Thereafter at station after station, a tall, gaunt man may have been seen handling baggage, running errands, caring for the cattle, doing any sort of work, no matter how humble, that lay to his hand, making his way slowly, wearily but steadily on toward the South.
Seth, working his way home to Celia.
He slept in baggage cars, on cattle trains. He swung to steps of trains moved off and clung there between brief stations. He stopped over at small towns and earned his bread at odd jobs, bread and sufficient money sometimes to move on steadily for a day or two.
Strange weathers burned and bit him. He walked heavily in the path of the wind overhung by pale clouds. He slept under the stars out in the open.
It was days before he passed the plains, the place of the sleepless winds where wan white skies bent above the grass of the hot dry pulse, the lifeless grass that wailed into the ceaseless wind its dirge of death and decay.
It was weeks before he reached Kansas City, the city of hills, with lights hung high and lights hung low. Here he found a place as brakeman and worked his way into Missouri.
Here it was as if an ocean steamer had suddenly stopped the whir of its wheels at the approach of the pilot come out from shore to tug it in.
The wind had stopped blowing.
The position was only temporary. Another brakeman taking his place, Seth walked.
He was not sorry to walk in this quiet land. How tenderly green the shrubbery was, how beautiful! Mingled with the darker green of the cedar and pine, the brown green of the cone.
How sweet the slow green trees! Not windswept! Not torn by the wild, wet fingers of the wind, not lashed with hot and scathing fingers gone dry with drought, but still and peaceful.
A sleepy world of streams it was, a sleepy world of streams and sweet green trees among whose leaflets gentle zephyrs breathed scarcely perceptible sighs of pure contentment.
Patiently, contentedly, he walked mile after mile through this beautiful Missouri which was so like home, among these tall, sighing trees, under the protection of their great still umbrella-like heads, thinking of his dream Celia, whom he was so soon to see.
The absence of the wind had left his brain clear. Since it was so short a time until his dream was to become a reality, no longing or heartache served to set his brain afire with the agony of despair. Calmly he walked in the white straight rain among the tender trees, his tired brain clear, thinking of her.
How would she receive him?
Surely, in spite of his empty-handedness, she would greet him lovingly because of their long separation and the death of the child. Surely she would receive him lovingly because of the endless days that had divided them. Those days! Those days! But he refused to let his mind dwell on the deadly length of them. It might sadden again.
In the world, he reasoned, there were those two only, Celia and himself. Should they not cling together?
True, he would arrive empty-handed, but he could make a living for her and himself in the old town. He was not without friends there. There were those who had loved him in the olden time. They would give him work. They would help him build up his lost fortunes. He would spend his life in retrieving, in compensating to Celia for the foolish years that he had spent dreaming dreams.
In St. Louis he remained for weeks, working about the station in the effort to earn enough for his ride to Cincinnati. At length he succeeded, but on an emigrant train.
He rode for a day, looking out the window at the landscape swimming by rather than at his wild-eyed companions, crowded together like sheep. At the end of the day he arrived at Cincinnati.
And then Seth came into—into God's country.
For some months after Celia's return to her native town, her friends gathered gladly about her. A little visit! That was natural enough. They welcomed her with open arms.
As the visit lengthened, questions ensued.
The child. What of him. Was he not very young to leave for such a length of time? Was not that a strange mother who could thus separate herself from a babe in arms; who could deprive him of the warmth and comfort of her embrace?
And Seth? What of him? For Seth had many friends among them who knew his great heart and his worth.
How was it possible for her to remain apart from her husband and child so long?
Contented in the soft and balmy clime, in the land of her birth, she told them of the terror of the winds, of the sunbaked prairie, of the plague of the grasshoppers, of the hot winds that blistered, of the scorch of the simoons, of the withering blasts of summer and the freezing storms of winter, and thought that sufficient explanation until she beheld herself reflected in the coldness of their glances as in a mirror, set aloof outside their lives as a thing abnormal, as a worthless instrument whose leading string is somehow out of tune, which has snapped with a discordant twang.
