The Brimming Cup

OLD MR. WELLES AND YOUNG MR. MARSH

Having lifted the knocker and let it fall, the two men stood gazing with varying degrees of attention at the closed white-painted old door. The younger, the one with the round dark head and quick dark eyes, seemed extremely interested in the door, and examined it competently, its harmoniously disposed wide panels, the shapely fan-light over it, the small panes of greenish old glass on each side. "Beautiful old bits you get occasionally in these out-of-the-way holes," he remarked. But the older man was aware of nothing so concrete and material. He saw the door as he saw everything else that day, through a haze. Chiefly he was concerned as to what lay behind the door. . . . "My neighbors," he thought, "the first I ever had."

The sun shone down through the bare, beautiful twigs of the leafless elms, in a still air, transparent and colorless.

The handle of the door turned, the door opened. The older man was too astonished by what he saw to speak, but after an instant's pause the younger one asked if Mr. and Mrs. Crittenden were at home and could see callers. The lean, aged, leather-colored woman, with shiny opaque black eyes, opened the door wider and silently ushered them into the house.

As long as she was in sight they preserved a prudent silence as profound as hers, but when she had left them seated, and disappeared, they turned to each other with lifted eyebrows. "Well, what was that, do you suppose?" exclaimed the Younger. He seemed extremely interested and amused. "I'm not so sure, Mr. Welles, about your being safe in never locking your doors at night, as they all tell you, up here. With that for a neighbor!"

The older man had a friendly smile for the facetious intention of this. "I guess I won't have anything that'd be worth locking doors on," he said. He looked about him still smiling, his pleasant old eyes full of a fresh satisfaction in what he saw. The room was charming to his gaze, cheerful and homey. "I don't believe I'm going to have anything to complain of, with the folks that live in this house," he said, "any more than with any of the rest of it."

The other nodded. "Yes, it's a very good room," he agreed. After a longer inspection, he added with a slight accent of surprise, "An oddly good room; stunning! Look at the color in those curtains and the walls, and the arrangement of those prints over that Chippendale sewing-table. I wonder if it's accidental. You wouldn't think you'd find anybody up here who could achieve it consciously."

He got to his feet with a vigorous precision of movement which the other admired. "Well, he's grown to be considerable of a man," he thought to himself. "A pity his father couldn't have lived to see it, all that aliveness that had bothered them so much, down at last where he's got his grip on it. And enough of it, plenty of it, oceans of it, left so that he is still about forty times more alive than anybody else." He looked tolerantly with his tired elderly amusement at the other, stepping about, surveying the room and every object in it.

The younger brought himself up short in front of a framed photograph. "Why, here's a château-fort I don't know!" he said with an abrupt accent. He added, with some vehemence, "I never even heard of it, I'm sure. And it's authentic, evidently."

The older man sat perfectly still. He did not know what a shatto four was, nor had he the slightest desire to ask and bring the information down on him, given as the other would give it, pressingly, vividly, so that you had to listen whether you wanted to or not. Heaven knew he did not want to know about whatever it was, this time. Not about that, nor anything else. He only wanted to rest and have a little life before it was too late. It was already too late for any but the quietest sort. But that was no matter. He wouldn't have liked the other kind very well probably. He certainly had detested the sort of "life" he'd experienced in business. The quietest sort was what he had always wanted and never got. And now it really seemed as though he was going to have it. For all his fatigued pose in the old arm-chair, his heart beat faster at the idea. He hadn't got used to being free yet. He'd heard people say that when you were first married it was like that, you couldn't realize it. He'd heard one of the men at the office say that for a long time, every time he heard his bride's skirts rustle, he had to turn his head to make sure she was really there. Well, he would like now to get up and look out of that window and see if his garden was really there. His garden! He thought with a secret feeling, half pity and half shame, of those yellowed old seed catalogues which had come, varnished and brilliant and new, year after year, so long ago, which he'd looked at so hard and so long, in the evenings, and put away to get yellow and sallow like his face . . . and his hopes. It must be almost time to "make garden," he thought. He had heard them saying at the store that the sap was beginning to run in the maple-trees. He would have just time to get himself settled in his house . . . he felt an absurd young flush come up under his grizzled beard at this phrase . . . "his house," his own house, with bookshelves, and a garden. How he loved it all already! He sat very still, feeling those savagely lopped-off tendrils put out their curling fingers once more, this time unafraid. He sat there in the comfortable old arm-chair at rest as never before. He thought, "This is the way I'm going to feel right along, every day, all the time," and closed his eyes.

He opened them again in a moment, moved subconsciously by the life-time habit of making sure what Vincent was up to. He smiled at the keen look of alert, prick-eared attention which the other was still giving to that room! Lord, how Vincent did love to get things all figured out! He probably had, by this time, an exact diagram of the owners of the house all drawn up in his mind and would probably spend the hour of their call, seeing if it fitted. Not that they would have any notion he was doing anything but talk a blue streak, or was thinking of anything but introducing an old friend.

One thing he wanted in his garden was plenty of gladioli. Those poor, spindling, watery ones he had tried to grow in the window-box, he'd forget that failure in a whole big row all along the terrace, tall and strong, standing up straight in the country sunshine. What was the address of that man who made a specialty of gladioli? He ought to have noted it down. "Vincent," he asked, "do you remember the address of that Mr. Schwatzkummerer who grew nothing but gladioli?" Vincent was looking with an expression of extreme astonishment at the sheet of music on the piano. He started at the question, stared, recollected himself, laughed, and said, "Heavens, no, Mr. Welles!" and went back into his own world. There were lots of things, Mr. Welles reflected, that Vincent did not care about just as hard as he cared about others.

In a moment the younger man came and sat down on the short, high-armed sofa. Mr. Welles thought he looked puzzled, a very unusual expression on that face. Maybe, after all, he hadn't got the owners of the house so well-plotted out as he thought he ought to. He himself, going on with his own concerns, remarked, "Well, the name must be in the Long Island telephone directory. When you go back you could look it up and send me word."

"Whose name?" asked Vincent blankly.

"Schwatzkummerer," said the other.

"What!" cried Vincent incredulously, and then, "Oh yes," and then, "Sure, yes, I'll look it up. I'm going back Thursday on the night train. I won't leave the Grand Central without going to a telephone booth, looking it up, and sending it to you on a postcard, mailed there. It ought to be here on the morning mail Saturday."

