The Gay Cockade

I

Perry Cunningham and I had been friends for years. I was older than he, and I had taught him in his senior year at college. After that we had traveled abroad, frugally, as befitted our means. The one quarrel I had with fate was that Perry was poor. Money would have given him the background that belonged to him—he was a princely chap, with a high-held head. He had Southern blood in his veins, which accounted perhaps for an almost old-fashioned charm of manner, as if he carried on a gentlemanly tradition.

We went through the art galleries together. There could have been nothing better than those days with him—the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace. Perry's search for beauty was almost breathless. We swept from Filippo Lippi to Botticelli and Bellini, then on to Ghirlandajo, Guido Reni, Correggio, Del Sarto—the incomparable Leonardo.

"If I had lived then," Perry would say, glowing, "in Florence or in Venice!"

And I, smiling at his enthusiasm, had a vision of him among those golden painters, his own young beauty enhanced by robes of clear color, his thirst for loveliness appeased by the sumptuous settings of that age of romance.

Then when the great moderns confronted us—Sorolla and the rest—Perry complained, "Why did I study law, Roger, when I might be doing things like this?"

"It is not too late," I told him.

I felt that he must not be curbed, that his impassioned interest might blossom and bloom into genius if it were given a proper outlet.

So it came about that he decided to paint. He would stay in Paris a year or two in a studio, and test his talent.

But his people would not hear of it. There had been lawyers in his family for generations. Since the Civil War they had followed more or less successful careers. Perry's own father had made no money, but Perry's mother was obsessed by the idea that the fortunes of the family were bound up in her son's continuance of his father's practice.

So Perry went home and opened an office. His heart was not in it, but he made enough to live on, and at last he made money enough to marry a wife. He would have married her whether he had enough to live on or not. She was an artist, and she was twenty when Perry met her. We had been spending a month in Maine, on an island as charming as it was cheap. Rosalie was there with a great-aunt and uncle. She was painting the sea on the day that Perry first saw her, and she wore a jade-green smock. Her hair was red, drawn back rather tightly from her forehead, but breaking into waves over her ears. With the red of her cheeks and the red of her lips she had something of the look of Lorenzo Lotto's lovely ladies, except for a certain sharp slenderness, a slenderness which came, I was to learn later, from an utter indifference to the claims of appetite. She was one of those who sell bread to buy hyacinths.

I speak of this here because Rosalie's almost ascetic indifference to material matters, in direct contrast to Perry's vivid enjoyment of the good things of life, came to have a tragic significance in later days. Perry loved a warm hearth in winter, a cool porch in summer. He had the Southerner's epicurean appreciation of the fine art of feasting. The groaning board had been his inheritance from a rollicking, rackety set of English ancestors, to whom dining was a rather splendid ceremony. On his mother's table had been fish and game from Chesapeake, fruits and vegetables in season and out—roast lamb when prices soared high in the spring, strawberries as soon as they came up from Florida. There had always been money for these in the Cunningham exchequer, when there had been money for nothing else.

Rosalie, on the other hand, ate an orange in the morning, a square of toast at noon, a chop and perhaps a salad for dinner. One felt that she might have fared equally well on dew and nectar. She had absolutely no interest in what was set before her, and after she married Perry this attitude of mind remained unchanged.

She was a wretched cook, and made no effort to acquire expertness. She and Perry lived in a small but well-built bungalow some miles out from town, and they could not afford a maid. When I dined with them I made up afterward for the deficiencies of their menu by a square meal at the club. There was no chance for Perry to make up, and I wondered as the years went on how he stood it.

He seemed to stand it rather well, except that in time he came to have that same sharpened look of delicacy which added a spiritual note to Rosalie's rich bloom. He always lighted up when he spoke of his wife, and he was always urging me to come and see them. I must admit that except for the meals I liked to go. Rosalie's success at painting had been negligible, but her love of beauty was expressed in the atmosphere she gave to her little home; she had achieved rather triumphant results in backgrounds and in furnishing.

I remember one spring twilight. I was out for the week-end, and we dined late. The little house was on a hill, and with the French windows wide open we seemed to hang above an abyss of purple sky, cut by a thin crescent. White candles lighted the table, and there were white lilacs. There was a silver band about Rosalie's red hair.

There was not much to eat, and Perry apologized, "Rose hates to fuss with food in hot weather."

Rosalie, as mysterious in that light as the young moon, smiled dreamily.

"Why should one think about such things—when there is so much else in the world?"

Perry removed the plates and made the coffee. Rosalie did not drink coffee. She wandered out into the garden, and came back with three violets, which she kissed and stuck in Perry's coat.

The next morning when I came down Rosalie was cutting bread for toast. She was always exquisitely neat, and in her white linen and in her white-tiled kitchen she seemed indubitably domestic. I was hungry and had hopes of her efforts.

"Peer is setting the table", she told me.

She always called him "Peer". She had her own way of finding names for people. I was never "Roger", but "Jim Crow". When questioned as to her reason for the appellation she decided vaguely that it might be some connection of ideas—dances—Sir Roger de Coverley—and didn't somebody "dance Jim Crow"?

"You don't mind, do you?" she had asked, and I had replied that I did not.

I did not confess how much I liked it. I had always been treated in a distinctly distant and dignified fashion by my family and friends, so that Rosalie's easy assumption of intimacy was delightful.

Well, I went out on the porch and left Rosalie to her culinary devices. I found the morning paper, and fifteen minutes later there came up across the lawn a radiant figure.

Rosalie, hearing the garden call, had chucked responsibility—and her arms were full of daffodils!

We had burned toast for breakfast! Rosalie had forgotten it and Perry had not rescued it until it was well charred. There was no bread to make more, so we had to eat it.

For the rest we had coffee and fruit. It was an expensive season for eggs, and Rosalie had her eye on a bit of old brocade which was to light a corner of her studio. She breakfasted contentedly on grapefruit, but Perry was rather silent, and I saw for the first time a shadow on his countenance. I wondered if for the moment his mind had wandered to the past, and to his mother's table, with Sunday waffles, omelet, broiled bacon. Yet—there had been no bits of gay brocade to light the mid-Victorian dullness of his mother's dining-room, no daffodils on a radiant morning, no white lilacs on a purple twilight, no slender goddess, mysterious as the moon.

It was in the middle of the following winter that I began to realize that Perry was not well. He had come home on a snowy night, tired and chilled to the bone. He was late and Rosalie had kept dinner waiting for him. It was a rather sorry affair when it was served. Perry pushed his chair back and did not eat. I had as little appetite for it as he, but I did my best. I had arrived on an earlier train, with some old prints that I wanted to show him. Rosalie and I looked at them after dinner, but Perry crouched over the fire and coughed at intervals.

