At the bend of the road the land sloped suddenly straight for the river brink. A quarter of a mile below was the dam, above Mr. Rudemeir’s red saw mill. Little River widened at this point, and swept in curves around a little island. There were no buildings on it, only broad low lush meadows that provided a home for muskrats and waterfowl. Late in the fall fat otters could be seen circling around the still waters, and wild geese and ducks made it a port of call in their flights north and south.

As Ella Lou started into the water, Carlota asked just one question.

“How deep is it?”

“Oh, it varies in spots,” answered Cousin Roxy, cheerfully; her chin was up, her firm lips set in an unswerving smile, holding the reins in a steady grasp that steadied Ella Lou’s footing. To Jean she had never seemed more resourceful or fearless. “There’s some pretty deep holes, here and there, but we’ll trust to Ella Lou’s common sense, and the workings of divine Providence. Go ’long there, girl, and mind your step.”

Ella Lou seemed to take the challenge personally. She felt her way along the sandy bottom, daintily, and the wheels of the two seated democrat sank to the hubs. Out in midstream they met the double current, sweeping around both sides of the island; and here for a minute or two, danger seemed imminent. Cousin Roxy gave a quick look back over her shoulder.

“Can you swim, Jean?” Jean nodded, and held on to the cats and Cynthy, grimly. It was hard saying which of the two were proving the more difficult to manage. The wagon swayed perilously, but Ella Lou held to her course, and suddenly they felt the rise of the shore line again. Overhead, there had flown a vanguard of frightened birds, flying ahead of the smothering clouds of smoke that poured now in blinding masses down from the burning woods. The cries and calls of the men working along the back fire line reached the little group on the far shore, faintly.

As the mare climbed up the bank, dripping wet and snorting, Cousin Roxy glanced back over her shoulder at the way they had come. Cynthy gave one look too, and covered her face with her hands. The flames had swept straight down over her little home, and she cried out in anguish.

“Pity’s sakes, Cynthy, praise God that the two of us aren’t burning up this minute with those old shingles and rafters,” cried Mrs. Ellis, joyfully. “I could rise and sing the Doxology, water soaked as I am, and mean it more than I ever have in all of my life.”

“Oh, and Miss Allan, not one of the cats got wet even,” Jean exclaimed, laughing, almost hysterically. “You don’t know what a time I had holding that bag up out of the water. Do turn around and look at the wonderful sight. See, Carlota!”

But Carlota had jumped out of the wagon with Cousin Roxy, and the two of them were petting and tending Ella Lou, who stood trembling in every limb, her eyes still wide with fear.

“You wonderful old heroine, you,” said Carlota, softly. “I think we all owe our lives to your courage.”

“She’s a fine mare, if I do say so, God bless her.” Cousin Roxy unwound her old brown veil and used it to wipe off Ella Lou’s dripping neck and back. If her own cloak had been dry she would have laid it over her for a cover.

The flames had reached the opposite shore, but while the smoke billowed across, Little River left them high and dry in the safety zone.

“I guess we’d better be making for home as quick as we can,” said Cousin Roxy. Except for a little pallor around her lips, and an extra brightness to her eyes, no one could have told that she had just caught a glimpse of the Dark Angel’s pinions beside that river brink. She pushed back her wisps of wavy hair, climbed back into the wagon, and turned Ella Lou’s nose towards home.

The Judge was watching anxiously, pacing up and down the long veranda with Billie sitting in his reed chair bolstered up with pillows beside him. He had telephoned repeatedly down to Greenacres, but they were all quite as anxious now as himself. It was Billie who first caught a sight of the team and its occupants.

Kit had gone out into the kitchen to start dinner going. She had refused to believe that any harm could come to Cousin Roxy or anyone under her care, and at the sound of Billie’s voice, she glanced from the window, and caught sight of Jean’s familiar red cap.

“Land alive, don’t hug me to death, all of you,” exclaimed Cousin Roxy. “Jean, you go and telephone to your mother right away, and relieve her anxiety. Like enough, she thinks we’re all burned to cinders by this time, and tell her she’d better have plenty of coffee and sandwiches made up to send over to the men in the woods. All us women will have our night’s work cut out for us.”

It was the girls’ first experience of a country forest fire. All through the afternoon the fresh relays of men kept arriving from the nearby villages, and outlying farms, ready to relieve those who had been working through the morning. Up at the little white church, the old bell rope parted and Sally Peckham’s two little brothers distinguished themselves forever by climbing to the belfry, lying on their backs on the old beams, and taking their turns kicking the bell.

