The way of all earth
Date: 2025-11-24T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Conduct of life -- Fiction

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The way of all earth

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The way of all earth

Author: Edith Barnard Delano

Release date: November 24, 2025 [eBook #77331]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77331

Credits: Terry Jeffress and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAY OF ALL EARTH ***

This ebook was created in honor of Distributed Proofreaders 25th Anniversary.

THE WAY OF ALL EARTH

THE WAY OF ALL
EARTH

BY

EDITH BARNARD DELANO

Behold, I have set before thee an open door and no man can shut it.

Revelation

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

Publishers   ::   1925   ::   New York

Copyright, 1923, 1924, 1925, by
Edith Barnard Delano

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, March, 1925
Second printing, May, 1925

PART I

THE WAY OF ALL EARTH

1

Five o’clock; and the lethargic slowness of the afternoon changed into activity with the abruptness with which light comes after the turning of an electric switch. The girls at the desks in the outer room—no bobbed locks in those days, but grotesque oddities of coiffure drooping low over foreheads and strangely puffed out over ears—stood up so unanimously, so instantly, that it was plain they had been waiting for the hands of the clock to mark the hour of liberation. The fugue of typewriters stopped; voices and the shuffling of feet sounded another rhythm. A stenographer closed a door behind her, came forward with red-ruled notebook and pencil and made her way to a desk near a window, a dissatisfied look on her face; she would have to get off those letters before she went home. Men opened and closed the drawers of their desks; then they, too, followed the girls down the stairs. One of them raised his arms and yawned.

“This spring weather gets you,” said he.

But nobody answered. The moment of release had come; in every man’s mind was the thought of getting away, just as eight hours before they had all been motivated by the idea of getting to work.

“Take the ferry?” Brice Denison asked a man whose shoulders brushed his as they went out the door.

“Tube’s quicker,” the other said.

“Well, I’ve got some grass seed to get.” He plunged into the human stream rushing westward, battling against the other stream forging to the east. Sometimes he could thread his way a step or two ahead of someone in front; sometimes he could do no more than keep pace with the onward moving crowd—a long step, a dozen short ones, looking for a gap, taking it, held again, then on. A street or two crossed, and the eastward stream grew less; it was possible to make better progress, to dodge more, to pass a couple of girls or a man; to walk swiftly under metal projections where halves of beef hung, and hogs with their sides held out by wooden pieces displayed the inner sheathing of their ribs, and crates and baskets of vegetables lay open to the dust, and fruit stands were piled high with oranges and apples, and vendors’ carts lined the curb with boxed strawberries. The air freshened as Brice reached the street lined on one side with ferries. He paused at the door of a shop, and stood for a moment looking at the blue and purple and yellow blooms.

“I’ll take a couple of those,” he said, and thrust his hand into a trousers-pocket.

Then over the broad street to the ferry house. Under a stairway the boy from whom he always bought the evening paper. He was recognized; the paper he wanted was snatched from the pile and thrust at him, his coins dropped into a waiting hand. Not a second was lost. Men hurrying to the ferry must not be delayed. Moments were precious, invaluable. They were hastening home.

There were trains waiting on the other side. The ferry docked. Men rushed off, parting to right and left. Some glanced at the clock, then began to walk more slowly; others raced, and others went stolidly on their way, through the gates, on to forward cars. The forward cars got there a moment sooner. Brice found a seat, put his baskets of pansies in the rack overhead, unfolded his evening paper. Other men were doing the same thing. Their movements might have been directed as by an orchestra leader. Headlines, first—they had seen them on news-stands, in other men’s hands, glanced at them in ferry or tube; then in unison, with a swishing sound, up and down the car the papers were turned, folded. The base-ball season was open. Tired men, with no time for play, lost themselves in the printed accounts of the game. The train moved out, a few late-comers passing along the aisle in the hope of finding seats. A hand fell on Brice’s shoulder.

“Why—hello there, Ned!” he said, as the other took the place at his side. “Haven’t seen you for ages!” A wave of self-consciousness passed over him; that was an inapt thing to say: no, he had not seen Ned Allen for ages. But the other man ignored any awkwardness there might have been.

“How’s things?” he asked. “How’s Anne?”

“Fine, fine! How’s Mabel?”

“She’s well. Billy’s had measles. I see you’re still the same old farmer, Brice!”

Brice glanced overhead at his pansies. “Yes. But I had to buy a lawn-mower when we moved, Ned. Gosh—those were great old days!”

The other grinned. “Yes. I miss your tool chest. Like your new house?”

“Not so new, now. Three years, nearly four, isn’t it? By Jove, it’s five!”

“Five—so it is! We still miss you. Movies near you?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. Anne’s sort of lost interest. Things come along, you know. You meet people, all that. I tell you what, Ned. We want you and Mabel to come up to dinner some night. Make it soon.”

“That’s indefinite. We’ll do better than that. Anything on tonight?”

“Not a thing.”

“Well then, you and Anne hop on a train and come down. Or maybe you keep a car?”

“No such luck!” said Brice, with a comforting warmth suddenly flaring within him; they had no car yet, but things were coming along.

“All right. You come down, and we’ll all go to the movies. Have a bite on the chafing-dish afterwards. We’ve got a new one—electric. Be like old times.”

“We’ll do it!” said Brice, as the train stopped and Allen arose. “In time for the second show, anyway.”

He did not open his paper again. Good, that, to meet Ned, especially today. Good to think of old times. That little two-family house, Ned and Mabel in the apartment above. The lawn-mower that he borrowed from Ned when his turn came to cut the small plot of grass. The tools that Ned borrowed in turn. Mabel and Anne going shopping together, sometimes on a matinée spree in town; small triumphs shared, simple pleasures—good old times, particularly good to think about tonight. Good to have had them, good to have gone on to something else; good, very good, still to be going on.

The train stopped at his station; he thrust his newspaper into a hip-pocket, took down the baskets of flowers. A short walk along the side of the tracks, a turn to the left and a block or two—it was not far to his house; its convenience had been one of their reasons for choosing it, but now its nearness to things had become insignificant. Its importance, its meaning had grown. It represented something more than any other house on the street, even than the other houses that he passed on the more important street. He never turned into the by-street without a quickening of the pulse. His eye never caught the gray stucco front with its roof of red tiles coming oddly down in a sweep incongruously borrowed from the Chinese without a warm sense of satisfaction. That house was not like other houses; it was not like any other house on that street, even. They were all set on low terraces. Some were shingled, some stuccoed; some had red roofs, and others had brown; some were painted in gray or yellow, with white trimmings and green blinds; some had two smaller windows on the front porch, some had one larger. Those differences were due to the effulgence of the builder’s imagination and to the real-estate man’s knowledge of salesmanship. This was a neighborhood that was meant for nice people with moderate incomes; at the time the houses were built there were no garages, though later several owners had built them, of cement or corrugated metal, in the tiny back yards. People who lived in nice neighborhoods, however convenient to the commuters’ trains, did not want to live in houses like all the other houses on the street. The floor plans of all those on Lammermoor Place were as like as right and left gloves; but outside no two were alike. Individuality was the keynote; individuality and a certain smart look. That was what made for quick sales. No need of substantial building. Looks, looks—that was what counted. It had counted with Brice and Anne; but now the house had taken upon itself for Brice a personality of its own. It was home. He was going home tonight with grass-seed for that bare spot on the lawn, and with pansies, and with something else. Anne would be pleased.

A little girl on roller skates skidded up to him as he turned the corner, threw herself upon him. He laughed, held out his hand, and the child set her feet together and let him drag her along.

“Mrs. Denison’s just come home. She came in an automobile,” she said. “See—? She hasn’t got out yet, but she’s there.”

A long gray runabout, “the latest sports model,” was at the curb in front of his house. Brice dropped the child’s hands as he reached it. His eyes met Anne’s.

“I’ve brought her safe home, you see,” said the man at the wheel.

“Thanks,” said Brice, dryly, without smiling.

Anne jumped down, spoke a laughing word of farewell over her shoulder. They went up the walk together. But in the hall she turned to him with a look of resentment that was like a hand thrusting him away.

“I think you might have been ordinarily polite to Ranney,” she said.

“I thought I was,” said Brice; but without replying Anne started upstairs. He set his baskets of pansies on the hall table. From the landing where the stairs turned she looked down.

“Of course if you really want to make a white spot on the hall table it’s quite all right to put those wet things there,” she said. He hastily took them up. “I can’t see why you like to come home looking like a delivery boy, anyway,” she added, and went on up to her room.

Brice carried the pansies through a swinging door into the kitchen. “Hello, Lucille,” he said to a young colored woman who turned from the stove to greet him with an exceptional dental display.

“My, ain’t them pretty!” she said.

“Yes. I’m going to plant them along the porch.”

“That’ll be grand! Mis’ Denison’s awful fond of flowers.”

“Got a tumbler or something?” Brice asked; he began picking off some of the larger blossoms. The girl brought him a small slim vase which he held under the faucet. Water splashed into the sink, spattered over his hands and coat.

“I’ll wipe you off,” said Lucille. “That faucet cuts up all the time.”

“Needs a new washer,” said Brice. “I’ll fix it tonight.” He carried the little vase into the dining-room, and in the doorway stopped short. There were flowers on the table, white lilacs and deep red roses, and thrust between them some purple orchids, such a forced mingling of the seasons as only the very rich can achieve. But Brice did not know that. He wondered vaguely what Anne had paid for them. Then he set his pansies in front of her place.

She came down in a moment; she was always deft in her changes of costume. It had not taken long, but she was fresh and elusively fragrant in a gown Brice had not seen before. She was smiling.

“You forgot to kiss me when you came in!” said she.

“I can make up for that,” Brice said. “You look like a party!”

“This?” she shrugged, turned herself about. “Do you like me?”

“You bet I like you!”

Lucille came in at the moment, and Anne slid into her chair at the table. She glanced at the pansies, set the vase out of the way. During the meal their talk was only casual. For the past few years Anne had insisted that their one maid should wait upon the table as nearly as possible in the manner of the more highly-paid and trained servants of her friends. For a time Brice found the result diverting. Often it was ludicrous enough. But even a humorous thing may become irksome; when the novelty began to wear off, he had protested.

“Oh, let the girl eat her dinner in peace, Nance,” he said, “and give us a chance to be human and talk. I’m getting fed up with having her stand there by the pantry door, listening to every word we say, and staring at me every time I put the fork to my mouth like a dog waiting for a bone. Call it off, can’t you?”

“No,” said Anne, decidedly. “If I don’t train her properly while we are alone, what can we do when we have guests?”

“Let ’em get along as we do. Why not?”

“That’s absurd,” she replied.

It was not until their evening meal was ended and they went into the greater freedom of the living-room that there was anything more than broken, polite exchanges of phrases between them. Brice’s gift of small talk was largely lacking, and he saw that Anne had something on her mind. She was always preoccupied, when she had something on her mind.

“Coffee in the living-room, Lucille,” Anne said to the girl, from the doorway.

Brice, already lighting his pipe, chuckled. Dinner had rested him. His sense of humor was uppermost again, and Anne was lovely in the light-colored gown. “You do keep it up, don’t you, old girl? You’re a wonder!”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He looked at her quizzically over the flaming match. “Coffee—and drawing-room. Gosh!” said he.

“Oh, I see the absurdity of it as well as you do,” she retorted. “This room——!”

Brice sobered a little. “Nothing the matter with this room,” he declared. “You’re a great hand at making a place home-like, old lady. Mighty cozy in here.”

She looked at him for a moment; then she asked, quietly, “Is that really your ideal, Brice? Cozy?”

“Well, why not? Looks good to me.”

She bit her lip, crossed the floor to press the little button in an electric lamp. He looked after her, added, “Not that I don’t wish it were—well, finer, and larger, and all that—for your sake.”

She came slowly back. He had thrown himself into a stuffed arm-chair which was worn into a permanent impress of his figure. They had bought it during the first year of their marriage, made an event of buying it, called it his birthday present, that birthday being two months in the future. He had never been willing to have it banished to those regions above where most of their early purchases filled spaces that would otherwise be vacantly gaping. Pipe-smoke was whirling about his head. He looked at her through its comforting haze.

“Look here, Nance,” he said. “Old Grant is going to resign. I’ve asked for his job.”

Instantly her expression changed.

“Oh, Brice! That will give us—how much does he get?”

“Well, twelve hundred, maybe fifteen hundred, more than I’m getting. But I suppose they wouldn’t start me off with that, you know. Getting the job’s the first thing.”

“But you will get it. Of course you will. And even twelve hundred more! Oh, Brice!”

“Don’t count on it too soon, old girl. There’s Farren, you know. He has more right to it than I have. And there’s always the chance of their bringing in a man from outside.”

“Oh! That wouldn’t be fair! And you’ve been there longer than Farren. Twelve hundred——”

The colored maid, with her cap awry and a grin on her face, at that moment backed through the portières that separated the dining-room from the living-room, bearing a tray too large for the two coffee-cups it held. She swung around to face Anne, and the coffee splashed over the rims of the cups to the saucers.

“Where you want it at?” she asked, cheerily.

“I will take it,” said Anne, with dignity, fully conscious of her husband’s suppressed amusement. “And the smaller tray next time, Lucille.”

The girl disappeared. “None of that for me,” said Brice. “Keeps me awake.”

Anne’s eyelids flickered. “You will need it tonight,” said she. “We are going out.”

“That’s so!” said Brice, cheerfully, reaching up for a cup. “How’d you know? Seen Mabel?”

She looked at him, plainly surprised. “Mabel?”

“Yes, Mabel. Ran into old Ned on the train. Said he and Mabel had been wanting us over in the evening for a long time, and why not tonight. So I said we’d go. Of course. Don’t like to drop away from old friends.”

Old friends. Ned, and Mabel. There flashed across Anne’s mind those first years of their married life, when she and Brice had had the downstairs apartment; those days when Ned was beginning his career of selling insurance, when Brice had been so triumphant over getting the new job with Whitten & Company. Yes, they were old friends. They had shared the lawn-mower, taken turns in clearing off the snow, gone to the movies together, compared the price of groceries, run in and out half a dozen times a day. Those grubby years, that she was so glad to have come away from. She hated to be reminded of them.

“I’m sorry, Brice, I promised Tessie Ogden we’d go there for bridge.”

“Oh, but look here! Mrs. Ogden won’t mind. Can’t hurt old Ned’s feelings.”

“I don’t want to hurt them. We’ll have them here to dinner some time.”

“But it’s been years since we were there, Nance. And I said we’d go. They’ll have gotten things ready—you know how hospitable Mabel is.”

Anne knew. The latest record for the phonograph, perhaps a game of five-hundred or the movies, and at the end of the evening something on the chafing-dish, with Mabel explaining where she had discovered the recipe. Anne knew all of it. The scurrying of Mabel to get things in order, Ned hurrying across the tracks to the delicatessen store. Mabel’s discussion with ten-year-old Florence about bed-time, Billy’s calls for a drink of water. An endless retailing of jokes Ned had read in the paper, by way of conversation. Oh, Anne knew it all; whenever she thought of it she thanked the stars of her destiny that they had helped her get away from it. Even as it was, she had not got very far; but not back to that, not back to that. She thought of Tessie Ogden, with her languid voice, thought of the richness of Tessie’s house, of the people who would be there.

“I’ll telephone Mabel, Brice,” she said. “I can’t possibly disappoint Tessie.”

Brice sat up. His pipe had gone out, and he sent an exploring thumb into its depths. “I can’t see Tessie’s being disappointed, Nance, by our not turning up. But Mabel—and old Ned——”

“I’m sorry, Brice. We shall have to go to Tessie’s. It’s bridge.”

“Well—that’s all the more reason, then. I told you before, Nance, I am not going to play bridge with that bunch.”

She got up, moved about restlessly. If only Brice would not make himself so hard to manage.

“Oh, you need not be afraid, this time, of losing,” she said. “Tessie told me to say that she’d be your partner. She always wins.”

Brice stood up, crossed to the mantel for tobacco. “Sweet thing, Tessie,” said he.

Anne flared. “She’s no worse than the facts. The fact is that my husband is too—too——”

Brice supplied the word. “Stingy.”

“You said it, not I! But there it is, and everybody knows it, taunts me about it. Laughs at me, probably, when I’m not there.”

“What do you care?” Brice looked at her with an oddly lifted eyebrow, a trick of his that she used to love. Now it exasperated her because it was always the sign that Brice was opposing his will to hers. “What do you care what those people think or even say, Nance? What the dickens do they matter?”

“They are my friends.”

“But are they? What do they mean to you, what would they do for you, what——”

“Tessie, at least, would play as my husband’s partner to keep him from losing.”

Brice sat down. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers fumbling over his pipe, his eyes on an unimportant figure of the rug.

“Anne,” he said slowly, after a moment of thought, “it does seem funny to have to try to make you understand. Can’t you, without our saying anything?”

She managed to smile; one prettily shod foot was swaying a little. “But if you play with Tessie, Brice, this time you’ll win,” she told him.

He bit his lip. “Look here, Nance,” he said, looking across at her. “I hate like the dickens to can anything you want to do, or anything you like to do. But this playing bridge for money. Honest, old girl, I can’t choke it down. It’s not playing a square deal with our life, our income being what it is.”

“Everybody does it. And you’ll win, if you——”

“Everybody does not do it. You may call me anything you like, but under the circumstances I don’t think it’s decent. Even if you can afford it—and you and I cannot, Nance—it’s a mere rushing into something for the sake of excitement, unwholesome excitement. If you can’t afford it, it’s all the worse. I am not gambling. If I have anything to do with it, my wife doesn’t gamble, either.”

“You played the other night.”

“I did. I’m sorry I did. I felt like a cheap skate while I was doing it. But we were there, and I’d have broken up the party if I stayed out. My having lost has nothing to do with my being unwilling to play again. I’m glad I lost. Served me right for being a coward.”

“You lost three dollars and forty cents. Was that much, for an evening’s amusement?”

“No. But it has nothing whatever to do with it. I gambled, and I am not going to gamble again.”

For a moment she was too angry to speak; then she stood up. “Brice,” she said, “I don’t think you quite appreciate what I am trying to do for you.”

“I think you’re a peach, Nance.”

Her head moved impatiently. “You don’t know how hard I have tried to know the right people. You——”

“What’s the matter with Alice’s set?”

“Nothing. Alice is my best friend. She has always been, ever since we were born. I met you at her house. But you know what Alice is, as well as I do. She’s always had everything. She doesn’t want anything more. She’s in a rut, and glad she’s in a rut, so long as George and the children are there with her. The people I have worked hard to know and make friends with, for your sake, are people who are not in a rut. They are rising people. And they’re the right people. You don’t understand how hard it is to keep up with them. I struggle and struggle, and you don’t try to help me at all.”

“Sure I’ll help you! But after all, why the struggle? Where’s it going to get you?”

“I’m not thinking about myself. I’m thinking about you, your future. It’s all so I can further your interests.”

His face clouded. “Where do my interests come in? We’re getting along.”

“Oh—getting along! You’ll never be a success until you know the right people. There’s DeLancey Hunt—he’s made over a hundred thousand this last year, they say. Meg’s got a new sedan, and Jack gave her a sapphire bracelet on her birthday. There’s Burson, and Harry Claflin, and the Averys. I don’t have to go over the list. The thing is that they are successful. And you will never be successful until you get in with them, know their ways, make friends of them. They can do things for you.”

“I can’t thrill over that, you know. I don’t want to climb by means of friends. Nor of people you and I play around with.”

“I know you don’t. That’s just what I’ve been telling you. You don’t help——”

“How much’ll it help to let Mrs. Ogden keep me from losing money at bridge?”

She ignored that. “There’s Ranney Copeland—you think so much of George and Alice, you ought to approve of Ranney. He’s George’s brother. But what do you do, the very first time he offers to help you? You turn him down flat.”

“I don’t like Ranney Copeland. And I will not play stocks.”

“Because you’re afraid!”

“Yes. I am afraid. I’m not ashamed of that.”

“Well, I am! You’ve got to push ahead as these other men do, if you’re going to get anywhere.”

There was silence between them for a full minute. Then he said, slowly, “Anne, we seem to be talking a different language, these days.”

“Then it’s because you won’t look at life as it is. You won’t put your hand out nor make any move to get ahead. You wait until some change in the office shoves you into a better place. You won’t see things that——”

“But life has a good many sides to it, old girl. We used to look at the same side, together, and not think it so bad.”

“And what was it? What was it, but——”

“Not so bad,” he repeated, “not so bad. Just what a good many millions of other men and other women are looking at, and finding it good.”

She waved a hand, indicating the room they were in, and laughed—not joyously. “This?”

“Well, yes, this—or something like it. Looks all right to me. Meant a good deal to us, getting these things together. Watched the house being built—remember? Pretty good, first time I came home to it and found you in the kitchen with a smudge on your nose. Still is pretty good.”

“Honestly, Brice, is that all the ambition you have?”

“Not all. No. I’d like to see you in a limousine of your own, and a house on a hill-top, if you wanted it. But, after all, whether they’re big and showy or not, the things men work for and want are just about the same. Those other fellows, the ones whose wives you’re running around with, don’t have any more.”

“Don’t have any more!” she repeated, incredulously.

“No. Home. Money enough to get by with. A wife, and—and children.”

She clasped her hands together. “Oh! I’m glad, glad, glad there are no children!”

He was staring again at the figure in the rug. “Yes,” he said, slowly, “I have known your feeling about that for some time.”

She jumped up, started to speak, but, instead, went out of the room. He heard her step overhead. Presently he went to the telephone and spoke with Ned Allen. Then for an hour or more he sat in the arm-chair, his body in its familiar sag to the left; sat there with his pipe, his eyes still exploring the intricacies of the pattern of the rug as a sick man will follow the lines of the wall-paper, idly, perhaps—or perhaps weaving into them strange figures.

2

In the morning she awoke to a spatter from the bath-room—Brice, as usual, running off all the hot water while he shaved. But immediately another thought came to her. Old Mr. Grant was going to resign. Twelve hundred a year more, maybe fifteen.

At the breakfast table she was smiling, debonnair, fresh and youthful looking in one of the simple ginghams that Brice loved. Owing to the demands of the day’s work, at breakfast the maid did not preside, and no cap was in evidence. Brice liked his coffee hot from the stove, so Anne brought it in herself and poured in a goodly portion of cream. Always, with Brice, each day began itself; there was no hanging over of the discussion of the night before.

“When does Mr. Grant go?” she asked.

Brice grinned across at her. “Now don’t you go counting on that too much, old lady.”

“But of course you’ll get it. I am going to see Alice about it today.”

He looked blank. “Alice?”

“Yes, of course. George Copeland is a stockholder in Whitten & Company. A word from him——”

“Oh, please, Nance! You don’t understand.”

Her good humor was not to be shaken. “That is just what I was trying to tell you last night, my dear. Everything is done through friendship, nowadays. That is just the value of my having worked so hard to make the friends I have. A word from George Copeland—I rather think nobody will disregard that!”

“Oh, my dear girl! Look here—you can’t do that. I won’t have it. It wouldn’t do any good, but I won’t have it. Think of the position it’d put me in.”

“Oh, very well. You’ll get it, of course, anyway. And Brice, the Dodsons want to sell their car.”

He got up, laughed, came around the table and bent over her. “Don’t you go thinking about a car yet, my child. Plenty of time for that.”

He came back from the hall and kissed her again. She was all but unconscious of it, yet when the front door had closed behind him she sat there thinking about him. Brice, and their life together. Ten years. What was it that Barrie had called it? Mid-channel, where the waters were deepest, the seas most rough. Mid-channel, where the danger was. But there could be no danger in her case. As a matter of fact, she thought any woman was rather stupid to let danger come after ten years of experience. Of course, those first years of adjustment were difficult enough. She remembered days when she had thrown herself on the bed and wept, for reasons long since forgotten. She remembered those moments when little futile discussions had arisen between them until they loomed like horrible dark barriers they could never cross to come heart to heart together again. She remembered how furious she was when Brice brought carnations on their first anniversary, forgetting that she loathed the stiff scent-laden things and adored daffodils. And she remembered how the next day she wept, and kissed the empty sleeve of his coat in the closet, because Ned Allen had let it out that Brice had gone without luncheon for four days in order to buy them. Oh, it was difficult enough to adjust one’s self to marriage, at first. But one learned. Certainly she had learned in those ten years what to avoid, where to persist, how to work quietly, when to be tender and yielding. Men did not learn as readily. Even now Brice did not trust her to know what was best for them. Yet she knew how to manage him. In the end he always came round to her way of thinking. He was going to do that now. For she wanted things, so many things. There was no harm in wanting them. The other women whom she had come to know during the past three or four years all had them. Their husbands were no cleverer than Brice. It was only that their attitude towards life was different, their way of looking at things that made them successful men. She could discover no other reason for it. She must, must, somehow, make Brice see things as they did. The rest would follow; and she wanted the rest, wanted it so.

She looked at the flowers on the dining-table for a moment, and a slow smile came to her face. It was good of Ranney Copeland to have sent them; he was always doing things like that. They must have fresh water. She divided them, taking some into the living-room. In the merciless revealing sunlight not even her determination could make it look gay like Tessie Ogden’s. Nor like Alice Copeland’s, with its sedate expensiveness. There was Brice’s old chair, with the cushions sagging to the left. That, alone, kept it in the class of the one-living-room house. The other things had been bought when they moved here from the two-family house. Then they had been achievements, definite advances in price and taste over anything they had possessed before. Now she saw them for what they were, understood their incongruity, their—her mind formed the word—their hideousness. Chairs, department-store Colonial. Too glossy. The rug that had seemed so fine, and the one small Oriental in front of the mantel, a later purchase whose price she had managed to keep from Brice. The one good piece, an Empire sofa, that somehow made all the rest look sordid. That, too, a later purchase, bought under Alice Copeland’s advice, at a price which Alice declared a real bargain, but one that had cost Anne some heart-burnings when Brice sat for two evenings over their household accounts because he would not consent to buying on the installment plan. That lamp on the table was an earlier purchase. Mabel and Ned had come down to admire it the day it came home. Perhaps she had been a little hard about Mabel and Ned last night; but one had to do hard things, sometimes, for good to come out of them. It was like surgery. Not pleasant, but sometimes necessary.

The door bell buzzed in the back of the house. She jumped up, then sat down again and took up a piece of embroidery. It rang again, and Lucille poked her head around the door from the kitchen.

“You answer the do’ bell?” she asked cheerfully.

“Certainly not,” said Anne. “Don’t forget your white apron.”

The girl brought in a couple of letters and a magazine. “Get the little tray from the hall-table and bring them in on that, please, Lucille,” Anne said.

The letters were not interesting. She usually found herself bored with magazines. One had to look them over, just as one had to read the novels that were being talked about and the headlines of newspapers. She went to the telephone and called up the grocery-man. More than once Brice had suggested that she could do better by going to the store herself, that the morning walk would do her good. But what was the use? You were only tempted to buy more when you saw things displayed, and she hated to dress for the street early in the morning. Besides, with this new prospect ahead of them, this new increase of salary, there would be less need of being careful. Careful—how she hated being careful. Brice even wanted her to keep accounts, as if it helped any to know what the money had been spent for, after it was gone. Brice didn’t realize how much she saved, anyway. On her clothes, for example. She had rather a flair for clothes. It interested her to contrive them out of little or nothing. Yes, little or nothing, since all she paid for was the material. People wondered how she managed to have so many dresses, but that was because she made them, of course with the help of a cheap little seamstress. There was a dress on the figure upstairs now that the seamstress had left for her to finish. She went up. If she hurried, she could wear it that afternoon. Alice Copeland was coming to take her to the country club. It was horrid, not having a car of one’s own. The Dodsons bought a new car every year; the one they would sell now was really as good as new. Brice would not refuse her that. She would not have to contrive for it as she had for the country-club dues. And he would not refuse to use the car, as he had persistently refused to go to the club with her, say what she would about the desirable people to be met there. The dues were only a hundred and eighty, after all; and one did not have to have extras, in spite of what Brice maintained. But that twelve hundred more they were going to have, or fifteen hundred, would certainly ease things. Perhaps she would not get the car this year, after all. That would make Brice happier. How he did love to save. And there was always Alice. Alice was always willing to give her a lift. Everyone knew they were almost like sisters.

They had always been like that, except a little less intimately during the first few years of her marriage, when she was in that first flush of excitement at being married to Brice and having a place of their own, and Alice was busy with her babies. She and Alice and Nicky—they had had good times together when they were children in the up-state town where her father, Professor Warren, was principal of the high school, and Alice’s father had owned the big mills. Anne, motherless, was in a sense everyone’s child. There was old Miss Willy, her father’s housekeeper, who did what she could; and Veronica’s mother on one side and the doctor’s family on the other. Anne was as much at home in both houses as in her father’s. Doctor Clark she adored, but there was a perpetual feud between herself and the doctor’s only son, Ambrose. Neither Anne nor Ambrose ever thought about the reason for the feud. It was enough that Veronica was Anne’s “most intimate friend,” and that Ambrose was forever wanting Nicky to stop playing with the girls and help him with some of the strange machines he was always trying to make. As for Nicky, her disposition towards the opposite sex was ordained before she was born. There awaited her arrival five brothers of her own and one Ambrose, who lived only two houses away, one ever-adoring Ambrose. Emphatically, Veronica took them all lightly. Alice was a plump, homely, shy little girl, an adoring slave of both Anne and Nicky, and always a little afraid of the boys. Naturally enough, it was Alice who had married first, just as it was natural that she should have married even more money than her father possessed. She was still a good deal the same sort of person as ever, plump and mild, generous, sentimental; having no troubles of her own, she wore the burden of others’ troubles on her heart, was forever being distressed about something. Lately it had been about Veronica. Why should Nicky persist in scorning marriage? Why wouldn’t she take Ambrose? Why did she live in that horrible, slummy part of the city? Why did she let herself come into contact with all sorts of grubby people, even have them at her rooms? Why should any woman on earth want to work, when she might have a nice home of her own and darling children? Those were Alice’s arguments, at which Nicky laughed and wrinkled up her eyes at Anne, or at Ambrose if he were present. Yet in her heart Anne agreed more with Alice than with Veronica.

They talked about it that afternoon on the way to the country club. “Yes,” Anne said, “I do think she’d be happier married. Ambrose would be easy to manage.”

“They are both coming out to dinner tomorrow,” Alice said. “Will you and Brice come, too?”

“Love to. I don’t think Brice and Ambrose see very much of each other, these days.”

“Men are not like us in that,” Alice remarked. “When women don’t see each other often there seems to be a lessening of intimacy after a while, with most of us, anyway. Men take up where they left off.”

“I’ve never thought about it,” Anne returned lightly. “I know Brice and Ambrose are awfully fond of each other. Of course, Ambrose detests me. He’s never forgiven me for marrying Brice, though he did introduce us. He thinks I’m not good enough for Brice.”

“Anne, you do exaggerate so,” Alice protested.

“Oh no I don’t. I never got on with Ambrose when we were children. I don’t get on with him now. I think he’s stupid, if you ask me. But he’s done awfully well. I don’t see why Nicky won’t have him. She’d still have her own way.”

On that mild spring afternoon some of the women were out on the links; others followed along, commenting, chatting, languidly paying tribute to the call of the season. Others sat for a while in the sun on the great rounded porch that hung above the first tee, Anne among them. A few days of brisk breeze had dried the grass, but Anne did not like walking. She waited with Mrs. Ogden until Alice and the others returned. Then, in the sudden coolness of the late afternoon, they all went indoors together.

“Tea, all you people,” Alice Copeland said. “My party.”

That was the hour that Anne liked best. Usually a man or two dropped in. Today there was only one, Ranney Copeland, who was devoting himself to a young bride. But now and again his eyes turned towards Anne. She appeared oblivious, though as the talk went on her gayety increased. She was standing at one end of the mantel, teacup in hand. The firelight slid on the silk over her arm, played on the long line of her hip, touched one side of her face to rosiness, emphasizing her slimness, enhancing her air of youthfulness that for all her thirty-two years was not wholly fictitious. She was conscious of being well placed. She liked to feel herself poised, graceful, elegant from the arch of her foot to the smooth bands of hair under the close hat. She liked to be standing at ease while other women were seated.

“Now I,” she was saying across the steaming tea, “am what the scientists call a throw-back. I’m the typical old-fashioned woman. It’s the mental attitude that counts. Mine, you know very well, Jane, is the sweet, old-fashioned one. I’m sure you have noticed it.”

“In a Callot model,” Ranney Copeland remarked. “Or is it a Paquin?”

Anne threw him a swift smile, and stirred her tea; but not before she had caught an exchange of glances between two of the women, and a raised eyebrow. Oh yes, the women understood about her clothes. Still, she knew how to wear them. Even Alice, with all her money, never succeeded in looking as well turned out.

“Is that why you didn’t show up for bridge last night?” Mrs. Ogden inquired. “So you could hold Brice’s hand in front of the fire, or something?”

“Of course,” Anne said calmly.

“Didn’t the old-fashioned woman always capture her husband’s pay-envelope on Saturday nights?” another woman asked.

Anne tilted her chin a little, looked down. “Darling,” she drawled, with an emphasis too tender.

“What Nance means to imply,” said Tessie Ogden, who had been twice divorced, “is that she is all for the sweet sanctity of the family.”

“Thanks, dear,” Anne laughed. “How well you understand me.”

“Just the same, I don’t blame Nellie Callum for going to Reno,” said the speaker Anne had first answered. “Though goodness knows, even that’s getting to be old-fashioned enough.”

“I hope she stayed at the hotel I advised,” Mrs. Ogden remarked. “And I gave her a letter to my lawyer.”

Anne smiled again. “I’m so old-fashioned that I think marriage is absolutely sacred. I think I even go further. It’s so sacred that one ought to keep on trying and trying it, until everyone’s satisfied. Like you, Tessie dear.”

The little bride’s eyes were round, but the others laughed. Only Alice Copeland looked distressed. “Nance never means half she says,” she protested.

“Oh, but I do, dear. That’s part of my Early Victorianism, my utter sincerity,” Anne returned.

Mrs. Copeland stood up, and the party drifted towards the place where their wraps were. On the wide porch of the club-house Anne heard a voice at her shoulder.

“You are wonderful, Nance,” Ranney Copeland was saying. “Just how much of that did you mean?”

Anne smiled. “I wonder!” she said, demurely.

But Alice had heard, too. She turned, gave her brother-in-law a direct look. “She didn’t mean a word of it, Ranney. And I won’t have you talking to Anne like that, in whispers.”

Ranney grinned. “Sweet small Cerberus,” said he.

“You needn’t be rude,” Mrs. Copeland said. “I just stated a fact. Are you coming, Anne?”

“Pardon me,” said Ranney. “Not my intention to be rude, my dear girl. But, Alice—one has often thought of it—just how much good as a watch-dog do you suppose old Cerberus was? One seems to have heard of a good many people who successfully crossed that river.”

Alice had stepped into her car. “Come on, Anne,” she said, with no further look at the man.

He stepped between Anne and the car, with a flash of the eyes at her that she did not lose. “Anne promised to let me take her home. What else do you suppose I came out for?” he said coolly to Alice.

Alice Copeland turned her head. Anne said, rather too quickly, “Sorry, dear. I forgot to mention it. You don’t mind?” Whereupon Mrs. Copeland’s car sped ahead.

When they had spun through the country-club gates, Anne spoke. “It is really very thoughtful of you to give me a lift,” she said. “You knew, as I did, that Alice was longing to get home to the babies. And I do live so out of the way!”

The man at the wheel looked at her with a slow smile. “As you remarked to Tessie just now, ‘Thanks, dear. How well you understand me.’”

They laughed. Then Anne gave him an upward glance. “The flowers were lovely, Ranney.”

“I can do so little,” he said, in a low tone.

They went on for half a mile in silence, then abruptly Anne spoke, her hands folded tightly together in her lap, her look straining ahead. “Oh, I hate it all! All!”

His lips twisted. “Then you put up a pretty good front, my dear girl.”

“But I do hate it. The petty economies, the subterfuges that they all see through.”

“You should worry! You can out-talk the best of them.”

“Oh—talk! As if that were all of it. I know what I have a right to—I know what I owe myself. I know how I get it, I know what I have to put up with to keep it. No one else knows, though they think they do. They can’t, because there’s so much of it. And I hate it, hate not having things, not being able to meet them on their own ground, hate living as I do, where I do. I hate not having even a car of my own, having to depend on charity.”

His car rounded a turn of the road, slipped ahead. “The charity is from you to me,” he told her. “And I’ve told you how you can very easily manage the rest.”

“I know, Ranney. But Brice will not hear of it. Money in the bank. That’s as far as his imagination will let him go.”

“But it’s perfectly safe, my dear girl. Didn’t you tell him that?”

“Oh, I told him.”

“It’s done every day. I can’t quite get his point of view, you know. A quick turn-over. No need of putting back any more than your original investment. You’d always have that, and the profits are yours to do as you like with. It’s perfectly simple. I should be very glad——”

“It’s no use, Ranney. He simply will not.”

“Let him go to some other broker, then. I can’t bear to see you——”

She shook her head. “To see it——! But I have to endure it.”

They were silent a moment. Then he asked, “Look here, Anne, just how much of all that did you mean?”

She had forgotten her wild talk at the club. Her mind had been traveling fast and far, had come back into more familiar country than that speaker’s platform by the mantelpiece. “Of what?” she asked.

“What you said about marriage. Just—how—old-fashioned are you?”

Her heart seemed to leap. She felt a cold breeze on her cheek. Her lips could scarcely articulate. She leaned forward a little. “I—don’t—know,” she whispered.

“Better let me out at the corner,” she said, later, and walked slowly up the little street with the houses all trying to be different yet all so alike. Brice was already home. He had set out the pansies along the front of the porch, and was running a lawn-mower. She hated the lawn-mower, but at sight of Brice a quick touch of compunction swept over her. A sandy-haired man somewhere in his middle thirties, his broad frame was already becoming stooped from desk work. His clothes were inconspicuous, a little shabby, everyday clothes worn season before last for best, now thriftily used for the office. There was a sort of doggedness in the way he pushed the lawn-mower. Anne knew he was tired.

He stopped when she turned into the short cement walk that led to the porch, and laughed, rubbing a hand upward over his brow. “Hello, old girl! Thought I’d get done before you caught me at it,” he said.