The older man knew perfectly well that he was being a little laughed at, for his absorption in gladioli, and not minding it at all, laughed himself, peaceably. "It would take a great deal more than a little of Vincent's fun," he thought, "to make me feel anything but peaceable here." He was quite used to having people set him down as a harmless, worn-out old duffer, and he did not object to this conception of his character. It made a convenient screen behind which he could carry on his own observation and meditation uninterrupted.

"Here comes somebody," said Vincent and turned his quick eyes toward the door, with an eager expression of attention. He really must have been stumped by something in the room, thought Mr. Welles, and meant to figure it out from the owners of the house themselves.

The tall, quiet-looking lady with the long dark eyes, who now came in alone, excusing herself for keeping them waiting, must of course be Mrs. Crittenden, Mr. Welles knew. He wished he could get to his feet as Vincent did, looking as though he had got there by a bound or a spring and were ready for another. He lifted himself out of his arm-chair with a heaviness he knew seemed all the heavier by contrast, took the slim hand Mrs. Crittenden offered him, looked at her as hard as he dared, and sank again into the arm-chair, as she motioned him to do. He had had a long experience in judging people quickly by the expression of their faces, and in that short length of time he had decided thankfully that he was really, just as he had hoped, going to like his new neighbor as much as all the rest of it. He gave her a propitiatory smile, hoping she might like him a little, too, and hoping also that she would not mind Vincent. Sometimes people did, especially nice ladies such as evidently Mrs. Crittenden was. He observed that as usual Vincent had cut in ahead of everybody else, had mentioned their names, both of them, and was talking with that . . . well, the way he did, which people either liked very much or couldn't abide. He looked at Vincent as he talked. He was not a great talker himself, which gave him a great deal of practice in watching people who did. He often felt that he saw more than he heard, so much more did people's faces express than their words.

He noticed that the younger man was smiling a good deal, showing those fine teeth of his, and he had one of those instantaneously-gone, flash-light reminiscences of elderly people, . . . the day when Mr. Marsh had been called away from the office and had asked him to go with little Vincent to keep an appointment with the dentist. Heavens! How the kid had roared and kicked! And now he sat there, smiling, "making a call," probably with that very filling in his tooth, grown-up, not even so very young any more, with a little gray in his thick hair, what people often called a good-looking man. How life did run between your fingers! Well, he would close his hand tight upon what was left to him. He noticed further that as Vincent talked, his eyes fixed on his interlocutor, his vigorous hands caressed with a slow circular motion the rounded arms of his chair. "What a three-ringed circus that fellow is," he thought. "I bet that the lady thinks he hasn't another idea in his head but introducing an old friend, and all the time he's taking her in, every inch of her, and three to one, what he'll talk about most afterwards is the smooth hard feeling of those polished arm-chairs." Vincent was saying, ". . . and so, we heard in a round-about way too long to bother you with, about the small old house next door being for sale, and how very quiet and peaceful a spot this is, and the Company bought it for Mr. Welles for a permanent home, now he has retired."

"Pretty fine of them!" murmured the older man dutifully, to the lady.

Vincent went on, "Oh, it's only the smallest way for them to show their sense of his life-time devotion to their interests. There's no estimating what we all owe him, for his steadiness and loyalty and good judgment, especially during that hard period, near the beginning. You know, when all electrical businesses were so entirely on trial still. Nobody knew whether they were going to succeed or not. My father was one of the Directors from the first and I've been brought up in the tradition of how much the small beginning Company is indebted to Mr. Welles, during the years when they went down so near the edge of ruin that they could see the receiver looking in through the open door."

Welles moved protestingly. He never had liked the business and he didn't like reminders that he owed his present comfort to it. Besides this was reading his own epitaph. He thought he must be looking very foolish to Mrs. Crittenden. Vincent continued, "But of course that's of no great importance up here. What's more to the purpose is that Mr. Welles is a great lover of country life and growing things, and he's been forced to keep his nose on a city grindstone all his life until just now. I think I can guarantee that you'll find him a very appreciative neighbor, especially if you have plenty of gladioli in your garden."

This last was one of what Welles called "Vincent's sidewipes," which he could inlay so deftly that they seemed an integral part of the conversation. He wondered what Mrs. Crittenden would say, if Vincent ever got through his gabble and gave her a chance. She was turning to him now, smiling, and beginning to speak. What a nice voice she had! How nice that she should have such a voice!

"I'm more than glad to have you both come in to see me, and I'm delighted that Mr. Welles is going to settle here. But Mr. . . ." she hesitated an instant, recalled the name, and went on, "Mr. Marsh doesn't need to explain you any more. It's evident that you don't know Ashley, or you'd realize that I've already heard a great deal more about you than Mr. Marsh would be likely to tell me, very likely a good deal more than is true. I know for instance, . . ." she laughed and corrected herself, ". . . at least I've been told, what the purchase price of the house was. I know how Harry Wood's sister-in-law's friend told you about Ashley and the house in the first place. I know how many years you were in the service of the Company, and how your pension was voted unanimously by the Directors, and about the silver loving-cup your fellow employees in the office gave you when you retired; and indeed every single thing about you, except the exact relation of the elderly invalid to whose care you gave up so generously so much of your life; I'm not sure whether I she was an aunt or a second-cousin." She paused an instant to give them a chance to comment on this, but finding them still quite speechless, she went on. "And now I know another thing, that you like gladioli, and that is a real bond."

She was interrupted here by a great explosive laugh from Vincent. It was his comment on her speech to them, and for a time he made no other, eyeing her appreciatively as she and Mr. Welles talked garden together, and from time to time chuckling to himself. She gave him once a sidelong amused glance, evidently liking his capacity to laugh at seeing the ground cut away from under his feet, evidently quite aware that he was still thinking about that, and not at all about Mr. Welles and tulip-beds. Welles was relieved at this. Apparently she was going to "take" Vincent the right way. Some ladies were frightfully rubbed the wrong way by that strange great laugh of Vincent's. And what she knew about gardening! And not only about gardening in general, but about his own garden. He was astounded at her knowledge apparently of every inch of the quadrangle of soil back of his house, and at the revelations she made to him of what could lie sleeping under a mysterious blank surface of earth. Why, a piece of old ground was like a person. You had to know it, to have any idea of all that was hidden in its bosom, good and bad. "There never was such a place for pigweed as the lower end of your vegetable lot," she told him; "you'll have to get up nights to fight it if there is plenty of rain this summer." And again, "Be careful about not digging too close to the east wall of your terrace. There is a border of peonies there, splendid pink ones, and you're likely to break off the shoots. They don't show so early as the red ones near the walk, that get more sun."

