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The Conquest of Canaan

by Booth Tarkington

April, 1996  [Etext #483]
[Date last updated: January 5, 2006]


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THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN
BY BOOTH TARKINGTON





To
L.F.T.


CONTENTS
CHAPTER                                      
I.      ENTER CHORUS 
II.     A RESCUE 
III.    OLD HOPES 
IV.     THE DISASTER 
V.      BEAVER BEACH 
VI.     "YE'LL TAK' THE HIGH ROAD AND I'LL TAK' THE LOW ROAD" 
VII.    GIVE A DOG A BAD NAME 
VIII.   A BAD PENNY TURNS UP 
IX.     OUTER DARKNESS 
X.      THE TRYST 
XI.     WHEN HALF-GODS GO 
XII.    TO REMAIN ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE IS NOT ALWAYS A VICTORY  
XIII.   THE WATCHER AND THE WARDEN  
XIV.    WHITE ROSES IN A LAW-OFFICE 
XV.     HAPPY FEAR GIVES HIMSELF UP 
XVI.    THE TWO CANAANS 
XVII.   MR. SHEEHAN'S HINTS 
XVIII.  IN THE HEAT OF THE DAY 
XIX.    ESKEW ARP 
XX.     THREE ARE ENLISTED  
XXI.    NORBERT WAITS FOR JOE 
XXII.   MR. SHEEHAN SPEAKS 
XXIII.  JOE WALKS ACROSS THE COURT-HOUSE YARD 
XXIV.   MARTIN PIKE KEEPS AN ENGAGEMENT 
XXV.    THE JURY COMES IN 
XXVI.   "ANCIENT OF DAYS" 



THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN


ENTER CHORUS

I

A dry snow had fallen steadily
throughout the still night, so that
when a cold, upper wind cleared the
sky gloriously in the morning the
incongruous Indiana town shone in a
white harmony--roof, ledge, and earth as evenly
covered as by moonlight.  There was no thaw;
only where the line of factories followed the big
bend of the frozen river, their distant chimneys like
exclamation points on a blank page, was there a
first threat against the supreme whiteness.  The
wind passed quickly and on high; the shouting of
the school-children had ceased at nine o'clock with
pitiful suddenness; no sleigh-bells laughed out on
the air; and the muffling of the thoroughfares
wrought an unaccustomed peace like that of Sunday.
This was the phenomenon which afforded the
opening of the morning debate of the sages in the
wide windows of the "National House."

Only such unfortunates as have so far failed
to visit Canaan do not know that the "National
House" is on the Main Street side of the Courthouse
Square, and has the advantage of being
within two minutes' walk of the railroad station,
which is in plain sight of the windows--an
inestimable benefit to the conversation of the aged
men who occupied these windows on this white
morning, even as they were wont in summer to hold
against all comers the cane-seated chairs on the
pavement outside.  Thence, as trains came and
went, they commanded the city gates, and, seeking
motives and adding to the stock of history, narrowly
observed and examined into all who entered or
departed.  Their habit was not singular.  He who
would foolishly tax the sages of Canaan with a
bucolic light-mindedness must first walk in Piccadilly
in early June, stroll down the Corso in Rome
before Ash Wednesday, or regard those windows of
Fifth Avenue whose curtains are withdrawn of a
winter Sunday; for in each of these great streets,
wherever the windows, not of trade, are widest, his
eyes must behold wise men, like to those of Canaan,
executing always their same purpose.

The difference is in favor of Canaan; the "National
House" was the club, but the perusal of
traveller or passer by was here only the spume
blown before a stately ship of thought; and you
might hear the sages comparing the Koran with the
speeches of Robert J. Ingersoll.

In the days of board sidewalks, "mail-time" had
meant a precise moment for Canaan, and even now,
many years after the first postman, it remained
somewhat definite to the aged men; for, out of
deference to a pleasant, olden custom, and perhaps
partly for an excuse to "get down to the hotel"
(which was not altogether in favor with the elderly
ladies), most of them retained their antique boxes
in the post-office, happily in the next building.

In this connection it may be written that a
subscription clerk in the office of the Chicago
Daily Standard, having noted a single subscriber
from Canaan, was, a fortnight later, pleased to
receive, by one mail, nine subscriptions from that
promising town.  If one brought nine others in a
fortnight, thought he, what would nine bring in a
month?  Amazingly, they brought nothing, and
the rest was silence.  Here was a matter of intricate
diplomacy never to come within that youth his
ken.  The morning voyage to the post-office,
long mocked as a fable and screen by the families
of the sages, had grown so difficult to accomplish 
for one of them, Colonel Flitcroft (Colonel in the
war with Mexico), that he had been put to it,
indeed, to foot the firing-line against his wife (a lady
of celebrated determination and hale-voiced at
seventy), and to defend the rental of a box which
had sheltered but three missives in four years.
Desperation is often inspiration; the Colonel
brilliantly subscribed for the Standard, forgetting to
give his house address, and it took the others just
thirteen days to wring his secret from him.  Then
the Standard served for all.

Mail-time had come to mean that bright hour
when they all got their feet on the brass rod which
protected the sills of the two big windows, with the
steam-radiators sizzling like kettles against the
side wall.  Mr. Jonas Tabor, who had sold his
hardware business magnificently (not magnificently
for his nephew, the purchaser) some ten years
before, was usually, in spite of the fact that he
remained a bachelor at seventy-nine, the last to settle
down with the others, though often the first to reach
the hotel, which he always entered by a side door,
because he did not believe in the treating system.
And it was Mr. Eskew Arp, only seventy-five, but
already a thoroughly capable cynic, who, almost
invariably "opened the argument," and it was he
who discovered the sinister intention behind the
weather of this particular morning.  Mr. Arp had 
not begun life so sourly: as a youth he had been
proud of his given name, which had come to him
through his mother's family, who had made it
honorable, but many years of explanations that
Eskew did not indicate his initials had lowered his
opinion of the intelligence and morality of the race.

The malevolence of his voice and manner this
morning, therefore, when he shook his finger at
the town beyond the windows, and exclaimed,
with a bitter laugh, "Look at it!" was no surprise
to his companions.  "Jest look at it!  I tell you
the devil is mighty smart.  Ha, ha!  Mighty
smart!"

Through custom it was the duty of Squire
Buckalew (Justice of the Peace in '59) to be the
first to take up Mr. Arp.  The others looked to
him for it.  Therefore, he asked, sharply:

"What's the devil got to do with snow?"

"Everything to do with it, sir," Mr. Arp
retorted.  "It's plain as day to anybody with eyes
and sense."

"Then I wish you'd p'int it out," said Buckalew,
"if you've got either."

"By the Almighty, Squire"--Mr. Arp turned in
his chair with sudden heat--"if I'd lived as long
as you--"

"You have," interrupted the other, stung.
"Twelve years ago!"

"If I'd lived as long as you," Mr. Arp repeated,
unwincingly, in a louder voice, "and had follered
Satan's trail as long as you have, and yet couldn't
recognize it when I see it, I'd git converted and
vote Prohibitionist."

"_I_ don't see it," interjected Uncle Joe Davey,
in his querulous voice.  (He was the patriarch of
them all.)  "_I_ can't find no cloven-hoof-prints in
the snow."

"All over it, sir!" cried the cynic.  "All over it!
Old Satan loves tricks like this.  Here's a town
that's jest one squirmin' mass of lies and envy and
vice and wickedness and corruption--"

"Hold on!" exclaimed Colonel Flitcroft.  "That's
a slander upon our hearths and our government.
Why, when I was in the Council--"

"It wasn't a bit worse then," Mr. Arp returned,
unreasonably.  "Jest you look how the devil fools us.
He drops down this here virgin mantle on Canaan
and makes it look as good as you pretend you
think it is: as good as the Sunday-school room of a
country church--though THAT"--he went off on a
tangent, venomously--"is generally only another
whited sepulchre, and the superintendent's mighty
apt to have a bottle of whiskey hid behind the
organ, and--"

"Look here, Eskew," said Jonas Tabor, "that's
got nothin' to do with--"

"Why ain't it?  Answer me!" cried Mr. Arp,
continuing, without pause:  "Why ain't it?  Can't
you wait till I git through?  You listen to me, and
when I'm ready I'll listen to--"

"See here," began the Colonel, making himself
heard over three others, "I want to ask you--"

"No, sir!" Mr. Arp pounded the floor irascibly
with his hickory stick.  "Don't you ask me anything!
How can you tell that I'm not going to
answer your question without your asking it, till
I've got through?  You listen first.  I say, here's
a town of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants,
every last one of 'em--men, women, and children--
selfish and cowardly and sinful, if you could see
their innermost natures; a town of the ugliest and
worst built houses in the world, and governed by a
lot of saloon-keepers--though I hope it 'll never
git down to where the ministers can run it.  And
the devil comes along, and in one night--why, all
you got to do is LOOK at it!  You'd think we needn't
ever trouble to make it better.  That's what the
devil wants us to do--wants us to rest easy about
it, and paints it up to look like a heaven of peace
and purity and sanctified spirits.  Snowfall like
this would of made Lot turn the angel out-of-doors
and say that the old home was good enough for
him.  Gomorrah would of looked like a Puritan
village--though I'll bet my last dollar that there 
was a lot, and a WHOLE lot, that's never been told
about Puritan villages.  A lot that--"

"WHAT never was?" interrupted Mr. Peter
Bradbury, whose granddaughter had lately announced
her discovery that the Bradburys were descended
from Miles Standish.  "What wasn't told about
Puritan villages?"

"Can't you wait?" Mr. Arp's accents were those
of pain.  "Haven't I got ANY right to present my
side of the case?  Ain't we restrained enough to
allow of free speech here?  How can we ever git
anywhere in an argument like this, unless we let
one man talk at a time?  How--"

"Go on with your statement," said Uncle Joe
Davey, impatiently.

Mr. Arp's grievance was increased.  "Now listen
to YOU!  How many more interruptions are comin'?
I'll listen to the other side, but I've got to state
mine first, haven't I?  If I don't make my point
clear, what's the use of the argument?
Argumentation is only the comparison of two sides of a
question, and you have to see what the first side
IS before you can compare it with the other one,
don't you?  Are you all agreed to that?"

"Yes, yes," said the Colonel.  "Go ahead.  We
won't interrupt until you're through."

"Very well," resumed Mr. Arp, with a fleeting
expression of satisfaction, "as I said before, I
wish to--as I said--" He paused, in some
confusion.  "As I said, argumentation is--that is, I
say--"  He stopped again, utterly at sea, having
talked himself so far out of his course that he was
unable to recall either his sailing port or his
destination.  Finally he said, feebly, to save the
confession, "Well, go on with your side of it."

This generosity was for a moment disconcerting;
however, the quietest of the party took up the
opposition--Roger Tabor, a very thin, old man
with a clean-shaven face, almost as white as his
hair, and melancholy, gentle, gray eyes, very unlike
those of his brother Jonas, which were dark
and sharp and button-bright.  (It was to Roger's
son that Jonas had so magnificently sold the hardware
business.)  Roger was known in Canaan as
"the artist"; there had never been another of his
profession in the place, and the town knew not the
word "painter," except in application to the useful
artisan who is subject to lead-poisoning.  There
was no indication of his profession in the attire of
Mr. Tabor, unless the too apparent age of his
black felt hat and a neat patch at the elbow of his
shiny, old brown overcoat might have been taken
as symbols of the sacrifice to his muse which his
life had been.  He was not a constant attendant
of the conclave, and when he came it was usually
to listen; indeed, he spoke so seldom that at the
sound of his voice they all turned to him with
some surprise.

"I suppose," he began, "that Eskew means the
devil is behind all beautiful things."

"Ugly ones, too," said Mr. Arp, with a start of
recollection.  "And I wish to state--"

"Not now!" Colonel Flitcroft turned upon him
violently.  "You've already stated it."

"Then, if he is behind the ugly things, too," said
Roger, "we must take him either way, so let us be
glad of the beauty for its own sake.  Eskew says
this is a wicked town.  It may be--I don't know.
He says it's badly built; perhaps it is; but it doesn't
seem to me that it's ugly in itself.  I don't know
what its real self is, because it wears so many
aspects.  God keeps painting it all the time, and
never shows me twice the same picture; not even
two snowfalls are just alike, nor the days that
follow them; no more than two misty sunsets are
alike--for the color and even the form of the
town you call ugly are a matter of the season of
the year and of the time of day and of the light
and air.  The ugly town is like an endless gallery
which you can walk through, from year-end to
year-end, never seeing the same canvas twice, no
matter how much you may want to--and there's
the pathos of it.  Isn't it the same with people
with the characters of all of us, just as it is with
our faces?  No face remains the same for two
successive days--"

"It don't?" Colonel Flitcroft interrupted, with
an explosive and rueful incredulity.  "Well, I'd
like to--"  Second thoughts came to him almost
immediately, and, as much out of gallantry as
through discretion, fearing that he might be taken
as thinking of one at home, he relapsed into
silence.

Not so with the others.  It was as if a
firecracker had been dropped into a sleeping poultry-
yard.  Least of all could Mr. Arp contain himself.
At the top of his voice, necessarily, he agreed
with Roger that faces changed, not only from day
to day, and not only because of light and air and
such things, but from hour to hour, and from
minute to minute, through the hideous stimulus
of hypocrisy.

