Philip and His Wife

IV.

DR. LAVENDAR always said that his brother Joseph lived with him ; but the fact was, Mr. Joseph Lavendar could spend only his Sundays at the rectory. He used to come down from Mercer on the Saturday morning stage, but he traveled back again on Monday morning to his music-teaching. “ My profession takes me away from home during the week,” he used to explain. That one day with his brother really made a home for this simple, honest gentleman, whose occupation was to drill short-pettieoated misses in their scales.

But although Mr. Lavendar came to Old Chester only to spend Sundays, the village, quite as much as his brother or himself, would have resented the suggestion that his home was not at the rectory; for everybody loved Joseph Lavendar. To be sure, he was something of an exquisite, which is not usually endearing: his suit of brown broadcloth was immaculate, his linen spotless, his shoes knew the polish of his brother’s precious stones; indeed, he had more than once been seen to brush a speck of dust from them with his pocket handkerchief. But, though finical about himself, he was tolerant of other people’s dusty shoes, to speak generically, and such tolerance is always endearing. Besides, the eager kindliness of his face was irresistible ; his mild, somewhat prominent blue eyes were without a shadow of suspicion of any of the human race; his bald, high forehead, with little tufts of reddish hair above each ear, was forever wrinkling with sympathy for somebody else. It was nothing more than Sympathy, for he never dared to offer advice; it being his instinct to believe that other people knew more than he did. He accepted, joyously and gratefully, the opinions of his friends, especially his brother’s opinion, for Dr. Lavendar’s judgment was quite ultimate with Mr. Joseph, — except, indeed, when he disapproved of people. Then, almost always Mr. Lavendar acquired an opinion of his own, and ventured to differ. He did it in an apologetic, deprecating, timid way, but he differed. It seemed as though he were constitutionally obliged to take the side of the under dog.

It was this amiable and unreasoning tendency which brought the first note of discord into the friendship of the two brothers, — a friendship very tender and faithful, and almost sentimental in the admiration which each felt for the other.

Mrs. Pendleton came to live in Old Chester; and Dr. Lavendar, who had quite forgotten her in these twenty tranquil years since she “threw Joey over,” suddenly found that he had not forgiven her. And certainly, the poor lady, with the best intentions in the world, did not endear herself. The fervency of her responses in church distracted the old clergyman from his own devotions ; her foolish benevolences amazed him; her efforts — those pitiful efforts of the outsider to seem on terms of intimacy with recently acquired acquaintances, efforts which are betrayed by speaking of comparative strangers by their first names — seemed to him only the unpardonable vulgarity which indeed they are. When she said “ Susy Carr behind Miss Susan’s back, Dr. Lavendar winced; and when she spoke of “ Jane ‘ and “Tommy,” he took immediate occasion to refer to Mrs. and Mr. Dove. Poor Mrs. Pendleton meant well, and in truth there was nothing upon which Dr. Lavendar could put his finger as his special reason for disliking her: perhaps that was rather an aggravation in itself ; our sentiments towards “ Dr. Fell" are probably heightened just because we “cannot tell.”

But it was in connection with Mrs. Pendleton that Mr. Lavendar’s constitutional tendency began to threaten the life of mutual admiration in the rectory. Mr. Joseph did no more than speak well of the little widow. He, too, had almost forgotten her, and he had quite forgiven her; but, spurred on by Dr. Lavendar’s dislike for her, he hunted in his memory for her good qualities, that he might defend her to his brother. No doubt the reviving remembrance of the pain she had made him suffer so long ago added to the warmth of his defense; which, to be sure, was eloquent in intention rather than in words, for he only protested, timidly, that he thought Mrs. Pendleton an exceedingly pleasing person. But that his taste, his discernment, his judgment, should be so at fault confounded and irritated Dr. Lavendar.

It would be as incredible as it is amusing, it only all the world did not know it to be true, that a difference in taste can be absolutely disastrous to friendship, and even to love. The absurd unhappiness begins at the moment when it becomes plain to each friend that the other ought to be convinced. What starts as a matter of opinion deepens into a question of principle.

This point had been reached by the two brothers. It was a long time since the amiable routine of Joseph Lavendar’s thought had been so broken in upon as by his brother’s injustice to Mrs. Pendleton. Never before had Dr. Lavendar’s indulgent admiration for Joseph’s unreasonable good nature been shocked into a suspicious doubt of Mr. Lavendar’s intelligence. Each brother had been amused at first, and then amazed, and now each had become almost indignant.

“ But, brother James,” Joseph would say, his mild, prominent eyes full of reproachful anxiety, “you don’t seem to be fair to the lady. It is n’t like you not to be fair.”

Even Dr. Lavendar saw the humor of that. “Ho! he said, and grinned a little. “Bell, perhaps I’m not always fair, Joey; but I’m never prejudiced; and I have a memory, sir ! ”

“ Oh yes, I know what you mean ; but that was twenty years ago, my dear James, and it was entirely my fault. She is a lady of great kindness, and ” —

But Dr. Lavendar would fling out impatiently that Joey did not know what he was talking about!

“ Kind? Well, yes, she has a good word for everybody. I think she’d speak well of the devil. I don’t call that ‘ kindness,’Joey. I call it silliness; silliness, sir, for the devil does n’t deserve a good word. You speak up for her as if you were going to — to marry her! ” Dr. Lavendar had cried once, sawing the air with his pipe, and searching for the most preposterous illustration he could find.

“ Marry — her ? I never — why, I never thought of such a thing.” stammered the younger brother, his high forehead growing faintly red. “I never — dreamed of such a thing.”

“Well, well; there ! I beg your pardon,’’ said Dr. Lavendar. “ I may have seemed irritated, but not at all, not at all. I was merely emphatic. I can’t help being amazed at your lack of intelligence. An unintelligent person distresses me ; and you ought surely to be able to see, Joey, that she ” —

And so they argued on ; each convinced that he was right, and each sincerely troubled at the attitude of the other. Again and again, Mr. Joseph, with timid and anxious persistence, suggested that Dr. Lavendar should show more marked kindness to Mrs. Pendleton, because she was a stranger and — and his friend. Again and again, Dr. Lavendar asserted that he would do his duty as her clergyman, but nothing more, because he did not like her, and he saw no reason why his private opinions should be at the mercy of his official duties. “ I ’ll call twice a year, or I ‘ll bury her, cheerfully, — that’s my duty ; but I won’t pretend that she’s a personal friend when she is n’t! ” he would insist.

It was in the winter that he had used the extraordinary illustration of marriage as a means of showing his brother how unreasonably far his defense of the little widow had gone. Until he said it himself, Dr. Lavendar had really never thought of anything so bad as that; yet, even as he used it, the illustration became a possibility to him, and he realized in a flash that defense, if persisted in, will create a certain tenderness in the defender for the defended. All through the spring his own suggestion rankled in his mind. “ But no,” he would assure himself, “ Joey has too much sense. It’s only his ridiculous amiability.” It never occurred to him that Joey, too, might brood upon that sarcastic suggestion, until the acceptance of it would seem natural and even chivalrous, and not sarcastic at all. But it will he readily perceived that if Mr. Joseph’s “ ridiculous amiability” could lead him to such a point, Mrs. Pendleton, or rather their disagreement about her, would mar the brothers’ Sundays to such a degree that each would secretly find Monday, and Joseph’s departure, a relief.