At last I couldn't stand it any longer.

"He needs some hot milk, a foot bath, and to be tucked up in bed."

Rosalie stared at me above the prints. "Perry?"

"Yes. He isn't well."

"Don't croak, Jim Crow."

But I knew what I was talking about. "I am going to get him to bed. You can have the milk ready when I come down."

It developed that there was no milk. I walked half a mile to a road house and brought back oysters and a bottle of cream. I cooked them myself in the white-tiled kitchen, and served them piping hot in a bowl with crackers.

Perry, propped up in bed, ate like a starved bird.

"I've never tasted anything better," he said; and, warmed and fed, he slept after a bit as soundly as a satisfied baby.

It was while he was eating the oysters that Rosalie came to the door and looked at him. He was not an æsthetic object—I must admit that no sick man is—and I saw distaste in her glance, as if some dainty instinct in her shrank from the spectacle.

When I went down I found her sitting in front of the fire, wrapped in a Chinese robe of black and gold. You can imagine the effect of that with the red of her hair and the red of her cheeks and lips. Her feet, in black satin slippers, were on a jade-green cushion, and back of her head was the strip of brocade that she had bought with her housekeeping money. It was a gorgeous bit, repeating the color of the cushion, and with a touch of blue which matched her eyes.

She wanted me to show her the rest of the prints. I tried to talk to her of Perry's health, but she wouldn't.

"Don't croak, Jim Crow," she said again.

As I look back at the two of us by the fire that night I feel as one might who had been accessory to a crime. Rosalie's charm was undoubted. Her quickness of mind, her gayety of spirit, her passion for all that was lovely in art and Nature—made her indescribably interesting. I stayed late. And not once, after my first attempt, did we speak of Perry.

II

It was in March that I made Perry see a doctor. "Nothing organic," was Perry's report. Beyond that he was silent. So I went to the doctor myself.

"What's the matter with him?"

"He is not getting the proper nourishment," the doctor told me. "He must have plenty of milk and eggs, and good red meat."

It sounded easy enough, but it wasn't. Rosalie couldn't grasp the fact that diet in Perry's case was important. For the first time I saw a queer sort of obstinacy in her.

"Oh, my poor Peer!" And she laughed lightly. "Do they want to make a stuffed pig of you?"

Well, you simply couldn't get it into her head that Perry needed the bread that she sold for hyacinths. She cooked steaks and chops for him, and served them with an air of protest that took away his appetite.

Of course there remained the eggs and milk, but he didn't like them. What Perry really needed was three good meals a day according to the tradition of his mother's home.

But he couldn't have them. His mother was dead, and the home broken up. The little bungalow, with its old brocades, its Venetian glass, its Florentine carvings, its sun-dial and its garden, was the best that life could offer him. And I must confess that he seemed to think it very good. He adored Rosalie. When in moments of rebellion against her seeming indifference I hinted that she lacked housewifely qualities he smiled and shifted the subject abruptly.

Once he said, "She feeds—my soul."

Of course she loved him. But love to her meant what it had meant in those first days on the Maine coast when she had seen him, slender and strong, his brown hair blowing back from his sun-tanned skin; it meant those first days in their new home when, handsome and debonair in the velvet coat which she had made him wear, he had added a high light to the picture she had made of her home.

This new Perry, pale and coughing—shivering in the warmth of the fire—did not fit into the picture. Her dreams of the future had not included a tired man who worked for his living, and who was dying for lack of intelligent care.

To put it into cold words makes it sound ghoulish. But of course Rosalie was not really that. She was merely absorbed in her own exalted theories and she was not maternal. I think when I compared her, unthinking, to the young moon, that I was subconsciously aware of her likeness to the "orbed maiden" whose white fire warms no one.

She tried to do her best, and I am quite sure that Perry never knew the truth—that he might have been saved if she could have left her heights for a moment and had become womanly and wifely. If she had mothered him a bit—poured out her tenderness upon him—oh, my poor Perry. He loved her too much to ask it, but I knew what it would have meant to him.

All through his last illness Rosalie clung to me. I think it grew to be a horror to her to see him, gaunt and exhausted, in the west room. He had a good nurse, toward the last, and good food. I had had a small fortune left to me, too late, by a distant relative. I paid for the cook and the nurse, and I sent flowers to Rosalie that she might take them to Perry and let his hungry eyes feed upon her.

It was in the winter that he died, and after all was over Rosalie and I went out and stood together on the little porch. There was snow on the ground and the bright stars seemed caught in the branches of the pines.

Rosalie shook and sobbed.

"I hate—death," she said. "Oh, Jim Crow, why did God let my poor Peer die?" She was completely unstrung. "Death is so—ugly."

I said, "It is not ugly. Peer will live again—like the daffodils in the spring."

"Do you believe that, Jim Crow?"

I did believe it, and I told her so—that even now her Peer was strong and well; and I think it comforted her. It gave her lover back to her, as it were, in the glory of his youth.

She did not wear mourning, or, rather, she wore mourning which was like that worn by no other woman. Her robes were of purple. She kept Perry's picture on the table, and out of the frame his young eyes laughed at us, so that gradually the vision of that ravaged figure in the west room faded.

I went to see her once a week. It seemed the only thing to do. She was utterly alone, with no family but the great-aunt and uncle who had been with her when she met Perry. She was a child in business matters, and Perry had left it to me to administer the affairs of his little estate. Rosalie had her small bungalow, Perry's insurance, and she turned her knowledge of painting to practical account. She made rather special things in lamp-shades and screens, and was well paid for them.

I went, as I have said, once a week. A woman friend shared part of her house, but was apt to be out, and so I saw Rosalie usually alone. I lived now at the club and kept a car. Rosalie often dined with me, but I rarely ate at the bungalow. Now and then in the afternoon she made me a cup of tea, rather more, I am sure, for the picturesque service with her treasured Sheffield than for any desire to contribute to my own cheer or comfort.

And so, gradually, I grew into her life and she grew into mine. I was forty-five, she twenty-five. In the back of my mind was always a sense of the enormity of her offense against Perry. In my hottest moments I said to myself that she had sacrificed his life to her selfishness; she might have been a Borgia or a Medici.

Yet when I was with her my resentment faded; one could as little hold rancor against a child.

Thus the months passed, and it was in the autumn, I remember, that a conversation occurred which opened new vistas. She had been showing me a parchment lamp-shade which she had painted. There was a peacock with a spreading tail, and as she held the shade over the lamp the light shone through and turned every feathered eye into a glittering jewel. Rosalie wore one of her purple robes, and I can see her now as I shut my eyes, as glowing and gorgeous as some of those unrivaled masterpieces in the Pitti Palace.

"Jim Crow," she said, "I shall do a parrot next—all red and blue, with white rings round his eyes."

