Chapter LV…

Chapter LV

"THE LOVE OF A MAID FOR A MAN"

The next morning, when Dr. Barry had gone, Mrs. Manners propped me up in bed and left me for a little, so she said. Then who should come in with my breakfast on a tray but my lady herself, looking so fresh and beautiful that she startled me vastly.

"A penny for your thoughts, Richard," she cried. "Why, you are as grave as a screech-owl this brave morning."

"To speak truth, Dolly," said I, "I was wondering how the commodore is to get away from the Texel, with half the British navy lying in wait outside."

"Do not worry your head about that," said she, setting down the tray; "it will be mere child's play to him. Oh but I should like to see your commodore again, and tell him how much I love him.

"I pray that you may have the chance," I replied.

With a marvellous quickness she had tied the napkin beneath my chin, not so much as looking at the knot. Then she stepped to the mantel and took down one of Mr. Wedgwood's cups and dishes, and wiping them with her apron, filled the cup with fragrant tea, which she tendered me with her eyes sparkling.

"Your Excellency is the first to be honoured with this service," says she, with a curtsey.

I was as a man without a tongue, my hunger gone from sheer happiness--and fright. And yet eating the breakfast with a relish because she had made it. She busied herself about the room, dusting here and tidying there, and anon throwing a glance at me to see if I needed anything. My eyes followed her hither and thither. When I had finished, she undid the napkin, and brushed the crumbs from the coverlet.

"You are not going?" I said, with dismay.

"Did you wish anything more, sir?" she asked.

"Oh, Dorothy," I cried, "it is you I want, and you will not come near me."

For an instant she stood irresolute. Then she put down the tray and came over beside me.

"Do you really want me, sir?"

"Dorothy," I began, "I must first tell you that I have some guess at the sacrifice you are making for my sake, and of the trouble and danger which I bring you."

Without more ado she put her hand over my mouth.

"No," she said, reddening, "you shall tell me nothing of the sort."

I seized her hand, however it struggled, and holding it fast, continued:

"And I have learned that you have been watching with me by night, and working by day, when you never should have worked at all. To think that you should be reduced to that, and I not know it!"

Her eyes sought mine for a fleeting second.

"Why, you silly boy, I have made a fortune out of my cookery. And fame, too, for now am I known from Mary-le-bone to Chelsea, while before my name was unheard of out of little Mayfair. Indeed, I would not have missed the experience for a lady-in-waiting-ship. I have learned a deal since I saw you last, sir. I know that the world, like our Continental money, must not be taken for the price that is stamped upon it. And as for the watching with you," said my lady, "that had to be borne with as cheerfully as might be. Since I had sent off for you, I was in duty bound to do my share toward your recovery. I was even going to add that this watching was a pleasure,--our curate says the sense of duty performed is sure to be. But you used to cry out the most terrifying things to frighten me: the pattering of blood and the bumping of bodies on the decks, and the black rivulets that ran and ran and ran and never stopped; and strange, rough commands I could not understand; and the name of your commodore whom you love so much. And often you would repeat over and over: 'I have not yet begun, to fight, I have not yet begun to fight!'"

"Yes, 'twas that he answered when they asked him if he had struck," I exclaimed.

"It must have been an awful scene," she said, and her shoulders quivered. "When you were at your worst you would talk of it, and sometimes of what happened to you in London, of that ride in Hyde Park, or--or of Vauxhall," she continued hurriedly. "And when I could bear it no longer, I would take your hand and call you by name, and often quiet you thus."

"And did I speak of aught else?" I asked eagerly.

"Oh, yes. When you were caliper, it would be of your childhood, of your grandfather and your birthdays, of Captain Clapsaddle, and of Patty and her father."

"And never of Dolly, I suppose."

She turned away her head.

"And never of Dolly?"

"I will tell you what you said once, Richard," she answered, her voice dropping very low. "I was sitting by the window there, and the dawn was coming. And suddenly I heard you cry: 'Patty, when I return will you be my wife?' I got up and came to your side, and you said it again, twice."

The room was very still. And the vision of Patty in the parlour of Gordon's Pride, knitting my woollen stocking, rose before me.

"Yes," I said at length, "I asked her that the day before I left for the war. God bless her! She has the warmest heart in the world, and the most generous nature. Do you know what her answer was, Dorothy?"

"No." 'Twas only her lips moving that formed the word. She was twisting absently the tassel of the bed curtain.

"She asked me if I loved her."

My lady glanced up with a start, then looked me searchingly through and through.

"And you?" she said, in the same inaudible way.

"I could answer nothing. 'Twas because of her father's dying wish I asked her, and she guessed that same. I would not tell her a lie, for only the one woman lives whom I love, and whom I have loved ever since we were children together among the strawberries. Need I say that that woman is you, Dorothy? I loved you before we sailed to Carvel Hall between my grandfather's knees, and I will love you till death claims me."

Then it seemed as if my heart had stopped beating. But the snowy apron upon her breast fluttered like a sail stirring in the wind, her head was high, and her eyes were far away. Even my voice sounded in the distance as I continued:

"Will you be the mistress of Carvel Hall, Dorothy? Hallowed is the day that I can ask it."

What of this earth may excel in sweetness the surrender of that proud and noble nature! And her words, my dears, shall be sacred to you, too, who are descended from her. She bent forward a little, those deep blue eyes gazing full into my own with a fondness to make me tremble.

"Dear Richard," she said, "I believe I have loved you always. If I have been wilful and wicked, I have suffered more than you know--even as I have made you suffer."

"And now our suffering is over, Dorothy."

"Oh, don't say that, my dear!" she cried, "but let us rather make a prayer to God."

Down she got on her knees close beside me, and I took both of her hands between my own. But presently I sought for a riband that was around my neck, and drew out a locket. Within it were pressed those lilies of the valley I had picked for her long years gone by on my birthday. And she smiled, though the tears shone like dewdrops on her lashes.

"When Jack brought you to us for dead, we did not take it off, dear," she said gently. "I wept with sorrow and joy at sight of it, for I remembered you as you were when you picked those flowers, and how lightly I had thought of leaving you as I wound them into my hair. And then, when I had gone aboard the 'Annapolis', I knew all at once that I would have given anything to stay, and I thought my heart would break when we left the Severn cliffs behind. But that, sir, has been a secret until this day," she added, smiling archly through her tears.

She took out one of the withered flowers, and then as caressingly put it back beside the others, and closed the locket.

"I forbade Dr. Barry to take it off, Richard, when you lay so white and still. I knew then that you had been true to me, despite what I had heard. And if you were to die--" her voice broke a little as she passed her hand over my brow, "if you were to die, my single comfort would have been that you wore it then."

"And you heard rumours of me, Dorothy?"

"George Worthington and others told me how ably you managed Mr. Swain's affairs, and that you had become of some weight with the thinking men of the province. Richard, I was proud to think that you had the courage to laugh at disaster and to become a factor. I believe," she said shyly, "twas that put the cooking into my head, and gave me courage. And when I heard that Patty was to marry you, Heaven is my witness that I tried to be reconciled and think it for the best. Through my own fault I had lost you, and I knew well she would make you a better wife than I."

"And you would not even let Jack speak for me!"

"Dear Jack!" she cried; "were it not for Jack we should not be here, Richard."

"Indeed, Dolly, two people could scarce fall deeper in debt to another than are you and I to my Lord Viscount," I answered, with feeling. "His honesty and loyalty to us both saved you for me at the very outset."

"Yes," she replied thoughtfully, "I believed you dead. And I should have married him, I think. For Dr. Courtenay had sent me that piece from the Gazette telling of the duel between you over Patty Swain--"

"Dr. Courtenay sent you that!" I interrupted.

"I was a wild young creature then, my dear, with little beside vanity under my cap. And the notion that you could admire and love any girl but me was beyond endurance. Then his Lordship arrived in England, brimming with praise of you, to assure me that the affair was not about Patty at all. This was far from making me satisfied that you were not in love with her, and I may say now that I was miserable. Then, as we were setting out for Castle Howard, came the news of your death on the road to Upper Marlboro. I could not go a step. Poor Jack, he was very honest when he proposed," she added, with a sigh.

"He loved you, Dorothy."

She did not hear me, so deep was she in thought.

"'Twas he who gave me news of you, when I was starving at Gordon's."

"And I--I starved, too, Richard," she answered softly. "Dearest, I slid very wrong. There are some matters that must be spoken of between us, whatever the pain they give. And my heart aches now when I think of that dark day in Arlington Street when I gave you the locket, and you went out of my life. I knew that I had done wrong then, Richard, as soon as ever the door closed behind you. I should have gone with you, for better for worse, for richer for poorer. I should have run after you in the rain and thrown myself at your feet. And that would have been best for my father and for me."

She covered her face with her hands, and her words were stifled by a sob.

"Dorothy, Dorothy!" I cried, drawing her to me. "Another time. Not now, when we are so happy."

"Now, and never again, dear," she said. "Yes, I saw and heard all that passed in the drawing-room. And I did not blame, but praised you for it. I have never spoken a word beyond necessity to my father since. God forgive me!" she cried, "but I have despised him from that hour. When I knew that he had plotted to sell me to that detestable brute, working upon me to save his honour, of which he has not the smallest spark; that he had recognized and denied you, friendless before our house, and sent you into the darkness at Vauxhall to be murdered, then he was no father of mine. I would that you might know what my mother has suffered from such a man, Richard."

"My dear, I have often pitied her from my soul," I said.

"And now I shall tell you something of the story of the Duke of Chartersea," she went on, and I felt her tremble as she spoke that name. "I think of all we have Lord Comyn to thank for, next to saving your life twice, was his telling you of the danger I ran. And, Richard, after refusing you that day on the balcony over the Park, I had no hope left. You may thank your own nobility and courage that you remained in London after that. Richard," she said, "do you recall my asking you in the coach, on the way from Castle Yard, for the exact day you met my father in Arlington Street?"

"Yes," I replied, in some excitement, "yes." For I was at last to come at the bottom of this affair.

"The duke had made a formal offer for me when first we came to London. I think my father wrote of that to Dr. Courtenay." (I smiled at the recollection, now.) "Then his Grace persisted in following me everywhere, and vowed publicly that he would marry me. I ordered him from our house, since my father would not. At last one afternoon he came back to dine with us, insolent to excess. I left the table. He sat with my father two hours or more, drinking and singing, and giving orders to the servants. I shut my door, that I might not hear. After a while my mother came up to me, crying, saying that Mr. Manners would be branded with dishonour and I did not consent to marry his Grace,--a most terrible dishonour, of which she could not speak. That the duke had given my father a month to win my consent. And that month was up, Richard, the very afternoon you appeared with Mr. Dix in Arlington Street."

"And you agreed to marry him, Dolly?" I asked breathlessly.

"By the grace of Heaven, I did not," she answered quickly. "The utmost that I would consent to was a two months' respite, promising to give my hand to no one in that interval. And so I was forced to refuse you, Richard. You must have seen even then that I loved you, dear, though I was so cruel when you spoke of saving me from his Grace. I could not bear to think that you knew of any stain upon our family. I think--I think I would rather have died, or have married him. That day I threw Chartersea's presents out of the window, but my father made the servants gather them all which escaped breaking, and put them in the drawing-room. Then I fell ill."

She was silent, I clinging to her, and shuddering to think how near I had been to losing her.

"It was Jack who came to cheer me," I said presently.

"His faith in you was never shaken, sweetheart. But I went to Newmarket and Ampthill, and behaved like the ingrate I was. I richly deserved the scolding he had for me when I got back to town, which sent me running to Arlington Street. There I met Dr. James coming out, who asked me if I was Mr. Carvel, and told me that you had called my name."

"And, you goose, you never suspected," says she, smiling.

"How was I to suspect that you loved a provincial booby like me, when you had the choice of so many accomplished gentlemen with titles and estates?"

"How were you to perceive, indeed, that you had qualities which they lacked?"

"And you were forever vowing that you would marry a nobleman, my lady. For you said to me once that I should call you so, and ride in the coach with the coroneted panels when I came home on a visit."

"And I said, too," retorted Dolly, with mischief in her eyes, "do you remember what I told you the New Year's eve when we sat out by the sundial at Carvel Hall, when I was so proud of having fixed Dr. Courtenay's attentions? I said that I should never marry you, sir, who was so rough and masterful, and thrashed every lad that did not agree with you."

"Alas, so you did, and a deal more!" I exclaimed.

With that she broke away from me and, getting to her feet, made me a low curtsey with the grace that was hers alone.

"You are my Lord and my King, sir," she said, "and my rough Patriot squire, all in one."

"Are you happy, Dolly?" I asked, tremulous from my own joy.

"I have never been happy in all my life before, Richard dear," she said.

In truth, she was a being transformed, and more wondrous fair than ever. And even then I pictured her in the brave gowns and jewels I would buy her when times were mended, when our dear country would be free. All at once, ere I could draw a breath, she had stooped and kissed me ever so lightly on the forehead.

The door opened upon Aunt Lucy. She had but to look at us, and her black face beamed at our blushes. My lady threw her arms about her neck, and hid her face in the ample bosom.

"Now praise de good Lawd!" cried Mammy; "I knowed it dis longest time. What's I done tole you, Miss Dolly? What's I done tole you, honey?"

But my lady flew from the room. Presently I heard the spinet playing softly, and the words of that air came out of my heart from long ago.

"Love me little, love me long, Is the burthen of my song. Love that is too hot and strong Burneth soon to waste. Still, I would not have thee cold, Nor too backward, nor too bold. Love that lasteth till 'tis old Fadeth not in haste."

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LVI. HOW GOOD CAME OUT OF EVIL

'Twas about candlelight when I awoke, and Dorothy was sitting alone beside me. Her fingers were resting upon my arm, and she greeted me with a smile all tenderness.

"And does my Lord feel better after--after his excitement to-day?" she asked.

"Dorothy, you have made me a whole man again. I could walk to Windsor and back."

"You must have your dinner, or your supper first, sir," she answered gayly, "and do you rest quiet until I come back to feed you. Oh, Richard dear," she cried, "how delightful that you should be the helpless one, and dependent on me!"

As I lay listening for the rustle of her gown, the minutes dragged eternally. Every word and gesture of the morning passed before my mind, and the touch of her lips still burned on my forehead. At last, when I was getting fairly restless, the distant tones of a voice, deep and reverberating, smote upon my ear, jarring painfully some long-forgotten chord. That voice belonged to but one man alive, and yet I could not name him. Even as I strained, the tones drew nearer, and they were mixed with sweeter ones I knew well, and Dorothy's mother's voice. Whilst I was still searching, the door opened, the voices fell calm, and Dorothy came in bearing a candle in each hand. As she set them down on the table, I saw an agitation in her face, which she strove to hide as she addressed me.

"Will you see a visitor, Richard?"

"A visitor!" I repeated, with misgiving. 'Twas not so she had announced Comyn.

"Will you see Mr. Allen?"--

"Mr. Allen, who was the rector of St. Anne's? Mr. Allen in London, and here?"

"Yes." Her breath seemed to catch at the word. "He says he must see you, dear, and will not be denied. How he discovered you were with us I know not."

"See him!" I cried. "And I had but the half of my strength I would fling him downstairs, and into the kennel. Will you tell him so for me, Dorothy?"

And I raised up in bed, shaken with anger against the man. In a trice she was holding me, fearfully.

"Richard, Richard, you will open your wound. I pray you be quiet."

"And Mr. Allen has the impudence to ask to see me!"

"Listen, Richard. Your anger makes you forget many things. Remember that he is a dangerous man, and now that he knows you are in London he holds your liberty, perhaps your life, in his hands."

It was true. And not mine alone, but the lives and liberty of others.

"Do you know what he wishes, Dorothy?"

"No, he will not tell us. But he is greatly excited, and says he must see you at once, for your own good. For your own good, Richard!"

"I do not trust the villain, but he may come in," I said, at length.

She gave me the one lingering, anxious look, and opened the door.

Never had I beheld such a change in mortal man as there was in Mr. Allen, my old tutor, and rector of St. Anne's. And 'twas a baffling, intangible change. 'Twas as if the mask bad been torn from his face, for he was now just a plain adventurer that need not have imposed upon a soul. The coarse wine and coarse food of the lower coffee-houses of London had replaced the rich and abundant fare of Maryland. The next day was become one of the terrors of his life. His clothes were of poor stuff, but aimed at the fashion. And yet--and yet, as I looked upon him, a something was in his face to puzzle me entirely. I had seen many stamps of men, but this thing I could not recognize.

He stepped forward with all of his old confidence, and did not regard a farthing my cold stare.

"'Tis like gone days to see you again, Richard," he cried. "And I perceive you have as ever fallen into the best of hands."

"I am Mr. Carvel to my enemies, if they must speak to me at all," I said.

"But, my dear fellow, I am not your enemy, or I should not be here this day. And presently I shall prove that same." He took snuff. "But first I must congratulate you on coming alive out of that great battle off Flamborough. You look as though you had been very near to death, my lad. A deal nearer than I should care to get."

What to say to the man! What to do save to knock him down, and I could not do that.

"There can be no passing the time of day between you and me, Mr. Allen," I answered hotly. "You, whose machinations have come as near to ruining me as a man's can."

"And that was your own fault, my dear sir," said he, as he brushed himself. "You never showed me a whit of consideration, which is very dear to men in my position."

My head swam. Then I saw Dolly by the door regarding me curiously, with something of a smile upon her lips, but anxiety still in her eyes. With a "by your leave, ma'am," to her, Mr. Allen took the chair abreast me.

"You have but to call me when you wish, Richard," said she.

"Nay, Dorothy, Mr. Allen can have nothing to say to me that you may not hear," I said instantly. "And you will do me a favour to remain."

She sat down without a word, where I could look at her. Mr. Allen raised his eyebrows at the revelation in our talk, but by the grace of God he kept his mouth shut.

"And now, Mr. Allen," I said, "to what do I owe the pain of this visit?"

"The pain!" he exclaimed, and threw back his head and gave way to a fit of laughter. "By the mass! your politeness drowns me. But I like you, Richard, as I have said more than once. I believe your brutal straight-dealing has more to do with my predilection than aught else. For I have seen a deal of rogues in my day."

"And they have seen a deal of you, Mr. Allen."

"So they have," he cried, and laughed the more. "Egad, Miss Dorothy, you have saved all of him, I think." Then he swung round upon me, very careless. "Has your Uncle Grafton called to express his sympathies, Richard?" he asked.

That name brought a cry out of my head, Dolly seizing the arm of her chair.

"Grafton Carvel in London?" I exclaimed.

"Ay, in very pretty lodgings in Jermyn Street, for he has put by enough, I'll warrant you, despite the loss of his lands. Your aunt is with him, and his dutiful son, Philip, now broken of his rank in the English army. They arrived, before yesterday, from New York."

"And to what is this an introduction?" I demanded.

"I merely thought it strange," said Mr. Allen, imperturbably, "that he had not called to inquire after his nephew's health."

Dolly was staring at him, with eyes wide open.

"And pray, how did he discover I was in London, sir?" I said. "I was about to ask how you knew of it, but that is one and the same thing."

He shot at me a look not to be solved.

"It is not well to bite the hand that lifts you out of the fire, Richard," said he.

"You had not gained admission to this house were I not on my back, Mr. Allen."

"And that same circumstance is a blessing for you," he cried.

'Twas then I saw Dorothy making me mute signals of appeal.

"I cannot think why you are here, Mr. Allen," I said. "When you consider all the harm you have done me, and all the double-dealing I may lay at your door, can you blame me for my feelings?"

"No," he answered, with more soberness than he had yet used; "I honour you for them. And perchance I am here to atone for some of that harm. For I like you, my lad, and that's God's truth."

"All this is neither here nor there, Mr. Allen," I exclaimed, wholly out of patience. "If you have come with a message, let me have it. If not, I beg you get out of my sight, for I have neither the will nor the desire for palavering."

"Oh, Richard, do keep your temper!" implored Dorothy. "Can you not see that Mr. Allen desires to do us--to do you--a service?"