However, this did not greatly distress her. She turned to her mother for companionship. The mother filled what small need she had of love until she died. She was soon followed, this mother of hers, into the land of shadows by the loving shadow of herself, Celia's black Mammy. Then Celia was left alone in the old house, which, for lack of funds, was fast falling into ruin, the wrinkled shingles of the roof letting in the rain in dismal drops to flood the cellar and the kitchen, the grass growing desolately up between the bricks of the pavement that led from door to gate for lack of the tread of neighborly feet.
Life, which is never the same, which is ever changing, changes by degrees. Not all at once did Celia's soul shrivel but gradually. Now and again in the early days following upon her return to her home, at the cry of a child in the street, she would start to her feet, then remember and shrug her shoulders and forget. And there were some nights that were filled for her with the remembered moan of the prairie winds. She heard them shriek and howl and whistle with all their old time force and terror. She sprang wildly out of bed and ran to the window to look out on the slumbrous quiet of the Southern night, to clasp her hand and thank her good fortune that she looked not out on the wide weird waste of the trackless prairie.
Gradually, too, she descended to poverty and that without complaint.
To poverty dire as that from which she had fled, except that it was unaccompanied by the horror of simoon and blizzard, of hot winds and cold.
For her this sufficed.
Too proud to ask for help of those who passed her by in coldness as a soulless creature of a nature impossible to understand and therefore to be shunned, she toiled and delved alone, a recluse and outcast in the home of her birth. She delved in the patch of a garden for the wherewithal to keep the poor roof over her head. She hoed and dug and drove hard bargains with the grocers to whom she sold her meagre products. She washed and ironed and mended and darned and cooked, coming at length perforce to the drudgery which throughout her brief life in the hole in the ground she had scornfully disdained.
Not once did the thought of asking help of Seth or of returning to him present itself.
And yet there were tardy times when the memory of the winds remained with her day in and day out, when at twilight she sat on the steps of her vine-covered, crumbling portico and communed with herself.
When, placing herself apart, she reviewed her life and observed herself with the critical eye of an uninterested outsider.
Invariably then she would say to herself, remembering the wail and shriek and moan of the hideous winds:
"I would leave them again, the winds and the child and him. If it happened a second time, and I again had the choice, I would leave them exactly the same."
Then aloud, in apology for what had the look to her own biased eyes of utter heartlessness:
"It was the fault of the winds," she would mutter, "it was the fault of the winds!"
Kentucky! God's country!
It was as if Seth had dropped out of a wind-blown cloud into a quiet garden, sweetly fenced about and away from the jar and fret of the world.
Placid, content, tranquil, standing stock-still in the delicacy of its old-fashioned beauty, as if the world outside and beyond had never progressed.
He wandered by old and rich plantations, carved by necessity into smaller farms, past big white stone gates opening to wide avenues which led up to them, looking wistfully in, still content to wander a space before he should experience the rapture of seeing Celia's face, loitering, the white happiness of that within his reach, half fearing to hold out his hand for it, fearing it might vanish, escape phantasmagorically, turn out to be a will-o'-the-wisp.
Whip-poor-wills accompanied him in his wanderings, Bob Whites, Nightingales; and lazy ebon negroes, musical as birds, sang lilting Southern songs on the way to the tinkle of banjo and guitar.
The negroes were not so kind as the birds. From them he suffered humiliation.
More than once he was dubbed "Po' white!" by some haughty ebon creature from whose mouth he was supposedly taking the bread.
But here, as in Missouri, he looked for consolation to the wet woods, to the still, soft, straight rain, to the sighing trees that softly soughed him welcome.
After weary days and nights, working by day on rock-pile or in field, sleeping by night in the corner of a friendly fence of worm-eaten rails, fanned by the delicate hair of the pale blue grasses, he came to Burgin.
The driver of the bus that conveyed passengers to Harrodsburg looked down upon him from the height of his perch. He was strange to Seth, but he recognized a something of the kinship of country in his face and manner.
"Have a lif'?" he asked.
Seth refused. It was bright daylight. He wished to steal into his old home under the covering of the twilight, he was so footsore and bedraggled.
