Mrs. Hallam's companion; and The Spring Farm, and other tales

Nearly everybody keeps a diary at some time in his life, I think. Aunt Brier does, I know, and Thea, and Aleck,—confound him, with his Hepburn lines and missing links!—and so I may as well be in fashion and commence one, even if I tear it up, as I probably shall. Well, here we are in Florence, and likely to be until Thea is able to travel. Why did she go tearing around Rome night and day in all sorts of weather, spooning it in the Coliseum by moonlight and declaring she was oh, so hot, when my teeth were chattering with cold, and I could see nothing in the beauty she raved about but some old broken walls and arches, with shadows here and there, which did not look half as pretty as the shadows in the park at home? Europe hasn’t panned out exactly as I thought it would, and I am getting confoundedly bored. Thea is nice, of course,—too nice, in fact,—but a fellow does not want to be compelled to marry a girl any way. He’d rather have some choice in the matter, which I haven’t had; but I like Thea immensely, and we are engaged.

There, I’ve blurted it out, and it looks first-rate on paper, too. Yes, we are engaged, and this is how it happened. Ever since I was knee-high Aunt Keziah has dinged it into me that I must marry Thea, or her heart would be broken, and the Mortons beggared. I wish old Amos Hepburn’s hand had been paralyzed before he added to that long lease a condition which has brought grief to my Uncle Douglas and cousin Gerold, who married an actress, or a cook, or something, because he loved her more than he did money. By George, I respect him for his independence, and wish I were more like him, and not a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow who does not know how to do a single useful thing or to earn a dollar.

Well, the time is drawing near for that lease to expire, and unless a direct heir of Joseph Morton, my great-grandfather, marries a direct heir of Amos Hepburn, the entire Morton estate will revert to the Hepburn heir. Now, I am a direct heir of Joseph Morton, and Thea is old Hepburn’s direct heir, which means, according to the way it was explained in the lease, that she is the eldest child, whether son or daughter, of the eldest child, and so on back to the beginning, when there were three daughters of old Amos. Thea comes from the second of these daughters, for where the first one is the Lord only knows. Aleck Grady descends from old Amos’s third daughter, and has no chance while Thea lives. Nor does he pretend to want any, as he has money enough of his own. He joined our party uninvited in Egypt, and has bored us to death with his family tree, and the missing link, which link means the eldest daughter of old Hepburn, of whom nothing is known after a certain date. And it is she and her descendants, if there are any, he is trying to hunt up. He is a shrewd fellow, and a kind of quack lawyer, too, and once told me that he did not think the long lease would hold water a minute in the United States, and asked if Aunt Keziah had consulted a first-class lawyer, and when I told him that she had not,—that it had been a rule in our family not to talk about the lease to any one until compelled to do so, and that even if she knew the document was invalid she would consider herself bound in honor to respect it as her father had done before her and enjoined her to do,—he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Chacun à son goût; but I should dispute that lease inch by inch, and beat the Hepburns too.”

“Why, then,” I asked, “are you so anxious to find the missing link, as you call it? I always supposed that for some reason you wanted to throw Thea out of the property.”

With that insinuating smile of his which Thea thinks so winning and I think so disgusting, he replied, “My dear fellow, how you mistake me! I don’t care a picayune who gets the Morton money, if you are fools enough to give it up. But I do care for my ancestors; in fact, I have a real affection for my great-aunt Octavia, and am most anxious to know what became of her and her progeny. I have her as far as New York, where all trace of her is lost. Would you like to see the family tree?”

As I had seen it half a dozen times and knew exactly where Octavia failed to connect, I declined, and then the conversation turned upon Thea, who, Aleck said, was a very nice girl, but a little too fast, and had about her too much gush and too much powder to suit him. It was strange why girls would gush and giggle and plaster their faces with cosmetics and blacken their eyebrows until they looked like women of the town, he said, appealing to me for confirmation of his opinion. I had more than half suspected him of designs on Thea, and I flamed up at once in her defense, telling him she neither gushed, nor powdered, nor blackened,—three lies, as I knew,—but I was angry, and when, with that imperturbable good humor which never fails him, he continued: “Don’t get so mad, I beg. I am older than you, and know human nature better than you do, and I know you pretty well. Why, I’ve made you quite a study. Thea, in spite of her powder and gush, is a splendid girl, and will make a good wife to the man she loves and who loves her, but she is not your ideal, and pardon me for suggesting that I don’t believe that you would marry her if it were not for that clause about the eldest heir, which I don’t think is worth the paper it is written on,”—I could have knocked him down, he was so cool and patronizing, and was also telling me a good deal of truth. But I would not admit it, and insisted that I would marry Thea if there had never been any Hepburn line and she had not a dollar in the world.

“Why don’t you propose, then, and done with it? She is dying to have you,” he said, and I declared I would, and that night I asked her to be my wife, and I have not regretted it either, although I know she is not my ideal.

But who is my ideal, and where is she, if I have one? I am sure I don’t know, unless it is the owner of a face which I have seen but twice, but which comes back to me over and over again, and which I would not forget if I could, and could not if I would. The first time I saw it was at a concert in Boston, not long before I left college. I was in the dress-circle, and diagonally to my right was an immense bonnet or hat which hid half the audience from me. Late in the evening it moved, and I saw beyond it a face which has haunted me ever since. It was that of a young and beautiful girl, who I instinctively felt belonged to a type entirely different from the class of girls whom I had known while at Harvard, and who, without being exactly fast in the worst acceptation of the term, had come so near the boundary-line between propriety and impropriety that it was difficult to tell on which side they stood. But this girl was different, with her deep-blue eyes and her wavy hair which I was sure had never come in contact with the hot curling-tongs, as Thea’s does, while her complexion, which reminded me of the roses and lilies in Aunt Keziah’s garden, owed none of its brilliancy to cosmetics, as Aleck says most complexions do. She was real, and inexpressibly lovely, especially when she smiled, as she sometimes did upon the lady who sat beside her, and who might have been her mother, or her chaperone, or some elderly relative. When the concert was over I hurried out, hoping to get near her, but she was lost in the crowd, and I only saw her once again, three weeks later, in an open street-car going in the opposite direction from the one in which I was seated. In her hand she held a paper parcel, which made me think she might possibly be a seamstress or a saleslady, and I spent a great deal of time haunting the establishments in Boston which employed girls as clerks, but I never found her, nor heard of her. She certainly was not at Moisiere’s and I don’t think she was at Wellesley, as I am sure I should have heard of her through Fred, who had a sister there. Once I thought I would tell him about her, but was kept from doing so by a wish to discover her myself, and when discovered to keep her to myself. But I have never seen her since the day she went riding so serenely past me, unconscious of the admiration and strange emotions she was exciting in me. Who was she, I wonder; and shall I ever see her again? It is not likely; and if I do, what can it matter to me, now that I am engaged to Thea?

