BOOK ONE

The Golden Child

“Are you a child or a teetotum?” the Sheep asked.

The Vinegar Saint

I

LEGS

The young man of twenty-three was not a clever tennis player, but his partner and his opponents, men of forty, were obviously less clever. The Mount Airy Club courts were sought chiefly by two sorts of players, boys too uncourageous for baseball, and men of impending girth; secluded by fine old ragged trees and off an unused road, it had no gallery of experts to disturb the timid.

The young man belonged to neither class, but he found his Saturday afternoon game of tennis with perspiring business-men just the thing to put him in tone for his own week’s business of research among revered but defunct Elizabethans. Besides, he often had the joys of victory hard won.

At present, he was fighting it out with a butter-and-egg middleman. Years of handling a fragile and perishable commodity had made the middleman self-conscious in the presence of so egg-like an object as a tennis ball. He puzzled his opponents, therefore, as the inexperienced whist player so often does, by unaccountable delicacy when one naturally expected a smashing drive, and at other times by reckless lobbing--as if he had just condemned a bad shipment!--when the safe return was a gentle touch.

A wife or two sat sewing in the lee of a cherry tree. They often stopped their mild chatter to watch some contested point--sometimes the ball stayed in play unaccountably long; a quarter of the returns was accidental!--at such times the repartee on the courts was equally compelling. A “professor” is by instinct talkative, and the enforced reticence of butter-and-egg middlemen unloosens sudden outbursts of speech--the figure has an unfortunate but truthful suggestion--like dammed things.

All this was a generation ago--June 17, 1888, to be exact--a period when tennis in America was an exclusive sport like lacrosse or cricket. But the game had already made great headway toward being an American thing. Mount Airy players had long ago dug out the English “lawn” to make a “skin court”; they had twisted the English “thank you” into a technical and not always polite order to return stray balls, and had adopted the usual American system of “badgering.” Anyone could see that the young chap was trying to “talk” his opponent into error. In the American code, the man loses caste who cannot stand the steady grind of talk directed persistently at every weakness.

An accidental shot to the middleman’s left hand, and an apt remark about left-handedness in general, had unnerved the professor’s opponent for the moment, causing a deposit of several easy balls in the net. Further well-placed banter encouraged the irritated middleman to take out a little private revenge on the ball; result, a walloping “three-bagger” over toward the Mount Airy sky line.

“Hard luck!” the young man murmured in mock politeness, gazing satirically after the ball, but the middleman seemed to view that terrific flight with deep satisfaction. His partner, however, scolded and advised him to be “steady.”

The game stood “four all.” It was the middleman’s service. That looked like a sure win for the young professor’s side; that is, unless the middleman grew cautious and canny. Tennis is a game requiring great strength and equally great delicacy. The middleman had been brought up in the produce business. For ten years he had assisted, between two o’clock in the morning and sunrise, in the transportation of hundreds of cases of eggs, than which there are few occupations requiring more combined strength and delicacy.

The middleman settled down to business. Balls were served with the wizard-like dexterity of a juggler. There was absolutely no “breakage”--a clean, fine shipment; score, 5-4.

At the same time the professor suddenly slumped.

He missed easy shots and fouled his partner. A young person sitting cross-legged on the side-lines--it was one of the many Levering girls, although one could not be sure without one’s glasses--had been for some time deliberately making fun of him, and in a very stealthy fashion, too. His private and original twists of chin, arm, head, even the crinkling of the eyes to avoid the glare, these had been sedulously imitated. The professor put the left palm to his chin--a thoroughly characteristic attitude; the young lady, squatting like a tailor, put her left palm to her chin and wiggled the fingers in some subtle token of derision. The professor played with a twisted lock at the very crown of his head; the young lady elevated a gorgeous bunch of her own brown hair.

This mirror-like mimicry got on his mind and caused some extraordinary tennis. Yes, she was one of the “Leverings”--a familiar name in that locality--but for a time he could not precisely place her. Ah! Those Leverings with the outlandish names, Regina?--Juanita?--

“Hard luck!” grunted the middleman, with a sharp tinge of vengeance in his tone. The professor had served a monstrous “out.”

What _was_ the name? He cocked an eye aloft and sucked in both cheeks--an attitude of cogitation; the Levering young lady twisted her head and neck into a Pre-Raphaelite Pièta. He had danced with her many times. He had played tennis with her at--ah! Manheim! Manheim Levering! That was it. No! Manheim was the name of a street.... Some absurd family name. What was it? A bad return threw the game into deuce. He clapped his hand over his mouth as a sign of apology; the Levering person--first name not yet recalled--immediately hid her face with a spread-out palm and peeped out between the fingers, a sign of utter shame over the bad play. Keyser! That was it! Keyser Levering. Of all the absurd names to give a girl! The Keysers had come over with Pastorius; that was enough to justify the maltreating of a young woman who--gracious!--she was pulling her nose, stroking it gently! Extraordinary conduct! Perhaps the name had affected her in some way. Names do react upon the owners; few Percys ever become valiant; Percy Hotspur was only a glorious exception. Pulling the nose was one of the young professor’s really bad habits; he had struggled all his life to stop it; the very thought of stopping gave him an uncontrollable itching. There! he was doing it again. And she? She was polishing vigorously with little finger upraised. The minx!

The professor suddenly doubled-up and rubbed his belt. He had caught a stabbing blow “in the wind,” as they say in boxing.

“Game and set!” exulted the middleman, and then offered satiric apologies for the knock-out; but the young man heard not; he was busy getting his breath and watching Miss Levering mimicking a gentleman doubled-up with a tennis ball in his stomach. A man may do some things, he thought as he pressed his lips and tried not to wince, that a lady should under no circumstances do. The young woman was certainly not herself that morning. Besides, he had borne the blow like a soldier, and had only passed a hand lightly over the burning spot, while she--she was pantomiming like a child with the colic.

His memory of her conduct on other occasions gave no hint of this. He recalled a quiet, lady-like person, mature, solicitous of the latest news of Elizabethan playwrights. The miss before him, sitting tailor-fashion on the grass, was carrying on--why, she was puckering her lips like a--but so was he!

And now she was flirting with him, one eye deliberately closed, the other looking up mischievously. Could it be the heat?

Finally he marched over and accused her of losing his game.

“You sat there telling me all my faults in sign language,” he told her. “I got so interested I forgot how to play.”

“Just when did you learn?” she inquired mildly.

“Well!” he looked at her. Without doubt he was an erratic player, brilliant and simply bad alternately, the sort that never improves; but he had not the least ambition to do better, so the satire had no sting for him. “Well!” he retorted. “It wasn’t yesterday.”

“No!” she speculated. “No! It couldn’t have been yesterday; it must have been this morning--after luncheon.”

Her right hand made a vigorous swish through the air; her eyes followed an imaginary ball which obviously sailed high out of bounds; her left had come clap over the mouth in clear chagrin. In a flash the professor had himself dramatically presented at his worst, but her cheerful laughter saved the mimicry from anything but good-natured raillery.

Then she told him how to hold his racket for certain plays, and instructed him in the theory of the angles of incidence and refraction upon which both tennis and billiards are founded.

“Yes!” he would say, and “Really, now!”; or “Why, we learned all that in physics, but I never saw any use for it!” But his main interest was in watching the bright, eager face, the frank, brown eyes which looked straight into him steadily and explored him; and without the slightest gleam of--well, there is no word for it--the sort of mature awareness that is rarely absent when a woman looks steadily into the eyes of a man. There was health in her face and a dominant egoism like a man’s. The last time he had talked with her she had been timid, and clinging, and feminine; a thing that had frightened him off. He remembered that he had likened her to a young aunt--visited rarely--who used to throw her arms about him without notice and kiss him back of the ear. After much practice he had learned finally to sense the beginning of the aunt’s attack and so, in a measure, defend himself. A pathetic lookup of the eyes, dog-like and reverent, was the unfailing sign; just so, at their last meeting, this Levering lady had regarded him as they walked together. Unconsciously he had kept one arm ready to ward off a possible pounce.

Miss Levering had not the shadow of a pounce about her now. She was talking tennis like a sporting editor. Somehow, the professor felt sorry. His strongest wish at that moment was to be attacked.

And he wasn’t listening at all to her harangue.

“You must watch the other fellow’s swing. If he ‘cuts’ up you mustn’t ‘cut’ down. The ball is turning round and round, this way,” she illustrated by swinging circles. “If you spin it the way it’s going it will drop dead.”

The professor was watching her animated face with the most open delight; and he followed her minute instructions absolutely not at all. Simple admiration beamed from him.

“My dear young lady! My dear young lady!” he was saying over and over to himself. “I will never call you ‘Keyser.’ It is the name of an emperor and a dog, but not of a bit of humanity like your delightful self. Wonder of wonders! Cosmos and chaos! Who can understand, O Lord, thy marvelous doings.... Male and female created He them.... Eyes, smiles, voice, gestures inimitable; soul, being, essence--what are they?... I don’t know anything.... Saw her for hours at a time and never noticed her till now.... Could we live on $600 salary and the rent of six small dwellings, not always rented, and the income of the D. & W. R. R., if it ever pays dividends? Glory be to Peter, what are eyes made of? And flesh and blood? Marvelous!... The Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep Thy law!... Talk on!... I’m not listening! It’s great! Oh, what a wonderful--”

Then he spoke aloud, ejaculating as if he had been stung by a green fly.

“Great Jupiter!” he shouted, and “Bless my soul!”

She had stood to show him how to swing his racket for a “Lawford,” in those days a rare stroke among amateurs.

“Bless my soul!” he exclaimed, staring at her feet.

The young lady’s dresses stopped at her knees! As she swung about, a long braid of hair became visible for the first time, tipped with a dainty bow of crimson ribbon.

“Say!” he clutched her by the arm. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen,” she replied, wondering at his excitement.

“What’s your name?” he demanded.

“Gorgas Levering. Same as it always was.”

“Thirteen! Jupiter Pluvius! Arrest me, somebody! Are you sure your name isn’t Keyser?”

“Keyser is my sister.”

“Thank goodness for that. Gorgas! Bad enough. But Keyser--ugh!--Are you named after a street?”

“No; family. What’s the matter? What are you looking at me that way for? Counting my freckles? Anything wrong with my feet?”

The professor dropped on the grass and laughed himself into exhaustion.

“Your--legs,” he got forth finally, but quietly, so the wives on the benches could not hear. “Legs--gave me--fright. They saved you, though. Hadn’t been--for--legs, I might have asked--you to--marry me.... Thirteen!... Gracious!...” He sobered up suddenly and remarked to the spirits of the air, as it were, “There ought to be a law against me.”

Miss Gorgas Levering sat down again cross-legged. She pulled her short skirts over her knees. Then she wound her long braid about her head and fastened it with a sharp twig. Demurely she looked at him, as her elder sister might have done.

“As you were saying, Professeh Blynn,” she mimicked one of her sister’s college friends. “Don’t let me interrupt a pro-po-sal. Small offehs of marriage cheerfully received. First come, first served.”

“Your face is quite old enough,” Professor Blynn speculated.

Her features were as womanly as they ever would be. Some young girls achieve that sort of maturity early; it is only a question of lengthened skirts and twisted hair and they grow up over night. Her vocabulary was strikingly mature, too; sure sign of much reading; and it was streaked with dashes of vigorous young thinking. Her strong coloring heightened the illusion.

“I’m an out-of-doors girl,” she explained. “I play tennis, you know--really play,” she laughed; “and I skate and climb trees and ride.” Then she told him, with comical gravity, that she was the beginning of a new species, and asked if he had read Gardiner’s “The Femine?” “It’s an English book; sort of pamphlet. It tells about the coming woman. She will be strong, first of all. He didn’t convert me. I was always that.”

The instinctive teacher in him brought him quickly to her level. He did not make fun of her, nor patronize. Just the right word or two he said, as he lolled on the grass and deliberately stuffed a brier pipe, enough to take her off the defensive, a position which every intelligent child must assume in the presence of superior elders, and led her to communicate naturally. He talked to her of modern ideas about woman; although his own ideas on the subject were not at all formed. “A Doll’s House” had just been translated into English and was already creating no end of stir. He told her about it. The story of Nora and her vain sacrifice caught hold of her active young mind. He promised her some books, forgetting completely her years as he had done in the beginning; and recommended a lot of German “new thought” just emerging into translations, rather shocking reading in those days, even for males.

Without any self-consciousness they explored each other’s faces as they talked. Certain of his little twists of mouth and eye--he had a habit of screwing up the left side of his face as he propounded, it seemed to assist him as he dug the idea up out of his mind and threw it from him--these she stored away without meaning to, along with his sudden wrinkling of brow, and the odd cock of the neck. Something dramatic in her had always been at work, seizing the high peculiarities of folks for the sake of later caricature. She did not miss that sly rubbing of the hand along the nose, nor his sudden display of white teeth when he smiled.

As a rule, he lost sight of his auditors when he spoke. His classes were always a blur, or rather, they merged into a single personality, which attended, squirmed, laughed as a complete organism. And in his successful dealings with very little children--they always received him into their intimacies without reserve--he had soon discovered that the best results were obtained when one does not in the beginning stare into their faces. You must look far off down the street as you parley with them, or they will catch the assumed interest or the lurking irony in your eye, and shy off.

So at first he only glanced up at her occasionally. The picture flashed upon his mind was not at all that of a child, but of a young woman of his own age, yet infinitely more self-absorbed and independent than any he could recall. The chin, grasped firmly in her hand as she leaned forward, the strong, searching eyes and the coiling braid and the absence of legs had their effect gradually of making him forget that he was dealing with a merely precocious youngster; so, as he warmed up to the tale of Helmer and Doctor Rank and Nora, he shifted about and watched her animated brown face.

The sun and the wind and the rain had toned her in shades of brown. The hair was black-brown, the eyes sepia but lustrous and alive, the skin ruddy-brown like a young Indian. The fat, short-fingered hand that supported the chin was almost cedar.

The illusion of maturity was enhanced by a flashing interpolation or two.

“Women mustn’t imitate men,” she asserted. “That’s silly. Men have some fine things that don’t belong just to them; that’s all. Why shouldn’t I ride a bicycle? Why shouldn’t I play tennis and get tanned? Why shouldn’t I work hard, too, and get all there is out of the sport? I’m no jelly fish. Chinese women _can_ walk; can’t they? Well, why shouldn’t they? I found that in Gardiner, but I thought of it myself, long before that.”

They discussed a possible Chinese woman who had revolted, and the consequences in community and family persecution. Then she hinted guardedly of some personal persecutions. The mother had misgivings. There was talk in the family of corralling and branding and fitting for market.

She had never been to school. She had fought against it; and they had given in. A nursery maid had taught her to read and figure, the rest had taken care of itself.

He admired her immensely then, she was so careful not to show a partisan spirit in a matter that so much concerned her happiness. The mother was quite right to wish her daughters to be alike, she admitted; but it is not given even loving mothers to understand all about their children. Sacrifice must be made by the children, she knew, for mothers must not suffer too much, even when they were unwisely restrictive or made laws just for the sake of making them. As she spoke thus soberly, the little lady seemed really older than the man before her.

Then the spell was shattered.

“I will _never_ wear a boned waist!” she broke in frankly.

In Mount Airy, twenty-five years ago, one did not speak openly of invisible clothing. In school one was taught to say limb, and not leg; and no young lady ever admitted any public knowledge of petticoats or stockings.

Then Miss Gorgas Levering yanked the twig from her braid, stood up, displayed two lithe young legs, shedding at once ten years of maturity.

He stood up, too. “Gorgas,” he began, and then stopped to look at her quizzically. “I can’t get used to that name,” he smiled. “With ‘Gorgas Lane’ just beyond the Unruh farm--” he waved a hand jokingly.

“But you!” she cried in defense--she knew all about him; he was “the professor” and a marked man. “‘Allen Blynn’--that’s a lane, too--Allen’s Lane! And that’s not so far away, either!”

Evidently the little lady was sensitive about her odd name.

“But Allen is a regular name,” he protested.

“So’s Gorgas!... And you’re ‘Allen L. Blynn,’ too; why, you’re a _real_ ‘lane’!”

“Oh, I dropped the ‘L’ long ago--when grandmother died.”

“I never had it!” she exulted.

“But the ‘L’ isn’t for ‘lane,’” he shook his head sadly. “It’s much worse--it’s for ‘Lafayette.’”

“Oh!” she gasped her delight.

“Much worse, eh?”

“I should say so!”

“I take it all back, Gorgas,” he dropped his bantering tone, and shook his head so humbly, and smiled so pleasantly that she was soon mollified. “We’re both named after families, I see--the kind of families that have streets named for them; but that ‘Lafayette’ of mine is worse than--worse than even ‘Keyser’!” Gorgas laughed; one’s own name is never funny, but how comic are other persons’! “When Lafayette paid Mount Airy the great visit in 1825,” he explained, “he made a very formal call on my grandmother--kissed her hand, I believe--well, she gave up the remainder of her life to bragging about it, and she hoped to perpetuate the event by naming me ‘Lafayette.’ Wasn’t that a dreadful calamity to put upon a young infant?”

“Awful!” she agreed heartily.

“While she lived I had to be ‘Allen L. Blynn,’” he smiled ruefully, “But ‘Lafayette’ died with her, bless her good old soul. At college when they asked me what the ‘L’ stood for, I used to say, ‘Just L.’ You don’t know how scared I was lest that crowd should discover all about that kiss-the-hand business!”

The middleman and his group came up just then and joked obviously about their prowess as players.

“Getting points from Gorgas?” inquired the middleman. “She took the junior cup, you know, and against some smart boys, too. At least they thought they were smart.”

The middleman had won both sets that afternoon, and could afford to expand. “You know, you tutors ought to be tutored before you take us on again. That might make you--”

“Astuter?” suggested the professor.

His grin was not at the jest. He was thinking of Gorgas, standing erect and brown as young Pocahontas, and looking very like that famous lady. The frown had not yet gone from her eyes. She would not wear--! Bless her! He could see her years later in all the tortures and disguises that women permit themselves to indulge in, including the ugly balloon sleeves, which were already enveloping very young girls; and pyramidal high-heeled shoes; perhaps even a “bustle.”

Someone asked the time.

“Jee-ru-salem!” whispered Gorgas. “I’ve got to cut it home.”

“Tell your mother I’m coming by on Wednesday afternoon. At about three. I’m looking over that Williams boy at two. It’s near you, you know.”

“Very good, Professor Blynn.”

“_Mr._ Blynn, if you don’t mind.”