"You will never do anything better than that peacock."

"Shan't I?" She left the shade over the lamp and sat down. "Do you think I shall paint peacocks and parrots for the rest of my life, Jim Crow?"

"What would you like to do?" I asked her.

"Travel." She was eager. "Do you know, I have never been to Europe? Perry used to tell me about it—Botticelli and Raphael—and Michaelangelo—"

"We had a great time," I said, remembering it all—that breathless search for beauty.

"He promised that some day he and I would go—together."

"Poor Perry!"

She rose restlessly.

"Oh, take me out somewhere, Jim Crow! I feel as if this little house would stifle me."

We motored to the country club. She wore the color which she now affected, a close little hat and a straight frock. People stared at her. I think she was aware of their admiration and liked it.

She smiled at me as she sat down at the table. "I always love to come with you, Jim Crow."

"Why?"

"You do things so well, and you're such a darling."

I do not believe that it was intended as flattery. I am sure that she meant it. She was happy because of the lights and the lovely old room with its cavernous fireplace and its English chintzes; and out of her happiness she spoke.

She could not, of course, know the effect of her words on me. No one had ever called me a darling or had thought that I did things well.

She used, too, to tell me things about my looks. "You'd be like one of those distinguished gentlemen of Vandyke's if you'd wear a ruff and leave off your eye-glasses."

I wonder if you know how it seemed to have a child like that saying such things. For she was more than a child, she was a beautiful woman, and everything surrounding her was beautiful. And there had been a great many gray years before I met Perry and before the money came which made pleasant living possible.

"I like you because you are strong," was another of her tributes.

"How do you know I am strong?"

"Well, you look it. And not many men could have carried me so easily up-stairs."

She had sprained her ankle in getting out of my car on the night that we had dined at the country club. She had worn high-heeled slippers and had stepped on a pebble.

It was on that night that I first faced the fact that I cared for her. In my arms she had clung to me like a child, her hair had swept my cheek, there had been the fragrance of violets.

I did not want to care for her. I remembered Perry—the burned toast which had seemed to mark the beginning of their tragedy—those last dreadful days. I knew that Perry's fate would not be mine; there would be no need to sell bread to buy hyacinths. There was money enough and to spare, money to let her live in the enjoyment of the things she craved; money enough to—travel.

The more I thought of it the more I was held by the thought of what such a trip would mean to me. It would be like that pilgrimage with young Perry. There would be the same impassioned interest—there would be more than that—there would be youth and loveliness—all mine.

I felt that I was mad to think of it. Yet she made me think of it. It was what she wanted. She was not in the least unwomanly, but she was very modern in her frank expression of the pleasure she felt in my companionship.

"Oh, what would I do without you, Jim Crow?" was the way she put it.

I grew young in my months of association with her. I had danced a little in my college days, but I had given it up. She taught me the new steps—and we would set the phonograph going and take up the rugs.

When I grew expert we danced together at the country club and at some of the smart places down-town. It was all very delightful. I made up my mind that I should marry her.

I planned to ask her on Christmas Eve. I had a present for her, an emerald set in antique silver with seed pearls. It was hung on a black ribbon, and I could fancy it shining against the background of her velvet smock. I carried flowers, too, and a book. I was keen with anticipation. The years seemed to drop from me. I was a boy of twenty going to meet the lady of my first romance.

When I arrived at the bungalow I found that Rosalie had with her the old great-aunt and uncle who had been with her when we first met in Maine. They had come on for Christmas unexpectedly, anticipating an eager welcome, happy in their sense of surprise.

Rosalie, when we had a moment alone, expressed her dismay.

"They are going to stay until to-morrow night, Jim Crow. And I haven't planned any Christmas dinner."

"We'll take them to the country club."

"How heavenly of you to think of it!"

I gave her the flowers and the book. But I kept the jewel for the high moment when I should ask her for a greater gift in exchange.

But the high moment did not come that night. The old uncle and aunt sat up with us. They had much to talk about. They were a comfortable pair—silver-haired and happy in each other—going toward the end of the journey hand in hand.

The old man went to the door with me when I left, and we stood for a moment under the stars.

"Mother and I miss hanging up the stockings for the kiddies," he said.

"Were there many kiddies?"

"Three. Two dead and one married and out West. Rosalie seemed the nearest that we had, and that's why we came. I thought mother might be lonely in our big old house."

The next day at the country club the old gentleman was genial but slightly garrulous. The old lady talked about her children and her Christmas memories. I saw that Rosalie was frankly bored.

As for myself, I was impatient for my high moment.

But I think I gave the old folks a good time and that they missed nothing in my manner. And, indeed, I think that they missed nothing in Rosalie's. They had the gentle complacency of the aged who bask in their own content.

It was toward the end of dinner that I caught a look in Rosalie's eyes which almost made my heart stop beating. I had not seen it since Perry's death. I had seen it first when she had stood in the door of his room on the night that I tucked him up in bed and gave him the hot oysters. It was that look of distaste—that delicate shrinking from an unpleasant spectacle.

Following her gaze I saw that the old gentleman had sunk in his chair and was gently nodding. His wife leaned toward me.

"Milton always takes a cat nap after meals," she said, smiling. And I smiled back, she was so rosy and round and altogether comfortable.

Rosalie and I went with them to the train, and it was as we drove back that I spoke of them.

"They are rather great dears, aren't they?"

Rosalie was vehement. "I hate old people!"

A chill struck to my bones. "You hate them? Why?"

"They're—ugly, Jim Crow. Did you see how they had shrunk since I last saw them—and the veins in their hands—and the skull showing through his forehead?"

She was twenty-five, and I was almost twice her age. When I was old she would still be young—young enough to see my shrunken body and the skull showing through!

The look that had been in her eyes for Perry would some day be in her eyes for me. And I knew that if I ever saw it it would strike me dead. It might not kill me physically, but it would wither like a flame all joy and hope forever.

When we reached the bungalow I built up a fire, and Rosalie, leaving me for a little, came back in something sheer and lovely in green. It was the first time since Perry's death that she had discarded her purple robes. She sank into a big chair opposite me and put her silver-slippered feet on the green cushion.

"Isn't it heavenly to be alone, Jim Crow?"

It was the high moment which I had planned, but I could not grasp it. Between me and happiness stood the shadow of that other Rosalie, shrinking from me when I was old as she had shrunk from Perry.

"My dear," I said, and I did not look at her, "I've been thinking a lot about you."

Her chin was in her hand. "I know."

But she didn't know.

"I've been thinking, Rosalie; and I want to give you something for Christmas which will make you happy throughout the year."

"You are such a darling, Jim Crow."

"And I have thought of this—a trip to Europe. You'll let me do it, won't you? There'll be the art galleries, and you can stay as long as you like."