There was but little sleep for any members of the family that night. Jean never forgot the thrill of watching the fire from the cupola windows, and with the other girls she spent most of the time up there until daybreak. There was a fascination in seeing that battle from afar, and realizing how the little puny efforts of a handful of men could hold in check such a devastating force. Only country dwellers could appreciate the peril of having all one owned in the world, all that was dear and precious, and comprised in the word “home,” swept away in the path of the flames.

“Poor old Cynthy,” said Jean. “I’m so glad she has her cats. I shall never forget her face when she looked back. Just think of losing all the little keepsakes of a lifetime.”

It was nearly five o’clock when Shad returned. He was grimy and smoky, but exuberant.

“By jiminitty, we’ve got her under control,” he cried, executing a little jig on the side steps. “Got some hot coffee and doughnuts for a fellow? Who do you suppose worked better than anybody? Gave us all cards and spades on how to manage a fire. He says this is just a little flea bite compared with the ones he has up home. He says he’s seen a forest fire twenty miles wide, sweeping over the mountains up yonder.”

“Who do you mean, Shad,” asked Jean. “For goodness’ sake tell us who it is, and stop spouting.”

“Who do you suppose I mean?” asked Shad, reproachfully. “Honey Hancock’s cousin, Ralph McRae, from Saskatoon.”

Jean blushed prettily, as she always did when Ralph’s name was mentioned. She had hardly seen him since his arrival, owing to Billie’s illness, and Carlota’s visit with her. Still, oddly enough, even Shad’s high praise of him, made her feel shyly happy.

The fire burned fitfully for three days, breaking out unexpectedly in new spots, and keeping everyone excited and busy. The old Ames barn went up in smoke, and Mr. Rudemeir’s saw mill caught fire three times.

“By gum!” he said, jubilantly, “I guess I sit out on that roof all night long, slapping sparks with a wet mop, but it didn’t get ahead of me.”

Sally and Kit ran a sort of pony express, riding horseback from house to house, carrying food and coffee over to the men who were scattered nearly four miles around the fire-swept area. Ralph and Piney ran their own rescue work at the north end of town. Honey had been put on the mail team with Mr. Ricketts’ eldest boy, while the former gave his services on the volunteer fire corps. The end of the third day Jean was driving back from Nantic station, after she had taken Carlota down to catch the local train to Providence. The Contessa had sent her maid to meet her there, and take her on to Boston. It had been a wonderful visit, Carlota said, and already she was planning for Jean’s promised trip to the home villa in Italy.

Visions of that visit were flitting through Jean’s mind as she drove along the old river road, and she hardly noticed the beat of hoofs behind her, until Ralph drew rein on Mollie beside her. They had hardly seen each other to talk to, since her return from Boston.

“The fire’s all out,” he said. “We have left some of the boys on guard yet, in case it may be smouldering in the underbrush. I have just been telling Rudemeir and the other men, if they’d learn to pile their brush the way we do up home, they would be able to control these little fires in no time. You girls must be awfully tired out. You did splendid work.”

“Kit and Sally did, you mean,” answered Jean. “All I did was to help cook.” She laughed. “I never dreamt that men and boys could eat so many doughnuts and cup cakes. Cousin Roxy says she sent over twenty-two loaves of gingerbread, not counting all the other stuff. Was any one hurt, at all?”

“You mean eating too much?” asked Ralph, teasingly. Then more seriously, he added, “A few of the men were burnt a little bit, but nothing to speak of. How beautiful your springtime is down here in New England. It makes me want to take off my coat and go to work right here, reclaiming some of these old worked out acres, and making them show the good that still lies in them if they are plowed deep enough.”

Jean sighed, quickly.

“Do you really think one could ever make any money here?” she asked. “Sometimes I get awfully discouraged, Mr. McRae. Of course, we didn’t come up here with the idea of being farmers. It was Dad’s health that brought us, but once we were here, we couldn’t help but see the chance of making Greenacres pay our way a little. Cousin Roxy has told us we’re in mighty good luck to even get our vegetables and fruit out of it this last year, and it isn’t the past year I am thinking of; it’s the next year, and the next one and the next. One of the most appalling things about Gilead is, that you get absolutely contented up here, and you go around singing blissfully, ‘I’ve reached the land of corn and wine, and all its blessings freely mine.’ Old Daddy Higginson who taught our art class down in New York always said that contentment was fatal to progress, and I believe it. Father is really a brilliant man, and he’s getting his full strength back. And while I have a full sense of gratitude towards the healing powers of these old green hills, still I have a horror of Dad stagnating here.”