Dr. Lavendar was the first to recognize this, and it sobered him into momentary indifference to the object of their dispute. “ Joey and I fall out! he said to himself, dismayed and almost frightened. “ Joey and I quarrel about that foolish woman ! What nonsense! We ’ll just drop the subject.” Was there ever a disagreement in a matter of opinion which was not broken into chapters, as it were, by this determination to “ drop the subject ” ?

The next Saturday, when Mr. Joseph climbed carefully down from the stage, and carried his carpet bag into the little hall in the rectory, Dr. Lavendar was saying to himself that he and Joey must not get into any more discussions about that person! Oddly enough, Mr. Lavendar, too, had determined to drop the subject, and, with this end in view, substituted another.

“ My dear Jim,” he said, “ I have found a very admirable garnet. I saw it at Soomby’s, and got it for a song, a mere song. But it needs a good deal of polishing.” Mr. Lavendar pulled open a little leather pouch, the mouth of which was gathered on a string ; he carried his notes in this, each carefully rolled up like a lamplighter and folded four times ; he shook out of it, carefully, a wad of tissue paper. Dr. Lavendar, pleased and eager, bent his thin old hand into a cup to hold the stone.

“ Yes, yes; wants a hit of cutting, a bit of polishing. Joey, you are an extravagant dog ! How much did this cost you, sir ? I saw young Shore yesterday. (Yes, they’re here. Came Thursday.) I told him he had got to give me a diamond when he gets rich. He says be ’ll never be rich. Very likely not. A man with a rich wife is a pretty poverty-stricken fellow, sometimes. I heard that she once sent her check for his club dues; think of that! ”

“ Poor boy ! ” said Mr. Lavendar, his face wrinkling with pity. Mr. Lavendar’s face showed his emotions as a little sheet of placid water shows the wind. “ But I ’m told she’s a good housekeeper ? ” he defended her.

“ Yes,” Dr. Lavendar agreed ; “ as far as the bread which perisheth goes, the boy ’s well fed. But that’s not enough, Joe ? ”

“ No, that’s not enough, Jim,” said the other; and then they went out, as they always did on summer Saturday afternoons, to make, arm in arm, with Danny at their heels, the tour of the garden behind the rectory.

“ The hollyhocks are not looking as thrifty as they did last year,” Joseph observed, with concern.

“ They ’ve never done so well as they did eight years ago, — no, nine ; it was the summer Philip and Cecil were married. Joey, how many pears do you suppose there are on that little jargonelle ? I counted ’em last night.”

The two brothers went across the deep solt tangle of the grass, and stood under the pear-tree. “It has twenty-seven pears, Joe! ”

“ I thought I saw twenty-nine.” Mr. Joseph said mildly, after a moment’s pause to count the still green fruit; “ but no doubt I was mistaken.”

After that, as they went down a little brick path, past the honey-locust hedge and the big laburnum bush, over to the south wall where the two beehives stood, Mr. Lavendar told, as usual, all the little details of his week’s work. Dr. Lavendar knew the names of the pupils, though he had never seen them, and he had his questions to ask and his comments to make : and then he told Joseph all the Old Chester news. But both were conscious of an effort; each was aware that the other disapproved of him, and that made a strange, intangible barrier between them.

The level sunlight, piercing through the trees and hushes, stretched in powdery lines across the grass; it shone warm against the red bricks between the ivy leaves on the rectory, and it struck a sudden shine from all the little panes of glass set in their deep window frames. The brothers sat down under a trellis where the wistaria hung its purple, beehaunted blossoms above their heads ; syringas pressed close about this little arbor, filling the air with heavy fragrance, and a thicket of lilacs, their dark, heart-shaped leaves spotted with white mould, made a dense shade behind it. There was a small wooden table in the arbor, and on it were a decanter and two glasses.

Dr. Lavendar, with a careful hand and an intent, puckered face, mixed the proper proportions of water and sugar and lemon with the contents of the decanter ; then, his legs stretched out before him, the front of his waistcoat sprinkled with ashes from his pipe, his black skullcap pulled down over his stiff white hair, he gave himself up to comfort. Danny had stretched himself luxuriously upon the grass checkered with moving leaf shadows, and was opening one eye occasionally to snap at an impertinent fly. Dr. Lavendar sipped, and sipped, and talked. Joseph listened, and agreed, and held his glass up before his eyes, narrowed to a beaming line so that they might catch the light through the liquor. It was not unnatural, everything being so harmonious, that Dr. Lavendar, with a view to dropping the subject, should do so with some well-chosen words.

“ Joey, in connection with what we were Speaking of last week, — I don’t mean to discuss it; of course every man has a right to his opinions, and you have a right to yours ; I’m the last person to dispute that, for, whatever else I may be, I’m tolerant, sir ! — but, in that connection, I just wished to say to you that, in formulating your opinion of — of your friend Mrs. Pendleton, it seemed to me you overlooked one fact which I think bespeaks character : she enjoys giving away money to the poor so much that she gives it where it does harm. Now, that’s pure selfishness, not generosity ; she ” —

“ Brother Jim, do you not overlook the fact that she has a kind disposition ?”

“I was not talking about her disposition ! ” declared Dr. Lavendar, frowning. “ I’m not in the habit of discussing a lady’s disposition, sir. I don’t know anything about her disposition. But I hope I am not trespassing upon any propriety when I say that her intelligence is at fault ? She is not intelligent. She has gone and given some money to Job Todd. He does n’t have to work, and so he gets drunk.”

“ A kind deed,” Mr. Joseph began to explain, “ may be an error of judgment, brother Jim, but ” —

“ It is n’t kind if it’s an error of judgment, brother Joe,”cried the other ; “ you have n’t any business to make errors in judgment in dealing with people like Todd.”

“ Well, but,” protested Mr. Lavendar. his face quite agitated, and his kind, prominent blue eyes distressed and entreating, “ everybody makes mistakes sometimes.”

“ No, they don’t. Look at Susan Carr. Never made a mistake in her life ! At least — you make me emphatic — I mean her judgment is good. Now, there ’s a woman I admire ! ”

Mr. Lavendar’s face softened ; he even blushed a little. “ An admirable lady, yes ; I agree with you,” he said. “ I am sure she has a kindly feeling for — for the lady of whom we were speaking. And you respect her judgment, brother Jim ? ”

“Of course I do — in most things. I don’t know her views on this subject. Utile Dulce is intelligent; she ” —

But Joseph did not follow his brother’s dissertation upon the estimable Miss Carr. “ Miss Susan and I are going to look over a new Te Deum,” he said; “I — I wrote her about it, and I shall take the liberty of stepping over to her house after tea.”

