Jewel Weed

Now Mr. Sebastian Early is far too intricate a person to be dismissed, as Mrs. Lenox disposed of him, with a phrase and a laugh. In early life, it is true, he had seemed a commonplace and insignificant young man. His first appearance before the public was as the inventor of a hook-and-eye, but his hook-and-eye had such unusual merits that it seemed, according to the engaging pictures and verses in the street-cars, to simplify most of the sterner problems of every-day life. As its lineaments began to stare at passers-by from thousands of huge bill-boards over the length and breadth of the land, dimes turned to dollars in Mr. Early’s ever-widening pockets, and for the time he felt himself a man of distinction. Yet in these later and regenerate days, Mr. Early sometimes had a moment’s anguish as he remembered those miles of unesthetic bill-boards, which once marred the meadows and streams of his native land; for with a widening horizon, there had crept upon him a rising spirit of discontent.

Perhaps it was that divine discontent, which William Morris celebrates, that makes men yearn for higher things. Department stores still rolled out their multitudinous cards of hooks-and-eyes, but the person of Sebastian Early passed unnoticed in the crowd. He yearned for fame, not for his product, but for himself, and the same ability that led him to serve the wants of the public in hooks now drove him to study its social demands. Like many another unfortunate, he began to perceive that dollars alone were not enough of a key to unlock the magic door. In this over-fed land, people with money are growing too common. Therefore to gold one must add power and distinction, if one would keep one’s head above the herd. This must one do and not leave the other undone.

Sebastian determined to make himself interesting. The public has a fawning respect for fame. One or two abortive attempts convinced Mr. Early that his literary efforts would bring him not even the distinction of infamy. At last he hit upon an idea. He would be a patron of the Arts—not one of your little ordinary buyers, but a man whose purse was, so to speak, regilded by mind. He spent six months of hard work as a student of the situation and then he made his début. He selected a few gems of half-forgotten eighteenth century literature—gems that deserved to be given life-preservers on that stream of oblivion into which they were too surely being sucked. These he brought forth in tiny volumes, wide-edged and thick-papered, illuminated as to capitals and bound in ooze or in old brocade on which were scattered a few decorations, calculated, so unthinkable were they, to upset the reasoning power of the average reader, and thus prepare him for the literary matter which he should find within.

These books naturally “took.” They invited no man to read, but they were interesting to look at and therefore particularly adapted to those occasions when one must make a small gift to a friend. Scarce a center-table in the country but held at least one. The beauty of it was that the literary matter cost him nothing, and the books were their own advertising bill-boards; for wherever they went they lay in conspicuous places.

From books Mr. Early passed on to furniture; and he begot strange shapes, wherein forgotten Gothic forms were commingled with forms that never man saw before; and these also took. So the circle widened, until glass pottery and rugs were gathered into the potpourri of Mr. Early’s genius.

Finally he established his magazine, The Aspirant, for he began to feel the need of explaining things—chiefly himself—to his expanding circle. The Aspirant had covers of butcher’s paper; and the necessity for self-defense at last developed in Mr. Early that literary style which he had found it impossible to cultivate while he still had nothing to say. He grew a peculiar ability for self-glorification and for slugging the other man. Particularly caustic did his pen become in respect to those, whether painters, musicians, poets, novelists or reformers, who had endeared themselves to the great mass of the public. The Aspirant always called the public “the rabble,” and you can’t damn humanity more easily and cheaply than by calling it “the rabble.” Naturally every one hastened to buy Mr. Early’s furniture, his rugs and his pottery, and diligently to read The Aspirant, in order that he or she might escape the universal condemnation. Be outré and you’ll be right; be right and you’ll be outré; be outré anyway: was the simple creed.

To those penniless celebrities to whom purchase of Mr. Early’s commodities was over-expensive, there was another way out from under. They might visit Mr. Early’s hospitable home, and so contribute their mite to the halo of distinction that surrounded him. The great ones came to St. Etienne. They ate and drank and were exhibited to an admiring throng. They gave lectures, introduced from the platform by Mr. Sebastian Early; they went away and The Aspirant chronicled their satellite excellences. No such ex-guest need fear a blow in the face upon its pages. All these things came before the public—more and more before the public every year. They kept Mr. Early’s growing corps of assistants busy, inventing new furniture and new forms of invective.

It is needless to say that the hook-and-eye was never included in the illustrious list of Mr. Early’s productions. That gentleman frequently blessed himself in private that his first commodity had been put upon the market as the “Imperial,” and not as the “Bright and Early” as he had once half-resolved. Only a few knew who was responsible for the bill-boards.

Still even his new enterprises paid. He was a good business man, and he shared with “the rabble” an appetite for cold cash. Nor did the crafty Arts exhaust either his abilities or his desires; for though he had no wish to pose before the world in the over-done rôle of a millionaire, still he needed money and ever more and more money. To get it he kept his hand in many a business enterprise and his eye on many a speculation of which the gaping world did not dream. Even his right-hand editorial writer knew not of his left-handed dip into an electric light company here or a paving contract there, for his left hand had assistants too,—quiet, unobtrusive, even shy,—men who could lobby a bill “on the quiet,” or wreck an opposing company, even though they did not know the difference between Hafiz and chutney. And Mr. Early’s mind was of such a broad catholicity that it would be hard to tell which side of his career he most enjoyed, the variety-show or the still-hunt.

Thus it will be seen that this great man, who was a credit to the new art movement of our time, and of whom St. Etienne, a young western city, felt justly proud, was in his usual element when he introduced to the society, in which he was now a fixed star, a light from the Far East. And Swami Ram Juna seemed so sure that he himself was right and all the rest of the world was wrong, that Mr. Early felt him to be a kindred spirit.

The impression deepened as he found himself alone with the Hindu. He had rather dreaded the strange demands and customs that might meet him; but the man of bronze and the snowy turban proved himself to be the best of table companions, suave, courteous and sympathetic. He seemed even to take a kindly interest in such matters of a day as Mr. Early’s incursions into the realms of art and literature. Through dinner they chatted almost gaily, and afterward, while Mr. Early smoked, the Swami joined him in the slow sipping of a liqueur.

There is a frankness of those who have nothing to hide; there is a frankness which makes a mask for him who is, below the surface, all mystery. As Sebastian studied his companion, he told himself that this simple creature was after all a man, perhaps adapting himself to public demands as any clever fellow would; and, as this thought occurred to him, Mr. Early’s benevolence increased.

“You ought to write a book,” he said with the air of one projecting a novel thought. “With your gift for expression, and your—ah—insight into realities, you couldn’t fail to make a success of it.”