“Very good, Mr. Blynn.”

“Stay around Wednesday, will you? I want to talk some more.”

“_Very_ good, Mr. Blynn.”

“Come around; you’ll find me in.”

The frown was entirely gone. She was smiling at her own “poetry” as she moved off.

“I’ll find you out, too, if I kin,” he threw back.

She walked two or three swift steps down the path before she retorted, without looking around:

“No, you won’t. You’ll simply ‘chin.’”

This was a pleasant blow at his profession. He _was_ a talker. Only that very morning he had written in an “album”--it was a day of albums--answers to questions that bared him to the core.

What is your occupation? Deliverer of addresses.

What would you rather be? Maker of speeches.

What is your favorite game? Conversation.

What game do you most dislike? Conversation of others.

He watched her as she walked swiftly down the path. Good-looking youngsters do hold the eye! The suggestion of young Indian persisted, the ideal Indian maiden of Hiawatha: she was so brown; the hair fell in an enormous black braid; her form was almost curveless; and she strode along with all the motion in her gliding feet, her lithe body as steady and as straight as a young poplar.

She disappeared for a moment in the dip of a gully, then rose again and dwindled slowly down the long path across a field. With folded arms he stared after her, thinking of many things: of the beauty of young childhood, a wondrous, vanishing thing; of her active, mature mind, caged up in that child’s frame; of--at the end of the path she turned swiftly, as if she knew he was there, and shot a hand high in the air as a parting salute. He waved back instantaneously. He could watch her for two minutes longer, until she crossed the railroad. But she trudged sturdily on and did not look back again.

II

GYPSIES!

The Williams boy, a well-built little man of eleven, was a healthy, riotous animal, keen, fluent and right-minded--but he had not been “promoted.” Blynn had found this out in an accidental meeting with the lad. The result was a regular Wednesday afternoon visit at the boy’s home with a new sort of “lessons,” and many tramps down Cresheim creek and up the Wissahickon--the core of the method--where instruction was part of the game.

Blynn had the teacher’s gift of presenting unknown regions of knowledge with all the allurements of advertisement of seaside estates. He aroused interest, a desire to explore, a proper pride in achievement; and, above all, hope. He never complained of stupidity, nor expressed the least impatience with slowness; so in this way he ever stirred up latent or lost personal faiths. Within a few months the Williams boy was ready to pass into the next grade and do himself credit; unless the well-intentioned but narrow school dames of the Hall should petrify his interest and with daily croakings cut off all communication.

Gorgas was standing in the fine old doorway of her home when he came out of the Williams’ gate. He waved to her cheerfully; she saluted gravely in return, one lift of the hand, as the Roman stage-senators do. When he came forward eagerly, his severe face alight with interest, she stood watching him without motion. That was a characteristic of Gorgas which she had possessed as a baby and which she maintained all her life; it gave charming dignity to her later years; active at one moment as the famous imps below, the next moment rigid as a wax-work, yet thunderingly alive, a fawn struck into silence, listening.

Not until he stood beside her did she move. Then abruptly she thrust out a hand.

“How do you do, Mr. Blynn,” she smiled an absurd, artificial smile, the perfect mask of a hostess. “_Won’t_ you sit down? It’s _awful_ good of you to call.”

“_Wie geht’s_, milady?” he bowed in perfect understanding of the game. “Excuse! I haff been talking zee Cherman _Sprache mit_ dot Wilhelm’s poy _und_ I cannot get back to English for several _minuten_ after-varts, afterwarts--afterwards--there! My tongue’s free. _’Raus mit ihm! Gesundheit!_ How are you? _Schreckliches Wetter_--I mean, sticky weather, isn’t it?”

They had reached the living room by this time. A glance about had not revealed Mrs. Levering or the older daughter. No doubt, they would be forthcoming later.

“The weather _is_ rather depressing,” she drawled. The tone struck him as decidedly familiar; but when she opened her large eyes and blinked deliberately at him twice, and then drew a languid hand across one cheek and fidgeted a moment in her chair, as if to distribute an imaginary “bustle,” it came to him with a rush that she was picturing Mrs. Williams, whom he had just left.

Blynn squeezed down into his chair, thrust his head into his neck, puffed out his cheek, a recognizable portrait of Mr. Williams, and growled.

“I don’t like it! I don’t like it! I don’t like it at all!”

In a moment or two they were caricaturing the neighborhood and making guesses as to the portrait.

He didn’t say, “That isn’t fair,” or “You shouldn’t mimic your elders that way”; nor did he begin any sentence with, “It isn’t nice for young girls to--” Instead, he joined in, became particeps criminis, and at once was initiated into the secretest of fraternities, the brotherhood of children. In a little while he had won the right to ask her any personal question he wished without once being suspected of school-teachering.

He wanted to know what she was reading.

“‘Man and Wife,’” she told him.

Wilkie Collins wrote it, and Professor Blynn did not know that! It was about a Scotch marriage, she explained: two persons had unwittingly acknowledged themselves man and wife before witnesses; that was enough to bind them in irrevocable marriage.

Her explanations were clear--evidently she knew what she was reading--and she talked of marriage and children with extraordinary frankness.

“At the same time I am reading ‘_La Peau de Chagrin’ par Honoré Balzac_,” this with a breathless kind of mystery.

The change of _timbre_ as the French name floated out musically brought Blynn to sudden attention.

“You speak French?” he inquired incredulously. He knew that she had never gone to school, and that among Mount Airy families it was not then customary to have governesses.

“Assez pour m’ faire comprendre,” she came back quickly. “Et vous, m’sieur? Vous l’parlez aussi?”

“Where on earth did you learn the language?” he showed his admiration for her glib prowess. “I read easily enough. It cost me the hardest kind of grubbing, too. But I couldn’t talk it two minutes.”

She grew suddenly statuesque.

“Who taught you?” he persisted.

“Bardek,” she whispered. “You must not tell. You will not tell?”

He crossed his heart.

“It’s a great secret. Mother must not know. Bardek is Bohemian; he speaks all languages.”

“Who is Bardek?”

She lowered her voice.

“Promise you won’t tell.”

He promised readily.

“Bardek is a gypsy, I think; but he doesn’t travel. He lives in the old mill in Cresheim Valley. I ride in the mornings, you know, very often alone. He talks to me in French and tells me how to say things.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Three years.”

“Since you were ten?”

“Yes; that’s when I got ‘Gyp.’”

“‘Gyp’ is a horse?”

“Yes.”

“Cresheim Valley in the mornings is a rather lonely spot, eh?”

“Yes; that makes it fine! There’s absolutely not a soul about between seven and eight. If anyone comes, I step into the old mill.”

“Merciful heavens!” said Blynn, but not aloud. Nothing in his manner betrayed the slightest hint of anything but entire acquiescence in the policy of meeting gypsies in an unfrequented valley between seven and eight in the morning.

“He teaches me other things, too,” she went on. “I’ve never told this to anyone but you; not a person. We seem so well acquainted--after yesterday. Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you. It’s been a terrible thing to keep to myself. They think--” motioning toward the house--“I pick up French out of books, the way I get most things. I do hammered copper and silver inlay, too; Bardek taught me. But I don’t get practice enough. Bardek says one must give a life to it. He makes beautiful things, and sells them to rich people.”

“Do you pay him?”

“Oh, no!” she smiled in a superior way. “Bardek is above money.”

“Ugh!” thought Blynn. He seemed to remember a dirty, fat man, pounding away on something at the mouth of the ruined paper-mill. He had rings in his ears, and a pair of huge mustachios gave him a villainous air.

“I have tried to give him money. But he stopped all that in no time. He took me inside and showed me a cunning box set in a stone in the mill. It was full of gold--oh!”

The “oh” was uttered with quick anguish. Blynn came swiftly to her chair and raised her head. Tears were flooding her eyes, and her face was screwed up into a horrid attempt to suppress the noise of weeping.

“What is the matter, my dear child?” he asked again and again.

Several times she tried to speak. Evidently from her glances toward the door she feared someone would be aware of a break in her voice; so with heroic efforts she shut back the sobs.

“I have--told! I--have--told! I promised not--to tell. I have told--you. It is--all right--I--know. You would keep--it--a--secret. But it hurts--that--I--have told. Bardek has been--so--good to me. It was--wicked.”

It was simply an accident, he assured her. Quietly he soothed her. “We are pals now,” he told her. This would make them into a league of secrecy. She could trust him. All his life he had been a father-confessor to children. He was tested. Keeping a secret like that was hard for her. Now it would be easier. Some things are almost too much to hold. She nodded. One must have outlets. Mothers were made for that purpose. She looked worried at that, so he took a quick turn. Sometimes even mothers couldn’t just understand; then one must have a pal or “bust.” Her eyes showed approval. A pal must know everything. No secrets from pals. That seemed to be agreed. He would go with her to Bardek some day soon--she showed half-frightened wonder at the plan--well, they would talk it over like good comrades later. Someone was coming.

“My name is Mum,” he nodded, “second-cousin to Dumb.”

She gave him a look of wild approval as Mrs. Levering appeared from the rear of the house; she was dressed for travel and hurrying.

“Why, Professor Blynn, I declare!” the good lady was obviously surprised at his presence. “I am particularly pleased to see you. Harold Williams has been praising you to me and telling all about you. You’ve done wonders with that boy--”

“Oh, no! no! God and his good mother are responsible for all the wonders. A fine little fellow, he is. Somebody got on the wrong side of him; that’s all.”

“But why didn’t I know you were here?” She looked mildly at Gorgas.

Blynn hastened to explain.

“I was talking with Gorgas last Saturday afternoon at the tennis-courts--”

“Ah! You came to talk about Gorgas. Good! The very thing I have been thinking of myself. I wish I had known you were coming, for I must be off to our little literary club. We’re fined if we don’t come on time,” she smiled as if the matter were unimportant. “Don’t let me seem abrupt, but I have only a half-minute. So let me come out bluntly. I want you to take Gorgas’ education in charge; look her over; find out where she needs patching and repainting. I declare she has grown up out of babyhood before I am ready. It is almost ungracious of her. I must blame somebody. She is thirteen years old, and doesn’t know anything. My fault, I know; but you’re a wonder--everybody says so. You’ll do it; won’t you?... Oh, yes. I must be practical. Everybody is poor nowadays--the Democrats are in, you know!--I must inquire about prices. What do you charge by the hour? I must ask for wholesale rates, for Mr. Levering’s wholesale, you know, and always gets discounts!”

Generations of Pennsylvania-German thrift beamed coldly from her eyes, although the rest of her ample person actually smiled.

“Absolutely nothing an hour, Mrs. Levering.”

“Oh, no!” she protested, but she looked relieved. “I will not hear of that. The Democrats haven’t brought us that low--yet. Although goodness only knows what’s to happen next. I really believe they caused that blizzard last March! Well! We’ll talk it over later. But you’ll have to charge something. It’s your business, man, and a tough job you’ll have,” twitching Gorgas’ ears affectionately. “Reading novels and riding Gyp--that’s this little girl’s idea of getting an education!”

“All right, Mrs. Levering, we’ll talk it over later. But I make it a rule never to charge for this sort of out-of-school work. I like to do it. It’s my fun. But you may give me a dinner occasionally. We teachers do get hungry for good food--and good company!”

“A bargain!” the lady called out happily. “But I’m off. I’ll be late. You’ve cost me a quarter-dollar fine, young man. Dinners? If you do anything with Gorgas I’ll take you in as a permanent boarder. Day-day, child. Goodby, Mr. Blynn. Sorry I couldn’t stay. Gorgas,” she was at the door now, “get Louisa to make a nice cool drink. And give the Professor something to eat. Don’t ever let him get hungry!” Her laugh carried her down the steps.

As they picnicked on the back-lawn, his instinct told him to keep away from the Bardek story, to act as if it were a thing to be forgotten. Only when he was ready to go, and she seemed to have an unwonted appearance of depression, he repeated his promise to keep the matter secret until she would wish him to tell. This seemed to brighten her tremendously; for she was terribly downcast at the thought of her failure. Now she seemed to be almost her buoyant self.

“You did not tell your mother I was coming,” he remarked.

“No.” But she did not seem troubled.

“Nor your sister?”

“No,” very seriously, “they were both going out. I was afraid if I told them they might stay home.”

Then the comical side of her statement struck her. They both laughed over it as they shook hands.

“Goodby, pupil,” he waved, “see you later.”

“If you don’t forget the date-r,” she rhymed.

“I’ll sure be there, I beg to state-r,” he returned as he moved off.

“Wednesday next at this here gate-r,” she called after him, gleeful to get the last rhyme.

He shook his head and threw up his hands as if she had scored heavily against him. That was an instinctive trick of his, to make children feel the keen joy of a mental victory. It gave her a little glow for hours afterward, as he knew it would, and quite saved her from a far-off conscience which told her she had not been faithful to Bardek.

III

THE OLD PAPER MILL

Blynn found himself tremendously interested in the business of teaching young persons, but he always discounted that enthusiasm. Scholarship, he felt, was his predestined occupation. Not that he really knew any good reason why the work of a delver in past documents should be especially worthy; nor did he ever inquire whether a life given to Elizabethan dramatists could be a life well spent. He enjoyed that sort of thing, but he had the collector’s instinct, not the scholar’s, although he did not know that; he carried on his readings and note-takings and classifyings as an amateur might collect butterflies. The figure fails in one important respect: all butterflies are beautiful. Better, he was like certain dealers in antique: ugly old furniture and bric-a-brac were sorted out with the same reverent care as the really beautiful. Six hundred a year--the beginner’s salary--seemed a magnificent return for tasks that he would willingly have performed, if he could have afforded it, without money and without price.

He did not know until much later that he was an exceptional teacher. Youngsters got the habit of confiding their academic troubles to him; and whether it were algebra or English grammar or poetry, he had the gift of making straight roads through the difficulties, and of charging his young friends with desire to go ahead.

A so-called stupid child or “bad” boys who wouldn’t study, these always seized his interest. Before he knew it, he had a dozen young folks on his list whose whole educational life he had surreptitiously taken possession of. The Williams boy was one; and now Gorgas had been added.

Gorgas Levering was an interesting “case” to Blynn. Through unwitting neglect, the child was out of touch with her parents and possibly in danger. Evidently she had a magnificent will, almost the only thing needful with the right sort of teacher, but perilous if it is coerced or left to drive its own unaided bent. The thought of her three years’ intimacy with the Bohemian Bardek gave Blynn a physical chill.

Bardek had done wonderful things with her, the French, for instance; she had the very tang of a native, even the shrugs and almost inimitable twists of hand and head. Blynn recognized the method; it was his own; and he respected Bardek’s results as a fellow-craftsman would; but he was not sure that he should respect Bardek’s morals.

She was the most interesting of all the children he had semi-officially under his charge, but she was something else. The memory of that illusion of maturity he could not dissipate by any amount of concentration upon the sum of her actual years. She had come at him first as a young woman challenging him to meet her on equal terms, and had stirred him as Olivia had been stirred by the disguised Viola. Some of the suggestion of that mistake continued to stay with him. The grave brown eyes searched him as he talked, and threw him into the half-belief that some witch had taken a woman and had given her the shape and habiliments of a child.

As he walked along the unfrequented streets of Mount Airy he scolded himself aloud for his shameful imaginings; but he could not shake them off. He reminded himself of Olivia fancying herself in love with Viola, and laughed. “Perhaps it is not Gorgas, but her sister. It really was brother Sebastian in the play. I’ll look her up. Keyser will--Keyser!--Bolts and shackles! What a name!”

One day he contrived, therefore, to chat with Miss Keyser, and so they arranged to spend an afternoon driving together. But on the way to “look Keyser up” he lapsed into a contemplation of the first meeting with Gorgas at the tennis-courts. “If this were Italy,” he grinned, “the thing would be simple enough; or even ‘Little Italy,’”--the near-by city’s Italian colony--“Thirteen, I hear, is rather the proper age there. At fifteen the little Italians either have _bambinos_ or they are on the shelf. Wasn’t Lady Devereaux, Sidney’s famous Stella, about that age? I’ll have to look up precedents. Beatrice? Dante’s Beatrice? She was a ‘fourteener,’ wasn’t she? And Juliet! Ah! Juliet was just thirteen!” He quoted humorously from the play, “‘On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen; that shall she, marry.’... Guess Shakespeare knew what he was about!... I’ve had a sad jar. Those legs! And the braid, and the silly ribbon!... I haven’t felt so cheap since--”

He laughed aloud suddenly and set a frightened little spaniel barking with fury.

“Go it, old boy,” he called. “You aren’t half so startled as I was.... Well,” he nodded his head vigorously. “She gave me a little insight into myself and into what’s coming to me some day, I expect. The next time, I hope it will be a real woman. Just the same, I’m going to be always grateful to the little witch for the deception; and I’ll pay, too.”... He closed his lips with determination. “That Bardek fellow will be looked into--migh-ty care-ful-ly, I tell you, boy.... He’s been putting things in her head, I warrant.... Thought all that wise talk was second-handed.... Where did she ever come across Gardiner’s ‘Femine’? Heavens! Why, it’s full of rot, just the sort of thing to upset a girl and persuade her that wrong is right.... But I must be careful. If we drive her sort--” He threw up his hands.

Miss Keyser Levering was already waiting in the little two-seated family carriage.

“Am I late?” he asked cheerfully.

“No; I’m early,” she responded, digging under the seat for a rug. “That shows that you don’t know me as well as you should. Some people are always two minutes late. My specialty is being two minutes early. Jump in; I’m going to drive. This ‘off’ animal is ‘Sorry,’ not ‘Gyp’; ‘Sorry’ has to be handled by one of the family. ‘Gyp’ is never in the stable days like this.”

At the mention of “Gyp,” Blynn’s mental ears stood up, but he got into the carriage with much irrelevant jesting over the relation between horses and horse-sense.

“Where is Gorgas?” he asked casually.

“Off with ‘Gyp,’ as always.” The sister was not concerned.

“‘Gyp’ is mild, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes; stupid.”

“Which way did she go?”

“Her usual--down Cresheim Valley.”

They trotted off toward Chestnut Hill. Blynn broke into a chatty strain until they had turned into the pike which marks the county line.

“Let’s go up the Wissahickon,” he suggested. “You can turn off here and go through Cresheim.”

After leaving Main Street they plunged into the Cresheim Valley, which in the eighteenth century was a thriving industrial center, with prosperous mills--three or four of them--busy at the manufacture of hosiery and paper. One has only to recall the conspicuous masculine leg of that century to know the demand for proper hose, and when one is reminded that Cresheim Valley produced the paper for the printing of the Declaration of Independence, the historic setting is made; but steam, trousers, and a less rebellious time had passed the hand of oblivion over the once busy vale.

