Hagar

When she opened her eyes, she opened them full upon other eyes—haggard, wolfishly hungry eyes, looking at her from out the thicket, behind them a body striped like a wasp....

"I didn't mean to scare you," said the boy, "but if you ever went most of two days and a night without anything to eat, you'd know how it felt."

"I never did," said Hagar. "But I can imagine it. I wish I had asked Mrs. Green for five apple turnovers." As she spoke, she pushed the red fringed napkin with the second turnover toward him. "Eat that one, too. I truly don't want any, and the flowers are never hungry."

He bit into the second turnover. "It seems mean to eat up your tea-party, but I'm 'most dead, and that's the truth—"

Hagar, sitting on the great stone with her hands folded in her lap and her sunbonnet back on her shoulders, watched her suddenly acquired guest. He would not come clear out of the thicket; the tangled growth held him all but head and shoulders. "I believe I've seen you before," she said at last. "About two weeks ago grandfather and Aunt Serena and I were on the packet-boat. Weren't you at the lock up the river? The boat went down and down until you were standing 'way up, just against the sky. I am almost sure it was you."

He reddened. "Yes, it was me." Then, dropping the arm that held the yet uneaten bit of turnover, he broke out. "I didn't run away while I was a trusty! I wouldn't have done it! One of the men lied about me and said dirty words about my people, and I jumped on him and knocked his head against a stone until he didn't come to for half an hour! Then they did things to me, and did what they called degrading me. 'No more trustying for you!' said the boss. So I run away—three days ago." He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "It seems more like three years. I reckon they've got the dogs out."

"What have they got the dogs out for?"

"Why, to hunt me. I—I—"

His voice sunk. Terror came back, and will-breaking fear, a chill nausea and swooning of the soul. He groaned and half rose from the thicket. "I was lying here till night, but I reckon I'd better be going—" His eyes fell upon his body and he sank back. "O God! I reckon in hell we'll wear these clothes."

Hagar stared at him, faint reflecting lines of anxiety and unhappiness on her brow, quiverings about her lips. "Ought you to have run away? Was it right to run away?" The colour flooded her face. It was always hard for her to tell of her errors, but she felt that she and the boy were in somewhat the same case, and that she ought to do it. "I did something my aunt had told me not to do. It was reading a book that she said was wicked. I can't see yet that it was wicked. It was very interesting. But the Bishop said that he didn't christen me for that, and that it was a sin. And now, for a whole week, grandmother says that I'm not to read any book at all—which is very hard. What I mean is," said Hagar, "though I don't feel yet that there was anything wicked in that book (I didn't read much of it), I feel perfectly certain that I ought to obey grandmother. The Bible tells you so, and I believe in the Bible." Her brow puckered again. "At least, I believe that I believe in the Bible. And if there wasn't anybody in the house, and the most interesting books were lying around, I wouldn't—at least I think I wouldn't—touch one till the week is over." She tried earnestly to explain her position. "I mean that if I really did wrong—and I reckon I'll have to say that I oughtn't to have disobeyed Aunt Serena, though the Bible doesn't say anything about aunts—I'll take the hard things that come after. Of course"—she ended politely—"your folks may have been mistaken, and you may not have done anything wrong at all—"

The boy bloomed at her. "I'll tell you what I did. I live 'way out in the mountains, the other end of nowhere. Well, Christmas there was a dance in the Cove, and I went, but Nancy Horn, that had promised to go with me, broke her word and went with Dave Windless. There was a lot of apple jack around, and I took more'n I usually take. And then, when we were dancing the reel, somebody—and I'll swear still it was Dave, though he swore in the court-room it wasn't—Dave Windless put out his foot and tripped me up! Well, Nancy, she laughed.... I don't remember anything clear after that, and I thought that the man who was shooting up the room was some other person, though I did think it was funny the pistol was in my hand.... Anyhow, Dave got a ball through his hip, and old Daddy Jake Willy, that I was awful fond of and wouldn't have hurt not for a still of my own and the best horse on the mountain, he got his bow arm broken, and one of the women was frightened into fits, and next week when her baby was born and had a harelip she said I'd done it.... Anyhow the sheriff came and took me—it was about dawn, 'way up on the mountain-side, and I still thought it was another man going away toward Catamount Gap and the next county where there wasn't any Nancy Horn—I thought so clear till I fired at the sheriff and broke his elbow and the deputy came up behind and twisted the pistol away, and somebody else threw a gourd of water from the spring over me ... and I come to and found it had been me all the time.... That's what I did, and I got four years."

"Four years?" said Hagar. "Four years in—in jail?"

"In the penitentiary," said the boy. "It's a worse word than jail.... I know what's right and wrong. Liquor's wrong, and the Judge said carrying concealed weapons was wrong, and I reckon it is, though there isn't much concealment when everybody knows you're wearing them.... Yes, liquor's wrong, and quarrels might go off just with some words and using your fists if powder and shot weren't right under your hand, tempting you. Yes, drinking's wrong and quarreling's wrong, and after I come to my senses it didn't need no preacher like those that come round Sundays to tell me that. But I tell you what's the whole floor space of hell wronger than most of the things men do and that's the place the lawyers and the judges and the juries send men to!"

"Do you mean that they oughtn't to—to do anything to you? You did do wrong."

"No, I don't mean that," said the boy. "I've got good sense. If I didn't see it at first, old Daddy Jake Willy came to the county jail three or four times, and he made me see it. The Judge and the lawyer couldn't ha' made me see it, but he did. And at last I was willing to go." His face worked. "The day before I was to go I was in that cell I'd stayed in then two months and I looked right out into the sunshine. You could see Old Rocky Knob between two bars, and Bear's Den between two, and Lonely River running down into the valley between the other two, and the sun shining over everything—shining just like it's shining to-day. Well, I stood there, looking out, and made a good resolution. I was going to take what was coming to me because I deserved it, having broken the peace and lamed men and hurt a woman, and broken Daddy Jake's arm and fired at the sheriff. I hadn't meant to do all that, but still I had done it. So I said, 'I'll take it. And I won't give any trouble. And I'll keep the rules. If it's a place to make men better in, I'll come out a better man. I'll work just as hard as any man, and if there's books to study I'll study, and I'll keep the rules and try to help other people, and when I come out, I'll be young still and a better man.'" He rose to his full height in the thicket, the upper half of his striped body showing like a swimmer's above the matted green. He sent out his young arms in a wide gesture at once mocking and despairing, but whether addressed to earth or heaven was not apparent. "You see, I didn't know any more about that place than a baby unborn!"

With that he dropped like a stone back into the thicket and lay dumb and close, with agonized eyes. Around the base of the ridge out of the wood came the dogs; behind them three men with guns.