In her letter of congratulation Aunt Keziah, who was wild with delight, wrote to me that nothing could make her so happy as my marriage with Thea, and that she knew I would keep my promise, no matter whom I might meet, for no one of Morton blood ever proved untrue to the woman he loved. Of course I shall prove true; and who is there to meet, unless it is my Lost Star, as I call her, for whom I believe I am as persistently searching as Aleck is for the missing link, for I never see a group of young American girls that I do not manage to get near enough to see if she is among them, and I never see a head of chestnut-brown hair set on shoulders just as hers was that I don’t follow it until I see the face, which as yet has not been hers. And in this I am not disloyal to Thea, whom I love better than any girl I have ever known, and whom I will make happy, if possible. She has been ill now nearly four weeks, but in a few days we hope to move on to Paris, where we shall stay until June, then go to Switzerland, and some time in the autumn sail for home, and the aunts who have vied with each other in spoiling me and are the dearest aunts in the world, although so unlike each other,—Aunt Keziah, with her iron will but really kind heart, Aunt Dizzy, with her invalid airs and pretty youthful ways which suit her so well in spite of her years, and Aunt Brier, whose name is a misnomer, she is so soft and gentle, with nothing scratchy about her, and who has such a sad, sweet face, with a look in her brown eyes as if she were always waiting or listening for something. I believe she has a history, and that it is in some way connected with that queer chap, Bey Atkins they called him, whose dress was half Oriental and half European, and whom I met at Shepheard’s in Cairo. I first saw him the night after our return from the trip up the Nile. He registered just after I had written the names of our party, at which he looked a long time, and then fairly shadowed me until he had a chance to speak to me alone. It was after dinner, and we were sitting near each other in front of the hotel, when he began to talk to me, and in an inconceivably short space of time had learned who I was, and where I lived, and about my aunts, in whom he seemed so greatly interested, especially Aunt Brier, that I finally asked if he had ever been to Morton Park.

“Yes,” he answered, knocking the ashes from his cigar and leaning back in the bamboo chair in the graceful, lounging way he has,—“yes, years ago I was in Versailles and visited at Morton Park. Your aunt Beriah and I were great friends. Tell her when you go home that you saw Tom Atkins in Cairo, and that he has become a kind of wandering Ishmael and wears a red fez and white flannel suit. Tell her, too—” but here he stopped suddenly, and, rising, went into the street, where his dragoman was holding the white donkey he always rode, sometimes alone and sometimes with a little girl beside him, who called him father.

Of course, then, he is married, and his wife must be an Arab, for the child was certainly of that race, with her great dark eyes and her tawny hair all in a tangle. I meant to ask him about her, but when next day I inquired for him, I was told that he had gone to his home near Alexandria, where, I dare say, there is a host of little Arabs, and a woman with a veil stretched across her nose, whom he calls his wife.

Alas for Aunt Brier if my conjecture is right!

CHAPTER V.—Beriah’s Story.
DORIS AND THE GLORY HOLE.

It is a long time since I have opened my journal, for there is so little to record. Life at Morton Park goes on in the same monotonous routine, with no change except of servants, of which we have had a sufficiency ever since the negroes became “ekels,” as our last importation from Louisville, who rejoiced in the high-sounding name of Helena Maude, informed us they were. Such things make Keziah furious, for she is a regular fire-eater, but I shall admit their equality provided they spare my best bonnet and do not insist upon putting their knives into our butter. Helena Maude is a pretty good girl, and when some of her friends come to the front door and ask if Miss Smithson lives here I tell them yes, and send them round to the cabins and say nothing to Keziah, who for the last few weeks has been wholly absorbed in other matters than colored gentry.

Doris is coming home to-morrow, and just the thought of it makes me so nervous with gladness that I can scarcely write legibly. I think it was a struggle for Keziah to consent to her coming, and she only did so after she heard Grant was engaged to Dorothea. I never saw Keziah as happy as she was upon the receipt of Grant’s letter, for his marriage with Dorothea means keeping our old home, and she allowed Helena Maude to whistle “Marching Through Georgia” as she cleared the table, and did not reprove her. It was soon after this that she announced her intention to bring Doris to Morton Park after her graduation, and that night Dizzy and I held a kind of jubilee in our sitting-room, we were so glad that at last Gerold’s daughter was coming to her father’s old home.

We need young blood here to keep us from stagnating, and although Grantley will be with us in the autumn, and possibly Dorothea, we know what they are, and are anxious for something new and fresh and pretty like Doris. I have a photograph of her, and it stands before me as I write, a picture of a wondrously beautiful young girl, with great earnest eyes confronting mine so steadfastly, and masses of soft, natural curls all over her head after the fashion of the present day. I know they are natural, although Keziah says they are the result of hot tongs, and that she shall stop it at once, for she will not have the gas turned on half the time while the irons are heating. That is Dorothea’s style; but she is in the Hepburn line, and is to marry Grant, which makes a difference.

Doris sent such a nice letter to Keziah, asking pardon for the saucy things she wrote to her years ago, and begging that some one of us would come to see her graduated. How I wanted to go! but Keziah said we could not afford it, as she intended buying a new upright Steinway in place of the old spindle-legged thing on which she used to thrum when a girl. We have heard that Doris is a fine musician, but Keziah will not admit that the piano was bought for her. Dorothea will visit us in the autumn, she says, and she wishes to make it as pleasant as possible for her. Dizzy and I both know what Dorothea’s playing is like, and that it does not matter much whether it is on a Steinway or a tin pan, but we are glad for something modern in our ancient drawing-room, where every article of furniture is nearly as old as I am, and where the new Steinway is now standing with one of Keziah’s shawls thrown over it to keep it from the dust.