I could see that she was puzzled. "Do you mean that I am to go—alone?" she asked slowly.

"There may be some one going. I'll find out."

There was dead silence.

"You will let me do it?" I asked finally.

She came over to my chair and stood looking down at me.

"Why are you sending me alone, Jim Crow?"

I think, then, that she saw the anguish in my eyes. She sank on her knees beside my chair.

"I don't want to go alone, Jim Crow. I want to stay—with—you."

Well, the jewel is on her breast and a ring to match is on her finger. And when the spring comes we are to sail for Italy, for France.

Perhaps we shall never come back. And I am going to give Rosalie all the loveliness that life can hold for her. Now and then she whispers that she never knew love until I taught it to her. That what she felt for Perry was but the echo of his own need of her.

"But I'd tramp the muddy roads with you, Jim Crow."

I wonder if she really means it. I wish with all my heart that I might know it true. I have never told her of my fears and I believe that I can make her happy. I shall try not to look too far beyond the days we shall have in the Louvre and the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. We shall search for beauty, and perhaps I can teach her to find it, before it is too late, in the things that count.

"If you loved a man, and knew that he loved you, and he wouldn't ask you to marry him, what would you do?"

The Admiral surveyed his grand-niece thoughtfully. "What do you expect to do, my dear?"

Petronella stopped on the snowy top step and looked down at him. "Who said I had anything to do with it?" she demanded.

The Admiral's old eyes twinkled. "Let me come in, and tell me about it."

Petronella smiled at him over her big muff. "If you'll promise not to stay after five, I'll give you a cup of tea."

"Who's coming at five?"

The color flamed into Petronella's cheeks. In her white coat and white furs, with her wind-blown brown hair, her beauty satisfied even the Admiral's critical survey, and he hastened to follow his question by the assertion, "Of course I'll come in."

Petronella, with her coat off, showed a slenderness which was enhanced by the straight lines of her white wool gown, with the long sleeves fur-edged, and with fur at the top of the high, transparent collar. She wore her hair curled over her ears and low on her forehead, which made of her face a small and delicate oval. In the big hall, with a roaring fire in the wide fireplace, she dispensed comforting hospitality to the adoring Admiral. And when she had given him his tea she sat on a stool at his feet. "Oh, wise great-uncle," she said, "I am going to tell you about the Man!"

"Have I ever seen him?"

"No. I met him in London last year, and—well, you know what a trip home on shipboard means, with all the women shut up in their cabins, and with moonlight nights, and nobody on deck—"

"So it was an affair of moonlight and propinquity?"

After a pause: "No, it was an affair of the only man in the world for me."

"My dear child—!"

Out of a long silence she went on: "He thought I was poor. You know how quietly I traveled with Miss Danvers. And he didn't associate Nell Hewlett with Petronella Hewlett of New York and Great Rock. And so—well, you know, uncle, he let himself go, and I let myself go, and then—"

She drew a long breath. "When we landed, things stopped. He had found out who I was, and he wrote me a little note, and said he would never forget our friendship—and that's—all."

She finished drearily, and the bluff old Admiral cleared his throat. There was something wrong with the scheme of things when his Petronella couldn't have the moon if she wanted it!

"And what can I do—what can any woman do?" Petronella demanded, turning on him. "I can't go to him and say, 'Please marry me.' I can't even think it"; her cheeks burned. "And he'd die before he'd say another word, and I suppose that now we'll go on growing old, and I'll get thinner and thinner, and he'll get fatter and fatter, and I'll be an old maid, and he'll marry some woman who's poor enough to satisfy his pride, and—well, that will be the end of it, uncle."

"The end of it?" said the gentleman who had once commanded a squadron. "Well, I guess not, Petronella, if you want him. Oh, the man's a fool!"

"He's not a fool, uncle." The sparks in Petronella's eyes matched the sparks in the Admiral's.

"Well, if he's worthy of you—"

Petronella laid her cheek against his hand. "The question is not," she said, faintly, "of his worthiness, but of mine, dear uncle."

Dumbly the Admiral gazed down at that drooping head. Could this be Petronella—confident, imperious, the daughter of a confident and imperious race?

He took refuge in the question, "But who is coming at five?"

"He is coming. He is passing through Boston on his way to visit his mother in Maine. I asked him to come. I told him I was down here by the sea, and intended to spend Christmas at Great Rock because you were here, and because this was the house I lived in when I was a little girl, and that I wanted him to see it; and—I told him the truth, uncle."

"The truth?"

"That I missed him. That was all I dared say, and I wish you had read his note of assent. Such a stiff little thing. It threw me back upon myself, and I wished that I hadn't written him—I wished that he wouldn't come. Oh, uncle, if I were a man, I'd give a woman the right to choose. That's the reason there are so many unhappy marriages. Nine wrong men ask a woman, and the tenth right one won't. And finally she gets tired of waiting for the tenth right one, and marries one of the nine wrong ones."

"There are women to-day," said the Admiral, "who are preaching a woman's right to propose."

Petronella gazed at him, thoughtfully. "I could preach a doctrine like that—but I couldn't practice it. It's easy enough to say to some other woman, 'Ask him,' but it's different when you are the woman."

"Yet if he asked you," suggested the Admiral, "the world might say that he wanted your money."

"Why should we care what the world would say?" Petronella was on her feet now, defending her cause vigorously. "Why should we care? Why, it's our love against the world, uncle! Why should we care?"

The Admiral stood up, too, and paced the rug as in former days he had paced the decks. "There must be some way out," he said at last, and stopped short. "Suppose I speak to him—"

"And spoil it all! Oh, uncle!" Petronella shook him by the lapels of his blue coat. "A man never knows how a woman feels about such things. Even you don't, you old darling. And now will you please go; and take this because I love you," and she kissed him on one cheek, "and this because it is a quarter to five and you'll have to hurry," and she kissed him on the other cheek.

The Admiral, being helped into his big cape in the hall, called back, "I forgot to give you your Christmas present," and he produced a small package.

"Come here and let me open it," Petronella insisted. And the Admiral, without a glance at the accusing clock, went back. And thus it happened that he was there to meet the Man.

It must be confessed that the Admiral suffered a distinct shock as he was presented to the hero of Petronella's romance. Here was no courtly youth of the type of the military male line of Petronella's family, but a muscular young giant of masterful bearing. The Hewlett men had commanded men; one could see at a glance that Justin Hare had also commanded women. This, the wise old Admiral decided at once, was the thing which had attracted Petronella—Petronella, who had held her own against all masculine encroachments, and who was heart-free at twenty-five!

"Look what this dearest dear of an uncle has given me," said Petronella, and held up for the young surgeon's admiration a string of pearls with a sapphire clasp. "They belonged to my great-aunt. I was named for her, and uncle says I look like her."