Anne smiled at him. His eyes took in all her spring prettiness. “I believe you really do like it,” she said. “Just the same, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Oh, it’s good exercise. Gosh—a day like this makes you want to get out and dig, or go fishing or something, doesn’t it?”

“It was lovely at the country club,” she told him. “Alice and some of the others played golf. The dogwood is out.”

There was no news as to who would be chosen for Grant’s place. “Don’t count on it too much,” he told her when he kissed her good-by the next morning. “It may be a week before we know, anyway.”

She put her hands on his arms. “Don’t think of it that way, Brice. You let things slide along so. Make them give it to you. You know you’re a better man for the job than Farren.”

His face softened. “Think a lot of the old man, don’t you?”

“Well—of course,” she said, and kissed him again.

She went upstairs still with that sense of compunction. All the evening before, all this morning, she had been very gentle with Brice. He was so good. Of course he needed prodding. With another sort of wife he would not have gotten ahead at all. He would have been like all the other men on the street, humdrum, satisfied, smug. When they first moved there he had rather tentatively scraped acquaintance with some of them. She had been right, quite right, to put a stop to that. She had learned her lesson. Their earlier friendship with Mabel and Ned Allen had blocked their making other friends until they moved. Even before the new house was ready she had made up her mind to know only the right people thereafter. She had met some at Alice’s; through them she told herself she would meet more. And she had. Brice might walk up the street with the men, or talk a little when he was out with that miserable lawn-mower; she bowed to the women, and saw to it that their acquaintance went no further. Impossible to mix sets. Now things were coming their way at last. That extra fifteen hundred. Poor old Brice. It had not been quite fair of her to talk like that, even among the women she had to amuse. For she did have to amuse them. Wild talk, quick talk—what else had she to offer them? They liked it, accepted her assumption that she was one of them, that only by the circumstance of Brice’s not having got on as fast as other men was she unable to go the whole pace with them. They were kind enough, for the most part. Occasional snubs did not matter. Tessie Ogden was a good sort, in spite of her varied matrimonial ventures; she had no end of money. One could not afford to be too conservative, unless, of course, one had wealth and position like Alice’s. Alice could afford to hold Mrs. Ogden at arm’s length. Alice could afford anything. Any Copeland could. Ranney Copeland, as well as Alice’s humdrum George.

Her thoughts brought her up short, there. What had Ranney meant by his question of the afternoon before? She flushed. After all, what she had said was true. They had thought it a joke, all those others. She really was an old-fashioned woman. Divorce? It was grubby, rather disgusting, on the whole. A woman’s job was not to go hunting for one man after another, but to make the man she had married. As she intended to make Brice. Good old Brice. She had forgotten to tell him to get home early. They were going to Alice’s. Perhaps he would like to meet Ambrose, come out with him. She went to the telephone.

3

Alice’s dinners were always sedate and somewhat elaborate; Anne envied the perfection of service, and always had an eye to the novelty of the hors d’œuvres. This evening there were only the six of them and Alice’s older little girl, who had begged to stay up to see Aunt Nicky. She was a dark, spindling little thing, with a rather disconcerting habit of staring. After dinner she slipped her hand in Veronica’s, and when her mother insisted that she must go up to bed wound her arms and legs about Nicky and clung to her.

“But I don’t want to go,” she protested.

Nicky somehow unwound her, held her off a little in front of her. “Elizabeth,” she said, seriously, “that’s the best reason in the world for not doing a thing. Never do anything you don’t want to do. Unless you have to. This is one of the times that you have to. So—scoot!”

When the child had departed George Copeland laughed. “You know I don’t altogether go along with your philosophy, Veronica, my child,” said he. He was a tall man, heavy and dark, usually shy. It was generally supposed that he liked everyone a little, no one very much, and that in business he knew how to drive a sharp bargain. Alice adored him.

“George,” Nicky said, looking up at him, “you’re six feet of sham. It’s precisely your own philosophy.”

Alice flushed a little. “At any rate, Nicky,” said she, “we’ll admit it is yours. You certainly do only what you want to. And I must say I think they’re queer things, sometimes.”

Veronica stared for an instant, then settled back in her chair. “Ah,” said she. “I thought you and Ambrose had your heads together at dinner. I see he’s told you.”

“What is it?” asked Anne. “You’re always quarreling, you two.”

“I have not been quarreling,” Ambrose declared, setting his coffee cup on a table. “But there are things I object to. I’ll admit I said that.”

“And I think you are right, Ambrose,” said Alice. “Nicky will persist in living alone in a queer part of the city. That’s stupid, as I see it. Anne agrees with me. I don’t think any woman living alone ought to fill up her place with people off the street.”

Nicky laughed. “One person, please. But it does rather fill up the place. I have to sleep on the sofa.”

“You don’t even know the girl,” Ambrose affirmed.

“Her name seems to be Stella,” said Nicky. “She says she’s a thief. And none too straight otherwise. Also she was uncommonly hungry. So what could I do?”

“What will you do?” Brice Denison asked, smiling a little, leaning forward.

“That’s what I came out for,” said Nicky, calmly. “I’ve got to give her a chance to get away from her man, you see. And I’m broke.”

“It’s not your affair, I tell you,” said Ambrose, savagely. “Turn her out, if she hasn’t already left with everything you possess.”

“It certainly is not your affair, Ambrose,” Nicky returned. “How much is it yours, George?”

“Why do you put it up to George?” Alice asked quickly. “If it’s money you want——”

“Well, I do,” said Nicky.

“Is she married?” Alice asked again.

George Copeland said, kindly, ponderously, “Oh, come now, Alice. How much do you need, Nicky?”

Nicky grinned up at him. “It’s not one of the times you have to, you know, George!”

George’s hand went into his pocket.

An hour or two later, when the women had gone upstairs for wraps, Anne said, “Why not come back with us for the night, Nicky? You won’t have to sleep on the sofa and I think I have some clothes you might use for your—thief.”

Nicky laughed. “Thanks. I’ll come. So I won’t have to go back in the train with Ambrose.”

Alice looked troubled. “Why do you pretend to hate Ambrose?” she asked. “You don’t really, you know!”

Nicky was putting on her hat in front of a glass. “Well, no. I think I’m rather in love with him, really. Anyway, part of the time. But this business of marriage——!”

“It’s the only real happiness,” Alice said solemnly.

Veronica turned, eyebrows raised. “Are you happy, Alice? Are you, Anne? Are George and Brice happy?”

“Of course we are!” Alice cried, flushing. Anne echoed, “Of course we are!”

Nicky looked from one to the other. “Of course and of course you are! Great institution, this marriage, isn’t it? Nothing to equal it.”

The next morning Anne watched Brice and Veronica walk off towards the station together. She had gone through her closets and found a number of last year’s things for Nicky. She and Nicky’s protégée were about the same size, it seemed, and she had a pleasant sense of having been generous. They were mostly things that could have been made over for herself. There was a glow of kindliness about her. She even joked a little with Lucille, and told her about the clever sandwiches that preceded the dinner at Mrs. Copeland’s. She went upstairs and threw all the windows open to the soft breeze. Things were lovely today. It would have been a day to play in, but there were no engagements. Well, anyway, she intended to stay at home and mend. Brice had been rather pathetic that morning, searching for a shirt with all its buttons. She smiled at herself indulgently. Good old Brice. She really neglected him a little, sometimes. She loved to make pretty things; mending was stupid. But this day she would give up to Brice, make up to him a little, however secretly, for her moment’s disloyalty at the club the other day. Not that it was really disloyalty. It was nothing worse than silly, wild talk.

The door-bell sounded. In a moment Lucille came up with a florist’s box. “Mist’ Denison cert’n’y do think a heap o’ you-all,” said she. “I’m going to git me a husband.”

Anne laughed. When the girl had left the room she opened the box. Tulips, this time, and Ranney Copeland’s card among them. She arranged the flowers about the house, smiling a little. Then she went back to her sewing. She sewed on some buttons, and reached for a basket piled high with stockings. Mending was stupid work. The curtains blew inward. Everyone would be out on Main Street. She had not telephoned the order for dinner. It would please Brice if she went to the store herself. There was no darning-cotton, after all. There never was, when you wanted it. She laughed a little at the eternal elusiveness of things like darning-cotton, put the basket aside, got into her trimmest street things.

She had barely turned the corner when a low, brown car swung up to the curb and stopped just in front of her.

“Now don’t tell me you were trying to dodge me,” said Ranney Copeland’s gay voice.

Anne laughed. “I had forgotten you,” she said, giving him a teasing look.

Ranney’s composure was not shaken at that. He had stepped to the sidewalk beside her. “I believe you were coming to meet me,” said he, laughing with her. “Let me give you a lift, won’t you?”

It was not in Anne to resist stepping into that car; but when Copeland, at the next corner, turned away from the main street where the shops were, she protested. “Oh, I mustn’t, Ranney. I’ve an errand—really.”

“So have I,” he declared, cheerfully. “I’ve got to show you something I came across the other day. Won’t take a minute.”

Yet the minute prolonged itself into an hour. The car spun out of the town, climbed a hill or two with no lessening of speed, sped away to the open country. Good company, was Ranney. After all there was all day for the mending. It had waited so long that it could very well wait a while longer.

It was past noon when at last the car stopped before a little gray roadhouse, once the place where a tollkeeper lived, the old tollgate now standing upright at one side of the road like a gaunt arm held high in surrender before the exigencies of modern life. Inside, in the tiny dining-room, beside a window that looked into budding apple trees, a table was prepared for two. At her look Ranney laughed.

“You didn’t think I was going to let you stay in that house of yours on a day like this, did you?” he asked.

She flushed. “It is the house that I live in,” she said. But her attempt at dignity made no impression upon him.

“Oh, come now! You hate it, and I thought you’d like this! They give you chicken and waffles. Not bad.”

Her lip quivered a little as she sat down. This was it. This was the power she wanted, the power these people had with their magic of money. To be able to get away from the little rooms of life, to ignore distance, to speak a word over the telephone and find things prepared for you, things, any kind of things.

Only a minute or two, and some of those things were there on the table before them. When the waitress had left the room, Copeland leaned across towards Anne.

“I didn’t mean to be brutal, you know. Honestly, I wanted to give you a good time. Anne——?”

“I know, Ranney,” she said, a little wearily. “You’re a good friend.”

“That’s what I want to be,” said he. Presently he added, “Anne, I wonder if you know what you’ve meant to me, these past months.”

“I don’t know, Ranney. Sometimes I’m numb. Sometimes I don’t know anything, don’t feel anything.” Why was it that, with him, a sense of utter helplessness against her fate, against the web she was caught in, seemed always to close her in? Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred more added to Brice’s salary. What, after all, would that little bit give them? How far would she ever be able to get away from that eternal grubbiness?

“It’s been a good deal, Anne. I wish I could tell you.”

“No. Don’t.”

“But I wish I could. I want to. You’ve been good, letting me see so much of you.”

For the first time she thought of that. A good deal. Yes, it had been that to herself, too. It had seemed natural enough, yet it was, it had been, a good deal. Her eyes widened. She gave him a startled look. “Too much, perhaps, Ranney. Perhaps I had better——”

“Oh, come now, Nance! Don’t begin to play the prude, just because the old hens are cackling. You’re too good a sport for that. Don’t you listen to Alice.”

He was leaning towards her again.

“Look here, Anne! Just how much did you really mean of what you said yesterday?”

“Not one word,” she declared.

“I thought that. But why not? Why not, after all? Why not make a break for it? A woman like you can get anything she wants.”

Her thought flew to Brice. Abruptly it was as though his good old red head, his bowed shoulders, were there before her instead of young Copeland’s sleek one and his shoulders so carefully tailored.

“But I have everything I want,” she said, her lips trembling a little.

He laughed. “I said you were a good sport. But I do want to do something for you, Anne. I wish you’d make your husband give me that money to invest for him. There’s a good thing I know of, right now. You’d have a mighty nice turn-over in only a month or two.”

She leaned back, and he let her think it out. The morning’s revulsion of feeling was not entirely banished by the hour with Ranney. She was still feeling Brice, in that subconsciousness where a woman’s thought of her husband is ever present, as the dear old blunderer who must be protected and cared for. Her mood was still but little different from what it had been when she had wanted to mend his stockings and sew on his buttons. Old Brice—to do something for him—somehow to protect him from those queer ideas of his, from his inhibitions. That money. If only he would! Ease for them both. Yes, for Brice as well as for herself. Oh, she knew how he thought about it. He called it gambling. As if everybody didn’t do it. He said they must have something on hand, something always available, in case anything happened. As if men could not always borrow. He loathed credit accounts, he made himself an object of gloom over every bill. As though credit were not to be used! Besides, she could be careful. She would be.

“Ranney,” she said, her face suddenly a little pale, “I will do it. We have a common account at the bank. I will give you the money to invest for us. And be very grateful.”

4

Even more than before she was full of the feeling of wanting to do something for Brice. As she stepped out of the tub she remembered that she had not ordered dinner. She got into a bathrobe and called down to Lucille.

“No’m, they ain’t any meat,” the girl told her. “I thought maybe you-all was going out to dinner again, or else you forgot.”

Anne’s good humor held. “You ought to have reminded me, Lucille,” she said gently. “But never mind. You just put on your hat and run over to Main Street, won’t you? Get a steak, a good thick one. You’ll have to hurry.”

“Yes’m, I’ll go. It’s plenty o’ time yet.”

Anne heard the pleased note in the girl’s voice. Ordinarily, of course, it would be wretched discipline to let her go out except on her regular days. But this time was exceptional. It was too late for delivery by the market-man. She went back to her dressing. Fresh things, everything fresh, the prettiest she had, and an old dress he was fond of. She would make herself beautiful.

She was all the gentle wife when he returned, all grace, all fragrance. Her consciousness was pervaded by the feeling of having done something for him, even though he was unaware of it, of having protected him against himself in the matter of the investment through Ranney. She felt motherly towards him, and wifely, too. She would be very sweet to him, yielding, caressing. She felt that she was quite up to being gay and soothing, as well. As soon as he came in she knew that there would have to be soothing. He was a little late, and more than a little frowning. She went at once to the kitchen to have dinner put on the table. She talked about light things, little things. He was unresponsive. When the steak had been served he looked at the hovering maid and frowned again.

“You may wait in the kitchen, Lucille,” he said. As the door to the pantry swung to Anne looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Something has gone wrong. I can see that,” she said, gently. “But you can’t talk here. She’ll be listening just the same, you know.”

Brice ignored that. “Look here, Anne,” said he. “Mrs. Ogden was on the train tonight. Damned chatterer. She told me she saw you driving with Copeland this morning. It’s the second time I’ve had that sort of thing flung at me within the week. I won’t have it.”

Anne looked at him, her eyebrows slightly raised. Two little red spots appeared in her cheeks. She pressed her lips together, touched her foot to the bell under the table.

“Potatoes, Lucille,” she said, quietly. “And remain in the room, please.”

The rest of the meal passed in silence. In silence they passed into the living-room. Brice went for his pipe, was about to speak when the dusky face under the white cap appeared between the curtains.

“You-all want any coffee?”

“No!” snapped Brice; and Anne took a seat by the table under the lamplight.

The pipe under way, Brice, from the hearth-rug, turned to her. “You heard what I said. I won’t have it.”

Anne’s tongue touched her lips. She was finding her rôle of maternal patience difficult, yet something still remained of that warm protective feeling. Brice’s furies were soon over.

“I don’t like that man, anyway. I don’t like his confounded impertinence in trying to get you to give him that money to invest. When I have any investments to make I can do it myself. He’s an idler, a philanderer. I don’t want you seen with him.”

“You are speaking of a very good friend of mine, Brice.”

“Well, he’s not! None of them are. Another thing that Ogden woman told me. That speech of yours at the country club, all that rot about divorce. If that’s the sort of thing you’ve got to spout to keep up with them——!”

“You needn’t be vulgar!”

“I’m not as vulgar as they are. Hang it all, Anne, I don’t like these new friends of yours. They’re not our sort. I don’t like them.”

“What do you mean by our sort?”

“We’re not in their class. Not financially or any other way. And don’t want to be. That’s what I mean.”

She was angry enough now. “Have we got to go over this every night?” she demanded, standing and facing him. “I tell you, Brice, I am getting tired of it.”

“And God knows I am!”

“There was no harm in my driving with Ranney. In this year of grace a married woman can do as she likes. It’s cheap to be jealous.”

“I wouldn’t insult you by being jealous of you. You see that, Anne, you must see that! But I don’t like it. Anne—” his voice shook a little, “Anne, what’s the matter with things the way they used to be?”

She laughed, but her eyes did not soften. “Warmed-up meats, and the movies, and a thrill when somebody gave us a drive in a Ford! Oh, I’m long past that, Brice.”

He looked at her. His pipe had gone out, and he lighted it again as carefully as though he were going through with a ceremony, finally flicking the match behind the gas-log. Anne stooped and took it out again, deliberately depositing it in the ash-tray on the table. Her eyes avoided his. Presently he crossed the room to the desk they shared, the desk where the check-book lay, and in the left-hand pigeonholes, Brice’s side, neatly bound together with elastic bands, the household receipts and bills. The desk was a cheap one. The lid stuck a little, and as he pulled it open a vase toppled over.

“Damn—!” he ejaculated.

Anne said nothing, but picked up the tulips. Then she went to the pantry door.

“Lucille, bring a mop and the dust-pan, please,” she said. The tone put Brice hopelessly in the wrong.

He bit his lip. He had to wait while the girl gathered the bits of broken glass and dried the floor. Then he sat down.

Anne looked at his back. What had he gone to the desk for? She thought quickly. That check-book. She had not filled in the stub, but the check was gone. This was no time tonight, when he was in such a mood. She watched him covertly, thinking quickly, planning. It was not the first time they had quarreled, come to a place where going on seemed impossible, where both had tacitly agreed to stop, where both had adopted a new manner that dropped a curtain of silence behind them, shutting out the sordidness and the threatening disaster of such a scene as they had just been living through. She found her cue. A change of voice, of attitude, of manner.

She went to him, passed a hand lightly over his hair. It cost her something to do that, but the price was, after all, paid to herself in self-satisfaction at her magnanimity.

“You’re tired. Don’t work tonight. Let’s have a game of cribbage or something,” she said.

Brice laid his pipe on the top of the desk—it had gone out again—and reached up for her hand. He raised his head, and his eyes were moist. “You’re a good old girl, Nance!” he said, gruffly.

“What shall we play?” she asked. “Come along—you’re so tired!”

“In a minute. I took out new life-insurance policy today. Got to write the check for it. They made me pay high—I’m a bit below par, it seems. Nothing to worry about.”

New life-insurance. Then he, too, was counting on that coming increase in salary. But—that check-book.

“How much—is the premium?” she asked. Her lips felt dry.

“Two hundred.”

Two hundred, and she had drawn down to less than that. For his sake, all for his sake; and of course they would get it back, “turn it over,” but—

“Brice, don’t write the check tonight.”

“It won’t take a minute.”

“Brice, I—Brice—you can’t!”

Something in her voice made him turn again. If it had only been any other night than this, when he was overtired. “Brice, I drew some money today.”

His face fell. “How much?” he asked, quietly.

“Four thousand.”

That incredulity in his face, that bewilderment. “What do you mean? What’s happened?”

“Nothing has happened, my dear, except that I am determined to make you do the right thing, the sort of thing other men do. You worked hard for that money, Brice, and you were just keeping it idle there in the bank. I have invested it for you, for us.”

He stood up. His face was very white. “Would you mind telling me just what you have done?”

She laughed a little. “Why, I have told you! You would not do it yourself, so I’ve done it for you. That’s all. We’ll make a quick turn-over with it.”

“You have drawn out four thousand dollars?”

“Yes. And we’ll make money by it.”

He swallowed, started to speak, swallowed again. “I have taken out a new policy——”

“But I did not know that!”

“There’s six hundred due on the house on the first of May. One hundred and eighty-odd in bills. Anne——”

“You’ll have twelve hundred a year more, maybe fifteen.”

“Anne! It’s not true! You haven’t drawn out that money! You know I’ve never been willing to touch it. We’ve saved it little by little. I oughtn’t have left it there in the drawing account. Anne!”

“Oh, where’s your nerve, Brice? You’ll get it all back, and more, ever so much more. Ranney promises that.”

“Ranney!” His face flooded with color. “That damned scoundrel! Anne, you haven’t put that money in his hands? Good God, Anne!”

He had grasped her wrists. His face was close to hers, a new face, furious, threatening, outraged, a terrible male face. His grasp hurt her. She felt herself shaking, swept by an anger that was beyond any other anger she had ever known, anger that was dismay, that was shame, and fear, and physical pain.

“Anne, what’s this man Copeland to you, that he’s able to make you do such a thing to me? What’s he to you?”

Oh, she wanted to hurt him, to hurt him. To strike him where it would hurt him most.

“Just whatever I want him to be!” she said.

He dropped her wrists. The moment was eternal, a chaos in which new worlds were forming.

“How much of that talk—at—the—at the country club—did you really mean?”

“Perhaps you will find that out,” said Anne, “and sooner than you expect.”

They stared at each other, new people, strange people. His face grew crimson. A vein stood out in his forehead.

“You will take those words back,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “You will take those words—back!”

“I will not. I mean them, every one of them. I could have Ranney Copeland any moment I wanted him. And if I did take him, it would be no worse than other women do all the time. I can’t go on like this. I tell you I will not, I will not——!”

His lips were pressed together. He had become a strange man, with new things at work, in him, things she had never seen before, things she had not thought possible.

“You are quite right,” he said in a moment. “You shall not go on like this!”

“What do you mean?”

“I shall see Copeland tomorrow. I’ll put an end to it. I promise you that. The damned scoundrel.”

“Do you mean you will ask him for that money?”

He laughed shortly.

“You shall not! I tell you, Brice Denison. You’ve shamed me enough, grubbing along in this hole of a place, making me go without things, making me— O-o-oh! You’re no man!”

His face grew pale. “And you think Copeland is?”

“I know he is.”

He turned away, and turned back to her. His hands were shaking, but his face was still. “You will think better of this by tomorrow, Anne.”

She looked back at him from the doorway. “I’ll never think better of it. Never differently, anyway. You’ll see. Oh, you’ll see!”

5

On the morning after her quarrel with Brice she was brought abruptly out of sleep by a sense of disaster, of things shattering and falling about her. Then she remembered.

She had left him downstairs the night before and lain awake for hours before he came up. She had pretended to be asleep, had listened to his quiet movements, at last to his breathing from the bed beside her own. For a long while she lay there awake, knowing that he was awake, too, wondering whether he was as tense with anger as she was, whether she had hurt him enough, hurt him to a realization of his failure, his weakness. She was not sorry she had hurt him. She could have hurt him more, more.

At last sleep came; now, when she awoke, it was to find that he had dressed and left the room. A glance at the clock told her that he must also, long since, have left the house.

Very well. After that crisis of last night it would not be easy to gloss over this quarrel as they had always done before. There had never been anything like this. He had misjudged her, set at naught everything she had done for him. He had scoffed at her friends, behaved utterly outrageously about Ranney Copeland. He intended to shame her further by getting that money back. Well, he shouldn’t. Anyway, he could not do it at once. Before she and Ranney had parted yesterday there had been words that came back to her now.

“Anne, do you know how much I think of you? Do you, Anne?”

She had parried that. “I know we’re good friends, Ranney.”

He had put a hand over hers for an instant. “Friends! Anne, you don’t know what you’ve been to me, these past months.”

“You too,” she had murmured.

“I’ve got to go away tomorrow. Only a few days. When I come back I am going to tell you something.”

After she had given him the check he had looked at her intently. She had read things in that look. “You’re not afraid, Anne?”

She had stepped away from him, laughed a little. “What could I be afraid of—with you, Ranney?” she had asked.

Yes, she remembered that, now. Yesterday she had been afraid to think of what meaning there might lie in his words, in his manner. Today what stood out was that he would be away for a few days, so Brice could not get the check back at once, not until she had further chance to bring him to his senses.

She got up, began to dress. There were small faint marks on her arm where Brice’s fingers had pressed, and her anger was fanned to new vigor when she saw them. That she should have had to stand there, held like that, hurt like that! Like any common fishwife, her husband a brute, a brawler. To be forced to listen, to look at him. Oh yes, she had answered him. “Whatever I want him to be!” “I am not going on!” Oh, she had hurt Brice. She was glad she had hurt him. “I could have Ranney Copeland any moment I wanted him.” She had watched those words sting.

How could they go on, with those words, stark, between them? She left the table, went into the living-room. A bit of the broken vase that Lucille had overlooked gleamed in the sunlight; she picked it up. The petals of some of the tulips had fallen. A newspaper lay on the rug. There were matches and burned tobacco on a tray on the table, and a match on the floor. The desk was still open. Brice had forgotten his pipe. The room wore a dissolute air. It was a place where passion had broken loose and left its débris. In the cool morning light it looked haggard. She ran up the stairs to her bedroom.

How was she to go on? If she and Brice really broke, what would she do? What could she do? What did any woman do, unless she married again? What else was there? Work? She had no yearnings for work. She knew nothing about it, but all that she wanted to know. She wanted other things. Life. That was what she wanted so, life. Hadn’t she a right to it?

She paced up and down the room, still in its disorder of the night, the sheets thrown back on the beds, Brice’s soiled collar on the bureau, the dress she had tossed aside drooping over a chair. Intolerable. She went to a window. Those houses across the street. Stupid people. Oh, why wouldn’t Brice see, why wouldn’t he do what other men did? Why, why? Oh, hideous, the whole thing, hideous, useless, senseless. That child across the way on her roller-skates. Such a noise.

Then she started. Ranney Copeland’s brown car had turned the corner, was stopping at the curb in front of her house. She drew back, a hand to her cheek. Then he had not gone away. Perhaps Brice had seen him already. Her face flamed, her heart quickened its beat. She laid a hand on the curtain. Then she felt weak. Not Ranney. Not Ranney getting out of the car, but Alice. Alice, running up the cement walk to the steps.

Hastily she looked into the mirror again. Then she went down. The bell had rung twice. Not like Alice, that haste. Where was Lucille? She opened the door herself.

Alice came in. Strange, how anyone as small as Alice could give such an effect of bustling. Anne took in at a glance the clothes she had on, and the haste with which she had donned them.

“Nance! I’m so glad you are home. I’ve come begging.”

“This room is a sight,” Anne said. “What’s the matter?”

“George is going to Boston, and I want to go with him.”

“Why on earth don’t you?”

“It’s the children. You know how I feel about leaving the children alone with the servants. I tried to get Miss Whitney, but she’s out on a baby case. Oh, Anne, darling, couldn’t you and Brice stay at the house just for two or three nights? I telephoned Nicky, but she’s getting that miserable girl off somewhere today. You wouldn’t have a thing to do, really. But you know how I feel about the children.”

Anne’s mind jumped. She and Brice. Two or three nights. She had wanted to get away, anywhere, just for a time until things blew over.

“Don’t be silly, Alice,” she said. “Of course we’d just love to come.”

“You couldn’t come right away, could you? You can telephone Brice from the house. I’ll drive you over. I’ve got Ranney’s car. He’s away, and George took ours down to have something done to it.”

“I’ll have to get a bag, and speak to Lucille.”

“But hurry, like a love, won’t you? George wants to start early. He’ll probably be there in a fidget by the time we get back.”

Anne went upstairs, for a moment stood in her bedroom with her hands pressed to her cheeks. Then she laughed. Oh, this time Fate had played into her hands! Not Brice. No, not with Brice. She would go, not leave him a word, but just go. For two nights. Only for two nights. It would give him a chance to think. Give him time to find out, to cool off, to come to his senses.

She pulled open a drawer, brought a suitcase from the closet. She would not need much. Five minutes later she ran down the stairs.

“I must speak to Lucille,” she said.

But Alice Copeland was already opening the front door. “Oh, you can telephone from the house,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you? I don’t want to keep George waiting.”

As they turned the corner Anne looked back. Lucille was standing on the porch, gazing after the car.

That day and the two following, in the Copelands’ house, gave Anne much time for thinking. The rich restfulness of the house itself, the quiet perfection of food and service, even the bed she slept on, with its deep box spring and mysteriously soft mattress and embroidered linen, all were as balm to her. For in such a mood as that in which Anne was it is physical things that soothe tense nerves. She did not see much of the children. With childhood’s prescience they understood well enough that Aunt Nance was not one who greatly desired their presence.

She had waved farewell to Alice and the impatient George. Alice had come back three times to kiss the children over again or to leave more directions with their nurse.

A New York decorator had “done” Alice’s drawing-room—old Georgian paneling, furniture whose dignity matched it, mellow things that were restful and beautiful and costly. Things, things that she, Anne, ought to have. Why not? Why had Alice Copeland, and the women like Alice Copeland, a house like this? And why, oh, why, had not Anne Denison one like it?

She drifted upstairs to Alice’s sitting-room. She knew it well, but saw it afresh today. Here were bright printed linens. Almost unconsciously she computed their cost by the yard. Here were soft chairs, a deep couch with embroidered pillows, magazines and books, a telephone under a lacy French doll. She remembered that she had not spoken to Lucille before she left, and crossed to the telephone. But she stopped, the receiver still on its hook. Why should she? Why, after all, should she give Brice a clew to where she was? She smiled as the thought came. This was the last place he would think of her being in, here, domiciled in the Copeland house as its mistress for the time. She wanted to punish him, wanted to worry him, to make him suffer. That was the way to manage him, this time. Had she not tried other ways, at other times, and had it all to go over again? She would let him have time to think, time to realize what she was to him, time to come to his senses. She raised the receiver, but instead of her own number she gave that of the market where she dealt. A roast. He liked the cold-meat régime. Let him try it. A large roast, that would last for three dinners; for the rest, she would trust to Lucille’s ingenuity.

At luncheon she spoke to the maid. “If anyone calls or telephones, you need not say that I am staying here while Mrs. Copeland is away. It will not be necessary. You may just make a note of the calls, and we will give them to Mrs. Copeland when she gets back.”

Three quiet days, two nights of soft sleep. On Friday Alice returned.

“What a darling you’ve been, Nance! The children look splendid,” she said, as though she had left them for a month and dreaded to find them small shadows of themselves.

Anne laughed; she was in the mood to laugh easily, well pleased with herself. “But it’s been heavenly,” she said.

“I hope Brice didn’t mind. I do hope they made him comfortable.”

Brice. She had not thought of it, but Alice, of course, would discover that Brice had not been there. “To tell you the truth, dear,” she said, “I didn’t bring Brice. He’s such an old stay-at-home.”

Alice’s face fell. “Oh, my dear, then I shouldn’t have begged you to come.”

“Nonsense. Brice was probably glad to get rid of me.”

Anne laughed as she said it, but Alice’s face was still serious. “Of course you don’t mean that,” she said. “But just the same, I feel conscience-stricken. You know I’m a perfect goose about leaving the children, but I’d rather leave them than be separated from George, even for a day or two. Silly, isn’t it?”

It was mid-afternoon when she drove home. From the car she noticed that the front window shades were all at different heights. But aside from that the whole house, even the street itself, struck her as though she had been away from it for a year. The same, all too precisely the same, with nothing changed. Yet the details stood out in new aspects, and aspects not beautiful. In the haste of her departure she had forgotten her key. A disheveled Lucille, capless, untidy, opened the door for her and stared.

Anne turned and waved to Alice. “Good-by! I’ve had a wonderful time,” she called out. The car slowly gathered speed and went on down the narrow street.

“Well, Lucille! You have not changed for the afternoon, have you?” she said, but still smiling a little. She was not going to be severe. They all let themselves go, unless you were right there to stand over them.

“My land! I thought you-all wasn’t coming back any more,” said the girl. Anne had started up the stairs. Lucille was following with the suitcase.

“I have been away with Mrs. Copeland,” said Anne. “Did you and Mr. Denison get along all right? Did the roast come?”

“Yes’m, it come. Mist’ Denison ain’t been home las’ night.”

Anne stood still for an instant, went on into her room. She thought quickly. Must carry it off. “Oh, that’s true. I forgot he had to go away. Well, we must have an extra good dinner for him tonight.”

Again she ordered by telephone. Tomorrow, really, she would begin to go to the store. Then, alone at last in her own room, she put her things to rights, slept for an hour, dressed herself in her prettiest. She was not going to plan the coming interview with Brice. Oh, he would be glad enough to see her. Time would have done its work. They had both been rather foolish. After dinner there would be a little pretty penitence on her part, embraces on his.

She waited dinner an hour. Brice did not come. She thought of telephoning the office, realized that everyone would have gone home. At last she ate alone. The dinner was good, and her appetite was good. How childish Brice was. Once or twice she smiled as she visualized his coming in, the quiet, cautious opening of the door, his fumbling in the hall, her placid self there under the lamp, quite as though nothing unpleasant or unusual had ever passed between them, quite as though there had been no absence. “Hello, dear! Late, aren’t you?” Yes, she smiled. She could afford to wait. She knew how to manage Brice.

Nine, ten o’clock came, and Brice did not come. Until long past twelve she sat there, a slowly returning anger mounting within her. So he had not got over it yet. He was playing her own game. Lucille had said that he had not come home at all, the night before. Oh, if that was what he was going to do, all right! All right!

Yet she lay far into the night, sleepless, angry, restless, thinking. It was despicable, his turning the tables like this. But she would not worry. He needn’t think she would worry.

In the morning she was aware of Lucille’s curious eyes. Before noon she telephoned to the office of Whitten & Company. No, Mr. Denison was not there. Would the person who answered be so kind as to leave a message on his desk, asking him to call up his house when he came in? Then she dressed for the street. On the way to the door she stepped into the kitchen, and said, quite casually:

“By the way, Lucille, when Mr. Denison calls up, just say that Mrs. Denison wants to have dinner a little early this evening, will you?” He would know, from that.

That afternoon she spent at the country club, went there and back in Mrs. Ogden’s car. Gayer than usual, she followed the other women around the links. She must take some lessons in golf. You weren’t in it, really, unless you played.

“No’m. Ain’t anybody telephoned,” said Lucille, on her return. Then she remembered—Saturday! The office closed early. He would not have gotten her message.

Again she sat at dinner alone, sat there, not eating. No appetite. But of course, that tea at the club. No other reason.

Sunday. No Brice. The long day alone. Again she lay awake.

On the morrow her anger began to be mixed with sheer fright. This was not like Brice. Never would Brice go as far as this, just to frighten her, just to get even. Something had happened. By mid-afternoon she realized that she could not, again, sit alone at that table, wait alone in that room for him. She must know. Yet something of pride, pride waiting to turn again into anger, made her want, as it were, to cover her tracks. Foolish—oh, she knew it was foolish. Nothing could, could have happened. Later she would laugh at her panic. And it might get into the papers. House telephone numbers could be traced. She went out to a drugstore, one where she was not known. She had to gather her courage before she could drop a coin into the telephone. The police-station. No accident reported. The hospitals. Nothing. No use calling up places in town.

She leaned against the wall of the booth for a moment before she came out of its fetid air. Brice. Brice. What was it? What was it?

6

Yet it was not until the following day that she found courage enough to do what she knew must be done. Go to him. That was it. He had always hated to have her go to the office, yet she had been there five or six times, knew some of the men there. The meeting would be none the easier with others around. She would have to make it casual. She could. Just walk in a little hurriedly. “Sorry to interrupt, my dear, but I wanted to tell you——” and so on. That. Just to see him. Just to show him that she was willing to take things up where they used to be. She knew she could count upon Brice to do the same thing.

Half an hour on the train. The ferry. The short walk. Those doors, where Brice went in every day, and the elevator. The outer office. A smiling nod to the man there. One of the partitioned rooms beyond, that Brice shared with two or three other men. She put her hand on the door. How her heart was beating! A tap; then she turned the knob, went in. Brice’s desk by the window, so oddly free from papers. The men there looked up. Mr. Farren pushed back his chair, came towards her smiling, hand out.

“Mighty glad to see you, Mrs. Denison. Hope Denison’s all right?”

Still she smiled. But how stiff her face felt! Must not let them see, must not let them guess. She must think quickly, speak naturally. Not ask them, not ask Farren. No, she must not do that. To think quickly. That was it. To think of the best thing to do, and to smile just enough.

“Quite all right, thank you. I wonder—I thought—do you suppose I could see Mr. Whitten for a moment?”

She was thankful that idea came to her. Thankful she managed to speak the words, any words. Thankful that her voice sounded enough like her own not to give her away to these men, Brice’s associates for how many years?

An odd little look came and went in Farren’s eyes. Why was he so brisk, so exceedingly cheery? Why was he embarrassed?

“Oh, I’m quite sure you can, Mrs. Denison. Just a moment. I’ll see.”

Then the room of the head of the firm. Twice before she had met him, once here in the office, once at his house when Mrs. Whitten had asked her and Brice to dine. He received her kindly enough.

“Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Denison? What can I do for you?”

She sat down, and he turned in his swivel chair to face her, leaning back with his elbows on its arms, the tips of his fingers together. She knew that Farren had closed the door behind him, that a young woman left a desk in a corner and followed him out. Suddenly the courage that had carried her on was not there. It was Brice, Brice she wanted.

“Mr. Whitten,” she said, “I have come to ask about my husband.”

“Ah. Yes. Of course. I am sorry, Mrs. Denison, we are all sorry, that things have turned out so.”

“He is not here.”

The old man took up a paper-knife that was on his desk. “Well, of course, Mrs. Denison, he has told you that. But we are sorry. I may say that we are very sorry indeed.”

What did he mean? She could only look at him.

“There was really no necessity for his leaving so abruptly. In fact, we are disappointed that he felt he must do so. Disappointed in him. These things—ah—happen. No good taking them that way. I am sure that Denison can find a place more—ah—more fitted to his—ah—hum. We gave him a month, you know, to look about in.”

Mr. Whitten paused. He had the air of having said all there was to say. She clasped her hands together in her lap to still their trembling, leaned a little towards him.

“Mr. Whitten,” she said, “will you please tell me just what has happened? Mr. Denison—my husband—has—has told me very little.”

His eyes sought the window, came back to her, rested on his hand that fidgeted with the paper cutter. “Well, my dear lady, there is so very little to tell. These things happen. There was the question, of course, of filling the place that will be vacant on the first of the month. Our Mr. Grant is retiring.”

