The legatee

Front matter

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CHAPTER I THE LEGACY ‘*¢ Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,’ ’’

rose the voices, Karen Torstenson’s above them all, sweetly insistent and compelling;

“¢ Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave.’ ”’

Karen’s voice, which had held the pitying cadence of a mother’s croon, rose now in triumphant acclaim, and the choir followed blindly, dragging with jubilant abandon several notes behind the creaking cabinet organ. Jaren’s leadership was proved and trusted ; the organ was an innovation, and the end of its probation was not yet.

The Wilsonport Methodist Church was crowded, despite the rain slapping against the windows, and the wind and fog rushing in from Lake Michigan. It was Olive Black’s wedding day, and weddings like this were events in Wilsonport.

“¢ Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter,

Feelings lie buried that grace can restore.’ ”

pleaded the chorus as the bridal party dropped their wet wraps, and came awkwardly up the aisle. But one face in the audience smiled. Not that the subtleties of humor were necessarily unknown in Wilsonport, but there was little that called for laughter in the fact that the organist could play only the hymns that she knew.

The two young people, stumbling noisily on the uncarpeted floor, stopped in front of the bare box pulpit where the clergyman stood waiting. There was but one touch of adornment in the room, — “Feed my Lambs.” The text, its letters made of yellowing cedar twigs, formed a half circle back of the clergyman’s head —a halo that might well have disquieted his congregation, for the winds of many months had robbed the sentence of its final “s.”? so that the mandate read with definite and unsoftened protest, a suggestive frame for the pinched face below.

In the rear of the room Robert Proctor stood watching observantly. His isolation, his manner, the very seams of his coat, bespoke him an alien ; the unconscious amusement in his eyes marked him yet more as one. But apart from the fleeting thought of the moment, he was not amused. He was the new owner of the Wilsonport Lumber Company’s mill, and this was his superintendent’s wedding; yet though he had come to Wilsonport only the day before, no glance now made him welcome. Indeed, the only look that had shown recognition of his presence had held rebuke. His smile at the wail of the wedding march had been detected, and the scorn in the gray eyes that had fronted his was unpleasant to remember. That the eyes belonged to one of the most youthful of the congregation, a young girl with a thin eager face and flying hair, did not affect his point of view. He was self-convicted of his rudeness.

* Do you, Olive, take this man” — The clergyman’s voice was searching, for he had seen many go away from his presence man and wife, and they had not always gone to happiness; but the girl’s “I do” thrilled confident and joyous. The challenge of her happiness sobered the listeners. Fate punished those who dared to claim such perfect joy.

The service was over, and again came Karen’s voice. Clarion clear it sounded in the hushed room, —

“ ¢* He leadeth me! Oh, blessed thought, Oh, words with heavenly comfort fraught!’ ”

The people needed no organ now, they heeded none, and they arose and sang; sang with rough, uneven voices ; sang out of the gray monotony of tired hearts, —

“** Whate’er I do, where’er I be, Still ’t is God’s hand that leadeth me.’ ”

Lines faded in tense faces, and eyes dimmed. They needed leading. For most of them life was tangled and perplexing, crowded with care. But for the time they had forgotten, and so they sang. They sang for Olive, and for her husband, George Cole. These two belonged to Wilsonport as did the great pines; therefore the people loved them, and crowding about them now, they tried to tell them so.

There were none to crowd toward Mr. Proctor. It was an untried sensation for this man to find himself upon the fringe of events, and to his surprised chagrin the feeling annoyed him. He turned to look again at the girl who had resented his smile, but she had disappeared. He remembered that she had worn a red cap. He would know her by that, he thought, and speak to her if — occasion offered. The justice of her Arran a still rankled.

‘¢¢ Fe Jeadeth me, He leadeth me!’ ”

The refrain, carrying the vibrant sweetness of Karen’s voice, stayed in his ears, and he looked across the room to where she stood, taller than the women around her, the yellow masses of her hair glinting even in the dull light.

‘“‘ A viking princess,” he said under his breath, ‘“‘and what a voice!’ But the princess was not for him. There was none of it for him —as yet —and he turned away into the rain. The rapture in the bride’s face, the sense of homely joys and comradeship that had ennobled the crude incongruities of the day, passed him by. He was outside it all.