"You have her eyes, my dear, and some of her ways. But she was less independent. In her time women leaned more, as it were, on man's strength."

Justin Hare looked at them with interest—at the slender girl in her white gown, at the tall, straight old man with his air of command.

"Women in these days do not lean," he said, with decision; "they lead."

A spark came into Petronella's eyes. "And do you like the modern type best?" she challenged.

He answered with smiling directness, "I like you."

The Admiral was pleased with that, though he was still troubled by this man's difference from the men of his own race. Yet if back of that honest bluntness there was a heart which would enshrine her—well, that was all he would ask for this dearest of girls.

He glanced at the clock, and spoke hurriedly: "I must be going, my dear; it is long after five."

"Must you really go?" asked the mendacious Petronella.

An hour later she was alone. The visit had been a failure. She admitted that, as she gazed with a sort of agonized dismay through the wide window to where the sea was churned by the wildness of the northeast gale. Snow had come with the wind, shutting out the view of the great empty hotels on the Point, shutting out, too, the golden star of hope which gleamed from the top of the lighthouse.

Petronella turned away from the blank scene with a little shudder. Thus had Justin Hare shut her out of his life. He had talked of his mother in Maine, of his hospital plans for the winter, but not a word had he said of those moonlight nights when he had masterfully swayed her by the force of his own passion, had wooed her, won her.

And now there was nothing that she could do. There was never anything that a woman could do! And so she must bear it. Oh, if she could bear it!

A little later, when a maid slipped in to light the candles, Petronella said out of the shadows, "When Jenkins goes to the post-office, I have a parcel for the mail."

"He's been, miss, and there won't be any train out to-night; the snow has stopped the trains."

"Not any train!" At first the remark held little significance, but finally the fact beat against her brain. If the one evening train could not leave, then Justin Hare must stay in town, and he would have to stay until Christmas morning!

Petronella went at once to the telephone, and called up the only hotel which was open at that season. Presently she had Hare at the other end of the line.

"You must come to my house to dinner," she said. "Jenkins has told me about your train. Please don't dress—there'll be only Miss Danvers and uncle; and you shall help me trim my little tree."

Although she told him not to dress, she changed her gown for one of dull green velvet, built on the simple lines of the white wool she had worn in the afternoon. The square neck was framed by a collar of Venetian point, and there was a queer old pin of pearls.

The Admiral, arriving early, demanded: "My dear, what is this? I was just sitting down to bread and milk and a handful of raisins, and now I must dine in six courses, and drink coffee, which will keep me awake."

She laid her cheek against his arm. "Mr. Hare's train couldn't get out of town on account of the snow."

"And he's coming?"

"Yes."

"But what of this afternoon, my dear?"

She slipped her hand into his, and they stood gazing into the fire. "It was dreadful, uncle. I had a feeling that I had compelled him to come—against his will."

"Yet you have asked him to come again to-night?"

She shivered a little, and her hand was cold. "Perhaps I shall regret it—but oh, uncle, can't I have for this one evening the joy of his presence? And if to-morrow my heart dies—"

"Nella, my dear child—"

The Admiral's own Petronella had never drawn in this way upon his emotions. She had been gentle, perhaps a little cold. But then he had always worshiped at her shrine. Perhaps a woman denied the lore she yearns for learns the value of it. At any rate, here in his arms was the dearest thing in his lonely life, sobbing as if her heart would break.

When Justin came, a half-hour later, he found them still in front of the fire in the great hall, and as she rose to welcome him he saw that Petronella had been sitting on a stool at her uncle's feet.

"When I was a little girl," she explained, when Hare had taken a chair on the hearth and she had chosen another with, a high, carved back, in which she sat with her silken ankles crossed and the tips of her slipper toes resting on a leopard-skin which the Admiral had brought back from India—"when I was a little girl we always spent Christmas Eve in this house by the sea instead of in town. We were all here then—mother and dad and dear Aunt Pet, and we hung our stockings at this very fireplace—and now there is no one but Miss Danvers and me, and uncle, who lives up aloft in his big house across the way, where he has a lookout tower. I always feel like calling up to him when I go there, 'Oh, Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anybody coming?'"

She was talking nervously, with her cheeks as white as a lily, but with her eyes shining. The Admiral glanced at Hare. The young man was drinking in her beauty. But suddenly he frowned and turned away his eyes.

"It was very good of you to ask me over," he said, formally.

That steadied Petronella. Her nervous self-consciousness fled, and she was at once the gracious, impersonal hostess.

The Admiral glowed with pride of her. "She'll carry it off," he said to himself; "it's in her blood."

"Dinner is served," announced Jenkins from the doorway, and then Miss Danvers came down and greeted Justin, and they all went out together.

There was holly for a centerpiece, and four red candles in silver holders. The table was of richly carved mahogany, and the Admiral, following an old custom, served the soup from a silver tureen, upheld by four fat cupids. From the wide arch which led into the great hall was hung a bunch of mistletoe; beyond the arch, the roaring fire made a background of gleaming, golden light.

To the young surgeon it seemed a fairy scene flaming with the color and glow of a life which he had never known. He had lived so long surrounded by the bare, blank walls of a hospital. Even Petronella's soft green gown seemed made of some mystical stuff which had nothing in common with the cool white or blue starchiness of the uniforms of nurses.

They talked of many things, covering with, their commonplaces the tenseness of the situation. Then suddenly the conversation took a significant turn.

"I love these stormy nights," Petronella had said, "with the snow blowing, and the wind, and the house all warm and bright."

"Think of the poor sailors at sea," Hare had reminded her.

"Please—I don't want to think of them. We have done our best for them, uncle and I. We have opened a reading-room down by the docks, so that all who are ashore can have soup and coffee and sandwiches, and there's a big stove, and newspapers and magazines."

"You dispense charity?"

"Why not?" she asked him, confidently. "We have plenty—why shouldn't we give?"

"Because it takes away from their manhood to receive."

The Admiral spoke bluntly. "The men don't feel it that way. This charity, as you call it, is a memorial to my wife. The grandfathers of these boys used to see her light in the window of the old house on stormy nights, and they knew that it was an invitation to good cheer. More than one crew coming in half frozen were glad of the soup and coffee which were sent down to them in cans with baskets of bread. And this little coffee-room has been the outgrowth of just such hospitality. There are too many of the men to have in my house. I simply entertain them elsewhere, and I like to go and talk to them, and sometimes Petronella goes."

"There's a picture of dear Aunt Pet hanging there," said Petronella, "and you can't imagine how it softens the manners of the men. It is as if her spirit brooded over the place. They have made it into a sort of shrine, and they bring shells and queer carved things to put on the shelf below it."