"I'll walk," he smiled, "but thank you just the same."
Four miles, then, over hill, down dale, past dusty undergrowth, the brilliant blue of the skies above him, passing negroes who looked strangely at him out of rolling eyes, who jerked black thumbs in his direction over shoulders, saying:
"See de po' white trash man, walkin' home!"
But there were some Bob Whites singing in the bushes over the rail fences, singing, singing!
A bird at the side of the road rested momentarily on a long, keen switch of a blackberry bush, the switch bent earthward, the bird flew off and the twig bent back again.
At sight of him ground squirrels sped into the underbrush.
Somewhere on the other side of the rail fences little negroes sang. They were too young yet to jerk their thumbs at him and say:
"Po' white!"
Now that he was so near to Celia his heart misgave him. How would she receive him, coming home to her a tramp, a dusty, tired, footsore tramp, wet, chilled to the bone, footsore and tired! So tired!
He forged ahead, trying hard to throw off these thoughts. It was the scornful negroes who had engendered them.
A mile from Harrodsburg he came to the toll gate. A woman whose yellow hair showed streaks of gray, raised the pole for him, smiling at him.
"That man had eyes like Seth Lawsons," she said to her husband, who smoked his pipe on the porch while she raised and lowered the poles and so supported the family.
She was the girl who had called good-by after Celia years before, when she left for her journey to the West and the Magic City.
It was twilight when Seth came to Celia's gate.
A woman sat alone on the step of the portico, looking out down the pike.
Seth paused, his hand on the latch, seeing which the woman shook her head negatively.
Seth raised the latch, whereupon she suddenly stood, frowning.
"I have nothing for you," she called out raspingly. "There is not a thing in the house to eat. Go away! Go away!"
"Celia!" Seth cried out, stabbed to the heart. "I am not a beggar for bread, but give me a crust of kindness for the love of God! I am Seth."
Seen from afar off by the loving eyes of memory, the cows' horns are longer than they are close by.
The kitchen was old and smoky. Once on a time it had been regularly calcimined, twice a year, or three times, but it had been many years now since it had undergone this cleanly process.
Celia's welcome of Seth had been according to her nature, all the more hardened now by seclusion and poverty. She heard without emotion of the death of the child. It mattered little to her. She had never known him. Seth, come back to her a failure, a tramp, was deserving of scant courtesy. She meted it out to him as it seemed to her he deserved.
The miles he had travelled counted little. Since he had proven himself too great a failure to travel as men do, it was only just that he should work his way, sleep in fence corners, live on crusts and walk.
It was one of her theories that, given sufficient time, all men and animals sink to their level.
Who was Seth that he should be exempt from this law?
The thought occurred to her that he had come to her as a last recourse. That, unable to make his own living, he had come to share hers.
That thought scarcely served to add warmth to her welcome.
Seth sat on a chair against the blackened wall in the position of the tramp who has covered weary distances, whose every bone aches with the extreme intensity of fatigue.
He was like a rag that had been thrown there.
As Celia had watched him get their first supper in the dugout, so he now watched her. As she had sat bitterly disillusioned in the darkness of the hole in the ground, so he sat within the four close walls of the smoke-begrimed kitchen of her old Kentucky home, disillusioned beyond compare.
In the once sunny hair there were streaks of gray, but it was not that. There were wrinkles beneath the blue eyes that had not lost their sternness, the cold blue of their intensity, the chill and penetrating frost of their gaze. Somehow, too, those large and beautiful eyes had appeared to grow smaller with the passing of the years, not with tears, for there are tears that wash out all else but beauty in some women's eyes, but with the barren drought of feeling which goes to sap the very fount of loveliness.
And it was this barren drought of feeling which at last served to disillusion him, whose existence he at last realized in this creature who had been his cherished idol. He realized it in her apathy upon hearing of the death of the child. He realized it in the look she turned upon him in which he saw her stern suspicion that he had come homeless to her in the hope of a home.