For once in our lives Dizzy and I have waged a fierce battle with Keziah, who came off victor as usual. The battle was over Doris’s room, which Keziah thinks is of little consequence. Looking at our house from the outside, one would say it was large enough to accommodate a dozen school-girls; but looks are deceptive, and it seems it can hardly accommodate one. There is a broad piazza in front, and through the centre a long and wide hall, after the fashion of most Southern houses. On the south side of the hall are the drawing-room and sitting-room, with fireplaces in each. On the north side are the dining-room and Keziah’s sleeping-room, where she usually sits and receives her intimate friends. On the floor above are also four rooms,—Dizzy’s and mine, which open together on the north side of the hall, and on the other side Grantley’s, and the guest-room, which has not been occupied in fifteen years, for when Dorothea is here she has always had a cot in my room or Dizzy’s. At the end of the hall is a small room, ten by twelve perhaps, and communicating with the guest-chamber, for which it was originally intended as a dressing-room, but which we use as a store-room for a most heterogeneous mass of rubbish, such as broken chairs and stands and trunks and chests, and old clothes and warming-pans and water-bags and Grantley’s fishing-tackle. The Glory Hole, we call it, though what the name has to do with the room I have no idea. There is a tradition that Gerold, when he first looked into it, exclaimed, “Oh, glory, what a hole!” and hence the name, which clung to it even after it was cleared of its rubbish for him, for he once occupied it when a little boy, and now it is to be his daughter’s.

Dizzy and I pleaded for the large guest-chamber, but Keziah said that was reserved for Dorothea who, as an engaged young lady, was too old to sleep in a cot. And nothing we could say was of any avail to turn her from her purpose. The Glory Hole was good enough for the daughter of a cook, she said, and so the room has been emptied of its contents, and, except that it is so small, it is quite presentable, with its matting and muslin hangings and willow chair and table by the window, under which there is a box of flowers, as one often sees in London. Just where she will put her trunk or hang her dresses I don’t know,—possibly in my closet, which is large enough for us both. She will be here to-morrow afternoon, and Keziah is nearly ill with dread of her coming, and worrying as to what she will be like, and whether she will bring a banjo, and worst of all, if she will want to ride a bicycle! This bicycle-riding is in Kizzy’s mind the most disreputable thing a woman can do, and the sight of a girl on a wheel, or a boy either, for that matter, is like a red flag to a bull, especially since the riders have taken to the sidewalks. She will never turn out, she declares, and I have seen her stand like a rock and face the enemy bearing down upon her, and once she raised her umbrella with a hiss and a shoo, as if she were scaring chickens. I dare say Thea will have one as soon as she lands in America, but for Doris there are no bicycles, or banjoes, or hot irons,—nothing but the Glory Hole. Poor little Doris!

I hope she will be happy with us, and I know I am glad because she is coming. So few have ever come home to make me glad, and the one who could make me the gladdest will never come again, for somewhere in the wide world the sun is shining on his grave, I am sure, or he would come back to me, and I should bid him stay, or rather go with him, whether to the sands of Arabia or to the shores of the Arctic Sea. My hair is growing gray, the bloom has faded from my cheek, and I shall be forty-four my next birthday, and it is twenty-four years since I saw Tom; but a woman’s love at forty-four is just as strong, I think, as a girl’s at twenty, and there is scarcely a night that I do not hear in my dreams the peculiar whistle with which he used to summon me to our trysting-place after Kizzy had forbidden him the house, and I see again his great, dark eyes full of entreaty and love, and hear his voice urging me to do what, if it were to do over again, I would do. That is an oddly-worded sentence; but I am too tired to change it, and will close my journal until after I have seen Doris.

I have been here four weeks, and begin to feel quite like the daughter of the house, with some exceptions. I am in love with Aunt Beriah, very intimate with Aunt Desire, and not as much in awe of Aunt Keziah as I was at first. It was a lovely afternoon when the coach from Frankfort set me down at the gate to the Morton grounds, where a little, brown-eyed, brown-haired lady was waiting for me. She had one of the sweetest faces I ever saw, and one of the sweetest voices, too, as she came towards me, holding out both her soft white hands, and saying to me, “I am sure you are Doris, and I am your aunt Beriah. Welcome to Morton Park!”

It was not so much what she said as the way she said it, which stirred me so strangely. It was the first word of affection I had heard from my own kin since my mother died, and, taking her hands in mine, I kissed them passionately, and cried like a child. I think she cried a little, too, but am not sure. I only know that she put her arm around my neck and said, soothingly, “There, there, dear. Don’t cry, when I am so glad.”

Then taking my bag and umbrella, she gave them to a colored girl, whom she called Vine, and who, after bobbing me a courtesy, disappeared through the gateway.

“It is not far, and I thought you would like to walk,” Aunt Brier said, leading the way, while I followed her into the park, at the rear of which stood the house, with its white walls and Corinthian pillars, looking so cool and pleasant in the midst of grass and flowers and maples and elms, with an immense hawthorn-tree in full bloom.

“Oh, this is lovely, and just as papa told me it was,” I exclaimed, and then, stopping short, Aunt Brier drew me close to her, and scrutinizing me earnestly, said, with a tremor in her voice, “Yes, Gerold told you of his old home. I was so fond of him. We were like brother and sister, and I was so sorry when he died. You are not as much like him as I fancied you were from your photograph.”

“No?” I said, interrogatively, wondering if she were disappointed in me; but she soon set me right on that point by saying, “Gerold was good-looking, but you are beautiful.”

I had been told that so often, and I knew it so well without being told, that I did not feel at all elated. I was only glad that she liked my looks, and replied, “And you are lovely, and so young, too. My great aunt ought to look older.”

She smiled at that, and said, “I am nearly forty-four, and feel sometimes as if I were a hundred. But there is Kizzy on the piazza. I think we’d better hurry. She does not like to wait for anything.”

I had never really known what fear of any person was, but I felt it now, and my heart beat violently as I hastened my steps towards the spot where Aunt Keziah stood, stiff and tall and straight, and looking very imposing in her black silk gown and lace cap set on a smooth band of false hair, a bunch of keys dangling at her belt, and a dainty hemstitched handkerchief clasped in her hands. In spite of her sixty odd years, she was a handsome woman to look at, with her shoulders thrown back and her chin in the air as if she were on the alert and the defensive. Her features were clearly cut, her face smooth and pale, while her bright black eyes seemed to look me through as they traveled rapidly from my hat to my boots and back again, evidently taking in every detail of my dress, and resting finally on my face with what seemed to be disapproval.

“How do you do, Miss Doris?” she said, with a quick shutting together of her thin lips, and without the shadow of a smile.

I had cried when Aunt Brier spoke to me, but I did not want to cry now, for something of the woman’s nature must have communicated itself to mine and frozen me into a figure as hard and stiff as she was. It was a trick of mine to imitate any motion or gesture which struck me forcibly, and I involuntarily threw my shoulders back and my chin in the air, and gave her two fingers just as she had given me, and told her I was quite well, and hoped she was the same. For a moment she looked at me curiously, while it seemed to me that her features did relax a little as she asked if I were not very tired with the journey and the dusty ride in the coach from Frankfort.

