XX. IN WHICH HENRY FENN FALLS FROM GRACE AND RISES AGAIN…

XX. IN WHICH HENRY FENN FALLS FROM GRACE AND RISES AGAIN

This chapter must devote itself chiefly to a bargain. In the bargain, Judge Thomas Van Dorn is party of the first part, and Margaret Fenn, wife of Henry Fenn, is party of the second part, and the devil is the broker.

Tom Van Dorn laid hungry eyes upon Margaret Fenn; Margaret Fenn looked ravenously upon all that Van Dorn had; his talent, his position, his worldly goods, estates and chattels. He wanted what she had. He had what she wanted, and by way of commission in negotiating the bargain, the devil took two souls--not such large souls so far as that goes; but still the devil seems to have been the only one in the transaction who profited.

June came--June and the soft night wind, and the warm stars; June with its new, deep foliage and its fragrant grass and trees and flowers; June with a mocking bird singing through the night to its brooding mate; June came with its poets leaning out of windows into the night hearing love songs in the rhythmic whisper of lagging feet strolling under the shade of elms. And under cover of a June night, breathing in the sensuous meaning of the time like a charmed potion, Judge Van Dorn, who personated justice to twenty-five thousand people, went forth a slinking, cringing beast to woo!

Here and there a lamp blinked through the foliage. The footfalls of late homecomers were heard a long way off; the voices of singers--a serenading party out baying at the night--was heard as the breeze carried the music upon its sluggish ebb and flow. To avoid belated homecomers, Judge Van Dorn crossed the street; the clanging electric car did not find him with its search-light, though he felt shielded by its roar as he stepped over the iron railing about the Fenn home and came softly across the lawn upon the grass.

On the verandah, hidden by summer vines, he sat a moment alone, panting, breathless, though he had come up but four steps, and had mounted them gently. A rustle of woman's garments, the creaking of a screen door, the perfume that he loved, and then she stood before him--and the next moment he had her in his arms. For a minute she surrendered without struggling, without protest, and for the first time their lips met. Then she warded him off.

"No--no, Tom. You sit there--I'll have this swing," and she slipped into a porch swing and finally he sat down.

"Now, Tom," she said, "I have given you everything to-night. I am entirely at your mercy; I want you to be as good to me as I have been to you."

"But, Margaret," he protested, "is this being good to me, to keep me a prisoner in this chair while you--"

"Tom," she answered, "there is no one in the house. I've just called Henry up by long distance telephone at the Secretary of State's office in the capitol building. I've called him up every hour since he got there this afternoon, to make him remember his promise to me. He hasn't taken a thing on this trip--I'm sure; I can tell by his voice, for one thing." The man started to speak. She stopped him: "Now listen, Tom. He'll have that charter for the Captain's company within half an hour and will start home on the midnight train. That will give us just an hour together--all alone, Tom, undisturbed."

She stopped and he sprang toward her, but she fended him off, and gave him a pained look and went on as he sank moaning into his chair: "Tom, dear, how should we spend the first whole hour we have ever had in our lives alone together? I have read and re-read your beautiful letters, dear. Oh, I know some of them by heart. I am yours, Tom--all yours. Now, dear," he made a motion to rise, "come here by my chair, I want to touch you. But--that's all."

They sat close together, and the woman went on: "There are so many things I want to say, Tom, to-night. I wonder if I can think of any of them. It is all so beautiful. Isn't it?" she asked softly, and felt his answer in every nerve in his body, though his lips did not speak. It was the woman who broke the silence. "Time is slipping by, Tom. I know what's in your mind, and you know what's in mine. Where will this thing end? It can't go on this way. It must end now, to-night--this very night, Tom, dear, or we must know where we are coming out. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Margaret," replied the man. He gripped his arm about her, and continued passionately, "And I'm ready." In a long minute of ecstasy they were dumb. He went on, "You have good cause--lots of cause--every one knows that. But I--I'll make it somehow--Oh, I can make it." He set his teeth fiercely, and repeated, "Oh, I'll make it, Margaret."

The night sounds filled their deaf ears, and the pressure of their hands--all so new and strange--filled them with joy, but the joy was shattered by a step upon the sidewalk, and until it died away they were breathless. Then they sat closer together and the woman whispered:

"'And I'd turn my back upon things eternal To lie on your breast a little while.'"

A noise in the house, perhaps of the cat moving through the room behind them, startled them again. The man shook and the woman held her breath; then they both smiled. "Tom--Tom--don't you see how guilty we are? We mustn't repeat this; this is our hour, but we must understand each other here and now." The man did not reply. He who had taken recklessly and ruthlessly all of his life had come to a place where he must give to take. His fortunes were tied up in his answer, so he replied: "Margaret, you know the situation--down town?"

"The judgeship?" she asked.

"Yes."

"But that will be settled in November. After that is time enough. Oh, eternity is time enough, Tom--I can wait and wait and wait--only if it is to be for eternity, we must not reckon with it now."

"Oh, Margaret, Margaret, Margaret--my soul's soul--I want you. I know no peace but to look into your eyes; I know no heaven but your smile--no God but your possession, no hell but--but--this!" He pressed her hand to his lips and moaned a kind of human bellow of unrequited love--some long suppressed man's courting note that we had in the forest, and he grasped her in a flood of passionate longing. She slipped away from him and stood up before him and said: "No,--No, no, my dear--my dear--I love you--Oh, I do love you, Tom--but don't--don't."

He started after her but she pushed him back with her powerful arms and held him. "Tom, don't touch me. Tom," she panted, "Tom." Her big meaningful eyes met his and she held him for a moment silent. He stepped back and she smiled and kissed his forehead when he had dropped into a chair.

"Now, Tom, time is slipping by. It's nearly midnight. We've got to talk sensibly and calmly. Sit here by me and be as sane as you can. We know we love one another. That's been said and resaid; that's settled. Now shall I first break for liberty--or will you? That must all be settled too. We can't just let things drift. I'm twenty-seven. You're thirty-five. Life is passing. Now when?"

They shrank before the light of a street car rounding the corner, that gleamed into their retreat. When it had gone, the man bowed his fine, proud, handsome head, and spoke with his eyes upon the ground:

"You go first--you have the best cause!" She looked upon his cowardly, sloping shoulders, and thought a moment. It was the tigress behind the flame who stooped over him, pondering, feeling her way through events that she had been going over and over in her imagination for weeks. The feline caution that guided her, told her, as it had always told her, that his letters were enough to damn him, but maybe not enough to hold him. She was not sure of men. Their standards might not be severe enough to punish him; he, knowing this, might escape. All this--this old query without answer went hurrying through her mind. But she was young; the spirit of adventure was in her. Henry Fenn, weak, vacillating, chivalrous, adoring Henry Fenn, had not conquered her; and the fire in her blood, and the ambition in her brain, came over her as a spell. She slipped to her knees, putting her head upon her lover's breast, and cried passionately in a guttural murmur--"Yes, I'll go first, Tom--now, for God's sake, kiss me--kiss me and run." Then she sprang up: "Now, go--go--go, Tom--run before I take it back. Don't touch me again," she cried. "Go."

She slipped back into the door, then turned and caught him again and they stood for a terrible moment together. She whirled into the house, clicked the door after her and left him standing a-tremble, gaping and mad in the night. But she knew her strength, and knew his weakness and was not afraid.

She let him moan a wordless lovesong, very low and terrible in the night alone before the door, and did not answer. Then she saw him go softly down the steps, look up and down the street, move guiltily across the yard, hiding behind a bush at a distant footfall, and slip slowly into the sidewalk and go hurrying away from the house. In half an hour she was waiting for Henry Fenn as a cat might wait at a rat hole.

The next day little boys followed Henry Fenn about the streets laughing; Henry Fenn, drunken and debased, whose heart was bleeding. It was late in the afternoon when he appeared in the Amen Corner. His shooting stars were all exploded from their rocket and he was fading into the charred papier-mâche of the reaction that comes from over exhilaration. So he sat on the walnut bench, back of the newspaper counter with his hands on his knees and his eyes staring at the floor while traffic flowed through the establishment oblivious to his presence. Mr. Brotherton watched Fenn but did not try to make him talk. There came a time when trade was slack that Fenn looked for a minute fixedly at Mr. Brotherton, and finally said, shaking his head sadly:

"She says I've got to quit!" A pause and another sigh, then: "She says if I ever get drunk again, she'll quit me like a dog." Another inspection of the floor; more lugubrious head-shaking followed, after which the eyes closed and the dead voice spoke:

"Well, here's her chance. Say, George," he tried to smile, but the light only flickered in his leaden eyes. "I guess I'm orey-eyed enough now to furnish a correct imitation of a gentleman in his cups?"

Fenn got up, took Brotherton back among the books at the rear of the store. The drunken man took from his pocket a fountain pen incased in a silver mounting. He held the silver trinket up and said:

"Damn his soul to hell!"

"Let me see it--whose is it, Henry?" asked Brotherton. Fenn answered, "That's my business." He paused; then added "and his business." Another undecided moment, and then Fenn concluded: "And none of your business."

Suddenly he took his hands off the big man, and said, "I'm going home. If she means business, here's her chance."

Brotherton tried to stop him, but Fenn was insistent. Customers were coming in, and so Brotherton let the man go. But all the evening he was worried about his friend. Absentmindedly he went over his stock, straightening up Puck and Judge and Truth and Life, and putting the magazines in their places, sorting the new books into their shelf, putting the standard pirated editions of English authors in their proper place and squaring up the long rows of "The Bonnie Brier Bush" and "A Hazard of New Fortunes" where they would catch the buyers' eyes upon the counter, in freshly jostled ranks, even and inviting, after the day's havoc in Harvey's literary circles. But always Fenn's face was in Brotherton's mind. The chatter of the evening passed without Brotherton realizing what it was all about. As for instance, between Grant Adams and Captain Morton over a sprocket which the Captain had invented and Henry Fenn had patented for the Captain. Grant on the other hand kept trying to tell the Captain about his unions organizing in the Valley, and neither was interested in what the other said, yet each was bursting with the importance of what he was saying. But even that comic dialogue could not take Mr. Brotherton's mind from the search of the sinister connection it was trying to discover, between the fountain pen and Henry Fenn.

So Brotherton, worried with the affairs of Fenn, was not interested and the Captain peddled his dream in other marts. With Fenn's ugly face on his mind, Brotherton saw young Judge Van Dorn swing in lightly, go through his daily pantomime, all so smoothly, so well oiled, so polished and polite, so courtly and affable, that for the moment Brotherton laid aside his fears and abandoned his suspicions. Then Van Dorn, after playing with his cigar, went to the stationery counter and remarked casually, "By the by, George, do you keep fountain pens?"

Mr. Brotherton kept fountain pens, and Judge Van Dorn said: "There--that one over by the ink eraser--yes, that one--the one in the silver casing--I seem to have mislaid mine. Yale men gave it to me at the reunion in '91, as president of the class--had my initials on it--ten years--yes," he looked at the pen offered by the store keeper. "That will do." Mr. Brotherton watched the Judge as he put the pen in his vest pocket, after it had been filled.

The Judge picked up a Chicago paper, stowed it away with "Anglo-Saxon Supremacy" in his green bag. Then he swung gracefully out of the shop and left Mr. Brotherton wondering where and how Henry Fenn got that pen, and why he did not return it to its owner.

The air of mystery and malice--two unusual atmospheres for Henry Fenn to breathe--which he had put around the pen, impressed his friend with the importance of the thing.

"A mighty smooth proposition," said Grant Adams, sitting in the Amen Corner reading "A Hazard of New Fortunes," when Van Dorn had gone.

"Well, say, Grant," returned Mr. Brotherton, pondering on the subject of the lost pen. "Sometimes I think Tom is just a little too oleaginous--a little too oleaginous," repeated Mr. Brotherton, pleased with his big word.

That June night Henry Fenn passed from Congress Street and walked with a steady purpose manifest in his clicking heels. It was not a night's bat that guided his feet, no festive orgy, but the hard, firm footfall of a man who has been drunk a long time--terribly mean drunk. And terribly mean drunk he was. His eyes were blazing, and he mumbled as he walked. Down Market Street he turned and strode to the corner where the Traders' National Bank sign shone under the electrics. He looked up, saw a light burning in the office above, and suddenly changed his gait to a tip-toe. Up the stairs he crept to a door, under which a light was gleaming. He got a firm hold of the knob, then turned it quickly, thrust open the door and stepped quietly into the room. He grinned meanly at Tom Van Dorn who, glancing up over his shoulder from his book, saw the white face of Fenn leering at him. Van Dorn knew that this was the time when he must use all the wits he had.

"Why, hello--Henry--hello," said Van Dorn cheerfully. He coughed, in an attempt to swallow the saliva that came rushing into his mouth. Fenn did not answer, but stood and then began to walk around Van Dorn's desk, eyeing him with glowing-red eyes as he walked. Van Dorn tipped back his chair easily, put his feet on the desk before him, and spoke, "Sit down, Henry--make yourself at home." He cleared his throat nervously. "Anything gone wrong, Henry?" he asked as the man stood over him glaring at him.

"No," replied Fenn. "No, nothing's gone wrong. I've just got some exhibits here in a law suit. That's all."

He stood over Van Dorn, peering steadfastly at him. First he laid down a torn letter. Van Dorn shuddered almost imperceptibly as he recognized in the crumpled, wrenched paper his writing, but smiled suavely and said, "Well?"

"Well," croaked Fenn passionately. "That's exhibit 'A'. I had to fight a hell-cat for it; and this," he added as he lay down the silver-mounted pen, "this is exhibit 'B'. I found that in the porch swing this morning when I went out to get my drink hidden under the house." He cackled and Van Dorn's Adam's apple bobbed like a cork upon a wave.

"And this," cried Fenn, as he pulled a revolver, "God damn you, is exhibit 'C'. Now, don't you budge, or I'll blow you to hell--and," he added, "I guess I'll do it anyway."

He stood with the revolver at Van Dorn's temple--stood over his victim growling like a raging beast. His finger trembled upon the trigger, and he laughed. "So you were going to have a convenient, inexpensive lady friend, were you, Tom!" Fenn cuffed the powerless man's jaw with an open hand.

"Private snap?" he sneered. "Well, damn your soul--here's a lady friend of mine," he poked the cold barrel harder against the trembling man's temple and cried: "Don't wiggle, don't you move." Then he went on: "Kiss her, you damned egg-sucking pup--when you've done flirting with this, I'm going to kill you."

He emphasized the "you," and prodded the man's face with the barrel.

"Henry," whispered Van Dorn, "Henry, for God's sake, let me talk--give me a show, won't you?"

Fenn moved the barrel of the revolver over between the man's eyes and cried passionately: "Oh, yes, I'll give you a show, Tom--the same show you gave me."

He shifted the revolver suddenly and pulled the trigger; the bullet bored a hole through the book on "Anglo-Saxon Supremacy" on the desk.

Fenn drew in a deep breath. With the shot he had spilled some vial of wrath within him, though Van Dorn could not see the change that was creeping into Fenn's haggard face.

"You see she'll shoot, Tom," said Fenn.

Holding the smoking revolver to the man's head, Fenn reached for a chair and sat down. His rage was ebbing, and his mind was clear. He withdrew the weapon a few inches, and cried:

"Don't you budge an inch."

His hand was limp and shaking, but Van Dorn could not see it. "Tom, Tom," he cried. "God help me--help me." He repeated twice the word "me," then he went on:

"For being what I am--only what I am--" he emphasized the "I."

"For giving in to your devil as I give into mine--for falling as I have fallen--on another road--I was going to kill you."

The revolver slipped from his hands. He picked it up by the barrel. He rose crying in a weak voice,

"Oh, Tom, Tom, Tom," Van Dorn was lifting up in his chair, "Tom, Tom, God help us both poor, hell-cursed men," sobbed Fenn, and then with a fearful blow he brought the weapon down and struck the white, false forehead that gleamed beneath Fenn's wet face.

He stood watching the man shudder and close his eyes, watching the blood seep out along a crooked seam, then gush over the face and fine, black hair and silken mustache. A bloody flood streamed there while he watched. Then Fenn wiped dry the butt of his revolver. He felt of the gash in the forehead, and found that the bone was not crushed. He was sober, and an unnatural calm was upon his brain. He could feel the tears in his eyes. He stood looking at the face of the unconscious man a long, dreadful minute as one who pities rather than hates a foe. Then he stepped to the telephone, called Dr. Nesbit, glanced at the fountain pen and the crumpled letter, burst into a spasm of weeping, and tiptoed out of the room.

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Chapter XXI

IN WHICH WE SEE A FAT LITTLE RASCAL ON THE RACK

A year and a month and a day, an exceedingly hot day, after Judge Thomas Van Dorn had fallen upon the stair leading to his office and had cut that gash in his forehead which left the white thread of a scar upon his high, broad brow, Judge Van Dorn sat in chambers in his office in the court house, hearing an unimportant matter. Because the day was hot, the Judge wore a gray silk coat, without a vest, and because the matter was unimportant, no newspaper reporters were called in. The matter in hand was highly informal. The Judge, tilted back in his easy chair, toyed with his silken mustache, while counsel for defendant, standing by the desk before which the Judge's chair was swinging, handled the papers representing the defendant's answer, to the plaintiff's pleadings. The plaintiff herself, dressed in rather higher sleeves than would have been thought possible to put upon a human form and make them stand erect, with a rather larger hat than one would have said might be carried by a single human neck without bowing it; the plaintiff above mentioned was rattling the court's paper knife.

Plaintiff's counsel, a callow youth from the law offices of Joseph Calvin, to be exact, Joseph Calvin, Jr., sat meekly on the edge of a small chair in the corner and being a chip of the old block, had little to say. The court and said hereinbefore described plaintiff talked freely between whiles as the counsel for said defendant, Henry Fenn, ran over his papers, looking for particular phrases, statements or exhibits which he desired to present to the court.

It appeared from the desultory reading of the papers by the attorney for the said defendant, Henry Fenn, that he had no desire to impose upon the plaintiff, as above described, any hardships in the matter and that the agreement reached by counsel as to the disposition of the joint property should be carried out as indicated in the answer submitted to the court--see folio No. 3. Though counsel for defendant smilingly told the court that if the counsel were Henry Fenn, he should not give up property worth at least five thousand dollars in consideration of the cause of action being made cruelty and inhuman treatment rather than drunkenness, but, as counsel explained and as the court agreed when a man gets to going by the booze route he hasn't much sense--referring, of course, to said defendant, Henry Fenn, not present in person.

When counsel for the said defendant had finished, and had put all his papers upon the desk in front of the court, the court reached into his desk, and handed the counsel for defendant a cigar, which with proper apologies to the hereinabove and before described plaintiff, counsel lighted, and said:

"That's certainly a good one."

But as the court was writing upon the back of one of the papers, the court did not respond for a moment, but finally said absently, "Yes,--glad you think so; George Brotherton imports them for me."

And went on writing. Still writing the court said without looking up, "I don't know of anything else."

And the counsel for defendant said he didn't either and putting on his hat, smiling at the plaintiff aforesaid, counsel for said defendant Henry Fenn departed, and after a minute the court ceased writing, folded and blotted the back of the paper, handed it to young Joe Calvin, sitting meekly on the edge of the chair, saying: "Here Joey, take this to the clerk and file it," and Joey got up from the edge of the chair and vanished, closing the door behind him.

"Well?" said the plaintiff.

"Well?" echoed the court.

"Well," reiterated the plaintiff, gazing into the eyes of the court with somewhat more eagerness than the law requires under statute therefore made and provided.

"So it's all over," she continued, and added: "My part."

She rose--this plaintiff hereinbefore mentioned, came to the desk, stood over him a moment, and said softly, much more softly than the code prescribes, "Tom--I hope yours won't be any harder."

Whereupon the court, then and there being as herein above set forth, did with premeditation, and much show of emotion look up into the eyes of said plaintiff, said eyes being tear-dimmed and extraordinarily beautiful as to their coloring to-wit: brown, as to their expression to-wit: sad and full of love, and furthermore the court did with deliberation and after for a moment while he held the heavy bejeweled hand of said plaintiff above mentioned, and did press said hand to his lips and then did draw the said plaintiff closer and whisper:

"God--God, Margaret, so do I hope so--so do I."

And perhaps the court for a second thought of a little blue-eyed, fair-haired girl and a gentle woman who lived for him alone in all the world, and perhaps not; for this being a legal paper may set down only such matters as are of evidence. But it is witnessed and may be certified to that the court did drop his eyes for a second or two, that the white thread of a scar upon the forehead of the court did redden for a moment while he held the heavy bejewelled hand of plaintiff, hereinbefore mentioned, and that he did draw a deep breath, and did look out of the window, set high up in the court house, and that he did see the elm trees covering a home which, despite all his perfidy and neglect was full of love for him--love that needed no high sleeves nor great plumy hats, nor twinkling silver bangles, nor jangling gold chatelaines, to make it beautiful. But let us make it of record and set it down here, in this instrument that the court rose, looked into the great brown eyes and the fair face, and seeing the rich, shameless mouth and blazing color upon the features, did then and there fall down in his heart and worship that mask, and did take the hand that he held in both of his and standing before the woman did cry in a deep voice, full of agony:

"For God's sake, Margaret, let me come to you now--soon." And she--the plaintiff in this action gazed at the man who had been the court, but who now was man, and replied:

"Only when you may honestly--legally, Tom--it's best for both of us."

They walked to the door. The court pressed a button as she left, smiling, and when a man appeared with a note book the court said: "I have something to dictate," and the next day young Joseph Calvin handed the following news item to the Harvey Times and to the South Harvey Derrick.

"A divorce was granted to-day by Judge Thomas Van Dorn of the district court in chambers to Mrs. Margaret Müller Fenn, from Henry Fenn. Charges of cruel and inhuman treatment filed by the attorneys for Mrs. Fenn were not met by Mr. Fenn and the court granted the decree and it was made absolute. It is understood that a satisfactory settlement of the joint property has been made. Mrs. Fenn will continue to hold the position she has held during the year past as chief clerk in the office of the superintendent of the Harvey Improvement Company. Mr. Fenn is former county attorney and is now engaged in the insurance business, having sold his real estate business to Joseph Calvin this morning."

And thus the decree of divorce between Henry Fenn and Margaret, his wife, whom God had joined together, was made absolute, and further deponent sayeth not.

But the town of Harvey had more or less to say about the divorce and what the town said, more or less concerned Judge Thomas Van Dorn. For although Henry Fenn sober would not speak of the divorce, Henry Fenn drunk, babbled many quotations about the "rare and radiant maiden, who was lost forever more." He was also wont to quote the line about the lover who held his mistress "something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."

As for the Judge, his sensitive mind felt the disapproval of the community. But the fighting blood in him was roused, and he fought a braver fight than the cause justified. That summer he went to all the farmers' picnics in his district, spoke wherever he was invited to speak, and spoke well; whatever charm he had he called to his aid. When the French of South Harvey celebrated the Fall of the Bastille, Judge Van Dorn spoke most beautifully of liberty, and led off when they sung the Marseillaise; on Labor Day he was the orator of the occasion, and made a great impression among the workers by his remarks upon the dignity of labor. He quoted Carlyle and Ruskin and William Morris, and wept when he told them how the mob had crucified the Carpenter, who was labor's first prophet.