"Did you ever use to live in that house?" he asked her, respectful of her mastery of its secrets.

She laughed. "No, oh no. We've lived right here all the eleven years of our life in Vermont. But there's another side to the local wireless information-bureau that let me know all about you before you ever got here. We all know all about everybody and everything, you know. If you live in the country you're really married to humanity, for better or for worse, not just on speaking terms with it, as you are in the city. Why, I know about your garden because I have stood a thousand, thousand times leaning on my hoe in my own garden, discussing those peonies with old Mrs. Belham who lived there before you." This seemed to bring up some picture into her mind at which she looked for a moment, turning from it to the man beside her, with a warmth in her voice which went to his heart. "It's been forlorn having that dear little old house empty and cold. I can't tell you how glad I am you have come to warm it, and live in it."

The wonder of it overcame Mr. Welles like a wave. "I can't believe I'm really going to!" he cried desperately. "It doesn't seem possible!" He felt shamed, knowing that he had burst out too violently. What could she know of what lay back of him, that he was escaped from! What could she think of him, but that he was a foolish, bitter old man?

She did not seem to think that, looking at him attentively as though she wanted to make out just what he meant. Perhaps she did make out, for she now said gently, "I believe you are going to like it, Mr. Welles. I believe you are going to find here what, . . . what you deserve to find." She said quietly, "I hope we shall be good neighbors to you."

She spoke so kindly, her look on him was so humane that he felt the water coming to his eyes. He was in a foolishly emotional state, these first days. The least little thing threw him off the track. It really did seem hardly possible that it was all true. That the long grind at the office was over, the business he had always hated and detested, and the long, hateful slavery at the flat finished at last, and that he had come to live out what was left to him in this lovely, peaceful valley, in that quiet welcoming little house, with this sweet woman next door! He swallowed. The corners of his mouth twitched. What an old lunatic he was. But he did not dare trust himself to speak again.

Now Vincent's voice rose. What a length of time Vincent had been silent,—he who never took a back seat for anybody! What had he been doing all this time, sitting there and staring at them with those awfully brilliant eyes of his? Very likely he had seen the silly weak tears so near the surface, had caught the sentimental twitch of the mouth. Yes, quite certainly, for, now he was showing his tact by changing the subject, changing it with a vengeance. "Mrs. Crittenden," he was saying, "my curiosity has been touched by that very fine photograph over there. I don't recognize the castle it shows."

"That's in Bayonne," she said, and paused, her eyes speculatively on him.

"No, Heavens no! You don't need to tell me that it's not Bayonne, New Jersey!" he answered her unspoken question violently. This made her laugh, opening her long eyes a little. He went on, "I've been as far as Pau, but never went into the Basque country."

"Oh, Pau." She said no more than this, but Welles had the impression that these words somehow had made a comment on Vincent's information. Vincent seemed to think so too, and curiously enough not to think it a very favorable comment. He looked, what he almost never looked, a little nettled, and spoke a little stiffly. "It's a very fine specimen," he said briefly, looking again at the photograph.

"Oh, it looks very much finer and bigger in the photograph than it really is," she told them. "It's only a bandbox of a thing compared with Coucy or Pierrefonds or any of the northern ones. It was built, you know, like the Cathedral at Bayonne, when the Plantagenets still held that country, but after they were practically pretty near English, and both the château and the Gothic cathedral seem queer aliens among the southern natives. I have the photograph up there on the wall only because of early associations. I lived opposite it long ago when I was a little girl."

This, to Mr. Welles, was indistinguishable from the usual talk of people who have been "abroad." To tell the truth they always sounded to him more or less "showing-off," though he humbly tried to think it was only because he could never take any part in such talk. He certainly did not see anything in the speech to make Vincent look at her, almost with his jaw dropped. He himself paid little attention to what she was now saying, because he could not keep his mind from the lingering sweet intonations of her voice. What difference did it make where she had lived as a little girl? She was going to live next door to him now; what an awfully nice woman she was, and quite a good-looking woman too, with a very nice figure, although not in her very first youth, of course. How old could she be? Between thirty and forty of course, but You couldn't tell where. His personal taste was not for such a long face as hers. But you didn't notice that when she smiled. He liked the way she did her black hair, too, so smooth and shining and close to her head. It looked as though she'd really combed and brushed it, and most women's hair didn't.

She turned to him now, again, and said, "Is this your very first call in Ashley? Because if it is, I mustn't miss the opportunity to cut in ahead of all the other gossips, and give you a great deal of information. You might just as well have it all in one piece now, and get it straight, as take it in little snippets from old Mrs. Powers, when she comes to bring your milk, this evening. You see I know that you are to get your milk of the Powers, and that they have plucked up courage to ask you eight cents a quart although the price around here has been, till now, six cents. You'll be obliged to listen to a great many more details from Mrs. Powers than from me, even those she knows nothing about. But of course you must be introduced to the Powers, in toto too. Old Mrs. Powers, a very lively old widow, lives on her farm nearly at the foot of Deer Hollow. Her married son and his family live with her. In this house, there is first of all my husband. I'm so sorry he is away in Canada just now, on lumbering business. He is Neale Crittenden, a Williams man, who in his youth had thoughts of exploring the world but who has turned out head of the 'Crittenden Manufacturing Company,' which is the high-sounding name of a smallish wood-working business on the other side of the field next our house. You can see the buildings and probably hear the saws from your garden. Properly speaking, you know, you don't live in Ashley but in 'Crittenden's' and your house constitutes one quarter of all the residences in that settlement. There are yours, and ours, the mill-buildings, the house where an old cousin of mine lives, and the Powers' house, although that is so far away, nearly half a mile, that it is really only a farm-house in the country. We, you see, are the suburb of Ashley."

Marsh laughed out again at this, and she laughed with him, their eyes, shining with amusement, meeting in a friendly glance.

"The mill is the most important member of Crittenden's, of course. Part of the mill-building is pre-Revolutionary, and very picturesque. In the life-time of my husband's uncle, it still ran by water-power with a beautiful, enormous old mossy water-wheel. But since we took it over, we've had to put in modern machinery very prosaically and run it on its waste of slabs, mostly. All sorts of small, unimportant objects are manufactured there, things you never heard of probably. Backs of hair-brushes, wooden casters to put under beds and chairs, rollers for cotton mills. As soon as my husband returns, I'll ask him to take you through it. That and the old church are the only historic monuments in town."