Formerly, in the days of her mother and her old black Mammy, they had taken tea in the dining-room, which had looked out on a green sward brightened by flowers.
Gay and cheerful teas these were, enlivened by guests.
In the absence of guests, Celia had fallen into the slack habit of eating in the kitchen of the smoke-begrimed ceiling and the dark bare walls. There was a small deal table against the window. It was covered with an abbreviated cloth.
Celia walked about setting this table for Seth and herself, laying with palpable reluctance the extra plate, cup, saucer, knife and fork. Her movements were no longer girlish. They were heavy and slow.
When tea was ready she bade Seth draw up his chair. They then ate their supper, Seth too tired to talk and Celia busy with the problem of this added mouth destined to consume the contents of her scant larder.
When supper was over Seth left her to clear the table, went out in the dark on the front porch away from the cold steel blue of her eye and sat down on the step.
Men seldom shed tears, or he would have found it in his heart to weep.
Not many moons after the wreck wrought by the withering winds, which, while they had not touched the place of the forks of the two rivers, lacked little of it, the Wise Men came out of the East and found Cyclona alone in the Kansas dugout there by the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas.
"Is this the place where the Indians pitched their tents?" they asked, "because no cyclones come here?"
"Yes," she answered.
"Then this," said they, "is where we will build our city."
"The Magic City," repeated Cyclona, without surprise.
"When we have finished it," they smiled, "it will be a Magic City."
Cyclona looked wistfully out along the weary track of the wind.
"But Seth," said she, "will never see it maybe. He has given up and gone back home."
Few there are who have not heard of the Magic City, the Windy Wonder of the West, the Peerless Princess of the Plains, and how it sprung up mushroom-like in a night there at the forks of the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas, where the Indians had pitched their tents and Seth had lived and hoped and despaired, and how men went wild erecting Colleges and Palaces and Temples and Watch Factories and buying up town lots so far from the town that if the city had been built on all of them it would have surpassed the marvellous tales of it written in the newspapers, reached half way to Denver and become, instead of the Magic City of the West, the Magic City of the World.
Seth had been a dreamer of dreams, but his vision of the Magic City was not half so marvellous as the city itself.
Fortunes were made in a day and lost before midnight.
Men came from far and near, many from the other side of the water, and bought town lots and sold them, bought still others and built tall houses and planted great avenues of trees, cottonwood trees, the trees of Seth's imaginings, trees that seemed also to spring up in a night, they grew so magically, thrusting deep roots into the moist black soil and greedily sucking up its moisture in a very madness of growing, and laid off parks and sent flashing electric cars out into the large farms and dangled big soft balls of electricity in the middle of the streets that twinkled at eventide like big pale blinking fireflies.
Those who had formerly eked out a precarious enough existence in dugouts, now lived in palaces, had their raiment fashioned by hands Parisian, and gave receptions on a scale of such grandeur that the flowers offered as souvenirs thereat would have kept many a wolf from a dugout door for years, and a few Wise Men it was said lost their heads in the mad whirl of speculation, but as that often happens in the building up of any great city, not necessarily in the West, it was not so surprising as it might have been.
Indeed, the World stood still a moment, agape at the wonder of the Magic City, and there were those who, now that Seth had passed out of the way of the wind into a country strange to them, spoke of him reverently as Prophet and Seer, going so far as to express regret that while within the sound of their voices they had carelessly dubbed him a foolish dreamer of mad, fantastic and impossible dreams, yet comforting themselves withal with the thought that they were not alone in denying a Prophet honor in his own country, since so wagged the world.
The Magic City, stretching itself far and near, had not failed to include the little station.
Common walls of plank no longer enshrined the person of the Post Mistress. She no longer looked out from the limited space of a narrow window onto ragged flower beds in whose soft, loose earth floundered wind-blown chickens.
She dwelt in the wide, white marble halls of a lofty new Post Office. Bell boys, porters and stenographers surrounded her.