“It is my intention,” said the Hindu.

Mr. Early looked a little taken aback, but brightened again with a new suggestion.

“Why not do it here?” he asked. “Come, where could you find a more fitting place? You have your rooms in a wing of the house all to yourself. That gives you perfect solitude. I should be delighted to have you for my guest while you do your work; and when you finish, I know enough of the tricks of the trade to help you push it a bit.”

“Of a certainty truth is self-vigorous, and needs no tricks to keep it living.”

“Ah, yes,” the man of business answered cheerfully. “But one may boost it,—one may boost it, my dear fellow.”

The Swami bent his great head and appeared to meditate. When he looked up, his spiritual eyes were narrowed to a speculative slit, and he studied the face on the other side of the comfortable log fire.

“My friend, you are generous. You offer me a home, and I am fain to accept it, if I may put the offer in another form. For the present I must return to India. Too long already have I been away from the atmosphere which is to me life. I must see some of the brothers of my soul. I must saturate myself with repose and with the underlying—with Karma. Also, in this too-vigorous country, that is unattainable. But here, in this place, one who is filled with the message might give it forth to his brothers—or perhaps to the sisters, who appear the more anxious for it. Here the very energy of the air says ‘give’ rather than ‘grow’. If I might a year—six months hence—accept your hospitality?” He looked tentatively at Mr. Early.

“My home is yours. Do what you like with it,” said Mr. Early benignly. He was thinking how well a picturesque cut of the Hindu’s head would look on the covers of The Aspirant, combined with a judicious puff within.

The Swami smiled serenely.

“I observe,” he went on in his delicate voice, “that the wing on the ground floor, in which you have given me room, has two apartments, divided by a little passage, and that the little passage gives not upon the public highway, but upon a garden, quiet and lovely, that faces the sun and is shut in by brick walls and hedges. The farther one of these rooms is bare and but slightly furnished, though my bedroom is sumptuous like that of a maha-rajah. Still the bare small room pleases me best. If I might have this room when I come again! If I might keep the bare room sacred to my meditations, all unentered save by myself! It means to me much that no alien mind, no soul of a common servant, should mar the serenity of the atmosphere in that spot where I sit alone with myself. I would have it dedicated to the greater Me. It would be the cap-sheaf—do you not so say in this land of great harvests?—thus to give shelter not only to my body, but to my soul, in this bare and quiet little room.”

“Why, certainly, certainly!” Mr. Early could not help thinking that a guest who spent most of his time alone in an empty room would prove no great tax upon his entertainer.

“I thank you,” said Ram Juna, rising and making a salaam of curious dignity and courtesy. “You bid me lecture. You bid me write and instruct in the sacred truths. That will I do when I come again; and my consolation shall be the unblemished hours when I sit alone in the little room which faces the sun. You comprehend me? You understand?”

And Mr. Early, who never, if he could help it, spent a half-hour in either solitude or idleness, answered again:

“Why, certainly, certainly.”

“In some months, then, I may return, noble friend. And now I will bid you farewell until the dawn.”

The Swami, with marvelous lightness of foot in spite of his huge body, made off for his own domain. If Mr. Early, who now sat and yawned alone by the dying fire, could have peeped in on the excellent Ram Juna, he would have been much gratified by the evident satisfaction with which the Oriental surveyed the quarters which were one day to be his. The Swami strode at once across the bedroom, across the little passage that opened into the garden, into the unused room beyond. Here with a swift thrust he turned on the electric light, then moved from window to window, opened them, examined the heavy wooden shutters which he closed and unclosed, craning his bull-neck through the opened sashes. Around and under each piece of furniture he peered, nodding and smiling his approbation of everything. As he came out, he paused for some moments to examine the lock on the door.

“Quite inadequate, quite inadequate,” he muttered with a frown. “We must do better than that.”

He stood and thought a moment, then put out the light, stepped to the garden door and disappeared into the night.

With so light a tread did he come back that Mr. Early, should he have been listening, could have heard no warning footstep to tell him that his guest was returning.

Back in his own bedroom, Ram Juna peeped into the luxurious bath-room with placid delight.

“So much water, so easily hot,” he said. “It is admirable. All is admirable.” He sank in a heap, cross-legged, in the middle of the floor, with large hands folded over his stomach, and large eyes narrowed, while a kindly smile spread over his face, and his head nodded at rhythmic intervals, for all the world like a benevolent Buddha. The ruby glowed and sparkled like a living thing in the light and movement; and thus he sat for some hours.

“Now,” said Richard Percival, as he and Norris stowed themselves away in his automobile, “we shall leave the city, in which are contained how many loves and struggles and silk umbrellas at reasonable prices, and go to the lake where there is no civilization to bother and distract. The lake is ‘The Lake’ par excellence to St. Etienne. It was created by Providence for summer homes. Therefore it was placed only ten miles from the Falls. Providence was a good business woman. Generations of savages lived and died—chiefly died—here. They came where the Father of Waters roared and tumbled and they made their prayers to the Great Spirit, but the sight never suggested to them a great city. Then came the Anglo-Saxon, whatever he is, and harnessed the power of the river, and built ugly gray mills, dusty with flour, and turned his log huts into houses of brick and stone, and erected saloons and department stores. And when he had worked like Dædalus—and you’ve probably forgotten who Dædalus was, now that you have been a few weeks out of college—when he had worked like Dædalus, I say, and got the hardest of it done, he began to look at something besides the Falls and to pine for means of dalliance. Behold then at his hand, Lake Imnijaska! And now Madeline Elton is the best thing on its shore. Gee up, old motor!”

They sped along and Dick took up the tale. He was used to talking while Norris listened and appreciated.

“Evidently you don’t know who Dædalus was or you would have answered back. What kind of an omniscient editor are you going to make, think you? Never mind, Dædalus is dead; and, anyway, Edison has beaten him by six holes.

“The lake, as I was saying, twists and turns so that it gets in more shore to the square inch than any other known sheet of water. Therefore the real-estate dealer loves it. And if you elevate your longshore nose and sniff at our lake because no salt codfish dry upon smelly wharves and no sea anemones or crabs appear and disappear with the tides, then will the entire population of St. Etienne rise and howl anathemas at you. They will run you out of town on the Chicago Express, and as you fly for your life they will shriek after you, ‘Well, anyway, we feed the world with flour!’ Yes, sir, that is the way we Westerners argue.”