She stopped and asked him meditatively, "What else do you suppose I need to forestall old Mrs. Powers on? My old Cousin Hetty perhaps. She has a last name, Allen—yes, some connection with Ethan Allen. I am, myself. But everybody has always called her Miss Hetty till few people remember that she has another name. She was born there in the old house below 'the Burning,' and she has lived there for eighty years, and that is all her saga. You can't see her house from here, but it is part of Crittenden's all the same, although it is a mile away by the main road as you go towards the Dug-Way. But you can reach it in six or seven minutes from here by a back lane, through the Eagle Rock woods."

"What nice names!" Mr. Welles luxuriated in them. "The Eagle Rock woods. The Dug-Way. The Burning. Deer Hollow."

"I bet you don't know what they mean," Vincent challenged him. Vincent was always throwing challenges, at everything. But by this time he had learned how to dodge them. "No, I don't know, and I don't care if I don't," he answered happily.

It pleased him that Mrs. Crittenden found this amusing, so that she looked at him laughing. How her eyes glistened when she laughed. It made you laugh back. He risked another small attempt at facetiousness. "Go on with the census of Crittenden's," he told her. "I want to know all about my future fellow-citizens. You haven't even finished up this house, anybody but your husband."

"There is myself. You see me. There is nothing more to that. And there are the three children, Paul, Elly, and Mark, . . ." She paused here rather abruptly, and the whimsical accent of good-humored mockery disappeared. For an instant her face changed into something quite different from what they had seen. Mr. Welles could not at all make out the expression which very passingly had flickered across her eyes with a smoke-like vagueness and rapidity. He had the queerest fancy that she looked somehow scared,—but of course that was preposterous.

"Your call," she told them both, "happens to fall on a day which marks a turning-point in our family life. This is the very first day in ten years, since Paul's birth, that I have not had at least one of the children beside me. Today is the opening of spring term in our country school, and my little Mark went off this morning, for the first time, with his brother and sister. I have been alone until you came." She stopped for a moment. Mr. Welles wished that Vincent could get over his habit of staring at people so. She went on, "I have felt very queer indeed, all day. It's as though . . . you know, when you have been walking up and up a long flight of stairs, and you go automatically putting one foot up and then the other, and then suddenly . . . your upraised foot falls back with a jar. You've come to the top, and, for an instant, you have a gone feeling without your stairs to climb."

It occurred to Mr. Welles that really perhaps the reason why some nice ladies did not like Vincent was just because of his habit of looking at them so hard. He could have no idea how piercingly bright his eyes looked when he fixed them on a speaker like that. And now Mrs. Crittenden was looking back at him, and would notice it. He could understand how a refined lady would feel as though somebody were almost trying to find a key-hole to look in at her,—to have anybody pounce on her so, with his eyes, as Vincent did. She couldn't know, of course, that Vincent went pouncing on ladies and baggagemen and office boys, and old friends, just the same way. He bestirred himself to think of something to say. "I wish I could get up my nerve to ask you, Mrs. Crittenden, about one other person in this house," he ventured, "the old woman . . . the old lady . . . who let us in the door."

At the sound of his voice Mrs. Crittenden looked away from Vincent quickly and looked at him for a perceptible moment before she heard what he had said. Then she explained, smiling, "Oh, she would object very much to being labeled with the finicky title of 'lady.' That was Touclé, our queer old Indian woman,—all that is left of old America here. She belongs to our house, or perhaps I should say it belongs to her. She was born here, a million years ago, more or less, when there were still a few basket-making Indians left in the valley. Her father and mother both died, and she was brought up by the old Great-uncle Crittenden's family. Then my husband's Uncle Burton inherited the house and brought his bride here, and Touclé just stayed on. She always makes herself useful enough to pay for her food and lodging. And when his wife died an elderly woman, Touclé still just stayed on, till he died, and then she went right on staying here in the empty house, till my husband and I got here. We were married in Rome, and made the long trip here without stopping at all. It was dawn, a June morning, when we arrived. We walked all the way from the station at Ashley out to the old house, here at Crittenden's. And . . . I'll never forget the astounded expression on my husband's face when Touclé rose up out of the long grass in the front yard and bade me welcome. She'd known me as a little girl when I used to visit here. She will outlive all of us, Touclé will, and be watching from her room in the woodshed chamber on the dawn of Judgment Day when the stars begin to fall."

Mr. Welles felt a trifle bewildered by this, and showed it. She explained further, "But seriously, I must tell you that she is a perfectly harmless and quite uninteresting old herb-gatherer, although the children in the village are a little afraid of her, because she is an Indian, the only one they have ever seen. She really is an Indian too. She knows every inch of our valley and the mountains better than any lumberman or hunter or fisherman in Ashley. She often goes off and doesn't come back for days. I haven't the least idea where she stays. But she's very good to our children when she's here, and I like her capacity for monumental silence. It gives her very occasional remarks an oracular air, even though you know it's only because she doesn't often open her lips. She helps a little with the house-work, too, although she always looks so absent-minded, as though she were thinking of something very far away. She's quite capable of preparing a good meal, for all she never seems to notice what she's up to. And she's the last member of our family except the very coming-and-going little maids I get once in a while. Ashley is unlike the rest of the world in that it is hard to get domestic servants here.

"Now let me see, whom next to introduce to you. You know all your immediate neighbors now. I shall have to begin on Ashley itself. Perhaps our minister and his wife. They live in the high-porticoed, tall-pillared white old house next door to the church in the village, on the opposite side from the church-yard. They are Ashleyans of the oldest rock. Both of them were born here, and have always lived here. Mr. Bayweather is seventy-five years old and has never had any other parish. I do believe the very best thing I can do for you is to send you straight to them, this minute. There's nothing Mr. Bayweather doesn't know about the place or the people. He has a collection of Ashleyana of all sorts, records, deeds, titles, old letters, family trees. And for the last forty years he has been very busy writing a history of Ashley."

"A history of Ashley?" exclaimed Vincent.

"A history of Ashley," she answered, level-browed.

Mr. Welles had the impression that a "side-wipe" had been exchanged in which he had not shared.

Vincent now asked irrelevantly, "Do you go to church yourself?"

"Oh yes," she answered, "I go, I like to go. And I take the children." She turned her head so that she looked down at her long hands in her lap, as she added, "I think going to church is a refining influence in children's lives, don't you?"

To Mr. Welles' horror this provoked from Vincent one of his great laughs. And this time he was sure that Mrs. Crittenden would take offense, for she looked up, distinctly startled, really quite as though he had looked in through the key-hole. But Vincent went on laughing. He even said, impudently, "Ah, now I've caught you, Mrs. Crittenden; you're too used to keeping your jokes to yourself. And they're much too good for that."