Ralph turned his head to watch her face, giving Mollie her own way, with slack rein.

“Has he said anything himself about wanting to go back to his work?” he asked.

“Not yet. I suppose that is what we really must wait for. His own confidence returning. You see, what I’m afraid of is this: Dad was born and brought up right here, and the granite of these old hills is in his system. He loves every square foot of land around here. Just supposing he should be contented to settle down, like old Judge Ellis, and turn into a sort of Connecticut country squire.”

“There are worse things than that in the world,” Ralph replied. “Too many of our best men forget the land that gave them birth, and pour the full strength of their mature powers and capabilities into the city mart. You speak of Judge Ellis. Look at what that old fellow’s mind has done for his home community. He has literally brought modern improvements into Gilead. He has represented her up at Hartford off and on for years, when he was not sitting in judgment here.”

“You mean, that you think Dad ought not to go back?” asked Jean almost resentfully. “That just because he happened to have been born here, he owes it to Gilead to stay here now, and give it the best he has?”

Ralph laughed, good naturedly.

“We’re getting into rather deep water, Miss Jean,” he answered. “I can see that you don’t like the country, and I do. I love it down east here where all of my folks came from originally, and I’m mighty fond of the west.”

“Oh, I’m sure I’d like that too,” broke in Jean, eagerly. “Mother’s from the west, you know. From California, and I’d love to go out there. I would love the wide scope and freedom I am sure. What bothers me here, are those rock walls, for instance.” She pointed at the old one along the road, uneven, half tumbling down, and overgrown with gray moss; the standing symbol of the infinite patience and labor of a bygone generation. “Just think of all the people who spent their lives carrying those stones, and cutting up all this beautiful land into these little shut-in pastures.”

“Yes, but those rocks represent the clearing of fields for tillage. If they hadn’t dug them out of the ground, they wouldn’t have had any cause for Thanksgiving dinners. I’m mighty proud of my New England blood, and I want to tell you right now, if it wasn’t for the New England blood that went out to conquer the West, where would the West be today?”

“That’s all right,” said Jean, a bit crossly for her, “but if they had pioneered a little bit right around here, there wouldn’t be so many run down farms. What I would like to do, now that Dad is getting well, is make Greenacres our playground in summertime, and go back home in the winter.”

“Home,” he repeated, curiously.

“Yes, we were all born down in New York,” answered Jean, looking south over the country landscape, as though she could see Manhattan’s panoramic skyline rising like a mirage of beckoning promises. “I am afraid that is home to me.”

“It always seems to me,” said Cousin Roxy, the first time she drove down with Billie to spend the day, “as if Maytime is a sort of fulfilled promise to us, after the winter and spring. When I was a girl, spring up here behaved itself. It was sweet and balmy and gentle, and now it’s turned into an uncertain young tomboy. The weather doesn’t really begin to settle until the middle of May, but when it does—” She drew in a deep breath, and smiled. “Just look around you at the beauty it gives us.”

She sat out on the tree seat in the big old-fashioned garden that sloped from the south side of the house to what Jean called “the close.” The terraces were a riot of spring bloom; tall gold and purple flag lilies grew side by side with dainty columbine and poet’s narcissus. Along the stone walls white and purple lilacs flung their delicious perfume to every passing breeze. The old apple trees that straggled in uneven rows up through the hill pasture behind the barn, had been transformed into gorgeous splashy masses of pink bloom against the tender green of young foliage.

“What’s Jean doing over there in the orchard?” Kit rose from her knees, her fingers grimy with the soil, her face flushed and warm from her labors, and answered her own query.

“She’s wooing the muse of Art. What was her name? Euterpe or Merope? Well, anyway that’s who she’s wooing, while we, her humble sisters, who toil and delve after cut worms—Cousin Roxy, why are there any cut worms? Why are there fretful midges? Or any of those things?”

“Land, child, just as home exercises for our patience,” laughed Mrs. Ellis, happily.

Jean was out of their hearing. Frowning slightly, with compressed lips, she bent over her work. With Shad’s help she had rigged up a home-made easel of birchwood, and a little three legged camp stool. As Shad himself would have said, she was going to it with a will. The week before she had sent off five studies to Cousin Beth, and two of her very best ones, down to Mr. Higginson. Answers had come back from both, full of criticism, but with plenty of encouragement, too. Mrs. Robbins had read the two letters and given her eldest the quick impulsive embrace which ever since her babyhood had been to Jean her highest reward of merit. But it was from her father, perhaps, that she derived the greatest happiness. He laid one arm around her shoulders, smiling at her with a certain whimsical speculation, in his keen, hazel eyes.