“Yes, I know.”

“The promotion really lay between your husband and Mr. Farren. It is the policy of our firm to give the more responsible positions to men who have, so to speak, an interest in the firm. A small thing, but a guarantee of their feeling the responsibility as their own. On the whole, our choice was for your husband. A few days ago, on Thursday, I think, we put the matter before him, suggested his taking up a small block of the company’s stock. We set the amount as low as two thousand dollars.”

Anne felt her lips grow cold.

“It was a shock, Mrs. Denison; I may say that it was a real shock, when your husband confessed that he had no savings whatever. We had not—ah—thought him that sort of man. We—hum—expressed ourselves accordingly. I feel we were quite within our rights in doing so. Mr. Denison has received a fair salary here, a very fair salary, and we expect our men to—ah—to live a little better than within their means. Our firm is a conservative one. Therefore, we expressed ourselves accordingly. Mr. Denison seemed somewhat nervous. Somewhat wrought up, if I may say so. Not like himself. He—ah—he stated that he regretted the firm’s lack of confidence in him, though I think we had not gone quite so far as to imply that, and suggested that we might care to fill his place here. On the whole, Mrs. Denison, that seemed the best thing to do, since he took it that way, and considering our sincere disappointment. But we gave him, of course we gave him a month in which to look about. We were exceedingly sorry when he came in the next day and informed us that he had decided to leave at once. Exceedingly sorry.”

She was not trembling now. It seemed to her that she had not life enough to tremble, that she was still, still, with life dead within her, a heaviness that weighted her whole body. Yet she stood up.

“Thank you, Mr. Whitten,” she said. “You have told me what I wished to know.”

He held open the door for her. She knew that she was shaking hands with him, knew that his eyes, really kindly eyes, were upon her own.

“I am sorry, Mrs. Denison. Great mistake, great mistake for young people to live up to their means, beyond them. Great mistake to be hasty.”

That outer office, the elevator, the street. On Thursday. That was the day after she went to Alice’s. Thursday. Brice had not gone home. At a street crossing a bell clanged, and she drew back, feeling her lips grow cold. An ambulance. Someone must know. There must be someone. Ambrose. But he’d take Brice’s side. If Brice really, really had gone. There was Nicky.

She walked on and on. What time did Nicky get home? No matter. She could wait. Or fill in the time with walking. Then, at last, Nicky’s door.

“Child!” Nicky cried. “What has happened to you? You look like a ghost!”

“I’ve been—shopping,” said Anne. “I thought, perhaps—tea——”

“You drop down on that sofa,” said Nicky. “I can do better than tea. You need it.”

“I’d rather have tea.”

She was conscious of Nicky’s eyes furtively on her, but she talked, talked of anything. Were the clothes right for that girl? Yes, Alice had been away. With George. So silly about George. No, the shops had been stupid. She hadn’t bought anything. It tired one so, shopping. What had Nicky been doing? Had she seen Ambrose?

“Saw him last night,” Nicky told her, sipping her tea.

“Did he—did he say anything about Brice?”

“No. What should he say?”

“Nothing. Only I thought——”

“Look here, Anne, what’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with Brice?”

“Nothing. How absurd you are, Nick.”

Veronica put down her teacup, stood before Anne with her hands loosely clasped behind her back. “Anne, you’re going to play the devil with Brice, one of these days,” she said. “You haven’t by any chance done it already, have you?”

“Just because I asked whether Ambrose had said anything about him? You do go rather far, Nicky, even for you!”

“Oh, all right!” said Nicky, with a shrug. “Going? I’ll be out again soon.”

Lucille at the door, tousled, her apron soiled. No matter. Just to get up to her room. That horrible feeling of having been tramping the streets with her soul bare, for anyone to see, to look into. Like that dream that comes to everyone of walking abroad without clothing. Now, quivering, wanting to get away from the light. But there was something she must think of. Oh, yes. Must not let the girl see things were wrong. Back-door gossip.

“Lucille, I’ve had dinner,” she called down the stairs.

By morning she was braced by that blessing of womankind, the instinctive demand of preserving appearances at any cost. One must wait. Hold hard and wait. Above all, not think. No, not think. Shut the mind to those thoughts. Shut them out. Wait.

Yet, as though it were indeed a house of death, she shrank away from the door when the postman rang. It was nothing, a bill, an advertisement of a millinery opening. It was after ten o’clock when a messenger-boy dropped his wheel at the curb and came running up to the door. Lucille brought her the little book to be signed, with its grimy sheet scribbled over with names. Not until the girl had vanished into the back of the house again did she really look at the letter in her hand. Then her knees trembled, from disappointment or relief. It was only from Ranney Copeland, his business address in the corner. So he was back. In a moment she ran a finger under the flap of the envelope. Something dropped to the floor, but her eyes were on what Ranney had scrawled.

“Dear Nance,—Just back, and find this addressed to you in my care. When your fortune is made, you’ll be getting dozens of these. I thought it might amuse you to taste the first sample. See you soon.

Yours,

Ranney.”

That was all. Some business circular, then. How sick she felt.

She stooped to the letter that had dropped, turned it over. The handwriting was Brice’s.

7

What becomes of the hours when life stands still? Anne Denison thought of that, afterward, and wondered. At the time, during that day and the next, there was no thought for Anne, but only feeling. Her world had burst, like an electric bulb, and there was no light. Nothing was real. The very furniture in her house took on strange shapes, grotesque. The sunlight dazzled her. The dark made her want to cry out and beat it away. She was aware of Lucille’s anxious hovering at times, knew that food was set before her which she had not ordered and which she did not eat. Now and again she read Brice’s letter, then hid it away, locked it away, only to take it out again and read:

“Anne, I have been a blind fool. Even when the girl said you had gone in his car, I couldn’t believe it until I learned that he had left town. God knows I don’t want to stand in your way. The four thousand, and what you can get on the equity in the house, will see you through until you get your divorce. Let it be desertion. I will not contest.

Brice.”

Gradually, after a day or two, she began again to think, to reason. It was all plain enough. Those words she had said when they parted, the night of the quarrel. “Anything I want him to be” and “Perhaps you will find that out sooner than you expect.” Her anger, her miserable, childish anger when she said them, the satisfaction she had had in hurting him. Her leaving the next day for Alice’s, and Alice driving her brother-in-law’s showy car. Lucille on the porch, staring after them. She could imagine that scene when Brice returned, and what Lucille must have told him.

“No, sir, she ain’t come in yet. She went off this mornin’ with Mist’ Copeland in the car.”

Something like that. And Brice’s anger at her disregard of his wishes, her apparent flaunting of his command not to be seen again with Ranney Copeland. Her not coming home. She turned hot and cold when she thought of what Brice had been through, that next day, at the office. His shame, when he had had to confess to Mr. Whitten that he had not so much in the world as two thousand dollars, the two thousand dollars that was only half of what she had drawn just the day before to put into Ranney Copeland’s hands, the two thousand dollars that would have given him that coveted and well-deserved better position, a real place in the world. Yes, her not coming home, after that next day of his. What sort of night had Brice spent? What sort of night, while she slept so dreamlessly in that soft bed of Alice’s? She recalled what Mr. Whitten had told her. On that Thursday Brice had gone back, closed up his desk, left.

Strangely enough, for a long time she could not look at Brice’s bureau. At last she was as strangely drawn to it, stood before it, touched it and drew away, before she gathered courage enough to open the drawers. A few things, only a few things had he taken. In his closet but one suit was missing, an old one. Her picture was still on the bureau, that picture she had had taken last year in the gown she had worn to the New Year’s dance. There had been another, of young Anne Warren, that she had declared absurd, with its hair arranged in that out-of-date way, that she had made him keep out of sight in the drawer. The frame was there, empty. She dropped to her knees by the bureau. He had taken that young Anne Warren, that Anne who had won his heart. Anne Denison, Anne in the ball gown, he had left behind.

Gradually, as the difficulties of the situation made themselves clear to her, she became filled with a cold anger against Brice, an anger far different from the earlier blazing fury. That he should have dared to believe that thing of her, that he should have dared to misunderstand her, and put her in this ghastly position. Oh, yes, she had said those bitter things. But she had lived with him ten years. How could he, how could he! Never in her heart had she been unfaithful, undevoted to him, any more than in her actions. Of course every woman, in those moments of desperate rebellion that the closeness of the marriage bond brings, thinks of what might happen, thinks of what she might do, thinks perhaps of leaving it all. But she had never meant it. No, never, never! Deliberately she closed her mind to what might have been going on in Brice’s mind. She would not let herself think again of what he had gone through during those days of her unexplained absence.

She did not love Ranney Copeland. But she had loved Brice, and this was what had come of it. Ranney Copeland? How much of truth was there in what she had said to Brice, that she could have Ranney Copeland whenever she wanted him? She thought of that, shrank away from the thought, grasped at it again. What else was there?

But first the world had to be faced, people had to be told, and the telling must come from herself, if the tale were to wear the guise she wished it to. There came a morning when she telephoned to make sure that Alice would be at home. An hour later she was in Alice’s upstairs sitting-room, where Mrs. Copeland was remonstrating with one of her small daughters who did not wish to go out for a walk. A patient maid was standing near holding the other child by the hand. The little girl who was consciously good eyed the one before whom Alice was kneeling with that stolid understanding of childhood, and with something of the good little girl’s self-complacency at the iniquity of the naughty one.

“But—I—am—not—going out with Nelly!” Elizabeth was saying.

“Yes, you are, darling! Come—put your arm in your coat.”

“Won’t!”

“Put your arm in, darling, for mother.”

“I won’t wear this old coat. I’m going to wear my new blue coat.”

“I’ll tell you!” Alice’s voice sounded as though she had just thought of the most wonderful thing. “I’ll tell you! You shall wear your blue coat the very next time you go out with mother.”

One thin arm went into the brown coat. “Well. When am I going out with you, mother?”

“We’ll drive down to meet daddy this afternoon. There—now kiss me, and run.”

“How wonderful you are with them, Alice,” said Anne, a little sadly, when the children had left the room. “Where do you get all that patience?”

“Oh, it isn’t patience, really. It’s a sort of trying to meet them on their own ground, the poor little darlings. You know how you feel, yourself, sometimes, about doing things you don’t want to do, and wearing things you detest.”

“Is there really anything you detest, Alice?”

“Why, yes, of course there is. I don’t think about it very much, but there must be.”

“Ah, you have everything! Just look at this room of yours, at this house.”

Alice’s face grew serious. “Nance, I wish you would let me say something to you.”

“Oh, I know what you want to say.”

“I don’t believe you do, not really. I don’t minimize the comfort of having things, Nance, just because I’ve been one of the fortunate ones that have always had them. But, honestly, Anne dear, it is not things that make one’s happiness. I’d be happy anywhere, anyhow, with George and the children. I would. And you have Brice, Nance. He’s such a dear!”

Again came that ghastly coldness about her lips that she had felt in Mr. Whitten’s office. How had Brice dared to make it so difficult for her? She had to hold hard to that anger against him, had to find something to give her courage.

“Oh, yes, Brice. That’s what I’ve come here this morning for, Alice. To tell you, before anyone else. Brice and I have separated.”

Alice stared at her for a moment, then abruptly sat down. Anne moved a step or two across the room, back again, let herself sink softly into a low, deep chair. She thought she had done it well. But why, why, why did she have to do it at all?

Alice had flushed. “Anne Denison! How can you say a thing like that? Why, Anne!”

“It is quite true. Of course we are not going to make a scandal of it. There’s a way of doing it decently. Desertion, I believe, or something like that.”

For a long minute Alice Copeland sat there without moving, looking at Anne. Then tears came to her eyes. “Nance! It can’t be too late. Let me see Brice.”

“No use, Alice. Brice has already left town. Oh, it’s quite all right, much the best thing for us both.”

“You don’t believe that! It isn’t possible that you can!”

“Oh, please, Alice dear! It’s all settled, or will be, as soon as the thing can be arranged.”

“But divorce! Anne, you can’t.”

Anne said nothing. Was it all going to be as hard as this?

“Anne! Why, you’d be like that dreadful Callum woman we were talking about at the country club that day, or like Tessie Ogden. The last time she married again the day after she got her decree.”

“And why not? It’s quite legal, I believe.”

“Legal! After those promises, and the life together? Oh, Anne!” Alice was openly sobbing now. Anne did not look at her. Presently she spoke again. “Anne, there isn’t, there couldn’t be anyone else? Brice isn’t that sort.”

“I told you we’d call it desertion.”

“But Anne, Nance darling, think of the loneliness! What would you do, what could you do?”

“What does any woman do, any woman like me? I don’t know how to earn my own living. I’m not young. I’m not old, either. I want life. Yes, I do, I want life. Well, how does any woman get it?”

They sat there a while without speaking, without looking at each other. Presently Alice went to a window and leaned out. “Don’t let them play off the sidewalk, Nelly,” she called.

When she came back her manner had changed. “You’ve told me your news, dear. I suppose I ought to tell you ours. Or has Ranney already told you?”

“Ranney?”

“His engagement is to be announced at last. I had come to believe it never would be, but they settled it while he was there. He’s played fast and loose. She’s a nice girl. Too nice for Ranney. He’s so different from George.”

The light in the room had grown strange. Anne’s lips were cold. She must keep calm, keep smiling. “Oh, you’re always too hard on Ranney, my dear,” she heard herself saying. “He’s not a bad sort. I rather like Ranney. What is the girl’s name?”

A few minutes later Alice followed her out towards the stairs. “Anne, wait a moment. Forgive me for asking. Have you money enough? Because George and I——”

“Oh, plenty of money. Plenty. Thanks just the same, dear. You give Ranney my love and tell him I’m waiting to hear all about it. I must go now. Don’t look like that, Alice. I’m all right.”

Alice kissed her. “I can’t bear to think of it,” she said, with a catch in her voice. “Let me try, let George go to him. It can’t be too late.”

“Don’t, Alice, please, please,” Anne said. She drew away. The world went black.

8

That night she lay looking out at the stars, and thinking. Another night came back to her when she had watched the stars with Brice, while they were still in that first new, terrible strangeness of union, of unforeseen distastes, on her part of mute shrinking from contacts and bareness of mind and body which Brice took so naturally and joyously. She had thought Pelham a strange place for him to choose for their honeymoon; a place where there was nothing to do, no one to be seen, no one to show herself to. The cottage on the bank of the stream, their tiny, too-intimate room with one window, the table where they had their meals with the old sisters whose sole means of livelihood came from boarding the casual trout-fishermen and more frequent lumbermen—she would have been restive there, if it had not been for Brice’s adoring. That she had welcomed. She would yield her hand, her lips, with a gratifying feeling of conferring. At times Brice had taken her gifts hesitantly, worshipfully; at other times tempestuously. The moments of devoutness pleased her more. Even in those early days she had told herself it was that attitude, that state of mind, that she would foster in him.

On their last evening in the woods it had been Brice who had shown reluctance to leave them. Even in that hour Anne was for going on to the next thing, the new thing, the thing beyond, unafraid of whatever it might be, purposing always to sway it towards herself, to make it her own. She had never questioned that she could influence and form the new life they were going into together.

But Brice had drawn her out of the cottage that evening, and they had walked along the rutted road, the dark woods treading the hill on their left, the stream murmuring at the foot of the slope like music heard in a dream. The moon was young and pale, blending its light with the lambency of the stars. They walked through mottled shadows, Brice’s arm about her. Sometimes as they emerged into an unshadowed place where the moonlight found her hair his arm would tighten. She would let her head fall back against his shoulder, gratified at his tremor of emotion, at the sense of power it gave her.

They came to a place where the road dropped to the level of the stream, where a broad rock from which Brice had often fished protruded above a pool where trout would rise a few hours later. They stood there side by side. Before the silvery beauty gemmed in the setting of the surrounding woods Brice’s arm had dropped away. He loved the place. He had led his love and his emotion to it, and stood with his face upturned to the stars, wrapt, a votary before the altar on which he has just laid his gift. Anne felt the withdrawal of his spirit. She was more conscious of Brice than of the shimmering water, of the stars. She was a little teased, amused, impatient at his enraptured, upturned look. She wanted his return to herself.

“Dear,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Brice looked at her. “You are,” he murmured. “You are beautiful. Our last night here.”

“Are you glad?” she laughed.

He did not answer. He did not touch her, did not move. All playfulness and all passion seemed to have left him. He was remote, a being other than the man who had held and caressed her. She became restive. She went close to him, brushed against him, raised her face in the moonlight.

Afterwards they sat on the rock until the moon dropped over the hill, and the pool lay dark beneath the shadowing trees, and the stars shone on the face of the stream, on Brice and herself. She was satisfied.

“We ought to go in,” he said. “I ought not to keep you out here in the dampness. You might get chilled.”

She smiled to herself, moved her cheek softly against his, yielded herself more to his arms. “This is so sweet,” she whispered. “And we are going away tomorrow.”

He pressed his lips to her hair, on her closed eyes, while the stars moved on.

Oh, she would always know how to manage Brice, how to bring him back to consciousness of her! What was instinctive at that early time had gradually developed into a technique that perfected itself as the need grew for holding him, controlling him. She had believed that she knew Brice’s mind and heart, all his impulses and reactions, just as she believed she managed them all for his well-being and her own. Her ultimate conception of successful marriage was that the woman must dominate, possess, and manage the man; woman’s part was to be the silent mainspring, man’s the clicking wheels.

Now and again during the years she had been aware of that same silent withdrawal of Brice’s which she had first encountered in Pelham under the stars. She believed it was only his masculine inarticulateness, or mental indolence, or contentment too absolute to be broken by speech or action. If by chance she suspected herself momentarily forgotten or disapproved of, she had always known what to do. She could make him see her again as beautiful, admirable, desirable. If it came to argument, she had always been able to make him say that she was right, or at any rate to yield to her. Only this last time had she failed; and she would not have failed even then, if Brice had not, in this inexplicable way, disappeared.

But there was the bare, ugly fact. He had disappeared. He had done the utterly unforeseen, and now she was lying in Alice’s house, her body filled with the dull ache of fever, looking again at the passage of the stars. Tonight the pool was not a peaceful depth above which she rested in Brice’s arms and drew him to thought of her. It was not peaceful. It was an enveloping blackness, hideously silent, that surged about her and buffeted her about like a leaf in the wind, helpless, rebellious, longing to rest, longing to find again some firmness of thought that eluded, that spun dizzily and mockingly through her brain. She was alone. There was no Brice. It was as though, after ten years, he had abruptly thrown her arms from his neck and sent her into that whirling night of bewilderment where nothing was as she had known it, nothing was real.

Yet after all something was real. What Alice had told her, and the smiling nurse confirmed. Motherhood. Terrible. A leering joke of Fate, as unexpected, as cruel, as bewildering as Brice’s behavior. For hours she was benumbed at the knowledge. She felt about it as one feels towards death. It could not be true, there must be some mistake. Yet as in the case of death, all the while she admitted the inevitableness of it: as death comes surely to all, so had this thing come inescapably to her. She would still have to know, tomorrow, that it was real. For many tomorrows she would have to bear the burden of it, and alone. In time, she would have to suffer. Alone. There would be a child, and Brice not there to—to suffer for it. She thought of that, savagely. Oh, Brice should have suffered for this, as she would have to suffer! It wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair. Even if Brice had been there, it would not have been fair. After ten years, motherhood. She had never wanted children. She knew why other women wanted them, some women. They were hostages to a sort of happiness, to complacency, to stability, to the holding of their husbands. Oh, yes, to some women, doubtless, something to love and care for, something on which to gratify that sentimentality that she had always scorned. She had not needed children. She knew how to arrange her life without that bother, that clutter, as she knew how to hold Brice. A cry escaped her.

The nurse came, bent above her.

“No, no! I don’t want anything, thank you,” she said.

That was for the moment true. She would have welcomed oblivion, anything, anything, that would let her escape her shattered world. She had believed so unquestioningly that she understood Brice, knew his every thought, how to manage him, how to hold him. And now he had gone. He had deserted her, left her with this. A child. His child. For she did not think of it as hers. It was Brice who had loved children, wanted one of his own, though she had believed she had convinced him of the inadvisability of having them. How could they have gotten along with all the added expense of children? But now—! There was no permanency left. All her plans, all her ideas, were whirling about her; only those stars were serene.

Sometimes she lay burning with anger which always resolved into bitterness against Brice. He should be found, would be, must be. And then—oh, yes!—then she would know what to do. There would be no more of those silent withdrawals of his, no more of his futile rebellions against her will. She had been too soft, too gentle. She had underestimated his desire and need of pleasing her. Now there would be the child, a mighty weapon. And she would use it. As other women used it. Brice must be found.

It was Nicky who precipitated the affair of the search for him. The nurse was gone at last, leaving Anne still languid in body after the fever and shock, but well enough to go down to Alice’s sitting-room in the afternoons. She knew that Alice watched her, sensed Alice’s vague disappointment and was scornfully amused, however secretly. Doubtless Alice expected a softening in her, a rosy tenderness of anticipation, as if any sudden incident could make a person other than she had always been. For with returning strength Anne was becoming herself again, calm, measuring, coolly determined. She was only awaiting the apt moment for speaking of Brice to Alice and George.

Nicky came in grinning impishly at Anne lying on Alice’s couch, lithe and graceful, well enough aware that the gracefulness would pass, making the most of the moment, one arm above her head, the other hand between the pages of a magazine she had not been reading.

“So the blow has fallen!” Nicky remarked.

“Nicky, don’t!” cried Alice. “It’s so sweet.”

“Yes, isn’t it? Like all the rest of the bonds of matrimony. How does Brice take it? Solemnly, I suppose.”

“Do sit down, Nick,” said Anne, and added, “Brice doesn’t know the joy in store for him.”

Nicky sat down, and Alice, her eyes on her sewing, said in a tone which was meant to carry a warning that the subject was not to be pressed upon, “Brice is away, Nicky dear. What have you been doing lately?”

Veronica recognized the tone, and laughed aloud. “What’s up?” she asked, looking from Alice to Anne.

Anne, too, looked at Alice, who had flushed a little. “Isn’t she a cherub? Alice—I do love you. The plain truth is, Nicky, that old Brice has gone off. Thinks he’s left me.”

“Oh, Anne dear!” from Alice, beseechingly.

“I knew there was something queer,” Nicky exclaimed.

Anne stirred; the arm over her head came down. “Why?”

“Because Ambrose——”

Anne laughed, sat up. “Ambrose! Of course! Alice—why didn’t we think of that? Of course, Ambrose knows where he is.”

“Oh, as to what Ambrose knows, or thinks he does,” Nicky exclaimed. “I’ll leave that to you two! All he would tell me was that old Brice was sick or something. He said Brice wrote him a letter last week, from Albany or somewhere, and asked him to be good to you, Anne. To stand by you or something.”

“From Albany! But that couldn’t have been all,” Alice cried. “He must have said more than that!” Anne’s eyes narrowed a little; she was thinking intently.

“All Ambrose told me. But he’s worried about it. Tried to call up your house, Anne. And went down to Whitten’s.”

Anne nodded. “Yes. I went there, too. Before I came to see Alice.”

Nicky chattered a moment or two of other things, looked at her wrist-watch and said she must fly. Alice went out of the room with her. When she came back, she sat down by Anne.

“Darling, I think Nicky came to say that. What did she mean?”

“I’ve wanted to tell you, Alice. It—isn’t easy.”

“I do think you had better. George could help, I am sure, if we knew. What was that about Whitten’s?”

“It goes back to the time I came here to look after the children. We had quarreled, and I did not leave word for Brice where I had gone. He—thought things.”

“Oh! But he couldn’t! Not that, Anne!”

“Apparently he did, though. He left me a note. I told you he had settled things. He thought he had. By telling me I might divorce him. He even left Whitten’s. Gave up his job. What he told Ambrose only goes to prove how determined he was.”

“Oh! But now——”

“Yes. That’s just it. Now there is—this. Brice will have to know this.”

“I knew George could help! He will find Brice, dear. And then—oh, you’re going to be happy, so happy, so happy, Nance! You and Brice—and what’s coming!”

Anne smiled, content for the time to leave it there. She was still weighted with that unaccustomed lassitude, and she knew George would act. Gradually she was able to be about the house again, and at last, one evening, George brought Ambrose with him for dinner. Anne sensed a crisis, and was gay throughout the meal. Afterwards she faced the two men.

“What is it?” she asked. “Out with it, George. What makes you and Ambrose so solemn? You have heard from Brice?”

“You know I always said you’d play the devil sooner or later, Anne,” Ambrose remarked. “Looks like you’d done it now.”

“Is that what you came here to say?” Anne flashed at him.

“No. I came to say I have been up to Albany myself. Brice stopped there overnight. Had only a suitcase with him. From there he apparently jumped off.”

“What do you mean, jumped off? If you think Brice is the sort of man who would——”

“I think I know Brice better than you ever did,” Ambrose said, savagely. “God—I hate to see his life ripped up like this.”

Alice protested, “Ambrose!”

“Well, damn it, I do! It’s my opinion Brice stood things as long as he could, and got out. I don’t blame him. But I do hate to see it.”

“You are implying that it is my fault,” Anne said. “I have never done anything, anything, that would justify Brice’s leaving me.”

“Please, please don’t quarrel,” Alice said.

“I have no intention of quarreling with anybody,” said Anne. “I never quarrel. I am very much obliged to Ambrose for going to Albany. I should think you would all understand that I want Brice to come back.”

“I know what cost him his job with Whitten,” said Ambrose.

Anne’s head went up. “I did that for the best,” she said. “If Brice had waited for me to explain it to him, he would have seen that. When he comes back, he will agree with me.” Suddenly she looked at George, threw out her hands in a gesture of appeal. “George, you’ll find him, won’t you? Oh, don’t you see? I want him to come back!”

Ambrose turned away impatiently, but George said, “Of course you do, Anne. We all do. And as for finding him, why, a man can’t absolutely disappear.”

“Oh, George,” Alice interjected, “I don’t know. There was that poor girl who started across the park with a book and box of candy. She was never heard from.”

“Nonsense, Allie! We’ll have Brice home again in a day or two. In a week, at latest. Don’t lose your nerve, Anne.”

“I’m not going to lose my nerve. I know what Alice is thinking. But it isn’t true. Brice is not dead.”

“You’re right, in that,” said Ambrose. “He’s no coward.”

“I think we should take every possibility into consideration,” ventured George. “Not that I——”

“What you are thinking about is not a possibility,” Anne affirmed. “I’ve told Alice that he sent me a letter, too.”

George nodded, but Ambrose looked at Anne, frowning. “Let me tell you, Anne, that you will not help us find Brice by keeping anything back,” said he.

“I’m not keeping anything back. I said I had told Alice. I’m willing to tell you. He wrote to me. I got the letter several days after he was gone, but he had posted it in New York. He told me to divorce him. For desertion. He said he would not contest.”

Ambrose bit his lip, walked restlessly about the room. After a moment Copeland said, “I feel that you ought to know, Anne, what the detectives said. They believe there is only one way of finding Brice. To advertise, to make the thing public.”

Anne paled. Her hand went to her mouth. “Not that!” she gasped. “I couldn’t stand that!”

Ambrose wheeled towards them. “No. Anne’s right. Not that!” said he. “Brice never in his life made a move without thinking it through first. He has gone. Therefore, he wanted to go. Neither Anne nor you nor I have the right to force him back against his will. Oh, I know what you’re thinking of, Alice! But if Brice wanted to cut out his old life, he knew what he was doing. I say, let the thing drop. Take Brice’s decision. You’ve no right to do anything else.”

“You’re not considering Anne, nor the child that’s coming, Ambrose,” George said, mildly. “We’ll find Brice. There’s no question of that. But of course if Anne doesn’t wish it, there shall be no publicity.”

“I couldn’t stand it, George,” said Anne, and Alice added, “Of course not. It’s not to be thought of.”

A week passed, two weeks, and still there was no word of Brice. Something kept Anne from asking, but her nervousness grew, and she watched Alice and George, unfailingly kind, and to her awakening sensitiveness increasingly anxious. Her strength had returned, but not her old vigor. She was beginning to feel it impossible to accept Alice’s hospitality much longer, yet the idea of returning to that empty house was curiously repugnant. It was not the old repugnance towards its smallness and cheapness. It would remind her so of those last days there when Brice’s staying away had for the first time given her a doubt of her own power and rightness. She did not want to live through days like those again, nor nights like those. The memory of them gave her an actual quivering of the flesh. She knew that Alice watched her, and turned her face away when Alice’s eyes would meet her own. One morning she grasped her courage and said:

“Why not tell me, Alice?”

Alice’s eyes filled with tears. “Darling, it’s so dreadful,” she said. “We haven’t heard a word. George has had two detectives. They haven’t a trace of him, after Albany. George is a director of the bank. He has found out that Brice took almost no money with him. It’s so dreadful!”

Anne’s mood alternated between anger and panic. What should she do, what could she do, if Brice were not found? How did he dare to remain away? How did he dare, after those years together, to doubt her to the point of behaving so unprecedentedly?

It was not until an afternoon when Tessie Ogden came in, unannounced, that the pride was born which was to become a force more impelling than anger or panic. Until that day she had succeeded in eluding all of Alice’s guests; but Tessie came into the upstairs sitting-room without warning.

“Oh, you poor, poor darling!” was Mrs. Ogden’s greeting. Anne had to endure the embrace that followed, listen to words that her own coolness had no power of stemming.

“Men, these men! I’ve had my experience, my dear! You can’t tell me anything about it. It’s just the way my first husband treated me. Simply went off with another woman, my dear. So what was I to do?”

“What on earth are you talking about, Tessie? Why the confidence?”

“Don’t pretend with me, Nance darling. I know all about it. I sympathize. How I sympathize!”

“I don’t understand. There is nothing for you to know, except that I have been rather ill, while my husband is away on business.”

Mrs. Ogden laughed, touched Anne’s hand playfully. “Your Lucille works for me, now. Needs training, of course, but—! It’s really touching, her devotion to you, her indignation at the way you were treated!”

“Why get your news from a servant, Tessie? What is it worth, from such a source?”

Tessie leaned back in her chair, lighted a cigarette, smiled languidly.

The next afternoon, when Alice was out, Anne left the house and walked to the terraced side-street that she had not seen for weeks. A faint nostalgia gripped at her throat, not for Brice, not for the house nor the things in it, but for the security that had slipped away from her. She had even more distaste than before for the street and the house, but at least it had represented an established place in the world, however small, however undesirable. She could never live there again, yet she was seeking it out in an unformulated desire to snatch at some of that lost security. The little girl who used to run to meet Brice called to her, swirled up on roller skates. The laundryman’s wagon was at the curb beyond. The grass on her own plot was long, bits of paper and string caught in it. On the porch a yellowed newspaper had blown into a corner. A folded circular was stuck between the knob and the door. She took out her latch-key. How close the hall was!

There was an oblong of white on the rug, where it had dropped through the letter-slot. She grew dizzy, grasped at the door for support. Brice.... Why had they not known he would write?

She picked up the letter without turning it over. She could not yet look at his writing. She went blindly into the living-room. The window shades were at uneven heights. Not his chair. The sofa. Her hat was so heavy.

Then she turned the letter in her hand. It was not from Brice. Miss Willy’s handwriting.

PART II

1

Far from the highways, a hundred miles, two hundred miles inland from the coast, there are many scattered villages, many road-strung hamlets like Heathville, some in the valleys, some daring the hill-tops, some clustered about an ancient mill now falling to ruin or transformed to some more placid use. It may be that over the rutted, narrow roads stage coaches once swirled by on the way to Albany, disgorging their tired travelers at the largest house whose size alone now proclaims its earlier uses. It may be that people built other houses near the tavern in human gregariousness, longing to feel themselves in touch with the world of affairs. There are other roads over which stage coaches never passed. They remained for the conquest of the rural-delivery mail carrier. There are a few that even the mail carrier does not attempt, that climb and wind and drop to wind again for miles between house and house. Always where those roads begin there stands a row of wooden or metal boxes set on posts of varying height, storm-bent to varying angles, where the postman stops. The row of boxes and the postman’s automobile are to the people who live along that road what stage coach and tavern were to their progenitors—their link with the world of affairs. Otherwise life goes on for them with much the same unbroken round as through two centuries. Birth and death, toil and Sunday rest. Goodnesses, evil. A few fields wrung from the grip of granite, a few growing back to underbrush. Sun and blight, good crops and failures. New shingles on a roof here, a new grave yonder. In every village there is a church, in every one a schoolhouse with a flagpole in front.

The road to Heathville begins at a railroad station where a train from the south stops once a day, not to be outrivaled by the train from the north. As though disdaining things as modern as railways, it rises hurriedly from the station, crosses a bridge and runs for a mile or two along a crest of red sandstone; then it takes its own way up hill and down, beside a tumbling stream winding through fern-sweet woods, past fields where willow and hazel tread along the brooks, past rocky pastures where cattle wear their paths among cedars and laurel and blueberries to graze on the rough thatch of grass between granite outcroppings. At last it emerges into a country gentler because it has submitted to the hand of man. Orchards and great red barns come closer together. Finally, on the summit of the last rocky lift, a white church steeple points towards the gilded cock that sways to the wind and looks down upon a dozen houses.

Anne arrived there at the hour when dusk had faded into night, a kindly curtain softly dropped between her and the life she had left; kindly, as though to blot distress out of her unhappy consciousness; and softly, as though to indicate the measure of the life that was waiting for her in the weeks and years to come. But she was not aware of the dropping of the curtain; she had no sense of being the spectator at a play. The drama, or the tragedy, was of herself. What had been and what was still to come was all that mattered to her. The people in the train, those she had left behind, those she might meet in Heathville, all were no more than settings of her stage. There was no other stage than hers, no other play than this mad misery of which she was the victim, this sequence of events which had caught her up and was carrying her along with it. Yet as at a play, Anne had a sense of definite divisions of time. One act was over. Now she was going through another. Again there should be action, directed by herself, staged by herself, brought to some conclusion of her own contriving. For the time being she was trapped. For months, perhaps for a year, the best she could do would be to escape those irritating contacts, to wait with endurance if not with patience, until she should be physically free again. Looking forward, she had no intention of remaining in the trap forever. What if Brice were not found? What if she had indeed failed with him? What if their marriage were wrecked forever? Once past this miserable bondage of the body, would not her courage and her intention reassert themselves, and her pride? Had those ever failed her? Could one lose, or drop like a garment, all one’s characteristics, merely because one had been mistaken and found one’s self involved in an unwelcome human commonplace like the one awaiting her? This child—of course one became fond of her own child. But she was not of the maternal type, not the sort of woman who would lose her identity in becoming a mother. The child, if it lived—perhaps it would not!—should be properly loved and cared for. Of course, there would be its future to think about. There would be difficulties there, if Brice did not come back. But if he did—ah, he would admit, then, how right she had always been in her ambitions. Yet for the present there was this slow-dragging time ahead. By that, and by the uncertainty about Brice, she was trapped.

Only Nicky had approved of her journey. The thought of it came to Anne on the day she found Miss Willy’s letter; her plan matured quickly, inevitably.

“Oh, Nance dear,” Alice protested. “You can’t go away, not with all this uncertainty.”

“The uncertainty is worse here, Alice, than it will be there. No one knows me there, except Willy. No one will be watching and speculating.”

They were all in the room when she told of her plan, Nicky and Ambrose and the Copelands. George Copeland, large and shy, told her:

“There’s plenty of room here, Anne. Like to have you.”

“I know you would, George. But don’t you see? I’ve got to get away.”

Nicky gave Ambrose a look. Anne understood. They had been talking it over between them, probably quarreling, as always.

“Anne has the right to do what she wants,” Nicky declared. “Brice seems to have done it. Don’t get sentimental about it, George, nor you either, Alice. Anne doesn’t want sympathy, nor a soft bed to lie on. What she wants now is to get away. Don’t you see that? To get away. It strikes me as perfectly natural.”

Alice said nothing. Her eyes rested softly on Anne. Oddly enough, it was Ambrose who made Anne’s way clear for her. The house could be rented. It would bring sixty, perhaps seventy dollars a month, half to be held as interest on the mortgage, and something, of course, for upkeep. There was the money that Ranney Copeland had. George could see to that, properly reinvest it. There would be an assured income, minute, to be sure, but something.

On the train Anne thought of her last words with Nicky. “How did you know?” she had asked, when they had a moment together alone, before parting. “How could you know I wanted to get away?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Nicky returned, with a shrug.

“I never did, before. I wanted to go on into things, not away. Now I want to get away from everything, from myself and everything.”

Nicky gave her a look in which mockery lurked. “Oh, well, as to that! Good luck to you!”

For the last two hours on the train Anne’s thought blurred like the passing landscape. She saw the river, the villages and hills, the woods and fields. She sensed the past, believed she sensed the future. The train was an overheated, rumbling discomfort that had to be endured, and the country it bore her through mattered nothing. Her own physical lassitude reacted upon her mind until both past and future were lost in her miserable realization of the physical. At last the name of her station was called. She looked about her on the dark platform, and almost immediately was aware of the quaint, small person talking as she came. She had forgotten how tiny Miss Willy was, and how intensely herself, whatever the circumstances.

“Annie, dear child! To think of your coming to see me at last! My beet-greens are up—your dear father used to love them so. I remember you didn’t, though. I’ve brought an automobile. It’s Mr. Wilkinson’s. He’s careful, real careful. Where’s your trunk, child? I knew you’d be used to riding in them, coming from the city and all. All those things yours? My, but you must have a lot of clothes. Still, I dare say you’d need ’em. Living like you do. No, I can get in alone. Let me look at you! My, but you’re pale, child. You ain’t sick are you?”

That was Miss Willy.

“And how is dear Brice?” asked Miss Willy, before they were out of the town. “So handsome! I knew he would take good care of you.”

“I want to know how you are,” Anne evaded. “I’ll talk about Brice tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m well. I’m always well. I can do a day’s work yet, and not have to thank anybody to help me. Why, what do you think, child? Somebody called me an old lady, only the other day. Or maybe a few months ago. Seems like the other day.”

“You’re not old,” Anne said, putting her hand over Miss Willy’s. Cotton gloves, the finger-tips long, too long. Knuckles, work-worn, bony, enlarged. Cotton gloves. Age. She shivered.

“Well, I just guess I am not,” said Miss Willy. “I’m only just seventy-two. That’s not ninety-two, is it? No, nor eighty-two. Oh, I can do a day’s work yet!”