As a result, the old road was ragged and rocky, and the only sign that broke the effect of forest primeval was the ruins of two of the old mills, a half-broken dam, and a dangerous looking mill race.

Blynn kept to the safe rôle of talker; but inwardly he chafed and worried. Somewhere down in those leafy depths an unknown foreigner was enticing a young girl to come to him....

He scrutinized both sides of the road as he neared the ruined paper-mill. Tethered among the bushes he knew “Gyp” was peacefully cropping. He listened and watched, but at no time lost his cue in the small talk; and was repaid by a slight movement of the bushes and the sight of a long nose reaching for green branches.

“Sorry” neighed in greeting and stretched his head to look; but “Gyp” withdrew directly to munch his bunch of leaves.

“Has ‘Gyp’ a white star on his nose?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Do you see her?”

“No,” he looked the other way. “I just guessed. Most horses do.”

Below the mill he claimed to have dropped a glove, got out, and ran swiftly back.

Only one dilapidated corner of the ancient paper-mill was still standing, and that had to be reached via a bridge of logs. Canvas was fastened over holes in the roof, and odds and ends of boards made a patch-work flooring, through which the rushing mill race could be clearly seen. The waters below swirled noisily over rocks and fallen masonry.

Save for an old stool, some rag rugs and a mass of copper odds and ends, the mill was quite empty.

IV

“THAT NOT IMPOSSIBLE SHE”

Almost as Blynn surveyed the empty mill he knew he had made a mistake in coming at all, and was instantly eager to get out unobserved. He knew what a child would think of this sort of spying and how it would take weeks of building up to get back the lost confidence. Particularly was it important just now to maintain the genuine intimacy which had miraculously grown up between them in so short a time. As he stumbled up the rocky Valley road he was apprehensive of seeing and being seen.

Perhaps Bardek and she had been watching from near-by bushes. That thought chilled him. Mixed with the fear of losing the child’s faith in him as trusty pal was the quick antagonism against that other pal, who was no doubt with her now in this wild spot.

It was a case for slow treatment. Hurry would spoil all. To come near the rendezvous at all was a grave mistake, he told himself; he had obeyed an impulse, purely a personal one, too, and it was an impulse which his mind should have resolutely checked. It shamed him a little to think how amateurishly he had acted, after all his knowledge of the mind of children.

Gorgas must take him to Bardek in her own good time. One must play a waiting game and trust mightily that all would be well.

He regained the carriage, exhibited a glove and took up the dropped conversation.

“I don’t agree with you about the Duke,” he continued. Miss Levering had seen “Twelfth Night” recently and had read it over to prepare herself for a conversation with a university instructor. “The Duke behaves quite properly, if you will agree with my theory.”

“He was a goose,” commented the lady, “groaning over his countess and not having the gumption to go up to her and talk it out. And in the last act he whisks over to Viola just because she puts on dresses. Shakespeare nodded when he made the Duke; that’s my theory.”

“Let me tell you mine,” said Blynn. “To the Elizabethan, love was an infection, a kind of pestilence, like the plague, which one caught from another. Once you have it you are ill. You become moody, put on gay clothes, wash your face, and demand sad songs. They sold medicines, love philters to give the disease, and hate potions to cure it. A chap usually knew when he had caught the pesky thing, but he was not always sure of the source. Well, the Duke had a bad case. He got it from the boy Cesario, who was really, as you know, a charming young lady disguised. Now the very salt of the play is the Duke’s blunders in guessing who played the trick on him. The Elizabethan audience understood that joke and enjoyed every one of his false moves toward the conquest of the Countess. It’s as if a fellow had the influenza and began to treat himself as if he had sunburn. Every application of cold cream and every sneeze would be comedy to the onlooker. So in the end, when the Duke discovers the cause of his trouble he promptly marries it; as most of us do. Oh, he isn’t a bit inconsistent, if you understand Elizabethan love.”

“Well, that only proves the play is founded on an error,” she persisted. “If you must have a lot of historic learning to appreciate a play, it is not great drama. I insist, Shakespeare nodded.”

“What makes you so certain that love is not a plague?”

“It may be, for all I know,” she parried. “But I should think two modern young people would know when they--”

“But do they, always? A man may behave exactly like the Duke, have all the symptoms, and not guess for the longest while what really is the matter with him. Frequently he blames it on the wrong lady. Sometimes somebody has to take him aside and speak roundly to him--the girl’s father, for instance. And there are enough bad marriages to make me believe that lovers often make a wrong diagnosis. It’s still a mystery to me. Cupid and his arrows was not a bad theory. He was a wretched shot, you know; frightfully bad. That would explain a lot of mismating.”

“But the Countess?” she persisted. “She wanted to marry a woman just because she found her dressed in man’s clothing; and what did she do later? Promptly switched off to the lady’s brother, Sebastian. There! I have settled your theory. She had never seen Sebastian before. She couldn’t get any--any pestilence or plague from a man who wasn’t about.”

Blynn laughed. “I didn’t want to lecture to you; but the theory is rather complicated and you have hit upon a fine illustration. How far can love carry? We say, as far as one can see distinctly. The Elizabethans put no limit--as far as the ends of the earth, to the very stars and back again.

“Beatrice and Benedict are in love long before they know it. Petruchio has picked out his Katharine before he sees her. Viola is in love with the Duke the moment she hears his name. You see, they took their cue from the carrying power of the mysterious plague. Look the way La Grippe is ravaging us; and we think it has travelled from the Far East. Besides, they believed the stars arranged all this sort of thing. We don’t believe in fate. Therefore we make ourselves too wise. I incline toward the Elizabethan theory. Do you know Crashaw’s lines ‘To His Supposed Mistress’?

‘Who’er she be That not impossible She That shall command my heart and me; Wher’er she lie, Locked up from mortal eye In shady leaves of destiny.’

“I’m content to believe in ‘the shady leaves of destiny.’”

Miss Levering was busy managing “Sorry,” who seemed restive. His ears were perked ahead, and he tossed his head nervously.

“Sorry! Sorry! Sorry, boy,” she soothed. “He sees something strange. There’s a man sitting on the roadside with a lot of pails around him. Trust ‘Sorry’ for picking out anything unusual.”

Blynn looked forward, but from his side of the carriage could see nothing.

“It’s a tramp, I suppose,” she conjectured. “They roost in here. Looks like a travelling tinker. ‘Whoa, Sorry! It’s all right, boy!’ If I talk to him he calms down. ‘Whoa, Sorry! Keep your head down, boy!’”

The man came into view; he was seated on a log hammering at a copper disk, a swarthy, stoutish fellow. A huge gold watch-chain stared out from his waistcoat. He wore no collar. A faded soft hat was decorated with a long turkey-feather. The costume, plus a large mustachio and much unshaved stubble, gave him an air of vagabondia.

“Sorry” slowed down and dug into the ground; the man looked up with smiling face.

“_Bon jour, la compagnie!_” he saluted, flourishing his hammer. Broad rings flashed from his fat hands.

Blynn searched about for traces of companions. The tall bushes gave no sign.

“_Bon jour_, Bardek,” returned Miss Levering. “Whoa, Sorry, you fool. It’s only Bardek. Bardek won’t eat you; whoa, boy!”

“_Mais, oui!_” laughed Bardek. “_Il sait bien qu’ j’en ai souvent mangé du ch’val!_ The horse-flesh is vairy good.”

Blynn leaned forward to talk to him. Here was a fine chance to get acquainted.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted. “My French isn’t good enough to expose to the open air. I’ll have to talk English. Do you under_stand_--”

But “Sorry” had evidently comprehended Bardek’s cannibalistic reference to the joy of eating horse-flesh, for he jolted Blynn down hard on the seat. At the syllable “--_stand_” Allen Blynn had abruptly sat. As they shot briskly up the drive, Blynn looked back to see the round face of Bardek extended in malevolent laughter.

When they had settled down into a normal pace, Blynn inquired,

“Who is this Bardek? Seems to me I have seen him often hanging about this region.”

“He’s a Frenchman--at least, I think he is French. Sort of a vagabond mender of kettles. I don’t know how he gets his living. He seems always well-fed and contented. He has a wife off there somewhere, and a couple of babes-in-the-woods. He comes and goes. Sometimes he is away for weeks on his rounds. We often stop to chat with him, Gorgas and I. Drat that animal. He ought to know Bardek. I’m ashamed of him. It was that big vase-like thing that scared him. He’d jump at a new tin-cup.”

They talked of the horses, then, as they emerged from a side-road, of the beauty of the Wissahickon Valley, a lovely unchronicled spot in American scenery, Miss Levering steering the conversation by gentle steps back to “Twelfth Night.”

“I’m almost converted to the Elizabethan view,” she admitted. “I’ve been going over in my mind a number of girls I know who have confessed how the man came, saw, and conquered. Girls do gabble, if it is dark enough, especially just after the marriage. They all talk like your Elizabethans, claim to have been destined for each other from the beginning, and so on; yet they all fought the man off at first; all except one girl--the man tried to get away from her, but something--your ‘shady destiny’--what was it?--got him at last.... It’s a horrid thought.”

“Why?”

“Well, it takes all choice away. Heavens! You might be destined to marry the lamp-lighter! I shouldn’t want to catch anything from ‘Aurora.’”

“Aurora,” the lamp-lighter, was one-armed and weather-beaten and gnarled like an ancient mariner; his classical name was a Levering invention.

The winding Wissahickon curled over its rocks far below, and thick trees covered every hill. An occasional carriage passed, mostly elegant broughams with liveried footmen and milady taking her afternoon drive; bicycles whizzed by with much churning of warning bells. Near the “Hill” Miss Levering cut off into a secluded side-road roofed by old trees.

Keyser Levering was twenty-two, and had been grown up and more or less her own master since she was fifteen; yet she felt just a little self-conscious on two counts. First she was alone in the secluded woodland with a young man. Of course, a chaperone would have been absurd; America had adopted the European chaperone for only very official affairs. In the ’80’s she would not have thought of going to the theater with him without elderly assistance, but she was permitted by the code to take him driving up the Wissahickon.

Secondly, she had dared openly to discuss with him the awful topic of love. To be sure, they had done it in an academic setting. Who could object to a learned consideration of Elizabethan literature? Nevertheless, she was not unmindful of the personal modern application of Elizabethan “theory.”

She did not want to become personally involved. Her instincts would have fought off any attempt on the young man’s part to bring the topic up to date; yet she found herself, mothlike, desiring him to do just that. His Elizabethan theory of maidens disturbed by unknown forces, holding out willing hands to nameless gentlemen, and hardly sure of recognizing the rescuer when he appeared--that was not only a startling idea to her, but it struck surprisingly near a description of her own state.

For a year or more she had been in a stupor of daydreams over that “not impossible He” that should command her heart and her. He took no visible shape in her mind, but remained near and yet disappointingly aloof and shadowy. Sometimes she had the palpitating feeling that he was just around the corner, that his nearing foot-falls could be heard. At other times she was sure she was dancing with him or talking to him over a dinner table. Many a young man was flattered by her searching gaze or by the subtle intimacy which she contrived to throw into a simple personal question.

Once during the previous winter Blynn had been frightened off by one of these moods of hers, and she knew it and was ashamed. The last thing she meant to do was to apprise this young man of her quest. He was being probed and cross-questioned; that was all; but he had not understood, and had misnamed her, coquette.

This pleasant jog among the leafy bowers of the Wissahickon, charged as it was by thoughts of Gorgas and her perilous rendezvous with Bardek, caused the professor to recast his idea of Keyser Levering. They had talked of love, to be sure, and she had held to the topic deliberately; yet with her eye and a considerable part of her attention necessarily on the horses, she had carried on the chat strictly like a graduate student. Of course, she knew the man. One flashing side-long glance from her fine, brown eyes would have sent him flying to cover and to silence.

Along the shaded road they stopped to admire the wonder of the place, and to allow the horses to drink at a spring. While “Sorry” and “Ned” cropped the bushes the two humans nibbled sandwiches and talked.

Miss Levering’s questions showed intelligence; that is, they showed that she knew how to stir up the lecturer in him. She wanted to consider him carefully; so she prodded him gently with artful interrogations; and kept him to his “theory.”

“What brought Petruchio from Verona to Padua?” Blynn asked, as he might have questioned a student.

“I have forgotten the details of the play,” she replied, “I think he said he had come to marry a rich wife.”

“Exactly,” Blynn nodded. “He was drawn to Padua as I have seen a butterfly drawn unerringly to its mate across miles of country. Of course, Petruchio didn’t know what was sending him forth; any more than he knew why his diaphragm was pumping air into his lungs, or why invisible Neptune influences our tides, or why a green weed will suddenly spring into a gold and white daisy. Life is so crowded with intelligent mysterious design that it is difficult to believe that anything happens haphazard.”

“I wonder if my young man has left Verona,” the lady commented with a comic sigh. “I’m getting on! Twenty-two, you know.” She shook her head with grotesque sadness. “He’ll have to hurry or--I’ll be travelling out to meet him.”

“He may be nearer than Verona,” Blynn essayed, still in the seriousness of his exposition. “He may be right here,” waving his hand.

The outright smile on her face caught his eye and brought him to earth. “All right,” he assented cheerfully. “I’ll swallow my theory whole--he may be right here beside you, for all either of us knows. I knew a chap who lived next door to his future wife and never guessed it until one summer he went abroad. He used to tell her all about his girls, too, and get her help and advice. Out on the ocean somewhere it came to him suddenly. Then he wanted to stop the boat! He came back on the next steamer. Fact! Fortunately his wire got in ahead of him, which gave her time to think things over. She was most surprised, but she had to acknowledge that he was right! They figured out that they had been in love a dozen years without once being aware of it. Frightful waste, eh? They’re the happiest couple I know.”

They sat in silence for a moment or two, each thinking a separate train of thought.

“Petruchio,” she turned to him quietly, “would you be so kind as to get out, put the check-rein back on ‘Ned’ and ‘Sorry’, and then hop in and drive with me back to Padua?”

“Ah, Kate!” he cried, springing out of the carriage. “Mad Kate, merry Kate, the daintiest Kate of all the Kates, and sometimes the curst, that right merrily I will.”

On the way home he induced her to talk of Gorgas, and as an elder sister she entered readily into a discussion of her future education. She told of the child’s fondness for boyish sports. Did he know that Gorgas had won a huge silver cup in a tennis contest? Yes, indeed; she had carried it off matched against pretty stout boys. Quite a hoyden, she was. Of course, she was getting too old for that sort of thing now. Something had to be done. She agreed that whatever it should be, it should be done gradually. The child must not be driven. So Blynn very adroitly filled Miss Keyser’s mind with the right attitude toward Gorgas. He was sure of having an ally in the work he had before him, and one that would not in his absence set up wrong family currents.

Twilight was settling when they arrived home. From McAlley, stableman, errand-boy and gardener, he learned that Gorgas and “Gyp” had not come back.

“She’ll be ’long soon,” McAlley remarked without concern. “Mebbe ‘Gyp’ is playin’ lame. He’s a scamp, that he is, a scamp.”

Blynn could not share McAlley’s indifference. His heart beat horridly, and for no good reason that his mind could tell him. The family always dined late, and the household was run on a do-as-you-please system. Perhaps this child had been out at dusk many times before. All that he told himself; yet terrifying apprehension seized him.

In fifteen minutes he was plunging down Cresheim Valley, now quite shadowy. Up the hill before him came a slow figure walking beside a horse. He dove into the bushes and watched her pass him. In the deceptive gloom she seemed to him again a self-possessed little woman. Far enough back he followed, within him the sickening relief that comes after sudden fear.

“I’ll never get used to this,” he said to himself, as he lost sight of her in the dark, when she turned into her own lane. “If that lassie belonged to me I’d see that she’d come home in daylight. She has no idea of the risk she’s running.”

He could not discern figures any longer, but he could make out McAlley’s lantern and could hear the voices.

He was feeling quite peaceful until one-armed “Aurora,” the lamp-lighter, who always loped along half bent over, gave him a fright by suddenly bobbing around the corner and scuttling across the road to a crazy street-lamp.

V

BARDEK

The opportunity of making the acquaintance of Bardek came sooner than Blynn had planned, and in a very natural manner.

The instruction of the Williams boy was carried on almost entirely in the open air. That youngster could no more enjoy himself cooped up in a house than a bear-cub. The moment he entered the shadowy door of the school-house his spirits congealed and his mind began to slow up. The rooms of the “Hall” had been planned entirely for adults--so had the discipline--and rather slow-blooded adults at that. The temperature and the ventilation were exactly right for elderly ladies and gentlemen. And they talked to children about draughts! They might just as well have worried them about sclerosis of the arteries.

In his adroit way Blynn had enticed the boy to play a “sort of game” with colloquial German. Call it a “game,” and the lad would play until he dropped; and by letting him shout at the top of his voice he was easily persuaded that it was not “study.”

In one of the wild paths in the Valley, where the sumac and the young poplar made a complete screen, Blynn and “Chuck” Williams, loudly reviewing German phrases, came upon a voice, rich and fine, carolling _deutsche Lieder_. It was quite near at hand among the tangle of blackberry vines and elderberry and came booming suddenly at them as if purposely to startle.

“Kuckuck! Kuckuck! Ruft aus dem Wald, Lasset uns singen; tanzen und springen, Frühling! Frühling! wird es nun bald!”

It was the song of the cuckoo, which every German child knows from the cradle. While it is yet winter the tremulous bird catches premonitions in the air and sings its eager song of spring. “Let us dance and sing,” it cries to all the woods; “Come out! Come out, into the blooming fields and among the budding trees!” Carried away by its own urging desire it flies from its haunts searching for the Spring.

The great voice softened and grew tenderly pathetic. Ah! brave little singer, your song is false, your throbbing heart has lied to you. Winter, stark, chilling winter is around you and within.

“Kuckuck! Kuckuck! Treflicher Held Was du gesungen ist dir gelungen Winter! Winter! räumet das Feld.”

At the end of the song the boy and the teacher applauded vigorously.

“Bravo!” called Blynn. “Once more! _Encore!_”

The bushes parted, disclosing the round face of Bardek.

“Grüss Gott!” he greeted jovially. “Have I not now heard the German speech? Die süsse Sprache meines Vaterlands?”

“Yes,” rejoined the astonished Blynn; “you did hear us talking German, a sort of German.”