“ Good idea,” assented the old clergyman, with a pleased look, — Joey was not apt to give up these discussions upon Mrs. Pendleton so readily ; “ excellent plan. I have a great regard for Susan Carr. Ah, Joey boy, there was a woman ! When you were both younger, I used to hope — But you’d had your deathblow, poor boy, — yes, your deathblow. It’s queer that an unintelligent person can have such an effect. Well,

I did n’t mean to discuss it. Yes, of course, go over to Susan’s. I think I ’ll step in with you myself.”

“Oh, will you?” said Mr. Joseph, a little blankly; “ that will be — very agreeable.”

V.

Mrs. Drayton had just declared that it was a little bitter to take a mother’s place to a child, and then be forgotten. “ For Cecil has been here three days, and has n’t called,” she was saying, when she discerned her step-daughter walking indolently up the village street.

“Oh, at last ! ” she said, and glanced at the mirror at her side, to see if she were tidy. Mrs. Drayton was always careful to have the elieval glass near her, so that she might be sure of the delicate precision of her invalid costume. “ The light hurts my eyes,” she used to say patiently, with the air of one who suffers for a principle, “ but I must be tidy! ” And so she patted her faded hair, and pulled the ruffles down about her lean wrists, and looked again swiftly into the glass.

There was a nervous quiver in her small, blond countenance ; she was afraid of Cecil. The smile at the corner of her step-daughter’s lip, which seemed to say, “ Yes, I understand you,” confused and terrified her. At heart, she much preferred the diversion of being neglected, the interest of Cecil’s unkindness, to the shivering apprehension which her dutifulness aroused.

“ How well you look ! ” Cecil said cordially; and Mrs. Drayton kissed her nervously, and responded, “ I don’t look as I feel, then. I am far from well, — far from well ! ”

Lyssie glanced at her sister imploringly ; had Cecil forgotten that her mother did not like to be told that she looked well ?

Cecil answered only by a surprised “ Really ? Well, one can’t tell anything by looks. It seems to me you look younger and better than when I saw you last.”

The frightened attention in Mrs. Drayton’s face relaxed. “ Well, I suppose I am a little older, but confinement indoors does spare the complexion, — I must admit that.” As she spoke, she glanced at the mirror again, which made Cecil say that the reflection from the glass must try her eyes ; and she even took the trouble to rise and throw her wrap across the tall carved frame and over the gleaming oblong of the mirror. She looked sidewise at her stepmother as she did it, and smiled. Mrs. Drayton gave a gasp, and had the air of one searching for a repartee. She found nothing more impressive to say, however, than that she thought Molly was looking well when Philip brought the child to see her. “ Philip came three days ago,” she declared significantly.

Lyssie, hovering on the outskirts of the conversation, ready to rush in as peacemaker, or to be silent when either of the two whom she loved best in the world seemed to he doing herself justice, said, hurriedly, something about Mr. Carey. Was he going to stay long ? Did he like Old Chester ?

“He is quite agreeable,” Mrs. Drayton announced, before Cecil made any effort to reply. “ He called yesterday. Your company came to see me, Cecil, though you did not.”

Cecil opened her eyes in frank astonishment. “ Why, he does admire you. Lys! ”

The invalid frowned, and drew her little pale lips together. “ Really, Cecil, such talk is quite indelicate. Young girls in Old Chester are not in the habit of hearing that they are admired.”

“ No, I should n’t think they were,” Cecil said dryly. “ Lys is an exception.

But perhaps you don’t mean her ever to have an admirer ? ”

“ Ceci, you ’re a goose ! ” Alicia broke in. “ How can anybody have an admirer in Old Chester ? I am going to succeed Miss Susan as a model spinster.”

“ When the proper time comes,” Mrs. Drayton said severely, “ I hope Alicia will be suitably settled. But I don’t approve of talking flippantly about a serious matter.”

“ It. is serious,”Cecil agreed, with an amused look. “But it does turn out well sometimes. Look at me ! And your marriage, too ; though you can hardly expect Lys to find a widower. I ’ve heard you say that widowers make the best husbands.”

Mrs. Drayton sat up very straight, and seemed to consider where she could strike a blow. “ Yes, you are quite right; they do. And as for your father’s being a widower, as you are unkind enough to remind me, Cecilia, I can’t help saying that I don’t mind being a second wife, but I never would have consented to be a second love ! ”

She almost sobbed, but Cecil said soothingly, “ I am sure you were not a second love, Mrs. Drayton.”

There seemed to be nothing objectionable in such an acknowledgment. “ But she means something,” the poor little woman thought, and repeated, with a catch in her voice, that there were people who said there was no husband so good as one who had learned a lesson of patience with a first wife, “ even if it was a very youthful experience.”

“Ah, well,” Cecil objected seriously, “ somebody’s got to marry first, to make the widowers, I suppose ? ”

“ Unfortunately,” Alicia broke in, “ we have no widowers, only a widow ; and she can’t get married unless she gives up the money her husband left her. Wasn’t it unkind in him to make a will like that ? ”

This well-timed remark diverted the threatening storm, and Mrs. Drayton began to gossip about her neighbors, and to deplore their failings, which made her more good natured. For a virtuous discontent with other people imparts a sense of rectitude and a peace of mind hardly equaled by virtue itself. Cecil, looking out of the window, and watching the blowing silver of some willows at the foot of the lawn, and beyond them, now and then, the faint, rocking flash of the river, listened lazily. Alicia breathed freely, and doubtless all would have gone well had Mrs. Drayton only refrained from going back to her first grievance. “ Yes, everybody in Old Chester is very kind to me; all my friends come to see me ; they don’t forget how lonely I am.”She sighed, and glanced at her husband’s miniature, which she wore on a long, slender gold chain about her neck.

Cecil was unable to resist this. "You must miss papa very much ? ”

“ Oh, I do, — oh yes, indeed ; it is a great cross ; my one prayer is that ” —

“That he will return?”

“ That his health will permit him to return. I could never be so selfish as to wish him to run any risk for my sake ; that is not my idea of love, Cecil.”

“ I should be so interested to know your idea of love,” Cecil answered slowly ; “ but I was sure you would not wish him to return.”

“ Mother is so nervous about people’s health,” rushed in the tender young troubled voice ; and then poor Lyssie said, breathlessly, she “ wondered when Cecil and Philip would come to tea.”

“ Why, you don’t seem to want to talk about our dear papa ? ” her sister said, laughing and rising; and then she bade her cowering stepmother good-by, and regretted that she must remove her wrap from the mirror.

“ Ceci, how can you tease mother so ! ” Lyssie said hotly, as they went downstairs. “You know how nervous she is, and you know, in spite of — of the things you make her say, she really loves you, and ” —

“Which of us is Mr. Drayton’s child by his first wife ? ” Cecil broke in drolly.