"In the city we are beginning to think that such methods weaken self-respect."

"That's because," said the wise old Admiral, "in the city there isn't any real democracy. You give your friend a cup of coffee and think nothing of it, yet when I give a cup of coffee to a sailor whose grandfather and mine fished together on the banks, you warn me that my methods tend to pauperize. In the city the poor are never your friends—in this little town no man would admit that he is less than I. They like my coffee and they drink it."

Petronella, seeing her chance, took it. "I think people are horrid to let money make a difference."

"You say that," said Hare, "because you have never had to accept favors—you have, in other words, never been on the other side."

The Admiral, taking up cudgels for his niece, answered, "If she had been on the other side, she would have taken life as she takes it now—like a gentleman and a soldier," and he smiled at Petronella.

Hare had a baffled sense that the Admiral was right—that Petronella's fineness and delicacy would never go down in defeat or despair. She would hold her head high though the heavens fell. But could any man make such demands upon her? For himself, he would not.

So he answered, doggedly, "We shall hope she need never be tested." And Petronella's heart sank like lead.

But presently she began to talk about the little tree. "We have always had it in uncle's lookout tower. That was another of dear Aunt Pet's thoughts for the sailors. On clear nights they looked through their glasses for the little colored lights, and on stormy nights they knew that back of all the snow was the Christmas brightness."

"I never had a tree," said Justin. "When I was a kiddie we had pretty hard times, and the best Christmas I remember was one when mother made us boys put up a shelf for our books, and she started our collection with 'Treasure Island' and 'Huckleberry Finn.'"

In the adjoining room, volumes reached from floor to ceiling, from end to end. Petronella had a vision of this vivid young giant gloating over his two books on a rude shelf. And all her life she had had the things she wanted! Somehow the thought took the bitterness out of her attitude toward him. How strong he must be to deny himself now the one great thing that he craved when his life had held so little.

"How lovely to begin with just those two books," she said, softly, and the radiance of her smile was dazzling.

When she showed him her presents she was still radiant. There was a queer opera-bag of Chinese needlework, with handles of jade, a Damascus bowl of pierced brass, a tea-caddy in quaint Dutch repoussé; there was a silver-embroidered altar-cloth for a cushion, a bit of Copenhagen faience, all the sophisticated artistry which is sent to those who have no need for the commonplace. There were jewels, too: a bracelet of topazes surrounded by brilliants, a pair of slipper buckles of turquoises set in silver, a sapphire circlet for her little finger, a pendant of seed pearls.

As she opened the parcels and displayed her riches Justin felt bewildered. His gifts to his mother had included usually gloves and a generous check; if he had ventured to choose anything for Petronella he would not have dared go beyond a box of candy or a book; he had given his nurses pocketbooks and handkerchiefs. And the men of Petronella's world bestowed on her brass bowls and tea-caddies!

Miss Danvers vanished up-stairs. The Admiral, having admired, slipped away to the library, encouraged by Petronella's whispered: "Oh, uncle dear, leave us alone for just a little minute. I've found a way!"

Then Petronella, with that radiance still upon her, sat down on her little stool in front of the fire, and looked at Justin on the other side of the hearth.

"You haven't given me anything," she began, reproachfully.

"What could I give that would compare with these?" His hand swept toward the exquisite display. "What could I give—"

"There's one thing," softly.

"What?"

"That copy of 'Treasure Island' that your mother gave you long ago."

Dead silence. Then, unsteadily: "Why should you want that?"

"Because your mother—loved you."

Again dead silence. Hare did not look at her. His hand clenched the arm of his chair. His face was white. Then, very low, "Why do you—make it hard for me?"

"Because I want—the book"; she was smiling at him with her eyes like stars. "I want to read it with the eyes of the little boy—with the eyes of the little boy who looked into the future and saw life as a great adventure; who looked into the future—and dreamed."

He had a vision, too, of that little boy, reading, in the old house in the Maine woods, by the light of an oil-lamp, on Christmas Eve, with the snow blowing outside as it blew to-night.

"And your mother loved you because she loved your father," the girl's voice went on, "and you were all very happy up there in the forest. Do you remember that you told me about it on the ship?—you were happy, although you were poor, and hadn't any books but 'Treasure Island' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' But your mother was happy—because she—loved your father."

As she repeated it, she leaned forward. "Could you think of your mother as having been happy with any one else but your father?" she asked. "Could you think of her as having never married him, of having gone through the rest of her days a half-woman, because he would not—take her—into his life? Can you think that all the money in the world—all the money in the whole world—would—would have made up—"

The room seemed to darken. Hare was conscious that her face was hidden in her hands, that he stumbled toward her, that he knelt beside her—that she was in his arms.

"Hush," he was saying in that beating darkness of emotion. "Hush, don't cry—I—I will never let you go—"

When the storm had spent itself and when at last she met his long gaze, he whispered, "I'm not sure now that it is right—"

"You will be sure as the years go on," she whispered back; then, tremulously: "but I—I could never have—talked that way if I had thought of you as the man. I had to think of you as the little boy—who dreamed."

"My great-grandfather slept in it," Van Alen told the caretaker, as she ushered him into the big stuffy bedroom.

The old woman set her candlestick down on the quaint dresser. "He must have been a little man," she said; "none of my sons could sleep in it. Their feet would hang over."

Van Alen eyed the big bed curiously. All his life he had heard of it, and now he had traveled far to see it. It was a lumbering structure of great width and of strangely disproportionate length. And the coverlet and the canopy were of rose-colored chintz.

"I think I shall fit it," he said slowly.

Mrs. Brand's critical glance weighed his smallness, his immaculateness, his difference from her own great sons.

"Yes," she said, with the open rudeness of the country-bred; "yes, you ain't very big."

Van Alen winced. Even from the lips of this uncouth woman the truth struck hard. But he carried the topic forward with the light ease of a man of the world.

"My grandfather had the bed sawed to his own length," he explained; "did you ever hear the story?"

"No," she said; "I ain't been here long. They kept the house shut up till this year."

"Well, I'll tell you when I come down," and Van Alen opened his bag with a finality that sent the old woman to the door.

"Supper's ready," she told him, "whenever you are."

At the supper table the four big sons towered above Van Alen. They ate with appetites like giants, and they had big ways and hearty laughs that seemed to dwarf their guest into insignificance.

But the insignificance was that of body only, for Van Alen, fresh from the outside world and a good talker at all times, dominated the table conversationally.

To what he had to say the men listened eagerly, and the girl who waited on the table listened.

She was a vivid personality, with burnished hair, flaming cheeks, eyes like the sea. Her hands, as she passed the biscuits, were white, and the fingers went down delicately to little points. Van Alen, noting these things keenly, knew that she was out of her place, and wondered how she came there.