She looked at him hard, with a certain wonder in her eyes.

"Oh, there's no necromancy about it," he told her. "I've been reading the titles of your books and glancing over your music before you came in. And I can put two and two together. Who are you making fun of to yourself? Who first got off that lovely speech about the refining influence of church?"

She laughed a little, half-uneasily, a brighter color mounting to her smooth oval cheeks. "That's one of Mrs. Bayweather's favorite maxims," she admitted. She added, "But I really do like to go to church."

Mr. Welles felt an apprehension about the turn things were taking. Vincent, he felt sure, was on the verge of being up to something. And he did not want to risk offending Mrs. Crittenden. He stood up. "Thank you very much for telling us about the minister and his wife, Mrs. Crittenden. I think we'll go right along down to the village now, and pay a call on them. There'll be time enough before dinner." Vincent of course got up too, at this, saying, "He's the most perfect old housekeeper, you know. He's kept the neatest flat for himself and that aged aunt of his for seventy years."

"Seventy!" cried Mr. Welles, scandalized at the exaggeration.

"Oh, more or less," said Vincent, laughing. Mr. Welles noticed with no enthusiasm that his eyes were extremely bright, that he smiled almost incessantly, that he stepped with an excess of his usual bounce. Evidently something had set him off into one of his fits of wild high spirits. You could almost feel the electricity sparkle from him, as it does from a cat on a cold day. Personally, Mr. Welles preferred not to touch cats when they were like that.

"When are you going back to the city, Mr. Marsh?" asked Mrs. Crittenden, as they said good-bye at the door.

Vincent was standing below her on the marble step. He looked up at her now, and something about his expression made Mr. Welles think again of glossy fur emitting sparks. He said, "I'll lay you a wager, Mrs. Crittenden, that there is one thing your Ashley underground news-service has not told you about us, and that is, that I've come up not only to help Mr. Welles install himself in his new home, but to take a somewhat prolonged rest-cure myself. I've always meant to see more of this picturesque part of Vermont. I've a notion that the air of this lovely spot will do me a world of good."

As Mr. Welles opened his mouth, perhaps rather wide, in the beginning of a remark, he cut in briskly with, "You're worrying about Schwatzkummerer, I know. Never you fear. I'll get hold of his address, all right." He explained briefly to Mrs. Crittenden, startled by the portentous name. "Just a specialist in gladiolus seeds."

"Bulbs!" cried Mr. Welles, in involuntary correction, and knew as he spoke that he had been switched off to a side-track.

"Oh well, bulbs be it," Vincent conceded the point indulgently. He took off his hat in a final salutation to Mrs. Crittenden, and grasping his elderly friend by the arm, moved with him down the flag-paved path.

TABLE TALK

As she and Paul carried the table out to the windless, sunny side-porch, Marise was struck by a hospitable inspiration. "You and Elly go on setting the table," she told the children, and ran across the side-yard to the hedge. She leaned over this, calling, "Mr. Welles! Mr. Welles!" and when he came to the door, "The children and I are just celebrating this first really warm day by having lunch out of doors. Won't you and Mr. Marsh come and join us?"

By the time the explanations and protestations and renewals of the invitation were over and she brought them back to the porch, Paul and Elly had almost finished setting the table. Elly nodded a country-child's silent greeting to the newcomers. Paul said, "Oh goody! Mr. Welles, you sit by me."

Marise was pleased at the friendship growing up between the gentle old man and her little boy.

"Elly, don't you want me to sit by you?" asked Marsh with a playful accent.

Elly looked down at the plate she was setting on the table. "If you want to," she said neutrally.

Her mother smiled inwardly. How amusingly Elly had acquired as only a child could acquire an accent, the exact astringent, controlled brevity of the mountain idiom.

"I think Elly means that she would like it very much, Mr. Marsh," she said laughingly. "You'll soon learn to translate Vermontese into ordinary talk, if you stay on here."

She herself went through the house into the kitchen and began placing on the wheel-tray all the components of the lunch, telling them over to herself to be sure she missed none. "Meat, macaroni, spinach, hot plates, bread, butter, water . . . a pretty plain meal to invite city people to share. Here, I'll open a bottle of olives. Paul, help me get this through the door."

As he pulled at the other end of the wheeled tray, Paul said that Mark had gone upstairs to wash his hands, ages ago, and was probably still fooling around in the soap-suds, and like as not leaving the soap in the water.

"Paul the responsible!" thought his mother. As they passed the foot of the stairs she called up, "Mark! Come along, dear. Lunch is served. All ready," she announced as they pushed the tray out on the porch.

The two men turned around from where they had been gazing up at the mountain. "What is that great cliff of bare rock called?" asked Mr. Marsh.

"Those are the Eagle Rocks," explained Marise, sitting down and motioning them to their places. "Elly dear, don't spread it on your bread so thick. If Mr. Bayweather were here he could probably tell you why they are called that. I have known but I've forgotten. There's some sort of tradition, I believe . . . no, I see you are getting ready to hear it called the Maiden's Leap where the Indian girl leaped off to escape an unwelcome lover. But it's not that this time: something or other about Tories and an American spy . . . ask Mr. Bayweather."

"Heaven forfend!" exclaimed Mr. Marsh.

Marise was amused. "Oh, you've been lectured to on local history, I see," she surmised.

"I found it very interesting," said Mr. Welles, loyally. "Though perhaps he does try to give you a little too much at one sitting."

"Mr. Welles," said Paul, with his mouth full, "fishing season begins in ten days."

Marise decided that she would really have to have a rest from telling Paul not to talk with food in his mouth, and said nothing.

Mr. Welles confessed that he had never gone fishing in his life, and asked if Paul would take him.

"Sure!" said Paul. "Mother and I go, lots."

Mr. Marsh looked at Marise inquiringly. "Yes," she said, "I'm a confirmed fisherman. Some of the earliest and happiest recollections I have, are of fishing these brooks when I was a little girl."

"Here?" asked Mr. Welles. "I thought you lived in France."

"There's time in a child's life to live in various places," she explained. "I spent part of my childhood and youth here with my dear old cousin. The place is full of associations for me. Will you have your spinach now, or later? It'll keep hot all right if you'd rather wait."

"What is this delicious dish?" asked Mr. Marsh. "It tastes like a man's version of creamed chicken, which is always a little too lady-like for me."

"It's a blanquette de veau, and you may be sure I learned to make it in one of the French incarnations, not a Vermont one."

Paul stirred and asked, "Mother, where is Mark? He'll be late for school, if he doesn't hurry."