But one may say this for Judge Van Dorn: that with all his desire for the approval of his fellows, even in South Harvey, even at the meetings of men who he knew differed with him, he did not flinch from attacking on every occasion and with all his eloquence the unions that Grant Adams was promoting. The idea of mutual help upon which they rested seemed to make Van Dorn see red, and he was forever going out of his way to combat the idea. So bitter was his antagonism to the union idea that in the Valley he and Grant Adams became dramatized in the minds of the men as opponents.

But in Harvey, where men regarded Grant Adams's activities with tolerant indifference and his high talk of bettering industrial conditions as the madness of youth, Judge Van Dorn was the town's particular idol.

A handsome man he was as he stood out in the open under the bower made by the trees, and with the grace and charm of true oratory, spoke in his natural voice--a soft, penetrating treble that reached to the furthest man in the crowd; tall, well-built, oval-faced, commanding--a judge every inch of him, even if a young judge--was Tom Van Dorn. And when he had finished speaking at the Harvest Home Picnic, or at the laying of the corner stone of the new Masonic Temple, or at the opening of the Grant County fair, men said:

"Well, I know they say Tom Van Dorn is no Joseph, but all the same I'm here to tell you--" and what they were there to tell you would discourage ladies and gentlemen who believe that material punishments always follow either material or spiritual transgressions.

So the autumn wore into winter, and the State Bar Association promoted Judge Van Dorn; he appeared as president of that dignified body, and thereby added to his prestige at home. He appeared regularly at church with Mrs. Van Dorn--going the rounds of the churches punctiliously--and gave liberally when a subscription paper for any cause was presented. But for all this, he kept hearing the bees of gossip buzzing about him, and often felt their sting.

Day after day, through it all he never slept until in some way, by some device, through some trumped up excuse that seemed plausible enough in itself, he had managed to see and speak to Margaret Fenn. Whether in her office in the Light, Heat & Power Company's building upon a business errand, and he made plenty of such, or upon the street, or in the court house, where she often went upon some business of her chief, or walking home at evening, or coming down in the morning, or upon rare occasions meeting her clandestinely for a moment, or whether at some social function where they were both present--and it of necessity had to be a large function in that event--for the town could register its disapproval of the woman more easily than it could put its opprobrium upon the man; or whether he spoke to her just a word from the sidewalk as he passed her home, always he managed to see her. Always he had one look into her eyes, and so during all the day, she was in his thoughts. It seems strange that a man of great talents could keep the machinery of his mind going and still have an ever present consciousness of a guilty intrigue. Yet there it was. Until he had seen her and spoken to her, it was his day's important problem to devise some way to bring about the meeting. So with devilish caution and ponderous circumlocution and craft he went about his daily work, serene in the satisfaction that he was being successful in his elaborate deceit; rather gloating at times in the iniquity of one in his position being in so low a business. He wondered what the people would say if they really knew the depths of his infamy, and when he sentenced a poor devil for some minor crime, he would often watch himself as a third party and wonder if he would ever stand up and take his sentence. But he had no fear of that. The little drama between Judge Van Dorn, the prisoner at the bar, and the lover of Margaret Fenn, was for his diversion, rather than for his instruction, and he enjoyed it as an artistic travesty upon the justice he was dispensing.

Thomas Van Dorn believed that the world was full of a number of exceedingly pleasant things that might be had for the taking, and no questions asked. So when he felt the bee sting of gossip, he threw back his head, squared his face to the wind, put an extra kink of elegance into his raiment, a tighter crimp into his smile and an added ardor into his hale greeting, did some indispensable judicial favor to the old spider of commerce back of the brass sign at the Traders National, defied the town, and bade it watch him fool it. But the men who drove the express wagons knew that whenever they saw Judge Van Dorn take the train for the capital they would be sure to have a package from the capital the next day for Mrs. Fenn; sometimes it would be a milliner's box, sometimes a jeweler's, sometimes a florist's, sometimes a dry-goods merchant's, and always a candy maker's.

At last the whole wretched intrigue dramatized itself in one culminating episode. It came in the spring. Dr. Nesbit had put on his white linens just as the trees were in their first gayety of foliage and the spring blooming flowers were at their loveliest.

After a morning in the dirt and grime and misery and injustice and wickedness that made the outer skin over South Harvey and Foley and Magnus and the mining and smelter towns of the valley, the Doctor came driving into the cool beauty of Quality Hill in Harvey with a middle aged man's sense of relief. South Harvey and its neighbors disheartened him.

He had seen Grant Adams, a man of the Doctor's own caste by birth, hurrying into a smelter on some organization errand out of overalls in his cheap, ill-fitting clothes, begrimed, heavy featured, dogged and rapidly becoming a part of the industrial dregs. Grant Adams in the smelter, preoccupied with the affairs of that world, and passing definitely into it forever, seemed to the Doctor symbolic of the passing of the America he understood (and loved), into an America that discouraged him. But the beauty and the calm and the restful elm-bordered lawns of Harvey always toned up his spirits. Here, he said to himself was the thing he had helped to create. Here was the town he had founded and cherished. Here were the people whom he really loved--old neighbors, old friends, dear in associations and sweet in memories.

It was in a cherubic complaisance with the whole scheme of the universe that the white-clad Doctor jogged up Elm Street behind his maternal sorrel in the phaëton, to get his noon day meal. He passed the Van Dorn home. Its beauty fitted into this mood and beckoned to him. For the whole joy of spring bloomed in flower and shrub and vine that bordered the house and clambered over the wide hospitable porch. The gay color of the spring made the house glow like a jewel. The wide lawn--the stately trees, the gorgeous flowers called to his heart, and seeing his daughter upon the piazza, the Doctor surrendered, drew up, tied the horse and came toddling along the walk to the broad stone steps, waving his hands gayly to her as he came. Little Lila, coming home from kindergarten and bleating through the house lamb-wise: "I'm hungry," saw her grandfather, and ran down the steps to meet him, forgetting her pangs.

He lifted her high to his shoulder, and came up the porch steps laughing: "Here come jest and youthful jollity, my dear," and stooping with his grandchild in his arms, kissed the beautiful woman before him.

"Some one is mighty sweet this morning," and then seeing a package beside her asked: "What's this--" looking at the address and the sender's name. "Some one been getting a new dress?"

The child pulling at her mother's skirts renewed her bleat for food. When Lila had been disposed of Laura sat by her father, took his fat, pudgy hand and said:

"Father, I don't know what to do; do you mind talking some things over with me. I suppose I should have been to see you anyway in a few days. Have we time to go clear to the bottom of things now?"

She looked up at him with a serious, troubled face, and patted his hand. He felt instinctively the shadow that was on her heart, and his face may have winced. She saw or knew without seeing, the tremor in his soul.

"Poor father--but you know it must come sometime. Let us talk it all out now."

He nodded his head. He did not trust his voice.

"Well, father dear," she said slowly. She nodded at the package--a long dress box beside the porch post.

"That was sent to Margaret Fenn. It came here by mistake--addressed to me. There were some express charges on it. I thought it was for me; I thought Tom had bought it for me yesterday, when he was at the capital, so I opened it. There is a dress pattern in it--yellow and black--colors I never could wear, and Tom has an exquisite eye for those things, and also there is a pair of silk stockings to match. On the memoranda pinned on these, they are billed to Mrs. Fenn, but all charged to Tom. I hadn't opened it when I sent the expressman to Tom's office for the express charges, but when he finds the package has been delivered here--we shall have it squarely before us." The daughter did not turn her eyes to her father as she went on after a little sigh that seemed like a catch in her side:

"So there we are."

The Doctor patted his foot in silence, then replied:

"My poor, poor child--my poor little girl," and added with a heavy sigh: "And poor Tom--Laura--poor, foolish, devil-ridden Tom." She assented with her eyes. At the end of a pause she said with anguish in her voice:

"And when we began it was all so beautiful--so beautiful--so wonderful. Of course I've known for a long time--ever since before Lila came that it was slipping. Oh, father--I've known; I've seen every little giving of the tie that bound us, and in my heart deep down, I've known all--all--everything--all the whole awful truth--even if I have not had the facts as you've had them--you and mother--I suppose."

"You're my fine, brave girl," cried her father, patting her trembling hand. But he could speak no further.

"Oh, no, I'm not brave--I'm not brave," she answered. "I'm a coward. I have sat by and watched it all slip away, watched him getting further and further from me, saw my hold slipping--slipping--slipping, and saw him getting restless. I've seen one awful--" she paused, shuddered, and cried, "Oh, you know, father, that other dreadful affair. I saw that rise, burn itself out and then this one--" she turned away and her body shook.

In a minute she was herself: "I'm foolish I suppose, but I've never talked it out before. I won't do it again. I'm all right now." She took his hands and continued:

"Now, then, tell me--is there any way out? What shall we do to be saved--Tom and Lila and I?" She hesitated. "I'm afraid--Oh, I know, I know I don't love Tom any more. How could I--how could I? But some way I want to mother him. I don't want to see him get clear down. I know this woman. I know what she means. Let me tell you, father. For two years she's been playing with Tom like a cat. I knew it when she began. I can't say how I knew it; but I felt it--felt it reflected in his moods, saw him nervous and feverish. She's been torturing him, father--she's strong. Also she's--she's hard. Tom hasn't--well, I mean she's always kept the upper hand. I know that in my soul. And he's stark, raving mad somewhere within him." A storm of emotion shook her and then she cried passionately, "And, oh, father, I want to rescue him--not for myself. Oh, I don't love him any more. That's all gone. At least not in the old way, I don't, but he's so sensitive--so easy to hurt. And she's slowly burning him alive. It's awful."

The little pink face of the Doctor began to harden. His big blue eyes began to look through narrow slits in his eyelids, and the pudgy, white-clad figure stood erect. The daughter's voice broke and as she gripped herself the father reached his bristling pompadour and cried in wrath, "Let him burn--let him burn, girl--hell's too good for him!"

His voice was high and harsh and merciless. It restored the woman's poise and she shook her head sorrowfully as she resumed:

"I can't bear to see it; I--I want to shield him--I must--if I can." A tremor ran through her again. She caught hold of herself, then went on more calmly. "But things can't go on this way. Here is this box--"

"Child--child," cried the Doctor angrily, "you come right home--right home," he piped with rising wrath. "Right home to mother and me."

The wife shook her head and replied: "No, father, that's the easy road. I must take the hard road." Her father's mobile face showed his pain and the daughter cried: "I know, father--I know how you would have stopped me before I chose this way. But I did choose and now here is Lila, and here is a home--a home--our home, father, and I mustn't leave it. Here is my duty, here in this home, and I must not ran away. I must work out my life as it is--as before God and Lila--and Tom--yes, Tom, father, as before all three, I have my responsibility. I must not put away Tom--no matter--no matter how I feel--no matter what he has done. I won't," she repeated. "I won't."

The father turned an impatient face to his daughter, and retorted, "You won't--you won't leave that miserable cur--that--that woman hunting dog--won't leave--"

The father's rage sputtered on his lips, but the daughter caught his hand as it was beating his cane on the floor. "Stop, father," she said gently, "it's something more than women that's wrong with Tom. Women are merely an outward and visible sign--it's what he believes--and what he does, living his creed--always following the material thing. As a judge I thought he would see his way--must see his way to bring justice here--" She looked into the fume stained sky above South Harvey, and Foley and Magnus, far down the valley, and tightened her grip on her father's hands. "But no--no," she cried, "Tom doesn't know justice--he only sees the law, the law and profits, and prosperity--only the eternal material. He sits by and sees the company settle for four and five hundred dollars for the lives of the men it wasted in the mine--yes, more than sits by--he stands at the door of justice and drives the widows and children into a settlement like an overseer. And he and Joe Calvin have some sort of real estate partnership--Oh--I know it's dishonest, though I don't know how. But it branches so secretly into the law and it all reaches down into politics. And the whole order here, father--Daniel Sands paying for politics, paying for government that makes the laws, paying for mayors and governors that enforce the laws and paying the judges to back them up--and all that poverty and wretchedness and wickedness down there and all this beauty and luxury and material happiness up here. It's all, all wrong, father." Her voice broke again in sobs, and tears were running down her cheeks as she continued. "How can we blame Tom for violating his vows to me? Where are all our vows to God to deal justly with His people--the widows and orphans and helpless ones, father?" She looked at her father through her tears, at her father, whose face was agape! He was staring into the wistaria vines as one who saw his world quaking. A quick bolt of sympathy shot through the daughter's heart. She patted his limp hands and said softly, "So--father--I mustn't leave Tom. He's a poor, weak creature--a rotten stick--and because I know it--I must stay with him!"

* * * * *

Behind the screen of matter, the lusty fates were pulling at the screws of the rack. "Pull harder," cried the first fate; "the little old pot-bellied rascal--make him see it: make him see how he warned her against the symptoms, but not the disease that was festering her lover's soul!"

"Turn yourself," cried the second, "make the forehead sweat as he sees how he has been delivering laws in a basket to grind iniquity through Tom Van Dorn's mill! Turn--turn, turn you lout!"

"And you," cried the third fate at the screw to the first, "twist that heart-string, twist it hard when he sees his daughter's broken face and hears her sobbing!"

But the angels, the pitying angels, loosened the cords of the rack with their gentle tears.

* * * * *

As the taut threads of the rack slackened, he heard the soft voice of his daughter saying: "But of course, the most important thing is Lila--not that she means a great deal to him now. He doesn't care much for children. He doesn't want them--children."

She turned upon her father and with anguished voice and with all her denied motherhood, she cried: "O, father--I want them--lots of them--arms full of them all the time."

She stretched out her arms. "Oh, it's been so hard, to feel my youth passing, and only one child--I wanted a whole house full. I'm strong; I could bear them. I don't mind anything--I just want my babies--my babies that never have come."

And then the pitiless fates turned the screws of the rack again and the father burst forth in his vain grief, with his high, soft, woman's voice. "I wonder--I wonder--I wonder, what God has in waiting for you to make up for this?"

Before she could answer, the telephone bell rang. The wife stepped to the instrument. "Well," she said when she came back. "The hour has struck; the expressman went to Tom for the express charges; he knows the package is here and," she added after a sigh, "he knows that I know all about it." She even smiled rather sadly, "So he's coming out--on his wheel."

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XXII. IN WHICH TOM VAN DORN BECOMES A WAYFARING MAN ALSO

The father rose. His head was cast down. He poked a vine curling about the porch floor with his cane.

"I wonder, my dear," he spoke slowly, and with great gentleness, "if maybe I shouldn't talk with Tom--before you see him."

He continued to poke the vine, and looked up at the daughter sadly. "Of course there's Lila; if it is best for her--why that's the thing to do--I presume."

"But father," broke in the daughter, "Tom and I can--"

But he entreated, "Won't you let me talk with Tom? In half an hour--I'll go. You and Lila slip over to mother's for half an hour--come back at half past twelve. I'll tell him where you are."

The mother and child had disappeared around the corner of the house when the click of Van Dorn's bicycle on the curbing told the Doctor that the young man was upon the walk. The package from the capital still lay beside the porch column. The Doctor did not lift his eyes from it as the younger man came hurrying up the steps. He was flushed, bright-eyed, a little out of breath, and his black wing of hair was damp. On the top step, he looked up and saw the Doctor.

"It's all right, Tom--I understand things." The Doctor's eyes turned to the parcel on the floor between them.

The Doctor's voice was soft; his manner was gentle, and he lifted his blue, inquiring eyes into the young Judge's restless black ones. Dr. Nesbit put a fatherly hand on the young man's arm, and said: "Shall we sit down, Tom, and take stock of things and see where we stand? Wouldn't that be a good idea?"

They sat down and the younger man eyed the package, turned it over, looked at the address nervously, pulled at his mustache as he sank back, while the elder man was saying: "I believe I understand you, Tom--better than any one else in the world understands you. I believe you have not a better friend on earth than I right at this minute."

The Judge turned around and said in a disturbed voice, "I am sure that's the God's truth, Doctor Jim." Then after a sigh he added, "And this is what I've done to you!"

"And will keep right on doing to me as long as you live," piped the elder man, twitching his mouth and nose contemptuously.

"As long as I live, I fancy," repeated the other. In the pause the young man put his hands to his hips and his chin on his breast as he slouched down in the chair and asked: "Where's Laura?"

"Over at her mother's," replied the father. "Nobody will interrupt us--and so I thought we could get down to grass roots and talk this thing out."

The Judge crossed his handsome ankles and sat looking at his trim toes.

"I suppose that idea is as good as any." He put one long, lean, hairy hand on the short, fat knee beside him and said: "The whole trouble with our Protestant religion is that we have no confessor. So some of us talk to our lawyers, and some of us talk to our doctors, and in extreme unction we talk to our newspapers."

He grinned miserably, and went on: "But we all talk to some one, and now I'm going to talk to you--talk for once, Doctor, right out of my soul--if I have one."

He rose nervously, obeying some purely physical impulse, and then sat down again, with his hands in his thick, black hair, and his elbows on his bony knees.

"All right, Tom," piped the Doctor, "go ahead."

"Well, then," he began as he looked at the floor before him, "do you suppose I don't know that you know what I'm up to? Do you think I don't know even what the town is buzzing about? Lord, man, I can feel it like a scorching fire. Why," he exclaimed with emotion, "feeling the hearts of men is my job. I've been at it for fifteen years--"

He broke off and looked up. "How could I get up before a jury and feel them out man by man as I talked if I wasn't sensitive to these things? You've seen me make them cry when I was in the practice. How could I make them cry if I didn't feel like crying myself. You're a doctor--you know that. People forget what I am--what a thousand stringed instrument I am. Now, Doctor Jim, let me tell you something. This is the bottom hard pan of the truth: I never before really cared for these women--these other women--when I got them. But I do care for the chase, I do care for the risk of it--for the exhilaration of it--for the joy of it!"

The Doctor's mouth twitched and he took a breath as if about to speak. Van Dorn stopped him: "Don't cut in, Doc Jim--let me say it all out. I'm young. I love the moonlight and the stars and I never go through a wood that I do not see trysting places there--and I never see a great stretch of prairie under the sunshine that I do not put in a beautiful woman and go following her--not for her--Doctor Jim, but for the joy of pursuit, for the thrill of uncovering a bared, naked soul, and the overwhelming danger of it. God--man, I've stood afraid to breathe, flattened against a wall and heard the man-beast growl and sniff, hunting me. I love to love and be loved; but not less do I love to hunt and be hunted. I've hidden under trees, I've skulked in the shadows, I've walked boldly in the sunlight with my life in my hand to meet a woman's eyes, to feel her guilty shudder in my arms. Oh, Doctor Jim, you don't understand the riot in my blood that the moon makes shining through the trees upon the water, with great, shadowy glades, and the tinkle of cow bells far away, and a woman afraid of me--and I afraid of her--and nothing but the stars and the night between us."

He rose and began pacing the piazza as he continued speaking. "It's always been so with me--as early as my boyhood it was so. I often wake in the lonely nights and think of them all over again--the days and nights, the girls and women who have flashed bright and radiant into my life. Over and over again, I repeat to my soul their names, over and over I live the hours we have spent together, the dangers, the delights, the cruel misery of it all and then at the turn of the street, at the corner of a room, in the winking of an eye I see another face, it looks a challenge at me and I am out on the high road of another romance. I've got to go! It's part of my life; it's the pulse of my blood."

He stood excited with his deep, beady, black eyes burning and his proud, vain face flushed and his hands a-tremble. The Doctor saw that he was in the midst of a physical and mental turmoil that could not be checked.

Van Dorn went on: "And then you and my friends ask me to quit. Laura, God help her--she naturally--" he exclaimed. "But is the moon to be blotted out for me? Are the night winds to be muffled and mean no more than the scraping of a dead twig against a rusty wire? Are flowers to lose their scent, and grass and trees and birds to be blurred and turned drab in my eyes? How do you think I live, man? How do you think I can go before juries and audiences and make them thrill and clench their fists and cry like children and breathe with my emotions, if I am to be stone dead? Do you think a wooden man can do that? Try Joe Calvin with a jury--what does he accomplish with all his virtue? He hasn't had an emotion in twenty years. A pretty woman looking at Joe in a crowd wouldn't say anything to him with her eyes and dilating nostrils and the swish of her body. And when he gets before a jury he talks the law to them, and the facts to them, and the justice of the case to them. But when I used to stand up before them, they knew I was weak, human mud. They had heard all the stories on me. They knew me, and some of them despised me, and all of them were watching out for me, but when I reached down in my heart and brought up the common clay of which we all are made and molded it into a man or an event before their eyes, then--by God they came to me. And yet you've been sitting there for years, Doctor Jim Nesbit and saying 'Tom--Tom, why don't you quit?'"

He was seated now, talking in a low, tense voice, looking the Doctor deeply in the eyes, and as he paused, the perspiration stood out upon his scarred forehead, and pink splotches appeared there and the veins of his temples were big and blue. The Doctor turned away his eyes and said coldly: "There's Laura--Tom--Laura and little Lila."

"Yes," he groaned, rising. "There are Laura and Lila."

He thrust his hands deeply into his pockets and looked down at the Doctor and sneered. "There's the trap that snapped and took a paw, and I'm supposed to lick it and love it and to cherish it."

He shuddered, and continued: "For once I'll speak and tell it all. I'll not be a hypocrite in this hour, though ever after I may lie and cringe. There are Laura and Lila and here am I. And out beyond is the wind in the elms and the sunshine upon the grass and the moving odor of flowers--flowers that are blushing with the joy of nature in her great perennial romance--and there's Laura and Lila and here am I."

His passion was ebbing; his face was hardening into its wonted vain, artificial contour, his eyes were losing their dilation, and he was sitting rather limply in his chair, staring into space. The Doctor came at him.

"You're a fool. You had your fling; you're along in your thirties, nearly forty now and it's time to stop." The younger man could not regain the height, but he could hide under his crust. So he parried back suavely, with insolence in his voice:

"Why stop at thirty--or even forty? Why stop at all?"

"Let me tell you something, Tom," returned the Doctor. "It's all very fine to talk this way; but this thing has become a fixed habit, just like the whiskey habit; and in fifteen or twenty years more you'll be a chronic, physical, degenerate man. You'll lose your self-respect. You'll lose your quick wits, and your whole mind and body will be burning up with a slow fire."

"Oh, you dear old fossil," replied Van Dorn in a hollow, dead voice, rising and patting his tie and adjusting his coat and collar, "I'm no fool. I know what I'm doing. I know how far to go, and when to stop. But this game is interesting; and I'm only a man," he straightened up again, patted his mustache, and again tipped his hat into a cockey angle over his forehead, and went on, "not a monk." He smiled, pivoted on his heel nervously and went on, "And what is more I can take care of myself."

"Tom," cried the Doctor in his treble, with excitement in his voice, "you can't take care of yourself. No man ever lived who could. You may get away with your love affairs, and no one be the wiser; you may make a crooked or dirty million on a stock deal and no one be the wiser; but you'll bear the marks to the grave."

