He fell silent; then his lips moved again:

Suddenly he broke off, and groaned aloud: “My Lord!” he said all in a breath. “And thirty-five years old—blame near thirty-six!”

He needs interpretation, this unfortunate Lucius. He meant that it was inexplicable and disgraceful for a man of his age to be afraid of a boy of seven and a girl of five. He had never been afraid of anybody else’s children. No; it had to be hers! And that was why he was afraid of them; he knew the truth well enough: he was afraid of them because they were hers. He was a man who had always “got on” with children beautifully; but he was afraid of Maud and Bill. He was afraid of what they would do to him and of what they would think of him.

There, in brief, is the overwhelming part that children can play in true romance!

“Lordy, Lordy!” sighed Lucius Brutus Allen. “Oh, Lordy!”

But at last he bestirred himself. He knew that Saruly, his elderly darky cook, must be waiting for him with impatience; she would complain bitterly of dishes overcooked because of his tardiness. Having glanced down into the Square and found it virtually devoid of life, for this was the universal hour of supper, he set his brown straw hat upon his head, and took the parasol under his arm—not because he meant to return it. He took it with him merely for the pleasure of its society.

Upon the bottom step of the flight of stairs that led down to the street, he found seated a small figure in a white “sailor suit.” This figure rose and spoke politely.

“How do you do?” it said. “Are you Uncle Lucius?”

“Who—— What’s your name?”

“Bill. Bill Ricketts,” said Bill.

Lucius made a hasty motion to reascend the stairs, but Bill confidingly proffered a small, clean hand that Mr. Allen was constrained to accept. Once having accepted it, he found himself expected to retain it.

“Mamma lef’ me sittin’ here to wait till you came downstairs,” Bill explained. “That man that came out said he couldn’t say but he was pretty sure you were up there. She told me to wait till either you came downstairs or she came back for me. She wants her parasol. Come on!”

“Come on where?”

“Up to your house,” said Bill. “She lef’ Maud waitin’ up there for you.”

It was the truth. And after a rather hurried walk, during which the boy spoke not once unless spoken to, but trotted contentedly at Lucius’s side, confidingly hand-in-hand with him, when they came in sight of the small brick house in the big yard, where Lucius lived, a tiny white figure was discernible through the dusk, rocking patiently in a wicker rocking-chair on the veranda.

At sight of them she jumped up and came running to the gate to meet them. But there she paused, gravely.

She made a curtsey, formal but charming.

“How do do, Uncka Wucius?” she said. “Mamma would wike her paraso’.”

Saruly, looming dark and large behind her, supplemented this information: “Miz Ricketts done lef’ the little girl here to wait fer you, Mist’ Allen. She tell me ask you please be so kine as to bring the chillun along home with you, an’ her parasol with ’em. She tell me the chillun been a little upset, jest at first, ’count o’ movin’ to a new place, but they all quieted down now, an’ she think it’ll be safe fer you to stay to dinnuh. An’ as ev’ything in my kitchen’s plum done to a crisp ’count o’ you bein’ so late, Mist’ Allen, if you leave it to me I think you bettuh.”

“I’ll leave it to you, Saruly,” said Lucius, gently. “I think I’d better.”

And then, with the parasol under his arm, and the hand of a child resting quietly in each of his, he turned with Bill and Maud, and, under the small, bright stars of the May evening, set forth from his own gate on his way to Lucy’s.

MURIEL ELIOT’S friends and contemporaries were in the habit of describing her as “the most brilliant girl in town.” She was “up on simply everything,” they said, and it was customary to add the exclamation: “How on earth she finds the time!” And since Muriel also found time to be always charmingly dressed, in harmony with her notable comeliness, the marvel of so much upness in her infant twenties may indeed need a little explaining.

Her own conception was that she was a “serious” person and cared for “serious reading”—that is to say, after she left college, she read, not what is acceptably called literature, but young journalists’ musings about what aspires to be called that; she was not at all interested in buildings or pictures or statues themselves, but thought she was, read a little of what is printed about such things in reviews, and spoke of “art” and “literature” with authoritative conviction. She was a kind-hearted girl, and she believed that “capitalism” was the cunning device of greedy men to keep worthy persons under heel; hence it followed that all “capital” should be taken away from the “capitalist class” by the “people;” and, not picturing herself as in any way uncomfortably affected by the process of seizure, she called herself a “socialist.”

In addition to all this, Muriel’s upness included “the new psychology” and the appropriate humorous contempt for the Victorian Period, that elastic conception of something-or-other which, according to the writing young ladies and gentlemen who were her authorities, seemed to extend from about the time of Custer’s Last Fight to the close of President Wilson’s first administration. Muriel, like her original sources of information, was just becoming conscious of herself as an authority at about the latter date—she was sixteen then; and at twenty she began to speak of having spent her youth in the Late Victorian Period. That obscure decade before her birth, that time so formless and dark between the years of our Lord 1890 and 1900, was Mid-Victorian; people still mistook Tennyson and Longfellow for poets.

Sometimes older women thought Muriel a little hard; she was both brilliant and scholarly, they admitted; but the papers she wrote for the women’s clubs were so “purely intellectual,” so icily scientific, so little reticent in the discussion of love, marriage and children, that these ladies shook their heads. The new generation, as expressed by Muriel, lacked something important, they complained; for nothing less than maidenliness itself had been lost, and with it the rosebud reveries, the twilight half-dreams of a coming cavalier, the embowered guitar at moonrise. In a word, the charm of maidenhood was lost because romance was lost. Muriel lacked the romantic imagination, they said, a quality but ill replaced by so much “new thought.”

They made this mistake the more naturally because Muriel herself made it, though of course she did not think of her supposed lack of romance as a fault. She believed herself to be a severely practical person, and an originally thinking person, as a quotation from one of her essays may partly explain. “I face the actual world as it is; I face it without superstition, and without tradition. Despising both the nonsense and the misery into which former generations have been led by romance, I permit no illusions to guide my thinking. I respect nothing merely because it is established; I examine mathematically; I think mathematically; I believe nothing that I do not prove. I am a realist.”

When she wrote this, she was serious and really thought it true; but as a matter of fact, what she believed to be her thinking was the occasional mulling over of scattered absorptions from her reading. Her conception of her outward appearance, being somewhat aided by mirrors, came appreciably near the truth, but her conception of her mind had no such guide. Her mind spent the greater part of its time adrift in half-definite dreaming, and although she did not even suspect such a thing, her romantic imagination was the abode in which she really dwelt.