“It always upsets me,” she said, suggesting that I go at once to my room and rest until dinner, which would be served sharp at six, “and,” she added, “we never wait for meals; breakfast at half-past seven in the summer, lunch at half-past twelve, dinner at six.”

Then she made a stately bow, and I felt that I was dismissed from her presence, and started to follow Aunt Beriah into the hall just as two negroes came up the walk bringing one of my trunks, which had been deposited at the entrance to the park.

“Mass’r Hinton’s man done fotchin’ t’other trunk on his barrer,” the taller negro said, in response to a look of inquiry he must have seen on my face, and instantly Aunt Kizzy’s lips came together just as they had done when she said, “How do you do, Miss Doris?”

“Two trunks?” she asked, in a tone which told me that I had brought altogether too much luggage.

“Yes,” I replied, stopping until the negroes came up the steps. “Perhaps I ought to have brought but one, but I have so many books and things, and, besides, one trunk was father’s and one mother’s, and I could not give either up. This was father’s, which he said you gave him when he went to college. See, here is his name.” And I pointed to “Gerald Morton, Versailles, Ky.,” on the end of the stout leather trunk, which had withstood the wear of years.

“Yes, I remember it,” she said, in a voice so changed and with so different an expression on her face that I scarcely knew her as she bent over the trunk, which she touched caressingly with her hand. “You have kept it well,” she continued; then, to the negroes, “Take it up-stairs, and mind you don’t mar the wall nor the banisters. Look sharp, now.”

“Mass’r Hinton’s man” had arrived with the wheelbarrow and the other trunk, a huge Saratoga, with mother’s name upon it, “Doris Morton, New Haven, Ct.,” but this Aunt Keziah did not touch. Indeed, it seemed to me that she recoiled from it, and there was an added severity in her tone as she told the man to be careful, and chided him for cutting up the gravel with the wheelbarrow.

“I’s couldn’t tote it, missis; it’s too heavy,” he said, as he waited for one of the other blacks to help him take it up the stairs.

I had reached the upper hall and was standing by the door of my room, while Aunt Beriah said, apologetically, “I am sorry it is so small: perhaps we can change it bye-and-bye.”

It was really a very pretty room, but quite too small for my trunks unless I moved out either the bedstead, or the bureau, or the washstand, and, as I could not well dispense with either of these, I looked rather ruefully at my aunt, who said, “There is a big closet in my room where you can hang your dresses and put both your trunks when they are unpacked.” And that was where I did put them, but not until after two days, for I awoke the next morning with the worst headache I ever had in my life, and which, I suppose, was induced by the long and rapid journey from Meadowbrook, added to homesickness and crying myself to sleep. I could not even sit up, and was compelled to keep my room, where Aunt Beriah nursed me so tenderly and lovingly, while Aunt Kizzy came three times a day to ask how I was, and where I first saw my aunt Desire, who had been suffering with neuralgia and was not present at dinner on the night of my arrival. She sent me her love, however, and the next day came into my room, languid and graceful, with a pretty air of invalidism about her, and a good deal of powder on her face, reminding me of a beautiful ball-dress which has done service through several seasons and been turned and made over and freshened up until it looks almost as well as new. Her dress, of some soft, cream-colored material was artistically draped around her fine figure and fastened on the left side with a ribbon bow of baby blue, and her fair hair, in which there was very little gray, was worn low on her neck in a large, flat knot, from which a few curls were escaping and adding to her youthful appearance. If I had not known that she was over fifty, I might, in my darkened room, easily have mistaken her for a young girl, and I told her so when after kissing me and telling me who she was, she sank into the rocking-chair and asked me if she looked at all as I thought she would.

With a merry laugh, which showed her white, even teeth, she said, “I like that. I like to look young, if I am fifty, which I will confess to you just because Kizzy will be sure to tell you; otherwise, torture could not wring it from me. A woman is as old as she feels, and I feel about twenty-five. Nor do I think it is necessary to blurt out my age all the time, as Kizzy does. It’s no crime to be old, but public opinion and women themselves have made it so. Let two of them get to saying nasty things about a third, and they are sure to add several years to her age, while even men call a girl right old before she is thirty, and doesn’t that prove that although age may be honorable it is not desirable, and should be fought against as long as possible? And I intend to fight it, too, and thus far have succeeded pretty well, or should, if it were not for Kizzy, who has the most aggravating way of saying to me, ‘You ought not to do so at your time of life,’ and ‘at your age,’ as if I were a hundred.”

I listened to her in amazement and admiration too. She was so pretty and graceful and earnest that although I thought her rather silly, and wished that in her fight against time she did not make up quite so much as I knew she did, I was greatly drawn towards her, and for a while forgot my headache as she told me of her ailments, which were legion, and with which Aunt Kizzy had little sympathy. “Kizzy thinks all one has to do is to exercise his will and make an effort, as Mrs. Chick insisted poor Fanny should do in ‘Dombey and Son,’” she said, and then went on to give me glimpses of their family life and bits of family history, all of which were, of course, very interesting to me. Aunt Brier, I heard, had been engaged, when young, to a very fine young man, but Aunt Kizzy broke up the match because she wished Beriah to marry some one in the Hepburn line, which was frightfully tangled up with the Morton line.

“It would take too long to explain the tangle,” she said, “and so I shall not try. It estranged your father from us, and his father before him, because each took the woman of his choice in spite of the line.”

Then she told me of her own dead love, to whose memory she had been faithful thirty years, and who so often visited her in her dreams that he was as much a reality now as the day he died.

“And that is why I try to keep young, for where he has gone they know no lapse of time, and if he can see me, as I believe he can, I do not want to look old to him,” she said, with a pathetic sob, while her white hands worked nervously.

Then she told me that I was in the Glory Hole, which my father had so named, and told me, too, that she and Beriah had fought for the larger room, but had given in to Kizzy, as they always did.

“I believe she has an invisible cat-o’-nine-tails which makes us all afraid of her,” she added; “but, really, when you get down to the kernel it is good as gold, and you can get there if you try. Don’t seem afraid of her, or fond of her, either. She hates gush, and she hates cowardice and deceit; but she adores manner and etiquette as she knew it forty years ago, and dislikes everything modern and new.”