“Och! it was a sort, yes,” the shoulders shrugged cynically; “but it was German, the speech of my country.”

“But you are not German, are you?” persisted Blynn. “Yesterday you were--”

“_Ach!_ Must man be ever the same? Yesterday was I French; gut! Heute bin ich wirklich deutsch. Auch gut! Morgen, vielleicht, bin ich italienisch! _Hora è sempre!_”

“What does he say?” inquired “Chuck.”

“My good boy,” Bardek explained in clear English. “Yesterday I have been French. Good! It pleased me so to be. The day was French,” flourishing his hands about the sky, “quite French. Today it pleases me to be German. How could anyone be anything but German on a day like this?” waving again toward the thick, white clouds and indicating the cool Northern breeze. “_Ein tousand ein hunderd ein und zwanzig! Was!_... Now at this moment am I North-German; soon,” he squinted at a gathering darkness in the southwest, “I am becoming _Bayrischer_. It rains ever in München; _nicht wahr_? _Ach!_ _München_ is a heaven of earth--rain, rain, rain, warm _himmlischer_ rain on the outside, and _bier, bier_, cool, _dunkels Löwenbraü_ on the inside!”

His voice was heavy and deep, the bass singing quality always present, and his intonation noticeably distinct like that of the book-read foreigner. He struck his consonants hard, as if he enjoyed them, especially the final t’s and s’s; his l’s trolled along the roof of his mouth; and he breathed his vowels sonorously.

He laughed as he stepped into the path, and added, still addressing the boy,

“When the sky is all of blue and pink, so am I Italian. My skin changes. I am then a new beast. Oh! It is good to change the skin and the mind. Boy, don’t you get sick to be always the American beast?”

“Not on your tin-type!” “Chuck” spoke up promptly. “I don’t want to be a Dutchman. Rather be what I am. But it’s fun talking Dutch with Mr. Blynn.”

“‘Not on your tin-type,’” echoed Bardek, eyes extended in mock surprise. “_Was für eine Sprache!_ What a language!”

Blynn explained. “A ‘tin-type’ is a cheap photograph. ‘Not on your tin-type’ is slang for--for, well, for ‘_Gar nichts._’”

“Not on his tin-type,” Bardek rolled his eyes, to the great amusement of “Chuck.” “_Nicht auf seiner Photographie!_ It is the language for peddlers.”

They chatted in mixed English and German for several minutes; at least, Bardek did; that is, when he wasn’t singing, or teaching “Chuck” some good colloquial German.

“Uh! _Schweinerei!_” he grunted in smiling disgust. “Chuck” had spat, American style, at a passing bee. “‘_Schweinerei_,’ my boy, means ‘piggy.’ But the pigs, they do not spit. Only the Americans spit. Everywhere in America is the sign, ‘Pray, do not spit _here_!’ ‘Pray, do not spit _there_!’ _Ach, Schweinerei! Vierte Klasse!_ That’s a good word for you, ‘_Vierte Klasse_!’ I, I am of the _Vierte Klasse_, but I, I do not yet spit!”

Blynn studied the man before him. The frank, open manner, the voluble utterance, the great healthy laughter stole into his prejudice and substituted liking. This is a chap one had to be friends with; yet Blynn knew that good fellows are not always harmless. There was something coarse about the man that repelled, the very thing, too, that attracted: his unspoken egoism, his quiet, outspoken self-satisfaction. Unconventionality beamed from him; too frequently, Blynn knew, a sign of selfishness. Would this fellow continue agreeable and jolly under provocation? It did not seem so. Or if his strong desires met with obstacle? Law, order, the rules of decent society, these he probably scoffed at; anything, indeed, that demanded restraint or curbing.

“I tried to talk to you yesterday,” Blynn remarked, “but the horse wouldn’t have it.”

“Yesterday?” Bardek raised his eyes in inquiry. “The horse would not?--_Ach!_” he roared, “you it was who--Ho!” he laughed at the memory. “You say, ‘I cannot _under_stand’ and then you cannot _up_-stand!” Bardek imitated by a pretence of flopping to the ground at the syllable “stand.” “I see very well that you could not ‘stand.’ You could not but sit. And it was something hard, _nicht wahr_, when you did sit!”

His laughter died out suddenly. “Wait,” he raised a hand. “It was the Miss Levering you were with? Yes? Excuse. I must see about something.” He really said, “Som’t’ing,” with just the suggestion of a studied “th,” but one could never indicate his speech phonetically. Sometimes, the “th” was clear, sometimes it was a “t,” sometimes a “z” or “d.” His English varied from right speech to a broken jargon, but always it was rich and clear. “Wait! I come back, _auf der Stelle_, in one moment.”

The bushes closed in about him. It was as if he had vanished, a fat satyr of the woods.

After a brief moment of silence his face appeared, and it was eloquent with welcome.

“You will come into my cave in the woods?” he beckoned, spreading out the bushes with his high hobnailed boots. “It is not to everyone that I give the invitation. You have come well recommended--by your faces and your good talk. You talk German--Dutch, you called it, you little _Schweinerei_!--Dutch it is not. Dutch is good. I can Dutch, but--this is my German day. Today, I welcome you as compatriots. Tomorrow, br-r-r,” scowling beautifully at “Chuck” Williams, “I may be French,” he glanced quizzically at the sky. “Then, you shall be my national enemy and I would--‘_Vive la belle France! A bas les All’mands!_’” he roared, making mimic charges at the delighted “Chuck.”

They were tramping through the thicket as they talked, shouted, and pantomimed. In a few steps they came upon a cosy clearing.

“_Wilkommen alle!_ Sit down, please!” Bardek pointed to comfortable rocks.

A small portable tent stretched out before them. At the side, smoke curled from a rock-oven, which was at the same time a tiny forge. Bowing before the visitors was an unkempt Frau. She looked forty at first glance; in a little while she seemed not more than twenty-five. Twenty was probably nearer her right age. In her arms nestled a rather overgrown youngster; tugging at her skirts was another.

“My summer house; the lady of the summer house,” Bardek explained ironically. Then he looked expectantly toward the tent.

“Bist du noch nicht fertig, mein Kindschen?” he called eagerly. “Now you can come out. Two gentlemen--_entschuldigen!_--one gentleman and one _Schweinerei_ would make call! Komm’, Liebschen!”

From within a familiar voice responded, but in German: “Just a minute, Bardek, please.... Now I am ready. _Können die Herr’n raten wer ich bin?_”

“She would know,” translated Bardek, “if the gentlemen can guess who she is.”

Without waiting for the guesses, he lifted the flap of the tent. Gorgas, enclosed head and body in a great green shawl, stepped calmly out and courtesied.

“Gee! This is great!” “Chuck” found voice for his glee. “It’s a dandy ‘hunky.’” “Hunky” is a boy’s secret hiding place. “I had a tent, once. Let’s have a tent out here, too, Mr. Blynn. We can live here and cook,” his greedy eye was devouring the perfect stone oven, “and study ’rithm’tic and things. Can’t we?”

The boy took Gorgas as a matter of course. She was thirteen and a girl; he was eleven and a boy--those differences represent leagues.

“I heard all you said,” Gorgas informed Blynn. “We often hear people going by on that path. Your German started Bardek after you. This is his German day. We--”

“Chuck” was examining things, with Bardek at his side explaining volubly.

“Do you speak German, too?” Blynn asked incredulously.

“Nur ein wenig,” she replied modestly, but her fine tones told much. “Besser sprech’ ich fransösisch und italienisch. Ich versteh’--I understand German, but much better than I speak it. The ‘German days’ don’t come as often as the French days. Bardek is all German today. Listen to him. His English gets German twists in it today.”

“Why, it’s quite jolly here.” Blynn seated himself on a comfortable stone, and assumed the air of a man who had done this sort of thing every day. “It’s quite a ‘hunky,’ as ‘Chuck’ would call it. I’d like to live this way myself. What man wouldn’t?”

“I’m so glad you like it,” Gorgas whispered. She leaned over and rested her arm on his knee. “Chuck” and Bardek were inside the tent. The wife was grinning at the strangers and singing a gentle lullaby. “We have fine times here. You’re the first person to come by on that path for over a week. We sing and talk languages and Bardek tells stories of his travels. He has been all over the world. Some of them are whoppers,” she dropped her voice still lower, “but you can tell by his eyes that he is making them up. And we--oh, wait till I show you my latest.”

She darted into the tent and returned with a disk of hammered copper, a dinner-plate, partly inlaid along the entire edge with a delicate silver tracery of a strange Byzantine design. “The holes had to be all cut out, and the silver filed and fitted. It must exactly fit, you know, exactly. Bardek scolds if it isn’t right to a millionth of an inch. It looks almost finished, but there are hours of pounding yet.”

“What is it when it is cooked?” he asked, but his tone showed his delight with the workmanship.

“Most anything--a cake plate, a serving tray, a card receiver, a fruit holder--lots of things. But, isn’t it beautiful! Bardek made the design. I couldn’t do that; but I did all the hammering and annealing and filed all the silver. Bardek says he may not throw this one away.”

“It’s a beauty!” admitted Blynn. “A jim-dandy! By George, Gorgas, I certainly do admire this. But how will you ever take it home?”

The shadow of disappointment rested for a moment on her face; then she seemed to shake it off resolutely.

“He will sell it. It is only practice for me. I am learning. He uses it to teach me hammer strokes. I made the Varri stroke on that,” pointing proudly to the hundreds of soft hammer marks, “with the big hammer. It is not so heavy when you learn how to swing it. If I ever get to know how--well, I’ll have it in me; no one can take it away. Then I can make beautiful things wherever I am.... It is mean to have to sell things, though--give them to people you never see.”

“Yes, indeed,” he touched her hand lightly in understanding. “I know just how you feel.”

“So!” Bardek pounced upon them. “You are showing it off, eh? It is good; very, very good.” He said “vairy,” but this word, like others of his English vocabulary, had many pronunciations. “I am vairy proud of my pupil. Gorgas--” he emphasized the last syllable as if it were Gorgasse--“Gorgas is a golden child. She has gifts. You will see, some day. I have put some of my art into her. That!--the little marks there!--is harder than it looks! It is the stroke of the best workman and the biggest miser in Milan, G’sepp’ G’ovan’ Varri. I stole it from him. Ho! I go to him and say, ‘Please, Messer G’sepp’ G’ovan’ Varri, I am poor, I will carry charcoal and blow your fire and sweep your place and make the beds and cook you good macaroni and cut up cheeses, if you will but give me a place to sleep.’

“G’sepp’ G’ovan’ Varri, he storm and curse; say he have no room for beggars, and that he will not pay, he will not pay; but his ugly eye watch me and then he say, ‘Blow that fire, you--’ I will not say what he have said I am. On my honor, gentlemen and ladies,” saluting, “I am not that thing that G’sepp’ G’ovan’ Varri say I have been.

“_Ach, Himmelreiche!_ How I work! I sweat and pull and dig and carry and--_I watch_! Tip, tip, tappy, tappy, tap--oh, so soft he play music by his hammer, the great hammer he make those soft touches. And he fires much, burns and hammers, burns and hammers. In two day I try, and he near catch me. In t’ree day I say, ‘Goodby, G’sepp’ G’ovan’ Varri! Your bed, it is too hard. I will just--skeedaddle! and take with me, oh, yes, jus’ a leetle somet’ing of a idea in my head.

“Before I leave I make a little gift of farewell: I make his secret strokes and it comes out a design, a great goose, and the taps on the wings spell ‘Varri.’

“And now the beautiful Gorgas--I give it to her for what I pay G’sepp’ G’ovan’ Varri, which is t’ gr-r-eat not’ing. If I stole it, well--der Hehler ist so gut wie der Stehler: the second thief is cousin to t’ first thief.... Ah! she do good! Vairy, vairy good!” He held the work up and admired it. “Es gibt nicht schöneres, nicht wahr, Kindschen?”

“Oh, it could be better,” protested Gorgas.

“_Wass hör’ ich?_” he affected great sternness. “_Englisch? Sprich’ Deutsch, bitte!_ Look at the heavens; it is today the heavens of Deutschland. Sprich’ nur Deutsch, bitte!”

“Oh, not German now, Bardek,” she laughingly begged. “Not before Mr. Blynn and ‘Chuck.’ I couldn’t.”

“_So scheu!_” murmured Bardek admiringly. “So shy and innocent. All right. We take holiday. We leave Deutschland for America and English. But,” sadly, “it is t’ one language I do not speak. Only in English am I foreigner.”

“Not at all,” protested Blynn. “Your English is splendid.”

“Ah!” the flattery touched home. “You are good to say it. But I know. In Europe I am in my home in every land. The Bohemian knows all speeches. They have the gift, as you would know many songs, glad ones and sorrowful. When we are still young we go to countries; it comes to us. But ah! I did go to England never; only by books did I know English, and look! Bah! I feel I must spit, like my little Schweinerei here. Books! They tell all lies. In France, in Germany, in Holland, in Hungary, in Italy, they would know me for compatriot. In America I am a barbarian, a pagan, a ‘Gypsy,’ a ‘Dago.’ Ach! English? Ich hab’ eine schlechte Aussprache. I know! I know!”

For an hour they debated genially. Before the meeting broke up Bardek dropped on the ground, stretched out full length, propped his head up with one hand, and lapsed into silence. Questions brought only short answers.

“It is time to go,” whispered Gorgas. “When he gets tired of people, he lets them know. Don’t talk to him any more; he has worn himself out with excitement.”

Gorgas led the way through overhanging branches without a word. “Chuck” followed. Blynn sought to soften the abrupt exodus by a simple wave of the hand before he bent low to avoid the briars.

“Kom’ bald wieder,” Bardek grunted. “Sobald als möglich. Come vairy soon again!” It was a sincere invitation, Gorgas assured them--Bardek was always himself--and it was a great tribute.

VI

LIBERTÉ, EGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ

They did come soon again. The air was gently from the southwest. There was a blue summer sky with high lazy clouds.

“Entrez, m’sieurs, mam’zelle!” called Bardek, and rattled on. “Je suis enchanté de vous voir! I am delighted to see you! Ah! when you were here last, the weather was gloomy and German--but today! Today the sky is beautiful and French. _Voici!_” spreading his hands to the heavens, “_Voici, la France!_”

“Hang up your hat on the hall-rack,” he went on gayly in French. “I am ravished to see you! _Comment ça va_, Chucks?”

Chucks grinned his lack of comprehension.

“_Comment ça va_, Chucks?” Bardek extended a hand of greeting. “Can you not speak, Chucks?” he dropped into English. “Can you only spit, eh? _Pfui!_ ‘_Comment ça va?_’ my Chucks, it is ‘Howd’y.’ But have care! _Prends attention!_ Pray do not spit. _Ici c’est defendu!_ Here,” sweeping his hand in a short circle, “here it is beautiful France and here it is not permitted. Are you yet German, Chucks? Must I fight you?” he crooked an imaginary gun and stood ready to charge bayonets. His eyes glared; his bushy eyebrows quivered; his whole body strained for the word of command. “_Conspuez les All’mands!_” he muttered as only the French could think that phrase. In a second all that ferocity had vanished. “_Non?_ You have not yet changed your skin? _Eh bien!_ We shall keep _l’entente cordiale_. _Vive l’Amérique!_ I shake the hand.”

“Chuck” and Bardek extended hands and wrung an international grip.

“Et mam’zelle?” he turned to Gorgas. “Que veutelle faire aujourd’ hui? Sit and talk, _hein_?”

“Let me work on my plate, Bardek,” she asked. “I’m excited about that plate.”

“_Comment!_” he bristled at her English. “The sky, it is all of French! Aujourd’hui,” flourishing terribly at the sky, “il s’agit de parler français!”

“Please, Bardek!” she begged. “Not French now; after while; not now. Please!”

“Comme tu voudras, petite,” he gave in finally. “She will not speak the French, which she speak like--oh!--like heaven. C’est très curieux! She is afraid, Mr. Blynn, that you be critic. Ho!” laughed Bardek frankly. “She need have not the fear. _Pssst!_ Mr. Blynn, he can have no language but the English. And even so, the little English of a little town,” pointing off toward the village, “a little town which goes to sleep on Sundays. It is too late for him. Language, it comes to children when their ears are open wide to hear the voice of things. When we grow old, sixteen, twenty, thirty--_malheureusement! Peau du diable!_--it is too late. The bones in the head, they go thick. So with all things--after fourteen, fifteen, the mind _est fermé_, closed, shut up tight.”

Gorgas was searching in the tent for her materials.

“So, I take this child when she _is_ child and teach her. You are professor, _n’est-ce pas_? Oh! You have my great admiration! You are--_pardon!_--so great a fool! You think you can teach old men and old girls who go to the university? How that is comic! Wooden-heads, they mumble words; they can repeat what you say, yes; but they can never _do_. To _do_, one must begin in the cradle. You would be contortionist, juggler, gymnast? Very well, wait until you are twenty-five! Sh! _Non!_ You laugh? Zen why you try to teach old men of twenty how to think? It is a great fooling.... Oh, well,” he shrugged, “zey zink,” he stopped and tried again, “t’hey t’hink they do great zings--t’ings--_bla!_” he made a wry face. “I cannot say zat ‘th.’ It is one language for those who stutter, the English.”

Bardek was all French on that day. One could almost believe that he had really changed his skin. He seemed sleeker, cleaner, even thinner; and the great mustachios had a glisten to them and a slight waxiness in the ends. His bearing was more courteous and considerate than on the “Deutschertag.” A gay kerchief adorned his neck and his turkey-feather had a jaunty tilt. Even his English had the very flavor of French idiom and French accent.

While he talked Gorgas brought her plate to a great stone, set up a lead block, and began to swing a rather large coppersmith’s hammer. She barely touched the metal as she beat rhythmically back and forth; the weight of the hammer seemed to disappear, so cleverly did she keep it moving.

“_V’là!_” pointed Bardek. “That is the stroke of G’sepp’ G’ovan’ Varri. _Parfaitment!_ _C’est bon!_ ‘Tap, tap, tippity, tippity, tap, tap!’ It is music, is it not, _m’sieur_? She has the delicate muscle for that work. Two year, three year? _Non!_ She will soon set--be woman and marry and have hundred t’ousand children. Ho!--”

Gorgas looked up at him in grave rebuke.

“Ho! see how she goes red and charming! The little maggots are running in her brain and making to wake all kind of wonder things and then--poof!--the school is done and life commence.”

“Chuck” was at her side watching seriously. He plied her with questions, eager to imitate and, boy-like, quite confident he could do as well.