It was five o'clock. The Professor stood near while she sorted out some letters and placed them in pigeon-holes. He was clad in the latest fashion as laid down by the London Tailors who, at the first sound of the Boom, had hastened on the wings of the wind to the Magic City. His frock coat radiated newness, his patent leathers shone, and a portion of the brim of a tall silk hat rested daintily between thumb and fingers of a well-gloved hand.
As a matter of fact, since he had proved himself her friend through thick and thin, through storms and adversity, through high winds and blizzards, the Post Mistress had at last, after much persuasion, awarded him the privilege of standing by her throughout the rest of her natural existence.
A dapper youth in livery approached the window, asked for letters and withdrew.
There was about him a certain air of elegance which yet had somehow the subtle effect of having been reflected.
"Will Low's valet," explained the Post Mistress. "Sometimes it seems to be a dream, all this. These men who sat around my big blazing stove spinning cyclone yarns while they waited for the brakeman to fling in the mailbag, sending their valets for their mail! It seems like magic, doesn't it?"
"It does," assented the Professor.
"There's Zed Jones," continued the Post Mistress, "with his new drag, his Queen Anne cottage built of gray stone, his Irish setters. And Mrs. Zed sending to Paris for all her clothes, and the little Zeds fine as fiddles with their ponies and their pony carts."
"And Hezekiah Smith," reminded the Professor.
"Who used to sleep on a pile of newspapers in his old newsstand on the corner, driving his tandem now. And Howard Evans and Roger Cranes and a dozen others, all poor as church mice then, and rich as cream now. It is like fairy land. You, too," with an admiring glance at the frock coat, "worth fifty thousand. And my bit of land bringing me a small fortune. I think after," with another smile in his direction, "we'll let some other lone single woman have this job who needs the money. We won't keep the Post Office any longer."
The Professor smiled a silent assent.
"But the most wonderful thing of all," went on the Post Mistress, "is that girl Cyclona. All of twenty-seven or eight, but she looks like a girl. It was pretty cute of her, wasn't it, to jump Seth's claim?"
"She didn't exactly jump it," said the Professor. "She was taking care of it after Seth went away, when her own topsy turvy house blew off somewhere. She had no other home. I wouldn't exactly call it jumping Seth's claim."
"Call it what you please," said the Post Mistress, "but it amounts to the same thing. She got all the money the Wise Men paid for the claim, and it went into the millions. Why, Seth's claim takes up the very heart of the city. That girl's worth her weight in gold, that Cyclona, and she deserves it, taking care of the baby first, then watching after Seth. I believe she's in love with Seth. I believe she lives in hopes that he'll come back again. I know. She is seen everywhere with Hugh Walsingham, drivin' with him in her stylish little trap, a good driver she is, too, after ridin' fiery bronchos, herdin' Seth's cattle and livin' wild-like on the prairies. She's a splendid whip, afraid of nothin'."
"But you can see in her big, stretchy faraway eyes that she ain't thinkin' about Hugh Walsingham, that she's always thinkin' about Seth and wishin' it was him a drivin' with her in that stylish little trap of hers."
She stopped to read a postal card.
"Cyclona's a fine young woman," she resumed, "and a beautiful young woman, if she is brown as a gypsy, but the wind has left a wheel in her head. She has never been right since that storm that blew away the topsy turvy house. Another shock and her mind will go entirely. I've heard a doctor say so, a man who knows. She deserves all she's got and a happy life with that handsome Englishman, but here she is with some fool idea that the money, all these riches she's fallen heiress to, that make her the belle of the Magic City, ain't hers. That they are held in trust for Seth and Celia, that heartless Celia, who deserted her husband and baby to go back to her home in the South.
"What right has that Celia got to any money that comes out of the West she hated so, out of this wind-blown place she wouldn't live in? None at all. No more right than I have. Leaving Seth out here on the plains all by himself, grievin' for her, breakin' his heart for her, nearly losin' his mind with grief about her.
"The money's Cyclona's. She worked for it, never thinkin' of the reward. She took care of the child and looked after Seth. She deserves all the good that can come to her, that girl does."
"She does," assented the Professor.