She did not tell me all this at one sitting, for she came to see me twice during the two days I kept my bed, and at each visit told me so much that I felt pretty well informed with regard to the family history, and began to lose my dread of Aunt Keziah and to feel less nervous when I heard her quick step and sharp voice in the hall. I knew she meant to be kind, and knew, too, that she was watching me curiously and trying to make up her mind as to what manner of creature I was, and whether I was feigning sickness or not. As she had never had a hard headache in her life, she did not know how to sympathize with one who had, and at the close of the second day she made me understand that mine had lasted long enough and that all I required now was an effort and fresh air, and that she should expect me down to breakfast the next morning. And as I was better, I made the effort, and at precisely half-past seven followed my three aunts down the stairs in a methodical, military kind of way, which reminded me of the school in Meadowbrook, where we used to march to the sound of a drum and a leader’s call of “Left, right; left, right,” Aunt Kizzy in this case being the leader and putting her foot down with an energy which marked all her movements.

The table was laid with great care, and Aunt Keziah said grace with her eyes open and upon black Tom, who was slyly purloining a lump of sugar from the bowl on the sideboard, and who nearly choked himself in his efforts to swallow it in time for his Amen, which was very audible and made me laugh in spite of my fear of Aunt Kizzy. When breakfast was over I was invited into her room, where I underwent a rigid cross-examination as to what I had learned at school, as well as done and left undone. I was also told what I could do and not do at Morton Park. There was a new Steinway in the drawing-room, on which I could practice each day from nine to ten and from three to four, but at no other time unless specially invited. Nor was I to sing unless asked to do so, while humming to myself was out of the question, as something very reprehensible. I was never to cross my feet when I sat down, nor lean back in my chair, nor put my hands upon the table, and above all things she hoped I did not whistle, and had not acquired a taste for banjoes and bicycles, as she heard some young ladies had.

With her sharp eyes upon me I was forced to confess that I could whistle a little and play the banjo, and had only been kept from buying one by lack of means, and also that when in Meadowbrook I had tried to ride a wheel.

“A Morton on a wheel and playing a banjo!” she exclaimed, in horror. “Surely, surely, you did not inherit this low taste from your father’s family. It is not the Morton blood which whistles and rides on wheels. It is your——”

Something in my face must have checked her, for she stopped suddenly and stared at me, while I said, “Aunt Kizzy, I know you mean my mother, and I want to tell you now that in every respect she was my father’s equal, and was the sweetest, loveliest woman I ever saw, and my father was so fond of her. I know you were angry because he married her, and you were very unjust to her, but she never said a word against you, and now she is dead I will hear nothing against her. She was my mother, and I am more like her than like the Mortons, and I am glad of it.”

This was not very respectful language, I knew, and I half expected her to box my ears, but she did nothing of the kind, and it seemed to me as if her expression softened towards me as she went on asking questions about other and different matters, and finally dismissed me with the advice that I should lie down awhile, as I looked pale and tired. That was four weeks ago, and since that time I have learned to know her better, and have found many good points which I admire. She has never mentioned my mother to me since that day, but has asked me many questions about my father and our home in Meadowbrook. In most things, too, I have my own way and am very happy, for Aunt Keziah has withdrawn some of her restrictions. I practice now when I like, and sing when I please, and even hum a little to myself, and once, when she was gone, I whistled “Annie Rooney” to my own accompaniment, with Aunts Dizzy and Brier for audience. I have seen a good many of the Versailles people, and have had compliments enough on my beauty to turn any girl’s head. I have learned every nook and corner of the house and park, and become quite attached to my Glory Hole, which I really prefer to the great room adjoining it, with its high-post bedstead and canopy, and its stiff mahogany furniture, which Aunt Kizzy says is nearly a hundred years old.

It looks a thousand, as does the furniture in the next room beyond, which puzzles me a little, it smells so like a man, and a young man, too. By this I mean that there is in it a decided odor of tobacco and cigars, and the leather-covered easy-chair looks to me as if some man had often lounged in it, while I know there are a smoking-jacket and a pair of men’s slippers there.

Funny that such things should be in this house of the Vestal Virgins, as I call them, and bye-and-bye I shall get to be one, I suppose, and tend the sacred fires, and go on errands of mercy, unless, indeed, I fall in love and am buried alive, as were the erring Vestals of old, which God forbid.

I wish that room did not bother me as it does. I think it is kept locked most of the time, but two days ago I saw Rache cleaning it, and walked in, as a matter of course, and smelled the cigars, and saw the jacket and the slippers in the closet, and asked Rache whose room it was. She stammers a little, and I could not quite make out what she said; and just as I was going to repeat my question Aunt Kizzy appeared and with a gesture of her hand waived me from the room, which remains to me as much a mystery as ever. I could, of course, ask one or all of my aunts about it, but by some intuition I seem to know that they do not care to talk about it. Indeed, I have felt ever since I have been here that there is something they are keeping from me, and I believe it is connected with this room, which may have been my father’s, or grandfather’s, or great-grandfather’s, although the smell is very much like the cigars of the Harvard boys, and that smoking-jacket had a modern look. But, whatever the mystery is, I mean in time to find it out.

Doris is here, and has been for four weeks, and in spite of myself I am drawn to her more and more every day. I did not want her to come, and I meant to be cold and distant to her, but when she looked at me with something in her blue eyes like Gerold, I began to soften, while the sight of Gerold’s trunk unnerved me wholly. I gave it to him when he first went away to college, and I remember so well how pleased he was, and how he put his arms around me and kissed me, as he thanked me for it, and said, “Auntie, the trunk is so big that I shall not bring it home at my vacations, but leave it in New Haven. So when you see it again it will be full of honors, and I shall be an A. B., of whom you will be so proud.”

God forgive me if I have done wrong; that was twenty-five years ago, and Gerold is dead, and his trunk was brought back to me by his daughter, whose face is not his face, although very, very beautiful. I acknowledge that to myself, and rebel against it a little, as I mentally contrast it with Dorothea’s and wonder what Grant will think of it. I have surely done well to keep him from all knowledge of her until he was engaged to Dorothea, and even now I tremble a little for the result when he is thrown in contact with her every day, for aside from her wonderful beauty there is a grace and charm about her that Dorothea lacks, and had I seen her before she came here I should have kept her at the North until after Grant’s marriage, which I mean shall take place as early as Christmas.