Dick halted at the top of the hill up which the faithful motor had coughed, and the two looked down on the shimmering blue that stretched below them with arms of broken opals sprawling for miles, now here, now there. Long tortuous passages opened out anew into ever more bays, as though the water were greedy to explore. Around it rolled the woodland in billows of intense green with sandy beaches in the troughs and straight cliffs at the crests. The green islands were vivid in color. So was the sky above, like the flash in a sapphire. A half-dozen sails fluttered gull-like, and as many launches darted along, suggesting living water creatures.

“By Jove!” Ellery exclaimed, moving uneasily. “When you sniff this air it makes you want to stand on tiptoe on a hilltop and shout. And when you look at these colors, they are too brilliant to be true.”

“Even you, you old conservative slow-poking duffer!” cried Dick. “This is the land to wake you up. It calls ‘harder—harder!’ every-day.”

“It’s a different kind of beauty from what I’m used to.” Ellery sobered down again. “I’ve been trying to analyze it ever since I came West. It wouldn’t appeal to the tired or the world-weary. Its charm is for the vigorous and the confident and the hopeful—for the young.”

“For us, my boy,” Dick said.

“At Madeline’s,” as Dick called it, with that obliviousness of the older generation shown by the younger, Norris felt as they entered, as he had felt at Mrs. Percival’s, that he was in a candid, human, refined home, with a full appreciation of the finer sides of life. They passed through the drawing-room and by long glass doors to the broad piazza, with every invitation to laziness, easy chairs, cushions, magazines, all made fragrant by a huge jar of roses and another of sweet peas. And there was not too much. The veranda in turn gave upon a wide expanse of green that stretched steeply down to that cool wet line where the lapping waters met the lawn. The trees whispered softly around. Every prospect was pleasing, and only man was vile; for there was another man, sitting in the most comfortable of chairs and engaging Madeline all to himself, as he contentedly sipped the cup of tea that he had taken from her hand. This other man, whose name was Davison, was making himself agreeable after the fashion of his kind, a fashion quite familiar to every girl who has been so unfortunate as to get a reputation, however little deserved, for superior brains.

“Afternoon,” he said, “I didn’t suppose any other fellows except myself were brave enough, to call on Miss Elton. I hear she’s so awfully clever, you know. Taken degrees and all that sort of thing. Give you my word it comes out in everything around her. Why, this very napkin she gave me has a Greek border. Everything has to be classic now.”

“Not everything, Mr. Davison,” said Madeline indulgently. “You know I am delighted to have you here.” She turned abruptly to the new-comers as though she had already had a surfeit of this subject. It is a pleasant thing to have had a good education, but one does not care to spend one’s time thinking about it, any more than about how much money there is in one’s pocket.

“You had a fine ride out?” Madeline asked.

“Great!” answered Dick. “To be young, on a summer day, seated in a good motor with a thoroughly tamed and domesticated gasoline engine, and to be coming to see you—what more could we ask of the gods?”

“You see Percival feels that he must lard the gods into his intercourse with you, Miss Elton,” Mr. Davison interjected.

“That’s because the gods have become nice homey things,” retorted Dick. “Even in the West we couldn’t keep house without Dionysius assisted by Hebe to superintend our afternoon teas, and Hercules as a patron of baseball.”

Madeline laughed and cast a grateful look in his direction.

“You see how pleasant it is to feel familiar with the gods so that you can use them freely,” she said.

“So you don’t think it’s necessary, in order to be clever, to despise everything that’s done nowadays, because the Greeks used up all the ideas first?” asked Davison.

“Not at all. Nature conducts a vast renovating and cleaning establishment, and whenever any old ideas look the least bit frayed or soiled around the edges, pop, in they go, and come out French dry-cleaned and as fresh as ever. They’re sent home in a spick-span box and you couldn’t tell ’em from new.”

“If we don’t get anything new I hope that we, at least, get rid of some of the old things—fears and superstitions,” said Madeline. “Things that are holy rites in one age are so apt to be holy frights in the next.”

“Say, did you ever go down the streets of Boston and notice the number of signs of palmists and astrologers and vacuum cures?” exclaimed Davison. “But perhaps it ain’t fair to take Boston for a standard.”

Ellery, a true New Englander, stared at him in astonishment, as one who heard sacred things lightly spoken of.

“Most of us can see how funny we are,” Davison pursued.

“Can we?” murmured Dick.

“But Boston,” he went on calmly, “has lost her sense of humor. She peers down at everything she does and says, ‘This is very serious.’ That’s why she takes astrologers in earnest. They’re in Boston. Anyway, I think you were mighty sensible to come back to us, Miss Elton, rather than to stay in the unmarried state, alias Massachusetts. A girl really has a much better chance in the West.”

“Yes, that’s where Miss Elton showed a long head,” said Dick with evident glee.

“But really now, joking apart,” Davison went on, having made his opening, “don’t you think it’s unsettling to a girl to do too much studying?”

“I hope you are not deeply agitated over the eradication of womanliness,” Madeline remonstrated. “Really, Mr. Davison, it isn’t an easy thing to stop being a woman—when you happen to be born one.”

“But there are plenty of unwomanly women,” he objected.

“That’s true,” she answered, “but I believe womanliness is killed—when it is killed—not through the brain, but through the heart. It’s not knowledge, but hard-heartedness that makes the unwomanly woman.”

She glanced up and met Norris’ eyes. It was not easy for him to join in the chatter of the others, but he was thinking how she illuminated her own words. Manifestly she was not lacking in mind, and quite as evidently her brain was only the antechamber of her nature. She gave him the impression of “the heart at leisure from itself”. There was the unconsciousness of sheltered girlhood, but already, in bud, the suggestion of that big type of woman who, as years mellow her, touches with sympathy every life with which she comes in contact. What she now was, promised more in the future, as though Fate said, “I’m not through with her yet. I’ve plenty in reserve to go to her making.”

“Intelligence,” said Dick pompously, “is the tree of life in man, and the flower in woman—and one does not presume to criticize flowers.”

Mr. Davison changed his method of attack.

“Oh, of course I’m up against it,” he said, “with you three fresh from the academic halls. But I can tell you you’ll feel pretty lonely out here. The street-car conductors don’t talk Sanskrit in the West. They talk Swede.”

“Oh, this,—this is home!” cried Madeline, springing up as if to shake off the conversation. “You don’t know how I love it! It’s fresh and vigorous and its face is forward.” She flung out her arms and smiled radiantly down on the three young men, as though she were an embodiment of the ozone of the Northwest.

“Sing to us, please, Madeline,” said Dick.