...One of the men was a jolly, fatherly kind of person. He tried to explain to Hagar that they weren't really going to hurt the convict at all—she saw for herself that the dogs hadn't hurt him, not a mite! The handcuffs didn't hurt him either—they were loose and comfortable. No; they weren't going to do anything to him, they were just going to take him back.—He hadn't hurt her, had he? hadn't said anything disagreeable to her or done anything but eat up her tea-party?—Then that was all right, and the fatherly person would go himself with her to the house and tell the Colonel about it. Of course he knew the Colonel, everybody knew the Colonel! And "Stop crying, little lady! That boy ain't worth it."

The Colonel's dictum was that the country was getting so damned unsettled that Hagar must not again be let to play on the ridge alone.

Old Miss, who had had that morning a somewhat longish talk with Dr. Bude, stated that she would tell Mary Green to send for Thomasine and Maggie and Corker. "Dr. Bude thinks the child broods too much, and it may be better to have healthy diversion for her in case—"

"In case—!" exclaimed Miss Serena. "Does he really think, mother, that it's serious?"

"I don't think he knows," answered her mother. "I don't think it is, myself. But Maria was never like anybody else—"

"Dear Maria!" said Mrs. LeGrand. "She should have made such a brilliant, lovely woman! If only there was a little more compliance, more feminine sweetness, more—if I may say so—unselfishness—"

"Where," asked the Bishop, "is Medway?"

Mrs. Ashendyne's needles clicked. "My son was in Spain, the last we heard: studying the painter Murillo."

CHAPTER V
MARIA

Thomasine and Maggie and Corker arrived and filled the overseer's house with noise. They were a blatantly healthful, boisterous set, only Thomasine showing gleams of quiet. They wanted at once to play on the ridge, but now Hagar wouldn't play on the ridge. She said she didn't like it any more. As she spoke, her thin shoulders drew together, and her eyes also, and two vertical lines appeared between these. "What you shakin' for?" asked Corker. "Got a chill?"

So they played down by the branch where the willows grew, or in the old, disused tobacco-house, or in the orchard, or about a haystack on a hillside. Corker wanted always to play robbers or going to sea. Maggie liked to jump from the haystack or to swing, swing, swing, holding to the long, pendant green withes of the weeping willow, or to climb the apple trees. Thomasine liked to make dams across the streamlet below the tobacco-house. She liked to shape wet clay, and she saved every pebble or bit of bright china, or broken blue or green glass with which to decorate a small grotto they were making. She also liked to play ring-around-a-rosy, and to hunt for four-leaved clovers. Hagar liked to play going to sea, but she did not care for robbers. She liked to swing from the willows and to climb a particular apple tree which she loved, but she did not want to jump from the haystack, nor to climb all trees. She liked almost everything that Thomasine liked, but she was not so terribly fond of ring-around-a-rosy. In her own likings she found herself somewhat lonely. None of the three, though Thomasine more than the others, cared much for a book. They would rather have a sugar-cake any day. When it came to lying on the hillside without speaking and watching the clouds and the tree-tops, they did not care for that at all. However, when they were tired, and everything else failed, they did like Hagar to tell them a story. "Aladdin" they liked—sitting in the shadow of the haystack, their chins on their hands, Thomasine's eyes still unconsciously alert for four-leaved clovers, Corker with a June apple, trying to determine whether he would bite into it now or wait until Aladdin's mother had uncovered the jewels before the Sultan. They liked "Aladdin" and "Queen Gulnare and Prince Beder" and "Snow White and Rose Red."

And then came the day that they went after raspberries. That morning Hagar, turning the doorknob of her mother's room, found the door softly opened from within and Phœbe on the threshold. Phœbe came out, closing the door gently behind her, beckoned to Hagar, and the two crossed the hall to the deep window. "I wouldn't go in this mahnin' ef I were you, honey," said Phœbe. "Miss Maria done hab a bad night. She couldn't sleep an' her heart mos' give out. Oh, hit's all right now, an' she's been lyin' still an' peaceful since de dawn come up. But we wants her to sleep an' we don' want her to talk. An' Old Miss thinks an' Phœbe thinks too, honey, dat you'd better not go in this mahnin'. Nex' time Old Miss 'll let you stay twice as long to make up for it."

Hagar looked at her large-eyed, "Is my mother going to die, Aunt Phœbe?"

But old Phœbe put her arms around her and the wrinkles came out all over her brown face as they did when she laughed. Phœbe was a good woman, wise and old and tender and a strong liar. "Law, no, chile—What put dat notion in yo' po' little haid? No, indeedy! We gwine pull Miss Maria through, jes' as easy! Dr. Bude he say he gwine do hit, and what Dr. Bude say goes for sho! Phœbe done see him raise de mos' dead. Law, no, don' you worry 'bout Miss Maria! An' de nex' time you goes in de room, you kin stay jes' ez long ez you like. You kin sit by her er whole hour an' won't nobody say you nay."

Downstairs Captain Bob was sitting on the sunny step of the sunny back porch, getting a thorn out of Luna's paw. "Hi, Gipsy," he said, when Hagar came and stood by him; "what's the matter with breakfast this morning?"

"I don't know," said Hagar. "I haven't seen grandmother to-day. Uncle Bob—"

"Well, chicken?"

"They'd tell you, wouldn't they, if my mother was going to die?"

Captain Bob, having relieved Luna of the thorn, gave his attention fully to his great-niece. He was slow and kindly and unexacting and incurious and unimaginative, and the unusual never occurred to him before it happened. "Maria going to die? That's damned nonsense, partridge! Haven't heard a breath of it—isn't anything to hear. Nobody dies at Gilead Balm—hasn't been a death here since the War. Besides, Medway's away.—Mustn't get notions in your head—makes you unhappy, and things go on just the same as ever." He pulled her down on the step beside him. "Look at Luna, now! She ain't notionate—are you, Luna? Luna and I are going over the hills this morning to find Old Miss's guineas for her. Don't you want to go along?"

"I don't believe I do, thank you, Uncle Bob."

Mrs. LeGrand came out upon the porch, fresh and charming in a figured dimity with a blue ribbon. "Mrs. Ashendyne and Serena are talking to Dr. Bude, and as you men must be famished, Captain Bob, I am going to ring for breakfast and pour out your coffee for you—"

In the hall Hagar appealed to her. "Mrs. LeGrand, can't I go into grandmother's room and hear what Dr. Bude says about my mother?" But Mrs. LeGrand smiled and shook her head and laid hands on her. "No, indeed, dear child! Your mother's all right. You come with me, and have your breakfast."