The car lurched on, the chatter continued. Anne caught bits of it as she caught glimpses of woods and fields under the stars.

“The day you were married. So sweetly innocent. All in white. I couldn’t help crying. Going off with the man of your heart. So handsome. Woman’s lot in life. Life is hard for some. Not that I mean—good gracious, no! Dear Brice! So good of him to let you come to see me. Good of him to spare you.”

On and on it went, on and on. Her childhood—like that, on and on.

“Each day brings it own troubles. Not that I mean—no, of course not. But sufficient unto the day—you know. Annie dear—you know!”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“I believe you weren’t listening. It’s pretty scenery, here in the glen. Too dark now to see. But you will see it. You’re going to stay a while, ain’t you? Annie, ain’t you going to stay a while? Come so far and all?”

“Yes. I’m going to stay—a while.”

“Dear Brice. So good of him to let you come. I guess he thought you needed the change. It’s wonderful the way a man will do everything for one he loves. So romantic. Like Mazeppa. Or Hero and that what’s-his-name—the one that swam the river.”

“Leander—wasn’t it?”

“Leander. Yes. Pa had a horse once named Leander. Sorrel. But I’m sure I wouldn’t want anybody to risk his life swimming a river or anything for me. Human life—the breath of the Almighty.”

What was she saying? Was it really as bewildering as it sounded, or was Anne’s own mind chaotic? It didn’t matter. She heard herself answering again. “Not a river, was it? A strait.”

“It’s the same thing. Salt water. And whales. Most uncomfortable, I should think. Night air’s always damp. Especially if the weather’s cold. That reminds me. I do hope Dorilliam won’t leave the milk before we get there. It’ll sour before morning, if he does.”

At last the chatter ceased. The car made an abrupt turn. Miss Willy grasped Anne’s arm as it veered. A small house loomed in the darkness.

“I was afraid to leave the lamp burning,” Miss Willy said. “You wait outside, child, while I strike a light.”

The milk was on the doorstep, and a large black cat that Anne trod on in the dark. Her bags were set inside at last.

“The kitchen’s no place to bring you into,” said Miss Willy, “but I got to see to the milk.”

Anne sank into a rocking-chair, closed her eyes. In a moment Miss Willy was back. “My goodness, you’re pale as an appagotion!” she cried. “I’ll get you some tea. ’Twon’t take a minute.”

She talked while she busied herself. At the table, the cat jumped into her lap. “Poor Buster! Poor little Buster! The lady didn’t mean to walk on his tail. Auntie’s baby! Ain’t he handsome, Annie? Is your tea right?”

“You always had a black cat,” Anne said. Willy’s voice, the jumble of her words. Long ago, childhood, strangely mixed with the present. What—what—oh, that languor, that heaviness, and the chatter going on.

“I call myself his auntie. Cats are so sensitive. He’d feel dreadfully hurt, Buster would, if he suspected he wasn’t a member of the family. I never was married. I don’t like to say I’m—but he knows as much as a child. You’ll see, Anne, he knows just as much as a child.”

That kitchen. Sounds going on and on. Later, the narrow dark hall and the straight flight of stairs, the bedroom above, the bed. Longing for rest, for cool sheets.

“Now you sleep as late as you can,” said Miss Willy. “You just make yourself right at home here. To think of your coming to see me.”

Sleep. This low-ceilinged room her refuge. Sounds outside, perhaps only insects, but like a lawn-mower, clicking, rattling, whirling. They reminded her of too much. Of people on porches, of Brice, walking, walking behind a lawn-mower, of things she wanted to shut out of her memory forever.

Yet that night she slept soundly and without dreams. She awoke slowly to realization of where she was. A band of sunlight lay on the floor, and through the open windows came the soft sounds of earliest summer, birds, and a low humming that she could not place. Far off, someone was whistling. She had not wound her watch. She went to the window, but to her eyes there was no beauty. The loveliness of the rolling hills, the freshly green pastures and orchards, the little garden below with its neat rows of vegetables already proclaiming old Willy’s diligence—this was only the country. Always she had thought of the country as of a place where lives were rough and barren of enjoyment, crude, as necessary to the maintenance of man as were mills, but as far beyond her interest as the manufacture of soap. The morning was warm, but she shivered. To be here, in this emptiness! That church up the road; across the way the gray house with an ell, and the few other houses beyond—what sort of people could live in those houses, center their lives about that bare church? Bare—yes, that was it; she had come to this bareness, to hide. To hide; but not to remain. Impossible, that. Time would pass, the long dragging months. Meanwhile, she would have to make things as easy as possible. Willy was happy at having her. Willy was kind and willing, devoted.

“I let you get your sleep out,” Miss Willy said, beaming, when at last Anne went down to the kitchen. “I always say there’s nothing like sleep for the young. As for me, I like to get up in the morning, so’s to get my chores out of the way. My, you look pretty!”

Anne breakfasted at the kitchen table, the cat Buster staring up at her with yellow eyes and Miss Willy talking the while.

“Auntie’s boy was naughty this morning. He caught a poor, poor little robin. Come out to the porch, Annie-my-dear. I’ll show you the nest.”

Anne felt no interest in nests, nor in the wide-opened beaks that arose from the one in the grapevine, but it was easier to follow old Willy than to remain indoors. Alone, she would have to think. The garden was a tangled, blossomy place, iris and peonies massed in bloom, roses budding; bees hummed there, a cat-bird called.

“The flowers take care of themselves,” said Miss Willy. “Funny how the Lord seems to be able to trust things that are only meant for looks to take care of themselves, while what’s meant for use has to give us a lot of hard work and all. I want you should see my vegetables.”

They passed a row of flaunting rhubarb. A cooped hen beat back and forth behind slats because her chicks were rambling and scratching under the broad leaves.

“There, look at my beet-greens. And the radishes. They’re not quite ready. I got the peas in good and early. Ain’t it a handsome sight?”

Anne had to say something; the small bright-eyed face was expectant. “Wonderful! Who does it all for you?”

Miss Willy laughed. “I just knew you’d ask that. Nobody does it but me. Not a soul helps me. I just guess I can do my day’s work yet.”

“But, Willy, you don’t plant and dig. You can’t!”

The little head tossed. “Oh, don’t I? It’s my garden. I do it all. Well”—she gave Anne a fleeting look—“well—all but the spading. Dorilliam does that. I don’t want to take praise for what I don’t do. And—my gracious!—that reminds me! I ought to’ve gone over this morning and had him drive down for your trunk. Now I can’t get him till noon. You did bring a trunk, didn’t you? You going to stay a while?”

Suddenly Anne felt dizzy. “Can’t we go back to the house?” she asked. “Can’t we go in? I must tell you——”

In the cool kitchen Anne told her. Miss Willy sat upright, sometimes her eyes on Anne’s face, sometimes on the hands folded tightly together on her apron. She asked no question, made no comment. When Anne had stopped speaking she sat for another moment silent; her lips twitched a little. Then she said, not looking at Anne:

“And to think it was me you came to. I—I’ve always wanted a baby to hold all I’d a mind to.”

Anne pressed her hands to her cheeks, started to speak again.

“I wouldn’t talk any more, if I were you,” said Miss Willy. “I can see you been through a lot. Talking won’t help it. You’ll feel different, after the baby comes.”

“Ah—different! I hope so. But the baby is such a small part of it.”

“No it ain’t, either. You’ll see.”

“I suppose there is always a way out of everything,” Anne said, from her mood of utter weariness. “We may both die.”

Miss Willy stood up. “Now look here, Anne Warren! I’m glad you come to my house. I’m glad to have you here. I want you should stay. But it’s my house, and there’s one thing I won’t have in my house. I won’t have the Lord’s ways blasphemed nor questioned.”

Anne flushed. “I can go, I suppose.”

“Well, you won’t go. You’ll stay where you be. But you’ll use what sense you got while you’re doing it.”

“Willy——!”

“I mean it. And I’ll say whatever I’ve a mind to. There ain’t anybody else to do it, and I knew you when you were a child. You were a little cantankerous imp, all the time wanting your own way, no matter what it might lead to. Many’s the time I longed to turn you over my knee. Many’s the time I wondered whether Solomon didn’t know better than folks nowadays, when he said that about sparing the rod. Still and all, a man with as many wives as he had must have been tried beyond patience when it come to the children. So I never laid hands on you, more’s the pity, and you’re past spanking, now. But you’ll stay here and act sensible. And you won’t talk about dying. That’s in the Lord’s hands, not yours.”

Anne stood up. How weary she was, how spent. How futile and foolish old Willy, with her primitive talk. That to go on for months. Yet after her waiting was over there would be other months. “Dear old Willy, you are kind. I want to stay here for a time, until—afterwards. I can pay a little.”

“Well then, so you shall,” said Miss Willy. “It’s a grand thing, to feel independent. Like me.”

2

The days were long, but she dreaded the fall of evening, when the insects began their rattling song. There were letters from Alice. Twice Ambrose wrote, inclosing the monthly check. There was no word of Brice. On that subject Ambrose wrote only a line each time. Alice recounted in detail, from which Anne’s mind shrank away, his endeavors and George’s. What it all summed up to was that Brice had vanished. And the crickets and locusts clicked on, like lawn-mowers. George still wished for publicity, but to that Anne refused her consent. She could see those headlines, or the veiled salaciousness of those small surreptitious paragraphs in the column marked “Personal.” Her affairs should never be aired there. Never would she consent to that final blow to her pride, never to the surmises and smiles that would cause. Besides, now she did not want him to come back, did not want to see him. He had done enough, hurt her too much, put too much upon her. Let him stay away forever! She tore Alice’s letter to bits, wept with anger. Miss Willy, hearing the sobs, ran to the gray house across the road, came back with the doctor.

It was the beginning of a friendship. A grizzled man, humorous, short of temper, Anne liked him. Gradually she came to look forward to his visits, always unexpected, apt to be lingering.

“Well, what of it?” he asked her one day when she complained of a headache. “Be gone by tomorrow.”

She was nettled. That, from a doctor. “But what of today? It’s really quite bad.”

“I dare say. But you’ve got to expect a pain here or there. I’m not going to dose you for that, Mrs. Denison.”

“Do you treat all your patients this way?”

“Not all. But part of the time. Words to you, syrup to others. When there’s nothing the matter with ’em.”

“You think there is nothing the matter with me?”

“You’re sharing the common lot. Women in your condition always think it’s uncommon. But it isn’t.”

She flushed. Her condition, the common lot. “I know what you mean. But my position is not quite the same——”

“I wonder if you do know what I mean?” he interrupted. “I’m not thinking of your physical condition. Call it mental. Or moral, if you like.”

“Doctor Severance! Moral!”

“Yes. Not speaking of morals. You find yourself in a situation. I’m a physician, so I called it a condition. You think it’s uncommon, unique, I dare say. It is not. Not a bit of it!”

“Who has been talking to you of my affairs, Doctor Severance?”

“You have. Not in words, no. Nor anyone else. No need to. Plain enough. Something’s gone wrong. You think it’s shaking the world. All women do. A teacup drops, there’s no other teacup. But isn’t there? Patterns vary, of course. But there remain plenty of teacups. All hold tea or coffee, most have handles.” He smiled, kindly, tolerantly. “Be mistress of yourself, Mrs. Denison, though your teacups smash.”

Anne stood up, biting her lip. “It seems to me,” she said, “that I have been mistress of myself!”

“Possibly too much, in a sense,” said he. “Bluff. All women use bluff. Some can’t find anything better. Some don’t want to. Some don’t need to. Some get away with it, even to bluffing themselves. You’ve been trying to do that, Mrs. Denison. I doubt if you can.”

“What else can one do?” she cried, with a gesture of impotence.

“Ha! Think it out. There’s a prescription for you. A new one,” he chuckled, “for headaches.”

Others of his prescriptions she tried to follow. She must walk every day, he insisted, meet the neighbors. But she had never walked without objective. Up the hill past the church, over the covered bridge to the store, where men and children stopped talking when she entered and stared at her curiously; in the other direction, down the road to nowhere, and back again. There was no sense in that. Better stay in the garden with Willy, or sit in the kitchen while Willy was busy at stove or sink. Aimless walks were intolerable.

“All right, then,” said the doctor. “See that hill over there? You walk to the top of that hill every day. No detours. There’s a brook or two. Jump them. Bit of a marsh. Find the tough clumps of grass. Wet feet won’t hurt you. Rocks. Go over them. Don’t go around. Straight up and straight back, if you want to.”

“But there are cattle!” she protested.

“Plenty,” said he. “Good company, cattle. Try to find out what they’re thinking.”

“But the sun is so hot!”

“All right. Go at night, then,” he laughed. “Good medicine, madam!”

For a time she obeyed him. When the sun dropped below the hill’s summit she would go warily down through the fields, over the marsh and the deep, narrow brooklets, watchfully among the cattle who stared, slowly followed, at last overcame their own shyness and her panic and nosed at her hands and her skirt.

“Take ’em some salt,” said Miss Willy.

Anne laughed aloud the first time she felt the warm roughness of their tongues on her palm and discovered that after all she was not afraid.

At first she thought only of reaching the top of the hill and returning. So much to be done with, got out of the way. But one day she lingered there until sunset. Another, she came back with her hands full of forget-me-nots. It was cool on the shaded hillside, warm on the crest, where the sun still shone. The rocks had gray velvet over them. There were strange little blossoms in the grass. Things she had never noticed before began to present themselves. The walk began to be not merely a prescription, a climb up a hillside. Gradually it was becoming an adventure, an exploration. But there were days so hot that she could not go out, even when the shadows were long; days when the walls of the house seemed to flicker in the intensity of the heat like the air above a fire. Then even the twitter of birds rasped her nerves. The humming of bees and the cooing of doves were as irritating as a siren’s whistle. There were days when she was too languid to do more than lie on her bed and endure; other hours when the attempt at enduring became almost madness, when she could have shrieked aloud in protest at her helplessness. That was what hurt. To be helpless, to have to wait, to endure, rebellious and bitter at the thought of what life had done to her. Life, and Brice. No, she did not want Brice to come back. She hated Brice, hated those years when his silence had fooled her, hated her memories and could not get away from them. They pursued. To look at the sun did not shut them out, nor to cover her eyes. Memories? They leaped out at her. That sofa. Brice’s frown of anxiety. The chair in the living-room, hideous, out of place. Why hadn’t he let her tuck it away upstairs? Why did she remember it so?

When she had been there a while the neighbors began to call. Prim women, strangely dressed, figures bulging or angular.

“Oh, I can’t see anyone,” Anne said, when the first ones came. “Tell them I’m not at home, or something.”

Miss Willy stood in the bedroom door. For a moment she pressed her lips together. Then she said, “Now look here, Annie Warren, I won’t have you behave so. They’ve come to call. You put on that lavender dress and come down.”

“You’re not dressed up,” Anne said, smiling a little. During her childhood Willy had called her Annie. She had loathed the diminutive. Willy knew it. But Willy knew, too, that in submitting to that Anne would have to submit to more. It held her in bounds, became the symbol of Willy’s authority. Willy was taking the same line now.

“I’m folks. I’m not company. You do as I tell you.”

Anne did more, did her best, but she could not make conversation with them. Their talk was of gardens and children, of intimate illnesses and more intimate affairs in their neighbors’ houses.

“I suppose they are curious about me,” she said, one day, when she was watching old Willy perform the rite of making doughnuts.

“That’s as may be,” said Miss Willy, dryly. “When you’ve lived in the country as long as I have you’ll know the easiest way to stop folks from bein’ curious is to get in the first word. I told ’em you are my niece. I lied. But I don’t doubt the Lord will forgive me. I said you’s a widow, come to live with me to help out. I said you’s going to take care of me in my old age. No harm in that. It’s a long way off from me yet, praise be. You don’t have to be scared.”

“Willy! Do I deserve that?” Anne cried, not so much in protest as in wonderment. It was like looking into a mirror, and finding an unaccustomed expression on her own face.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Miss Willy, dryly. “I been wondering a good deal. I don’t know what you aim to do. But it seems to me you’re not bracing yourself. You’re hiding away from yourself. Trying to. Nobody can, in the end, far as I know.”

Anne thought a moment. “Yes,” she said, “yes. That is just what I am trying to do. What else is there?”

“You got your life to live.”

“My life. You call it my life. It is not. This thing that is coming, and what Brice has done to me—my life, my own life has been taken away from me. I’m walled in. I’m trapped.”

“Most folks are walled in, with one thing or another. I never met one that wasn’t. You ain’t making use of your wall.”

“Use of it?”

“What else are walls for?” asked Willy, waving a long fork over the frying pan. “Folks wouldn’t build ’em for nothing. They don’t, if it’s only to get the rocks out o’ the fields. God doesn’t, either. Walls are useful, if it’s only to brace up against.”

“Oh, what can I do? It’s easy enough to talk about bracing, setting one’s feet firm! My whole world has slipped. What is left?”

Miss Willy smiled. “I am, for one thing.” She returned to the table, began to cut out more rings of dough.

Anne reached her hand across. “Willy, I’m not ungrateful. I appreciate everything you do for me. I know I don’t pay what it’s worth——”

“Now look here, Anne Warren! I take your pay ’cause I got to, and to make you feel better. But when you talk about gratitude—well, that’s your business, not mine. Folks that do things for gratitude do them from vanity. I hope I ain’t vain. Maybe I am. But I try not to be. Our Lord wasn’t vain when he healed the leper and raised up the dead.”

She dropped a plateful of rings into the smoking fat. Anne’s eyes were smarting. “Willy, you make me ashamed,” she murmured.

“That’s good,” said Miss Willy.

“What can I do? Don’t you see how helpless I am?”

“Well, since you ask, there’s one thing you can do. You can think of the folks around here as folks, not lumps of clay. That’s what you been doing. But you listen to me, Anne Warren! There’s all sorts of clay. I’m not saying you’re our sort. Some clay’s good for bricks, and some for fine china. There’s some that ain’t good for a thing, as far as I know, but to keep things from growing. Still and all, the Almighty used clay. Didn’t look about him for anything better. He’d just finished making a new world, too, all spick and span, with flowers and waters and snakes and everything. Might have taken his pick, but he found clay plenty good enough. There! That’s the last. Want a hot one?”

Anne took the doughnut, went out of doors to a chair under the apple tree. The old woman’s talk had startled her. Notwithstanding a lurking sense of shame and deserved admonishment her thoughts were not of herself. Where had old Willy learned her philosophy? Surely philosophy, or wisdom, did not accrue to one. It was no thistle-seed, to be blown white-winged on the wind, to germinate wherever it fell, on rock or roadside or—clay. Willy’s life had been bare, so bare. Anne’s thought brought back, in one of those oddly photographic flashes with which the mind visualizes a long train of circumstance in a single picture, the coming of Willy to her father’s house and events leading up to it. There had been many women, called, in the small-town phraseology, housekeepers. Between the time of her mother’s death and the coming of Willy, Professor Warren’s continuous advertisements for help were the joke and the pity of his neighbors. Anne could not remember her mother, but she remembered the succession of housekeepers, not as individuals, but as people who got in her way, who tried to restrain her, on whom she used all her childish arts of retaliation and torment until they left in despair or dudgeon. She remembered the day when Miss Willy came, a small gray-clad person with a carpet bag that instantly claimed the child’s attention and afterward became an object of admiration. There was no other like it in town, and she used to bribe Alice into docility, and even occasionally Nicky, by a sight of it in the attic. Sometimes Nicky held out for the further bribe of being allowed to march up and down the length of the attic with it in her hands, while Alice and Anne would chant, “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.” Alice always wanted to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” but Nicky and Anne agreed that a carpet bag was not an appropriate implement for Christian soldiers. Besides, one couldn’t step as quickly to that tune as to the other.

But that first day Anne had eyed Miss Willy solemnly, biding her time. She had no doubt that this new one would be like the others, easy to vanquish.

“Her name’s Willy,” she told her father that night at the supper table. The professor, harassed, poor man, as he always was when confronted with his daughter after a long day at the high school, weakly remonstrated. “That’s what she said it was,” Anne insisted. “She told me to call her that.”

“But, surely,” the professor protested, weakly, looking to the end of the table for help. Miss Willy was all placidity.

“She can, if she’s a mind to,” said she.

The good man’s frown of helpless perplexity had not lessened. “But surely, there must be another name, a name more, ah——”

“I know,” Miss Willy had answered, tranquilly. “Folks do seem to find it kind o’ queer. But that’s what I was christened. After my pa. Not Willamena nor anything like that. Just plain Willy.”

“Then I think your—ah—last name——”

“It don’t make much difference. That’s Willis.”

Anne was still solemn, her eyes demurely downcast. Willy Willis. She’d know how to deal with that! But her hopes and intentions met their small Waterloo no later than that same night. The campaign was short and decisive.

“I get to bed by myself,” she told Willy. But Willy replied, “Not this night, you don’t. Not till I get those snarls out o’ your hair, anyway.”

“I like it this way. I don’t like to have anybody else comb my hair.”

“Liking ain’t getting. You stand still. I won’t hurt any more than I got to. But those snarls come out.”

So Miss Willy remained, saw her married, and a year or two later watched while the professor’s life ebbed, while Anne and Brice were hurrying towards the town Anne had left with so little reluctance. Then she had come back to Heathville. That was old Willy’s life, as Anne knew it. Where and how had wisdom, philosophy, come to her?

That evening Anne asked, “Willy, have you ever lived anywhere else but here and with father and me?”

Miss Willy was knitting. “No,” she said. “Never was much of a mover.”

Anne smiled. “How did you happen to come to us?”

“I wanted my freedom,” said Willy.

“Freedom?”

“Yes. I guess maybe most folks do, sooner or later. My aunt was a good woman. This was her house. She took me in when ma died. But I wanted my freedom. So when I saw your pa’s advertisement, I packed up and went. Then I come back again. The house had been shut up for years. My land, it was dirty! I don’t know when I’ve had such a good time as I did cleaning it up. And the garden all weeds. When I was a girl, this place used to seem kind of little, shut off in the hills the way it is and all. There didn’t seem to be anything to do. Now—dear me, sirs! The days ain’t half long enough.”

“I must help you more,” Anne said.

Miss Willy looked over her spectacles, went on with her knitting, changing a needle. “I wasn’t hinting,” said she. “I like the work. Funny, it’s just what my aunt used to do, when I was a girl. Maybe the difference is now it’s my own. I don’t know. Only, I’m free now. I guess folks get to know about that, when they’re old. I had a squirrel once. It lived in a cage for years. Went round and round on a wheel thing at one side of the cage. I thought, ‘Poor thing! It’s old. It ain’t got long to live. I’ll give it its freedom before it dies.’ So I set the cage on the porch, and opened the door. The squirrel went out like a flash, and ran up a tree. But the next day it was back in its cage again, making the wheel go round and round.”

There were days when the heat was less, when midsummer quietude brooded upon the hills, and fields exhaled the odors of growing things and woods exuded their winter-stored moisture to the summons of the wind across the tree-tops; long mornings when Anne listlessly washed the dishes and made the beds and dusted, while old Willy toiled outside; and long afternoons when Anne walked, sometimes on the road through the glen, sometimes to the doctor’s prescribed hill-top and back, sometimes, as her strength grew, to farther pastures. To those walks she was driven and lured: driven by her desire to get away from the house, from Willy’s chatter, from her own thoughts; and lured as a child goes looking for fairies by a feeling that never quite came to consciousness that somewhere, sometime, she would find something, some balm of the spirit, some response or enlightenment. Sometimes she walked in desperation, taking with her the burden of her rebellion. This place, to be buried here! She must, must get away, anywhere, anywhere. But at least the long walks gave her dreamless sleep. In August Nicky came for a Sunday. Alice and the children were at the seashore. Nicky was in a quiet mood; they spent the long afternoon under the apple tree.

“You look at me as though I were one of your ‘cases,’” Anne said, aware of Veronica’s covert inspection.

“Do I?” Nicky calmly responded. “I wasn’t thinking about you at all, if you want to know. I was thinking about myself—and Ambrose.”

“He’d be glad to know that.”

Nicky was lounging back, one knee over the other, arms under her head. “You know, Anne—this mess of yours—it’s made me like Ambrose rather better.”

“Because I’ve proved your contention that marriage is a failure? Made you think you are right in your eternal argument with Ambrose?”

“Oh, no. I always knew I was. But Ambrose has been so mad about it. He was always so darned meek, before. I rather prefer Ambrose mad.”

“The rôle of the strong man, the cave-man,” Anne laughed. “Even you can’t escape the feminine complex, Nick, the longing to cling, to have something to cling to.”

Nicky chuckled. “There’s only one George,” she said, cryptically. “And time hasn’t finished with George yet, nor with Alice. One thing I’ve noticed about clinging vines, feminine and otherwise. They rot the stump they cling to. If it isn’t a stump, they smother it, keep it from fruiting. And if by any chance the old tree’s too strong for them, the vine is no good. There you are.”

Anne sat up. “Well, I have failed. I admit that. Or to put it the other way, maybe the right way, Brice failed. But just the same, Nicky, it does not have to be failure. There ought to be a sense of duty, if nothing more, that would bind. Brice failed in that. I never did.”

“Didn’t you? But anyway, this rot about duty. Oh, I know it has its uses. It helps along the propagation of the race. But when you think what it does to poor old humanity—! No, old girl. If I should marry I’d have to be jolly well certain that there’d be something more left after ten years than mere duty. That salt would have no savor for me. As it hasn’t for Brice, apparently.”

“I have stopped thinking about Brice. I prefer to stop talking about him.”

“All right, after I’ve given you a message from Ambrose. They’ve done all they can to trace Brice. Ambrose asked me to say that he cannot collect on the life insurance for you. Not evidence enough. He wants to know if you’d like to sell the house. He’d buy it himself on a quit-claim deed. Nobody else would, without Brice’s signature.”

“How Ambrose must have loved offering me charity,” said Anne, bitterly. “Tell him I thank him beyond words. But I have enough. Between forty and fifty a month.”

Nicky sat up, too. “Good Lord, Anne! Is that all? What’ll you—do?” she cried.

Anne bit her lip, made a helpless gesture with her hands.

Yet gradually, during the weeks she had been in Heathville, her sense of values had been readjusting themselves. Here there was all but nothing to spend money for.

“Why, you’re richer than anybody in this whole village,” Miss Willy had said, “unless it’s that Kent man and the doctor. Even the minister only gets two hundred a year, and he’s well off. Forty dollars a month—my land!”

She was watching the old woman at work in her garden one day, squatting between the rows, weeding. “Why do you work so for those things, stupid things like beets and carrots?” she asked.

“They’re for winter. The cabbages, too, and potatoes. Of course.”

“But why do you grow them at all? Why not buy them?”

Miss Willy looked up. “I just told you. They are for winter. What else’ll we eat?”

“But there’s a store!”

“A store? My goodness, child! Folks around here don’t buy things like them at the store. It don’t keep ’em, anyway. But even if it did, who’d buy what they grow in the garden?”

Yet even then Anne did not dream of the ways and means, the contrivings and savings, that went into life in the village, Miss Willy’s and that of her neighbors. Their meals were plain enough. Anne observed, without comment, that whatever was bought or brought in from the garden was eaten, sooner or later, to the last mouthful, by human or cat or fowl. Nothing was wasted.

She had noticed the clothes worn by the women, and there was the affair of Miss Willy’s best bonnet, donned only for Sundays and the monthly church supper. “I do think it becomes me,” said Willy complacently. “I’ve had it six years going on seven. It’s just as good as new.”

Then there was the boy Dorilliam. The name had amused her. She repeated it, smiling, one evening, and Miss Willy said, “Yes, it’s real high-sounding. He’s the seventh. Mis’ Wells, she wanted a girl, all the rest being boys. Had her heart set on calling it Dora. When it come, well, she was always romantic, Mis’ Wells was, and she never had much of a chance to break out. I guess it did her some good to call him Dorilliam.”

During the midsummer heat Anne protested against the old woman’s eternal work in the garden; she would pay Dorilliam to hoe.

“But it’s twenty cents an hour!” Miss Willy cried. “My goodness, child! Twenty cents for one hour, and sugar the price it is.”

In the early coolness of September her walks became longer. The heaviness of her languor was less, yet one day when she reached the crest of the hill and sat down in the shade of a weather-worn maple she knew that she was tired, not with that terrible weight of the spirit which had shadowed her for so long, borne her down, but as a workman is tired at noon and sits down, gratefully, that his body may refresh itself with food and rest and cessation from toil. From where she sat no habitation of man was to be seen. The world seemed a place empty of animate life, for even the cattle were below in the marsh, out of sight. Haze lay on the hills, merging them into the sky. The patches of sweetfern were already darkening to ripeness, and the rock at her side was warm to the touch. Asters and goldenrod glowed in the sunlight, the sumach was red. Beyond, down the valley, here and there in the woods, a white birch shone, slender, fastidious, seeming to tread its way daintily forward to the eye’s finding, like a conscious beauty at a ball. Upon the meadows cloud-shadows lingered, and under the maple was shade, quiet and shade.

Different. Why were things different, today? Many times she had looked on the same scene, inwardly shrunk from its emptiness. But this quietude in the drenching sunlight and the cool shade, this was not emptiness. Peace. Yes, it was a sort of peace, but something was going on in it, through it. There was life working. Not hurrying, not crowding, silent, but working on and on. Trees gnarled by winter storms, rocks laid bare and carved by frost and ice; a land worn rugged and seamed from its age-long battle, but still with vitality and a germ of things to be, things that would die to grow again, grow and become lovely with a perpetual renewing. And even after fruition and harvest, through winter, to spring, on and on, ever to be renewed. Life. Suddenly, there under the sheltering boughs of the old tree, there facing the sunlight, she put her hand to her heart. Another heart within her was beating, another life had stirred.

For an hour she sat there, her arms clasping her knees, her head bowed above them. A great stillness pervaded her. Life going on, herself part of it, needed. That was it, needed. Fitting in with it. Necessary to its scheme, a part of its plan; a utensil of service, and servant as well. And for so long she had thought there was no plan at all; or, if there were, that its parts were hopelessly jumbled. Strange. If one were a part, or were needed, then there was something to do, something to wait for, to hope for.

At last she stood up, and looked again over the drowsy loveliness of the world. Slowly she went down the hill, and placidly. There was nothing to hurry for, no need now to walk and walk so that she could not think. When she came in sight of the spire and houses of Heathville, even those looked different, less poor and sordid, friendlier. Miss Willy was not in the kitchen. There came a faint echo of hammering from the direction of the hen-house, and Anne took her way towards it. The downy chicks that had scratched under the rhubarb had long since grown into frisky birds large enough to be promoted to the privilege of roosting with their mothers and aunts in the hen-house. Miss Willy was there now, mysteriously wielding a hammer.

“What on earth are you doing?” Anne asked, from the doorway. “Carpentering—you?”

Miss Willy turned, her mouth as full of nails as a seamstress’s of pins. “I’m making a walk for that poor blind chicken,” said she. She took the nails from between her lips, and pointed with pride to a contrivance she had achieved, a board slanting from floor to roost, with occasional cross-pieces on it. “There, look at that! Ain’t that grand? Dunno why I didn’t think of it before. That poor chicken has been trying its level best to jump on the roost every night, and bumping its head on the board and all. Must a felt like a body knocking at the Gate and Saint Peter away on vacation.”

“But what good is that queer-looking board?”

“Can’t you see, child? Use your eyes! That’s a walk. I been coming out here every night to put that poor thing on its roost. Come winter, and I’d get good and tired of it. Besides, think of its feelings. Now I’ll just train it to peck around and find its own walk and climb up. Get on the roost like its folks, without having to be helped all the time. Nobody likes to be helped all the time.”

Anne’s face softened a little. “And I would have killed that blind chicken long ago,” she said, thoughtfully.

“Well, then, I wouldn’t. Lots o’ folks with two eyes in their head see less than that chicken and have no more sense. It’s got a right to live.”

3

When autumn came, Dorilliam set up a stove in the front parlor, that room which until Anne’s arrival had been kept for the most part closed, a ceremonial elegance of which Miss Willy was very proud. The house itself had none of the dignity of the doctor’s and some of the other older ones. Apparently it represented the imaginative efflorescence of some country builder of half a century before, limited in means and method. There were but two sizable rooms on the first floor, parlor and kitchen. Miss Willy’s bedroom opened off from the kitchen, little more than a large cupboard, its space amply filled with bed and pine bureau, while back of the kitchen, longer than the house itself, was the shed where wood was stored and a miscellany of oddments that were mysteries to Anne. She had pleaded to have the wall-papered fireboard taken away from the parlor. An open fire would have made of the room a different place. But Miss Willy looked troubled.

“But how’d we heat your bedroom?” she asked. “Mine’s real nice and warm, opening off from the kitchen like it does. But if the stove pipe don’t run up through yours, child, how’ll we heat it?”

For the first time Anne understood the purpose of the round hole in her floor that had seemed so mysterious, the hole through which she could see one red rose on the parlor carpet. She had supposed that it was left for the purpose of being able to look down upon callers. It amused her to be brought face to face with so elemental a problem as heating a house. It had startled her to find that there was no bathroom, surprised her that the water in the kitchen came from a pump, not from a faucet. Yet those things did not concern her, and in the matter of the fireplace she yielded. In time Dorilliam set up a stove. When she first saw Willy come staggering in with an armful of wood, she protested. It was not woman’s work. Dorilliam must do it. But thereafter, mysteriously, the fire in the stove seemed to feed itself, and in the evenings old Willy would drop wearily into her chair and nod. Vaguely Anne wondered why she was so tired, now that the garden work was over, the small crops harvested and stored away in the cellar. Yet, after all, the endless monotony of the days were enough to weary anyone. Morning, drudgery, night, morning again, and more drudgery. That summed up life in Heathville, as far as she could discern.

With the autumn rains her restlessness returned and times of rebellion, now not against the coming of the child, but at the aridity she was living through. Alice wrote insistently that she should come to stay with her and George, later to go to a hospital. Anne refused less because of reluctance to accept Alice’s bounty than because she was unwilling to encounter old friends, old acquaintances, to have to meet their pity or amusement. Now she would not let her mind dwell upon the difficulties of the future because that would be bad for the child. This was a time when she could do nothing but wait, and this was as good a place as any. Later, of course, she must find some means of making a real livelihood. Live in Heathville, her child, hers? Of course she would find some means of escaping that.

During the radiant days of October she frequently drove with the doctor on his rounds in a small battered car that possessed a personality of its own. She liked the doctor. He was “country-queer,” as he described himself, but his was the only mind she had encountered in Heathville that could think, or express its thoughts. As to that, she believed that Dorilliam’s mother and the other women she had met did not think at all, but lived by instinct, or went about their tasks like trained animals, except that for them there was no reward of caress or tidbit. Purposeless, stupid, they seemed to her. Dr. Severance was neither. He called his car Sally.

“Named her after an old mare I had. Died in the harness, as I hope to. One thing she does almost as well as old Sally did. She gets me there.”

Yet apparently Sally did not always hold that intention. More than once the doctor had to dismount and do mysterious things to Sally, almost at times, as Anne once told him, laughing, amounting to major operations. Once Sally’s temperament overcame her not far from a small brown cottage set back in the woods; after some minutes of futile ministrations on the doctor’s part, Sally still remained where she had stopped, soundless and motionless. Anne had stepped down and was walking along the road through the yellow leaves. As she repassed the cottage a man came out and after a look towards the car beyond smiled at Anne. She had become used by now to the friendly custom in the country of taking acquaintanceship for granted. They walked back to the car together. The doctor, hands on hip, glared in mock ferociousness at the other man.

“Come to try one of your faith cures on her, I suppose,” he growled.

The other man chuckled. “Might try it on you, Tom,” he remarked. “You’re a little excited, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve worked on the blame thing an hour at least. She won’t go,” spluttered the doctor.

“That’s like you medical men. You fiddle and tinker and dose, and think you’ve done all of it. You’re always forgetting there’s something else.”

The doctor snorted. “I’ve heard you say that before! Look here, you Rufus—you use faith on Sally and get her to start, and I’ll take up some stock in that faith of yours.”

The man called Rufus had moved to the side of the car. His hair was quite white, his shoulders were stooped, and life had worn marks on his face; but he bore the indefinable stamp of the intellectual. Anne decided at once that he was not a native of Heathville. He seemed to smile easily, or else the smile never quite left his eyes. Now he bent towards the driving-wheel of the car, peering as though from near-sightedness, and stood up to grin at the doctor.

“I’ve long since discovered, as I’ve told you before—as you say, Tom, quite as you say!—that there is some eternal spark that moves things. There must be a spark, Tom, somewhere. In the case of your Sally why not turn on your spark, Tom, and see——”

The doctor’s mouth opened. A blank look came over his face. But he, too, came up to the side of the car. He reached over, touched a small lever, and instantly Sally responded with rattles and tremblings.

“Hell!” said the doctor. Anne laughed aloud, long and gayly as she had not laughed in months. “I beg your pardon,” the doctor muttered. “Ladies present.”

But Anne’s laugh still rang out, and the man called Rufus was chuckling with her. The doctor was red. He climbed into the car.

“Who was that?” asked Anne, when they had passed the brown house with the woods at its back.

“Old fool,” said the doctor.

Anne bit her lip. “Well, but who else?”

The doctor permitted himself to smile. “Name’s Kent, though you’re likely to hear him called ‘The fellow that bought the Carscadden place.’ Nobody knew where he came from, nor who he was. Had to call him something, so the title sort o’ got itself hung on to him. Folks thought, I believe, he was some relation of the Carscaddens, who hadn’t lived there for a generation.”

“Does he live there alone?”

“Lord, no; got a Jap servant, for one thing, and a wife, and there’s always a houseful o’ lame ducks, human and otherwise. You’ll have to go there and make his acquaintance some day. He’s a great friend of mine, really. But Sally don’t like him.”

“Oh,” said Anne. “Because of his principles, I suppose?”

The doctor sniffed. “Something like that,” said he.

Another day they were driving along together, slowly, in the lace-like shade of the woods. Anne had been saying little; these drives with the doctor brought a measure of soothing to her spirit. By this time the brilliance of the autumn foliage was past, lying in golden tribute on the earth that had given it life. Now and again the little car would stop before some house while the doctor went in, leaving Anne musing, outside.