"Of that I am not so sure," I replied.

"It is his way, Miss Manners," said the rector, "and I hold it not against him. To speak truth, I looked for a worse reception, and came steeled to withstand it. And had my skin been thin, I had left ere now." He took more snuff. "It was Mr. Dix," he said to me slowly, "who informed Mr. Carvel of your presence in London."

"And how the devil did Mr. Dix know?"

He did not reply, but glanced apprehensively at Dorothy.

And I have wondered since at his consideration.

"Miss Manners may not wish to hear," he said uneasily.

"Miss Manners hears all that concerns me," I answered.

He shrugged his shoulders in comprehension.

"It was Mr. Manners, then, who went to Mr. Dix, and told him under the pledge of secrecy."

Not a sound came from Dorothy, nor did I dare to look at her face. The whole matter was clear to me now. After his conversation with me, Mr. Marmaduke had lost no time in seeing Mr. Dix, in order to raise money on my prospects. And the man of business had gone straight to Grafton with the intelligence. The suspicion flashed through me that Mr. Allen had been sent to spy, but his very next words disarmed it.

"And now, Richard," he continued, "before I say what I have come to say, and since you cannot now prosecute me, I mean to confess to you something which you probably know almost to a certainty. I was in the plot to carry you off and deprive you of your fortune. I have been paid for it, though not very handsomely. Fears for my own safety alone kept me from telling you and Mr. Swain. And I swear to you that I was sorry for the venture almost before I had embarked, and ere I had received a shilling. The scheme was laid out before I took you for a pupil; indeed, that was part of it, as you no doubt have guessed. As God hears me, I learned to love you, Richard, in those days at the rectory. You were all of a man, and such an one as I might have hoped to be had I been born like you. You said what you chose, and spoke from your own convictions, and catered to no one. You did not whine when the luck went against you, but lost like a gentleman, and thought no more of it. You had no fear of the devil himself. Why should you? While your cousin Philip, with his parrot talk and sneaking ways, turned my stomach. I was sick of him, and sick of Grafton, I tell you. But dread of your uncle drove me on, and I had debts to frighten me."

He paused. "Twas with a strange medley of emotions I looked at him. And Dorothy, too, was leaning forward, her lips parted and her eyes riveted upon his face.

"Oh, I am speaking the truth," he said bitterly. "And I assume no virtue for the little justice it remains in my power to do. It is the lot of my life that I must be false to some one always, and even now I am false to your uncle. Yes, I am come to do justice, and 'tis a strange errand for me. I know that estates have been restored to you by the Maryland Legislature, Richard, and I believe in my heart that you will win this war." Here he fetched a memorandum from his pocket. "But to make you secure," said he, "in the year 1710, and on the 9th of March, old style, your great-grandfather, Mr. George Carvel, drew up a document entailing the lands of Carvel Hall. By this they legally pass to you."

"The family settlement Mr. Swain suspected!" I exclaimed.

"Just so," he answered.

"And what am I to pay for this information?" I asked.

Hardly were the words spoken, when Dorothy ran to my bedside, and seizing my hand, faced him.

"He--he is not well, Mr. Allen," she cried.

The rector had risen, and stood gazing down at us with the whole of his life written on his face. That look was fearful to see, and all of hell was expressed therein. For what is hell if it is not hope dead and buried, and galling regret for what might have been? With mine own great happiness so contrasted against his torture, my heart melted.

"I am not well, indeed, Mr. Allen," I said. "God knows how hard it is for me to forgive, but I forgive you this night."

One brief instant he stared at me, and then tumbled suddenly down into his chair, his head falling forward on his arms. And the long sobs by which his frame was shaken awed our very souls. Dorothy drew back against me, clasping my shoulder, the tears wet upon her cheeks. What we looked on, there in the candlelight, was the Revelation itself.

How long it, endured none of us might say. And when at last he raised his face, it was haggard and worn in truth, but the evil of it seemed to have fled. Again and again he strove to speak. The words would not obey. And when he had mastered himself, his voice was shattered and gone.

"Richard, I have sinned heavily in my time, and preached God's holy word with a sneer and unbelief in my heart. He knows what I have suffered, and what I shall yet suffer before His judgment comes for us all. But I beg it is no sin to pray to Him for your happiness and Miss Dorothy's."

He stumbled there, and paused, and then continued with more steadiness:

"I came here to-night to betray you, and might have gone hence to your uncle to claim my pieces of silver. I remain to tell you that Grafton has an appointment at nine with his Majesty's chief Secretary of State. I need not mention his motives, nor dwell upon your peril. For the King's sentiments toward Paul Jones are well known. You must leave London without delay, and so must Mr. Manners and his family."

Is it the generations which decide? When I remember bow Dorothy behaved that night, I think so. Scarce had the rector ceased when she had released me and was standing erect before him. Pity was in her eyes, but in her face that courage which danger itself begets in heroic women.

"You have acted a noble part this day, Mr. Allen," she said, "to atone for the wrongs you have done Richard. May God forgive you, and make you happier than you have been!"

He struggled to his feet, listening as to a benediction. Then, with a single glance to give me confidence, she was gone. And for a minute there was silence between us.

"How may you be directed to?" I asked.

He leaped as out of a trance.

"Just 'the world,' Richard," said he. "For I am adrift again, and not very like to find a harbour, now."

"You were to have been paid for this, Mr. Allen," I replied. "And a man must live."

"A man must live!" he cried. "The devil coined that line, and made it some men's history."

"I have you on my conscience, Mr. Allen," I went on, "for I have been at fault as well as you. I might have treated you better, even as you have said. And I command you to assign a place in London whence you may be reached."

"A letter to the Mitre coffee-house will be delivered," he said.

"You shall receive it," I answered. "And now I bid you good-by, and thank you."

He seized and held my hand. Then walked blindly to the door and turned abruptly.

"I do not tell you that I shall change my life, Richard, for I have said that too many times before. Indeed, I warn you that any money you may send will be spent in drink, and--and worse. I will be no hypocrite to you. But I believe that I am better this hour than I have been since last I knelt at my mother's knee in the little Oxfordshire cottage where I was born."

When Dorothy returned to me, there was neither haste in her step nor excitement in her voice. Her very coolness inspired me.

"Do you feel strong enough for a journey, Richard?" she asked.

"To the world's end, Dolly, if you will but go with me."

She smiled faintly. "I have sent off for my Lord and Mr. Fox, and pray that one of them may be here presently."

Scarcely greater were the visible signs of apprehension upon Mrs. Manners. Her first care, and Dorothy's, was to catechise me most particularly on my state. And whilst they were so occupied Mr. Marmaduke entered, wholly frenzied from fright, and utterly oblivious to his own blame in the matter. He was sent out again directly. After that, with Aunt Lucy to assist, they hurriedly packed what few things might be taken. The costly relics of Arlington Street were untouched, and the French clock was left on the mantel to tick all the night, and for days to come, in a silent and forsaken room; or perhaps to greet impassively the King's officers when they broke in at the door. But I caught my lady in the act of wrapping up the Wedgwood cups and dishes.

In the midst of these preparations Mr. Fox was heard without, and was met at the door by Dorothy. Two sentences sufficed her to tell him what had occurred, and two seconds for this man of action to make his decision.

"In an hour you shall have travelling chaises here, Dorothy," he said. "You must go to Portsmouth, and take ship for Lisbon. And if Jack does not arrive, I will go with you."

"No, Charles, you must not!" she cried, her emotion conquering her for the nonce. "That might be to ruin your career, and perchance to lose your life. And suppose we were to escape, what would they say of you!"

"Fish!" Charles retorted, to hide some feelings of his own; "once our rebel is out of the country, they may speak their minds. They have never lacked for names to call me, and I have been dubbed a traitor before now, my dear lady."

He stepped hastily to the bed, and laid his hand on me with affection.

"Charles," I said, "this is all of a piece with your old recklessness. You were ever one to take any risk, but I will not hear of such a venture as this. Do you think I will allow the hope of all England to be staked for a pirate? And would you break our commander of her rank? All that Dorothy need do at Portsmouth is to curtsey to the first skipper she meets, and I'll warrant he will carry us all to the antipodes."

"Egad, but that is more practical than it sounds," he replied, with a glance of admiration at my lady, as she stood so tall before us. "She has a cool head, Richard Carvel, and a long head, and--and I'm thinking you are to come out of this the best of all of us. You cannot get far off your course, my lad, with her at the helm."

It was there his voice belied the jest in his words, and he left us with precipitation.

They lifted me out of my sheets (I was appalled to discover my weakness), and bundled me with tender care in a dozen shawls and blankets. My feet were thrust into two pairs of heavy woollen stockings, and Dorothy bound her own silk kerchief at my throat, whispering anxious questions the while. And when her mother and mammy went from the room, her arms flew around my neck in a passion of solicitude. Then she ran away to dress for the journey, and in a surprising short time was back again, with her muff and her heavy cloak, and bending over me to see if I gave any signs of failure.

Fifty and five minutes had been registered by the French clock, when the rattle of wheels and the clatter of hoofs sounded below, and Charles Fox panted up the stairs, muffled in a huge wrap-rascal. 'Twas he and Aunt Lucy carried me down to the street, Dorothy walking at my side, and propped me up in the padded corner of one of the two vehicles in waiting. This was an ample travelling-carriage with a lamp hanging from its top, by the light of which my lady tucked me in from head to foot, and then took her place next me. Aunt Lucy filled most of the seat opposite. The baggage was hoisted up behind, and Charles was about to slam the door, when a hackney-chaise turned the corner at a gallop and pulled up in the narrow street abreast, and the figure of my Lord Comyn suddenly leaped within the compass of the lanthorn's rays. He was dressed as for a ball, with only a thin rain-cloak over his shoulders, for the night was thick with mist. He threw at us a startled look that was a question.

"Jack, Richard is to be betrayed to-night by his uncle," said Charles, shortly. "And I am taking them to Portsmouth to get them off for Lisbon."

"Charles," said his Lordship, sternly, "give me that greatcoat."

It was just the one time that ever I saw uncertainty on Mr. Fox's face. He threw an uneasy glance into the chaise.

"I have brought money," his Lordship went on rapidly; "'Twas that kept me, for I guessed at something of this kind. Give me the coat, I say."

Mr. Fox wriggled out of it, and took the oiled cape in return.

"Thank you, Jack," he said simply, and stepped into the carriage. "Who is to mend my waistcoats now?" he cried. "Faith, I shall treasure this against you, Richard. Good-by, my lad, and obey your rebel general. Alas! I must even ask your permission to salute her."

And he kissed the unresisting Dorothy on both her cheeks. "God keep the two of you," he said, "for I love you with all my heart."

Before we could answer he was gone into the night; and my Lord, standing without, had closed the carriage door. And that was the last I saw of this noble man, the true friend of America, who devoted his glorious talents and his life to fighting the corruption that was rotting the greatness of England. He who was followed by the prayers of the English race was ever remembered in our own humble ones.

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LVII. I COME TO MY OWN AGAIN

'Twas a rough, wild journey we made to Portsmouth, my dears, and I think it must have killed me had not my lady been at my side. We were no sooner started than she pulled the curtains and opened her portmanteau, which I saw was near filled with things for my aid and comfort. And I was made to take a spoonful of something. Never, I believe, was medicine swallowed with a greater willingness. Talk was impossible, so I lay back in the corner and looked at her; and now and anon she would glance at my face, with a troubled guess in her own as to how I might stand the night. For we were still in London. That I knew by the trot of our horses, and by the granite we traversed from time to time. But at length we rumbled over a bridge, there was a sharp call back from our post-boy to him of the chaise behind, and then began that rocking and pitching and swaying and creaking, which was to last the whole night long, save for the brief stops at the post-houses.

After an hour of it, I was holding my breath against the lurches, like a sea-sick man against that bottomless fall of the ship's bows on the ocean. I had no pain,--only an over whelming exhaustion,--but the joy of her touch and her presence kept me from failing. And though Aunt Lucy dozed, not a wink of sleep did my lady get through all of those weary twelve hours. Always alert was she, solicitous beyond belief, scanning ever the dial of her watch to know when to give me brandy and physic; or reaching across to feel my temples for the fever. The womanliness of that last motion was a thing for a man to wonder at. But most marvellous of all was the instinct which told her of my chief sickening discomfort, --of the leathery, travelled smell of the carriage. As a relief for this she charged her pocket-napkin with a most delicate perfume, and held it to my face.

When we drew up to shift horses, Jack would come to the door to inquire if there was aught she wanted, and to know how I was bearing up. And often Mrs. Manners likewise. At first I was for talking with them, but this Dorothy would not allow. Presently, indeed, it was beyond my power, and I could only smile feebly at my Lord when I heard Dolly asking him that the hostlers might be more quiet. Toward morning a lethargy fell upon me. Once I awoke when the lamp had burned low, to perceive the curtains drawn back, a black blotch of trees without, and the moonlight streaming in on my lady's features. With the crack of a whip I was off again.

When next consciousness came, the tarry, salt smell of a ship was in my nostrils, and I knew that we were embarked. I lay in a clean bunk in a fair-sized and sun-washed cabin, and I heard the scraping of ropes and the tramp of feet on the deck above my head. Framed against the irregular glass of the cabin window, which was greened by the water beyond, Dorothy and my Lord stood talking in whispers.

"Jack!" I said.

At the sound they turned and ran toward me, asking how I felt.

"I feel that words are very empty, Jack, to express such a gratitude as mine," I answered. "Twice you have saved me from death, you have paid my debts, and have been stanch to us both in our troubles. And--" The effort was beyond me, and I glanced appealingly at Dolly.

"And it is to you, dear Jack," she finished, "it is to you alone that we owe the great joy of our lives."

Her eyes were shining through her tears, and her smile was like the sun out of a rain-swept sky. His Lordship took one of her hands in his own, and one of mine. He scanned our faces in a long, lingering look.

"You will cherish her, Richard," he said brokenly, "for her like is not to be found in this world. I knew her worth when first she came to London, as arrant a baggage as ever led man a dance. I saw then that a great love alone was needed to make her the highest among women, and from the night I fought with you at the Coffee House I have felt upon whom that love would fall. O thou of little faith," he cried, "what little I may have done has been for her. No, Richard, you do not deserve her, but I would rather think of her as your wife than that of any man living."

I shall not dwell upon that painful farewell which wrung our hearts, and made us silent for a long, long while after the ship was tossing in the short seas of the Channel.

Nor is it my purpose to tell you of that long voyage across the Atlantic. We reached Lisbon in safety, and after a week of lodgings in that city by the best of fortune got passage in a swift bark bound for Baltimore. For the Chesapeake commerce continued throughout the war, and kept alive the credit of the young nation. There were many excitements ere we sighted the sand-spits of Virginia, and off the Azores we were chased for a day and a night by a British sloop of war. Our captain, however, was a cool man and a seaman, and slipped through the cruisers lying in wait off the Capes very triumphantly.

But the remembrance of those fair days at sea fills my soul with longing. The weather was mild and bright for the season, and morning upon morning two stout topmen would carry me out to a sheltered spot on the deck, always chosen by my lady herself. There I sat by the hour, swathed in many layers of wool, and tended by her hands alone. Every nook and cranny of our lives were revealed to the other. She loved to hear of Patty and my years at Gordon's, and would listen with bated breath to the stories of the Ranger and the Bonhomme Richard, and of that strange man whom we both loved, whose genius had made those cruises famous. Sometimes, in low voices, we talked of our future; but often, when the wind blew and the deck rocked and the sun flashed upon the waters, a silence would fall between us that needed no word to interpret.

Mrs. Manners yielded to my wish for us all to go to Carvel Hall. It was on a sparkling morning in February that we sighted the familiar toe of Kent Island, and the good-natured skipper put about and made for the mouth of our river. Then, as of old, the white cupola of Carvel House gleamed a signal of greeting, to which our full hearts beat a silent response. Once again the great windmill waved its welcome, and the same memory was upon us both as we gazed. Of a hale old gentleman in the sheets of a sailing pinnace, of a boy and a girl on his knees quivering with excitement of the days to come. Dorothy gently pressed my hand as the bark came into the wind, and the boat was dropped into the green water. Slowly they lowered me into it, for I was still helpless, Dorothy and her mother and Aunt Lucy were got down, and finally Mr. Marmaduke stepped gingerly from the sea-ladder over the gunwale. The cutter leaped under the strong strokes up the river with the tide. Then, as we rounded the bend, we were suddenly astonished to see people gathered on the landing at the foot of the lawn, where they had run, no doubt, in a flurry at sight of the ship below. In the front of the group stood out a strangely familiar figure.

"Why," exclaimed Dolly, "it is Ivie Rawlinson!"

Ivie it was, sure enough. And presently, when we drew a little closer, he gave one big shout and whipped off the hat from his head; and off, too, came the caps from the white heads of Scipio and Chess and Johnson behind him. Our oars were tossed, Ivie caught our bows, and reached his hand to Dorothy. It was fitting that she should be the first to land at Carvel Hall.

"'Twas yere bonny face I seed first, Miss Dolly," he cried, the tears coursing down the scars of his cheeks. "An' syne I kennt weel the young master was here. Noo God be praised for this blythe day, that Mr. Richard's cam to his ain at last!"

But Scipio and Chess could only blubber as they helped him to lift me out, Dolly begging them to be careful. As they carried me up the familiar path to the pillared porch, the first I asked Ivie was of Patty, and next why he had left Gordon's. She was safe and well, despite the Tories, and herself had sent him to take charge of Carvel Hall as soon as ever Judge Bordley had brought her the news of its restoration to me. He had supplied her with another overseer. Thanks to the good judge and to Colonel Lloyd, who had looked to my interests since Grafton was fled, Ivie had found the old place in good order, all the negroes quiet, and impatient with joy against my arrival.

It is time, my children, to bring this story to a close. I would I might write of those delicious spring days I spent with Dorothy at Carvel Hall, waited on by the old servants of my grandfather. At our whim my chair would be moved from one to another of the childhood haunts; on cool days we sat in the sun by the dial, where the flowers mingled their odours with the salt breezes off the Chesapeake; or anon, when it was warmer, in the summer-house my mother loved, or under the shade of the great trees on the lawn, looking out over the river. And once my lady went off very mysteriously, her eyes brimful of mischief, to come back with the first strawberries of the year staining her apron.

We were married on the fifteenth of June, already an anniversary for us both, in the long drawing-room. General Clapsaddle was there from the army to take Dorothy in his arms, even as he had embraced another bride on the same spot in years gone by. She wore the wedding gown that was her mother's, but when the hour was come to dress her Aunt Lucy and Aunt Hester failed in their task, and it was Patty who performed the most of that office, and hung the necklace of pearls about her neck.

Dear Patty! She hath often been with us since. You have heard your mothers and fathers speak of Aunt Patty, my dears, and they will tell you how she spoiled them when they went a-visiting to Gordon's Pride.

Ere I had regained my health, the war for Independence was won. I pray God that time may soften the bitterness it caused, and heal the breach in that noble race whose motto is Freedom. That the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack may one day float together to cleanse this world of tyranny!

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Afterword

The author makes most humble apologies to any who have, or think they have, an ancestor in this book. He has drawn the foregoing with a very free hand, and in the Maryland scenes has made use of names rather than of actual personages. His purpose, however poorly accomplished, was to give some semblance of reality to this part of the story. Hence he has introduced those names in the setting, choosing them entirely at random from the many prominent families of the colony.

No one may read the annals of these men, who were at once brave and courtly, and of these women, who were ladies by nature as well as by birth, and not love them. The fascination of that free and hospitable life has been so strong on the writer of this novel that he closes it with a genuine regret and the hope that its perusal may lead others to the pleasure he has derived from the history of Maryland.