“Very well, I will,” she said. “I’ll sing you a song I made myself yesterday, when I was happy because I was at home again. Perhaps it will tell you how I feel, for it’s a song of Minnesota.” She turned and nodded to Mr. Davison, and then slipped through the doors to the room where the piano stood.

The long shadows of afternoon lay across the lawn, and the grass, more green than ever in the level light, clasped the dazzling blue of the quiet waters. The three men stretched themselves in their easy chairs, as a stroked kitten stretches itself, with a lounging abandon which is forbidden to their sisters, as Madeline’s voice rose fresh and true and touched with the joy of youth.

“Ho, west wind off the prairie;
Ho, north wind off the pine;
Ho, myriad azure lakes, hill-clasped,
Like cups of living wine;
Ho, mighty river rolling;
Ho, fallow, field and fen;
By a thousand voices nature calls,
To fire the hearts of men.

”Ho, fragrance of the wheat-fields;
Ho, garnered hoards of flax;
Ho, whirling millwheel, ’neath the falls;
Ho, woodman’s ringing ax.
Man blends his voice with nature’s,
And the great chorus swells.
He adds the notes of home and love
To the tale the forest tells.

“Oh, young blood of the nation;
Oh, hope in a world of need;
The traditions of the fathers
Still be our vital seed.
Thy newer daughters of the West,
Columbia, mother mine,
Still hold to the simple virtues
Of field and stream and pine.”

The song stopped abruptly, and Dick sprang to his feet.

“Good, Madeline!” he exclaimed. “You make me feel how great it is to be part of it.”

“Do I?” she said. “I thought of you when I wrote it. Oh, here come father and mother back from their drive.”

Mr. Davison rose hastily.

“I’d no idea it was so late,” he said. “I must be going. Miss Elton, I didn’t mean a word of all that about your being so clever. You’re all right.”

“Thanks for the tribute,” Madeline smiled as he disappeared down the drive. “Dick, I wish you’d always be on hand when he comes. He makes my brain feel like a woolly dog.”

“Rummy chap,” said Norris.

The older people came in to greet the boy they had known all his life, to ask the innumerable usual questions, to say the inevitable things through dinner.

Afterwards, when the last fragments of sunset burned through and across the water, they gathered on the piazza. It was that dreamy hour when women find it easy to be silent and men to talk. Madeline and her mother sat close, with hands restfully clasped in their joy at being together. Mr. Elton eyed the two young men from his vantage of years of shrewd wisdom. Both the boys were clean-shaven, after the manner of the day, a fashion that seems to become clean manliness, vigorous and self-controlled. Both were good to look at; but here the resemblance ended, for Dick’s long slender face and body lithe with its athletic training, was alive and restless, as though he found it difficult to keep back his passion for activity; Ellery, big but loosely joined, had the dogged look of one that held some of his energy in reserve. A good pair, Mr. Elton concluded, and felt a sudden spasm of longing for a son—not that he would have exchanged Madeline for any trousered biped that walked, but it would be a great thing to own one such well of young masculine vigor as these.

“It’s going to be great fun for us old fellows to sit back and watch you young ones,” the elder man ejaculated. “There are several good-sized jobs waiting for you.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Dick. “When there’s nothing to do, nobody’ll do it.”

“And it will be a tame sort of a world, eh? Well, thank the Lord, it’s none of our responsibility any longer. You’ve got to tackle it. The new phases of things are too much for me, with a brain solidified by years.”

“You might at least help us by stating the problem,” said Norris.

“You see, it’s like this. Until a few years ago every census map of the United States was seamed by a long line marked ‘frontier.’ That line is gone. That’s the situation in a nutshell. Our work, the subjugation of the land, is about done, and the question is now up to you; what are you going to do with it? You know the old story of the man who said he had a horse who could run a mile in two-forty. And the other fellow asked, ‘What are you going to do when you get there?’ We’ve done the running and our children are there. Now what? You must develop a whole set of new talents—not trotting talents, but staying talents.”

“I suppose,” said Norris slowly, for Dick was silent, “circumstances bring out abilities. That’s the law that operated in the case of the older generation, and we’ll have to trust to it in ours.”

“That’s true. But I sometimes wonder if, after all, we are helping you to the best preparation. We send you back to get the old education. The tendency of old communities is to rehash the traditions until they become authority. New communities have to face problems for themselves and solve them by new ways. The first kind of training makes scholars. The second brings out genius. The old makes men think over the thoughts of others. Heaven knows we need men who will think for themselves!”

“Well, ‘old and young are fellows’,” said Dick. “To-day grows out of yesterday.”

“Yes, if it grows. The growing is the point. It mustn’t molder on yesterday. You must have enough books to get your thinkers going, but not more. You must not feast on libraries until you get intellectual gout and have to tickle your palate with dainties. A good deal of stuff that’s written nowadays seems to me like literary cocktails,—something to stir a jaded appetite. That’s my friend Early’s specialty—to serve literary cocktails. But the appetite you bolster up isn’t the equivalent of a good healthy hunger after a day out-of-doors.”

“When nature wants a genius, I suppose she has to use fresh seed,” said Dick.

“And genius is creative,” Mr. Elton went on. “So far, the genius this country has developed is that which takes the raw material of forest and river and creates civilization. And let me tell you that’s a very different job from heaping up population.”

Silence fell on the little group and they became suddenly aware of lapping waters and the sleepy twitter of birds, and even of a long slender thread of pale light that struck across the lake from a low-lying star. Madeline gave a little sigh and pressed her mother’s hand.

Dick flushed and hesitated in the darkness, with youth’s confidence in its own great purposes and youth’s craving for sympathy in its ambitions. Mr. Elton’s combination of kindness and shrewdness seemed to draw him out.

“It sounds impertinent and conceited for a young fellow like me to talk about what he means to do.”

“Fire away. I knew your father, Dick.”

“Then you’ll know what I mean when I say that it has always been my ambition to live up to his traditions—his ideal of a man’s public duties.”

Mr. Elton nodded and Dick went on, while Ellery eyed him with some of the old college respect, and Madeline leaned eagerly forward.

“I don’t mean any splurge, you understand, but the same quiet service he gave. Father left his affairs in such good order that there isn’t any real necessity for me to try to add to my income. Of course, it isn’t a great fortune, but it’s more than enough; and my ambitions don’t lie that way. There’s a certain amount of business in taking care of it as it stands. Mother is glad to turn the burden of it over to me. She’s done nobly—dear little woman—but—”

“I understand. It’s a man’s business.”

“Yes,” said Dick, with the simple masculine superiority of four and twenty. “That’s enough of a background for life, you see; but I long since made up my mind that public affairs—affairs that concern the whole community—are to be my real interest.”