“Good people, those,” the old man said, as he drove away from one little house.

“And so poor,” said Anne. “I saw four or five children there, in that tiny house.”

The doctor considered a moment. “In one sense,” he said slowly, thinking it out, “poverty is having the consciousness of poverty. Those people have never had more. They have no consciousness of being poor. They are not poor.”

“Oh, but the fact remains that they are. Look at the house, think of the lack of advantages.”

“And what are those?”

“Advantages? But, surely, one knows!”

“No, no! What are they, really, comprehensively? Can you say, Mrs. Denison? In the sense in which you mean, all a matter of comparison, aren’t they? Well, comparison with what? With something a man has not got and thinks he wants, or thinks he ought to have, or thinks somebody else has gotten ahead of him by possessing? What’s the end of that sort of thinking?”

“Ah, but not to think, not to want, not to aspire!”

“I wasn’t talking of aspirations.”

“But weren’t you?”

The doctor shook his head. “You’ll have to take that up with Rufus some day.”

“That queer man?”

“Yes, he’s queer. Old fool, as I said. Not that he’s old as he looks. But he is queer, though he’s got a lot of sound sense in him, too. He’s thought things out. You’ll have to know Rufus.”

“If he has thought out some sort of philosophy like the one you’ve been propounding it’s greatly to his credit, but it doesn’t affect the real question of poverty, does it?”

“Doesn’t it? Well, you’ll see. But let me tell you this, Mrs. Denison: the normal man is never a poor man.”

“Perhaps that accounts for so few being normal. So many are poor.”

“I don’t mean it that way. You know I don’t. I mean that the normal man cannot be poor, because he has all there is that’s worth while, because being normal about sums up to having a good digestion, doing a day’s work, getting a little happiness and giving some. Get that into life, and you’ve got about all there is, in the ultimate analysis.”

“I hear a doctor talking,” Anne commented, and added, “Your friend back there suggested one more element. He mentioned a spark.”

The doctor looked down at her sideways, pursing his lips. “H’m!” said he.

Her thoughts went back again and again to that conversation. Was that all? Must she endure, and find nothing more than that? Health and work, it summed up to, for happiness was only a fleeting illusion. She saw no riches in the doctor’s circle. Poverty was not merely having no money, and she shrank from poverty for herself and the child. Thinness of joy, meagerness? No, no! That should not be.

The thought set her pacing restlessly up and down the small overheated room on an evening when the rain beat against the windows. It was Sunday, and Willy observed the day by going to church in the morning, whatever the weather, and by having their dinner at two o’clock instead of at noon. The displaced meal hour set the day awry. Except for that there seemed to be no change from other days. Willy was forever busy at something.

“My goodness, child, that lamp’s smoking,” she said, when she came into the room. She took the low rocking-chair by the table, the cat Buster jumping into her lap. “I been thinking,” she went on. “When I was a child, they used to call Sunday the Lord’s day. That’s funny, now ain’t it?”

Even old Willy’s chatter was better than the dreary persistence of the rain. “Funny?” Anne asked, smiling a little. “Why?”

“As if every day isn’t the Lord’s day,” said Willy, her faded eyes looking at Anne, looking away again. “I just guess he sees to that. He’s got us all in his hand every day, Sundays and all; and every day, come day go day, he keeps right on working and looking out for us.”

Anne smiled a little. She had heard a good deal of Willy’s primitive theology during the past months.

“Not but what I know Sunday’s by rights set apart for us humans,” Willy went on. “A good thing it is, too. I’ve heard folks talk hard things about men, and about women, too, that does one way on weekdays and another on Sundays. But I say—land!—it’s better to behave decent one day of the week than never at all, poor critters. And if that’s being a hypocrite, well, it’s better to be a hypocrite one day than seven.”

Anne laughed aloud. Miss Willy stroked Buster, who purred like a tea-kettle.

“Another funny thing is how people’s mistakes get mixed up with their sins, in folks’s minds. I don’t doubt the Lord sees which is which. I don’t doubt he’s capable of handling ’em both. But I often think folks try too hard to do the untangling themselves. I don’t know. But I’m going on seventy-three. I’ve come to the conclusion we’d be better off if we’d just leave it all to the Lord.”

“That’s a comfortable doctrine, my dear,” Anne remarked. “But if you’d let it work out, wouldn’t it be a little like giving the kitten the work-basket to play with?”

Miss Willy looked at her over the top of her spectacles. “That’s just what the good Lord has done,” said she, “given us the work-basket to play with. And a real good snarl we make out of it, most of us. But having given us a work-basket apiece, as you might say, he don’t expect the kittens to take on themselves to say who’s to blame for the tangles. That’s where we don’t follow the Lord’s way.”

“There’s no question of that,” Anne agreed.

“No. And that’s what you’re doing, Anne Warren. You and Brice had one work-basket between you. Somehow it’s got into an awful mess. So you’re scratching at Brice, thinking it’s his fault.”

“I don’t want to talk about Brice.”

“I dare say. But I’m going to talk about him. Whenever I’ve a mind to. Right now what I got to say is, that baby that’s coming has got a right to his father, and his father has got a right to him.”

“Brice has gone. They have tried to find him. He’s gone.”

“Yes. Maybe. But you’re forgetting that he’s the baby’s father. I know. I don’t say they haven’t done all they could do to get hold of Brice. But they ought to do more than they can. There ain’t anything impossible, after you get it done. The baby belongs to him.”

Anne jumped to her feet. “No! No, he’s mine! All mine!”

“He’s the Lord’s, Anne Warren. And the Lord’s fixed it so’s he had to have father and mother both. You’re setting yourself up in the Lord’s place when you pass judgment on Brice.”

“He has set judgment upon himself. He has gone. If he never sees his son, that will be judgment. He deserves it. I am not sorry. No, I’m not sorry.”

4

After a time of weakness when she scarcely realized the small creature at her side, after other days of watching him with wonder, and days of sitting in the sunny window behind the geraniums with the baby asleep in a basket nearby, Anne said to Miss Willy:

“His name is Warren.”

Willy looked at her. Anne saw protest in the look, but she smiled, serenely, securely. “His name is Warren,” she repeated.

“H’m,” said old Willy. “Well. After your poor dear father. Well, you’re his mother. I suppose you got a right to call him what you’re a mind to.”

“I am his mother. Oh, I am,” Anne agreed, lifting the baby, snuggling him up to her face. She knew well enough what Willy implied. For this was Brice’s child, like Brice in every small feature, like him even in the soft, reddish hair on his head. But her whole being protested against what Willy wanted. Another Brice—all the more reason why he should not bear Brice’s name. No one should have a share in him, Brice least of all. She denied Brice’s share in him, even to herself. He was hers, all hers, miraculously flesh of her flesh, hers to love, to mold. He should be more and more hers. Often during that marvelous spring and summer the same jealous thought returned to her. The child flourished and grew, a sunny baby. His first smile was for Willy.

“Look at that, now,” the old woman cried. “Who’d a thought it? He knows me. He knows his old Willy.”

Anne snatched the baby up to her breast. She had watched for that first smile, longed for it, wanted it for herself. But a moment afterwards she was ashamed. Willy was the slave of them both, toiling and loving with a devotion as absolute as that of the nun whose life is centered in the cross on the altar and the red light before it, who spends her nights on her knees and would starve herself, castigate herself, readily give up her body and soul and her life bit by bit that her Lord might perceive and accept her adoration. Willy would come in a dozen times during the day to look at the child. Her face became rapt when his tiny fingers curled about one of hers.

“To think this should happen to me,” she said more than once. “To think of your baby being right here in my house, where I can see him and all.”

Then she would trot off to her work again, trotting more slowly and falteringly as the months passed. Anne, absorbed in the child, took it as a matter of course that things were done for them both. She did not observe that Willy’s hours of work were longer than they had ever been. One day in the spring she surprised the old woman spading the garden, and remonstrated.

“I can do it,” said Willy. “I like to do it.”

“Nonsense,” said Anne. “Dorilliam can do it in half the time. I’ll go up the hill after supper and tell him to come tomorrow.”

“Now look here, Anne Warren, I won’t have you wasting your money that way. You got to save.”

Anne laughed a little. “Save out of what I have? What’s the use? It would never amount to anything.”

“You got plenty to save something out of, if you don’t go frittering it away. You got to save for Warren’s education.”

“Land,” said Dorilliam’s mother, when she dropped in one morning while the baby was having his bath by the kitchen stove, “mine never had all those fixin’s. I just washed ’em off when they were dirty, and kept ’em well fed, and let ’em cry and let ’em sleep. A baby ain’t only a baby, when all’s said and done.”

Anne said nothing. That, doubtless, was true, as far as it went. But to compare the young Warren with these country children? As well compare grain-sacks and silk. There were things about her child that she had never observed in others. She never tired of pondering on all his small perfections. Her state was not peace, but absorption. The rest of the world was shut out, thrust aside, while she tended her baby and watched the developing wondrousness of him. For the first time in her life she was absorbed in something besides herself, yet this was inextricably herself, her own as nothing else had ever been. As his individuality developed she hugged that thought to her more and more. Even while she adored them and gloried in them, she was jealous of the will and impulses that came from somewhere within his small self. For when young Warren wanted to sleep or to stay awake, he did so. When he was hungry, he made his want known vociferously. He loved the warm water about his plump little body, and yelled when he was lifted out of it. He hated to have his nose and his ears touched, and decisively said so. Here was something apart from his mother, not hers at all, needs and preferences not springing from her, the will of another creature to which she must yield, which she resented and feared and adored.

“Got a will of his own,” said Willy one day when the two of them had tried in vain for an hour or more to get him to sleep. When their patience was threadbare, both vanquished by the utter helplessness of the adult before a baby’s unreasoned persistence, the boy had abruptly stopped crying, looked into the old woman’s face, smiled divinely, and dropped into slumber. She laid him down on the sofa. “Just wanted to make us understand once for all that he wouldn’t go to sleep till he got good and ready,” said she.

Anne bent over the child. “He’s his mother’s own boy,” she said, with the fatuous sentimentality of the parent who has just been worsted in a battle with her offspring and finds balm in her tenderness, pride in the strength of the victor.

Miss Willy sniffed. “He is, and he isn’t,” said she. She had no sooner dropped into the rocking-chair than Buster jumped into her lap. “Some of him’s yours and some is his father’s. You needn’t look at me that way, Anne Warren. And some of him belongs to himself, and a good part’s the Lord’s. What the Lord means him to be you can’t tell much about. It’s got to come out. I’ve always noticed that the Lord does a lot of mixing of his stuffs, before he finishes a job. Same as I do with my bread. And when he’s got a thing turned out at last, it’s cram full of most everything, good and bad, sense and foolishness. It works pretty well, but it needs a whole lot of oiling to keep it a-going. The baby’s like that. There’s a lot in that baby that’s going to come out, do what you will. You got to help him get started, but I guess when you think he’s all finished it’ll be just about the time he’s beginning to run with his own machinery, and if you poke your hand into it you’ll likely get pinched. He belongs to himself, Anne, and don’t you forget that. Not that you’re likely to get much of a chance to.”

Anne smiled. Willy was not a mother, Willy could not know.

There is no chart which tells how a mother’s time goes. Anne did not know how the months went. In the autumn Alice and George stopped for an hour. They had been motoring, and Alice was anxious to get back to the children.

“Darling, are you comfortable here? Why won’t you come back with us?” Alice asked.

Anne laughed. “No, I’m not comfortable, as you know comfort, Alice. But this is the place for me until Wanny is a little older. Of course I am not going to live here forever. When he is old enough to play with other children I shall have to take him away from here. There will be the question of school, too. I shall have to learn how to make money.”

They were alone under the apple tree. George had driven to the store for gasoline. For a moment Alice looked off, vaguely, at a distant hill-top where already a maple gleamed yellow; then without turning to Anne she asked,

“Did you hear that Ranney is married?”

“I supposed he would be. In the spring, wasn’t it?”

Alice shook her head. “No, just lately. Not to that girl he was engaged to. He treated that nice girl so badly. Kept putting things off. He has married a woman who was divorced. He’s so different from George. One wouldn’t think they could be brothers.”

Winter came and went by, and in earliest spring, before the glaze ice was gone, Miss Willy fell. Anne came down one morning to find the kitchen cold. She called, opened the door of the old woman’s bedroom. Then throwing a shawl about her she went out of doors. At the door of the hen-house she found her, huddled, eyes dim with pain.

“No, don’t you lift me,” said Willy, her lips blue, her face gray in the sunlight. “Something’s broke.”

Anne sped across the road for the doctor and on for Dorilliam, who came running back with his father and a brother or two. They carried old Willy into the bedroom off the kitchen, and for an hour while young Warren shrieked unregarded Anne stood by and helped. When the worst of it was over Miss Willy’s lips quivered to a smile. Anne followed the doctor out of doors. She was shaken and trembling. It was the first time she had ever seen torture administered that healing might come.

“No, she’s not likely to die,” the doctor told her. “Of course she has worked pretty hard, but it’s amazing how much vitality there is in her sort. I’ve known bones to knit even at her age. But with a broken hip—well, she may get around some, after a time.”

After a time. Anne looked at him, pale. He patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry too much, Mrs. Denison,” he told her. “Whatever happens, you can comfort yourself with one thing. It means a lot to Miss Willy to know you are here. I shall never forget the light in her face the day she told me her widowed niece had come to take care of her in her old age. They so dread being a burden, these people. And they dread even more having to be taken care of by strangers, maybe to go on the town.”

To take care of her. That brave lie told to shield Anne’s pride. She went back to the kitchen. To take care of her.

Bit by bit, Anne learned what that meant, to take care of someone. Day by day she learned what it had meant that old Willy had taken care of herself and the boy.

Things, unimagined things, things vaguely known about but never realized, had to be done, and not by someone else whom she could dismiss from her thoughts with pay; elemental things, that she had always taken for granted. The fire in the kitchen stove would not keep burning unless it were fed with some regularity. After a week that stove seemed to Anne like some ravenous maw that was always yawning, always devouring, never to be satisfied. There were twenty-two steps from the wood-pile at the end of the shed, with a step up and a step down each way. Twenty-two steps, to bring in coal or wood, that Miss Willy, at seventy-four, had trod how many times a day? There was food to be cooked, food that mysteriously scorched, or came from the stove as mysteriously hard. Water, the pump over the kitchen sink the only means of getting it. How had old Willy ever, oh, ever carried all those pails and pitchers of water upstairs and down again, for Anne’s needs and Warren’s? And she had always thought of water and food and fire quite simply as things that were, that existed, like air and sunlight, made for man’s use, and there waiting, simply, infallibly there.

Then, there was time. Hitherto time had been divided into a few broad parts, bed-time and rising-time, breakfast- and luncheon- and dinner-time; or, at Miss Willy’s, dinner- and supper-time. Now there were many bewildering subdivisions, and one had to hasten to meet them before their requirements or demands or whatever they were used for slipped over into another of the strange subdivisions, disastrously. Time to get up—oh, yes, but time also to make the fire, time to get it to going, time to get the stove hot and the breakfast cooked, time for young Warren’s increasing needs, while in her consciousness was always the fact that Miss Willy lay, patient, waiting, perhaps suffering. There were hens and the chicks to be fed, then a rushing for dinner. And in between, where there was not room to crowd a single second’s endeavor, a whole multitude of tasks that must somehow be got through. Cleaning. And washing. What those things did to her back, so much younger than Willy’s.

“It’s awful, you having to do everything,” Miss Willy said to her one day when she brought the boy into the room all fresh and rosy from his bath. She had got up at five that morning, but things were still waiting. Yet she looked down at Willy and laughed.

“It is. It is, isn’t it? Because I’m such a duffer at it, Willykin. You don’t know!”

Miss Willy did not laugh with her. Her lips trembled. “But if you wasn’t here, Anne, I’d—maybe I’d have to—go on—the town.”

Anne put the boy on the floor—he was beginning to creep about—and sat on the side of the bed.

“Willy,” she said, “something is happening to me. I don’t know what it is. But I think I was never so happy in my life nor so disgusted with myself. I do hate to see you lying there, but I think perhaps your breaking your funny old bones was just your last fine sacrifice for me. I think——”

But that was too much for old Willy. Her eyes struck dim fire. “Now look here, Annie Warren,” said she, with the first return of her old spirit that she had shown since her fall, “if you think the Lord’s put me here so’s you can get hold of a mite of sense, you’re mistaken. That’s putting too much on the Lord. I slipped on the ice because I wasn’t looking out. That’s what did it. My own fault. But I do say it’s high time you knew how to do things. Not that I should want you to tire yourself out. And—my goodness! Quick! Look at that child! He’ll be on the stove in a minute!”

Anne flew.

There were days, a while later, when she got up at four, when to stay in bed would have been sheer unwarrantable luxury, though her body still ached for rest and she told herself that she could not go through with the work ahead of her. Yet she arose, and the day’s work caught her up, whirled her on with it, herself not the force that accomplished but the means, the mere tool of that force.

When spring reluctantly gave way to summer people in Heathville hastily made their gardens. It was not safe to plant earlier lest the tender green shoots be nipped by late frost, nor later lest the first hot spell of June wither them.

“Memorial Day, that’s the right time to plant,” said old Deacon Bassett who lived up the road. “You ain’t likely to get caught either goin’ or comin’.”

Dorilliam had done the plowing, the spading, the leveling. Anne had supposed that Dorilliam would do all the rest. She had never felt interested in gardening, and now her time was too full to contemplate added work out of doors. But she sat at the kitchen table one night with pencil and paper after paying Dorilliam, her pocket-book open, what remained of its contents spread out before her. There had to be extra milk now, quarts of it, for young Warren. Oranges, too, that now had become not the inevitable breakfast fruit, but a daily expense of five cents, ten cents, a staggering total each month. The boy was beginning to walk; the delicate shoes she sent to town for wore out in a few weeks. Old Willy had always done their washing. That Anne was incapable of, and it had to be paid for. Moreover, she had discovered the extreme meagerness of the old woman’s supply of bedding and towels, and had bought more. Pity she had not thought of bringing some from that house whose contents she had never wanted to see again. The people who had rented it at first had departed. The next tenants had wanted it unfurnished, and she had insisted that everything should be sent to the auction rooms, everything, everything. She wanted nothing, no reminders. They brought a small fraction of what they had cost. At old Willy’s command, for it was more than suggestion, the little sum had been deposited in a savings bank, to be used for the boy’s education. That could not be touched. With herself as housekeeper, more was spent than under old Willy’s close management for food and fuel. Even kerosene had to be bought oftener. And now loomed the question of the garden. Anne counted her money, tried to estimate the hours during the summer that she would need Dorilliam, added up what that would cost, deducted. It could not be done. She spoke of it to Willy, the next day.

“I’ve decided that we won’t have a garden this year, dear,” said she. “I’m no gardener. You know that. We’ll just do without.”

For a moment the old woman lay without looking at Anne, without speaking. Her face against the pillow was wrinkled and pallid. Her age might have been beyond computing, like the Sphinx’s, and as silently as the Sphinx she might have been pondering the proposition implied in Anne’s words. Then she spoke.

“What’ll we eat?” she asked.

“Oh, anything, everything,” Anne said lightly, even while an inner sense warned her that the question was not a light one. “There’s always something to eat, isn’t there?”

“Well, what?” Willy persisted.

There is no question as tormenting as the one which puts its solution on the questioner. Old Willy lay looking impassively at a crack in the wall, but Anne looked at Willy. “There is always something to eat, isn’t there?” she had asked. But was there? Food. Food, the elemental, primal, ultimate necessity. Was it indeed always there? She thought of her pocket-book, her sheets of figuring. The thing faced her, simply, starkly, naked, stripped of everything, as hideous and uncompromising as a skeleton: was food always there? What would they eat? Where would it come from?

It was breath-taking, bewildering. She busied herself again and again with her pencil and paper, then consulted Dorilliam. Something, some remote shame or pride, forbade her from talking to Willy. That old woman lying there, who had met this problem so many years, now so helpless, probably thinking and thinking, perhaps worrying. No. If she had the thing to go through with, she would do it alone, for Dorilliam did not count as a person except in the sense of being a workman of sorts and of having to be paid.

“What you want to buy seeds for?” he asked, when she asked him as casually as she could what she would need to buy.

“To plant in the garden,” said she, sternly. She was always suspecting that Dorilliam held her in secret amusement and scorn, as those countrymen do who know a few things beyond the scope of someone they confront, and believe their knowledge surpasses all of the others. But the boy was honestly puzzled.

“Yeah. But what you want to buy ’em for? Why don’t you plant what you got?”

“What I have?”

“Sure. She’s got ’em saved up, ain’t she? Everybody saves ’em up for next year.”

So after all she spoke to Willy again about the garden, went to the place where Willy had stored the saved seeds, in jars and small packets tied about with bits of string. Economy had never held anything of beauty for Anne, but when she brought out those seeds, fruit of an old woman’s toil, so carefully cured and saved that the soil might be fruitful again the next year, something gripped at her throat. Here was a poignant significance that rose up at her. Here, too, was the germ of a new perception. The garden was made and tended that they might have something to eat. As simple as that. But there was more in it than that stark necessity. It was the child of other gardens. In the little packets of saved seeds there was not only harvest, but a link with gardens of other summers, with summers to come, as old Willy’s toil was linked with the labor of the ages, as her own would be. On and on, the treadmill, unending, however one ached. And after she had talked with Willy as to methods and means, she was confronted with her stupendous ignorance of what seemed so simple, what was, indeed, so elemental.

“Why, you just scrape out a row, and put ’em into it,” said Willy. “Then you cover ’em up.”

“With what?” she asked, for she had seen newspapers carefully spread over some of the old woman’s tender “cuttings” and wondered if that were a rite to be observed with everything else.

“Good land, child, ain’t you got any sense at all? You cover ’em up with dirt, and pat ’em all down, of course.”

Anne laughed a little. “Do they have to be patted? Shall I pull up the blankets and hear them say their prayers, too?”

Willy sniffed. “You don’t have to blaspheme just because you’re so ignorant,” said she, “though lots of folks do. Yes, they do have to be patted, or else trod on. The dirt’s got to touch ’em, or else they won’t sprout. And the dirt’s got to be fine, not all lumps. Sakes alive, I wish I could get out o’ this bed.”

“That’s sheer pride and jealousy, Willy. You think I can’t make this garden, and you want to do it yourself,” Anne laughed. But when she confronted the actual task she did not laugh. Before, she felt herself potentially able to cope with it. It must be quite simple, like driving a Ford, because people of such inferior intelligence mastered it. Of course it was not fit work for her, and she had not a minute to spare for it. But it must be easy enough, since even an old woman like Willy had accomplished it. Her only difficulty would be in finding time. So one morning she got up at four, just as dawn was flushing on the western hills, and betook herself to the place Dorilliam had raked at such a cost. Scrape out a row, Willy had said, and make the dirt fine. Easy, until her shoulders ached with the weight of the hoe.

Her row turned out to be a wandering path of varying depth. She dropped in the seeds. Willy had said there were enough in the bundle for a whole row, but they mysteriously gave out before the row was half filled. She considered the problem, carefully picked out seeds enough for the rest of the row. Then came the affair of making the dirt fine, to cover them with. She could not. It was heavy with dew, refused to crumble, persisted in becoming a tough, clayey substance under her hands. She had been out two hours, Warren’s cries could be heard, she was aching and angry. She had not achieved one single row in this miserable garden, and the piece of smoothed land stretched before her into a leering expanse as broad as an ocean. It was the first time she had ever discovered that to work with nature one must use nature’s time, wait on her moods. When she went to the garden again, later in the day, she was amazed to find that the earth crumbled easily enough. Thereafter she rose at the same early hour, but worked at other things until the garden was ready.

A few weeks later, again directed by one of Deacon Bassett’s pronouncements, she was working there with a hoe, the baby happy and noisy, playing in the dirt, his attention absorbed by filling a tin can with a hole in the bottom, watching the soil sift out, and filling the can again. Someone spoke to him over the fence. Anne looked up and nodded, but Warren deserted his game and promptly performed the acrobatic feat of making himself into a small pyramid, bracing his feet until they were steady by resting his hands on the ground, his inevitable method of arising. Then he toddled and tumbled towards Dorilliam.

“What’s them things for?” Dorilliam presently asked. He had come near, holding Warren’s hand.

Anne sat back, wearily, but with a sense of triumph, too. “Them things” were an achievement, and she took pride in making them well, first by scraping the earth up with a hoe, then rounding it off with her hands.

“They’re the hills for the corn, of course,” said she. “This is the week for corn. What should they be?” She rather enjoyed snubbing Dorilliam.

“I dunno,” said the boy. “Never saw nothing like ’em before.”

“And you’ve lived in the country all your life. I’m surprised at you. Mr. Bassett says it’s much better to plant corn in hills than in rows. It doesn’t blow over as easily.”

Dorilliam’s slow grin was a thing to see. “Here, you gimme that hoe,” said he, and forsook Warren’s hand so abruptly that the baby sat down with a soft thud. Dorilliam scraped out a shallow hole.

“Now that,” said he, “is a hill. You put your corn in there on top. Then you cover it over. Then you stomp on it. That’s the way to plant corn. Them things you made, they ain’t hills. They’re Mount Ararats.”

“My goodness,” Anne murmured, meekly. “A hill upside down.”

But the incident gave her a new feeling of humility, of helplessness, of respect: humility, that she, Anne Denison, should cope so badly with such primitive affairs; helplessness, because there seemed so many difficulties, however absurd and small; respect for these country people, even for Dorilliam, that they could perform with ease what she found so intricate.

Long before the last row was planted and walked on there were green things beginning to show in the first ones. By that time she had formed quite a friendship with the Deacon, a stern, gray old man. Often after supper he would come down the road to inspect her labors. Sometimes, when a new problem came up, she would tuck Warren under her arm and run to Bassett’s house for advice.

“Yes,” she complacently told him one evening, “they’re coming along.” That was a phrase he used; she had unconsciously adopted it. “And I do think Miss Willy’s seeds are wonderful. Ever so many more come up than I’ve planted, it seems to me.”

Bassett rubbed his chin. He shaved on Sundays only. “Yeus. Well, mebbe,” said he. “But I shouldn’t be s’prised if a good many of those green shoots are weeds. I s’ppose you ain’t got around to weedin’ yet.”

That, when she had begun to tell herself that her labors were all but over. She thought of her aching arms, of tasks waiting indoors, thought yearningly of Dorilliam. But old Willy had managed without the boy. So would she. Many an evening after she had washed the day’s grime from Warren and got him to sleep, and laundered some of his small garments, and made the kitchen neat after supper, she worked on her knees between the rows, weeding until it was too dark to see. Yet do what she might, there were disasters.

“Seems like our beet-greens is terrible slow, this year,” said Miss Willy. “You got ’em in in time, too. It’s funny, what a difference there is in seasons.”

No need to tell her that all the young beets had been carefully, laboriously, back-breakingly weeded up. And such futile things, anyway, beet-greens. To get the best of one, merely by being. It shamed her, that difficulty of coping with little things that she had scarcely realized existed except as insignificant parts of a whole that ordered itself. She had always been willing to battle with what she conceived to be big things, those that meant conflict with people. There was exhilaration in that. It got one somewhere. But this daily, hurrying conflict with nature and the bare routine of living was bewildering. It entangled her in all sorts of complicated trivialities, as though it could make any difference, for example, whether one planted corn in rows or in holes or on small Mount Ararats. To find that it did make a difference, that one had to discover and yield to the preferences of corn and of beans, was bewildering.

Bewildering; but slowly out of bewilderment there came a feeling of conducting a campaign. She was not going to let herself be conquered by a vegetable garden. It grew in importance, became a battle-ground. Eventually, victorious, she had such a feeling of triumph and achievement as not even the arrival of Warren had given her,—Wanny, that small-featured replica of Brice. The garden with all its failures and oddities, not in the least like Miss Willy’s neat, straight-rowed one, was a thing of her own creating, wrought by her own labor, by the veritable sweat of her brow and the grime of her hands and the ache of her body, something that contributed to the very foundation of life, something, quite simply, to eat. It was as though she had caused earth or air or water to come into existence. She had caused food to be. She did not regard her performance nor its results as beautiful, nor as clever, nor as amusing, nor as something bound up with the future, like Wanny. She had brought something that was elemental out of nothingness. She had become creative of that which was the very basis of existence.

5

So the summer passed in toil. No time for thoughts, nor for thought. No time, really, for anything, with so much to be done, so little that could be left undone. Hens, Anne discovered, could be as clamorous as babies. When a prideful, clucking absurdity emerged from a hidden nest with a brood of chicks she could have crushed the lot of them. They were hated, but they were important, for they were food, and after a day or two their very helplessness and dependency captured her. She was indignant and sorrowful when one fell prey to Buster’s rapaciousness. Miss Willy frequently asked after her flowers. There were weeds among them that Anne told herself could not go unregarded, whatever happened. The peonies bloomed so generously. How could she let their brave beauty smother in weeds? After a summer rain, the hollyhocks lay on the ground. There was no time for it, but she must find stakes, tie them up.

By midsummer Wanny was toddling everywhere. He possessed an ingenuity for getting into mischief beyond anything his mother had ever encountered. If he were silent or out of sight for too long she had to drop everything, hunt for him. And his clothes, those small costly shoes that wore out so soon, the rompers that had to be fresh every morning. There were days when his bath was no more than a hasty sponging away of grime before he was put to sleep, nights when she was so weary that she dropped on her bed without undressing, to wake in the dawn with a crowding sense of things waiting to be done, in a panic of fear lest she had over-slept. Everything was in the present. The future was something she had no time to think about. Work. Two to care for, three to provide for, hurriedly, rather chaotically.

Winter came, when she had thought there would be more time. But again there were stoves, lamps, sewing. The child had outgrown the first baby coat Alice had sent. Anne contrived to make him another out of an old skirt of her own. It had no air of elegance. She laughed when she dressed him in it.

“Pitty, pitty,” said Warren, smoothing his bulging front.

“Not so very pretty, old man,” Anne laughed. “But it will keep you warm.”

“Pretty is as pretty does,” said old Willy, and Anne, “Goodness, I hope not. If his looks had to be measured by his behavior——!”

Two years before she could not have tolerated that garment. Now she could laugh at it, was even rather proud of it. But she did not for more than a moment think of the change in herself. There was something else waiting to be done. Orderliness she had not begun to learn. There were neighbor women who came to see Miss Willy, bringing gifts of pies and doughnuts and “tastes” of jelly and jam and pickles. Seeing Miss Willy’s enjoyment of the delicacies, Anne remembered that the old woman had always managed to put up some of her own. Now the pantry shelves held none. She had never thought of making any. Where had Willy found time to do it? How did those other women, busy mothers of families, find time? Even the mere thought of their dish-washing staggered Anne’s imagination, now that she knew how mysteriously dishes piled up for only three. And there was their mending, their cooking, their washing. Yet those over-worked women found time to come to Miss Willy’s and “visit” sometimes for an hour or more. Anne found herself listening to their talk. It was no longer of trivialities beyond or beneath her scope and her interest; it was of things become vital. They had been vague, dull, toiling creatures without imagination, without grace, uninteresting. Now they emerged into separate entities, personalities with feelings and impulses which she recognized, more skilled and experienced than herself in things of first importance. There was so much that they knew and that she did not, and things they achieved daily, as a matter of course, simply and neatly, that staggered her efforts and ingenuity to perform and left her worn with fatigue after trying.

“The working classes”—she remembered that she used to think of the working classes, in the old days, with something akin to disgust. She had never been able to understand Nicky’s interest in them, nor how she had been able to endure daily contact with them. Either they toiled with an impenetrable, ineffectual, stolid indifference, or they disagreeably or violently protested against their lot, deviously trying to better it at the cost of the comfort of people who were more fortunate than themselves. They were unreasonably envious, and their morals were as sordid as their way of living. She had always felt injured and angry when one of her maids had asked for extra time off. She remembered her amused scorn when they spent their earnings for some foolish finery to be worn on one or two afternoons of the week.

These women who dropped in to see Willy were toilers in a labor unending. She knew about that, now. As far as she could perceive, theirs was a labor without result or reward, just a grind, day after day, year after year. Now she knew that they were not sunk in a dull state of mental and spiritual stagnation. They were not clamorously trying to better their lot at the expense of others. Apparently they shattered no more of the Ten Commandments than anyone else did. Sometimes she wondered what secret revolts of the soul might be theirs, or whether they had souls at all in the sense of possessing a well-spring of feeling and thought and aspiration. They concerned themselves with things she had never supposed required thought or were bound up with feeling or led to aspiration, but indubitably aspiration and feeling and thought played a part in their lives.

At first they had been shy with her. One or two had told her hesitatingly how fine it was for Miss Willy to have her there. They thought of her as the niece from the city who went about always dressed up and sat around while Miss Willy waited on her. Now they found her aproned, busy, and there was always the child to talk about. Anne found herself listening with absorbed interest to tales of other children’s illnesses. She was not bored when Mrs. Ware told how her Julia had broken her collar-bone, nor when Mrs. Beaman told how her twins in one winter had measles and chicken pox and whooping cough, alternately, “so’s we were no sooner gettin’ out o’ one thing with Elizabeth than we come down with the same thing with Florence; and by the time Florence was better, Elizabeth had started on something else.” Those things were not trivial. They were not disgusting. They were not unpleasant diseases that troublesome children persisted in having, so that one wondered how mothers endured them. They were dangers that lurked for Wanny. Those women were mothers. So was she.

She took Wanny to the Christmas tree at the church. His round-eyed wonder was a revelation, something that pierced to her heart. Mrs. Beaman gave him an orange. When he held it in both hands, stared at it, it was not an orange, but a symbol, a mystery. He had seen it taken from a box under the tree. Therefore it was endued with beauties and wonders beyond all other oranges. Anne, looking up, met Mrs. Beaman’s glance, her tolerant, understanding smile.

A few days thereafter Mrs. Wells ran down the road bearing a plate wrapped up in a napkin. Hot rolls. “I thought maybe they’d go good for supper,” said she.

“Land! I should think so,” old Willy said. “We ain’t had any home-made bread since I don’t know when.”

The visitor looked at Anne. “Why, you don’t buy all your bread, do you?”

“I can’t make it,” Anne said.

“But it costs so much at the store.”

The next day Anne bundled up Wanny and walked up the road to the Bassetts’s. The children of that house had long ago gone away, the old couple were alone, and Mrs. Bassett was known as the best housekeeper in Heathville, eternally busy.

“Will you teach me how to make bread?” Anne asked, and could see the flattered look in the old woman’s eyes.

Her first loaves were an achievement that gave her a satisfaction scarcely less than her conquest of the garden.

“What’s that I smell?” old Willy called out, from the bedroom. “You ain’t ever trying to make bread, child! You’ll just waste the flour.”

“Not I,” Anne declared, coming in with a freshly baked loaf turned out on a towel. “Look at that! Willy, when I think of the money we’ve spent at that store for bread——!”

Old Willy’s lips quivered. “I got to get out o’ this bed,” said she. “You can’t do all the work yourself, and takin’ on more all the time.”

Anne put the loaf down, came and stood near the bed. “Willy,” she said, “it’s the strangest thing. No matter how much more I find to do, I always seem to find time to do it in. And stranger still, I rather like doing it. It makes me feel so important.”

Gradually the women who had been coming to see Miss Willy lingered to chat with Anne. Recipes were given, that had to be explained. Flower seeds were brought in small bits of brown paper, and about their flowers odd sentiments lingered, odd to Anne because at first they seemed so trivial.

“That’s ‘Impatience,’” said one, presenting a slim sprig of green planted in a can from which the label had been removed. “‘Impatience,’ though some folks call it ‘Patience’. Either way it’s the truth, for it’s always in a hurry to bloom, and it blooms all the time.”

There were slips of geranium, too, and a small, prickly cactus. Anne thought of Alice’s masses of flowers, of those she herself had always managed to buy for the dining-room, and of lilacs and orchids, and tulips; Tulips that fell. But these little struggling things in pots and cans had personality, identity. They were a nuisance at first, because she was forever forgetting to water them; but when she discovered them drooping, and watched for them to revive, they assumed an importance beyond reason. They were gifts. She could not let them die. Then they bloomed.

By the time spring came again Miss Willy was hobbling about with a crutch and a cane. The crutch Anne had to buy. That month she began to do their washing. The cane was brought out of a chest in the attic.

“My poor grandfather’s cane,” said Miss Willy. “You can see his name on the silver band. Poor man. I’m afraid he drank a good deal. My grandmother married again. But after all, I’m sure there’s nothing like young love, my dear. I’ve been thinking. When Wanny grows up——”

So Willy was almost herself once more, though she was never again able to do active work. She could sit in the window behind the flowers and sew, and knit stockings for Warren. It lifted a good deal from Anne to have her watch the boy, whose capacity for mischief increased every day.

“What that child does think up,” said Willy. He had climbed on a chair when no one was looking and dropped soap into a stew Anne was making for dinner. They discovered it when he danced up and down, clapping his hands and shouting:

“Oh, ’ook at the bubbles! ’ook at the bubbles on the stove! Pretty bubbles! Wanny makes ooooh pretty bubbles!”

Then, from the chair where his mother had forcefully deposited him, he howled miserably. “Don’t like Wanny’s bubbles! Bad Mums don’t like Wanny’s bubbles!”

Anne looked dolefully at Willy. “Stew enough for two days. Oh dear! All that good meat!”

Miss Willy’s placidity was not ruffled. “He was only just doing what you do yourself, and what most folks do,” said she.

“I never put soap in the stew,” Anne protested, laughing ruefully.

“I ain’t so sure about that. But what I meant was he only sees things from where he stands. You got to make allowances for that.”

In the course of the months Anne had achieved some measure of orderliness. Work did not crowd as much as before. She found herself looking forward with unsuspected eagerness to the time when the garden could be planted. It was good to see the snows melting, good to see the brown earth emerging and drying, good to bring in pussy-willows and to wander with Warren through the moist woods to find hepaticas, even good to hear the hylas again. One night when the others were asleep she stood at her window and looked out. The moon was high. Earth and sky were inherent parts of the same beauty, hesitant, translucent. In the moonlight even the familiar garden and roads and fields wore an effect of luminous unreality. The world slept, yet it was breathing and dreaming. It called her to go forth into its hesitant loveliness, to penetrate and become a part of its dream. The boy was sleeping with his face buried in his pillow, the red curls on his neck damp and sweet. He could be trusted not to wake. She crept down the stairs. The doors were never locked.