As few liberties as possible have been taken with the lives of Charles James Fox and of John Paul Jones. The latter hero actually made a voyage in the brigantine 'John' about the time he picked up Richard Carvel from the Black Moll, after the episode with Mungo Maxwell at Tobago. The Scotch scene, of course, is purely imaginary. Accuracy has been aimed at in the account of the fight between the 'Bonhomme Richard' and the 'Serapis', while a little different arrangement might have been better for the medium of the narrative. To be sure, it was Mr. Mease, the purser, instead of Richard Carvel, who so bravely fought the quarter-deck guns; and in reality Midshipman Mayrant, Commodore Jones's aide, was wounded by a pike in the thigh after the surrender. No injustice is done to the second and third lieutenants, who were absent from the ship during the action.

The author must acknowledge that the only good anecdote in the book and the only verse worth printing are stolen. The story on page concerning Mr. Garrick and the Archbishop of York may be found in Fitzgerald's life of the actor, much better told. The verse (in Chapter X) is by an unknown author in the Annapolis Gazette, and is republished in Mr. Elihu Riley's excellent "History of Annapolis."

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A bold front is half the battle A man ought never to be frightened by appearances Affections warm despite absence, and years, and interest Ever been my nature to turn forward instead of back Genius honored but never encouraged God bless their backs, which is the only part I ever care to see He was our macaroni of Annapolis Human multitude with its infinity of despairs and joys It is sorrow which lifts us nearest to heaven No real prosperity comes out of double-dealing Shaped his politics according to the company he was in Sight of happiness is often a pleasure for those who are sad Sir, I have not yet begun to fight The worse the disease, the more remarkable the cure Their lines belonged rather to the landscape (cottages) Thy politics are not over politic Tis no so bad it micht-na be waur Within every man's province to make himself what he will Ya maun ken th' incentive's the maist o' the battle Youth is in truth a mystery

A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill

CONTENTS

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Book I

Volume 1. I. WHAT'S IN HEREDITY? II. PERDITA RECALLED III. CONCERNING PROVIDENCE IV. OF TEMPERAMENT V. IN WHICH PROVIDENCE BEEPS FAITH VI. HONORA HAS A GLIMPSE OF THE WORLD

Volume 2. VII. THE OLYMPIAN ORDER VIII. A CHAPTER OF CONQUESTS IX. IN WHICH THE VICOMTE CONTINUES HIS STUDIES X. IN WHICH HONORA WIDENS HER HORIZON XI. WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN XII. WHICH CONTAINS A SURPRISE FOR MRS. HOLT

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Book II

Volume 3. I. SO LONG AS YE BOTH SHALL LIVE II. "STAFFORD PARK" III. THE GREAT UNATTACHED IV. THE NEW DOCTRINE V. QUICKSANDS VI. GAD AND MENI

Volume 4. VII. OF CERTAIN DELICATE MATTERS VIII. OF MENTAL PROCESSES-FEMININE AND INSOLUBLE IX. INTRODUCING A REVOLUTIONIZING VEHICLE X. ON THE ART OF LION TAMING XI. CONTAINING SOME REVELATIONS

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Book III

Volume 5. I. ASCENDI II. THE PATH OF PHILANTHROPY III. VINELAND IV. THE VIKING V. THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Volume 6. VI. CLIO, OR THALIA? VII "LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS" VIII. IN WHICH THE LAW BETRAYS A HEART IX. WYLIE STREET X. THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

Volume 7. XI. IN WHICH IT IS ALL DONE OVER AGAIN XII. THE ENTRANCE INTO EDEN XIII. OF THE WORLD BEYOND THE GATES. XIV. CONTAINING PHILOSOPHY FROM MR. GRAINGER XV. THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY

Volume 8. XVI. IN WHICH A MIRROR IS HELD UP XVII. THE RENEWAL OF AN ANCIENT HOSPITALITY XVIII. IN WHICH MR. ERWIN SEES PARIS

A MODERN CHRONICLE

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I. WHAT'S IN HEREDITY

Honora Leffingwell is the original name of our heroine. She was born in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, at Nice, in France, and she spent the early years of her life in St. Louis, a somewhat conservative old city on the banks of the Mississippi River. Her father was Randolph Leffingwell, and he died in the early flower of his manhood, while filling with a grace that many remember the post of United States Consul at Nice. As a linguist he was a phenomenon, and his photograph in the tortoise-shell frame proves indubitably, to anyone acquainted with the fashions of 1870, that he was a master of that subtlest of all arts, dress. He had gentle blood in his veins, which came from Virginia through Kentucky in a coach and six, and he was the equal in appearance and manners of any duke who lingered beside classic seas.

Honora has often pictured to herself a gay villa set high above the curving shore, the amethyst depths shading into emerald, laced with milk-white foam, the vivid colours of the town, the gay costumes; the excursions, the dinner-parties presided over by the immaculate young consul in three languages, and the guests chosen from the haute noblesse of Europe. Such was the vision in her youthful mind, added to by degrees as she grew into young-ladyhood and surreptitiously became familiar with the writings of Ouida and the Duchess, and other literature of an educating cosmopolitan nature.

Honora's biography should undoubtedly contain a sketch of Mrs. Randolph Leffingwell. Beauty and dash and a knowledge of how to seat a table seem to have been the lady's chief characteristics; the only daughter of a carefully dressed and carefully, preserved widower, likewise a linguist,--whose super-refined tastes and the limited straits to which he, the remaining scion of an old Southern family, had been reduced by a gentlemanly contempt for money, led him 'to choose Paris rather than New York as a place of residence. One of the occasional and carefully planned trips to the Riviera proved fatal to the beautiful but reckless Myrtle Allison. She, who might have chosen counts or dukes from the Tagus to the Danube, or even crossed the Channel; took the dashing but impecunious American consul, with a faith in his future that was sublime. Without going over too carefully the upward path which led to the post of their country's representative at the court of St. James, neither had the slightest doubt that Randolph Leffingwell would tread it.

It is needless to dwell upon the chagrin of Honora's maternal grandfather, Howard Allison Esquire, over this turn of affairs, this unexpected bouleversement, as he spoke of it in private to his friends in his Parisian club. For many years he had watched the personal attractions of his daughter grow, and a brougham and certain other delights not to be mentioned had gradually become, in his mind, synonymous with old age. The brougham would have on its panels the Allison crest, and his distinguished (and titled) son-in-law would drop in occasionally at the little apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann. Alas, for visions, for legitimate hopes shattered forever! On the day that Randolph Leffingwell led Miss Allison down the aisle of the English church the vision of the brougham and the other delights faded. Howard Allison went back to his club.

Three years later, while on an excursion with Sir Nicholas Baker and a merry party on the Italian aide, the horses behind which Mr. and Mrs. Leffingwell were driving with their host ran away, and in the flight managed to precipitate the vehicle, and themselves, down the side of one of the numerous deep valleys of the streams seeking the Mediterranean. Thus, by a singular caprice of destiny Honors was deprived of both her parents at a period which--some chose to believe--was the height of their combined glories. Randolph Leffingwell lived long enough to be taken back to Nice, and to consign his infant daughter and sundry other unsolved problems to his brother Tom.

Brother Tom--or Uncle Tom, as we must call him with Honora--cheerfully accepted the charge. For his legacies in life had been chiefly blessings in disguise. He was paying teller of the Prairie Bank, and the thermometer registered something above 90 deg. Fahrenheit on the July morning when he stood behind his wicket reading a letter from Howard Allison, Esquire, relative to his niece. Mr. Leffingwell was at this period of his life forty-eight, but the habit he had acquired of assuming responsibilities and burdens seemed to have had the effect of making his age indefinite. He was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, his mustache and hair already turning; his eyebrows were a trifle bushy, and his eyes reminded men of one eternal and highly prized quality--honesty. They were blue grey. Ordinarily they shed a light which sent people away from his window the happier without knowing why; but they had been known, on rare occasions, to flash on dishonesty and fraud like the lightnings of the Lord. Mr. Isham, the president of the bank, coined a phrase about him. He said that Thomas Leffingwell was constitutionally honest.

Although he had not risen above the position of paying teller, Thomas Leffingwell had a unique place in the city of his birth; and the esteem in which he was held by capitalists and clerks proves that character counts for something. On his father's failure and death he had entered the Prairie Bank, at eighteen, and never left it. If he had owned it, he could not have been treated by the customers with more respect. The city, save for a few notable exceptions, like Mr. Isham, called him Mr. Leffingwell, but behind his back often spoke of him as Tom.

On the particular hot morning in question, as he stood in his seersucker coat reading the unquestionably pompous letter of Mr. Allison announcing that his niece was on the high seas, he returned the greetings of his friends with his usual kindness and cheer. In an adjoining compartment a long-legged boy of fourteen was busily stamping letters.

"Peter," said Mr. Leffingwell, "go ask Mr. Isham if I may see him."

It is advisable to remember the boy's name. It was Peter Erwin, and he was a favourite in the bank, where he had been introduced by Mr. Leffingwell himself. He was an orphan and lived with his grandmother, an impoverished old lady with good blood in her veins who boarded in Graham's Row, on Olive Street. Suffice it to add, at this time, that he worshipped Mr. Leffingwell, and that he was back in a twinkling with the information that Mr. Isham was awaiting him.

The president was seated at his desk. In spite of the thermometer he gave no appearance of discomfort in his frock-coat. He had scant, sandy-grey whiskers, a tightly closed and smooth-shaven upper lip, a nose with-a decided ridge, and rather small but penetrating eyes in which the blue pigment had been used sparingly. His habitual mode of speech was both brief and sharp, but people remarked that he modified it a little for Tom Leffingwell.

"Come in, Tom," he said. "Anything the matter?"

"Mr. Isham, I want a week off, to go to New York."

The request, from Tom Leffingwell, took Mr. Isham's breath. One of the bank president's characteristics was an extreme interest in the private affairs of those who came within his zone of influence and especially when these affairs evinced any irregularity.

"Randolph again?" he asked quickly.

Tom walked to the window, and stood looking out into the street. His voice shook as he answered:

"Ten days ago I learned that my brother was dead, Mr. Isham."

The president glanced at the broad back of his teller. Mr. Isham's voice was firm, his face certainly betrayed no feeling, but a flitting gleam of satisfaction might have been seen in his eye.

"Of course, Tom, you may go," he answered.

Thus came to pass an event in the lives of Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary, that journey to New York (their first) of two nights and two days to fetch Honora. We need not dwell upon all that befell them. The first view of the Hudson, the first whiff of the salt air on this unwonted holiday, the sights of this crowded city of wealth,--all were tempered by the thought of the child coming into their lives. They were standing on the pier when the windows were crimson in the early light, and at nine o'clock on that summer's morning the Albania was docked, and the passengers came crowding down the gang-plank. Prosperous tourists, most of them, with servants and stewards carrying bags of English design and checked steamer rugs; and at last a ruddy-faced bonne with streamers and a bundle of ribbons and laces--Honora--Honora, aged eighteen months, gazing at a subjugated world.

"What a beautiful child! exclaimed a woman on the pier."

Was it instinct or premonition that led them to accost the bonne?

"Oui, Leffingwell!" she cried, gazing at them in some perplexity. Three children of various sizes clung to her skirts, and a younger nurse carried a golden-haired little girl of Honora's age. A lady and gentleman followed. The lady was beginning to look matronly, and no second glance was required to perceive that she was a person of opinion and character. Mr. Holt was smaller than his wife, neat in dress and unobtrusive in appearance. In the rich Mrs. Holt, the friend of the Randolph Leffingwells, Aunt Mary was prepared to find a more vapidly fashionable personage, and had schooled herself forthwith.

"You are Mrs. Thomas Leffingwell?" she asked. "Well, I am relieved." The lady's eyes, travelling rapidly over Aunt Mary's sober bonnet and brooch and gown, made it appear that these features in Honora's future guardian gave her the relief in question. "Honora, this is your aunt."

Honora smiled from amidst the laces, and Aunt Mary, only too ready to capitulate, surrendered. She held out her arms. Tears welled up in the Frenchwoman's eyes as she abandoned her charge.

"Pauvre mignonne!" she cried.

But Mrs. Holt rebuked the nurse sharply, in French,--a language with which neither Aunt Mary nor Uncle Tom was familiar. Fortunately, perhaps. Mrs. Holt's remark was to the effect that Honora was going to a sensible home.

"Hortense loves her better than my own children," said that lady.

Honora seemed quite content in the arms of Aunt Mary, who was gazing so earnestly into the child's face that she did not at first hear Mrs. Holt's invitation to take breakfast with them on Madison Avenue, and then she declined politely. While grossing on the steamer, Mrs. Holt had decided quite clearly in her mind just what she was going to say to the child's future guardian, but there was something in Aunt Mary's voice and manner which made these remarks seem unnecessary--although Mrs. Holt was secretly disappointed not to deliver them.

"It was fortunate that we happened to, be in Nice at the time," she said with the evident feeling that some explanation was due. "I did not know poor Mrs. Randolph Leffingwell very--very intimately, or Mr. Leffingwell. It was such a sudden--such a terrible affair. But Mr. Holt and I were only too glad to do what we could."

"We feel very grateful to you," said Aunt Mary, quietly.

Mrs. Holt looked at her with a still more distinct approval, being tolerably sure that Mrs. Thomas Leffingwell understood. She had cleared her skirts of any possible implication of intimacy with the late Mrs. Randolph, and done so with a master touch.

In the meantime Honora had passed to Uncle Tom. After securing the little trunk, and settling certain matters with Mr. Holt, they said good-by to her late kind protectors, and started off for the nearest street-cars, Honora pulling Uncle Tom's mustache. More than one pedestrian paused to look back at the tall man carrying the beautiful child, bedecked like a young princess, and more than one passenger in the street cars smiled at them both.

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II. PERDITA RECALLED

Saint Louis, or that part of it which is called by dealers in real estate the choice residence section, grew westward. And Uncle Tom might be said to have been in the vanguard of the movement. In the days before Honora was born he had built his little house on what had been a farm on the Olive Street Road, at the crest of the second ridge from the river. Up this ridge, with clanking traces, toiled the horse-cars that carried Uncle Tom downtown to the bank and Aunt Mary to market.

Fleeing westward, likewise, from the smoke, friends of Uncle Tom's and Aunt Mary's gradually surrounded them--building, as a rule, the high Victorian mansions in favour at that period, which were placed in the centre of commodious yards. For the friends of Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary were for the most part rich, and belonged, as did they, to the older families of the city. Mr. Dwyer's house, with its picture gallery, was across the street.

In the midst of such imposing company the little dwelling which became the home of our heroine sat well back in a plot that might almost be called a garden. In summer its white wooden front was nearly hidden by the quivering leaves of two tall pear trees. On the other side of the brick walk, and near the iron fence, was an elm and a flower bed that was Uncle Tom's pride and the admiration of the neighbourhood. Honora has but to shut her eyes to see it aflame with tulips at Eastertide. The eastern wall of the house was a mass of Virginia creeper, and beneath that another flower bed, and still another in the back-yard behind the lattice fence covered with cucumber vine. There were, besides, two maples and two apricot trees, relics of the farm, and of blessed memory. Such apricots! Visions of hot summer evenings come back, with Uncle Tom, in his seersucker coat, with his green watering-pot, bending over the beds, and Aunt Mary seated upright in her chair, looking up from her knitting with a loving eye.

Behind the lattice, on these summer evenings, stands the militant figure of that old retainer, Bridget the cook, her stout arms akimbo, ready to engage in vigorous banter should Honora deign to approach.

"Whisht, 'Nora darlint, it's a young lady yell be soon, and the beaux a-comin' 'round!" she would cry, and throw back her head and laugh until the tears were in her eyes.

And the princess, a slim figure in an immaculate linen frock with red ribbons which Aunt Mary had copied from Longstreth's London catalogue, would reply with dignity:

"Bridget, I wish you would try to remember that my name is Honora."

Another spasm of laughter from Bridget.

"Listen to that now!" she would cry to another ancient retainer, Mary Ann, the housemaid, whose kitchen chair was tilted up against the side of the woodshed. "It'll be Miss Honora next, and George Hanbury here to-day with his eye through a knothole in the fence, out of his head for a sight of ye."

George Hanbury was Honora's cousin, and she did not deem his admiration a subject fit for discussion with Bridget.

"Sure," declared Mary Ann, "it's the air of a princess the child has."

That she should be thought a princess did not appear at all remarkable to Honora at twelve years of age. Perdita may have had such dreams. She had been born, she knew, in some wondrous land by the shores of the summer seas, not at all like St. Louis, and friends and relatives had not hesitated to remark in her hearing that she resembled--her father,--that handsome father who surely must have been a prince, whose before-mentioned photograph in the tortoise-shell frame was on the bureau in her little room. So far as Randolph Leffingwell was concerned, photography had not been invented for nothing. Other records of him remained which Honora had likewise seen: one end of a rose-covered villa--which Honora thought was a wing of his palace; a coach and four he was driving, and which had chanced to belong to an Englishman, although the photograph gave no evidence of this ownership. Neither Aunt Mary nor Uncle Tom had ever sought--for reasons perhaps obvious--to correct the child's impression of an extraordinary paternity.

Aunt Mary was a Puritan of Southern ancestry, and her father had been a Presbyterian minister, Uncle Tom was a member of the vestry of a church still under Puritan influences. As a consequence for Honora, there were Sunday afternoons--periods when the imaginative faculty, in which she was by no means lacking, was given full play. She would sit by the hour in the swing Uncle Tom had hung for her under the maple near the lattice, while castles rose on distant heights against blue skies. There was her real home, in a balconied chamber that overlooked mile upon mile of rustling forest in the valley; and when the wind blew, the sound of it was like the sea. Honora did not remember the sea, but its music was often in her ears.

She would be aroused from these dreams of greatness by the appearance of old Catherine, her nurse, on the side porch, reminding her that it was time to wash for supper. No princess could have had a more humble tiring-woman than Catherine.

Honora cannot be unduly blamed. When she reached the "little house under the hill" (as Catherine called the chamber beneath the eaves), she beheld reflected in the mirror an image like a tall, white flower that might indeed have belonged to a princess. Her hair, the colour of burnt sienna, fell evenly to her shoulders; her features even then had regularity and hauteur; her legs, in their black silk stockings, were straight; and the simple white lawn frock made the best of a slender figure. Those frocks of Honora's were a continual source of wonder and sometimes of envy--to Aunt Mary's friends; who returned from the seaside in the autumn, after a week among the fashions in Boston or New York, to find Honora in the latest models, and better dressed than their own children. Aunt Mary made no secret of the methods by which these seeming miracles were performed, and showed Cousin Eleanor Hanbury the fashion plates in the English periodicals. Cousin Eleanor sighed.

"Mary, you are wonderful," she would say. "Honora's clothes are better-looking than those I buy in the East, at such fabulous prices, from Cavendish."

Indeed, no woman was ever farther removed from personal vanity than Aunt Mary. She looked like a little Quakeress. Her silvered hair was parted in the middle and had, in spite of palpable efforts towards tightness and repression, a perceptible ripple in it. Grey was her only concession to colour, and her gowns and bonnets were of a primness which belonged to the past. Repression, or perhaps compression, was her note, for the energy confined within her little body was a thing to have astounded scientists: And Honora grew to womanhood and reflection before she had. guessed or considered that her aunt was possessed of intense emotions which had no outlet. Her features were regular, her shy eye had the clearness of a forest pool. She believed in predestination, which is to say that she was a fatalist; and while she steadfastly continued to regard this world as a place of sorrow and trials, she concerned herself very little about her participation in a future life. Old Dr. Ewing, the rector of St. Anne's, while conceding that no better or more charitable woman existed, found it so exceedingly difficult to talk to her, on the subject of religion that he had never tried it but once.

Such was Aunt Mary. The true student of human nature should not find it surprising that she spoiled Honora and strove--at what secret expense, care, and self-denial to Uncle Tom and herself, none will ever know--to adorn the child that she might appear creditably among companions whose parents were more fortunate in this world's goods; that she denied herself to educate Honora as these other children were educated. Nor is it astonishing that she should not have understood the highly complex organism of the young lady we have chosen for our heroine, who was shaken, at the age of thirteen, by unfulfilled longings.