"So," mocked the sneering voice of the young Judge, "I suppose you'll carry the marks of all the men you've bought up in this town for twenty years."

"Yes, Tom," returned the Doctor pitifully, as he rose and stood beside the preening young man, "I'll carry 'em to the grave with me, too; I've had a few stripes to-day."

"Well, anyway," retorted Van Dorn, pulling his hat over his eyes, restlessly, "you're entitled to what you get in this life. And I'm going to get all I can, money and fun, and everything else. Morals are for sapheads. The preacher's God says I can't have certain things without His cracking down on me. Watch me beat Him at his own game." It was all a make-believe and the Doctor saw that the real man was gone.

"Tom," sighed the Doctor, "here's the practical question--you realize what all this means to Laura? And Lila--why, Tom, can't you see what it's going to mean to her--to all of us as the years go by?"

Their eyes met and turned to the parcel on the floor. "You can't afford--well, that sort of thing," the Doctor punched the parcel contemptuously with his cane. "It's all bad enough, Tom, but that way lies hell!"

Van Dorn turned upon the Doctor, and squared his jaw and said: "Well then--that's the way I'm going--that way"--he nodded toward the package--"lies romance for me! There is the road to the only joy I shall ever know in this earth. There lies life and beauty and all that I live for, and I'm going that way."

The Judge met the father's beseeching face, with an angry glare--defiant and insolent.

The Doctor had no time to reply. There was a stir in the house, and a child's steps came running through the hall. Lila stopped on the porch, hesitating between the two men. The Doctor put out his arms for her. Van Dorn casually reached out his hand. She ran to her father and cried, "Up--Daddy--up," and jumped to his shoulder as he took her. The Doctor walked down the steps as his daughter came out of the door.

The man and the woman looked at one another, but did not speak. The father put the child down and said:

"Now, Lila, run with grandpa and get a cooky from granny while your mother and I talk."

She looked up at him with her blue eyes and her sadly puckered little face, swallowed her disappointed tears and trudged down the steps after the white-clad grandfather who was untying his horse.

When the child and the grandfather were gone the wife said in a dead, emotionless voice, looking at the parcel on the floor, "Well, Tom?"

"Well, Laura," he repeated, "that's about the size of it--there it is--and you know all about it. I shall not lie--this time. It's not worth while--now."

The woman sat in a porch chair. The man hesitated, and she said: "Sit down, Tom. I don't know what to do or what to say," she began. "If there were just you and me to consider, I suppose I'd say we'd have to quit. But there's Lila. She is here and she does love you--and she has her right--the greatest right in the world to--well, to us--to a home, and a home means a father and a mother." The man rose. He put his hands in his coat pockets and stood by the porch column, making no reply.

The wife continued, "I can't even speak of what you have done to me, Tom. But it will hurt when I'm an old woman--I want to hide my face from every one--even from God--when I think of what you have used me for."

He dropped into the chair beside her, looking at the floor. Her voice had stirred some chord in his thousand-stringed heart. He reached out a hand to her.

"No, Tom," said the wife, "I don't want your pity."

"No, Laura," the husband returned quickly, "no, you don't need my pity; it's not pity that I am trying to give you. I only wished you to listen to what I have to say." The wife looked at her husband for a second in fear as she apprehended what he was about to utter. He turned his eyes from her and went on: "It was a mistake, a very nightmare of a mistake--my mistake--all my mistake--but still just an awful mistake. We couldn't make life go. All this was foredoomed, Laura, and now--now--" his eyes were upon the parcel on the floor, "here I am sure I have found the thing my life needs. And it is my life--my life." He saw his wife go pale, then flush; but he went on. "After all, it is one's own life that commands him, and nothing else in the world. And now I must follow my destiny."

"But, Tom," asked the wife, "you aren't going to this woman? You aren't going to leave us? You surely won't break up this home--not this home, Tom?"

The man hesitated before answering, then spoke directly: "I must follow my destiny--work it out as I see it. You have no right, no one has any right--even I have no right to compromise with my destiny. I live in this world just once!"

"But what is your destiny, Tom?" answered the wife. "Leave me out of it: but aren't the roots you have put down in this home, this career you are building; our child's normal girlhood with a father's care--aren't these the big things in your destiny? Lila's life--growing up under the shame that follows a child of parents divorced for such base reasons as these? Lila's life is surely a part of your destiny. Surely, surely you have no rights apart from her and hers!"

His quick mind was ready. "I have my own life to live, my own destiny to follow; my individual equation to solve, and for me nothing exists in the universe. As for my career--I'll take care of that. That's mine also!"

The wife threw out an appealing hand. "Tom, I can't help wanting to pick you up and shield you. It will be awful--awful--that thing you are trying to go into. You've always chosen the material thing--the practical thing--and she--she's a practical woman. Oh, Tom--I'm not jealous--not a bit. If I thought she would enrich your soul--if I thought she would give you what I've wanted to give you--what I've prayed God night after night to let me give you--I'd take even Lila and go away and give you your chance for a love such as I've had. Can you see, Tom, I'm not jealous? I'm not even angry."

He turned upon her suddenly and said: "You don't know what you're talking about. Anyway--she suits me--she'll enrich me as you call it all right. I'm sure of that."

"No, Tom," said the wife quietly, "she'll not enrich you--not spiritually. No one can do that--for any one. It must come from within. I've poured my very heart over you, Tom, and you didn't want it--you only wanted--oh, God--hide my shame--my shame--my shame." Her voice rose for a moment and she muffled it with her face in her arms.

"Tom--" she faltered, "Tom--I am going to make one last plea--for Lila's sake won't you put it all away--won't you?" she shuddered. "It is killing all my self-respect, Tom--but I must. Won't you--won't you please for Lila's sake come back, break this off--and see if we can't patch up life?"

"No," he answered.

Their eyes met; his shifting, beady eyes were held forcibly with many a twitching, by her gray eyes. For two awful seconds they stood taking farewell of each other.

"No," he repeated, dropping his glance.

Then he put out his hand with a gesture of finality, "I'm going now. I don't know when--or--well, whether I'll come--" He picked up the package. He was going down the steps with the package in his hands when he heard the patter of little feet and a little voice calling:

"Daddy--daddy--" and repeated, "daddy."

He did not turn, but walked quickly to the sidewalk. As far as he could hear, that childish voice called to him.

And he heard the cry in his dreams.

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XXIII. HERE GRANT ADAMS DISCOVERS HIS INSIDES

Laura Van Dorn stood watching her husband pass down the street. She silenced the child by clasping her close in the tender motherly arms. No tears rose in the wife's eyes, as she stood looking vacantly down the street at the corner where her husband had turned. Gradually it came to her consciousness that a crowd was gathering by her father's house. She remembered then that she had seen a carriage drive up, and that three or four men followed it on bicycles, and then half a dozen men got out of a wagon. Even while she stared, she saw the little rattletrap of a buggy that Amos Adams drove come tearing up to the curb by her father's house. Amos Adams, Jasper and little Kenyon got out. Even amidst the turmoil of her emotions, she moved mechanically to the street, to see better, then she clasped Lila to her breast and ran toward her father's home.

"What is it?" she cried to the first man she met at the edge of the little group standing near the veranda steps.

"Grant Adams--we're afraid he's killed." The man who spoke was Denny Hogan. Beside him was an Italian, who said, "He's burned something most awful. He got it saving des feller here," nodding and pointing to Hogan.

Laura put down her child and hurried through the house to her father's little office. The strong smell of an anesthetic came to her. She saw Amos Adams standing a-tremble by the office door, holding Kenyon's hand. Amos answered her question.

"They think he's dying,--I knew he'd want to see Kenyon."

Jasper, white and frightened, stood on the stairs. These details she saw at a glance as she pushed open the office door. At first she saw great George Brotherton and three or four white-faced, terrified working men, standing in stiff helplessness, while like a white shuttle, among the gloomy figures the Doctor moved quickly, ceaselessly, effectively. Then her eyes met her father's. He said:

"Come in, Laura--I need you. Now all of you go out but George and her."

Then, as she came into the group, Laura saw Grant Adams, sitting with agony upon his wet face. Her father bent over him and worked on a puffy, pink, naked arm and shoulder, and body. The man was half conscious; his face was twitching, and when she looked again she saw where his right hand should be only a brown, charred stump.

Not looking up the Doctor spoke: "You know where things are and what I need--I can't get him clear under," Every motion he made counted; he took no false steps; he made no turn of his body or twist of his hand that was not full of conscious purpose. He only spoke to give orders, and when Brotherton whispered to Laura:

"White hot lead pig at the smelter--Grant saw it was going to kill Hogan and grabbed it."

The Doctor shook his head at Brotherton and for two hours that was all Laura knew of the accident. Once when the Doctor stopped for a second to take a deep breath, Brotherton asked, "Do you want another doctor?" the little man shook his head again, and motioned with it at his daughter.

"She's doing well enough." She kept her father's merciless pace, but always the sense of her stricken life seemed to be hovering in the back of her consciousness, and the hours seemed ages as she applied her bandages, and helped with the gruesome work of the knife on the charred stump of the arm. But finally it was over and she saw Brotherton and Hogan lift Grant to a cot, under her father's direction, and carry him to the bedroom she had used as a girl at home. While the Doctor and Laura had been working in his office Mrs. Nesbit had been making the bedroom ready.

It was five o'clock, and the two fagged women were in Mrs. Nesbit's room. The younger woman was pale and haggard and unable to relax. The mother tried all of a mother's wiles to bring peace to the over-strung nerves. But the daughter paced the floor silently, or if she spoke it was to ask some trivial question about the household--about what arrangements were made for the injured man's food, about Lila, about Amos Adams and Kenyon. Finally, as she turned to leave the room, her mother asked, "Where are you going?" The daughter answered, "Why, I'm going home."

"But Laura," the mother returned, "I believe your father is expecting your help here--to-night. I am sure he will need you." The daughter looked steadily, but rather vacantly at her mother for a moment, then replied: "Well, Lila and I must go now. I'll leave her there with the maid and I'll try to come back."

Her hand was on the door-knob. "Well," hesitated her mother, "what about Tom--?"

The eyes of the two women met. "Did father tell you?" asked the daughter's eyes. The mother's eyes said "Yes." Then rose the Spartan mother, and put a kind, firm hand upon the daughter's arm and asked: "But Laura, my dear, my dear, you are not going back again, to all--all that, are you?"

"I am going home, mother," the daughter replied.

"But your self-respect, child?" quoted the Spartan, and the daughter made answer simply: "I must go home, mother."

When Laura Van Dorn entered her home she began the evening's routine, somewhat from habit, and yet many things she did she grimly forced herself to do. She waited dinner for her husband. She called his office vainly upon the telephone. She and Lila ate alone; often they had eaten alone before. And as the evening grew from twilight to dark, she put the child to bed, left one of the maids in the child's room, lighted an electric reading lamp in her husband's room, turned on the hall lamp, instructed the maid to tell the Judge that his wife was with her father helping him with a wounded man, and then she went out through the open, hospitable door.

But all that night, as she sat beside the restless man, who writhed in his pain even under the drug, she went over and over her problem. She recognized that a kind of finality had come into her relations with her husband. In the rush of events that had followed his departure, a period, definite and conclusive seemed to have been put after the whole of her life's adventures with Tom Van Dorn. She did not cry, nor feel the want of tears, yet there were moments when she instinctively put her hands before her face as in a shame. She saw the man in perspective for the first time clearly. She had not let herself take a candid inventory of him before. But that night all her subconscious impressions rose and framed themselves into conscious reflections. And then she knew that his relation with her from the beginning had been a reflex of his view of life--of his material idea of the scheme of things.

As the night wore on, she kept her nurse's chart and did the things to be done for her patient. For the time her emotions were spent. Her heart was empty. Even for the shattered and suffering body before her, the tousled red head, the half-closed, pain-bleared eyes, the lips that shielded the clenched teeth--she felt none of that tenderness that comes from deep sympathy and moving pity. At dawn she went home with her body worn and weary, and after the sun was up she slept.

Scarcely had the morning stir begun in the Nesbit household, before Morty Sands appeared, clad in the festive raiment of the moment--white ducks and a shirtwaist and a tennis racket, to be exact. He asked for the Doctor and when the Doctor came, Morty cocked his sparrow like head and paused a moment after the greetings of the morning were spoken. After his inquiries for Grant had been satisfied, Morty still lingered and cocked his head.

"Of course, Doctor," Morty began diffidently, "and naturally you know more of it than I--but--" he got no further for a second. Then he gathered courage from the Doctor's bland face to continue: "Well, Doctor, last night at Brotherton's, Tom came in and George and Nate Perry and Kyle and Captain Morton and I were there; and Tom--well, Doctor--Tom said something--"

"He did--did he?" cut in the Doctor. "The dirty dog! So he broke the news to the Amen Corner!"

"Now, Doctor, we all know Tom," Morty explained. "We know Tom: but George said Laura was helping with Grant, and I just thought, certainly I have no wish to intrude, but I just thought maybe I could relieve her myself by sitting up with Grant, if--"

The Doctor's kindly face twitched with pain, and he cried: "Morty, you're a boy in a thousand! But can't you see that just at this time if I had half a dozen cases like Grant's, they would be a God's mercy for her!"

Morty could not control his voice. So he turned and tripped down the steps and flitted away. As Morty disappeared, George Brotherton came roaring up the hill, but no word of what Van Dorn had said in the Amen Corner did Mr. Brotherton drop. He asked about Grant, inquired about Laura, and released a crashing laugh at some story of stuttering Kyle Perry trying to tell deaf John Kollander about the Venezuelan dispute. "Kyle," said George, "pronounces Venezuela like an atomizer!" Captain Morton rested from his loved employ, let the egg-beater of the hour languish, and permitted stock in his new Company to slump in a weary market while he camped on the Nesbit veranda during the day to greet and disperse such visitors as Mrs. Nesbit deemed of sufficiently small social consequence to receive the Captain's ministrations. At twilight the Captain greeted Laura coming from her home for her night watch, and with a rather elaborate scenario of amenities, told her how his Household Horse company was prospering, how his egg beater was going, and asked after Lila's health, omitting mention of the Judge with an easy nonchalance which struck terror to the woman's heart--terror, lest the Captain and through him all men should know of her trouble.

But deeper than the terror in her heart at what the Captain might know and tell was the pain at the thing she knew herself--that the home which she loved was dead. However proudly it might stand before the world, for the passing hour or day or year, she knew, and the knowledge sickened her to her soul's death, that the home was doomed. She kept thinking of it as a tree, whose roots were cut; a tree whose leaves were still green, whose comeliness still pleased the eye but whose ugly, withered branches soon must stand out to affront the world. And sorrowing for the beauty that was doomed she went to her work. All night with her father she ministered to the tortured man, but in the morning she slipped away to her home again hoping her numb vain hope, through another weary journey of the sun.

The third night found Grant Adams restless, wakeful, anxious to talk. The opiates had left him. She saw that he was fully himself, even though conscious of his tortured body. "Laura," he cried in a sick man's feeble voice, "I want to tell you something."

"Not now, Grant," she returned quietly. "I'd rather hear it to-morrow."

"No," he returned stubbornly, "I want to tell you now."

He paused as if to catch his breath. "For I want you to know I'm the happiest man in the world." He set his teeth firmly. The muscles of his jaw worked, and he smiled up at her. He questioned her with his blue eyes, and after some assent had come into her face--or he thought it had, he went on:

"There's a God in Israel, Laura--I know it way down in me and all through me."

A crash of pain stopped him. He grinned at the groan, which the pain wrenched from him, and whispered, "There's a God in Israel--for He gave me my chance. I saw the great white killing thing coming to do for Denny Hogan. How I'd waited for that chance. Then when it came, I wanted to run. But I didn't run. There's something in you bigger than fear. So when God gave me my chance He put the--the--the--" pain wrenched him again, and he said weakly, "the--I've got to say it, you'll understand--He put the--the guts in me to take it."

When she left him a few minutes later he seemed to be asleep. But when Doctor Nesbit came into the room an hour later Grant was wide-eyed and smiling, and seemed so much better that as a reward of merit the Doctor brought in the morning paper and told Grant he could look at the headings for five minutes. There it was that he first realized what a lot of business lay ahead of him, learning to live as a one-armed man. The Doctor saw his patient worrying with the paper, and started to help.

"No, Doctor," said the young man, "I must begin sometime, and now's as good a time as any." So he struggled with the unwieldy sheets of paper, and finally managed to get his morning's reading done. When the time was up, he handed back his paper saying, "I see Tom Van Dorn is going on his vacation--does that mean Laura, too?" The Doctor shook his head; and by way of taking the subject away from Laura he said: "Now about your damages, Grant--you know I'll stand by you with the Company, don't you--I'm no Van Dorn, if I am Company doctor. You ought to have good damages--for--"

"Damages! damages!" cried Grant, "why, Doctor, I can't get damages. I wasn't working for the smelter when it happened. I was around organizing the men. And I don't want damages. This arm," he looked lovingly at the stump beside him, "is worth more in my business than a million dollars. For it proves to me that I am not afraid to go clear through for my faith, and it proves me to the men! Damages! damages?" he said grimly. "Why, Doctor, if Uncle Dan and the other owners up town here only know what this stump will cost them, they would sue me for damages! I tell you those men in the mine there saved my life. Ever since then I've been trying to repay them, and here comes this chance to turn in a little on account, to bind the bargain, and now the men know how seriously I hold the debt. Damages?" There was just a hint of fanaticism in his laugh; the Doctor looked at Grant quickly, then he sniffed, "Fine talk, Grant, fine talk for the next world, but it won't buy shoes for the baby in this," and he turned away impatiently and went into a world of reality, leaving Grant Adams to enjoy his Utopia.

That morning after breakfast, when Laura had gone home, the Doctor and his wife sitting alone went into the matter further. "Of course," said the Doctor, "she'll see that he has gone away. But when should we tell her what he has done?"

"Doctor," said the mother, "you leave his letter here where I can get it. I'm going over there and pack everything that rightfully may be called hers--I mean her dresses and trinkets--and such things as have in them no particular memory of him. They shall come home. Then I'll lock up the house."

The Doctor squinted up his eyes thoughtfully and said slowly, "Well, that seems kind. I don't suppose you need read her the whole letter. Just tell her he is going to ask for a divorce--tell her it's incompatibility. But his letter isn't important." The Doctor sighed.

"Grant ought really to stay here another week--maybe we can stretch it to ten days--and let her have all the responsibility she'll take. It'll help her over the first bridge. Kenyon is taking care of Lila--I suppose?" The Doctor rose, stood by his wife and said as he found her hand:

"Poor Laura--poor Laura--and Lila! You know when I had her down town with me yesterday, in the hallway leading to Joe Calvin's office, she met Tom--" The Doctor looked away for a moment. "It was pretty tough--her little heartbreak when he went by her without taking her up!" The wife did not reply. The husband with his arm about her walked toward the door.

"You can't tell me, my dear, that Tom isn't paying--I know how that sort of thing gets under his skin--he's too sensitive not to imagine all it means to the child." Mrs. Nesbit's face hardened and her husband saw her bitterness. "I know, my dear--I know how you feel--I feel all that, and yet in my very heart I'm sorry for poor Tom. He's swapping substance for shadow so recklessly--not only in this, not merely with Laura--but with everything--everything."

"Good Lord, Jim, I don't see how you can agonize over a wool-dyed scoundrel like that--perhaps you have some tears for that Fenn hussy, too!"

"Well," squeaked the Doctor soberly--"I knew her father--a lecherous old beast who brought her up without restraint or morals--with a greedy philosophy pounded into her by example every day of her life until she was seventeen years old. There's something to be said--even for her, my dear--even for her."

"Well, Jim Nesbit," answered his wife, "I'll go a long way with you in your tomfoolery, but so long as I've got to draw the line somewhere I draw it right there."

The Doctor looked at the floor. "I suppose so--" he sighed, then lifted his head and said: "I was just trying to think of all the sorrows that come into the world, of all the tragedies I ever knew, and I have concluded that this tragedy of divorce when it comes like this--as it has come to our daughter--is the greatest tragedy in the world. To love as she loved and to find every anchor to which she tied the faith of her life rotten, to have her heart seared with faithlessness--to see her child--her flesh and blood scorned, to have her very soul spat upon--that's the essence of sorrow, my dear."

He looked up into her eyes, bent to kiss her hand, and after he had picked up his cane and his hat from the rack, toddled down the walk to the street, a sad, thoughtful, worried little man, white-clad and serene to outward view, who had not even a whistle nor a vagrant tune under his breath to console him.

That day, after her father's insistence, Laura Van Dorn changed from the night watch to the day nurse, and from that day on for ten days, she ministered to Grant Adams' wants. Mechanically she read to him from such books as the house afforded--Tolstoi--Ibsen, Hardy, Howells,--but she was shut away from the meaning of what she read and even from the comments of the man under her care, by the consideration of her own problems. For to Laura Van Dorn it was a time of anxious doubt, of sad retrogression, of inner anguish. In some of the books were passages she had marked and read to her husband; and such pages calling up his dull comprehension of their beauty, or bringing back his scoffing words, or touching to the quick a hurt place in her heart, taxed her nerves heavily. But during the time while she sat by the injured man's bedside, she was glad in her heart of one thing--that she had an excuse for avoiding the people who called.

As Grant grew stronger--as it became evident that he must go soon, the woman's heart shrank from meeting the town, and she clung to each duty of the man's convalescence hungrily. She knew she must face life, that she must have some word for her friends about her tragedy. She felt that in going away, in suing for the divorce himself, her husband had made the break irrevocable. There was no resentment nor malice toward him in her heart. Yet the future seemed hopelessly black and terrible to her.

The afternoon before Grant Adams was to leave the Nesbit home he was allowed to come down stairs, and he sat with her upon the side porch, all screened and protected by vines that led to her father's office. Laura's finger was in a book they had been reading--it was "The Pillars of Society." The day was one of those exquisite days in mid-June, and after a cooling rain the air was clear and seemed to put joy into one's veins.

"How modern he is--how American--how like Harvey," said the young man. "Ibsen might have lived right here in this town, and written that," he added. He started to raise his right arm, but a twinge of pain reminded him that the stump was bound, so he raised his left and cried:

"And I tell you, Laura--that's what I'm on earth to fight--the whole infernal system of pocket-picking and poor-robbing, and public gouging that we permit under the profit system." The woman's thoughts were upon her own sorrow, but she called herself back to smile and reply:

"All right, Grant--I'm with you. We may have to draft father and commandeer George Brotherton, and start out as a pirate crew--but I'm with you."

"Let me tell you something," said the man. "I've not been loafing for the past two years. I've got Harvey--the men in the mines and smelter, I mean, fairly well unionized, but the unions are nothing--nothing ultimate--they are only temporary."

"Well," returned the woman, soberly, "that's something."

The man made no answer. With his free hand he was ruffling his red hair, and she could see the muscles of his jaw working, and she felt his great mouth harden as he flashed his blue eyes upon her. "Laura," he cried, "they may whip us this year. For a while they may scare the men into voting for prosperity, but as sure as we both live we shall see these times and these issues and these men who are promoting this devilish conspiracy eternally damned--all of them--the issues, the times and the men who are leading. And I don't want to hurt you, Laura, but," he added solemnly, "your husband must take his punishment with the rest."

