The Coming of the Tide

MARGARET SHERWOOD

VIII

On a broad shelf of rock in a great fissure of the cliff sat Frances Wilmot, her hands clasped about her knees, swaying rhythmically to and fro with the rhythm of the waves beneath. Spray dashed on her brown cheek and bare head, and a little wind had blown one damp lock across her face. A line of deep tan showed on either arm outstretched from the white shirt-waist; there were no floating ruffles about her now, only a sturdy white piqué that showed traces of recent climbing over the rocks. She bore small resemblance to the dainty maiden who had alighted at the Emerson Inn three weeks ago, and might have been a sea-born thing that had crawled for a little space out of the limpid water and the tangled weeds of green and brown that grew below. She was crooning softly to herself as she swayed this way and that, for out of her passionate love she was making a song of the tide, and the rich voice sank to low murmurs, then rose to clear triumph as the little ripple over the rocks got into it, and the joy of the oncoming wave. She listened, as she tried now this note and now that, for the melody of retreating water, and its hidden sound as it sought crevice or tiny cavern that none else knew, while the memory of its least echo on the pebbles of the long beach came back to her, and of its thunder in the sudden storm of two days ago.

“Oh, I can’t do you!” she said, shaking back her spray-moistened hair; “you are so free a thing, and yet the great rhythm is there in the veriest ripple that I can hardly hear.”

Living the life of the water, she had grown to talk to the sea as to a comrade, and on far headland or at the edge of sheer gray cliff a mighty presence had seemed to meet her, answering word and cry. Now she was silent; in the silence, too, the answer came, and the girl listened, with eyelids closed, her dark head leaning against the rock. Paul Warren, coming abruptly upon her retreat, stopped, afraid to move this way or that, lest her eyes should open; and, as he paused, irresolute, he gazed with deepening wonder. That expression, worn by her face and by the whole figure nestling close to the stone, of being one with sun and sea and rock, smote home to the heart of the man who had known close kinship with naught save books. More quick than ever in his heart to-day were those old influences, of morbid theory and of melancholy life, which had worked on the mind of the child with an intensity cruelly disproportionate to their real weight; and wind and sea, bringing a keener sense of aloofness, brought, too, unknown desire. Curiously impersonal at last in his way of taking things, he had grown to stand apart even from himself, not in an attitude of self-absorption, but of self-indifference; one’s own personality was an object of such small interest! Now his whole being was full of a sudden yearning to find and claim his world, for the touch of life had come like the flick of a whip on the sensitive flanks of a restive horse. The wide horizon line and the look on Frances Wilmot’s face brought home to him a deepened feeling of his isolation, and no sooner was he aware of it than she opened her eyes, causing an expression of genuine annoyance in his. Was it because he was disturbing her or because she was disturbing him, she wondered, as she gave him greeting.

“You really ought not to appear unannounced,” she said saucily, unawed by the half frown on his face. “ Polite ghosts rap. Don’t you realize that the sudden materialization of spirits is trying for mortal nerves?”

He smiled back, quickly touched by her mood.

“May the ghost sit down for a minute, long enough to beg your pardon, — that is, if it is permitted to him to speak ?”

“They never wait for permission. It is their own caprice, and not that of the living, that governs them.”

“In that case,” said Paul Warren, settling himself comfortably, “I feel justified in staying, even at the risk of disturbing the mermaid in her cave.”

“I’m not a mermaid,” said the girl, her lip curling imperceptibly.

“And I’m not a ghost. But if you set the fashion of calling names, you must expect people to follow.”

“There’s a difference between calling names and giving names,” she retorted, looking at him through merry, half-shut eyes. “And you really are a ghost, you know, only you don’t half understand your properties. You ought to appear in diaphanous white, made in the fashion of a trailing robe or toga, and you ought to wear a dim electric light shining somewhere in your hair. I will admit, however, that you have chosen a day quite in keeping with the spirit world.”

It was one of the times of veiled beauty, when pine and juniper and sweet-fern on the cliff above wore a deeper and more blended green because of the absent sunlight, and the gray-brown rocks with their crumbling lichens took on a lovelier tone. The low, soft clouds that floated overhead shaded from purple to pale silvery gray which matched the under side of the wings of the gulls, and the water gave back the color hue for hue, out and farther out, where even the horizon line vanished in the mystery of infinite distance. It was late afternoon; cliff swallows, with deep purple wings and breasts that hinted the dim red of the rocks, were circling near; and the air was soft, and sweet as the caresses of dear, dead hands.