There is an astronomer who knows as much about the moon as can yet be known; but when that moon is new in the sky, each month, he will be a little troubled if he fails to catch his first glimpse of it over the right shoulder. When he does fail, his disappointment is so slight that he forgets all about it the next moment, and should you ask him if he has any superstition he will laugh disdainfully, with no idea that he deceives both his questioner and himself. This is the least of the mistakes he makes about his own thoughts; he is mistaken about most of them; and yet he is a great man, less given to mistakes than the rest of us. Muriel Eliot’s grandmother, who used to sing “Robin Adair,” who danced the Spanish Fandango at the Orphan Asylum Benefit in 1877, and wrote an anonymous love-letter to Lawrence Barrett, was not actually so romantic as Muriel.

The point is that Muriel’s dreaminess, of which she was so little aware, had a great deal more to do with governing her actions than had her mathematical examinings and what she believed to be her thinking. Moreover, this was the cause of her unkindness to young Renfrew Mears, who lived across the street. Even to herself she gave other reasons for rejecting him; but the motive lay deep in her romanticism; for Muriel, without knowing it, believed in fairies.

Had she been truly practical, she would have seen that young Mr. Mears was what is called an “ideal match” for her. His grandfather, a cautious banker, had thought so highly of the young man’s good sense as to leave him the means for a comfortable independence; yet Renfrew continued to live at home with his family and was almost always in bed by eleven o’clock. He was of a pleasant appearance; he was kind, modest, thoughtfully polite, and in everything the perfect material from which the equerry or background husband of a brilliant woman is constructed. No wonder her mother asked her what on earth she did want! Muriel replied that she despised the capitalistic institution of marriage, and she believed that she meant what she said; but of course what she really wanted was a fairy-story.

In those wandering and somewhat shapeless reveries that controlled her so much more than she guessed, there were various repetitions that had become rather definite, though never quite so. One of these was the figure of her Mate. Her revery-self never showed her this mystery clearly in contours and colours, but rather in shadowy outlines, though she was sure that her Mate had dark and glowing eyes. He was somewhere, and sometime she would see him. When she did see him, she would recognize him instantly; the first look exchanged would bring the full revelation to both of them—they would ever have little need of spoken words. But her most frequent picture of this mystic encounter was a painful one: she saw herself a bride upon the bridegroom’s arm and coming down the steps of the church;—a passing stranger, halting abruptly upon the pavement, gave her one look from dark and glowing eyes, a look fateful with reproach and a tragic derision, seeming to say: “You did not wait till I came, but took that fool!”

Then he passed on, forever; and it was unfortunate for young Mr. Mears that the figure of the bridegroom in these foreshadowings invariably bore a general resemblance to his own. Renfrew had more to overcome than appeared upon the surface; he had shadows to fight; and so have other lovers—more of them than is guessed—when ladies are reluctant. For that matter, the thing is almost universal; and rare is the girl, however willing, who says “Yes,” without giving up at least some faint little tremulous shadow of a dream—though she may forget it and deny it as honestly as that astronomer forgets and denies the moon and his right shoulder.

Renfrew’s case with his pretty neighbour was also weakened by the liking and approval of her father and mother, who made the mistake of frequently praising him to her; for when parents do this, with the daughter adverse, the poor lover is usually ruined—the reasons being obvious to everybody except the praising parents. Mrs. Eliot talked Renfrew Mears and his virtues at her daughter till the latter naturally declared that she hated him. “I do!” she said one morning. “I really do hate him, mamma!”

“What nonsense!” her mother exclaimed. “When I heard the two of you chatting together on the front porch for at least an hour, only last evening!”

“Chatting!” Muriel repeated scornfully. “Chatting together! That shows how much you observe, mamma! I don’t think he said more than a dozen words the whole evening.”

“Well, don’t you like a good listener?”

“Yes,” Muriel replied emphatically. “Indeed, I do! A good listener is one who understands what you’re saying. Renfrew Mears has just lately learned enough to keep quiet, for fear if he speaks at all, it’ll show he doesn’t understand anything!”

“Well, if he doesn’t, why did you talk to him?”

“Good gracious!” Muriel cried. “We can’t always express ourselves as we wish to in this life, mamma; I should think you’d know that by this time! I can’t throw rocks at him and say, ‘Go back home!’ every time he comes poking over here, can I? I have to be polite, even to Renfrew Mears, don’t you suppose?”

The mother, sighing, gave her daughter one of those little half-surreptitious glances in which mothers seem to review troubled scenes with their own mothers; then she said gently: “Your father and I do wish you could feel a little more kindly toward the poor boy, Muriel.”

“Well, I can’t, and I don’t want to. What’s more, I wouldn’t marry him if I did.”

“Not if you were in love?”

“Poor mamma!” Muriel said compassionately. “What has love to do with marrying? I expect to retain my freedom; I don’t propose to enter upon a period of child-rearing——”

“Oh, good gracious!” Mrs. Eliot cried. “What a way to talk!”

“But if I did,” Muriel continued, with some sharpness, “I should never select Renfrew Mears to be my assistant in the task. And as for what you call ‘love,’ it seems to me a rather unhealthy form of excitement that I’m not subject to, fortunately.”

“You are so queer,” her mother murmured; whereupon Muriel laughed.

No doubt her laughter was a little condescending. “Queer?” she said. “No—only modern. Only frank and wholesome! Thinking people look at life as it really is, nowadays, mamma. I am a child of the new age; but more than that, I am not the slave of my emotions; I am the product of my thinking. Unwholesome excitement and queer fancies have no part in my life, mamma.”

“I hope not,” her mother responded with a little spirit. “I’m not exactly urging anything unwholesome upon you, Muriel. You’re very inconsistent, it seems to me.”

“I!” Muriel said haughtily. “Inconsistent!”

“Why, when I just mention that your father and I’d be glad if you could feel a little kinder toward a good-looking, fine young man that we know all about, you begin talking, and pretty soon it sounds as though we were trying to get you to do something criminal! And then you go on to say you haven’t got any ‘queer fancies!’ Isn’t it a queer fancy to think we’d want you to do anything unhealthy or excited? That’s why I say you’re inconsistent.”

Muriel coloured; her breathing quickened; and her eyes became threateningly bright. “The one thing I won’t be called,” she said, “is ‘inconsistent!’ ”

“Well, but——”

“I won’t!” she cried, and choked. “You know it makes me furious; that’s why you do it!”