He is coming home sooner than I expected; indeed he sails in two or three days, and I must tell her at once that she has a cousin, and in some way put her on her honor not to try to attract him. It is a difficult thing to do, for the girl has a spirit of her own, and there is sometimes a flash in her eyes which I do not like to meet. I saw it first when I said something derogatory of her mother. How her eyes blazed, and how grand she was in her defense, and how I respected her for it!

Ah me, that Hepburn lease! What mischief it has wrought, and how the ghosts of the past haunt me at times, when I remember the stand I have taken to save our house from ruin! Beriah says I am a monomaniac on the subject, and also that she doubts the validity of the lease. But that does not matter. My father bade me respect Amos Hepburn’s wishes, and I shall, to the letter, if Grant does not marry Dorothea.

I must stop now and superintend the opening of a box which by some mistake Grant left at Cambridge and did not think necessary to have forwarded to us until recently, when he gave orders to have it sent us by express, It has in it a little of everything, he wrote, and among the rest a picture which he thinks will interest and puzzle us as it has him. I hear Tom hammering at the box, and must go and see to it.

I have solved the mystery of that room with the smell of cigars and the smoking-jacket. It does belong to a man, and that man is Grantley Montague, and Grantley Montague is my second cousin. Aunt Kizzy told me all about him this morning, and I am still so dazed and bewildered and glad and indignant that I can scarcely write connectedly about it. Why was the knowledge that Grant was my cousin kept from me so long, and from him, too, as he is still as ignorant as I was a few hours ago? Aunt Kizzy’s explanation was very lame. She said if he had known that he had a cousin at Wellesley when he was in Harvard, nothing could have kept him from seeing me so often that we should both have been interrupted in our studies,—that she did not approve of students visiting the girls while they were in school,—and that she hardly knew why she did not tell me as soon as I came here. This was not very satisfactory, and I believe there is something behind; but when I appealed to Aunts Dizzy and Beriah, and said I was hurt and angry, Aunt Brier did not answer at all, but Aunt Dizzy said, “I don’t blame you, and I’d have told you long ago if I had not been so afraid of Kizzy;” and that is all I could get from her.

But I know now that Grant is my cousin; and this is how it happened. This morning, as I was crossing the back piazza, I saw Tom opening a box which had come by express and which Aunt Kizzy was superintending. Taking a seat on the side piazza, I thought no more about it until I heard Aunt Kizzy say, very hurriedly and excitedly, “Go, boy, and call Miss Desire and Miss Beriah,—quick,” and a moment after I heard them both exclaim, and caught the sound of my father’s name, Gerold. Then I arose, and, going around the corner, saw them bending over a picture which I recognized at once, and in a moment I was kneeling by it and kissing it as I would have kissed my father’s hand had it suddenly been reached to me.

“Oh, the picture!” I cried. “It is my father’s; he painted it. I saw him do it. He said it was a picture of his aunties, and this is himself. Dear father!” And I touched the face of the young man who was standing behind the woman with the baby in her lap.

Aunt Kizzy was very white, and her voice shook as she asked me to explain, which I did rapidly and clearly, telling all I knew of the picture, which had been sold to some gentleman from Boston for fifty dollars.

“And,” I added, “that fifty dollars went to pay his funeral expenses, poor dear father. He was ill so long, and we were so poor.”

I was crying, and in fact we were all crying together, Aunt Kizzy the hardest of all, so that the hemstitched handkerchief she always carried so gingerly was quite moist and limp. I was the first to recover myself, and asked:

“How did it get here? Whose box is this?”

“Our nephew’s, Grantley Montague, who was graduated at Harvard last year and is now in Europe. He left this box in Cambridge by mistake, and it was not sent to us until yesterday. We are expecting him home in a short time. He must have bought the picture for its resemblance to us, although he could not have known that it was painted for us.”

It was Aunt Kizzy who told me this very rapidly, as if anxious to get it off her mind, and I noticed that she did not look at me as she spoke, and that she seemed embarrassed and anxious to avoid my gaze.

“Grantley Montague,—your nephew! Then he is my cousin!” I exclaimed, while every particular connected with the young man came back to me, and none more distinctly than the telegram, No, sent in response to my request that I might attend his tea-party.

I know that my eyes were flashing as they confronted Aunt Kizzy, who stammered out:

“Your second cousin,—yes. Did you happen to see him while at Wellesley?”

She was trying to be very cool, but I was terribly excited, and, losing all fear of her, replied:

“No; you took good care that I should meet no Harvard boys; but I saw Grantley Montague once on the train, and I heard so much about him, but I never dreamed he was my cousin. If I had, nothing would have kept me from him. Did he know I was there?”

“He knows nothing of you whatever,” Aunt Kizzy said. “I did not think it best he should as it might have interfered with the studies of you both. He is coming soon, and you will of course make his acquaintance.”

I was sitting upon the box and crying bitterly, not only for the humiliation and injustice done to me, but from a sense of all I had lost by not knowing that Grantley was my cousin.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, when she asked why I cried. “It would have made me so happy, and I have been so lonely at times, with no one of my own blood to care for me, and I should have been so proud of him; and when he invited me to his party, why didn’t you let me go? I did everything to please you. You did nothing to please me!”

I must have been hysterical, for my voice sounded very loud and unnatural as I reproached her, while she tried to soothe me and explain. But I would not be soothed, and kept on crying until I could cry no longer, and still, in the midst of my pain, I was conscious of a great joy welling up in my heart, as I reflected that Grantley was my cousin, and that I should soon see him in spite of Aunt Kizzy, who, I think, was really sorry for me and did not resent what I said to her. She had me in her room for an hour after lunch, and tried to smooth the matter over.

“You are very pretty,” she said, “and Grant is very susceptible to a pretty face, and if he had seen yours he might have paid you attentions which would have turned your head, and perhaps have done you harm as they would have meant nothing. They couldn’t mean anything; they must mean nothing.”

She was getting more and more excited, and began to walk the floor as she went on:

“I may as well tell you that I dread his coming. He is very magnetic,—with something about him which attracts every one. Your father had it, and your grandfather before him, and Grant has it, and you will be influenced by it, but it must not be. Oh, why did I let you come here, with your fatal beauty, which is sure to work us evil? or, having come, why are you not in the Hepburn line?”

I thought she had gone crazy, and stared at her wonderingly as she continued:

“I can’t explain now what I mean, except that Grant must marry money, and you have none. You have only your beauty, which is sure to impress him, but it must not be. Promise me, Doris, to be discreet, and not try to attract him,—not try to win his love.”