At the end of the meal he told the story of the Canopy Bed.

"My great-grandfather was a little man, and very sensitive about his height. In the days of his early manhood he spent much time in devising ways to deceive people into thinking him taller. He surrounded himself with big things, had a big bed made, wore high-heeled boots, and the crown of his hat was so tall that he was almost overbalanced.

"But for all that, he was a little man among the sturdy men of his generation, and if it had not been for the Revolution I think he would have died railing at fate. But the war brought him opportunity. My little great-grandfather fought in it, and won great honors, and straight back home he came and had the bed sawed off! He wanted future generations to see what a little man could do, and his will provided that this house should not be sold, and that, when his sons and grandsons had proved themselves worthy of it by some achievement, they should come here and sleep. I think he swaggered a little when he wrote that will, and he has put his descendants in an embarrassing position. We can never sleep in the canopy bed without taking more upon ourselves than modesty permits!"

He laughed, and instinctively his eyes sought those of the girl who waited on the table. Somehow he felt that she was the only one who could understand.

She came back at him with a question: "What have you done?"

"I have written a book," he told her.

She shook her head, and there were little sparks of light in her eyes. "I don't believe that was what your grandfather meant," she said, slowly.

They stared at her—three of the brothers with their knives and forks uplifted, the fourth, a blond Titanic youngster, with his elbows on the table, his face turned up to her, as to the sun.

"I don't believe he meant something done with your brains, but something fine, heroic—" There was a hint of scorn in her voice.

Van Alen flushed. He was fresh from the adulation of his bookish world.

"I should not have come," he explained, uncomfortably, "if my mother had not desired that I preserve the tradition of the family."

"It is a great thing to write a book"—she was leaning forward, aflame with interest—"but I don't believe he meant just that—"

He laughed. "Then I am not to sleep in the canopy bed?"

The girl laughed too. "Not unless you want to be haunted by his ghost."

With a backward flashing glance, she went into the kitchen, and Van Alen, lighting a cigarette, started to explore the old house.

Except for the wing, occupied by the caretaker, nothing had been disturbed since the family, seeking new fortunes in the city, had left the old homestead to decay among the desolate fields that yielded now a meagre living for Mrs. Brand and her four strapping sons.

In the old parlor, where the ancient furniture showed ghostlike shapes in the dimness, and the dead air was like a tomb, Van Alen found a picture of his great-grandfather.

The little man had been painted without flattery. There he sat—Lilliputian on the great charger! At that moment Van Alen hated him—that Hop-o'-my-Thumb of another age, founder of a pigmy race, who, by his braggart will, had that night brought upon this one of his descendants the scorn of a woman.

And even as he thought of her, she came in, with the yellow flare of a candle lighting her vivid face.

"I thought you might need a light," she said; "it grows dark so soon."

As he took the candle from her, he said abruptly: "I shall not sleep in the canopy bed; there is a couch in the room."

"Oh," her tone was startled, "you shouldn't have taken all that I said in earnest."

"But you meant it?"

"In a way, yes. I have been in here so often and have looked at your grandfather's picture. He was a great little man—you can tell from his eyes—they seem to speak at times."

"To you?"

"Yes. Of how he hated to be little, and how he triumphed when fame came at last."

"I hate to be little—"

It was the first time that he had ever owned it. Even as a tiny boy he had brazened it out, boasting of his mental achievements and slurring the weakness of his stunted body.

"I know," she had shut the kitchen door behind her, and they were standing in the hallway alone, "I know. Every man must want to be big."

She was only the girl who had waited on the table, but as she stood there, looking at him with luminous eyes, he burned with dull resentment, envying the blond boy who had sprawled at the head of the supper table. After all, it was to such a man as Otto Brand that this woman would some day turn.

He spoke almost roughly: "Size isn't everything." She flushed. "How rude you must think me," she said; "but I have been so interested in dissecting your grandfather that I forgot—you—"

Van Alen was moved by an impulse that he could not control, a primitive impulse that was not in line with his usual repression.

"I am tempted to make you remember me," he said slowly, and after that there was a startled silence. And then she went away.

As he passed the sitting-room on his way up-stairs, he looked in, and spoke to Otto Brand.

More than any of the other brothers, Otto typified strength and beauty, but in his eyes was never a dream, his brain had mastered nothing. He was playing idly with the yellow cat, but he stopped at Van Alen's question.

"Her great-grandfather and yours were neighbors," the boy said, with his cheeks flushing; "they own the next farm."

"The Wetherells?" Van Alen inquired.

The boy nodded. "They ain't got a cent. They're land poor. That's why she's here. But she don't need to work."

"Why not?"

"There's plenty that wants to marry her round about," was the boy's self-conscious summing up.

With a sense of revolt, Van Alen left him, and, undressing in the room with the canopy bed, he called up vaguely the vision of a little girl who had visited them in the city. She had had green eyes and freckles and red hair. Beyond that she had made no impression on his callowness. And her name was Mazie Wetherell.

He threw himself on the couch, and the night winds, coming in through the open window, stirred the curtains of the canopy bed with the light touch of a ghostly hand.

Then dreams came, and through them ran the thread of his hope of seeing Mazie Wetherell in the morning.

But even with such preparation, her beauty seemed to come upon him unawares when he saw her at breakfast. And again at noon, and again at night. But it was the third day before he saw her alone.

All that day he had explored the length and breadth of the family estate, finding it barren, finding that the population of the little village at its edge had decreased to a mere handful of laggards, finding that there was no lawyer within miles and but one doctor; gaining a final impression that back here in the hills men would come no more where once men had thronged.

It was almost evening when he followed a furrowed brown road that led westward. Above the bleak line of the horizon the sun hung, a red gold disk. There were other reds, too, along the way—the sumac flaming scarlet against the gray fence-rails; the sweetbrier, crimson-spotted with berries; the creeper, clinging with ruddy fingers to dead tree-trunks; the maple leaves rosy with first frosts.

And into this vividness came the girl who had waited on the table, and her flaming cheeks and copper hair seemed to challenge the glow of the autumn landscape.

She would have passed him with a nod, but he stopped her.

"You must not run away, Mazie Wetherell," he said; "you used to treat me better than that when you were a little girl."

She laughed. "Do you remember my freckles and red hair?"

"I remember your lovely manners."

"I had to have nice manners. It is only pretty children who can afford to be bad."

"And pretty women?" he asked, with his eyes on the color that came and went.

She flung out her hands in a gesture of protest "I have seen so few."

His lips were opened to tell her of her own beauty, but something restrained him, some perception of maidenly dignity that enfolded her and made her more than the girl who had waited on the table.

"You were a polite little boy," she recalled, filling the breach made by his silence. "I remember that you carried me across the street, to save my slippers from the wet. I thought you were wonderful. I have never forgotten."