“Ghost,” said Frances Wilmot, turning suddenly to check the mist that came unbidden to her eyes, “I see a book in your pocket. There is a spiritualist lady at the Inn who would be delighted to find out what you read in the place you come from. Perhaps she could make little paragraphs for the papers: ‘Books most in demand during the last week in the Spirit World!’”

Paul Warren drew the volume from its hiding-place. “I was merely investigating; it does not represent my taste.”

“Nietsche!” cried the girl. “Now I know why you have avoided me so carefully : you were afraid I would talk to you about Nietsche. I assure you I won’t; I have n’t read him.”

“ You must be a rather unusual woman if that would prevent you from discussing him! Besides, I have n’t avoided you.”

“Mr.Paul Hollis Warren,” said thegirl quickly, “is n’t your great-great-greatgrandfather Warren about to enter into you and tell a fib?”

It was impossible not to give back her laughter, note for note.

“Perhaps,” he admitted, “but I had not met you.”

“That’s something of a bull, is n’t it: you could not meet me because you had not met me ? But to come back to Learned Women: what do you suppose my comrades at the Inn asked me last night?”

“Being a mere man, I have not the wit to suggest.”

“What arguments for the immortality of the soul I thought most convincing!”

“And you told them” —

“I told them,” she said with a dimple, “to remember that the schools in the South are very poor; it is something they often say to excuse my shortcomings. Then the Lady from Wilmington said that it was a most important question, to which I should give deep thought.”

“How did you escape?”

“I said,” she answered slowly, “that, whatever it is, it is n’t a question, and that any immortality of the soul worth having is beyond the reach of argument; for to say that you believe is to express a doubt. Surely it is present, insistent, throbbing in every nerve! The Lady from Wilmington was deeply shocked.”

“Did anything happen?”

The girl answered by a peal of laughter.

“ In the words of old romance: ‘ She shaped herself horse and man by enchantment into a great marble stone.’ Then she was attacked by the Lady from Cincinnati, who is scientific, and a positivist. She remarked, between two bits of a roll, that our knowledge is strictly limited to the world that we see; that metaphysical assertions are therefore impossible; and then said loudly that there is no immortality of the soul. I am telling you all this because I don’t know whether it is the Summer Girl or the Learned Woman that you are afraid of in me, and I am trying to find a golden mean between the two, being neither.”

“I suppose it would be useless to assure you that I am not afraid of you in any aspect ; I trust that I have the courage of an ordinary man. I am very much interested in what you are saying; please go on.”

“There was n’t any more,” said Frances, “for I insisted that her last remark was a metaphysical assertion, and that she ought not to make it; therefore she said that my logic would improve as I grew older.”

Paul Warren looked at the girl curiously: it was hard to tell whether she was merry or sad; in jest or in earnest. The serious glance of his eyes brought mirth quickly to the surface in hers.

“Ghost,” she said suddenly, “do you know that the water is all purple-gray, changing every minute with a beauty that takes the heart out of you?”

He looked at it critically.

“No,” he admitted; “I did not.”

“And the heart of it all is the change, change, change; can’t you hear the moments go by with swiftly tripping feet ? It. is the feeling it come and go that makes the beauty; you will never find through all eternity just the same shade of color, whatever more exquisite tint may come.”

“You are a poet,” he said deliberately. “Why are n’t you writing poetry ?”

She spread her brown hands out to the spray.

“ Why spoil it by writing it ? I want to feel it in my finger tips, and hear it in my ears, with no printed pages between. Do you know that the waves make an entirely different music on the rocks and in all the clefts and crannies on a shaded day like this, from that which they make when the sun is shining?”

“I am afraid not,” he answered, smiling skeptically.

She looked at him with laughing eyes.

“You are just a mind, very thinly embodied, are n’t you ? You would n’t care if the sky were colorless and the sea dumb. You ought n’t to be troubled with carrying about the weight of a body, for you don’t need even wings.”

“I thought you were only a girl,” he remarked irrelevantly.

“I’m not!” said Frances. “‘I’m a woman growed,’ if you please, sir! But do you mind telling me what it is like in the realm of pure thought?”

“Not if you will tell me what it is like under the sea,” he retorted.

“Oh,” cried the girl, “I could n’t tell you all,for part of it is a mystery. But it is cool and clear and green, and the bed of it is dim with gold and red with coral, and rich colors running all through the scale are there, browns that shade into purples, and blues that fade into greens, and some of the growths are live creatures, and some don’t know whether they are living things or not,” — here she glanced wickedly at him and tilted her chin a wee bit in the air, — “and” —

“And?” for she had paused.