“Aunt Keziah! What do you take me for!” I exclaimed, indignantly, and she replied:

“Forgive me; I hardly know what I am saying; only it must not be. You must not mar my scheme, though if you were in the line, I’d accept you so gladly as Grantley’s wife.” And then, to my utter amazement, she stooped and kissed me, for the first time since I had known her.

A great deal more she said to me, and when the interview was over, there was on my mind a confused impression that I was not to interfere with her plan of marrying Grantley to a rich wife,—Dorothea Haynes, probably, although no mention was made of her,—and also that I was to treat him very coldly and not in any way try to attract him. The idea was so ludicrous that after a little it rather amused than displeased me, but did not in the least lessen my desire to see the young man who had been the lion at Harvard, and whom I had seen in the car whistling an accompaniment to Dorothea’s banjo.

I have told Aunts Desire and Beriah of that incident, and of nearly all I had heard with regard to Grantley and Dorothea, but the only comment they made was that they had known Miss Haynes since she was a child, that she had visited at Morton Park, and would probably come there again in the autumn. Once I thought to ask if she were engaged to Grantley, but the wall of reserve which they manage to throw about them when the occasion requires it, kept me silent, and I can only speculate upon it and anticipate the time when I shall stand face to face with Grantley Montague.

CHAPTER IX.—The Author’s Story.
GRANTLEY AND DORIS.

It was one of those lovely summer days, neither too hot nor too cold, which sometimes occur in Kentucky even in August. The grounds at Morton Park were looking their best, for there had been a heavy shower the previous night, and since sunrise three negroes had been busy mowing and rolling and pruning and weeding until there was scarcely a twig or dead leaf to be seen upon the velvet lawn, while the air was sweet with the odor of the flowers in the beds and on the broad borders. Mas’r Grantley was expected home on the morrow, and that was incentive enough for the blacks to do their best, for the negroes worshiped their young master, who, while maintaining a proper dignity of manner, was always kind and considerate and even familiar with them to a certain extent. Within doors everything was also ready for the young man. Keziah had indulged in a new cap, Dizzy in a pretty tea-gown, while Beriah had spent her surplus money for a new fur rug for Grant’s room, which had been made very bright and attractive with the decorations which had come with the picture in the box from Cambridge. As for Doris, she had nothing new, nor did she need anything, and she made a very pretty picture in her simple muslin dress and big garden-hat, when about four o’clock she took a book and sauntered down to a summer-house in the rear of the grounds, near the little gate which opened upon the turnpike and was seldom used except when some one of the family wished to go out that way to call upon a neighbor or meet the stage.

Taking a seat in the arbor, Doris was soon so absorbed in her book as not to hear the stage from Frankfort when it stopped at the gate, or to see the tall young man with satchel in one hand and light walking-cane in the other who came up the walk at a rapid rate and quickened his steps when he caught a glimpse of a light dress among the green of the summer-house. Grantley, who had been spending a little time with Dorothea at Wilmot Terrace, which was a mile or more out of Cincinnati, had not intended to come home until the next day, but there had suddenly come over him an intense longing to see his aunts and the old place, which he could not resist, while, to say the truth, he was getting a little tired of constant companionship with Dorothea and wished to get away from her and rest. It was all very well, he said to himself, to be kissed and caressed and made much of by a nice girl for a while, but there was such a thing as too much of it, and a fellow would rather do some of the love-making himself. Dorothea was all right, of course, and he liked her better than any girl he had ever seen, although she was not his ideal, which he should never find. He had given that up, and the Lost Star did not now flit across his memory as often as formerly, although he had not forgotten her, and still saw at times the face which had shone upon him for a brief moment and then been lost, as he believed, forever. He was not, however, thinking of it now, when, wishing to surprise his aunts, he dismounted from the stage at the gate and came hurrying up the walk,—the short cut to the house. Catching sight of Doris’s dress, and thinking it was his aunt Desire, he called out in his loud, cheery voice, “Hello, Aunt Dizzy! You look just like a young girl in that blue gown and big hat with poppies on it. Are you glad to see me?”

In an instant Doris was on her feet and confronting him with the bright color staining her cheeks and a kindling light in her blue eyes as she went forward to meet him. She knew who it was, and, with a bright smile which made his heart beat rapidly, she offered him her hand and said, “I am not your aunt Dizzy, but if you are Grantley Montague I am your cousin, Doris Morton,—Gerald Morton’s daughter,—and I am very glad to see you.”

For the first time in his life Grantley’s speech forsook him. Here was his Lost Star, declaring herself to be his cousin! What did it mean? Dropping his satchel and taking off his soft hat, with which he fanned himself furiously, he exclaimed, “Great Scott! My cousin Doris! Gerold Morton’s daughter! I don’t understand you. I never knew he had a daughter, or much about him any way. Where have you kept yourself, that I have never seen or heard of you, and why haven’t my aunts told me of you?”

He had her hand in his, as he led her back to the summer-house, while she said to him. “A part of the time I have been at Wellesley. I was there when you were at Harvard, and used to hear a great deal of you, although I never dreamed you were my cousin till I came here.”

This took his breath away, and, sitting down beside her, he plied her with questions until he knew all that she knew of her past and why they had been kept apart so long.

“By Jove, I don’t like it,” he said. “Why, if I had known you were at Wellesley I should have spent half my time on the road between there and Harvard——”

“And the other half between Harvard and Madame De Moisiere’s?” Doris said, archly, as she moved a little from him, for he had a hand on her shoulder now.

“What do you mean?” he asked, quickly, while something of the light faded from his eyes, and the eagerness from his voice.

“I heard a great deal about you from different sources, and about Miss Haynes, too; and I once saw you with her in the train whistling an accompaniment to her banjo,” Doris replied.

“The dickens you did!” Grant said, dropping Doris’s hand, which he had held so closely.

It is a strange thing to say of an engaged young man that the mention of his betrothed was like a breath of cold wind chilling him suddenly, but it was so in Grant’s case. With the Lost Star sitting by him, he had for a moment forgotten Dorothea, whose farewell kiss was only a few hours old.

“The dickens you did! Well, I suppose you thought me an idiot; but what did you think of Dorothea?” he asked, and Doris replied:

“I thought her very nice, and wished I might know her, for I felt sure I should like her. And she is coming to Morton Park in the autumn. Aunt Brier told me.

“Yes, I believe she is to visit us then,” Grant said, without a great deal of enthusiasm, and then, changing the conversation, he began to ask about his aunts, and what Doris thought of them, and if she were happy with them, and when she first heard he was her cousin, and how.