The "argument" grew heated; half a dozen tidy
quarrels arose; all the sages went at it fiercely,
except Roger Tabor, who stole quietly away.
The aged men were enjoying themselves thoroughly,
especially those who quarrelled.  Naturally, the
frail bark of the topic which had been launched
was whirled about by too many side-currents to
remain long in sight, and soon became derelict,
while the intellectual dolphins dove and tumbled
in the depths.  At the end of twenty minutes
Mr. Arp emerged upon the surface, and in his
mouth was this:

"Tell me, why ain't the Church--why ain't the
Church and the rest of the believers in a future life
lookin' for immortality at the other end of life,
too?  If we're immortal, we always have been;
then why don't they ever speculate on what we
were before we were born?  It's because they're
too blame selfish--don't care a flapdoodle about
what WAS, all they want is to go on livin' forever."

Mr. Arp's voice had risen to an acrid triumphancy,
when it suddenly faltered, relapsed to a
murmur, and then to a stricken silence, as a tall, fat
man of overpowering aspect threw open the outer
door near by and crossed the lobby to the clerk's
desk.  An awe fell upon the sages with this advent.
They were hushed, and after a movement in their
chairs, with a strange effect of huddling, sat
disconcerted and attentive, like school-boys at the
entrance of the master.

The personage had a big, fat, pink face and a
heavily undershot jaw, what whitish beard he wore
following his double chin somewhat after the manner
displayed in the portraits of Henry the Eighth.
His eyes, very bright under puffed upper lids, were
intolerant and insultingly penetrating despite
their small size.  Their irritability held a kind of
hotness, and yet the personage exuded frost, not
of the weather, all about him.  You could not
imagine man or angel daring to greet this being
genially--sooner throw a kiss to Mount Pilatus!

"Mr. Brown," he said, with ponderous hostility,
in a bull bass, to the clerk--the kind of voice
which would have made an express train leave the
track and go round the other way--"do you hear
me?"

"Oh yes, Judge," the clerk replied, swiftly, in
tones as unlike those which he used for strange
transients as a collector's voice in his ladylove's
ear is unlike that which he propels at delinquents.

"Do you see that snow?" asked the personage,
threateningly.

"Yes, Judge."  Mr. Brown essayed a placating
smile.  "Yes, indeed, Judge Pike."

"Has your employer, the manager of this hotel,
seen that snow?" pursued the personage, with a
gesture of unspeakable solemn menace.

"Yes, sir.  I think so.  Yes, sir."

"Do you think he fully understands that I am
the proprietor of this building?"

"Certainly, Judge, cer--"

"You will inform him that I do not intend to
be discommoded by his negligence as I pass to
my offices.  Tell him from me that unless he keeps
the sidewalks in front of this hotel clear of snow I
will cancel his lease.  Their present condition is
outrageous.  Do you understand me?  Outrageous!
Do you hear?"

"Yes, Judge, I do so," answered the clerk,
hoarse with respect.  "I'll see to it this minute,
Judge Pike."

"You had better."  The personage turned
himself about and began a grim progress towards the
door by which he had entered, his eyes fixing
themselves angrily upon the conclave at the windows.

Colonel Flitcroft essayed a smile, a faltering one.

"Fine weather, Judge Pike," he said, hopefully.

There was no response of any kind; the undershot
jaw became more intolerant.  The personage
made his opinion of the group disconcertingly
plain, and the old boys understood that he knew
them for a worthless lot of senile loafers, as great a
nuisance in his building as was the snow without;
and much too evident was his unspoken threat
to see that the manager cleared them out of there
before long.

He nodded curtly to the only man of substance
among them, Jonas Tabor, and shut the door
behind him with majestic insult.  He was Canaan's
millionaire.

He was one of those dynamic creatures who
leave the haunting impression of their wills
behind them, like the tails of Bo-Peep's sheep, like
the evil dead men have done; he left his intolerant
image in the ether for a long time after he had
gone, to confront and confound the aged men and
hold them in deferential and humiliated silence.
Each of them was mysteriously lowered in his own
estimation, and knew that he had been made to
seem futile and foolish in the eyes of his fellows.
They were all conscious, too, that the clerk had
been acutely receptive of Judge Pike's reading of
them; that he was reviving from his own squelchedness
through the later snubbing of the colonel;
also that he might further seek to recover his
poise by an attack on them for cluttering up the
office.

Naturally, Jonas Tabor was the first to speak.
"Judge Pike's lookin' mighty well," he said, admiringly.

"Yes, he is," ventured Squire Buckalew, with
deference; "mighty well."

"Yes, sir," echoed Peter Bradbury; "mighty
well."

"He's a great man," wheezed Uncle Joe Davey;
"a great man, Judge Martin Pike; a great man!"

"I expect he has considerable on his mind,"
said the Colonel, who had grown very red.  "I
noticed that he hardly seemed to see us."

"Yes, sir," Mr. Bradbury corroborated, with an
attempt at an amused laugh.  "I noticed it, too.
Of course a man with all his cares and interests
must git absent-minded now and then."

"Of course he does," said the colonel.  "A
man with all his responsibilities--"

"Yes, that's so," came a chorus of the brethren,
finding comfort and reassurance as their voices and
spirits began to recover from the blight.

"There's a party at the Judge's to-night," said
Mr. Bradbury--"kind of a ball Mamie Pike's givin'
for the young folks.  Quite a doin's, I hear."

"That's another thing that's ruining Canaan,"
Mr. Arp declared, morosely.  "These entertainments
they have nowadays.  Spend all the money
out of town--band from Indianapolis, chicken
salad and darkey waiters from Chicago!  And
what I want to know is, What's this town goin' to
do about the nigger question?"

"What about it?" asked Mr. Davey, belligerently.

"What about it?" Mr. Arp mocked, fiercely.
"You better say, `What about it?' "

"Well, what?" maintained Mr. Davey, steadfastly.

"I'll bet there ain't any less than four thousand
niggers in Canaan to-day!" Mr. Arp hammered
the floor with his stick.  "Every last one of 'em
criminals, and more comin' on every train."

"No such a thing," said Squire Buckalew, living
up to his bounden duty.  "You look down the
street.  There's the ten-forty-five comin' in now.
I'll bet you a straight five-cent Peek-a-Boo cigar
there ain't ary nigger on the whole train, except
the sleepin'-car porters."

"What kind of a way to argue is that?"
demanded Mr. Arp, hotly.  "Bettin' ain't proof, is
it?  Besides, that's the through express from the
East.  I meant trains from the South."

"You didn't say so," retorted Buckalew,
triumphantly.  "Stick to your bet, Eskew, stick to
your bet."

"My bet!" cried the outraged Eskew.  "Who
offered to bet?"

"You did," replied the Squire, with perfect
assurance and sincerity.  The others supported
him in the heartiest spirit of on-with-the-dance,
and war and joy were unconfined.

A decrepit hack or two, a couple of old-fashioned
surreys, and a few "cut-unders" drove by, bearing
the newly arrived and their valises, the hotel
omnibus depositing several commercial travellers
at the door.  A solitary figure came from the
station on foot, and when it appeared within fair
range of the window, Uncle Joe Davey, who had
but hovered on the flanks of the combat, first
removed his spectacles and wiped them, as though
distrusting the vision they offered him, then, 
replacing them, scanned anew the approaching figure
and uttered a smothered cry.

"My Lord A'mighty!" he gasped.  "What's
this?  Look there!"

They looked.  A truce came involuntarily, and
they sat in paralytic silence as the figure made its
stately and sensational progress along Main Street.

Not only the aged men were smitten.  Men
shovelling snow from the pavements stopped suddenly
in their labors; two women, talking busily
on a doorstep, were stilled and remained in frozen
attitudes as it passed; a grocer's clerk, crossing
the pavement, carrying a heavily laden basket to
his delivery wagon, halted half-way as the figure
came near, and then, making a pivot of his heels
as it went by, behaved towards it as does the
magnetic needle to the pole.

It was that of a tall gentleman, cheerfully, though
somewhat with ennui, enduring his nineteenth
winter.  His long and slender face he wore smiling,
beneath an accurately cut plaster of dark hair
cornicing his forehead, a fashion followed by many
youths of that year.  This perfect bang was shown
under a round black hat whose rim was so small as
almost not to be there at all; and the head was
supported by a waxy-white sea-wall of collar,
rising three inches above the blue billows of a puffed
cravat, upon which floated a large, hollow pearl.
His ulster, sporting a big cape at the shoulders,
and a tasselled hood over the cape, was of a rough
Scotch cloth, patterned in faint, gray-and-white
squares the size of baggage-checks, and it was so
long that the skirts trailed in the snow.  His legs
were lost in the accurately creased, voluminous
garments that were the tailors' canny reaction
from the tight trousers with which the 'Eighties had
begun: they were, in color, a palish russet, broadly
striped with gray, and, in size, surpassed the milder
spirit of fashion so far as they permitted a liberal
knee action to take place almost without superficial
effect.  Upon his feet glistened long shoes,
shaped, save for the heels, like sharp racing-shells;
these were partially protected by tan-colored low
gaiters with flat, shiny, brown buttons.  In one
hand the youth swung a bone-handled walking-
stick, perhaps an inch and a half in diameter, the
other carried a yellow leather banjo-case, upon the
outer side of which glittered the embossed-silver
initials, "E. B."  He was smoking, but walked
with his head up, making use, however, of a gait at
that time new to Canaan, a seeming superbly
irresponsible lounge, engendering much motion
of the shoulders, producing an effect of carelessness
combined with independence--an effect which the
innocent have been known to hail as an unconscious one.

He looked about him as he came, smilingly, with
an expression of princely amusement--as an elderly
cabinet minister, say, strolling about a village
where he had spent some months in his youth, a
hamlet which he had then thought large and imposing,
but which, being revisited after years of
cosmopolitan glory, appeals to his whimsy and his
pity.  The youth's glance at the court-house
unmistakably said:  "Ah, I recall that odd little box.
I thought it quite large in the days before I
became what I am now, and I dare say the good
townsfolk still think it an imposing structure!"
With everything in sight he deigned to be amused,
especially with the old faces in the "National
House" windows.  To these he waved his stick
with airy graciousness.

"My soul!" said Mr. Davey.  "It seems to
know some of us!"

"Yes," agreed Mr. Arp, his voice recovered,
"and _I_ know IT."

"You do?" exclaimed the Colonel.

"I do, and so do you.  It's Fanny Louden's boy,
'Gene, come home for his Christmas holidays."

"By George! you're right," cried Flitcroft; "I
recognize him now."

"But what's the matter with him?" asked Mr.
Bradbury, eagerly.  "Has he joined some patent-
medicine troupe?"

"Not a bit," replied Eskew.  "He went East
to college last fall."

"Do they MAKE the boys wear them clothes?"
persisted Bradbury.  "Is it some kind of uniform?"

"I don't care what it is," said Jonas Tabor.  "If
I was Henry Louden I wouldn't let him wear 'em
around here."

"Oh, you wouldn't, wouldn't you, Jonas?" Mr.
Arp employed the accents of sarcasm.  "I'd like to
see Henry Louden try to interfere with 'Gene
Bantry.  Fanny'd lock the old fool up in the
cellar."

The lofty vision lurched out of view.

"I reckon," said the Colonel, leaning forward to
see the last of it--"I reckon Henry Louden's about
the saddest case of abused step-father I ever saw."

"It's his own fault," said Mr. Arp--"twice not
havin' sense enough not to marry.  Him with a
son of his own, too!"

"Yes," assented the Colonel, "marryin' a widow
with a son of her own, and that widow Fanny!"

"Wasn't it just the same with her first husband
--Bantry?" Mr. Davey asked, not for information,
as he immediately answered himself.  "You bet
it was!  Didn't she always rule the roost?  Yes,
she did.  She made a god of 'Gene from the day
he was born.  Bantry's house was run for him, like
Louden's is now."

"And look," exclaimed Mr. Arp, with satisfaction,
"at the way he's turned out!"

"He ain't turned out at all yet; he's too young,"
said Buckalew.  "Besides, clothes don't make the
man."

"Wasn't he smokin' a cigareet!" cried Eskew,
triumphantly.  This was final.

"It's a pity Henry Louden can't do something
for his own son," said Mr. Bradbury.  "Why don't
he send him away to college?"

"Fanny won't let him," chuckled Mr. Arp,
malevolently.  "Takes all their spare change to
keep 'Gene there in style.  I don't blame her.
'Gene certainly acts the fool, but that Joe Louden
is the orneriest boy I ever saw in an ornery world-
full."

"He always was kind of misCHEEvous," admitted
Buckalew.  "I don't think he's mean, though, and
it does seem kind of not just right that Joe's father's
money--Bantry didn't leave anything to speak
of--has to go to keepin' 'Gene on the fat of the
land, with Joe gittin' up at half-past four to carry
papers, and him goin' on nineteen years old."

"It's all he's fit for!" exclaimed Eskew.  "He's
low down, I tell ye.  Ain't it only last week Judge
Pike caught him shootin' craps with Pike's nigger
driver and some other nigger hired-men in the
alley back of Pike's barn."