The Bishop appearing at the stair foot, she turned to greet him. Hagar, slipping from her touch, stole down the hall to Old Miss's chamber and tried the door. It gave and let her in. Old Miss was seated in the big chair, Dr. Bude and the Colonel were standing on either side of the hearth, and Miss Serena was between them and the door.

"Hagar!" exclaimed Miss Serena. "Don't come in now, dear. Grandmother and I will be out to breakfast in a moment."

But Hagar had the courage of unhappiness and groping and fear for the most loved. She fled straight to Dr. Bude. "Dr. Bude—oh, Dr. Bude—is my mother going to die?"

"No, Bude," said the Colonel from the other side of the hearth.

Dr. Bude, an able country doctor, loved and honoured, devoted and fatherly and wise, made a "Tchk!" with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

Old Miss, leaving the big chair, came and took Hagar and drew her back with her into the deep chintz hollows. No one might doubt that Old Miss loved her granddaughter. Now her clasp was as stately as ever, but her voice was quite gentle, though of course authoritative—else it could not have belonged to Old Miss. "Your mother had a bad night, dear, and so, to make her quiet and comfortable, we sent early for Dr. Bude. She is going to sleep now, and to-morrow you shall go in and see her. But you can only go if you are a good, obedient child. Yes, I am telling you the truth. I think Maria will get well. I have never thought anything else.—Now, run away and get your breakfast, and to-day you and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker shall go raspberrying."

Dr. Bude spoke from the braided rug. "No one knows, Hagar, what's going to happen in this old world, do they? But Nature has a way of taking care of people quite regardless and without waiting to consult the doctors. I've watched Nature right closely, and I never give up anything. Your mother's right ill, my dear, but so have a lot of other people been right ill and gotten well. You go pick your raspberries, and maybe to-morrow you can see her—"

"Can't I see her to-night?"

"Well, maybe—maybe—" said the doctor.

The raspberry patches were almost two miles away, past a number of shaggy hills and dales. A wood road led that way, and Hagar and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker, with Jinnie, a coloured woman, to take care of them, felt the damp leaf mould under their feet. A breeze, coming through oak and pine, tossed their hair and fluttered the girls' skirts and the broad collar of Corker's voluminous shirt. The sky was bright blue, with two or three large clouds like sailing vessels with all sail on. A cat-bird sang to split its throat. They saw a black snake, and a rabbit showed a white tip of tail, and a lightning-blasted pine with a large empty bird-nest in the topmost crotch, ineffably lonely and deserted against the deep sky, engaged their attention. They had various adventures. Each of the children carried a tin bucket for berries, and Jinnie carried a white-oak split basket with dinner in it—sandwiches and rusks and a jar with milk and snowball cakes. They were going to stay all day. That was what usually they loved. It was so adventurous.

Corker strode along whistling. Maggie whistled, too, as well as a boy, though he looked disdain at her and said, "Huh! Girls can't whistle!"

"Dar's a piece of poetry I done heard," said Jinnie,—

Thomasine hummed as she walked. She had filled her bucket with various matters as she went along, and now she was engaged in fashioning out of the green burrs of the burdock a basket with an elaborate handle. "Don't you want some burrs?" she asked Hagar, walking beside her. Thomasine was always considerate and would give away almost anything she had.

Hagar took the burrs and began also to make a basket. She was being good. And, indeed, as the moments passed, the heavy, painful feeling about her heart went away. The doctor had said and grandmother had said, and Uncle Bob and Phœbe and every one.... The raspberries. She instantly visualized one of the blue willow saucers filled with raspberries, carried in by herself to her mother, at supper-time. Yarrow was in bloom and Black-eyed Susans and the tall white Jerusalem candles. Coming back she would gather a big bouquet for the grey jar on her mother's table. She grew light-hearted. A bronze butterfly fluttered before her, the heavy odour of the pine filled her nostrils, the sky was so blue, the air so sweet—there was a pearly cloud like a castle and another like a little boat—a little boat. Off went her fancy, lizard-quick, feather-light.

sang Jinnie as she walked.

The raspberry patches were in sunny hollows. There was a span-wide stream, running pure over a gravel bed, and a grazed-over hillside, green and short-piled as velvet, and deep woods closing in, shutting out. Summer sunshine bathed every grass blade and berry leaf, summer winds cooled the air, bees and grasshoppers and birds, squirrels in the woods, rippling water, wind in the leaves made summer sounds. It was a happy day. Sometimes Hagar, Thomasine, Maggie, Corker, and Jinnie picked purply-red berries from the same bush; sometimes they scattered and combined in twos and threes. Sometimes each established a corner and picked in an elfin solitude. Sometimes they conversed or bubbled over with laughter, sometimes they kept a serious silence. It was a matter of rivalry as to whose bucket should first be filled. Hagar strayed off at last to an angle of an old rail fence. The berries, as she found, were very fine here. She called the news to the others, but they said they had fine bushes, too, and so she picked on with a world of her own about her. The June-bugs droned and droned, her fingers moved slower and slower. At last she stopped picking, and, lying down on a sunken rock by the fence, fell to dreaming. Her dreams were already shot with thought, and she was apt, when she seemed most idle, to be silently, inwardly growing. Now she was thinking about Heaven and about God. She was a great committer of poetry to memory, and now, while she lay filtering sand through her hands as through an hourglass, she said over a stanza hard to learn, which yet she had learned some days ago.

When she had repeated it dreamily, in an inward whisper, the problem of why, in that case, she was so far from home engaged her attention. The "here" and the "there—" God away, away off on a throne with angels, and Hagar Ashendyne, in a blue sunbonnet here by a Virginia rail fence, with raspberry stain on her hands. Home was where you lived. God was everywhere; then, was God right here, too? But Hagar Ashendyne couldn't see the throne and the gold steps and floor and the angels. She could make a picture of them, just as she could of Solomon's throne, or Pharaoh's throne, or Queen Victoria's throne, but the picture didn't stir anything at her heart. She wasn't homesick for the court. She was homesick to be a good woman when she grew up, and to learn all the time and to know beautiful things, but she wasn't homesick for Heaven where God lived. Then was she wicked? Hagar wondered and wondered. The yellow sand dropped from between her palms.... God in the sand, God in me, God here and now.... Then God also is trying to grow more God.... Hagar drew a great sigh, and for the moment gave it up.

Before her on the grey rail was a slender, burnished insect, all gold-and-green armour. Around the lock of the fence came, like a gold-and-green moving stiletto, a lizard which took and devoured the gold-and-green insect.... God in the lizard, God in the insect, God devouring God, making Himself feed Himself, growing so.... The sun suddenly left the grass and the raspberry bushes. A cloud had hidden it. Other cloud masses, here pearly white, here somewhat dark, were boiling up from the horizon.

Jinnie called the children together. "What we gwine do? Look like er storm. Reckon we better light out fer home!"