Very early in life Honora learned to dread the summer, when one by one the families of her friends departed until the city itself seemed a remote and distant place from what it had been in the spring and winter. The great houses were closed and blinded, and in the evening the servants who had been left behind chattered on the front steps. Honora could not bear the sound of the trains that drifted across the night, and the sight of the trunks piled in the Hanburys' hall, in Wayland Square, always filled her with a sickening longing. Would the day ever come when she, too, would depart for the bright places of the earth? Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she was filled with a fierce belief in a destiny to sit in the high seats, to receive homage and dispense bounties, to discourse with great intellects, to know London and Paris and the marts and centres of the world as her father had. To escape--only to escape from the prison walls of a humdrum existence, and to soar!

Let us, if we can, reconstruct an August day when all (or nearly all) of Honora's small friends were gone eastward to the mountains or the seaside. In "the little house under the hill," the surface of which was a hot slate roof, Honora would awake about seven o'clock to find old Catherine bending over her in a dun-coloured calico dress, with the light fiercely beating against the closed shutters that braved it so unflinchingly throughout the day.

"The birds are before ye, Miss Honora, honey, and your uncle waterin' his roses this half-hour."

Uncle Tom was indeed an early riser. As Honora dressed (Catherine assisting as at a ceremony), she could see him, in his seersucker coat, bending tenderly over his beds; he lived enveloped in a peace which has since struck wonder to Honora's soul. She lingered in her dressing, even in those days, falling into reveries from which Catherine gently and deferentially aroused her; and Uncle Tom would be carving the beefsteak and Aunt Mary pouring the coffee when she finally arrived in the dining room to nibble at one of Bridget's unforgettable rolls or hot biscuits. Uncle Tom had his joke, and at quarter-past eight precisely he would kiss Aunt Mary and walk to the corner to wait for the ambling horse-car that was to take him to the bank. Sometimes Honora went to the corner with him, and he waved her good-by from the platform as he felt in his pocket for the nickel that was to pay his fare.

When Honora returned, Aunt Mary had donned her apron, and was industriously aiding Mary Ann to wash the dishes and maintain the customary high polish on her husband's share of the Leffingwell silver which, standing on the side table, shot hither and thither rays of green light that filtered through the shutters into the darkened room. The child partook of Aunt Mary's pride in that silver, made for a Kentucky great-grandfather Leffingwell by a famous Philadelphia silversmith three-quarters of a century before. Honora sighed.

"What's the matter, Honora?" asked Aunt Mary, without pausing in her vigorous rubbing.

"The Leffingwells used to be great once upon a time, didn't they, Aunt Mary?"

"Your Uncle Tom," answered Aunt Mary, quietly, "is the greatest man I know, child."

"And my father must have been a great man, too," cried Honora, "to have been a consul and drive coaches."

Aunt Mary was silent. She was not a person who spoke easily on difficult subjects.

"Why don't you ever talk to me about my father, Aunt Mary? Uncle Tom does."

"I didn't know your father, Honora."

"But you have seen him?"

"Yes," said Aunt Mary, dipping her cloth into the whiting; "I saw him at my wedding. But he was very, young."

"What was he like?" Honora demanded. "He was very handsome, wasn't he?"

'Yes, child."

"And he had ambition, didn't he, Aunt Mary?"

Aunt Mary paused. Her eyes were troubled as she looked at Honora, whose head was thrown back.

"What kind of ambition do you mean, Honora?"

"Oh," cried Honora, "to be great and rich and powerful, and to be somebody."

"Who has been putting such things in your head, my dear?"

"No one, Aunt Mary. Only, if I were a man, I shouldn't rest until I became great."

Alas, that Aunt Mary, with all her will, should have such limited powers of expression! She resumed her scrubbing of the silver before she spoke.

"To do one's duty, to accept cheerfully and like a Christian the responsibilities and burdens of life, is the highest form of greatness, my child. Your Uncle Tom has had many things to trouble him; he has always worked for others, and not for himself. And he is respected and loved by all who know him."

"Yes, I know, Aunt Mary. But--"

"But what, Honora?"

"Then why isn't he rich, as my father was?"

"Your father wasn't rich, my dear," said Aunt Mary, sadly.

"Why, Aunt Mary!" Honora exclaimed, "he lived in a beautiful house, and owned horses. Isn't that being rich?"

Poor Aunt Mary!

"Honora," she answered, "there are some things you are too young to understand. But try to remember, my dear, that happiness doesn't consist in being rich."

"But I have often heard you say that you wished you were rich, Aunt Mary, and had nice things, and a picture gallery like Mr. Dwyer."

"I should like to have beautiful pictures, Honora."

"I don't like Mr. Dwyer," declared Honora, abruptly.

"You mustn't say that, Honora," was Aunt Mary's reproof. "Mr. Dwyer is an upright, public-spirited man, and he thinks a great deal of your Uncle Tom."

"I can't help it, Aunt Mary," said Honora. "I think he enjoys being --well, being able to do things for a man like Uncle Tom."

Neither Aunt Mary nor Honora guessed what a subtle criticism this was of Mr. Dwyer. Aunt Mary was troubled and puzzled; and she began to speculate (not for the first time) why the Lord had given a person with so little imagination a child like Honora to bring up in the straight and narrow path.

"When I go on Sunday afternoons with Uncle Tom to see Mr. Dwyer's pictures," Honora persisted, "I always feel that he is so glad to have what other people haven't or he wouldn't have any one to show them to."

Aunt Mary shook her head. Once she had given her loyal friendship, such faults as this became as nothing.

"And when" said Honora, "when Mrs. Dwyer has dinner-parties for celebrated people who come here, why does she invite you in to see the table?"

"Out of kindness, Honora. Mrs. Dwyer knows that I enjoy looking at beautiful things."

"Why doesn't she invite you to the dinners?" asked Honora, hotly. "Our family is just as good as Mrs. Dwyer's."

The extent of Aunt Mary's distress was not apparent.

"You are talking nonsense, my child," she said. "All my friends know that I am not a person who can entertain distinguished people, and that I do not go out, and that I haven't the money to buy evening dresses. And even if I had," she added, "I haven't a pretty neck, so it's just as well."

A philosophy distinctly Aunt Mary's.

Uncle Tom, after he had listened without comment that evening to her account of this conversation, was of the opinion that to take Honora to task for her fancies would be waste of breath; that they would right themselves as she grew up.

"I'm afraid it's inheritance, Tom," said Aunt Mary, at last. "And if so, it ought to be counteracted. We've seen other signs of it. You know Honora has little or no idea of the value of money--or of its ownership."

"She sees little enough of it," Uncle Tom remarked with a smile.

"Tom."

"Well."

"Sometimes I think I've done wrong not to dress her more simply. I'm afraid it's given the child a taste for--for self-adornment."

"I once had a fond belief that all women possessed such a taste," said Uncle Tom, with a quizzical look at his own exception. "To tell you the truth, I never classed it as a fault."

"Then I don't see why you married me," said Aunt Mary--a periodical remark of hers. "But, Tom, I do wish her to appear as well as the other children, and (Aunt Mary actually blushed) the child has good looks."

"Why don't you go as far as old Catherine, and call her a princess?" he asked.

"Do you want me to ruin her utterly?" exclaimed Aunt Mary.

Uncle Tom put his hands on his wife's shoulders and looked down into her face, and smiled again. Although she held herself very straight, the top of her head was very little above the level of his chin.

"It strikes me that you are entitled to some little indulgence in life, Mary," he said.

One of the curious contradictions of Aunt Mary's character was a never dying interest, which held no taint of envy, in the doings of people more fortunate than herself. In the long summer days, after her silver was cleaned and her housekeeping and marketing finished, she read in the book-club periodicals of royal marriages, embassy balls, of great town and country houses and their owners at home and abroad. And she knew, by means of a correspondence with Cousin Eleanor Hanbury and other intimates, the kind of cottages in which her friends sojourned at the seashore or in the mountains; how many rooms they had, and how many servants, and very often who the servants were; she was likewise informed on the climate, and the ease with which it was possible to obtain fresh vegetables. And to all of this information Uncle Tom would listen, smiling but genuinely interested, while he carved at dinner.

One evening, when Uncle Tom had gone to play piquet with Mr. Isham, who was ill, Honora further surprised her aunt by exclaiming: "How can you talk of things other people have and not want them, Aunt Mary?"

"Why should I desire what I cannot have, my dear? I take such pleasure out of my friends' possessions as I can."

"But you want to go to the seashore, I know you do. I've heard you say so," Honora protested.

"I should like to see the open ocean before I die," admitted Aunt Mary, unexpectedly. "I saw New York harbour once, when we went to meet you. And I know how the salt water smells--which is as much, perhaps, as I have the right to hope for. But I have often thought it would be nice to sit for a whole summer by the sea and listen to the waves dashing upon the beach, like those in the Chase picture in Mr. Dwyer's gallery."

Aunt Mary little guessed the unspeakable rebellion aroused in Honora by this acknowledgment of being fatally circumscribed. Wouldn't Uncle Tom ever be rich?

Aunt Mary shook her head--she saw no prospect of it.

But other men, who were not half so good as Uncle Tom, got rich.

Uncle Tom was not the kind of man who cared for riches. He was content to do his duty in that sphere where God had placed him.

Poor Aunt Mary. Honora never asked her uncle such questions: to do so never occurred to her. At peace with all men, he gave of his best to children, and Honora remained a child. Next to his flowers, walking was Uncle Tom's chief recreation, and from the time she could be guided by the hand she went with him. His very presence had the gift of dispelling longings, even in the young; the gift of compelling delight in simple things. Of a Sunday afternoon, if the heat were not too great, he would take Honora to the wild park that stretches westward of the city, and something of the depth and intensity of his pleasure in the birds, the forest, and the wild flowers would communicate itself to her. She learned all unconsciously (by suggestion, as it were) to take delight in them; a delight that was to last her lifetime, a never failing resource to which she was to turn again and again. In winter, they went to the botanical gardens or the Zoo. Uncle Tom had a passion for animals, and Mr. Isham, who was a director, gave him a pass through the gates. The keepers knew him, and spoke to him with kindly respect. Nay, it seemed to Honora that the very animals knew him, and offered themselves ingratiatingly to be stroked by one whom they recognized as friend. Jaded horses in the street lifted their noses; stray, homeless cats rubbed against his legs, and vagrant dogs looked up at him trustfully with wagging tails.

Yet his goodness, as Emerson would have said, had some edge to it. Honora had seen the light of anger in his blue eye--a divine ray. Once he had chastised her for telling Aunt Mary a lie (she could not have lied to him) and Honora had never forgotten it. The anger of such a man had indeed some element in it of the divine; terrible, not in volume, but in righteous intensity. And when it had passed there was no occasion for future warning. The memory of it lingered.

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III. CONCERNING PROVIDENCE

What quality was it in Honora that compelled Bridget to stop her ironing on Tuesdays in order to make hot waffles for a young woman who was late to breakfast? Bridget, who would have filled the kitchen with righteous wrath if Aunt Mary had transgressed the rules of the house, which were like the laws of the Medes and Persians! And in Honora's early youth Mary Ann, the housemaid, spent more than one painful evening writing home for cockle shells and other articles to propitiate our princess, who rewarded her with a winning smile and a kiss, which invariably melted the honest girl into tears. The Queen of Scots never had a more devoted chamber woman than old Catherine,--who would have gone to the stake with a smile to save her little lady a single childish ill, and who spent her savings, until severely taken to task by Aunt Mary, upon objects for which a casual wish had been expressed. The saints themselves must at times have been aweary from hearing Honora's name.

Not to speak of Christmas! Christmas in the little house was one wild delirium of joy. The night before the festival was, to all outward appearances, an ordinary evening, when Uncle Tom sat by the fire in his slippers, as usual, scouting the idea that there would be any Christmas at all. Aunt Mary sewed, and talked with maddening calmness of the news of the day; but for Honora the air was charged with coming events of the first magnitude. The very furniture of the little sitting-room had a different air, the room itself wore a mysterious aspect, and the cannel-coal fire seemed to give forth a special quality of unearthly light.

"Is to-morrow Christmas?" Uncle Tom would exclaim. Bless me! Honora, I am so glad you reminded me."

"Now, Uncle Tom, you knew it was Christmas all the time!"

"Kiss your uncle good night, Honora, and go right to sleep, dear,"--from Aunt Mary.

The unconscious irony in that command of Aunt Mary's!--to go right to sleep! Many times was a head lifted from a small pillow, straining after the meaning of the squeaky noises that came up from below! Not Santa Claus. Honora's belief in him had merged into a blind faith in a larger and even more benevolent, if material providence: the kind of providence which Mr. Meredith depicts, and which was to say to Beauchamp: "Here's your marquise;" a particular providence which, at the proper time, gave Uncle Tom money, and commanded, with a smile, "Buy this for Honora--she wants it." All-sufficient reason! Soul-satisfying philosophy, to which Honora was to cling for many years of life. It is amazing how much can be wrung from a reluctant world by the mere belief in this kind of providence.

Sleep came at last, in the darkest of the hours. And still in the dark hours a stirring, a delicious sensation preceding reason, and the consciousness of a figure stealing about the room. Honora sat up in bed, shivering with cold and delight.

"Is it awake ye are, darlint, and it but four o'clock the morn!"

"What are you doing, Cathy?"

"Musha, it's to Mass I'm going, to ask the Mother of God to give ye many happy Christmases the like of this, Miss Honora." And Catherine's arms were about her.

"Oh, it's Christmas, Cathy, isn't it? How could I have forgotten it!"

"Now go to sleep, honey. Your aunt and uncle wouldn't like it at all at all if ye was to make noise in the middle of the night--and it's little better it is."

Sleep! A despised waste of time in childhood. Catherine went to Mass, and after an eternity, the grey December light began to sift through the shutters, and human endurance had reached its limit. Honora, still shivering, seized a fleecy wrapper (the handiwork of Aunt Mary) and crept, a diminutive ghost, down the creaking stairway to the sitting-room. A sitting-room which now was not a sitting-room, but for to-day a place of magic. As though by a prearranged salute of the gods,--at Honora's entrance the fire burst through the thick blanket of fine coal which Uncle Tom had laid before going to bed, and with a little gasp of joy that was almost pain, she paused on the threshold. That one flash, like Pizarro's first sunrise over Peru, gilded the edge of infinite possibilities.

Needless to enumerate them. The whole world, as we know, was in a conspiracy to spoil Honora. The Dwyers, the Cartwrights, the Haydens, the Brices, the Ishams, and I know not how many others had sent their tributes, and Honora's second cousins, the Hanburys, from the family mansion behind the stately elms of Wayland Square--of which something anon. A miniature mahogany desk, a prayer-book and hymnal which the Dwyers had brought home from New York, endless volumes of a more secular and (to Honora) entrancing nature; roller skates; skates for real ice, when it should appear in the form of sleet on the sidewalks; a sled; humbler gifts from Bridget, Mary Ann, and Catherine, and a wonderful coat, with hat to match, of a certain dark green velvet. When Aunt Mary appeared, an hour or so later, Honora was surveying her magnificence in the glass.

"Oh, Aunt Mary!" she cried, with her arms tightly locked around her aunt's neck, "how lovely! Did you send all the way to New York for it?"

"No, Honora," said her aunt, "it didn't come from New York." Aunt Mary did not explain that this coat had been her one engrossing occupation for six weeks, at such times when Honora was out or tucked away safely in bed.

Perhaps Honora's face fell a little. Aunt Mary scanned it rather anxiously.

"Does that cause you to like it any less, Honora?" she asked.

"Aunt Mary!" exclaimed Honora, in a tone of reproval. And added after a little, "I suppose Mademoiselle made it."

"Does it make any difference who made it, Honora?"

"Oh, no indeed, Aunt Mary. May I wear it to Cousin Eleanor's to-day?"

"I gave it to you to wear, Honora."

Not in Honora's memory was there a Christmas breakfast during which Peter Erwin did not appear, bringing gifts. Peter Erwin, of whom we caught a glimpse doing an errand for Uncle Tom in the bank. With the complacency of the sun Honora was wont to regard this most constant of her satellites. Her awakening powers of observation had discovered him in bondage, and in bondage he had been ever since: for their acquaintance had begun on the first Sunday afternoon after Honora's arrival in St. Louis at the age of eighteen months. It will be remembered that Honora was even then a coquette, and as she sat in her new baby-carriage under the pear tree, flirted outrageously with Peter, who stood on one foot from embarrassment.

"Why, Peter," Uncle Tom had said slyly, "why don't you kiss her?"

That kiss had been Peter's seal of service. And he became, on Sunday afternoons, a sort of understudy for Catherine. He took an amazing delight in wheeling Honora up and down the yard, and up and down the sidewalk. Brunhilde or Queen Elizabeth never wielded a power more absolute, nor had an adorer more satisfactory; and of all his remarkable talents, none were more conspicuous than his abilities to tell a story and to choose a present. Emancipated from the perambulator, Honora would watch for him at the window, and toddle to the gate to meet him, a gentleman-in-waiting whose zeal, however arduous, never flagged.

On this particular Christmas morning, when she heard the gate slam, Honora sprang up from the table to don her green velvet coat. Poor Peter! As though his subjugation could be more complete!

"It's the postman," suggested Uncle Tom, wickedly.

"It's Peter!" cried Honora, triumphantly, from the hall as she flunk open the door, letting in a breath of cold Christmas air out of the sunlight.

It was Peter, but a Peter who has changed some since perambulator days, --just as Honora has changed some. A Peter who, instead of fourteen, is six and twenty; a full-fledged lawyer, in the office of that most celebrated of St. Louis practitioners, Judge Stephen Brice. For the Peter Erwins of this world are queer creatures, and move rapidly without appearing to the Honoras to move at all. A great many things have happened to Peter since he had been a messenger boy in the bank.

Needless to say, Uncle Tom had taken an interest in him. And, according to Peter, this fact accounted for all the good fortune which had followed. Shortly before the news came of his brother's death, Uncle Tom had discovered that the boy who did his errands so willingly was going to night school, and was the grandson of a gentleman who had fought with credit in the Mexican War, and died in misfortune: the grandmother was Peter's only living relative. Through Uncle Tom, Mr. Isham became interested, and Judge Brice. There was a certain scholarship in the Washington University which Peter obtained, and he worked his way through the law school afterwards.

A simple story, of which many a duplicate could be found in this country of ours. In the course of the dozen years or so of its unravelling the grandmother had died, and Peter had become, to all intents and purposes, a member of Uncle Tom's family. A place was set for him at Sunday dinner; and, if he did not appear, at Sunday tea. Sometimes at both. And here he was, as usual, on Christmas morning, his arms so full that he had had to push open the gate with his foot.

"Well, well, well, well!" he said, stopping short on the doorstep and surveying our velvet-clad princess, "I've come to the wrong house."

The princess stuck her finger into her cheek.

"Don't be silly, Peter!" she said; and Merry Christmas!"

"Merry Christmas!" he replied, edging sidewise in at the door and depositing his parcels on the mahogany horsehair sofa. He chose one, and seized the princess--velvet coat and all!--in his arms and kissed her. When he released her, there remained in her hand a morocco-bound diary, marked with her monogram, and destined to contain high matters.

"How could you know what I wanted, Peter?" she exclaimed, after she had divested it of the tissue paper, holly, and red ribbon in which he had so carefully wrapped it. For it is a royal trait to thank with the same graciousness and warmth the donors of the humblest and the greatest offerings.

There was a paper-knife for Uncle Tom, and a workbasket for Aunt Mary, and a dress apiece for Catherine, Bridget, and Mary Ann, none of whom Peter ever forgot. Although the smoke was even at that period beginning to creep westward, the sun poured through the lace curtains into the little dining-room and danced on the silver coffeepot as Aunt Mary poured out Peter's cup, and the blue china breakfast plates were bluer than ever because it was Christmas. The humblest of familiar articles took on the air of a present. And after breakfast, while Aunt Mary occupied herself with that immemorial institution,--which was to lure hitherwards so many prominent citizens of St. Louis during the day,--eggnogg, Peter surveyed the offerings which transformed the sitting-room. The table had been pushed back against the bookcases, the chairs knew not their time-honoured places, and white paper and red ribbon littered the floor. Uncle Tom, relegated to a corner, pretended to read his newspaper, while Honora flitted from Peter's knees to his, or sat cross-legged on the hearth-rug investigating a bottomless stocking.