“Did I understand you to say you never permitted your emotions to control you?” her mother asked dryly.

In retort, Muriel turned to the closet where she kept her hats; for her favourite way of meeting these persecutions was to go out of the house abruptly, leaving her mother to occupy it in full remorse; but this time Mrs. Eliot forestalled her. A servant appeared in the doorway and summoned her: “There’s someone downstairs wants to see you; I took him in the library.”

“I’ll come,” said Mrs. Eliot, and with a single dignified glance at her daughter, she withdrew, leaving Muriel to digest a discomfiture. For the art of domestic altercation lies almost wholly in the withdrawal, since here the field is won by abandoning it. In family embroilments she proves herself right, and the others wrong, who adroitly seizes the proper moment to make an unexpected departure either with dignity or in tears. People under stress of genuine emotion have been known to practice this art, seeming thereby to indicate the incompatible presence of a cool dramatist somewhere in the back of their heads; yet where is there anything that is not incompatible? Muriel, injured by the word “inconsistent,” had meant to withdraw in silent pain, thus putting her mother in the wrong; but, in the sometimes invaluable argot of the race-course, Mrs. Eliot got away first. Muriel felt severely baffled.

There remained to her, however, a retreat somewhat enfeebled by her mother’s successful withdrawal: Mrs. Eliot had gone out of the room; Muriel could still go out of the house. Therefore she put on a hat, descended the stairs and went toward the front door in a manner intended to symbolize insulted pride taking a much more important departure than the mere walking out of a room.

Her mother, of course, was intended to see her pass the open double doors of the library, but Mrs. Eliot’s back happened to be toward these doors, and she was denied the moving-picture of the daughter sweeping through the hall. The caller, however, suffered no such deprivation; he sat facing the doorway, and although Muriel did not look directly at him, she became aware of a distinguished presence. The library was shadowy, the hall much lighter; she passed the doors quickly; but she was almost startled by the impression made upon her by this young man whom she had never before seen. Then, as she went on toward the front door, she had suddenly a sensation queerly like dizziness; it seemed to her that this stranger had looked at her profoundly as she passed, and that the gaze he bent upon her had come from a pair of dark and glowing eyes.

She went out into the yard, but not, as she had intended, to the street; and turning the corner of the house, she crossed the sunny lawn to some hydrangea bushes in blossom, where she paused and stood, apparently in contemplation of the flowers. She was trembling a little, so strong was her queer consciousness of the stranger in the library and of his dark and glowing eyes. Such sensations as hers have often been described as “unreal;” that is to say, “she seemed to be in a dream.” Her own eyes had not fully encountered the dark and glowing ones, but never had any person made so odd and instantaneous an impression upon her. What else was she to conclude but that there must have been “something psychic” about it? And how, except by telepathy, could she have so suddenly found in her mind the conviction that the distinguished-looking young man was a painter? For to her own amazement, she was sure of this.

After a time she went back into the house, and again passed through the hall and by the open doors, but now her bearing was different. In a sweet, low voice she hummed a careless air from Naples, while in her arms she bore a sheaf of splendid hydrangea blossoms, thus offering, in the momentary framing of the broad doorway, a composition rich in colour and also of no mean decorative charm in contour, it may be said. “The Girl from the Garden” might have been the title she wished to suggest to a painter’s mind, but when she came into the view of her mother’s caller, consciousness of him increased all at once so overwhelmingly that she forgot herself. She had meant to pass the doorway with a cool leisureliness and entirely in profile—a Girl from the Garden with no other thought than to enliven her room with an armful of hydrangea blossoms—but she came almost to a halt midway, and, for the greater part of a second packed with drama, looked full upon the visitor.

He was one of those black-and-white young men: clothes black, linen white, a black bow at the collar, thick black hair, the face of a fine pallor, and black eyes lustrously comprehending. What they must have comprehended now was at least a little of the significance of the arrested attitude beyond the doorway, and more than a little of what was meant by the dark and lustrous eyes that with such poignant inquiry met his own. For Muriel’s fairly shouted at him the startled question: “Who are you?”

Time, life and love are made of seconds and bits of seconds: Muriel had gone on, carrying her question clamouring down the hall with her, before this full second elapsed. She ran up the stairs and into her own room, dropped the hydrangeas upon a table, and in two strides confronted a mirror. A moment later she took up the hydrangeas again, with a care to hold them as she had held them in the hall below, then walked by the mirror, paused, gave the glass a deep, questioning look and went on. After that she seated herself beside an open window that commanded a view of the front gate, and waited, the great question occupying her tumultuously.

By this time the great question had grown definite, and of course it was, “Is this He?” Other questions came tumbling after it: How did she know he was a painter, this young man of whom she had never heard? It is only in the moving pictures that a doctor must look like a doctor, a judge like a judge, an anarchist like an anarchist, a painter like a painter; the age of machines, hygiene and single-type clothing has so blurred men into indistinguishability that only a few musicians still look like musicians, a feat accomplished simply by the slight impoverishment of barbers. The young man in the library was actually a painter, but Muriel may well have been amazed that she knew it; for nowadays it is a commonplace that a Major General in mufti may reasonably be taken for a plumber, while an unimportant person soliciting alms at the door is shown into the house under the impression that a Senator is calling.

Why (Muriel asked herself) had her mother not mentioned such an appointment? But perhaps there had been no appointment; perhaps he had called without one. What for? To ask permission to paint the daughter’s portrait? Had he seen her somewhere before to-day? Where did he live? In Paris?

The front door could be heard closing below, and she looked down upon a white straw hat with a black band. This hat moved quickly down the path to the gate, and the young stranger was disclosed beneath the hat: a manly figure with an elastic step. Outside the gate he paused, looking back thoughtfully with his remarkable eyes; and Muriel, who had instantly withdrawn into the concealment of a window-curtain, marked that this look of his had the quality of covering the whole front of the house at a glance. It was a look, moreover, that seemed to comprehend the type of the house and even to measure its dimensions—a look of the kind that “takes in everything,” as people say. Muriel trembled again. Did he say to himself: “This is Her house?” Did he think: “I should like to set my easel here by the gate and paint this house, because it is the house where She dwells”?

His pause at the gate was only a momentary one; he turned toward the region of commerce and hotels and walked quickly away, the intervening foliage of the trees almost immediately cutting him off from the observation of the girl at the window. Then she heard her mother coming up the stairs and through the upper hall; whereupon Muriel, still tremulous, began hastily to alter the position of the little silver implements upon her dressing-table, thus sketching a preoccupation with small housewifery, if Mrs. Eliot should come into the room. But to the daughter’s acute disappointment, the mother passed the open door without even looking in, and retired to her own apartment.