He walked toward his mill, with dogged discomfort ignoring the rain. The village looked deserted, and its small, unpainted houses stood dripping and lonely among the blackened stumps of the clearing. Before him, Lake Michigan, a rolling mass of sullen gray, merged without horizon line into the leaden sky above. Behind, so near that the scattered houses of the settlement seemed clinging to the narrow beach for refuge, lay the forest, black and forbidding in the storm.

The man threw back his head impatiently. He had not supposed that his moods were dependent either on the barometer or on the liking of the people about him. Manifestly his coming had . bred constraint. He must conquer that. In all probability, years of his life lay before him in this village, and since he could not occupy a pinnacle indefinitely, it behooved him to dismount while he could accomplish the descent with grace.

The mill was deserted in honor of the superintendent’s wedding, and Mr. Proctor walked through its reverberating passages with a sense of rising independence. His own mill, his own ma-. chinery! Pride of ownership had worked into his consciousness but slowly; it came now with an alluring flavor. The long lines of belting, the glitter of the great saws, gave him an exultant sense of mastery. Powerful as they were, their power was yet his, his to control. He smiled as he realized how these material properties -comforted his vanity. It was not, at this moment, that they represented money, but that they were all that needed him, that claimed him, in this alien land.

He walked to the top of the log-slide, and looked out. The mill was on the beach, and the shallow crescent of the bay lay before him. The rain had ceased, but the wind blew furiously, and the surf rolled in with a boom of crashing break ers. The sand was as empty of life as a desert, and the man looked at it with longing. The electricity of the wind was in his blood. What a track that beach would make! In a moment he was on it, the wet sand springing under his running feet. Convention snatched at him fiercely as - he ran, but he threw her off, and sped with bounding pulse. Should he be seen — why, he was running to the pier! It was his pier, and in danger from the storm! therefore he ran. That would do as explanation were he catechised. There was that in the air of Wilsonport that taught him the everboding imminence of catechism.

As he reached the pier, his pace slackened. Two figures were racing toward him, balancing surely on the pier’s shaking timbers. What matter if they had seen him? They, too, were running, and doing it right well. He watched them with approval. They were boy and girl, and the girl wore a red cap. It was, he could see, his redcapped critic of the wedding. Here was his opportunity.

The runners were absorbed, and did not see Mr. Proctor. The girl was running with tight-pressed lips ; she was losing, but not, it was plain, for lack of effort. She stopped at the end of the pier, her hand pressed to her side, her forehead clearing.

“You ’ve won, Adrien,” — there was a somewhat disproportionate admiration in her voice, — “but— Let’s try it again from here to the mill.”

She was starting without waiting for reply when she saw Mr. Proctor. Her arrested breath showed her surprise.

Mr. Proctor stepped forward, but the kindly greeting that he had in mind was not forthcoming. The girl was older than he had thought, and her gray eyes, again unfriendly and reproving, scattered speech. What was the meaning of all this fiery defiance ?

She turned to her companion.

‘There ’s father, Adrien. Ill leave you now, and go home with him.” She vanished even with her words, and Mr. Proctor smiled after her. Evidently to think was to act with this whirlwind apparition.

The boy did not share the man’s smile. The portentous dignity that strives to hide embarrassment wrapped him in sombre folds.

“ A great storm, isn’t it?” the man said with insistent cheerfulness. This gloom of reserve piqued his curiosity.

“Yes, it isa grand storm. I am just going.” The boy spoke with punctiliously clear enunciation, yet a slight accent clung to his carefully chosen words.

The man turned. “Ill walk with you. Iam a stranger here. I came” —

*¢ You came yesterday on the Lurline, Mr. Proctor. Everybody in town knows that.”

The man’s eyebrows shifted a shade from the horizontal. “Fame, verily! I shouldn’t have suspected it from my reception this afternoon. And your name ?”

The boy was silent a moment, his grave young face set with the pallid fixity of ivory. ‘ Adrien Lauzeone,” he said with grudging deliberation. “¢ My father is Xavier Lauzeone. He keeps the hotel —‘ The Farmer’s Friend.’ It’s a saloon, too,” he added defiantly.

“‘T remember. I was told that my men stayed there — some of them. I didn’t see you at the wedding.”

The boy’s face melted to curving lines. This was the way men talked to equals. Perhaps the ‘‘ Farmer’s Friend” was not a stigma after all.

‘* How was the wedding?” he asked. ‘* Was the church full?”