Mr. Schindlinger, the retired grocer, one of the
silent members, corroborated Eskew's information.
"I heert dot, too," he gave forth, in his fat voice.
"He blays dominoes pooty often in der room back
off Louie Farbach's tsaloon.  I see him myself.
Pooty often.  Blayin' fer a leedle money--mit
loafers!  Loafers!"

"Pretty outlook for the Loudens!" said Eskew
Arp, much pleased.  "One boy a plum fool and
dressed like it, the other gone to the dogs already!"

"What could you expect Joe to be?" retorted
Squire Buckalew.  "What chance has he ever
had?  Long as I can remember Fanny's made
him fetch and carry for 'Gene.  'Gene's had everything
--all the fancy clothes, all the pocket-money,
and now college!"

"You ever hear that boy Joe talk politics?"
asked Uncle Joe Davey, crossing a cough with a
chuckle.  "His head's so full of schemes fer running
this town, and state, too, it's a wonder it don't
bust.  Henry Louden told me he's see Joe set
around and study by the hour how to save three
million dollars for the state in two years."

"And the best he can do for himself," added
Eskew, "is deliverin' the Daily Tocsin on a second-
hand Star bicycle and gamblin' with niggers and
riff-raff!  None of the nice young folks invite him
to their doin's any more."

"That's because he's got so shabby he's quit
goin' with em," said Buckalew.

"No, it ain't," snapped Mr. Arp.  "It's
because he's so low down.  He's no more 'n a town
outcast.  There ain't ary one of the girls 'll have
a thing to do with him, except that rip-rarin' tom-
boy next door to Louden's; and the others don't
have much to do with HER, neither, I can tell ye.
That Arie Tabor--"

Colonel Flitcroft caught him surreptitiously by
the arm.  "SH, Eskew!" he whispered.  "Look
out what you're sayin'!"

"You needn't mind me," Jonas Tabor spoke up,
crisply.  "I washed my hands of all responsibility
for Roger's branch of the family long ago.  Never
was one of 'em had the energy or brains to make
a decent livin', beginning with Roger; not one
worth his salt!  I set Roger's son up in business,
and all the return he ever made me was to go into
bankruptcy and take to drink, till he died a sot,
like his wife did of shame.  I done all I could
when I handed him over my store, and I never
expect to lift a finger for 'em again.  Ariel Tabor's
my grandniece, but she didn't act like it, and you
can say anything you like about her, for what I
care.  The last time I spoke to her was a year
and a half ago, and I don't reckon I'll ever trouble
to again."

"How was that, Jonas?" quickly inquired Mr.
Davey, who, being the eldest of the party, was the
most curious.  "What happened?"

"She was out in the street, up on that high
bicycle of Joe Louden's.  He was teachin' her to
ride, and she was sittin' on it like a man does.  I
stopped and told her she wasn't respectable.
Sixteen years old, goin' on seventeen!"

"What did she say?"

"Laughed," said Jonas, his voice becoming
louder as the recital of his wrongs renewed their
sting in his soul.  "Laughed!"

"What did you do?"

"I went up to her and told her she wasn't a
decent girl, and shook the wheel."  Mr. Tabor
illustrated by seizing the lapels of Joe Davey and
shaking him.  "I told her if her grandfather had
any spunk she'd git an old-fashioned hidin' for
behavin' that way.  And I shook the wheel again."
Here Mr. Tabor, forgetting in the wrath incited
by the recollection that he had not to do with an
inanimate object, swung the gasping and helpless
Mr. Davey rapidly back and forth in his chair.
"I shook it good and hard!"

"What did she do then?" asked Peter Bradbury.

"Fell off on me," replied Jonas, violently.  "On
purpose!"

"I wisht she'd killed ye," said Mr. Davey, in a
choking voice, as, released, he sank back in his
chair.

"On purpose!" repeated Jonas.  "And smashed
a straw hat I hadn't had three months!  All to
pieces!  So it couldn't be fixed!"

"And what then?" pursued Bradbury.

"SHE ran," replied Jonas, bitterly--" ran!  And
Joe Louden--Joe Louden--"  He paused and
gulped.

"What did he do?" Peter leaned forward in
his chair eagerly.

The narrator of the outrage gulped again, and
opened and shut his mouth before responding.

"He said if I didn't pay for a broken spoke on
his wheel he'd have to sue me!"

No one inquired if Jonas had paid, and Jonas
said no more.  The recollection of his wrongs,
together with the illustrative violence offered to
Mr. Davey, had been too much for him.  He sank
back, panting, in his chair, his hands fluttering
nervously over his heart, and closed his eyes.

"I wonder why," ruminated Mr. Bradbury--"I
wonder why 'Gene Bantry walked up from the
deepo.  Don't seem much like his style.  Should
think he'd of rode up in a hack."

"Sho!" said Uncle Joe Davey, his breath
recovered.  "He wanted to walk up past Judge
Pike's, to see if there wasn't a show of Mamie's
bein' at the window, and give her a chance to look
at that college uniform and banjo-box and new
walk of his."

Mr. Arp began to show signs of uneasiness.

"I'd like mighty well to know," he said,
shifting round in his chair, "if there's anybody here
that's been able to answer the question I PUT,
yesterday, just before we went home.  You all
tried to, but I didn't hear anything I could
consider anyways near even a fair argument."

"Who tried to?" asked Buckalew, sharply,
sitting up straight.  "What question?"

"What proof can you bring me," began Mr.
Arp, deliberately, "that we folks, modernly, ain't
more degenerate than the ancient Romans?"



II

A RESCUE

Main Street, already muffled by
the snow, added to its quietude a
frozen hush where the wonder-bearing
youth pursued his course along
its white, straight way.  None was
there in whom impertinence overmastered
astonishment, or who recovered from the sight in time
to jeer with effect; no "Trab's boy" gathered
courage to enact in the thoroughfare a scene of
mockery and of joy.  Leaving business at a
temporary stand-still behind him, Mr. Bantry swept
his long coat steadily over the snow and soon
emerged upon that part of the street where the
mart gave way to the home.  The comfortable
houses stood pleasantly back from the street, with
plenty of lawn and shrubbery about them; and
often, along the picket-fences, the laden branches
of small cedars, bending low with their burden,
showered the young man's swinging shoulders
glitteringly as he brushed by.

And now that expression he wore--the indulgent
amusement of a man of the world--began to
disintegrate and show signs of change.  It became
finely grave, as of a high conventionality, lofty,
assured, and mannered, as he approached the Pike
mansion.  (The remotest stranger must at once
perceive that the Canaan papers could not have
called it otherwise without pain.)

It was a big, smooth-stone-faced house,
product of the 'Seventies, frowning under an
outrageously insistent mansard, capped by a cupola,
and staring out of long windows overtopped with
"ornamental" slabs.  Two cast-iron deer, painted
death-gray, twins of the same mould, stood on
opposite sides of the front walk, their backs towards
it and each other, their bodies in profile to the
street, their necks bent, however, so that they
gazed upon the passer-by--yet gazed without
emotion.  Two large, calm dogs guarded the top
of the steps leading to the front-door; they also
were twins and of the same interesting metal,
though honored beyond the deer by coats of black
paint and shellac.  It was to be remarked that
these dogs were of no distinguishable species or
breed, yet they were unmistakably dogs; the
dullest must have recognized them as such at a
glance, which was, perhaps, enough.  It was a
hideous house, important-looking, cold, yet harshly 
aggressive, a house whose exterior provoked a
shuddering guess of the brass lambrequins and
plush fringes within; a solid house, obviously--
nay, blatantly--the residence of the principal
citizen, whom it had grown to resemble, as is the
impish habit of houses; and it sat in the middle
of its flat acre of snowy lawn like a rich, fat man
enraged and sitting straight up in bed to swear.

And yet there was one charming thing about this
ugly house.  Some workmen were enclosing a large
side porch with heavy canvas, evidently for festal
purposes.  Looking out from between two strips
of the canvas was the rosy and delicate face of a
pretty girl, smiling upon Eugene Bantry as he
passed.  It was an obviously pretty face, all the
youth and prettiness there for your very first
glance; elaborately pretty, like the splendid
profusion of hair about and above it--amber-colored
hair, upon which so much time had been spent that
a circle of large, round curls rose above the mass of
it like golden bubbles tipping a coronet.

The girl's fingers were pressed thoughtfully
against her chin as Eugene strode into view;
immediately her eyes widened and brightened.  He
swung along the fence with the handsomest
appearance of unconsciousness, until he reached a
point nearly opposite her.  Then he turned his
head, as if haphazardly, and met her eyes.  At once
she threw out her hand towards him, waving him
a greeting--a gesture which, as her fingers had been
near her lips, was a little like throwing a kiss.  He
crooked an elbow and with a one-two-three military
movement removed his small-brimmed hat, extended
it to full arm's-length at the shoulder-level,
returned it to his head with Life-Guard precision.
This was also new to Canaan.  He was letting
Mamie Pike have it all at once.

The impression was as large as he could have
desired.  She remained at the opening in the
canvas and watched him until he wagged his shoulders
round the next corner and disappeared into a cross
street.  As for Eugene, he was calm with a great
calm, and very red.

He had not covered a great distance, however,
before his gravity was replaced by his former
smiling look of the landed gentleman amused by the
innocent pastimes of the peasants, though there
was no one in sight except a woman sweeping some
snow from the front steps of a cottage, and she,
not perceiving him, retired in-doors without knowing
her loss.  He had come to a thinly built part
of the town, the perfect quiet of which made the
sound he heard as he opened the picket gate of
his own home all the more startling.  It was a
scream--loud, frantic, and terror-stricken.

Eugene stopped, with the gate half open.

Out of the winter skeleton of a grape-arbor at
one side of the four-square brick house a brown-
faced girl of seventeen precipitated herself through
the air in the midst of a shower of torn card-board
which she threw before her as she leaped.  She lit
upon her toes and headed for the gate at top speed,
pursued by a pale young man whose thin arms
strove spasmodically to reach her.  Scattering
snow behind them, hair flying, the pair sped on
like two tattered branches before a high wind; for,
as they came nearer Eugene (of whom, in the
tensity of their flight, they took no note), it was
to be seen that both were so shabbily dressed as
to be almost ragged.  There was a brown patch
upon the girl's faded skirt at the knee; the shortness
of the garment indicating its age to be something
over three years, as well as permitting the
knowledge to become more general than befitting
that her cotton stockings had been clumsily darned
in several places.  Her pursuer was in as evil case;
his trousers displayed a tendency to fringedness at
pocket and heel; his coat, blowing open as he ran,
threw pennants of torn lining to the breeze, and
made it too plain that there were but three buttons 
on his waistcoat.

The girl ran beautifully, but a fleeter foot was
behind her, and though she dodged and evaded
like a creature of the woods, the reaching hand
fell upon the loose sleeve of her red blouse, nor fell
lightly.  She gave a wrench of frenzy; the antique
fabric refused the strain; parted at the shoulder
seam so thoroughly that the whole sleeve came
away--but not to its owner's release, for she had
been brought round by the jerk, so that, agile as
she had shown herself, the pursuer threw an arm
about her neck, before she could twist away, and
held her.

There was a sharp struggle, as short as it was
fierce.  Neither of these extraordinary wrestlers
spoke.  They fought.  Victory hung in the balance
for perhaps four seconds; then the girl was
thrown heavily upon her back, in such a turmoil
of snow that she seemed to be the mere nucleus of a
white comet.  She struggled to get up, plying knee
and elbow with a very anguish of determination;
but her opponent held her, pinioned both her
wrists with one hand, and with the other rubbed
great handfuls of snow into her face, sparing
neither mouth nor eyes.

"You will!" he cried.  "You will tear up my
pictures!  A dirty trick, and you get washed for
it!"

Half suffocated, choking, gasping, she still
fought on, squirming and kicking with such spirit
that the pair of them appeared to the beholder
like figures of mist writhing in a fountain of snow.

More violence was to mar the peace of morning.
Unexpectedly attacked from the rear, the
conqueror was seized by the nape of the neck and one
wrist, and jerked to his feet, simultaneously
receiving a succession of kicks from his assailant.
Prompted by an entirely natural curiosity, he
essayed to turn his head to see who this might be,
but a twist of his forearm and the pressure of strong
fingers under his ear constrained him to remain
as he was; therefore, abandoning resistance, and,
oddly enough, accepting without comment the
indication that his captor desired to remain for
the moment incognito, he resorted calmly to
explanations.

"She tore up a picture of mine," he said,
receiving the punishment without apparent emotion.
"She seemed to think because she'd drawn it herself
she had a right to."

There was a slight whimsical droop at the corner
of his mouth as he spoke, which might have been
thought characteristic of him.  He was an odd-
looking boy, not ill-made, though very thin and
not tall.  His pallor was clear and even, as though
constitutional; the features were delicate, almost
childlike, but they were very slightly distorted,
through nervous habit, to an expression at once
wistful and humorous; one eyebrow was a shade
higher than the other, one side of the mouth slightly
drawn down; the eyelids twitched a little, habitually;
the fine, blue eyes themselves were almost
comically reproachful--the look of a puppy who
thinks you would not have beaten him if you had
known what was in his heart.  All of this was in
the quality of his voice, too, as he said to his
invisible captor, with an air of detachment from any
personal feeling:

"What peculiar shoes you wear!  I don't think
I ever felt any so pointed before."

The rescuing knight took no thought of offering to
help the persecuted damsel to arise; instead, he
tightened his grip upon the prisoner's neck until,
perforce, water--not tears--started from the latter's eyes.

"You miserable little muff," said the conqueror,
"what the devil do you mean, making this scene
on our front lawn?"

"Why, it's Eugene!" exclaimed the helpless one.
"They didn't expect you till to-night.  When did
you get in?"

"Just in time to give you a lesson, my buck,"
replied Bantry, grimly.  "In GOOD time for that,
my playful step-brother."

He began to twist the other's wrist--a treatment
of bone and ligament in the application of which
school-boys and even freshmen are often adept.
Eugene made the torture acute, and was apparently 
enjoying the work, when suddenly--without any
manner of warning--he received an astounding
blow upon the left ear, which half stunned him
for the moment, and sent his hat flying and himself
reeling, so great was the surprise and shock of it.
It was not a slap, not an open-handed push, nothing
like it, but a fierce, well-delivered blow from a
clinched fist with the shoulder behind it, and it
was the girl who had given it.

"Don't you dare to touch Joe!" she cried,
passionately.  "Don't you lay a finger on him."

Furious and red, he staggered round to look at
her.

"You wretched little wild-cat, what do you mean
by that?" he broke out.

"Don't you touch Joe!" she panted.  "Don't
you--"  Her breath caught and there was a break
in her voice as she faced him.  She could not finish
the repetition of that cry, "Don't you touch Joe!"

But there was no break in the spirit, that passion
of protection which had dealt the blow.  Both boys
looked at her, something aghast.

She stood before them, trembling with rage and
shivering with cold in the sudden wind which had
come up.  Her hair had fallen and blew across
her streaming face in brown witch-wisps; one of
the ill-darned stockings had come down and hung
about her shoe in folds full of snow; the arm which
had lost its sleeve was bare and wet; thin as the
arm of a growing boy, it shook convulsively, and
was red from shoulder to clinched fist.  She was
covered with snow.  Mists of white drift blew
across her, mercifully half veiling her.

Eugene recovered himself.  He swung round
upon his heel, restored his hat to his head with
precision, picked up his stick and touched his
banjo-case with it.

"Carry that into the house," he said, indifferently,
to his step-brother.

"Don't you do it!" said the girl, hotly, between
her chattering teeth.

Eugene turned towards her, wearing the sharp
edge of a smile.  Not removing his eyes from her
face, he produced with deliberation a flat silver
box from a pocket, took therefrom a cigarette,
replaced the box, extracted a smaller silver box from
another pocket, shook out of it a fusee, slowly lit
the cigarette--this in a splendid silence, which he
finally broke to say, languidly, but with particular
distinctness:

"Ariel Tabor, go home!"

The girl's teeth stopped chattering, her lips
remaining parted; she shook the hair out of her eyes
and stared at him as if she did not understand, but
Joe Louden, who had picked up the banjo-case
obediently, burst into cheerful laughter.

"That's it, 'Gene," he cried, gayly.  "That's the
way to talk to her!"

"Stow it, you young cub," replied Eugene, not
turning to him.  "Do you think I'm trying to be
amusing?"

"I don't know what you mean by `stow it,' " Joe
began, "but if--"

"I mean," interrupted the other, not relaxing
his faintly smiling stare at the girl--"I mean that
Ariel Tabor is to go home.  Really, we can't have
this kind of thing occurring upon our front lawn!"

The flush upon her wet cheeks deepened and
became dark; even her arm grew redder as she gazed
back at him.  In his eyes was patent his complete
realization of the figure she cut, of this bare arm,
of the strewn hair, of the fallen stocking, of the
ragged shoulder of her blouse, of her patched short
skirt, of the whole dishevelled little figure.  He
was the master of the house, and he was sending
her home as ill-behaved children are sent home by
neighbors.

The immobile, amused superiority of this
proprietor of silver boxes, this wearer of strange and
brilliant garments, became slightly intensified as
he pointed to the fallen sleeve, a rag of red and
snow, lying near her feet.

"You might take that with you?" he said,
interrogatively.

Her gaze had not wavered in meeting his, but
at this her eyelashes began to wink uncontrollably,
her chin to tremble.  She bent over the sleeve and
picked it up, before Joe Louden, who had started
towards her, could do it for her.  Then turning,
her head still bent so that her face was hidden
from both of them, she ran out of the gate.

"DO go!" Joe called after her, vehemently.  "Go!
Just to show what a fool you are to think 'Gene's
in earnest."

He would have followed, but his step-brother
caught him by the arm.  "Don't stop her," said
Eugene.  "Can't you tell when I AM in earnest,
you bally muff!"

"I know you are," returned the other, in a low
voice.  "I didn't want her to think so for your
sake."

"Thousands of thanks," said Eugene, airily.
"You are a wise young judge.  She couldn't stay--
in THAT state, could she?  I sent her for her own
good."

"She could have gone in the house and your
mother might have loaned her a jacket," returned
Joe, swallowing.  "You had no business to make
her go out in the street like that."

Eugene laughed.  "There isn't a soul in sight
--and there, she's all right now.  She's home."

Ariel had run along the fence until she came to 
the next gate, which opened upon a walk leading
to a shabby, meandering old house of one story,
with a very long, low porch, once painted white,
running the full length of the front.  Ariel sprang
upon the porch and disappeared within the house.

Joe stood looking after her, his eyelashes winking
as had hers.  "You oughtn't to have treated
her that way," he said, huskily.

Eugene laughed again.  "How were YOU treating
her when I came up?  You bully her all you
want to yourself, but nobody else must say even
a fatherly word to her!"

"That wasn't bullying," explained Joe.  "We
fight all the time."

"Mais oui!" assented Eugene.  "I fancy!"

"What?" said the other, blankly.

"Pick up that banjo-case again and come on,"
commanded Mr. Bantry, tartly.  "Where's the
mater?"

Joe stared at him.  "Where's what?"

"The mater!" was the frowning reply.

"Oh yes, I know!" said Joe, looking at his step-
brother curiously.  "I've seen it in stories.  She's
up-stairs.  You'll be a surprise.  You're wearing
lots of clothes, 'Gene."

"I suppose it will seem so to Canaan," returned
the other, weariedly.  "Governor feeling fit?"

"I never saw him," Joe replied; then caught
himself.  "Oh, I see what you mean!  Yes, he's
all right."

They had come into the hall, and Eugene was
removing the long coat, while his step-brother looked
at him thoughtfully.

"'Gene," asked the latter, in a softened voice,
"have you seen Mamie Pike yet?"

"You will find, my young friend," responded
Mr. Bantry, "if you ever go about much outside
of Canaan, that ladies' names are not supposed
to be mentioned indiscriminately."

"It's only," said Joe, "that I wanted to say that
there's a dance at their house to-night.  I suppose
you'll be going?"

"Certainly.  Are you?"

Both knew that the question was needless; but
Joe answered, gently:

"Oh no, of course not."  He leaned over and
fumbled with one foot as if to fasten a loose shoe-
string.  "She wouldn't be very likely to ask me."

"Well, what about it?"

"Only that--that Arie Tabor's going."

"Indeed!" Eugene paused on the stairs, which
he had begun to ascend.  "Very interesting."

"I thought," continued Joe, hopefully, straightening
up to look at him, "that maybe you'd dance
with her.  I don't believe many will ask her--I'm
afraid they won't--and if you would, even only
once, it would kind of make up for"--he faltered
--"for out there," he finished, nodding his head
in the direction of the gate.

If Eugene vouchsafed any reply, it was lost in
a loud, shrill cry from above, as a small, intensely
nervous-looking woman in blue silk ran half-way
down the stairs to meet him and caught him
tearfully in her arms.

"Dear old mater!" said Eugene.

Joe went out of the front-door quickly.



III

OLD HOPES

The door which Ariel had entered
opened upon a narrow hall, and
down this she ran to her own room,
passing, with face averted, the entrance
to the broad, low-ceilinged
chamber that had served Roger Tabor as a studio
for almost fifty years.  He was sitting there now,
in a hopeless and disconsolate attitude, with his
back towards the double doors, which were open,
and had been open since their hinges had begun
to give way, when Ariel was a child.  Hearing her
step, he called her name, but did not turn; and,
receiving no answer, sighed faintly as he heard her
own door close upon her.

Then, as his eyes wandered about the many
canvases which leaned against the dingy walls, he
sighed again.  Usually they showed their brown
backs, but to-day he had turned them all to face
outward.  Twilight, sunset, moonlight (the Courthouse
in moonlight), dawn, morning, noon (Main
Street at noon), high summer, first spring, red
autumn, midwinter, all were there--illimitably
detailed, worked to a smoothness like a glaze, and
all lovingly done with unthinkable labor.

And there were "Italian Flower-Sellers,"
damsels with careful hair, two figures together, one
blonde, the other as brunette as lampblack, the
blonde--in pink satin and blue slippers--leaning
against a pillar and smiling over the golden coins
for which she had exchanged her posies; the brunette
seated at her feet, weeping upon an unsold
bouquet.  There were red-sashed "Fisher Lads"
wading with butterfly-nets on their shoulders;
there was a "Tying the Ribbon on Pussy's Neck";
there were portraits in oil and petrifactions in
crayon, as hard and tight as the purses of those
who had refused to accept them, leaving them
upon their maker's hands because the likeness had
failed.

After a time the old man got up, went to his
easel near a window, and, sighing again, began
patiently to work upon one of these failures--a
portrait, in oil, of a savage old lady, which he was
doing from a photograph.  The expression of the
mouth and the shape of the nose had not pleased
her descendants and the beneficiaries under the
will, and it was upon the images of these features
that Roger labored.  He leaned far forward, with
his face close to the canvas, holding his brushes
after the Spencerian fashion, working steadily
through the afternoon, and, when the light grew
dimmer, leaning closer to his canvas to see.  When
it had become almost dark in the room, he lit a
student-lamp with a green-glass shade, and, placing
it upon a table beside him, continued to paint.
Ariel's voice interrupted him at last.

"It's quitting-time, grandfather," she called,
gently, from the doorway behind him.

He sank back in his chair, conscious, for the
first time, of how tired he had grown.  "I suppose
so," he said, "though it seemed to me that
I was just getting my hand in."  His eyes brightened
for a moment.  "I declare, I believe I've
caught it a great deal better.  Come and look,
Ariel.  Doesn't it seem to you that I'm getting
it?  Those pearly shadows in the flesh--"

"I'm sure of it.  Those people ought to be very
proud to have it."  She came to him quietly, took
the palette and brushes from his hands and began
to clean them, standing in the shadow behind him.
"It's too good for them."

"I wonder if it is," he said, slowly, leaning
forward and curving his hands about his eyes so as
to shut off everything from his view except the
canvas.  "I wonder if it is!" he repeated.  Then
his hands dropped sadly in his lap, and he sank
back again with a patient kind of revulsion.  "No,
no, it isn't!  I always think they're good when
I've just finished them.  I've been fooled that
way all my life.  They don't look the same afterwards."

"They're always beautiful," she said, softly.

"Ah, ah!" he sighed.

"Now, Roger!" she cried, with cheerful sharpness,
continuing her work.

"I know," he said, with a plaintive laugh,--"I
know.  Sometimes I think that all my reward
has been in the few minutes I've had just after
finishing them.  During those few minutes I seem
to see in them all that I wanted to put in them;
I see it because what I've been trying to express
is still so warm in my own eyes that I seem to have
got it on the canvas where I wanted it."

"But you do," she said.  "You do get it there."

"No," he murmured, in return.  "I never did.
I got out some of the old ones when I came in this
morning, some that I hadn't looked at for years, and
it's the same with them.  You can do it much
better yourself--your sketches show it."

"No, no!" she protested, quickly.

"Yes, they do; and I wondered if it was only
because you were young.  But those I did when
I was young are almost the same as the ones I
paint now.  I haven't learned much.  There hasn't
been any one to show me!  And you can't learn
from print, never!  Yet I've grown in what I SEE--
grown so that the world is full of beauty to me
that I never dreamed of seeing when I began.
But I can't paint it--I can't get it on the canvas.
Ah, I think I might have known how to, if I
hadn't had to teach myself, if I could only have
seen how some of the other fellows did their work.
If I'd ever saved money to get away from Canaan
--if I could have gone away from it and come
back knowing how to paint it--if I could have got
to Paris for just one month!  PARIS--for just one
month!"

"Perhaps we will; you can't tell what MAY happen."
It was always her reply to this cry of his.

"PARIS--for just one month!" he repeated, with
infinite wistfulness, and then realizing what an
old, old cry it was with him, he shook his head,
impatiently sniffing out a laugh at himself, rose
and went pottering about among the canvases,
returning their faces to the wall, and railing at
them mutteringly.

"Whatever took me into it, I don't know.  I
might have done something useful.  But I couldn't
bring myself ever to consider doing anything else--
I couldn't bear even to think of it!  Lord forgive
me, I even tried to encourage your father to paint.
Perhaps he might as well, poor boy, as to have put
all he'd made into buying Jonas out.  Ah me!
There you go, `Flower-Girls'!  Turn your silly
faces to the wall and smile and cry there till I'm
gone and somebody throws you on a bonfire.  I'LL
never look at you again."  He paused, with the
canvas half turned.  "And yet," he went on,
reflectively, "a man promised me thirty-five dollars
for that picture once.  I painted it to order,
but he went away before I finished it, and never
answered the letters I wrote him about it.  I wish
I had the money now--perhaps we could have
more than two meals a day."

"We don't need more," said Ariel, scraping the
palette attentively.  "It's healthier with only
breakfast and supper.  I think I'd rather have a
new dress than dinner."

"I dare say you would," the old man mused.
"You're young--you're young.  What were you
doing all this afternoon, child?"

"In my room, trying to make over mamma's
wedding-dress for to-night."

"To-night?"

"Mamie Pike invited me to a dance at their
house."

"Very well; I'm glad you're going to be gay,"
he said, not seeing the faintly bitter smile that
came to her face.

"I don't think I'll be very gay," she answered.

"I don't know why I go--nobody ever asks me to
dance."

"Why not?" he asked, with an old man's astonishment.

"I don't know.  Perhaps it's because I don't
dress very well."  Then, as he made a sorrowful
gesture, she cut him off before he could speak.
"Oh, it isn't altogether because we're poor; it's
more I don't know how to wear what I've got, the
way some girls do.  I never cared much and--
well, I'M not worrying, Roger!  And I think I've
done a good deal with mamma's dress.  It's a very
grand dress.  I wonder I never thought of wearing it
until to-day.  I may be"--she laughed and blushed
--"I may be the belle of the ball--who knows!"

"You'll want me to walk over with you and
come for you afterwards, I expect."

"Only to take me.  It may be late when I
come away--if a good many SHOULD ask me to
dance, for once!  Of course I could come home
alone.  But Joe Louden is going to sort of hang
around outside, and he'll meet me at the gate and
see me safe home."

"Oh!" he exclaimed, blankly.

"Isn't it all right?" she asked.

"I think I'd better come for you," he answered,
gently.  "The truth is, I--I think you'd better not
be with Joe Louden a great deal."

"Why?"

"Well, he doesn't seem a vicious boy to me, but
I'm afraid he's getting rather a bad name, my
dear."

"He's not getting one," she said, gravely.  "He's
already got one.  He's had a bad name in Canaan
for a long while.  It grew in the first place out of
shabbiness and mischief, but it did grow; and if
people keep on giving him a bad name the time
will come when he'll live up to it.  He's not any
worse than I am, and I guess my own name isn't
too good--for a girl.  And yet, so far, there's nothing
against him except his bad name."

"I'm afraid there is," said Roger.  "It doesn't
look very well for a young man of his age to be
doing no better than delivering papers."

"It gives him time to study law," she answered,
quickly.  "If he clerked all day in a store, he
couldn't."

"I didn't know he was studying now.  I thought
I'd heard that he was in a lawyer's office for a few
weeks last year, and was turned out for setting fire
to it with a pipe--"

"It was an accident," she interposed.

"But some pretty important papers were burned,
and after that none of the other lawyers would
have him."

"He's not in an office," she admitted.  "I didn't
mean that.  But he studies a great deal.  He
goes to the courts all the time they're in session,
and he's bought some books of his own."

"Well--perhaps," he assented; "but they say
he gambles and drinks, and that last week Judge
Pike threatened to have him arrested for throwing
dice with some negroes behind the Judge's stable."

"What of it?  I'm about the only nice person in
town that will have anything to do with him--
and nobody except you thinks I'M very nice!"

"Ariel!  Ariel!"

"I know all about his gambling with darkies,"
she continued, excitedly, her voice rising, "and I
know that he goes to saloons, and that he's an
intimate friend of half the riffraff in town; and I know
the reason for it, too, because he's told me.  He
wants to know them, to understand them; and he
says some day they'll make him a power, and then
he can help them!"

The old man laughed helplessly.  "But I can't
let him bring you home, my dear."

She came to him slowly and laid her hands upon
his shoulders.  Grandfather and granddaughter
were nearly of the same height, and she looked
squarely into his eyes.  "Then you must say it is
because you want to come for me, not because I
mustn't come with Joe."

"But I think it is a little because you mustn't
come with Joe," he answered, "especially from
the Pikes'.  Don't you see that it mightn't be
well for Joe himself, if the Judge should happen to
see him?  I understand he warned the boy to keep
away from the neighborhood entirely or he would
have him locked up for dice-throwing.  The Judge
is a very influential man, you know, and as
determined in matters like this as he is irritable."

"Oh, if you put it on that ground," the girl
replied, her eyes softening, "I think you'd better
come for me yourself."

"Very well, I put it on that ground," he
returned, smiling upon her.

"Then I'll send Joe word and get supper," she
said, kissing him.

It was the supper-hour not only for them but
everywhere in Canaan, and the cold air of the
streets bore up and down and around corners the
smell of things frying.  The dining-room windows
of all the houses threw bright patches on the snow
of the side-yards; the windows of other rooms,
except those of the kitchens, were dark, for the
rule of the place was Puritanical in thrift, as in all
things; and the good housekeepers disputed every
record of the meters with unhappy gas-collectors.

There was no better housekeeper in town than
Mrs. Louden, nor a thriftier, but hers was one of
the few houses in Canaan, that evening, which
showed bright lights in the front rooms while the
family were at supper.  It was proof of the agitation
caused by the arrival of Eugene that she forgot
to turn out the gas in her parlor, and in the
chamber she called a library, on her way to the
evening meal.

That might not have been thought a cheerful
feast for Joe Louden.  The fatted calf was upon the
board, but it had not been provided for the prodigal,
who, in this case, was the brother that stayed at
home: the fete rewarded the good brother, who had
been in strange lands, and the good one had found
much honor in his wanderings, as he carelessly let
it appear.  Mrs. Louden brightened inexpressibly
whenever Eugene spoke of himself, and consequently
she glowed most of the time.  Her husband--
a heavy, melancholy, silent man with a grizzled
beard and no mustache--lowered at Joe throughout
the meal, but appeared to take a strange comfort
in his step-son's elegance and polish.  Eugene
wore new evening clothes and was lustrous to eye
and ear.

Joe escaped as soon as he could, though not
before the count of his later sins had been set before
Eugene in detail, in mass, and in all of their depth,
breadth, and thickness.  His father spoke but
once, after nodding heavily to confirm all points of
Mrs. Louden's recital.

"You better use any influence you've got with
your brother," he said to Eugene, "to make him
come to time.  I can't do anything with him.  If
he gets in trouble, he needn't come to me!  I'll
never help him again.  I'm TIRED of it!"

Eugene glanced twinklingly at the outcast.  "I
didn't know he was such a roarer as all that!" he
said, lightly, not taking Joe as of enough consequence
to be treated as a sinner.

This encouraged Mrs. Louden to pathos upon
the subject of her shame before other women
when Joe happened to be mentioned, and the supper
was finished with the topic.  Joe slipped away
through the kitchen, sneakingly, and climbed the
back fence.  In the alley he lit a cheap cigarette,
and thrusting his hands into his pockets and shivering
violently--for he had no overcoat,--walked
away singing to himself, "A Spanish cavalier
stood in his retreat," his teeth affording an
appropriate though involuntary castanet accompaniment.

His movements throughout the earlier part of
that evening are of uncertain report.  It is known
that he made a partial payment of forty-five cents
at a second-hand book-store for a number of volumes--
Grindstaff on Torts and some others--which
he had negotiated on the instalment system; it is
also believed that he won twenty-eight cents 
playing seven-up in the little room behind Louie Farbach's
bar; but these things are of little import
compared to the established fact that at eleven
o'clock he was one of the ball guests at the Pike
Mansion.  He took no active part in the festivities,
nor was he one of the dancers: his was, on the
contrary, the role of a quiet observer.  He lay stretched
at full length upon the floor of the enclosed
porch (one of the strips of canvas was later found
to have been loosened), wedged between the outer
railing and a row of palms in green tubs.  The
position he occupied was somewhat too draughty
to have been recommended by a physician, but he
commanded, between the leaves of the screening
palms, an excellent view of the room nearest the
porch.  A long window, open, afforded communication
between this room, one of those used for
dancing, and the dim bower which had been made
of the veranda, whither flirtatious couples made
their way between the dances.

It was not to play eavesdropper upon any of
these that the uninvited Joe had come.  He was
not there to listen, and it is possible that, had the
curtains of other windows afforded him the chance
to behold the dance, he might not have risked the
dangers of his present position.  He had not the
slightest interest in the whispered coquetries that
he heard; he watched only to catch now and then,
over the shoulders of the dancers, a fitful glimpse
of a pretty head that flitted across the window--
the amber hair of Mamie Pike.  He shivered in the
draughts; and the floor of the porch was cement,
painful to elbow and knee, the space where he lay
cramped and narrow; but the golden bubbles of
her hair, the shimmer of her dainty pink dress,
and the fluffy wave of her lace scarf as she crossed
and recrossed in a waltz, left him, apparently, in
no discontent.  He watched with parted lips, his
pale cheeks reddening whenever those fair glimpses
were his.  At last she came out to the veranda with
Eugene and sat upon a little divan, so close to Joe
that, daring wildly in the shadow, he reached out
a trembling hand and let his fingers rest upon the
end of her scarf, which had fallen from her shoulders
and touched the floor.  She sat with her back
to him, as did Eugene.

"You have changed, I think, since last summer,"
he heard her say, reflectively.

"For the worse, ma cherie?" Joe's expression
might have been worth seeing when Eugene said
"ma cherie," for it was known in the Louden
household that Mr. Bantry had failed to pass his
examination in the French language.

"No," she answered.  "But you have seen so
much and accomplished so much since then.  You
have become so polished and so--" She paused, 
and then continued, "But perhaps I'd better not
say it; you might be offended."

"No.  I want you to say it," he returned,
confidently, and his confidence was fully justified, for
she said:

"Well, then, I mean that you have become so
thoroughly a man of the world.  Now I've said it!
You ARE offended--aren't you?"

"Not at all, not at all," replied Mr. Bantry,
preventing by a masterful effort his pleasure from
showing in his face.  "Though I suppose you mean
to imply that I'm rather wicked."

"Oh no," said Mamie, with profound admiration,
"not exactly wicked."

"University life IS fast nowadays," Eugene
admitted.  "It's difficult not to be drawn into it!"

"And I suppose you look down on poor little
Canaan now, and everybody in it!"

"Oh no," he laughed, indulgently.  "Not at all,
not at all!  I find it very amusing."

"All of it?"

"Not you," he answered, becoming very grave.

"Honestly--DON'T you?"  Her young voice trembled
a little.

"Honestly--indeed--truly--" Eugene leaned
very close to her and the words were barely audible.

"You KNOW I don't!"

"Then I'm--glad," she whispered, and Joe saw 
his step-brother touch her hand, but she rose quickly.
"There's the music," she cried, happily.  "It's
a waltz, and it's YOURS!"

Joe heard her little high heels tapping gayly
towards the window, followed by the heavier tread
of Eugene, but he did not watch them go.

He lay on his back, with the hand that had
touched Mamie's scarf pressed across his closed
eyes.

The music of that waltz was of the old-fashioned
swingingly sorrowful sort, and it would be hard to
say how long it was after that before the boy could
hear the air played without a recurrence of the
bitterness of that moment.  The rhythmical pathos
of the violins was in such accord with a faint sound
of weeping which he heard near him, presently,
that for a little while he believed this sound to be
part of the music and part of himself.  Then it
became more distinct, and he raised himself on one
elbow to look about.

Very close to him, sitting upon the divan in the
shadow, was a girl wearing a dress of beautiful silk.
She was crying softly, her face in her hands.



IV

THE DISASTER

Ariel had worked all the afternoon
over her mother's wedding-gown,
and two hours were required by her
toilet for the dance.  She curled her
hair frizzily, burning it here and
there, with a slate-pencil heated over a lamp
chimney, and she placed above one ear three or
four large artificial roses, taken from an old hat
of her mother's, which she had found in a trunk
in the store-room.  Possessing no slippers, she
carefully blacked and polished her shoes, which had
been clumsily resoled, and fastened into the strings
of each small rosettes of red ribbon; after which
she practised swinging the train of her skirt until
she was proud of her manipulation of it.  She
had no powder, but found in her grandfather's
room a lump of magnesia, that he was in the habit
of taking for heart-burn, and passed it over and
over her brown face and hands.  Then a lingering
gaze into her small mirror gave her joy at last: she
yearned so hard to see herself charming that she
did see herself so.  Admiration came and she told
herself that she was more attractive to look at
than she had ever been in her life, and that,
perhaps, at last she might begin to be sought for like
other girls.  The little glass showed a sort of
prettiness in her thin, unmatured young face; tripping
dance-tunes ran through her head, her feet keeping
the time,--ah, she did so hope to dance often
that night!  Perhaps--perhaps she might be asked
for every number.  And so, wrapping an old waterproof
cloak about her, she took her grandfather's
arm and sallied forth, high hopes in her beating
heart.

It was in the dressing-room that the change began
to come.  Alone, at home in her own ugly little
room, she had thought herself almost beautiful,
but here in the brightly lighted chamber crowded
with the other girls it was different.  There was
a big cheval-glass at one end of the room, and she
faced it, when her turn came--for the mirror was
popular--with a sinking spirit.  There was the
contrast, like a picture painted and framed.  The
other girls all wore their hair after the fashion
introduced to Canaan by Mamie Pike the week before,
on her return from a visit to Chicago.  None
of them had "crimped" and none had bedecked
their tresses with artificial flowers.  Her alterations
of the wedding-dress had not been successful; the
skirt was too short in front and higher on one
side than on the other, showing too plainly the
heavy-soled shoes, which had lost most of their
polish in the walk through the snow.  The ribbon
rosettes were fully revealed, and as she glanced at
their reflection she heard the words, "LOOK AT THAT
TRAIN AND THOSE ROSETTES!" whispered behind her, and
saw in the mirror two pretty young women turn
away with their handkerchiefs over their mouths
and retreat hurriedly to an alcove.  All the feet
in the room except Ariel's were in dainty kid or
satin slippers of the color of the dresses from which
they glimmered out, and only Ariel wore a train.

She went away from the mirror and pretended
to be busy with a hanging thread in her sleeve.

She was singularly an alien in the chattering
room, although she had been born and lived all
her life in the town.  Perhaps her position among
the young ladies may be best defined by the remark,
generally current among them, that evening,
to the effect that it was "very sweet of Mamie
to invite her."  Ariel was not like the others; she
was not of them, and never had been.  Indeed, she
did not know them very well.  Some of them
nodded to her and gave her a word of greeting
pleasantly; all of them whispered about her with
wonder and suppressed amusement; but none
talked to her.  They were not unkindly, but they
were young and eager and excited over their own
interests,--which were then in the "gentlemen's
dressing-room."

Each of the other girls had been escorted by a
youth of the place, and, one by one, joining these
escorts in the hall outside the door, they descended
the stairs, until only Ariel was left.  She came
down alone after the first dance had begun, and
greeted her young hostess's mother timidly.  Mrs.
Pike--a small, frightened-looking woman with a
prominent ruby necklace--answered her absently,
and hurried away to see that the imported waiters
did not steal anything.

Ariel sat in one of the chairs against the wall
and watched the dancers with a smile of eager and
benevolent interest.  In Canaan no parents, no
guardians nor aunts, were haled forth o' nights to
duenna the junketings of youth; Mrs. Pike did not
reappear, and Ariel sat conspicuously alone; there
was nothing else for her to do.  It was not an
easy matter.

When the first dance reached an end, Mamie
Pike came to her for a moment with a cheery welcome,
and was immediately surrounded by a circle
of young men and women, flushed with dancing,
shouting as was their wont, laughing inexplicably
over words and phrases and unintelligible mono-
syllables, as if they all belonged to a secret society
and these cries were symbols of things exquisitely
humorous, which only they understood.  Ariel
laughed with them more heartily than any other,
so that she might seem to be of them and as merry
as they were, but almost immediately she found
herself outside of the circle, and presently they all
whirled away into another dance, and she was left
alone again.

So she sat, no one coming near her, through
several dances, trying to maintain the smile of
delighted interest upon her face, though she felt
the muscles of her face beginning to ache with their
fixedness, her eyes growing hot and glazed.  All the
other girls were provided with partners for every
dance, with several young men left over, these latter
lounging hilariously together in the doorways.
Ariel was careful not to glance towards them, but
she could not help hating them.  Once or twice
between the dances she saw Miss Pike speak appealingly
to one of the superfluous, glancing, at the
same time, in her own direction, and Ariel could
see, too, that the appeal proved unsuccessful, until
at last Mamie approached her, leading Norbert
Flitcroft, partly by the hand, partly by will-power.
Norbert was an excessively fat boy, and at the
present moment looked as patient as the blind.
But he asked Ariel if she was "engaged for the next
dance," and, Mamie having flitted away, stood
disconsolately beside her, waiting for the music to
begin.  Ariel was grateful for him.

"I think you must be very good-natured, Mr.
Flitcroft," she said, with an air of raillery.

"No, I'm not," he replied, plaintively.  "Everybody
thinks I am because I'm fat, and they expect
me to do things they never dream of asking
anybody else to do.  I'd like to see 'em even ASK
'Gene Bantry to go and do some of the things they
get me to do!  A person isn't good-natured just
because he's fat," he concluded, morbidly, "but
he might as well be!"

"Oh, I meant good-natured," she returned, with
a sprightly laugh, "because you're willing to waltz
with me."

"Oh, well," he returned, sighing, "that's all
right."

The orchestra flourished into "La Paloma"; he
put his arm mournfully about her, and taking her
right hand with his left, carried her arm out to a
rigid right angle, beginning to pump and balance
for time.  They made three false starts and then
got away.  Ariel danced badly; she hopped and
lost the step, but they persevered, bumping against
other couples continually.  Circling breathlessly
into the next room, they passed close to a long
mirror, in which Ariel saw herself, although in a
flash, more bitterly contrasted to the others than
in the cheval-glass of the dressing-room.  The
clump of roses was flopping about her neck, her
crimped hair looked frowzy, and there was something
terribly wrong about her dress.  Suddenly
she felt her train to be ominously grotesque, as a
thing following her in a nightmare.

A moment later she caught her partner making a
burlesque face of suffering over her shoulder, and,
turning her head quickly, saw for whose benefit
he had constructed it.  Eugene Bantry, flying
expertly by with Mamie, was bestowing upon Mr.
Flitcroft a condescendingly commiserative wink.
The next instant she tripped in her train and fell to
the floor at Eugene's feet, carrying her partner
with her.

There was a shout of laughter.  The young
hostess stopped Eugene, who would have gone on,
and he had no choice but to stoop to Ariel's assistance.

"It seems to be a habit of mine," she said,
laughing loudly.

She did not appear to see the hand he offered,
but got to her feet without help and walked quickly
away with Norbert, who proceeded to live up to the
character he had given himself.

"Perhaps we had better not try it again," she
laughed.

"Well, I should think not," he returned, with the
frankest gloom.  With the air of conducting her
home he took her to the chair against the wall
whence he had brought her.  There his responsibility
for her seemed to cease.  "Will you excuse
me?" he asked, and there was no doubt that he
felt that he had been given more than his share
that evening, even though he was fat.

"Yes, indeed."  Her laughter was continuous.
"I should think you WOULD be glad to get rid of me
after that.  Ha, ha, ha!  Poor Mr. Flitcroft, you
know you are!"

It was the deadly truth, and the fat one, saying,
"Well, if you'll just excuse me now," hurried
away with a step which grew lighter as the distance
from her increased.  Arrived at the haven of a far
doorway, he mopped his brow and shook his head
grimly in response to frequent rallyings.

Ariel sat through more dances, interminable
dances and intermissions, in that same chair, in
which, it began to seem, she was to live out the rest
of her life.  Now and then, if she thought people
were looking at her as they passed, she broke into a
laugh and nodded slightly, as if still amused over
her mishap.

After a long time she rose, and laughing cheerfully
to Mr. Flitcroft, who was standing in the
doorway and replied with a wan smile, stepped
out quickly into the hall, where she almost ran
into her great-uncle, Jonas Tabor.  He was going
towards the big front doors with Judge Pike, having
just come out of the latter's library, down the
hall.

Jonas was breathing heavily and was shockingly
pale, though his eyes were very bright.  He turned
his back upon his grandniece sharply and went out
of the door.  Ariel turned from him quite as abruptly
and re-entered the room whence she had come.
She laughed again to her fat friend as she passed
him, and, still laughing, went towards the fatal
chair, when her eyes caught sight of Eugene Bantry
and Mamie coming in through the window from
the porch.  Still laughing, she went to the window
and looked out; the porch seemed deserted and
was faintly illuminated by a few Japanese lanterns.
She sprang out, dropped upon the divan, and burying
her face in her hands, cried heart-brokenly.
Presently she felt something alive touch her foot,
and, her breath catching with alarm, she started
to rise.  A thin hand, issuing from a shabby sleeve,
had stolen out between two of the green tubs and
was pressing upon one of her shoes.

"'SH!" said Joe.  "Don't make a noise!"

His warning was not needed; she had recognized
the hand and sleeve instantly.  She dropped back
with a low sound which would have been hysterical 
if it had been louder, while he raised himself on
his arm until she could see his face dimly, as he
peered at her between the palms.

"What were you going on about?" he asked,
angrily.

"Nothing," she answered.  "I wasn't.  You
must go away, and quick.  It's too dangerous.  If
the Judge found you--"

"He won't!"

"Ah, you'd risk anything to see Mamie Pike--"

"What were you crying about?" he interrupted.

"Nothing, I tell you!" she repeated, the tears
not ceasing to gather in her eyes.  "I wasn't."

"I want to know what it was," he insisted.
"Didn't the fools ask you to dance?  Ah!  You
needn't tell me.  That's it.  I've been here for
the last three dances and you weren't in sight till
you came to the window.  Well, what do you care
about that for?"

"I don't!" she answered.  "I don't!"  Then
suddenly, without being able to prevent it, she
sobbed.

"No," he said, gently, "I see you don't.  And
you let yourself be a fool because there are a lot
of fools in there."

She gave way, all at once, to a gust of sorrow
and bitterness; she bent far over and caught his
hand and laid it against her wet cheek.  "Oh,
Joe," she whispered, brokenly, "I think we have
such hard lives, you and I!  It doesn't seem right
--while we're so young!  Why can't we be like
the others?  Why can't we have some of the fun?"

He withdrew his hand, with the embarrassment
and shame he would have felt had she been a boy.
"Get out!" he said, feebly.

She did not seem to notice, but, still stooping,
rested her elbows on her knees and her face in her
hands.  "I try so hard to have fun, to be like the
rest,--and it's always a mistake, always, always,
always!"  She rocked herself, slightly, from side
to side.  "I am a fool, it's the truth, or I wouldn't
have come to-night.  I want to be attractive--I
want to be in things.  I want to laugh like they
do--"

"To laugh just to laugh, and not because there's
something funny?"

"Yes, I do, I do!  And to know how to dress
and to wear my hair--there must be some place
where you can learn those things.  I've never had
any one to show me!  Ah!  Grandfather said
something like that this afternoon--poor man!
We're in the same case.  If we only had some one
to show us!  It all seems so BLIND, here in Canaan,
for him and me!  I don't say it's not my own
fault as much as being poor.  I've been a hoyden;
I don't feel as if I'd learned how to be a girl yet, 
Joe.  It's only lately I've cared, but I'm seventeen,
Joe, and--and to-day--to-day--I was sent
home--and to-night--" She faltered, came to a
stop, and her whole body was shaken with sobs.
"I hate myself so for crying--for everything!"

"I'll tell you something," he whispered,
chuckling desperately.  "'Gene made me unpack his trunk,
and I don't believe he's as great a man at college as
he is here.  I opened one of his books, and some
one had written in it, `Prigamaloo Bantry, the Class
Try-To-Be'!  He'd never noticed, and you ought
to have heard him go on!  You'd have just died,
Ariel--I almost bust wide open!  It was a mean
trick in me, but I couldn't help showing it to him."

Joe's object was obtained.  She stopped crying,
and, wiping her eyes, smiled faintly.  Then she
became grave.  "You're jealous of Eugene," she
said.

He considered this for a moment.  "Yes," he
answered, thoughtfully, "I am.  But I wouldn't
think about him differently on that account.  And
I wouldn't talk about him to any one but you."

"Not even to--" She left the question unfinished.

"No," he said, quietly.  "Of course not."

"No?  Because it wouldn't be any use?"

"I don't know.  I never have a chance to talk
to her, anyway."

"Of course you don't!"  Her voice had grown
steady.  "You say I'm a fool.  What are you?"

"You needn't worry about me," he began.  "I
can take care--"

"'SH!" she whispered, warningly.  The music
had stopped, a loud clatter of voices and laughter
succeeding it.

"What need to be careful," Joe assured her,
"with all that noise going on?"

"You must go away," she said, anxiously.  "Oh,
please, Joe!"

"Not yet; I want--"

She coughed loudly.  Eugene and Mamie Pike
had come to the window, with the evident intention
of occupying the veranda, but perceiving Ariel
engaged with threads in her sleeve, they turned away
and disappeared.  Other couples looked out from
time to time, and finding the solitary figure in
possession, retreated abruptly to seek stairways and
remote corners for the things they were impelled
to say.

And so Ariel held the porch for three dances and
three intermissions, occupying a great part of the
time with entreaties that her obdurate and reckless
companion should go.  When, for the fourth
time, the music sounded, her agitation had so
increased that she was visibly trembling.  "I
can't stand it, Joe," she said, bending over him.

"I don't know what would happen if they found
you.  You've GOT to go!"

"No, I haven't," he chuckled.  "They haven't
even distributed the supper yet!"

"And you take all the chances," she said, slowly,
"just to see her pass that window a few times."

"What chances?"

"Of what the Judge will do if any one sees
you."

"Nothing; because if any one saw me I'd leave."

"Please go."

"Not till--"

"'SH!"

A colored waiter, smiling graciously, came out
upon the porch bearing a tray of salad, hot oysters,
and coffee.  Ariel shook her head.

"I don't want any," she murmured.

The waiter turned away in pity and was re-
entering the window, when a passionate whisper
fell upon his ear as well as upon Ariel's.

"TAKE IT!"

"Ma'am?" said the waiter.

"I've changed my mind," she replied, quickly.
The waiter, his elation restored, gave of his viands
with the superfluous bounty loved by his race when
distributing the product of the wealthy.

When he had gone, "Give me everything that's
hot," said Joe.  "You can keep the salad."

"I couldn't eat it or anything else," she
answered, thrusting the plate between the palms.

For a time there was silence.  From within the
house came the continuous babble of voices and
laughter, the clink of cutlery on china.  The young
people spent a long time over their supper.  By-
and-by the waiter returned to the veranda,
deposited a plate of colored ices upon Ariel's knees
with a noble gesture, and departed.

"No ice for me," said Joe.

"Won't you please go now?" she entreated!

"It wouldn't be good manners," he responded.
"They might think I only came for supper--"

"Hand me back the things.  The waiter might
come for them any minute."

"Not yet.  I haven't quite finished.  I eat with
contemplation, Ariel, because there's more than
the mere food and the warmth of it to consider.
There's the pleasure of being entertained by the
great Martin Pike.  Think what a real kindness
I'm doing him, too.  I increase his good deeds and
his hospitality without his knowing it or being
able to help it.  Don't you see how I boost his
standing with the Recording Angel?  If Lazarus
had behaved the way I do, Dives needn't have
had those worries that came to him in the after-
life."

"Give me the dish and coffee-cup," she 
whispered, impatiently.  "Suppose the waiter came
and had to look for them?  Quick!"

"Take them, then.  You'll see that jealousy
hasn't spoiled my appetite--"

A bottle-shaped figure appeared in the window
and she had no time to take the plate and cup
which were being pushed through the palm-leaves.
She whispered a syllable of warning, and the dishes
were hurriedly withdrawn as Norbert Flitcroft,
wearing a solemn expression of injury, came out
upon the veranda.

He halted suddenly.  "What's that?" he asked,
with suspicion.

"Nothing," answered Ariel, sharply.  "Where?"

"Behind those palms."

"Probably your own shadow," she laughed; "or
it might have been a draught moving the leaves."

He did not seem satisfied, but stared hard at
the spot where the dishes had disappeared, meantime
edging back cautiously nearer the window.

"They want you," he said, after a pause.  "Some
one's come for you."

"Oh, is grandfather waiting?"  She rose, at
the same time letting her handkerchief fall.  She
stooped to pick it up, with her face away from
Norbert and towards the palms, whispering
tremulously, but with passionate urgency, "Please GO!"

"It isn't your grandfather that has come for 
you," said the fat one, slowly.  "It is old Eskew
Arp.  Something's happened."

She looked at him for a moment, beginning to
tremble violently, her eyes growing wide with
fright.

"Is my grandfather--is he sick?"

"You better go and see.  Old Eskew's waiting
in the hall.  He'll tell you."

She was by him and through the window instantly.
Norbert did not follow her; he remained
for several moments looking earnestly at the palms;
then he stepped through the window and beckoned
to a youth who was lounging in the doorway across
the room.

"There's somebody hiding behind those plants,"
he whispered, when his friend reached him.  "Go
and tell Judge Pike to send some of the niggers
to watch outside the porch, so that he doesn't get
away.  Then tell him to get his revolver and come
here."

Meanwhile Ariel had found Mr. Arp waiting in
the hall, talking in a low voice to Mrs. Pike.

"Your grandfather's all right," he told the
frightened girl, quickly.  "He sent me for you,
that's all.  Just hurry and get your things."

She was with him again in a moment, and seizing
the old man's arm, hurried him down the steps and
toward the street almost at a run.

"You're not telling me the truth," she said.
"You're not telling me the truth!"

"Nothing has happened to Roger," panted Mr.
Arp.  "Nothing to mind, I mean.  Here!  We're
going this way, not that."  They had come to the
gate, and as she turned to the right he pulled her
round sharply to the left.  "We're not going to
your house."

"Where are we going?"

"We're going to your uncle Jonas's."

"Why?" she cried, in supreme astonishment.
"What do you want to take me there for?  Don't
you know that he's stopped speaking to me?"

"Yes," said the old man, grimly, with something
of the look he wore when delivering a clincher at
the "National House,"--"he's stopped speaking to
everybody."



V

BEAVER BEACH

The Canaan Daily Tocsin of the following
morning "ventured the assertion"
upon its front page that
"the scene at the Pike Mansion was
one of unalloyed festivity, music,
and mirth; a fairy bower of airy figures wafting
here and there to the throb of waltz-strains; a
veritable Temple of Terpsichore, shining forth with
a myriad of lights, which, together with the generous
profusion of floral decorations and the mingled
delights afforded by Minds's orchestra of Indianapolis
and Caterer Jones of Chicago, was in all
likelihood never heretofore surpassed in elegance
in our city. . . .  Only one incident," the Tocsin
remarked, "marred an otherwise perfect occasion,
and out of regard for the culprit's family connections,
which are prominent in our social world, we
withhold his name.  Suffice it to say that through
the vigilance of Mr. Norbert Flitcroft, grandson of
Colonel A. A. Flitcroft, who proved himself a 
thorough Lecoq (the celebrated French detective), the
rascal was seized and recognized.  Mr. Flitcroft,
having discovered him in hiding, had a cordon of
waiters drawn up around his hiding-place, which
was the charmingly decorated side piazza of the
Pike Mansion, and sent for Judge Pike, who came
upon the intruder by surprise.  He evaded the
Judge's indignant grasp, but received a well-
merited blow over the head from a poker which
the Judge had concealed about his person while
pretending to approach the hiding-place casually.
Attracted to the scene by the cries of Mr. Flitcroft,
who, standing behind Judge Pike, accidentally
received a blow from the same weapon, all the guests
of the evening sprang to view the scene, only to
behold the culprit leap through a crevice between
the strips of canvas which enclosed the piazza.
He was seized by the colored coachman of the
Mansion, Sam Warden, and immediately pounced upon
by the cordon of Caterer Jones's dusky assistants
from Chicago, who were in ambush outside.
Unfortunately, after a brief struggle he managed to
trip Warden, and, the others stumbling upon the
prostrate body of the latter, to make his escape
in the darkness.

"It is not believed by many that his intention
was burglary, though what his designs were can
only be left to conjecture, as he is far beyond the
age when boys perform such actions out of a sense
of mischief.  He had evidently occupied his hiding-
place some time, and an idea of his coolness
may be obtained from his having procured and
eaten a full meal through an unknown source.
Judge Pike is justly incensed, and swears that he
will prosecute him on this and other charges as soon
as he can be found.  Much sympathy is felt for
the culprit's family, who feel his shame most
keenly, but who, though sorrowing over the occurrence,
declare that they have put up with his
derelictions long enough, and will do nothing to
step between him and the Judge's righteous indignation."

The Pike Mansion, "scene of festivity, music,
and mirth" (not quite so unalloyed, after all, the
stricken Flitcroft keeping his room for a week under
medical supervision), had not been the only bower
of the dance in Canaan that evening: another
Temple of Terpsichore had shone forth with lights,
though of these there were not quite a myriad.
The festivities they illumined obtained no mention
in the paper, nor did they who trod the measures
in this second temple exhibit any sense of injury
because of the Tocsin's omission.  Nay, they were
of that class, shy without being bashful, exclusive
yet not proud, which shuns publicity with a single-
heartedness almost unique in our republic, courting
observation neither in the prosecution of their
professions nor in the pursuit of happiness.

Not quite a mile above the northernmost of the
factories on the water-front, there projected into
the river, near the end of the crescent bend above
the town, a long pier, relic of steamboat days,
rotting now, and many years fallen from its maritime
uses.  About midway of its length stood a
huge, crazy shed, long ago utilized as a freight
storeroom.  This had been patched and propped, and
a dangerous-looking veranda attached to it, over-
hanging the water.  Above the doorway was
placed a sign whereon might be read the words,
"Beaver Beach, Mike's Place."  The shore end
of the pier was so ruinous that passage was offered
by a single row of planks, which presented an
appearance so temporary, as well as insecure, that
one might have guessed their office to be something
in the nature of a drawbridge.  From these a
narrow path ran through a marsh, left by the
receding river, to a country road of desolate
appearance.  Here there was a rough enclosure, or
corral, with some tumble-down sheds which afforded
shelter, on the night of Joseph Louden's disgrace,
for a number of shaggy teams attached to those
decrepit and musty vehicles known picturesquely
and accurately as Night-Hawks.  The presence of
such questionable shapes in the corral indicated
that the dance was on at Beaver Beach, Mike's
Place, as surely as the short line of cabs and family
carriages on upper Main Street made it known
that gayety was the order of the night at the Pike
Mansion.  But among other differences was this,
that at the hour when the guests of the latter were
leaving, those seeking the hospitalities of Beaver
Beach had just begun to arrive.

By three o'clock, however, joy at Mike's Place
had become beyond question unconfined, and the
tokens of it were audible for a long distance in all
directions.  If, however, there is no sound where
no ear hears, silence rested upon the country-side
until an hour later.  Then a lonely figure came
shivering from the direction of the town, not by
the road, but slinking through the snow upon the
frozen river.  It came slowly, as though very
tired, and cautiously, too, often turning its head
to look behind.  Finally it reached the pier, and
stopped as if to listen.

Within the house above, a piano of evil life was
being beaten to death for its sins and clamoring
its last cries horribly.  The old shed rattled in every
part with the thud of many heavy feet, and trembled
with the shock of noise--an incessant roar of
men's voices, punctuated with women's screams.
Then the riot quieted somewhat; there was a
clapping of hands, and a violin began to squeak
measures intended to be Oriental.  The next
moment the listener scrambled up one of the
rotting piles and stood upon the veranda.  A shaft
of red light through a broken shutter struck across
the figure above the shoulders, revealing a bloody
handkerchief clumsily knotted about the head,
and, beneath it, the face of Joe Louden.

He went to the broken shutter and looked in.
Around the blackened walls of the room stood a
bleared mob, applausively watching, through a fog
of smoke, the contortions of an old woman in a
red calico wrapper, who was dancing in the centre
of the floor.  The fiddler--a rubicund person
evidently not suffering from any great depression
of spirit through the circumstance of being "out
on bail," as he was, to Joe's intimate knowledge--
sat astride a barrel, resting his instrument upon the
foamy tap thereof, and playing somewhat after
the manner of a 'cellist; in no wise incommoded
by the fact that a tall man (known to a few friends
as an expert in the porch-climbing line) was sleeping
on his shoulder, while another gentleman (who
had prevented many cases of typhoid by removing
old plumbing from houses) lay on the floor at the
musician's feet and endeavored to assist him by
plucking the strings of the fiddle.

Joe opened the door and went in.  All of the
merry company (who were able) turned sharply
toward the door as it opened; then, recognizing
the new-comer, turned again to watch the old
woman.  One or two nearest the door asked the
boy, without great curiosity, what had happened
to his head.  He merely shook it faintly in reply,
and crossed the room to an open hallway beyond.
At the end of this he came to a frowzy bedroom,
the door of which stood ajar.  Seated at a deal
table, and working by a dim lamp with a broken
chimney, a close-cropped, red-bearded, red-haired
man in his shirt-sleeves was jabbing gloomily
at a column of figures scrawled in a dirty
ledger.  He looked up as Joe appeared in the
doorway, and his eyes showed a slight surprise.

"I never thought ye had the temper to git
somebody to split yer head," said he.  "Where'd ye
collect it?"

"Nowhere," Joe answered, dropping weakly on
the bed.  "It doesn't amount to anything."

"Well, I'll take just a look fer myself," said the
red-bearded man, rising.  "And I've no objection
to not knowin' how ye come by it.  Ye've always
been the great one fer keepin' yer mysteries to
yerself."

He unwound the handkerchief and removed it
from Joe's head gently.  "WHEE!" he cried, as a
long gash was exposed over the forehead.  "I 
hope ye left a mark somewhere to pay a little on
the score o' this!"

Joe chuckled and dropped dizzily back upon the
pillow.  "There was another who got something
like it," he gasped, feebly; "and, oh, Mike, I wish
you could have heard him going on!  Perhaps
you did--it was only three miles from here."

"Nothing I'd liked better!" said the other,
bringing a basin of clear water from a stand in
the corner.  "It's a beautiful thing to hear a man
holler when he gits a grand one like ye're wearing
to-night."

He bathed the wound gently, and hurrying from
the room, returned immediately with a small jug
of vinegar.  Wetting a rag with this tender fluid,
he applied it to Joe's head, speaking soothingly
the while.

"Nothing in the world like a bit o' good cider
vinegar to keep off the festerin'.  It may seem a
trifle scratchy fer the moment, but it assassinates
the blood-p'ison.  There ye go!  It's the fine thing
fer ye, Joe--what are ye squirmin' about?"

"I'm only enjoying it," the boy answered, writhing
as the vinegar worked into the gash.  "Don't
you mind my laughing to myself."

"Ye're a good one, Joe!" said the other, continuing
his ministrations.  "I wisht, after all, ye
felt like makin' me known to what's the trouble.
There's some of us would be glad to take it up fer
ye, and--"

"No, no; it's all right.  I was somewhere I had
no business to be, and I got caught."

"Who caught ye?"

"First, some nice white people"--Joe smiled
his distorted smile--"and then a low-down black
man helped me to get away as soon as he saw who
it was.  He's a friend of mine, and he fell down
and tripped up the pursuit."

"I always knew ye'd git into large trouble some
day."  The red-bearded man tore a strip from
an old towel and began to bandage the boy's head
with an accustomed hand.  "Yer taste fer excitement
has been growin' on ye every minute of the
four years I've known ye."

"Excitement!" echoed Joe, painfully blinking
at his friend.  "Do you think I'm hunting excitement?"

"Be hanged to ye!" said the red-bearded man.
"Can't I say a teasing word without gittin' called
to order fer it?  I know ye, my boy, as well as ye
know yerself.  Ye're a queer one.  Ye're one of
the few that must know all sides of the world--
and can't content themselves with bein' respectable!
Ye haven't sunk to `low life' because ye're
low yourself, but ye'll never git a damned one o'
the respectable to believe it.  There's a few others 
like ye in the wide world, and I've seen one or
two of 'em.  I've been all over, steeple-chasin',
sailorman, soldier, pedler, and in the PO-lice; I've
pulled the Grand National in Paris, and I've been
handcuffed in Hong-Kong; I've seen all the few
kinds of women there is on earth and the many
kinds of men.  Yer own kind is the one I've seen
the fewest of, but I knew ye belonged to it the
first time I laid eyes on ye!"  He paused, then
continued with conviction:  "Ye'll come to no
good, either, fer yerself, yet no one can say ye
haven't the talents.  Ye've helped many of the
boys out of a bad hole with a word of advice
around the courts and the jail.  Who knows but
ye'd be a great lawyer if ye kept on?"

Young people usually like to discuss themselves
under any conditions--hence the rewards of palmistry,--
but Joe's comment on this harangue was
not so responsive as might have been expected.
"I've got seven dollars," he said, "and I'll leave
the clothes I've got on.  Can you fix me up with
something different?"

"Aha!" cried the red-bearded man.  "Then ye
ARE in trouble!  I thought it 'd come to ye some
day!  Have ye been dinnymitin' Martin Pike?"

"See what you can do," said Joe.  "I want to
wait here until daybreak."

"Lie down, then," interrupted the other.  "And 
fergit the hullabaloo in the throne-room beyond."

"I can easily do that"--Joe stretched himself
upon the bed,--"I've got so many other things
to remember."

"I'll have the things fer ye, and I'll let ye know
I have no use fer seven dollars," returned the red-
bearded man, crossly.  "What are ye sniffin' fer?"

"I'm thinking of the poor fellow that got the
mate to this," said Joe, touching the bandage.
"I can't help crying when I think they may have
used vinegar on his head, too."

"Git to sleep if ye can!" exclaimed the Samaritan,
as a hideous burst of noise came from the dance-
room, where some one seemed to be breaking a
chair upon an acquaintance.  "I'll go out and
regulate the boys a bit."  He turned down the
lamp, fumbled in his hip-pocket, and went to the
door.

"Don't forget," Joe called after him.

"Go to sleep," said the red-bearded man, his
hand on the door-knob.  "That is, go to thinkin',
fer ye won't sleep; ye're not the kind.  But think
easy; I'll have the things fer ye.  It's a matter of
pride with me that I always knew ye'd come to
trouble."



VI

YE'LL TAK' THE HIGH ROAD AND I'LL TAK' THE
LOW ROAD

The day broke with a scream of wind
out of the prairies and such cloudbursts
of snow that Joe could see
neither bank of the river as he made
his way down the big bend of ice.
The wind struck so bitterly that now and then
he stopped and, panting and gasping, leaned his
weight against it.  The snow on the ground was
caught up and flew like sea spume in a hurricane;
it swirled about him, joining the flakes in the air,
so that it seemed to be snowing from the ground
upward as much as from the sky downward.
Fierce as it was, hard as it was to fight through,
snow from the earth, snow from the sky, Joe was
grateful for it, feeling that it veiled him, making
him safer, though he trusted somewhat the change
of costume he had effected at Beaver Beach.  A
rough, workman's cap was pulled down over his
ears and eyebrows; a knitted comforter was wound
about the lower part of his face; under a ragged
overcoat he wore blue overalls and rubber boots;
and in one of his red-mittened hands he swung a
tin dinner-bucket.

When he reached the nearest of the factories he
heard the exhaust of its engines long before he
could see the building, so blinding was the drift.
Here he struck inland from the river, and, skirting
the edges of the town, made his way by unfrequented
streets and alleys, bearing in the general
direction of upper Main Street, to find himself at
last, almost exhausted, in the alley behind the
Pike Mansion.  There he paused, leaning heavily
against a board fence and gazing at the vaguely
outlined gray plane which was all that could be
made of the house through the blizzard.  He had
often, very often, stood in this same place at night,
and there was one window (Mrs. Pike's) which he
had guessed to be Mamie's.

The storm was so thick that he could not see
this window now, but he looked a long time through
the thickness at that part of the gray plane where
he knew it was.  Then his lips parted.

"Good-bye, Mamie," he said, softly.
"Goodbye, Mamie."

He bent his body against the wind and went on,
still keeping to the back ways, until he came to
the alley which passed behind his own home,
where, however, he paused only for a moment to
make a quick survey of the premises.  A glance
satisfied him; he ran to the next fence, hoisted
himself wearily over it, and dropped into Roger
Tabor's back yard.

He took shelter from the wind for a moment or
two, leaning against the fence, breathing heavily;
then he stumbled on across the obliterated paths
of a vegetable-garden until he reached the house,
and beginning with the kitchen, began to make
the circuit of the windows, peering cautiously into
each as he went, ready to tap on the pane should
he catch a glimpse of Ariel, and prepared to run if
he stumbled upon her grandfather.  But the place
seemed empty: he had made his reconnaisance
apparently in vain, and was on the point of going
away, when he heard the click of the front gate
and saw Ariel coming towards him, her old water-
proof cloak about her head and shoulders, the
patched, scant, faded skirt, which he knew so
well, blowing about her tumultuously.  At the
sound of the gate he had crouched close against
the side of the house, but she saw him at once.

She stopped abruptly, and throwing the water-
proof back from her head, looked at him through
the driven fog of snow.  One of her hands was
stretched towards him involuntarily, and it was
in that attitude that he long remembered her:
standing in the drift which had piled up against
the gate almost knee-deep, the shabby skirt and
the black water-proof flapping like torn sails, one
hand out-stretched like that of a figure in a
tableau, her brown face with its thin features mottled
with cold and unlovely, her startled eyes fixed
on him with a strange, wild tenderness that held
something of the laughter of whole companionship
in it mingling with a loyalty and championship
that was almost ferocious--she looked an Undine
of the snow.

Suddenly she ran to him, still keeping her hand
out-stretched until it touched his own.

"How did you know me?" he said.

"Know you!" was all the answer she made to
that question.  "Come into the house.  I've got
some coffee on the stove for you.  I've been up
and down the street waiting for you ever since it
began to get light."

"Your grandfather won't--"

"He's at Uncle Jonas's; he won't be back till
noon.  There's no one here."

She led him to the front-door, where he stamped
and shook himself; he was snow from head to foot.

"I'm running away from the good Gomorrah,"
he said, "but I've stopped to look back, and I'm a
pretty white pillar."

"I know where you stopped to look back," she
answered, brushing him heartily with her red
hands.  "You came in the alley way.  It was
Mamie's window."

He did not reply, and the only visible token
that he had any consciousness of this clairvoyance
of hers was a slight lift of his higher eyebrow.
She wasted no time in getting him to the kitchen,
where, when she had removed his overcoat, she
placed him in a chair, unwound the comforter, and,
as carefully as a nurse, lifted the cap from his
injured head.  When the strip of towel was disclosed
she stood quite still for a moment with the cap in
her hand; then with a broken little cry she stooped
and kissed a lock of his hair, which escaped, discolored,
beneath the bandage.

"Stop that!" he commanded, horribly embarrassed.

"Oh, Joe," she cried, "I knew!  I knew it was
there--but to SEE it!  And it's my fault for leaving
you--I HAD to go or I wouldn't have--I--"

"Where'd you hear about it?" he asked, shortly.

"I haven't been to bed," she answered.  "Grandfather
and I were up all night at Uncle Jonas's, and
Colonel Flitcroft came about two o'clock, and he
told us."

"Did he tell you about Norbert?"

"Yes--a great deal."  She poured coffee into a
cup from a pot on the stove, brought it to him,
then placing some thin slices of bread upon a gridiron,
began to toast them over the hot coals.  "The
Colonel said that Norbert thought he wouldn't get
well," she concluded; "and Mr. Arp said Norbert
was the kind that never die, and they had quite
an argument."

"What were you doing at Jonas Tabor's?" asked
Joe, drinking his coffee with a brightening eye.

"We were sent for," she answered.

"What for?"

She toasted the bread attentively without
replying, and when she decided that it was brown
enough, piled it on a warm plate.  This she brought
to him, and kneeling in front of him, her elbow on
his knee, offered for his consideration, looking
steadfastly up at his eyes.  He began to eat ravenously.

"What for?" he repeated.  "I didn't suppose
Jonas would let you come in his house.  Was he
sick?"

"Joe," she said, quietly, disregarding his
questions---"Joe, have you GOT to run away?"

"Yes, I've got to," he answered.

"Would you have to go to prison if you stayed?"
She asked this with a breathless tensity.

"I'm not going to beg father to help me out,"
he said, determinedly.  "He said he wouldn't,
and he'll be spared the chance.  He won't mind 
that; nobody will care!  Nobody!  What does anybody
care what _I_ do!"

"Now you're thinking of Mamie!" she cried.
"I can always tell.  Whenever you don't talk
naturally you're thinking of her!"

He poured down the last of the coffee, growing
red to the tips of his ears.  "Ariel," he said, "if I
ever come back--"

"Wait," she interrupted.  "Would you have to
go to prison right away if they caught you?"

"Oh, it isn't that," he laughed, sadly.  "But
I'm going to clear out.  I'm not going to take any
chances.  I want to see other parts of the world,
other kinds of people.  I might have gone, anyhow,
soon, even if it hadn't been for last night.  Don't
you ever feel that way?"

"You know I do," she said.  "I've told you--
how often!  But, Joe, Joe,--you haven't any
MONEY!  You've got to have money to LIVE!"

"You needn't worry about that," returned the
master of seven dollars, genially.  "I've saved
enough to take care of me for a LONG time."

"Joe, PLEASE!  I know it isn't so.  If you could
wait just a little while--only a few weeks,--only a
FEW, Joe--"

"What for?"

"I could let you have all you want.  It would
be such a beautiful thing for me, Joe.  Oh, I know 
how you'd feel; you wouldn't even let me give you
that dollar I found in the street last year; but this
would be only lending it to you, and you could pay
me back sometime--"

"Ariel!" he exclaimed, and, setting his empty
cup upon the floor, took her by the shoulders and
shook her till the empty plate which had held the
toast dropped from her hand and broke into
fragments.  "You've been reading the Arabian Nights!"

"No, no," she cried, vehemently.  "Grandfather
would give me anything.  He'll give me all the
money I ask for!"

"Money!" said Joe.  "Which of us is wandering?
MONEY?  Roger Tabor give you MONEY?"

"Not for a while.  A great many things have
to be settled first."

"What things?"

"Joe," she asked, earnestly, "do you think it's
bad of me not to feel things I OUGHT to feel?"

"No."

"Then I'm glad," she said, and something in
the way she spoke made him start with pain,
remembering the same words, spoken in the same
tone, by another voice, the night before on the
veranda.  "I'm glad, Joe, because I seemed all
wrong to myself.  Uncle Jonas died last night,
and I haven't been able to get sorry.  Perhaps
it's because I've been so frightened about you, 
but I think not, for I wasn't sorry even before
Colonel Flitcroft told me about you."

"Jonas Tabor dead!" said Joe.  "Why, I saw
him on the street yesterday!"

"Yes, and I saw him just before I came out on
the porch where you were.  He was there in the
hall; he and Judge Pike had been having a long
talk; they'd been in some speculations together,
and it had all turned out well.  It's very strange,
but they say now that Uncle Jonas's heart was
weak--he was an old man, you know, almost
eighty,--and he'd been very anxious about his
money.  The Judge had persuaded him to risk it;
and the shock of finding that he'd made a great
deal suddenly--"

"I've heard he'd had that same shock before,"
said Joe, "when he sold out to your father."

"Yes, but this was different, grandfather says.
He told me it was in one of those big risky
businesses that Judge Pike likes to go into.  And last
night it was all finished, the strain was over, and
Uncle Jonas started home.  His house is only a
little way from the Pikes', you know; but he
dropped down in the snow at his own gate, and
some people who were going by saw him fall.  He
was dead before grandfather got there."

"I can't be sorry," said Joe, slowly.

"Neither can I.  That's the dreadful part of it!
They say he hadn't made a will, that though he
was sharper than anybody else in the whole world
about any other matter of business, that was the
one thing he put off.  And we're all the kin he had
in the world, grandfather and I.  And they say"--
her voice sank to a whisper of excitement--