It was strange to be walking along the road in this strange light. Even the shadows were softer, melting and merging into the earth. On and on she walked, slowly, through a world creating itself anew, through sweet woods, between fields fragrant with the moist breath of night, past a marsh where the hylas piped, little Pans, plaintive, luring, singing of joys that might be or joys to come.

Abruptly, where the road wound through a stretch of woods, she stopped. Something moved there. Once fear would have held her, but she had come to know how needless fear was in that far-away countryside.

“I hope I have not frightened you?” a voice asked.

Strange, to hear again a voice of cultivation, words enunciated with careless precision. Suddenly she remembered. Not far beyond was the house of the man who had come out to the doctor’s car on the day it had stalled, the man the doctor termed “old fool.”

“Not exactly,” she said, quietly. “I’m afraid I have walked rather farther than I meant to.”

He had come nearer. He was hatless, and she remembered how white his hair had looked that day, and realized that its whiteness gave him that strange appearance now in the dim light.

“Yes. One has to come out on a night like this,” he said. “I’ve an idea that the real purpose of the moon is to keep the balance even. The sun works. The moon calms and blesses. We need both work and calm, to keep the balance true.”

Anne smiled faintly. How odd he was, to speak like that, without preface, to a stranger.

“There are various other things one needs, are there not?” she suggested, falling into his mood.

“Yes. Oh, yes. But they all come into the two categories. Work, not necessarily what one does not love or enjoy, but work, occupation. And calm. ‘Ease and alternate labor.’ What else is there?”

They had fallen into step. After a moment she said, “I think you are laughing at me.”

He grasped at a bough that projected across the road, its buds just beginning to open, snapped it off, the sound of its breaking distinct in the night’s stillness.

“Forgive me. Not at you. I should not have said that. Nor felt it. It’s only fair that life should give us the obvious things, make us go searching for the others.”

“So there is something else?”

She knew he turned to look at her. “You came out to find it, didn’t you? And I came out.”

They walked on a little. “Does one find, I wonder?” she murmured.

They had reached the edge of the woods. Before them a meadow lay flooded with moonlight, gleaming like a sea becalmed. They stood still, held by its beauty.

“I don’t know,” he said presently. “But if one may still search, still come out, into this!”

“It’s beautiful,” she said softly. “But there’s no answer there.”

“I’m not so sure. Not that it matters, the answer. It’s the search, the fact that one can come out, that one wants to.”

“Is that enough?” Unconsciously they spoke almost in whispers, as though to speak aloud would be to break the spell of the night.

“Not enough, no. But there’s always the belief or the hope that there’s something to be found. Else one would not come out.”

“I wonder,” she said.

“Oh, we all wonder. But we all know it’s there.”

“What?”

He waited. “Rhythm, I think. Or call it God.”

They were silent a moment. Then, without seeming to know she was there, he walked away.

6

The first day she permitted Miss Willy to go as far as the garden Anne proudly pointed. “There!” she exclaimed. “Look at that, all ready for the seeds. I did it myself, too. Dorilliam did nothing but the plowing.”

“Wanny helped,” the youngster boasted.

“Not the hoeing and raking! You never did, Anne Warren!” old Willy cried.

Anne laughed, brushed a hand upward across her damp forehead. “But I did. I’m so proud of it. I call that a good job well done.”

A letter received from Alice about that time amused her. Alice and George were taking the children to Europe for the summer. Would not Anne use their house while they were gone? The servants would be there, the house going on as usual. There would be the car, and Warren would like the children’s playthings, the sand-pile and swing in the yard. There was plenty of room for Miss Willy, too. Anne’s first thought was, “Why, I couldn’t leave the garden!” Then she laughed aloud. But it was quite true. That garden had been conquered the year before. Now it was hers, and she could not tolerate the thought of leaving it. That summer there were no such mistakes as had baffled her last year, for old Willy looked on and advised. Anne was bending over the wash-tubs every week, rejoicing in the flapping white things on the line. She was making their bread, and under Willy’s direction canning fruits and young tender vegetables in glass jars for winter. Warren, with his increased capacity for getting out of sight and into mischief, was even more care than before. Yet she had an elated consciousness of living.

One July day when the heat was so intense that Willy had not ventured out of doors, Anne was hanging out clothes, grateful that the weekly washing was done. The old woman came to the kitchen door.

“Wanny with you?” she called.

Anne put the last clothes-pin in place, took up her basket. “That monkey! Has he slipped off again? I’ll have to go look for him.”

She went, calling, and presently Warren came running towards her, his face mottled with crimson, torn with briers, and both his closed fists dripping red. But he was smiling angelically.

“I brought you some, too, Mums,” said he, opening his hands and holding them up to her. He had been tightly grasping the raspberries.

“He ought to be spanked,” said Miss Willy.

Anne looked over the child’s head, and smiled. He was standing in one of the tubs getting scoured, his dimpled body rising from the suds in which he was infinitely more interested than in cleanliness.

“Will you do the spanking?” she asked.

Miss Willy looked at her over her spectacles, said not a word more.

That afternoon the child was sleepy. His forehead was hot. “Don’t want to go out in the garden. Want to stay here,” he said later, and Anne, who was starting the fire for supper, absently agreed.

“All right, old man. But don’t get in mother’s way.”

Then she heard a cry from Miss Willy. Another moment and she was kneeling on the floor, lifting the child to her breast, shrieking.

“Stop that! Leave him there! Don’t take him up! It’s a spasm,” she heard Willy say.

“He’s dying! My baby’s dying!”

“He ain’t, either! You leave him right there, and run for the doctor. I’ll get the kettle on. Give me a spoon to put in his mouth. Now run——!”

The little body was stiff, the child’s eyes rolled upward.

“If the doctor ain’t there, get Mis’ Beaman,” Willy called after her.

She stumbled on the steps, caught herself, raced on. The doctor was not there. Mrs. Beaman turned from the stove, the twins and the other children staring open-mouthed at the frantic woman who had burst in upon them.

“My baby! Convulsions—he’s dying,” Anne panted.

Instantly Mrs. Beaman grasped a steaming tea-kettle from the stove and held it towards Anne. “Take that and run,” said she. “Here you, Johnny, you carry this pot. Never mind the potatoes in it, they won’t do any harm. Now I’ll get the mustard——”

Ten minutes, half an hour, and Wanny was wrapped in a blanket, relaxed, his eyes closed. Mrs. Beaman laughed.

“I used to think you used a good many things to bathe him with, when he was a baby,” she said, “but I guess it’s the first time he ever had a hot bath with potatoes floating around in the water.”

Anne was still trembling. “If you hadn’t come! You saved my boy.”

Late in August Nicky came for a week. She watched Anne at first curiously, making no comment on her varied activities. Human work in the garden was over until time for harvesting. There were hours in the long afternoons when the two could sit in the shade or walk through the woods.

“Anne,” Veronica asked one day, “do you ever have time to think?”

Anne laughed. “Yes, with my hands.”

“I’ve never seen you look so happy, so satisfied.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“That, from Nance Denison! But you aren’t Nance Denison.”

Anne leaned forward, her hands dropped beyond her knees. “Oh, yes I am. Don’t you think I am not, Nicky old girl. I always wanted to do things, my own things, have my own way. Now I’m doing them, reveling in having my own way. Of course I’m happy!”

“And satisfied?”

“Oh, well, that! There always has to be something beyond. Of course I’m not going to stay here forever.”

“That’s really what I came about, Nance.” Anne looked at her questioningly. “There’s a new home for working girls. A sort of hotel, really, but they want to provide something more for the girls than other homes do. They want a hostess, a woman who has been used to things. I can get you the job if you want it.”

“There’s Wanny.”

“You could have Wanny with you. The pay isn’t bad.”

Anne stood up, her hands behind her back. There was the garden, the house, the hen-house, the hills and ripening fields.

“Nicky, I can’t,” she said. “Not while old Willy lives.”

Nicky lay back, stretched her arms over her head, yawned. “You’re growing up, Anne,” said she.

Afterwards, Anne wondered at herself a little. It was true that a few years before she would have taken the chance without thinking of anyone who stood in the way. If she had heard of some other woman making such a choice she would have scorned her for it, set her down in the same category into which she had dismissed people like those who were now her neighbors, as being of no account, bound by their own dullness and stupidity and lack of initiative, without intention, without aspiration. Her mind was still groping. She could not have told why she had permitted herself to be held by allegiance to old Willy. But, however vaguely, she was beginning to feel that there was something beyond initiative and aspiration, some established necessary sequence, perhaps even some purpose.

Several times she had encountered the man Kent on the road or in the store. Once he had said to Warren:

“You come to see me, and I’ll show you something!”

She thought of him as of one who could speak her old language, remembered his odd way of coming abruptly to things that were commonly left unspoken or only touched upon after a preface of intimacy, as though they were common enough to be taken for granted, so much a part of one’s habitual thought as to come naturally to any man’s lips. Her harvesting work was done for the year. The little place was neat for winter, the pantry shelves were filled. She smiled when she looked at those rows of bright jars. She, Anne Denison, “forehanded!” On a day in late September she took her son by the hand and set forth. Not that Warren permitted himself to be held in leash for long. His legs were sturdy. How she loved them, their curves and dimples and bruises. He would trot ahead of her to kick up the leaves, go foraging into the woods, spring out upon her at the next turn. He howled when he investigated a chestnut burr, a moment later joyously presented her with a spray of asters. Walks with Wanny had their variety. Before they came in sight of the cottage her ears caught the sound of music. A piano, played rather superbly, she thought. In spite of her restraining call Warren flew to the door, hammered upon it.

“I want to see what that noise is. Let me in. I want to see.”

As she reached the door it opened, and Kent stood there, laughing. He took the child’s hand, closed the door behind them, and came down the walk towards Anne.

“We’ve interrupted you,” she said, with an air of apology.

But he shook his head. “No. I was playing to my wife. But she’s asleep now. It always quiets her.”

“I am sorry. I did not know Mrs. Kent was ill.”

His face bore a worn look, as of one who had not slept. “Always ill. I am very glad you came to see me.”

“I have been thinking so much, Mr. Kent, of some of the things you said to me that night when I was so wild as to walk in the moonlight.” He looked at her questioningly, yet she did not find it difficult to speak simply of what had seemed so simple to him.

He nodded. “Ah—yes.” Then his manner changed. He looked down at Warren. “How would you like to come into my garden? I could show you something there.”

“There isn’t any garden any more. We’ve dug the potatoes,” said Warren.

“There is always a garden,” the man said, laughing. “Come along!”

He led the way with the boy, talking and answering, for there had to be a good deal of answering, with Warren.

“This is a funny garden,” said Warren.

“You just wait,” laughed Kent. “And don’t stumble.”

The path led down sharply. Anne drew a quick breath when it ended abruptly in a cleared space at the base of the hill, a space perhaps a full hundred yards across, leveled and smooth, the woods closing it in, sunlight drenching it. Only a few bronzed leaves clung to the low-growing oaks against its forested wall. For the rest, it was raked clean, like a house swept and garnished. And that, thought Anne, was what it must be, a house here in the woods, with the sky for its roof. There were borders where even now a late rose or two braved the cold nights. At one side a long shallow pool, its banks strengthened with field stones, caught a bit of the sky’s blue. Just beyond was an arbor, white, grape-trellised, and at other places two long low benches of gleaming white. On one of these lay a doll, large as a baby and as daintily dressed, its legs hanging limply over the side. On the floor of the arbor, in a spot of sunlight, a dog lay. It got up when it saw Kent, hobbled joyously towards him on three legs. He stooped and patted it. Warren drew back towards his mother.

“I never saw a dog like that,” he said. “Where’s all of him?”

“The rest of him, you mean?” Kent laughed aloud. “Well, once he was caught in a trap. The trap bit off his paw. But there are no other dogs here, you see, so he doesn’t realize how different he is. We don’t remind him of it.”

Anne remembered, something the doctor had said that first time. “A lot of lame ducks.” This, apparently, was one of them. Then she became aware of a face in the depths of the arbor, a form there.

“Jenny,” Kent called. “You Jenny there! Come out here and say ‘how do’ to the lady and the young man I’ve brought to call on you.”

It was a child; or, surely, the laugh came from a girl who was not quite past childhood. A girl of thirteen or so, Anne thought, when she haltingly emerged. As she came she seemed to help herself by the side of the arbor where shade lay deepest. Her face wore that curious agedness of the city child who has long been ill.

“A-a-ah! No you don’t,” Kent called out, laughing. “Don’t you touch that crutch, Jenny!”

“I ain’t, honest I ain’t, Mr. Kent. It’s on the bench!”

“Then you’re cheating. You’re holding on to the wall.”

The girl giggled delightedly, as at some huge joke. “But I got to.”

“Now hear that! I told you to come here. Now then, come along. Come along.”

She came to the opening of the arbor, bracing herself by a hand on its side. Anne saw that her body was twisted, restricted by some muscular impediment, perhaps a form of paralysis. Jenny was smiling, and Kent shook his head.

“Won’t do, Jenny. You let go of that door, and come out here.”

“But I can’t, Mr. Kent. Honest I can’t.”

“Come!”

She took a step or two forward, wavered. Anne would have jumped to her side, but Kent’s raised hand warned her back.

“Now you see that you can. Come along!”

A step or two more, and suddenly the girl fell awkwardly, sprawling, laughing. “Gee, ain’t he funny!” she cried.

Kent helped her up, took her arm and led her to one of the benches. “Now next time, young woman, you’ll walk. Tumbling has gone out of fashion. Do you hear?” he warned her.

“It’s a heavenly place,” Anne said, “a sort of magic garden, as though the fairies had lived here a while and then forgotten it.”

Kent nodded. “I made it for my wife. We just about live down here, in the summer. You see, she’s afraid of the woods, and as they shut in the garden she’s safe here. She’s afraid to run away, except by the path, and we can watch that.”

In spite of herself Anne stared.

“Yes, she is like that,” Kent said, quietly. “As I said, it’s the reason for our living here. Where we lived before she was forever running away, slipping past all our vigilance. It wasn’t good for her to be constantly watched and she needed the air. Now she is happier. She has some freedom, but she is safe.”

Before the strange revelation Anne knew nothing to say. Kent went on, as though musing: “That doll over there. It is hers. I shall have to take it back to the house before she wakes up, or she’ll cry for it. She calls it her baby, yet at times, you see, she forgets it. When she is very bad. Yes, she is like that.”

Presently Anne said, “The little girl there——”

Kent smiled. “Oh, Jenny. Yes. We have them here. First one, then another. Jenny will soon be all right. She went on two crutches a few months ago.”

He had indeed shown her something in his garden. Anne was certain of that. His wife “like that,” the lame dog, the child Jenny. She thought of their meeting in the moonlight, and his words, “Not that it matters, the answer. It’s the search.” Now, in the light of what he had shown her, those words did not ring true. For what was his search, how much was he seeking? Obviously, the man was not impoverished. He was not held to Heathville by that dumb and stupid allegiance to the soil that she read in the simpler people. Yet there he stayed with a mad wife and a lame dog and children like Jenny. “We have them here. First one, then another.” He was not searching, not seeking. He was submitting, letting himself be held. By what?

She had been held by old Willy, as Kent was held by his wife.

Throughout the winter the old woman seemed as mentally brisk as ever. “My land,” she said, one cold Sunday morning, “I do wish I could get up the hill to church. Makes me feel downright wicked, to be so mad about it. Not that I s’ppose it’s any worse to get mad because you can’t go to church than because you can’t dance or something, nor any better, either.”

Anne laughed. “I don’t believe it will be held up against you because you can’t go to church,” said she.

Miss Willy sniffed. “I was talking about getting mad, not about going to church,” she said.

Anne laughed. “Well, I’m sorry you can’t get to church, then.”

“So am I. I do want something awful to see that new bonnet the minister’s wife got in the missionary box.”

“Willy! You wicked old woman! You’ve fooled me for years. I thought you went to church to say your prayers. I didn’t dream your mind was so set on worldly things.”

Miss Willy sniffed. “I do go to church to say my prayers, when I can get there. And if a body’s mind wasn’t mixed up with worldly things, what would there be to pray about?” she demanded.

There came a day in April when the sun shone and from Anne’s window all the world wore a fresh morning face after rain. Dressing, she looked out upon the familiar scene, now as unconsciously cherished as the features of a beloved. Then she turned to the bed where Warren, now in his fourth year, lay asleep. He had long since refused to submit to a day-time nap, though after his day’s intensive play he was willing enough to go to bed with the chickens. But no birds could wake him early in the morning. He lay now with his arms and legs outstretched, strong and plump, his firm flesh tanned by sun and weather. He was her life, her blessing. Whenever she saw him like that a surge of love all but choked her. She bent over him before she left the room. He would sleep for hours longer.

She went down quietly, started the kitchen fire as noiselessly as she could, went out to the hens. The morning air was sweet. Good to breathe it in. She raised her face in the sunshine. When she went in again she set the simple breakfast to cooking. There was no sound from Miss Willy’s room. Strange, for the old woman had not lost her life-long habit of waking with the dawn. She would wait patiently until Anne could find time to help her dress, but always she called out a morning greeting. Anne softly turned the knob of the bedroom door. The little figure was lying on its side, one hand under a withered cheek. Anne’s heart leaped. That stillness, and the posture like a child asleep, secure in a mothering presence near by. She bent over the bed.

Miss Willy was, indeed, asleep. Past waking.

Presently Anne went across the road for the doctor. He made his brief examination, and stood up, looking at Anne who was unaware of the tears on her cheeks.

“Yes,” he told her, gently, “yes, she’s gone. Worn out. That’s the best way to go. Finished her work.”

“Sleep at the end of the day,” Anne murmured.

The doctor nodded. “Like David. You remember? ‘Who after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid with his fathers.’ What’s better than to serve one’s own generation?”

“She did that.”

The doctor turned away. “I’ll send women to you,” he said, from the door.

They came, those women. Quietly, reverently they came, not reluctantly to that task from which Anne shrank, but taking it as one of the things to be done, by its very inevitableness removed from horror. She heard them moving about the room, speaking in low voices behind the closed door. They asked her to heat water, and when she had it ready one of them said:

“Now don’t you feel so bad. Her time had come.”

Dorilliam’s mother came out to the kitchen. “I didn’t like to open the bureau without you said so. But I know where the things are. She’s had ’em laid away a long time. She told me about ’em.”

Anne helped them find the poor, decent clothes, so plain, so clean. So Willy had thought of her burial, even while she thought so much of living. Death—Anne remembered the day her father died. Willy had been alone with him. She and Brice had hurried, but arrived too late. She had been a little in awe of that silent presence, even afraid. She had cried out to Brice when strange men with black bags passed the parlor door on the way upstairs, and Brice had closed the door and put his arms about her, closed the door against her dread. Now there was no Brice.

Hurriedly she put that memory from her. There was nothing of fear connected with Willy’s lying there. Why remember that shielding from that other fear? She had felt no grief for her father; they had never been close together. After he died she had been sorry that they had never been closer. This was different. Not grief, but something gentler, something more poignant. Or was grief like this? Death like this quiet passing seemed scarcely mysterious, but only a part of the inevitable round of things. Now she knew something about that round of things. There was winter, a going to sleep, and spring following winter. She thought of Miss Willy’s springtime, of the little toiling creature who had wanted her freedom. Had she found freedom now? Or what? For there was spring.

“You’d better let me take Wanny home with me,” said Mrs. Beaman. “The twins’ll just love looking after him. It ain’t good for children to be in the house when there’s death.”

Anne kissed her. “If you’ll take him for a few hours, later,” she said. “For a day or two I can tell him Miss Willy’s asleep in there.”

So the child played about as usual, whispering when he came into the kitchen, tiptoeing past the closed door. Willy was asleep. He understood that, and Anne dwelt on the thought of it.

Mrs. Bassett came over the first day, a slender, thin-lipped woman, with some sprays of geranium in her hand. “Seems like I never get much time to grow flowers,” she said, “but there’s these.”

Another brought heliotrope, another a basket of crocuses. One came with nasturtiums. “Seems real nice to see ’em this time o’ year, don’t it?” she asked, with pride. “They do real well in my south windows. They come from some seeds she gave me once.”

At night another came, a great white bloom in her hand and on her face the look of a votary. “My night-bloomin’ cereus. ’Twon’t last, but she always come over to see it, the night ’twas due to come out. I want she should have it.”

On the day when Anne sent Warren to play with the Beaman children the neighbors gathered solemnly in the parlor, presently to follow Miss Willy, who never had led before. Anne stood by the grave lined with evergreen boughs. There was greenery, too, over the mound of fresh earth.

“Who did that?” she asked, as they came away.

“Why, we all did. We always do that, for a neighbor.”

Those women, unimaginative, she had thought them, their lives but one long labor, too barren for sentiment; yet when the time for sentiment came they had done that tender service.

On the day after the funeral Warren went into the bedroom, stood looking at the bed. “Where’s auntie?” he asked. “When did she wake up?”

“She’s gone away, Wanny. Where she won’t have to go to sleep any more.”

The child stared at her. “Where’s that?”

“Ever so far away. Where the spring lives before it comes. Where the baby birds come from, and baby boys and girls, before they are born.” She had no sooner spoken the words than she was conscious of the fatuity of them. Why should she cheat the child with sentimentality? Why not try to tell him the truth? Why deck it out in inanities? But Warren’s eyes were alight and wide-opened.

“Where the fairies live?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, well,” said Wanny, “she won’t like it much there. Not without me. I guess she’ll come back soon.”

But a day or two afterwards he came to his mother with quivering lip. “I want auntie. Why don’t she come back? Will you tell her to hurry?”

Anne turned her face away. “I want her, too, my lamb. But she can’t come.”

“Why can’t she come? Has she lost her crutch?”

“Yes. She’s lost it.”

“Why don’t you take it to her, then?”

“I can’t, Wanny. I can’t go where she is.”

“Well, where is she? That’s what I want to know.”

How much theology did one give a child? There had to be something. What could one say? She took him in her arms. “Auntie is with her Heavenly Father, my dear. He loves her, and needs her.”

“How do you know he does?”

Theology had its difficulties. “I do know. He’s my Heavenly Father, too. So I know. Just the way you know mother loves you.”

Wanny thought about that. “Have I got one, too?” he asked.

She kissed his curls. “Of course. We all have. Now run along and play. Maybe you’d like to help feed the chickens?”

But a few nights thereafter, while she was making him ready for bed, taking off his stockings and reveling in the fragrance of his hair against her face, he propounded another question.

“Mums,” he asked, “when am I going to my father?”

7

Under old Willy’s handkerchiefs in the top drawer of a bureau they found a folded sheet of paper. “I am in my right mind and senses. I give my body to the grave and my soul to the Lord. Everything else is to go to my friend, Anne Warren Denison.” There was Willy’s cramped signature, and the signature of witnesses.

“It was no more than right,” said Mrs. Wells, who was one of the witnesses, “seeing you come here to take care of her in her old age.”

Anne said nothing. The date stood out like a pointing finger. Willy had written it more than five years before she had come to Heathville, at a time when she thought of the old woman once a year, when the purchase of some gift for Christmas was one of those burdensome trivialities that she got through with as hurriedly as she could. The house was hers, the garden, the few hundreds in the savings bank, because old Willy had loved her, in her own mind built up about her a little tradition that later expressed itself in the kindly falsehood with which she quieted the curiosity of the neighbors. “Come to take care of her in her old age.” Perhaps Willy had dreamed of that during the years she had lived alone. Perhaps she had longed to have someone in her old age. It was a new thing to Anne to have that feeling of dull self-reproach, that consciousness of failure, unmixed with anger. Anger had obliterated any consciousness of failure towards Brice. Now old Willy’s bequest and the inescapable thoughts it brought with it held a mirror of self-analysis up to her. She could not look around it, nor walk away from it, but must stare and stare at the reflection of herself. And there was another thing that she had to think about. Warren’s questions, his reference to his father.

Willy was dead, Brice had gone out of her life, but the boy remained. Not four years in the world, already he was asking questions she could not answer. He would grow, would question further. Was she going to fail her son as she had failed those others? Oh yes, Willy had, indeed, had someone to take care of her in her old age; her longings and her poor little pride had been justified at the end. But Anne could take to herself no credit for that. Willy dead, she could admit her own failure. If things had fallen out differently, she would have said, when word came of the old woman’s death, “The poor old soul!” When word came of the bequest, she would have said, “How funny! What on earth shall I do with it?” It was only by chance, and because of her own need, not Willy’s, that she had stood by at the end.

So, now that the time had come when she was free to leave, she had to pause for a while, try to read her compass, to take her bearings, for there were strange seas ahead. She had been drifting. Where was she now? What was her position, what worth had this place she had thought she had won to, this security she thought her own toil had achieved for her spirit, this freedom from the bond of obligation? There was Brice. She had never believed that Brice was dead. Gradually she found herself thinking more and more about Brice, without anger, without bitterness.

If all life lead on to something, what was waiting for her? What was she going to meet? Above all, what was Warren going to meet, and how was she going to help him meet it? Could she escape that slow, onsweeping purpose pervading everything, that warp that ran through the whole fabric of life? To some natures life is a decomposing thing, to some a stimulus, to others a slow melting-pot, terrible in its persistency, yet all the while in its crucible melting away the baser elements that the purer may emerge. In some natures a gold of the spirit is the residuum, made a thing of itself only after the fires of life have had their way with it, worked it and fused and refined it. Anne’s physical freedom had come at last only to thrust her into the core of the crucible, but even yet she was not undergoing its intensest heat.

It was too early to begin work in the garden. The fields were drying slowly that year, the season pausing, farmers waiting with impatient acceptance of the inevitable. Many hours during the winter she had passed with Kent before his fireside or in Miss Willy’s parlor or tramping over the rutted roads. He had played to her and loaned her books. On a day when the sun was as warm as in June she and Warren started for Kent’s house, the boy running here and there to peep into the buckets hanging to roadside maple trees.

“Sap’s running good,” Deacon Bassett told her as they passed his place. “Cold nights and hot suns—that’s what brings the sap up.”

She had never encountered Mrs. Kent. Her presence pervaded the house, Kent spoke of her frequently, but Anne had dreaded to see her, hoped that she never would—that woman who played with a doll, who was afraid of the woods and had to be watched lest she run away. In her mind she had visualized something repulsive. Insanity, she supposed, was a thing of wild impulses, a thing of terror. Pitiful, yes, but dreadful, better kept behind bars or in one of those places where “they” had good care. But on that day she was sitting in a deep chair before a fire of embers, and Kent was playing. The children, Warren and Jenny, were in a window-seat busy about their own affairs. The door opened. Anne could see, without moving, the slim form that stood there, hesitant. There was nothing startling, nothing repulsive, about that woman. Forty, perhaps, she was obviously fragile, and could never have been beautiful; but there remained about her a delicacy, a grace, a gentle desire to please that must once have meant charm. She was smiling.

Kent looked over his shoulder, his fingers still touching the keys. “Come in, Paula,” he said, quietly.

Mrs. Kent came in, step by step, still looking at Anne, until she was standing in front of her, hands loosely clasped. She waited until the music had stopped.

“Pretty lady,” she said, under her breath.

Kent came towards them. “It’s Mrs. Denison, Paula. Aren’t you glad to see her?”

She held out her hand, and Anne, standing, took it. Paula still looked at her searchingly. “I don’t know her. But she’s pretty. I’m glad she came to see us. Are we going to have tea, Rufus? Are there any cakes?”

Kent went out of the room, and his wife took Anne’s hand, led her to a sofa, sat down by her. She was still smiling, still friendly, like a child in her gentleness. Anne could find nothing to say. Before Kent returned Wanny slipped from the window-seat, came and stood in front of the pair, his small legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, a posture copied from his firm friend Dorilliam.

Paula’s lips parted. She withdrew her hand from Anne’s. “Oh! It’s a child!”

“My son Warren,” said Anne. Her maternal instinct at work, she added, “Wanny, say ‘How do you do, Mrs. Kent.’”

But Mrs. Kent had slipped to her knees before the boy. She was touching him, first his bright hair, then his cheek, then his hand. To his mother’s amazement the youngster submitted. Then, quite suddenly, he laughed.

“I like you,” said he. “You’re so funny.”

Paula sat back on the floor, laughed too. “And I like you, boy.” She looked up at Anne, leaned closer, whispered. “I have a baby, too. She doesn’t grow. It worries me. And she never talks. She’s asleep now, or I couldn’t have come down. I’ll show her to you, some day. But her hair—I like the color of your boy’s hair—like fire-light. What is your name, boy?”

Wanny told her. Again she fingered the ruddy softness of his hair, and he laughed aloud. She said, “I like it. I think I will change the color of my baby’s hair to that. Rufus will do it for me.”

“Will do what, Paula?” Kent asked. He came into the room, the Japanese boy following with a tea-tray whose richness reminded Anne of old days. When she had told him, he said, quite naturally, as though it were the most usual thing in the world to change hair:

“Yes, of course, I will. I will send to the city today for some hair the color of Wanny’s. In four days from now your baby shall have red hair like his, Paula.”

And Paula, jumping up, clapped her hands. But then she spied the cakes on the tea-tray, grabbed two of them, ate.

“Rufus,” Anne asked, a week or so later when they were walking along through the muddy road, “Rufus, why do you keep her there? Why do you have her live with you?” For one could ask any question, directly, of Kent.

He frowned, looked puzzled. “I don’t know that I can make it plain to you, Anne, or to myself. But there’s this: one does not discard responsibility, or care, or what not, by putting it out of sight. One sees a thing through, anyway. Life jolly well sees to it that we do that.”

Afterwards, thinking it over, Anne wondered. Was that true? Did one never escape? Was escape cut off? A thing out of sight—did that follow one, haunt, overtake? Or was it always inevitably present? There was her marriage. Brice. She had believed they had escaped each other, and misunderstandings, and the enormous, minute daily rubs. Yet here was she, here was Warren, with his developing intelligence and his questions and demands and rights, and there, somewhere, was Brice. Did he, too, have his demands, his rights? Were they still her concern, again to become her problem? Was the whole thing still there, for them both? Was there still that bond, still, still to be reckoned with whether she would or not? “One sees it through, anyway. Life sees to it that we do that.” Life—what was it? The wheel of the squirrel-cage old Willy had once spoken about, the wheel that one spins and spins, believing one’s self the force that drives the world; the cage that one cannot leave, but must return to and return to, because all outside the cage is wilderness?

For days she weighed that question; then came the great crisis of her life, out of the blue, suddenly, without warning, as crises come. It came, that flame of Fate which was to burn away slowly, with agony, the dross of her spirit.

PART III

1

The fields had dried at last, the plowing of her garden was done. She had learned by now how to manage her work in the house so that she had more hours for work in the sun; she held to her habit of rising early, of getting out into the morning’s freshness. That day she had been toiling with spade and rake at leveling the plowed furrows. Wanny was sleeping late. After a while the height of the sun warned her that he would soon be clamoring for breakfast. From the kitchen she heard his voice, not calling, but murmuring as though he were dreaming. She called gayly up the stairs:

“Get up, old Lazybones. See how quickly you can dress yourself! You’re going to help mother in the garden today, you know.”

He did not come. Again she went to the foot of the stairs. “Wanny, old Bunty’s chicks are out. Hurry up, hurry up!”

There was a wail, low, frightened. She ran up with the quick inward panic that every mother knows how to cover with a smile. The child was lying still, whimpering—Wanny, who never cried. She stood beside the bed.

“But get up, Wanny. Quick—quick! Get up!”

“I can’t, Mums. Somebody’s taken my legs away.”

She tossed off the covers. For all her pleading, all the child’s efforts, he could not move....

Weeks, months—how could she count the time that followed? “A sporadic case,” Dr. Severance said, shaking his head. “We never know where it will strike, nor when, nor why. In time, perhaps. But we can’t tell.”

She telephoned Alice, and in two days Alice’s car was there, and a nurse. They carried the child to the city, to a hospital that was said to do wonders for infantile paralysis cases. Wanny, like that, a “case”.... There was Nicky, there were Alice and George, there was even Ambrose, but they were like shadows, for all their reality to her. She must have talked, eaten, slept, but the hours away from the hospital were blanks, those spent by the child’s bedside sheer agony. Doctors came. She thanked God for Alice’s money, and in a moment forgot the thought of God and Alice and money. Nurses passed in and out of the room, were kind, and cheerful, and very busy. She looked at them, spoke to them, and forgot there were nurses. Mornings came at last, when she might hasten to the hospital. Evenings were only times when Alice or Nicky arrived and told her that she would have to go with them. When George suggested calling a specialist from a western city, she eagerly welcomed the suggestion. Pride? She had none. She would have crawled in the street, abased herself forever, if by doing that she could have given a quiver of life to those still limbs.

Yet after a while they said he was better. They called it that. There was no “better” to Anne. The child had run and danced and fluttered in and out of the sunshine like a butterfly, as free, as unconscious of himself. What could “better” mean, when he was still crippled? Better, because he could move one leg again? The other was useless. She knew; in time even its rounded beauty would shrivel. They called that being better. They said they could do no more for him than that. They said it cheerfully, as though they were making a great gift.

“Alice,” she said, “I have got to go home.”

All the long way in Alice’s car she thought of that. Home. She thought of it like that. Not a place, this time, to hide herself in. Not a place to wait in, ashamed and sore and bitter. Home. Ah, life was treacherous! It sneaked upon you, jumped at you from around the corners. The squirrel-cage, round and round. Safest, within the bars. That was it. One was safest within the bars.

She found her garden planted and cared for, the rows already green with vegetables in leaf. Peonies flaunted in the border. The house had been cleaned. Windows were open to the summer air. A fire was laid in the kitchen stove ready for lighting. On the table a loaf of bread was wrapped in a mended napkin. Before supper was ready the Beaman twins came with a tiny kitten for Wanny. Later, Dr. Severance looked in.

“They’ve done well for him,” he said, when he had examined the boy. “Better than I could. I’ll keep an eye on you both.”

The next morning Mrs. Wells came. Dorilliam had brought milk that morning, saying, “Ma says you needn’t bother about paying anything for the milk for a while. The cow’s fresh, and we just give it to the pigs.”

His mother looked at Warren, sitting outside, so still in the sun, the kitten in his lap. “I know how you must be feelin’,” said she. “But there’s one thing. You got him. It’d be worse, if he had been took.”

Anne said nothing. It was true that she had him. More than ever she had him now, held in her heart with a passion of protectiveness, a passion surpassing anything she had known while he was active and well.

“I know how ’tis,” said Dorilliam’s mother, “because I lost one. The fifth, it was, and we were real poor that winter, and folks said ’twas just as well he was taken. We knew they said it. We got seven in all, now, good boys, every one of them. But there’s always the one we lost. We don’t talk much about it. Don’t have to. Pa, he ain’t the talkin’ kind. Maybe I’m not, either. But I guess we both know.”

Anne was looking at her: had she ever seen her before, that squat, homely woman, the drudge, the—unthinking?

“Every spring pa goes up to the buryin’ ground with a rake and clears off. There’s a bush there, sweet brier, I planted. No, we don’t say much. But there’s always the one we lost. The others are good boys, every one of them. I know that other was spared a lot. But—well, we lost him.”

Another came, a slim, spare spinster who lived and worked hard in her brother’s house. Anne knew her by the name all the neighborhood called her, Miss Abby. She had spoken to her often before, been a little amused at the way the type exemplified itself in her, prim, dried, with eyes that saw everything and lips that pursed themselves as though to keep back those comments that were best unspoken, at any rate when one lived in one’s brother’s house and was thankful enough for a home.

“I just thought I’d run over,” said she. “Wondered if maybe there wasn’t some sewing I could do for you, evenin’s. I got plenty of time on my hands, evenin’s.”

As she was going, she hesitated in the doorway, looked up at Anne. “You got a real nice home here,” she said. “A child of your own’s a good bit of comp’ny.”

Mrs. Ware came, both arms full of shining glass jars. “My canned peaches,” she told Anne with pride, “and some jell. I want you should taste them.”

Anne thanked her and smiled. “A generous taste, Mrs. Ware,” said she. “They look wonderful.”

“There’s more where those come from. You won’t get much time for canning this year.”

Anne had thought her a silent woman, hard, intent on her business of feeding a family. Mr. Ware had a large farm, kept four “hands” in summer. But this day whatever impediment usually sealed Mrs. Ware’s lips was removed for the moment. She gave Anne a shy look.

“Our eldest girl, now. She had what Wanny’s got. I guess ’twas that. An’ it went to her head. They said if she lived she’d never be—right. Oh, I’m so thankful your boy’s—all right!”

Impulsively, Anne kissed her.

And still others came. Some made no comment on Warren, some offered a bit of old-fashioned advice, brought a remedy, or a tonic for Anne, or some other small gift. Most came quite simply to visit. Anne understood, after a time. They were accepting her as one of themselves, a woman living through the lot that is woman’s. They were standing by, spiritually shoulder to shoulder.

Frequently Kent came, always with something for the child. One day he arrived with a large bulging parcel under his arm, Jenny giggling behind him.

“I don’t know what to do with this girl,” said he. “She says she won’t live with us any longer. Wants to come here to live with you and Wanny!”

Jenny laughed and nodded.

“She’s an independent young person, is Jenny. You see, she can board where she likes. She has friends, who pay the large sum of four dollars a week so that Jenny may eat. And she does eat. My word, how Jenny does eat! Now’s she tired of our food, and wants to try yours. What do you say, Mrs. Denison?”

Anne flushed. She saw through the simple ruse. “Ah, Rufus——”

“But say, lookit, honest, Mis’ Denison, there’s a heap I can do. I’m fourteen now, goin’ on fifteen. And he’s jokin’ about all I eat. There’s a heap I can do and I’d just love to look after Wanny.”

Jenny stayed. Said Rufus, “No use getting morbid, my friend. And you will be that, if you keep yourself shut up here alone with the child.”

Anne held out her hand. “You’re a good friend,” she said, and instantly there came into her mind another time when she had used those same words to another man. To Ranney Copeland. “A good friend.”

So there were days when Anne could get out, days when she walked with Kent over the roads and hills, or went to his garden for tea, or listened to his music.

“People will talk,” she told him one day when he was proposing a long tramp. But Kent shook his head.