"What in the world are we going to do with all these things?" said Peter.

"We?" cried Honora.

"When we get married, I mean," said Peter, smiling at Uncle Tom. "Let's see!" and he began counting on his fingers, which were long but very strong--so strong that Honora could never loosen even one of them when they gripped her. "One--two--three--eight Christmases before you are twenty-one. We'll have enough things to set us up in housekeeping. Or perhaps you'd rather get married when you are eighteen?"

"I've always told you I wasn't going to marry you, Peter," said Honora, with decision.

"Why by not?" He always asked that question.

Honora sighed.

"I'll make a good husband," said Peter; "I'll promise. Ugly men are always good husbands."

"I didn't say you were ugly," declared the ever considerate Honora.

"Only my nose is too big," he quoted; "and I am too long one way and not wide enough."

"You have a certain air of distinction in spite of it," said Honora.

Uncle Tom's newspaper began to shake, and he read more industriously than ever.

"You've been reading--novels!" said Peter, in a terrible judicial voice.

Honora flushed guiltily, and resumed her inspection of the stocking. Miss Rossiter, a maiden lady of somewhat romantic tendencies, was librarian of the Book Club that year. And as a result a book called "Harold's Quest," by an author who shall be nameless, had come to the house. And it was Harold who had had "a certain air of distinction."

"It isn't very kind of you to make fun of me when I pay you a compliment," replied Honora, with dignity.

"I was naturally put out," he declared gravely, "because you said you wouldn't marry me. But I don't intend to give up. No man who is worth his salt ever gives up."

"You are old enough to get married now," said Honora, still considerate.

"But I am not rich enough," said Peter; "and besides, I want you."

One of the first entries in the morocco diary--which had a lock and key to it--was a description of Honora's future husband. We cannot violate the lock, nor steal the key from under her pillow. But this much, alas, may be said with discretion, that he bore no resemblance to Peter Erwin. It may be guessed, however, that he contained something of Harold, and more of Randolph Leffingwell; and that he did not live in St. Louis.

An event of Christmas, after church, was the dinner of which Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary and Honora partook with Cousin Eleanor Hanbury, who had been a Leffingwell, and was a first cousin of Honora's father. Honora loved the atmosphere of the massive, yellow stone house in Wayland Square, with its tall polished mahogany doors and thick carpets, with its deferential darky servants, some of whom had been the slaves of her great uncle. To Honora, gifted with imagination, the house had an odour all its own; a rich, clean odour significant, in later life, of wealth and luxury and spotless housekeeping. And she knew it from top to bottom. The spacious upper floor, which in ordinary dwellings would have been an attic, was the realm of young George and his sisters, Edith and Mary (Aunt Mary's namesake). Rainy Saturdays, all too brief, Honora had passed there, when the big dolls' house in the playroom became the scene of domestic dramas which Edith rehearsed after she went to bed, although Mary took them more calmly. In his tenderer years, Honora even fired George, and riots occurred which took the combined efforts of Cousin Eleanor and Mammy Lucy to quell. It may be remarked, in passing, that Cousin Eleanor looked with suspicion upon this imaginative gift of Honora's, and had several serious conversations with Aunt Mary on the subject.

It was true, in a measure, that Honora quickened to life everything she touched, and her arrival in Wayland Square was invariably greeted with shouts of joy. There was no doll on which she had not bestowed a history, and by dint of her insistence their pasts clung to them with all the reality of a fate not by any means to be lived down. If George rode the huge rocking-horse, he was Paul Revere, or some equally historic figure, and sometimes, to Edith's terror, he was compelled to assume the role of Bluebeard, when Honora submitted to decapitation with a fortitude amounting to stoicism. Hide and seek was altogether too tame for her, a stake of life and death, or imprisonment or treasure, being a necessity. And many times was Edith extracted from the recesses of the cellar in a condition bordering on hysterics, the day ending tamely with a Bible story or a selection from "Little Women" read by Cousin Eleanor.

In autumn, and again in spring and early summer before the annual departure of the Hanbury family for the sea, the pleasant yard with its wide shade trees and its shrubbery was a land of enchantment threatened by a genie. Black Bias, the family coachman, polishing the fat carriage horses in the stable yard, was the genie; and George the intrepid knight who, spurred by Honora, would dash in and pinch Bias in a part of his anatomy which the honest darky had never seen. An ideal genie, for he could assume an astonishing fierceness at will.

"I'll git you yit, Marse George!"

Had it not been for Honora, her cousins would have found the paradise in which they lived a commonplace spot, and indeed they never could realize its tremendous possibilities in her absence. What would the Mediterranean Sea and its adjoining countries be to us unless the wanderings of Ulysses and AEneas had made them real? And what would Cousin Eleanor's yard have been without Honora? Whatever there was of romance and folklore in Uncle Tom's library Honora had extracted at an early age, and with astonishing ease had avoided that which was dry and uninteresting. The result was a nomenclature for Aunt Eleanor's yard, in which there was even a terra incognita wherefrom venturesome travellers never returned, but were transformed into wild beasts or monkeys.

Although they acknowledged her leadership, Edith and Mary were sorry for Honora, for they knew that if her father had lived she would have had a house and garden like theirs, only larger, and beside a blue sea where it was warm always. Honora had told them so, and colour was lent to her assertions by the fact that their mother, when they repeated this to her, only smiled sadly, and brushed her eyes with her handkerchief. She was even more beautiful when she did so, Edith told her,--a remark which caused Mrs. Hanbury to scan her younger daughter closely; it smacked of Honora.

"Was Cousin Randolph handsome?" Edith demanded. Mrs. Hanbury started, so vividly there arose before her eyes a brave and dashing figure, clad in grey English cloth, walking by her side on a sunny autumn morning in the Rue de la Paix. Well she remembered that trip abroad with her mother, Randolph's aunt, and how attentive he was, and showed them the best restaurants in which to dine. He had only been in France a short time, but his knowledge of restaurants and the world in general had been amazing, and his acquaintances legion. He had a way, which there was no resisting, of taking people by storm.

"Yes, dear," answered Mrs. Hanbury, absently, when the child repeated the question, "he was very handsome."

"Honora says he would have been President," put in George. "Of course I don't believe it. She said they lived in a palace by the sea in the south of France, with gardens and fountains and a lot of things like that, and princesses and princes and eunuchs--"

"And what!" exclaimed Mrs. Hanbury, aghast.

"I know," said George, contemptuously, "she got that out of the Arabian Nights." But this suspicion did not prevent him, the next time Honora regaled them with more adventures of the palace by the summer seas, from listening with a rapt attention. No two tales were ever alike. His admiration for Honora did not wane, but increased. It differed from that of his sisters, however, in being a tribute to her creative faculties, while Edith's breathless faith pictured her cousin as having passed through as many adventures as Queen Esther. George paid her a characteristic compliment, but chivalrously drew her aside to bestow it. He was not one to mince matters.

"You're a wonder, Honora," he said. "If I could lie like that, I wouldn't want a pony."

He was forced to draw back a little from the heat of the conflagration he had kindled.

"George Hanbury," she cried, "don't you ever speak to me again! Never! Do you understand?"

It was thus that George, at some cost, had made a considerable discovery which, for the moment, shook even his scepticism. Honora believed it all herself.

Cousin Eleanor Hanbury was a person, or personage, who took a deep and abiding interest in her fellow-beings, and the old clothes of the Hanbury family went unerringly to the needy whose figures most resembled those of the original owners. For Mrs. Hanbury had a wide but comparatively unknown charity list. She was, secretly, one of the many providence which Honora accepted collectively, although it is by no means certain whether Honora, at this period, would have thanked her cousin for tuition at Miss Farmer's school, and for her daily tasks at French and music concerning which Aunt Mary was so particular. On the memorable Christmas morning when, arrayed in green velvet, she arrived with her aunt and uncle for dinner in Wayland Square, Cousin Eleanor drew Aunt Mary into her bedroom and shut the door, and handed her a sealed envelope. Without opening it, but guessing with much accuracy its contents, Aunt Mary handed it back.

"You are doing too much, Eleanor," she said.

Mrs. Hanbury was likewise a direct person.

"I will, take it back on one condition, Mary. If you will tell me that Tom has finished paying Randolph's debts."

Mrs. Leffingwell was silent.

"I thought not," said Mrs. Hanbury. "Now Randolph was my own cousin, and I insist."

Aunt Mary turned over the envelope, and there followed a few moments' silence, broken only by the distant clamour of tin horns and other musical instruments of the season.

"I sometimes think, Mary, that Honora is a little like Randolph, and-Mrs. Randolph. Of course, I did not know her."

"Neither did I," said Aunt Mary.

"Mary," said Mrs. Hanbury, again, "I realize how you worked to make the child that velvet coat. Do you think you ought to dress her that way?"

"I don't see why she shouldn't be as well dressed as the children of my friends, Eleanor."

Mrs. Hanbury laid her hand impulsively on Aunt Mary's.

"No child I know of dresses half as well," said Mrs. Hanbury. "The trouble you take--"

"Is rewarded," said Aunt Mary.

"Yes," Mrs. Hanbury agreed. "If my own daughters were half as good looking, I should be content. And Honora has an air of race. Oh, Mary, can't you see? I am only thinking of the child's future."

"Do you expect me to take down all my mirrors, Eleanor? If she has good looks," said Aunt Mary, "she has not learned it from my lips."

It was true: Even Aunt Mary's enemies, and she had some, could not accuse her of the weakness of flattery. So Mrs. Hanbury smiled, and dropped the subject.

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IV. OF TEMPERAMENT

We have the word of Mr. Cyrus Meeker that Honora did not have to learn to dance. The art came to her naturally. Of Mr. Cyrus Meeker, whose mustaches, at the age of five and sixty, are waxed as tight as ever, and whose little legs to-day are as nimble as of yore. He has a memory like Mr. Gladstone's, and can give you a social history of the city that is well worth your time and attention. He will tell you how, for instance, he was kicked by the august feet of Mr. George Hanbury on the occasion of his first lesson to that distinguished young gentleman; and how, although Mr. Meeker's shins were sore, he pleaded nobly for Mr. George, who was sent home in the carriage by himself,--a punishment, by the way, which Mr. George desired above all things.

This celebrated incident occurred in the new ballroom at the top of the new house of young Mrs. Hayden, where the meetings of the dancing class were held weekly. Today the soot, like the ashes of Vesuvius, spouting from ten thousand soft-coal craters, has buried that house and the whole district fathoms deep in social obscurity. And beautiful Mrs. Hayden what has become of her? And Lucy Hayden, that doll-like darling of the gods?

All this belongs, however, to another history, which may some day be written. This one is Honora's, and must be got on with, for it is to be a chronicle of lightning changes. Happy we if we can follow Honora, and we must be prepared to make many friends and drop them in the process.

Shortly after Mrs. Hayden had built that palatial house (which had a high fence around its grounds and a driveway leading to a porte-cochere) and had given her initial ball, the dancing class began. It was on a blue afternoon in late November that Aunt Mary and Honora, with Cousin Eleanor and the two girls, and George sulking in a corner of the carriage, were driven through the gates behind Bias and the fat horses of the Hanburys.

Honora has a vivid remembrance of the impression the house made on her, with its polished floors and spacious rooms filled with a new and mysterious and altogether inspiring fashion of things. Mrs. Hayden represented the outposts in the days of Richardson and Davenport--had Honora but known it. This great house was all so different from anything she (and many others in the city) had ever seen. And she stood gazing into the drawing room, with its curtains and decorously drawn shades, in a rapture which her aunt and cousins were far from guessing.

"Come, Honora," said her aunt. "What's the matter, dear?"

How could she explain to Aunt Mary that the sight of beautiful things gave her a sort of pain--when she did not yet know it herself? There was the massive stairway, for instance, which they ascended, softly lighted by a great leaded window of stained glass on the first landing; and the spacious bedrooms with their shining brass beds and lace spreads (another innovation which Honora resolved to adopt when she married); and at last, far above all, its deep-set windows looking out above the trees towards the park a mile to the westward, the ballroom,--the ballroom, with its mirrors and high chandeliers, and chairs of gilt and blue set against the walls, all of which made no impression whatever upon George and Mary and Edith, but gave Honora a thrill. No wonder that she learned to dance quickly under such an inspiration!

And how pretty Mrs. Hayden looked as she came forward to greet them and kissed Honora! She had been Virginia Grey, and scarce had had a gown to her back when she had married the elderly Duncan Hayden, who had built her this house and presented her with a checkbook,--a check-book which Virginia believed to be like the widow's cruse of oil-unfailing. Alas, those days of picnics and balls; of dinners at that recent innovation, the club; of theatre-parties and excursions to baseball games between the young men in Mrs. Hayden's train (and all young men were) who played at Harvard or Yale or Princeton; those days were too care-free to have endured.

"Aunt Mary," asked Honora, when they were home again in the lamplight of the little sitting-room, "why was it that Mr. Meeker was so polite to Cousin Eleanor, and asked her about my dancing instead of you?"

Aunt Mary smiled.

"Because, Honora," she said, "because I am a person of no importance in Mr. Meeker's eyes."

"If I were a man," cried Honora, fiercely, "I should never rest until I had made enough money to make Mr. Meeker wriggle."

"Honora, come here," said her aunt, gazing in troubled surprise at the tense little figure by the mantel. "I don't know what could have put such things into your head, my child. Money isn't everything. In times of real trouble it cannot save one."

"But it can save one from humiliation!" exclaimed Honora, unexpectedly. Another sign of a peculiar precociousness, at fourteen, with which Aunt Mary was finding herself unable to cope. "I would rather be killed than humiliated by Mr. Meeker."

Whereupon she flew out of the room and upstairs, where old Catherine, in dismay, found her sobbing a little later.

Poor Aunt Mary! Few people guessed the spirit which was bound up in her, aching to extend its sympathy and not knowing how, save by an unswerving and undemonstrative devotion. Her words of comfort were as few as her silent deeds were many.

But Honora continued to go to the dancing class, where she treated Mr. Meeker with a hauteur that astonished him, amused Virginia Hayden, and perplexed Cousin Eleanor. Mr. Meeker's cringing soul responded, and in a month Honora was the leading spirit of the class, led the marches, and was pointed out by the little dancing master as all that a lady should be in deportment and bearing.

This treatment, which succeeded so well in Mr. Meeker's case, Honora had previously applied to others of his sex. Like most people with a future, she began young. Of late, for instance, Mr. George Hanbury had shown a tendency to regard her as his personal property; for George had a high-handed way with him,--boys being an enigma to his mother. Even in those days he had a bullet head and a red face and square shoulders, and was rather undersized for his age--which was Honora's.

Needless to say, George did not approve of the dancing class; and let it be known, both by words and deeds, that he was there under protest. Nor did he regard with favour Honora's triumphal progress, but sat in a corner with several congenial spirits whose feelings ranged from scorn to despair, commenting in loud whispers upon those of his sex to whom the terpsichorean art came more naturally. Upon one Algernon Cartwright, for example, whose striking likeness to the Van Dyck portrait of a young king had been more than once commented upon by his elders, and whose velveteen suits enhanced the resemblance. Algernon, by the way, was the favourite male pupil of Mr. Meeker; and, on occasions, Algernon and Honora were called upon to give exhibitions for the others, the sight of which filled George with contemptuous rage. Algernon danced altogether too much with Honora,--so George informed his cousin.

The simple result of George's protests was to make Honora dance with Algernon the more, evincing, even at this period of her career, a commendable determination to resent dictation. George should have lived in the Middle Ages, when the spirit of modern American womanhood was as yet unborn. Once he contrived, by main force, to drag her out into the hall.

"George," she said, "perhaps, if you'd let me alone perhaps I'd like you better."

"Perhaps," he retorted fiercely, "if you wouldn't make a fool of yourself with those mother's darlings, I'd like you better."

"George," said Honora, "learn to dance."

"Never!" he cried, but she was gone. While hovering around the door he heard Mrs. Hayden's voice.

"Unless I am tremendously mistaken, my dear," that lady was remarking to Mrs. Dwyer, whose daughter Emily's future millions were powerless to compel youths of fourteen to dance with her, although she is now happily married, "unless I am mistaken, Honora will have a career. The child will be a raving beauty. And she has to perfection the art of managing men."

"As her father had the art of managing women," said Mrs. Dwyer. "Dear me, how well I remember Randolph! I would have followed him to--to Cheyenne."

Mrs. Hayden laughed. "He never would have gone to Cheyenne, I imagine," she said.

"He never looked at me, and I have reason to be profoundly thankful for it," said Mrs. Dwyer.

Virginia Hayden bit her lip. She remembered a saying of Mrs. Brice, "Blessed are the ugly, for they shall not be tempted."

"They say that poor Tom Leffingwell has not yet finished paying his debts," continued Mrs. Dwyer, "although his uncle, Eleanor Hanbury's father, cancelled what Randolph had had from him in his will. It was twenty-five thousand dollars. James Hanbury, you remember, had him appointed consul at Nice. Randolph Leffingwell gave the impression of conferring a favour when he borrowed money. I cannot understand why he married that penniless and empty-headed beauty."

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Hayden, "it was because of his ability to borrow money that he felt he could afford to."

The eyes of the two ladies unconsciously followed Honora about the room.

"I never knew a better or a more honest woman than Mary Leffingwell, but I tremble for her. She is utterly incapable of managing that child. If Honora is a complicated mechanism now, what will she be at twenty? She has elements in her which poor Mary never dreamed of. I overheard her with Emily, and she talks like a grown-up person."

Mrs. Hayden's dimples deepened.

"Better than some grown-up women," she said. "She sat in my room while I dressed the other afternoon. Mrs. Leffingwell had sent her with a note about that French governess. And, by the way, she speaks French as though she had lived in Paris."

Little Mrs. Dwyer raised her hands in protest.

"It doesn't seem natural, somehow. It doesn't seem exactly--moral, my dear."

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Hayden. "Mrs. Leffingwell is only giving the child the advantages which her companions have--Emily has French, hasn't she?"

"But Emily can't speak it--that way," said Mrs. Dwyer. "I don't blame Mary Leffingwell. She thinks she is doing her duty, but it has always seemed to me that Honora was one of those children who would better have been brought up on bread and butter and jam."

"Honora would only have eaten the jam," said Mrs. Hayden. "But I love her."

"I, too, am fond of the child, but I tremble for her. I am afraid she has that terrible thing which is called temperament."

George Hanbury made a second heroic rush, and dragged Honora out once more.

"What is this disease you've got?" he demanded.

"Disease?" she cried; "I haven't any disease."

"Mrs Dwyer says you have temperament, and that it is a terrible thing."

Honora stopped him in a corner.

"Because people like Mrs. Dwyer haven't got it," she declared, with a warmth which George found inexplicable.

"What is it?" he demanded.

"You'll never know, either, George," she answered; "it's soul."

"Soul!" he repeated; "I have one, and its immortal," he added promptly.

In the summer, that season of desolation for Honora, when George Hanbury and Algernon Cartwright and other young gentlemen were at the seashore learning to sail boats and to play tennis, Peter Erwin came to his own. Nearly every evening after dinner, while the light was still lingering under the shade trees of the street, and Aunt Mary still placidly sewing in the wicker chair on the lawn, and Uncle Tom making the tour of flowers with his watering pot, the gate would slam, and Peter's tall form appear.

It never occurred to Honora that had it not been for Peter those evenings would have been even less bearable than they were. To sit indoors with a light and read in a St. Louis midsummer was not to be thought of. Peter played backgammon with her on the front steps, and later on--chess. Sometimes they went for a walk as far as Grand Avenue. And sometimes when Honora grew older--she was permitted to go with him to Uhrig's Cave. Those were memorable occasions indeed!