“You sit in the midst of it, and you bathe in the color that is like living light. You sit way, way down at the centre of the deep, and you know the heart of the great tides, and the way they come and the way they go, and the reason of it all, but you never tell.”

“Don’t stop,” he begged.

“ You shall have no more of it,” she answered, “until you can see the color and hear the waves. Now tell me how they made you a ghost: I want to know the training in the Spirit Land.”

“It goes way, way back,” he replied, lightly. “First you have some ancestors who think much about theology ” —

“And one who is bad,” suggested Frances.

“One who is very bad, and many who are reckless, and in the course of time the race gets rather confused in its mind, the sinners beginning to brood too much over their sins ” —

“And about saving their own souls,” interrupted the girl.

“Precisely. They read a great deal and they meditate a great deal, and then, possibly because they have found life too much for them, they hand it on, till at last it comes to a youngster made out of all the odds and ends, of broken faiths and shattered ideals. He has a fairly active mind, and, brought up in the shadow of the past, he sets to work to try to think things out. You see, as he grows up, he feels that the powers that be have tossed him a pretty hard nut to crack when they tossed him this world ” —

“And a boy who would never have dreamed of trying to crack a nut by thinking about it, but would have gone at it with nerve and muscle, is foolish enough to believe that he can think out this world! ” cried the girl willfully. “ And yet it was n’t his fault. They had taught him theories and theologies, and so he turned out to be ” —

“A ghost ?” said Paul Warren, laughing. It was the first foolish conversation he had ever had in his life, and he was enjoying it.

“A philosopher,” said the girl severely.

“You don’t object to a man’s using what mind he has ?” he queried meekly.

“It should be kept in its place, being a good servant, but a bad master.”

“ Who taught you all this ? Siren or mermaid you must be, for no mortal maiden of your years could have this depth of knowledge. It is a combination of the wisdom of four years and of fourscore.”

“A father and a mother,” said the girl, with a sudden shining in her eyes, “who had lived and who knew. The wisdom and the beauty of things I felt when I was a little child at their knees, and it was impossible, as I grew older, not to understand.”

The purple-winged swallows flew nearer, unafraid, for the voices had ceased, and the two people in the cleft in the rock were suddenly aware that their jesting conversation had led them into the depths; and, with the feeling once more that they were strangers, there was on the part of both a desire to escape. Water and gentle air and cloud floated softly about them, encompassing them with rest. Paul Warren took his leave, stiffly enough. He was half angry with himself for the way in which he had been talking with a woman, having never before ventured so far from under the protecting shell of his reserve; and he was filled with wonder at this girl’s poignant sense of things of which in his nine and twenty years he had been but dimly aware. Her eager grasp on all that touched her life stung him with sudden conviction of the futility of his careless way of letting go.

IX

“Paul,” asked Uncle Peter sharply, strolling down the piazza steps with a cigar between his teeth, “what is the lawn being clipped for?”

Lifting his eyes from his book, the young man looked with a certain satisfaction down the broad slope, which was being converted into something halfway between a stubble field and velvet turf.

“ I thought it would be a good thing to get it into the shape it had when grandfather was alive. We have been a bit careless lately.”

Uncle Peter clapped his hands together in delight. He was in high spirits this morning, and evidently in possession, according to his own theories, of the jolliest soul among his forefathers.

“I told you so! I told you so! Ancestral traits coming out as plain as daylight! You laugh at my ideas, yet here you are a living proof of them. So your grandfather Warren is uppermost in you to-day! I am having a touch myself of Peter Finch; he was a great joker, you know. Wonderful, wonderful that you can’t escape from your grandfather, however hard you try.”

Here Uncle Peter turned and saw old Andrew Lane standing near with a rake in his hand, and listening with an amused grin on his wrinkled old face. He nodded, but did not touch his battered straw hat, and a flush crept over Uncle Peter’s cheeks; this man was always rude to him.

“Take off your hat to your betters, Andrew,” he said, not without condescension. The grin spread farther, and, with open mouth, the old man laughed silently.

“So I do,” he answered, advancing toward Paul and touching his hat brim. " The’s a man here from Porchmouth says you wanted him.”

“Bring him here,” said the young proprietor. “ It is a gardener who, I thought, might be able to give us some suggestions about touching up the old place.”

Uncle Peter stood near and listened to the dialogue that followed, a cloud gathering on his brow.

“ I do not want things much changed,” explained Paul to the Portsmouth man, “ I wish to keep it in all essentials as it was in my father’s day, but it could be made a little trimmer.”

“Yes, sir, yes,” assented the man, handling his pruning shears.

“ It ought to look more as if it were inhabited by the living as well as by the dead,” thought Paul.