She told him of the box and the picture which had led to the disclosure, and which she had recognized at once.

“And your father was the artist!” he exclaimed. “By Jove, that’s funny! How things come round! I found it in a dealer’s shop and bought it because it looked so much like my aunts, although I did not really suppose they were the originals, as I never remembered them as they are on the canvas. And that moon-faced baby was meant for me, was it? What did you think of him?”

“I didn’t think him very interesting,” Doris replied; and then they both laughed, and said the pleasant nothings which two young people who are pleased with each other are apt to say, and on the strength of their cousinship became so confidential and familiar that at the end of half an hour Doris felt that she had known Grant all her life, while he could scarcely have told how he did feel.

Doris’s beauty, freshness, and vivacity, so different from what he had been accustomed to in the class of girls he had known, charmed and intoxicated him, while the fact that she was his cousin and the Lost Star bewildered and confused him; and added to this was a feeling of indignation that he had so long been kept in ignorance of her existence.

“I don’t like it in Aunt Kizzy, and I mean to tell her so,” he said, at last, as he rose to his feet, and, picking up his satchel, went striding up the walk towards the house, with Doris at his side.

It was now nearly six o’clock, and Aunt Kizzy was adjusting her cap and giving sundry other touches to her toilet preparatory to dinner, when, glancing from her window, she saw the young couple as they emerged from a side path, Doris with her sun-hat in her hand and her hair blowing about her glowing face, which was lifted towards Grant, who was looking down at her and talking rapidly. Miss Kizzy knew Doris was pretty, but never had the girl’s beauty struck her as it did now, when she saw her with Grant and felt an indefinable foreboding that the Hepburn line was in danger.

“Doris is a flirt, and Grant is no better, and I’ll send for Dorothea at once. There is no need to wait until autumn,” she said to herself, as she went down stairs and out upon the piazza, where Beriah and Desire were already, for both had seen him from the parlor and had hurried out to meet him.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he said to each of the three aunts, as he kissed them affectionately. “I know you didn’t expect me,” he continued, as, with the trio clinging to him and making much of him, he went into the house,—“I know you didn’t expect me so soon, but the fact is I was homesick and wished to see you all and so I came. I hope you are glad. And, I say, why in the name of all that is good didn’t you ever tell me I had a cousin,—and at Wellesley, too? And why did you never tell me more of Cousin Gerold, who, it seems, painted that picture of you all? It’s awfully queer. Hello, Tom, how d’ye?” he added, as a woolly head appeared in the doorway and a grinning negro answered:

“Jes’ tol’able, thanky, Mas’r Grant. How d’ye youself?”

Keziah was evidently very glad of this diversion, which turned the conversation away from Doris, who had remained outside, with a feeling that for the present the aunts must have Grant to themselves. How handsome and bright and magnetic he was, and how gay he made the dinner with his jokes and merry laugh! Once, however, it seemed to Doris that a shadow flitted across his face, and that was when Miss Keziah asked after Dorothea.

“Oh, she’s right well,” he answered, indifferently, and when his aunt continued:

“Didn’t she hate to have you leave so abruptly?” he replied, laughingly:

“She paid me the compliment of saying so, but I reckon Aleck Grady will console her for awhile.”

“Who is Aleck Grady?” Miss Morton asked, and Grant replied:

“Have I never written you about Aleck Grady? A good fellow enough, but an awful bore, and a second cousin of Thea’s, who joined us in Egypt and has been with us ever since.”

Beriah had heard of him, but Miss Morton could not recall him, and continued to ask questions about him as if she scented danger from him as well as from Doris. Was he in the Hepburn line and really Thea’s cousin, and did she like him?

At the mention of the Hepburn line Grant’s face clouded, and he answered rather stiffly:

“He is in the Hepburn line, one degree removed from Thea, and he is hunting for a missing link, which, if found, will knock Thea into a cocked hat.”

Miss Morton knew about the missing link herself; indeed, she had once tried to trace it, but had given it up with the conviction that it was extinct, and if she thought so, why, then, it was so, and Aleck Grady would never find it. But he might be dangerous elsewhere, and she repeated her question as to whether Thea liked him or not.

“I dare say,—as her cousin,” Grant replied, adding, with a view to tease his aunt, “and she may get up a warmer feeling, for there is no guessing what will happen when a young man is teaching a girl to ride a bicycle, as he is teaching Thea.”

“Ride a bicycle! Thea on a bicycle! Thea astride of a wheel!” Miss Morton exclaimed, horrified and aghast at the idea.

Was the world all topsy-turvy, or had she lived so long out of it that she had lost her balance and fallen off? She did not know, and she looked very white and worried, while Grant laughed at her distress and told her how picturesque Thea looked in her blue gown and red shoes and jockey cap, adding:

“And she rides well, too, which is more than can be said of all the girls. But it is of no use to kick at the bicycles; they have come to stay, and I mean to get Doris one as soon as I can. She must not be left out in the cold when Thea and I go racing down the turnpike. She will be splendid on a wheel.”

“God forbid!” came with a gasp from the highly scandalized lady, while Doris’s eyes shone with a wonderful brilliancy as they looked their thanks at Grant.

With a view to change the conversation, Beriah began to question Grant of his trip to Egypt, without a suspicion of the deep waters into which she was sailing. After describing some of the excursions on the donkeys, Grant suddenly exclaimed:

“By the way, Aunt Brier, I met an old acquaintance of yours in Cairo, Tom Atkins, who said he used to visit Morton Park. Do you remember him?”

Beriah was white to the roots of her hair, and her hand shook so that her coffee was spilled upon the damask cloth as she answered, faintly:

“Tom Atkins? yes, I remember him.”

It was Keziah who came to the rescue now by giving the signal to leave the table, and so put an end for the time being to the conversation concerning Tom Atkins; but that evening, after most of the family had retired, as Grant sat smoking in the moonlight at the end of the piazza, a slender figure clad in a gray wrapper with a white scarf on her head stole up to him and said, very softly and sadly:

“Now, Grant, tell me about Tom.”

Grant told her all he knew, and that night Beriah wrote in her diary as follows:

“Tom is alive, and wears a fez and a white flannel suit, and has a little, dark-eyed, tawny-haired girl whom he calls Zaidee. Of course there is or has been an Oriental wife, and Tom is as much lost to me as if he were sleeping in his grave. I am glad he is alive, and think I am glad because of the little girl Zaidee. It is a pretty name, and if she were motherless I know I could love her dearly for Tom’s sake, but such happiness is not for me. Ah, well, God knows best.”