Protests arose. "Ho!" cried Corker, "it ain't going to be a storm. I haven't got my bucket more'n half full and we haven't had a picnic neither! Let's stay!"

"Let's stay," echoed Maggie. "Who's afraid of a little bit of storm anyhow?"

"It's lots better for it to catch us here in the open," argued Thomasine. "They're all tall trees in the wood. But I think the clouds are getting smaller—there's the sun again!"

The sunshine fell, strong and golden. "We's gwine stay den," said Jinnie. "But ef hit rains an' you all gets wet an' teks cold, I's gwine tell Old Miss I jus' couldn't mek you come erway!—Dar's de old cow-house at de end of de field. I reckon we kin refugee dar ef de worst comes to de worst."

While they were eating the snowball cakes, a large cloud came up and determinedly covered the sun. By the time they had eaten the last crumb, lightnings were playing. "Dar now, I done tol' you!" cried Jinnie. "I never see such children anyhow! Old Miss an' Mrs. Green jus' ought-ter whip you all! Now you gwine git soppin' wet an' maybe de lightning'll strike you, too!"

"No, it won't!" cried Corker. "The cow-house's my castle, an' we've been robbing a freight train an' the constable an' old Captain Towney and the army are after us—I'm going to get to the cow-house first!"

Maggie scrambled to her feet. "No, you ain't! I'm going to—"

The cow-house was dark and somewhat dirty, but they found a tolerable square yard or two of earthen floor and they all sat close together for warmth—the air having grown quite cold—and for company, a thunderstorm, after all, being a thing that made even train robbers and castled barons feel rather small and helpless. For an hour lightnings flashed and thunders rolled and the rain fell in leaden lines. Then the lightnings grew less frequent and vivid, and the thunder travelled farther away, but the rain still fell. "Oh, it's so stupid and dark in here!" said Corker. "Let's tell stories. Hagar, you tell a story, and Jinnie, you tell a story!"

Hagar told about the Snow Queen and Kay and Gerda, and they liked that very well. All the cow-house was dark as the little robber girl's hut in the night-time when all were asleep save Gerda and the little robber girl and the reindeer. When they came to the reindeer, Corker said he heard him moving behind them in a corner, and Maggie said she heard him, too, and Jinnie called out, "Whoa, dere, Mr. Reindeer! You des er stay still till we's ready fer you!"—and they all drew closer together with a shudder of delight.

The clouds were breaking—the lines of rain were silver instead of leaden. Even the cow-house was lighter inside. There was no reindeer, after all; there were only brown logs and trampled earth and mud-daubers' nests and a big spider's web. "Now, Jinnie," said Corker, "you tell a ghost story."

Thomasine objected. "I don't like ghost stories. Hagar doesn't either."

"I don't mind them much," said Hagar. "I don't have to believe them."

But Jinnie chose to become indignant. "You jes' hab to believe dem. Dey're true! My lan'! Goin' ter church an' readin' de Bible an' den doubtin' erbout ghosts! I'se gwine tell you er story you's got ter believe, 'cause hit's done happen! Hit's gwine ter scare you, too! Dey tell me hit scare a young girl down in de Hollow inter fits. Hit's gwine ter mek yo' flesh crawl. Sayin' ghos' stories ain't true, when everybody knows dey's true!"

The piece of ancient African imagination, traveller of ten thousand years through heated forests, was fearsome enough. "Ugh!" said the children and shivered and stared.—It took the sun, indeed, to drive the creeping, mistlike thoughts away.

Going home through the rain-soaked woodland, Hagar began to gather flowers. Her bucket of berries on her arm, she stepped aside for this bloom and that, gathering with long stems, making a sheaf of blossoms. "What you doin' dat for?" queried Jinnie. "Dey's all wet. You'll jes' ruin dat gingham dress!" But Hagar kept on plucking Black-eyed Susans, and cardinal flowers, and purple clover and lady's-lace.

They came, in the afternoon glow, in sight of Gilead Balm. They came closer until the house was large, standing between its dark, funereal cedars, with a rosy cloud behind.

"All the blinds are closed as though we'd gone away!" said Hagar. "I never saw it that way before."

Mrs. Green was at the lower gate, waiting for them. Her old, kind, wrinkled face was pale between the slats of her sunbonnet, but her eyelids were reddened as though she had been weeping. "Yes, yes, children, I'm glad you got a lot of berries!—Corker and Maggie and Thomasine, you go with Jinnie. Mind me and go.—Hagar, child, you and me are goin' to come on behind.... You and me are goin' to sit here a bit on the summer-house step.... The Colonel said I was the best one after all to do it, and I'm going to do it, but I'd rather take a killing! ... Yes, sit right here, with my arm about you. Hagar, child, I've got something to tell you, honey."

Hagar looked at her with large, dark eyes. "Mrs. Green, why are all the shutters closed?"

CHAPTER VI
EGLANTINE

No one could be so cross-grained as to deny that Eglantine was a sweet place. It lay sweetly on just the right, softly swelling hill. The old grey-stucco main house had a sweet porch, with wistaria growing sweetly over it; the long, added grey-stucco wings had pink and white roses growing sweetly on trellises between the windows. There were silver maples and heavily blooming locust trees and three fine magnolias. There were thickets of weigelia and spiræa and forsythia, and winding walks, and an arbour, and the whole twenty acres or so was enclosed by a thorny, osage-orange hedge, almost, though not quite so high as the hedge around the Sleeping Beauty's palace. It was a sweet place. Everyone said so—parents and guardians, the town that neighboured Eglantine, tourists that drove by, visitors to the Commencement exercises—everybody! The girls themselves said so. It was praised of all—almost all. The place was sweet. M. Morel, the French teacher, who was always improving his English, and so on the hunt for synonyms, once said in company that it was saccharine.

Miss Carlisle, who taught ancient and modern history and, in the interstices, astronomy and a blue-penciled physiology, gently corrected him. "Oh, M. Morel! We never use that word in this sense! If you wish to vary the term you might use 'charming,' or 'refined,' or 'elegant.' Besides"—she gazed across the lawn—"it isn't so sweet, I always think, in November as it is in April or May."

"The sweetest time, I think," said Miss Bedford, who taught mathematics, geography, and Latin, "is when the lilac is in bloom."

"And when the robins nest again," sighed a pensive, widowed Mrs. Lane, who taught the little girls.

"It is 'refined' always," said M. Morel. "November or April, what is ze difference? It has ze atmosphere. It is sugary."

"Here," remarked Miss Gage, who taught philosophy—"here is Mrs. LeGrand."