“ Cecil! ”

“ Ah, well, I ought not to tease Mrs. Drayton, — you are quite right,” Cecil confessed frankly. “ I won’t. I ’ll stay at home. Lyssie, come to supper to-night and entertain your mother’s admirer. Why did n’t he tell me he had called ? ” And then she went away, smiling to herself at Mrs. Drayton’s fright.

But Lyssie could not be spared that evening. Her mother had been so much agitated by Cecil’s visit that she was too unwell to be left alone.

“ Oh, I am a poor useless creature,” said Mrs. Drayton, her voice quivering. “ I interfere with your pleasures. I’m a burden to you. Yes, you need n’t deny it, Lyssie ; you would rather be with Cecil than stand here and comb my hair! I am a miserable burden ; and if it were not wrong, I should wish that my heavenly Father would take me to himself! ”

While Lyssie, with great good sense tempered by tenderness, was combating these opinions, Cecil, in the fragrant twilight on the terrace, talked about her stepmother to her husband and her guest; or it would be more exact to say, she talked to her guest, for Philip, sitting smoking on the steps of the terrace, took no part in the conversation. Molly, nestling down in his arms, listened to her mother’s talk, and frankly resisted her father’s efforts to gain her attention.

“ I’d rather hear mamma talk. Mamma is so funny ! ” she said ; and Philip had no choice, at last, but to lure the child down into the garden, to spare her some little childish delusions about her grandmother.

Roger Carey, listening, laughed and looked annoyed, and then laughed again. “ The old lady is preposterous,” he thought, “ but she’s Miss Drayton’s mother. Mrs. Shore does n’t seem to consider that.” It occurred to him, at that moment, that this decent sensitiveness on his part was because she was Miss Drayton’s mother. Nevertheless, he laughed until the tears stood in his eyes, when his hostess told him, with unsparing and clever truthfulness, this or that incident in which poor foolish Mrs. Drayton had taken herself seriously.

“ And the funny part of it is, Lyssie doesn’t see how amusing her mother is,” Mrs. Shore ended ; “ she takes her seriously, too, — dear little thing ! ”

“ Well, that’s fortunate,” Mr. Carey commented.

“ Fortunate ? Why, not at all ; it simply encourages Mrs. Drayton, and” —

“ Yes ; but don’t you see.” interrupted Roger Carey, “ it would be fatal if she were ridiculous in her daughter’s eyes ? Absurdity is the one thing love can’t stand ; it can overlook anything else, — coldness, or weakness, or vicionsness, — but just be ridiculous, and that’s the end of it! ”

“ Ah, but not that kind of love,” Cecil said. “ My sister’s feeling for her mother is not the lover’s love, nor even the filial love ; it is the maternal passion. One is never ridiculous to one’s mother ! ”

Love is a most interesting topic between men and women. Mr. Carey’s cigar went out while he laid down the law with all the emphasis of the theorist ; until, by some chance, — perhaps it. was in the way of an illustration of married love, — they came hack to Mrs. Drayton again, and Cecil began to tell another absurd story about her. Then Roger Carey lighted his cigar, and frowned a little.

“It ’s awfully funny,” he said, “but I feel as though I ought to apologize to your sister for listening to it.”

The blunt rudeness made Cecil Shore look at him with attention. But he never thought of apologizing to her ; instead, he began to talk of other things, with that good-humored determination to change the subject which is so irritating to the listener. Mrs. Shore felt it, and was almost relieved to see her husband appear. Philip had mounted Molly on his shoulder ; she was pulling his head over sidewise upon her little breast, and rumpling his hair about his eyes. When they reached the steps of the terrace, he slipped her gently down from her high perch, and made great pretense of horror at his disheveled condition, which enchanted Molly, who shrieked her desire for another ride.

“No, a merciful little girl is merciful to her beast. I’ve carried you round the garden three times, and how many times have I been carried round, I’d like to know ? And it ’s your bedtime, too. Oh, what dissipation! It’s a quarter past eight! Run along, now, to bed.”

“Oh no, I want her,” Cecil said gayly. “ Don t you want to sit up with mamma a little while ? ”

And Molly, nothing loath to escape her nurse and her father’s rule of bed at eight o’clock, climbed up into her mother’s lap. Cecil clasped her in her arms and kissed her, rocking the child backwards, and catching her with a storm of caresses. Philip looked away, and then hack again, and opened and shut his hands nervously. His glance had in it none of that deep and beautiful meaning with which a man may look at the woman and the child who are his, who stand to him forever as that other Mother and Child who belong to our humanity and divinity. Roger Carey felt the peculiar unhappiness which is experienced by a guest conscious that a domestic infelicity is occurring in his presence. He said impetuously, and with no regard for relevance, something about some stock quotation, and bewailed his luck.

“ Hang it. the day after I bought, down it went! ”

Philip, turning his hack on those two on the terrace above him, said calmly, why had he not done thus and so ? why had he not taken advantage of this and that ? and then gave him a hit of information which made Roger slap his thigh and cry out in grateful enthusiasm, “ By Jove, that’s the neatest thing I ’ve heard of ! I did n’t know you were up to this sort of thing! You ought to be on the street; what a business man you would make!”

“ Philip is a good business man,” said Cecil kindly. “ Since he has managed my property, my income has increased fifty per cent, — no, forty. How much did you tell me, Philip? Fifty per cent ? ”

Roger drew in his breath in a noiseless whistle; he did not look at his host.

“ Your income has increased forty per cent,” Philip answered.

“Well,” said Roger, “if you have any more of these ideas lying around loose, do hand them over to me. I ’m amazed to find that you have a genius for speculating.’

“ I have n’t. It is Mrs. Shore’s wish to invest her money in this way ; I merely act for her. That ’s how I happen to know about it.”

“ Philip’s one fear is that I shall grow what he calls disgustingly rich,” Cecil murmured, over Molly’s head. (” Now, Molly, go to bed. Mamma is tired. Come, don’t be so slow! I hate people who dawdle. You absurd little monkey ! you don’t want to go to bed? Well, then, climb up in mamma’s lap again.) Mr. Carey, you don’t know all Mr. Shore’s remarkable qualities: he is a single-tax man, a wornan’s-rigilts man, a — a — an artist, — all in one. Oh, and a financier ; though that is not genuine ; he prefers poverty, don’t you, Philip?”

“ I think I prefer a walk, at this moment,” her husband said lightly, “ if you will excuse me ? Carey, shall I leave you with Mrs. Shore ? ” And then he lounged down into the summer dusk and disappeared.

Roger Carey debated with himself a moment, and looked after him. He did not like Mrs. Shore, but he liked to hear her talk; so his half-uttered excuse died upon his lips. “Shore’s too polite to her,” he thought, and then gave himself up to the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her. But Cecil saw the moment’s hesitation with an astonishment that had in it both amusement and annoyance.

VI.