Muriel most urgently wished to follow her and shower her with questions: “Who is he? Isn’t he a painter? Why did he come to see you? What were you talking about? When is he coming again? What did he say when he saw me?” But remembering the terms upon which she and her mother had so recently parted, and that odious word “inconsistent,” Muriel could not bend to the intimacy of such a questioning. In fact, her own thought took the form, “I’d rather die!”

She turned to the window again, looked out at that gate so lately made significant by the passage of the stranger—and there was young Mr. Renfrew Mears, just coming in. He was a neat picture of a summer young gentleman for any girl’s eye; but to Muriel he was a too-familiar object, and just now about as interesting as a cup of tepid barley-water. She tried to move away before he saw her, but Renfrew had always a fatal quickness for seeing her. He called to her.

“Oh, Muriel!”

“Well—what?” she said reluctantly.

“There’s something I want to ask you about. Will you come down a few minutes?”

“Oh, well—I suppose so,” was her not too heartening response; but on the way downstairs a thought brightened her. Perhaps Renfrew might know something about a dark young man—a painter—lately come to town.

He was blank upon this subject, however, as she discovered when they had seated themselves upon a wicker settee on the veranda. “No,” he said. “I haven’t heard of any artist that’s come here lately. Where’d you hear about one?”

“Oh, around,” she said casually. “I’m not absolutely certain he’s an artist, but I got that idea somewhere. The reason I wanted to know is because I thought he might be one of the new group that have broken away, like Matisse and Gaugin.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Haven’t you heard of anybody at all that’s a stranger here—visiting somebody, perhaps?”

“Not exactly,” Renfrew replied, thinking it over conscientiously. “I don’t believe I have, exactly.”

“What do you mean, you don’t think you have ‘exactly’?” she asked irritably. “Have you, or haven’t you?”

“Well,” he said, “my Aunt Milly from Burnetsville is visiting my cousins, the Thomases, but she’s an invalid and you probably wouldn’t——”

“No, I wouldn’t!” Muriel said. “Don’t strain your mind any more, Renfrew.”

“I could inquire around,” he suggested. “I thought it wouldn’t likely be my aunt, but you said ‘anybody at all.’ ”

“Never mind! What was it you wanted to ask me?”

“Well, it’s something that’s rather important, but of course maybe you won’t think so, Muriel. Anyway, though, I hope you’ll think it’s sort of important.”

“But what is it? Don’t hang fire so, Renfrew!”

“I just wanted to lead up to it a little,” he explained mildly. “I’ve been thinking about getting a new car, and I wondered what sort you think I’d better look at. I didn’t want to get one you wouldn’t like.”

Her lips parted to project that little series of sibilances commonly employed by adults to make children conscious of error. “Why on earth should you ask me?” she said sharply. “Is that your idea of an important question?”

Renfrew’s susceptible complexion showed an increase of colour, but he was growing more and more accustomed to be used as a doormat, and he responded, without rancour: “I meant I hoped you’d sort of think it important, my not wanting to get one you wouldn’t like.”

“Now, what do you mean by that?”

“Well,” he said, “I mean I hoped you’d think it was important, my thinking it was important to ask you.”

“I don’t,” she returned as a complete answer.

“You say——”

“I say I don’t,” she repeated. “I don’t. I don’t think it’s important. Isn’t that clear enough, Renfrew?”

“Yes,” he said, and looked plaintively away from her. “I guess I don’t need any new car.”

“Is there anything more this morning?” she was cruel enough to inquire.

“No,” he answered, rising. “I guess that’s all.” Then, having received another of his almost daily rejections, he went away, leaving her to watch his departing figure with some exasperation, though she might well have admired him for his ingenuity: every day or two he invented a new way of proposing to her. In comparison, her refusals were commonplace, but of course she neither realized that nor cared to be brilliant for Renfrew; and also, this was a poor hour for him, when the electric presence of the black-and-white stranger was still vibrant in the very air. Muriel returned to her room and put the hydrangeas in a big silver vase; she moved them gently, with a touch both reverent and caressing, for they had borne a part in a fateful scene, and already she felt it possible that in the after years she would never see hydrangeas in blossom without remembering to-day and the First Meeting.

Impulsively she went to her desk and wrote:

“Is it true that You have come? My hand trembles, and I know that if I spoke to my mother about You, my voice would tremble. Oh, I could never ask her a question about You! A moment ago I sat upon the veranda with a dull man who wants to marry me. It seemed a desecration to listen to him—an offense to You! He has always bored me. How much more terribly he bored me when perhaps I had just seen You for the first time in my life! Perhaps it is not for the first time in eternity, though! Was I ever a Queen in Egypt and were You a Persian sculptor? Did we meet in Ephesus once?

“It is a miracle that we should meet at all. I might have lived in another century—or on another planet! Should we then have gone seeking, seeking one another always vainly? All my life I have been waiting for You. Always I have known that I was waiting, but until to-day I did not know it was for just You. My whole being trembled when I saw You—if it was You? I am trembling now as I think of You, as I write of You—write to You! A new life has possibly begun for me in this hour!

“And some day will I show You this writing? That thought is like fire and like ice. I burn with it and freeze with it, in terror of You! See! Here is my heart opened like a book for your reading!

“Oh, is it, is it You? I think that You are a painter; that is all I know of You—and why do I think it? It came to me as I stood in a garden, thrilling with my first quick glimpse of You. Was that the proof of our destiny, yours and mine? Yes, the miracle of my knowing that You are a painter when I do not even know your name—that is the answer! It must be You! I tremble with excitement as I write that word ‘You’ which has suddenly leaped into such fiery life and meaning: I tremble and I could weep! Oh, You—You—You! Is it?”

Twice, during the latter phases of this somewhat hasty record of ardour, she had been summoned to lunch, and after hurrying the final words upon the page, she put the paper into a notebook and locked it inside her desk. Then she descended the stairs and went toward the dining-room, but halted suddenly, unseen, outside the door. She had caught the word “painter,” spoken by her father.

“Well, I’m glad you liked that painter.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Eliot said. “I talked it over with him, and I’m afraid he agreed with you instead of with me. Naturally, he would, though! I was quite interested in him.”

“You were?”