They sat mute, then each heard the plaintive cry of a child running through the house. "She is looking for me," said Laura. In a moment a little wet-eyed girl was in her mother's arms, crying:

"I want my daddy--my dear daddy--I want him to come home--where is he?"

She sobbed in her mother's arms and held up her little face to look earnestly into the beautiful face above her, as she cried, "Is he gone--Annie Sands' new mamma says my papa's never coming back--Oh, I want my daddy--I want to go home."

She continued calling him and sobbing, and the mother rose to take the child away.

"Laura!" cried Grant, in a passionate question. He saw the weeping child and the grief-stricken face of the mother. In an instant he held out his bony left hand to her and said gently: "God help you--God help you."

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Chapter XXIV

IN WHICH THE DEVIL FORMALLY TAKES THE TWO HINDERMOST AND CLOSES AN ACCOUNT IN HIS LEDGER

Harvey tried sincerely to believe in Tom Van Dorn up to the very day when it happened. For the town had accepted him gladly and unanimously as its most distinguished citizen. But when the town read in the Times one November day after he had come home from his political campaign through the east for sound money and the open mills--a campaign in which Harvey had seen him through the tinted glasses of the Harvey Daily Times as one of the men who had saved the country--when the town read that cold paragraph beginning: "A decree of divorce was issued to-day to Judge Thomas Van Dorn, from his wife, Mrs. Laura Nesbit Van Dorn, upon the ground of incompatibility of temperament by Judge protem Calvin in the district court," and ending with these words: "Mrs. Van Dorn declined through her attorney to participate in a division of the property upon any terms and will live for the present with her daughter, aged five, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. James Nesbit on Elm Street"--when the town read that paragraph, Harvey closed its heart upon Thomas Van Dorn.

Only one other item was needed to steel the heart of Harvey against its idol, and that item they found upon another page. It read, "Wanted, pupils for the piano--Mrs. Laura Van Dorn, Quality Hill, Elm Street."

Those items told the whole story of the deed that Thomas Van Dorn had done. If he had felt bees sting before he got his decree, he should have felt vipers gnawing at his vitals afterward.

But he was free--the burden of matrimony was lifted. He felt that the whole world of women was his now for the choosing, and of all that world, he turned in wanton fancy to the beckoning arms of Margaret Fenn. But the feeling of freedom, the knowledge that he could speak to any woman as he chose and no one could gainsay him legally, the consciousness that he had no ties which the law recognized--and with him law was the synonym of morality--the exuberant sense of relief from a bondage that was oppressive to him, overbore all the influence of the town's spirit of wrath in the air about him.

As for the morality of the town and what he regarded as its prudery--he scorned it. He believed he could live it down; he said in his heart that it was merely a matter of a few weeks, a few months, or a few years at most, before they would have some fresh ox to gore and forget all about him. He was sure that he could play upon the individual self-interest of the leaders of the community to make them respect him and ignore what he had done. But what he had done, did not bother him much. It was done.

He seemed to be free, yet was he free?

Now Thomas Van Dorn was thirty-eight years old that autumn. Whether he loved the woman he had abandoned or not, she was a part of his life. Counting the courtship during which he and this woman had been associated closely, nearly ten years of his life, half of the years of his manhood--and that half the most active and effective part, had been spent with her. A million threads of memory in his brain led to her; when he remembered any important event in his life during those ten years, always the chain of associated thought led back to the image of her. There she was, fixed in his life; there she smiled at him through every hour of those ten years of their life, married or as lovers together.

For whom God had joined, not Joseph Calvin, not Joseph Calvin, sitting as Judge protem, not Joseph Calvin vested with all the authority of the great commonwealth in which he lived, could put asunder. That was curious. At times Thomas Van Dorn was conscious of this phenomenon, that he was free, yet bound, and that while there was no God, and the law was the final word, in all considerable things, some way the brain, or the mind that is fettered to the brain, or the soul that is built upon the aspect of the mind fettered to the brain, held him tethered to the past.

For our lives are not material, whatever our bodies may be. Our lives are the accumulations of consciousness, the assembling of our memories, our affections, our judgments, our aspirations, our weaknesses, our strength--the vast sum of all our impressions, good or bad, made upon a material plate called the brain. The brain is of the dust. The picture--which is a human life--is of the spirit. And the spirit is of God. And when by whatever laws of chance or greed, or high purpose or low desire two lives are joined until the cement of years has united the myriads of daily sensations that make up a segment of these lives, they are thus joined in the spirit forever.

Now Thomas Van Dorn went about his free life day by day, glorying in his liberty. But strands of his old life, floating idly and unnoticed through minutes of his hourly existence, kept tripping him and bothering him. His meals, his clothes, his fixed habits of work, the manifold creature comforts that he prized--all the associations of his life with home--came to him a thousand, thousand times and cut little knife-edged rents in the fabric of his new freedom.

And he would have said a year before that it was physically impossible for one child--one small, fair-haired child of five, with pleading face and eager eyes--to meet a man so often in a given period of time, as Lila met him. At first he had avoided her; he would duck into stores; hurry up stairways, or hide himself in groups of men on the sidewalk when he saw her coming. Then there came a time when he knew that the little figure was slipping across the street to avoid him because his presence shamed her with her playmates.

He had never in his heart believed that the child meant much to him. She was merely part of the chain that held him, and yet now that she was not of him or his interests, it seemed to Thomas Van Dorn that she made a piteous figure upon the street, and that the sadness that flitted over her face when she saw him, in some way reproached him, and yet--what right had she in him--or why should he let her annoy him, or disturb his peace and the happiness that his freedom brought. Materially he noticed that she was well fed, well dressed, and he knew that she was well housed. What more could she have--but that was absurd. He couldn't wreck his life for the mere chance that a child should be petted a little. There was no sense in such a proposition. And Thomas Van Dorn's life was regulated by sense--common sense--horse sense, he called it.

It is curious--and scores of Tom Van Dorn's friends wondered at it then and have marveled at it since, that in the six months which elapsed between his divorce and his remarriage, he did not fathom the shallowness and pretense of Margaret Fenn. But he did not fathom them. Her glib talk taken mechanically from cheap philosophy about being what you think you are, about shifting moral responsibility onto good intentions, about living for the present and ignoring the past with the uncertain future, took him in completely. She used to read books to him, sitting in the glow of her red lamp-shade--a glow that brought out hidden hints of her splendid feline body, books which soothed his vanity and dulled his mind. In that day he fancied her his intellectual equal. He thought her immensely strong-minded, and clear headed. He contrasted her in thought with the wife he had put away, told Margaret that Laura was always puling about duty and getting her conscience pinched and whining about it. They agreed sitting there under the lamp, that they had been mates in some far-off jungle, that they had been parted and had been seeking one another through eons, and that when their souls met one of the equations of the physical universe was solved, and that their happiness was the adjustment of ages of wrong. She thought him the most brilliant of men; he deemed her the most wonderful of women, and the devil checked off two drunken fools in his inventory.

It was in those halcyon days of his courtship of Margaret Fenn, when he felt the pride of conquest of another soul and body strongly upon him, that Judge Thomas Van Dorn began to acquire--or perhaps to exhibit noticeably--the turkey gobbler gait, that ever afterward went with him, and became famous as the Van Dorn Strut. It was more than mere knee action--though knee action did characterize it prominently. The strut properly speaking began at the tip of his hat--his soft, black hat that sat so cockily upon his head. His head was thrown back as though he had been pulled by a check-rein. His shoulders swung jauntily--more than jauntily, call it insolently--as he walked, and his trunk swayed with some stateliness as his proud hands and legs performed their grand functions. But withal he bowed and smiled--with much condescension--and lifted his hat high from his handsome head, and when women passed he doffed it like a flag in a formal salute, and while his body spelled complacence, his face never lost the charm and grace and courtesy that drew men to him, and held them in spite of his faults.

One bitter cold December day, when the wind was blowing sleet down Market Street, and hardly a passer-by darkened the doors of the stores, the handsome Judge sailed easily into the Amen Corner, fumbled over the magazines, picked out a pocketful of cigars from the case, without calling Mr. Brotherton who was in the rear of the store working upon his accounts, lighted a cigar, and stood looking out of the frosted window at the deserted gray windy street, utterly ignoring the presence of Captain Morton who was pretending to be deeply buried in the National Tribune, but who was watching the Judge and trying to summon courage to speak. The Judge unbuttoned his modish gray coat that nearly reached his heels and put his hands behind him for a moment, as he puffed and pondered--apparently debating something.

"Judge," said the Captain suddenly and then the Captain's courage fell and he added, "Bad morning."

"Yes," acquiesced the Judge from his abstraction. In a long pause that followed, Captain Morton swallowed at least a peck of Adam's apples that kept coming up to choke him, and then he cleared his throat and spoke:

"Tom--Tom Van Dorn--look around here." He lowered his voice and went on, "I want to talk to you." The Captain edged over on the bench.

"Sit down here a minute--I've been wanting to see you for a month." Captain Morton spoke all but in a whisper. The Adam's apple kept strangling him. The Judge saw that the old man was wrestling with some heavy problem. He turned, and looking down at the little wizened man, asked: "Well, Captain?"

The Captain moistened his lips, patted his toes on the floor, and twirled his fingers. He took a deep breath and said: "Tom, I've known you since you were twenty-one years old. Do you remember how we took you in the first night you came to town--me and mother? before the hotel was done, eh?" A smile on the Judge's face emboldened the Captain. "You've got brains, Tom--lots of brains--I often say Tom Van Dorn will sit in the big chair at the White House yet--what say? Well, Tom--" Now there was the place to say it. But the Captain's Adam's apple bobbed convulsively in a second silence. He decided to take a fresh start: "Tom, you're a sensible man--? I says to myself I'm going to have a plain talk to that man. He's smart; he'll appreciate it. Just the other day--George back there, and John Kollander and Dick Bowman and old man Adams, and Joe Calvin, and Kyle Perry were in here talking and I says--Gentlemen, that boy's got brains--lots of brains--eh? and he's a prince; 'y gory a prince, that's what Tom Van Dorn is, and I can go to him--I can talk to him--what say?" The Captain was on the brink again. Slowly there mantled over the face of the prince the gray scum of a fear. And the scar on his forehead flashed crimson. The Captain saw that he had been anticipated. He began patting his toes on the floor. Judge Van Dorn's face was set in a cement of resistance.

"Well?" barked the Judge. The little man's lips dried, he smiled weakly, and licked his lips and said: "It was about my sprocket--my Household Horse--I says, Tom Van Dorn understands it if you gentlemen don't and some day him and me will talk it over and 'y gory--he'll buy some stock--he'll back me."

The Captain's nervous voice had lifted and he was talking so that the clerk and Mr. Brotherton both in the back part of the store might hear. The cement of the Judge's countenance cracked in a smile, but the gray mantle of fear still fluttered across his eyes.

"All right, Captain," he answered, "some other time--not now--I'm in a hurry," and went strutting out into the storm.

Mr. Brotherton with his moon face shining into the ledger laughed a great clacking laugh and got up from his stool to come to the cigar case, saying, "Well, say--Cap--if you'd a' went on with what you started out to say, I'd a' give fi' dollars--say, I'd a' made it ten dollars--say!" And he laughed again a laugh that seemed to set all the celluloid in the plush covered, satin lined toilet cases on the new counter a-flutter. He walked down the store with elephantine tread, as he laughed, and then the door opened and Dr. Nesbit came in. Five months had put a perceptible bow into his shoulders, and an occasional cast of uncertainty into his twinkling eyes.

Mr. Brotherton called half down the store, "Say, Doc--you should have been here a minute ago, and seen the Captain bristle up to Tom Van Dorn about his love affair and then get cold feet and try to sell him some Household Horse stock." The Captain grinned sheepishly, the Doctor patted the Captain affectionately on the shoulder and chirped.

"So you went after him, did you, Ezry?" The loose skin of his face twitched, "Poor Tom--packing up his career in a petticoat and going forth to fuss with God--no sense--no sense," piped the Doctor, glancing over the headlines in his Star. The Captain, still clinging to the subject that had been too much for him, remarked: "Doc--don't you think some one ought to tell him?" The Doctor put down his paper, stroked his pompadour and looking over his glasses, answered:

"Ezry--if some one hasn't told him--no one ever can. I tried to tell him once myself. I talked pretty middlin' plain, Ezry." He was speaking softly, then he piped out, "But what a man's heart doesn't tell him, his friends can't. Still, Ezry, a strong friend is often a good tonic for a weak heart." The Doctor looked at the Captain, then concluded: "That was a brave, kind act you tried to do--and I warrant you got it to him--some way. He's a keen one--Ezry--a mighty keen one; and he understood."

Mr. Brotherton went back to his ledger; the Doctor plunged into the Star, the Captain folded up his newspaper and began studying the trinkets in the holiday stock in the show case under the new books. A comb and brush with tortoise shell backs seemed to arrest his eyes. "Doc," he mused, "Christmas never comes that I don't think of--her--mother! I guess I'd just about be getting that comb and brush for her." The Doctor casually looked through the show case and saw what had attracted the Captain. "Doc," again the Captain spoke, bending over the case with his face turned from his auditor: "You're a doctor and are supposed to know lots. Tell me this: How does a man break it to a woman when he wants to leave her--eh?" Without waiting for an answer the Captain went on: "And this is what puzzles me--how does he get used to another one--with that one still living? You tell me that. I'd think he'd be scared all the time that he would do something the way his first wife had trained him not to. Of course," meditated the Captain, "right at first, I suppose a man may feel a little coltish and all. But, Doc, honest and true, when mother first left I kind of thought--well, I used to enjoy swearing a little before we was married, and I says to myself I guess I may as well have a damn or two as I go along--but, Doc, I can't do it. Eh? Every time I set off the fireworks--she fizzles; I can see mother looking at me that way." The old man went on earnestly: "Tell me, Doc, you're a smart man--how Tom Van Dorn can do it. What say? 'Y gory I'd be scared--right now! And if I thought I had to get used all over again to another woman, and her ways of doing things--say of setting her bread Friday night, and having a hot brick for her feet and putting her hair in her teeth when she done it up, and dosing the children with sassafras tea in spring--I'd just naturally take to the woods, eh? And as for learning over again all the peculiarities of a new set of kin and what they all like to eat and died of, and how they all treated their first wives, and who they married--Doc? Doc?" The Captain shook a dubious and doleful head. "Fourteen years, Doc," sighed the Captain. "Pretty happy years--children coming on,--trouble visiting us with the rest; sorrow--happiness--skimping and saving; her a-raking and scraping to make a good appearance, and make things do; me trying one thing and another, to make our fortune and her always kind and encouraging, and hopeful; death standing between us and both of us sitting there by the kitchen stove trying to make up some kind of prayer to comfort the other. Fourteen years of it, Doc--her and me, and her so patient, so forbearing--Doc--you're a smart man--tell me, Doc, how did Tom Van Dorn get around to actually doing it? What say?"

The Doctor waved his folded paper in an impatient gesture at the Captain.

"We are all products of our yesterdays, Ezry; we are what we were, and we will be what we were. Man is queer. Sometimes out of the depth of him a god rises--sometimes it's a beast. I've sat by the bed and seen life gasp into being; I've stood in the ranks and fought with men as you have, and have seen them fight and then again have seen them turn tail like cowards. I have sat by the bed and seen life sigh into the dust. What is life--what is the God that quickens and directs us,--why and how and whence?--Ezry Morton, man--I don't know. And as for Tom--into that roaring hell of lust and lying and cheap parching pride where he is plunging--why, Ezry, I could almost cry for the fool; the damned beforehand fool!"

As the Doctor went whistling homeward through the storm that winter night he wondered how many more months the black spell of grief and despair would cover his daughter. Five months had passed since that summer day when her home had fallen. He knew how tragic her struggle was to fit herself into her new environment. She was dwelling, but not living in the Nesbit home. It was the Nesbit home; a kindly abode, but not her home. Her home was gone. The severed roots of her life kept stirring in her memory--in her heart, and outwardly, her spirit showed a withered and unhappy being, trying to rebuild life, to readjust itself after the shock that all but kills. The Doctor realized what an agony the new growth was bringing, and that night, stirred somewhat to somber meditation by Captain Morton's reflections, the Doctor's tune was a doleful little tune as he whistled into the wind. Excepting Kenyon Adams, who still came daily bringing his violin and was rapidly learning all that she knew of the theory of music, Laura Van Dorn had no interest in life outside of her family. When the Adamses came to dinner as frequently they came--Laura seemed to feel no constraint with them. Grant had even made her laugh with stories of Dick Bowman's struggles to be a red card socialist, and to vote the straight socialist ticket and still keep in ward politics in which he had been a local heeler for nearly twenty years. Laura was interested in the organization of the unions, and though the Doctor carped at it and made fun of Grant, it was largely to stir up a discussion in which his daughter would take a vital interest.

Grant was getting something more than a local reputation in labor circles as an agitator, and was in demand as an organizer in different parts of the valley. He worked at his trade more or less, having rigged up a steel device on the stump of his right forearm that would hold a saw, a plane or a hammer. But he was no longer a boss carpenter at the mines. His devotion to the men and in the work they were doing seemed to the Nesbits to awaken in their daughter a new interest in life, and so they made many obvious excuses to have the Adamses about the Nesbit home.

Kenyon was growing into a pale, dreamy child with wonderful eyes, lustrous, deep, thoughtful and kind. He was music mad, and read all the poetry in the Nesbit library--and the Doctor loved poetry as many men love wine. Hero-tales and mythology, romances and legends Kenyon read day after day between his hours of practice, and for diversion the boy sat before the fire or in the sun of a chilly afternoon, retailing them in such language as little Lila could understand. So in the black night of sorrow that enveloped her, Laura Nesbit often spent an hour with Grant Adams, and talked of much that was near her heart.

He was strong, sometimes she thought him coarse and raw. He talked the jargon of the agitator with the enthusiasm of a dervish and the vernacular of the mine and the shop and the forge. But in him she could see the fire of a mad consuming passion for humanity.

During those days of shame and misery, when the old interests of life were dying in her heart, interests upon which she had built since her childhood--the interests of home, of children, of wifehood and motherhood, to which in joy she had consecrated herself, she listened often to Grant Adams. Until there came into her life slowly and feebly, and almost without her conscious realization of it, a new vision, a new hope, a new path toward usefulness that makes for the only happiness.

As the Doctor went whistling into the storm that December night, he went over in his mind rather seriously the meaning and the direction and the final outcome of those small, unconscious buddings of interest in social problems that he saw putting forth in his daughter's mind. Above everything else, he was not a reformer. He hated the reformer type. But he preferred to see her interested in the work of Grant Adams--even though he considered Grant mildly cracked and felt that his growing power in the valley was dangerous--rather than to see her under the black pall that enveloped her.

It was early in the evening as the Doctor went up the hill. He passed Judge Van Dorn, striding along and saw him turn into Congress Street to visit his lady love. The Judge carried a large roll of architect's plans under his arm. The Doctor nodded to the Judge, and the Judge rather proud that he was free and did not have to slink to his lady's bower, returned a gracious good evening, and his tall, straight figure went prancing down the street. When the Doctor entered his home, he found Laura and Lila sitting by the open fire. The child was in her night gown and they were discussing Santa Claus. Lila was saying:

"Kenyon told me Santa Claus was your father?"

Before the mother could reply the little voice went on:

"I wonder if my Santa Claus will come this year--will he, mother?--Why doesn't father ever come to us, mother--why doesn't he play with me when I see him?"

Now there is the story of the absent one that parents tell--the legend about God and Heaven and the angels--a beautiful and comforting legend it is for small minds, and being merciful, God may in His own way bring us to realize it, in deed and in truth. When the lonely father or the broken hearted mother tells the desolate child that legend, childhood finds surcease there for its sorrow. But when there is no God, no Heaven, no angels to whom the absent one has gone, what then do deserted mothers say?--or dishonored fathers answer? What surcease for its sorrow has the little lonely, aching heart in that sad case? What then, "ye merry gentlemen that nothing may dismay"?

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XXV. IN WHICH WE SEE TWO TEMPLES AND THE CONTENTS THEREOF

It was an old complaint in Harvey that the Harvey Tribune was too much of a bulletin of the doings of the Adams family and their friends. But when a man sets all the type on a paper, writes all the editorials and gets all the news he may be pardoned if he takes first such news as is near his hand. Thus in the May that followed events set down in the last chapter we find in the Tribune a few items of interest to the readers of this narrative. We learn for instance that Captain Ezra Morton who is introducing the Nonesuch Sewing Machine, paid his friends in Prospect school district a visit; that Jasper Adams has been promoted to superintendent of deliveries in Wright & Perry's store; that Kenyon Adams entertained his friends in the Fifth Grade of the South Harvey schools with a violin solo on the last day of school; that Grant Adams had been made assistant to the secretary of the National Building Trades Association in South Harvey; that Mr. George Brotherton with Miss Emma Morton and Martha and Ruth had enjoyed a pleasant visit with the Adamses Sunday afternoon and had resumed an enjoyable buggy ride after partaking of a chicken dinner. In the editorial column were some reflections evidently in Mr. Left's most lucid style and a closing paragraph containing this: "Happiness and character," said the Peach Blow Philosopher, "are inseparable: but how easy it is to be happy in a great, beautiful house; or to be unhappy if it comes to that in a great, beautiful house: Environment may influence character; but all the good are not poor, nor all the rich bad. Therefore, the Peach Blow Philosopher takes to the woods. He is willing to leave something to the Lord Almighty and the continental congress. Selah!"

As Dr. Nesbit sat reading the items above set forth upon the broad new veranda of the residence that he was so proud to call his home, he smiled. It was late afternoon. He had done a hard day's work--some of it among the sick, some of it among the needy--the needy in the Doctor's bright lexicon being those who tried to persuade him that they needed political offices. "I cheer up the sick, encourage the needy, pray for 'em both, and sometimes for their own good have to lie to 'em all," he used to say in that day when the duties of his profession and the care of his station as a ruling boss in politics were oppressing him. Dr. Nesbit played politics as a game. But he played always to win.

"Old Linen Pants is a bland old scoundrel," declared Public Opinion, about the corridors of the political hotel at the capital. "But he is as ruthless as iron, as smooth as oil, and as bitter as poison when he sets his head on a proposition. Buy?--he buys men in all the ways the devil teaches them to sell--offices, power, honor, cash in hand, promises, prestige--anything that a man wants, Old Linen Pants will trade for, and then get that man. Humorous old devil, too," quoth Public Opinion. "Laughs, quotes scripture, throws in a little Greek philosophy, and knows all the new stories, but never forgets whose play it is, nor what cards are out." Thus was he known to others.