When the gardener had gone, Uncle Peter took up again the thread of conversation which he had reluctantly dropped.

“Oh, you want to go on reading, do you? It’s always books,” he muttered. “ Whoever you get that taste from, it is n’t from me; it must be somebody on your mother’s side; though, to be sure, your father had it. I, for my part, don’t believe that great readers think as much as people who use their wits in observation. To a man who is capable of carrying on a sustained train of thought, everything in the natural world contributes something to his idea. Now to me the very birds on the trees, and Belinda when she scrubs, and the butterflies and the grasshoppers, teach something of heredity.”

Here he trotted away, but presently was back again, his early mood of cheerfulness changed to deep gloom, and he inquired suspiciously how much was to be paid a day to this new gardener, and how much to the mason whom he had found mending the wall.

“It’s absurd, Paul,” he burst out suddenly, “that the management of my property should have gone to you. Why,lean remember when you wore dresses and had a curl on the top of your head.”

“It was father’s wish,” answered Paul, briefly.

“He was foolish, as foolish as his father and mine before him,” answered Uncle Peter, irritably tapping the piazza step with his cane. “ Why was the bulk of the property left to John, anyway, when I was the oldest son, and only an allowance to me? Why was your father to manage even that?” and the old man glared at his nephew.

“Don’t you remember that grandfather had English ideas, and wanted the estate to be inherited by one son ? I presume he thought you did not want to be bothered with it all,” answered Paul gently. He was sorry for the old man, and the frequent efforts that had to be made to explain to him that which never could be explained were hard for both of them.

“Bothered!” shrieked Uncle Peter; “bothered with a little money of my own!” And he sank down into a chair, rocking furiously to and fro.

It was with a cunning expression that he inquired carelessly after a minute’s silence: —

“Where do you get the money for all these improvements, my boy?”

“It doesn’t take much,” was the answer; “there is really very little being done. There happens to be quite a surplus in the bank just now.”

“ Ah!” cried Uncle Peter, in a tone that spoke volumes.

“You need n’t be alarmed,” said Paul good-naturedly. “I am not using yours. You get your allowance regularly, don’t you ?”

“I do, as yet,” answered the old man ironically. “I wonder if you know that there is a trace of swindling in the blood ? Now your great-great-great-grandfather Warren” —

“Oh, confusion seize my great-greatgreat-grandfather Warren!” cried Paul, too amused to be irritated, and too irritated to be entirely amused. “If there has ever been anything but over-scrupulous honesty in the family, nobody but you knows anything about it. Go to your banker and make inquiries, if you think that I am wronging you.”

“I meant nothing, nothing at all,” said Uncle Peter, disappearing in the direction of the dining-room and the sideboard. “I only think it is well to be constantly on the alert against temptation. Yes, yes, my allowance came as usual this morning.”

He soon came back to his nephew, evidently in better humor.

“I tell you what it is,” he said gravely, “when I went in there just now it was as if a hand, my great-great-grandfather Warren’s hand, were pushing me toward the sideboard.”

“Perhaps I’d better keep it locked,” suggested Paul. “What do you say, uncle ?”

“No, no, no,” answered the old man quickly. “I might come some time and find it shut, and who can tell what spirit would enter in to rend and tear ? You cannot trifle, Paul, you cannot trifle with the dead;” and with this solemn warning the conversation was over.

It touched Paul to see his mother’s pleasure in the beauty that was coming back to the old home. That slope of the lawn with its great elms looked like Washington, she said one day, now that it was so smooth; only, the far street beyond was but a country road and lacked the gay life of the city. Paul said little, but listened with a certain remorse: why had they not done this before, his father and he, who had jogged on so comfortably with their own thoughts, forgetful of a woman’s needs? With a gratified sense that he was busy with his father’s task, the young man went about his work, judging, and rightly, that John Warren would have been glad to see these changes that he had neglected to make. Paul sent to Washington to inquire what was the best time of the year to transplant magnolia trees, ordering some to be sent when the proper season came. Did his mother know, he asked, the place by Morningkill Brook where dogwood blossomed in the spring ? He coaxed her to walk with him there, that she might find the spot and be ready when the flowers came again with their suggestion of the South. A faint little ripple of belated happiness came into Mrs. Warren’s heart in those days, as her son began slowly to understand.

For Mrs. Warren’s new mood the Virginia girl was partly responsible; she was much with the elder lady, coming often for a luncheon or a drive. Her scrupulous adherence to the compact she had made with Paul Warren amused him as much as it mystified his mother. Unless directly addressed, she did not speak to him, and, when listening, wore the air of one hearkening to a voice that came from far away.