Neither had Van Alen forgotten. It had been a great feat for his little strength. There had been other boys there, bigger boys, but he had offered, and had been saved humiliation by her girlish slimness and feather weight.

"I was a strong little fellow then," was his comment: "I am a strong little fellow now."

She turned on him reproachful eyes. "Why do you always harp on it?" she demanded.

"On what?"

"Your size. You twist everything, turn everything, so that we come back to it."

He tried to answer lightly, but his voice shook. "Perhaps it is because in your presence I desire more than ever the full stature of a man."

He was in deadly earnest. Hitherto he had been willing to match his brain, his worldly knowledge, his ancestry, against the charms of the women he had met; but here with this girl, standing like a young goddess under the wide, sunset sky, he felt that only for strength and beauty should she choose her mate.

He wondered what he must seem in her eyes; with his shoulder on a level with hers, with his stocky build that saved him from effeminacy, his carefulness of attire—which is at once the burden and the salvation of the small man.

As for his face, he knew that its homeliness was redeemed by a certain strength of chin, by keen gray eyes, and by a shock of dark hair that showed a little white at the temples. There were worse-looking men, he knew, but that, at the present moment, gave little comfort.

She chose to receive his remark in silence, and, as they came to a path that branched from the road, she said:

"I am going to help take care of a child who is sick. You see I am mistress of all trades—nurse, waitress, charwoman, when there is nothing else."

He glanced at her hands. "I cannot believe that you scrub," he said.

"I sit up at night to care for my hands"—there was a note of bitterness in her tone—"and I wear gloves when I work. There are some things that one desires to hold on to, and my mother and my grandmother were ladies of leisure."

"Would you like that—to be a lady of leisure?"

She turned and smiled at him. "How can I tell?" she asked; "I have never tried it."

She started to leave him as she said it, but he held her with a question: "Shall you sit up all night?"

She nodded. "His mother has had no sleep for two nights."

"Is he very ill?"

The girl shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows? There is no doctor near, and his mother is poor. We are fighting it out together."

There was something heroic in her cool acceptance of her hard life. He was silent for a moment, and then he said: "Would you have time to read my book to-night?"

"Oh, if I might," she said eagerly, "but you haven't it with you."

"I will bring it," he told her, "after supper."

"But," she protested.

"There are no 'buts,'" he said, smiling; "if you will read it, I will get it to you."

The sky had darkened, and, as he went toward home, he faced clouds in the southeast.

"It is going to rain," Otto Brand prophesied as they sat down to supper.

The other three men hoped that it would not. Already the ground was soaked, making the cutting of corn impossible, and another rain with a frost on top of it would spoil all chance of filling the silo.

Van Alen could not enter into their technical objections. He hoped it would not rain, because he wanted to take a book to Mazie Wetherell, and he had not brought a rain-coat.

But it did rain, and he went without a rain-coat!

The house, as he neared it, showed no light, and under the thick canopy of the trees there was no sound but the drip, drip of the rain. By feeling and instinct he found the front door, and knocked.

There was a movement inside, and then Mazie Wetherell asked softly: "Who's there?"

"I have brought the book."

The bolt was withdrawn, and in the hall, scarcely lighted by the shaded lamp in the room beyond, stood the girl, in a loose gray gown, with braided shining hair—a shadowy being, half-merged into the shadows.

"I thought you would not come," in a hushed tone, "in such a storm."

"I said I should come. The book may help you through the long night."

She caught her breath quickly. "The child is awfully ill."

"Are you afraid? Let me stay."

"Oh, no, no. His mother is sleeping, and I shall have your book."

She did not ask him in, and so he went away at once, beating his way back in the wind and rain, fording a little stream where the low foot-bridge was covered, reaching home soaking wet, but afire with dreams.

Otto Brand was waiting for him, a little curious as to what had taken him out so late, but, getting no satisfaction, he followed Van Alen up-stairs, and built a fire for him in the big bedroom. And presently, in the light of the leaping flames, the roses on the canopy of the bed glowed pink.

"Ain't you goin' to sleep in the bed?" Otto asked, as he watched Van Alen arrange the covers on the couch.

"No," said Van Alen shortly, "the honor is too great. It might keep me awake."

"My feet would hang over," Otto said. "Funny thing, wasn't it, for a man to make a will like that?"

"I suppose every man has a right to do as he pleases," Van Alen responded coldly. He was not inclined to discuss the eccentricities of his little old ancestor with this young giant.

"Of course," Otto agreed, and his next remark was called forth by Van Alen's pale blue pajamas.

"Well, those are new on me."

Van Alen explained that in the city they were worn, and that silk was cool, but while he talked he was possessed by a kind of fury. For the first time the delicate garments, the luxurious toilet articles packed in his bag, seemed foppish, unnecessary, things for a woman. With all of them, he could not compete with this fair young god, who used a rough towel and a tin basin on the kitchen bench.

"Maybe I'd better go," the boy offered. "You'll want to go to bed."

But Van Alen held him. "I always smoke first," he said, and, wrapped in his dressing-gown, he flung himself into a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace.

And after a time he brought the conversation around to Mazie Wetherell.

He found the boy rather sure of his success with her.

"All women are alike," he said; "you've just got to keep after them long enough."

To Van Alen the idea of this hulking youngster as a suitor for such a woman seemed preposterous. He was not fit to touch the hem of her garment. He was unmannerly, uneducated; he was not of her class—and even as he analyzed, the boy stood up, perfect in his strong young manhood.

"I've never had much trouble making women like me," he said; "and I ain't goin' to give up, just because she thinks she's better than the rest round about here."

He went away, and Van Alen stared long into the fire, until the flames left a heart of opal among the ashes.

He had not been unsuccessful with women himself. Many of them had liked him, and might have loved him if he had cared to make them. But until he met Mazie Wetherell he had not cared.

Desperately he wished for some trial of courage where he might be matched against Otto Brand. He grew melodramatic in his imaginings, and saw himself at a fire, fighting the flames to reach Mazie, while Otto Brand shrank back. He stood in the path of runaway horses, and Otto showed the white feather. He nursed her through the plague, and Otto fled fearfully from the disease.

And then having reached the end of impossibilities, he stood up and shook himself.

"I'm a fool," he said to the flames, shortly, and went to bed, to lie awake, wondering whether Mazie Wetherell had reached that chapter of his book where he had written of love, deeply, reverently, with a foreknowledge of what it might mean to him some day. It was that chapter which had assured the success of his novel. Would it move her, as it had moved him when he reread it? That was what love ought to be—a thing fine, tender, touching the stars! That was what love might be to him, to Mazie Wetherell, what it could never be to Otto Brand.