What Saint Louisan of the last generation does not remember Uhrig's Cave? nor look without regret upon the thing which has replaced it, called a Coliseum? The very name, Uhrig's Cave, sent a shiver of delight down one's spine, and many were the conjectures one made as to what might be enclosed in that half a block of impassible brick wall, over which the great trees stretched their branches. Honora, from comparative infancy, had her own theory, which so possessed the mind of Edith Hanbury that she would not look at the wall when they passed in the carriage. It was a still and sombre place by day; and sometimes, if you listened, you could hear the whisperings of the forty thieves on the other side of the wall. But no one had ever dared to cry "Open, Sesame!" at the great wooden gates.

At night, in the warm season, when well brought up children were at home or at the seashore, strange things were said to happen at Uhrig's Cave.

Honora was a tall slip of a girl of sixteen before it was given her to know these mysteries, and the Ali Baba theory a thing of the past. Other theories had replaced it. Nevertheless she clung tightly to Peter's arm as they walked down Locust Street and came in sight of the wall. Above it, and under the big trees, shone a thousand glittering lights: there was a crowd at the gate, and instead of saying, "Open, Sesame," Peter slipped two bright fifty-cent pieces to the red-faced German ticketman, and in they went.

First and most astounding of disillusions of passing childhood, it was not a cave at all! And yet the word "disillusion" does not apply. It was, after all, the most enchanting and exciting of spots, to make one's eye shine and one's heart beat. Under the trees were hundreds of tables surrounded by hovering ministering angels in white, and if you were German, they brought you beer; if American, ice-cream. Beyond the tables was a stage, with footlights already set and orchestra tuning up, and a curtain on which was represented a gentleman making decorous love to a lady beside a fountain. As in a dream, Honora followed Peter to a table, and he handed her a programme.

"Oh, Peter," she cried, "it's going to be 'Pinafore'!"

Honora's eyes shone like stars, and elderly people at the neighbouring tables turned more than once to smile at her that evening. And Peter turned more than once and smiled too. But Honora did not consider Peter. He was merely Providence in one of many disguises, and Providence is accepted by his beneficiaries as a matter of fact.

The rapture of a young lady of temperament is a difficult thing to picture. The bird may feel it as he soars, on a bright August morning, high above amber cliffs jutting out into indigo seas; the novelist may feel it when the four walls of his room magically disappear and the profound secrets of the universe are on the point of revealing themselves. Honora gazed, and listened, and lost herself. She was no longer in Uhrig's Cave, but in the great world, her soul a-quiver with harmonies.

"Pinafore," although a comic opera, held something tragic for Honora, and opened the flood-gates to dizzy sensations which she did not understand. How little Peter, who drummed on the table to the tune of:

"Give three cheers and one cheer more For the hearty captain of the Pinafore,"

imagined what was going on beside him! There were two factors in his pleasure; he liked the music, and he enjoyed the delight of Honora.

What is Peter? Let us cease looking at him through Honora's eyes and taking him like daily bread, to be eaten and not thought about. From one point of view, he is twenty-nine and elderly, with a sense of humour unsuspected by young persons of temperament. Strive as we will, we have only been able to see him in his role of Providence, or of the piper. Has he no existence, no purpose in life outside of that perpetual gentleman in waiting? If so, Honora has never considered it.

After the finale had been sung and the curtain dropped for the last time, Honora sighed and walked out of the garden as one in a trance. Once in a while, as he found a way for them through the crowd, Peter glanced down at her, and something like a smile tugged at the corners of a decidedly masculine mouth, and lit up his eyes. Suddenly, at Locust Street, under the lamp, she stopped and surveyed him. She saw a very real, very human individual, clad in a dark nondescript suit of clothes which had been bought ready-made, and plainly without the bestowal of much thought, on Fifth Street. The fact that they were a comparative fit was in itself a tribute to the enterprise of the Excelsior Clothing Company, for Honora's observation that he was too long one way had been just. He was too tall, his shoulders were too high, his nose too prominent, his eyes too deep-set; and he wore a straw hat with the brim turned up.

To Honora his appearance was as familiar as the picture of the Pope which had always stood on Catherine's bureau. But to-night, by grace of some added power of vision, she saw him with new and critical eyes. She was surprised to discover that he was possessed of a quality with which she had never associated him--youth. Not to put it too strongly--comparative youth.

"Peter," she demanded, "why do you dress like that?"

"Like what?" he said.

Honora seized the lapel of his coat.

"Like that," she repeated. "Do you know, if you wore different clothes, you might almost be distinguished looking. Don't laugh. I think it's horrid of you always to laugh when I tell you things for your own good."

"It was the idea of being almost distinguished looking that--that gave me a shock," he assured her repentantly.

"You should dress on a different principle," she insisted.

Peter appeared dazed.

"I couldn't do that," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because--because I don't dress on any principle now."

"Yes, you do," said Honora, firmly. "You dress on the principle of the wild beasts and fishes. It's all in our natural history at Miss Farmer's. The crab is the colour of the seaweed, and the deer of the thicket. It's a device of nature for the protection of weak things."

Peter drew himself up proudly.

"I have always understood, Miss Leffingwell, that the king of beasts was somewhere near the shade of the jungle."

Honora laughed in spite of this apparent refutation of her theory of his apparel, and shook her head.

"Do be serious, Peter. You'd make much more of an impression on people if you wore clothes that had--well, a little more distinction."

"What's the use of making an impression if you can't follow it up?" he said.

"You can," she declared. "I never thought of it until to-night, but you must have a great deal in you to have risen all the way from an errand boy in the bank to a lawyer."

"Look out!" he cautioned her; "I shall become insupportably conceited."

"A little more conceit wouldn't hurt you," said Honora, critically. "You'll forgive me, Peter, if I tell you from time to time what I think. It's for your own good."

"I try to realize that," replied Peter, humbly. "How do you wish me to dress--like Mr. Rossiter?"

The picture evoked of Peter arrayed like Mr. Harland Rossiter, who had sent flowers to two generations and was preparing to send more to a third, was irresistible. Every city, hamlet, and village has its Harland Rossiter. He need not be explained. But Honora soon became grave again.

"No, but you ought to dress as though you were somebody, and different from the ordinary man on the street."

"But I'm not," objected Peter.

"Oh," cried Honora, "don't you want to be? I can't understand any man not wanting to be. If I were a man, I wouldn't stay here a day longer than I had to."

Peter was silent as they went in at the gate and opened the door, for on this festive occasion they were provided with a latchkey. He turned up the light in the hall to behold a transformation quite as wonderful as any contained in the "Arabian Nights" or Keightley's "Fairy Mythology." This was not the Honora with whom he had left the house scarce three hours before! The cambric dress, to be sure, was still no longer than the tops of her ankles and the hair still hung in a heavy braid down her back. These were positively all that remained of the original Honora, and the change had occurred in the incredibly brief space required for the production of the opera "Pinafore." This Honora was a woman in a strange and disturbing state of exaltation, whose eyes beheld a vision. And Peter, although he had been the subject of her conversation, well knew that he was not included in the vision. He smiled a little as he looked at her. It is becoming apparent that he is one of those unfortunate unimaginative beings incapable of great illusions.

"You're not going!" she exclaimed.

He glanced significantly at the hall clock.

"Why, it's long after bedtime, Honora."

"I don't want to go to bed. I feel like talking," she declared. "Come, let's sit on the steps awhile. If you go home, I shan't go to sleep for hours, Peter."

"And what would Aunt Mary say to me?" he inquired.

"Oh, she wouldn't care. She wouldn't even know it."

He shook his head, still smiling.

"I'd never be allowed to take you to Uhrig's Cave, or anywhere else, again," he replied. "I'll come to-morrow evening, and you can talk to me then."

"I shan't feel like it then," she said in a tone that implied his opportunity was now or never. But seeing him still obdurate, with startling suddenness she flung her arms mound his neck--a method which at times had succeeded marvellously--and pleaded coaxingly: "Only a quarter of an hour, Peter. I've got so many things to say, and I know I shall forget them by to-morrow."

It was a night of wonders. To her astonishment the hitherto pliant Peter, who only existed in order to do her will, became transformed into a brusque masculine creature which she did not recognize. With a movement that was almost rough he released himself and fled, calling back a "good night" to her out of the darkness. He did not even wait to assist her in the process of locking up. Honora, profoundly puzzled, stood for a while in the doorway gazing out into the night. When at length she turned, she had forgotten him entirely.

It was true that she did not sleep for hours, and on awaking the next morning another phenomenon awaited her. The "little house under the hill" was immeasurably shrunken. Poor Aunt Mary, who did not understand that a performance of "Pinafore" could give birth to the unfulfilled longings which result in the creation of high things, spoke to Uncle Tom a week later concerning an astonishing and apparently abnormal access of industry.

"She's been reading all day long, Tom, or else shut up in her room, where Catherine tells me she is writing. I'm afraid Eleanor Hanbury is right when she says I don't understand the child. And yet she is the same to me as though she were my own."

It was true that Honora was writing, and that the door was shut, and that she did not feel the heat. In one of the bookcases she had chanced upon that immortal biography of Dr. Johnson, and upon the letters of another prodigy of her own sex, Madame d'Arblay, whose romantic debut as an authoress was inspiration in itself. Honora actually quivered when she read of Dr. Johnson's first conversation with Miss Burney. To write a book of the existence of which even one's own family did not know, to publish it under a nom de plume, and to awake one day to fetes and fame would be indeed to live!

Unfortunately Honora's novel no longer exists, or the world might have discovered a second Evelina. A regard for truth compels the statement that it was never finished. But what rapture while the fever lasted! Merely to take up the pen was to pass magically through marble portals into the great world itself.

The Sir Charles Grandison of this novel was, needless to say, not Peter Erwin. He was none other than Mr. Randolph Leffingwell, under a very thin disguise.

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V. IN WHICH PROVIDENCE BEEPS FAITH

Two more years have gone by, limping in the summer and flying in the winter, two more years of conquests. For our heroine appears to be one of the daughters of Helen, born to make trouble for warriors and others --and even for innocent bystanders like Peter Erwin. Peter was debarred from entering those brilliant lists in which apparel played so great a part. George Hanbury, Guy Rossiter, Algernon Cartwright, Eliphalet Hopper Dwyer--familiarly known as "Hoppy"--and other young gentlemen whose names are now but memories, each had his brief day of triumph. Arrayed like Solomon in wonderful clothes from the mysterious and luxurious East, they returned at Christmas-tide and Easter from college to break lances over Honora. Let us say it boldly--she was like that: she had the world-old knack of sowing discord and despair in the souls of young men. She was--as those who had known that fascinating gentleman were not slow to remark--Randolph Leffingwell over again.

During the festival seasons, Uncle Tom averred, they wore out the latch on the front gate. If their families possessed horses to spare, they took Honora driving in Forest Park; they escorted her to those anomalous dances peculiar to their innocent age, which are neither children's parties nor full-fledged balls; their presents, while of no intrinsic value--as one young gentleman said in a presentation speech--had an enormous, if shy, significance.

"What a beautiful ring you are wearing, Honora," Uncle Tom remarked slyly one April morning at breakfast; "let me see it."

Honora blushed, and hid her hand under the table-cloth.

And the ring-suffice it to say that her little finger was exactly insertable in a ten-cent piece from which everything had been removed but the milling: removed with infinite loving patience by Mr. Rossiter, and at the expense of much history and philosophy and other less important things, in his college bedroom at New Haven. Honora wore it for a whole week; a triumph indeed for Mr. Rossiter; when it was placed in a box in Honora's bedroom, which contained other gifts--not all from him--and many letters, in the writing of which learning had likewise suffered. The immediate cause of the putting away of this ring was said to be the renowned Clinton Howe, who was on the Harvard football eleven, and who visited Mr. George Hanbury that Easter. Fortunate indeed the tailor who was called upon to practise his art on an Adonis like Mr. Howe, and it was remarked that he scarcely left Honora's side at the garden party and dance which Mrs. Dwyer gave in honour of the returning heroes, on the Monday of Easter week.

This festival, on which we should like to linger, but cannot, took place at the new Dwyer residence. For six months the Victorian mansion opposite Uncle Tom's house had been sightless, with blue blinds drawn down inside the plate glass windows. And the yellow stone itself was not so yellow as it once had been, but had now the appearance of soiled manilla wrapping paper, with black streaks here and there where the soot had run. The new Dwyer house was of grey stone, Georgian and palatial, with a picture-gallery twice the size of the old one; a magnificent and fitting pioneer in a new city of palaces.

Westward the star of Empire--away from the smoke. The Dwyer mansion, with its lawns and gardens and heavily balustraded terrace, faced the park that stretched away like a private estate to the south and west. That same park with its huge trees and black forests that was Ultima Thule in Honora's childhood; in the open places there had been real farms and hayricks which she used to slide down with Peter while Uncle Tom looked for wild flowers in the fields. It had been separated from the city in those days by an endless country road, like a Via Claudia stretching towards mysterious Germanian forests, and it was deemed a feat for Peter to ride thither on his big-wheeled bicycle. Forest Park was the country, and all that the country represented in Honora's childhood. For Uncle Tom on a summer's day to hire a surrey at Braintree's Livery Stable and drive thither was like--to what shall that bliss be compared in these days when we go to Europe with indifference?

And now Lindell Road--the Via Claudia of long, ago--had become Lindell Boulevard, with granitoid sidewalks. And the dreary fields through which it had formerly run were bristling with new houses in no sense Victorian, and which were the first stirrings of a national sense of the artistic. The old horse-cars with the clanging chains had disappeared, and you could take an electric to within a block of the imposing grille that surrounded the Dwyer grounds. Westward the star!

Fading fast was the glory of that bright new district on top of the second hill from the river where Uncle Tom was a pioneer. Soot had killed the pear trees, the apricots behind the lattice fence had withered away; asphalt and soot were slowly sapping the vitality of the maples on the sidewalk; and sometimes Uncle Tom's roses looked as though they might advantageously be given a coat of paint, like those in Alice in Wonderland. Honora should have lived in the Dwyers' mansion-people who are capable of judging said so. People who saw her at the garden party said she had the air of belonging in such surroundings much more than Emily, whom even budding womanhood had not made beautiful. And Eliphalet Hopper Dwyer, if his actions meant anything, would have welcomed her to that house, or built her another twice as fine, had she deigned to give him the least encouragement.

Cinderella! This was what she facetiously called herself one July morning of that summer she was eighteen.

Cinderella in more senses than one, for never had the city seemed more dirty or more deserted, or indeed, more stifling. Winter and its festivities were a dream laid away in moth balls. Surely Cinderella's life had held no greater contrasts! To this day the odour of matting brings back to Honora the sense of closed shutters; of a stifling south wind stirring their slats at noonday; the vision of Aunt Mary, cool and placid in a cambric sacque, sewing by the window in the upper hall, and the sound of fruit venders crying in the street, or of ragmen in the alley--"Rags, bottles, old iron!" What memories of endless, burning, lonely days come rushing back with those words!

When the sun had sufficiently heated the bricks of the surrounding houses in order that he might not be forgotten during the night, he slowly departed. If Honora took her book under the maple tree in the yard, she was confronted with that hideous wooden sign "To Let" on the Dwyer's iron fence opposite, and the grass behind it was unkempt and overgrown with weeds. Aunt Mary took an unceasing and (to Honora's mind) morbid interest in the future of that house.

"I suppose it will be a boarding-house," she would say, "it's much too large for poor people to rent, and only poor people are coming into this district now."

"Oh, Aunt Mary!"

"Well, my dear, why should we complain? We are poor, and it is appropriate that we should live among the poor. Sometimes I think it is a pity that you should have been thrown all your life with rich people, my child. I am afraid it has made you discontented. It is no disgrace to be poor. We ought to be thankful that we have everything we need."

Honora put down her sewing. For she had learned to sew--Aunt Mary had insisted upon that, as well as French. She laid her hand upon her aunt's.

"I am thankful," she said, and her aunt little guessed the intensity of the emotion she was seeking to control, or imagined the hidden fires. "But sometimes--sometimes I try to forget that we are poor. Perhaps --some day we shall not be."

It seemed to Honora that Aunt Mary derived a real pleasure from the contradiction of this hope. She shook her head vigorously.

"We shall always be, my child. Your Uncle Tom is getting old, and he has always been too honest to make a great deal of money. And besides," she added, "he has not that kind of ability."

Uncle Tom might be getting old, but he seemed to Honora to be of the same age as in her childhood. Some people never grow old, and Uncle Tom was one of these. Fifteen years before he had been promoted to be the cashier of the Prairie Bank, and he was the cashier to-day. He had the same quiet smile, the same quiet humour, the same calm acceptance of life. He seemed to bear no grudge even against that ever advancing enemy, the soot, which made it increasingly difficult for him to raise his flowers. Those which would still grow he washed tenderly night and morning with his watering-pot. The greatest wonders are not at the ends of the earth, but near us. It was to take many years for our heroine to realize this.

Strong faith alone could have withstood the continued contact with such a determined fatalism as Aunt Mary's, and yet it is interesting to note that Honora's belief in her providence never wavered. A prince was to come who was to bear her away from the ragmen and the boarding-houses and the soot: and incidentally and in spite of herself, Aunt Mary was to come too, and Uncle Tom. And sometimes when she sat reading of an evening under the maple, her book would fall to her lap and the advent of this personage become so real a thing that she bounded when the gate slammed --to find that it was only Peter.

It was preposterous, of course, that Peter should be a prince in disguise. Peter who, despite her efforts to teach him distinction in dress, insisted upon wearing the same kind of clothes. A mild kind of providence, Peter, whose modest functions were not unlike those of the third horse which used to be hitched on to the street car at the foot of the Seventeenth-Street hill: it was Peter's task to help pull Honora through the interminable summers. Uhrig's Cave was an old story now: mysteries were no longer to be expected in St. Louis. There was a great panorama--or something to that effect--in the wilderness at the end of one of the new electric lines, where they sometimes went to behold the White Squadron of the new United States Navy engaged in battle with mimic forts on a mimic sea, on the very site where the country place of Madame Clement had been. The mimic sea, surrounded by wooden stands filled with common people eating peanuts and popcorn, was none other than Madame Clement's pond, which Honora remembered as a spot of enchantment. And they went out in the open cars with these same people, who stared at Honora as though she had got in by mistake, but always politely gave her a seat. And Peter thanked them. Sometimes he fell into conversations with them, and it was noticeable that they nearly always shook hands with him at parting. Honora did not approve of this familiarity.

"But they may be clients some day," he argued--a frivolous answer to which she never deigned to reply.

Just as one used to take for granted that third horse which pulled the car uphill, so Peter was taken for granted. He might have been on the highroad to a renown like that of Chief Justice Marshall, and Honora had been none the wiser.

"Well, Peter," said Uncle Tom at dinner one evening of that memorable summer, when Aunt Mary was helping the blackberries, and incidentally deploring that she did not live in the country, because of the cream one got there, "I saw Judge Brice in the bank to-day, and he tells me you covered yourself with glory in that iron foundry suit."

"The Judge must have his little joke, Mr. Leffingwell," replied Peter, but he reddened nevertheless.

Honora thought winning an iron foundry suit a strange way to cover one's self with glory. It was not, at any rate, her idea of glory. What were lawyers for, if not to win suits? And Peter was a lawyer.

"In five years," said Uncle Tom, "the firm will be 'Brice and Erwin'. You mark my words. And by that time," he added, with a twinkle in his eye, "you'll be ready to marry Honora."

"Tom," reproved Aunt Mary, gently, "you oughtn't to say such things."

This time there was no doubt about Peter's blush. He fairly burned. Honora looked at him and laughed.

"Peter is meant for an old bachelor," she said.

"If he remains a bachelor," said Uncle Tom, "he'll be the greatest waste of good material I know of. And if you succeed in getting him, Honora, you'll be the luckiest young woman of my acquaintance."