“You must have known Gorgas for a long time,” Blynn began. “That work of hers is really wonderful. How did you find her?”

Bardek squatted on the ground, produced a file, and began to smooth off bits of sheet silver. He glanced up at Blynn through crinkling eyes.

“You look so stupid,” Bardek threw back his head; “and it is right. You do not know yet how much it is I know. You do it well, the look of the fool. Good! Gorgas has taken you for a friend. It is well that you play fool for her, speak for her, be dumb for her and if it need, lie for her, make ‘whoppers,’ as she calls t’em, for her. I like you for that, my friend.

“You would know how she came? Well, she jus’--came. Three year ago she ride by on ‘Gyp’ and I say ‘H’lo, missy,’ and she say, ‘What are you doing?’ and I say ‘I make beauty’ and show her something, a small vase, all of gold and copper. Her eye grow big, so! and she draw back and say, ‘Are you a gypsy?’ and I say, ‘_Non! non! non!_ T’ousand times _non!_ I am a Bohemian.’ And she get off her horse, tie him to a tree and say, ‘Then may I come with you and will you show me how to make beauty?’

“Zat is all, my friend, and she have been making beauty all the time. She herself makes beauty,” he looked back at her tenderly, “wherever she go. She is always serious, always in great thinking. Zey are ze most beautiful children, the quiet ones. Gigglers? Bah! Comics? Zey are ordinairy. Her eyes they always look at you like they were so old! _Elle est très sympathique_, my good friend.

“She learn--ah, how she learn!--_vite!_ _Comme ça!_” he snapped his fingers. “She take languages like the singing sparrow drinks at spring water. She would be Bohemian perhaps; her grandfather or grandmother--who knows? In America everybody must come from Europe! See her brown face and black hair? Ah! that is often seen in my country. It is oriental.”

He stopped talking to gaze at her at work.

Blynn took the chance to tell of many things. He sketched in the mother and the Levering household. He told of schools and all the business of bringing up young girls to be gay, delicate do-nothings until some man should be attracted by their frailty and marry them.

Bardek exploded many times. His theories of education for girls were not the prevailing ones in America. Everybody should learn to work, he believed. The highest trade of all is that of a maker of beauty. Those few who can, should have material, tools and infinite leisure. They were the only aristocrats; and among them there should be no fakirs. The university doctor may be a fool; he usually is a fool, averred Bardek; but no one cares; he can do little harm. But with things of beauty there should be no such trifling. Learning was no great matter; no scholar has learning enough to reconstruct the broken wing of a beetle; the world wags very well when learning is asleep. But beauty is important; one must choose ever between beauty and death.

Those who could not minister to the esthetic needs should take their turn at the fetching, lifting and carrying, the portering of life. That is their happiness, their beauty.

“Look at my wife,” he illustrated, nudging toward the tent. “She has not the skill, the art. Good! But she work, and carry a pack, and do everything right for the babies; and she is happy, working, working, working all the day. When she work and I work, we sing songs of Hungary where she live. That is fine. Woman must not be waxworks! _Sapristi!_ The good Lord has give them a job, my friend. _Nom d’une pipe!_” he sighed softly. “A big job! It needs zat zey get ready for it.”

In the spaces between Bardek’s speeches Blynn tried to hint of the trouble that would come to Gorgas if it were known at home how she had spent her time off in the Cresheim woods.

Bardek was not concerned; when a man is right he does not worry his head about what others will think. If he had bothered himself over the opinions of small minds he would have stayed in Hungary and sold tobacco and postage stamps. No! Liberty is worth paying much for; and when there is fear of criticism, liberty is dead.

Bah! The fat mother would not know a golden child from a _salade de tomate_. Doubtless she would scold a little. His wife, she scolds. It is nothing; it passes off and away like steam in the air. What one has, one has; all the scoldings of all the little people in the world cannot alter it; on earth there is no judge but oneself.

“Already,” he said, “the little Gorgas has more than all those copy-kittens who went to school and sat at wooden desks in the dark little rooms and listened as nice old ladies tell how to be jus’ waxworks. In her arm, in the ends of all her fingers, in her eye and on her tongue and in her brain, too, she has beauty, and the power to make beauty.

“You, you, my friend, have studied in the university. Try it out with the little Gorgas. What do you know that she does not know better? Do you know better how high is heaven and how wide are the angels’ wings? You have studied languages, and you know German--a sort of German, ho!--and French and Italian, perhaps; and you will always be foreigner there and a fool: but she, the little Gorgas that I teach, she _is_ German and she _is_ French and she _is_ Italian.”

He stopped his work for a moment to show her how to smooth off the inlay without disturbing the fine surface of the beaten copper.

“Let us sing for them, my pretty one,” he coaxed in French. “You are some of the beauty that I have made. I want to show you off, exhibit you, prove my skill. What shall it be?” He ran through several simple songs of childhood. Reluctantly she agreed, only to please him as he knew, and together they sang a lively air. It was about life on the winding roads, and there was a chorus of jolly tappings which they did lightly with their hammers.

“That is liberty,” Bardek commented. “In France they have not liberty except painted on every sign-post. ‘_Liberté, fraternité, equalité!_’ _Là, là, là, là, là!_ It is the great national joke! America? _Non!_ ‘The land of the brave,’” he sang nasally in burlesque, “‘and the ho-o-me of the fre-e-e!’ Ho! that is vairy, vairy comic.” He wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes. “Very comic! I come to the land of liberty, ‘the ho-o-me of the free’ and I cannot sell my work without I get a permit for which I must pay; and in each spot I must have new one. I cannot live as I please. The people say, ‘_Phieu!_ go away, ugly man. You have no soul, for you have no stiff white collar. Tie up the neck with white peekadilly and we give you liberty to live by us!’ I have not liberty to drink my beer or smoke when I please.

“And Miss Gorgas, she cannot learn to make beautiful things. She cannot tell her mother she come to me. She must sneak like a thief and lie. It is not good, that kind of liberty. Liberty is a great thing, my friend. You all go mad and have red-fire and elections and speeches and big ugly bands and Mr. Cleveland is made president, and _hélas!_ millions of free Americans weep, weep, weep zet zeh must have Mr. Cleveland for president. America is not the land of liberty. It is the land of prohibition, yes; sobriety, yes; uniformity, yes; but here is not liberty. Of all peoples in Mount Airy only I perhaps have liberty. You would not want to live like me, eh? You look at me. _Zut!_ I read you mind. You say, ‘Not on your tin-type!’ Then you do not much care for liberty.”

Many such days the little group had together. German days, French days, Italian days came in regular succession. “Chuck” disputed with him about the days, and Bardek took great joy in his wordy battles over the sort of weather that prevailed. To all but “Chuck” it was quite evident that his succession of days was a transparent device to give Gorgas constant exercise in the fluent, living language; but save for the laughing eyes and occasional wink, he stoutly stood for the theory that the weather made his skin change. Bohemians, he claimed, belonged to no country and to every country and were doomed all their lives to slip back and forth through various national personalities. The weather did it.

“You have only one country!” he told “Chuck” scornfully. “How sorry I am for you! So you hooray for the stars and stripes, and you make the grand racket on the Fourt’ of July, an’ you rage at Sout’ America, and Europe, an’ all the other little peoples. Poof!” he blew himself up into his own notion of the spread-eagle American orator. “You could fight the whole wor-r-ld, wit’ hands tied behind the back--and the whole wor-r-ld would laugh in zere sleeve, and make such pictures in the comic papers, about which you would know nothing. Oh, how sorry I am for you, Chucks, who have only one country, when I, Bardek, have so many! In France I sing the Marseillaise on the fourteen of July; in Germany I celebrate the eighteen of January, the birthday of the Empire; and in Poland, on the twelve of September, I drink to Sobieski, who saved Poland from the Turk--an’ at no time do I rage, and make boasts at any country. You are proud of only one land, Chucks; I, Bardek, am homesick for all the wor-r-ld!”

One day when they went back through the hidden path and under the arch of briers into the enclosure, not a vestige of Bardek and his belongings remained.

“He will come back when he wishes to be here again,” Gorgas explained, with just a shade of disappointment. But she did not wholly conceal her gratification. Lately she had been feeling terribly guilty over her clandestine meetings with the Bohemian. She could date the beginning of her worry over the matter. It had come suddenly in the night when she awoke trembling and weeping over she knew not what. Fires burned in her, and she discovered an intense longing to give up what had been heretofore the most helpful experience in her life: her solitude, her freedom from the necessity of communicating. Now she cried out for a brother or a sister or a mother to whom she could tell everything, even trivial things. Until now she had fared alone, self-sufficient as a tree, and had never spoken to anyone, even to Bardek, of what meant most to her. On this night, as she lay awake, she reveled in the despairs of loneliness.

At about that time Blynn had appeared and had satisfied her need. To him she had unburdened, and had come away pure and heightened as after confession.

All this had made her self-conscious in her visits to Bardek. He had remarked the change in her, and talked about it, as was his way; which made her, somehow, ashamed. When her cheeks flamed under his persistent candor, he would call to his wife in great delight. In some Hungarian dialect he would invite her to look at the bud bursting; the little, green leaves unfolding; the fresh, sweet petals stretching themselves. There never was any doubt as to his meaning.

After that when Gorgas parted the elder branches and looked into his bower she came with the face of a child-woman, full of subtle new dignity, an unstudied preoccupation, as if the mind within were very, very busy on its great affairs.

And guilt seized her, without giving a single reason. “It is wrong!” sang a humming in her ears. “What is wrong?” she would ask herself wildly. “It is wrong! It is wrong!” the voices would cry; and no one could tell her _what_ was wrong.

With Blynn beside her she looked steadily at the blanched circle left by the tent.

“Well!” she gave a deep, healthy exhalation, and stepped back into the narrow path. “I’m both sorry and glad. I don’t know why I should be glad; but I am. It is all mixed--m-mixed u-up.” Her lips quivered though her eyes smiled gamely. “I don’t know whether I am going to cry or laugh.”

“Shall I toss a coin?” Blynn inquired.

“Chuck” was examining the “hunky” and speculating upon moving in as soon as he could wheedle a tent out of his father. Blynn and Gorgas stood close together facing each other in the path. Her eyes searched his steadily until they slowly brimmed and shut out all view.

“I guess I’m mo-mostly g-glad!” she put out her hands toward him and lightly touched his sleeve.

“If you cry now,” whispered the man, “you’ll splash me awfully. Let’s wait till we have more room.”

That decided the matter. It was a hearty burst of girlish laughter which cleared the air like the proverbial thunder. All the way home they sang and danced and played “tag” and raced.

“When will Bardek be back?” Blynn asked before he bade the children goodby.

“Perhaps next week; perhaps next month,” Gorgas conjectured. “Once he stayed away two months. Oh, he’ll be along again soon. _A tout à l’heure, m’sieu’_.” She stepped gaily up the walk toward her own door. “_Auf wiedersehen und -hören und -sprechen._ Until I see you and hear you and speak you again!”

Yet the month passed away, and another month and many months, but Cresheim Valley saw no trace of Bardek.

Along in November the mails brought a carefully wrapped package containing eighty-two dollars and six cents. A note in French said simply:

“It was a robber who bought your plate, but I will not ask too much for the art which I stole from Varri. I do penance by taking so little. The miser! For my silver and copper I charge you a trifle--which I have taken out. What is here is yours--well earned, golden child.

“Until we meet and talk again,

“BARDEK.”

After a conference with Mr. Blynn, Gorgas forwarded the package anonymously to the treasurer of the Children’s Aid Society.

“It is an offering to propitiate the theft from G’sepp’ G’ovan’ Varri,” said Blynn; “let us hope it will count as a mass for the peace of Varri’s penurious soul.”

VII

A “FRENCH DAY” AT NIGHT

Mrs. Levering did not mean to neglect her children; but her life was busy with the running of a big household, and with the claims of neighbors, the church, and charitable organizations. In her home life she was delightfully lax and unsystematic; but it was liberty for all, not a bad arrangement for domestic happiness, when it works.

Her two children had come along without making much demand upon her. If they had been frail or sickly she would have been the promptest of nurses, and perhaps she would have learned more about them; but they grew along sturdily without so much as a single call for help. As a result they instinctively repelled coddling. There were no effusive greetings between mother and daughter, no kissings at night time, and only the most casual peck at lengthy partings. It was a very sensible and practical environment; and, on the whole, satisfactory to the Levering family.

Mrs. Levering treated her daughters as if they were her own age. There was no “baby-talk” at any stage of their upbringing. Nearly everything was discussed openly, but that did not mean that the children had a vote in everything. Unconventional as the mother was in most things, she threw about the children a protective ring of unwritten rules, over which there was no debate--almost the same code that her own mother had used. Gorgas could fight against going to school and win. School was an expense, anyway; and Gorgas seemed to be doing very well by herself with such help as the mother fancied Keyser was giving her; and many children managed pretty well with a tutor or two. But acquaintances, especially male, were scrutinized and limited; late night prowlings were forbidden; there was no latch-key for any save the master-of-the-house--who never went out!--and all letters, outgoing and incoming, must pass inspection.

So, you see, Mrs. Levering had no tingle of conscience concerning her children; on the contrary, she had many exalted moments at the thought of all her prohibitory care over them.

Allen Blynn was O. K.’d as a matter of course. Everyone knew all about him. He was an honor man at college; his mother was of “good people,” descendants of somebody or other; and he was of the faculty of the University. Of course, his manners were right--he used a fork properly; he was charmingly considerate of ladies; children liked him; and he had a good, honest face; but the other qualifications, the college honors and the university degrees really made him “moral,” and therefore a free and unrestricted companion of her two girls. Besides, the mother was thrifty enough to see the advantage of securing so excellent and so inexpensive a tutor for Gorgas.

On the days when he and Gorgas studied together it grew to be the custom for the tutor to stay on for the informal family dinner, to get his “pay,” as he had bargained, of good food and good company. They were jolly affairs, full of gay chatter and serious discussion of men and things. Blynn radiated on these occasions, for the dinner was his natural habitat. On the tennis-courts he was an indifferent actor; but whenever the game was speech, he scored masterfully.

Guests seemed to drop in fortuitously on these evenings, while the dinner grew imperceptibly more elaborate. With a daughter aged twenty-two, Mrs. Levering’s instincts told her when to entertain young people, and Miss Keyser Levering was a more modern mental replica of her mother. Edwin Morris, the university tennis champion, still in his late ’teens, was a frequent visitor, as were “Sam” Davis, the “law-man”; Keyser’s chums, Mary Weston and Betty Sommers; Diccon, a newspaper-man, and a collegian of Blynn’s time; and Leopold, a distinguished-looking young English Jew, of the science department of the University.

Others came and went, but these gradually drifted together to form the core of a little social group.

On these occasions Gorgas seemed to disappear. She shrank visibly into the rôle of little girl invited to look on. Her animated and accomplished sister overpowered her and made her a speechless dependent. All the gaucheries of childhood came out to daunt her. She stumbled against things, spilled her salt, and walked about with ox-like grace. One mild, reproving look from her sister would make her trebly clumsy for the evening.

Blynn tried often to bring her out, but it only increased her seeming stupidity. After all, she was a child, he reminded himself, but not without puzzled memories of the strange age she could put on when they were alone together.

Keyser, whom Blynn had rechristened “Kate,”--a name which everyone took up--was so charmingly at ease that in spite of his desire to befriend the little sister, he found his talk gravitating toward the elder.

And Gorgas was really content to look on, to listen and, above all, to remain completely unnoticed. She did not always succeed, much to her public confusion. With Morris, the tennis boy, she was more comfortable, save when he tried to draw her out into the circle. This he discovered early he must not do; so he contrived to sit beside her and tell her about his college pranks in undertones. When he discovered that she played tennis and had won the Junior cup, he took her in charge forthwith; and on other days met her on the courts and gave her an exceptional practice. Their “doubles” combination soon grew to be practically unbeatable.

One evening the conversation drifted to the culture-war over Latin and Greek. Blynn was trying to show how the absorption in these studies, which rarely got beyond the veriest elements, was keeping our generation from the marvelous literatures of Europe. Centuries from now, he claimed, the modern languages would be looked upon as even more classical than the ancients.

“I am handicapped in my work,” he admitted, “because I do not know Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, German, and French; I mean, really know them. A school child in any country of Europe would laugh at my attempts to speak or read the languages. No one ever hinted to me what were the real tools of scholarship.”

Leopold told of his classical training under tutors in England. He had begun to read Latin at eight, added Greek at nine, and he could not remember when he was unable to understand French and German.

“America is giving up foreign languages,” Leopold summed up. “The students will not put the time on them.”

“But I know they will,” Blynn returned firmly, “if the thing is taught reasonably. You began at eight and nine, Leopold; well, that’s the age to do it.”

The conversation threatened to become pedagogic and heavy, but the girls were interested, too. Mary Weston told of some phenomenal pianists who had been developed in just that way.

“The teacher told me she took them young, four to five years; visited them every day. There was no hateful ‘practice.’ ‘Mar-y! have you done your scales today?’ ‘No-m.’ ‘Then come right in this minute and do them!’ I can hear my mother calling me yet. Result: ‘Chapel in the Mountains’ with the left hand over,” she illustrated comically on the table, “‘Dum, dum, _dum_, twinkle-innkle-ink!’ That’s almost my repertoire.... This teacher got her youngsters over every difficulty without a single growl. Master Stewardson--you heard him, Kate,”--everyone had adopted Blynn’s “Kate”--“at the Willings’--he’s one of them. Wasn’t he slick?”

Mary drew an imaginary bow across her arm and whined the opening of the “Spring Song.”

“Bravo!” applauded Leopold, “that’s bully, you know. Sounds just like a violin--one with a bad throat.”

“I thought she fingered well,” added Davis.

Diccon insisted that he heard an open string. He always abominated the open string.

A burst of imitators overtook the table, violins, flageolets, bassoons, bass-viols. Morris took the prize with the sextette from “Lucia” as done by Sousa on a half-dozen interrupting muted trombones.

“All of which proves,” summed up Betty Sommers, when the fun had died down, “that none of us knows music.”

Davis, the law-man, protested--he had been a growling bass-viol: “Don’t say that. We have merely cultivated virtuosity at the expense of--”

“Skill,” “Music,” “Everything,” he was helped out.

“At the expense of--I demand the floor, Madam Chairman--at the expense of--”

“Our neighbors,” Gorgas put in quietly.

“Good!” cried Davis. “Amendment accepted. Ah! Somnolent and suspicious Mount Airy! This; night’s joy will be chronicled as dissipation, and tongues will wag. Here’s to our neighbors,” and he tossed off a handful of salted almonds.