“So you’re going into politics, Dick?” said the older man slowly.

“Well, not to scramble for office,” Percival answered with a flush. “We fellows have been well-enough taught, haven’t we, Ellery? to know that it is rather an ugly mess—I mean municipal affairs in this country. The local situation, here in St. Etienne, I have yet to study; and I don’t mean to lose any time in beginning.”

Mr. Elton made no reply for a moment, and when he spoke there was an unpleasant cynicism in his voice that galled Dick’s pride.

“The young reformer! Well, I suppose a decent man with a little ability could do something here, if he knew what he was going to do. It’s a good thing to get on your sea-legs before you try to command a ship.”

“Father!” Madeline cried out, unable to contain herself. “Don’t you be a horrid wet blanket!”

The three looked at her to see her face aglow with the lovely feminine belief in masculinity that also belongs to the early twenties.

“That’s all right,” said the elder Elton unemotionally. “I wasn’t wet-blanketing—I know things are needed. There’s plenty of corruption wanting to be buried, and most of us are content to hold our noses and let it lie. Or perhaps we give an exclamation of disgust when it is served up in the newspapers. Reform if you must, but don’t reform all day and Sundays too; and build your cellars before you begin your attics.”

Then he went on a shade more heartily: “It’s a mighty good thing for some of you young fellows to be going into politics; perhaps that’s the chief work for the next generation. And Norris—what of you?”

Ellery started. It had been a silent evening for him, but his silence had glowed with interest, not so much in the conversation as in his own thoughts. Two things had forced themselves home,—the first when he looked down on that expanse of vivid water, vivid sky, vivid green. Here a man, even a young man, might waken to all his faculties and make something of life. He need not plod dully through years, to reach success only when he is old and tired. The landscape poured like wine into Ellery Norris’ veins.

And now here was the other side. He had watched with fascination the restfulness of Miss Elton’s hands, the one that held her mother’s, the one that lay quietly in her lap. He watched her steady eyes that kept upon her father and Dick as they talked. He saw her face glow with sympathy and interest and yet remain calm, as if secure in the goodness of the world; and he told himself that he was glad this wonderful thing belonged to Dick. Dick’s restlessness would be held in leash, as it were, by this steadfastness.

Once she half turned as though she felt his scrutiny, and queer pains darted through his body when her eyes met his.

Now when Mr. Elton attacked him, he came back from his far-away excursion with a sense of surprise that there was a present, but he smiled cheerfully.

“Oh, I’m not a very important person. I’m just beginning to learn the trade of a newspaper man, and I’m afraid I shan’t be able to think about much but city news and bread and butter for the next few years.”

“No telling what may happen, with his Honor, the mayor here, backed up by the power of the press. We’ll make St. Etienne a model city in the sight of gods and men, eh, boys?” said Mr. Elton good-humoredly, but rising as if to cut short the conversation.

“Can’t we take a walk before Ellery and I go back to town?” asked Dick.

“Go, you kid things. I haven’t seen the evening paper yet, and that’s more to my old brain than moonlight strolls.” Mr. Elton dismissed them.

The three young people set out upon a path that twisted by the lake shore, bordered on its inner side by trees that had become in the darkness mere shapeless masses out of which an occasional mysterious thread of light brought into sight some uncanny shape. The purple of the evening zenith had sunk into deeper and deeper blue, pricked here and there with stars. Bats were wheeling in mysterious circles among the tree-tops, and the air was full of sounds that seem to come only at twilight.

“Isn’t it strange that though every one of those trees is an old friend, I should be frightened at the very idea of being alone among them at night? And yet there’s nothing in the dark that isn’t in the day,” said Madeline.

“Oh, yes, there is,” Dick rejoined. “There’s more being afraid in the dark.”

She laughed and they went on in silence.

“Who’s been building a new house, just on the very spot I always meant to own some day—right here next to your father?” Dick demanded, stopping abruptly.

“Oh, you haven’t seen that, have you?” said Madeline. “Let’s sit down on this log and look at the stars. That’s Mr. Lenox’s new house; and I’m so sorry for them!”

“Why grieve for the prosperous? Reserve your tears for the suffering.”

“Why, you know, in town, they live with Mr. Windsor, who is Mrs. Lenox’s father, and he’s a multimillionaire; and it’s a great establishment; and the world is necessarily very much with them. So when Mr. Lenox proposed that they should build a country house of their own and spend their summers here, I think he wanted to get out to some primitive simplicity, where the children could go barefoot if they wanted to. But as soon as it was suggested, Mr. Windsor presented his daughter with a big tract, and insisted on building this great palace, and they have to keep so many servants that Mr. Lenox says it is a regular Swedish boarding-house. And there are so many guest-rooms that it would be a shame not to have them occupied; and extra people run out in their motors every day; and the children have to be kept immaculate all the time. So they’ve brought the world out with them. Mr. Lenox has to dress for dinner, instead of putting on old slippers and going out to weed the strawberry-bed, which is what he would like to do when he gets out on the evening train.”

“Poor things, in bondage to their house!” said Norris, and they all looked solemnly at the multitude of lights shining through the trees.

“There are ever so many disadvantages about being among the few very rich people in a western town, where most of your friends aren’t opulent,” Madeline went on. “When Mrs. Lenox makes a call, she has to wait while the woman changes her dress. And nobody says to her, ‘Oh, do stay to lunch,’ when they’ve nothing but oysters or beefsteak, but they wait till they get in an extra chef and then send her a formal invitation. I believe ours is one of the half-dozen houses where people don’t pretend to be something quite different from what they are when Mrs. Lenox appears. And yet she’s the most simple-minded and genuine person, and would rather have beefsteak and friendship than paté de fois gras and good gowns any day.”

“Poor things!” said Dick again.

“I think they are out on the terrace now. Would you like to go over and see them?” Madeline asked.

“No, thank you,” said Dick politely. “We won’t make their life any more complicated. Besides, I prefer the society of you and the stars to that of the miserable too-rich. And they are not alone.”

“Of course not. They never are. But Mrs. Lenox said yesterday that late this fall, when every one else has gone into winter quarters, she is going to ask you and me and perhaps one or two others to visit her; and we’ll have a serene and lovely time.”

“Do you think that there is any hope that they will have lost part of their money by that time?” asked Dick.

“Father says Mr. Windsor has forgotten how to lose money, and of course Mr. Windsor and Mr. Lenox are all one.”

“I must see to it that I don’t marry a millionaire’s daughter,” said Dick.