Alone, Philip Shore drew a breath of relief: he let himself out into the grassy lane by the great iron gates at the foot of the garden, and as they clanged sharply behind him his face lost its look of restraint, and settled into the worn lines of habitual and troubled thought. It was an interesting face, gentle, intelligent, sad ; the face, as Mr. William Drayton had recognized, of an ascetic, of a man -who might even he a fanatic, but one in which the harassed bitterness could melt into sweetness when his eye caught a flower nodding against a blue sky, or when he heard the murmur of water under a vague moon, or when a child ’s hand touched his own. Even now, with eyes oppressed and heavy with thought, he stopped to notice some distant cypresses standing like black spires against the fading yellow in the west. He seemed to have no objective point in his walk ; he went at first towards Miss Susan Carr’s house, and then hesitated, and turned down the road, walking slowly and aimlessly until he reached the bridge which crossed the river, like a gray ribbon stretched between green banks. Though the sky was still faintly light, it was quite dark down there, for the river ran close to the hills : it was very silent, too.

Philip folded his arms upon the stone coping, and watched the slight heaving of the lily pads ; there was a faint lap and slip of the water against the pier in mid-stream. As he leaned there, looking down at the black current, a sudden tremulous sparkle wavered up from its depths, and he lifted his eyes to see a star hanging low in the melting, translucent dusk above the hill; the star in the river shook and trembled, plunging down like a golden plummet, or blotted out when a lily leaf swung across its upward track; but it grew brighter, for the darkness deep.ened, and still he leaned and watched it. He was saying over to himself words which clamored in his ears in all his silent moments : “ How far is a man’s own conception of his duty to weigh against accepted standards ? ”

It is a serious question. Most conscientious men and women must answer it one way or another in their lives. Philip Shore had been trying to answer it for three years. For it was just three years since he had acknowledged the hopelessness of his marriage, and had said to himself a hard saying : “ Marriage without love is as spiritually illegal as love without marriage is civilly illegal.” This once admitted, that unanswered question inevitably presents itself: Must a man he base in his own eyes, because the law approves ? Shall he live a lie, because expediency and custom condone the offense ? Or may his own conception of duty weigh against accepted standards ?

Philip Shore was thirty-three that summer ; but he looked older, for he had hardly known youth in the sense of joyous unconcern and divine, full-blooded humanness. The years before he went to college had not been young years; his uncle had made the lad his companion, and kept him reading and studying with him when he should have been at hoarding-school, among boys of his own age. Philip’s passionate feeling for color and form Donald Shore admired, with reverence, because he was himself quite without it. The boy should be an artist, he said : and Susan Carr agreed with him, and so they put their wedding off a little longer, that Donald might take Philip away for a year’s study before he went to college. “ When you are through college, boy,” the uncle said,

“ we ’ll go abroad !" But before that time came Donald died, and Philip had to arrange for that study abroad without the encouragement and stimulus of Mr. Shore’s deep and quite unwarrantable belief in him.

Philip had been so happy with his uncle that he had not cared very much for the society of those of his own age, except indeed for Cecil Drayton’s society, and hers not at all because she was the Everlasting Feminine. “ Cecil has brains,” he told his uncle ; “ she is n’t girly.” So it was not until he had finished college, and had come home to Old Chester for a month’s visit before starting for Paris, that he fell in love with this tall, silent, mysterious Cecil. At least she seemed mysterious to him. Perhaps love, like art, needs mystery, for it does not always thrive in the unreserve of realism. Certainly, Philip’s absence for the next three years kept him very ignorant and very devoted. He was very much in love in those few weeks before he went away. He said to her the old, beautiful words which every lover has whispered, and every mistress has believed : “ No woman was ever loved as I love you — because there never was a woman like you! ” Cecil, just home from boarding-school, wondering what life meant, still altogether potential, — Cecil smiled, and sighed, and consented ; gazing with calm, innocent eyes at the extraordinary agitation in his face. She thought he would kiss her, but he knelt down and kissed the hem of her dress, and went away silently, leaving her amused, but not displeased. Then had come the three years of engagement and absence and letter-writing, — three things which most perfectly conceal character. When they ended, these two young persons knew each other less than at their beginning.

Cecil had been impatient for the engagement to end. She wanted to go abroad ; she wanted to live the strange, fascinating Bohemian life of which her lover wrote her ; she wanted — oh, how much she wanted ! — to get away from Old Chester. “ I’m rich, you know,” she wrote him once, shyly ; and though he adored the noble frankness of her love, he must, he told her, feel that he was able to support her, and then — then !

And so he worked, his soul kindling with the thought of the woman he loved. His love was a form of art to him ; it was religion ; it was life ; it was his inmost self. It created in him the purity, the truth, the reverence, which it revealed in her. That she should love him filled him with that fine humility which exalts instead of depresses. It was the mystery of the Divine coming down to earth for us men and for our salvation : it was not to be understood ; it was to be accepted. Her potentiality did not trouble him ; her sweet ignorance of human passion exhilarated him.

Love such as this dwells less upon the beauty of the beloved, the touch of her hand, the ivory curve of her soft throat, — the things on which a younglover writes lame verses, and of which he is as proud as though he were responsible for their perfection, — such love thinks less, or not at all, of those things, and much of the God who is revealed in them. Of course, with the pathetic belief of youth that absolute confidence is possible between human souls, Philip used to write to her of all this spiritual significance of love; and she, with gentle and non-committal sympathy, would answer that what he said was true, or wonderful, or beautiful: and her lover’s heart would glow at the “ reserve,” the “ insight,” which those words indicated.

Philip Shore was a man eapable of sustained ecstasy, — a man who lived, not upon those occasional sunlit peaks of emotion which most of us touch now and then, but upon a high plateau of noble idealism, — and the three years of waiting became almost the novitiate of a holy life, so complete was his idealization of marriage, of love, and of the woman he loved. Very likely there was a touch of the mystic in this young man ; mysticism is latent in most artistic temperaments, though it does not always show in artists, perhaps because the mercantile instinct which they so readily acquire chokes anything so unprofitable as mysticism. And Philip, unhappily, was never to be more than artistic ; his ability fell just short of making him an artist.

They were married rather unexpectedly, at last. The three years’ study had not found Philip very far on the road to success, and the engagement might have been prolonged, had not Mr. William Drayton met him one day in Paris, and, in a burst of sudden fatherly interest, told him the engagement had lasted long enough. “ She ’s got plenty of money, so what’s the use of waiting? Take her or leave her ; don’t shilly-shally !" said the unromantic father.

And Philip took her.

And so at length came the wonderful day. Now, nine years after, Philip, leaning over the parapet of the old bridge, staring down at the rocking lilies, remembered it. the color burning suddenly in his face.

The night before he arrived in Old Chester was as much a holy vigil to him as were those sacred hours which young knights spent on their knees before their armor. He was too solemn to know that he was happy ; his thoughts were prayers. The next day, as a priest might go to the altar, — nay, as a soul to its God, — Philip Shore went to the woman he loved.