"Hugh Walsingham's in a good fix, too," continued the Post Mistress, "sold his claim for a whole lot of money. Able now, he is, to help his poor relations back there in England, who sent him to the plains to get rid of him. Funny how things turn out sometimes."
"Cyclona coming out of Nowhere, and he packed off out of England, both outcasts, both rich now and ready to live happy ever after, if Cyclona would only get rid of this fool notion of hers that she's only holdin' the riches in trust for Celia and Seth.
"Have you heard the news? It's this: You know Nancy Lewis, the dish-washer in the restaurant before the Boom, the girl who happened to save her earnings and buy a bit of land that turned into a gold nugget? Well, a millionaire who made his money here, fell in love with her. She accepted him, but he made a slight mistake. He failed to keep an engagement with her one night and sent a waiter with a note. She got huffy and went off and married the waiter.
"We can't rise all at once from our station in life, can we? Like as not, when we get into our new house and put on style ourselves with our drags and our dogs, I'll be sortin' out letters in my dreams and handin' them through a dream window to the people. This girl is a born dish-washer. She clung to her station. Her children may rise from the position of dish-washers, if they have enough money and education, but not she."
"Wait a minute. Here's a postcard I haven't read yet. It looks like it's been through a cyclone. Land sakes alive! Guess who it's from!"
"Can't," said the Professor, beginning to be hungry.
The Post Mistress turned the card over and over.
"It's from Jonathan, Cyclona's father," she chuckled. "Of all the people in the world! It is post-marked Texas."
"So that's where they blew to! It's to Cyclona, but everybody will be dying to know what it says. Listen:
"'Dear Cyclona:—
"'I think you will be glad to hear that this cyclone was good to us, blowin' us 'way down here in Texas, where the weather is so fine. It saved me the trouble, too, of bothering with the roof. It blew it right side up and the clothes are all down in the room now.'"
"'Your affectionate father,'"
"'Jonathan.'"
"'P.S.—I like this part of the country better than I did Kansas. I think we will stay here, Cyclona.'"
"Until another cyclone comes along," the Professor commented, "and blows him into the Gulf."
"I wonder," mused the Post Mistress, "if the cyclone put the clothes away in the presses when it took them down from the walls."
It was as the Post Mistress had said. Cyclona was the heiress of the Magic City. As Seth had predicted, she sold his land in its heart for more money than she knew what to do with. Cyclona was not only the most beautiful young woman in the Magic City, but she was the most beautifully gowned and exquisite, what with her well-filled purse with its attendant luxuries of maids, mantua-makers and milliners. She was new to look at, but old thoughts clung to her, old dreams, old fancies.
Cyclona dreamed a dream one night. She thought that she was in the old dugout at the little deal table before the dim half-window, outside which the wind sang fitfully, blowing the tumbleweeds hither and thither, near and far, with moans and sighs, and Seth sat by her side. And as of old he talked to her of the beautiful house.
"All these were of costly stones, according to the measures of hewed stones," she heard him say in the dream, "sawed with saws within and without. Even from the foundation unto the coping, and so on the outside toward the great court."
Cyclona sat up in her bed with a start and slept no more.
So it was the beautiful house that she was to build, of course. Wondering how it was she had not thought before of carrying out Seth's dearest wish without waiting to be reminded of it in a dream, reproaching herself, condemning her selfishness, marvelling how she could for a moment have considered this money her own which she simply held in trust for Celia and Seth.
Thereafter, Hugh, in spite of his deep affection for her, became occasionally somewhat exasperated with Cyclona, who all at once developed such peculiar ideas in regard to the building of the house, ideas gathered from an old and yellow plan resurrected from the leaves of a well-thumbed Bible brought from the dugout.
"Cedar!" he cried, "Must we bring cedar all the way from the South? It will cost a fortune. Why not use some other wood? There are others as beautiful."
"We will use cedar," determined Cyclona without further explanation, and cedar they used, carved curiously in pomegranate and lily work, very beautiful, Hugh had to acknowledge, though the expense was more than it should have been, no matter how much money a young woman had to throw to the birds.
"Shall we have so many windows?" he asked as Cyclona ordered window after window, according to the old yellow plan.