“Yes—such an unexpected type.”

“Well, no,” Mr. Eliot said. “Nobody’s an unexpected type nowadays. Isn’t Muriel coming down at all?”

“Jennie’s been up for her twice,” his wife informed him. “I suppose she’ll come eventually. She’s cross this morning.”

“What about?”

“Oh, I just asked her if she couldn’t be a little fairer to a certain somebody. I suppose I’d better not have mentioned it, because it made her very peevish.”

Upon this, Muriel made her entrance swiftly enough to let her mother know that the last words had been overheard, an advantage the daughter could not forego. She took her place at the table opposite to her gourmandizing little brother Robert, and in silence permitted her facial expression alone to mention what she thought of a mother who called her “peevish” when she was not present to defend herself.

Only a moment before, she had been thrilled inexpressibly: the black-and-white stranger, so mysteriously spoken of by her parents, was indeed a painter. That proved his You-ness, proved everything! Her whole being (as she would have said) shook with the revelation, and her anxiety to hear more of him was consuming; but the word “peevish” brought about an instantaneous reversion. She entered the dining-room in an entirely different mood, for her whole being was now that of a daughter embattled with a parent who attacks unfairly—so intricately elastic are the ways of our whole beings!

Mrs. Eliot offered only the defense of a patient smile; Mr. Eliot looked puzzled and oppressed; and for a time there was no conversation during the further progress of this uncomfortable meal. Nothing was to be heard in the room except the movements of a servant and the audible eating of fat little Robert, who was incurably natural with his food.

It was Muriel who finally decided to speak. “I’m sorry to have interrupted your conversation,” she said frostily. “Perhaps, though, you’d prefer not to say any more about me to papa and Robert while I’m here to explain what really happened, mamma.”

“Oh, nonsense!” Mr. Eliot said. “I suppose even the Pope gets ‘peevish’ now and then; it’s no deadly insult to say a person got a little peevish. We weren’t having a ‘conversation’ about you at all. We were talking about other matters, and just barely mentioned you.”

Muriel looked at him quickly. “What other things were you talking about?”

He laughed. “My! How suspicious you are!”

“Not at all; I simply asked you what other things you were talking about.”

Instead of replying, “About a distinguished young painter who saw you on the street and wants to paint your portrait,” Mr. Eliot laughed again and rose, having finished his coffee. He came round the table to her and pinched her ear on his way to the door. “Good gracious!” he said. “Don’t you suppose your mother and I ever talk about anything except what a naughty daughter we have?” And with that he departed. Mrs. Eliot said, “Excuse me,” rather coldly to Muriel, followed him to the front door, and failed to return.

Muriel did not see her mother again during the afternoon, and in the evening Mr. and Mrs. Eliot went out to a dinner of their bridge-club, leaving their daughter to dine in the too audible company of Robert. She dressed exquisitely, though not for Robert, whose naturalness at the table brought several annoyed glances from her. “Can’t you manage it more quietly, Robert?” she asked at last, with the dessert. “Try!”

“Whaffor?” he inquired.

“Only because it’s so hideous!”

“Oh, hush!” he said rudely, and, being offended, became more natural than ever, on purpose.

She sighed. With the falling of the dusk, her whole being, not antagonized by her mother’s presence, had become an uplifted and mysterious expectation; and the sounds made by the gross child Robert were not to be borne. She left the table, went out into the starlight, and stood by the hydrangeas, an ethereal figure in draperies of mist.

“Oh, You!” she whispered, and let a bare arm be caressed by the clumps of great blossoms. “When are you coming again, You? To-night?”

She quivered with the sense of impending drama; it seemed to her certain that the next moment she would see him—that he would come to her out of the darkness. The young painter should have done so; he should have stepped out of the vague night-shadows, a poetic and wistful figure, melancholy with mystery yet ineffably radiant. “Mademoiselle, step lightly!” he should have said. “Do you not see the heart beneath your slipper? It was mine until I threw it there!”

“Ah, You!” she murmured to the languorous hydrangeas.

At such a moment the sound of peanuts being eaten, shells and all, could not fail to prove inharmonious. She shivered with the sudden anguish of a dislocated mood; but she was Robert’s next of available kin and recognized a duty. She crossed the lawn to the veranda, where he sat, busy with a small paper sack upon his knee.

“Robert! Stop that!”

“I ain’t doin’ anything,” he said crossly.

“You are. What do you mean, eating peanuts when you’ve just finished an enormous dinner?”

“Well, what hurt is that?”

“And with the shells on!” she cried.

“Makes more to ’em,” he explained.

“Stop it!”

“I won’t,” Robert said doggedly. “I’m goin’ to do what I please to-night, no matter how much trouble I get into to-morrow!”

“What ‘trouble’ do you expect to-morrow?”

“Didn’t you hear about it?” he asked. “Papa and mamma were talkin’ about it at lunch.”

“I didn’t hear them.”

“I guess it was before you came down,” Robert said; and then he gave her a surprise. “The painter was here this morning, and they got it all fixed up.”

Muriel moved back from him a step, and inexplicably a dismal foreboding took her. “What?” she said.

“Well, the thing that bothers me is simply this,” Robert informed her: “He told mamma he’d have to bring his little boy along and let him play around here as long as the work went on. He said he has to take this boy along with him, because his wife’s a dentist’s ’sistant and can’t keep him around a dentist office, and they haven’t got any place to leave him. He’s about nine years old, and I’ll bet anything I have trouble with him before the day’s over.”

“Do you mean the—the painter is married, Robert?”

“Yes, and got this boy,” Robert said, shaking his head. “I bet I do have trouble with him, if he’s got to be around here until they get three coats o’ paint on our house. Mamma thought they only needed two, but papa said three, and the painter talked mamma into it this morning.”

“The house?” Muriel said. “We’re going to have the—the house painted?”

Robert was rather surprised. “Why, don’t you remember how much papa and mamma were talkin’ about it, two or three weeks ago? And then they thought not and didn’t say so much about it, but for a while papa was goin’ to have every painter in town come up here and make a bid. Don’t you remember?”

“I do now,” Muriel said feebly; and a moment later she glanced toward the bright windows of the house across the street. “Robert,” she said, “if you’ve finished those horrible peanuts, you might run and ask Mr. Renfrew Mears if he’d mind coming over a little while.”