Thinking of that supreme moment, here in the summer darkness on the bridge, he drew a breath that was like a groan. He remembered what he had meant to tell her ; he knew the very words in which he had intended to say that in these three years of absence the white thought of her had shown in every dark place of his nature; she should see that the man’s soul in him knelt before her womanhood. He meant, too, to share with her, with the generosity of only the highest love, a deep distress of his own, at which, in his letters, he had only been able to hint, — the knowledge that had come to him of his own mediocrity in art, and the alternative of going on with a work which he loved, in which he could never excel, and the giving it up to put his shoulder to the wheel of life, and be of some use in the world. That she would counsel him as his own soul had counseled him he had never doubted. It was in this spirit that he met her.

Still in her eyes he found the same deep smile, the smile into which he had read every solemn meaning of life and death and love ; still, still, that wonderful, sympathetic silence, which had again and again revealed him to himself by all its unuttered intelligence. There was all this, but there was something more. They sat together alone in the June dusk. There was the scent of jessamine about them ; a star shook in the tender sky ; far down in the orchard, a bird cry, as clear as a drop of honey, fell into the beating silence. Cecil, leaning back in her chair, bent her arm behind her head, and the full sleeve slipped up above her elbow; the warm shadow of her white chin fell across the curve of her bare throat; the dusky rose in her cheek deepened ; she drew in her red lower lip, and lifted her eyes, full of the glints and lights of dark wine, and brimmed with strange, mocking, delicious meaning, and looked full at him. Then she laughed. It seemed to` Philip that she said something, — he did not know what, — some commonplace about the wedding, perhaps ; he did not hear it. A mad, unrecognized, latent Self leaped up. All his love burst into flame ; the spiritual passion vanished. His hands tightened upon each other as he looked at her: his eyes glowed. Cecil’s smiling silence intoxicated him ; he crushed her hand in his savagely, kissing the warm palm, until she gave a little cry and laugh, and said he hurt her. “ Mine! ” the young man was saying to himself.

Those three years, in which his thoughts of her had been prayer, were forgotten; all he meant to say to her, face to face, heart to heart, man to God, was forgotten ; all the solemn glory and whiteness of love went out, as a star in heaven might be blotted from a man’s sight by the roar of some hot fire here on his little earth. Oh, love ! love! love ! This, then, was love, — this supremest expression of self?

Philip, remembering, his elbow on the crumbling parapet of the bridge, his chin on his clenched hand, ground his teeth. Well, so it had gone. Looking back upon it, he saw earnestness and ambition and responsibility flung aside; he saw art forgotten, or followed for the personal ends of amusement or occupation ; he saw himself the prisoner of an ignoble passion, hiding his chains behind the cloak of marriage. He knew every step of the shameful, splendid, glowing way. He knew the ghastly moment when he looked hack at the heights from which he had come, and recognized the dishonor he had done to love and the woman he loved. The remembrance of that moment, of that time of anguish and of struggle, turned him sick now, eight years afterwards; for it was a year before he awoke, a lurid, drunkest year, in which he had no thought of anything but self. His awakening dated from their first quarrel which had in it anything deeper than some selfish irritation ; there had been plenty of such contentions, followed by equally selfish reconciliations. This quarrel had sprung from his reviving determination to give up his painting. Cecil had refused to listen to anything so foolish. She adored the life in Paris, a life which had in it all the freedom of the Latin Quarter and all the luxury of the Champs - Elysées. Her resistance woke the old arguments for truth, the old reverence for art. There had been a violent altercation: Philip, in a half-dazed way, standing out for what, blindly, as though through some mist of memory, he knew to be right; Cecil saying insolently that the money was hers, and she “ would not allow it.”

Then you can stay by yourself! he had flung back at her. “ I ’ve done with this pretense.” And with a high hand he had carried out his wish, and they had come back to America.

That was the beginning. The old ideals crowded upon him, and he knew that he did not desire them. It was a time of dreadful remorse that seemed like some sickness in the very substance of the soul. Then it was that he turned to his wife for forgiveness, only to discover, with confusion and incredulity and dismay, that Cecil was not aware that she had anything to forgive.

After that came the long struggle to waken her dormant soul, — a struggle which amused, and then bored, and at last irritated her beyond words. At first she endured it with rallying tenderness and temptation, and he would fall for weeks or months into loathful ease and satisfaction in the comfort of his life ; for, except when he teased her with visions and ecstasies, Cecil made his life full of lazy and beautiful comfort. With Molly’s birth, which came just after their return to America, the revelation of fatherhood summoned him with solemn and irresistible voice to his spiritual manhood. That summons seemed to him so conclusive that he found Cecil’s deafness to it incredible. She loved the child with a fierce unlmmanness ; she caressed it in a way that made him sometimes turn away his eyes. Yet, through Molly, with kindling hope, again and again and again he appealed to her. He called out with anguish to something which was dead, or had never lived.

But they came no closer together because of the child; their constant and bitter disagreement concerning her training made her little life like a wedge driven into the very heart of their marriage.

To Philip first had come the recognition of the hopelessness of the situation : he had thought to marry a beautiful soul, but had married instead a beautiful body. The woman whom he had loved had never existed. The woman who had for a time chained him to his senses, stifled his soul, insulted his heavenly vision, — that woman he had never loved, as he counted love. And that woman was his wife.

Cecil, by and by, had come to feel, with a dull sense of disappointment, that love, by its very nature, was a temporary and passing experience, but she was much too philosophical to be unhappy. She used to look at young lovers with some amusement, but no bitterness ; her life was too comfortable for that. Besides, she did not dislike Philip. In those first days, when she had been fond of him, and they had quarreled, she had almost hated him; but that was all past, and now she was both tolerant and good natured.

“ How far is a man’s own conception of duty to weigh against accepted standards ? ” said Philip Shore to himself again, looking down at the swaying glimmer of the star. It was very dark now on the bridge ; it was very silent. But the silence was clamorous with incisive questions: Is not a man’s own conception of duty a dangerous and an egotistic guide ? Is not obedience to an unwritten law merely fantastic and absurd when it interferes with all material well being; when it robs a man of a home; when it bids him turn his eyes away from the beautiful, unloved woman who is his wife ; when it even means the possible renunciation of his child ? Again and again Philip Shore had said to himself that such obedience was impossible.

And yet, coming back to the associations and ideals of his youth, here in his old home, he recognized, almost with terror, that it was possible. Those high demands spoke in all the silences of his luxurious living: “ Is not marriage without love as spiritually illegal as love without marriage is civilly illegal? And if it is, what is your duty? ”

It needs a brave man to answer that question.

VII.

Miss Susan Carr’s distress at Joseph Lavendar’s folly was so genuine that she did not strain the truth when she said she was not well, and could not go to church, the first Sunday after she had received his letter. “ No self-respecting woman will let a man have the chance to be reiused,” said Miss Susan, and she was glad that a headache came to her assistance in saving Mr. Lavendar from mortification.