But as he remained longer and longer in the game, as his fourth term as state Senator began to lengthen, the game here and there began to lose in his mouth something of its earlier savor. That afternoon as he sat on the veranda overlooking the lawn shaded by the elm trees of his greatest pride, Dr. Nesbit was discoursing to Mrs. Nesbit, who was sewing and paid little heed to his animadversions; it was a soliloquy rather than a conversation--a soliloquy accompanied by an obligate of general mental disagreement from the wife of his bosom, who expressed herself in sniffs and snorts and scornful staccato interjections as the soliloquy ran on. Here are a few bars of it transcribed for beginners:

From the Doctor's solo: "Heigh-ho--ho hum--Two United States Senators, one slightly damaged Governor, marked down, five congressmen and three liars, one supreme court justice, also a liar, a working interest in a second, and a slight equity in a third; organization of the Senate, speaker of the house,--forty liars and thirty thieves--that's my political assets, my dear."

"I wish you'd quit politics, Doctor, and attend to your practice," this by way of accompaniment from Mrs. Nesbit. The Doctor was in a playful and facetious mood that pleasant afternoon.

He leaned back in his chair, reached up in the air with outstretched arms, clapped his hands three times, gayly, kicked his shoe-heels three times at the end of his short little legs, smiled and proceeded: "Liabilities of James Nesbit, dealer in public grief, licensed dispenser of private joy, purveyor of Something Equally Good, item one, forty-nine gentlemen who think they've been promised thirty-six jobs--but they are mistaken, they have been told only that I'll do what I can for them--which is true; item two, three hundred friends who want something and may ask at any minute; item three, seventy-five men who will be or have been primed up by the loathed opposition to demand jobs; item four, Tom Van Dorn who is as sure as guns to think in about a year he has to have a vindication, by running for another term; item five--"

"He can't have it," from Mrs. Nesbit, and then the piping voice went on:

"Item six, a big, husky fight in Greeley county for the maharaja of Harvey and the adjoining provinces." A deep sigh rose from the Doctor, then followed more clapping of hands and kicking of heels and some slapping of suspenders, as the voices of Kenyon and Lila came into the veranda from the lawn, and the Doctor cast up his accounts: "Let's see now--naught's a naught and figure's a figure and carry six, and subtract the profits and multiply the trouble and you have a busted community. Correct," he piped, "Bedelia, my dear, observe a busted community. Your affectionate lord and master, kind husband, indulgent father, good citizen gone but not forgotten. How are the mighty fallen."

"Doctor," snapped Mrs. Nesbit, "don't be a fool; tell me, James, will Tom Van Dorn want to run again?"

Making a basket with his hands for the back of his head the Doctor answered slowly, "Ho-ho-ho! Oh, I don't know--I should say--yes. He'll just about have to run--for a Vindication."

"Well, you'll not support him! I say you'll not support him," Mrs. Nesbit decided, and the Doctor echoed blandly:

"Then I'll not support him. Where's Laura?" he asked gently.

"She went down to South Harvey to see about that kindergarten she's been talking of. She seems almost cheerful about the way Kenyon is getting on with his music. She says the child reads as well as she now and plays everything on the violin that she can play on the piano. Doctor," added Mrs. Nesbit meditatively, "now about those oriental rugs we were going to put upstairs--don't you suppose we could take the money we were going to put there and help Laura with that kindergarten? Perhaps she'd take a real interest in life through those children down there." The wife hesitated and asked, "Would you do it?"

The Doctor drummed his chair arm thoughtfully, then put his thumbs in his suspenders. "Greater love than this hath no woman shown, my dear--that she gives up oriental rugs for a kindergarten--by all means give it to her."

"James, Lila still grieves for her father."

"Yes," answered the Doctor sadly, "and Henry Fenn was in the office this morning begging me to give him something that would kill his thirst."

The doctor brought his hands down emphatically on his chair arms. "Duty, Bedelia, is the realest obligation in the world. Here are Lila and Henry Fenn. What a miserable lot of tommy rot about soul-mating Tom and this Fenn woman conjured up to get away from their duty to child and husband. They have swapped a place with the angels for a right to wallow with the hogs; that's what all their fine talking amounts to." The Doctor's shrill voice rose. "They don't fool me. They don't fool any one; they don't even fool each other. I tell you, my dear," he chirped as he rose from his chair, "I never saw one of those illicit love affairs in life or heard of it in literature that was not just plain, old fashion, downright, beastly selfishness. Duty is a greater thing in life than what the romance peddlers call love."

The Doctor stood looking at his wife questioningly--waiting for some approving response. She kept on sewing. "Oh you Satterthwaites with hearts of marble," he cried as he patted the cast iron waves of her hair and went chuckling into the house.

Mrs. Nesbit was aroused from her reverie by the rattle of the Adams buggy. When it drew up to the curb Laura and Grant climbed out and came up the walk. Laura wore a simple summer dress that brought out all the exquisite coloring of her skin, and made her light hair shine in a kind of haloed glory. It had been months since the mother had seen in her daughter's face such a smile as the daughter gave to the man beside her--red-faced, angular, hard muscled, in his dingy blue carpenter's working clothes with his measuring rule and pencil sticking from his apron pocket, and with his crippled arm tipped by its steel tool-holder.

"Grant is going to take that box of Lila's toys down to the kindergarten, mother," she explained.

When they had disappeared up the stairs Mrs. Nesbit could hear them on the floor above and soon the heavy feet of the man carrying a burden were on the stairs and in another minute the young woman was saying:

"Leave them by the teacher's desk, Grant," and as he untied the horse, she called, "Now you will get that door in to-night without fail--won't you? I'll be down and we'll put in the south partition in the morning." As she turned from the door she greeted her mother with a smile and dropped wearily into a chair.

"Oh mother," she cried, "it's going to be so fine. Grant has the room nearly finished and he's interesting the wives of the union men in South Harvey and George Brotherton is going to give us every month all the magazines and periodicals that are not returnable and George brought down a lot of Christmas numbers of illustrated papers, and we're cutting the bright pictures out and pinning them on the wall and George himself worked with us all afternoon. George says he is going to make every one of his lodges contribute monthly to the kindergarten--he belongs to everything but the Ladies of the G. A. R.--" she smiled and her mother smiled with her,--"and Grant says the unions are going to pay half of the salary of the extra teacher. That makes it easier."

"Well, Laura, don't you think--"

But her daughter interrupted her. "Now, mother," she went on, "don't you stop me till I'm done--for this is the best yet. Morty Sands came down to-day to help--" Laura laughed a little at her mother's surprised glance, "and Morty promised to give us $200 for the kindergarten just as soon as he can worm it out of his father for expense money." She drew in a deep, tired breath, "There," she sighed, "that's all."

Her own child came up and the mother caught the little girl and began playing with her, tying her hair ribbon, smoothing out her skirts, rubbing a dirt speck from her nose, and cuddling the little one rapturously in her arms. When the two women were alone, Laura sat on the veranda steps with her head resting upon her mother's knee. The mother touched the soft hair and said: "Laura, you are very tired."

"Yes, mother," the daughter answered. "The mothers are so hungry for help down there in South Harvey, and," she added a little drearily--"so am I; so we are speaking a common language."

She nestled her head in the lap above her. "And I'm going to find something worth doing--something fine and good."

She watched the lazy clouds, "You know I'm glad about Morty Sands. Grant thinks Morty sincerely wants to amount to something real--to help and be more than a money grubber! If the old spider would just let him out of the web!" The mother stared at her daughter a second.

"Well, Laura, about the only money grubbing Morty seems to be doing is grubbing money out of his father to maintain his race horse."

The daughter smiled and the mother went on with her work. "Mother, did you know that little Ruth Morton is going to begin taking vocal lessons this summer?" The mother shook her head. "Grant says Mr. Brotherton's paying for it. He thinks she has a wonderful voice."

"Voice--" cut in Mrs. Nesbit, "why Laura, the child's only fourteen--voice--!"

Laura answered, "Yes, mother, but you've never heard her sing; she has a beautiful, deep, contralto voice, but the treble above 'C' is a trifle squeaky, and Mr. Brotherton says he's 'going to have it oiled'; so she's to 'take vocal' regularly."

On matters musical Mrs. Nesbit believed she had a right to know the whole truth, so she asked: "Where does Mr. Brotherton come in, Laura?"

"Oh, mother, he's always been a kind of god-father to those girls. You know as well as I that Emma's been playing with that funeral choir of yours and Mr. Brotherton's all these years, only because he got her into it, and Grant says he's kept Mrs. Herdicker from discharging Martha for two years, just by sheer nerve. Of course Grant gets it from Mr. Brotherton but Grant says Martha is so pretty she's such a trial to Mrs. Herdicker! I like Martha, but, mother, she just thinks she should be carried round on a chip because of her brown eyes and red hair and dear little snubby nose. Grant says Mr. Brotherton is trying to get the money someway to float the Captain's stock company and put his Household Horse on the market. I think Mr. Brotherton is a fine man, mother--he's always doing things to help people."

Mrs. Nesbit folded up her work, and began to rise. "George Brotherton, Laura," said her mother as she stood at full length looking down upon her child, "has a voice of an angel, and perhaps the heart of a god, but he will eat onions and during the twenty years I've been singing with him I've never known him to speak a correct sentence. Common, Laura--common as dishwater."

As Laura Van Dorn talked the currents of life eddying about her were reflected in what she said. But she could not know the spirit that was moving the currents; for with a neighborly shyness those who were gathering about her were careful to seem casual in their kindness, and she could not know how deeply they were moved to help her. Kindergartens were hardly in George Brotherton's line; yet he untied old bundles of papers, ransacked his shop and brought a great heap of old posters and picture papers to her. Captain Morton brought a beloved picture of his army Colonel to adorn the room, and deaf John Kollander, who had a low opinion of the ignorant foreigners and the riff-raff and scum of society, which Laura was trying to help, wished none the less to help her, and came down one day with a flag for the schoolroom and insisted upon making a speech to the tots about patriotism. He made nothing clear to them but he made it quite clear to himself that they were getting the flag as a charity, which they little deserved, and never would return. And to Laura he conveyed the impression that he considered her mission a madness, but for her and the sorrow which she was fighting, he had appreciative tenderness. He must have impressed his emotions upon his wife for she came down and talked elaborately about starting a cooking school in the building, and after planning it all out, went away and forgot it. The respectable iron gray side-whiskers of Ahab Wright once relieved the dingy school room, when Ahab looked in and the next day Kyle Perry on behalf of the firm of Wright & Perry came trudging into the kindergarten with a huge box which he said contained a p-p-p-p-p-pat-a-p-p-p-pppat-pat--here he swallowed and started all over and finally said p-p-patent, and then started out on a long struggle with the word swing, but he never finished it, and until Laura opened the box she thought Mr. Perry had brought her a soda fountain. But Nathan Perry, his son, who came wandering down to the place one afternoon with Anne Sands, put up the swing, and suggested a half dozen practical devices for the teacher to save time and labor in her work, while Anne Sands in her teens looked on as one who observes a major god completing a bungling job of the angels on a newly contrived world.

Sometimes coming home from his day's work Amos Adams would drop in for a chat with the tired teacher, and he refreshed her curiously with his quiet manner and his unsure otherworldliness, and his tough, unyielding optimism. He had no lectures for the children. He would watch them at their games, try to play with them himself in a pathetic, old-fashioned way, telling them fairy stories of an elder and a grimmer day than ours. Sometimes Doctor Nesbit, coming for Laura in his buggy, would find Amos in the school room, and they would fall to their everlasting debate upon the reality of time and space with the Doctor enjoying hugely his impious attempt to couch the terminology of abstract philosophy in his Indiana vernacular.

Lida Bowman bringing her little brood sometimes would sit silently watching the children, and look at Laura as if about to speak, but she always went away with her mind unrelieved. Violet Hogan, who brought her beruffled and bedizened eldest, made up for Mrs. Bowman's reticence. Moreover Violet brought other mothers and there was much talk on the topics of the day--talk that revealed to Laura Nesbit a whole philosophy that was new to her--the helpfulness of the poor to the poor.

But if others brought to Laura Van Dorn material strength and spiritual comfort in her enterprise, Grant Adams waved the wand of his steel claw over the kindergarten and made it live. For he was a power in the Wahoo Valley. Her friends knew that his word gave the kindergarten the endorsement of every union there and thus brought to it mothers with children and with problems as well as children, whom Laura Van Dorn otherwise never could have reached. The unions made a small donation monthly to the work which gave them the feeling of proprietorship in the place and the mothers and children came in self-respect. But if Grant gave life to the kindergarten, he got more than he gave. For the restraining hand of Laura Van Dorn always was upon him, and his friends in the Valley came to realize her friendship for them and their cause. They knew that many a venture of Grant's Utopia would have been a wild goose chase but for the wisdom of her counsel. And the two came to rely upon each other unconsciously.

So in the ugly little building near Dooley's saloon in South Harvey the two towns met and worked together; and all to heal a broken heart, a bruised life. From out of the unexplored realm where our dreams are blooming into the fruit of reality one evening came Mr. Left with this message: "Whoever in the joy of service gives part of himself to the vast sum of sacrificial giving that has remained unspent, since man began to walk erect, is adding to humanity's heritage, is building an unseen temple wherein mankind is sheltered from its own inhumanity. This sum of sacrificial giving is the temple not made with hands!"

Now the foundations of that part of the temple not made with hands in South Harvey, may be said to have been laid and the watertable set on the day when Laura Van Dorn first laughed the bell-chime laugh of her girlhood. And that day came well along in the summer. It was twilight and the Doctor was sitting with his wife and daughter on their east veranda when Morty Sands came flitting across the lawn like a striped miller moth in a broad-banded outing suit. He waved gayly to the little company in the veranda and came up the steps at two bounds, though he was a man of thirty-eight and just the least bit weazened.

"Well," he said, with his greetings scarcely off his lips, "I came to tell you I've sold the colt!"

The chorus repeated his announcement as a question.

"Yes, sold the colt," solemnly responded Morty. And then added, "Father just wouldn't! I tried to get that two hundred in various ways--adding it to my cigar bill; slipping it in on my bill for raiment at Wright & Perry's, but father pinned Kyle down, and he stuttered out the truth. I tried to get the horse-doctor to charge the two hundred into his bill and when father uncovered that--I couldn't wait any longer so I've sold the colt!"

"Well, Morty, what for in Heaven's name?" asked Laura. Morty began fumbling in his pockets before he spoke. He did not smile, but as his hand came out of an inside pocket, he said gently: "For two hundred and seventeen dollars and a half! I fought an hour for that half dollar!" He handed it to the Doctor, saying: "It's for the kindergarten. You keep it for her, Doctor Jim!"

When Morty had gone Mrs. Nesbit said: "What queer blood that Sands blood is, Doctor. There is Mary Sands's heart in that boy, and Daniel has bred nothing into him. They must have been a queer breed a generation or two back!"

The Doctor did not answer. He took the money which Morty had given to him, handed it to Laura and said: "And now my dear, accept this token of devotion from Sir Mortimer Sands, of the golden heart and wooden head!" And then Laura laughed, not in derision, not in merriment even, but in sheer joy that life could mean so much. And as she laughed the temple not made with hands began to rise strong and beautiful in her heart and in the hearts of all who touched her.

How they would have sneered at Laura Van Dorn's niche in the temple, those practical folk who helped her because they loved her. How George Brotherton would have laughed; with what suspicion John Kollander would have viewed the kindergarten, if he had been told that it was part of a temple. For he had no sort of an idea of letting the rag-tag and bob-tail of South Harvey into a temple; he knew very well they deserved no temple. They were shiftless and wicked. How Wright & Perry would have sniffed at any one who would have called the dreary little shack, where Laura Van Dorn held forth, a temple. For they all pretended to see only the earthly dimensions of material things. But in their hearts they knew the truth. It is the American way to mask the beauty of our nobler selves, or real selves under a gibing deprecation. So we wear the veneer of materialism, and beneath it we are intense idealists. And woe to him who reckons to the contrary!

Perhaps the town's views on temples in general and Laura's temple in particular, was summed up by Hildy Herdicker, Prop., when she read Mr. Left's reflections in the Tribune. "Temples--eh?--temples not made with hands--is it? Well, Miss Laura can get what comfort she can out of her baby shop; but me? Every man to his trade as Kyle Perry said when he tried to buy a dozen scissors and got a sewing machine--me?--I get my heart balm selling hats, and if others gets theirs coddling brats--'tis the good God's wisdom that makes us different and no business of mine so long as they bring grist to the profit mill! The trouble with their temples is that they don't pay taxes!"

So in the matter of putting up temples--particularly in the matter of erecting temples not made with hands, the town worked blindly. But so far as Laura Van Dorn was concerned, while she was working on her part of the temple, she had the vision of youth still in her heart. Youth indeed is that part of every soul that life has not tarnished, and if we keep our faith, hold ourselves true and bow to no circumstance however arrogant it may be, youth still will abide in our hearts through many years. Now Laura, who was born Nesbit and became Van Dorn, was taking up life with that large charity that comes to every unconquered soul. She held her illusions, she believed in herself, and youth shone like a beacon from her face and glowed in her body.

For Thomas Van Dorn, who had been her husband, she had trained herself to hold no unkind thought. She even taught Lila--when the child asked for him--to harbor no rancor toward him. So the child turned to her father when they met, the natural face of a child; it was a sad little face that he saw--though no one else ever saw it sad; but the child smiled when she spoke and looked gently at him, in the hope that some day he would come back to her.

Now it happened that on the night when Laura's laugh first echoed through her temple another rising temple witnessed a ceremony entirely befitting its use.

That night--late that night when a pale moon was climbing over the valley below the town, Margaret and her lover stood alone in the great unfinished house which they were building.

Through the uncurtained windows the moonlight was streaming, making white splashes upon the floors. Across the plank pathways they wandered locating the halls, the great living-room, the spacious dining-room, the airy, comfortable bedrooms exposed to the south, the library, the kitchen, and the ballroom on the third floor. It was to be a grand house--this house of Van Dorn. And in their fancy the man and the woman called it the temple of love erected as an altar to the love god whom they worshiped. They peopled it with many a merry company. They saw the rich and the great in the dining-room. They pictured in this vision pleasure capering through the ball room. They enshrined wisdom and contentment in the library. In the great living-room they installed elegance and luxury, and hospitality beckoned with ostentatious pride for the coming of such of the nobility as Harvey and its environs and the surrounding state and Nation could produce. A grand, proud temple, a rich, beautiful temple, a strong, masterful temple would be this temple of love.

"And, dearest," said he--the master of the house, as he held her in his arms at the foot of the stairway that swept down into the broad hall like the ghost of some baronial grandeur, "dearest, what do we care what they say! We have built it for ourselves--just for you, I want it--just for you; not friends, not children, not any one but you. This is to be our temple of love."

She kissed him, and whined wordless assent. Then she whispered: "Just you--you, you, and if man, woman or child come to mar our joy or to lessen our love, God pity the intruder." And like a flaming torch she fluttered in his arms.

The summer breeze came caressingly through an unclosed window into the temple. It seemed--the summer breeze which fell upon their cheeks--like the benediction of some pagan god; their god of love perhaps. For the grand house, the rich house, the beautiful, masterful temple of their mad love was made for summer breezes.

But when the rain came, and the storms fell and beat upon that house, they found that it was a house built upon sand. But while it stood and even when it fell there was a temple, a real temple, a temple made with hands--a temple that all Harvey and all the world could understand!

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XXVI. DR. NESBIT STARTS ON A LONG UPWARD BUT DEVIOUS JOURNEY

The Van Dorns opened their new house without ostentation the day after their marriage in October. There was no reception; the handsomest hack in town waited for them at the railway station, as they alighted from the Limited from Chicago. They rode down Market Street, up the Avenue to Elm Crest Place, drove to the new house, and that night it was lighted. That was all the ceremony of housewarming which the place had. The Van Dorns knew what the town thought of them. They made it plain what they thought of the town. They allowed no second rate people to crowd into the house as guests while the first rate people smiled, and the third rate people sniffed. The Judge had some difficulty keeping Mrs. Van Dorn to their purpose. She was impatient--having nothing in particular to think about, and being proud of her furniture. Naturally, there were calls--a few. And they were returned with some punctiliousness. But the people whom the Van Dorns were anxious to see did not call. In the winter, the Van Dorns went to Florida for a fortnight, and put up at a hotel where they could meet a number of persons of distinction whom they courted, and whom the Van Dorns pressed to visit them. When she came home from the winter's social excursion, Mrs. Van Dorn went straight to the establishment of Mrs. Herdicker, Prop., and bought a hat; and bragged to Mrs. Herdicker of having met certain New York social dignitaries in Florida whose names were as familiar to the Harvey women as the names of their hired girl's beaux! Then having started this tale of her social prowess on its career, Margaret was more easily restrained by her husband from offering the house to the Plymouth Daughters for an entertainment. It was in that spring that Margaret began--or perhaps they both began to put on what George Brotherton called the "Van Dorn remnant sale." The parade passed down Market Street every morning at eight thirty. It consisted of one handsome rather overdressed man and one beautiful rather conspicuously dressed woman. On fair days they rode in a rakish-looking vehicle known as a trap, and in bad weather they walked through Market Street. At the foot of the stairs leading to the Judge's office they parted with all the voltage of affection permitted by the canons of propriety and at five in the evening, Mrs. Van Dorn reappeared on Market Street, and at the foot of the stairs before the Judge's office, the parade resumed its course.

"Well--say," said George Brotherton, "right smart little line of staple and fancy love that firm is carrying this season. Rather nice titles too; good deal of full calf bindings--well, say--glancing at the illustrations, I should like to read the text. But man--say--hear your Uncle George! With me it's always a sign of low stock when I put it all in the window and the show case! Well, say--" and he laughed like the ripping of an earthquake. "It certainly looks to me as if they were moving the line for a quick turnover at a small profit! Well say!"

But without the complicated ceremony required to show the town that he was pleased with his matrimonial bargain, the handsome Judge was a busy man. Every time he saw Dr. Nesbit toddling up or down Market Street, or through South Harvey, or in the remotenesses of Foley or Magnus, the Judge whipped up his energies. For he knew that the Doctor never lost a fight through overconfidence. So the Judge, alone for the first time in his career, set out to bring about his nomination, where a nomination meant an election. Now a judge who showed the courage of his convictions, as Judge Van Dorn had shown his courage in forcing settlements in the mine accident cases and in similar matters of occasional interest, was rather more immediately needed by the mine owners of Harvey than the political boss, who merely used the mine owner's money to encompass his own ends, and incidentally work out the owner's salvation. Daniel Sands played both sides, which was all that Van Dorn could ask. But when the Doctor saw that Sands was giving secret aid to Van Dorn, the Doctor's heart was hot within him. And Van Dorn continued to rove the district day and night, like a dog, hunting for its buried bone.