Dick’s first summer at home was a period of delight. He absorbed ideas and so felt that he was doing something in this city of his birth which now, in his manhood, came back to him as something new and strange. The weeks drifted by and he seemed to drift with them, though both mind and body were alert. All the things he learned and all the things he meant to do were tripled and quadrupled in interest when he passed them on to his two counselors-in-chief, Norris, solid and appreciative, Madeline, even more believing and more sympathizing, but glorified by that charm of sex which gilds even trifling contact of man and maid, making her friendship not only gilt but gold.

So he spent his days in prowling about and meeting all sorts and conditions of men, while Ellery slaved in a dirty and noisy office; but when Saturday came and the Star went to press at three, Norris, with the blissful knowledge that there was no Sunday edition, would meet Percival, stocked with a week’s accumulation of experiences. In the hearts of both would be deep rejoicing as, at week-end after week-end, they stowed themselves in Dick’s motor and betook themselves lakeward, nominally to go to the Country Club and play golf, but with the subconsciousness for both that the lake meant Madeline.

There were, to be sure, other people, girls agreeable, pretty and edifying, men of their own type and age, older men who did less sport and more business, but all of these were neither more nor less than a many-colored background to the little three-cornered intimacy which, as Dick said, “was the real thing.”

It came to be understood that the three should spend their Sunday afternoons together, not on the cool piazza, where intrusion in its myriad forms might come upon them, but off somewhere, either on the bosom of the waters or on the bosom of the good green earth, who whispers her secret of eternal vitality to every one that lays an ear close to her heart.

The season was like the placid hour before the world wakes to its daily comedy and tragedy; and yet, with all its superficial serenity, this summer carried certain undercurrents of emotion that hardly rose to the dignity of discontent, but which, nevertheless, troubled the still waters of the soul. At first Madeline half resented the continual presence of Norris at these sacred conclaves. He seemed so much an outsider. Dick she had known all her life and she could talk to him with perfect freedom, but his friend often sat silent during their chatter, as though he were an onlooker before whom spontaneity was impossible. Yet as Sunday after Sunday the two young men strode up together, she grew to accept Ellery. First he became inoffensive; then she became aware that his eyes spoke when his lips were dumb; and finally, when words did come, they were the words of a friend who understood moods and tenses. In some ways it was a comfort to have this buffer between her and Dick. It helped to prolong the period of uncertain certainty.

Dick never spoke of love, but the way was pointed not only by the easy restfulness of their comradeship, but in the very atmosphere that surrounded them. She read it half-consciously in the looks of father and mother as they met and accepted Dick’s intimacy in the house, in the warmth of Mrs. Percival’s motherly affection when Madeline ran in for one of her frequent calls. Life was full of it, like the gentle half-warmth that comes before the sun has quite peeped over the horizon on a summer morning; and it was well that this dawn to their day should be a long one. Madeline had been away the greater part of four years, and she was now in no hurry to cut short her reunion with the old home life. Dick, too, had his beginnings to make, man-fashion, and they ought to be made before he took on himself the full life of a man. So she was happily content to drift, conscious in a vague dreamy way that the drift was in the right direction, feeling the situation without analyzing it. It was a condition of affairs like Madeline herself, gently affectionate, but not passionate or deeply emotional. She was not of the type of women who rise up and control destiny.

Norris, for all his passive exterior, had undercurrents that were fervid and powerful, and this first summer in the West, unruffled on its surface, stirred them and sent his life whirling along their irresistible streams. He never lost the sense that he was an outsider, admitted on sufferance to see the happiness of others and allowed to pick up their crumbs. If hard work, oblivion and lovelessness were to be his lot, the hardest of these was lovelessness. Much as he loved Dick he continually resented that young man’s careless acceptance of the good things of life, and most of all did his irritation grow at Percival’s way of taking Madeline for granted, enjoying her beauty, her sympathy, the grace that she threw over everything, and yet, thought Ellery, never half appreciating them. He himself bowed before them with an adoration that was framed in anguish because these things were, and were not for him. More and more cruel grew the knowledge that the currents of his life were gall and wormwood, flowing through wastes of bitterness.

Yet, along with the new grief came a new awakening, at first dimly felt by Madeline alone, then read with greater and greater clearness.

But of all undercurrents, Dick, prime mover and chief talker, remained unconscious, absorbed in his own dawning career, delighting in his two friends chiefly as hearers and sympathizers with his multitudinous ideas.

So it happened that one August afternoon, when it was late enough for the sun to have lost its fury, a not too strenuous breeze drove their tiny yacht through a channel which stretched enticingly between a wooded island and the jutting mainland.

“Let’s land there,” Madeline exclaimed suddenly. “It looks like a jolly place.”

She pointed toward a stretch of beach caught between the arms of trees that came to the very water’s edge, and enshrined in a great wild grape-vine that had climbed from branch to branch until it made a tangled canopy.

Dick turned sharply inward and ran their prow into the twittering sand.

“Thou speakest and it is thy servant’s place to obey,” he said.

“How does it feel to keep slaves? I’ve often wondered,” Ellery said as he jumped ashore and Dick began tossing him rugs and cushions.

“Very comfy, thank you, and not at all un-Christian,” she answered saucily. “Dick, don’t throw the supper basket, under penalty of liquidating the sandwiches. I think there’s a freezer of ice-cream under the deck, if you’ll pull it out. Now, are you ready for me?”

She stepped lightly forward under Dick’s guidance, took Ellery’s outstretched hands and sprang to the shore, where a kind of throne was built for her against a prostrate log,—all this help not because it was necessary, but as the appropriate pomp of royalty.

“I suspect,” said Dick, looking about him with great satisfaction, “that this was a favorite picnic place for Gitche Manito and Hiawatha, in the morning of days.”

“That shows how nature can forget,” Madeline retorted. “Surely you know the real story, Dick.”

“I don’t,” said Ellery. “Tell it to me.”

She snuggled comfortably down into her rugs.

“In early days, which is the western equivalent for ‘once upon a time,’ a furious storm raged down the lake and tore the water into long ribbons of purple and green. A beautiful girl stood, perhaps on this very spot, with a savage who had rescued her from a sinking canoe and brought her here, dripping but safe. Over there on the mainland her father came running out of the woods in an agony of fear. He saw her here, saw her signals, but the shriek of the storm and the roar of the waters drowned out the words that she frantically screamed toward him. He saw her point to the Indian, who was always feared, always counted treacherous, and his dread of the hurricane changed to terror of the savage. He raised his rifle and the girl’s deliverer dropped dead at her feet.”