Then it occurred to her, as a respite, to accept a long-standing invitation from some old friends in Ashurst, and so escape the next Saturday and Sunday. “ But after all,” she sighed to herself when, on Friday, she said good-by to the Misses Woodhouse, and turned her face again towards Old Chester, “ after all, I can’t be away from home every time Joseph Lavendar is in town. I suppose I’ve got to meet him some time. But my manner shall show him — he ’ll understand from my manner that I ’m not — not thinking of such things ! ” She was saying this to herself as she climbed into the empty stagecoach at Mercer, and then sat waiting for it to start, and looking at the rain streaming on the window. “ I will be severe,” said this amiable woman, frowning at the vacant seats opposite her ; “ it’s better that Mr. Joseph should think me disagreeable than misunderstand any mere friendliness. I could not respect myself if I allowed ”— Just here the stiff handle of the door turned with a jerk, and Mr. Joseph Lavendar stepped into the coach.

“Oh dear!“ said poor Miss Susan, shrinking back into her corner.

Mr. Lavendar sat down on the middle seat of the stage ; it had a swinging strap for a back, and was quite narrow and far from comfortable. Mr. Lavendar took it for that reason ; for though the stage was almost empty at present, it would doubtless fill up, and as a matter of course Joseph Lavendar took the least desirable seat. When he looked up and saw Miss Susan sitting opposite him, he felt the compensation which unselfish people are forever discovering in their sacrifices.

“ Why, my dear Miss Susan! ” he cried. “ Why, this is very delightful, quite an unexpected pleasure. I feared that your visit was to be prolonged over another Sunday.”

“I did think of it,” said Miss Susan faintly. (“ If nobody else gets in, I will get out.” she decided desperately ; “ I ’ll say I forgot something — I’ll say I’m ill — I ’ll say — Oh, how can he be going to Old Chester on Friday ? ”)

Perhaps the distress in her face asked the question; at all events, he began, cheerfully, to explain his presence. One of his little pupils was ill,—poor dear child, — a most pleasing child, a son of poor Thomas Townsend. Miss Susan recalled Thomas Townsend? He died some fifteen years ago ; he was a relative of — of our friend Mrs. Pendleton.

“ But as his illness is not serious, I can he grateful for the opportunity, which I very much appreciate (as you know, my dear Miss Susan), to spend an extra day in Old Chester.”

Miss Carr began, nervously, to gather up her umbrella and bags. “I think I must” — she said hurriedly, but paused, and fell hack into her corner again, for a large lady, in a tight black alpaca, was climbing, laboriously and with panting breath, into the coach. He can’t speak now,” thought Miss Susan, relieved but unhappy.

The stage sagged forward, and started with a swaying jog; the rain clattered on its ribbed top, and on the rubber aprons that covered the trunks piled at the back; and its three occupants resigned themselves to that peculiar jolting discomfort which only the inside rider knows.

“ Let me see,” said Mr. Lavendar pleasantly ; “ you have no later Old Chester news than I have myself ? In fact, I have the most recent, as I only left town on Monday. But you can tell me something about our friends in Ashurst. I trust they are all well ? ”

“ Yes,” Miss Susan assured him, and made haste to repeat all the Ashurst gossip she could think of.

The large lady, whose elans were in terraces, was swaying about in her corner, as the coach swung and lurched, but she was so comfortably protected by her personality that she was able to doze a little, though sometimes, at a decided jolt, her eyes would spring sharply open, and then drop shut again. Miss Susan looked at her imploringly; if Mr. Joseph should see that she had fallen asleep, what might not happen ?

“ I was sorry not to see you last week,” Mr. Lavendar said, when Miss Susan came to a pause in her Ashurst reminiscences ; “ and the week before you were indisposed, Lyssie told me. I was much disappointed.”

Miss Susan murmured her apologies for having missed the choir practicing. She searched her memory desperately for further Ashurst gossip, but nothing presented itself.

Mr. Lavendar lifted his left leg across his right knee, and looked at it critically, brushing a little dust from the neat brown broadcloth.

“ I was very much in hopes to have had a short—ah — conversation with you, my dear Miss Susan,” he said ; and then, the color mounting in his face, he added, “ You received my letter, of course ? ”

Susan Carr dared not look at him. Was he going to — here, in a stagecoach ? “Letter?” she said. “ Oh yes, I — I believe I did. Don’t you think we had better open a window ? It’s quite warm in here. At least, if it will not inconvenience this other lady,” said Miss Susan, raising her voice, so that Mr. Lavendar was quite startled, and their fellow-passenger opened her eyes in a sleepy gleam.

“ It is warm,” Mr. Joseph agreed, and he tugged at the window strap with an energy which made his face red, and wakened the stout lady so thoroughly that she sat up for a moment and looked about with frowning surprise. Then a gust of cold, wet air blew in upon the swaying, pitching occupants of the coach, and Susan Carr wondered if it would not keep her protector awake. “ How fresh and delightful the air is, ma’am ! ” she said to the lady pleadingly.

It’s damp,” returned the other, and closed her eyes.

“ My letter did not call for a reply,” Mr. Lavendar proceeded, in a low and confidential voice, “ but I thought I should have seen you before this. There is so much I want to say,” he ended simply.

“ A man who talks on such subjects in a stagecoach must be — very much so.” thought Miss Susan despairingly. “ But I won’t let him ! ” And, with this determination, she burst into eager and emphatic views about the weather. The rain beating against the closed windows made the landscape waver and glimmer ; the woods were gray with mist, and the streams under the creaking wooden bridges were swollen and laced with tangles of foam.

“ I think this is the equinoctial,” announced Miss Susan breathlessly. “ Just see how it pours ! And the wind is very high ! And did you notice, as we crossed the river, that the water was up to the middle of the pier, and”— Here, to Miss Susan’s joy, the other traveler awoke, and found the subject so interesting that she too expressed her opinion, while Mr. Lavendar said protectingly, “ It’s only a passing shower, ladies, — a passing shower,” and watched patiently for a chance to go back to the subject which was plainly uppermost in his mind.

As for Miss Susan, remembering her one experience in love-making, recalling Donald’s quiet, matter-of-fact affection, his tranquil yielding to circumstances, she felt this intensity on the part of Joseph with a certain quickening of the heart. “ Oh, I wish he would n’t,” she said to herself, “ for this will spoil everything, though we ’ve been friends all these years.” She was almost ready to cry with the trouble and worry of it; and indeed, when at last, damp and tired, she reached home, and sat down in the dining-room to her solitary cup of tea, the tears really did stand in her kind eyes. In her thoughts she went over Mr. Lavendar’s looks and words in the coach, and the result of her meditations was that another Saturday afternoon’s practice passed, and “ Miss Susan was a little under the weather, and could n’t come.” That the robust Susan Carr should be indisposed began to be food for comment in Old Chester. Alicia Drayton, as she walked down to the church to go over the hymns for the next day with Mr. Lavendar, wondered a little about it. “Why, this is the third time she ’s missed the practicing ! ” said Lyssie to herself; and then an absent look came into her eyes, and she thought no more about Miss Susan.

The rain of the day before had washed the July dust from the roadside weeds and grasses; the trees, all in a shining rustle with the fresh wind, made pretty shadows on the path, and the lines of moss between the flagstones were like stripes of green velvet. The very air seemed washed and shining and full of the Saturday afternoon feeling, — the feeling of order and cleanliness and readiness for the morrow.