It was in the courthouse that Van Dorn made his strongest alliance--in the courthouse, where the Doctor was supposed to be in supreme command. A capricious fate had arranged it so that nearly all the county officers were running for their second terms, and a second term was a time honored courtesy. Van Dorn tied himself up with them by maintaining that his was a second term election also,--and a second regular four year term it was. His appointment, and his election to fill out the remainder of his predecessor's term, he waved aside as immaterial, and staged himself as a candidate for his second term. The Doctor tried to break the combination between the Judge and the second term county candidates by ruthlessly bringing out their deputies against the second termers as candidates. But the scheme provoked popular rebellion. The Doctor tried bringing out one young lawyer after another against the Judge, but all had retainers from the mine owners, and no one in the county would run against Van Dorn, so the Doctor had to pick his candidate from outside of the county, in a judicial convention wherein Greeley County had a majority of the votes. But Van Dorn knew that for all the strategy of the situation, the Doctor might be able to mass the town's disapproval of Van Dorn, socially, into a political majority in the convention against him. So the handsome Judge, with his matrimonial parade to give daily, his political fortunes to consider every hour, and withal, a court to hold, and a judicial serenity to maintain, was a busy young man--a rather more than passing busy young man!

As for the Doctor, he threw himself into the contest against Van Dorn with no mixed motives. "There," quoth the Doctor, to the wide world including his own henchmen, yeomen, heralds, and outriders, "is one hound pup I am going to teach house manners!" And failing to break Van Dorn's alliance in the courthouse, and failing to bulldoze Daniel Sands out of a secret liaison with Van Dorn, failing to punish those of his courthouse friends who permitted Van Dorn to stand with them on their convention tickets in the primary, the Doctor went forth with his own primary ticket, and announced that he proposed to beat Van Dorn in the convention single handed and alone.

And so quiet are the wheels of our government, that few heard them grinding during the spring and early summer--few except the little coterie of citizens who pay attention to the details of party politics. Yet underneath and over the town, and through the very heart of it wherever the web of the spider went, there was a cruel rending. Two men with hate in their hearts were pulling at the web, wrenching its filaments, twisting it out of shape, ripping its texture, in a desperate struggle to control the web, and with that control to govern the people.

Then Dr. Nesbit pushed his way into the very nest of the spider, and bolted into Daniel Sands's office to register a final protest against Sands's covert alliance with the Judge. He plunked angrily into the den of the spider, shut the door, turned the spring lock, and looking around saw not Sands, but Van Dorn himself.

The Doctor burst out: "Well, young man! So you're here, eh!" Van Dorn nodded pleasantly, and replied graciously: "Yes, Doctor, here I am, and I believe we have met here before--at one time or another."

The Doctor sat down and slapping a fat hand on a chair arm, cried angrily: "Thomas, it can't be did--you can't cut 'er."

Judge Van Dorn answered blandly, rather patronizingly: "Yes, Dr. Jim, it can be done. And I shall do it."

"Have you let 'em fool you--the fellows on the street?" asked the Doctor.

Judge Van Dorn tapped on the desk beside him meditatively, then answered slowly: "No--I should say they mostly lied to me--they're not for me--excepting, maybe, Captain Morton, who tried to say he was opposed to me--but couldn't--quite. No--Doctor--no--Market Street didn't fool me."

He was so suave about it, so naïve, and yet so cock-sure of his success, that the Doctor was impatient: "Tom," he piped, "I tell you, they're too strong to bluff and too many to buy. You can't make it."

The younger man shut one eye, knocked with his tongue on the roof of his mouth, and then said as he looked insolently into the Doctor's face:

"Well, to begin--what's your price?"

The Doctor flushed; his loose skin twitched around his nostrils, and he gripped his chair arms. He did not answer for nearly a minute, during which the Judge tilted back in his chair beside the desk and looked at the elder man with some show of curiosity, if not of interest.

"My price," sneered the Doctor, "is a little mite low to-day. It's a pelt--a hound pup's pelt and you are going to furnish it, if you'll stop strutting long enough for me to skin you!"

The two men glared at each other. Then Van Dorn, regaining his poise, answered: "Well, sir, I'm going to win--no matter how--I'm going to win. I've sat up with this situation every night for six months--Oh, for a year. I know it backwards and forwards, and you can't trip me any place along the line. I've counted you out." He went on smiling:

"What have I done that is not absolutely legal? This is a government of law, Doctor--not of hysteria. The trouble with you," the Judge settled down to an upright position in his chair, "is that you're an old maid. You're so--so" he drawled the "so" insolently, "damn nice. You're an old maid, and you come from a family of old maids. I warrant your grandmother and her mother before her were old maids. There hasn't been a man in your family for five generations." The Doctor rose, Van Dorn went on arrogantly, "Doctor James Nesbit, I'm not afraid of you. And I'll tell you this: If you make a fight on me in this contest, when I'm elected, we'll see if there isn't one less corrupt boss in this state and if Greeley County can't contribute a pompadour to the rogues' gallery and a tenor voice to the penitentiary choir."

During the harangue of the Judge, the Doctor's full lips had begun to twitch in a smile, and his eyes to twinkle. Then he chirped gaily:

"Heap o' steam for the size of the load and weight of your biler, Tom. Better hoop 'em up!"

And with a laugh, shaking his little round stomach, he toddled out of the room into the corridor, and began whistling the tune that tells what will happen when Johnny comes marching home.

So the Doctor whistled about his afternoon's work and did not realize that the whistling was a form of nervousness.

That evening the Doctor and Laura began to read their Browning where they had left off the night before. They were in the midst of "Paracelsus," when the father looked up and said:

"Laura, you know I'm going to fight Tom Van Dorn for another term as district judge?"

"Why, of course you should, father--I didn't expect he'd ask it again!" said the daughter.

"We had a row this afternoon--a miserable, bickering row. He got on his hind legs and snarled and snapped at me, and made me mad, I guess. So I got to thinking why I should be against him, and it came to me that a man who had violated the decencies as he has and whose decisions for the old spider have been so raw, shouldn't be judge in this district. Lord, what will young fellows think if we stand for him! So I have kind of worked myself up," the Doctor smiled deprecatingly, "to a place where I seem to have a sacred duty in the matter of licking him for the sake of general decency. Anyway," he concluded in his high falsetto, "old Browning's diver, here, fits me. He goes down a pauper and, with his pearl, comes up a prince."

"Festus," cried the Doctor, waving the book, "I plunge."

Thus through the pique of pride, and through the sting of scorn, a force of righteousness came into the world of Harvey. For our miracles of human progress are not always done with prunes and prisms. The truth does not come to men always, nor even, generally, as they are gazing in joyful admiration at the good and the beautiful. Sudden conversions of men to good causes are rare, and often unstable and sometimes worthless. The good Lord would find much of the best work of the world undone if he waited until men guided by purely altruistic motives and inspired by new impulses to righteousness, did it. The world's work is done by ladies and gentlemen who, for the most part, are largely clay, working in the clay, for clay rewards, with just enough of the divine impulse moving them to keep their faces turned forward and not back.

Public opinion in the Amen Corner, voiced by Mr. Brotherton, spoke for Harvey and said: "Well, say--what do you think of Old Linen Pants bucking the whole courthouse just to get the hide of Judge Van Dora? Did you ever see such a thing in your whole life?" emphasizing the word "whole" with fine effect.

Mr. Brotherton sat at his desk in the rear of his store, contemplating the splendor of his possessions. Gradually the rear of the shop had been creeping toward the alley. It was filled with books, stationery, cigars and smoker's supplies. The cigars and smoker's supplies were crowded to a little alcove near the Amen Corner, and the books--school books, pirated editions of the standard authors, fancy editions of the classics, new books copyrighted and gorgeously bound in the fashion of the hour, were displayed prominently. Great posters adorned the vacant spaces on the walls, and posters and enlarged magazine covers adorned the bulletin boards in front of the store. Piles of magazines towered on the front counters--and upon the whole, Mr. Brotherton's place presented a fairly correct imitation of the literary tendencies of the period in America just before the Spanish war.

Amos Adams came in, with his old body bent, his hands behind him, his shapeless coat hanging loosely from his stooped shoulders, his little tri-colored button of the Loyal Legion in his coat lapel, being the only speck of color in his graying figure. He peered at Mr. Brotherton over his spectacles and said: "George--I'd like to look at Emerson's addresses--the Phi Beta Kappa Address particularly." He nosed up to the shelves and went peering along the books in sets. "Help yourself, Dad, help yourself--Glad you like Emerson--elegant piece of goods; wrapped one up last week and took it home myself--elegant piece of goods."

"Yes," mused the reader, "here is what I want--I had a talk with Emerson last night. He's against the war; not that he is for Spain, of course, but Huxley," added Amos, as he turned the pages of his book, "rather thinks we should fight--believes war lies along the path of greatest resistance, and will lead to our greater destiny sooner." The old man sighed, and continued: "Poor Lincoln--I couldn't get him last night: they say he and Garrison were having a great row about the situation."

The elder stroked his ragged beard meditatively. Finally he said: "George--did you ever hear our Kenyon play?"

The big man nodded and went on with his work. "Well, sir," the elder reflected: "Now, it's queer about Kenyon. He's getting to be a wonder. I don't know--it all puzzles me." He rose, put back the book on its shelf. "Sometimes I believe I'm a fool--and sometimes things like this bother me. They say they are training Kenyon--on the other side! Of course he just has what music Laura and Mrs. Nesbit could give him; yet the other day, he got hold of a piano score of Schubert's Symphony in B flat and while he can't play it, he just sits and cries over it--it means so much to the little fellow."

The gray head wagged and the clear, old, blue eyes looked out through the steel-rimmed glasses and he sighed: "He is going ahead, making up the most wonderful music--it seems to me, and writing it down when he can't play it--writing the whole score for it--and they tell me--" he explained deprecatingly, "my friends on the other side, that the child will make a name for himself." He paused and asked: "George--you're a hardheaded man--what do you think of it? You don't think I'm crazy, do you, George?"

The younger man glanced up, caught the clear, kindly eye of Amos Adams looking questioningly down.

"Dad," said Mr. Brotherton, hammering his fat fist on the desk, "'there's more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio'--well say, man--that's Shakespeare. We sell more Shakespeares than all the other poets combined. Fine business, this Shakespeare. And when a man holds the lead in the trade as this Shakespeare has done ever since I went into the Red Line poets back in the eighties--I'm pretty nearly going to stay by him. And when he says, 'Don't be too damn sure you know it all--' or words to that effect--and holds the trade saying it--well, say, man--your spook friends are all right with me, only say," Mr. Brotherton shuddered, "I'd die if one came gliding up to me and asked for a chew of my eating tobacco--the way they do with you!"

"Well," smiled Amos Adams, "much obliged to you, George--I just wanted your ideas. Laura Van Dorn has sent Kenyon's last piece back to Boston to see if by any chance he couldn't unconsciously have taken it from something or some one. She says it's wonderful--but, of course," the old man scratched his chin, "Laura and Bedelia Nesbit are just as likely to be fooled in music as I am with my controls." Then the subject drifted into politics--the local politics of the town, the Van Dorn-Nesbit contest.

And at the end of their discussion Amos rubbed his bony, lean, hard, old hands, and looked away through the books and the brick wall and the whole row of buildings before him into the future and smiled. "I wonder--I wonder if the country ever will come to see the economic and social and political meaning of this politics that we have now--this politics that the poor man gets through a beer keg the night before election, and that the rich man buys with his 'barl.'"

He shook his head. "You'll see it--you and Grant--but it will be long after my time." Amos lifted up his old face and cried: "I know there is another day coming--a better day. For this one is unworthy of us. We are better than this--at heart! We have in us the blood of the fathers, and their high visions too. And they did not put their lives into this nation for this--for this cruel tangle of injustice that we show the world to-day. Some day--some day," Amos Adams lifted up his face and cried: "I don't know! May be my guides are wrong but my own heart tells me that some day we shall cease feeding with the swine and return to the house of our father! For we are of royal blood, George--of royal blood!"

"Why, hello, Morty," cut in Mr. Brotherton. "Come right in and listen to the seer--genuine Hebrew prophet here--got a familiar spirit, and says Babylon is falling."

"Well, Uncle Amos," said Morty Sands, "let her fall!" Old Amos smiled and after Morty had turned the talk from falling Babylon to Laura Van Dorn's kindergarten, Amos being reminded by Laura of Kenyon and his music, unfolded his theory of the occult source of the child's musical talent, and invited George and Morty to church to hear Kenyon play.

So when Sunday came, with it came full knowledge that most members of the congregation were to hear Kenyon Adams' new composition, which had been rather widely advertised by his friends; and Rev. John Dexter, feeling himself a fifth wheel, discarded his sermon and in humility and contrition submitted some extemporaneous remarks on the passion for humanity of "Christ and him crucified."

A little boy was Kenyon Adams--a slim, great-eyed, serious faced, little boy in an Eton jacket and knickerbockers--not so much larger than his violin that he carried under his arm. His little hand shook, but Grant caught his gaze and with a tender, earnest reassurance put sinews into the small arms, and stilled an unsteady jaw. The organ was playing the prelude, when the little hand with the bow went out in a wide, sure, strong curve, and when the bow touched the strings, they sang from a soul depth that no child's experience could know.

It was the first public rendering of the now famous Adagio in C minor, known sometimes as "The Prairie Wind," or perhaps better as the Intermezzo between the second and third acts of the opera that made Kenyon Adams' fame in Europe before he was twenty. It has been changed but little since that first hearing there in John Dexter's church with the Sands Memorial organ, built in the early eighties for Elizabeth Page Sands, mother of Anne of that tribe. The composition is simplicity itself--save for the mystical questioning that runs through it in the sustained sevenths--a theme which Captain Morton said always reminded him of a meadow lark's evening song, but which repeats itself over and over plaintively and sadly as the stately music swells to its crescendo and dies with that unanswered cry of heartbreak echoing in the last faint notes of the closing bar.

When it was finished, those who had ears heard and understood and those who had not said, "Well," and waited for public opinion, unless they were fools, in which case they said they would have preferred something to whistle. But because the thing impressed itself upon hundreds of hearts that hour, many in the congregation came forward to greet the child.

Among these, was a tall, stately young woman in pure white with a rose upon her hat so deeply red that it seemed guilty of a shame. But her lips were as red as the red of the rose and her eyes glistened and her face was wrought upon by a great storm in her heart. Behind her walked a proud gentleman, a lordly gentleman who elbowed his way through the throng as one who touches the unclean. The pale child stood by Grant Adams as they came. Kenyon did not see the beautiful woman; the child's eyes were upon the man. He knew the man; Lila had poured out her soul to the boy about the man and in his child's heart he feared and abhorred the man for he knew not what. The man and woman kept coming closer. They were abreast as they stepped into the pulpit where the child stood. By his own music, his soul had been stirred and riven and he was nervous and excited. As the woman beside the man stretched out her arms, with her face tense from some inner turmoil, the child saw only the proud man beside her and shrank back with a wild cry and hid in his father's breast. The eyes of Grant and Margaret met, but the child only cuddled into the broad breast before him and wept, crying, "No--no--no--"

Then the proud man turned back, spurned but not knowing it, and the beautiful woman with red shame in her soul followed him with downcast face. In the church porch she lifted up her face as she said with her fair, false mouth: "Tom, isn't it funny how those kind of people sometimes have talent--just like the lower animals seem to have intelligence. Dear me, but that child's music has upset me!"

The man's heart was full of pride and hate and the woman's heart was full of pride and jealousy. Still the air was sweet for them, the birds sang for them, and the sun shone tenderly upon them. They even laughed, as they went their high Jovian way, at the vanities of the world on its lower plane. But their very laughter was the crackling of thorns under a pot wherein their hearts were burning.

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Chapter XXVII

IN WHICH WE SEE SOMETHING COME INTO THIS STORY OUTSIDE OF THE MATERIAL WORLD

"Life," writes Mr. Left, using the pseudonym of the Peachblow philosopher, "disheartens us because we expect the wrong things of it. We expect material rewards for spiritual virtues, material punishments for spiritual transgressions; when even in the material world, material rewards and punishments do not always follow the acts which seem to require them. Yet the only sure thing in the world is that our spiritual lapses bring spiritual punishments, and our spiritual virtues have their spiritual rewards."

Now these observations of Mr. Left might well be taken for the thesis of this story. Tom Van Dorn's spiritual transgressions had no material punishments and the good that was in Grant Adams had no material reward. Yet the spiritual laws which they obeyed or violated were inexorable in their rewards and punishments.

Once there entered the life of Judge Van Dorn, from the outside, the play of purely spiritual forces, which looped him up and tripped him in another man's game, and Tom, poor fellow, may have thought that it was a special Providence around with a warrant looking after him. Now this statement hangs on one "if,"--if you can call Nate Perry a man! "One generation passeth and another cometh on," saith the Preacher. Perhaps it has occurred to the reader that the love affairs of this book are becoming exceedingly middle aged; some have only the dying glow of early reminiscence. But here comes one that is as young as spring flowers; that is--if Nate Perry is a man, and is entitled to a love affair at all. Let's take a look at him: long legged, lean faced, keen eyed, razor bodied, just back from College where he has studied mining engineering. He is a pick and shovel miner in the Wahoo Fuel Company's mine, getting the practical end of the business. For he is heir apparent of stuttering Kyle Perry, who has holdings in the mines. Young Nate's voice rasps like the whine of a saw and he has no illusions about the stuff the world is made of. For him life is atoms flopping about in the ether in an entirely consistent and satisfactory manner. Things spiritual don't bother him. And yet it was in working out a spiritual equation in Nate Perry's life that Providence tipped over Tom Van Dorn, in his race for Judgeship.

And now let us put Mr. Brotherton on the stand:

"Showers," exclaims Mr. Brotherton, "showers for Nate and Anne,--why, only yesterday I sent him and Grant Adams over to Mrs. Herdicker's to borrow her pile-driver, and spanked him for canning a dog, and it hasn't been more'n a week since I gave Anne a rattle when her father brought her down town the day after the funeral, as he was looking over Wright & Perry's clerks for the fourth Mrs. Sands--and here's showers! Well, say, isn't time that blue streak! Showers! Say, I saw Tom Van Dorn's little Lila in the store this morning--isn't she the beauty--bluest eyes, and the sweetest, saddest, dearest little face--and say, man--I do believe Tom's kind of figuring up what he missed along that line. He tried to talk to her this morning, but she looked at him with those blue eyes and shrank away. Doc Jim bought her a doll and a train of cars. That was just this morning, and well, say--I wouldn't be surprised if when I come down and unlock the store to-morrow morning, some one will be telling me she's having showers. Isn't time that old hot-foot?"

"Showers--kitchen showers and linen showers, and silver showers for little Anne--little Anne with the wide, serious eyes, 'the home of silent prayer';--well, say, do you know who said that? It was Tennyson. Nice, tasty piece of goods--that man Tennyson. I've handled him in padded leather covers; fancy gilt cloth, plain boards, deckle-edges, wide margins, hand-made paper, and in thirty-nine cent paper--and he is a neat, nifty piece of goods in all of them--always easy to move and no come backs." After this pean to the poet, Mr. Brotherton turned again to his meditations, "Little Anne--Why, it's just last week or such a matter I wrapped up Mother Goose for her--just the other day she came in when they sent her off to school, and I gave her a diary--and now it's showers--" He shook his great head, "Well, say--I'm getting on."

And while Mr. Brotherton mused the fire burned--the fire of youth that glowed in the heart of Nathan Perry. When he wandered back from college no one in particular had noticed him. But Anne Sands was no one in particular. And as no one in particular was looking after Anne and her affairs, as a girl in her teens she had focused her heart upon the gangling youth, and there grew into life one of those matter-of-fact, unromantic love affairs that encompass the whole heart. For they are as commonplace as light and air and are equally vital. Because their course is smooth, such affairs seem shallow. But let unhappy circumstance break the even surface, and behold, from their depths comes all the beauty of a great force diverted, all the anguish of a great passion curbed and thwarted.

In this democratic age, when deep emotional experiences are not the privilege of the few, but the lot of many, heart break is almost commonplace. We do not notice it as it may have been noted in those chivalric days when only the few had the finer sensibilities that may make great mental suffering possible. So here in the commonplace town of Harvey, in their commonplace homes, amid their commonplace friends and relatives, two commonplace hearts were aching all unsuspected by a commonplace world. And it happened thus:

Anne Sands had opinions about the renomination and reëlection of Judge Van Dorn. For Judge Van Dorn's divorce and remarriage had offended Anne Sands.

On the other hand, to Nathan Perry the aspirations of Judge Van Dorn meant nothing but the ambition of a politician in politics. So when Anne and he had fallen into the inevitable discussion of the Van Dorn case, as a part of an afternoon's talk, indignation flashed upon indifference and the girl saw, or thought she saw such a defect in the character of her lover that, being what she was, she had to protest, and he being what he was--he was hurt to the heart. Both lovers spoke plainly. The thing sounded like a quarrel--their first; and coming from the Sands house into the summer afternoon, Nate Perry decided to go to Brotherton's. He reflected as he walked that Mr. Brotherton's remarks on "showers," which had come to Anne and Nate, might possibly be premature. And the reflection was immensely disquieting.

A practical youth was Nathan Perry, with a mechanical instinct that gloried in adjustment. He loved to tinker and potter and patch things up. Now something was wrong with the gearing of his heart action. His theory was that Anne was for the moment crazy. He could see nothing to get excited about over the renomination and election of Judge Van Dorn. The men in the mine where the youth was working as a miner hated Van Dorn, the people seemed to distrust him as a man more or less, but if he controlled the nominating convention that ended it with Nathan Perry. The Judge's family affairs were in no way related to the nomination, as the youth saw the case. Yet they were affecting the cams and cogs and pulleys of young Mr. Perry's love affairs, and he felt the matter must be repaired, and put in running order. For he knew that love affair was the mainspring of his life. And the mechanic in him--the Yankee that talked in his rasping, high-keyed tenor voice, that shone from his thin, lean face, and cadaverous body, the Yankee in him, the dreaming, sentimental Yankee, half poet and half tinker, fell upon the problem with unbending will and open mind.

So it came to pass that there entered into the affairs of Judge Thomas Van Dorn, an element upon which he did not calculate. For he was dealing only with the material elements of a material universe!

When Nathan Perry came to Brotherton's he sat down in the midst of a discussion of the Judgeship that began in rather etherial terms. For Doctor Nesbit was saying:

"Amos, I've got you cornered if you consider the visible universe. She works like a watch; she's as predestined as a corn sheller. But let me tell you something--she isn't all visible. There's something back of matter--there's another side to the shield. I know mighty well there's a time when my medicine won't help sick folks--and yet they get well. I've seen a great love flame up in a man's heart or a woman's heart or a child's in a bed of torture, and when medicine wouldn't take hold I've seen love burn through the wall between the worlds, and I have seen help come just as sure as you see the Harvey Hook and Ladder Company coming rattling down Market Street! Funny old world--funny old world--seventy rides around the sun--and then the fireworks." After puffing away to revive his pipe he said: "I sort of got into this way of thinking recently going over this judgeship fight." He smoked meditatively then broke out, "Lord, Lord, what an iron-clad, hog-tight, rock-ribbed, copper-riveted material proposition it is that Tom is putting up. He's bound self-interest with self-interest everywhere. He and Joe Calvin have roped old man Sands in, and every material interest in this whole district is tied up in the Van Dorn candidacy. I'm a child in a cyclone in this fight. The self-interest of the county candidates, of all the deputies who hope two years from now to be county candidates, and all their friends, every straw boss at the shops, in the smelters, in the mines--and all the men who are near them and want to be straw bosses, every merchant who is caught in the old spider's web with a ninety-day note; every street-car conductor, every employee of the light company, every man at the waterworks plant, every man at the gas plant, the telephone linemen--every human being that dances in the great woof of this little spider's web feels the pull of devilish material power."