“I think not,” he said. “It’s an odd thing, that, in these country people. They do gossip. No doubt of that. But there’s a deep understanding about them, too. And a loyalty. No, I don’t think they will talk.”

A bit farther on he looked down at her. “Anne, would you mind, if they did? If they ‘talked’?”

She considered. “I think I should. Not in the same way I once might have minded. Indeed, there was a time when I dared that, and more, without caring. But now I should care. Because I want them to like me.”

Kent smiled, as though his question were answered.

Anne’s heart was continuously wrung when she watched Warren moving about, learning to use his crutch, contriving queer little ways to achieve what he used to at a bound; but with a child’s ready acceptance of circumstances he seemed before long to be unaware of the impediment. The girl Jenny helped him. She herself had been crippled for years. To her there was nothing strange about being impeded as Wanny was. You just got along. Jenny, too, was proving herself increasingly useful, and as always, when her hands had but little to do, Anne’s mind was active.

2

Once or twice during old Willy’s life Anne had gone with her to the white-spired church down the road. Once or twice had been enough. But now she began to think of it again. It was never open except on Sunday. It was bare, colorless, uncomfortable. The form of service was unlike anything she had ever seen before, unfamiliar hymns droned out to the accompaniment of an ornate walnut melodeon set casually across a corner, readings in which minister and people took part, though Anne could never find them in the book until they were half over; long prayers that seemed to her to be filled with banalities and unwarrantable personalities; a wooden box on the end of a short pole thrust along the pews, and a sermon to follow. Nothing there for her. Yet the neighbors went continually. Or it may have been faithfully, as though it meant something to them. Perhaps they did get something from it.

One Sunday she left Warren with Jenny, dressed herself in her six-year-old best, and walked up the road as the bell was ringing. It was just as she had remembered it. Not a head turned when Anne went into the church, although she knew that everyone there was aware of her. No one came forward to show her where to sit. She understood. They thought of her as quite naturally taking her place as one of them. The day was cool. A fire had been lighted in the corrugated cast-iron stove at the back. The place had become over-heated, and through the open windows flies swarmed in, swirling and buzzing in the heavy air. Again those hymns in unison, except when some adventurous soul attempted an alto or tenor that did nothing to enhance the harmony. Again the long prayers with men sitting stolid and women with hands to their foreheads. Again the sermon. Anne knew the minister. She had seen him many a morning leading his cow to pasture or working his garden, and sometimes in the afternoons passing her house on his way to some parochial visit, dressed in ministerial garb of long black-skirted coat that flapped oddly about his bent legs. Someone had told her that he had been a blacksmith in his youth. He preached earnestly, with strange, frequently repeated gestures, awkward, his voice thundering phrases he had caught from the newspapers. “And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter, and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam,” his text was. He shrieked out the words over and over; “they” should be smitten hip and thigh, their slaughter punished with greater slaughter. He was vague enough about the rock Etam, vague as to who should be smitten or why, yet he repeated the phrase over and over. His earnestness was grotesque, pitiable. He jumped up and down like a masquerading child in a futile rage. But Mrs. Wells sat placid, there was a smile on Deacon Bassett’s face, as he occasionally nodded his head; men and women who got up before dawn to make their days longer sat there and listened, or sat there decorously at least.

At last the service was over. Anne was for slipping away unobserved, but found her way blocked by the welcoming hand of Deacon Bassett. Mrs. Wells stopped her in the aisle.

On the road she was joined by the small, spare spinster who had been to see her more than once since her return from the city with Wanny. Miss Abby’s manner of speaking oddly matched her manner of walking. Her steps were short, quick, determined.

“I see you come to it, too,” said she. “Like me. Time was when I didn’t go to meetin’, either.”

Anne felt that she must say something. “The sermon was—” she faltered, unable to find appropriate words, groping for something she could say, something one of the flock would be glad to hear about that sermon.

“Oh, I know all about the sermon,” Miss Abby supplied, dryly. “You don’t need to say anything about the sermon. If folks went to church to hear the sermon, they’d stay to home. That’s what I used to do. But now I go. Regular.”

Still Anne said nothing. She had long since discovered that silence was not only permissible among these direct country folk, but often the surest means of getting them to talk.

“I guess maybe it’s the same way with you as ’twas with me,” said Miss Abby. “I go because it’s like keepin’ step.”

“Keeping step?”

“Yes. Ever try walkin’ along with a body and takin’ your own way while she keeps hers? Tires you out. Keepin’ step’s dif’rent. You can go quite a ways without gettin’ all ragged out, if you keep in step.”

“That is true,” Anne said.

Miss Abby nodded. “Yes. It’s what lots of folks go to church for, I guess. I’ve heard ’em say they go there to pray. But ’tain’t so. Not with a lot of ’em, anyway. Not with me. I could say my prayers anywhere, just as well as in church. Better, some places. But I used to rebel. Against quite a good deal. Now I don’t. Not so much, anyway. Now I keep step. It’s easier to.”

These people in Heathville had their tragedies, large and small. They worked, they bore children and suffered. They were poor. For so long she had believed them submissive, or dulled to acceptance of an empty daily routine. Now she was beginning to see that they must have had their inner struggles, their questionings. Miss Abby “used to rebel,” old Willy had wanted her freedom. All humanity falters and stumbles, catches itself, goes on; drops in the ranks, recovers, gets up again and struggles on, keeps step, or tries to. Was the power of going on, of enduring, of finding a basis of living, of avoiding the bruised knees and stubbed toes, only to be found through keeping step? That little Miss Abby had no place in the world, merely filled a niche in her brother’s household that could have been filled as well by any other member of the family, or need not have been filled at all. She was negligible. Yet even she had had her puny rebellions. As Willy had wanted to be free, so had Miss Abby wanted to set her own pace. Perhaps she had even had hopes and ambitions, all coming at last to trying to keep in step, to keep along. Because it was easier. Easier, or the only working basis to be found. No use rebelling, trying, struggling. Anne’s thoughts brought her back again to the question of ambition.

“To succeed in one’s soul, ambition must become longing.” What had she ever longed for? Warren’s activity back again, yes. But concerning herself, the intimate self that was.... What was that intimate self? She had never thought much about her soul. Things, money, position, gayety, power—those she had wanted, wanted terribly. There was a point to wanting, a reason for it, in that sense. The aim of it was definite. But what was longing? As senseless as Miss Abby’s keeping step: it got you nowhere. Yet there was something, there was something. People lived on, found a means of living on, found something that lifted life above existence. What was it, where was it? She had not failed, not weakened nor faltered in the struggle, yet she was stranded, groping for she knew not what, her soul crying out for help. And there was no answer. Disaster had come to her, motherhood, poverty, work, the last blow struck through the heart of her heart: she was still herself, still Anne Denison. Personality remained, persisting, surviving through it all. Looking back on her life with Brice, she could not see where she had failed. She had been well-intentioned. There had even been love between herself and Brice. At this distance, after these years, she wondered what had become of that love. It was like her anger, burned out.

Strange, what had brought on the disaster between him and herself. That fusillade of anger on their last night—she could see it as terrible, now, in its suddenness, in the way it had burst out with all the devastating force of the unforeseen. She had read of bomb outrages, where some moronic miscreant lays a hideous thing with a fuse in the way of innocent people. Then, explosion and death, or life maimed forever. Something like that was the moment of uncontrolled fury on her part and Brice’s, that moment that maimed life and killed love for them. There must have been a fuse, must have been some small, furtive thing, futile perhaps in itself, yet vicious enough at last to have caused that explosion. What was it that had burned its way into her nerves and brain, into Brice’s? Right things did not explode. Right things were orderly, like life and growth, spring and summer. How far from right, how far from clean orderliness must she and Brice have gotten for disaster so complete to have overtaken them? She had blamed Brice, blamed life and circumstance, denied blame on her own part. She had fallen back on her pride, endured pain, submitted to poverty and given herself to toil. But now she wanted something more. Not help, not rescue. She wanted to probe until a meaning might be found, or if not a meaning, truth.

“You’re not looking as well as you might,” Dr. Severance said. “Too shut up, here. Come drive around with me.”

She went with him, many times. They were long drives, into the by-ways of the hills.

“How do you manage to get around to these far-away people?” Anne asked him.

“I don’t. Not as a doctor should. Of course I do the best I can, but they have to wait—disastrously, many times.”

“It seems to me they have to wait for everything. And so little comes after all the waiting.”

“Oh, they’re sure of birth and death. That’s about as much as any of us are sure of,” said he.

“What holds them to it?” Anne asked. “Just that they can’t get away?”

“No,” said the doctor. “Sometimes habit, lack of initiative. Some are satisfied. Some are too timid to run out of their burrows.”

“Is there no joy? Is there nothing that carries them along with it?”

“Ask them,” the doctor said. “They’ll always talk about themselves.”

They stopped at a house where a man sat on the steps, heavy, black-bearded, with small black eyes gleaming steadily beneath his shaggy eyebrows with the sinister watchfulness of a serpent’s. The doctor went into the house and Anne spoke to the man, using the invariable introduction of the country, a remark on the weather. He did not get up, but replied affably enough. Then she said:

“I’m sorry your wife is sick.”

“She wouldn’t have to be, if she’d take the kind o’ medicine I do. Reg’lar heart-pills, they be. But the woman, she wants the doctor all the time. Still and all,” with a brief sly look upward and a fleeting grin, “he’s cheaper. He don’t charge northin.’”

Anne said nothing else, looked about her. There were blossoming petunias trained against the house on strings, a lanky begonia in a can set on a window-sill.

“What are ‘reg’lar heart-pills’?” she asked, as they drove away.

The doctor smiled. “Strychnine, mostly. He used to take grain alcohol. Now it’s hard cider. When that’s gone, he tramps six miles down to the village and buys ‘reg’lar heart-pills.’ Spends all his wages that way.”

“And the woman?”

“Cancer.”

She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “What have they?”

“God knows,” said the doctor.

But another day Anne went into the house. “I brought you up some tomatoes,” she said. “There are more in my garden than I could use.”

The woman smiled. “I ain’t seen any this year. The man don’t like ’em. He don’t like any vegetables much, excepting potatoes and maybe a mess o’ dandelions, so we don’t grow ’em.”

“No, of course not. No use cooking for one,” Anne said.

“No. That’s what worries me, layin’ here like this. What’ll he do for pie, after I’m gone? He’s set on havin’ his pie. He ain’t much of a hand at doing for himself.”

Another day they stopped at a house where a baby was wailing, its mother, a girl who looked like a child, holding it in her lap like a doll, swinging the while in a ragged hammock. An older woman came to the door when the car stopped, but went hurriedly in when she saw Anne.

“Well, Elsie,” the doctor called out, cheerily, “how’s the future President?”

The girl came forward, smiling. When she saw a stranger in the doctor’s car she stopped short and the smile faded.

“You come here and show off that baby,” the doctor said. The girl came shyly, and Anne held out her arms.

“Oh, let me hold him a minute,” she said.

The girl gave up the child, and flushed.

“I tell Elsie,” Dr. Severance said, “that there’s nothing in all this world as wonderful as being a mother.”

“Except the baby itself. That’s more wonderful. Isn’t it?” she asked. The girl nodded, and took the child back, and held it to her breast.

“Yes, that was the girl’s mother who dodged when she saw us,” said the doctor as he started the car again. “She’s ashamed. Nothing like that ever happened in her family before, you see. Elsie’s not married.” A few hundred yards from the house they passed a stalwart lad who waved to the doctor. Anne, turning to watch him, saw the girl running along the road to meet him.

“Floyd Travers? Yes, he’s a fine lad,” Dr. Severance said. “His father has a big dairy farm. He’s going to marry Elsie.”

“That clean-looking boy? Was he——?”

“No. But he says he’s not going to have her live where folks are ashamed of her. He’s building a house. They’ll be married when it’s done.”

3

Kent was looking worn in those days. Paula, Anne knew, kept much to her room. She wondered what must go on in that house. To herself Kent was always the welcoming friend. Once or twice when she was there Paula came in, sat beside her, held her hand, then whispered something about her baby, and drifted out again like a pale wraith of womanhood. One day Anne was sitting before the fire while the early dusk crept in. Kent was playing, but presently the music ceased. Kent crossed the room to drop wearily into a chair by the hearth.

“Tired, Rufus?” Anne asked.

He ran a hand wearily up over his forehead. “Oh, out of tune, Anne, out of tune.”

“Ah, life is all discord. That is the trouble.”

He sat forward, some faint color returning to his face. “Thank you for saying that, because it gives me back some of my fighting edge. It’s not discord, Anne. Don’t you believe it.”

“Tuneless, then.”

“Oh, if it’s tunes you want—! But harmony, rhythm. That is what counts. You get into the rhythm, and you’re fixed. Get into it, drift into it, fight into it, but get there. That’s God.”

He was leaning forward with his clasped hands dropped between his knees, looking into the fire. Suddenly Anne felt his eyes on hers.

“Look here, Anne, I’m going to tell you something. There is a woman I have loved for years as a thirsty beast loves a spring. As a blind man loves the light. I was parched and blind before I knew her.”

“Rufus——”

“Don’t say that as if you were sorry. You don’t know. Listen. I want to tell you. There’s Paula. Like that for two months before our child was born. They said her mind would come back. It never did. The child was dead, but it wasn’t that. Heredity, and the illness before.

“I had met Rose before Paula’s illness. Somehow, afterwards—well, you don’t know how those things come. It was there, between us, shared by us. We both knew. It came to us like a bolt, our knowing. Even with Paula like that, I was willing to do anything—oh, dear God! willing—such a word, for what that thirst was. That thirst. Rose would have dared, faced the world and dared. She wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t fear that held her back. No, not back, above. She saw something beyond. It seemed to me that to be with her, to possess her and be possessed, would be to have found the summit, to stand on it, the world underneath. But she wanted more than that. Something finer. She could forego things of the body, to make sure of possessing things of the soul. She made me see. It wasn’t easy. But she made me see. One is carried along by something, once one has it. Something above discord. Something that solves discord. Harmony. Rhythm. I can’t say it any better.”

“But if one doesn’t consciously have it or feel it? If one doesn’t find it?”

“No matter. Oh, I’m not saying that it can’t be found, or had. One stumbles, and finds the firm earth. Or to say it more clearly, one stumbles into a current that bears him up, carries him along. I don’t know what it is. I don’t care what you call it. I do know it’s there. Here. A thing to grasp and to let one’s self drift upon, both. A thing you’ve got to get hold of if you’re going to get hold of life, not merely live. Faith’s the core of it. Not merely believing in anything, exactly. It may be that, too. I don’t know. Faith. There’s no other word I can think of. It’s as good as another, if you don’t try to pin it down to belief in a ritual. That’s all right, too, I dare say. If one needs it. What I mean is a getting in touch, through what’s in us all. The spirit, maybe you’d call it. Anyway, faith. When you say that, you’re bound to think, ‘Faith—in—God.’ That’s in our blood, in our bones. It’s not fetishism. May have been once, when our skulls were shaped differently. But I doubt it. Because we are animals. Breath of life’s in us. Even a dog longs for the active peace of surrender to something that’s stronger and greater than he is. Put a dog on a chain, in a kennel, force him to surrender to something he knows is less powerful, less fine than himself, and what do you see? Humiliation. Degradation, conscious degradation. Same with man. We’ve got to stand up, decently, cleanly, and answer to something that’s bigger than we are. Better than we are. Why not God? All right. Then what’s next?”

“I’ve been wondering——!”

“Yes. One does wonder. Rose made me see that our own little personal wonder and doubt is too insignificant to matter, once one has touched faith. I could see nothing active in the idea. I wasn’t willing to hymn-sing. Well—it was she who sent those children down here to me. I didn’t want them here. They were a nuisance. She laughed. She does, when she’s very serious. ‘You need them, you know,’ she told me. ‘You are looking for something, and you have not found it. You look with your mind.’ I didn’t know what she meant. ‘Force what you’re reaching for into that child, and see what will happen,’ she said. ‘But if I don’t know—?’ I asked her. She laughed again. ‘What is it you want to know? How to go on? What to go on with? What can be found that will carry you on? A hand in the dark? There is something. Tell the child so!’”

“If one knew what it is,” Anne murmured.

“Precisely. I didn’t. One day I was watching the little beggar fumbling about with his crutch. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘why don’t you leave that thing alone? Why don’t you forget about it? You can.’ I was as startled as he was, but after I’d said it I couldn’t see why not. So I kept telling him that he was not really paralyzed, that he could walk. And one day he did.”

Anne’s hand went to her cheek. Her lips parted. Kent nodded. “I know. But that’s truth. I saw it. The kid walked. Just as others have done. Just as Jenny did. Startling? I was blinded, at first. Fairly stunned. Then I got hold of it. I got the thing with conviction. Something had happened to that youngster, and he had walked. Some energy had been released. Or else he had touched it, taken it into himself. Well, then, if he could, why not others? To walk, having been paralyzed—what, after all, was that? People went on, lived,—lived, I say!—with worse things to endure than lame legs. What does it? What keeps the world going, anyway? Is it all automatic, something that, started, has to go on and on? Hear a bird sing, look at the stars, and you know it’s not that. All right, then—God. Purpose. Has to be. There’s nothing else. And how had that kid come in touch with it? He had believed what I told him over and over. Something inside of him had accepted the truth of it, even though I did not. His poor little faith touched the spark. That purpose. That rightness.”

They were silent a while. Presently Anne said: “You turned on the spark in the doctor’s car, that day.”

He tossed his head back. “The doctor! He speaks of my faith cures. I have nothing to do with it. He uses the same faith over and over every day. Grins at an old chap and gives him a pill. Puts his hand on somebody’s pulse and tells him it’s all right. And they’re better. I tell you, there’s some basic energy. God—faith—love—eternal purpose. Something that we can make use of, take into ourselves. Something that carries us on.”

“You spoke of rightness.... But, Rufus, there are things like my boy, like Paula.”

He brushed the hair from his forehead. “Oh, I know. And many another thing that’s called tragedy. But after all, isn’t tragedy a thing of the soul, Anne? If one finds God, as I mean God—gets in touch, somehow, with purpose that’s energy, so that one can live along with his tragedy, it’s never quite that. There’s something besides. Physical things are so little, so easily hurt, bruised, crushed. What do they matter!”

Anne got to her feet, flung out her arms. “They do matter! One has them.”

Abruptly his exalted mood left him. “They do. God—I know that. I falter. Everyone does. But I’ve found out that the only way to rectify our troubles and weaknesses and failures is to reach out for something that will harmonize them all.”

“To reach out—! But who has ever found?”

“I’m not saying one may arrive at the absolute. But I know I’ve glimpsed it.”

“But what can harmonize failure, Rufus, and suffering and all our human disasters?”

“What else could do it but having a sense of being part of the whole, a consciousness that the whole is part of us? Could earth endure winter, if there were no spring to come? Wouldn’t all mankind want to commit suicide, if there were not the sure knowledge that others are to come after us? Could I be an individual, if I were not part of the whole? Can you think of a purposeless whole? No. One cannot conceive of chaos. Any more than of ether, or the radiations of unseen stars. Then if there is, is a purposeful whole, there’s some purpose sweeping through it and carrying it along. Rhythm, or God. That’s the harmony, and the harmonizing motivation, too.”

“If that is so, if it’s there waiting for us anyway, the rhythm, the harmony, what need of faith?”

“Melody sleeps in the mute strings, doesn’t it? There must be the hand on the bow, to make the strings speak. An engine with steam up may be pulsing and waiting, but for all purposes it’s only a hideous contrivance of steel and iron until a hand on the lever releases it to life.”

Anne sat down again. She was looking into distant things, dim things, in which others were forming. “A hand on the lever.... Do you really believe that if one does find that faith, or purpose, whatever you mean by God, one really can use it, put it to personal use, put it to work?”

“Faith, as I mean it, is force, that part of harmony and strength and rightness that can be drawn by man into himself. Faith, as force, can be acquired, can be developed, can be used. Possessing it in that sense, man steps into his place again as a working part of the whole order of rightness. Of purpose.”

“Rightness. Oh, what, anyway, is good, or goodness? You admitted that one never can touch the absolute.”

“Dear girl, you’re muddling things. Humanity is never absolute. We are always moving, always forming. Of course I don’t know what goodness is. If it’s anything at all, it ought to be one thing for you and maybe another for me. But good—I do know what good is! What could it be, but a conscious activity wherein all our conflicts and all our bewilderments, all our entangling habits and preconceptions and failures, and what you called our disasters, emerge into some working order?”

“That could never be.”

“Doesn’t it have to be, if we’re going on, catching the rhythm and carried with it and by it?”

“By faith, just by faith? Oh, Rufus!”

“Yes. God—faith—love. Why be afraid of the words?” He stood up, stretched his arms, laughed. “Oh, I know we’re all confoundedly afraid of words. They’ve had all sorts of meanings piled on to them during the ages, got themselves entangled with the very inconsistencies that made them necessary. They began as definitions, and they’ve become equivocations. So we’re afraid of them. But there were primitive needs that gave rise to them, Anne, and there are primitive things, eternal things, still in them, working out through them. Think it out.”

4

On a morning later in spring Miss Abby overtook her again on the road and gave her a bunch of arbutus.

“I’m always the first one around here to find any,” she said. “Ain’t they pretty? Seems queer, how they get to smell like that, growin’ out of the mold the way they do.”

But before the arbutus faded the neighborhood was shaken by a tragedy. Dorilliam came hammering on the door one morning before Warren and Jenny were awake.

“Deacon Bassett’s hung hisself in the barn,” he cried, and ran to spread his news farther.

Anne found a cloak, remembered to close the draft of the stove, ran up the muddy road. About the barn a group of men clustered, standing awkwardly, apparently waiting for something further to happen. Inside the house Mrs. Bassett was sitting very straight in a rocking-chair, tight-lipped and silent. Other women were in the room, busying themselves about the things Mrs. Bassett must ordinarily have done. They gave Anne significant looks, and one by one went away. Mrs. Bassett might have been an image of stone, except for the rise and fall of her breast; but suddenly she spoke.

“I kept waiting and waiting,” she said. “For things to get better. And now it’s come to this. He ain’t ever spoke to me, not for more’n twenty years, any more’n he could help. I ain’t ever had a dollar o’ my own to spend. The children, they left home as soon as they could. I never blamed ’em. Now one of ’em’s dead. The other one’s out in California. He hasn’t wrote for over a year. I kept waiting and waiting. And now it’s come to this. And the house is mortgaged.”

For twenty years ... and it had come to that. Anne went away sick at heart. She met Kent, coming along the road.

“Rufus,” she asked, waving a hand towards the place where the men still lingered, “what do you make of things like that?”

He was pale. He shook his head slowly. “I know, Anne, I know. There’s not much to say. Except—‘Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.’”

She went on to her own house. The children were awake, their voices coming down to the kitchen. Outside a bluebird called. On the back of the stove the kettle was humming.

That evening she could neither sew nor read. When her work was done she sat with her hands in her lap. The children were busy at the table with scissors and paste and bits of colored paper, but the meaning of their chatter scarcely penetrated to her consciousness.

“Say, now you listen to me, Wanny Denison,” Jenny warned for the third time. “If you drop the scissors again you’ll get down and pick ’em up yourself.”

“I can’t,” Wanny replied, serenely. “My crutch won’t bend.”

“You don’t have to use your old crutch, anyway,” said Jenny. “I don’t use mine any more.”

“That’s silly,” said Warren. “Cause I do have to.”

“No, you don’t, either. It’s fun, trying to go without it. And you can, if you try.”

“You’re a girl,” Warren said, nonchalantly.

Jenny sat back and stared at him. “Well, of course I’m a girl. What’s that got to do with it?”

“Girls can’t tell the truth if they try to. That’s what D’rilliam says.”

Jenny blazed. “D’rilliam’s a liar!” said she.

“Ho! Mums, Mums, look at me, look at me! Did you hear Jenny swear, Mums? She swore.”

“I didn’t, either, Mis’ Denison! Honest, I didn’t!”

“No,” Anne agreed, “I don’t think you swore, Jenny. What were you trying to tell Warren?”

“He don’t have to use his crutch, Mis’ Denison. Honest, he don’t. He just won’t believe it.”

“Why won’t you, Wanny?” Warren stared at her. “You believe so many things. Why not that?”

“I do have to use it. That’s why. I’d fall down without it.”

In the morning Anne was startled out of her thoughts of breakfast by howls from upstairs. She ran up, to discover the boy sitting on the side of the bed and pommeling Jenny.

“You go ’way. You go ’way,” he was yelling. “You let me alone. You go ’way.”

“Gee, Mis’ Denison. I dunno what’s got into him,” the bewildered Jenny exclaimed. “I got him half dressed, and the minute my back was turned he set up a-howling and yelling. He fell on the floor.”

“Warren! Stop that, stop fighting, stop crying! What is the matter with you?”

“I hate you,” cried Wanny. “Jenny’s a liar and you are a liar. I hate you!”

“Who’s swearing now?” put in Jenny.

“She said I didn’t have to use any crutch. You said to believe it. And I fell down. I hate you.”

“Very well, go on hating me,” said Anne. “Go on crying. And fall down again.”

“D—don’t you care?”

“Of course I care. So does Jenny. But we both think you’re a very silly boy. Once Jenny couldn’t walk without a crutch——”

“Two of ’em!” from Jenny.

“Two of them. Mr. Kent told her to make-believe she could walk without any. After a time she could. So of course Jenny thinks you are silly not to make-believe, too. And of course I think you’re silly. If I had to use a crutch, I’d think about it hard, hard, hard, until I didn’t have to use it any more. Until I could walk and run and climb trees and maybe drive a hay-wagon the way Dorilliam does. But of course it’s your own affair.”

“I don’t believe you could climb trees, anyway,” said Warren. “And I fell down. I should think you’d be sorry I fell down.”

“I’m sorry you’re silly,” said Anne, and with a look bade Jenny follow her downstairs. “Let him think it over a while,” she said, and Jenny grinned and went out to the hens.

Spring was by then well on the way. Again the year had rounded through sleep to waking. One morning she stood at her window and watched the sun gild the western hills. She looked at her boy, still sleeping, one arm thrown up over his pillow. In the next room was Jenny; she would help Warren dress, give him his breakfast. That new world out of doors was calling irresistibly.

Along the road for a way, then into the pastures she went. There were no cattle there now; they had not yet been turned out for summer. But there was other life enough; wet grass, sweet and cool; birds singing, robins and bluebirds; far off, crows flying and calling. Many times during the years she had gone back to that hilltop where the old maple grew. No shadow there, now. Red buds on the boughs, bluets under her hand. As the sun rose it drew mist from the earth, smoke before an altar or a veil before the face of a bride. Everything softened, dark woods and white birch stems, hills and fields. Those fields—year after year she had watched them, dark and tired in autumn, gleaming with snow during winter, in summer lying in patterns of man’s contriving. As now, through the mist, coming to life, stirring, teeming, holding within themselves germs of things to come. Ordered, harmonious sequence. What was that Kent said? Harmony a thing that solves discord. That was it—life, so full of discord, but nature’s on-working purpose the solvent. Life ... Mrs. Bassett. That girl with the baby. Dorilliam’s mother, and her baby that had died, the grave that Mr. Wells tended. Herself and Brice. Life, something that carried them all along, through their stress, their mistakes, their sorrows and bleaknesses, as surely returning, revolving, working and working and pulsing as the life under those fields, the life rising now in the maple. Impelling purpose, the fall of the seasons, their rise again. In the end some amalgam, something that made of the broken parts a whole. Man’s part to nature, and nature’s to man; interlocked service, and, later, fruition.

Slowly she went down the hill, crossed the wet fields to the house. She stopped at the hen-house to investigate a nest where some chicks were due to hatch that day. In the garden she stooped to release some daffodils from a mass of wet leaves that were weighting them away from the sun. Jenny came to the kitchen door and called, frantically waving a dish-towel.

“Hurry up, Mis’ Denison! I got something to show yer.”

Anne went in, smiling. Warren was standing without his crutch, both feet on the floor. He was holding on to the edge of the table.

“It ain’t nothing to do,” said he. “I can do it any old time, if I want to.”

Anne felt dizzy, but she crossed the room calmly, went to the sink and pumped a cool draft of water. “Of course you can do it,” she said. “Before long you will probably be walking better than you talk.”

“D’rilliam says ‘ain’t,’” said young Warren, grinning. “I say it, too.”

“I’ll make you a custard for dinner,” said Anne. “Jenny, won’t you be late for school?”

5

June passed to midsummer. Corn was in tassel, here and there tobacco fields flaunted their tropical, broad-leaved luxuriance. Month by month Warren had become increasingly forgetful of his lameness. That summer Dorilliam invented a game which gave them both infinite delight. Every morning now the big team of grays would stop in front of the house and Dorilliam would come to the kitchen door.

“Mornin’. We’re awful short of help this year, Mis’ Denison,” he would say. “We need somebody to set on the hay to keep it from fallin’ off the wagon. Ain’t anybody ’round here could help us out, is there?”

Then Warren would yelp, throw himself on Dorilliam; and Anne, warned by the watchful Jenny, would go to the door to wave to the helper perched high on the scented load whenever it passed the house. Her heart sang when the child would come home, his ruddy curls tousled and wet, and forcefully announce his hunger.

“D’rilliam says when he’s all grown up he’s going to marry Jenny,” young Warren announced one noonday, when the last of the pudding was disappearing. “He says she ain’t nearly as silly as most girls. So he’s going to marry her.”

Jenny was calm, disdainful. “He thinks he’s smart,” said she. “I thought about us getting married long before he did.”

“What’s marry, Mums?” the boy asked.

Jenny replied. “It’s keeping house for a man and having a lot of children,” said she. “First you’re lovers, and then you’re married. See?”

“What’s lovers?”

“Goodness! I thought everybody knew that. Lovers are what kisses you when there ain’t anybody looking. I’m going to have lots and lots of ’em. I wisht I wasn’t only fifteen.”

“What’s the sense of kissing?” Warren scoffed.

Jenny widened her eyes at him. “Plenty of sense, you silly! They go down on their knees to you, too, and ask you will you be mine and all. That’s when they’re lovers. After they’re husbands you cook for ’em.”

Anne bit her lip. Warren considered. “Am I a husband?”

Jenny rolled her eyes at Anne. “Will you listen to that?” said she.

“Well, Mums cooks for me. You do, too, only I don’t like your cooking, much.”

“You’d have to like it or leave it, if you were my husband. But you ain’t going to be. Oncet I thought maybe I’d marry a minister,” she went on, dreamily. “There was one used to come to the hospital. His hair curled something beautiful. But I guess I’ll marry D’rilliam. In the country you get the egg money, and in the city all you get is the cooking.”

Warren looked at his mother solemnly. “Have you got a husband, Mums?” he asked.

Jenny abruptly shoved back her chair and arose. “Good-night,” said she.

Anne laughed, but the question gave her thought. How soon would the time come when the child would question her seriously, when she would have to answer him honestly? What would the questions be, what would her son’s judgment be? What—and there lay the core of it all—what would her own judgment be? What was it now? What had she done to Warren, and what had she done to Brice? Perhaps in her inmost thoughts she had formulated that question before, but now it leaped out at her, not to be avoided. Brice had done terrible things to her. She still thought that. But she had done something to Brice, too, and judgment arose before her, not with any traditional flaming sword, but with all sorts of little things surrounding it—her withdrawals, his dumbly submerged disappointments, daily hurts, small daily betrayals of their love. She had wanted to drive him, had used one whip and another. She had ignored their stings.

She was walking along a shady road one afternoon, dressed in a faded gingham that had been one of her new gowns the year Brice went away. Again walking had become her refuge and respite, as in the months before Warren’s birth. Heathville lay too far from the highway for hurrying motorists and the road was too rough and narrow for them; only now and again did a large car spin through it, adventuring or lost. Such a car was coming now, speeding over the top of the hill beyond, coming down the descent in swirls of dust. Anne stepped off the road into the goldenrod. The car passed. Then, to her surprise, it stopped a few yards beyond. The driver stood up and looked back at her. It was Ranney Copeland. From the back seat two women turned, one whom Anne did not know, the other Tessie Ogden, with mocking eyes half-veiled under supercilious lids.

Ranney came running with both hands outstretched. “Nance! My dear girl,” he cried. “This is great luck. What are you doing in this wilderness?”

She shook his hands, laughing. “But I live here, of course! Surely you knew that from Alice.”

“Oh—Alice. My sweet little sister-in-law does not approve of me any more than she ever did. I’ve asked about you, my dear, many’s the time, and got snubbed.”

They walked towards the car. Tessie leaned over its side. “Nance, how wonderful to meet you! I told Ranney this road must lead somewhere.”

Ranney’s wife leaned back in a corner, a thin woman, controlled, dissatisfied, already obviously grasping at every aid to her fading beauty. She smiled very faintly when Anne was introduced. The smile remained on her lips. How did Anne sense the antagonism between her and Tessie?

“I am on my way to the Whitmores’ camp,” Tessie explained, “and of course dear Ranney insisted on taking me. We thought this would be a short cut.” She was looking at Anne’s dress, at the dust on her shoes.

Presently the car sped away. Anne knew as well as though she had heard it what Tessie’s comment would be. “Poor dear Nance! What a fright she is! How she has aged!”

That supercilious woman in the corner, rouged and whitened, with over-attended eyebrows; Ranney and Tessie—those were the sort of people for whom she had failed Brice, forced him and herself out of step. “God knows, I don’t want to stand in your way.” That was what Brice had thought he was doing: setting her free for that. Into what freedom had he gone?

He was again alive to her as he had been during their ten years together; more alive, indeed, than he ever had been. During those years she had ignored any possibility that there might be hidden places, secret places, in Brice; now almost with panic she began to think about them, for she had never believed he was dead. What had Brice become during the years, what had he found or lost? And before that, before he left, how much had he ignored and put up with? How much had he, whom she had never suspected of being able to analyze at all, pondered upon her, tried to dissect and disconnect what he wanted her to be and what she was? To what extent had he weighed and forgiven, forborne? Had the ultimate revelation been as abrupt for him as his decision was to herself? Here, at last, with a completeness that had all the effect of suddenness, like the opening of a door one has been furtively watching, here was a new Brice; the same, but new. The one she had been married to for ten years, the one she had not seen for more than six, abruptly and forcefully making her think about him, estimate him, judge him and judge herself.

Laughingly she related to Kent her roadside encounter with Ranney Copeland and Tessie. He was lounging against the back of the arbor in his garden, pipe in mouth, hugging his elbows. Something of her old gayety returned for the moment. She gave him a pantomime of Mrs. Copeland, mimicked the intonations of the others. His mouth quirked.

Then the playful mood left her. “And those, my good friend, people like those are what I smashed up my marriage for.”

He looked at her, for a moment saying nothing. Never before had she spoken of any past back of Heathville.

“I wonder,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“We-ll, I doubt if we’re really as much influenced by people as we’d like to think. We all want to pass the buck. And we do smash things, don’t we?”

“I did. My husband left me.”

Kent leaned forward, knocked the ashes from his pipe. “I supposed he was dead,” he said.

“He is not dead. I don’t know where he is. But I know he is not dead.”

At first Kent apparently found nothing to say. He did not look at Anne, but off into the woods. “What little pebbles we are,” he said after a while, “and what big circles we do make.”

Anne drew a quick breath. She got to her feet, walked a little away, came back, stood with her hands behind her. “I didn’t think I was only a little pebble. I thought I was always right. I wanted to go my own way, and I wanted my husband to go along with me. I stumbled. Not very far. I know now that I blundered and hurt. I did not transgress any great moral law. But the circles were big, yes! We got drowned in them.”

“I wonder,” said Kent.

“Oh, I know what you think! Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps I’m not drowned. In a sense. But I have been submerged.”

He gave her a quiet look. “Pretty well out now, though, aren’t you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“But aren’t you?”

“Oh, I’ve by no means rescued myself. I’ve learned something, I suppose. But why does one have to learn? I told you I broke no great laws. Yet I shattered my life and Brice’s—my husband’s. And now there’s Warren involved in it.”

“Um,” he muttered.

“We are such blind blunderers. I’ve watched these people around here. They are blind, too, most of them.”

“So are moles. But they get along.”

“By burrowing.”

They sat silent for a time. Kent said, musingly: “One doesn’t get anywhere, talking of size or degree in moral law. Nor in denying it. The very act of denying admits its existence.”

“But I just never thought about it,” Anne said. “So my husband is somewhere, and my son is growing up. There’s no answer.”

On the way home that afternoon she took a by-road that led past a new house. She had been there before. Floyd Travers had taken the girl Elsie there before it was finished, and even now, as she drew near, she heard the sharp cracking of hammer on nails. The little drama of the child-mother and the young man had interested her. She had made friends of them both. The young man was shingling the roof of the shed; he waved when he saw her, and got down from the ladder.

“Well, now, Elsie will be mighty sorry she’s missed you,” he said. “She drove down to get a mail-order package. I wanted to finish that roof. Can’t work on it till after I get home, you know, and the days are getting shorter.”

“I ought not to stop you,” Anne said.

He looked off to the west. “It won’t rain tonight. I’m glad you stopped by, Mis’ Denison. I want to show you something.” He led her indoors. The little place was shining and neat, pervaded by the smell of fresh paint.

“Look at that,” the lad said, opening a door. “This room’s for the little feller when he gets big enough. Elsie painted it all herself. The furniture’s going to be painted, too, when we get it.”

Anne admired and praised. Floyd led the way back to the kitchen, and opened another door. “Elsie wanted a regular pantry,” said he. “Her ma never had one.”

The utensils were few and cheap. There were two pies set in a screened window, and some jars of canned vegetables on an upper shelf. Anne looked at the young man. He returned her look and nodded, smiling.

“She’s a fine housekeeper, Elsie is,” he said as they went out together.

Outside the house Anne hesitated. “Floyd, you’ve done a big thing,” she said, and knew her lips trembled a little.

“Why, I don’t look at it that way,” the young man returned, thoughtfully. “It’s sort of like this. Folks say Elsie made a mistake. Some of ’em say worse than that. A feller asked me once if it didn’t make any difference to me. I said sure it did, because I knew we had something firm to stand on. Lots of folks get married and make their mistakes afterwards. I know about Elsie’s, and she knows about it. So we got that to stand on.”