“Well, girlie, if you will persist in developing such talent, we can’t afford to hide this candle light under a bushel. Bethiah has written also, insisting that you are given your chance to go abroad with her later on.”

“What does Mother say?” asked Jean, quickly. She knew that the only thing that might possibly hold her back from the trip abroad would be her mother’s solicitude and loving fears for her welfare.

“She’s perfectly willing to let you go as long as Cousin Beth goes with you. It would only be for three months.”

“But when?” interrupted Jean. “It isn’t that I want to know for my own pleasure, but you don’t know how fearfully precious these last years in the ’teens seem to me. There’s such a terrible lot of things to learn before I can really say I’ve finished.”

“And one of the first things you have to learn is just that you never stop learning. That you never really start to learn until you attain the humility of knowing your own limitations. So don’t you worry, Jeanie, you can’t possibly go over to Europe and swallow its Art Galleries in three months. By the way, if you are really going, you had better start in learning some of the guide posts.”

He crossed over to one of his book cases, and picked out an old well-worn Baedeker bound in red morocco, “Northern Italy.” He opened it lovingly, and its passages were well underlined and marked in pencil all the way through. There were tiny sprays of pressed flowers and four leaved clovers, a five pointed fig leaf, and some pale silver gray olive ones. “Leaves from Vallambrosa,” he quoted, softly. “Your mother and I followed those old world trails all through our honeymoon, my dear.”

Jean leaned over his shoulder, eagerly, her arms clasped around his neck, her cheek pressed to his.

“You dear,” she said, fervently. “Do you know what I’m going to do with the very first five thousand dollars I receive for a masterpiece? I shall send you and the Motherbird flying back to visit every single one of those places. Won’t you love it, though?”

“I’d rather take all you kiddies with us. You gain so much more when you share your knowledge with others. Do you know what this west window makes me think of, Jean?” He pointed one hand to the small side window that looked far down the valley. “Somewhere over yonder lies New York. Often times through the past year, I have stood there, and felt like Dante at his tower window, in old Guido Di Rimini’s castle at Ravenna. Joe’s pigeons circling around down there make me think of the doves which he called ‘Hope’s messengers’ bringing him memories in his exile from his beloved Florence.”

Jean slipped down on her knees beside him, her face alight with gladness.

“Oh, Dad, Dad, you do want to go back,” she cried. “You don’t know how afraid I’ve been that you’d take root up here and stay forever. I know it’s perfectly splendid, and it has been a place of refuge for us all, but now that you are getting to be just like your old self—”

Her father’s hand checked her.

“Steady, girlie, steady,” he warned. “Not quite so fast. I am still a little bit uncertain when I try to speed up. We’ve got to be patient a little while longer.”

Jean pressed his hand in hers, and understood. If it had been hard for them to be patient, it had been doubly so for him, groping his way back slowly, the past year, on the upgrade to health.

Softly she repeated a poem that was a favorite of Cousin Roxy’s, and which he had liked to hear.

Jean was thinking of their talk as she sat out in the orchard today, trying to catch some of the fleeting beauty of its blossom laden trees. It was an accepted fact now, her trip abroad with Mrs. Newell, and they planned to sail the first week in September, so as to catch the Fall Academy and Exhibitions, all the way from London south to Rome. A letter from Bab had told her of the Phelps boy’s success; after fighting for it a year he had taken the Prix de Rome. This would give him a residence abroad, three years with all expenses paid, full art tuition and one thousand dollars in cash. Babbie had written:

“I am teasing Mother to trot over there once again, and am pretty sure she will have to give in. The poor old dear, if only she would be contented to let me ramble around with Hedda, we would be absolutely safe, but she always acts as if she were the goose who had not only laid a golden egg, but had hatched it. And behold me as the resultant genius. Anyway we’ll all hope to meet you down at Campodino. I hear the Contessa’s villa there is perfectly wonderful. Mother says it’s just exactly like the one that Browning rented during his honeymoon. He tells about it in ‘DeGustibus.’ I believe most of the rooms have been Americanized since the Contessa married Carlota’s father, and you don’t have to go down to the seashore when you want to take a bath. But the walls are lovely and crumbly with plenty of old lizards running in and out of the mold. I envy you like sixty. I wish I had a Contessa to tuck me under her wing like that.”

“How are you getting along, girlie?” asked a well known voice behind her.

“I don’t know, Dad,” said Jean, leaning back with her head on one side, looking for all the world, as Kit would have said, like a meditative brown thrush. “I can’t seem to get that queer silver gray effect. You take a day like this, just before a rain, and it seems to underlie everything. I’ve tried dark green and gray and sienna, and it doesn’t do a bit of good.”

“Mix a little Chinese black with every color you use,” said her father, closing one eye to look at her painting. “It is the old masters’ trick. You’ll find it in the Flemish school, and the Veronese. It gives you the atmospheric gray quality in everything. Hello, here come Ralph and Piney.”

Piney waved her hand in salutation, but joined Kit and Helen in the lower garden at their grubbing for cut worms.

“If you put plenty of salt in the water when you sprinkle those, it’ll help a lot,” she told them.

“Oh, we’ve salted them. Shad told us that. We each took a bag of salt and went out sprinkling one night, and then it rained, and I honestly believe it was a tonic to the cut worm colony. The only thing to do, is go after them and annihilate them.”

Ralph lifted his cap in greeting to the group on the terrace, but went on up to the orchard. Kit watched him with speculative eyes and spoke in her usual impulsive fashion.

“Do you suppose for one moment that the prince of Saskatoon is coming wooing my fair sister? Because if he has any such notions at all, I’d like to tell him she’s not for him,” she said, emphatically. “Now I believe that I’m a genius, but I have resources. I can do housework, and be the castle maid of all work, and smile and be a genius still, but Jean needs nourishing. If he thinks for one moment he’s going to throw her across his saddle bow and carry her off to Saskatoon, he’s very much mistaken.”

Piney glanced up at the figures in the orchard, before she answered in her slow, deliberate fashion,

“I’m sure, I don’t know, but Ralph said he was coming back here every spring, so he can’t expect to take her away this year.”

Up in the orchard Mr. Robbins talked of apple culture, of the comparative virtues of Peck’s Pleasants and Shepherd Sweetings, and whether peaches would grow in Gilead’s climate. From the birch woods across the road there came the clinking of a cow bell where Buttercup led some young stock in search of good pasturage. Shad was busy mending the cultivator that had balked that morning, as he was weeding out the rows of June peas. He called over to Mr. Robbins for some advice, and the latter joined him.

Ralph threw himself down in the grass beside the little birch easel. Jean bent over her canvas, touching in some shadows on the trunks of the trees, absently. Her thoughts had wandered from the old orchard, as they did so often these days. It was the future that seemed more real to her, with its hopes and ambitions, than the present. Gilead was not one half so tangible as Campodino perched on the Campagna hills with the blue of the Mediterranean lapping at its feet.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss it all?” asked Ralph, suddenly.

“Perhaps,” she glanced down at him in Jean’s own peculiar, impersonal way. To Ralph, she had always been the little princess royal, ever since he had first met her, that night a year ago, in the spring gloaming. Dorrie and Kit had met the stranger more than half way, and even Helen, the fastidious, had liked him at first sight, but with Jean, there had always been a certain amount of reserve, her absorption in her work always had hedged her around with thorns of aloofness and apparent shyness. “But you see after all, no matter how far one goes, one always comes back, if there are those you love best waiting for you.”

“You’ll only be gone three months, won’t you?”

Jean shook her head.

“It depends on how I’m getting on. Cousin Beth says I can find out in that time whether I am just a plain barnyard chicken, or a real wild swan. Did you ever hear of how the islanders around Nantucket catch the young wild geese, and clip their wings? They keep them then as decoys, until there comes a day when the wings are full grown again, and the geese escape. Wouldn’t it be awful to imagine one were a captive wild goose, and then try to fly and discover you were just a nice little home bred White Leghorn pullet.”

“Oh, Jean,” called Kit. “Cousin Roxy’s going, now.”

Ralph rose, and extended his hand.

“I hope your wings carry you far, Jean,” he said earnestly. “We’re leaving for Saskatoon Monday morning and I’ll hardly get over again as Honey and I are doing all the packing and crating, but you’ll see me again next spring, won’t you?”

Jean laid her hand in his, frankly.

“Why, I didn’t know you were going so soon,” she said. “Of course, I’ll see you if you come back east.”

“I’ll come,” Ralph promised, and he stood where she left him, under the blossoming apple trees, watching the princess royal of Greenacres join her family circle.

THE END

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