“Yes, crowded. You were not there?”

“Tama Catholic.” The boy’s tone held a touch of impatience. It was plain that this prosperous outsider had much to learn.

“Oh!” said Mr. Proctor, vaguely aware of quicksands. ‘But your friend was there. Who ' is she, and who is your Norse princess? I wish that you would tell me about the people here. The singer this afternoon was a very daughter of the Eddas, who ” —

“IT don’t understand what you ’re saying,” interrupted the boy, — his hurried speech suggested that he wished a change of subject, —“ but I will some day. No one here would understand you — no one but Katherine Edmister. Katherine talks the same way — and Dr. Edmister, too.”

“TI doubt that I understood myself,” said Proctor lightly. There was no need to emphasize his awkwardness by explanation. “In my mother tongue, then, who was the tall girl who sang? She had a voice like dripping honey.”

“Dripping honey,” pondered the boy. ‘“'That’s just like Karen. You must know Karen Torsten- ‘son; they keep the store.”

“The store?” Yes, he recalled it. ‘Dry Goods and General Merchandise. Ole Torstenson.” It was the mill store, and he had been there that morning. He felt a gentle glow of pleasure that he was connected, even remotely, with its display of plough and crockery, if those utensils ministered to the well-being of the day’s goddess.

Young Lauzeone looked curious, and the man was pricked from his reverie by the pressing necessity of sustaining the conversation.

“Who was the lamb?” he ventured wildly. It was difficult to keep his auditor in mind, when his thoughts were struggling with chaotic impressions of the grimy interior of Ole Torstenson’s store.

“The lamb?”

“ The clergyman, I mean. Protestants call them lambs sometimes,” he added with ready mendacity. *¢ Never mind, I’m not so much interested in him. Who was it that you said talked as I do?”

The boy’s eyes shifted. He looked embarrassed.

“IT guess you mean Dr. Edmister,” he said evasively. ‘‘He’s the doctor here. He lives up on the bluff.”

‘In the big log house hanging over the water ?”’

‘¢ He wanted it made of logs,” the boy protested. “He ’s rich enough to have a better house. He likes log houses.” The hopelessness of impressing his auditor with so palpable an absurdity saddened his tone.

“ Does he?” Here, then, was something that augured promise for the future, and Mr. Proctor looked expectantly down the curve of the beach to where a brown lichen of a house clung to the cliff that tipped the southern horn of the harbor’s erescent. ‘And his wife?”

The wind tossed the black strands of the boy’s hair into his eyes. ‘He hasn’t any wife. She’s dead. I said his girl — his daughter, I mean,” he corrected. ‘Mrs. Green keeps house for him — that is, her and Ephraim does. Ephraim’s her husband.”

They had reached the office door of the mill, and Mr. Proctor stopped and studied the figure before him.

“It’s too windy to go farther now,” he said, ‘but come to see me. I live in the house that was my uncle’s — back of the lumber piles. No wonder that you didn’t understand my stupidly long words. But I’ve a book that will tell you what I was talking about. Would you like to read it?”

The boy’s pleasure appeared in his eyes, to vanish swiftly. He drew back.

“The mill is yours now?” he asked.

The tone brought Mr. Proctor’s wandering glance to earth. “Yes, the mill is mine.” It was the tone of the conscious superior, and he amended it. ‘ My uncle, who owned the mill, is dead, you know. I am his heir.”

‘The men say that it’s the same thing,” the -boy pursued. ‘They don’t see any difference.”

“ A reincarnation, am I? Well, what of it?”

Again the boy’s eyes shifted. ‘* Did you have slaves?”

Mr. Proctor smiled. The lad was developing surprises. ‘ Naturally,” he said. “Did my biographers omit to state that I was from Virginia ?”

The boy turned away. His stubborn mouth showed that he could understand the tolerant amusement that he was helpless to resent.

“J hope you ’ll come for the book, Adrien?” Mr. Proctor went on. ‘I’ve no slaves now, I assure you, whatever my shameful past may have been.” His smile was whimsical, but he held out his hand, and the boy took it shyly.

*¢ [’d like to come,” answered the boy. ‘I want to study everything. J mean to know as much as Kather— as muchas anybody. I don’t work in your mill, so I don’t see what the men can do, even if I do come to see you. The war is over, anyway. The men say” —

“The men say?” Mr. Proctor picked up the broken thread only to drop it. It was not to his mind to discuss his workmen and their vagaries with this boy. ‘Come and get the book, then. Good-by.”