"There must be no dark spot in all this house," decided Cyclona, and when it was finished there was not. Built of stone brought from great distances, stone of delicate pink from Tennessee, carved, wide of door, alight with windows, it was a marvel to those who came and stood by, watching the building of it.
"A beautiful house," they called it. "A beautiful house!"
There was no word of Seth in regard to the beautiful house that Cyclona failed to remember.
"This is the stairway," she heard him say, "up which Celia shall trail in her silks and her velvets. This is the threshold her little feet shall press, and here is the low divan before a wide and sunny window where she shall sit and thrum on her guitar."
Cyclona fashioned the threshold of marble, she built the stairway spacious, she had the low divan carved in cedar and placed it before a wide and sunny window in the music room. She placed there mandolins and guitars. She ordered a piano made of cedar for the music room. She had antique and gorgeous pillows embroidered by deft fingers for the low divan, then went on to the bed-room of white and gold, of which Seth had delighted to dream. She ordered pier-glasses, so many that Hugh began to fear indeed for her sanity. She bought spindle-legged furniture of gold and scattered it about. She covered the gold bedstead with lace of the rarest. She hung curtains at the sunny window, but curtains of so lacey a web that no possible ray of light could they exclude.
"Exquisite!" exclaimed Hugh, "but must you have gold door knobs?"
"We must," answered Cyclona; and people came in wonder to look at the beautiful house whose gold door knobs passed into one of the many traditions of the excess of insanity displayed by the very rich of that marvellous boom in their expenditure of money.
Cyclona caused the cellar to be lighted, according to Seth's directions, until there was no dark spot in it. Light gleamed throughout, if not the light of day, the light of electrics.
"I never in my life," declared Hugh, "saw so light a cellar. It is like a conservatory."
By the time the house was finished, it was the wonder of the Magic City, which itself was the wonder of the West for its beautiful houses.
Then, when carpenter, painter, wood-carver and decorator had departed, and the house stood in the sunshine, a gem of a house, surpassing, if possible, in beauty, the house of Seth's imaginings, he came to Cyclona for the last time in a dream. He stood in the dimness of a low-roofed room, looking out of a window. His face was inexpressibly sad. He stood there stilly for a long time, looking out of the window.
Then there rushed through Cyclona's dream the heavy whirring roar of the wind, the moan of the wind, the wail of the wind.
Cyclona started out of the dream with a cry.
What had happened? What was it? What was it?
It was as if her life had gone out all at once like the flame of a candle. It was as if her heart-strings had snapped asunder.
What was it? What was it?
She lay back among her pillows, trembling in the dark, afraid of she knew not what, her wide eyes agaze at the ceiling's shadows.
And then after a long while she fell asleep again and once more dreamed.
The wind soughed through her dream again, pitifully, wailingly, as it had often soughed outside the dugout. Presently it dropped to a whisper and the passing gleam of clouds let in a slab of sunlight through the window.
Was Seth in the dugout then, or in that other room?
Whichever it was, the sunlight rested goldenly on the calmness of his face. It glorified it.
In her dream, Cyclona looked long and lovingly at the strong, fine lines of it brought out by this unexpected high light of the skies, accentuated Rembrandt-like against the darkness of the hole in the ground.
Yes. It was in the hole in the ground and not that other room of the Beautiful House.
As she looked the calm dream face of Seth turned to her with a smile of ineffable content.
On the following day Hugh said to her:
"Now that the beautiful house is finished, be mine. Be mine!"
She shook her head and looked at him with eyes that turned the heart of him cold. The pupils that had once been large and full and black had shrunk to the size of pin heads.
"No," she said. "I will wait and keep the house beautiful for Seth. Last night I saw him in a dream. He'll be coming home soon now to the beautiful house."
She walked to the window and looked out. She sank into a chair there, folded her hands and smiled contentedly, looking out through the leaves of the trees down the sunlit road.
"I will wait here for Seth," she repeated. "He won't be long now. He'll be coming home soon. I saw his face last night in a dream, and he smiled at me."