“ Did some one speak ? ” she asked with wickedly twinkling eyes, on one occasion when Paul had made what seemed to his mother a particularly impressive remark. How could it be that they disliked each other so much, even to the verge of rudeness, Mrs. Warren asked herself, when Paul was Paul and this girl was so charming ?

“Tell me something about Miss Bevanne,” said Frances Wilmot one day at luncheon, when a sudden feeling that her silence was not fair to the people who did not understand the cause made her speak to her host.

“I know nothing of her,” he answered, “ except that she used to be a little girl ”—

“Strange,” murmured the guest.

“With two long braids of pale hair, and no color in her face except in her eyes.”

“Not color,” corrected Frances Wilmot. “Her eyes have no color; it is only light. She looks as if she had some inner source of illumination.”

Then she leaned back in her chair, gazing at Paul as if she did not see him, but as if she were looking through a mist at the paneled door behind. This expression of interested amusement that he was wearing always irritated her.

An eager flush came into Mrs. Warren’s face as she spoke.

“I hope you may meet Miss Bevanne some time here. The other day at church I invited her to come with her brother. They never were here as children, because of some old trouble, which I should like to have forgotten.”

As chance would have it, they came that afternoon, when Mrs. Warren, worn out by a headache, was asleep, and Frances Wilmot, now thoroughly at home in the old house, was reading in a hammock on the piazza. Paul had gone to meet an engagement in the city, and it was left to Uncle Peter to do the honors for the family. He performed his task with a stateliness and garrulity most amusing to the guests, whom he entertained by displaying the old pre-revolutionary Warren house, still standing behind a clump of spruces not far away. Finding interested listeners, he began to harp upon his pet theories, and to Miss Wilmot in particular, whom he had never had so much at his disposal as to-day, he poured out his interpretations of the family history, while Mr. Bevanne and his sister were lingering in the old kitchen. That was an intelligent and charming girl, Uncle Peter thought to himself, as she sat listening to him on the old settle by the huge brick fireplace in the parlor, vainly wishing that fate had let her talk with Alice Bevanne. He told her of his great-grandmother Anne, with her love of beautiful things, and of great-greatgrandfather Warren, whose sins lived on in the family like suppressed volcanic fire.

“It all goes on quietly in the main, Miss Wilmot,” he said earnestly. “It’s a good family, and all that, but there is something hot down under, and you can never tell when it is going to flame out. Grass green over the lava, you know, and then one day, hiss, comes the eruption! Now these tendencies burst out when you least expect them: certain of them I confess to having myself, and certain others I clearly discern in Paul.”

The girl smiled: it would be a delight, she thought, to see any kind of volcanic eruption that could break up the imperturbable self-possession and the reserve of Mr. Paul Hollis Warren. To Uncle Peter the smile meant encouragement, and he left his rocking-chair, coming over to sit at the girl’s side that he might talk more freely; but the nearer he came the louder he spoke. His philosophy was in a specially gloomy state to-day, partly because his suspicion that Paul was about to wrong him in money matters was becoming a fixed idea in his mind, partly because he was conscious of being less fastidiously dressed than usual, on an occasion when he naturally wished to appear at his best. Frances Wilmot watched him with eyes in which the look of amusement was giving way to one of distress. How could she let this funny little old man go on saying things that nobody ought to say ? How could she stop him ?

“Paul’s a good boy enough, but I am beginning to have my doubts about — Well, there is no use in talking; ladies are n’t usually interested in business matters. He used to have the Warren temper: I remember seeing him as a child of fourteen months try to beat his brains out on the floor because he could not get what he wanted. There have been few indications of that lately, but he has the seeds of melancholia, as anybody can see. However, it is a gifted family; now you did not know, did you, that we have a poetess among our ancestors ? Ellen Wilton, Mary Ellen Wilton. She wrote poems, hymns; at the house I can showyou her portrait, and her book,which is bound in red velvet with gilt clasps. Such things never die out in a family, you know, and I sometimes think I have a touch of her in me. I am certainly very susceptible to — to influences;” and Uncle Peter shook his withered little head mysteriously, as if willing to say more if asked.

To Frances Wilmot’s great relief the others soon joined them, and the family psychology was for a time forgotten in discussion of interesting objects. The old spinning wheel, the old set of musical glasses, the room where the slaves used to cook their supper, and where the great crane still hung behind the grim fire-dogs, were displayed by Uncle Peter with no less pride than that which he felt in displaying the family faults.