All rose to greet the mistress of Eglantine as she came out from the hall upon the broad porch. Mrs. LeGrand's graciously ample form was wrapped in black cashmere and black lace. Her face was unwrinkled, but her hair had rapidly whitened. It was piled upon her head after an agreeable fashion and crowned by a graceful small cap of lace. She was ample and creamy and refinedly despotic. With her came her god-daughter, Sylvie Maine. It was early November, and the sycamores were yet bronze, the maples aflame. It was late Friday afternoon, and the occasion the arrival and entertainment overnight of an English writer of note, a woman visiting America with a book in mind.

Mrs. LeGrand said that she had thought she heard the carriage wheels. Mr. Pollock, the music-master, said, No; it was the wind down the avenue. Mrs. LeGrand, pleasantly, just condescending enough and not too condescending, glanced from one to the other of the group. "M. Morel and Mr. Pollock and you, Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford, will, I hope, take supper with our guest and me? Sylvie, here, will keep her usual place. I can't do without Sylvie. She spoils me and I spoil her! And we will have besides, I think, the girl that has stood highest this month in her classes. Who will it be, Miss Gage?"

"Hagar Ashendyne, Mrs. LeGrand."

Mrs. LeGrand had a humorous smile. "Then, Sylvie, see that Hagar's dress is all right and try to get her to do her hair differently. I like Eglantine girls to look their birth and place."

"Dear Cousin Olivia," said Sylvie, who was extremely pretty, "for all her plainness, Hagar's got distinction."

But Mrs. LeGrand shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't see it. A little wind arising, all the place became a whirl of coloured leaves. And now the carriage wheels were surely heard.

Half an hour later Sylvie went up to Hagar's room. It was what was called the "tower room"—small and high up—too small for anything but a single bed and one inmate. It wasn't a popular room with the Eglantine girls—a room without a roommate was bad enough, and then, when it was upon another floor, quite away from every one—! Language failed. But Hagar Ashendyne liked it, and it had been hers for three years. She had been at Eglantine for three years, going home to Gilead Balm each summer. She was eighteen—old for her age, and young for her age.

Sylvie found her curled in the window-seat, and spoke twice before she made her hear. "Hagar! come back to earth!"

Hagar unfolded her long limbs and pushed her hair away from her eyes. "I was travelling," she said. "I was crossing the Desert of Sahara with a caravan."

"You are," remarked Sylvie, "too funny for words!—You and I are to take supper with 'Roger Michael'!"

A red came into Hagar's cheek. "Are we? Did Mrs. LeGrand say so?"

"Yes—"

Hagar lit the lamp. "'Roger Michael'—'Roger Michael'—Sylvie, wouldn't you rather use your own name if you wrote?"

"Oh, I don't know!" answered Sylvie vaguely. "What dress are you going to wear?"

"I haven't any but the green."

"Then wear your deep lace collar with it. Cousin Olivia wants you to look as nice as possible. Don't you want me to do your hair?"

Hagar placed the lamp upon the wooden slab of a small, old-time dressing-table. That done, she stood and looked at herself with a curious, wistful puckering of the lips. "Sylvie, prinking and fixing up doesn't suit me."

"Don't you like people to like you?"

"Yes, I do. I like it so much it must be a sin. Only not very many people do.... And I don't think prinking helps."

"Yes, it does. If you look pretty, how can people help liking you? It's three fourths the battle."

Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it?... But then we don't all think the same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneath her smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd like to be beautiful. I'd like to be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and I suppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie.

Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thought that Hagar ought to have said, "I'd like to be as beautiful as you, Sylvie." But Sylvie had a sweet temper and she was not unmagnanimous. "I shouldn't call you ugly," she said judicially. "You aren't pretty, and I don't believe any one would ever call you so, but you aren't at all disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask who you are. I wouldn't worry."

"Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only preferring.—I'll wear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, and with it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's.

The visitor from England found the large, square Eglantine parlour an interesting room. The pier-glasses, framed in sallow gilt, the many-prismed chandelier, the old velvet carpet strewn with large soft roses, the claw-foot furniture, the two or three portraits of powdered Colonial gentlemen, the bits of old china, the framed letters bearing signatures that seemed to float to her from out her old United States History—all came to her like a vague fragrance from some unusual old garden. And then, curiously superimposed upon all this, appeared memorials of four catastrophic years. Soldiers and statesmen of the Confederacy had found no time in which to have their portraits painted. But Mrs. LeGrand had much of family piety and, in addition, daguerreotypes and cartes de visite of the dead and gone. With her first glow of prosperity she had a local artist paint her father from a daguerreotype. Stalwart, with a high Roman face, he looked forth in black broadcloth with a roll of parchment in his hand. The next year she had had her husband painted in his grey brigadier's uniform. Her two brothers followed, and then a famous kinsman—all dead and gone, all slain in battle. The portraits were not masterpieces, but there they were, in the pathos of the grey, underneath each a little gilt plate. "Killed at Sharpsburg."—"Killed Leading a Charge in the Wilderness."—"Killed at Cold Harbour." Upon the wall, against the pale, century-old paper, hung crossed swords and cavalry pistols, and there were framed commissions and battle orders, and an empty shell propped open the wide white-panelled door. The English visitor found it all strange and interesting. It was as though a fragrance of dried rose-leaves contended with a whiff of gunpowder. The small dining-room into which presently she was carried had fascinating prints—"Pocahontas Baptized," and "Pocahontas Married," and a group of women with children and several negroes gathered about an open grave, one woman standing out, reading the burial service.—Roger Michael was so interested that she would have liked not to talk at all, just to sit and look at the prints and mark the negro servants passing about the table. But Mrs. LeGrand's agreeable voice was asking about the health of the Queen—she bestirred herself to be an acceptable guest.

The small dining-room was separated only by an archway from the large dining-room, and into the latter, in orderly files, came the Eglantine pupils, wound about to their several tables and seated themselves with demureness. M. Morel was speaking of the friendship of France and England. Roger Michael, while she appeared to listen, studied these American girls, these Southern girls. She found many of them pretty, even lovely,—not, emphatically, with the English beauty of skin, not with the colour of New England girls, among whom, recently, she had been,—not with the stronger frame that was coming in with this generation of admission to out-of-door exercise, the certain boyish alertness and poise that more and more she was seeing exhibited,—but pretty or lovely, with delicacy and a certain languor, a dim sweetness of expression, and, precious trove in America! voices that pleased. She noted exceptions to type, small, swarthy girls and large overgrown ones, girls that were manifestly robust, girls that were alert, girls that were daring, girls that were timid or stupid, or simply anæmic, girls that approached the English type and girls that were at the very antipodes—but the general impression was of Farther South than she had as yet gone in America, of more grace and slowness, manner and sweetness. Their clothes interested her; they were so much more "dressed" than they would have been in England. Evidently, in deference to the smaller room, there was to-night an added control of speech; there sounded no more than a pleasant hum, a soft, indistinguishable murmur of young voices.

"They are so excited over the prospect of your speaking to them after supper," said Mrs. LeGrand, her hand upon the coffee urn.—"Cream and sugar?"

"They do not seem excited," thought Roger Michael.—"Sugar, thank you; no cream. Of what shall I talk to them? In what are they especially interested?"

"In your charming books, I should say," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "In how you write them, and in the authors you must know. And then your sweet English life—Stratford and Canterbury and Devonshire—"

"We have been reading 'Lorna Doone' aloud this month," said Miss Carlisle. "And the girls very cleverly arranged a little play.... Sylvie here played Lorna beautifully."

Roger Michael smiled across at Hagar, two or three places down, on the other side of the table. "I should like to have seen it," she said in her good, deep English voice.

"Oh," said Hagar, "I'm not Sylvie. I played Lizzie."

"This is my little cousin and god-daughter, Sylvie Maine," said Mrs. LeGrand. "And this is Hagar Ashendyne, the granddaughter of an old friend and connection of my family."

"Hagar Ashendyne," said Roger Michael. "I remember meeting once in the south of France a Southerner—a Mr. Medway Ashendyne."

"Indeed?" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand. "Then you have met Hagar's father. Medway Ashendyne! He is a great traveller—we do not see as much of him as we should like to see, do we, Hagar?"

"I have not seen him," said Hagar, "since I was a little girl."

Her voice, though low, was strange and vibrant. "What's here?" thought Roger Michael, but what she said was only, "He was a very pleasant gentleman, very handsome, very cultivated. My friends and I were thrown with him during a day at Carcassonne. A month afterwards we met him at Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching—quite wonderfully."

Mrs. LeGrand inwardly deplored Medway Ashendyne's daughter's lack of savoir-faire. "To give herself away like that! Just the kind of thing her mother used to do!" Aloud she said, "Medway's a great wanderer, but one of these days he will come home and settle down and we'll all be happy together. I remember him as a young man—a perfectly fascinating young man.—Dinah, bring more waffles!—Yes, if you will tell our girls something of your charming English life. We are all so interested—"

Miss Carlisle's voice came in, a sweet treble like a canary's. "The Princess of Wales keeps her beauty, does she not?"

The study hall was a long, red room, well enough lighted, with a dais holding desk and chairs. Roger Michael, seated in one of these, watched, while her hostess made a little speech of introduction, the bright parterre of young faces. Sitting so, she excercised a discrimination that had not been possible in the dining-room. Of the faces before her each was different, after all, from the other. There were keen faces as well as languorous ones; brows that promised as well as those that did not; behind the prevailing "sweet" expression, something sometimes that showed as by heat lightning, something that had depth. "Here as elsewhere," thought Roger Michael. "The same life!"

Mrs. LeGrand was closing, was turning toward her. She rose, bowed toward the mistress of Eglantine, then, standing square, with her good, English figure and her sensibly shod, English feet, she began to talk to these girls.

She did not, however, speak to them as, even after she rose, she meant to speak. She did not talk letters in England, nor English landscape. She spoke quite differently. She spoke of industrial and social unrest, of conditions among the toilers of the world. "I am what is called a Fabian," she said, and went on as though that explained. She spoke of certain movements in thought, of breakings-away toward larger horizons. She spoke of various heresies, political, social, and other. "Of course I don't call them heresies; I call them 'the enlarging vision.'" She gave instances, incidents; she spoke of the dawn coming over the mountains, and of the trumpet call of "the coming time." She said that the dying nineteenth century heard the stronger voice of the twentieth century, and that it was a voice with a great promise. She spoke of women, of the rapidly changing status of women, of what machinery had done for women, of what education had done. She spoke of the great needs of women, of their learning to organize, of the need for unity among women. She used the words "false position" thrice. "Woman's immemorially false position."—"Society has so falsely placed her."—"Until what is false is done away with."—She said that women were beginning to see. She said that the next quarter-century would witness a revolution. "You young people before me will see it; some of you will take part in it. I congratulate you on living when you will live." She talked for nearly an hour, and just as she was closing it came to her, with a certain effect of startling, that much of the time she had been speaking to just one countenance there. She was speaking directly to the girl called Hagar Ashendyne, sitting halfway down the hall. When she took her seat there followed a deep little moment of silence broken at last by applause. Roger Michael marked the girl in green. She didn't applaud; she sat looking very far away. Mrs. LeGrand was saying something smoothly perfunctory, beflowered with personal compliments; the girls all stood; the Eglantine hostess and guest, with the teachers who had been at table, passed from the platform, and turned, after a space of hallway, into the rose-carpeted big parlour.

Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford brought up the rear. "Didn't you think," murmured the latter, "that that was a very curious speech? Now and then I felt so uneasy.—It was as though in a moment she was going to say something indelicate! Dear Mrs. LeGrand ought to have told her how careful we are with our girls."

The wind rose that night and swept around the tower room, and then, between eleven and twelve, died away and left a calm that by contrast was achingly still. Hagar was not yet asleep. She lay straight and still in the narrow bed, her arms behind her head. She was rarely in a hurry to go to sleep. This hour and a half was her dreaming-awake time, her time for romance building, her time for floating here and there, as in a Witch of Atlas boat in her own No-woman's land. She had in the stalls of her mind half a dozen vague and floating romances, silver and tenuous as mist; one night she drove one afield, another night another. All took place in a kind of other space, in countries that were not on any map. She brought imagined physical features into a strange juxtaposition. When the Himalayas haunted her she ranged them, snow-clad, by a West Indian sea. Ætna and Chimborazo rose over against each other, and a favourite haunt was a palm-fringed, flower-starred lawn reached only through crashing leagues of icebergs. She took over localities that other minds had made; when she wished to she pushed aside a curtain of vine and entered the Forest of Arden; she knew how the moonlight fell in the wood outside Athens; she entered the pilotless boat and drove toward the sunset gate of the Domain of Arnheim. Usually speaking, people out of books made the population of these places, and here, too, there were strange juxtapositions. She looped and folded Time like a ribbon. Mark Antony and Robin Hood were contemporaries; Pericles and Philip Sidney; Ruth and Naomi came up abreast, with Joan of Arc, and all three with Grace Darling; the Round Table and the Girondins were acquainted. All manner of historic and fictive folk wandered in the glades of her imagination, any kind of rendezvous was possible. Much went on in that inner world—doubts and dreams and dim hypotheses, romance run wild, Fata Morganas, Castles in Spain, passion for dead shapes, worship of heroes, strange, dumb stirrings toward self-immolation, dreams of martyrdom, mind drenched now with this poem, now with that, dream life, dream adventures, dream princes, religions, world cataclysms, passionings over a colour, a tone, a line of verse—much utter spring and burgeoning. Eighteen years—a fluid unimprisoned mind—and no confidante but herself; of how recapitulatory were these hours, of how youth of all the ages surged, pulsed, vibrated through her slender frame, she had, of course, no adequate notion. She would simply have said that she couldn't sleep, and that she liked to tell herself stories. As she lay here now, she was not thinking of Roger Michael's talk, though she had thought of it for the first twenty minutes after she had put out the lamp. It had been very interesting, and it had stirred her while it was in the saying, but the grappling hook had not finally held; she was not ready for it. She had let it slip from her mind in favour of the rose and purple and deep violin humming of one of her romances. She had lain for an hour in a great wood, like a wood in Xanadu, beneath trees that touched the sky, and like an elfin stream had gone by knights and ladies.... The great clock down in the hall struck twelve. She turned her slender body, and the bed being pushed against the window, laid her outstretched hands upon the window-sill, and looked up, between the spectral sycamore boughs, to where Sirius blazed. Dream wood and dream shapes took flight. She lay with parted lips, her mind quiet, her soul awake. Minutes passed; a cloud drove behind the sycamore branches and hid the star. First blankness came and then again unrest. She sat up in bed, pushing her two heavy braids of hair back over her shoulders. The small clock upon the mantel ticked and ticked. The little room looked cold in the watery moonlight. Hagar was not dreaming or imagining now; she was thinking back. She sat very still for five minutes, tears slowly gathering in her eyes. At last she turned and lay face down upon the bed, her outstretched hands against the wooden frame. Her tears wet the sleeve of her gown. "Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes. Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes...."

CHAPTER VII
MR. LAYDON

The winter was so open, so mild and warm, that a few pale roses clung to their stems through half of December. Christmas proved a green Christmas; neither snow nor ice, but soft, Indian summer weather. Eglantine always gave two weeks' holiday at Christmas. It was a great place for holidays. Right and left went the girls. Those whose own homes were too far away went with roommates or bosom friends to theirs; hardly a pupil was left to mope in the rooms that grew so still. Most of the teachers went away. The scattering was general.

But Hagar remained at Eglantine. Gilead Balm was a good long way off. She had gone home last Christmas and the Christmas before, but this year—she hardly knew how—she had missed it. In the most recently received of his rare letters her grandfather had explicitly stated that, though he was prepared to pay for her schooling and to support her until she married, she must, on her side, get along with as little money as possible. It was criminal that he had so little nowadays, but such was the melancholy fact. The whole world was going to the dogs. He sometimes felt a cold doubt as to whether he could hold Gilead Balm. He wished to die there, at any rate. Hagar had been very unhappy over that letter, and it set her to wondering more strongly than ever about money, and to longing to make it. In her return letters he suggested that she stay at Eglantine this Christmas, and so save travelling expenses. And in order that Gilead Balm might not feel that she would be too dreadfully disappointed, she said that it was very pleasant at Eglantine, and that several of the girls were going to stay, and that she would be quite happy and wouldn't mind it much, though of course she wanted to see them all at Gilead Balm. The plan was of her suggesting, but she had not realized that they might fall in with it. When her grandmother answered at length, explaining losses that the Colonel had sustained, and agreeing that this year it might be best for her to stay at Eglantine, she tried not to feel desperately hurt and despondent. She loved Gilead Balm, loved it as much as her mother had hated it. Old Miss's letter had shown her own disappointment, but—"You are getting to be a woman and must consider the family. Ashendyne and Coltsworth women, I am glad to say, have always known their duty to the family and have lived up to it." The last half of the letter had a good deal to say of Ralph Coltsworth who was at the University.

Hagar was here at Eglantine, and it was two days before Christmas, and most of the girls were gone. Sylvie was gone. The teacher whom she liked best—Miss Gage—was gone. Mrs. LeGrand, who liked holidays, too, was going. Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford and the housekeeper were not going, and they and the servants would look after Eglantine. Besides these there would be left the books in the book-room, and Hagar would have leave to be out of doors, in the winding walks and beneath the trees, alone and whenever she pleased. The weather was dreamy still; everywhere a warm amethyst haze.

This morning had come a box from Gilead Balm. Her grandmother had filled it with good things to eat and the Colonel sent his love and a small gold-piece. There was a pretty belt from Captain Bob and a hand-painted plate and a soft pink wool, shell-pattern, crocheted "fascinator" from Miss Serena. Mrs. Green sent a hemstitched handkerchief, and the servants sent a Christmas card. Through the box were scattered little sprays from the Gilead Balm cedars, and there was a bunch of white and red and button chrysanthemums. Hagar, sitting on the hearth-rug, unpacked everything; then went off into a brown study, the chrysanthemums in her lap.

Later in the morning she arranged upon the hand-painted plate some pieces of home-made candy, several slices of fruitcake, three or four lady apples, and a number of Old Miss's exquisitely thin and crisp wafers, and with it in her hand went downstairs to Mrs. LeGrand's room, knocked at the door, and was bidden to enter. Mrs. LeGrand half-raised herself from a flowery couch near the fire, put the novel that she was reading behind her pillow, and stretched out her hand. "Ah, Hagar!—Goodies from Gilead Balm? How nice! Thank you, my dear!" She took a piece of cocoanut candy, then waved the hand-painted plate to the round table. "Put it there, dear child! Now sit down for a minute and keep me company."

Hagar took the straight chair on the other side of the hearth. The bright, leaping flame was between the two. It made a kind of softer daylight, and full in the heart of it showed Mrs. LeGrand's handsome, not yet elderly countenance, the ripe fullness of her bust, covered by a figured silk dressing-sacque, and her smooth, well-shaped, carefully tended hands. Hagar conceived that it was her duty to think well and highly of Mrs. LeGrand, who was such an old friend of the family, and who, she knew, out of these same friendly considerations, was keeping her at Eglantine on the easiest of terms. Yes, it was certainly her duty to love and admire Mrs. LeGrand. That she did not do so caused her qualms of conscience. Many of the girls raved about Mrs. LeGrand, and so did Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford. Hagar supposed with a sigh that there was something wrong with her own heart. To-day, as she sat in the straight chair, her hands folded in her lap, she experienced a resurgence of an old childhood dislike. She saw again the Gilead Balm library, and the pool of sunlight on the floor and the "Descent of Man," and heard again Mrs. LeGrand telling the Bishop that she—Hagar—was reading an improper book. Time between then and now simply took itself away like a painted drop-scene. Six years rolled themselves up as with a spring, and that hour seamlessly adjoined this hour.

"I'm afraid," said Mrs. LeGrand, "that you'll be a little lonely, dear child, but it won't be for long. Time flies so!"

"I don't exactly get lonely," said Hagar gravely. "You are going down the river, aren't you?"

"Yes, for ten days. My dear friends at Idlewood won't hear of my not coming. They were my dear husband's dearest cousins. Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford, together with Mrs. Brown, will take, I am sure, the best of care of things here."

"Yes, of course. We'll get on beautifully," said Hagar. "Mr. Laydon is not going away either. His mother is ill and he will not leave her. He says that if we like to listen, he will come over in the evenings and read aloud to us."

Mr. Laydon was teacher of Belles-Lettres at Eglantine, a well-looking young gentleman, with a good voice, and apparently a sincere devotion to the best literature. Eglantine and Mr. Laydon alike believed in the future of Mr. Laydon. It was understood that his acceptance of a position here was of the nature of a makeshift, a mere pot-boiler on his road to high places. He and his mother were domiciled with a cousin from whose doorstep you might toss a pebble into the Eglantine grounds. In the past few years the neighbouring town had begun to grow; it had thrown out a street which all but touched the osage-orange hedge.

Mrs. LeGrand made a slight motion with her hand on which was her wedding-ring, with an old pearl ring for guard. "I shall tell Mrs. Lane not to let him do that too often. I have a great esteem for Mr. Laydon, but Eglantine cannot be too careful. No one with girls in their charge can be too careful!—What is the Gilead Balm news?"

"The letter was from grandmother. She is well, and so is grandfather. They have had a great deal of company. Uncle Bob has had rheumatism, but he goes hunting just the same. The Hawk Nest Coltsworths are coming for Christmas—all except Ralph. He is going home with a classmate. Grandmother says he is the handsomest man at the University, and that if I hear tales of his wildness I am not to believe them. She says all men are a little wild at first. Aunt Serena is learning how to illuminate texts. Mrs. Green has gone to see her daughter, who has something the matter with her spine. Thomasine's uncle in New York is going to have her visit him, and grandmother thinks he means to get Thomasine a place in a store. Grandmother says no girl ought to work in a store, but Thomasine's people are very poor, and I don't see what she can do. She's got to live. Corker has a place, but he isn't doing very well. Car'line and Isham have put a porch to their cabin, and Mary Magazine has gotten religion."

"Girls of Thomasine's station," said Mrs. LeGrand, "are beginning more and more, I'm sorry to see, to leave home to work for pay. It's spreading, too; it's not confined to girls of her class. Only yesterday I heard that a bright, pretty girl that I used to know at the White had gone to Philadelphia to study to be a nurse, and there's Nellie Wynne trying to be a journalist! A journalist! There isn't the least excuse for either of those cases. One of those girls has a brother and the other a father quite able to support them."

"But if there really isn't any one?" said Hagar wistfully. "And if you feel that you are costing a lot—" Her dreams at night were beginning to be shot with a vague but insistent "If I could write—if I could paint or teach—if I could earn money—"

"There is almost always some one," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "And if a girl knows how to make the best of herself, there inevitably arrives her own establishment and the right man to take care of her. If"—she shrugged—"if she doesn't know how to make the best of herself, she might as well go work in a store. No one would especially object. That is, they would not object except that when that kind of thing creeps up higher in the scale of society, and girls who can perfectly well be supported at home go out and work for pay, it makes an unfortunate kind of precedent and reacts and reflects upon those who do know how to make the best of themselves."

Hagar spoke diffidently. "But a lot of women had to work after the war. Mrs. Lane and General ——'s daughters, and you yourself—"

"That is quite different," said Mrs. LeGrand. "Gentlewomen in reduced circumstances may have to battle alone with the world, but they do not like it, and it is only hard fate that has put them in that position. It's an unnatural one, and they feel it as such. What I am talking of is that nowadays you see women—young women—actually choosing to stand alone, actually declining support, and—er—refusing generally to make the best of themselves. It's part of the degeneracy of the times that you begin to see women—women of breeding—in all kinds of public places, working for their living. It's positively shocking! It opens the gate to all kinds of things."

"Wrong things?"

"Ideas, notions. Roger Michael's ideas, for instance,—which I must say are extremely wrong-headed. I regretted that I had asked her here. She was hardly feminine." Mrs. LeGrand stretched herself, rubbed her plump, firm arms, from which the figured silk had fallen back, and rose from the couch. "I hope that Eglantine girls will always think of these things as ladies should. And now, my dear, will you tell Mrs. Lane that I want to see her?"

Mrs. LeGrand went away from Eglantine for ten days. Of the women teachers living in the house, all went but Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford. All the girls went but three, and they were, first, Hagar Ashendyne; second, a pale thin girl from the Far South, a martyr to sick headaches; and third, Francie Smythe, a girl apparently without many home people. Francie was sweetly dull, with small eyes and a perpetual smile.

How quiet seemed the great house with its many rooms! They closed the large dining-room and used the small room where Roger Michael had supped. They shut the classrooms and the study-hall and the book-room, and sat in the evenings in the bowery, flowery parlour. Here, the very first evening, and the second, came Mr. Laydon with Browning in one pocket and Tennyson in the other.

Mrs. Lane was knitting an afghan of a complicated pattern. Her lips moved softly, continuously, counting. Mr. Laydon, making an eloquent pause midway of "Tithonous" caught this One—two—three—four—and had a fleeting expression of pain. Mrs. Lane saw the depth to which she had sunk in his esteem and flushed over her delicate, pensive face. For the remainder of the hour she sat with her knitting in her lap. But really the afghan must be finished, and so, the second evening, she placed her chair so as to face not the reader but a shadowy corner, and so knit and counted in peace. Miss Bedford neither knit nor counted; she said that she adored poetry and sighed rapturously where something seemed to be indicated. She also adored conversation and argumentation as to this or that nice point. What did Mr. Laydon think Browning really meant in "Childe Roland," and was Porphyria's lover really mad? Was Amy really to blame in "Locksley Hall"? Miss Bedford made play with her rather fine eyes and teased the fringe of the table-cover. The pale girl from the Far South—Lily was her name—sat by the fire and now rubbed her forehead with a menthol pencil and now stroked Tipsy Parson, Mrs. LeGrand's big black cat. Francie Smythe had a muslin apron full of coloured silks and was embroidering a centre-piece—yellow roses with leaves and thorns. Francie was a great embroiderer. Hagar sat upon a low stool by the hearth, over against Lily, close to the slowly burning logs. She was a Fire-Worshipper. The flames were better to her than jewels, and the glowing alleys and caverns below were treasure caves and temples. She sat listening in the rosy light, her chin in her hands. She thought that Mr. Laydon read very well—very well, indeed.