for him, yet which I could say to him there in the open day, with the sun making a peeping eye of every icy crystal on fence or tree-twig.

"Well?" he cried after a moment.

"O Tom," I asked in despair, "why don't you help me? I can't say it. I can't tell you I"--

I did not dare to look at him, and I came to a stop in my speech because I could feel that he was pressing eagerly to my side.

"You what, Ruth?" he demanded, his voice quivering. "Be careful!"

Perhaps his agitation helped me to master mine. Certain it is for the moment I thought only that he must not be kept in suspense, and so I burst out abruptly:--

"Tom, you are horrid! I've offered myself to you once, and now you want me to protest in the open street that I can't live without you! Well, then; I can't!"

"Ruth!"

It was all he said; just my name, which he has said hundreds and hundreds of times ever since he could say anything; but I think I can never hear my name again without remembering the love he put into it. I trembled with happiness, but I would not look at him. I walked on with my eyes fixed on the snowy hills beyond the town, and tried to believe I was acting as if I had said nothing and felt nothing unusual. I remember our words up to this time, but after that it is all a joyful blur. I know Tom walked about and waited for me while I did my errand with Peggy Cole; the droll old creature scolded me because the flannel was not thicker, and I beamed on her as if she were expressing gratitude; then he walked home with me, and couldn't come in because as we turned the corner we saw Aunt Naomi walk into the house.

One thing I do remember of our talk on the way home. Tom said suddenly, and with a solemnity of manner that made me grave at once:--

"There is one thing more, Ruth, we must be frank about now or we shall always have it between us. Can you forgive me for being baby's father?"

He had found just the phrase for that dreadful thing which made it most easy for me to answer.

"Tom, dear," I answered, "it isn't for me to forgive or not to forgive. It is in the past, and I want to help you to forget utterly what cannot now be helped."

"But baby," he began, "she"--

"Baby is ours," I interrupted. "All the rest may go."

He promised to come in to-night, and then I had to face Aunt Naomi. She looked me through and through with eyes that seemed determined to have the very deepest secrets of my soul. Whether I concealed anything from her or not I cannot tell; but after all why should I care? The day has been lived through, and it is time for Tom to come.

December 3. If I could write--But I cannot, I cannot! Ever since Rosa rushed in last night, crying out that Tom was drowned, I have seen nothing but the water black with cold, and the flocks of ice cakes grinding--Oh, why should I torment myself with putting it down?

December 5. We buried him to-day. Cousin Mehitable sent a wreath of ivy. Nobody else knows our secret. If he remembers, it is sweet for him to know.

December 13. The stars are so beautiful to-night they make me remember how Tom and I in our childhood used to play at choosing stars we would visit when we could fly. To-night he may be exploring them, but for me they shine and shine, and my tears blur them, and make them dance and double.

December 19. I have been talking with Deacon Richards and Mr. Turner. They both think I can take Tom's place on the reading-room committee without coming forward too much. Nothing need be said about it, only so I can do most of Tom's work. Of course I cannot go to the room evenings as he did; but Mr. Turner will do that. Tom was so interested in this that I feel as if I were continuing his work and carrying out his plans. I remember all he had told me, and it almost seems like doing it with him. Almost!

December 20. Now I know all about Tom's death that anybody knows. I could not talk about it before. Aunt Naomi and dear Miss Charlotte both tried to tell me, but I would not let them. To-night Mr. Turner came to talk about the library, and before he went away we spoke about Tom. He was so homely in his speech, so honest, so kindly, that I kept on, and could listen to him even when he told how Tom died.

That night Tom had been down on the other side of the river, and was coming up--coming to me--past the Flatiron wharf. Mrs. Brownrig was on the wharf, crazy with drink, and threatening to throw herself overboard. Two or three of the people who live near there, men and women, were trying to get her away, and when Tom appeared they asked him to see what he could do. As he came near her the old woman shrieked out that he had killed her daughter and would murder her; and before they realized what she was doing she had jumped into the water. Tom ran to the edge, unfastening his overcoat as he went, and just paused to tear it off before he leaped in after her. The tide was running out, and the water was full of ice. He had a great bruise on his forehead where he had evidently been struck by a block. Mrs. Brownrig pinioned his arms too, so he had no chance anyway. It was a mercy that the bodies were recovered before the tide drifted them out.

"Tom was an awful good fellow," the blacksmith concluded, "an awful good fellow."

I could not answer him.

December 23. Deacon Webbe has been here to-day. He was so bowed and bent and broken I could hardly talk to him without sobbing; and I had to tell him I was to have been his daughter, and that if he would let me, I would be so still. He was greatly touched, and he will keep our secret.

December 24. More than the death of Father, more, even, than that of Mother who had been my care and comfort so long, the death of Tom seems to leave me alone in a wide, empty universe. I cannot conceive of a future without him; I cannot believe the bonds which bound us are broken. I have his child, and I cannot take baby in my arms without feeling I am coming closer to Tom. All my friends have been very dear. I do not think any one of them, except perhaps Miss Charlotte, suspects how much the loss of Tom means to me, but they at least realize that we were life-long comrades, and that I must feel the death of the father of baby very keenly. However much or little they suspect, no one has betrayed any intimation that Tom and I were more than close friends. Even Aunt Naomi has said nothing to make me shrink. People are so kind in this world, no matter what pessimists may say.

December 31. I have been very busy with all the Christmas work for my poor people, the things Tom wanted done for the reading-room, and the numberless trifles which need to be attended to. To-night I think I am writing in my diary for the last time. The year has been full of wonderful things, some of them terrible to bear, and yet, now I look back, I see it has brought me more than it has taken away. Tom is mine always, everywhere, as long as we two have any existence in all the wide spaces between the stars we used to choose to fly to; and his baby is left to comfort me and to hearten me for the work I have all around me to do. I cannot keep the tears back always, and heartache is not to be cured by any sort of reasoning that I know; yet as long as I have his love, the memory of Father and Mother, and dear baby, I have no right to complain. Just to be in one's place and working, to go on growing,--dying when the time comes,--what a priceless, blessed thing life is!

Transcriber's Note.

Phrases in italics are indicated by _italics_.

Phrases in bold are indicated by =bold=.

Words in the text which were in small-caps were converted to normal case.

Double-word "a" removed on page 228: "Yours truly and with a a sad and loving"

Typos corrected: page 35: "fastastic" --> "fantastic" (fantastic bunches of snow in the willows) page 119: "be" --> "he" (clergyman with whom he)