"That's so," she said, and reflected how often one used that phrase in response to one of Paul's solid and unanswerable statements.

Mark appeared just then and she began to laugh helplessly. His hands were wetly, pinkly, unnaturally clean, but his round, rosy, sunny little face was appallingly streaked and black.

Paul did not laugh. He said in horrified reproach, "Oh, Mark! You never touched your face! It's piggy dirty."

Mark was staggered for a moment, but nothing staggered him long. "I don't get microbes off my face into my food," he said calmly. "And you bet there aren't any microbes left on my hands." He went on, looking at the table disapprovingly, "Mother, there isn't a many on the table this day, and I wanted a many."

"The stew's awful good," said Paul, putting away a large quantity.

"'Very,' not 'awful,' and don't hold your fork like that," corrected Marise, half-heartedly, thinking that she herself did not like the insipid phrase "very good" nor did she consider the way a fork was held so very essential to salvation. "How much of life is convention, any way you arrange it," she thought, "even in such an entirely unconventional one as ours."

"It is good," said Mark, taking his first mouthful. Evidently he had not taken the remarks about his face at all seriously.

"See here, Mark," his mother put it to him as man to man, "do you think you ought to sit down to the table looking like that?"

Mark wriggled, took another mouthful, and got up mournfully.

Paul was touched. "Here, I'll go up with you and get it over quick," he said. Marise gave him a quick approving glance. That was the best side of Paul. You could say what you pleased about the faults of American and French family life, but at any rate the children didn't hate each other, as English children seemed to, in novels at least. It was only last week that Paul had fought the big French Canadian boy in his room at school, because he had made fun of Elly's rubber boots.

As the little boys clattered out she said to the two guests, "I don't know whether you're used to children. If you're not, you must be feeling as though you were taking lunch in a boiler factory."

Mr. Welles answered, "I never knew what I was missing before. Especially Paul. That first evening when you sent him over with the cake, as he stood in the door, I thought, 'I wish I could have had a little son like that!'"

"We'll share him with you, Mr. Welles." Marise was touched by the wistfulness of his tone. She noticed that Mr. Marsh had made no comment on the children. He was perhaps one of the people who never looked at them, unless they ran into him. Eugenia Mills was like that, quite sincerely.

"May I have a little more of the blanquette, if I won't be considered a glutton?" asked Mr. Marsh now. "I've sent to the city for an invaluable factotum of mine to come and look out for us here, and when he comes, I hope you'll give him the recipe."

The little boys clattered back and began to eat again, in haste with frequent demands for their mother to tell them what time it was. In spite of this precaution, the clock advanced so relentlessly that they were obliged to set off, the three of them, before dessert was eaten, with an apple in one hand and a cookie in the other.

The two men leaned back in their chairs with long breaths, which Marise interpreted as relief. "Strenuous, three of them at once, aren't they?" she said. "A New York friend of mine always says she can take the vibration-cure, only by listening to family talk at our table."

"What's the vibration-cure?" asked Mr. Welles seriously.

"Oh, I don't know!" confessed Marise. "I'm too busy to keep up with the latest fads in cures as Eugenia does. You may meet her there this summer, by the way. She usually spends a part of the summer with us. She is a very old school-friend of mine."

"French or Vermont incarnation?" inquired Marsh casually. "May I smoke? Won't you have a cigarette, yourself?"

"Oh, French!" Marise was immensely amused, and then, remembering that the joke was not apparent, "If you'd ever seen her, even for a moment, you'd know why I laugh. She is the embodiment of sophisticated cosmopolitanism, an expert on all sorts of esoteric, aesthetic and philosophic matters, book-binding, historic lace, the Vedanta creed, Chinese porcelains, Provençal poetry, Persian shawls . . ."

"What nationality is she, herself?" inquired Mr. Welles with some curiosity.

Marise laughed. "She was born in Arkansas, and brought up in Minnesota, what did you suppose? No European could ever take culture so seriously. You know how any convert always has a thousand times more fervor than the fatigued members of the faith who were born to it."

"Like Henry James, perhaps?" suggested Marsh.

"Yes, I always envied Henry James the conviction he seems to have had, all his life, that Europeans are a good deal more unlike other people than I ever found them. It may be obtuseness on my part, but I never could see that people who lived in the Basses-Pyrénées are any more cultivated or had any broader horizons than people who live in the Green Mountains. My own experience is that when you actually live with people, day after day, year after year, you find about the same range of possibilities in any group of them. But I never advance this theory to Eugenia, who would be horrified to know that I find a strong family likeness between her New York circle and my neighbors here."

She had been aware that Marsh was looking at her as she spoke. What a singular, piercing eye he had! It made her a little restive, as at a too-intimate contact, to be looked at so intently, although she was quite aware that there was a good deal of admiration in the look. She wondered what he was thinking about her; for it was evident that he was thinking about her, as he sent out that penetrating gaze.

But perhaps not, after all; for he now said as if in answer to her last remark, "I have my own way of believing that, too, that all people are made of the same stuff. Mostly I find them perfectly negligible, too utterly without savor even to glance at. Once in a thousand years, it seems to me, you come across a human being who's alive as you are, who speaks your language, is your own kind, belongs to you. When you do, good Lord! What a moment!"

He pronounced this in a perfectly impersonal tone, but something about the quality of his voice made Marise flash a quick glance at him. His eyes met hers with a sudden, bold deepening of their gaze. Marise's first impulse was to be startled and displeased, but in an instant a quick fear of being ridiculous had voiced itself and was saying to her, "Don't be countrified. It's only that I've had no contact with people-of-the-world for a year now. That's the sort of thing they get their amusement from. It would make him laugh to have it resented." Aloud she said, rather at random, "I usually go down once a season to the city for a visit to this old friend of mine, and other friends there. But this last winter I didn't get up the energy to do that."

"I should think," said Mr. Welles, "that last winter you'd have used up all your energy on other things, from what Mrs. Powers tells me about the big chorus you always lead here in winters."

"That does take up a lot of time," she admitted. "But it's a generator of energy, leading a chorus is, not a spender of it."

"Oh, come!" protested Marsh. "You can't put that over on me. To do it as I gather you do . . . heavens! You must pour out your energy and personality as though you'd cut your arteries and let the red flood come."

"You pour it out all right," she agreed, "but you get it back a thousand times over." She spoke seriously, the topic was vital to her, her eyes turned inward on a recollection. "It's amazing. It's enough to make a mystic out of a granite boulder. I don't know how many times I've dragged myself to a practice-evening dog-tired physically with work and care of the children, stale morally, sure that I had nothing in me that was profitable for any purpose, feeling that I'd do anything to be allowed to stay at home, to doze on the couch and read a poor novel." She paused, forgetting to whom she was speaking, forgetting she was not alone, touched and stirred with a breath from those evenings.

"Well . . . ?" prompted Mr. Marsh. She wondered if she were mistaken in thinking he sounded a little irritable.

"Well," she answered, "it has not failed a single time. I have never come back otherwise than stronger, and rested, the fatigue and staleness all gone, buried deep in something living." She had a moment of self-consciousness here, was afraid that she had been carried away to seem high-flown or pretentious, and added hastily and humorously, "You mustn't think that it's because I'm making anything wonderful out of my chorus of country boys and girls and their fathers and mothers. It's no notable success that puts wings to my feet as I come home from that work. It's only the music, the hearty satisfying singing-out, by ordinary people, of what too often lies withering in their hearts."

She was aware that she was speaking not to sympathizers. Mr. Welles looked vague, evidently had no idea what she meant. Mr. Marsh's face looked closed tight, as though he would not open to let in a word of what she was saying. He almost looked hostile. Why should he? When she stopped, a little abashed at having been carried along by her feelings, Mr. Marsh put in lightly, with no attempt at transition, "All that's very well. But you can't make me believe that by choice you live up her all the year around. You must nearly perish away with homesickness for the big world, you who so evidently belong in it."

"Where is the big world?" she challenged him, laughing. "When you're young you want to go all round the globe to look for it. And when you've gone, don't you find that your world everywhere is about as big as you are?"

Mr. Marsh eyed her hard, and shook his head, with a little scornful downward thrust of the corners of his mouth, as though he were an augur who refused to lend himself to the traditional necessity to keep up the appearance of believing in an exploded religion. "You know where the big world is," he said firmly. "It's where there are only people who don't have to work, who have plenty of money and brains and beautiful possessions and gracious ways of living, and few moral scruples." He defined it with a sovereign disregard for softening phrases.

She opposed to this a meditative, "Oh, I suppose the real reason why I go less and less to New York, is that it doesn't interest me as it used to. Human significance is what makes interest for me, and when you're used to looking deep into human lives out of a complete knowledge of them as we do up here, it's very tantalizing and tormenting and after a while gets boring, the superficial, incoherent glimpses you get in such a smooth, glib-tongued circle as the people I happen to know in New York. It's like trying to read something in a language of which you know only a few words, and having the book shown to you by jerks at that!"

Mr. Marsh remarked speculatively, as though they were speaking of some quite abstract topic, "It may also be possibly that you are succumbing to habit and inertia and routine."

She was startled again, and nettled . . . and alarmed. What a rude thing to say! But the words were no sooner out of his mouth than she had felt a scared wonder if perhaps they were not true. She had not thought of that possibility.

"I should think you would like the concerts, anyhow," suggested Mr. Welles.

"Yes," said Marise, with the intonation that made the affirmation almost a negative. "Yes, of course. But there too . . . music means so much to me, so very much. It makes me sick to see it pawed over as it is among people who make their livings out of it; used as it so often is as a background for the personal vanity or greed of the performer. Take an ordinary afternoon solo concert given by a pianist or singer . . . it always seems to me that the music they make is almost an unconsidered by-product with them. What they're really after is something else."

Marsh agreed with her, with a hearty relish, "Yes, musicians are an unspeakable bunch!

"I suppose," Marise went on, "that I ought not to let that part of it spoil concert music for me. And it doesn't, of course. I've had some wonderful times . . . people who play in orchestra and make chamber-music are the real thing. But the music you make yourself . . . the music we make up here . . . well, perhaps my taste for it is like one's liking (some people call it perverse) for French Primitive painting, or the something so awfully touching and heart-felt that was lost when the Renaissance came up over the Alps with all its knowingness."

"You're not pretending that you get Vermonters to make music?" protested Marsh, highly amused at the notion.

"I don't know," she admitted, "whether it is music or not. But it is something alive." She fell into a muse, "Queer, what a spider-web of tenuous complication human relationships are. I never would have thought, probably, of trying anything of the sort if it hadn't been for a childhood recollection. . . . French incarnation this time," she said lightly to Marsh. "When I was a little girl, a young priest, just a young parish priest, in one of the poor hill-parishes of the Basque country, began to teach the people of his parish really to sing some of the church chants. I never knew much about the details of what he did, and never spoke to him in my life, but from across half the world he has reached out to touch this cornet of America. By the time I was a young lady, he had two or three big country choruses under his direction. We used to drive up fist to one and then to another of those hill-towns, all white-washed houses and plane-tree atriums, and sober-eyed Basques, to hear them sing. It was beautiful. I never have had a more complete expression of beauty in all my life. It seemed to me the very soul of music; those simple people singing, not for pay, not for notoriety, out of the fullness of their hearts. It has been one of the things I never forgot, a standard, and a standard that most music produced on platforms before costly audiences doesn't come up to."

"I've never been able to make anything out of music, myself," confessed Mr. Welles. "Perhaps you can convert me. I almost believe so."

"'Gene Powers sings!" cried Marise spiritedly. "And if he does . . ."

"Any relation to the lively old lady who brings our milk?"

"Her son. Haven't you seen him yet? A powerfully built granite rock of a man. Silent as a granite rock too, as far as small talk goes. But he turns out to have a bass voice that is my joy. It's done something for him, too, I think, really and truly, without sentimental exaggeration at all. He suffered a great injustice some six or seven years ago, that turned him black and bitter, and it's only since he has been singing in our winter choir that he has been willing to mix again with anyone."

She paused for a moment, and eyed them calculatingly. It occurred to her that she had been talking about music and herself quite enough. She would change the subject to something matter-of-fact. "See here, you'll be sure to have to hear all that story from Mr. Bayweather in relentless detail. It might be your salvation to be able to say that I had told you, without mentioning that it was in a severely abridged form. He'd want to start back in the eighteenth century, and tell you all about that discreditable and unreconstructed Tory ancestor of mine who, when he was exiled from Ashley, is said to have carried off part of the town documents with him to Canada. Whether he did or not (Mr. Bayweather has a theory, I believe, that he buried them in a copper kettle on Peg-Top Hill), the fact remains that an important part of the records of Ashley are missing and that has made a lot of trouble with titles to land around here. Several times, unscrupulous land-grabbers have taken advantage of the vagueness of the titles to cheat farmers out of their inheritance. The Powers case is typical. There always have been Powerses living right there, where they do now; that big pine that towers up so over their house was planted by 'Gene's great-grandfather. And they always owned an immense tract of wild mountain land, up beyond the Eagle Rock range, along the side of the Red-Brook marsh. But after paying taxes on it for generations all during the time when it was too far away to make it profitable to lumber, it was snatched away from them, seven years ago, just as modern methods and higher prices for spruce would have made it very valuable. A lawyer from New Hampshire named Lowder turned the trick. I won't bother you going into the legal details—a question of a fake warranty deed, against 'Gene's quit-claim deed, which was all he had in absence of those missing pages from the town records. As a matter of fact, the lawyer hasn't dared to cut the lumber off it yet, because his claim is pretty flimsy; but flimsy or not, the law regards it as slightly better than 'Gene's. The result is that 'Gene can't sell it and daren't cut it for fear of being involved in a law-suit that he couldn't possibly pay for. So the Powers are poor farmers, scratching a difficult living out of sterile soil, instead of being well-to-do proprietors of a profitable estate of wood-land. And when we see how very hard they all have to work, and how soured and gloomy it has made 'Gene, and how many pleasures the Powers' children are denied, we all join in when Mrs. Powers delivers herself of her white-hot opinion of New Hampshire lawyers! I remember perfectly that Mr. Lowder,—one of the smooth-shaven, thin-lipped, fish-mouthed variety, with a pugnacious jaw and an intimidating habit of talking his New Hampshire dialect out of the corner of his mouth. The poor Powers were as helpless as rabbits before him."

It all came up before her as she talked, that horrid encounter with commercial ruthlessness: she saw again poor 'Gene's outraged face of helpless anger, felt again the heat of sympathetic indignation she and Neale had felt, recognized again the poison which triumphant unrighteousness leaves behind. She shook her head impatiently, to shake off the memory, and said aloud, "Oh, it makes me sick to remember it! We couldn't believe, any of us, that such bare-faced iniquity could succeed."

"There's a good deal of bare-faced iniquity riding around prosperously in high-powered cars," said Mr. Welles, with a lively accent of bitterness. "You have to get used to it in business life. It's very likely that your wicked Mr. Lowder in private life in New Hampshire is a good husband and father, and contributes to all the charitable organizations."

"I won't change my conception of him as a pasty-faced demon," insisted Marise.

It appeared that Mr. Marsh's appetite for local history was so slight as to be cloyed even by the very much abbreviated account she had given them, for he now said, hiding a small yawn, with no effort to conceal the fact that he had been bored, "Mrs. Crittenden, I've heard from Mr. Welles' house the most tantalizing snatches from your piano. Won't you, now we're close to it, put the final touch to our delightful lunch-party by letting us hear it?"

Marise was annoyed by his grand seigneur air of certainty of his own importance, and piqued that she had failed to hold his interest. Both impressions were of a quicker vivacity than was at all the habit of her maturity. She told herself, surprised, that she had not felt this little sharp sting of wounded personal vanity since she was a girl. What did she care whether she had bored him or not? But it was with all her faculties awakened and keen that she sat down before the piano and called out to them, "What would you like?"

They returned the usual protestations that they would like anything she would play, and after a moment's hesitation . . . it was always a leap in the dark to play to people about whose musical capacities you hadn't the faintest idea . . . she took out the Beethoven Sonata album and turned to the Sonata Pathétique. Beethoven of the early middle period was the safest guess with such entirely unknown listeners. For all that she really knew, they might want her to play Chaminade and Moskowsky. Mr. Welles, the nice old man, might find even them above his comprehension. And as for Marsh, she thought with a resentful toss of her head that he was capable of saying off-hand, that he was really bored by all music—and conveying by his manner that it was entirely the fault of the music. Well, she would show him how she could play, at least.

She laid her hands on the keys; and across those little smarting, trivial personalities there struck the clear, assured dignity and worth of her old friend . . . was there ever such a friend as that rough old German who had died so long before she was born? No one could say the human race was ignoble or had never deserved to live, who knew his voice. In a moment she was herself again.

Those well-remembered opening chords, they were by this time not merely musical sounds. They had become something within her, of her own being, rich with a thousand clustered nameless associations, something that thrilled and sang and lived a full harmonious life of its own. That first pearling down-dropping arabesque of treble notes, not only her fingers played those, but every fiber in her, answering like the vibrating wood of a violin, its very cells rearranged in the pattern which the notes had so many times called into existence . . . by the time she had finished she had almost forgotten that she had listeners.

And when, sitting for a moment, coming back slowly from Beethoven's existence to her own, she heard no sound or stir from the porch, she had only a quiet smile of tolerant amusement. Apparently she had not guessed right as to their tastes. Or perhaps she had played them to sleep.

As for herself, she was hungry for more; she reached out her hand towards that world of high, purified beauty which miraculously was always there, with open doors of gold and ivory. . . .

What now? What did she know by heart? The Largo in the Chopin Sonata. That would do to come after Beethoven.

The first plunge into this did not so intimately startle and stir her as the Beethoven movement had done. It was always like that, she thought as she played, the sound of the first note, the first chord struck when one had not played for a day or so; it was having one's closed eyes unsealed to the daylight anew, an incredulous rapture. But after that, though you didn't go on quaking and bowing your head, though you were no longer surprised to find music still there, better than you could possibly remember it, though you took it for granted, how deeply and solidly and steadfastly you lived in it and on it! It made you like the child in the Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and free"; it took you in to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine; and you adored none the less although you were not "breathless with adoration," like the nun; because it was a whole world given to you, not a mere pang of joy; because you could live and move and be blessedly and securely at home in it.

She finished the last note of the Largo and sat quiet for a moment. Then she knew that someone had come into the room behind her. She turned about, facing with serene, wide brows whatever might be there.

The first meeting with the eyes of the man who stood there moved her. So he too deeply and greatly loved music! His face was quite other from the hawk-like, intent, boldly imperious countenance which she had seen before. Those piercing eyes were softened and quietly shining. The arrogant lines about the mouth that could look so bitter and skeptical, were as sweet and candid as a child's.

He smiled at her, a good, grateful, peaceful smile, and nodded, as though now they understood each other with no more need for words. "Go on . . . go on!" was all he said, very gently and softly. He sank down in an arm-chair and leaned his head back in the relaxed pose of listening.

He looked quite and exactly what Marise was feeling.

It was with a stir of all her pulses, a pride, a glory, a new sympathy in her heart, that she turned back to the piano.