Paul Warren missed it all. Coming home late in the afternoon, very tired, and driving slowly over the grass-grown road past the old house, he caught the sound of Uncle Peter’s voice as it came rippling out through the low, old-fashioned windows.

“So I say that Nature sinned against me, for she gave me no personality of my own. She made me merely an empty shell to be tenanted by any bygone creature who chooses to inhabit me. And do you know, I am convinced that it is the same with the others. There’s my nephew, Paul, for instance,—you must pardon me if I bring him in often as an illustration, but he is the only one I have left to study now, — I continually observe the same phenomena taking place in him.”

Paul had stopped his horse, and he heard the sound of suppressed laughter that followed his uncle’s words. Then came the notes of Frances Wilmot’s beautiful voice: “But you know, Mr. Warren, that is all nonsense.” The young man grasped the whole ironic situation, and touching his horse sharply with the whip, drove on, unobserved by any eyes except those of Alice Bevanne. He caught their look, half halted, then went his way. being in no mood to play just then the part of host.

“She will not tell them that I am here,” he said to himself; and she did not.

“Oh! ” exclaimed Frances Wilmot with a little groan of relief, as Uncle Peter, hearing the sound of wheels, hurried away to find his nephew, and left his guests alone.

“It’s as interesting as a play,” said Mr. Bevanne, with a little burst of smothered laughter. “You do find the most amazing absurdities in human nature up this way.”

“It was shameful,” said the Southern girl vehemently. “I feel as if the family skeleton had been showing me the closet where he lives.”

As Mrs. Warren entered the room the three guests realized that the odd situation in which they had been placed had acted like a sudden flash light in which they could read the expressions of one another’s faces with an embarrassing distinctness.

X

“What did you say, Paul?” asked Mrs. Warren, gently swinging to and fro in a great veranda rocker. “You agree with me that it would be better to make up this quarrel with the Bevannes ? Oh, I am so glad, so glad!” and she came over, seated herself on the broad arm of her son’s chair, and lightly kissed his forehead. “Do, and forget those dreadful words your father said; it is more Christian so. You are a good boy, and always were.”

Paul looked at her with thoughtful, non-committal eyes; truth to tell he was a bit ashamed that reconciliation with the family enemy cost him so little. Could he identify himself with nothing, not even a family feud ?

“It can’t be done!” chirped Uncle Peter from the railing. “What gets into the blood stays there, and you will find that the Warren-Bevanne quarrel is n’t over yet.”

“We can at least make the experiment,” said Paul quietly.

“ I was afraid you might not like their coming here the other day; I invited them almost without thinking,” said Mrs. Warren.

“It was a matter of perfect indifference to me,” responded the young man with a touch of regret. “Would n’t it be well to invite them to luncheon ? Your friend. Miss Wilmot, would probably find it more pleasant with some young people about. Of course we cannot make it gay for her this summer, nor would she want that.”

Mrs. Warren lightly touched her son’s hair with her hand.

“‘Your friend!’” she said reproachfully. “Why not yours ? Why don’t you like her?”

“I don’t dislike her,” said Paul magnanimously. “But do not try to make a young man out of me, mother; I think I must have had gray hair when I was born.”

“Why, you did n’t have a single hair, Paul,” she exclaimed.

“I mean I had gray hair inside.”

“Sometimes,” remarked Uncle Peter, taking a cigar from his pocket, “sometimes, Paul, I think you are out of your mind. You say the strangest things, with the least sense in them! As for this girl, you must be blind, — but of course you always were that, — or you would see that she is one of the loveliest creatures that ever walked the earth. I declare, I wish I were thirty!”

“I’m afraid that you have made her dislike you, Paul dear,” said his mother, her hand upon his shoulder. “I notice that she never speaks to you if she can help it.”

“Then it is my duty to provide her with companions whom she does like,” said Paul, “and that brings me back to the Bevannes. From some remark she made I imagine she is very much interested in Alice Bevanne.”

“That is odd,” said Mrs. Warren; “but the brother is a very nice young man. What frank eyes he has, and such an open manner! It would be sinful, I think, to keep our old grudges there!”

Regarding the luncheon she hesitated, glancing at her gown of black, her fresh sense of recent sorrow causing her to shrink from even so simple a festivity as this; yet it was in behalf of peacemaking, and that gentle thought won the day. Alice Bevanne and her brother were invited to meet Miss Wilmot, and a Southern fever came upon Aunt Belinda as she made preparations.

“Honey,” she said to Mrs. Warren, “kin I make beaten biscuit?”

“Of course!” said that lady, wondering at the broad smile upon the black face as the old darkey fingered her lilac apron.

“An’ fried chicken, an’ a Smithfield ham done wid champagne ? I jes’ like ter show these No’then folks what a rale supper is, an’ I know Miss Frances jes’ dyin’ fo’ some beaten biscuit: I kin tell dat by de looks of her. All de years I bin up yer I ain’t seen no young lady like dat. Her hair jes’ nach’ally straight, ain’t it?”

If any one was bored when the feast of reconciliation came, that person was not Uncle Peter. From grave to gay, he ran the whole gamut of his intellectual charms, laughing merrily at his own jests, and wiping his eyes over his own pathetic tales.

“You don’t feel these things as I do, perhaps,” he said to Frances Wilmot, to whom he devoted himself. “ I am peculiarly sensitive, perhaps foolishly so.”

Paul Warren overheard without the quiver of a muscle; after all, one could not bully fate! His mother mournfully remarked that he exchanged not more than a dozen “words with Miss Wilmot; but Aunt Belinda, who, in her woman’s desire for further knowledge, and her cook’s desire to watch the appreciation of the feast she had created, had forced the table maid to feign headache and was waiting with a grace that belied her bulk, chuckled delightedly to herself as she passed to and fro.

“Mas’r Paul, he know every which way dat young lady lookin’, for all he ain’t sayin’ nuffin’; an’ her face change ebery time he open his mouf talkin’ ter somebody else. I reckon dey act de way a hen an’ a snake acts, jes’ like dey don’t know what to make ob one ’nudder.”

Aunt Belinda had spoken truth, for now and then, across the sound of many voices, the Southern girl’s eyes glanced toward Paul, and he became aware that there was a shade of meaning, humorous or sad, which none save he and she understood. It was as if she were drawn against her will, by some doom of nature, to share her appreciations with him, and he found himself waiting for those rare interpretations which escaped the others.

If the quiet manner of Alice Bevanne wearied Uncle Peter, when he found himself obliged to talk with her for five minutes after luncheon, her brother charmed his hostess by a slightly exaggerated attention to her wishes, which recalled to her the young men she had known in the days of her youth.

“Mr. Bevanne has acquired the Southern manner,” she said to her son when the guests were gone. “ But the sister — Well, she is a lady, but that is all I can say; she is singularly destitute of charm.”

Paul said nothing; perhaps his mother was right, yet the glance of the girl’s luminous eyes, and the depth of expression in her face, made him wonder if there were not something better than charm in the feminine world. At any rate, he found in her a refuge from her brother, whom he treated with an excess of courtesy that boded dislike on further acquaintance. Searching for a cause for this desire to keep a measured distance between himself and Alec Bevanne, he failed to find it. To the best of his belief it was not the old enmity, which in all earnestness he was trying to end; he could detect no reason save an instinctive difference in taste.

“Five hundred years ago,” Paul said to himself as he strolled up and down the walk late in the afternoon, “I suppose I should have killed the man simply and perhaps devoutly for the sake of the feud, and a hundred years ago I should have fought a duel with him, but now I have no impulse except to be decently polite to him, and to keep out of his way. No family quarrel ought to be intrusted to a man with a sense of humor!”

Truth to tell, Paul Warren was sore over a lack of grievance. Alec Bevanne had not, as he had expected, overwhelmed Miss Wilmot with his attentions, but had had the good taste to spend his engaging efforts on his hostess.

“I declare!” said Paul to himself, stopping abruptly in his walk, “I believe I am sorry that the man is not a cad!”

In the summer days that followed these four people were much together. From the gay life of the few guests at Wahonet, Frances Wilmot was cut off by her sorrow, as the Bevannes were by their poverty, and Paul by his own desire. The latter, from his apathy in regard to human beings, whose presence usually roused in him a feeling of loneliness unknown in solitude, wakened to a certain interest in his new friends.

One morning there was a prolonged knock upon Mrs. Warren’s door, and when permission was given, Aunt Belinda entered, gorgeous in yellow calico, but wearing an expression of alarm that seemed to blanch still further the whites of her eyes and her gleaming teeth against their dusky background.

“Mis’ Emily, whar’s Mas’r Paul gone wid all dem picks and spades ?” she demanded.

“Picks and spades!” repeated Mrs. Warren, looking up from her writing desk with mild surprise upon her face.

“Yes, honey, picks and spades,” repeated Aunt Belinda tragically. The voice, soft and deep, ran the words together in a long, mournful, cadenced wail which sounded like the expression of an animal’s grief.

“I never see no sech goin’s on sence I came up yer. Mas’r Paul’s paw never touched none of them things; now he bin an’ gone an’ pruned de laylock bushes, workin’ jes’ like any field han’. Look out o’ dat winder an’ see him now!”

Mrs. Warren rose and looked anxiously out. There, striding across the July fields with a quicker tread than that of his old solitary tramps, was Paul, carrying over one shoulder a bundle of golf clubs. A happy smile crossed the mother’s face.

“Why, Belinda!” she exclaimed, “that’s not work! It is golf, a game.”

“A play game?” asked the colored woman skeptically.

“A play game, yes,” answered Mrs. Warren, laughing joyously, “and you must be as glad as I that at last he is getting interested in the things that belong to his years.”

A broad smile illuminated Aunt Belinda’s dark face.

“Co’se I’se glad,” she said heartily, “ef it’s a play game, sho ’nuff, but it looks mighty like it was common work to me.”

But, as the days went on, the old colored woman watched him with delight.

“Mas’r Paul jes’ wakin’ up to know he’s alive! ” she muttered one day. “ Jes’ readin’, thinkin’, what’s dat for a man!”

It was true that Paul Warren found an unwonted charm in things hitherto obnoxious, sharing an occasional drive, on which, through all the talking and the laughter, he heard cadences of one voice sweeter than the rest; or a long tramp over some winding road shaded from the sun by drooping branches, where, between dark tree trunks, they watched the sunlit green on the fields beyond. Whole occasional days were devoted to enjoyment; dust gathered on the library table, and Robin, stealing in unobserved on his old quest, chewed up the second and third heads of an essay on Herbert Spencer. When at last he invited his friends to share with him the one amusement of his old days of solitude, sailing across the waves in his cherished Sea Gull, it seemed to his mother, as well as to himself, that the last wall of his reserve was breaking down. He awakened often in the morning to a wonderful lightness of heart, which sometimes lingered with him through the long summer hours; and old troubles grew to be at times like halfforgotten stories of childhood, which it was hard to recall. For the first time in his life, Paul Warren made a truce with his soul.

Between him and his mother’s friend, the Southern girl, was an armed peace. Upon all about him she had laid her spell. Uncle Peter frankly rendered her the homage of his withered heart; Mrs. Warren was living again in her a girl’s life, and one happier than her own had ever been; Aunt Belinda still cherished with devotion the look which had greeted her beaten biscuit; and Alec Bevanne wore his admiration as an open secret in his blue eyes. Only Robin Hood and Paul withstood the enchantress, the former with the expression of accusing grief wherewith he repelled all human-kind, the latter with a rather strict observance of the compact of silence; for certain moments in her presence had brought him a sharp sense of danger, and a more formal courtesy was wont to mark his efforts to keep out a foe who might disturb the little inner quiet he had achieved. Yet their surface intercourse in the presence of others was full of charm for him, and in minor matters he submitted to her management with a meekness which no one had ever before discovered in him. It was she who undertook his education in golf.

“You think too hard about it,” she said laughingly one day. “Just go by instinct and strike. You play too intellectual a game, Hamlet!”

In spite of his obedience in the matter of golf playing, of which he knew nothing, and in the matter of riding, which he understood better than she, he left Miss Wilmot usually with a puzzled sense that he was master of the situation. Through all the silences, a sense of his splendid gift and his strength was strong upon her, perhaps because of the enigmatic eyes which watched and studied; for the man’s mind was hard at work upon this baffling personality which he did not comprehend. It might be because he knew nothing of women that she puzzled him so, yet he half divined the fact that no other woman would puzzle him as this one did. A minute’s conversation with her on some rounded height of the green golf course, or under flickering sunlight and shadow at the turning of a woodland way, sometimes came as a flash of light, revealing her sane, sweet, and strong, one who would face loneliness and gayety and pleasure and hurt with the same fearless eyes, winning joy from the heart of pain; the next minute she was her old, elusive self again, escaping.

“I am a problem to which there is n’t any answer, Mr. Warren,” she said one day, quietly watching him as he watched her. “Don’t try to think me out! If you get the answer and put down your analysis correctly under heads one, two, and three, it will not be right!”

So gentle, yet so spirited, so keen in judgment, yet so quickly touched to sensitive feeling, young in many ways, yet at some points older in wisdom than Mother Eve and the serpent together, he said whimsically to himself, — would no one read him the riddle of this woman ?

Those rare moments of silent understanding came oftenest when, dancing over the waves in the Sea Gull, with the spray in their faces, the joy of swift motion in the girl’s eyes, the rhythm of her body, the sweep of her wind-blown hair, thrilled him with a new sense of the meaning of the words she had spoken half in jest about her living at the heart of the great tides.

(To be continued.)