“We don’t know music,” insisted Blynn, his mind not at all diverted by the clamor; “and we don’t know anything.”

“I arise to protest,” Mary Weston appealed to Mrs. Levering. “This male professor has cast aspersions upon the expensive education we girls have achieved via the instruction imparted at the ‘Misses Warren’s Select French and English School for Young Ladies.’”

Laughter from the girls showed how much they valued this expensive training.

“If I had a catalog here,” Mary persisted, “I could prove to you how thoroughly well we were brung up. ‘You must nevah say, “raised,” my deah young lady,’” Mary was in full swing imitating the elder Miss Warren. “‘Beets are “raised”; turnips and cabbages are “raised”; young ladies are “reahed,” ah! “reahed”!’”

“Kate” joined in with a mock quotation from the catalog. Interruptions were frequent. “‘The young ladies of this school are taught the French language according to the natural method. Conversation is encouraged. All the work of the French class is conducted entirely in the French language. A correct accent is insisted upon.’”

Imitation of the French teachers followed, along with samples of the kind of French that was “encouraged.”

“There’s my proof,” Blynn went on. “Everyone here has studied French for one or more years. Some of us have been abroad where each had a chance to test it out. Who really knows any French, except Leopold? I don’t mean ability to read. Anybody can guess what French means; but can anyone here really talk and think in French? I have met German boys, still in school, who could talk with me in English and could pass me many times in French. They got it all out of their schools. In other words, they gave their time, the most precious hours of their lives, and got something lasting.”

The conversation broke in two. The upper end of the table were agreeing with Blynn, the lower end were trying with much laughter to carry on a discussion in French.

“_Je vous aime, je vous adore, que voulez-vous encore?_” Betty remarked to Diccon. “It means, ‘I just dote on you, Dicky-boy.’”

“_Je ne comprends pas_,” replied Diccon. “Score a point for me. It’s all French, every bit of it guaranteed. _Je ne comprends pas._ ‘I don’t understand.’ I used it all over Paris. ‘I don’t understand’ fits anywhere.”

“_J’ai un petit frère_,” volunteered Davis. “It means, ‘I have a little brother.’ I haven’t any little brother, but that’s French, all right.”

“_Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!_” said Kate.

They were taking turns. Blynn saw a chance to surprise them.

“Here! children,” he rapped on the table. “I have a game for you. Each of us will show off his French. Leopold is debarred; he is French. No! We’ll let him in.... Let me see,” he glanced hurriedly about the table. “We’ll take partners, each talk to his _vis-à-vis_.” He produced his watch. “I’ll make it easy. One full minute speech and one full minute reply. Time out for all pauses. Repetitions not allowed. Get ready. Kate and Diccon will begin, the gentleman first.”

Gorgas leaned over eager-eyed to watch the fun, until swiftly it came to her that she and Leopold would be last. Toward Blynn she cast a terrified appeal.

While the first two were blundering joyfully through their minute he slipped around to her and whispered.

“Please carry this out for me! If you say the word, I’ll have them excuse you.... I’ll take all the blame. It’s only fun. Please!”

“All right,” she nodded. But her face, for a humming second, lost some of its ruddy tan.

Their ludicrous book sentences encouraged her, and made her feel suddenly strong and unabashed. Into her mind came pictures of clear, blue-sky days with Bardek gesticulating and spouting his vivid jargon.

Davis was telling about his brother. “I have a little brother. _J’ai un petit frère_,” he announced with great eagerness, and stopped. Betty had got through by cleverly remembering a conjugation: “I drink, you drink, he drinks, she drinks, it drinks, we drink,” etc. Mary claimed foul on the ground that conjugations didn’t make sense; but her own contribution was a familiar medley: “_Monsieur, bureau, Lafayette, encore, dèpot, merci, madame, bon-bon_.” Morris tried “Alice in Wonderland.” “’Twas brillig and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble on the wabe,” but was caught; although he insisted that it was as much French as anything.

To be sure, no one was really trying. Betty, no doubt, could have blundered along tolerably well, and Davis had taken part in a French play, much of which he probably remembered. The game was a frolic and was so played, until Leopold spoke.

“_Ma chère amie_,” he leaned over and gazed earnestly at Gorgas. He was a dark, grave looking man, the type of scholar Jew. Everyone, of course, could follow his carefully chosen phrases. “When I look into your eyes,” he said slowly, “I see treasure there; for you have that which the world, with all its seeming care for franc and sou, regards ever as above price. First, you have youth, with the future all to spend; and you have faithfulness, a vast store--I see it in your steady brown eyes; and you have beauty born of these two, youth and faithfulness. And besides, while you speak seldom, and sit serene apart, you have rare, rare thoughts. Would that I could share them.”

It seemed almost like a trick to play upon Gorgas, the unschooled. There was a little uneasiness. Mrs. Levering was about to give an appropriate excuse when Gorgas replied.

Her tones were deep and French to the very roots. Her features changed; turns and twists of eye and mouth, which she had caught unwittingly from Bardek, swept across the animated young face and gave a new charm to her words. Ah, how often lately had Bardek made much that same speech to her! And how often had she flamed in reply! Tonight she was swift to rebuke the man before her, first, for his open flattery--Gorgas was quite wrong, here, as she found out later; Leopold was never more honest--and secondly, for his attempt to make a public jest of her. Gorgas could never believe that she was good to look at; always she grew flustered at sudden praise, suspecting some hidden irony.

She came back with nervous, rapid-fire Gallic, a sudden contrast to his deliberate language. She told him that he should not have said that sort of thing to her, especially before all these people. It may be true. She would not deny that she had all the virtues, but her friends were those who did not gabble smart phrases about her eyes and her ears and her nose as if they were properties for sale. Why couldn’t he have talked of impersonal things as the others had? Well! He would be paid back in kind. Well! She would look into his eyes, and what does she see? _Sapristi!_ Nothing; for his eyes are away. They are busy watching the faces of girls and reporting lies about them!

Leopold, astonished at the spirited attack, offered a most humble apology, and protested his sincerity, keeping steadily to the French, which was to him almost a second tongue. She tossed him aside with a swift change of mood. She knew that it was all fun; but that sort of personal praise always made her unhappy.

He had not thought she would understand, he offered in excuse.

That did not help his case a bit, she returned quickly, for then he had evidently sought deliberately to make her a laughing stock. “Vous voulez rire,” she said, “mais je n’aime pas qu’on se moque de moi!”

Their parley grew less warm. He forced her to laugh by pointing out the gaping crowd of elders. He told her that no one present could possibly give a translation of their conversation, for it had been carried on, not in the studied pace suitable for foreigners, but clipped and jammed into a swift colloquial clatter.

“Look at Diccon,” Leopold went on, still keeping away from English. “He is so surprised, his mouth won’t come shut for a week. And Betty, she--” and so on until nearly everyone in the company was tolled off.

Sensation! The discovery that the Prince really wanted Cinderella after all was nothing in comparison. Where did she get it? Had she lived abroad? No. Had she gone to school? No. Then she must have had tutors. Ah! There it was. Allen Blynn, by way of silly books, had done the trick. Marvelous! Hearty congratulations! It was a miracle of pedagogy.

Blynn denied everything; but they put it down to modesty. Needless to say, from that hour Gorgas was respected by the elder girls and was brought more into their circle. And from that hour, too, she lost the major part of her left-handedness in public. She began to move across the room without striking chairs or sliding ashamed into secluded corners.

Some of the same dignity of bearing, so natural in the open out-of-doors, began to appear within doors; her native comedy spirit, the gift of dramatic caricature, gradually unclosed, to the great surprise of her elder sister.

VIII

“MY THEORY IS ----”

Blynn visited his youngsters or had them on his own grounds with the regularity of a physician looking up his patients. Those that were out of reach he held by correspondence. Yet always his visits or his letters seemed the most casual thing. The youngsters looked for him because it meant a splendid sort of play, something organized and meaningful. When children play alone they get into ruts and they waste great time in small disputes; an umpire or a director keeps things moving.

About this time Blynn began to keep a card index of his “cases,” recording all available facts about character, and special abilities; and in addition, data to show the ground they had covered, with notes of suggestive treatment.

There was no difficulty over any of the cases save that of Gorgas. He had not the least notion what to do with her. On many counts she was entirely too wise for her teacher. He knew that she must have constant practice in German, French, and Italian, or she would lose much of her previous holdings; she must not neglect her work in copper; she should have other studies, science, history, literature, mathematics, music; and she should have opportunity to continue the development of her physical self.

A forge was constructed in a disused stone spring-house. No one interfered with any eccentric device that Blynn suggested; it began to be generally conceded that he could perform miracles with children--Gorgas’ French and, later, the discovery of her knowledge of German and Italian caused everyone to look upon him as a wizard--so there was no objection to the fitting-up of a complete coppersmith’s workshop in the old spring-house.

When he came to take stock of her mental furnishings he found some strange wares. Gardiner’s “The Femine” he had laid to the door of Bardek; but of all Bardek’s odd learning, “The Femine” was not a part; indeed, he would have scoffed at the contents. An aunt, a “Gorgas,” had left her namesake a few hundred dollars a year, the interest of which was to be spent in books. Ever since she could remember, Gorgas had been permitted to spend that small sum as she should choose. The effect of the responsibility was to give her a keen interest in the book-reviews of such magazines as came regularly to the house. And with the growth of the private collection, there came also a fine love for books.

Her little “den” was across the hall from the library. One afternoon Blynn found her there and spent many astonished minutes poring over her treasures.

“You have read all this?” he inquired incredulously.

She gave several pleased little nods. “Nearly all. Some were too much for me. I shall give them up until I grow into them. I get only a few every quarter; so it grows gradually,” she explained.

“Why, some of this is material I ought to know myself--and don’t; books I’ve promised myself to read.... How did you get to know there were such things? Bardek, again?”

Oh, no! The advertisements of the _Atlantic Monthly_; the book chat in _Harper’s_, and the _Nation_; and especially the remarks of wise persons--like Mr. Blynn!--who have no idea that “a chiel’s among ye takin’ notes.” There was really a note-book with publishers’ names and prices; one had to buy carefully so as to get the best for the money (Pennsylvania-German thrift cropping out here, thought Blynn).

“That one,” she touched a volume, “he’s too much for me. Everybody is talking about him. The magazines are full of it; and you and Mr. Leopold are always quoting. That made me buy. I got good binding, too. Don’t you just love fine bindings?” She stroked the leather cover gently. “But I suppose I’ll have to know more before I can understand.”

Browning was the big man in those days; he was receiving his belated hero-worship and, as usual, it was noisy and overdone.

Blynn ran the pages over and stopped at “Andrea del Sarto.” Then he read. It needed only a touch of explanation here and there to set the pathetic monologue and make clear the simple story of this great failure.

The poem was plain enough now, she said; and it was beautiful; but why did Andrea leave his great work, give up all that was really dear in life, and in his middle days suffer poverty and disgrace, all for that worthless Lucrezia?

Why, indeed! Blynn promised to show her reproductions of Sarto’s paintings, especially the fine figure of young John the Baptist; then she might understand; for Lucrezia was the model for that spiritual face. She must have had qualities to inspire a picture like that. A man would give up much for a woman who called him, even--this is the puzzle of life--even though he knew she were worthless.

“Do you suppose,” she asked, “that in the first years of their marriage they were--” She wanted to say “lovers,” but that’s a hard word to say aloud in English. Except on the stage or in novels, we avoid direct reference to love. We seem to be half ashamed of it. “Do you think,” she began again, “they really--cared?”

“I should think so,” he guessed. “Most folks do, for awhile. We can’t get into the private history of families; but from the outside it seems that--uh--affection,” he was also shying at the word, “soon dies out. It rather frightens one to look on the hundreds of indifferent or possibly discordant couples who, no doubt, were one time violently--uh--enamored of each other. It doesn’t seem possible to keep the thing up!”

“If that’s true, I’m sorry,” she said seriously.

“So am I.”

“Why should it be true?”

“I’ve often puzzled over it. My theory is--”

She laughed. “Do you know, you always begin that way? ‘My theory is.’ But go on, I’m interested.... I like your theories.... You don’t care if I say what I think; do you?”

“Oh, dear, no!” he smiled. “I was only thinking how full of theories I am. I haven’t breathed half of them aloud yet.... I wouldn’t dare.... Well, my theory is that two people who--uh--”

“Yes?” She was sitting cross-legged on the floor and looking steadily up at him.

He looked down at her a second or two, studying her frank eyes.

“Would you mind sitting on a chair?” he asked.

“_Mais, oui_,” yet she did not stir. “But I am quite comfy here, _mon père_.”

“Uh!” he grinned. “Don’t call me ‘father.’”

“You are ten years older,” she contended, “and--”

“How did you discover that?”

“I asked Edwin.”

“Edwin?”

“Edwin Morris.”

“Oh, your tennis chum. How old is he?”

“Eighteen; only five years older than I.”

“H’m!” he looked at her suspiciously; but she seemed quite guiltless.

“Why mustn’t I sit on the floor, _mon p-- mon duc, mon prince_?”

She hummed the air of “La Tour, Prends Garde,” that old song which the French children sing and act so prettily in the summer evenings, reminding us of our own “London Bridge is Falling Down.” Gorgas touched the words softly,

“Mon duc, mon prince! Mon duc, mon prince! Je viens me plaindre à vous.”

“Duke and prince?” he shook his head. “I’m too American for that.”

Without further word she sang the next stanza,

“Mon capitaine, Mon colonel! Que me demandez-vous?”

“Ah, that’s better,” Blynn smiled.

“And why, _mon capitaine_,” she smiled back, “may I not sit on the floor?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he explained. “It’s--legs. I’ve discovered something about you.” He spoke with exaggerated jocularity. “When I see your underpinnings, I know I am talking to a child, aged thirteen, who looks upon me as a grandfather; but when you squat on the floor and look up at me like a little coquette”--his tone was that of pure banter--“I get the craziest notion possible into my head, that you have grown up and--that you are sitting there quietly laughing at all my tedious explanation, and well--you know, you fooled me completely that day on the tennis-courts. I could have sworn you were at least twenty-two.”

“Why do you need--to treat me--differently?”

Her eyes rested on him now with quiet gravity. They looked into him and seemed to explore his very mind. This child had been schooled all her life to mask her feelings until few suspected she was capable of any. In this confident hour she unmasked and let him see without shame that he was her _capitaine_, under whom she would serve right loyally. Youth and faithfulness! Blynn could see all that, too, in her eyes; and perhaps something else, which disturbed him and caused him to come to instant decision.

“Do you know, young lady,” he broke the spell of the silence abruptly, “that in October you are going to the Misses Warren’s Select French and English School for Young Ladies?”

“No!” she stood up. “I won’t go. Who said I must go? That hateful place? Why, everybody makes fun of it. It--it would be torture. I won’t go! Please, Mr. Blynn, don’t let them send me there.”

“But you must go somewhere,” he soothed. “I’ve been inquiring. They’ve made a number of changes since the death of the elder sister. It’s really quite a decent place now. What you need is not book education, but social education.”

“What!”

“I put that badly. I mean you should mix more with your own generation. There are girls who--”

“Girls! I don’t want to know any. Most of them are just simpletons, smirking at boys. Boys! boys! boys! That’s their whole talk. They aren’t interested in books or anything. I tell you, I couldn’t stand being all day with girls. I couldn’t breathe. I--”

“Now, steady,” he calmed her. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. That’s a bargain; isn’t it? No Warren business, if you don’t like it. Remember, you’re going to do as you like.”

“Yes,” she said more calmly; but all the rebellion in her was stirring.

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t worked out the plan yet. The Warren school is--well, I’m thinking about it. I’ve been looking into the School of Applied Arts, too.”

“That’s more like it,” she was blinking hard.

“You see,” he showed her his perplexity. “You and I aren’t getting anywhere. We just sit around and talk and talk--at least, I do--”

“But that’s the joy of it,” she was astonished at his sudden dullness. “Don’t you like our--talks?”

“Bless my soul, yes! They’re great! You bring me out; make me think of things I didn’t know I knew. Enjoy it? Jerusalem! But your mother thinks I am teaching you things--”

“Why, you are,” her eyes grew wide. “Every day I learn _lots_ from you. I can’t give you up, Mr. Blynn. Why, we have the most beautiful pow-wows. Nobody else really talks to me. Look,” she picked up the Browning, “you have given me Andrea today; I never could have gotten it myself. And I’m just nervous thinking of more you will give me. Don’t--don’t--send me off, just when we were--. It’s mean!” she quavered, stamping her foot in vexation, for she had prided herself on not being a weeping person, and lately the tears were swelling on the flimsiest provocation.

But he was firm about regular school and took pains to make his reasons clear to her. His scheme for her--which gradually began to form as he talked--was special hours at Miss Warren’s in German and French. They had a new Swiss teacher there who had a splendid bi-lingual training. She would also get music, mathematics and Latin. Once or twice a week she would take the metal classes in the School of Applied Arts. The Italian she would have to keep up by reading, for awhile at least.

“But English literature?” she protested. “Aren’t you going to keep on with your readings? Why, we’ve hardly begun!”

“Perhaps,” he held out. “Some of it I will surely do; perhaps I’ll arrange a little class with your sister and Betty Sommers.”

“That will not be so nice,” she admitted. “But,” with seeming understanding of the expression that swept across his face, “if you think it best, _mon capitaine_, I’ll give them a share.”

Youth and faithfulness shone in her eyes again; and the frankness of childhood.

He collected his belongings, borrowed a book from her shelf and prepared to go.

“There!” she said. “I knew we had forgotten something. That horrid school thing hopped in between and spoiled it all.” She held the Browning open to “Andrea del Sarto.” “You were telling me your theory about married people, and why they don’t--keep on--keep on--”

“Oh, yes,” he helped. “Well, my theory is a very simple one. There is no patent on it, but no one seems to want to use it.” He knitted his brows and looked afar off. “I think young people ought to prepare ahead of time for all that’s to follow. They get lost in the beginnings--for there are beginnings, and there are middles and ends, each is different. They ought to prepare themselves to go on from one stage of affection into another, without surprise or suspicion of each other. And better, they should study all the little paths that tend to take them apart. Therefore, they should cultivate many of the same interests, insist upon having many associations together, and refuse to let a separate set of occupations absorb them too much--like housekeeping or whist playing for the woman, and selling cheeses, let us say, for the man. Memory is the thing that binds one’s life together; married people should see to it that they have many, many beautiful memories in common. There! that’s a long speech; and it’s my theory. There must be a flaw in it somewhere, or more folks would have adopted it. I have faith in it--I have faith, you notice, in all my theories. One should. If ever I have the chance to try it out, I’ll do my best to make it work.”