Amos Adams threw back his grizzled head in a laugh that failed to vocalize. "Well, Jim, according to your account you're liable to get burned and singed and disfigured until you're as useless in politics as this old Amos Adams--the spook chaser!"

There was no bitterness in Amos Adams's voice. "It's all right, Jim--I have no complaint to make against life. Forty years ago Dan Sands got the first girl I ever loved. I went to war; he paid his bounty and married the girl. That was a long time ago. I often think of the girl--it's no lack of faith to Mary. And I have the memory of the war--of that Day at Peach Tree Creek with all the wonderful exulting joy of that charge and what God gave me to do. This button," he put his thumb under the Loyal Legion emblem in his warped coat lapel, "this button is more fragrant than any flower on earth to my heart. Dan Sands has had five wives; he missed the hardship of the war. He has a son by her. Jim," said Amos Adams as he opened his eyes, "if you knew how it has cut into my heart year by year to see the beautiful soul that Hester Haley gave to Morty decay under the blight of his father--but you can't." He sighed. "Yet there is still her soul in him--gentle, kind, trying to do the right thing--but tied and hobbled by life with his father. Grant may be wrong, Doctor," cried the father, raising his hand excitedly, "he may be crazy, and I know they laugh at him up town here--for a fool and the son of a fool; he certainly doesn't know how he is going to do all the things he dreams of doing--but that is not the point. The important thing is that he is having his dream! For by the Eternal, Jim Nesbit, I'd rather feel that my boy was even a small part of the life force of his planet pushing forward--I'd rather be the father of that boy--I'd rather be old Amos Adams the spook chaser--than Dan Sands with his million. I've been happier, Jim, with the memory of my Mary than he with his five wives. I'd rather be on the point of the drill of life and mangled there, than to have my soul rot in greed."

The Doctor puffed on his pipe. "Well, Amos," he returned quietly, "I suppose if a man wants to get all messed up as one of the points of the drill of life, as you call it--it's easy enough to find a place for the sacrifice. I admire Grant; but someway," his falsetto broke out, "I have thought there was a little something in the bread-and-butter proposition."

"A little, Doctor Jim--but not as much as you'd think!" answered Amos.

"Nevertheless in this fight here in Greeley County, I'm quietly lining up a few county delegates, and picking out a few trusty friends who will show up at the caucuses, and Grant has a handful of crazy Ikes that I am going to use in my business, and if we win it will be a practical proposition--my head against Tom's."

The Doctor rose. Amos Adams stopped him with "Don't be too sure of that, Jim; I got a writing from Mr. Left last night and he says--"

"Hold on, Amos--hold on," squeaked the Doctor's falsetto; "until Mr. Left is registered in the Third Ward--we won't bother with him until after the convention."

The Doctor left the place smiling at Amos and glancing casually at young Mr. Perry. The dissertation had been a hard strain on the practical mind of young Mr. Perry, and while he was fumbling his way through the mazes of what he had heard, Amos Adams left the shop and another practical man very much after Nathan Perry's own heart came in. Daniel Sands had no cosmic problems on his mind with which to befuddle young Perry. Daniel Sands was a seedy little old man of nearly three score years and ten; his dull, fishy eyes framed in red lids looked shiftily at one as though he was forever preoccupied in casting up sums in interest. His skin was splotched and dirty, a kind of scale seemed to be growing over it, and his long, thin nose stuck out of his shaggy, ill-kept whiskers like a sharp snout, attenuated by rooting in money. When he smiled, which was rarely, the false quality of his smile seemed expressed by his false teeth that were forever falling out of place when he loosed his facial muscles. He walked rather stealthily back to the desk where the proprietor of the shop was working; but he spoke loud enough for Nate Perry's practical ear to comprehend the elder man's mission.

"George, I've got to be out of town for the next ten days, and the county convention will meet when I'm gone." He stopped, and cleared his throat. Mr. Brotherton knew what was coming. "I just called to say that we're expecting you to do all you can for Tom." He paused. Mr. Brotherton was about to reply when the old man smiled his false smile and added:

"Of course, we can't afford to let our good Doctor's family affairs interfere with business. And George," he concluded, "just tell the boys to put Morty on in my place. And George, you kind of sit by Morty, and see that he gets his vote in right. Morty's a good boy, George--but he someway doesn't get interested in things as I like to see him. He'll be all right if you'll just fix his ballot in the convention and see that he votes it." He blinked his dull, red eyes at the book seller and dropped his voice.

"I noticed your paper as I passed the note counter just now; some of it will be due while I'm gone; I'll tell 'em to renew it if you want it." He smiled again, and Mr. Brotherton answered, "Very well--I'll see that Morty votes right, Mr. Sands," and solemnly went back to his ledger. And thus the practical mind of Nathan Perry had its first practical lesson in practical politics--a lesson which soon afterwards produced highly practical results.

Up and down Market Street tiptoed Daniel Sands that day, tightening his web of business and politics. Busily he fluttered over the web, his water pipes, his gas pipes, his electric wires. The pathway to the trade of the miners and the men in the shops and smelters lay through his door. Material prosperity for every merchant and every clerk in Market Street lay in the paunch of the old spider, and he could spin it out or draw it in as he chose. It was not usual for him to appear on Market Street. Dr. Nesbit had always been his vicegerent. And often it had pleased the Doctor to pretend that he was seeking their aid as friends and getting it solely upon the high grounds of friendship.

But as the Doctor stood by his office window that day and saw the old spider dancing up and down the web, Dr. Nesbit knew the truth--and the truth was wormwood in his mouth--that he had been only an errand boy between greed in the bank and self-interest in the stores. In a flash, a merciless, cynical flash, he looked into his life in the capital, and there he saw with sickening distinctness that with all his power as a boss, with his control over Senators and Governors and courts and legislatures, he was still the errand boy--that he reigned as boss only because he could be trusted by those who controlled the great aggregations of capital in the state--the railroads, the insurance companies, the brewers, the public service corporations. In the street below walked a flashy youth who went in and out of the saloons in obvious pride of being. His complacent smile, his evident glory in himself, made Dr. Nesbit turn away and shut his eyes in shame. He had loathed the youth as a person unspeakable. Yet the youth also was a messenger--the errand boy of vice in South Harvey who doubtless thought himself a person of great power and consequence. And the difference between an errand boy of greed and the errand boy of vice was not sufficient to revive the Doctor's spirits. So the Doctor, sadly sobered, left the window. The gay enthusiasm of the diver plunging for the pearl was gone from the depressed little white clad figure. He was finding his pearl a burden rather than a joy.

That evening Morty Sands, resplendent in purple and fine linen--the purple being a gorgeous necktie, and the fine linen a most sumptuous tailor-made shirt waist above a pair of white broadcloth trousers and silk hose, and under a fifty dollar Panama hat, tripped into the Brotherton store for his weekly armload of reading and tobacco.

"Morty," said Mr. Brotherton, after the young man had picked out the latest word in literature and nicotine, "your father was in here to-day with instructions for me to chaperone you through the county convention Saturday,--you'll be on the delegation."

The young man blinked good naturedly. "I haven't got the intellect to go through with it, George."

"Oh, yes, you have, Morty," returned Mr. Brotherton, expansively. "The Governor wants me to be sure you vote for Van Dorn--that's about all there is in the convention. Old Linen Pants is to name the delegates to the State and congressional conventions--they're trying to let the old man down easy--not to beat him out of his State and congressional leadership."

The young man thought for a moment then smiled up into the big moon-face of Brotherton--"All right, Georgie, I suppose I'll have to cast my unfettered vote for Van Dorn, though as a sporting proposition my sympathies are with the other side."

"Well, say--you orter 'a' heard a talk I heard Doc Nesbit give this afternoon. That old sinner will be shouting on the mourner's bench soon--if he doesn't check up."

Morty looked up from his magazine to say: "George--it's Laura. A man couldn't go with her through all she's gone through without being more of a man for it. When I took a turn in the mining business last spring I found that the people down in South Harvey just naturally love her to death. They'll do more or less for Grant Adams. He's getting the men organized and they look up to him in a way. But they get right down on their marrow bones and love Laura."

Morty smiled reflectively: "I kind of got the habit myself once--and I seem someway never to have got over it--much! But, she won't even look my way. She takes my money--for her kindergarten. But that is all. She won't let me take her home in my trap, nor let me buy her lunch--why she pays more attention to Grant Adams with his steel claw than to my strong right arm! About all she lets me do is distribute flower seeds. George," he concluded ruefully, "I've toted around enough touch-me-nots and coxcomb seeds this spring for that girl to paint South Harvey ringed, streaked and striped."

There the conversation switched to Captain Morton's stock company, and the endeavor to get the Household Horse on the market. The young man listened and smiled, was interested, as George Brotherton intended he should be. But Morty went out saying that he had no money but his allowance--which was six months overdrawn--and there the matter rested.

In a few days, a free people arose and nominated their delegates to the Greeley County convention and the night before the event excitement in Harvey was intense. There could be no doubt as to the state of public sentiment. It was against Tom Van Dorn. But on the other hand, no one seriously expected to defeat him. For every one knew that he controlled the organization--even against the boss. Yet vaguely the people hoped that their institutions would in some way fail those who controlled, and would thus register public sentiment. But the night the delegates were elected, it seemed apparent that Van Dorn had won. Yet both sides claimed the victory. And among others of the free people elected to the Convention to cast a free vote for Judge Van Dorn, was Nathan Perry. He was put on the delegation to look after his father's interests. Van Dorn was a practical man, Kyle Perry was a practical man and they knew Nate Perry was a practical youth. But while Tom Van Dorn slept upon the assurance of victory, Nate Perry was perturbed.

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XXVIII. WHEREIN MORTY SANDS MAKES A FEW SENSIBLE REMARKS IN PUBLIC

When Mortimer Sands came down town Saturday morning, two hours before the convention met, he found the courthouse yard black with prospective delegates and also he found that the Judge's friends were in a majority in the crowd. So evident was their ascendancy that the Nesbit forces had conceded to the Judge the right to organize the convention. At eleven o'clock the crowd, merchants, clerks, professional men, working men in their Sunday clothes, delegates from the surrounding country towns, and farmers--a throng of three hundred men, began to crowd into the hot "Opera House." So young Mr. Sands, with his finger in a book to keep his place, followed the crowd to the hall, and took his seat with the Fourth Ward delegation. Having done this he considered that his full duty to God and man had been performed. He found Nathan Perry sitting beside him and said:

"Well, Nate, here's where Anne's great heart breaks--I suppose?"

Nathan nodded and asked: "I presume it's all over but the shouting."

"All over," answered the elder young man as he dived into his book. As he read he realized that the convention had chosen Captain Morton--a partisan of the Judge--for chairman. The hot, stifling air of the room was thick with the smoke of cheap tobacco. Morty Sands grew nervous and irritated during the preliminary motions of the organization. Even as a sporting event the odds on Van Dorn were too heavy to promote excitement. He went out for a breath of air. When he reëntered Judge Van Dorn was making the opening speech of the convention. It was a fervid effort; the Spanish war was then in progress so the speech was full of allusions to what the Judge was pleased to call "libertah" and "our common countrah" and our sacred "dutah" to "humanitah." Naturally the delegates who were for the Judge's renomination displayed much enthusiasm, and it was a noisy moment. When the Judge closed his remarks--tearfully of course--and took his seat as chairman of the Fourth Ward delegation, which was supposed to be for him unanimously as it was his home ward, Morty noticed that while the Judge sat grand and austere in the aisle seat with his eyes partly closed as one who is recovering from a great mental effort, his half-closed eyes were following Mr. Joseph Calvin, who was buzzing about the room distributing among the delegates meal tickets and saloon checks good for food for man and beast at the various establishments of public entertainment.

Morty learned from George Brotherton that as the county officers were to be renominated without opposition, and as the platform had been agreed to the day before, and as the county central committeemen had been chosen the night before at the caucuses, the convention was to be a short horse soon curried. Of course, Captain Morton as permanent chairman made a speech--with suitable eulogies to the boys who wore the blue. It was the speech the convention had heard many times before, but always enjoyed--and as he closed he asked rather grandly, "and now what is the further pleasure of the convention?"

It was Mr. Calvin's pleasure, as expressed in a motion, that the secretary be instructed to cast the vote of the convention for the renomination of the entire county ticket, and further that Senator James Nesbit, in view of his leadership of the party in the State, be requested to name the delegates to the State and congressional conventions and that Judge Thomas Van Dorn--cheers led by Dick Bowman--Thomas Van Dorn be requested to name the delegates to the judicial district convention. Cheers and many cries of no, no, no, greeted the Calvin motion. It was seconded and stated by the chair and again cheered and roared at. Dr. Nesbit rose, and in his mild, treble voice protested against the naming of the delegates to the State and congressional and judicial conventions. He said that while it had been the practice in the past, he was of the opinion that the time had come to let the Convention itself choose by wards and precincts and townships its delegates to these conventions. He said further that as for the State and congressional delegates, they couldn't pick a delegation of twenty men in the room if they tried, that would not contain a majority which he could work with. At which there was cheering from the anti-Van Dorn crowd--but it was clear that they were in the minority. No further discussion seemed to be expected and the Captain was about to put the motion, when from among the delegates from South Harvey there arose the red poll of Grant Adams. From the Harvey delegates he met the glare of distrust due from any crowd of merchants and clerks to any labor agitator. Morty could see from the face of Dr. Nesbit that he was surprised. Judge Van Dorn, who sat near young Sands, looked mildly interested. After he was recognized, Grant in an impassioned voice began to talk of the inherent right of the Nesbit motion, providing that each precinct or ward delegation could name its own delegates to the State, congressional and judicial conventions.

If the motion prevailed, Judge Van Dorn would have a divided delegation from Greeley county to the judicial convention, as some of the precincts and wards were against him, though a majority of the united convention was for him. Grant Adams, swinging his iron claw, was explaining this to the convention. He was appealing passionately for the right of proportional representation; holding that the minority had rights of representation that the majority should not deny.

Judge Van Dorn, without rising, had sneered across the room in a snarling voice: "Ah, you socialist!" Once he had growled: "None of your red mouthed ranting here!" Finally, as it was evident that Grant's remarks were interesting the workmen on the delegations, Van Dorn, still seated, called out:

"Here, you--what right have you to address this convention?"

"I am a regularly accredited delegate from South Harvey, holding the proxy--"

He got no further.

The Van Dorn delegates roared, "Put him out. No proxies go," and began hooting and jeering. It was obvious that Van Dorn had the crowd with him. He let them roar at Grant, who stood quietly, demanding from time to time that the chair should restore order. Captain Morton hammered the table with his gavel, but the Van Dorn crowd continued to hoot and howl. Finally Judge Van Dorn rose and with great elaborateness of parliamentary form addressed the chair asking to be permitted to ask his friend with a proxy one question.

The two men faced each other savagely, like characters symbolizing forces in a play; complaisance and discontent. Behind Grant was the unrest and upheaval of a class coming into consciousness and tremendously dynamic, while Van Dorn stood for those who had won their fight and were static and self-satisfied. He twirled his mustache. Grant raised his steel claw as if to strike; Van Dorn spoke, and in a barking, vicious, raucous tone intended to annihilate his adversary, asked:

"Will you tell this convention in the interest of fairness, what, if any, personal and private motives you have in helping Dr. Nesbit inject a family quarrel into public matters in this county?"

A moment's silence greeted the lawyer's insolently framed question. Mortimer Sands saw Dr. Nesbit go white, start to rise, and sit down, and saw dawning on the face of Grant Adams the realization of what the question meant. But before he could speak the mob broke loose; hisses, cheers and the roar of partisan and opposition filled the room. Grant Adams tried to speak; but no one would hear him. He started down the aisle toward Van Dorn, his red hair flashing like a banner of wrath, menacing the Judge with the steel claw upraised. Dr. Nesbit stopped Grant. The insult had been so covert, so cowardly, that only in resenting its implication would there be scandal.

Mortimer Sands closed his book. He saw Judge Van Dorn laugh, and heard him say to George Brotherton who sat beside young Sands:

"I plugged that damn pie-face!"

Nathan Perry, the practical young man sitting in the Fourth ward delegation, heard the Judge and nudged Morty Sands. Morty Sands's sporting blood rose in him. "The pup," he whispered to Nate. "He's taking a shot at Laura."

The crowd gradually grew calm. There being no further discussion, Captain Morton put the motion of Joseph Calvin to let the majority of the convention name all delegates to the superior conventions. The roar of ayes overwhelmed the blat of noes. It was clear that the Calvin motion had carried. The Doctor was defeated. But before the chair announced the vote the pompadour of the little man rose quickly as he stood in the middle aisle and asked in his piping treble for a vote by wards and precincts.

In the moment of silence that followed the Doctor's suggestion, Nathan Perry's face, which gradually had been growing stony and hard, cracked in a mean smile as he leaned over to Morty and whispered:

"Morty, can you stand for that--that damned hound's snap at Laura Van? By grabby I can't--I won't!"

"Well, let's raise hell, Nate--I'm with you. I owe him nothing," said the guileless and amiable Morty.

Judge Van Dorn rose grandly and with great elegance of diction agreed with the Doctor's "excellent suggestion." So tickets were passed about containing the words yes and no, and hats were passed down delegation lines and the delegates put the ballots in the hats and the chairmen of delegations appointed tellers and so the ballots were counted. When the Fourth ward balloting was finished, Judge Van Dorn looked puzzled. He was three votes short of unanimity. His vanity was pricked. He believed he had a solid delegation and proposed to have it. When in the roll call the Fourth ward delegation was reached (it was the fourth precinct on the secretary's roll) the Judge, as chairman of the Fourth warders, rose, blandly and complacently, and announced: "Ward Four casts twenty-five votes 'yes' and three votes 'no.' I demand a poll of the delegation."

George Brotherton rose when the clerk of the convention called the roll and voted a weak, husky 'no' and sat down sheepishly under the Judge's glare.

Down the list came the clerk reading the names of delegates. Finally he called "Mortimer Sands," and the young man rose, smiling and calm, and looking the Judge fairly in the eye cried, "I vote no!"

Then pandemonium broke loose. The convention was bedlam. The friends of the Judge were confounded. They did not know what it meant.

The clerk called Nathan Perry.

"No," he cried as he looked maliciously into the Judge's beady eyes.

Then there was no doubt. For the relations of Wright & Perry were so close to Daniel Sands that no one could mistake the meaning of young Perry's vote, and then had not the whole town read of the "showers" for Anne Sands? Those who opposed the Judge were whispering that the old spider had turned against the Judge. Men who were under obligations to the Traders' Bank were puzzled but not in doubt. There was a general buzzing among the delegations. The desertion of Mortimer Sands and Nathan Perry was one of those wholly unexpected events that sometimes make panics in politics. The Judge could see that in one or two cases delegations were balloting again. "Fifth ward," called the clerk.

"Fifth ward not ready," replied the chairman.

"Hancock township, Soldier precinct," called the clerk.

"Soldier precinct not ready," answered the chairman.

The next precinct cast its vote No, and the next precinct cast its vote 7 yes and 10 no and a poll was demanded and the vote was a tie. The power of the name of Sands in Greeley county was working like a yeast.

"Well, boys," whispered Mr. Brotherton to Morty as two townships were passed while they were reballoting, "Well, boys--you sure have played hell." He was mopping his red brow, and to a look of inquiry from Morty Mr. Brotherton explained: "You've beaten the Judge. They all think that it's your father's idea to knife him, and the foremen of the mines who are running these county delegations and the South Harvey contingent are changing their votes--that's how!"

In another instant Morty Sands was on his feet. He stood on a seat above the crowd, a slim, keen-faced, oldish figure. When he called upon the chairman a hush fell over the crowd. When he began to speak he could feel the eyes of the crowd boring into him. "I wish to state," he said hesitatingly, then his courage came, "that my vote against this resolution, was due entirely to the inferential endorsement of Judge Thomas Van Dorn," this time the anti-Van Dorn roar was overwhelming, deafening, "that the resolution contained."

Another roar, it seemed to the Judge as from a pit of beasts, greeted this period. "But I also wish to make it clear," continued the young man, "that in this position I am representing only my own views. I have not been instructed by my father how to cast this ballot. For you know as well as I how he would vote." The roar from the anti-Van Dorn crowd came back again, stronger than ever. The convention had put its own interpretation upon his words. They knew he was merely making it plainer that the old spider had caught Judge Van Dorn in the web, and for some reason was sucking out his vitals. Morty sat down with the sense of duty well done, and again Mr. Brotherton leaned over and whispered, "Well, you did a good job--you put the trimmings on right--hello, we're going to vote again." Again the young man jumped to his feet and cried amid the noise, which sank almost instantly as they saw who was trying to speak: "I tell you, gentlemen, that so far as I know my father is for Judge Van Dorn," but the crowd only laughed, and it was evident that they thought Morty was playing with them. As Morty Sands sat down Nathan Perry rose and in his high, strong, wire-edged tenor cried: "Men, I'm voting only myself. But when a man shows doghair as Judge Van Dorn showed it to this convention in that question to Grant Adams--all hell can't hold me to--" But the roar of the crowd drowned the close of the sentence. The mob knew nothing of the light that had dawned in Nathan Perry's heart. The crowd knew only that the son and the future son-in-law of the old spider had turned on Van Dorn, and that he was marked for slaughter so it proceeded with the butchering which gave it great personal felicity. Men howled their real convictions and Tom Van Dorn's universe tottered. He tried to speak, but was howled down.

"Vote--vote, vote," they cried. The Fourth ward balloted again and the vote stood "Yes, fifteen, no, twelve," and the proud face of the suave Judge Van Dorn turned white with rage, and the red scar flickered like lightning across his forehead. The voting could not proceed. For men were running about the room, and Joseph Calvin was hovering over the South Harvey delegation like a buzzard. Morty Sands suspected Calvin's mission. The young man rose and ran to Dr. Nesbit and whispered: "Doctor, Nate's got seven hundred dollars in the bank--see what Calvin is doing? I can get it up here in three minutes. Can you use it to help?"

The Doctor ran his hand over his graying pompadour and smiled and shook his head. In the din he leaned over and piped. "Touch not, taste not, handle not, Morty--I've sworn off. Teetotler," he laughed excitedly. Young Sands saw a bill flash in Mr. Calvin's hands and disappear in Dick Bowman's pockets.

"No law against it," chirped the Doctor, "except God Almighty's, and He has no jurisdiction in Judge Tom's district."

As they stood watching Calvin peddle his bills the convention saw what he was doing. A fear seized the decent men in the convention that all who voted for Van Dorn would be suspected of receiving bribes. The balloting proceeded. In five minutes the roll call was finished. Then before the result was announced George Brotherton was on his feet saying, "The Fourth ward desires to change her vote," and while Brotherton was announcing the complete desertion of the Fourth ward delegation, Judge Van Dorn left the hall. Men in mob are cruel and mad, and the pack howled at the vain man as he slunk through the crowd to the door.