She had been deeply stirred by the subject that had occupied her all day, and it was a spiritual necessity for her (so to say) to continue upon the topic with somebody—even with Renfrew Mears! However, she rejected him again, though with a much greater consideration for his feelings than was customary; and when he departed, she called after him:

“Look out for your clothes when you come over to-morrow. We’re going to have the house painted.”

Then, smiling contentedly, she went indoors and up to her room. The great vase of hydrangeas stood upon a table; she looked at it absently, and was reminded of something. She took some sheets of written paper from a notebook in her desk, tossed them into a waste-basket, yawned, and went to bed.

“HIGHLAND PLACE” was one of those new little cross-streets in a new little bosky neighbourhood, that had “grown up over night,” as we say, meaning grown up in four or five years; so that when citizens of the older and more solid and soiled central parts of the city come driving through the new part, of a Sunday afternoon in spring, they are pleased to be surprised. “My goodness!” they exclaim. “When did all this happen? Why, it doesn’t seem more’n a year or so since we used to have Fourth o’ July picnics out here! And now just look at it—all built up with bride-and-groom houses!”

“Highland Place” was the name given to this cross-street by the speculative land company that “developed” it, and they did not call it “Waverley Place” because they had already produced a “Waverley Place” a block below. Both “Places” were lined with green-trimmed small white houses, “frame” or stucco; and although the honeymoon suggestion was architecturally so strong, as a matter of fact most of the inhabitants held themselves to be “settled old married people,” some of the couples having almost attained to a Tin Wedding Anniversary.

The largest of the houses in “Highland Place” was the “hollow-tile and stucco residence of Mr. and Mrs. George M. Sullender.” Thus it had been defined, under a photographic reproduction, with the caption “New Highland Place Sullender Home,” in one of the newspapers, not long after the little street had been staked out and paved; and since the “Sullender Home” was not only the largest house but the first to be built in the “Place,” and had its picture in the paper, it naturally took itself for granted as being the most important.

Young Mrs. William Sperry, whose equally young husband had just bought the smallest but most conspicuously bride-and-groom cottage in the whole “Place,” was not so deeply impressed with the Sullender importance as she should have been, since the Sperrys were the newcomers of the neighbourhood, had not yet been admitted to its intimacies, and might well have displayed a more amiable deference to what is established.

“No,” Mrs. Sperry said to her husband, when they got home after their first experience of the “Place’s” hospitality, a bridge-party at the Sullenders’—“I just can’t stand those people, Will. They’re really awful!”

“Why, what’s the matter with ’em?” he inquired. “I thought they were first rate. They seemed perfectly friendly and hospitable and——”

“Oh, yes! Lord and Lady of the Manor entertaining the tenantry! I don’t mind being tenantry,” young Mrs. Sperry explained;—“but I can’t stand the Lord-and-Lady-of-the-Manor style in people with a nine-room house and a one-car garage.”

“It may be one-car,” her husband laughed; “but it has two stories. They have a chauffeur, you know, and he lives in the upstairs of the garage.”

“So that entitles the Sullenders to the Manor style?”

“But I didn’t notice any of that style,” he protested. “I thought they seemed right nice and cordial. Of course Sullender feels that he’s been making quite a success in business and it naturally gives him a rather condescending air, but he’s really all right.”

“He certainly was condescending,” she grumbled, and went on with some satire: “Did you hear him allude to himself as a ‘Realtor?’ ”

“Well, why shouldn’t he? He is one. That’s his business.”

“My Lord the Realtor!” Mrs. Sperry cried mockingly. “There ought to be an opera written called ‘Il Realtor’ like the one there used to be with the title ‘Il Janitor.’ Those are such romantic words! ‘Toreador,’ ‘Realtor,’ ‘Humidor’——”

“Here, here!” her husband said. “Calm down! You seem to have got yourself worked up into a mighty sarcastic mood for some reason. Those people only want to be nice to us and they’re all right.”

Mrs. Sperry looked at him coldly. “Did you hear Mr. Sullender saying that his company had sold seven ‘homes’ this month?” she inquired.

“Oh, you can’t expect everybody to know all the purist niceties of the English language,” he said. “Sullender’s all right and his wife struck me as one of the nicest, kindest women I ever——”

“Kind!” Mrs. Sperry echoed loudly. “She doesn’t stop at being ‘kind’! She’s so caressingly tender, so angelically loving, that she can’t possibly pronounce a one-syllabled word without making two syllables of it! Did you notice that she said ‘yay-yus’ for ‘yes’, and ‘no-oh’ for ‘no’? I do hate the turtle-dove style of talking, and I never met a worse case of it. Mrs. Sullender’s the sweetest sweet-woman I ever saw in my life and I’m positive she leads her husband a dog’s life!”

“What nonsense!”

“It serves him right for his Realtoring, though,” Mrs. Sperry added thoughtfully. “He ought to have that kind of a wife!”

“But you just said she was the sweetest——”

“Yes, the sweetest sweet-woman I ever saw. I do hate the whole clan of sweet-women!”

The young husband looked perplexed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he admitted. “I always thought——”

“I’m talking about the sweet-woman type that Mrs. Sullender belongs to. They use intended sweetness. They speak to total strangers with sweetness. They wear expressions of saintly sweetness. Everybody speaks of a sweet-woman with loving reverence, and it’s generally felt that it would be practically immoral to contradict one of ’em. To be actually sassy to a sweet-woman would be a cardinal sin! They let their voices linger beautifully on the air; and they listen, themselves, to the lovely sounds they make. They always have the most exquisitely self-sacrificing reasons for every action of their lives; but they do just exactly what they want to do, and everybody else has to do what a sweet-woman wants him to. That’s why I’m sure Mr. Sullender, in spite of all his pomposity, leads a dog’s life at home.”

“Of all the foolish talk!” young Sperry exclaimed. “Why, everybody says they’re the most ideally married couple and that they lead the happiest life together that——”

“ ‘Everybody says!’ ” she mocked him, interrupting. “How often have you known what ‘everybody says’ turn out to be the truth about anything? And besides, we don’t know a thing about any of these people, and we don’t know anybody else that does! Who is this ‘everybody’ that’s told you how happy the Sullenders are?”

“Well, it’s just a general impression I got,” he admitted. “I think I heard someone down-town alluding to Sullender’s domestic relations being very fortunate and pleasant.”

“Oh, you think so? Is that all? You don’t really know a thing about it, then.”

“No matter. You’re wrong this time, Bella. The Sullenders——”

But Bella shook her pretty young head, interrupting him again. “You’ll see! I do hope there won’t have to be too much intimacy but you can’t live across the street from people very long, in a neighbourhood like this, without getting to know the real truth about ’em. You wait and see what we get to know about the Sullenders!”

“Yes, I’ll wait,” he laughed. “But how long?”

“Oh, I don’t know; maybe a year, maybe a month——”

“Let’s make it a month, Bella,” he said, and put his arm about her. “If we don’t find out in a month that the Sullenders are miserable together, will you admit you’re wrong?”

“No, I won’t! But you’ll probably have to admit that I’m right before that long. I have a sense for these things, Will, and I never go wrong when I trust it. Women know intuitively things that men never suspect. I know I’m right about Mrs. Sullender.”

Her husband permitted the discussion to end with this, wisely fearing that if he sought further to defend his position Bella might plausibly accuse him of “always insisting upon the last word.” And so, for that night, at least, the matter was dropped from their conversation, though not from the thoughts of Mrs. Sperry. Truth to tell, she was what is sometimes called an “obstinate little body,” and, also, she appreciated the advisability of a young wife’s building for future and lifelong use the foundations of infallibility. That is to say, she was young and therefore inexperienced, but she had foresight.

Moreover, she had attentively observed the matrimonial condition of her parents and aunts and uncles. Many and many a time had she heard a middle-aged husband speak to his wife of like years somewhat in this manner: “No, Fannie, you’re wrong again. You’re mistaken about this now, just as you were about James Thompson’s adding machine in 1897. And you were wrong about painting the house, the year after that, too. Don’t you remember how you insisted dark green was the right colour, and finally had to admit, yourself, that dark green was awful, and light yellow would have been just right, as I all along said it would?”

Thus, young Mrs. Sperry, looking to times far ahead, had determined to be wrong about nothing whatever during these early years of her matrimony. Moreover, since argument had arisen concerning the Sullenders, she had made up her mind to be right about them, and to “prove” herself right, “whether she really was or not!” And that is why, on the morning after her arraignment of sweet-women generally, and of her too gracious neighbour particularly, the pretty newcomer in “Highland Place” found herself most pleasurably excited by the naïve but sinister revelations of a stranger eight years of age.

At a little before nine o’clock, Mr. William Sperry had departed (in a young husband’s car) for his place of business, some five miles distant in the smoky heart of the city; and not long afterward the thoughtful Bella, charmingly accoutred as a gardener, came forth with a trowel to uproot weeds that threatened a row of iris she had set out along the gravel path leading from the tiny white veranda to the white picket gate. Thus engaged, she became aware of a small presence fumbling at the latch of this gate, and she changed her position from that of one on all fours, who gropes intently in the earth, to that of one upright from the knees, but momentarily relaxed.

“Do you want to come in?” she inquired, looking out from the shade of her broad hat to where the little figure in blue overalls was marked off into stripes of sunshine and shadow by the intervening pickets of the gate. “Is there something you want here, little boy?”

He succeeded in operating the latch, came in, and looked attentively over her excavations. “Have you found any nice worms?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t found any at all,” she said, somewhat surprised by his adjective. “But I don’t think there are any ‘nice’ worms anywhere. Worms are all pretty horrid.”

“No, they ain’t,” he returned promptly and seriously. “There’s lots o’ nice worms.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Yes, there is.”

“Oh, no.”

“There is, too,” he said stubbornly and with some asperity. “Everybody knows there’s plenty of nice worms.”

“Where did you get such nonsense in your head?” Bella asked, a little sharply. “Whoever told you there are nice worms?”

“Well, there is!”

“But what makes you think so?” she insisted.

“Well——” He hesitated, then said with a conclusive air, settling the question: “My mother. I guess she knows!”

Bella stared at him incredulously for a moment.

“What’s your name?”

“My name’s George. My name’s George, the same as my papa,” he replied somewhat challengingly.

“Don’t you live just across the street?” she asked.

“Yes, I do.” He turned, pointing to the “George M. Sullender residence”; and Bella thought she detected a note of inherited pride in his tone as he added, “That’s where I live!”

“But, George, you don’t mean,” she insisted curiously;—“you don’t mean that your mother told you there are nice worms? Surely not!”

“My mother did,” he asserted, and then with a little caution, modified the assertion. “My mother just the same as did.”

“How was that?”

And his reply, so unexpected by his questioner, sent a thrill of coming triumph through her. “My mother called my father a worm.”

“What!”

“She did,” said George. “She called him a worm over and over——”

“What!”

“And if he’s a worm,” George went on, stoutly, “well, I guess he’s nice, isn’t he? So there got to be plenty nice worms if he’s one.”

“George!”

“She calls him a worm most every little while, these days,” said George, expanding, and he added, in cold blood, “I like him a great deal better than what I do her.”

“You do?”

“She hit him this morning,” George thought fit to mention.

“What?”

“With a cloe’s-brush,” he said, dropping into detail. “She hit him on the back of the head with the wooden part of it and he said, ‘Ooh’!”

“But she was just in fun, of course!”

“No, she wasn’t; she was mad and said she was goin’ to take me with her and go back to my grampaw’s. I won’t go with her. She’s mad all the time, these days.”

Bella stared, her lips parted, and she wished him to continue, but remembered her upbringing and tried to be a lady. “Georgie,” she said severely;—“you shouldn’t tell such things. Don’t you know better than to speak in this way of what happens between your poor papa and your mother?”

The effect upon George was nothing, for even at eight years of age a child is able to understand what interests an adult listener, and children deeply enjoy being interesting. In response to her admonition, he said simply: “Yesterday she threw a glass o’ water at him and cut where his ear is. It made a big mark on him.”

“Georgie! I’m afraid you’re telling me a dreadful, dreadful story!” Bella said, though it may not be denied that in company with this suspicion there arrived a premonitory symptom of disappointment. “Why, I saw your papa yesterday evening, myself, and there wasn’t any mark or anything like——”

“It don’t show,” George explained. “It took him a good while, but he got it fixed up so’s it didn’t show much. Then he brushed his hair over where it was.”

“Oh!”

“My mother hates my papa,” said George. “She just hates and hates him!”

“What for?” Bella couldn’t stop this question.

“She wants him to have more money and he says what good would that do because she’d only throw it around.”

“No!”

“Yes,” said George. “And she’s mad because once he got so mad at her he hit her.”

“What!”

“He did, too,” George informed her, nodding, his large eyes as honest as they were earnest. “She said she was goin’ to see my grampaw and she left me at home, but my papa catched her at the Pitcher Show with Mr. Grumbaugh.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Grumbaugh,” George repeated, with the air of explaining everything. “So my papa made her come home and he hit her, and she hit him, too!”

“Before you!” Bella exclaimed, horrified.

“Sure!” George said, and looked upon her with some superiority. “They do it all before me. Last week they had a big fight——”

He would have continued willingly, but at this point he was interrupted. Across the street a door opened, and out of it came Mrs. Sullender, leading a five-year-old girl by the hand. She called loudly, though in a carefully sweet and musical tone:

“George? Jaw—aurge? Oh, Jaw-aur-gie?”

“Yes’m?” he shouted.

Mrs. Sullender nodded smilingly to Bella, and called across: “Georgie, you dear little naughty thing! Didn’t I tell you half an hour ago to come indoors and play with poor dear little Natalie? She’s been waiting and waiting so patiently!”

George looked morose, but began to move in the desired direction. “I’m comin’,” he muttered, and was so gross as to add, under his breath, “Doggone you!”

However, he went across the street; and then Mrs. Sullender, benevolently leading the two children by the hand, nodded again to Bella with a sweetness that was evident even at a distance, and reëntered the house, taking George and the tiny Natalie with her.

Bella remained upon her knees, staring violently at the “Sullender Home,” and her thoughts were centred upon her husband. “Just wait till he gets here!” she thought.

But she saved her triumph until after dinner, when he had made himself comfortable upon the lounge in their tiny “living-room” and seemed to be in good content with his briar pipe.

“I had a caller after you left, this morning,” she informed him sunnily.

“Who was it?”

“Mr. George M. Sullender.”

“So? That’s odd,” said Sperry. “I saw him starting down-town in his car just before I did. How did he happen to come back here?”

“He didn’t. This was Mr. George M. Sullender, Junior.”

“Who’s that?”

“Their little boy,” said Bella. “You’ve seen him playing in their yard with the little sister.”

“Oh, yes. Did his mother send him over on an errand?”

“No. He came to see if I’d found any ‘nice worms’,” Bella said, and added, in a carefully casual tone, but with a flashing little glance from the corner of her eye: “He said some worms must be nice because Mrs. Sullender is in the habit of calling Mr. Sullender a worm, and Georgie thinks his father is nice.”

Young Mr. Sperry took his pipe from his mouth and looked at his wife incredulously. “What did you say about Mrs. Sullender’s calling Mr. Sullender——”

“A ‘worm,’ William,” said Bella. “She calls him a ‘worm,’ William, because he doesn’t make even more money than he does, poor man. The child really hates his mother: he never once spoke of her as ‘mamma’ but he always said ‘my papa’ when he mentioned Mr. Sullender. I think I must have misjudged that poor creature a little, by the way. Of course he is pompous, but I think his pomposity is probably just assumed to cover up his agony of mind. He has a recent scar that his wife put on his head, too, to cover up.”

“Bella!”

“Yes,” she said reflectively. “I think he’s mainly engaged in covering things up, poor thing. Of course he does strike his sweet-woman, now and then, when he finds her at the movies with gentlemen he doesn’t approve of; but one can hardly blame him, considering the life she leads him. It was last week, though, when they had their big fight, I understand—with the children looking on.”

But at this, William rose to his feet and confronted her. “What on earth are you talking about, Bella?”

“The Sullenders,” she said. “It was curious. It was like having the front of their house taken off, the way a curtain rolls up at the theatre and shows you one of those sordid Russian plays, for instance. There was the whole sickening actual life of this dreadful family laid bare before me: the continual petty bickerings that every hour or so grow into bitter quarrels with blows and epithets—and then, when other people are there, as we were, last night, the assumption of suavity, the false, too-sweet sweetness and absurd pomposities—oh, what an ugly revelation it is, Will! It’s so ugly it makes me almost sorry you were wrong about them—as you’re rather likely to be in your flash judgments, you poor dear!”

Bella (who was “literary” sometimes) delivered herself of this speech with admirable dramatic quality, especially when she made her terse little realistic picture of the daily life of the Sullenders, but there was just a shade of happy hypocrisy and covert triumph in the final sentence, and she even thought fit to add a little more on the point. “How strange it is to think that only last night we were arguing about it!” she exclaimed. “And that I said we’d not need to wait a month to prove that I was right! Here it is only the next day, and it’s proved I was a thousand times righter than I said I was!”

“Well, perhaps you’ll enlighten me——” he began, and she complied so willingly that she didn’t let him finish his request.

She gave him Georgie’s revelation in detail, emphasizing and colouring it somewhat with her own interpretations of many things only suggested by the child’s meagre vocabulary; and she was naturally a little indignant when, at first, her husband declined to admit his defeat.

“Why, it’s simply not believable,” he said. “Those people couldn’t seem what they seemed to be last night, and be so depraved. They were genuinely affectionate in the tone they used with each other and they——”

“Good gracious!” Bella cried. “Do you think I’m making this up?”

“No, of course not,” he returned hastily. “But the child may have made it up.”

“About his own father and mother?”

“Oh, I know; yet some children are the most wonderful little story-tellers: they tell absolutely inexplicable lies and hardly know why themselves.”

But at this, Bella looked at him pityingly. “Listen a moment! There was all the sordid daily life of these people laid out before me in the poor little child’s prattle: a whole realistic novel, complete and consistent, and I’d like to know how you account for a child of seven or eight being able to compose such a thing—and on the spur of the moment, too! When children make up stories they make ’em up about extraordinary and absurd things, not about the sordid tragedies of everyday domestic life. Do you actually think this child made up what he told me?”

“Well, it certainly does seem peculiar!”

“ ‘Peculiar?’ Why, it’s terrible and it’s true!”

“Well, if it is,” he said gloomily, “we certainly don’t want to get mixed up in it. We don’t want to come into a new neighbourhood and get involved in a scandal—or even in gossiping about one. We must be careful not to say anything about this, Bella.”

She looked away from him thoughtfully. “I suppose so, though of course these people aren’t friends of ours; they’re hardly acquaintances.”

“No, but that’s all the more reason for our not appearing to be interested in their troubles. We’ll certainly be careful not to say anything about this, won’t we, Bella?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” she returned absently. “Since the people are really nothing to us, though, I don’t suppose it matters whether we say anything or not.”

“Oh, but it does!” he insisted, and then, something in her tone having caught his attention, he inquired: “You haven’t said anything to any one about it, have you, Bella?”