“Then fifty years went by, and this became a bower for the eating of sandwiches,” added Dick.

Norris was lying on his back and staring through the tangle of grape and maple leaves at the flecks of blue beyond.

“That’s a noble story,” he said. “I didn’t suppose this new land had any legends. It all gives me the impression of being just old enough to be big.”

“Isn’t that the conceit of the Anglo-Saxon? He calls this a new land because he’s lived here only about a half-century. Things did happen before you were born, my dear boy,” said Dick.

“Indeed! What things?” Norris asked placidly.

“Suppose you enlarge your mind by looking up the stories of the old coureurs du bois who used to stumble through these woods when they were the border-land between Chippewa and Sioux.” Dick threw a pebble at Norris’ face. “Suppose you go up to that inky stream in the north, which twists mysteriously through the forests, black with the bodies of dead men rotting in its mire. I don’t wonder they thought the rough life more fascinating than kings and courts. I’d like to have seen sun-dances and maiden-tests; I’d like to have eaten food strange enough to be picturesque, and to have found new streams and traced them to their sources, and to have come unexpectedly on new lakes, like amethysts. It’s as much fun to discover as to invent. And then the Jesuit fathers, half-tramp, half-martyr,—they were great old fellows.”

“And the Frenchman—where is he?” said Madeline. “Gone, and left a few names for the Swede and the American to mispronounce; but you may come down later, Mr. Norris, and find how law and order, in our own people, fought with savagery out here on the frontier. It’s a thrilling story.”

“You love it all and its legends, don’t you?” Ellery looked from one to the other.

“Don’t you?” Madeline asked.

“By Jove, I do!” he cried, sitting suddenly upright as though stirred with genuine feeling. “I love it without its legends. It does not seem to me to have any past. It is all future. It makes me feel all future, too.”

“Do you know what’s happened to you?” Dick laughed exultantly. “Gitche Manito the Mighty has got you—the spirit of the West—which, being interpreted, is Ozone.”

“Something has got me, I admit,” Norris cried. “What is it? What is it that makes the sky so dazzling? What is it that makes the leaves fairly radiate light? What is it that, every time you take a breath, makes the air freshen you down to your toes? I feel younger than I ever did before in all my life.”

The other two were looking at him.

“Well, our height above the sea-level—” Dick began.

“Oh, rot!” Ellery exclaimed. “It’s something more than air—it’s atmosphere. You feel here that it’s glorious to work.”

“You make me proud of you, old boy.”

“It’s funny how universally you fellows call me ‘old boy’. I suppose I was older than the rest of you. I had to take the responsibility for my own life too soon and it took out of me that assurance that most of you had—that complacent confidence that things would somehow manage themselves. But I’m getting even now. I’m appreciating being young, which most men don’t.”

“Bully for you!” Dick cried. “If you couldn’t be born a Westerner, you are born again one. I am moved to tell you something that gave me a small glow yesterday. I met Lewis—the editor of the Star, you know, Madeline—and he insisted on stopping me and congratulating me on having brought Mr. Norris to St. Etienne; said he was irritated at first by having a man forced on him by influence, when there was really no particular place for him, but, he went on, ‘Mr. Norris is rapidly making his own place. We think him a real acquisition.’”

“Oh, pooh!” Norris lapsed sulkily into his usual quiet manner. “Of course I can write better than I can talk. My thoughts are just slow enough, I guess, to keep up with a pen.”

Dick laughed softly as though he were pleased at things he did not tell. Madeline, for the first time, gave her real attention to Mr. Norris, whom she had not hitherto thought worth dwelling on—at least when Dick was about. Never before had this young man talked about himself.

A silence fell.

“Was that a wood-thrush?” Norris asked, manifestly grasping at a change of subject.

“I don’t know, and I don’t intend to know,” Madeline cried, with such unusual viciousness that the two men stared. “Poor birds!” she said. “I’ve nothing against them, but I’m in rebellion against the bird fad. I’m so tired of meeting people and having them start in with a gushing, ‘Oh, how-de-do! Only fancy, I have just seen a scarlet tanager!’ and you know they haven’t, and they wouldn’t care anyway, and their mother may be dying.”

Ellery laughed, and Dick said:

“Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to invent a fad of my own.”

“Let us in on the ground floor.”

“If you like. I’m learning the notes of the wind in the tree-tops. It has such variety! No two trees sound alike. Hear that sharp twitter of the maples? The oak has a deep sonorous song, and the elm’s is as delicate as itself. I believe I could tell them all with my eyes shut.”

“One breeze with infinite manifestations. I suppose our souls twist the breath of the spirit to our own likenesses in the same way,” Ellery said.

Madeline looked at him and he smiled.

“You’re getting poetical, old codger,” said Dick. “You must be in love.” Ellery blushed, but Dick went on, oblivious of byplay. “I move that we celebrate the occasion by a cold collation. Last week, your mother kindly made inquiries about my tastes that led me to infer that everything I most affect is stowed away in that comfortable-looking basket.”

So they had supper, and Norris fished a volume of Shelley from his pocket and read The Cloud, which Dick followed by a really funny story from a magazine. They fell to talking about their own affairs, which to the young are the chief interests. It takes years “that bring the philosophic mind” to make abstractions stimulating. Finally they wafted homeward under a sky dark at the zenith and becoming paler and paler, violet, rose, wan white, with a line of intense violet along the horizon, and, as they sailed, Madeline sang softly as one does in the immediate presence of nature.

This was one day. On another Dick was full of his adventures of the week. He was learning to know his St. Etienne in all its phases. He told them of the lumber mills down by the river, where brawny men, primitive in aspect, fought with a never-ending stream of logs which came down with the current and raised themselves like uncanny water-monsters, up a long incline, finally to meet their death at the hands of machinery that ripped and snarled and clutched. Who would dream, to look at the great commonplace piles of boards that lined the riverbank for miles, that their birth-pangs had been so picturesque?

Or again, Dick told them of those other mills, which were the chief foundation of St. Etienne’s wealth, piles of gray stone, for ever dust-laden and dingy, into which poured a never-ending stream of grain, and out of which poured an equally unceasing stream of bags and barrels laden with flour. Around the wide interiors wandered a few men, gray too, who peeped now and then into caverns where hidden machinery did all the work. Outside, locomotives whistled and puffed and snorted, as they switched the miles of cars to and from the mills. Great vans rolled up with their burdens of fresh empty barrels to be filled and rolled away again.

It was the commonplace of daily toil, but Dick made it vivid, because it was in him to see all things as the work of men, and whenever you catch them doing real work, men are interesting.