Alicia, with her green singing-book under her arm, glanced along the river road. “ Will he come before we begin to practice ? ” she said to herself. Ah, what chance have elderly ladies with headaches for sympathy when such questions come into a girl’s mind ? She stood a moment on the threshold of the church, looking out at the sunshine, and hearing Mr. Lavendar up in the organ loft pulling out the stops and running his fingers along the keys.

“ Miss Susan is not very well, Mr. Joseph,” she said, as she pushed open the little baize door of the loft, “ and she can’t come this afternoon, so you and Mr. Tommy and I will have to practice by ourselves; ” and then she nodded pleasantly at the other member of the choir, who, with his spectacles on, was poring over a manuscript of music.

“ Dear, dear, I am sorry to hear that she is indisposed,” said Mr. Joseph; “ exceedingly sorry. Will you he so kind as to say so to her, Lyssie, if you see her this evening; say I had meant to call, but, as she is indisposed, I will not intrude ? ” But he sighed as he spoke, and then he pivoted round on the long wooden bench to his organ; his feet, searching for the keyboard, made a muffled sound in the listening silence of the church. Down below, the cheerful red cushions on the seats were all turned over to preserve their color, and the chancel was ghostly with white covers on the altar and the reading-desk; there was the scent of Prayer Books and dust, with strange, wandering hints of flowers which had lain here with the dead all these years, or denied death on Faster mornings.

From a little round window high in the wall behind the organ a bar of yellow sunlight shot down into the dusk : it threaded its noiseless way among the singing-books upon the benches ; it struck a sudden sparkle from the ring on Mr. Tommy’s thin veined hand as he held his music-book close to his eyes; and it shone through the soft hair about Alicia Drayton’s forehead, turning it into a delicate aureole of light around the shadowed seriousness of her face. She had been listening for a hand on the outer door of the church, a step on the graveled path, and she had even suggested timidly to Mr. Lavendar that — that perhaps the church door was locked, and perhaps — some one was trying to get in ? Mr. Lavendar said mildly, “ You came in last, Lyssie; did you lock it? Then of course it is n’t fastened. Miss Susan can get in, if she changes her mind and wishes to come.”

“ Oh yes, so she can ! ” Lyssie answered. But still she listened.

Yet when Roger Carey did slip in, closing the door gently behind him, and starting the muffled echo of the empty church, Alicia, singing, the sun making that powdery halo around her head, did not hear him, and he looked up and saw her, and the young fellow’s clear, positive, honest eyes filled suddenly with a reverence which the church itself had not brought into them.

When Lyssie saw him, there was a tremor in her pretty voice, which is natural enough in any nice girl ’s voice when she finds that somebody is listening to her. This, not being a conceited man, was the explanation Roger Carey made to himself while he waited for the practicing to end. He sat in one of the square pews, which had a straight, uncomfortable back covered with prickly red cloth, and a door whose lifting brass catch had doubtless invited many of those idle fingers for which Satan, even in Old Chester, finds some mischief still. Roger Carey’s fingers began to lift it now, and then to let it fall with a clatter, while he wished Mr. Lavendar would not try “ We praise thee, O God ! ” for a fifth time, and while he thought, smiling to himself, of this or that which Miss Alicia Drayton had said to him. Her quaint truthfulness, her enchanting modesty in matters of opinion, her wisdom unto that which was good, her simplicity concerning evil, had delighted him as he had come to know her better. When he watched her or listened to her, it was with the pleasure of the man who has found something new. But he said to himself that he was not in love with her. Certainly, his appreciation of her sweet young womanhood was of the nature of his appreciation of a limpid morning in spring, or of a star, or of the pathos of innocence and happiness in a child ’s face, rather than that more selfish appreciation which comes when a man is falling in love. Roger Carey was profoundly stirred and happy; he felt lifted up to good things. But he was not, he said to himself, “ in love with her.”

He was impatient for the practicing to cease; he liked to hear her pretty voice, but he liked better to see her and to hear her talk. As he sat waiting for her, smiling now and then at some thought of her, and playing with the little brass catch on the pew door, he read the inscriptions on the two or three tablets on the walls, and that upon the brass plate in the chancel, in memory of the first minister of the church, — his name, his virtues, and the exhortation to “ mark the perfect man,” and after that those two dates which bound with solemn meaning the weakest or the meanest of lives, the dates of birth and death. The empty church, the silent tread of the light from the window in the organ loft up the aisle and across the chancel, the moving shadows of the leaves outside, and, through all, Alicia’s voice, “ O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never he confounded,” — all these things, the scene, the waiting, the old and beautiful words, fell into the young man’s heart with a strange touch of melancholy, and his face was serious when he met Lyssie at the door and they went out into the sunset.

It was pretty to see these two young people together, and to mark the change that each produced in the other. Lyssie’s shy anxiety, the anxiety that a girl just beginning to fall in love feels, and does not understand, — a desire to seem her best, to please, to win, all the little humility that, when she is alone, makes her sigh and say to herself that she means to try to improve, — all that was gone in a flash, and instead there was a soft arrogance, a charming girlish imperiousness, and such joyousness!

Roger Carey seemed to have acquired all that Lyssie put aside; his impulsive dogmatism and careless good nature and frank criticism were lost, and in their place was a humbleness which was new to him, and an enchanting sense of delight in the sweetness of this young creature ; he wanted to hear her talk, to see her smile, to protect her, to care for her. It was rather the feeling of the discoverer than the more serious joy of being himself discovered.

They did not go home at once, but wandered about in the churchyard and talked to each other. Once they grew so earnest that they stopped, and Lyssie sat down on an old tomb that stood like a low granite table under the shadow of a tulip-tree. She wore a little grayand-white-striped gingham, and she had a bunch of laburnum in her belt. She took off her hat, and sat leaning her open palm on the lichen-covered name, looking up at Roger Carey with candid eyes of that color which lies on distant hills, and is neither blue nor violet. The sunshine touched her face and dress; a leaf shadow swung back and forth across her hand, and over the assertion of endless love and grief on the old stone; and there they talked and listened, and looked and lived.

It was the usual talk: the girl’s tentative expressions of opinion on great subjects ; the man’s instant acquiescence in them; the mutual astonishment at their unity of thought.

You think so, too ? Why, how strange ! I’ve always felt that.”

“ You would rather see Egypt than any other country in the world ? Why, how odd that is! Do you know, I’ve always said I’d rather go to Egypt than any place else.”

“ You really feel that a lie is the only thing you could n’t forgive, Mr. Carey? Well, if I could n’t forgive everything, — forgiveness is n’t hard to me, — why, I think I should draw the line at a lie ! ”

Ah, well, well, it is the old, beautiful story. We laugh at the conviction of the glorious and harmonious future ; the two soids and the single thought, built up in a moment, because views of Shakespeare and the musical glasses coincide ; but all the same, it is a divine time and a true time, and it does survive !

Margaret Deland.