“It will work,” she said simply.

“That’s encouraging, now,” he laughed. “What makes you think so?”

“My theory is that the woman is always willing to have memories, the kind you speak of. It is the man who flies off to his own affairs and leaves her to just dig along.”

“Ah! Amazonian,” he cried. “That’s out of Gardiner!”

“No,” quietly. “I have been watching my neighbors, that’s all. Men are awfully excited about men-things. I don’t blame them. They do have lots of fun, boys and men.... But you will make it work, all right.”

“Why?”

“Well,” she thought, “you will try; and then you aren’t at all interested in yourself--No! you aren’t--You are always thinking of somebody else. I’ve watched you--”

“Oh!” he cried, “you’ll make me self-conscious.”

“Often, I’ve watched you. I notice that your eye is always looking to see what other persons need. You get chairs before other men notice they are wanted, and you open doors, and pass things before they’re asked for, and all that sort of thing.... And, you understand--”

“Understand?”

“Yes; you understand ... you understand--me, for instance.”

They looked at each other a quiet second or two.

“I wonder if I do,” he said, trying to smile like a grandfather.

They walked across the hall into the library.

“Oh, you know all about little me,” she laughed, and shook her head as if it were a doleful burden.

IX

“BONG-JOUR”

The winter was spent for Gorgas pretty much as Blynn had planned. She was entered as a pupil in the Misses Warren Select French and English School for Young Ladies; but the desertion from freedom was not made easily; nor was it ever entirely successful. Gorgas was the vagabond type. In literature Vagabondia has its charming unconventional men, but seldom if ever has the female of this species been put forward without shocking sensitive souls. The unconventional woman is--well, no better than she should be. Somehow the world has worshipped its men when they step forth from its fetters of use and wont, but it looks terribly askance at women of equal daring.

On the morning of the opening of school Gorgas rode solemnly on Gyp, without even the “shining morning face” of Shakespeare’s famous reluctant schoolboy. She was full of forebodings of coming disaster. Professor Blynn, her _capitaine_, had said, go; that was the sole impelling force. She knew that she could not turn back without distressing him; he it was who had taken the rebellious untamed forces of her little life and had bound them both with and against her will. It was terrible, this bowing to the decisions of another; terrible and unutterably satisfying! She pondered on this contradictory fact as she let Gyp trot forward; upon the convicting desires that found reasonable lodgment in her mind: the desire to turn Gyp’s head right about for a canter toward Bardek and Cresheim Valley, and the greater wish to obey the will of another, to plod straight forward and suffer the pangs of a strange schooldom. Her conscience had a fine glow of satisfaction with each step toward the disagreeable adventure.

Miss Warren saw her from the window.

“Surely that is not one of our new girls?” she exclaimed to the secretary.

Both drew aside the heavy lace curtains, discreetly keeping themselves at a polite distance in the shadows.

“It is Gorgas Levering,” the secretary replied.

“But she is riding astride!” Miss Warren looked helplessly about. “Like a man!” she added. “Mercy! Do go out and tell her--”

But Gorgas cut that command short by dismounting--like a man. She was leading Gyp toward the stables, one arm over the horse’s mane, her head erect, her eyes focused far away. At that moment she was enjoying a childlike delight in successful martyrdom. As she passed around the school--really a fine old Colonial mansion--she came face to face with Miss Warren framed in a massive side door.

“You are Miss Gorgas Levering, I presume?” Miss Warren made the statement with disarming graciousness.

“Miss Warren!” Gorgas ejaculated.

The child was startled by the apparition, conjuring up the photograph on Keyser’s dressing-table, that now spoke in the flesh, like an ancient figure in history suddenly come to life; and her spirits oozed. The regality of this distinguished-looking woman struck at her and took away her sense of equality. In the presence of Miss Warren one had always to struggle against an overwhelming feeling of personal inferiority.

“I am so glad you have come early,” Miss Warren ignored the exclamation. “Perhaps you would like to come in and freshen yourself after your ride.”

Miss Warren’s attire was spotless. Without a further word Gorgas realized that there was something vulgar and unclean in riding a horse. She became conscious of her dusty appearance and of Gyp’s warm, sweaty body.

“Home, Gyp,” she said, and turned his head about and patted him smartly on the flank. Gyp trotted off alone.

Miss Warren took in the unconventional attire.

“You are wearing--uh--bloomers; are you not?” she asked in a noncommittal tone.

Then Gorgas answered in a phrase she had never before used in speaking to her elders. It was the reply of servants and underlings; something she knew should not be said, but it came unbidden to her lips.

“_Yes, ma’am_,” she said.

Instantly she was aware of having surrendered her will completely to the overpowering superiority of the woman before her. Her face flamed; she would have given all she possessed to have recalled the expression; but it was out, and she was condemned. From afar she heard the quiet explanation from Miss Warren that young ladies should not say “yes, ma’am”; they should say, “Yes, Miss Warren.” All of which she knew by instinct, yet she could offer no explanation. She was suffused with shame.

“It is too late to ask you to go home and change,” Miss Warren spoke kindly as she ushered Gorgas into the house and showed her the way to the water-taps. “Fortunately we have a few proper skirts in the lockers that you may wear over your--uh--riding costume. While you are getting refreshed I will have Miss Lewis find one for you.”

Meekly Gorgas let herself be decked in a faded blue serge skirt, which bulged uncomfortably and succeeded in taking out of her the remaining grains of spirit. If she had entertained any thought of walking through the spacious doorway and bolting for Gyp and freedom, that inharmonious skirt tethered her to the spot like a chain anchor.

She sat on a bench under a window in the wide corridor. A teacher or two came in.

“_Bon jour!_” they greeted Miss Warren, who bon-joured them in return. “Old Bong-joor,” Gorgas remembered, was one of the private names for Miss Warren among the alumnæ. Other French phrases, mainly about the weather, were passed back and forward. Gorgas recognized them instantly as by-words among the Warren graduates, and she knew that they were not quite French. At least it was not Bardek’s way of greeting. That same type of mystic language was leveled at the first few early pupils. They replied in kind, and seemed to know what was expected of them.

“Bon jour, Harriet.”

“Bon jour, Ma-de-moi-selle Warren.”

“Tu est arrivé de bonne heure.”

“Oui, Ma-de-moi-selle Warren.”

“C’est bon, Harriet.”

“Oui, Ma-de-moi-selle Warren.”

There was something comic in the picture presented. The little girls stood at rigid attention and recited their trite phrases, keeping diplomatically to the plain _oui_ or _non_, and so added to the glory of “The Misses Warren’s French and English School for Young Ladies.” Here was the echo far off in America of a one-time supremacy of French as the language of the upper classes of Europe. Tag-rags of the language lingered for awhile in novels, until it finally died out and was deposited in the back pages of the old Webster dictionary, where the proletariat may still find the meaning of such recondite phrases as “_entre nous_,” and “_on dit_.”

“I wish you to know one of our new girls,” Miss Warren would say occasionally after the French pass-words had been given and returned. “This is Miss Gorgas Levering.”

“We welcome you to our school,” the well drilled young ladies would recite, step two steps forward, shake hands like a drill sergeant, bow and retire to a room set apart for assembly.

More “_Bon jours_” went on until about thirty girls, ranging from ten to eighteen, had assembled. Gorgas was ushered in with the others and given a seat. A bell was tapped somewhere in the house; the polite unnatural murmur hushed. Another bell tapped; the girls rose and stood waiting for the customary prayer, but a clatter in the hall turned heads and set very natural tongues a-wagging. Two or three smart taps on the bell brought only partial order. A heavy voice in the hallway caused smiles of recognition.

“Am I late again?” it cried impatiently.

The words of one of the teachers could not be heard, but the reply of the late-comer was quite clear.

“Darn it, I’m always late!” the heavy voice boomed out. “Your old clock’s wrong. I know I started in plenty of time this morning.”

“Bea Wilcox!” The name was uttered aloud by several excited girls. Miss Warren called the group smartly to attention and requested Miss Lewis to see that proper care was taken of the unruly late-comer, but while heads turned to the front dutifully and silence came, the joyful wreaths on the faces were not so easily ordered away. Bea Wilcox was the one rift in the morning’s respectable gloom.

“I’m sorry, Miss Warren,” Bea exclaimed comfortingly as she tore off her gloves and took her place in assembly. “I tried to get here, honest I did. Your clock’s awful fast.”

“If you please, Miss Wilcox,” the principal assumed her deadliest tones, “we prefer to hear your excuses in private. And I wish you would soften down your very--uh--heavy voice; and please do not say ‘awful?’”

A chill passed over the room, thawed instantly by Bea.

“Oh, all right,” she chirped in cheery basso. “But it ain’t my fault if the clock’s wrong; is it?”

“If you will be so good as not to speak. And pray remember that ‘ain’t’ is not good English.”

“Oh, ain’t it?” she inquired pleasantly, adding, as if to her compatriots, “but I bet the thingembob’s off the pendulum?”

“Miss Wilcox!” the command was peremptory.

“Yes’m?”

The “yes’m” was most deferential. It was meant to be. Miss Wilcox was the big, muscular type of girl that goes in for athletics, cares little for books, loving rather to strive muscle against muscle than to swaddle and grow prim and become self-conscious of nose and eyelash. These athletic girls are glorious at tennis and hockey--Bea Wilcox, at fifteen, was a wonder at both sports; she could even bat and play first-base like a man--but they are not usually considered refined. Delicate intellectual shadings they do not always perceive. Her “yes’m” was a rough attempt at respect, but it drew a titter from the precise young ladies.

The titter from the comic “yes’m” had hardly died out before a far-off bell, tolling lazily, proclaimed that in at least one church tower a belated nine-o’clock was being celebrated.

“There!” cried Miss Wilcox, striking a listening attitude. “Listen! D’y’ hear that! Ah! ha! Miss Warren! We always go by that bell. I told you you were fast.”

“You will kindly leave the room, Miss Wilcox,” Miss Warren spoke with dignified forbearance. “Pray, go to my office.”

“Now, what have _I_ done!” The young lady moved belligerently toward the hallway. “Always getting _jumped_ on for doin’ _nothin’_.”

What _had_ she done? Gorgas asked herself. But she did not ask aloud. Nor did anyone else. Thirty youngsters watched the unlucky Wilcox girl flounce out of the room, each knowing that it would mean a long lecture, a detention after school, the punishment of much memorization of Bible verses, and perhaps the writing out of a thousand replicas of the sentence, “Children should be seen and not heard”; and certainly it would mean a letter to the elder Wilcoxes, in which Bea would not appear a heroine. There was no protest from her own mates, except the mute flash of understanding from one to the other which implied that here was one more irresistible victory of authority over justice.

Gorgas found herself marching in a silent line--silent save for some furtive whispering as they turned safe corners in hall or stairway--supervised by ferret-eyed teachers. She was tolled off to a group that met in one of the western rooms on the second floor. Trees--big chestnuts--shot above the windows and left a view of lawn and rising hill beyond; and some of their leaves brushed just beyond reach, so that they could be heard distinctly as they whisked back and forth against the house.

Teachers came and went. They heard lessons mainly, and gave marks in a book for every word spoken. While they were gracious in a sort of unbending way, they seemed ever alert, like a Trappist lady superior, to catch someone breaking the eternal vow of silence. Even as they relieved one another on guard, they would watch the class with worried, roving eyes, until the last reluctant moment. That vigilance crept into their faces; it labeled them wherever they went, even in their vacations!

Gorgas was mercifully permitted to look on during the long hours of that first day, although she was given detailed instructions for the lessons that were to be learned by the morrow. There was a long spelling list, including Cambodia, peristyle, ratiocination, caryatid, and other hard ones; a list of the mountains of the world with the exact height of each; a section of American history to be memorized--the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, which nobody believes nowadays--the conjugation of several French verbs, and some problem in arithmetic which aimed to discover that if fourteen men working six hours a day could dig a ditch four feet wide, six feet deep and ten feet long in three days, how many men working four days, seven hours a day, it would require to dig a ditch three feet wide, five feet deep and twelve feet long. And there was “literature”: the memorization of the dates of birth and death of Cotton Mather and his contemporaries.

The French class offered hope at first. Mlle. Schwartz--German-Swiss-- looked French as she bobbed into the room, a vivacious, worried little woman. She said, “I _hopp_ you do know the vairbs today.” It was a vain “hopp.” The _pièce de resistance_ was a future perfect:

I shall have been regarded,

Thou shalt have been regarded,

He shall have been regarded.

Gorgas, who knew French, found the phrase new. She wondered if anyone would ever need to “have been regarded.” But to Mlle. Schwartz it was the open sesame to all of French; that and its even more bristling negative interrogative:

Shall I not have been regarded?

Shalt thou not have been regarded? etc.

The prize of Mlle. Schwartz’s praise went to a little be-spectacled girl on the front row who knew her “shall-have-been-regarded’s” backward and forwards.

“Ah! Bessie,” Mlle. Schwartz would pounce on her in despair of the others, “the past anterior!” Bessie knew the past anterior. “The pluperfect!” Bessie knew the pluperfect. And the subjunctive, and the indicative interrogative.

Gorgas felt ashamed. She knew no French, after all! In spite of all her chatter with Bardek, she was ignorant of the language. So she edged over to the Bessie girl at the fifteen minute recess, shyly, as one would toward a superior.

“It was beautiful,” Gorgas spoke quickly in French, a nervous tribute to the perfect scholar. “Ah! how it was beautiful, the conjugations which you know so well!”

“Huh?” Bessie looked across her spectacles. She was munching a bun, and spoke with difficulty.

“The French that you know so wonderfully!” Gorgas kept eagerly to the French. “I speak it and read it, but I never knew about the conjugations. Is it very hard? When I heard you speak I was ashamed not to know them. They all seemed so familiar, yet I did not know them.”

“Don’t she talk funny!” Bessie smiled weakly at the group beside her. Then she added, “I don’t understand her. Is it some foreign language?”

“But you know French!”

“Was that French what you just spoke?”

“Yes.”

“Gee! girls!” Bessie looked about her. “She can talk in French!”

“But you do, too,” Gorgas was fearful of being alone in this.

“Me?” inquired Bessie. “No. I don’t know any _speakin’_ French. I only know conjugations. _Speakin’_ French don’t come for years--not till you get to college.”

A heavy voice interrupted. It came from across the lawn.

“Whoo-oo!” it called joyfully and drew nearer. The owner was loping in ungainly bounds. “I’m let out!” Bea Wilcox shouted. Then she glanced at the office corridors and lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper which penetrated almost as far as her normal tones. “I’m loose! Don’t come too near, everybody.” She put her long arms around the nearest girls, one of whom was Gorgas, and hugged them to her. “I’m dangerous, I am! Old Bong-joor said I was--the sweet old Lavender-Box. She said I was to be par-tic-u-lar-ly careful”--old Bong-joor was being imitated now--“not to obflusticate the fiddlesticks of these deah innocent guhls, especially the young lady, Miss, uh, Brownface, who had just enrolled. Where’s Brownface?”

Brownface was being hugged gloriously by Bea’s strong right arm.

“Oh! Oh!” Bea cried as she loosed the other arm and hugged Gorgas to her. “Be careful, Browny. Don’t get too close to me. I’m dangerous!” Back and forth she rocked Gorgas. “I’m ketchin’. I’m the human colery morbus.”

“And she can talk in French,” piped up Bessie of the spectacles.

Bea thrust Gorgas at arms length.

“Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Honest?”

“Yes.”

“Is it ketchin’?” This with mock fear.

Only laughter answered this question.

“Well, I want it to be.” Bea nodded her head vindictively. “I want to ketch a whole lot of it. Old Bong-joor gave me ten pages of French exercises to write out. Browny, you’re my lucky stone. I’m going to love you.” She grabbed Gorgas once more and rocked her like a baby, “Will you do every one of them for me?”

Gorgas said she would be glad to help.

“Help?” croaked Bea. “I don’t want help. I just want you to do the whole biz for me. I can’t even punctuate in French. And see here, Bessie Four-eyes,” she reached forward with her foot and drew that lady nearer, “if anybody ‘spills’ this to Bong-joor--_anybody_, mind; I’m not sayin’ who--they’ll have their backbones taken out _very carefully_ and dusted off--bone by bone.”

The good arm never left Gorgas. It protected her and warmed her and temporarily drove off the chill of the school-house.

X

HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS

But even the impetuous friendliness of Bea Wilcox could not quite dispel the chill of the school-house. Until some arrangements could be made for afternoon hours at the Applied Arts School Gorgas was to spend her whole day at the Warren School. They were hours of dreary inactivity, enforced silence, enforced immobility; and “lessons” that appealed to no normal healthy instinct.

In two weeks Gorgas rebelled. Every night she had memorized dutifully the odds and ends of unprofitable facts that had been detailed for home study. But they would not stay fixed in her mind. She knew the exact height in feet of Mt. Etna, the list of the counties of her native State with the name of the chief city, innumerable pages of a stupid political history of the United States, lists of births and deaths, and the population of a score of cities. Bessie and her tribe, weaklings physically, shone in the class-room. They “knew” everything. They were eager to display and greedy for book-facts; but they never questioned the usefulness of anything.

“The population of New York city, Miss Levering, please?” Miss Lewis, the geography teacher, was quizzing.

“May I ask, Miss Lewis,” Gorgas plucked up courage to inquire, “why anyone should have to know that?”

“Please do not be impertinent, Miss Levering.”

Miss Lewis was not a good disciplinarian and she knew it. A native graciousness and meekness prevented her from succeeding in quelling pupils; but she struggled hard to dominate.

“Oh, I don’t mean to be impertinent,” Gorgas went on eagerly. “But population is always changing. Our book tells us the number of people who lived in New York, but only for 1880. Why, that was eight years ago! With millions of immigrants and--uh--births, you know, it must be much bigger now. When you were a school girl you had to memorize populations, but, you see, they’re of no use now. We’ll have to do it all over again after the census of 1890; won’t we?”

“I--I--well, I suppose so; yes,” Miss Lewis had never questioned the traditional pabulum of the school course. She was not of courageous mould. “But I am afraid you will have to learn your lessons just the same. So kindly answer my question: what is the population of New York?”

“But, don’t you see,” Gorgas did not notice the eager movement among her classmates, who took sides instinctively in favor of every rebellion against authority; nor did she see the weak look of fear and determination in the eyes of her teacher. “But don’t you see, no one can tell? And what do you mean by New York city? All the people who live there? Or the people who visit New York--they say there are thousands and thousands of visitors. And what about Brooklyn and Jersey City--I’ve been looking at the map--it’s all one big city. I know a man who lives in New Jersey who has his business in New York, and he says there are thousands like him. How can you tell how many there are in New York city this minute? Nobody could possibly count them.”

“If you do not know your lesson, Miss Levering, I must ask you to be seated.”

“But you don’t understand,” Gorgas was enthusiastic in her childlike earnestness. “Nobody knows that lesson. Even _you_ don’t know it, Miss Lewis.”

All might have been well, but, unfortunately, the class broke into an unpremeditated whoop. Tappings on the desk brought no respect for authority. The youngsters saw nothing but lovely audacious baiting in Gorgas’ innocent speech.

The tumult brought Miss Warren to the door. Gorgas was still standing, conscious now, as evidenced by her flushed face, that she had caused trouble. Silence fell like a blight on the group; one youngster tugged at Gorgas’ skirt, aiming to be helpful; and another risked punishment by boldly whispering that “Bong-joor” was at the door.

But Gorgas could not retreat. That would be to acknowledge wrongdoing. So she not only stood her ground, but continued speaking.

“I don’t see the use of it, Miss Lewis, really I don’t.”

“What is it that the young lady does not see the use of?” Miss Warren inquired majestically. Even Gorgas knew from the tone that she was already judged and destined for her first punishment. Miss Lewis lamely tried to put the case; she wanted to be fair, but her little four hundred dollars a year, her very life, in fact, was at issue; she could see failure hovering before her, so she plucked up a borrowed strength from the orderly class and threw the blame upon Gorgas.

Miss Warren was quite calm. “I have noticed that Miss Levering, unlike her sister, who was a great credit to our school, does not easily conform to rules. She does not keep a good ‘line,’ and I notice that she talks to others in the halls. I had meant to speak to her about this, and other matters that have come to my attention, but preferred to wait, hoping that as she was new to us she would eventually understand and submit to authority. But it seems that my forbearance was a mistake. We cannot have rebellious spirits in our school, Miss Lewis. It would not be fair to the parents who have entrusted to us the moral responsibility of training their children and who look upon our school as an environment free from contaminating influences. At recess time, Miss Lewis, will you be so good as to send the young lady to my office?”

“I have done nothing wrong, Miss Warren,” Gorgas stirred her nervous tongue to say.

Miss Warren fixed her with a smile.

“I can quite comprehend,” she said, “that you think you have done nothing wrong. However, your parents, wisely or not, have permitted us to be the sole judge in such matters. You will find us very fair and very just; and also very firm.”

The interview with Miss Warren was full of the same numbing type of monologue. But no other “punishment” followed. Gorgas was led to feel that she was on probation; that mercy had been shown to her ignorance of the rights of constituted authority; and that her future stay in the school would be entirely dependent on herself. In the whole interview Gorgas spoke not a single word.

But she raged, nevertheless, at the public humiliation. In the recess periods the girls hailed her with delight, but she got no joy from that. Mistily she thought of Bardek and the free play of thought that he allowed, by which she learned prodigiously every minute; and she thought of Allen Blynn, who treated her as a human being and opened up springs of intellectual delight for her thirsty soul; and even of Leopold, who talked science with her as if she were a colleague. And in none of her conversations with those men had there been aught of heights of mountains, and boundaries of counties, and populations of cities.

One evening, when she had been struggling to memorize a list of uses of the French subjunctive, she resolved to rebel. Leopold had dropped in and had wasted the best part of her study period by chattering with her in French. Together they had reviewed the French lesson for the morrow and agreed that for them the French subjunctive did not exist.

“Even the French do not know those rules,” he told her. “And many persons know them perfectly without knowing French at all.”

“Then I will not learn them,” Gorgas closed her book abruptly.

“I wouldn’t do that!” he laughed. “Miss Warren will send you kiting. And then what will you do?”

“I will leave school,” she decided. “I can’t breathe in that place.”

But she resolved to tell Allen Blynn first. It grieved her to disappoint him; so she would not take the decisive step until she had informed him of all the necessities of the case. He had certain rights, she admitted.

But Allen Blynn was hard to find. His visits to the Leverings had been most infrequent and casual. A suspicion had come to her sensitive soul that he had preferred not to see much of her. Her entrances had usually been the sign for his leave-takings.

She tried to get courage to go directly to him; she had even got so far as the house; but always she fled. So she took the weak course and wrote him:

_Dear Mr. Blynn_:

I am going to leave school immediately.

I remain,

Very sincerely yours,

GORGAS LEVERING.

The next mail brought an answer.

_Dear Miss Gorgas_:

You are not going to do anything of the sort--at least not until we have had a good talk on Saturday afternoon, beginning promptly at three o’clock.

I also remain,

Very sincerely but very firmly yours,

ALLEN BLYNN.

On Saturday afternoon she was waiting for him on the old-fashioned settle before the door of her home.

“Hello, missy!” he called to her from the gate. “When do you graduate?”

“S-sh!” she whispered, and nodded toward the house.

As he drew near he gave a mock whisper in return, “I’ve figured it out that they must have promoted you a class every two days and a half. So you’re to graduate immediately. Tell me about it.”

“We’ve got to walk,” she spoke low.

“Whither, fellow conspirator.”

“To the tennis-courts.”

“Ah!” he mimicked an actor, “’twas there we met.”

“This is no joke,” she declined to catch his spirit. “I’m going to quit.”

It was October and the tennis-courts were bare; so they had the field to themselves as they sat on the home-made judge’s bench.

“‘Begin at the beginning,’” said Blynn, “as the King said to the White Rabbit, ‘go on until you come to the end, and then stop.’”

The tale was unfolded, populations, scoldings, subjunctive and all.

Blynn laughed. “Is it as bad as that? I had no idea the school was such a dungeon. Why, it is supposed to be a first-class institution! I’ll never believe another prospectus.”

“Do _you_ know, Mr. Blynn, how many people are in New York city at this minute?”

“Bless my soul, no!” he shook his head ruefully. “I shouldn’t want to have that on my conscience. It’s much easier to take the count of 1880.”

“But that wasn’t right, even in 1880,” she continued seriously.

“Yes,” he laughed; “New York has grown bigger even while we’ve been talking; or maybe smaller, for half the town may have gone to Coney Island for over Sunday.”

“What does it matter how many people live in New York?” she asked. “I want to know; really. Miss Warren thinks it very important--although she doesn’t know herself how many were there even in 1880.”

“Well, bless my soul, did you ask her?”

“Yes; she told me to come in and see her if ever I wanted to know anything. So one morning I asked her about New York. She made a guess, but she was thousands off. ‘Excuse me, Miss Warren,’ I said--I was sticky with politeness, ‘but I think that’s what it was in 1820. I’m _sure_ it’s grown bigger every year since that time; but I suppose that was the correct answer when _you_ went to school.’”

“Ha! And what did she say to that?”

“She looked me over _very_ carefully, but decided that I didn’t look bright enough. I didn’t. I flattened my face out--this way.” Her face took on the appearance of a dull image; life went out of her eyes.

“Bless my soul, Gorgas, don’t! You look feeble-minded!” And Gorgas knew that Allen Blynn was paying the actress a stupendous compliment. “Go on!” he said. “Go on! This is great!”

“Then I told her the right number, but pretended to guess it--1,202,299--that’s what the book says, anyway. All the time she was hunting for a geography. ‘I’m sure that is not right, Miss Levering,’ but it was: 1,202,299. She hated me for knowing it, too; I could see it in her eye, and I just knew she wouldn’t let me stay right. ‘In 1880,’ I helped her. ‘Ah!’ she swallowed the bait. ‘Of course, Miss Levering, in 1880! But that was eight years ago. Since then, I have no doubt, it has increased considerably--considerably.’ ‘How much is it now, Miss Warren?’ I asked as if she knew everything; ‘how much exactly?’ She swelled up and said, ‘Well, we shan’t be able to tell that until the next census is completed. Of course, no one knows exactly.’”

“Treason!” cried Blynn. “She ought to have been scolded for that speech!”

“And in public!” Gorgas was still vibrating from that open rebuke. “That’s why I got my dressing down before the whole class, too. I’ll never forgive her for that. It was beastly. So I just said sweetly, ‘I am _so_ glad you say that, Miss Warren. That’s what I told Miss Lewis, but she said it was still 1,202,299. It’s funny, too,’ I went on; ‘for that’s what you reprimanded me for before the class. Thank you _so_ much. Goodby,’ and I shot out before she could recover.”

“That’s very subtle,” Blynn commented. “Do you really think she caught your jab?”

“Oh, yes indeedy! If you could see the beady look in old Bong-jour’s eye the next morning. She was ready for me, but so was I. When she bong-joured me I bong-joured her back. Bong-jour! Huh! She doesn’t know French, either.”

“Of course, she doesn’t,” Blynn chuckled. “Most of that school French is the woodenest stuff. How did you find out, Missy?”

“Oh, when she Bong-joured me that morning, I came back fast. It took her off her pins. I asked her questions in French, and then told her in English that she hadn’t answered ’em. I came later than the rest so as there’d be a crowd around. I made her own up that she couldn’t follow me. She tried to talk me down high-and-mighty-like, and pretend that my French was bad; but I jabbered right off to Mlle. Schwartz. Ma’m’selle isn’t very strong on the French herself--”

“What! Another fraud!”

“Well, she can do the French all right, but she’s really German and got her French mostly out of books. But she’s a demon on conjugations and rules.”

“Well, did Ma’m’selle stand by you?”

“You bet. I just went a little slower for her. She’s afraid of me--more afraid of me than she is of Bong-jour--so she always slams French back at me, to show she understands.”

“Well!” Blynn was delighted. “Did the old lady own up?”

“Partly, but everybody in school knows she’s an old fraud. She cried, ‘Slower! Oh, slower! _ma cherie, s’il vouz plait_,’ with a gasp after each word. But I never slower-ed a minute. I jabbered all the faster.”

“And so you’re going to chuck it?” he inquired mildly.

“Yes.”

He thought for awhile--to her a disconcerting thing; it made her feel in the wrong.

“Oh, I shouldn’t mind the fool lessons, perhaps,” she took new ground, “if it weren’t for the hours of silence, sitting at wooden desks without so much as a squirm. Some day I’ll break out and scream.... You don’t think I ought to stay, do you, Mr. Blynn?”

“Yes,” he nodded cheerfully. “Bad as it is, my advice is to stick.”

“Why?”

“It’s a part of my philosophy.”

“What’s philosophy?”

“Philosophy?” He dug his stick in the sod at the edge of the court. “It’s one’s theory of life.”

She hugged both knees and settled back on the bench.

“I like your theories. Tell me about it.”

“My theory is--”

They both laughed at the memory of the time they had talked over “Andrea del Sarto,” and he had been prolific of “theories.”

“It’s hard to put into words,” he mused. “You know, I’m what the Irish call a ‘spoiled priest.’”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a man who starts out to be a priest, but falters on the way and becomes a teacher. He’s a priest just the same; the religious strain is strong in him; he will preach on the slightest provocation. No matter what he does to earn a living, he will find his main interest in soul saving. There’s always something of the religious zealot in him.”

A look came into his eyes that explained better than words what he meant by zealot; it is the same sort of intense stare, a focusing on some distant ideal, that gives the mark to ascetics and martyrs and socialists, and certain types of reformers. It wasn’t a pleasant look, but it made one confident in the man; confident that he would drive himself, against his own interests, to fulfill the duty as he saw it.

“Well,” he made an attempt to begin, “it seems very unreasonable to you that teachers should ask you to know what they don’t know themselves; to learn things that are of no use; to walk ‘in line’ when you might saunter out your own way; to keep silent when it would do no harm to talk. It seems unreasonable, doesn’t it?”

“Well; it is!”

“I agree with you--absolutely senseless and unreasonable. At the same time, I would obey the rules.”

“Why?”

“Because I am afraid of sensible and reasonable things.”

“I’m not!”

“If it were the custom everywhere to walk into the schoolroom backwards, I should do just that.” His eyes narrowed, and the lines about his mouth grew tense.

“That would be silly.”

“So is the commandment, ‘Thou shall not kill.’”

“What!”

“The reasonable, sensible thing to do is to kill. That’s why we go to war. Killing is the most natural emotion, and it is the acme of reason. No murderer ever feels guilty. He has justified his act by the highest reasons of self-preservation and self-advancement. We live in the most rational age the world has ever known. We have reasoned away all restrictions. There is no such thing as authority any more. In some western states they have abolished the common law, and in the east certain classes of society have abolished even the common decencies. It is unreasonable, they say, to be true to one’s wife, to revere one’s mother, to obey parents, to pay debts, to stand by a friend, to vote for civic betterment. All the commandments are unreasonable, including the greatest, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ All that we call moral and right is unreasonable. And I believe they are unreasonable. Sin is as justifiable as righteousness--more so, perhaps. I believe that, but I also believe that ‘the wages of sin is death’; that’s why I am afraid of reason.”

“Isn’t it reasonable to be good to others?” Gorgas inquired wonderingly.

“I’m afraid not.” Blynn’s lips were compressed; his gaze was fixed on the farther trees. “Books have been written against it. Goodness is weakness, they tell us; and so it is. The only right is might, they tell us; and that is undoubtedly the law of survival. Deceit, the snare, devouring murder--that is the supreme law of Nature. I believe that; and yet.... I cannot take my side with evil, even though I perish.”

Suddenly he laughed. The slight hardness went out of his eyes--that hidden scourging priest deep within him--and _mon capitaine_ took its place.

“Heigh-ho!” he whistled. “Don’t let me get started on that sort of speech. I’m a little mad on that side. I warn you. If ever I get going again like that, say, ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus.’... It’s a charm out of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ Shakespeare invented it.”

“I’ll never say it.”

“Say ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus,’ and keep your fingers crossed.”

“I won’t. That would be _most_ unreasonable. I want to hear more.”

But he did not go on. “Mother had a horse once who got into the oats,” she offered in illustration. “He foundered. I suppose he thought eating oats was reasonable enough.”

“Well, is it not?” Blynn looked at her. “There are things I want to do that are as reasonable as that. I have gone over every point of the argument and I can’t find a flaw in the reasoning. Every decent instinct I have says, Go ahead. But the unwritten code of my race, the summed up wisdom that we call custom, says, ‘No. Go ahead and you will repent in unforeseen miseries.’... ‘There is a way that _seemeth_ right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.’... So I obey. There are those who scoff at the candles on the altar, who grow pert at the expense of old mysterious faiths, who would jostle cheek and jowl with Deity. I can quite understand them; but I would hesitate to follow them in very deed.... Did I hear you say ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’?”

“No.”

“What are you puzzling over?”

“I was wondering what all this has to do with old Bong-jour. I know it means I’ll have to go back and stand it; but it isn’t--” she laughed--“it isn’t reasonable.”

“No; it isn’t,” he nodded, “and that’s the very reason you should go back. The wisdom that is older than either you or I, Gorgas, says that youth must submit; must endure; must bow to other wills. ‘A boy’s will’--and a girl’s will--‘is the wind’s will.’ The way toward strength and mastery is first to submit. In some respects you should be thankful that the way is hard. The more foolish your school exactions are, the wiser you will become in discovering them. Already you have grown enormously, due to the Warren School. It has brought out your wits to match their stupidity. Remember, I don’t say to submit ignorantly. There’s no growth in that. Give yourself up to the law; but keep your judgment ever on the alert. Extract every ounce of knowledge from your serfdom; but yourself be free. The essence of freedom is not rebellion, but intelligent surrender.”

The sun began to drop down behind Chestnut Hill. A pleasant crispness came into the October afternoon.

“It’s time to go back,” Blynn arose. “I’m afraid the ‘spoiled priest’ has bored you.”

“I like him.”

“He likes you; you are a splendid communicant. You never interrupt the service.”

“Service on the tennis-courts!” she laughed as they jogged down the hill together. “But you won your service,” she smiled up at him.

“Good girl!” he spoke quietly, a deep, congratulatory tone that gave her a joyous surge of delight. Troubles vanished. Her mind became clean-swept as if by magic; pure, sterilized of rebellious miseries. It was mental healing. “Good girl! I’ve won my service; yes; and I’m glad. But according to the rules it’s your turn to serve now. I’ll be watching every gain you make. It’s a great fight, the fight against oneself. Glorious! Don’t give in an inch!”

He was of only fair height, a spare youngish sort of chap; she was tall for fourteen; so they might have been taken at that darkened hour for a pair of loitering swains.

“Where will you be waiting?” Gorgas asked.

“From a near distance,” he answered.

“Why are you so stingy with your talks?” She darted the question with characteristic abruptness. “This is the first real good one we’ve had since ‘Andrea.’”

A group of friendly neighbors passed. The frank smiles on their faces showed that they appreciated the joke of twenty-four and fourteen promenading together. But it struck Blynn like a slap in the face. He glared and raised his hat energetically.

“I must not hover about you,” he spoke almost sharply. “The neighbors would be talking in no time.”

“Oh, they began that long ago,” she spoke without the least concern. “What do I care what people say! Don’t stalk like that. I can’t keep up with you.”

“Well, I do!”

“Do what?”

“Care what people say!” he was terribly in earnest. “I care mightily. You can’t ignore the mass of unseen thoughts and opinions about you. It’s a force like the sea that can rise and swallow you. Don’t set your own opinions up and ignore all that,” he waved his hand over Mount Airy. “You will be like a canoe in mid-ocean. ‘You don’t care what people say!’ Be careful. Sometimes the voice of the race is speaking. And the race is older and wiser than any single person in it. Buried instincts of the race come to the top, and, behold, you have ‘what people say.’ The voice of the people is sometimes the voice of the devil; and sometimes it is the voice of God.”

“What _was_ that word I was to say--Honorifica--what?”

“‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus!’” he laughed heartily, like a good sportsman.

“Well, honorifica--whatever it is!” she said firmly. “What you said this afternoon may have been all right; but this is just stuff and nonsense. Do you think I’d care what anybody in Mount Airy said about me? They’re a pack of blithering fools.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” he said cheerfully as he bade her goodby at the gate. “‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’ is a great charm. It always brings me to my senses! Goodby, Gorgas.”

“Goodby,” she repeated, and turned slowly up the walk. To herself she said, “The fools! The fools!” The memory of the smirking faces that passed them was full upon her. “The fools! Now they’ve scared him off; just when things were going nice!”