Sometimes Dick had other stories to tell. In his collegiate days, he had grown familiar with the typical slum and its problems. The class in sociology had visited such. So he went to the slums of St. Etienne, and behold, they were not slums at all, for the slum can not be grown, like a mushroom, in a night. It must have a thousand nauseous influences stagnating for a long time undisturbed. But here were meager little wooden huts, flanked by rusting piles of scrap-iron, or flats along the river-bottom where the high waters of spring were sure to send the dwellers in these shabby apologies for homes scrambling to the roofs, or drive them to the shelter of the neighboring brewery. Here as the waters swept under the stony arches of the bridges, old women tucked up their petticoats and fished for the richness with which a city befouls its river. Here they made themselves neat woodpiles of the drift of the sawmills, and turned an honest penny by exhibiting on their roofs gaudy advertisements of plug-tobacco, that those who passed on the bridge above might look down and read and resolve to avoid the brand thus obnoxiously glorified.

Sometimes Dick had to relate a picturesque interview with a policeman who unfolded to him unknown phases of life, for though he believed in himself, Percival also believed in the other man, and therefore made him a friend. Every one likes a jolly friendly prince, and that was Dick’s type.

Or he would dip into a police court where all the stages of wretchedness were pitchforked into one another’s evil-smelling company, so that it ranged from the highest circle of purgatory to the lowest depths of hell.

“Why do you go to such places, Dick? It’s nauseating,” Madeline exclaimed.

“Why?” he demanded. “I suppose that sometime, when I’ve made over my information into the neat systematic package that you prefer, I shall start a soul-uplifting row. I look forward to that as my career. You ought to get a career, Madeline.”

“A career? I know the verb, but not the noun,” she retorted saucily. “I’m afraid mine is nothing but the trivial task, flavored with all the flavors I like best.”

Sometimes, when they went home together at night, Percival had stories to unfold to Norris alone—stories he could not tell Madeline, of things found in the mire, upon which the healthy happy world turns its back when every night it goes “up town” to pleasant hearthstones and to normal life. These were tales of foul sounds and foul air, where men and women gathered and drank and gambled and laughed with laughter that was like the grinning of skulls, hollow and despairing. They were stories of girls with sodden eyes and men with wooden faces—of innumerable schemes to suck money by any means but those of honor. And these were the phases of his study that Dick looked upon with a kind of anguished fascination, as more and more he saw how the hands stretched out of that mire smirched the city which he hoped to serve.

Sometimes, and this was when they were with Madeline again, Ellery would have his experience to tell, redolent of printer’s ink, and full of the interest of that profession which is never two days the same—stories of how business toils and spins and is not arrayed like Solomon. Norris, too, was beginning to run up against human nature both in gross and in detail, and to know the world, from the fight last night in Fish Alley up to the doings of statesmen and kings. Madeline had little to tell, for she was living quietly at home, taking the housekeeping off her mother’s hands and driving her father to the morning train. She had few episodes more exciting than an afternoon call or a moonlight sail. But the young men brought her their lives, and when she had made her gay little bombardment of comment, they felt as though some new light had fallen upon familiar facts. The very simplicity of her thought put things in the right relation and gave the effect of a view from a higher plane.

There were many times when they did not discuss, but gave themselves to the joy of young things. They sailed, and Madeline held the tiller; and, when evening came on, they curled down with cushions in the bottom of the boat and sang and chattered the twilight out. They played golf and tennis, and the blood leaped in their veins, for whatever they did, they did it with heart and soul. As for their relations with one another, these were taken for granted, and what they meant, not one of the three stopped to question. It was enough that they were sweet and satisfying in silence.

Late in the season there came a Sunday, memorable to Ellery, when Dick had gone away for some purpose, and, after a little self-questioning, Norris ventured alone for his afternoon with Madeline. She welcomed him with such serene unconsciousness that he wondered why he had hesitated.

“I’m not so good a sailor as Dick, Miss Elton,” he said. “Will you trust yourself with me?”

“Being an independent young woman, I’m willing to depend on you.”

“A truly feminine position.”

“It means that I am quite capable of seizing the helm myself if you should fail me,” she laughed.

“And I am masculine enough to determine that you shall get it only by favor, not by necessity,” he retorted.

“That suits me quite well,” Madeline answered gravely.

“And you are not apprehensive of storms in the vague far-away?”

“Don’t. I’m so contented with things as they are that I do not want to think of far-aways or of anything that means change.”

“You are satisfied with to-day?” he persisted.

“Perfectly.”

Ellery flushed with traitorous rejoicing that Dick was absent. It was a day of sunshine—not the ardent blaze of summer, but the crisp glow of October that seems all light with little heat. The lake was so pale as to be hardly blue, and girdled with soft yellow, touched only here and there with the intenser red of the rock maples. Back farther from shore rose the tawny bronze of oaks. The light breeze flung the Swallow along with those caressing wave-slaps that are the sleepiest of sounds.

To sail under that sky, with Madeline leaning on her elbow near at hand, they two separated from the rest of the world by wide waters, was like a brief experience of Paradise. Ellery watched the light tendril of hair that touched her cheek, lifted itself and touched again, near that lovely curve above her ear. The cheek was warm and creamy but untouched by deeper color. He fell into that mood of blessed silence that, as a rule, comes only when one is solitary.

As they rounded at the dock he came back to himself with a sudden wonder if she had missed the titillation of Dick’s chatter, for she had been as silent as he.

“I’m afraid I have been very dull. I enjoyed myself so much that I forgot to try to amuse you.”

“It’s been a heavenly sail, exactly to match the day,” Madeline answered with a deep contented sigh that filled him with delight. “I was this moment thinking what a comfort it was to know you well enough so that I didn’t have to talk. It’s a test of comradeship, isn’t it?”

As they smiled at each other, his heart leaped with the consciousness of a bond below the surface.

He treasured this crumb of her kindness, not because she was niggardly, but because there was little that belonged to him and to him alone. Sometimes, in the rush and roar of the office, came the memory of her eyes and her voice of assurance.

“What will our comradeship be like, when—when she is Dick’s wife?” he questioned himself, and then fell to work with fury.

Thus the delightful summer died into the past; there came a winter only less good, with its dinners and dances, with quiet fireside evenings, and yet another summer of the same close friendship that began to take on the semblance of a permanent thing in life, all the richer as experience grew deeper and knowledge wider and the best things dearer.

Whether they read or sang or discussed, though the world saw little done, these three young people had the inestimable happiness of knowing one another.