After that, delegation after delegation changed its vote and before the result was announced Mr. Calvin withdrew his motion, and the spent convention only grunted its approval. Then it was that Mugs Bowman crowded into the room and handed Nathan Perry this note scrawled on brown butcher's paper in a hand he knew. "I have this moment learned that you are a delegate and must take a public stand. Don't let a word I have said influence you. I stand by you whatever you do. Use your own judgment; follow your conscience and 'with God be the rest.'" "A. S."

Nathan Perry folded the note, and as he put it in his vest pocket he felt the proud beat of his heart. Fifteen minutes later when the convention adjourned for noon, Nathan and Morty Sands ran plumb into Thomas Van Dorn, sitting in the back room of the bank, wet eyed and blubbering. The Judge was slumped over the big, shining table, his jaws trembling, his hands fumbling the ink stands and paper weights. His eyes were staring and nervous, and beside him a whiskey bottle and glass told their story. The man rose, holding the table, and shrieked:

"You damned little fice dog, you--" this to Morty, "you--you--" Morty dashed around the table toward the Judge, but before he could reach the man to strike, the Judge was moving his jaws impotently, and grasping the thin air. His mouth foamed as he fell and he lay, a shivering, white-eyed horror, upon the floor. The bank clerks lifted the figure to a leather couch, and some one summoned Doctor Nesbit.

The Doctor saw the whiskey bottle half emptied and saw the white faced, prostrate figure. The Doctor sent the clerks from the room as he worked with the unconscious man, and piped to Morty as he worked, "Nothing serious--heat--temper, whiskey--and vanity and vexation of spirit; 'vanity of vanities--all is vanity--saith the preacher.'" Morty and Nathan left the room as the man's eyes opened and the Doctor with a woman's tenderness brought the wretched, broken, shattered bundle of pride back to consciousness.

For years this became George Brotherton's favorite story. He first told it to Henry Fenn thus:

"Say, Henry, lemme tell you about old man Sands. He come in here the day after he got back from Chicago to wrestle with me for letting Morty vote against Tom. Well--say--I'm right here to tell you that was some do--all right, all right! You know he thought I got Morty and Nate to vote that way and the old spider came hopping in here like a granddaddy long-legs and the way he let out on your humble--well, say--say! Holler--you'd orto heard him holler! Just spat pizen--wow! and as for me who'd got the lad into the trouble--as for me," Mr. Brotherton paused, folded his hand over his expansive abdomen and sighed deeply, as one who recalls an experience too deep for language. "Well, say--I tried to tell him I didn't have anything to do with it, but he was wound up with an eight-day spring! I knew it was no use to talk sense to him while he was batting his lights at me like a drunk switchman on a dark night, but when he was clean run down I leans over the counter and says as polite as a pollywog, 'Most kind and noble duke,' says I, 'you touch me deeply by your humptious words!' says I, 'let me assure you, your kind and generous sentiments will never be erased from the tablets of my most grateful memory'--just that way.

"Well, say--" and here Mr. Brotherton let out his laugh that came down like the cataract at Ladore, "pretty soon Morty sails in fresh as a daisy and asks:

"'Father been in here?'

"'Check one father,' says I.

"'Raising hell?' he asks.

"'Check one hell,' says I.

"'Well, sir,' says he, 'I'm exceedingly sorry.'

"'One sorrow check,' says I.

"'Sincerely and truly sorry, George,' he repeats and 'Two sorrows check,' I repeats and he goes on: 'Look here, George, I know father, and until I can get the truth into him, which won't be for a week or two, I suppose he may try to ruin you!'

"'Check one interesting ruin,' says I.

"But he brought down his hand on the new case till I shuddered for the glass, and well, say--what do you think that boy done? He pulls out a roll of money big enough to choke a cow and puts it on the case and says: 'I sold my launch and drew every dollar I had out of the bank before father got home. Here, take it; you may need it in your business until father calms down.'

"Wasn't that white! I couldn't get him to put the roll back and along comes Cap Morton, and when I wouldn't take it the old man glued on to him, and I'm a goat if Morty didn't lend it to the Captain, with the understanding I could have it any time inside of six months, and the Captain could use it afterward. That's where the Captain got his money to build his shop."

It cost Daniel Sands five thousand dollars in hard earned money, not that he earned the money, but it was hard-earned nevertheless, to undo the work of that convention, and nominate and elect Thomas Van Dorn district Judge upon an independent ticket. And even when the work was done, the emptiness of the honor did not convince the Judge that this is not a material world. He hugged the empty honor to his heart and made a vast pretense that it was real.

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XXIX. BEING NOT A CHAPTER BUT AN INTERLUDE

Here and now this story must pause for a moment. It has come far from the sunshine and prairie grass where it started. Tall elm trees have grown from the saplings that were stuck in the sod thirty years before, and they limit the vision. No longer can one see over the town across the roofs of Market Street into the prairie. No longer even can one see from Harvey the painted sky at night that marks South Harvey and the industrial towns of the Wahoo Valley. Harvey is shut in; we all are sometimes by our comforts. The dreams of the pioneers that haloed the heads of those who came to Harvey in those first days--those dreams are gone. Here and there one is trapped in brick or wood or stone or iron; and another glows in a child or walks the weary ways of man as a custom or an institution or as a law that brought only a part of the blessings which it promised.

And the equality of opportunity for which these pioneers crossed the Mississippi and came into the prairie uplands of the West--where is that evanescent spirit? Certainly it touched Daniel Sands's shoulder and he followed it; it beckoned Dr. Nesbit and he followed it a part of the journey. Surely Kyle Perry saw it for years, and Captain Morton was destined to find it, gorgeous and iridescent. Amos Adams might have had it for the asking, but he sought it only for others. It never came to Dooley and Hogan, and Williams and Bowman and those who went into the Valley. Did it die, one may ask; or did it vanish like a prairie stream under the sand to flow on subterranean and appear again strong, purified and refreshed, a powerful current to carry mankind forward? The world that was in the flux of dreams that day when Harvey began, had hardened to reality thirty years after. Men were going their appointed ways working out in circumstances the equation of their life's philosophy.

And now while the story waits, we may well look at three pictures. They do not speed the narrative; they hardly point morals to adorn this tale. But they may show us how living a creed consistently colors one's life. For after all the realities of life are from within. Events, environment, fortune good or bad do not color life, or give it richness and form and value. But in living a creed one makes his picture. So let us look at Thomas Van Dorn, who boasted that he could beat God at his own game, and did. For all that he wanted came to him, wealth and fame and power, and the women he desired.

Judge and Mrs. Van Dorn and her dog are riding by in their smart rubber tired trap, behind a highly checked horse and with the dog between them. They are not talking. The man is looking at his gloved hands, at the horse, at the street,--where occasionally he bows and smiles and never by any chance misses bowing and smiling to any woman who might be passing. His wife, dressed stiffly and smartly, is looking straight ahead, with as weary a face as that of the Hungarian Spitz beside her. Time, in the Temple of Love on the hill has not worn her bloom off; it is all there--and more; but the additional bloom, the artificial bloom, is visible. When she smiles, as she sometimes smiles at the men friends of the Judge who greet the pair, it is an elaborately mechanical smile, with a distinct beginning, climax, and ending. Some way it fails to convince one that she has any pleasure in it. The smile still is beautiful, exceedingly beautiful--but only as a picture. When the smile is garnished with words the voice is low and musical--but too low and too obviously musical. It does not reveal the soul of Margaret Van Dorn--the soul that glowed in the girl who came to Prospect Township fifteen years before, with banners flying to lay siege to Harvey. The soul that glowed through those wonderful eyes upon Henry Fenn--where is it? She has not been crossed in any desire of her life. She has enjoyed every form of pleasure that money could buy for her; she is delving into books that make the wrinkles come between her eyebrows, and is rubbing the wrinkles out and the ideas from the books as fast as they come. She is droning a formula for happiness, learned of the books that make her head ache, and is repeating over and over, "God is good, and I am God," as one who would plaster truth upon his consciousness by the mere repetition of it. But the truth does not help her. So she sits beside her husband, a wax work figure of a woman, and he seems to treat her as a wax figure. For he is clearly occupied with his own affairs.

When he is not bowing and smiling, a sneer is on his face. And when he speaks to the horse his voice is harsh and mean. He holds an unlighted cigar in his mouth as a terrier might hold a loathed rat; working the muscles of his lips at times viciously but saying nothing. The soft, black hat of his youthful days is replaced by a high, stiff, squarely sawed felt hat which he imagines gives him great dignity. His clothes have become so painfully scrupulous in their exact conformation to the mode that he looks wooden. He has given so much thought to the subject of "wherewithal shall ye be clothed," that the thought in some queer spiritual curdling has appeared in the unyielding texture of his artificial tailored skin, that seems to be a part of another consciousness than his own.

Moreover, those first days he spent after the convention have chipped the suavity from his countenance, and have written upon the bland, complacent face all the cynicism of his nature. Triumph makes cynicism arrogant, so the man is losing his mask. His nature is leering out of his eyes, snarling out of his mouth, and where the little, lean lines have pared away the flesh from his nose, a greedy, self-seeking pride is peering from behind a great masterful nose. Thomas Van Dorn should be in the adolescence of maturity; but he is in the old age of adolescence. His skin has no longer the soft olive texture of youth; it is brown and mottled and leathery. His lips--his lips once full and red, are pursing and leadening.

Thus the pair go through the May twilight; and when the electric lights begin to flash out at the corners, thus the Van Dorns ride before the big black mass of the temple of love that looms among the young trees upon the lawn. The woman alights from the trap. She pauses a moment upon the stone block at the curbing. The man makes no sign of moving. She takes the dog from the seat, and puts it on the ground. The man gathers the reins tightly in his hands, then drops them again, lights his cigar, and says behind his hands: "I'm going back downtown."

"Oh, you are?" echoes the woman.

"Yes, I am," replies the man sharply.

The woman is walking up the wide parking, with the dog. She makes no reply. The man looks at her a second or two, and drives away, cutting the horse to a mad speed as he rounds the corner.

Through the wide doors into the broad hall, up the grand staircase, through the luxurious rooms goes the high Priestess of the Temple of Love. It is a lonely house. For it is still in a state of social siege. So far as Harvey is concerned, no one has entered it. So they live rather quiet lives.

On that May evening the mistress of the great house sits in her bed room by the mild electric, trying book after book, and putting each down in disgust. Philosophy fails to hold her attention--poetry annoys her; fiction--the book of the moment, which happened to be "The Damnation of Theron Ware," makes her wince, and so she reaches under the reading stand, and brings out from the bottom of a pile of magazines a salacious novel filled with stories of illicit amours. This she reads until her cheeks burn and her lips grow dry and she hears the roll of a buggy down the street, and knows that it must be nearly midnight and that her mate is coming. She slips the book back into its place of concealment, picks up "The Harmonious Universe," and walks with some show of grandeur in her trailing garments down the stairs to greet her lord.

"You up?" he asks. He glances at the book and continues: "Reading that damn trash? Why don't you read Browning or Thackeray or--if you want philosophy Emerson or Carlyle? That's rot."

He puts what scorn he can into the word rot, and in her sweetest, falsest, baby voice the woman answers:

"My soul craves communion with the infinite and would seek the deeper harmonies. I just love to wander the wide wastes between the worlds like I've been doing to-night."

The man grabs the book from her, and finding her finger in a place far beyond the end of the cut leaves, he looks at her, and sneers a profane sneer and passes up the stairs. She stares after him as he slowly mounts, without joy in his tread, and she follows him lightly as he goes to his room. She pauses before the closed door for a lonely moment and then sighs and goes her way. She mumbles, "God is good and I am God," many times to herself, but she lies down to sleep wondering whimperingly in a half-doze if Pelleas and Melisande found things so dreadfully disillusioning after all they suffered for love and for each other. As a footnote to this picture may we not ask:

Is the thing called love worth having at the cost of character? The trouble with the poets is that they take their ladies and gentlemen of pliable virtue and uncertain rectitude, only to the altar. One may ask with some degree of propriety if the duplicity they practiced, the lying they did and justified by the sacredness of their passion, the crimes they committed and the meannesses they went through to attain their ends were after all worth while. Also one may ask if the characters they made--or perhaps only revealed, were not such as to make them wholly miserable when they began to "live happily ever after"? A symposium entitled "Is Love Really Worth It?" by such distinguished characters as Helen of Troy, Mrs. Potiphar and Cleopatra, might be improving reading, if the ladies were capable of telling the truth after lives of dissimulation and deceit.

But let us leave philosophy and look at another picture. This time we have the Morton family.

The Captain's feet are upon the shining fender. There is no fire in the stove. It is May. But it is the Captain's habit to warm his feet there when he is in the house at night, and he never fails to put them upon the fender and go through his evening routine. First it is his paper; then it is his feet; then it is his apple, and finally a formal discussion of what they will have for breakfast, with the Captain always voting for hash, and declaring that there are potatoes enough left over and meat enough unused to make hash enough for a regiment. But before he gets to the hash question, the Captain this evening leads off with this:

"Curious thing about spring." The world of education, reading its examination papers, concurs in silence. The worlds of fashion and of the fine arts also assenting, the Captain goes on: "Down in South Harvey to-day; kind o' dirty down there; looks kind of smoky and tin cannery, and woe-begone, like that class of people always looks, but 'y gory, girls, it's just as much spring down there as it is up here, only more so! eh? I says to Laura, looking like a full bloom peach tree herself in her kindergarten, says I, 'Laura, it's terrible pretty down here when you get under the smoke and the dirt. Every one just a lovin',' says I, 'and going galloping into life kind of regardless. There's Nate and Anne, and there's Violet and Hogan, and there's a whole mess of fresh married couples in Little Italy, and the Huns and Belgians are all broke out with the blamedest dose of love y' ever see! And they's whole rafts of 'em to be married before June!' Well, Laura, she laughed and if it wasn't like pouring spring itself out of a jug. Spring," he mused, "ain't it curious about spring!"

Champing his apple the Captain gesticulates slowly with his open pocket knife, "Love"--he reflects; then backs away from his discussion and begins anew: "Less take--say Anne and Nate, a happy couple--him a lean, eagle-beaked New England kind of a man; her--a little quick-gaited, big-eyed woman and sping! out of the Providence of Goddlemighty comes a streak of some kind of creepy, fuzzy lightning and they're struck dumb and blind and plumb crazy--eh?"

He champs for a time on the apple, "Eighteen sixty-one--May, sixty-one--me a tidy looking young buck--girl--beautiful girl with reddish brown hair and bluest eyes in the world. Sping! comes the lightning, and melts us together and the whole universe goes pink and rose-colored. No sense--neither of us--no more'n Anne and Nate, just one idea. I can't think of nothing but her--war isn't much; shackles on four millions slaves--no consequence; the Colonel caught us kissing in his tent the day I left for the army; union forever--mere circumstance in the lives of two crazy people--in a world mostly eyes and lips and soft hands and whispers and flowers, eh--and--" The Captain does not finish his sentence.

He rises, puts his apple core on the table, and says after a great sigh: "And so we bloomed and blossomed and come to fruit and dried up and blowed away, and here they are--all the rest of 'em--ready to bloom--and may God help 'em and keep 'em." He pauses, "Help 'em and keep 'em and when they have dried up and blowed away--let 'em remember the perfume clean to the end!" He turns away from the girls, wipes his eyes with his gnarled fingers, and after clearing his throat says: "Well, girls, how about hash for breakfast--what say?"

The wheels of the Judge's buggy grate upon the curbing nearby and the Captain remarks: "Judge Tom gets in a little later every night now. I heard him dump her in at eight, and here it is nearly eleven--pretty careless,--pretty careless; he oughtn't to be getting in this late for four or five years yet--what say?" Public opinion again is divided. Fashion and the fine arts hold that it is Margaret's fault and that she is growing to be too much of a poseur; but the schools, which are the bulwarks of our liberties, maintain that he is just as bad as she. And what is more to the point--such is the contention of the eldest Miss Morton of the fourth grade in the Lincoln school, he has driven around to the school twice this spring to take little Lila out riding, and even though her mother has told the teachers to let the child go if she cared to, the little girl would not go and he was mean to the principal and insolent, though Heaven knows it is not the principal's fault, and if the janitor hadn't been standing right there--but it really makes little difference what would have happened; for the janitor in every school building, as every one knows, is a fierce and awesome creature who keeps more dreadful things from happening that never would have happened than any other single agency in the world.

The point which the eldest Miss Morton was accenting was this, that he should have thought of Lila before he got his divorce.

Now the worlds of fashion and the fine arts and the schools themselves, bulwarks that they are, do not realize how keenly a proud man's heart must be touched if day by day he meets the little girl upon the street, sees her growing out of babyhood into childhood, a sweet, bright, lovable child, and he yearns for something sincere, something that has no poses, something that will love him for himself. So he swallows a lump of pride as large as his handsome head, and drives to the school house to see his child--and is denied. In the Captain's household they do not know what that means. For in the Captain's household which includes a six room house--not counting the new white painted bathroom, the joint product of the toil of the handsome Miss Morton and the eldest Miss Morton, and not counting the basket for the kitten christened Epaminondas, and maintained by the youngest Miss Morton over family protests--in the Captain's household there is peace and joy, if one excepts the numbing fear of a "step" that sometimes prostrates the eldest Miss Morton and her handsome sister; a fear that shelters their father against the wily designs of their sex upon a meek and defenseless and rather obliging gentleman. So they cannot put themselves in the place of the rich and powerful neighbors next door. The Mortons hear the thorns crackling under the pot, but they cannot appreciate the heat.

And now we come to the last picture.

It is still an evening in May!

"Well, how is the missionary to South Harvey," chirrups the Doctor as he mounts the steps, and sees his daughter, waiting for him on the veranda. She looks cool and fresh and beautiful. Her eyes and her skin glow with health and her face beams upon him out of a soul at peace.

"She's all right," returns the daughter, smiling. "How's the khedive of Greeley county?"

As the Doctor mounts the steps she continues: "Sit down, father--I've something on my mind." To her father's inquiring face she replied, "It's Lila. Her father has been after her again. She just came home crying as though her little heart would break. It's so pitiful--she loves him; that is left over from her babyhood; but she is learning someway--perhaps from the children, perhaps from life--what he has done--and when he tries to attract her--she shrinks away from him."

"And he knows why--he knows why, Laura." The Doctor taps the floor softly with his cane. "It isn't all gone--Tom's heart, I mean. Somewhere deep in his consciousness he is hungering for affection--for respect--for understanding. You haven't seen Tom's eyes recently?" The daughter makes no reply. "I have," he continues. "They're burned out--kind of glassy--scummed over with the searing of the hell he carries in his heart--like the girls' eyes down in the Row. For he is dying at the heart--burning out with everything he has asked for in his hands, yet turning to Lila!"

"Father," she says with her eyes brimming, "I'm not angry with Tom--only sorry. He hasn't hurt me--much--when it's all figured out. I still have my faith--my faith in folks--and in God! Really to take away one's faith is the only wrong one can do to another!"

The father says, "The chief wrong he did you was when he married you. It was nobody's fault; I might have stopped it--but no man can be sure of those things. It was just one of the inevitable mistakes of youth, my dear, that come into our lives, one way or another. They fall upon the just and the unjust--without any reference to deserts."

She nods her assent and they sit listening to the sounds of the closing day--to the vesper bell in the Valley, to the hum of the trolley bringing its homecomers up from the town; to the drone of the five o'clock whistles in South Harvey, to the rattle of homebound buggies. Twice the daughter starts to speak. The second time she stops the Doctor pipes up, "Let it come--out with it--tell your daddy if anything is on your mind." She smiles up into his mobile face, to find only sympathy there. So she speaks, but she speaks hesitatingly.

"I believe that I am going to be happy--really and truly happy!" She does not smile but looks seriously at her father as she presses his hand and pats it. "I am finding my place--doing my work--creating something--not the home that I once hoped for--not the home that I would have now, but it is something good and worth while. It is self respect in me and self respect in those wives and mothers and children in South Harvey. All over the place I find its roots--the shrivelled parching roots of self-respect, and the aspiration that grows with self respect. Sometimes I see it in a geranium flowering in a tomato can, set in a window; oftentimes in a cheap lace curtain; occasionally in a struggling, stunted yellow rose bush in the hard-beaten earth of a dooryard; or in a second hand wheezy cabinet organ in some front bedroom--in a thousand little signs of aspiration, I find America asserting itself among these poor people, and as I cherish these things I find happiness asserting itself in my life. So it's my job, my consecrated job in this earth--to water the geranium, to prune the rose, to mulch the roots of self-respect among these people, and I am happy, father, happier every day that I walk that way."

She looks wistfully into her father's face. "Father, you won't quite understand me when I tell you that the tomato cans with their geraniums behind those gray lace curtains, that make Harvey people smile, are really not tomato cans at all. They are social dynamite bombs that one day will blow into splinters and rubbish the injustices, the cruel injustices of life that the poor suffer at the hands of their exploiters. The geranium is the flower, the spring flower of the divine discontent, which some day shall bear great and wonderful fruit."

"Rather a swift pace you're setting for a fat man, Laura," pipes the Doctor, adding earnestly: "There you go talking like Grant Adams! Don't let Grant Adams fool you, child: the end of the world isn't here. Grant's a good boy, Laura, and I like him; but he's getting a kind of Millerite notion that we're about to put on white robes and go straight up to glory, politically and socially and every which way, in a few years, and there's nothing to it. Grant's a good son, and a good brother, and a good friend and neighbor, but"--the Doctor pounds his chair arm vehemently, "there are bats, my dear, bats in his belfry just the same. Don't get excited when you see Grant mount his haystack to jump into the crack o' doom for the established order!"

The daughter smiles at him, but she answers:

"Perhaps Grant is touched--touched with the mad impatience of God's fools, father. I don't always follow Grant. He goes his way and I go mine. But I am sure of this, that the thing which will really start South Harvey, and all the South Harveys in the world out of their dirt and misery, and vice, is not our dreams for them, but their dreams for themselves. They must see the vision. They must aspire. They must feel the impulse to sacrifice greatly, to consecrate themselves deeply, to give and give and give of themselves that their children may know better things. And it is my work to arouse their dreams, to inspire their visions, to make them yearn for better living. I am trying to teach them to use and to love beautiful things, that they may be restless among ugly things. I think beauty only serves God as the handmaiden of discontent! And, father, way down deep in my heart--I know--I know surely that I must do this--that it is my reason for being--now that life has taken the greater joy of home from me. So," she concludes solemnly; "these people whom I love, they need me, but father, God and you only know how I need them. I don't know about Grant,--I mean why he is going his solitary way, but perhaps somewhere in his heart there is a wound! Perhaps all of God's fools--those who live queer, unnormal self-forgetting lives, are the broken and rejected pieces of life's masonry which the builder is using in his own wise way. As for the plan, it is not ours. Grant and I, broken spawl in the rising edifice, we and thousands like us, odd pieces that chink in yet hold the strain--we must be content to hold the load and know always--always know that after all the wall is rising! That is enough."

And now we must put aside the pictures and get on with the story.

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