"Tom," said Aunt Mary, "it was all very well to talk that way when Honora was a child. But now--she may not wish to marry Peter. And Peter may not wish to marry her."

Even Peter joined in the laughter at this literal and characteristic statement of the case.

"It's more than likely," said Honora, wickedly. "He hasn't kissed me for two years."

"Why, Peter," said Uncle Tom, "you act as though it were warm to-night. It was only seventy when we came in to dinner."

"Take me out to the park," commanded Honora.

"Tom," said Aunt Mary, as she stood on the step and watched them cross the street, "I wish the child would marry him. Not now, of course," she added hastily,--a little frightened by her own admission, "but later. Sometimes I worry over her future. She needs a strong and sensible man. I don't understand Honora. I never did. I always told you so. Sometimes I think she may be capable of doing something foolish like--like Randolph."

Uncle Tom patted his wife on the shoulder.

"Don't borrow trouble, Mary," he said, smiling a little. "The child is only full of spirits. But she has a good heart. It is only human that she should want things that we cannot give her."

"I wish," said Aunt Mary, "that she were not quite so good-looking."

Uncle Tom laughed. "You needn't tell me you're not proud of it," he declared.

"And I have given her," she continued, "a taste for dress."

"I think, my dear," said her husband, "that there were others who contributed to that."

"It was my own vanity. I should have combated the tendency in her," said Aunt Mary.

"If you had dressed Honora in calico, you could not have changed her," replied Uncle Tom, with conviction.

In the meantime Honora and Peter had mounted the electric car, and were speeding westward. They had a seat to themselves, the very first one on the "grip"--that survival of the days of cable cars. Honora's eyes brightened as she held on to her hat, and the stray wisps of hair about her neck stirred in the breeze.

"Oh, I wish we would never stop, until we came to the Pacific Ocean!" she exclaimed.

"Would you be content to stop then?" he asked. He had a trick of looking downward with a quizzical expression in his dark grey eyes.

"No," said Honora. "I should want to go on and see everything in the world worth seeing. Sometimes I feel positively as though I should die if I had to stay here in St. Louis."

"You probably would die--eventually," said Peter.

Honora was justifiably irritated.

"I could shake you, Peter!"

He laughed.

"I'm afraid it wouldn't do any good," he answered.

"If I were a man," she proclaimed, "I shouldn't stay here. I'd go to New York--I'd be somebody--I'd make a national reputation for myself."

"I believe you would," said Peter sadly, but with a glance of admiration.

"That's the worst of being a woman--we have to sit still until something happens to us."

"What would you like to happen?" he asked, curiously. And there was a note in his voice which she, intent upon her thoughts, did not remark.

"Oh, I don't know," she said; "anything--anything to get out of this rut and be something in the world. It's dreadful to feel that one has power and not be able to use it."

The car stopped at the terminal. Thanks to the early hour of Aunt Mary's dinner, the western sky was still aglow with the sunset over the forests as they walked past the closed grille of the Dwyer mansion into the park. Children rolled on the grass, while mothers and fathers, tired out from the heat and labour of a city day, sat on the benches. Peter stooped down and lifted a small boy, painfully thin, who had fallen, weeping, on the gravel walk. He took his handkerchief and wiped the scratch on the child's forehead.

"There, there!" he said, smiling, "it's all right now. We must expect a few tumbles."

The child looked at him, and suddenly smiled through his tears.

The father appeared, a red-headed Irishman.

"Thank you, Mr. Erwin; I'm sure it's very kind of you, sir, to bother with him," he said gratefully. "It's that thin he is with the heat, I take him out for a bit of country air."

"Why, Tim, it's you, is it?" said Peter. "He's the janitor of our building down town," he explained to Honora, who had remained a silent witness to this simple scene. She had been, in spite of herself, impressed by it, and by the mingled respect and affection in the janitor's manner towards Peter. It was so with every one to whom he spoke. They walked on in silence for a few moments, into a path leading to a lake, which had stolen the flaming green-gold of the sky.

"I suppose," said Honora, slowly, "it would be better for me to wish to be contented where I am, as you are. But it's no use trying, I can't."

Peter was not a preacher.

"Oh," he said, "there are lots of things I want."

"What?" demanded Honora, interested. For she had never conceived of him as having any desires whatever.

"I want a house like Mr. Dwyer's," he declared, pointing at the distant imposing roof line against the fading eastern sky.

Honora laughed. The idea of Peter wishing such a house was indeed ridiculous. Then she became grave again.

"There are times when you seem to forget that I have at last grown up, Peter. You never will talk over serious things with me."

"What are serious things?" asked Peter.

"Well," said Honora vaguely, "ambitions, and what one is going to make of themselves in life. And then you make fun of me by saying you want Mr. Dwyer's house." She laughed again. "I can't imagine you in that house!"

"Why not?" he asked, stopping beside the pond and thrusting his hands in his pockets. He looked very solemn, but she knew he was smiling inwardly.

"Why--because I can't," she said, and hesitated. The question had forced her to think about Peter. "I can't imagine you living all alone in all that luxury. It isn't like you."

"Why I all alone?" asked Peter.

"Don't--Don't be ridiculous," she said; "you wouldn't build a house like that, even if you were twice as rich as Mr. Dwyer. You know you wouldn't. And you're not the marrying kind," she added, with the superior knowledge of eighteen.

"I'm waiting for you, Honora," he announced.

"You know I love you, Peter,"--so she tempered her reply, for Honora's feelings were tender. What man, even Peter, would not have married her if he could? Of course he was in earnest, despite his bantering tone, "but I never could--marry you."

"Not even if I were to offer you a house like Mr. Dwyer's?" he said. A remark which betrayed--although not to her--his knowledge of certain earthly strains in his goddess.

The colours faded from the water, and it blackened.

As they walked on side by side in the twilight, a consciousness of repressed masculine force, of reserve power, which she had never before felt about Peter Erwin, invaded her; and she was seized with a strange uneasiness. Ridiculous was the thought (which she lost no time in rejecting) that pointed out the true road to happiness in marrying such a man as he. In the gathering darkness she slipped her hand through his arm.

"I wish I could marry you, Peter," she said.

He was fain to take what comfort he could from this expression of good-will. If he was not the Prince Charming of her dreams, she would have liked him to be. A little reflection on his part ought to have shown him the absurdity of the Prince Charming having been there all the time, and in ready-made clothes. And he, too, may have had dreams. We are not concerned with them.

............................

If we listen to the still, small voice of realism, intense longing is always followed by disappointment. Nothing should have happened that summer, and Providence should not have come disguised as the postman. It was a sultry day in early September-which is to say that it was comparatively cool--a blue day, with occasional great drops of rain spattering on the brick walk. And Honora was reclining on the hall sofa, reading about Mr. Ibbetson and his duchess, when she perceived the postman's grey uniform and smiling face on the far side of the screen door. He greeted her cordially, and gave her a single letter for Aunt Mary, and she carried it unsuspectingly upstairs.

"It's from Cousin Eleanor," Honora volunteered.

Aunt Mary laid down her sewing, smoothed the ruffles of her sacque, adjusted her spectacles, opened the envelope, and began to read. Presently the letter fell to her lap, and she wiped her glasses and glanced at Honora, who was deep in her book once more. And in Honora's brain, as she read, was ringing the refrain of the prisoner:

"Orleans, Beaugency! Notre Dame de Clery! Vendome! Vendome! Quel chagrin, quel ennui De compter toute la nuit Les heures, les heures!".

The verse appealed to Honora strangely; just as it had appealed to Ibbetson. Was she not, too, a prisoner. And how often, during the summer days and nights, had she listened to the chimes of the Pilgrim Church near by?

"One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four!"

After Uncle Tom had watered his flowers that evening, Aunt Mary followed him upstairs and locked the door of their room behind her. Silently she put the letter in his hand. Here is one paragraph of it:

"I have never asked to take the child from you in the summer, because she has always been in perfect health, and I know how lonely you would have been without her, my dear Mary. But it seems to me that a winter at Sutcliffe, with my, girls, would do her a world of good just now. I need not point out to you that Honora is, to say the least, remarkably good looking, and that she has developed very rapidly. And she has, in spite of the strict training you have given her, certain ideas and ambitions which seem to me, I am sorry to say, more or less prevalent among young American women these days. You know it is only because I love her that I am so frank. Miss Turner's influence will, in my opinion, do much to counteract these tendencies."

Uncle Tom folded the letter, and handed it back to his wife.

"I feel that we ought not to refuse, Tom. And I am afraid Eleanor is right."

"Well, Mary, we've had her for seventeen years. We ought to be willing to spare her for--how many months?"

"Nine," said Aunt Mary, promptly. She had counted them. "And Eleanor says she will be home for two weeks at Christmas. Seventeen years! It seems only yesterday when we brought her home, Tom. It was just about this time of day, and she was asleep in your arms, and Bridget opened the door for us." Aunt Mary looked out of the window. "And do you remember how she used to play under the maple there, with her dolls?"

Uncle Tom produced a very large handkerchief, and blew his nose.

"There, there, Mary," he said, "nine months, and two weeks out at Christmas. Nine months in eighteen years."

"I suppose we ought to be very thankful," said Aunt Mary. "But, Tom, the time is coming soon--"

"Tut tut," exclaimed Uncle Tom. He turned, and his eyes beheld a work of art. Nothing less than a porcelain plate, hung in brackets on the wall, decorated by Honora at the age of ten with wild roses, and presented with much ceremony on an anniversary morning. He pretended not to notice it, but Aunt Mary's eyes were too quick. She seized a photograph on her bureau, a photograph of Honora in a little white frock with a red sash.

"It was the year that was taken, Tom."

He nodded. The scene at the breakfast table came back to him, and the sight of Catherine standing respectfully in the hall, and of Honora, in the red sash, making the courtesy the old woman had taught her.

Honora recalled afterwards that Uncle Tom joked even more than usual that evening at dinner. But it was Aunt Mary who asked her, at length, how she would like to go to boarding-school. Such was the matter-of-fact manner in which the portentous news was announced.

"To boarding-school, Aunt Mary?"

Her aunt poured out her uncle's after-dinner coffee.

"I've spilled some, my dear. Get another saucer for your uncle."

Honora went mechanically to the china closet, her heart thumping. She did not stop to reflect that it was the rarest of occurrences for Aunt Mary to spill the coffee.

"Your Cousin Eleanor has invited you to go this winter with Edith and Mary to Sutcliffe."

Sutcliffe! No need to tell Honora what Sutcliffe was--her cousins had talked of little else during the past winter; and shown, if the truth be told, just a little commiseration for Honora. Sutcliffe was not only a famous girls' school, Sutcliffe was the world--that world which, since her earliest remembrances, she had been longing to see and know. In a desperate attempt to realize what had happened to her, she found herself staring hard at the open china closet, at Aunt Mary's best gold dinner set resting on the pink lace paper that had been changed only last week. That dinner set, somehow, was always an augury of festival--when, on the rare occasions Aunt Mary entertained, the little dining room was transformed by it and the Leffingwell silver into a glorified and altogether unrecognizable state, in which any miracle seemed possible.

Honora pushed back her chair.

Her lips were parted.

"Oh, Aunt Mary, is it really true that I am going?" she said.

"Why," said Uncle Tom, "what zeal for learning!"

"My dear," said Aunt Mary, who, you may be sure, knew all about that school before Cousin Eleanor's letter came, "Miss Turner insists upon hard work, and the discipline is very strict."

"No young men," added Uncle Tom.

"That," declared Aunt Mary, "is certainly an advantage."

"And no chocolate cake, and bed at ten o'clock," said Uncle Tom.

Honora, dazed, only half heard them. She laughed at Uncle Tom because she always had, but tears were shining in her eyes. Young men and chocolate cake! What were these privations compared to that magic word Change? Suddenly she rose, and flung her arms about Uncle Tom's neck and kissed his rough cheek, and then embraced Aunt Mary. They would be lonely.

"Aunt Mary, I can't bear to leave you--but I do so want to go! And it won't be for long--will it? Only until next spring."

"Until next summer, I believe," replied Aunt Mary, gently; "June is a summer month-isn't it, Tom?"

"It will be a summer month without question next year," answered Uncle Tom, enigmatically.

It has been remarked that that day was sultry, and a fine rain was now washing Uncle Tom's flowers for him. It was he who had applied that term "washing" since the era of ultra-soot. Incredible as it may seem, life proceeded as on any other of a thousand rainy nights. The lamps were lighted in the sitting-room, Uncle Tom unfolded his gardening periodical, and Aunt Mary her embroidery. The gate slammed, with its more subdued, rainy-weather sound.

"It's Peter," said Honora, flying downstairs. And she caught him, astonished, as he was folding his umbrella on the step. "Oh, Peter, if you tried until to-morrow morning, you never could guess what has happened."

He stood for a moment, motionless, staring at her, a tall figure, careless of the rain.

"You are going away," he said.

"How did you guess it?" she exclaimed in surprise. "Yes--to boarding-school. To Sutcliffe, on the Hudson, with Edith and Mary. Aren't you glad? You look as though you had seen a ghost."

"Do I?" said Peter.

"Don't stand there in the rain," commanded Honora; "come into the parlour, and I'll tell you all about it."

He came in. She took the umbrella from him, and put it in the rack.

"Why don't you congratulate me?" she demanded.

"You'll never come back," said Peter.

"What a horrid thing to say! Of course I shall come back. I shall come back next June, and you'll be at the station to meet me."

And--what will Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary do--without you?"

"Oh," said Honora, "I shall miss them dreadfully. And I shall miss you, Peter."

"Very much?" he asked, looking down at her with such a queer expression. And his voice, too, sounded queer. He was trying to smile.

Suddenly Honora realized that he was suffering, and she felt the pangs of contrition. She could not remember the time when she had been away from Peter, and it was natural that he should be stricken at the news. Peter, who was the complement of all who loved and served her, of Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom and Catherine, and who somehow embodied them all. Peter, the eternally dependable.

She found it natural that the light should be temporarily removed from his firmament while she should be at boarding-school, and yet in the tenderness of her heart she pitied him. She put her hands impulsively upon his shoulders as he stood looking at her with that queer expression which he believed to be a smile.

"Peter, you dear old thing, indeed I shall miss you! I don't know what I shall do without you, and I'll write to you every single week."

Gently he disengaged her arms. They were standing under that which, for courtesy's sake, had always been called the chandelier. It was in the centre of the parlour, and Uncle Tom always covered it with holly and mistletoe at Christmas.

"Why do you say I'll never come back?" asked Honora. "Of course I shall come back, and live here all the rest of my life."

Peter shook his head slowly. He had recovered something of his customary quizzical manner.

"The East is a strange country," he said. "The first thing we know you'll be marrying one of those people we read about, with more millions than there are cars on the Olive Street line."

Honora was a little indignant.

"I wish you wouldn't talk so, Peter," she said. "In the first place, I shan't see any but girls at Sutcliffe. I could only see you for a few minutes once a week if you were there. And in the second place, it isn't exactly--Well--dignified to compare the East and the West the way you do, and speak about people who are very rich and live there as though they were different from the people we know here. Comparisons, as Shakespeare said, are odorous."

"Honora," he declared, still shaking his head, "you're a fraud, but I can't help loving you."

For a long time that night Honora lay in bed staring into the darkness, and trying to realize what had happened. She heard the whistling and the puffing of the trains in the cinder-covered valley to the southward, but the quality of these sounds had changed. They were music now.

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VI. HONORA HAS A GLIMPSE OF THE WORLD

It is simply impossible to give any adequate notion of the industry of the days that followed. No sooner was Uncle Tom out of the house in the morning than Anne Rory marched into the sitting-room and took command, and turned it, into a dressmaking establishment. Anne Rory, who deserves more than a passing mention, one of the institutions of Honora's youth, who sewed for the first families, and knew much more about them than Mr. Meeker, the dancing-master. If you enjoyed her confidence,--as Aunt Mary did,--she would tell you of her own accord who gave their servants enough to eat, and who didn't. Anne Rory was a sort of inquisition all by herself, and would have made a valuable chief of police. The reputations of certain elderly gentlemen of wealth might have remained to this day intact had it not been for her; she had a heaven-sent knack of discovering peccadilloes. Anne Rory knew the gentlemen by sight, and the gentlemen did not know Anne Rory. Uncle Tom she held to be somewhere in the calendar of the saints.

There is not time, alas, to linger over Anne Rory or the new histories which she whispered to Aunt Mary when Honora was out of the room. At last the eventful day of departure arrived. Honora's new trunk--her first--was packed by Aunt Mary's own hands, the dainty clothes and the dresses folded in tissue paper, while old Catherine stood sniffing by. After dinner--sign of a great occasion--a carriage came from Braintree's Livery Stable, and Uncle Tom held the horses while the driver carried out the trunk and strapped it on. Catherine, Mary Ann, and Bridget, all weeping, were kissed good-by, and off they went through the dusk to the station. Not the old Union Depot, with its wooden sheds, where Honora had gone so often to see the Hanburys off, that grimy gateway to the fairer regions of the earth. This new station, of brick and stone and glass and tiles, would hold an army corps with ease. And when they alighted at the carriage entrance, a tall figure came forward out of the shadow. It was Peter, and he had a package under his arm. Peter checked Honora's trunk, and Peter had got the permission--through Judge Brice--which enabled them all to pass through the grille and down the long walk beside which the train was standing.

They entered that hitherto mysterious conveyance, a sleeping-car, and spoke to old Mrs. Stanley, who was going East to see her married daughter, and who had gladly agreed to take charge of Honora. Afterwards they stood on the platform, but in spite of the valiant efforts of Uncle Tom and Peter, conversation was a mockery.

"Honora," said Aunt Mary, "don't forget that your trunk key is in the little pocket on the left side of your bag."

"No, Aunt Mary."

"And your little New Testament at the bottom. And your lunch is arranged in three packages. And don't forget to ask Cousin Eleanor about the walking shoes, and to give her my note."

Cries reverberated under the great glass dome, and trains pulled out with deafening roars. Honora had a strange feeling, as of pressure from within, that caused her to take deep breaths of the smoky air. She but half heard what was being said to her: she wished that the train would go, and at the same time she had a sudden, surprising, and fierce longing to stay. She had been able to eat scarcely a mouthful of that festal dinner which Bridget had spent the afternoon in preparing, comprised wholly of forbidden dishes of her childhood, for which Bridget and Aunt Mary were justly famed. Such is the irony of life. Visions of one of Aunt Mary's rare lunch-parties and of a small girl peeping covetously through a crack in the dining-room door, and of the gold china set, rose before her. But she could not eat.

"Bread and jam and tea at Miss Turner's," Uncle Tom had said, and she had tried to smile at him.

And now they were standing on the platform, and the train might start at any moment.

"I trust you won't get like the New Yorkers, Honora," said Aunt Mary. "Do you remember how stiff they were, Tom?" She was still in the habit of referring to that memorable trip when they had brought Honora home. "And they say now that they hold their heads higher than ever."

"That," said Uncle Tom, gravely, "is a local disease, and comes from staring at the tall buildings."

"Uncle Tom!"

Peter presented the parcel under his arm. It was a box of candy, and very heavy, on which much thought had been spent.

"They are some of the things you like," he said, when he had returned from putting it in the berth.

"How good of you, Peter! I shall never be able to eat all that."

"I hope there is a doctor on the train," said Uncle Tom.

"Yassah," answered the black porter, who had been listening with evident relish, "right good doctah--Doctah Lov'ring."

Even Aunt Mary laughed.

"Peter," asked Honora, "can't you get Judge Brice to send you on to New York this winter on law business? Then you could come up to Sutcliffe to see me."

"I'm afraid of Miss Turner," declared Peter.

"Oh, she wouldn't mind you," exclaimed Honora. "I could say you were an uncle. It would be almost true. And perhaps she would let you take me down to New York for a matinee."

"And how about my ready-made clothes?" he said, looking down at her. He had never forgotten that.

Honora laughed.

"You don't seem a bit sorry that I'm going," she replied, a little breathlessly. "You know I'd be glad to see you, if you were in rags."

"All aboard!" cried the porter, grinning sympathetically.

Honora threw her arms around Aunt Mary and clung to her. How small and frail she was! Somehow Honora had never realized it in all her life before.

"Good-by, darling, and remember to put on your thick clothes on the cool days, and write when you get to New York."

Then it was Uncle Tom's turn. He gave her his usual vigorous hug and kiss.

"It won't be long until Christmas," he whispered, and was gone, helping Aunt Mary off the train, which had begun to move.

Peter remained a moment.

"Good-by, Honora. I'll write to you often and let you know how they are. And perhaps--you'll send me a letter once in a while."

"Oh, Peter, I will," she cried. "I can't bear to leave you--I didn't think it would be so hard--"

He held out his hand, but she ignored it. Before he realized what had happened to him she had drawn his face to hers, kissed it, and was pushing him off the train. Then she watched from the, platform the three receding figures in the yellow smoky light until the car slipped out from under the roof into the blackness of the night. Some faint, premonitory divination of what they represented of immutable love in a changing, heedless, selfish world came to her; rocks to which one might cling, successful or failing, happy or unhappy. For unconsciously she thought of them, all three, as one, a human trinity in which her faith had never been betrayed. She felt a warm moisture on her cheeks, and realized that she was crying with the first real sorrow of her life.

She was leaving them--for what? Honora did not know. There had been nothing imperative in Cousin Eleanor's letter. She need not have gone if she had not wished. Something within herself, she felt, was impelling her. And it is curious to relate that, in her mind, going to school had little or nothing to do with her journey. She had the feeling of faring forth into the world, and she had known all along that it was destined she should. What was the cause of this longing to break the fetters and fly away? fetters of love, they seemed to her now--and were. And the world which she had seen afar, filled with sunlit palaces, seemed very dark and dreary to her to-night.

"The lady's asking for you, Miss," said the porter.

She made a heroic attempt to talk to Mrs. Stanley. But at the sight of Peter's candy, when she opened it, she was blinded once more. Dear Peter! That box was eloquent with the care with which he had studied her slightest desires and caprices. Marrons glaces, and Langtrys, and certain chocolates which had received the stamp of her approval--and she could not so much as eat one! The porter made the berths. And there had been a time when she had asked nothing more of fate than to travel in a sleeping-car! Far into the night she lay wide awake, dry-eyed, watching the lamp-lit streets of the little towns they passed, or staring at the cornfields and pastures in the darkness; thinking of the home she had left, perhaps forever, and wondering whether they were sleeping there; picturing them to-morrow at breakfast without her, and Uncle Tom leaving for the bank, Aunt Mary going through the silent rooms alone, and dear old Catherine haunting the little chamber where she had slept for seventeen years--almost her lifetime. A hundred vivid scenes of her childhood came back, and familiar objects oddly intruded themselves; the red and green lambrequin on the parlour mantel--a present many years ago from Cousin Eleanor; the what-not, with its funny curly legs, and the bare spot near the lock on the door of the cake closet in the dining room!

Youth, however, has its recuperative powers. The next day the excitement of the journey held her, the sight of new cities and a new countryside. But when she tried to eat the lunch Aunt Mary had so carefully put up, new memories assailed her, and she went with Mrs. Stanley into the dining car. The September dusk was made lurid by belching steel-furnaces that reddened the heavens; and later, when she went to bed, sharp air and towering contours told her of the mountains. Mountains which her great-grandfather had crossed on horse back, with that very family silver in his saddle-bags which shone on Aunt Mary's table. And then--she awoke with the light shining in her face, and barely had time to dress before the conductor was calling out "Jersey City."

Once more the morning, and with it new and wonderful sensations that dispelled her sorrows; the ferry, the olive-green river rolling in the morning sun, alive with dodging, hurrying craft, each bent upon its destination with an energy, relentlessness, and selfishness of purpose that fascinated Honora. Each, with its shrill, protesting whistle, seemed to say: "My business is the most important. Make way for me." And yet, through them all, towering, stately, imperturbable, a great ocean steamer glided slowly towards the bay, by very might and majesty holding her way serene and undisturbed, on a nobler errand. Honora thrilled as she gazed, as though at last her dream were coming true, and she felt within her the pulse of the world's artery. That irksome sense of spectatorship seemed to fly, and she was part and parcel now of the great, moving things, with sure pinions with which to soar. Standing rapt upon the forward deck of the ferry, she saw herself, not an atom, but one whose going and coming was a thing of consequence. It seemed but a simple step to the deck of that steamer when she, too, would be travelling to the other side of the world, and the journey one of the small incidents of life.

The ferry bumped into its slip, the windlasses sang loudly as they took up the chains, the gates folded back, and Honora was forced with the crowd along the bridge-like passage to the right. Suddenly she saw Cousin Eleanor and the girls awaiting her.

"Honora," said Edith, when the greetings were over and they were all four in the carriage, which was making its way slowly across the dirty and irregularly paved open space to a narrow street that opened between two saloons, "Honora, you don't mean to say that Anne Rory made that street dress? Mother, I believe it's better-looking than the one I got at Bremer's."

"It's very simple,", said Honora.

"And she looks fairly radiant," cried Edith, seizing her cousin's hand. "It's quite wonderful, Honora; nobody would ever guess that you were from the West, and that you had spent the whole summer in St. Louis."

Cousin Eleanor smiled a little as she contemplated Honora, who sat, fascinated, gazing out of the window at novel scenes. There was a colour in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes. They had reached Madison Square. Madison Square, on a bright morning in late September, seen for the first time by an ambitious young lady who had never been out of St. Louis! The trimly appointed vehicles, the high-stepping horses, the glittering shops, the well-dressed women and well-groomed men--all had an esprit de corps which she found inspiring. On such a morning, and amidst such a scene, she felt that there was no limit to the possibilities of life.

Until this year, Cousin Eleanor had been a conservative in the matter of hotels, when she had yielded to Edith's entreaties to go to one of the "new ones." Hotels, indeed, that revolutionized transient existence. This one, on the Avenue, had a giant in a long blue livery coat who opened their carriage door, and a hall in yellow and black onyx, and maids and valets. After breakfast, when Honora sat down to write to Aunt Mary, she described the suite of rooms in which they lived,--the brass beds, the electric night lamps, the mahogany French furniture, the heavy carpets, and even the white-tiled bathroom. There was a marvellous arrangement in the walls with which Edith was never tired of playing, a circular plate covered with legends of every conceivable want, from a newspaper to a needle and thread and a Scotch whiskey highball.

At breakfast, more stimulants--of a mental nature, of course. Solomon in all his glory had never broken eggs in such a dining room. It had onyx pillars, too, and gilt furniture, and table after table of the whitest napery stretched from one end of it to the other. The glass and silver was all of a special pattern, and an obsequious waiter handed Honora a menu in a silver frame, with a handle. One side of the menu was in English, and the other in French. All around them were well-dressed, well-fed, prosperous-looking people, talking and laughing in subdued tones as they ate. And Honora had a strange feeling of being one of them, of being as rich and prosperous as they, of coming into a long-deferred inheritance.

The mad excitement of that day in New York is a faint memory now, so much has Honora lived since then. We descendants of rigid Puritans, of pioneer tobacco-planters and frontiersmen, take naturally to a luxury such as the world has never seen--as our right. We have abolished kings, in order that as many of us as possible may abide in palaces. In one day Honora forgot the seventeen years spent in the "little house under the hill," as though these had never been. Cousin Eleanor, with a delightful sense of wrong-doing, yielded to the temptation to adorn her; and the saleswomen, who knew Mrs. Hanbury, made indiscreet-remarks. Such a figure and such a face, and just enough of height! Two new gowns were ordered, to be tried on at Sutcliffe, and as many hats, and an ulster, and heaven knows what else. Memory fails.

In the evening they went to a new comic opera, and it is the music of that which brings back the day most vividly to Honora's mind.

In the morning they took an early train to Sutcliffe Manors, on the Hudson. It is an historic place. First of all, after leaving the station, you climb through the little town clinging to the hillside; and Honora was struck by the quaint houses and shops which had been places of barter before the Revolution. The age of things appealed to her. It was a brilliant day at the very end of September, the air sharp, and here and there a creeper had been struck crimson. Beyond the town, on the slopes, were other new sights to stimulate the imagination: country houses--not merely houses in the country, but mansions--enticingly hidden among great trees in a way to whet Honora's curiosity as she pictured to herself the blissful quality of the life which their owners must lead. Long, curving driveways led up to the houses from occasional lodges; and once, as though to complete the impression, a young man and two women, superbly mounted, came trotting out of one of these driveways, talking and laughing gayly. Honora took a good look at the man. He was not handsome, but had, in fact, a distinguished and haunting ugliness. The girls were straight-featured and conventional to the last degree.

Presently they came to the avenue of elms that led up to the long, low buildings of the school.

Little more will be necessary, in the brief account of Honora's life at boarding-school, than to add an humble word of praise on the excellence of Miss Turner's establishment. That lady, needless to say, did not advertise in the magazines, or issue a prospectus. Parents were more or less in the situation of the candidates who desired the honour and privilege of whitewashing Tom Sawyer's fence. If you were a parent, and were allowed to confide your daughter to Miss Turner, instead of demanding a prospectus, you gave thanks to heaven, and spoke about it to your friends.

The life of the young ladies, of course, was regulated on the strictest principles. Early rising, prayers, breakfast, studies; the daily walk, rain or shine, under the watchful convoy of Miss Hood, the girls in columns of twos; tennis on the school court, or skating on the school pond. Cotton Mather himself could not have disapproved of the Sundays, nor of the discourse of the elderly Doctor Moale (which you heard if you were not a Presbyterian), although the reverend gentleman was distinctly Anglican in appearance and manners. Sometimes Honora felt devout, and would follow the service with the utmost attention. Her religion came in waves. On the Sundays when the heathen prevailed she studied the congregation, grew to distinguish the local country families; and, if the truth must be told, watched for several Sundays for that ugly yet handsome young man whom she had seen on horseback. But he never appeared, and presently she forgot him.

Had there been a prospectus (which is ridiculous!), the great secret of Miss Turner's school could not very well have been mentioned in it. The English language, it is to be feared, is not quite flexible enough to mention this secret with delicacy. Did Honora know it? Who can say? Self-respecting young ladies do not talk about such things, and Honora was nothing if not self-respecting.

"SUTCLIFFE MANORS, October 15th.

"DEAREST AUNT MARY: As I wrote you, I continue to miss you and Uncle Tom dreadfully,--and dear old Peter, too; and Cathy and Bridget and Mary Ann. And I hate to get up at seven o'clock. And Miss Hood, who takes us out walking and teaches us composition, is such a ridiculously strict old maid--you would laugh at her. And the Sundays are terrible. Miss Turner makes us read the Bible for a whole hour in the afternoon, and reads to us in the evening. And Uncle Tom was right when he said we should have nothing but jam and bread and butter for supper: oh, yes, and cold meat. I am always ravenously hungry. I count the days until Christmas, when I shall have some really good things to eat again. And of course I cannot wait to see you all.

"I do not mean to give you the impression that I am not happy here, and I never can be thankful enough to dear Cousin Eleanor for sending me. Some of the girls are most attractive. Among others, I have become great friends with Ethel Wing, who is tall and blond and good-looking; and her clothes, though simple, are beautiful. To hear her imitate Miss Turner or Miss Hood or Dr. Moale is almost as much fun as going to the theatre. You must have heard of her father--he is the Mr. Wing who owns all the railroads and other things, and they have a house in Newport and another in New York, and a country place and a yacht.

"I like Sarah Wycliffe very much. She was brought up abroad, and we lead the French class together. Her father has a house in Paris, which they only use for a month or so in the year: an hotel, as the French call it. And then there is Maude Capron, from Philadelphia, whose father is Secretary of War. I have now to go to my class in English composition, but I will write to you again on Saturday.

"Your loving niece,

"HONORA."

The Christmas holidays came, and went by like mileposts from the window of an express train. There was a Glee Club: there were dances, and private theatricals in Mrs. Dwyer's new house, in which it was imperative that Honora should take part. There was no such thing as getting up for breakfast, and once she did not see Uncle Tom for two whole days. He asked her where she was staying. It was the first Christmas she remembered spending without Peter. His present appeared, but perhaps it was fortunate, on the whole, that he was in Texas, trying a case. It seemed almost no time at all before she was at the station again, clinging to Aunt Mary: but now the separation was not so hard, and she had Edith and Mary for company, and George, a dignified and responsible sophomore at Harvard.

Owing to the sudden withdrawal from school of little Louise Simpson, the Cincinnati girl who had shared her room during the first term, Honora had a new room-mate after the holidays, Susan Holt. Susan was not beautiful, but she was good. Her nose turned up, her hair Honora described as a negative colour, and she wore it in defiance of all prevailing modes. If you looked very hard at Susan (which few people ever did), you saw that she had remarkable blue eyes: they were the eyes of a saint. She was neither tall nor short, and her complexion was not all that it might have been. In brief, Susan was one of those girls who go through a whole term at boarding--school without any particular notice from the more brilliant Honoras and Ethel Wings.

In some respects, Susan was an ideal room-mate. She read the Bible every night and morning, and she wrote many letters home. Her ruling passion, next to religion, was order, and she took it upon herself to arrange Honora's bureau drawers. It is needless to say that Honora accepted these ministrations and that she found Susan's admiration an entirely natural sentiment. Susan was self-effacing, and she enjoyed listening to Honora's views on all topics.

Susan, like Peter, was taken for granted. She came from somewhere, and after school was over, she would go somewhere. She lived in New York, Honora knew, and beyond that was not curious. We never know when we are entertaining an angel unawares. One evening, early in May, when she went up to prepare for supper she found Susan sitting in the window reading a letter, and on the floor beside her was a photograph. Honora picked it up. It was the picture of a large country house with many chimneys, taken across a wide green lawn.

"Susan, what's this?"

Susan looked up.

"Oh, it's Silverdale. My brother Joshua took it."

"Silverdale?" repeated Honora.

"It's our place in the country," Susan replied. "The family moved up last week. You see, the trees are just beginning to bud."

Honora was silent a moment, gazing at the picture.

"It's very beautiful, isn't it? You never told me about it."

"Didn't I?" said Susan. "I think of it very often. It has always seemed much more like home to me than our house in New York, and I love it better than any spot I know."

Honora gazed at Susan, who had resumed her reading.

"And you are going there when school is over."

"Oh, yes," said Susan; "I can hardly wait." Suddenly she put down her letter, and looked at Honora.

"And you," she asked, "where are you going?"

"I don't know. Perhaps--perhaps I shall go to the sea for a while with my cousins."

It was foolish, it was wrong. But for the life of her Honora could not say she was going to spend the long hot summer in St. Louis. The thought of it had haunted her for weeks: and sometimes, when the other girls were discussing their plans, she had left them abruptly. And now she was aware that Susan's blue eyes were fixed upon her, and that they had a strange and penetrating quality she had never noticed before: a certain tenderness, an understanding that made Honora redden and turn.

"I wish," said Susan, slowly, "that you would come and stay awhile with me. Your home is so far away, and I don't know when I shall see you again."

"Oh, Susan," she murmured, "it's awfully good of you, but I'm afraid--I couldn't."

She walked to the window, and stood looking out for a moment at the budding trees. Her heart was beating faster, and she was strangely uncomfortable.

"I really don't expect to go to the sea, Susan," she said. "You see, my aunt and uncle are all alone in St. Louis, and I ought to go back to them. If--if my father had lived, it might have been different. He died, and my mother, when I was little more than a year old."

Susan was all sympathy. She slipped her hand into Honora's.

"Where did he live?" she asked.

"Abroad," answered Honora. "He was consul at Nice, and had a villa there when he died. And people said he had an unusually brilliant career before him. My aunt and uncle brought me up, and my cousin, Mrs. Hanbury, Edith's mother, and Mary's, sent me here to school."

Honora breathed easier after this confession, but it was long before sleep came to her that night. She wondered what it would be like to visit at a great country house such as Silverdale, what it would be like to live in one. It seemed a strange and cruel piece of irony on the part of the fates that Susan, instead of Honora, should have been chosen for such a life: Susan, who would have been quite as happy spending her summers in St. Louis, and taking excursions in the electric cars: Susan, who had never experienced that dreadful, vacuum-like feeling, who had no ambitious craving to be satisfied. Mingled with her flushes of affection for Susan was a certain queer feeling of contempt, of which Honora was ashamed.

Nevertheless, in the days that followed, a certain metamorphosis seemed to have taken place in Susan. She was still the same modest, self-effacing, helpful roommate, but in Honora's eyes she had changed --Honora could no longer separate her image from the vision of Silverdale. And, if the naked truth must be told, it was due to Silverdale that Susan owes the honour of her first mention in those descriptive letters from Sutcliffe, which Aunt Mary has kept to this day.

Four days later Susan had a letter from her mother containing an astonishing discovery. There could be no mistake,--Mrs. Holt had brought Honora to this country as a baby.

"Why, Susan," cried Honora, "you must have been the other baby."

"But you were the beautiful one," replied Susan, generously. "I have often heard mother tell about it, and how every one on the ship noticed you, and how Hortense cried when your aunt and uncle took you away. And to think we have been rooming together all these months and did not know that we were really--old friends.

"And Honora, mother says you must come to Silverdale to pay us a visit when school closes. She wants to see you. I think," added Susan, smiling, "I think she feels responsible, for you. She says that you must give me your aunts address, and that she will write to her."

"Oh, I'd so like to go, Susan. And I don't think Aunt Mary would object ---for a little while."

Honora lost no time in writing the letter asking for permission, and it was not until after she had posted it that she felt a sudden, sharp regret as she thought of them in their loneliness. But the postponement of her homecoming would only be for a fortnight at best. And she had seen so little!

In due time Aunt Mary's letter arrived. There was no mention of loneliness in it, only of joy that Honora was to have the opportunity to visit such a place as Silverdale. Aunt Mary, it seems, had seen pictures of it long ago in a magazine of the book club, in an article concerning one of Mrs. Holt's charities--a model home for indiscreet young women. At the end of the year, Aunt Mary added, she had bought the number of the magazine, because of her natural interest in Mrs. Holt on Honora's account. Honora cried a little over that letter, but her determination to go to Silverdale was unshaken.

June came at last, and the end of school. The subject of Miss Turner's annual talk was worldliness. Miss Turner saw signs, she regretted to say, of a lowering in the ideals of American women: of a restlessness, of a desire for what was a false consideration and recognition; for power. Some of her own pupils, alas! were not free from this fault. Ethel Wing, who was next to Honora, nudged her and laughed, and passed her some of Maillard's chocolates, which she had in her pocket. Woman's place, continued Miss Turner, was the home, and she hoped they would all make good wives. She had done her best to prepare them to be such. Independence, they would find, was only relative: no one had it completely. And she hoped that none of her scholars would ever descend to that base competition to outdo one's neighbours, so characteristic of the country to-day.

The friends, and even the enemies, were kissed good-by, with pledges of eternal friendship. Cousin Eleanor Hanbury came for Edith and Mary, and hoped Honora would enjoy herself at Silverdale. Dear Cousin Eleanor! Her heart was large, and her charity unpretentious. She slipped into Honora's fingers, as she embraced her, a silver-purse with some gold coins in it, and bade her not to forget to write home very often.

"You know what pleasure it will give them, my dear," she said, as she stepped on the train for New York.

"And I am going home soon, Cousin Eleanor," replied Honora, with a little touch of homesickness in her voice.

"I know, dear," said Mrs. Hanbury. But there was a peculiar, almost wistful expression on her face as she kissed Honora again, as of one who assents to a fiction in order to humour a child.

As the train pulled out, Ethel Wing waved to her from the midst of a group of girls on the wide rear platform of the last car. It was Mr. Wing's private car, and was going to Newport.

"Be good, Honora!" she cried.

A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill

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