Adrien hesitated. ‘ You— you asked me who — who it was that was running. But I didn’t tell you because — It was Katherine Edmister, the one I told you about. There she is; and that’s her father.”’

Mr. Proctor’s glance traveled with the boy’s gesture. The red cap was going up the village street, dancing like a wind-blown leaf in the wake of a tall man.

Dr. Edmister and his daughter! Mr. Proctor looked after them with meditative anticipation. Yet if the father proved as stormy as the daughter had shown herself to be — He shook his head at the memory as he unlocked his office door.

Chapter II Behind The Red Geraniums

JESSIE applied her eye to knowledge at the erack of Mr. Proctor’s study door. Jessie was a legacy — not catalogued, as were the mill and other properties, but none the less an inheritance.

She was a Norwegian woman who had kept Mr. Oliver Proctor’s house during his life in Wilsonport ; she would continue to keep it for his nephew. The phrase, which defined the situation, was her own. ‘To be a man’s servant was one thing, to keep his house, another ; she drew the distinction with nicety of line. To keep a house demanded more than skill in cooking — though that was hers. The habits of the family were a charge to keep, and she spared no labor in reforming them. She was studying them now upon her knees, and the line of her eyebrows spoke dissatisfaction.

“Your uncle was always prompt to meals,”’ she chanted at length. Her voice took the village into confidence.

Mr. Proctor laid down his pen without surprise. A month of Wilsonport and Jessie had inured him to voices which spoke from key-holes and window casings. “Come in, Jessie,” he called. “Is it supper time? ”

“You said that you was going away to supper,” she said. ‘ You told me that you was invited to George Cole’s.” Her tone implied rooted unbelief of his intentions.

Mr. Proctor looked at his watch. “I am. And it’s almost six now.” He turned from his papers with a smile. ‘So my uncle was prompt, was he?”

Jessie nodded. Her brown face, despite its wrinkles, repelled the suggestion of age. She seemed as superior to the weakness born of time as if she were the gnarled tree-trunk she resembled. “°T ain’t that he was prompt when they asked him,” she supplemented. ‘They never asked him.”

** Asked him ?”’

“To supper.” She nodded again, each movement pregnant with meaning. ‘I didn’t suppose they ’d ask you.” There was veiled pride in the admission, and she hastened to cover it. ‘‘ They ’ve been long enough making up their minds to do it, anyway. You’ve been here a month to-morrow.”

Mr. Proctor’s glance had returned to his papers. “Did n’t they like my uncle?” he asked with tolerant civility and an absent mind.

Jessie’s eyes snapped. ‘ Hated him like pizen. He never listened to what folks said, either — any more than you do. Smiling ain’t listening, let me tell you.”” She turned an indignant back, and started toward the kitchen, then stopped. ‘“ They ealled your uncle ‘ Copperhead,’ ”’ — she delivered her postscript as if it were a missile, — “and George Cole’s gone to housekeeping in the house with the red geraniums in the window.”

Mr. Proctor looked after her, live interest quickening his eyes. ‘‘ Copperhead!’ ” he meditated. ‘That’s what the boys called me to-day. So Jessie’s not the only legacy not mentioned in the will.” He shrugged his shoulders, but his lips curved upwards, and the smile stayed with him in his walk across the sand. It was somewhat ghoulish, this wearing of a dead man’s mantle, but it had its compensations. Since his surroundings held no companionship, it was a boon that they could furnish amusement, and he would welcome novelty in any guise.

Behind the red geraniums, Mrs. Cole extended a shy hand in welcome.

“‘ George will be in pretty soon,” she explained. ‘*¢ He could n’t come till the hands left the mill, and he’s just cleaning himself up now.”

The cleaning up disclosed the host in his wedding broadcloth, grave and unabashed. His unsmiling face turned often to his wife with evident affection, but his words were austerely few, and supper was eaten in the silence which a rite demands. Mr. Proctor’s thoughts canvassed the known world for dialogue, but each essay failed to evoke more than a monosyllable. The social experience of years seemed threatened with shipwreck when a scratch at the kitchen door brought the hostess to her feet.

“ That sounds like Chevalier,” she cried with relief. “Katherine must be out there.. [’ll eall her in to supper.”

Mrs. Cole opened the door, and a small dog bounded in with a delighted whine, pawing, with ingratiating impartiality, at the people and chairs alike.

“Send him out, Olive,’ came a clear voice. ‘Chevalier understood that the Panjandrum was coming to tea, and he’s after the sacrificial ealf. He’s always pushing himself socially.”

Silence chilled the table, while a whispered consultation took place behind the door. “I must come in and explain,” the voice went on, clearer and more expostulatory. ‘‘ Indeed I must, Olive. No, I must come now.”

Katherine Edmister herself followed the voice, and Mr. Proctor’s face showed sudden interest. He had not seen her since the day of the wedding, and the memory of her look quickened his curiosity. If her tongue matched her eyes there would be no lack of conversation now.

‘Miss Edmister, let me make you acquainted ; this is Mr. Proctor,” said Mrs. Cole with slow formality. Introductions were blessedly infrequent in Wilsonport, and the form limped slightly on the rare occasions of its appearance.

The geographical restraints imposed by chair and table fettered Mr. Proctor’s bow, though he improved the limited area offered him, but the girl came forward, and held out abrown hand. Her weapons seemed sheathed. Her anger had apparently been a childish impulse, soon forgotten.

“T’m afraid that you heard me call you the Panjandrum,” she began at once. “I am sorry. I supposed that you were in the other room. I didn’t mean to be unpleasant. Indeed I did n’t. But, you see, we have so little to talk about here ! I really meant,’ her wide firm mouth twitched slightly at the corners, “ to be complimentary.”

Her look was candid as a child’s. In truth she seemed little more than one, with her slight figure and flying hair, and Mr. Proctor showed his frank amusement.

“Tf I bury the Panjandrum, will you put the lamb in the same grave?” he hazarded. “ I know that you saw me laugh at the wedding.”

The girl’s look did not respond. She turned with a touch of hauteur that added years to her apparent age. ‘I must go, Olive,” she began abruptly, and walked toward the door, shaking her head in smiling refusal of Mrs. Cole’s appeals.

Mr. Cole pushed back his plate. ‘I want you to stay, Katherine,” he said with an air of finality.

The girl stopped instantly, though her mouth was mutinous. “I’ve had my supper,” she demurred, “and father will worry.”

“T7ll take you home,” Mr. Cole went on with. the same note of command, “‘and we can send word to your father when Heinrich goes up with the milk.”

“ Very well,” said Katherine with instant submission. She drew a chair to the table, and Mr. Cole watched her, an air of responsibility tempering his evident pride.

“You ’re old enough to put your hair up, Katherine,’ he chided. ‘ Mr. Proctor thinks that you ’re a little girl.”

The girl flushed, and looked at Mr. Proctor defensively. “I am not very old,” she protested. “ Karen is so dignified that you expect too much from me.” She seemed less annoyed at the personality than anxious to cover the abruptness of Mr. Cole’s speech. She turned to Mr. Proctor. ‘Do you know Karen Torstenson?” Her eyes lighted at the name.

It was the man’s turn to feel confused. He had not realized till that moment that Miss Torstenson had been in his thoughts.

‘“¢ Miss Karen is the — she sings, does n’t she?”

* Karen is a child of God,” asserted Mr. Cole. “Yes, she sings in the choir. You ought to know her. I’ll get her now, and we can have a sing.”

His wife nodded placid approval. ‘Get Paul Livingstone to come too,” she called after him, ‘‘and ask him to bring his ‘ Precious Jewels.’ ”

Mr. Proctor ventured a smile. ‘ Does he wear them — the jewels?”’ He turned toward Katherine, but her grave face reduced jesting to impertinence. :

Mrs. Cole’s light laugh expressed less of amusement than of comfortable acquiescence. “It’s a singing book,” she conscientiously explained. “*¢ Precious Jewels’ is just its name. I wanted Paul Livingstone to bring it along with him. Paul - Livingstone ’s our teacher.”

“Qh!” said Mr. Proctor comprehensively and with meekness, oppressed by Katherine’s deliberate scrutiny. He had no words to add, for they were entering the front room, and the gloom of that formal apartment fell blightingly upon his spirit. All his standards were at fault, and he surrendered himself to the red plush arms awaiting him, bereft of whatever small talk his life had taught him. He seemed thinking in a foreign tongue.

Mrs. Cole sat down on a worsted bird of violent plumage, and rocked to and fro. Her air of pleased content was in itself an illumination of the labyrinth of Mr. Proctor’s doubts. Why, he was not expected to talk! Clearly the compulsion of conversation, other than as a means to an end, was unknown to Mrs. Cole’s mind.

A rap at the kitchen door broke the spell.

“Té’s Mr. Heinrich with the milk, Olive.” Katherine, who had remained in the kitchen, looked in to explain.

Heinrich was the keeper of the lighthouse, and the village dairyman as well, —a small bent man, with shrewd eyes and grizzled hair. He met Katherine with a bow of exaggerated deference, and she responded with a courtesy of equal import. Then they laughed, as friends of old time laugh together, and went into the pantry, whence disjointed murmurs of further laughter reached the front room. Mr. Proctor looked at his hostess, but she made no explanation even when Katherine’s clear treble was heard to say, —

“ Say to the Lady Bertha that court will be held Saturday next.”

- The answer which Mr. Proctor awaited with shameless eagerness was lost in the sound of Mr. Cole’s steps outside.

With Mr. Cole came Karen Torstenson, and a sombre-eyed young man who was introduced as Mr. Livingstone, the teacher. Miss Torstenson, her height dwarfing the men beside her, entered with a matronly assurance of movement that contradicted her dimple. Her blush, as she was introduced, meant nothing, but was entrancing to watch, and the three men, each to his fashion, paid tribute — Mr. Cole with the complacence of familiarity, Mr. Proctor with undisguised admiration, and the schoolmaster with a frown of protest.

There was no lack of conversation now. It ran the gamut of the day’s sorrow and comedy; the price of hemlock bark; the working out of the road tax; the run of whitefish; the sinking of a schooner. Mr. Proctor listened, but most of the talk was Chaldaic to his mind. He looked at Katherine. She sat, her dog in her arms, her face vivid with attention, and his interest in her flagged. He had thought, in an unformulated way, that the girl’s defiant attitude might be a reflection of her father’s revolt against the restrictions of the village life, and that he might find in Dr. Edmister one to whom this gossip was a weariness. But no. The voices about him quoted the doctor as authority. Father and daughter evidently looked at this as life. Mr. Proctor was conscious of disappointment.

It was a relief to turn to Karen. She rocked in radiant calm, talking not at all, but laughing, now and then, at nothing in particular, with the gurgling rush of a meadowlark’s note, — a sound so delicious that Mr. Proctor wondered if his admiration of it were patent enough to be disconcerting. Mr. Livingstone’s eyes followed him with unplea- ‘sant intentness, and though his weeks in Wilsonport had wonted him to unexplained dislike, this look seemed needlessly hostile.

The talk was now of the church, and George Cole had forgotten his taciturnity in a discussion of the needs of the Sunday-school. They had been having a revival, he parenthesized to Mr. Proctor, and now they must plan to hold the young people. His unembarrassed speech was convincing, and Mr. Proctor’s intelligence joyed in a sudden understanding of his superintendent’s force. He remembered Katherine’s docility of the earlier evening ; was it because she, too, appreciated strength that she had given such swift obedience ? He looked across at her with a return of curiosity.

She met his scrutiny with unconsciousness of his existence. Her mind was following Mr. Cole, and she shook Chevalier’s submissive paw to testify to her approval.

“They need work to keep them interested,” she interrupted. ‘ I’ll make the girls in my class give a tenth of their berry money. It’s going to hea great raspberry year.”

Mr. Proctor’s too ready smile betrayed him; the connection between revivals and raspberries seemed remote.

‘Picking berries is hard work,” Katherine flashed. ‘Honest work— work that’s worth while.”

Mr. Proctor alone understood the addendum, but he refused to meet the challenge, and dismissed the matter with a mental shrug. The girl was tiresome with her perpetual defiance of his smiles. Had she undertaken to champion. the entire village ? | Karen smiled languidly at her friend’s enthusiasm. Her blue eyes were untroubled by a hint of either assent or protest, and the very folds of her gown radiated calm. Mr. Proctor walked over to her and began totalk. It was worth while to wake her laughter.

“Sing for us, Karen,’ Mr. Cole said, after a pause. He dropped his head back, and his face resumed its mask.