6

The roads were still frozen. To save wood Anne sewed in the kitchen. That afternoon she had been looking over the past with an ingathering sweep that merged it into a whole, set it on the scales of consciousness as an entity to be weighed not by the importance of its impulses and its mistakes, not by intention of good or evil, not by what gladness there was nor by the magnitude of its failures. Love, marriage, her life with Brice; disaster, motherhood, toil; contact with courage and misery, and with dumb striving—those set on one side of the scale, and something on the other side that kept the balance even. Were there nothing in life to counterbalance life the scale had gone down long since, and humanity with it. Here and there, now and again, she had glimpsed what there was; but still there remained a sense of incompletion. To be and not to do was not enough, nor to envision and not to strive. Yet what action lay within her control, within reach of her initiative? On and on; but where? Why?

Someone was at her door. Not one of the neighbors—some stranger, since the knock came from the front of the house. She put down her sewing, went through the cold, narrow hall.

“Alice—you! Over these roads!”

“But I hadn’t seen you for nearly three years, Anne. I couldn’t wait any longer.”

“You’ll have to come back to the kitchen. Alice, you dear, such a long way to come——”

“George had business in Springfield. I’ve got to get back there tonight. No, the car’s heated. The man can wait outside.”

“Tea—in a minute——”

“Yes. Anne, I did want to see you! Ranney said you were looking so—” She stopped, and Anne laughed.

“Oh, yes, of course! Ranney! I have seen Ranney, and Mrs. Ranney, and sweet Tessie!” Alice’s face had flushed slightly, and her eyes looked troubled and shy, but Anne’s twinkled.

“Alice, you silly. Don’t you suppose I know perfectly well the sort of thing Ranney said, and Tessie? I can hear her saying it: ‘Poor dear Nance! How she’s aged! And what a fright she is!’ Wasn’t that it?”

“Something like that,” Alice confessed. Then she added, “Nance, don’t you care any more?”

“About being a fright? I’m too busy to bother. I suppose I should, if I stopped to think about it. I know I should.”

“I rather meant—about what they say.”

“Oh, that! That’s only funny.”

“You know, Anne, you really have changed,” Alice said after a while. “And I don’t mean in looks only.” Anne laughed. “You always did laugh at me, so you haven’t changed in that. But you seem to see things differently. You’re not the same woman, not a bit like the girl you were.”

“I am the same, though. I should feel pretty hopeless, if I thought people could stop being themselves, and begin over again. I’d rather know that something had been added. Even something taken away. I’d rather stand on my past, even such as it is.”

“You mean not to have learned, to have——”

“Not to find, yes. Or keep on hoping to find, anyway.”

Alice leaned forward, her hands dropped beyond her knees. “Dear old girl, if you’re still the same Nance I’m afraid I shall not dare to tell you.”

Her heart seemed to stand still. Something clicked in her throat. She could not ask.

Alice nodded. “Yes. We have heard from him. George has seen him.”

Anne stood up. She must have air—something. The clock on the mantel ticked. The kettle hummed on the stove.

“Anne dear——”

“Wait!”

The clock. The stove. There was a yellowed place on the wall-paper. Brice. The yellowed place was shaped like an animal. Brice.... Her cheeks were cold. Oh, it was her hands on them. Earth rising up. No, only the floor. Far off, coming along the road, children’s voices. Oh, yes, from school. Supper after a while. Once there were stars ... a pool. “I will not contest.” Shaped like an animal. Funny. What happened when....

“Anne, dearest girl.”

She moved away from Alice’s touch. Presently she sat down again. “Tell me.”

“A letter came. Through a lawyer. To Ranney’s office.”

“Tell me.”

“You see, Brice had been thinking all this time that you and Ranney were——”

“Wait. Alice, I can’t——”

“It’s all right, dear, all right. We understood. Ranney gave George the letter. Brice has a good business, lumber. He needed some money. There was a paid-up insurance policy in your name. He thought you would be willing——”

“Oh——”

“We talked it over. We wanted to do what was right. Ambrose came out. George went to the lawyer, found out where Brice was. They both went to see him.”

“They told him?”

“That there had never been anything between you and Ranney.”

“Did he believe?”

“They both told him.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else, Anne.”

“Not about—Warren?”

Alice was silent.

“Didn’t he—ask anything?”

“I’m afraid not, dear. But still, you know,” she went on eagerly, after a moment, “just what they did tell him must have given him a good deal of a moment. And Brice never did talk much, did he?”

Anne shook her head. No. Brice never did talk much. “But not to tell! How could they?”

“I wanted them to. But I suppose things have to come out as they will. Brice knows now that you are living, and still his wife. And now you know that Brice is living.”

Presently Anne asked, “Where?”

Alice’s manner changed: that was over. “Oh, George says it’s lovely country, a place way up in the hills, called Pelham. It’s somewhere at the end of never. Awful roads, but the land’s cheap. Brice has a mill, and several little tractor outfits that travel about and cut lumber. He wanted to buy more land.”

So there, at last, out of the darkness, was Brice. No longer merely the man she had loved and married and shared life with for ten years. No longer only that man she had thought she could whip or cajole or dominate, nor the man who had deserted her. Life had been sweeping her on, doing things to her. There had been years to be lived through for Brice, too. What had they done to him? What were his thoughts of her now? Anger? Indifference? Distaste? She had admitted to herself long since that she had never seen into his secret heart, never shared nor divined his mental processes. Then what was he now? A stranger.

A good business, Alice had said, in Pelham. She remembered Pelham, the little close room where they slept for those first two weeks, the precipitous hills, the pool, the stars. Why had he gone to Pelham? What had he thought to find there, to recapture? “A good business.” Then he, too, had been carried along by life, by the details and ingredients of living. But he had had his denials. Different from hers. She had Warren. What compensations had Brice found, what strength?

One afternoon she was out of doors, contemplating her garden. The earth had not dried enough for plowing, but already the sun had brought to green life small creeping weeds, nature’s hurrying way of covering scars and bare places. Someone had given Warren some duck’s eggs. Now a frantic hen was trying to teach the strange yellow creatures to scratch. She watched them, smiling a little: even a hen’s hopes and plans.... Then she raised her head and listened. That was Warren’s voice, shrieking, howling. She took a quick step or two towards the voice, then stood still, biting her lip. He hated a fuss made over him. She would wait. Then she saw them coming over the field, Warren ahead, Jenny racing madly after him, calling. Anne’s lips felt cold, but she waited and watched. Warren was wild with fury. The sound told that. But he was running. Not limping, but running, tearing headlong towards home like any small boy in a rage.

“It’s bees, Mis’ Denison,” Jenny’s call reached her. “He got in a bees’ nest. Bees got him.”

She heard, and did not hear. He was pelting towards her, crimson of face, furious, howling. At last he threw himself against her, but when she stooped to embrace him he fought her away.

“Get ’em off o’ me. Go ’way. Le’ me go. Get ’em off o’ me.”

Jenny came panting. “Gosh! There ain’t anything the matter with his legs any more.”

Anne knelt on the ground, tried to hold the child. “Warren, keep still! Stop fighting me. How can I get the bees off if you won’t let me touch you?”

“There ain’t any bees on him, Mis’ Denison. He ran away from ’em.”

“There are, too,” Warren cried, glaring at Jenny through tears. “They hurt. You get ’em off o’ me.”

Anne had captured his hands. “The bees are gone, Warren. There aren’t any on you. But do you know what you’ve done? Stop crying—look at me! You’ve run away from the bees!”

“I’ll say he did!” Jenny affirmed, grinning.

“I don’t care!” The boy still blazed. “You get the hurts off o’ me, then!”

Anne led him into the house. “Soda’s what you put on ’em,” said Jenny the experienced. So with soda they anointed him. Presently he was counting the daubs.

“I don’t think much of bees,” said he thoughtfully. “Drat their old hides. I want my supper.”

That night in her bedroom Anne stood by the window. No moon; but stars were out in cool myriads. Their light fell on the earth like a caressing hand reached out in sleep. A line came into her mind, “The army of unconquerable law”.... That was it. Unconquerable law. Ageless, untroubled serenity. Submission, no breaking of ranks. No beating against things as they were. Safe inside of restraint. Freedom.

A distant world, a gleaming planet, dropped beyond a hill.

PART IV

1

After much searching of road-maps and timetables, tables, she discovered that Pelham was distant only a long day’s drive. Dorilliam, now a tall youth of nineteen, had bought the doctor’s old car and would take them. Her one problem that seemed unsurmountable was the disposal of Jenny. The child had become dear to her. She could not set her adrift on the sea of chance, subject her to the uncertain tides of charity, yet she could not take her where she was going.

She explained a little to Dorilliam’s mother. Mrs. Wells would know what to say to the others. The neighbors came for farewell visits, even those she knew best wearing an unaccustomed formality that she understood. It was their tribute to the unusual, the unexpected. None questioned her. Mrs. Ware, whose house was already fuller of children than any other, said to her, “You let Jenny come stay with us. There’s plenty of room. The twins’d love having her.”

Yet in the end the problem was solved by means of Miss Abby. “Well,” she sighed, as she stood up to leave, “you had a nice home here.”

Anne was inspired. “Miss Abby, would you be able to come here and live here with Jenny? I should be so delighted to give you the place free. I couldn’t offer much else; but there’s four dollars a week for Jenny’s board, and——”

“Land,” said Miss Abby, “I never saw that much money a week in my life. It wouldn’t cost that to live, not with the garden. I guess maybe my brother’d let me have wood.” She gave Anne a quick look. “I never had a house of my own.”

So it was arranged. Jenny’s comment was, “Gee, us’ll be two old maids together.”

“What’s old maids?” Warren asked.

“It’s ladies that don’t get married.”

Warren stared at her. “Aren’t you going to marry Dorilliam?”

But Jenny’s self-consciousness had grown in a year. “Oh—Dorilliam! He’s not so much!”

“Well, Dorilliam ought to get married. Mr. Ware says a farmer does better when he’s married. He could marry Miss Abby. I’ll tell him. I like her, myself.”

Jenny rolled her eyes at Anne.

There were things to be done. She began to take count of her appearance. She did not want to appear before Brice in the guise of poverty. She wanted to make no appeal of any sort to him. Long ago George Copeland had re-invested for her what was left of the four thousand dollars after Ranney’s venture with it; she had used some of it at the time of Warren’s illness. Each month a check brought her the minute income. Now the roof needed mending; that would have to be done before she left. She wrote to Alice, asking that George should in some way place part of her little capital at her disposal; Warren must be properly clothed, and would Alice choose a ready-made suit and a blouse? She made herself two new house-dresses, mended, contrived, got Jenny ready for summer. Dorilliam plowed the garden, Anne planted it. Through everything she moved deliberately, for she knew now what to do.

The last days rain came down steadily. “It won’t matter. The doctor goes everywhere in the rain,” she told Dorilliam.

“You’re a brave woman, Anne,” Kent said, standing in her little parlor the evening before she left.

She looked at him meditatively. “I don’t think it’s that, Rufus,” she said, slowly. “It’s the next thing to do.”

“How you do take it,” said he.

She shook her head. “It’s taking me. Life does.” After a while she said, “I wonder why the enlightening word in all our crises comes from outside.”

“Have to be guide-posts, I suppose. So many paths.”

“Yes. And mercifully they are really paths. Worn. Trodden.”

He turned and looked down on her. “Was that your enlightening word?”

“Oh, something on Sunday. One of the prophets, I think. ‘This day I am going the way of all the earth: and ye know in all your hearts and in all your souls, that not one thing hath failed of all which the Lord your God spake concerning you: all are come to pass.’ It leaped at me out of the reading. Experience—we always think our own is unique. But the path has been trodden.”

He slowly nodded, staring at nothing; then abruptly he threw his head back. “Only—dear God!—sometimes——”

She stood up, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Courage, Rufus,” she said.

He took her hand, gripped it. “Thanks, Anne,” he said after a moment. “That’s your enlightening word to me.”

They embarked in Dorilliam’s car the next morning. The rain continued, trickled in rivulets around the curtains. From the front seat Warren chattered ceaselessly with Dorilliam. It was mid-afternoon when a long descent brought them out on a road where a battered sign-post pointed the way to Pelham. At last the hills closed in; the stream ran torrential below the road. At last a bridge, a cross-road, a jam of logs and a mill.

“Yeah, he lives up there in the last house. Ain’t here today, though. Don’t know whether he’ll get back tonight or not,” someone said to Anne’s question.

Out of the car into the rain. No answer to their knock on the door. Their things carried into a shanty of a room or two.

“Don’t seem right to leave you like this,” Dorilliam said, “But I got to get home by morning.”

Inside the place Warren looked about him. “You said we were going somewhere, Mums. This don’t look much like somewhere.”

Anne did not answer. She too was looking around. This room they were in—its walls were of board with maps and blue-prints here and there, and flamboyant calendars, some of them three years old. A big iron stove, round, its rusty sides corrugated, the fire dead. A few wooden arm-chairs and a table. A cheap morris chair, its cushions sagged to the left. Her hand went to her throat.

“What are you doing that for? I don’t like this place. I want to go home.” Warren was frowning. His lip trembled a little after he spoke.

She crossed the floor to a door that stood ajar. An oil-stove there, a table covered with oilcloth, an open cupboard with shelves, some dishes and canned things. The place was neat. A third room opened off from the large one. There too was neatness, the bed made, gray blankets pulled up. She remembered something. Cozy—Brice’s word—cozy....

“I want to go home,” said Warren. “I’m hungry.”

She opened the remnant of the lunch she had brought. “How long are we going to stay here, anyway?” Warren asked when he had eaten.

“I don’t know,” she said shortly. Even the muscles of her arms were braced against the boy’s chatter, against that ceaseless downpour of rain. The room was becoming shadowy.

Someone was whistling tunelessly. The sound penetrated the patter, came on. There was a step on the porch. The door opened. Warren went forward.

“Hello!” said he.

The man in oilskins stopped abruptly, then smiled with that slight softening about the eyes of the man who loves children. “Why, hello, Bill! What are you doing in here?”

Warren laughed, went nearer, looked up. “What makes you think my name’s Bill? I don’t know you. Do you live here?”

Across the child’s head Brice saw Anne.

He looked again at the boy. He flushed slowly, as though it were painfully. Even in that fading light she saw a vein stand out on his temple.

“Is it?” he asked. “Is your name Bill?”

Warren thrust his hands into his trouser’s-pockets. “Well, not ezackly, you know. It’s Warren Denison, ’s a matter of fact. But I like Bill better.” Man and boy, they stared at each other. “My mother’s name is Mrs. Denison,” Warren further elucidated. “What’s yours?”

Again the man looked over the child’s head at Anne. She shook her head. Her voice sounded strange. “Nothing. It seemed—fairer.” Her hands were cold. She felt stiff, rigid and stiff.

Presently Brice asked: “How did you happen to come here, Bill?”

“Why, in Dorilliam’s car. He paid a hundred and fifteen dollars for that car, cash. It’s a pretty good car.” The man said nothing. Warren shuffled his feet. “But I don’t like this place much. Mums said we were going somewhere. Is this somewhere? Why don’t you say something? Is this somewhere?”

Still the man did not answer.

“What did you say your name was?” asked Warren.

“My name is Denison, too——”

Warren laughed. “Sort of funny! You might get mixed up with me. What’ll I call you? Where’s the rest of your folks?”

Abruptly the man’s control broke. He raised his hands. “Oh my God!” he cried.

He turned, went blindly into the frame of the door, rebounded, blundered out into the rain.

In the morning the rain had stopped. “Well, I guess I’ll go take a walk,” Warren said, in Dorilliam’s best manner. “You can come along, too, if you want to.”

“I think I’ll stay here,” Anne said lightly.

During the morning a boy came up the hill with a basket. “The boss sent it,” he said. “If there’s anything else you want I’m to bring it up from the store. I’ll bring the milk in the evening.”

At noon Warren came home, his eyes gleaming. “Say, I met that feller again. I like him. He asked me to dinner, but I told him my mother’d be expecting me back. Gosh, I’m hungry.”

He had been over the mill with Brice; he gave her details. “The next time he invites you to stay with him, you may,” she told him.

For three days after that she had dinner alone. She did not leave the house. She had a sense of things impending. The utmost she could do was to wait and to appear as usual to Warren. On the fifth evening after the boy was asleep she was sitting beside the kerosene lamp, her hands in her lap. She did not hear his step on the porch. The knock at the door made her raise her head, but she could not get up. He came in, met her eyes. Then his glance took in the room.

“He is in there,” she said, “asleep.”

He crossed the floor. She knew that he stood in the doorway looking into that other room. After a while he came back, sat down in the chair that sagged to his shape. Presently he asked:

“Why did you come?”

“I brought Wanny.”

He laughed shortly. “After these years!”

She nodded. “He was born at the end of that year!”

After a pause he asked, “Did you know—before?”

“No.”

“Was it why you didn’t—” he swallowed,—“Copeland——”

“No. I said that because I wanted to hurt you.”

They sat in silence for a time that seemed interminable. She thought the silence would never break.

“I don’t see that it’s going to do either of us any good to hark back,” he said at last. “What do you propose to do?”

“I am not proposing anything. I brought your son.”

“After these years. God——!”

She crowded back words that were on her lips.

“Why don’t you say it?” he flung at her.

Her head moved. “It’s there between us, anyway. But even if I had known at first where you were, I would not have brought him. Not then.”

“Why do you tell me that?”

“I am ready to tell you anything. Or do anything.”

He sat frowning, puzzled, suspicious, resentful. “You don’t mean that. You’re working something again.”

She clasped her hands tighter.

“Words, words! Something you mean to get! What is it?”

She did not answer.

“What are you after? What do you intend to do?”

“Whatever is right. I don’t know.”

“Ha! Would you give me the boy?”

Her head went back. “If that is right.”

He laughed again in that way that was not mirthful. “Who’s to decide that? What are you up to?”

She sat very still. He looked at her curiously. No flare-up of anger. A woman controlled.

“What do you mean by right?”

“It’s not what we need, either of us. It’s what he needs. He’s growing up. That’s as far as I see.”

They did not look at each other. Presently she knew that he had taken the attitude she remembered, leaning forward, his hands dropped between his knees, looking intently at nothing.

“You can’t live in this place,” he said at last.

She did not look up.

“There are no comforts. Nothing you have been used to.”

“I went to old Willy. Warren was born there. I’ve learned to do things.”

After a while he crossed the floor again and went into the room where Warren slept. When he came back he hesitated a moment, then went out, without speaking.

2

During the days the intermittent whine of the saw-mill reached her. During the evenings she sat alone. She put no restraint upon Warren; his air of importance grew enormously.

“I’ve got to hurry,” he said one morning. “We’re putting on a new belt today.”

He described the workings of the machinery, told how the logs came down the river, called various men by name. For a time he did not come home for the mid-day meal; he regaled her at supper with boastful tales of wondrous food he had had, things hitherto forbidden him, pies, corned-beef, dumplings. When she refrained from the comment he evidently expected he eyed her speculatively.

“You don’t cook things like that,” he said. “I like that man.”

But one noon he appeared, frowning. He threw his cap across the floor. “He made me come home,” he told her. “He says I can stay tomorrow.”

After a few days she understood. Brice was sharing him. As her first dread wore off she accepted it. There was nothing to do but live in the moment; the moments hung heavily. She could not plan, and she would not think. There was little to do in the shack. She explored the woods, walked up the road past the house where she and Brice had once stayed. Polish people lived there now. When she had been there a week or two she went to the store. From a distance she saw them together, father and son. They were standing on the boxed runway beside the dam, identical in posture, their heads identical in tilt and color.

One or two women in the store eyed her curiously and slipped out.

“Good morning, Mrs. Denison,” the store-keeper said.

So she was known. Yet she expected that, knew what surmises and comments must be going about. She took home some yarn, some packets of seeds. The cabin had been built over the cellar-hole of a house long since burned; at the back was a weedy place where a garden had once been. She grubbed up the dried stuff, went to the nearest house to borrow a spade.

“You come here to stay?” the woman asked.

“Long enough to make a garden, anyway,” Anne replied, smiling. “Long enough to get acquainted with folks, too, I hope.”

“Well, it’ll be nice for Mr. Denison. The little feller does favor his pa.”

“I wish you’d leave your baby with me, sometime,” Anne returned, and the relationship was established.

“Run over again,” said the woman, and Anne returned, “You, too.”

She spaded and planted. It was good to be at work, again, normal work, accustomed work. One morning a few weeks later she was there on her knees grubbing out the first weeds when she heard Warren calling. He came around the house, Brice with him. The man stood still as Anne rose.

“We’re going off to one of the camps,” said Wanny. “Can we?”

Anne brushed the hair out of her eyes, looked at Brice. But he was frowning at the garden. “Who did that?” he demanded.

“It’s not done yet. Rather weedy.”

“You?”

“Oh, I always have a garden.”

“Well, I help,” Warren put in. “Though of course this year I’ve been rather busy. Say, Mums, can we? Can we go?”

She looked inquiringly at Brice.

“It will be late when we get back,” he said. “I didn’t like to take him without asking you.”

She brushed the earth from her hands. “Just wait a minute. I’ll put up a lunch,” she said, and walked off into the house. From the kitchen she heard Warren’s crescendo of questions, finally his “What’s the matter with you, Dad? Why don’t you answer? Say, Dad, why don’t you answer?” A glance showed her Brice staring at the bit of raw land....

When they had gone she went thoughtfully back to her weeding. Weeds, little things that crept in overnight, things that grew so swiftly. Some might go on to blossom, all would drop seed if let grow. And they were not wanted; they got in the way of human intention, interfered with human endeavor. Yet nature loved them. Even in a garden they had their uses. If one pulled them out, their roots loosened the soil about worthier plants. What weeds were there now between her and Brice? She did not know. Old things between them. She knew that, knew that he still resented them. She had known that he must, even before their one interview. Was he letting those die now, wilt in the sun of Warren? She did not know. And she must not think. Things went on, carried one with them. That was all she could do now. Wait, let herself be carried along. There had been many times when she would have doubted the current. She was doing all she could to yield herself to it. Now she did not so much as know what she wanted. To want was not vital. The only thing was to go on.

It was midnight when they came home. She heard them, opened the door, holding the lamp high. Warren was blinking as though he had just awakened. Anne laughed.

“You’d better get him to bed,” she said. She set the lamp on the table, went off to the kitchen. She did not return until she heard the door close behind Brice, half an hour later. He had not spoken.

Gradually she made friends with more of the women. For the most part they were not like the old neighbors, being of alien birth or else of that class that drifts from place to place as their men grow dissatisfied with one job and seek out another. There was no church, the school-house was closed. The woman from whom she borrowed the spade had her fifth baby that summer, the last one just creeping, the oldest a boy of seven. Anne saw the doctor’s car there in the morning, went over and helped. The woman was tired; the case prolonged itself. It was Wanny’s day to be home for dinner, but she could not leave. She trusted to the child’s returning to Brice, and that night Brice came up the hill with him at supper time. The day had been hot and wearying. She was sitting on the unpainted steps of the porch.

“Bill said you weren’t here,” Brice said. “Anything wrong?”

“No. The Cadigan baby came. I was down there helping.”

He gave her a sharp look, nodded, turned away.

A week or two later he stood in the door with Warren tugging at his hand. “C’m’on in! Say, Mums, I asked him to supper. He said he liked radishes.”

She looked in from the kitchen. “Of course,” she said. “I’ll put on another plate.”

“There, sit down,” she said a while later. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll bring in the things.”

Brice was not looking at her. He was awkward, silent. When Warren offered him the radishes he flushed. “We grow them pretty good, don’t we?” asked Warren, complacently.

“Biscuits?” Anne hurriedly suggested. “Here’s your coffee, Brice.”

Warren stared at her. “What did you call him that for?” he asked.

She laughed. “That’s his name,” she informed him. “Why not?”

Warren looked at the man for confirmation. “Is it?”

Brice grinned. “It is.”

Warren’s eyes were round. “How did you know, Mums? Did you know him before we came here?”

“Of course. Years before.”

“Did you know he was my father?”

Brice’s hands dropped in his lap. He stared at his son, gave a brief glance at Anne, stared again.

“Yes, I knew that, too.”

“Then all I got to say is I think you were awful slow about handing him over,” said Warren. “But anyway, I’m glad I got him now. My father could wollop Johnny Ware’s father. He could beat up most anybody, I guess.”

“Thanks,” said Brice.

Warren eyed him over a glass of milk. “But there’s one thing about fathers I don’t like very much,” said he. “I might as well tell you.”

“Shoot,” said Brice, his lips twitching.

“Well. Johnny Ware’s father gave him a licking once when he hadn’t done a single thing but just lied a little bit, and I don’t think I’d like to get——”

Brice pushed his chair back, leaned across the table towards his son, shaking a finger. “Now look here,” said he, “you may like it or not. If I ever catch you lying, friend Bill, what Johnny Ware’s father did to him won’t be a patch on what you will get. Understand?”

Warren frowned and flushed. His eyes were on Brice’s. “Yes,” he said after a moment, in a weaker tone.

“Say ‘Yes, sir!’”

“Yes, sir,” Warren meekly repeated.

Anne, her hands full of dishes, went hastily out of the room. As she passed back and forth she caught bits of their talk. Brice was standing, filling his pipe, smoking.

“You ought not to be doing this,” he said to her abruptly. She stood still.

“This?” she asked, honestly wondering.

“This work. I saw washing on a line. That garden.”

“Oh, work’s good for everybody. Besides, I honestly like it.”

Presently she seated herself by the lamp and took up her knitting. “Bedtime, young man,” she said.

“I’m not going to bed just yet,” the young man informed her. “You see, I’ve got company.”

“Do as your mother tells you,” from Brice.

The child looked from one to the other. “Will you come tell me a story after I get in bed?”

“No. You don’t get rewarded for what you ought to do. Off with you.”

When the door closed behind the boy he knocked the ashes from his pipe and put it into his pocket. He was standing beyond the table. “I don’t get you, Anne,” he said. She looked up from her knitting. “This work. You can’t stay on here. There are no other women.”

“I’m not lonely, if that’s what you mean. And there are other women. I’ve been making their acquaintance.” His head moved impatiently. “I mean of your own sort. Naturally.”

“They are women who have lived. I have, too.”

“You, digging in a garden, washing dishes.”

She laughed. “You ought to have seen my first garden, Brice. I weeded up all the beets.” She changed needles. She knew that he was looking down at her. He took a turn across the room and back, lighted a pipe.

“What are you trying to do?” he asked at last. “You’re trying to put over something.”

Her knitting dropped in her lap. “I am not trying to put anything over. I’m not trying to do anything. But I don’t blame you for thinking it.”

“Oh, blame!” He threw himself into the big chair, leaning forward, elbows on knees, staring off. Presently he said, “I was a beast, Anne, to light out as I did. That was a scoundrelly trick.”

“Old Willy said once that people are always getting mixed up about sins and mistakes. We are, aren’t we?”

He laughed shortly. “One’s an easier word to say than the other.”

“Yes. But I think we were guilty of both, really.” She spoke slowly, thinking it out. “Sin isn’t only transgressing the law.”

“But I did transgress the law. Even seeing it as a mere contract, I didn’t stand up to my job.”

She shook her head. “It went deeper than that, Brice. Ours was a spiritual sin. Neither of us saw that we were transgressing an ideal. I didn’t even know there was one. And if I had known, I wouldn’t have cared.”

He smoked for a moment in silence. “Just what do you mean?” he asked.

“I’m not clever. Perhaps I can’t make it clear. But marriage is something more than a contract. It ought to be, anyway. Life is.”

“Life is that, too.”

“Yes. But it’s only when we work inside of the terms of the contract, of life, marriage, anything, that we make anything of it. It’s only when we don’t strain at things that we’re free.”

“We strained at things. And they broke.”

“Broke. We didn’t see.”

“See what?”

“Oh. All life is a part of life, Brice. It’s when we don’t go along with it, don’t see there’s something that carries us along....”

“What do you mean?” he asked again.

She hesitated. He could scarcely hear the words. “There have been times when I have seen God.”

After a moment he said, “You weren’t religious.”

“I’m not speaking in terms of religion. Not thinking that way.”

“How, then?”

“Terms of nature, perhaps. The earth goes on—autumn and spring, sunlight, storms, but on and on, carried along. There are scars. Things crowd into growth to cover them up. I’ve lived among farmers, bad seasons, good seasons. People, too—we enjoy, grow, suffer. Something carries us on. There is something sustaining. Something at work through everything, urging us, binding us, banding us. So we go on.”

“Is that what you mean by having seen God?”

“The force is there. And at work. Why be afraid of terms, of names?”

“But force. I think of force as something to use.”

“I, too,” she murmured.

He filled his pipe again. “Use—God?”

“God, force. We do use it. Whatever’s at work sees that we do, whether we know it or not.”

“Unconsciously. Haphazard.”

“Not haphazard. We don’t see the whole scheme. That does not make us less a part of it. Nor less important. And it can be used consciously.”

“No.”

“Yes. I have used it consciously.”

“How?”

“By faith.” He stirred impatiently, and she looked at him. “That word offends you. I mean it only as a reaching out with one’s soul, a willingness to let the force that is God carry us along.”

He sat for minutes without speaking. When at last he spoke it was in a different tone. “I don’t know you, Anne.”

“Well, there is Warren! He is our going on.” Presently she added, without looking up, “You had better look in on him before you go.”

After that night there was more ease between them. Frequently he came up with the boy to supper; then his coming became a matter of course. One evening he dropped an envelope at Anne’s place. She looked at him inquiringly. He flushed, avoided her eyes.

“Money,” he said shortly. “Thought you’d be needing it.”

She laughed. “Did you ever know a woman who didn’t? Many thanks!”

“Thanks—” he repeated.

She caught his embarrassment, hurried on. “But you’ve been good about sending up food, and there’s not much to spend money for here. I’ve rather fallen out of the way of spending.” She stopped abruptly.

“Look here, Anne—I’ve wondered.... How did you manage?”

“Ambrose bought the house finally. And George got back the money from Ranney.”

Even now his face clouded at the name. “Where did you live?”

“I told you—in Heathville.”

“Heathville——?”

“With Willy.”

“She went away to her father,” Warren remarked. “He must be a pretty old man by now.”

Anne’s eyes gleamed at Brice. “I went there right after I found out about—Wanny. Willy left me the place, and——”

“What did you find out about me?” Warren demanded.

“You eat your supper,” said Brice. “Don’t interrupt.”

“—and I—I think I learned how to live—there.”

“I know how to live,” said Warren. “You just breathe and breathe——”

“I told you not to interrupt!” said Brice.

“I wasn’t interrupting, Dad! I was just talking.”

“That was interrupting, and you know it.”

“Well—I forgot.”

“A gentleman does not forget things he ought to remember, young man.”

“Are you a gentleman?” asked Warren, eyes as blandly innocent as a newsboy’s. “Because of course if you are I’m perfectly willing to be one, too.”

Brice glanced swiftly at Anne, flushing painfully.

“Warren,” said she, “I rather suspect that you are trying to discover whether you can answer your father back. Suppose you go to your room and think about it.”

“I haven’t finished my supper.”

“Do as your mother tells you,” said Brice; and Warren departed.

They looked at each other; Anne laughed deprecatingly. “He needs you,” she said.

“But he had me there. A gentleman does not forget things he ought to remember.”

“Don’t, Brice,” she said, her hands trembling.

It was true that the child led them, but before the summer was gone she knew that her own going on was through Brice as well. Not with the old love, that fragile, incomplete thing that had failed them both. Before, she had been unaware of Brice’s thought unless it concerned herself actively, or else she had mentally shrugged it aside, or set herself against it. Of things deeper than thought, formative, unseen broodings of the spirit, she had been wholly ignorant. She had taken no account of Brice except in his outward aspects, slow-moving, slow-thinking; as to most things inarticulate except when she stung him or lured him to speech. She had had no sensitiveness towards him; now she was becoming sensitive to his every look, every mood. When he watched Warren, she understood why. When his lips twitched or a look of surprise or deliberation was on his face, she knew what he was thinking. When after some word of hers he sat silent, her thoughts followed his. He was a guest in the house of her mind, he who had dwelt there in such varying guises. New contacts, new apprehensions were revealing him.

As for Brice’s attitude towards herself, she knew that his first distrust was wearing off. She knew that he watched her and wondered. She knew that she had made him think. In earlier days she had wanted him to think her way; now she was content, more than content, to trust to his thinking for himself. She respected him. He was no longer the stoop-shouldered, plodding commuter, either in mind or body. He had aged more than the years could account for. He was broader, heavier than the man who used to push the lawn-mower and yearn to go fishing. In place of the plodding contentment of those days there was the alertness of active purpose about him.

On a bleak day in May, one of those days when winter seems to return for a final flaunt of his power, Warren came in to supper with unwonted quietness, wearing an air of complacency, his hair damp. They questioned him.

“Sure,” he admitted. “I went in swimming. All the fellers went in.”

“What did I tell you?” asked Brice.

“You said not to go in ’cause the water’s cold. It wasn’t a bit cold today. So I went in.”

“What else did I tell you?”

“What else?”

“What else did I tell you?”

“Me?”

Brice’s hand came down on the table.

“Oh, yes,” said Warren. “You said not to go in until I could swim. Well, I can swim now.”

“I told you not to go into the water until I had taught you to swim.”

Warren reached for a biscuit. “Maybe you did, come to think of it,” he admitted. “I guess I forgot.”

“You did not forget. You disobeyed. Tomorrow you will stay in your room all day. Your mother will take you your meals, or I will. For the whole day you will stay there alone. You’ll have time to make up your mind that remembering pays. Understand?”

That night he was restless and feverish, but in the morning he appeared, dressed and smiling, ignoring the slight hoarseness in his voice.

“What’s this?” asked Brice.

“Well, I got to go to school, I suppose. I suppose you wouldn’t want me to miss school.”

Brice laid a hand on his shoulder and marched him, protesting and kicking, into the bedroom, took him his oatmeal and milk.

“Don’t I get any toast?” asked Warren.

“You do not,” said Brice, with emphasis. “Nor sugar.” He turned the key in the lock.

At noon he asked, “Any sounds from up there? Any protests?”

“Not a murmur,” Anne told him. They smiled. She gave him a plate, a glass of milk.

At his exclamation Anne ran in from the kitchen. The bedroom was empty, the window open.

The sun high, the sun low, night coming, then darkness.

The sun high: after an hour or two the whine of the mill suddenly stopping. Without hat or coat Anne ran up the road. Men pouring out, separating in groups, going off into the woods, up the road. A woman came to Anne’s side.

“Don’t you worry like that, Mis’ Denison,” she said. “They’ll find him. He can’t have gone far.”

Later the schoolteacher, tears in her frightened eyes. “Oh, Mrs. Denison, I am so sorry! I thought you were keeping him home for something. I ought to have sent to find out.”

Anne, her lips dry, shook her head.

“Isn’t there something I can do?” the girl asked.

Something that she could do!

The sun low: dusk, and from across the river came the woman whom Anne had stood by in her travail. “Sure, an’ don’t ye go frettin’ yourself like that, ma’am. It won’t do any good to fret.”

That numbness, that quietness—fretting!

Night coming: and Brice coming in for a flash-light and lanterns, avoiding her eyes. Those lines by his mouth, the dark under his eyes. The blacksmith’s wife there in the room with her, deep-bosomed, untidy, kind.

“They’ll be wanting some coffee,” she told Anne. “You help me, my dear. There’s nothing like work.”

Down the hill with the pail of steaming brew between them, cups handed out to the men who passed by, twos and threes, singly, stopping only to quaff down the drink, avoiding Anne’s eyes.

Darkness: people there in the house, in the room, whisperings, a door opened upon the night. The cool night, the sweet night, night sounds and stars, and somewhere out there Warren, alone, perhaps stumbling, perhaps fallen, perhaps going on and on, losing himself over and over, like those lanterns that came and went through the woods.

Towards midnight the house became quieter. People had slipped away. Only Mrs. Cadigan remained.

“You ought to go back to the children,” Anne said.

“Sure, they can do without me the night.”

Before dawn the sound of men running. Anne rushed to the road. “Have they——”

“Not yet. But don’t you go down, ma’am. They’re getting things ready to drag the mill-pond.”

Blindly into the house again. Morning. Women entering quietly, as though they were gathering for a.... Anne went into her bedroom, fell on her knees. Not prayer, nothing that words could be found for. Weakness. Her spirit clutching at something that was not there, held by human suffering to human Weakness, faltering but reaching out.

So far off, at first. Sounds, all part of the horror. Part of the encompassing agony. Then a voice at the door.

“Mis’ Denison! Quick——!”

Herself in the door, women crowding about her, supporting her, laughing and crying. Their words with no meaning. Those sounds coming nearer. Men shouting and calling, waving their hats, swinging their lanterns. Brice in the doorway. Over his shoulder, Warren.

“Here’s hot milk, Mis’ Denison.” That, from one of the women. Another was on her knees, chafing his feet. Another came presently with a pail of hot water to bathe them in. The dear weight on her lap, his head on her shoulder, and Brice standing by, watching them both.

“We’ll come back by and by and red up a bit,” one of the women said. Anne smiled at them. They looked so very far off. They were shadows. In her arms was the substance of life. The door closed behind them.

Warren’s arm went about her neck. He whimpered a little. “You were so mean, Mums, you and Dad. I ran away. I wanted to show you.”

Brice carried him to bed. He was asleep before they undressed him.

Later, facing each other, the night and the years there between them.

“Brice, did you hear what he said?”

He nodded. “I was thinking—all the time there in the woods—if he should be—if we didn’t find him.... You would go, too.... Oh, my God, Anne! I need you so!”

END

Transcriber’s Note

- Obvious typographic errors and omissions silently corrected.

- Variations in hyphenation and spelling kept as in the original. Except for the following:

- p. 201 “to-day” to “today”

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAY OF ALL EARTH ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg License available with this file or online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg License must appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works provided that:

- • You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg trademark, but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”

- • You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.

- • You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of receipt of the work.

- • You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg and future generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 41 Watchung Plaza #516, Montclair NJ 07042, USA, +1 (862) 621-9288. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project Gutenberg eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg, including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

Table of Contents

- THE WAY OF ALL EARTH

- PART I

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8

- PART II

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7

- PART III

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6

- PART IV

- 1

- 2

- Transcriber’s Note

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE