College girls

“Is it this?”	Frontispiece
	Facing page
She stopped and her face grew whiter,	12
“They wanted him to put them in his stories,”	14
The political economist,	76
“It has been a long while since you were a student here,”	78
“How kind you are,”	90
“You cannot imagine how anxious the girls are to see you,”	174
“Play!”	176
A rather chilling influence,	230
She had stolen furtive glances at her,	232
When the two women were within a few feet of each other,	240

THERE was a great deal of jangling of bells, and much laughter and talk, and the chaperon, who was an assistant Greek professor, looked as if she had never heard of Aristophanes, and listened apparently with the most intense interest to a Harvard half-back eagerly explaining to her the advantages of a flying wedge; and when the College loomed in sight, with its hundreds of lights, and the sleigh drew up under the big porte cochère, and while a handsome youth was bidding his sister, the hostess of the party, an unusually affectionate good-by, she explained to the rest how very sorry she was she could not invite them in. But the Harvard men, in a feeling sort of way, said they understood, and after much lifting of hats and more laughter, the sleigh went off, and the chaperon and her charges were left standing in the “Centre.”

She confessed then that she was extremely tired and that she did not think she ever cared again to see the “winter sports.” She thought the sight afforded her that afternoon, of two nice boys, very scantily clothed and with bloody faces, banging away at each other until they could hardly stand, compared with the view of those same young gentlemen the week before at the College, immaculately dressed and with very good-looking noses and eyes, was entirely too great a strain on her. So she went off to her study and left the excited and pleased young women to stroll down the corridor to Miss Ronald’s room, to talk it over and to decide for the twentieth time that Somebody of ’94 ought to have come off winner in the fencing match, instead of Somebody else of ’93.

The room they went into was a typical college room, with its bookstands and long chairs and cushions and innumerable trophies, of which Miss Ronald was rather proud. She was a stylish girl, with New York manners and clothes, and a pretty, rather expressionless face, strongly addicted to fads, and after almost four years of college life still something of a fool. She had become popular through her own efforts and the fact that she had a brother at Harvard. If a girl really wishes to be a favorite in college she must arrange to have some male relative at a neighboring university.

The sleighing party over to Harvard for the winter sports had been an especial success, so her guests took off their wraps and settled themselves in her chairs in a very cordial sort of way, and discussed amiably the merits of the tug-of-war, while someone made chocolate. After a while, when they had all had their say about the pole-vaulting and the running jumps, the conversation flagged a little and the room came in for its share of attention.

There was a comparative stranger among the guests—a Miss Meredith—to whom Miss Ronald could show her numerous souvenirs for the first time. She was especially glad to have them to show to this particular girl because she thought they would impress her—although it would have been a little difficult for a casual observer to understand just why, for as Miss Meredith was led around the room by her hostess, from the screen made of cotillion favors and the collection of lamp-post signs presented to her by Harvard admirers afflicted with kleptomania, over to the smoking-cap and tobacco-pouch of some smitten undergraduate, anyone could see what a handsome girl she was, and though more plainly dressed than the others, that she seemed to be thoroughly at her ease. Perhaps Miss Ronald expected her to be impressed because she had taken her up, and had first introduced her to this set and made a success of her. No one had known anything about her or her people, and she had entered shortly before as a “special student,” and therefore belonged to no particular class. She was evidently a little older than Miss Ronald and her friends, and her face was somewhat sad, and there was a thoughtful look in the eyes. She seemed to be rather haughty, too, and as if afraid she would be patronized. But Miss Ronald, whose particular craze in the beauty line was a cream complexion, gray eyes, and red-brown hair, had declared the new-comer to be lovely, and even after she had discovered that this handsome girl was not of her own social standing, that her people were unknown and unimportant, she still declared her intention of cultivating her. She had found this harder to do than she had expected, and so, as she led her around the room, she rather delighted in the belief that she was impressing this girl by the many evidences of a gay social career.

The others, who had seen all the trophies many times before, and who knew just which one of Miss Ronald’s admirers had given her the Harvard blazer, and where she had got the Yale flag and the mandolin with the tiger-head painted on it—for Miss Ronald, being a wise young lady, cultivated friends in every college—sat back and talked among themselves and paid very little attention to what the other two were doing. They were a little startled, therefore, by a low exclamation from the girl with Miss Ronald. She had stopped before a long photograph-case filled with pictures of first violins and celebrated actors and college men—all the mute evidences of various passing fancies. Miss Ronald, who was putting away the faded remains of some “Tree-flowers” and some pictures of Hasty Pudding theatricals, looked over at the girl.

“What is it?” she said, carelessly, and then noting her pallor and the direction of her gaze she laughed in an embarrassed little way and went over to her.

“Is it this?” she said, taking a half-hidden photograph from among the jumble of pictures and holding it up to the view of all.

It was the photograph of a young man, a successful man, whose name had become suddenly famous and whose personality was as potent as his talents. He was not handsome, but his fine face was more attractive than a handsome one would have been. There was a look of determination in the firmly closed lips and square-cut jaw, and an indefinable air of the man of the world about the face which rendered it extremely fascinating. On the lower edge of the picture was written his name, in a strong, bold hand that corresponded with the look on the face.

“My latest craze,” said Miss Ronald, smiling rather nervously and coloring a little as she still held the picture up. There was a slight and awkward pause, and then half a dozen hands reached for it. There was not a girl in the room who had not heard of this man and wished she knew him, and who had not read his last book and the latest newspaper paragraphs about him. But their interest had been of the secretly admiring order, and they all felt this girl was going a little too far, that it was not just the thing to have his picture—the picture of a man she did not know. And as she looked around and met the gray eyes of the girl beside her she felt impelled to explain her position as if in answer to the unspoken scorn in them. She was embarrassed and rather angry that it had all happened. She could laugh at the first-violins and the opera-tenors and the English actor—they had only been silly fancies—but this one was different. Without knowing this man she had felt an intense interest in him and his face had fascinated her, and she had persuaded herself that he was her ideal and that she could easily care for him. She suddenly realized how childish she had been and the ridiculousness of it all, and it angered her.

“Of course I know it isn’t nice to have his picture—in this way—” she began defiantly, “but I know his cousin—it was from him that I got this photograph—and he has promised to introduce us next winter.” She seemed to forget her momentary embarrassment and looked very much elated. “Won’t that be exciting? I shan’t know in the least what to say to him. Think of meeting the most fascinating man in New York!”

“Be sure you recognize him,” murmured one of the girls, gloomily, from the depths of a steamer-chair. “I met him last winter. I had never seen a photograph of him then, and not knowing he was the one, I talked to him for half an hour. When I found out after he had gone who he was, I couldn’t get over my stupidity. My mother was angry with me, I can tell you!”

Each one knew something about him, or knew someone who knew him, or the artist who illustrated his stories, or the people with whom he had just gone abroad, or into what thousandth his last book had got. They all thought him a hero and fascinatingly handsome, and they declared with the sentimental candor of the very young girl, that they would never marry unless they could marry a man like that—a man who had accomplished great things and had a future before him, and who was so clever and interesting and distinguished-looking.

The girl who had had the singular good fortune to meet him was besieged with questions as to his looks and manner of talking, and personal preferences, to all of which she answered with a fine disregard for facts and a volubility out of all proportion to her knowledge. They wondered whether his play—he had just written one, and the newspapers were saying a great deal about its forthcoming production—would be as interesting as his stories, and they all hoped it would be given in New York during the Christmas holidays, and they declared that they would not miss it for anything.

Only one girl sat silent, her gray eyes bright with scorn—she let them talk on. Their opinions about his looks, and whether he was conceited or only properly sensible of his successes, and whether the report was true that he was going to Japan in the spring, seemed indifferent to her. She sat white and unsmiling through all their girlish enthusiasm and sentimental talk about this unknown god and their ideals and their expectations for the future—and when the photograph, which had been passed from hand to hand, reached her, she let it fall idly in her lap as though she could not bear to touch it. As it lay there, a hard look came into her face. When she glanced up, she found Miss Ronald gazing at her with a curious, petulant expression.

Suddenly she got up and a look of determination was upon her face and in her eyes. Their talk was all very childish and silly, but she could see that beneath their half-laughing manner there was a touch of seriousness. This man, with his fine face and his successes and personal magnetism, had exercised a strange fascination over them, and most of all over the pretty, sentimental girl looking with such a puzzled expression at her.

After all, this girl had been good to her. She would do what she could. She stood tall and straight against the curtains of the window facing the rest and breathing quickly.

“Yes—I know of him,” she said, answering their unspoken inquiry. “You think you know him through his books and the reviews and newspaper notices of him.” Her voice was ringing now and she touched the picture lightly and scornfully with her finger.

“I know him better than that. I know things of him that will not be told in newspaper paragraphs and book reviews.” She paused and her face grew whiter. “You read his stories, and because they are the best of their kind, the most correct, the most interesting, because his men are the men you like to know, men who are always as they should be to men, because there is an atmosphere of refinement and elegance and pleasing conventionality about them—you think they must be the reflex of himself. O yes! I know—the very last story—you have all read it—who could be more magnificent and correct than Roscommon? And you think him like his hero! There is not one of you but would feel flattered at his attentions, you might easily fall in love with him—I dare say you would scarcely refuse him—and yet”—she broke off suddenly.

“There was a girl,” she began after a moment’s hesitation, in a tone from which all the excitement had died, “a friend of mine, and she loved him. Perhaps you do not know that before he became famous he lived in a small Western town—she lived there too. They grew up together, and she was as proud of him—well, you know probably just how proud a girl can be of a boy who has played with her and scolded her and tyrannized over her and protected her and afterward loved her. For he did love her. He told her so a thousand times and he showed it

to her in a thousand ways. And she loved him! I cannot tell you what he was to her.” They were all looking curiously at her white face and she tried to speak still more calmly.

“Well, after a time his ambition—for he was very ambitious and very talented—made him restless. He wanted to go East—he thought he would succeed. She let him go freely, willingly. His success was hers, he said. Everything he was to do was for her, and she let him go, and she told him then that he could be free. But he was very angry. He said that he would never have thought of going but to be better worthy of her. He succeeded—you know—the world knows how well he has succeeded, and the world likes success, and what wonder that he forgot her. She was handsome—at least her friends told her so—but she was not like the girls he knows now. She was not rich, and she had never been used to the life of luxury and worldliness to which he had so quickly accustomed himself. But,” she went on, protestingly, as if in reply to some unspoken argument or some doubt that had assailed her, “she could have been all he wished her. She was quick and good to look at, and well-bred. She could have easily learned the world’s ways—the ways that have become so vital to him.”

She stopped, and then went on with an air of careful impartiality, as if trying to be just, to look at both sides of the question, and her beautiful face grew whiter with the effort.

“But, of course, she was not like the girls he had met. He used to write to her at first how disgusted he was when those elegant young ladies would pet him and make much of him and use him and his time as they did everything else in their beautiful, idle lives. He did not like it, he said; and then I suppose it amused him, and then fascinated him. They would not let him alone. They wanted him to put them in his stories, and he had to go to their dinners and to the opera with them. He said they wanted someone to ‘show off’; and at first he resented it, but little by little he came to like it and to find it the life he had needed and longed for, and to forget and despise the simpler one he had known in his youth——”

She stopped again and pulled nervously at the silk fringe of the curtain, and looked at the strained faces of the girls as if asking them whether she had been just in her way of putting the thing. And then she hurried on.

“And so she released him. He had not been back in two years—not since he had first gone away, and she knew it would be easier to do it

before she saw him again. And so when she heard of his success and how popular he was, and that he was the most talked about of all the younger authors, she wrote him that she could not be his wife. But she loved him, and she let him see it in the letter. She bent her pride that far—and she was a proud girl! She told herself over and over that he was not worthy of her—that success had made a failure of him, but she loved him still and she let him see it. She determined to give him and herself that chance. If he still loved her he would know from that letter that she, too, loved him. Well, his answer—she told me that his answer was very cold and short. That if she wished to give him up he knew she must have some good reason.”

Someone stirred uneasily, and gave a breathless sort of gasp.

“That was hard,” she went on. She was speaking now in an impassive sort of way. “But that was not the hardest. She saw him again. It was not long ago——” She stopped and put one hand to her throat. “She had gone away. She desired to become what he had wished she was, although she could never be anything to him again, and she was succeeding, and thought that perhaps she would forget and be happy. But he found out where she was, and went to her. Something had gone wrong with him. You remember—he was reported to be engaged to a young girl very well known in society—the daughter of a senator, and a great beauty. Well, there was some mistake. He came straight to my friend and told her that he did not know what he had been doing, that she was the only girl he had ever loved and he asked her forgiveness. He told her that his life would be worthless and ruined, that his success would mean less than nothing to him if she did not love him, and he implored her to be what she had once been to him and to marry him.”

Miss Ronald looked up quickly, and the petulant expression in her eyes had given place to a look of disdain.

“What did she say then?” she asked.

The girl shook her head, mournfully.

“She could not,” she said, simply. “She would have given her soul to have been able to say yes, but she could not!”

When the door had quite closed behind her, they sat silent and hushed. Suddenly Miss Ronald walked over to the window, and picking up the photograph where it had fallen, face downward, she tore it into little bits.

ALLARDYCE felt both aggrieved and bored when he found that his sister had gone off with a walking-party and was not likely to return for an hour or two. He had this unwelcome bit of news from the young woman in cap and gown who had come from the office into the reception-room and was standing before him, glancing every now and then from his face to the card she held, with a severely kind look out of her gray eyes.

“I telegraphed her I was in Boston and would be out,” remarked Allardyce, in an injured tone.

“Yes,” assented the young woman, “Miss Allardyce had left word in the office that she was expecting her brother, but that as he had not come by the 2.30 or 3.10 train, she had concluded he was detained in Boston, and that if he did arrive later he was to wait.” She added that he would be obliged to do so in any case, as there was no express back to Boston for two hours, and that if he would like to see the college while he waited she would send someone to take him over it.

But Allardyce seemed so doubtful as to whether he cared to become better acquainted with the architecture of the college, and so disappointed about it all, that the kindly senior felt sorry for him and suggested sympathetically that he “might amuse himself by strolling through the grounds.” She could not have been over twenty, but she had all the seriousness and responsibility of an undergraduate, and Allardyce suddenly felt very young and foolish in her presence and wondered hotly how old she thought he was, and why she hadn’t told him to “run out and play.” He decided that her idea was a good one, however, so he took his hat and stick and wandered down the south corridor to the piazza. Standing there he could see the lake and the many private boats lying in the bend of the shore, each fastened to its little dock, and beyond, the boat-house with the class practice-barges, slim and long, just visible in the cool darkness beneath. He thought it all looked very inviting, and there was a rustic bench under a big tree half-way down the hill where he could smoke and get a still better view of the water.

So he settled himself quite comfortably, lit a cigarette, and looked gloomily out over the lake. He assured himself bitterly that after having been abroad for so many years, and after having inconvenienced himself by taking a boat to Boston instead of a Cunarder to New York—his natural destination—in order to see his sister, that she was extremely unkind not to have waited for him. He was deep in the mental composition of a most reproachful note to her when he discovered that by closing his eyes a little and looking intently at the Italian Gardens on the opposite side of the water, he could easily fancy himself at a little place he knew on Lake Maggiore. This afforded him amusement for a while, but it soon palled on him, and he was beginning to wonder moodily how he was ever to get through two hours of the afternoon, when he saw a young girl come out of the boat-house with a pair of sculls and make her way to one of the little boats. She leaned over it, and Allardyce could see that she was trying to fit a key into the padlock which fastened the boat to its dock, and that after several attempts to undo it she looked rather hopelessly at the lock and heavy chain. He went quickly down the hill and along the shore. He was suddenly extremely glad that he was in America, where he could be permitted to speak to and help a girl, even if a total stranger, without having his assistance interpreted as an insult.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, lifting his hat. “Can I be of any help?”

The girl looked up a little startled, but when she saw the tall, good-looking youth, she smiled in a relieved sort of way and rose quickly from her knees.

“Indeed, yes,” she said, without any embarrassment. “I can’t unlock this; perhaps you can.”

Allardyce took the key, and kneeling down fitted it in its place and turned it with very little effort. The girl looked rather ruefully at him as he jumped up.

“Thank you,” she said in a politely distant way. “I don’t see why I could not have done that. I am very strong in my hands, too.”

Allardyce smiled indulgently. All girls were under the impression that they were strong. At any rate this one was tremendously pretty, he decided—much prettier than the stately senior he had encountered up at the college, and he was glad there were no cap and gown this time. He was aware, of course, that he ought to lift his hat and move on, and not stand there staring at her, but his previous solicitude had made him feel sociable.

“Perhaps you will let me put the oars in for you,” he suggested. He was rather alarmed after he had spoken, but when he glanced at the girl to see how she had taken his further self-invited assistance he found her looking at him in a very friendly way. All at once he felt quite elated and at his ease. It had been a long while since he had had much to do with American girls, and he concluded that all that had been said about their charming freedom and cordiality of manner had not been exaggerated. But when he had put the sculls in the boat it occurred to him that it would not do to presume too far on that freedom and cordiality, and that if he was not to depart immediately—and he felt no inclination to do so—he must offer some sort of explanation of himself.

“I am waiting for my sister,” he remarked genially.

“Oh! your sister,” echoed the girl.

“Yes—Miss Allardyce. Perhaps you are in the same class,” he hazarded.

She looked at him for a moment in a slightly surprised way, and then out across the water, and Allardyce saw, as she turned her head away from him, that she was smiling.

“No,” she said slowly, “but I know her quite well.”

“Ah! I’m glad of that,” said the young man, boldly and cheerfully. “Now I feel quite as if I had been properly introduced! ‘Les amis de nos amis,’ you know!”

The girl smiled back at him. “I am Miss Brent. By the way, your sister has the distinction of being the only Allardyce in college. It’s a rather unusual name.”

“Yes,” assented Allardyce, delightedly. “Scotch, you know.” And then in a sudden burst of confidence—“My people were Scotch and French. I have been educated abroad and have come home for the law course at the University. Awfully glad to be in America again, too, for, after all, I am an American through and through.” He pulled himself up sharply in some confusion and amusement at his unusual loquacity.

But the girl before him did not seem to find it strange, and was quite interested and politely attentive.

“And where is your sister?” she demanded.

“Oh, that’s the essential, and I forgot to mention it,” he replied, laughing a little and digging his stick into the soft earth. “She’s gone off walking!” and then he went on insinuatingly and plaintively—“And I don’t know a soul here—never was here before in my life—and there’s no train to Boston, and I have to wait two hours for her!”

The young woman smiled sympathetically. “That’s too bad,” she said, and then she looked doubtfully at Allardyce. He seemed very young and to be having a rather bad time of it, and there is an unwritten law at the college which constitutes every member of it the natural protector and entertainer of lost or bored strangers.

“I am going across the lake for water-lilies,” she went on after a little hesitation. “If you care to come you may, and pull me about while I gather them. It is hard work to do it alone.”

“You are very kind,” said Allardyce promptly, “and it is very nice of you to put it that way. It will be a great favor to me to let me go.”

He rowed her across the water in the direction of the Italian Gardens, and they found a good deal to say to each other, and she seemed very unaffected and friendly, although Allardyce fancied once or twice that when she replied to some of his remarks her voice trembled in an odd way as if she were secretly amused. But he thought her delightful, and he was very much obliged to her for taking him off his hands in this way, though he could not help feeling some surprise at her invitation. Of course he could not imagine such a thing happening to him on the Continent. No French or German girl would have the chance or enough savoir faire to treat him as this girl was treating him. He told her all this in more veiled terms when they had reached the water-lilies, and he had turned around in his seat and was carefully balancing the boat while she pulled the dripping, long-stemmed flowers. Miss Brent laughed outright at his remarks, and Allardyce laughed good-naturedly too, although what he had said did not strike him as being at all amusing. But he was glad that she was so easily diverted. He reflected that perhaps her invitation had not been entirely disinterested—that she considered it as stupid to go out rowing alone, as he did to wander around the college without his sister—and that as she had been kind enough to save him from a solitary afternoon, it was his part to be as amusing and entertaining as possible.

“You must not consider us in the light of very young girls,” she explained. “You know this is a woman’s college.”

“That’s what is so nice,” returned Allardyce confidently. “You are girls with the brains and attainments of women. That is a very delightful combination.” He gave her an openly admiring, rather patronizing glance. He did not mean to be superior or condescending, but he reflected that in spite of her ease of manner she was yet in college, and so must be very young. He seemed to himself to be quite old and world-worn in comparison.

Miss Brent looked over at the college towering up on the other side of the lake.

“How do you like it?” she asked politely, after a moment’s silence.

“Oh, I didn’t see anything of it,” replied Allardyce easily, leaning his elbows comfortably on the unshipped oars. “I got my walking papers promptly from a young woman up there, and so I left. She rather frightened me, you know,” he ran on. “Awfully severe-looking, cap and gown, and that sort of thing. I thought if that was only an undergraduate I didn’t want to encounter any of the teachers—professors, I believe you call them—and so I fled. You do have women professors, don’t you?” he inquired with a great deal of awe.

“Yes,” said the girl.

“Well—they must be pretty awful,” he said cheerfully, after a moment’s pause.

The girl straightened up cautiously, pulling at the rubber-like stem of an immense lily.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said carelessly. She was bending over the side of the boat, and Allardyce could not see her face; but he heard the laugh in her voice again. “There! there’s a boutonnière for you.”

Allardyce caught the lily she swung toward him by the stem, and stuck it in his coat.

“I suppose that’s about the size of the Russian Giant’s button-hole flower,” he remarked frivolously. They were quite good friends now. Allardyce looked over at the college again.

“You must find it pretty slow up there,” he said confidentially. “Can’t imagine how you girls exist. You ought to go to a Paris boarding-school. You can have no end of fun there, you know.” He was nodding his head enthusiastically at her. “I have a cousin at one in the Avenue Marceau. Went to see her just before I sailed and it was tremendously amusing. These French girls are awful flirts! When I went away every girl in that school came to the windows and looked at me. It was rather trying, but I felt that for once I knew what popularity was!”

Miss Brent buried her face in the biggest lily of the bunch.

“And—and what did you do?” she inquired, in suppressed tones.

“Oh—I? Why I bowed and smiled at the whole lot. Must have looked rather like an idiot, now I come to think of it; and my cousin wrote me she got into no end of trouble about it. One of the maîtresses happened to see me. But it was great fun while it lasted. And after all where is the harm of a little flirting?” he concluded, judicially.

“Where indeed?” assented the girl, with a laugh.

“That’s right—I am glad to hear you say that,” broke in Allardyce, approvingly. “There’s something wrong with a woman who doesn’t cry or flirt—it’s a part of her nature,” he went on, with the air of having made a profoundly philosophic discovery. “You know you agree with me,” he urged, insinuatingly.

She shook her head.

“Personally I don’t know,” she said; “you see I am so busy——”

“Oh! I say,” cried Allardyce, “you don’t mean you study as hard as that! Of course,” he added impartially, “it’s all very well for some girls to grind—” he stopped in alarm as the girl drew herself up slightly.

“I hope my sister doesn’t study too much,” he hastened to add, lamely.

Miss Brent put her handkerchief suddenly to her lips, which were trembling with laughter.

“I don’t think you need worry!” she said.

Allardyce was considerably mystified and a little offended.

“But she’s very bright,” added the girl, quickly; “especially in mathematics, where I see most of her; but I believe she is not a very hard student.”

“Well,” said Allardyce, jocosely; “I’ll tell you a secret. I am the hard student of the family, and that’s much better than that my sister should be, I think. I don’t approve of girls working too hard. It makes them old—takes away their freshness—especially if they go in for mathematics. Do you know I have never been able to imagine a girl mathematician anyway,” he ran on, confidentially. “Always seemed like a sort of joke. Now there was that English girl—what was her name, who was worse than a senior wrangler? Her photographs were just everywhere. I was in Cambridge that summer and they were in all the shop-windows, and I would stop and look carefully to see if they were not different from the ones I had seen the day before. For they were quite pretty you know, and I was always hoping that there was some mistake and that they had got some other young woman, entirely innocent, mixed up with her.”

There was so much genuine distress in his tone that Miss Brent made an heroic attempt not to laugh.

“Well,” she exclaimed, “don’t say that—some people think I am good at mathematics myself.”

Allardyce shook his head at her. “I’m sure it’s a mistake—you are trying to impose on me,” he said, with mock severity. “At any rate I am glad my sister is guiltless of any such accusation. We are under the impression that she goes in for a good time at college—at least one would suppose so from her letters. I got one from her just before I left Paris in which she gave me a very amusing account of some blow-out here—some class function or other, and she seemed dreadfully afraid that the faculty would get hold of the details. She says you stand tremendously in awe of your faculty. Wait a minute—I’ve got the letter here somewhere,” he went on, fumbling in his pockets. “Didn’t think much of the affair considered in the light of a scrape, but she seemed to think it exciting and dangerous to the last degree. That’s where you girls are so funny—you think you are doing something immensely wrong and it is just nothing at all. I see I haven’t the letter with me; but perhaps you were in it all and know a great deal more about it than I do.”

Miss Brent suddenly twisted herself around in the boat, and reached for an especially big lily.

“No—” she said, “I—I don’t think I was there. Will you pull a little on the left oar—a little more, please. It’s that lily I want!”

“There’s another thing about girls,” resumed Allardyce meditatively and kindly, when the boat had straightened back. “You seem to think it a terrible calamity, a disgrace, to get plucked in an examination. Now a man takes it philosophically. Of course, it isn’t a thing one especially cares to have happen one; but it doesn’t destroy a fellow’s interest in life, nor make him feel particularly ashamed of himself. He just goes to work with a tutor and hopes for better luck next time. That’s the best way to take it, don’t you think? But perhaps you don’t know anything about it. Ever get plucked?—I beg your pardon,” he added hastily.

But the girl did not appear at all offended.

“Oh, you mustn’t ask that,” she said, leaning back and laughing at him; “at any rate,” she added, with an air of careful consideration, “I don’t think I ever got ‘plucked’ in—mathematics. And now you must take me back.”

Allardyce gave a shudder of mock horror. “Oh, mathematics!” he said, picking up the oars.

When they were half-way across the lake Allardyce saw a young girl standing on the shore waving at them.

“Why,” he said, looking intently at the figure, “I believe it is my sister.”

Miss Brent leaned forward.

“Yes, it is your sister,” she said slowly, and she smiled a little.

Miss Allardyce kissed her brother with a great show of affection, and told him how sorry she was to have missed him. “And I am sure it was very good of you to have taken care of him,” she went on impressively and gratefully, turning to Miss Brent. But that young lady disclaimed any merit.

“We’ve had a delightful afternoon,” she declared, “and your brother has been very good to pull me about and keep the boat from tipping over, while I gathered these lilies. I am very glad to have met him. Good afternoon.”

“Charming girl!” murmured Allardyce, appreciatively, digging his stick in the earth, and leaning on it as he looked after Miss Brent.

“We had an awfully jolly time together,” he went on, to the girl beside him; “sort of water-picnic, without the picnic.”

Miss Allardyce looked sharply at her brother. Something in his manner made her anxious. “How did you meet her?” she demanded.

“Oh! that’s the best part,” said Allardyce joyously. “Wasn’t introduced at all. I offered to unlock her boat for her, and I liked her looks so much that I hated to go away, so I asked her if she was in your class, and she said ‘No,’ but that she knew you, and that I considered was introduction enough. We just went off together and had a very good time. Lucky for me that somebody took me up when my own sister went off and left me,” he added reproachfully.

Miss Allardyce shook her head impatiently. “Never mind about me.” She looked anxiously at her brother. “What did you say to her?”

“Oh! I don’t remember exactly;” he replied vaguely and cheerfully. “We talked a good deal—at least I did,” with a sudden realization of how he had monopolized the conversation. “About French boarding-schools and women professors and getting plucked in examinations, and I told her about that scrape you wrote me of. She hasn’t a bit of nonsense about her,” he went on enthusiastically. “She didn’t say much, but I am sure she agreed with me that girls are by nature flirts, and not mathematicians.”

Miss Allardyce gave a little gasp. “Well,” she said, with a sort of desperate calmness, “you’ve done it now! Do you know who that was you were talking to? That was the assistant-professor of mathematics. Oh! yes, I know she looks awfully young, and she is young. I suppose you think a woman has to be fifty before she knows anything. Why she only took her degree two years ago, and she was so tremendously clever that she went off and studied a year in Leipsic and then came back as instructor in mathematics, and this year when one of the assistant-professors was called suddenly to Europe, she was made assistant-professor in her place, and they say she’s been a most wonderful success. And I know she is pretty; but that doesn’t prevent her examinations from being terrors, and I didn’t get through the last one at all, and if you told her about that scrape, and that women ought not to be mathematicians——” she stopped breathlessly and in utter despair.

Allardyce whistled softly and then struck his stick sharply against the side of the little dock. “Well,” he exclaimed indignantly, “she’s most deceitfully young and pretty,” and then he turned reproachfully upon his sister. “It’s all your fault,” he said; “what did you go off walking for?”

Baltimore, October 20th.

MY DEAREST ALMA: As we have been confiding our joys and woes to each other for the last twenty-five years, it is to you I naturally write about this new trial which has come into my life. You will probably think it peu de chose, but I assure you, my dear, that if you really and truly put yourself in my place you will realize that it is an annoyance. Henry’s child has at last written to me that she “has finished her studies for the present” (!) and is coming to America to spend the winter with us. You must see, Alma, that this is slightly appalling. I have never seen her—not since she was a little thing with enormous gray eyes and a freckled nose—and I know absolutely nothing about her except what Henry wrote me from time to time, when he stopped his eternal wanderings long enough to remember he had a sister. But judging by the education he gave her—and I consider it simply deplorable—and the evident taste she had for it, and later for “the higher education of woman,” I feel distressingly positive that I cannot approve of the child. I am very sorry now that I did not make an effort to go to her when her father died in England, five years ago, but she wrote me that she had friends there who were doing everything for her, and that she was coming directly to America to enter college according to her father’s wishes, and that there was really no need to disturb myself about her. I could see, Alma, the effect of the independent, strange existence she had led, in that letter. It repelled me. Now, Eleanor, I am sure, would have been completely prostrated, the dear child!

So she came directly to Boston, and I, being so busy with my own preparations for taking Eleanor and Margaret to Paris, simply could not arrange to go on to Boston to see her. As of course you know, we remained abroad four years, and last year, when we returned and I expected to see Helen at last, she wrote me a letter which I got just before leaving Paris, saying that she had decided to go to Oxford for a year to take a course in mathematical astronomy at the Lady Margaret Hall. So we passed each other in mid-ocean.

Fancy, Alma! I knew when I read that letter what kind of a girl she was. One of your hard students, engrossed in books, without one thought for dress or social manners! I am afraid she will prove a severe trial. And just when Eleanor is counting on having such a gay second winter and Margaret is to début. It is a little hard, is it not, dear? Thank Heaven, I shall never have to blame myself as Henry would have to do if he were alive. At least I have seen to it that my daughters have had the education which will fit them to ornament society, the education that I still believe in notwithstanding all this talk of colleges for women and advancement in learning, and college settlements and extensions, and Heaven knows what besides!

My girls have had first, the best of training at Mrs. Meed’s, and then four years at Les Oiseaux, you know. They speak French perfectly, of course, and Margaret has even tried Italian and German. They both ride and drive well, and Eleanor plays and sings very sweetly. But what is the use of my telling you about them when you know them so well?

I only wish, Alma, you could tell me something about Helen! Just think, I have never even seen a photograph of her! It is one of her fads not to have them taken, from which I argue that she is very homely, very opinionated, and very strange. Eleanor has two dozen in different poses, I am sure. The only information I have at all about Helen’s looks is from Margaret, who saw her for an hour in Brookline—it was five years ago—just before we sailed. She had run up to see a Boston friend for a few days, and of course she was very young and has probably forgotten, but she insists that Helen was rather pretty. However, I do not attach the least importance to what Margaret says, because, as you know, she is so good-natured that she always says the best of everyone; and then her tastes are sometimes really deplorable—so unlike Eleanor’s! Besides, her description of Helen does not sound like that of a pretty girl. She says she wore her hair parted and back from her face, and was slightly near-sighted. Think of it, Alma! For the hair, encore passe, Mr. Gibson and Mr. Wenzell have made that so much the fashion lately that one might forgive it; but short-sighted! Eye-glasses! Spectacles perhaps! Hard study since may have completely ruined her eyes. I greatly fear she will show up very badly beside Eleanor’s piquant beauty and Margaret’s freshness.

She writes me that she will be here in a month, so that it is time I was seriously considering what I am to do with her. Of course, with the severe education she has had, she probably dislikes society and could not be induced to go out, knowing well that she could not shine in it; but as my brother’s child she must be at least introduced properly, and she can then subside gracefully. Of course, where there are two such attractive girls in the house as Eleanor and Margaret, she cannot hope to compete in social honors with them, and will probably much prefer in any case to continue her studies or go in for charitable work, or something of that sort.

My dear Alma, I have just read over this letter and am shocked to see how much I have written about this affair. Forgive me if I have wearied you and—yes, do give me some good advice.

Are you going to Carlsbad?

The girls are out of town for a few days, or would send love as I do.

Very affectionately yours,
Marian Morrison.

P.S. They say a woman cannot write a letter without a postscript, and I believe it! Tell me what to do about H. How had I best introduce her to society? Don’t you think a dinner—where she could sit beside someone whom I could especially choose as suited to her—and where she would not be too much en évidence? A dance would not do at all—I doubt if she can dance, poor girl!

M. M.

October 22d.

My Dearest Marian: How could you think me so cold-blooded as to consider such a piece of news as your letter contains “peu de chose”? I feel for you, I assure you. What a dilemma! The dear girls! how do they like the idea? Margaret, as you say, will probably not mind, but Eleanor—so exquisitely pretty and stylish! It will be rather a thorn in the flesh, I imagine. O! how I wish I had children—two such lovely girls as yours would make life a different thing for me!

Of course, the dinner. How could you think of anything else! Invite some of the professors from the University for her, and have the rest of the company of young society people, so that Eleanor and Margaret can enjoy it too.

Oh, my dear, I would like to write a long, long letter about this, but I am in such confusion and hurry! Mr. Bennett has been ordered to Wiesbaden for the winter, and we sail in a week. I wish I could be in Baltimore to help you, but it is impossible, of course. I count on your writing me all your plans, and just how Helen appears, and whether it is all as dreadful as you now fear. Address to the Langham Hotel until November 25th, after that, care Brown, Shipley, as usual. Good-by. I have a thousand things to tell you of, but must put them off until I reach London and have a moment to myself.

As ever,
Devotedly yours,
A. B.

P.S. Don’t look too much on the dark side of things. I knew a Philadelphia girl once—the niece of old Colonel Devereaux you know—and she was rather pretty and quite good form, though a college girl. I think, however, she had been but one year to college.

A. B.

Baltimore, November 15th.

Dearest Alma: Your note, which was so welcome and which came so long ago, would have had an earlier answer had I not been a little sick, and so busy and worried that I have not had time or heart to write even to you. So you can imagine in what a state I am.

The girls came back to town shortly after I last wrote you, and we held a sort of family council about Helen. The dear girls were charming, and Eleanor bore it very bravely. She says she will give Helen hints about her hair, and will implore her not to wear spectacles, but rimless eye-glasses.

We are very much worried about her gowns. Of course her own taste is not to be depended upon, and I hardly fancy her income would justify her in leaving her toilette entirely with a grande couturière, even if she would dream of doing such a thing, which I very much doubt. Her father, you know, left the bulk of his fortune to found a library in Westchester. He always said he never intended to leave Helen enough to tempt anyone to marry her for her money. Poor Henry—what a strange, misguided man! But then, of course, he could not foresee that his daughter would be an ugly duckling, and strong-minded and college-bred, and all that. Oh, yes, of course he must have known about the college. But at any rate, man-like, he did not realize how unattractive Helen would be.

Well, as I say, we talked it over, and the girls agree with me that the best thing is a dinner. Eleanor was for having it a small affair. She said it would be truer kindness to Helen, but Margaret, who is very blunt sometimes, I am sorry to say, said she thought “we ought to give Helen a chance,” as she rather vulgarly expressed it, and insisted so strongly on it that we gave in, and have decided to have a dinner, and invite some of Eleanor’s friends later to a small dance. This will relieve Eleanor of some of her more pressing social obligations, and she will also be able to introduce Margaret to some of her particular set before she makes her formal début later in the season. A débutante cannot have too many friends.

And so, after talking it over, we determined to invite Professor Radnor, of the University. He is a comparatively young man—about forty-five, I judge—and though far from handsome he is considered very interesting, I believe, to those who understand him. He is of good family, too—one of the Radnors of Cliff Hill, you know. He and Helen can talk biology or whatever it is he professes—I really forget what it is. Then there is Colonel Gray—I shall invite him because he was an old friend of her father, and though very grumpy and disagreeable, and apt to bore one to death with his interminable war stories, still I always invite him to the house once a year, and he is to be depended upon to come; and indeed, Alma, I am so perplexed to know whom to invite that I really cannot pick and choose. Then I think I shall have the new rector at “All Souls.” He is a young man, an Englishman, and as stupid as the proverbial Britisher; very high church, and as I have not yet invited him to dinner, I think the choice of him rather diplomatic. It really has been too much of an exertion to get up a dinner-party for him alone, and indeed Eleanor cannot bear him, she says; but with her usual sweetness has consented to have him come if Helen and Margaret will take him off her hands. He and Helen will doubtless find much to say to each other about Dr. Bernardo, and the People’s Palace, and that sort of thing. I think with these three I can safely let the girls take care of the rest, and invite younger people who will be congenial to them. I say younger people, for Helen must be twenty-three or four, and she will doubtless seem much older and graver. You see I shall be prepared; I know this will be an ordeal, but I mean to do the best for her that I can. I shall have everything as handsome as possible—the girls are particularly anxious about it—as Eleanor proposes asking young Claghart, the new artist, you know, who is making such a name for himself.

Helen will be here in a week. I shall send out the invitations in a day or two, so as to have no refusals—dinner engagements are already getting numerous. I shall let you know all about Helen and the dinner-party. I know you are as interested as myself in this, and that you sympathize with me. Poor Henry! to think that he should have given me a niece who has spent the best years of her life shut up in colleges, and ruining health and looks in sedentary, intellectual pursuits!

The Kinglakes were here yesterday and send their kindest regards to you. Good-by! A thousand best wishes for a happy trip. Do tell Mr. Bennett how much I hope he will be improved by Wiesbaden.

Write soon to your devoted friend,

Marian M.

My Dear Colonel: Of course it is to you, Henry’s oldest friend, that I write first to tell the charming news that his daughter Helen is coming to us in a week. She has “finished her studies for the present,” so she writes, and we are at last to see the dear child. We are delighted to have her come, and feel that she must meet you at once. You will certainly find her to your taste, as she is so highly educated and not at all like these society girls whom you justly condemn as utterly frivolous.

We have arranged a little dinner-party for Thursday, the twenty-fourth, and positively count on you to come and put us all in a good humor with one of your inimitable war stories.

Most cordially your friend,
Marian V. Morrison.

Friday, November the eighteenth.

My Dear Mr. Beaufort: Will you give us the great pleasure of seeing you at dinner on Thursday evening, at half-past eight? Only severe illness has kept me from asking this favor long ago, so that I very much hope nothing will prevent your accepting now. Eleanor tells me to remind you that the Young People’s Guild has been changed to Wednesday evening, so at least that will not interfere with your acceptance. If you come, virtue will not be its own reward in this case. I have a niece whom I am particularly anxious you should meet. She is intensely interested in all charities—especially London charities—and is very quiet and charming, if not exactly pretty. But I am sure you agree with me that beauty is often only a snare!

The girls particularly wish to be remembered.

Most truly yours,
Marian V. Morrison.

Friday, November the eighteenth.

November the eighteenth.

My Dear Professor Radnor: Can we persuade you to abandon your lectures and experiments long enough to dine with us on the evening of the twenty-fourth? I know we are very frivolous and not at all the people to interest you, however much you interest us, but I fancy I shall have someone here whom you will be glad to meet. I want you to know my niece, Miss Helen Hammersley. She is an immensely clever girl—has taken her degree at one of our famous women’s colleges, and has just returned from a year of Oxford and the Bodleian, so that I feel reasonably sure she will be able to listen intelligently to you, at any rate. She is greatly interested in your specialty, and will certainly esteem it the greatest privilege to meet such a noted authority on the subject as yourself.

I will take no excuse.

Very sincerely your friend,
Marian V. Morrison.

November 19th.

Dearest Grace: We are sending out invitations to dinner and small dance afterward in honor of a cousin of ours, Helen Hammersley, who is coming from England to spend the winter with us, and of course we thought of you first and foremost. You must come and save the situation with your brilliancy and tact. There! can you refuse me after that? To tell you the truth, dear, we are all awfully worried about the whole thing. We none of us know Helen at all, and we are simply au désespoir about her because she is such a strange girl. She has been at college for five years—first in America and then at Oxford, and we all feel miserably sure of what an impossible sort of girl she is. She even took some sort of honor in mathematics at Oxford—just fancy! What she is going to be like in a ball-room no mortal can guess! So we have done the best we can—mamma has invited some old fogies to entertain her, and I propose we make our end of the table as much of a shining contrast as possible. I shall ask that Canadian you adore so—Reggie Montrose—for you, and your brother Jerry for Margaret, and shall reserve Wayne Claghart for myself; so please take warning and let that youth severely alone. He is my especial property, and I consider him simply the nicest man I know. He has hinted two or three times that he would like to sketch my head. He needn’t be afraid of my refusing, if he’d only ask me outright! I shall tell Helen, of course, that I asked him because he has lately returned from England, and she has just returned, etc., etc., but I’m afraid he’ll be so far away from her and she’ll be so busy talking theologies with Professor Radnor (forgot to tell you mamma has asked him!), and the East End with Percy Beaufort, that I don’t think she’ll have a chance to stun him with her learning. Besides, I don’t think he is the man to devote much time to that sort of a girl.

Now, don’t disappoint me! I count on you. Later there will be a lot of people in—the usual crowd, you know—and if you’ll say positively you’ll come, we will make it a small cotillon and you shall lead with Reggie.

I’ll let Margaret write to Jerry—they are such chums, but you be sure and make him come. Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, let him know about Helen’s homeliness and flabbergastering attainments, or he won’t stir a foot.

Good-by. Expect you down Wednesday. Telegraph me you will come.

As ever,
Eleanor.

November 19th.

Dear Mr. Montrose: Thank you so much for that lovely philopena present. How charming of you to have thought of that! Won’t you take dinner with us next Thursday, at half after eight, and let me thank you in person? After dinner you may dance the cotillon with Miss Fairfax. There! is not that an inducement? I have a cousin whom I want you to meet, too—she is just returning to America and is very learned, and not quite your style, I fear, but she will doubtless be good for you after me!

Most cordially yours,
Eleanor Morrison.

Saturday, November 19th.

Dear Mr. Claghart: Do you remember your promise to run down to Baltimore? Well, I shall expect you to keep it next Thursday. We are to have a little dinner and a dance afterward (perhaps I should say a dinner and a little dance—no, the adjective belongs to both), and I shall certainly expect you to be on hand. Your fame has preceded you, of course, and a great many very nice young women are simply existing on the thought of meeting Mr. Wayne Claghart, the artist! Shall I reserve the very prettiest and nicest of them all to dance the cotillon with you?

Hoping to see you without fail,

Very sincerely yours,
Eleanor Morrison.

November 19th.

Dear Jerry: Eleanor has a dinner on for next Thursday, and we want you to throw over all your numerous engagements for that evening and come to us. Do, Jerry—and favor me a lot—I forgot to say there was a german afterward—and be generally nice to your débutante, Margot. As an inducement I will say that we’ve got a jolly surprise for you. Eleanor don’t want me to tell, but I’m going to. Our cousin, Helen Hammersley, is coming to spend the winter with us—it’s for her the dinner is being given—and mamma and Eleanor are in despair about her. I don’t believe she’s half bad, but they say she’s awfully ugly, and too smart to be nice. I suppose she is awfully erudite—is that the word? Wears specs, and dresses like everything, I suppose. Wonder if she ever danced the german—she can have a sprained ankle if she don’t know how.

As ever,
Margaret.

Washington, November 20th.

Delighted to come. Charmed to lead with R. Have two new figures. Order little French flags for one set favors.

Grace.

Washington, November 22d.

Terrible attack tonsillitis. Doctor says positively cannot go.

Grace.

My Dear Miss de Rochemont: Much to my surprise and annoyance I have this moment found an invitation which I thought had been mailed to you several days ago. It must have slipped out of the other notes some way and has been lying under some papers here on my desk ever since. Can you forgive this mischance and accept so tardy an invitation? It will give us all the greatest pleasure to see you at half after eight. I especially want to introduce to you a cousin of mine just returned from the other side. She has been in college all her life, and I want her to meet some of our most charming society girls to rub her shyness off and make her take more interest in social life. Perhaps you may convert her! Hoping that no previous engagement will prevent our seeing you Thursday,

Most sincerely yours,
Eleanor Morrison.

November 25th.

My Dear Alma: What a surprise! I can scarcely collect my thoughts sufficiently to write intelligently on the subject. I really was never more surprised in all my life—more intensely and thoroughly surprised. But I must try and tell you connectedly all about it. To begin with—Helen did not come on the twentieth as we had expected, but telegraphed us that she was detained in Boston and would not reach Baltimore until the morning of the twenty-fourth. This was very annoying, as I was most anxious about her gown for the dinner, and then I imagined that she would be utterly dragged out after travelling all night. Dear Eleanor would have been, I am quite sure. But Helen seems to be one of those distressingly healthy people—no nerves, no sensitiveness. She quite laughed when I asked her if she were not tired!

Well—she came on the eleven-five train, and, Alma, she is not at all the kind of person I had expected. She is even handsome after a certain style of her own—not one that I admire—not at all Eleanor’s style. But certainly it could be much worse. The men even seemed to find her quite good-looking. She has certainly preserved her complexion wonderfully well—and as for her being short-sighted! Between ourselves I am sure it is only an excuse for using a very beautiful lorgnon, and for looking rather intently at one in a sort of meditative way which I consider rather offensive, but which Percy Beaufort told me he found most attractive. He is very disappointing, by the way; I had expected so much of him, but I find him quite an ordinary young man.

I was really shocked at Helen’s levity. I had expected from her superior education that her mind would be above trivialities, but the way she laughed and seemed to enjoy the conversation of Reggie Montrose and Jerry Fairfax! and if she had confined her attentions to those boys! But, Alma, she even tried to infatuate Colonel Gray and Professor Radnor! Two such men! She is far from being the quiet, thoughtful student I had expected to so enjoy. Why, she had the audacity to say to Colonel Gray, after one of his irascible explosions at things in general—“My dear Colonel, you are a living example of squaring the circle—quite round yet full of angles!” You know how rotund the Colonel is, Alma. Think of it! To Colonel Gray, whose irritability is simply proverbial. And he actually seemed to enjoy it! Men of a certain age seem to be only too willing to make fools of themselves if a young girl looks at them. And Percival Beaufort, who is so interested in London charities, could not extract one word from her on the subject, I believe; at any rate I distinctly heard her giving him an animated account of the last “Eights Week,” and he was inquiring solicitously who was the coxswain for Magdalen! Even Professor Radnor seemed to lose his head, though I believe she talked more sensibly to him than to the others, for he told me that she was one of the few women he had ever met who seemed to thoroughly understand Abel’s demonstration of the impossibility of solving a quintic equation by means of radicals—whatever that means.

By the way, we need not have worried about her gown at all. It was quite presentable, and had in it a quantity of rare old point d’Alençon which Helen says Henry picked up in Paris. It quite vexed me to think that I have none of that pattern—it is especially beautiful.

Eleanor would add a word, but she is feeling quite ill this morning, dear child! She was so worried over the dinner. At the very last moment Grace Fairfax failed her, and she was obliged to invite Marie de Rochemont in her place. We were especially sorry that Grace could not come, and that Jerry did. He is getting completely spoiled; his assurance and inconsiderateness are truly wonderful.

By the way, we have changed our plans for the winter slightly. We are going to the Bermudas for a month, and Helen will visit friends in Boston for the rest of the winter. Write soon and let me know how Mr. Bennett is feeling. Address here, all our mail will be forwarded.

As ever, your devoted friend,
Marian Morrison.

Baltimore, November 25th.

Dear Grace: I suppose I’ve got to keep my solemn promise to write to you all about the blow-out, though it’s an awful effort for me to write letters, and I’m so razzle-dazzled too! You simply weren’t in it! She’s stunning! The fellows all call her “La Belle Hélène.” Claghart started the name and it took like wildfire. The fair Eleanor is furious. She looked perfectly insignificant by the side of that magnificent creature. What the dickens did Margaret mean by her letter? Why, Helen Hammersley is a perfect beauty. It isn’t good to spring a surprise like that on a fellow. Bad for one’s nerves. Claghart is terribly shaken. Found out she had met ever so many celebrated artists, English and French, and they jawed for hours. Fact is Claghart’s got the cinch on the rest of us because she’s so awfully interested in art—I heard her tell him so. Oh! I almost forgot to tell you the joke! You see, Mrs. Morrison had put her up at her end of the table, with the rector of All Souls on one side of her—the old duffer!—and that fossil, Professor Radnor, on the other, and of all people in the world that ante-bellum specimen, Colonel Ralph Gray, opposite! Think of that, with Montrose and Claghart and myself at the other end, cut off from her by half a dozen married people! Think of the injustice, the tactlessness of such a proceeding! Well, I simply determined to shake things up a bit, so after the bird I said, as sweetly as only yours truly can say, “Mrs. Morrison, I was at the Dwights’ the other evening to a progressive dinner-party. Charming idea, don’t you think?” I knew all the men would back me up, and sure enough Reggie Montrose sang out, “Yes, indeed, Mrs. Morrison! Why not try it to-night?” and before the words were fairly out of his mouth, Claghart had jumped up with his wine-glass and his napkin in his hand, and was moving up one seat nearer “La Belle Hélène.” Of course there was an awful muss and Eleanor was furious, I could see, but she pulled herself together and smiled awfully sweetly at Claghart. Marie de Rochemont turned perfectly green—give you my word of honor. Margaret was the only one who seemed really not to mind. She’s a nice little thing, but she won’t have much show in society if Helen Hammersley is around.

I wish I could tell you about “La Belle Hélène,” but I’m not much for descriptions. She’s different from any girl I ever knew—not very tall, but awfully good figure—fixes her hair like those stunning girls of Gibson’s you know, and she’s got a way of looking at a fellow—earnest and yet half laughing—that’s enough to drive one out of one’s senses. She’s got that je ne sais quoi, you know—something awfully fetching and magnetic and all that sort of thing. (You’ll think me a drivelling idiot!) She wore a beauty of a gown, white satin—or gauze, I’m not sure which. Was going to ask Claghart—being an artist he’s up to such fine distinctions—but forgot it. I say, Grace, why don’t your gowns look like that? You’d better ask her who built hers. Tell you what, she’s just fascinating—not stiff or uppish a bit, but she’s got a certain sort of dignity you girls don’t seem to acquire, some way or other.

She simply hoodooed old Gray, not to mention Percy Beaufort, the Professor, and several dozen others, including your devoted brother. There was one solemn moment at the cotillion when every man in the room was around her. The other girls looked black, I promise you! What the deuce, Grace, makes you girls so jealous? I actually believe Eleanor didn’t like her cousin’s brilliant success at all, and yet you told me she was so anxious about it. Can’t make you girls out.

You say she’s been to college all her life and is awfully smart? Well, I suppose she is—she looks that way—but she didn’t come any of it on us. And yet she’s clever, that’s sure, for she knows all the points of difference between the Rugby and Association game, and I heard her talking golf with Claghart and telling Professor Radnor that dancing was a healthful amusement, and he was asking her, in the most idiotic way, if she’d teach him the two-step. Wasn’t that rich! And old Gray said to a lot of fellows in the smoking-room that, “By Jove, she was the handsomest girl he’d seen in a quarter of a century, and that if she was an example of a college-bred girl he wished they’d all go to college.”

Well, I must stop. I really believe, Grace, this is the longest letter I ever wrote, and I want you to put it to my credit—understand? and the next time I try to arrange a trip to Mount Vernon with certain people, you’ll please be more amenable to reason—See?

I think I’ve told you everything except that I’m going to stop here for a few days—they’re always asking me, you know, and I told Margaret last night that I’d accept this time. Eleanor looked as if she didn’t half like it. Why not, do you suppose? But I can’t tear myself away. I’m desperately in love with “La Belle Hélène,” besides I’m awfully interested in watching the running between Claghart and Montrose. It will be a close finish, I think, with Claghart in the lead, Montrose a good second, and a full field not far behind. Excuse sporting instincts and language.

As ever, your aff. brother,
Jerry.

How’s your throat? Better, I hope. Hers is lovely—“like a piece of marble column”—at least that’s what Reggie confided to me at 3 G. M. this morning.

J. F.

THE waiters had served the coffee and were retiring in long rows down the sides of the big dining-hall. The rattle of knives and forks and the noise of general and animated talk were subsiding, and the pleased, expectant hush which always precedes the toasts, was falling upon the assembly. At the lower end of the room, farthest from the “distinguished-guest” table, the unimportant people began to turn their chairs around toward the speakers and to say “’Sh!” and “Who’s that?” to each other in subdued whispers, and the seniors grasped their sheepskins less nervously and began to realize their importance and the fact that they were no longer undergraduates but full-fledged alumnæ. And with the realization came a curious disagreeable sensation and a queer tightening in the throat, accompanied by a horrible inclination to shed tears over the closed chapter of their lives. Then they fiercely thought how their brothers act under similar circumstances, and wished they were men and could give the class yell and drink champagne to stifle their feelings. That being impossible they tasted a very mild decoction of coffee and turned their troubled eyes to the far end of the room, and wished ardently that the President would get on her feet and say something funny to make them forget that this was the end, the last act of politeness on the part of the faculty to them, that they were being gracefully evicted, as it were, and could never be taken back upon the same terms or under the same conditions.

It was the annual Commencement dinner to the retiring senior class, and the senior class was, as usual, feeling collapsed and blank after the excitement of Commencement week and the discovery that they were B.A.’s or B.S.’s, and that the world was before them and there would be no more faculties to set them going or haul them up, but that they would have to depend on their own faculties in the future. There was the annual foregathering of brilliant men and women whose presence was to be an incentive to the newly fledged alumnæ, and the display of whose wit and wisdom in after-dinner speeches was to be a last forcible impression of intellectual vigor and acquirements left on their minds.

Suddenly the President arose. She stood there, graceful, perfectly at ease, waiting for a moment of entire silence. Her sensitive, bloodless face looked more animated than usual, her brown eyes quietly humorous. It was a face eminently characteristic—indicative of the element of popularity and adaptability in her nature that made her, just then, so valuable to the college. When she spoke her voice carried a surprising distance, notwithstanding its veiled, soft quality, so that those farthest from her were able to catch and enjoy the witty, gnomic, sarcastic manner of her speech.

What she said was taken down by the shorthand reporter smuggled in for the occasion by the enterprising class-president and is enrolled in the class-book, so it need not be recorded here; but when she had finished, the editor of one of the foremost magazines in the country was smiling and nodding his head appreciatively, and a man whose sermons are listened to by thousands every Lord’s Day leaned over and made some quick side remark to her and ran his hands in a pleased, interested way through his long hair; and the young and already famous President of a certain college said, on rising, that he felt very genuine trepidation at attempting any remarks after that. He fully sustained his reputation, however, of a brilliant talker, and was followed by the honorary member of the juniors, whose post-prandial speeches have made him famous on both sides of the water.

The room became absolutely quiet, save for the voice of the speaker, the occasional burst of applause, and the appreciative murmur of the listeners. Outside, the afternoon began to grow mellow, long shadows thrown by the pointed turrets of the building lay across the green campus, the ivy at the big windows waved to and fro slightly in the cool breeze. Attention flagged; people began to tire of the clever, witty responses to the toasts and to look about them a little.

At one of the tables reserved for the alumnæ, near the upper end of the room, sat a girl dressed in deep mourning. Her face was very beautiful and intelligent, with the intelligence that is more the result of experience than of unusual mental ability. There were delicate, fine lines about the mouth and eyes. She could not have been more than twenty-four or five, but there was an air of firmness and decision about her which contradicted her blond—almost frivolous—beauty and lent dignity to the delicate figure.

After awhile she leaned back in her chair a trifle wearily and looked about her curiously as if for changes. The general aspect of the place remained the same, she decided, but there were a great many new faces—new faces in the faculty, too, where one least likes to find them. Here and there she saw an old acquaintance and smiled perfunctorily, but, on the whole, there was no one present she cared very much to see. She had just come to the conclusion that she was sorry she had made the long journey to be present at the dinner when she became conscious that someone was looking intently at her across the room. She leaned forward eagerly and smiled naturally and cordially for the first time. And then she sank back suddenly and blushed like a school-girl and smiled again, but in a different way, as if at herself, or at some thought that tickled her fancy. It certainly did strike her as rather amusing and presuming for her to be smiling and bowing so cordially to Professor Arbuthnot. She remembered very distinctly, in what awe she had stood of that learned lady, and that in her undergraduate days she had systematically avoided her, since she could not avoid her examinations and their occasionally disastrous consequences. She recalled very forcibly the masterly lectures, the logical, profound, often original talks, which she had heard in her lecture-room, though she had to acknowledge to herself reproachfully, that the matter of them had entirely escaped her memory. She had been one of a big majority who had always considered Professor Arbuthnot as a very high type—perhaps the highest type the college afforded—of a woman whose brains and attainments would make her remarkable in any assembly of savants. In her presence she had always realized very keenly her own superficiality, and she felt very much flattered that such a woman should have remembered her and not a little abashed as she thought of the entire renunciation of study she had made since leaving college. She wondered what Professor Arbuthnot might be thinking about her—she knew she was thinking about her, because the bright eyes opposite were still fixed upon her with their piercing, not unkindly gaze. It occurred to her at last, humorously, that perhaps the Professor was not considering her at all, but some question in—thermo-electric currents for instance.

But Miss Arbuthnot’s mind was not on thermo-electric currents; she was saying to herself: “She is much more beautiful than when she was here, and there is a new element of beauty in her face, too. I wonder where she has been since, and why she is in mourning. She was unintelligent, I remember. It’s a great pity—brains and that sort of beauty rarely ever go together. Her name was Ellis—yes—Grace Ellis. I think I must see her later.” And the Professor gave her another piercing smile and settled herself to listen to a distinguished political economist—a great friend of hers—speak.

The Political Economist got upon his feet slowly and with a certain diffidence. He was a man who had made his way, self-taught, from poverty and ignorance to a professorship in one of the finest technical schools of America.

There was a brusqueness in his manner, and the hard experiences of his life had made him old. He spoke in a quiet, authoritative way. He declared, with a rather heavy attempt at jocoseness, that his hearers had had their sweets first, so to speak, and that they must now go back and take a little solid, unpalpable nourishment; that he had never made a witty or amusing remark in his life, and he did not propose to begin and try then, and finally he hinted that the President had made a very bad selection when she invited him to respond to the toast—“The Modern Education of Woman.” As he warmed to his subject he became more gracious and easy in manner. He spoke at length of the evolution of women’s colleges, their methods, their advantages, their limitations; he touched upon the salient points of difference between a man’s college life and that of a girl; differences of character, of interests, of methods of work. And then he went on:

“I believe in it—I believe firmly in the modern education of woman. It is one of the things of most vital interest to me; but my enthusiasm does not blind me. There are phases of it which I do not indorse. I object to many of its results. The most obvious bad result is the exaggerated importance which the very phrase has assumed.” He smiled plaintively around upon the company. “Are we to have nothing but woman’s education—toujours l’éducation de la femme? There is such eagerness to get to college, such blind belief in what is to be learned there, such a demand for a college education for women, that we are overwhelmed by it. Every year these doors are closed upon hundreds of disappointed women, who turn elsewhere, or relinquish the much-prized college education. The day is not far distant when it will be a distinct reproach to a woman that she is not college-bred.” He looked down thoughtfully and intently and spoke more slowly.

“It is this phase of it which sometimes troubles me. Life is so rich in experience for woman—so much richer and fuller for woman than for

man—that I tremble at this violent reaction from nature to art. To-day woman seems to forget that she must learn to live, not live to learn. At the risk of being branded as ‘behind the times,’ of being considered narrow, bigoted, old-fashioned, I must say that until woman re-discovers that life is everything, that all she can learn here in a hundred times the four years of her college course is but the least part of what life and nature can teach her, until then I shall not be wholly satisfied with the modern education of woman.”

When he ceased there was an awkward and significant silence, and the editor looked over at him and smiled and shook his head reprovingly. And then the President got up quickly and with a few graceful, apropos remarks restored good-humor, and taking the arm of the distinguished divine, led the way from the dining-hall to the reception-rooms, and people jostled each other good-naturedly, and edged themselves between chairs and tables to speak to acquaintances, and there was much laughter and questioning and exclamations of surprise and delight, until finally the long procession got itself outside the dining-hall into the big corridors.

At the door Professor Arbuthnot caught sight of Miss Ellis again. She beckoned to the girl, who came quickly toward her.

“I am tired and am going to my rooms for awhile, will you come?” The girl blushed again with pleasure and some embarrassment.

“I should be delighted,” she said simply, and together they walked down the broad hallway.

“It’s very good of you,” she broke in nervously, looking down at the small, quiet figure beside hers—she was head and shoulders taller than the Professor.

“Not at all,” declared Miss Arbuthnot, kindly. “I want to see you—it has been a long while since you were a student here—four or five years I should say—and you recall other faces and times.”

“It has been four years—I can hardly believe it,” said the girl, softly. She wondered vaguely what on earth Miss Arbuthnot could wish to see her for—she had been anything but a favorite with the faculty as a student, but she felt very much flattered and very nervous at the attention bestowed upon her.

When she reached Professor Arbuthnot’s rooms, the embarrassment she had felt at being noticed by so distinguished a member of the faculty visibly increased.

The place was typical—the absence of all ornament and feminine bric-à-brac—the long rows of book-shelves filled with the most advanced works on natural sciences, the tables piled up with brochures and scientific magazines, enveloped her in an atmosphere of profound learning quite oppressive. She had never been in the room but once before, and that was on a most inauspicious occasion—just after the mid-year’s. She wondered uneasily, and yet with some amusement, if Professor Arbuthnot remembered the circumstance. But that lady was not thinking of the young girl. She was busy with her mail, which had just been brought in, opening and folding up letter after letter in a quick, methodical way.

“More work for me,” she said, smiling; “here is an invitation to deliver six lectures on electro-optics.” The girl looked at her admiringly.

“Absolutely I’ve forgotten the very meaning of the words; and as for lecturing!” she broke off with a little laugh. “Are you going to give them?”

“Yes: it makes a great deal of work for me, but I never refuse such invitations. Besides I shall be able to take these lectures almost bodily from a little book I am getting out.” Professor Arbuthnot went over to the desk and lifted up a pile of manuscript, and smiled indulgently at the girl’s exclamation of awe.

“It isn’t much,” she went on. “Only some experiments I have been making in the optical effects of powerful magnets. They turned out very prettily. I have a good deal of hard work to do on the book yet. I shall stay here a week or two longer, quite alone, and finish it all up.”

The girl touched the papers reverently.

“Here is a note I have just received from Professor ——” (Miss Arbuthnot named one of the most distinguished authorities of the day on magnetism and electricity). “I sent him some of the first proof-sheets, and he says he’s delighted with them. We are great friends.”

The girl’s awe and admiration increased with every movement. She looked at the small, slight woman whose intelligent, ugly face had an almost child-like simplicity of expression, contrasting strangely enough with the wrinkled, bloodless skin and piercing eyes. Her hair, which was parted and brushed severely back, was thickly sprinkled with gray.

She gasped a little. “You actually know him—know Professor ——?”

Miss Arbuthnot laughed. “Oh, yes,” she said; “we often work together. We get along famously; we are ‘sympathetic’ in our work, as the French say.”

The girl swept her a mock courtesy.

“I feel too flattered for anything that you deign to speak to me,” she said, laughing and bowing low.

Professor Arbuthnot looked pleased; she was far above conceit, but she was not entirely impervious to such fresh, genuine admiration. She was feeling particularly happy, too, over the results of her experiments—particularly interested in her work.

“If you are so impressed by that,” she laughed, “I shall have to tell you something even more wonderful still. I have just received an honorary degree from —— College. It was quite unexpected, and I must say I am extremely pleased. It is very agreeable to know that one’s work is appreciated when one has given one’s life to it.”

It seemed to the girl, with these evidences of success appealing to her, that a life could not be more nobly spent than in such work. She went slowly around the room after that, looking at a great many interesting things. At books with priceless autographs on their title-pages, and photographs of famous scientists, and diagrams of electrical apparatus, and editions in pamphlet form of articles by Professor Arbuthnot, published originally in scientific journals.

The girl suddenly felt sick and ashamed of herself. It struck her very forcibly just how little she knew, and how she had neglected her opportunities.

“What an awful ignoramus I am!” she burst out at length. “I don’t know what these mean; I have only the vaguest idea what these men have done. How different you are! Your life has had a high aim and you have attained it. While I——!” she stopped with a scornful gesture. “If it were not for Julian I believe I would come back here and start over!”

Miss Arbuthnot looked at her critically. She admired the girl’s beauty tremendously—it was her one weakness—this love of beauty. She never looked at herself in a mirror oftener than necessary.

“Ah! Julian; who is Julian?”

The girl blushed again—she had a pretty way of flushing quickly.

“Julian?—why he’s my husband. I forgot to tell you that I married my cousin, Julian Ellis, as soon as I left college.”

“Really!” Miss Arbuthnot came over and sat down on the divan beside the girl. “You look so young,” she said, rather wistfully. “And you have been married four years?”

The girl nodded. “It seems much longer,” she said. “I have had—a great deal of trouble.”

“Tell me about it,” said the older woman kindly. But the girl was much embarrassed at the idea of talking of her own little affairs to Professor Arbuthnot.

“I am afraid it would only bore you,” she said, hurriedly. “Your interests—you are interested in so many——”

But Miss Arbuthnot was firm. “Let me hear,” she insisted.

“I’m sure I hardly know what there is to tell,” the girl began nervously. “My father was much opposed to my marrying Julian. He did not wish me to leave college; and he did not believe in cousins marrying. He said that if we did he would disinherit me—you know he is rich. But Julian and I were in love with each other, and so of course we got married.” She stopped suddenly and drawing off her glove looked at her wedding-ring. Professor Arbuthnot watched her curiously. The girl’s simple statement—“and of course we got married” struck her forcibly. She wondered what it would feel like to be swayed by an emotion so powerful that a father’s commands and the loss of a fortune would have absolutely no influence upon it. She could not remember ever having felt anything like that.

“Julian was awfully poor and I of course had nothing more, and so we went to Texas—Julian had an opening there,” she went on. “It was awfully lonely—we lived ten miles from the nearest town—and you know what a Texas town is.” Miss Arbuthnot shook her head. She had never been west of Ohio.

The girl gave a little in-drawn gasp. “Well, it’s worse than anything you can conceive of. I think one has to live in one of them and then move away and have ten miles of dead level prairie land between you and it to know just what loneliness is. But we were so happy, so happy at first—until Julian was taken ill.” She leaned back against the couch and clasped her hands around her knees.

“It was awful—I can’t tell you,” she went on in a broken voice. “But you know what unspeakable agony it is to see what you love best on earth ill and suffering, and you nearly powerless to do a thing. And how I loved him! I never knew until then what he was—how much of my life he had become. You must know what agony I went through?” she looked interrogatively, beseechingly at the woman beside her.

Miss Arbuthnot looked away. “I am not sure—I—I was never in love,” she said uncertainly. A curious wave of jealousy swept over her that she who had been such a student, whose whole life had been a study, should have somehow missed experiences that this girl had lived through already. The girl shook her head softly, pityingly, as if she could hardly believe her.

“I shall never forget it, and that night,” she went on, closing her eyes faintly. “I thought he was dying. I had to have a doctor, but I was afraid to leave him. I remember how everything flashed through my mind. It was a decision for life or death. If I left him I knew I might never see him alive again, and yet if I did not——” She opened her eyes wide and clasped and unclasped her hands. “It was the most horrible moment of my life.”

“My poor child!” Miss Arbuthnot put her hand timidly on the girl’s arm. She suddenly felt absurdly inexperienced in her presence.

“I got Ivan’s saddle on him—I don’t know just how—and we started. It was about two o’clock I remember. The prairie looked just like the sea, at night—only more lonesome and quite silent. I was horribly frightened. Even Ivan was frightened. He trembled all over—it’s a terrible thing to see a horse tremble with fright.”

“Do you mean to say,” demanded Professor Arbuthnot, “that you rode twenty miles in the dead of night, alone upon a Texas prairie?”

“Yes,” answered the girl mechanically. “It was for Julian,” she added as if in entire explanation.

Miss Arbuthnot looked at her; she could not realize such wealth of courage and devotion. She wondered with a sudden, hot shame whether she would have dared it had she been in this girl’s place.

“I don’t think I ever prayed before—really prayed you know,” she ran on meditatively as if she had forgotten the Professor’s presence. “It was dawn when we got back.” She stopped entirely and looked out through the window onto the cool green campus. Miss Arbuthnot scarcely dared move. There was something so intimate, almost sacred in the girl’s revelations.

“Did he live?” she inquired softly at length.

The girl turned her face toward her. An almost illuminated look had come into it.

“Yes—the doctor saved his life, but he said if I had been two hours later——!”

“You saved his life!” Professor Arbuthnot got up and walked to the window. She could not quite take it all in. The girl appeared entirely different to her. She was looking at a woman who had saved the life of the man she loved.

“And then—” the girl gave a little laugh—“I fainted—wasn’t it ridiculous? I am such an idiot. It makes me ashamed to think of it now—when there was so much to be done—and for me to faint!” She gave an impatient little shake of the head.

“I am sure you never did anything so silly as to faint!” She glanced admiringly at Professor Arbuthnot.

“I don’t think I ever experienced any emotion sufficiently strong to make me.” Miss Arbuthnot spoke so grimly that the girl jumped up hurriedly.

“I’m awfully afraid I am boring you and keeping you from your work——” She gave a glance at the manuscript upon the desk. “I’m sure you are wanting to get at it, and think me very troublesome to tell you all this about myself.”

Professor Arbuthnot looked at her a moment.

“Sit down!” she said imperiously. “I am learning more than if I were working on the physical principles of the nebular theory!”

The girl gave a gay, puzzled little laugh.

“Are you making fun of me? I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Miss Arbuthnot waved her remark away impatiently.

“And after you had recovered from your fainting spell, what happened?”

“Oh—I helped the doctor and we pulled Julian through together somehow. And then I went to work. He was ill all winter—something had to be done—I sing fairly well——”

“I remember now,” broke in Miss Arbuthnot. “You used to sing at College Vespers. I liked your voice.”

The girl gave a gasp of pleasure. She felt immensely flattered that Professor Arbuthnot had liked to hear her sing.

“Thank you,” she said feelingly. “I got a position in a church choir and I went into town three days in the week and gave lessons. I made four hundred dollars that winter.” She broke off with a little laugh. “I don’t think I ever felt so good in all my life as when I counted up and found that I had really made four hundred dollars for Julian! I never understood before why poor people want to get married—it’s for the fun of working for each other I think. It’s the most satisfying sensation I know of.” She glanced up at the woman beside the window. Miss Arbuthnot nodded absently. She was thinking of her safe investments—she had accumulated a good deal of money during her long years of teaching and her people had all been well off and she had never given a cent to anyone except in presents and trifling remembrances and organized charitable work. A strange desire grew upon her to share her life with someone. She looked with troubled eyes at the girl who had suddenly made her work and her life dissatisfying to her.

“I don’t understand”—she murmured—“and didn’t you ever regret—regret your wealth and social position?—the other life you had known?”

“I think it’s my turn not to understand,” said the girl slowly with a puzzled look. “You mean did I regret marrying Julian?”

Miss Arbuthnot nodded. An angry little flush mounted to the girl’s cheek, and then, as if the mere thought was too amusing to be taken seriously:

“Regret marrying Julian? O! Professor Arbuthnot—and then there was little Julian, you know. He was the dearest, the sweetest—wait, I have his picture.” She pulled at a little silk cord about her neck and drew forth a small miniature case. In it, painted on porcelain, was the head of a child with the blond beauty of its mother. As the girl looked at it her eyes filled with tears and she bent over it sobbing and kissing it passionately.

“That is all I have to regret,” she said. “He was two years old when he died—that was almost a year ago. I couldn’t tell you what he was like. I think he was the brightest, prettiest, sweetest boy in the world. You ought to have seen his hands and feet—all dimples and soft pinkiness and milky whiteness—and his eyes and long lashes——!” she stopped breathlessly.

Professor Arbuthnot looked at her wonderingly. She went over to her and looked down at the crushed figure.

“You have loved and loved again and lost. You have been a mother and your child is dead,” she said slowly. “I would sympathize with you if I knew how.”

The girl caught her hand.

“How kind you are! I never speak of this—I hardly know how I came to do so with you. I am sure I must have wearied you.” She put the locket back and began to draw on her gloves again slowly.

Professor Arbuthnot said nothing. In the last hour she had had glimpses of a life and a love

she had never known, and the revelation silenced her. She had sometimes reproached herself that the studious calm, the entire absorption of her life in her work had been exaggerated, and as she looked at the slight figure in its black gown, at the pale face with its sombred, youthful beauty, the conviction was borne in upon her, by this little breath from the outside world, by the life of this girl as told by her, that the insularity of her existence had been a mistake. A sudden intense dissatisfaction and impatience with her life took hold upon her.

The girl rose to go. She stood there hesitating, embarrassed, as if she wished to ask something, and rather dreaded doing so.

“I—I shall have a great deal of time this winter,” she hazarded, twisting the ring of her fan slowly round and round her finger, “and I am going to study—indeed I am!” She glanced up quickly, as if afraid Professor Arbuthnot might be smiling. “I know you think it foolish for me to try, but you don’t know how you’ve inspired me this afternoon!” She went on enthusiastically. “You and everything here make me realize intensely how little I know, and I am going to begin and really learn something. You don’t know how much obliged I’d be if you would tell me a little how to begin—what to start on—something easy, adapted for weak intellects!”

She looked up smiling and with heightened color at Professor Arbuthnot. She still stood in so much awe of her and was so afraid of being laughed at!

But that lady was not laughing at all. She looked preternaturally grave.

“It seems to me,” she said slowly, “that you and the natural sciences can get along admirably without each other. Why, child, you have lived!” she cried with sudden vehemence. She went over and shook her gently by the shoulder. “You are twenty-four and I am fifty! In four years you have crowded into your life more than I shall ever learn!”

The girl looked at her wonderingly, puzzled.

“Have you forgotten so soon what we heard this afternoon—that ‘life is everything, that all that you can learn in a hundred times the four years of your college course is but the least part of what life and nature can teach you?’” She pushed the girl toward the door.

“When you are tired of living come back to me.”

She stood and watched the girl, with the mystified, half-hurt look on her face, disappear down the corridor. When she had quite gone she went in and stood at the window for a long, long while looking out at the deepening shadows, and then she seated herself grimly at her desk and wrote to her publishers that they would have to delay the appearance of her book, as she felt she needed a vacation and would have to give up work on it for awhile.

SHE was so noticeably pretty and stylish, with that thorough-bred air of the young girl to whom life has always been something more or less of a social event, that she attracted a great deal of attention, though, of course, she very properly appeared to be oblivious of that fact. Even the baggage-master, when she caught his eye, hastened toward her and bestirred himself generally in a way that is not characteristic of baggage-men on the Boston and Albany, or any other road. She noticed vaguely that he seemed rather surprised when she gave him her four trunk-checks and he assured her with elaborate politeness that the train would stop at a certain small station without fail, to let off several hundred young women who wished to go directly to “the College.”

When Miss Eva Hungerford, on the completion of an enthusiastic college career, wrote to her young Philadelphia cousin, Margaret Wright, that she ought to take a college course, it was quite in despair of really inducing that young lady to do so, and only in the vain hope of saving her from an early and ill-considered marriage with an extremely nice Harvard youth, who declared that he would cheerfully forego his senior year if her parents would give their consent.

It was therefore with both delight and surprise that, just before starting for Europe, Miss Hungerford received a rather gloomy letter from her young cousin, who said that with such a brilliant example before her, and deeply impressed by the weighty arguments in her cousin’s letter, she had told the Harvard man that she was much too young and ignorant to marry, and fully convinced that society was a hollow sham, she had determined to devote the next four years to those pursuits which had raised her cousin so far above the ordinary girl. She was even greatly interested, she said, in her preparations for the entrance examinations which she would take at Philadelphia, and the chances of her being admitted. Miss Hungerford was quite touched by the little tribute to herself contained in the letter, and wrote a most cordial answer, and rather upbraided herself for having thought so lightly of her cousin. But her mother seemed to be distressingly sceptical about Margaret’s heroic determination, and said she shouldn’t wonder if some misunderstanding with the Harvard man were not at the bottom of it. But Miss Hungerford was confident that such a lofty purpose could have been born only of some noble sentiment, and refused to have her faith in her young cousin shaken by such a supposition.

When Miss Wright got off the train at the pretty little station, she found herself in the midst of a sufficiently large crowd of young women, all of whom seemed to be aggravatingly well acquainted with each other, and who set about in a most business-like way to get where they wanted to go, some taking “barges” and omnibuses, others striking out easily over the roads in the direction of the college. Being totally unfamiliar with the place and somewhat bewildered by the number of girls, Miss Wright thought she would simply take a carriage and get up to the college as quickly as possible.

She never told anyone but her best friend what were her sensations on reaching the big building and being “numbered” for an interview with one of the assistant professors, instead of seeing the president herself, as she had expected to do; or how hurt she felt at being totally ignored by the vast majority of busy, rather severe-looking young women, or how grateful she felt to a patronizing Sophomore who talked to her kindly, if condescendingly, for a few moments and who took her through unending corridors to her rooms. Later in the day she found two or three girls who wore tailor-made travelling gowns and seemed ill at ease, and they all huddled together in a corner of one of the big corridors and talked rather helplessly to each other. They would have liked to know what the peals on the big Japanese bell meant, and if they were expected to do anything about it, but they were afraid to ask anyone, because they were not sure which were the professors and which the students.

When it came her turn to see the assistant, she felt quite ready to go home. She had made out a list of studies which she thought she would like, but when she showed it to the professor, that astute lady very kindly but firmly told her that it was ill-advised and made her out another. She had wanted to study mathematical astronomy, because a Harvard man had said a chum of his studied it and found it “immense,” and besides she thought the name would impress her friends; but the professor pointed out to her that she would have to take the entire course in mathematics before she could hope to do anything with the astronomy. It was the same way with several other things, and she found, when the interview was over, that her list consisted mostly of freshman studies. She was rather disheartened by this, but remembered that Miss Hungerford had been a full freshman, and so she determined to go to work conscientiously.

And she did work very hard, but there were a great many young women who seemed to have had a much more thorough previous education than herself, and though she was not in the least snobbish, she was secretly surprised and a little bit aggrieved by their evident disregard of her superior gowns. She might as well not even curl her hair, she thought gloomily—most of the best students wore theirs back in a rather uncompromising way, and she thought it might have some influence for the better on her mind, and half-way determined to do it. But when she saw how she looked with it straight and pulled quite back, she gave it up for fear the Harvard man (who though so near, maintained a stony silence and invisibility) should happen to come over to the college to see some other girl.

When the winter concerts began and the young women were inviting their friends out from the “Tech” and Harvard and Amherst, and other places which to any but the college mind would seem appallingly distant, she sat resigned and alone, and wondered what her people would think if they could see her looking so sad and deserted. Her friends, she knew, would feel sorry for her, and would at last believe in her determination to go through the course.

When she had been at college about four months and was beginning to realize how little she knew, and how infinitely far off the president still seemed, and the effect of the study of chemistry on a brain unprepared for it, and was pitying herself for looking so pale and thin under her anxieties—one of the favorite concerts of the year was given. A celebrated violinist and his wife, a charming singer, were coming out. It was the last concert before the Christmas holidays, and one of the tailor-made girls with whom she had become intimate since that miserable first day had invited a lot of men out and had asked her to help entertain them. As every one knows, it is a long-established custom in that college for those young women who are so fortunate as to have a large masculine acquaintance to ask their friends to help them “take care” of the surplus male element.

Miss Wright was feeling very blue that evening and had just about made up her mind to stay at the college through the Christmas vacation, that she might spare her parents the distress of seeing her so worn and changed; so that when the tailor-made girl came to ask her to see after some of her friends for her, she thought that probably she was entitled to some recreation for the good resolution she had made. But she was now much too indifferent to men and such things to bestir herself very greatly, so she only put on her next most becoming gown and descended languidly to find the people.

Her friend saw her first and made a little dive at her through the circle of youths around her, and bore her to them with quite an air of triumph. And then, while she was trying to hear the names and remember where they came from, she suddenly saw a Harvard man coming toward her, and looking very much surprised and intensely happy, and somewhat embarrassed. She had just time to wish she had put on the other gown, when the bell for the concert sounded and everybody began to rush down the corridor. Somehow they got left behind the others, and as the place was crowded and they did not seem to care much for the celebrated violinist, who really played exceptionally well that evening, they considerately took seats against the wall behind everybody, where they could talk to their hearts’ content.

And they really must have talked quite a good deal, for when the last bell sounded for all the visitors to go and the driver of the big college sleigh (which was really an omnibus on runners) was shouting himself hoarse in the “centre” and in nervous asides assuring the excited and aggrieved passengers already assembled and waiting that they would all be late for the last train that night if the remaining few did not hurry up—while all of this was going on, the Harvard man was still sitting with her on the pedestal of a plaster statue in a darkened corner of a corridor, assuring her that they could be married just as soon as the finals were over, and that though he was sure to be made a marshal he would not wait for Class Day for anything which he could then think of under the sun, and that instead of sending out invitations to a spread in Beck, he would give his friends a delightful shock by substituting his wedding cards for them, and while the other fellows were working like beavers at the Tree, or filling dance cards for their friends, or wearing themselves to shreds dancing with their friends’ friends, they could be in a boat half-way over to the other side. And she was saying she didn’t think she would come back after Christmas so as to have plenty of time to get her gowns and things ready, and that she did not think she was really and truly fitted for college life; which he interrupted to assure her that he was certain she already knew vastly more than he did, and that he would telegraph her mother and father about the whole thing before he slept, and that if the answer was favorable he would send her some flowers the next day as a token. And then when the coachman’s patience had quite given out and they heard the sleigh go dashing away from under the porte-cochère, before she could realize it he had kissed her once quickly and jumped down the steps four at a time, and was out of the door tearing after the vanishing coach.

The next afternoon Miss Wright received an enormous box full of Mabel Morrison roses, and her tailor-made friend, not understanding the significance of the flowers, thought it was rather shabby on her part not to offer her some. About the same time of day the Harvard man sent a long and explicit telegram to the agent of the Cunard Line for the very best stateroom on a steamer sailing on or about the 20th of the next June, and blushed boyishly and then laughed a little at its “previousness,” as he signed the application for “Mr. and Mrs. Roger Pervere, New York,” six months before his wedding-day.

JUDGE CAHILL drew his chair a trifle nearer the fire and the tall, muscular young man who was with him, and who bore so striking a resemblance to him as to be unmistakably his son, dropped into one opposite. They had finished their late dinner and were on the way to the library, but the elder man had paused before the big chimney-piece, standing meditatively for a few moments, and had finally seated himself comfortably and evidently with no immediate intention of proceeding to the library beyond.

“The whole arrangement is just what I have planned and hoped for all my life,” he said at length, with a bright look at the young man opposite. “And we have a capital chance of talking it over together to-night. It is rather lucky that your aunt is away for a few days, Dana. Your sister will be delighted. You must write to her at once that it is un fait accompli and that she must leave college for over Sunday and come in and celebrate with us!”

“Oh! it will doubtless seem a mere trifle to Louise in comparison with her own arduous duties and tasks,” responded young Cahill, laughing a little and offering a cigar to his father, who refused it with a slight shake of his fine, white head.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll smoke one,” he said, lighting his own.

“Oh! I don’t mind at all,” said the elder man; and then absently and sadly, as he pushed the thick, silvery hair back from his forehead with a quick decisive motion habitual with him:

“I wish your mother could have lived to see this, Dana!”

The younger man made an inarticulate murmur of assent and regret, and then they both sat silent, staring into the crackling logs, while the butler moved noiselessly about, putting a decanter and glasses on the table and turning down the lamp a bit and folding back the screen. The younger man was making a rather unsuccessful attempt to recall his mother. He remembered her vaguely as a boy of eight remembers, and she had always seemed to him rather like some beautiful woman of whom he had read than his own mother; and the portrait of her in the drawing-room, although he could recall every feature, every line of it, was like the picture of any other beautiful woman he might have seen in a gallery abroad or the year’s Academy. At last he looked up, and shaking the ash from his cigar, said, with rather an effort—

“You have been most kind, sir. I scarcely think I deserve so much at your hands. I shall try to be all you wish.”

Judge Cahill looked quickly around. “That’s right! that’s right, my boy!” he said heartily, and with a touch of surprise in his voice. “You have always been what I wished—not very studious, perhaps”—he laughed indulgently, “but you always stood fairly well at the University, and although you have doubtless done a great many things of which I know nothing and of which I do not wish to know,” he added quickly and decidedly, “still I believe you have lived a life which you have no need to be ashamed of. I know that you are honest, and truthful, and straight, and that I can trust you, and that the responsibilities which you are to assume will make you even more upright and ‘square,’ if possible.”

He glanced admiringly and affectionately at the athletic young figure sitting easily before him, at the well-shaped head and pleasant blue eyes and finely-cut mouth of the young man.

“You might have been so different,” went on the older man, musingly, and with a certain whimsicality. “You might never have been willing to go through the University; or worse still, you might never have been able to get through; or you might have made debts that even I would not have felt willing or able to pay; or you might have been unwilling to supplement your college education with the years of travel which I thought necessary; or you might have had so decided a dislike for the law that it would have been impossible for me to take you in the firm as I am now so delighted, so proud to do; or you might have married too soon and ruined your life. In short, you might have been a disappointment—and you are not.”

The young man shifted his position a little, and tumbled the burnt end of his cigar into the ash-tray at his elbow.

“You are very kind, sir,” he repeated. “I am not quite equal to telling you just how kind you seem to me, and how proud I am to be the junior member of the firm. I feel a legal enthusiasm kindling within me which I am sure will land me on the Supreme Bench some day!” And then he went on more seriously, and with an anxious note in his voice. “But I hope you are not deceiving yourself about me, sir. If you remember, you did have to pay debts for me at the University, and there was one time when I thought active measures would be taken to prevent my finishing my course even if I had been quite inclined to continue, as indeed I was; and I am not very clever, and shall never be at the head of my profession as you are, sir!”

Judge Cahill leaned back and laughed easily.

“I had quite forgotten those little incidents, Dana!” he said, “and do you know, it seems to me that we are unusually complimentary and effusive to each other to-night. I am congratulating myself on having such a son, and you on having me for your father! Well—it is not a bad idea. A little more demonstration in our family will not hurt anything.” He paused slightly, and then added: “Your mother was not very demonstrative.”

Again young Cahill murmured an assent as he looked reflectively into the fire. He could just remember that she had not seemed very fond of himself.

“But Louise is demonstrative enough,” he said, at length.

“Yes—yes, indeed,” replied his father, readily. “Louise is very affectionate and enthusiastic. She seems tremendously interested in her college—much more so than you were in yours,” he added with another laugh.

Dana Cahill got up leisurely, and stood by the chimney-piece thrusting his hands in his pockets and looking thoughtfully into the fire.

“I am thinking, sir,” he began, hesitatingly, “of what you have said about my having lived straight. I want to be fair about it. I have lived better than some. I have done nothing to be ashamed of, as you said, sir, and I cannot think of anything just now to speak of which would illustrate my point. But I cannot help thinking that your ideals and principles are so much higher and purer than those of most young men of to-day, that I may have fallen short of them in a great many ways of which you do not dream.” He moved back uneasily to his chair and dropped into it. “I do not mean in the more vital questions. I have done nothing dishonorable, nothing that I could not afford to do according to the world’s standard.”

The elder man looked at him, and a shade of annoyance and uneasiness crept into his face.

“Well?” he asked, finally.

Young Cahill looked up, and his frank, boyish face wore a rather perplexed, troubled expression.

“Well,” he said, “that’s all—unless—” he stopped suddenly and lit another cigar rather nervously.

“Unless what?” insisted the elder man, the uneasiness and annoyance betraying themselves in his voice.

“But,” he added, quickly; “don’t tell me anything that you might later regret telling, or anything very disagreeable if you can help it, for I confess you have been so satisfactory, so thoroughly all that I wanted my son to be, that I shrink from hearing anything to your detriment.”

“I don’t know that it is exactly to my detriment, for after all, I was thinking of a particular case to illustrate what I said a while ago, and I am pretty sure that most of the men I know wouldn’t think seriously of it for a moment; but I acknowledge that I have never felt satisfied with myself about it all.” He threw back his head and stared fixedly at the ceiling for a moment, and then burst out laughing.

“By Jove, sir! we are getting demonstrative,” he said. “Do you feel yourself equal to being a father confessor besides just an ordinary father?”

Judge Cahill smiled in a perfunctory way.

“If your conscience is in such a bad way as to need confessing, Dana, I shall be very glad to hear, although I, of course, cannot give you absolution.”

Cahill paused a moment.

“That’s so, sir,” he said, finally. “After all it is hardly worth while troubling you about such a small thing, and one that happened so long ago, and which is settled now, rightly or wrongly, forever.”

He stood up as if to say good-night, but the elder man did not rise and sat looking thoughtfully at the blaze with the uneasy, surprised look still on his face.

“It is not about business? nothing that affects your character for honesty and fair dealing?” he said at length, interrogatively.

“Oh, no!” replied Cahill, quickly.

Judge Cahill looked inexpressively relieved. He poured out a little wine and drank it off quickly, as if he had experienced some moment of sharp emotion which had left him faint. The younger man noticed the action and went on hastily.

“It was nothing—only about a girl whom you never heard of, and myself—something that happens to two-thirds of the men one meets—it is really of little consequence, though it has worried me, and since I have spoken of it at all, I may as well tell you about it, sir.”

But it was a very fragmentary story that he told and the facts, as he reviewed them hastily, seemed absurdly commonplace and inadequate to the amount of worry he had given himself.

“It was five years ago, sir, you remember, just after I left college, and went out to Nevada for the summer with Lord Deveridge and the rest of that English syndicate. It was when they bought ‘The Bish’ mine, you know. Of course we went about a great deal. They were so afraid of being swindled, and there had been such pots of money lost out there by English syndicates, that they determined to investigate fully and take every precaution. So they went around trying to sift things out, and there were a great many complications of all sorts which occasioned a great deal of delay, and there were so many conflicting rumors about the value of the mine, that I began to think they were never going to wind up things. Deveridge and I got awfully tired of pottering around after all sorts of men, meeting an expert geologist here and a committee there, and never getting at anything; so we finally decided to cut the whole thing for two weeks and go off on a little shooting expedition. Two or three others joined us, and we had magnificent sport for four days—and then I sprained my bad ankle again.” He stopped suddenly. “It is very curious how things happen,” he said at length, with a little laugh. “If it hadn’t rained the morning of the Springfield game, the ground wouldn’t have been wet and I wouldn’t have slipped in that last scrimmage, and my ankle wouldn’t have been sprained, and I wouldn’t have wrenched it on that mountain road, and I wouldn’t have been laid up two weeks in the house with her, and none of this would have happened.”

But the elder man was in no mood for trifling.

“You were saying——?” he began, anxiously.

“That I hurt my ankle and had to limp to the nearest inhabited place and stay there until it got better. Of course the others went on. They were coming back that way and stopped for me. I was all broken up at not being able to enjoy the shooting, but my ankle gave me so much trouble at first that I didn’t have a great deal of time to think about it; and then it began to dawn on me that she—the daughter I mean—was unusually pretty and refined and quite different from her parents seemingly, and—and—there was nothing else to do, sir, and I am afraid that I acted as most young men would act under similar circumstances.”

“You mean,” said his father, with an uncompromising directness which Cahill thought rather brutal and unnecessary, “you mean that you made love to the girl?”

The young man nodded.

“She was very pretty, you know, and it was only for a short time, and she must have seen—have realized—that there was a difference, that there was nothing to it. It was only the most incipient flirtation—the same thing that goes on at Bar Harbor and the Pier and Newport among a different class of people.”

Judge Cahill said nothing, rather to the young man’s discomfiture, so he ran on, hurriedly:

“They were very poor, and I paid them liberally for what they did for me. I confess I rather lost my head about the girl for a week! She was strikingly pretty, but she had only the most elementary education and was absurdly unconventional. Of course it was nothing, sir, and I don’t flatter myself that she felt any worse when I left than I did—at least she never made any sign,” he added, meditatively.

“I can see how, from your point of view, it appeared nothing, Dana,” said the elder man, gravely, at length. “But I hope this is the only episode of the kind in your life,” he continued, after a moment’s pause.

The younger man stood up with a rather relieved look on his face.

“Indeed it is, sir! and I think the fact that I have let it worry me so much is proof that I am a novice at it. The whole thing was so unimportant that I feel rather ridiculous for having spoken of it. There was never anything serious in the affair, and of course, sir, I did not dream—I knew it would be impossible to bring her here. You—my sister——” he stopped and looked around him rather helplessly.

“Of course,” assented the elder man, readily. “I am glad you got yourself so cleanly out of such an entanglement. As you say, it was commonplace and unimportant. Have you ever heard anything of her since?”

“O, no! I saw her for two weeks and then we parted with mutual regret, and that was all, sir! Your too complimentary remarks recalled the whole episode to my mind, and made me feel rather hypocritical, for I confess that I consider that sort of thing extremely caddish. There’s no excuse for it.”

“There is not, indeed,” assented the elder man, rising. “And it has further surprised me, because you have always seemed rather indifferent to women, Dana—almost too much so. Well—I am glad you told me. Your life has been clean, indeed, if you have no worse things to tell of than a two weeks’ flirtation with a little Western girl!” He laughed again—a deep, hearty laugh, with a relieved ring in it.

“Good-night!” he said. “To-morrow you will please get to the office promptly as a junior member should! ‘Cahill, Crosby, and Cahill’ sounds very imposing, doesn’t it, Dana? much more so than merely ‘Cahill and Crosby.’ I’m delighted, my boy! And it is especially good to think that you are back with me. What with your college life and travels, and law study, I have hardly seen anything of you for ten years, and at my age one cannot spare ten years—it is too big a slice out of the little cake left! Good-night!”

“Good-night, sir!” responded the young man, heartily, as he held the door open for his father to pass into the library.

And then he reseated himself before the fire and smoked another cigar and recalled a great many details that had somehow slipped his memory when talking to his father, and he felt distinctly relieved and glad to get away from his own thoughts when he remembered an engagement which took him out immediately.

 

At Easter Miss Louise Cahill left college to spend the vacation at her home in Boston. It was possibly because she was small and blond and quite irrepressible that her most intimate friend, Edith Minot, of Baltimore, whom she brought home with her, was tall and rather stately, with a dark, severe beauty quite in contrast to that of Miss Cahill. They were alike, however, in a great many ways, in their young enthusiasms and in their devotion to art—they worshipped Israels and Blommers and Herzog—and in their vast interest in electrical inventions and discoveries, and in their sympathy with whatever was weak or ill or oppressed, and in modern charities and college settlements. They had been great friends at college, where Miss Minot had taken her degree the year before, but they had seen little of each other since, Miss Cahill having returned to finish her college course and Miss Minot having been abroad until late in the fall, and having then been much taken up with the social life of Baltimore.

Miss Cahill was very much afraid that society had spoiled Miss Minot, and that she would be less interested in art for art’s sake, and in university extensions and college settlements and organized charitable work. She was therefore much delighted and very enthusiastic to find that her friend was not at all changed in the ten months of absence, but that in the midst of her travels and social pleasures she had contrived to devote a great deal of time to the things that had always interested her, and that she had studied the Guild Hall Loan Exhibit and the East End with equal enthusiasm, while in London, and was greatly interested in Nikola Tesla’s latest experiments and in college settlements. It was the college settlements that interested her most, however.

“But I think,” she explained earnestly that evening to her friend and young Cahill, after the Judge and his sister had gone into the library—“I think that although there are more interesting and dreadful things to be contended with at the Chicago Settlement, and although Rivington Street is on a much larger scale, still I think I like the Boston College Settlement the most. Perhaps it’s because I know it better, or because it is not quite in the slummiest slums, or because I’m so interested in my protégée there—at any rate, I like it best.”

Miss Cahill looked plaintively at her brother.

“Just think, Dana, when Edith was at college she used to spend her Christmas vacations in Tyler Street. Don’t you think she’s very brave and good? I’m sure I’m only too glad to give my money, and I’m greatly interested in it, and awfully pleased when the others go; but I don’t think I could possibly stay there myself! And I actually believe she came near refusing my invitation to come here, because she thought she ought to go to the settlement!”

Cahill laughed easily.

“That is hard on us, Miss Minot. Think of having to compete in attractions with the college settlement, and only just managing to come out ahead!” He was not thinking very much of what he was saying—he was looking at the sombre, beautiful eyes, with the lids slightly lowered over them, and the sensitively cut lips and air of thorough breeding of the girl before him; and he was saying to himself that he had been singularly unfortunate to have always been away in Japan, or at the law school, or in Paris, when Miss Minot had visited his sister.

A little touch of color crept into the clear pallor of the girl’s cheeks.

“How unkind of you and Louise!” she exclaimed, smiling. “You must know there could be no question of what was nicest to me. I’m very sorry that I like dances and the opera and luncheons and all that so much, but it is so, and the people at the college settlement are very good to let me come in now and then, and try to help a little and ease my conscience a little for all its self-indulgence and worldly pleasures. So you must not think better of me than you should!”

“Don’t believe her, Dana!” interposed Miss Cahill, indignantly. “She does it all because she’s so awfully good, and she never brags about it as I would do, I’m sure, and they all adore her down there, and the little boys beg for her flowers, and the little girls have to be kissed, and the teachers are always delighted to see her,” she ran on, breathlessly and triumphantly.

Miss Minot looked up. “I do love the little children and they interest me tremendously,” she said. She leaned forward eagerly, and appealed to Cahill. “Don’t you see,” she said, “how easy it is to become interested in that sort of thing? One doesn’t have to be particularly religiously inclined or even ordinarily good—it’s just the human nature of it which touches one so. You ought to see them,” she went on, still appealing to Cahill. “They are so interested and amused in their ‘clubs,’ which meet different afternoons in the week, and they are so anxious to get in even before the others leave! I have seen them climbing up in the windows to get a look at the good times the others were having, and waiting about at the door in the cold until that ‘club’ should have gone home and left the warm rooms and the playthings, and the cheerful, bright teachers to them. It rather puts our society functions to shame, where no one goes to a reception until the receiving hours are half over, or to the opera until next to the last act.”

“And you ought to see how fond they are of her,” insisted Miss Cahill, admiringly. “She lets them get on her prettiest gowns and muss her, and she is so patient! I keep at a distance, and tell them they are very good and I hope they are having a nice time.”

Cahill laughed.

“Philanthropy made easy, is what suits you, Louise!”

“But it isn’t philanthropy at all,” objected Miss Minot, “unless it’s philanthropy to us outsiders to be allowed to go and help and share a little of the pleasure and culture of our selfish lives. Really you ought to see the children,” she went on, eagerly. “I don’t believe Palmer Cox’s brownies or ‘pigs in clover’ are such favorites anywhere else, and you wouldn’t imagine how interesting the making of a pin-cushion cover could be; and I never thought ‘Daisy Bell,’ and ‘Sweet Marie,’ and ‘Mollie and the Baby and I,’ were really pretty tunes until I heard a little girls’ club singing them in excellent tune, and with an appreciation of the sentiments quite astonishing.”

Cahill nodded a trifle absently. He decided that he had never seen any girl’s face quite as lovely or that appealed to him so as this girl’s, and that she was very different from most of his sister’s college friends, who were such serious young women and who rather over-awed him, and with whom he was never entirely at his ease.

“And then the women in the evening! They like the singing best, I think. It is wonderful to watch them when she sings for them, and I think her voice never sounds so beautiful as then.”

Cahill looked up interrogatively.

“She?” he said.

“It’s her protégée, Dana,” interposed Miss Cahill. “Edith won’t tell you the straight of it, so I shall. Edith found her already at the settlement. She was awfully poor, but she had this glorious voice and she was trying to support herself, and earn enough to have her voice trained. And she would come over Sunday evenings—she lived near the settlement—and sing for the men and women. You ought to see how they appreciate it and how they listen to her quite quietly, as if astonished and charmed into silence. She is nearly as poor as they, and it is all she can do for them, she says—I forget what she did, type-writing or something—and she was going to an awfully bad teacher and getting her voice ruined, and so Edith made friends with her in that way. She has now sent her to Alden and really supports her so she can devote herself entirely to her music.”

Miss Minot glanced quickly up in a little embarrassed way.

“Louise is terrible!” she said, laughing. “But you cannot imagine how wonderfully beautiful her voice is. It is one of those naturally perfect voices—she had always sung, but never suspected what an extraordinary gift she had until two or three years ago. It’s such a tremendous satisfaction to do something for a voice like that. One gets so tired spending on one’s self and cultivating one’s own little society voice, that can just be heard across the drawing-room if everyone keeps quite still! Alden says she will be ready for Marchesi in six months, and for the Grand Opera in a year.”

“And one of these days, when she is a great prima donna and has married a marquis, or a count at least, she will come back and patronize you and send you a box for the matinée!” remarked Cahill.

Miss Minot shook her head smilingly.

“You are very cynical and you don’t know her in the least. She is very beautiful and very fine and most grateful—absurdly grateful.”

“And she adores Edith,” put in Miss Cahill. “She has been her only friend and confidant, and she worships her and treats her as if she were a goddess, and I believe she would have her hands chopped off or her eyes burned out, or be executed quite cheerfully, to show her devotion.”

Miss Minot looked openly amused. “I don’t know about all that, I’m sure!” she said, “but I don’t think she would patronize me. Besides it would not be strange if she were cynical and hard like yourself, Mr. Cahill,” she went on smiling over at him, “for she has had a great deal of trouble already.” The girl pushed her chair back a little, and her fine, earnest face grew grave and perplexed.

Miss Cahill gave a little gasp. “I knew she had a history, Edith! She looks like it. She is awfully pretty,” she went on, turning to her brother. “I have seen her several times at the settlement, but we are not friends yet—I doubt if she even knows my name. I would like to know her, though—there is something so sad about her eyes and mouth, and her voice makes one cry.”

“And Alden—you know Alden, Mr. Cahill?—well, he’s rather brutal, sometimes—thinks only of his art—and he told her one day that she was particularly fortunate to have had a great trouble in her life, and that it would do more for her voice than ten years of training. You ought to have seen how she looked at him! But men are brutal; it was a man who made her suffer first. She only told me part of the story, I don’t quite understand, but I know it nearly broke her heart, young as she was, and that she will never get over it or be the same again. I am not sure,” went on the girl thoughtfully, “it was before she came to Boston, but I don’t know the details, and of course I could ask no questions. She met him quite a while ago, out West, I believe, where she lived, and she thought he loved her, he led her to believe so, and she loved him, I know. He must have been quite different from the men she had known. He had everything and she nothing. It was a sort of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid episode, only the king was not kingly at all, and when the time came for him to go, he left her quite calmly.”

Her face was flushed now and her eyes wide open and shining with the indignation she felt. It struck Cahill again that she was the handsomest girl he had ever seen, and he liked her so—aroused and animated—even better than coldly beautiful. He was not listening very much to what she was saying, but he was watching her quietly and intently, the nobly poised head and low forehead with the hair growing so beautifully on it, and the rounded chin and firm, rather square jaw. As he looked at her the conviction was borne in upon him that she was a girl who would be capable of entire devotion or utter renunciation, and that she would be implacable if her confidence were once destroyed.

“It must be a fine thing for a man to do,” she went on, scornfully, “to make a girl love him and believe him nobler, and better, and stronger than he is, and then to undeceive her so cruelly! And a girl like this one, too! That was the worst of it. It is bad enough when the girl and the man have equal chances—when they know each other’s weapons and skill, and when they can retire gracefully and before it is too late, or when they are already so scarred up that one wound more makes no difference. But when the advantages are all on one side—when one is so much stronger than the other! It may be because I am so fond of this girl, or it may be because I am even yet unused to the world’s ways, and the four years spent in college and away from such things may have made me super-sensitive, but however it may be, it seems a despicable thing to me!” She stopped short, and the indignation and scorn in her voice rang out sharply.

Cahill moved uneasily and looked around him. He had been so absorbed in watching the girl’s face that he had hardly taken in what she had been saying, but in some vague way he felt jarred and restless.

“And then,” continued Miss Minot, “if only she did not take it as she does—if she were only angry, or indifferent, or revengeful even—but she loves him still and she would do anything for him. She would be capable to-morrow of sacrificing herself and her love if she thought it would make him happier. Such devotion is as rare as genius.”

Miss Cahill leaned far forward, tracing out the delicate inlaid pattern of the table with the point of her silver letter-opener.

“If I were engaged to a man,” she said, thoughtfully, “and were to discover that he had treated a girl so, I would give him up, no matter what it cost me.”

“And you, Miss Minot?” said Cahill, “what would you do?” He felt a sudden, sharp curiosity as to her answer, and a vague apprehension of what she would say. The girl lifted her head proudly.

“It would not be any effort for me to give such a man up,” she said, quietly.

Cahill stood up restlessly. This girl had touched upon something which he would have liked to forget. Of course it had been greatly different in his case, he assured himself, but he felt uneasy and sore. And then he smiled. There was something which struck him as pathetically amusing in the seriousness of these two girls. They were so young and untried and utterly unworldly, and they took such a tragic view of such a common-place affair, and were so ready to be sacrificed for their high ideals and principles.

“You are very severe,” he said at length, with a rather forced laugh. “If we are all to be judged like that it will go hard with us.” But he could attempt no excuse or explanation with the girl’s beautiful, indignant eyes upon him, and presently the talk drifted off in other channels.

It was about two weeks after this that Cahill began to realize just how deeply in love he was with Edith Minot. She had interested him from the first, and her very dissimilarity from most of the society girls he knew, the nobility and seriousness of her nature beneath a rather cold and conventional manner, and the young purity of her presence had struck him as being the finest and most attractive things he had ever seen. He had been with her a great deal in the two weeks she had spent with his sister, and he had had a great many opportunities of finding out just how superior she was to most girls, how witty and clever she could be, and what native dignity and fine simplicity of character she possessed, and how sincere and truthful she was. They had gone together to teas and receptions, and small dances, and the numerous post-Easter weddings, and the fact that she was his sister’s guest made it very easy for him to see a great deal of her without any gossip or talk. But delightful as all that had been, he was glad now that she was going back in a few days to her own people, and that he could go down in a decently short time and tell her what he could not tell her in his father’s house and which he had found so hard to withhold. The uncertainty in which he was as to whether she cared for him or not made him restless and very properly despondent, although he sometimes fancied that she was less cold to him than to the others, and that if she talked with him about certain things of particular interest to her, it was because she valued his opinion and friendship. And he was much pleased and very flattered when she appealed to him about her different schemes, and was even ready to sacrifice their last day to the college settlement.

“I really must go to Tyler Street to-day,” Miss Minot had said. “It’s my last chance. I have been very selfish, and have been having entirely too good a time. Why, I haven’t even seen my boys or heard the Prima Donna Contessa!” She turned and smiled at Cahill as she spoke. “By the way,” she continued, “why don’t you and Louise come with me and hear her sing? I have sent her a note telling her to meet me at the settlement at four o’clock, and I know she will be only too pleased to sing for us. It is quite wonderful, you know.”

“Of course we will go,” assented Miss Cahill briskly, while her brother aquiesced cheerfully, if less enthusiastically. It occurred to him that it would be as well for him not to be alone with Miss Minot any more, if he intended to hold to his resolution of not speaking just yet.

It was rather late when they started for the settlement, and by the time they had walked down Tyler Street from Kneeland—they left the carriage at the corner of Kneeland—they found that it was quite four and time for a club, the members of which were enthusiastically crowding around the door waiting for permission to enter, and playing leap-frog and tag and imperilling life and limb by walking on the spiked iron fence in their frantic attempts to see in the windows. But when they caught sight of Miss Minot they stopped playing and jumped down from the fence and threw away their shinny sticks, and began to all talk at once at her, and to tell her what they had been doing during the winter, and that they hadn’t been absent from school but twice or ten times, or not at all, as the case happened to be, and they all seemed to have had a surprising number of deadly diseases, of which fact they were inordinately proud; and there were several still on the waiting list, who wanted her to intercede for them to have their names put in the club books, so they could go in and have a good time with the others; to all of which, and a great deal more, she listened sympathetically and interestedly. And as she stood so, the eager, softened expression on her face, laughing and talking with the children crowding around her, the boys grabbing at her hands and the little girls touching shyly the gown she wore, it seemed to Cahill that he had never seen her quite so lovely and lovable. He felt an amused sort of jealousy as he saw her run lightly up the steps with her slim hands held tightly by two very dirty and very affectionate little boys, with the rest swarming after her and hemming her in; and when the front door was finally opened and she and his sister disappeared with them into the rooms beyond, he felt rather aggrieved and out of it.

He found himself in a narrow little hall and was just wondering what he should do with his hat and stick, when she came out from the inner room, closing the door behind her. She was laughing in a breathless, pleased way, and her face had a little flush on it as she turned to him.

“Please take off my coat,” she gasped, leaning against the balustrade of the steep little stairs. “I’m going to amuse them until the Prima Donna comes—she isn’t here, at least I don’t see her anywhere. Louise is playing for them now.” Cahill could just catch the sounds of a piano above the shrill laughter of the children. They were quite alone in the little hallway, and as he bent down to take off her coat, a sudden, wild impulse overcame him. He forgot everything except that he loved her and must tell her so, and he held her tightly while he spoke rapidly and earnestly. It suddenly seemed preposterous to him that he could have dreamed of waiting another week to find out whether she loved him or not; she must tell him then and there, he said, quick, before anyone came. And although she did not, in fact, tell him anything at all, he was so content with her eyes as she turned toward him that, bending down, he gave her one quick kiss after another.

And then the sound of the piano ceased and they heard a scramble of running feet at the door, which was thrown open by Miss Cahill.

“Where are you? come in!” she cried.

As Cahill and Miss Minot went into the room beyond, a girl came slowly down the stairs which they had just left. Her face was pitifully white and drawn, and there was a scared, surprised look in her eyes which was not good to see. When she reached the lowest step she stopped thoughtfully, leaning heavily against the stairs’ rail.

“I saw them,” she said, softly and tremulously to herself. “I saw them, and there is no possibility of a mistake. I don’t understand anything about it—how it has happened—but it was he—it was he! If she loves him—and she does love him—I saw it in her face, there is but one thing for me to do—there is no other way now.” She put both hands on the banister and swayed slightly toward it in her effort to control herself. “She has been everything to me, has done everything for me. And if I love him—and I do love him!—there is a million times more necessity for me to do it.” Her lips worked painfully and silently for a moment.

An instant later she had crossed the narrow passageway, and throwing open the door, stood there smiling faintly, with the hurt, frightened look still on her pale face. Miss Minot was the first to see her. She moved toward her, swiftly catching both the girl’s hands in her own, and dragging her forward to where Cahill and his sister were standing.

“The Prima Donna Contessa!” she said, gayly. “May I introduce Miss Cahill, Mr. Cahill——” but she stopped suddenly, for she saw Cahill take a step forward while a dull red suffused his face.

“You!” he said—“you!” His voice sounded an octave higher than usual and there was a queer, excited ring to it.

The girl drew back in a puzzled, half-offended way. But Cahill left his sister’s side and crossed quickly to where the girl was standing.

“Great heavens!—you!—aren’t you—?” he began, but the girl interrupted him quickly.

“Excuse me,” she said, in a politely distant tone.

“Don’t pretend—” he began again with a curious insistance in his voice; and then he stopped, putting his hand heavily on the back of a chair near him and looking at Miss Minot and the girl standing beside her. An agony of apprehension took hold upon him.

The girl made a little gesture of surprise and turned proudly and indifferently to Miss Minot.

“I don’t think I understand,” she said quietly to her.

The nonplussed, vacant look on her face made Cahill hesitate. He looked fixedly at her. The red had left his face now and it showed a strange pallor. He was just conscious of the cold, astonished look on Miss Minot’s face, and that his sister was staring blankly at him. He pulled himself together sharply.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, with slow difficulty. “I have made a stupid mistake—I thought—” he stopped and drew a sharp breath.

The girl’s eyes met his steadily for a moment, and then she smiled again slightly.

“Oh, certainly,” she said, easily. “I have reminded so many people of so many other people that I am getting quite used to it! Resemblances are so often deceiving.”

Cahill looked at her in a curiously relieved way.

“And here we are, standing talking,” she ran on, “while the children are waiting to sing! They have learned some very pretty Easter hymns. You shall hear them.”

She spoke rapidly and directly to Cahill as though she wished to prevent him from talking, and her voice sounded strained and monotonous. She went over to the piano quickly and seated herself, and presently, when the children had got through their songs, she began to sing alone, and that evening both Miss Minot and Miss Cahill agreed enthusiastically that she had never sung like that before, and that if the director of the Grand Opera had heard her he would have signed a contract with her on the spot.

Miss Minot was rather disappointed that Cahill did not seem more impressed.

“I don’t believe you enjoyed it half as much as I thought you would,” she said, reproachfully to him. It was late, and they were just leaving the drawing-room, but he had held her back for an instant while the others passed on into the big hall.

“And isn’t she lovely and a great artist?” she insisted.

Cahill looked down at the severely beautiful face beside him, and for an instant the feeling of dread and apprehension which had swept over him that afternoon returned with redoubled force. He felt again the sudden, awful shock the sight of that girl’s face had been to him, the intense relief on discovering his mistake. He realized acutely and for the first time just how impossible it would ever be to tell her of that episode in his life which the girl’s face had recalled, and which he had once felt impelled to tell his father, and he determined to make up to her in every way that a man can, for his silence. The possibility which had faced him for a moment, of losing her, had made her inexpressibly dear to him, and in that instant he had realized passionately all that the loss of her would mean to him. He had felt unutterably glad that the danger had been averted and that she need never know. He did not mean to deceive her, but as he held her hand and looked at her, he had but one thought, one fierce desire—to keep that look of trust and happiness forever on her earnest and beautiful face. He leaned forward slightly.

“How can I tell anything about any other woman when you are there?” he said, argumentatively, smiling at her. “You didn’t expect me to take much interest in the timbre of her voice or her trill when you had just told me——”

“Oh, yes—I know—I never told you anything,” objected the girl, laughing and drawing away her hands. “And you were so dramatic—so curious when you met her, that if I had—known you longer, I think absolutely I would have demanded an explanation. Isn’t that what they say in books—‘demand an explanation?’”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what they say in books. No book ever told me anything about this!”

The girl turned her shining, happy eyes upon him.

“How unutterably silly of me,” she said, breathlessly. “For a moment you said she was so like someone, and she had told me her story, I hardly know what I thought—imagined.” She spoke in little, broken pauses, and as she finished she laid her hand timidly on Cahill’s arm. “You said she reminded you of——”

The young man laughed happily. “The mere idea!” he said, touching her hands softly, and then he added lightly, as they moved toward the door: “What she reminded me of was an episode in my life that happened long ago and which was very uninteresting and unimportant.”

MISS EVA HUNGERFORD was having a mauvais quart-d’heure, or to speak more exactly, une mauvaise demi-heure. She was lying in a long chair near her dressing-table, the pale-green satin cushions tucked closely around her, and her hands held tightly over her eyes to keep out any ray of sunlight that might enter the spectrally darkened room.

She was thinking hard. Once, when she partially emerged from her abstraction, she decided with reproach that she could not remember to have thought so hard for so long a time since leaving college, though in the meanwhile she had written a tragedy and a small volume of sonnets. The occasion called for thought. In half an hour he was to be there, and she had understood from his manner the evening before that she must have an answer ready for him.

It was all very tiresome. She had warded him off so far, but that could not go on forever. She had felt a little frightened; he had looked at her in a way she had never imagined he could look, and she had been devoutly thankful that just then her “most intimate friend” (even authors have “intimate friends”) had come in with her brother to make arrangements about a coaching party for the following Saturday. But she could not hope for a much longer reprieve. There was a note in his voice that she could not mistake, as he asked her when he could see her alone. She wondered now why she had told him at half-past four the next day. Why had she not said next week, or after she got back from Mexico, or any other time more remote than the present?

“Yes,” she acknowledged to herself, “I was afraid: and not of him but of myself. That is the humiliation of it. What was it I read in Ruskin? That it all ends with Tom, Dick, or Harry? I don’t believe it. At any rate, I shall not give up my career for any man.”

Miss Hungerford always spoke of her “career” to her friends with a sad sort of expression, as if it cut her off from them in some unexplainable way, and made her not of this world. Unconsciously she enjoyed the mingled admiration and awe of the less ambitiously intellectual of her “set” when they heard that she was really going to college. When she came home at vacations they gave her afternoon receptions and luncheons, because, though of course they never breathed it to her, they had met with a flat failure when they tried to get their brothers and masculine friends to come for dinner-dances and “small and earlies.”

“Why, she’s awfully pretty!” they would exclaim when the men pleaded engagements.

“She’s terribly clever, isn’t she?” they would ask, warily. “Why, of course, Eva Hungerford is just too bright for anything, but she never makes one feel it. She doesn’t take a mean delight in showing off one’s ignorance. She talks just like we do,” they would declare, and the brothers would smile peculiarly and vanish.

But even her warmest friends admitted that she was carrying things too far when, at the end of her college career she announced her intention of taking a course in old English at Oxford, and then of going to France to study the literature.

“No, I am not going over in the Winthrop’s yacht, nor am I going coaching with them through Ireland,” she would explain. “I do not mean to travel much. I intend to study seriously. Of course, I shall take my summers off and enjoy myself, but I have a serious end in view, which I must not lose sight of.”

Miss Hungerford had a rather classic face, and looked like a true Spartan when she would say that. Her friends would be either dumb with admiration at such explanations or, sometimes, the more venturesome would try to lure her from her purpose. But she only looked with pity on such attempts.

She was away two years, and although she had tried to keep up with her friends, on returning she found a great many of them married and more or less occupied with affairs which had no part in her life. This saddened her very much and made her more than ever determined to pursue her “career.” She had very few difficulties to contend with. There had been one slight interruption. While in Paris the young Comte de la Tour, whom she had first met at the American minister’s, had taken up a great deal of her time. When he proposed, she had refused him so calmly that she felt justified in admiring herself. She was rather mortified, however, on thinking it over, to find that for a whole month afterward she had not been able to fix her mind on anything serious, and had accepted a great many invitations out. This taught her a lesson. She had discovered that “to be serious, to do her best work, men must not divert her thoughts.” She wrote that down in her commonplace book, so that it would be a perpetual warning to her.

When she got home, her mother and father were delighted to find her no more changed. They had feared the worst from her letters. Her mother, hearing that old English script was very hard on the eyesight, had, after a good cry, resigned herself to glasses. She was intensely relieved to find that there was no occasion for her resignation, and in her happiness to find that Beowulf had not injured her daughter’s vision, herself helped to select a teak desk and bookcases for a “private study” for her. She even sanctioned an edition in pomona green and gold, of the French tragedy and sonnets. These books were not as much reviewed as Miss Hungerford had thought they would be, but her friends admired them intensely and generally came to her with them, that she might write her name on the title-page.

But scarcely had the room been arranged for hard work (Miss Hungerford had determined to spend the next few months in writing a curtain-raiser for Daly’s), when another and more serious interruption occurred.

She never knew just how it happened. Certainly she had never encouraged him, though she had sometimes suspected her mother of doing so, and assuredly Paul Stanhope in no way corresponded to her ideal hero. A few years ago she would not have admitted that she had a masculine ideal, but now, as she put another cushion under her shoulder, she was forced to admit to herself that she might have one. Stanhope was big and strong and handsome. So far he answered to her ideal. But was he intellectual? He drove a four-in-hand splendidly, but that was hardly an intellectual employment. Was he literary? She remembered that in speaking once of Matthew Arnold’s “Monody on the Death of Arthur Hugh Clough,” she had noticed a distinctly blank expression on his face, and that he had tried to turn the conversation. But Miss Hungerford had been too quick for him and had herself changed the subject. That was one of her best points, as she acknowledged to herself. She could adapt herself to the people she happened to be talking to. But could she do so for a lifetime? Miss Hungerford shuddered and pressed her hands more tightly over her eyes, as if to keep out the vision of a husband who did not appreciate allusions to the “Cumnor cowslips.”

Then in some way the phrase “Art is long” got into her head. She knew it, and was not afraid. She had said it to herself a thousand times to keep up her courage. She knew she was only beginning. Still she did think the critics might have noticed more positively that she was beginning. But nothing should turn her from her purpose. She was sure the American drama needed fresh material, fresh workers. She had studied French methods, and had determined to devote the rest of her life to adapting them to the American stage. Her youth would be well spent in regenerating our drama and elevating our literature, though she should not become famous until she was an old woman. Even with such high resolves for our country’s good, Miss Hungerford could not entirely relinquish all hope of becoming renowned.

“An old woman!” She jumped up and, drawing the silk curtains slightly, gazed at herself in the mirror. She leaned forward and breathed lightly on the glass, so that the reflection might be more soft and exquisite.

“It must be hard to lose one’s good looks!” she said, half aloud. Generally, when Miss Hungerford was tempted to be vain, she laid it all to an exalted, abstract love of the beautiful. Now she put her hands through her hair at each side and drew it down loosely, so that her face was half in shadow and altogether charming. And then she put it back suddenly, for she remembered that it had fallen down so once when she and Stanhope were riding together, and he had looked at her in a very openly admiring way. When he had next called she had worn it so, and his look and exclamation of delight when she had entered the room had warned her what risks she was running.

She turned impatiently from the mirror and picked up a book that her “most intimate friend” had sent her several days before. She had not read it, because she had found that it commenced with a very modern love scene, and she never read love scenes. Miss Hungerford, who had a taste for epigram, once told her friend that “the science of reading is to know how to skip,” and she usually skipped the lui et elle dialogues, but if they occurred in a classic, and she felt that she had no right to omit anything (she was a very conscientious sort of person) she summoned all her fortitude to aid her in getting through. Now she opened the book and read a few pages. After all, it did not seem absolutely repulsive. She decided that she had not given the book a fair trial, and she noticed with some surprise that, curiously enough from the description of him, the hero of the story must resemble Paul Stanhope. But when she found that she was thinking of Stanhope she put the book down.

“I am certainly getting frivolous,” she thought severely.

“I will go up to my study. I can think better there.” As she passed her little French clock, she noticed with a slight shudder that it was twenty minutes after four. She stopped suddenly and rang a bell. “I will make it easy for both of us,” she decided; “I will order tea served as usual, and I will just tell him very calmly how impossible it is for me to take upon myself any other career than that of a student and writer. No one can possibly be sentimental over a tea-urn and champagne biscuits,” she thought with relief. When the man appeared she gave him instructions to bring in the tea-things at five precisely. “That will make our interview short and yet give me time to settle it all at once and forever,” she thought. “Afterward we can discuss every-day affairs, and I am sure he will recognize how wisely I have acted, and we can be very good friends,” and she passed slowly up the stairs to her particular den.

She felt stronger now, more certain of herself. The first sheets of her “curtain-raiser” were lying on her desk, and the sight of them encouraged her. For a moment a bewildering vision of a crowded theatre, a storm of applause, and herself, seated behind the curtains of a box, seeing, hearing her own piece, took possession of her. She even heard cries for the author, but of course her duty to herself and her family would prevent her appearing publicly as the writer of the play. She could see no objection, however, to being pointed out as “Miss Hungerford, you know, the brilliant young authoress.” Yes, life was a failure, art was everything! Nothing should ever come between her and her work.

Then she sat down at her desk and tried to write. She remembered the keen sense of pleasure she always experienced when she had finished a sonnet or scene of a play, but she was thinking now of how she would receive Stanhope. “I will give him my hand in a very quiet, friendly way that will show at once what my decision is. Nothing shall make me alter or give up my career.”

But it was very hard to give up everything, and she was very young and her friends thought her beautiful. Could there be no compromise? After all life need not be so dreary, and Paul Stanhope was distinctly the nicest and most eligible man she knew. Any number of girls liked him tremendously, and she sighed as she thought that she was keeping some girl from getting a very good husband indeed. This idea, though not wholly distasteful to her, brought her sharply back to her resolutions, and she picked up her Calderon. She had been reading it the day before and had left it turned down at the page. Suddenly a great pity for Calderon took possession of her. After all he was so dead now! Could he know how famous he was? Was he famous while he lived? Did his fame bring him love and happiness? She did not even know. Underneath the Calderon lay a copy of a poet’s works—a poet now famous and beloved, but who had died miserably poor and unknown. By the side of this volume lay the last number of a popular magazine. She had bought it because it contained a story by a man whom all the world was talking about. She had read in the morning’s paper that he had just been divorced from his wife. The sight of the book sickened her. She turned away and opened the case where she kept her Shakespeare, and took out a book at random. It was the sonnets. He, too, the greatest and wisest, had been wretchedly unhappy.

Suddenly the futility of all effort took hold of her. Suppose she should drudge her life away, never taste of happiness, die, and be only known as “Hungerford the dramatist.” She shuddered. In the years to come many people might not even know whether “Hungerford” had been a man or a woman. But she could never hold up her head again if she should relinquish her “career” now. What would her friends think? She felt that she had burned her ships behind her when she had published her tragedy, and that the eyes of her world were upon her.

She wished she were not so stylish and so distressingly well off in this world’s goods. Geniuses, she reflected, were always ugly and poor. Only lately had it come to be considered not infra dig. to grow rich off one’s brains. She would have liked to be an old-time ugly, poverty-stricken genius. As that could not be, however (her family might have objected to being dispossessed of a most generous income), the best thing she could do was to work on to the end. Better to die in harness, nobly striving after perfection, than to live to an ingloriously happy old age. She saw herself a melancholy woman, whose youth and beauty had fled before the exhausting demands of her genius. Fame had come, but too late. Her name was on every lip, but death awaited her. Nothing was left her but to choose her biographer and epitaph. She had long thought that the lines (adapted) from the “Adonais” would be very appropriate:

She considered them very sweet, and Shelley had always been one of her gods. There was a sort of poetical justice in the selection. She felt very sad and firm.

Just then someone tapped at the door, and a card was handed her. She trembled a little as she took it, but there was no change in her voice as she told the man to take Mr. Stanhope to the library and that she would be down immediately.

But she did not go at once. She stopped at her own door and went to the mirror, where she loosened her hair a little at the sides, and after looking critically at the effect, she went slowly down the stairs. At each step she repeated to herself “I must be firm. My career before everything.”

She was saying this over to herself for the twentieth time when she found, rather to her dismay, that she was at the door. Pushing aside the curtains, she extended her hand as she planned to do, but something in Stanhope’s expression as he came quickly toward her made her falter and let it drop to her side. The next thing she knew he had his arms around her and she was not repulsing him. He had not given her the least chance to explain, she thought indignantly. She would never have allowed it if he had given her a moment’s time! As for Stanhope, no idea of explanation entered his head. He saw no necessity for one.

After a while she told him that she did not love him, but he did not seem to believe her, and she could think of no way of proving it after what had happened. Then she assured him that she had always planned to spend her life in writing and study, and that it was impossible for her to marry him. But he declared that there were no end of writers in the world and absolutely but one woman who could be his wife, so that he did not think her decision just or warranted. And then he went over to her very tenderly and asked her if she really cared more for her musty books and a “brilliant career” (Stanhope was careful to use the word “career”) than she did for a man who loved her so devoutly that he would willingly lay down his life for her? At this Miss Hungerford cried a little, and he put her head on his shoulder while she thought about it.

While they were thus engaged the clock struck five and the servant appeared punctually with tea-things. He was much confused when he caught sight of them, and Miss Hungerford privately determined to speak to the man for his officiousness.

The wedding was very brilliant and Miss Hungerford’s “most intimate friend” was maid of honor. She never told the bride, but she told everyone else, “that she had never expected Eva Hungerford to marry and give up her career, but that she was thankful it had happened, and she was sure she would be happy!”

In the meantime Daly’s is without the curtain-raiser.

MISS ATTERBURY put the paper she was reading carefully and slowly down upon the table. It was the Boston —— , and there was a long article upon the first page marked ostentatiously around with a blue lead-pencil, and headed in glaring letters, “Athletics in Girls’ Colleges.”

There was a dangerous gleam in Miss Atterbury’s dark-gray eyes, and she seemed a trifle more than her ordinary five feet eight inches as she drew herself up and turned, with that careful repression of irritation which always denotes the extreme limit of self-control, upon an inoffensive freshman, comfortably installed in the window-seat, playing a mandolin.

“I was in Antwerp two weeks last summer,” she remarked, with careful emphasis, “and I heard the cathedral chimes play ‘La Mandolinata’ twice every five minutes, I think. I would be obliged if you would play something else, or even stop altogether for a while—I have something important to talk about just now.”

The freshman stuck her pick guiltily in the strings, and shifted her position upon the cushions into one of extreme and flattering attention, while the four girls who had been playing whist over in a corner turned hastily around toward Miss Atterbury.

“What is it now, Katharine?” inquired Miss Yale, reproachfully, laying down her cards. “She always takes things so terribly au grand sérieux,” she explained plaintively to the rest. Miss Yale had her rooms with Miss Atterbury, and stood rather in awe of that young woman, and was very proud of her athletic prowess, and could always be relied upon to tell her friends “that Katharine Atterbury was the captain of the senior crew, and could pull an oar as well as a ’Varsity stroke, and that the champion tennis-player of a certain year had said that she was an antagonist to be feared and respected.”

“This is what is the matter,” said Miss Atterbury, in a tragic voice, picking up the paper. “I don’t know who it is that writes such absurd, such wilfully misleading articles about us, but I do know that if I could get at him I would——”

What Miss Atterbury would do was apparently too awful to speak of just then.

One of the girls got up and went over to her.

“But what is it?—what have they said about us now?” she inquired, impatiently.

“What they are always doing—poking fun at us,” replied Miss Atterbury, hotly, and with a fine disregard of grammar. “To read this article one would imagine that we were imbecile babies. One would think that a girl was as weak as a kitten, and didn’t know a boat from an elevator, or a five-lap running track from an ice-wagon, or a golf club from a sewing-machine. He—whoever the man is who wrote this ridiculous article—seems to think that all our training and physical development is a huge joke. He don’t even know how stupid he is. That’s the worst of it—he isn’t even aware of his unutterable, his colossal ignorance!”

“Wouldn’t it be fun to have him drawn and quartered, as an awful example, a sort of warning to the other newspaper men not to write about what they are totally ignorant of, and to leave us alone,” suggested the inoffensive little freshman, with a base but entirely successful attempt to get back into Miss Atterbury’s good graces.

The senior gave her a brief but cordial glance, and then ran on:

“Something must be done about it. I’m tired of reading this sort of trash about women’s colleges. It is time the public was learning the true state of things—that girls can and do swim, and row and play golf and tennis, and run and walk about, just as their brothers do, and that we have courage and muscle enough to go in for football even, except that we have some little regard for our personal appearance!”

“And it’s so degrading and irritating to go home in the vacations, and have one’s brother tease one to death about it all, and try to be funny, and ask one if the color of one’s gymnasium suit is becoming, and if the golf captain knows the caddie from a cleek,” interposed Miss Thayer, a pretty blond girl who got up slowly and sauntered over to Miss Atterbury, putting her face over that young lady’s shoulder to get a look at the unfortunate paper. As she did so she gave a little cry of surprise.

“Why, I know the man who wrote that,” she gasped. “There! J. E. N.—see those initials at the end?—they mean Jack Newbold. I remember now he is writing for that paper. He told me this summer at the sea-shore that he was going in for newspaper work. His grandfather owns this paper, you know, and has promised him half a million when he is twenty-five if he will go through the whole thing—learn everything a newspaper man must know. He didn’t want to do it much, but, of course, he would go in for almost anything sooner than lose all that pile of money.”

Miss Atterbury looked thoughtfully and intently at Miss Thayer.

“You say he is a friend of yours?” she demanded, slowly.

“Oh, yes; we got to be very good friends this summer. He taught me how to play fifteen-ball pool—that’s about all he knows,” went on the girl, scornfully. “He’s an awful duffer about everything else. You ought to see him play tennis! It’s not very edifying, but it’s awfully funny.”

Miss Atterbury gave a little gasp of delight.

“That’s too good to be true,” she said, enthusiastically.

Miss Thayer rather stared. “Why?” she demanded, and then, without waiting for a reply, she swept on. “You wouldn’t think so if you had to play doubles with him! And he simply can’t walk—gets awfully tired, he says. I think it’s his clothes. Gets ’em in London, and they are terribly swell and uncomfortable. And he is always afraid his collar is going to melt; it’s quite painful to be with him on a warm day. And I couldn’t induce him to come out in my cat-boat with me. Said he didn’t think a girl could learn to handle one with any degree of safety. Did you ever hear of anything so unjust? I think he was afraid.”

Miss Atterbury was leaning on the table now, and her countenance had assumed such a cheerful look that the freshman felt quite relieved and ventured to pick up her mandolin again.

“Go on!” demanded the senior, delightedly.

“Well, I don’t know anything more,” declared Miss Thayer, impatiently. “Isn’t that enough for you? He’s no good at out-door sports, and what he is doing writing us up or down is more than I can imagine. He oughtn’t to be allowed to do so. He don’t know anything about it at all, and I should think he would be ashamed of himself. I suppose his editor told him to do it, and he simply ‘made up’ and put down everything he had ever heard about us, and worked in all the old jokes about girls’ colleges.”

Miss Atterbury got up slowly.

“Well!” she said, impressively, to Miss Thayer, “I’m sorry if that young man is much of a friend of yours, for we have got to make an example of him. I suppose you know him well enough to invite him out here Monday afternoon?—for you’ve got to do it,” she added, with calm decision.

Miss Thayer said she thought she might venture on that simple act of courtesy, though she could not quite understand why Miss Atterbury was so anxious to see him since she disapproved of him so entirely; to which that young woman replied that she wished to see him once, so that she might never see him again, and that the next day she would explain her plans, in which she expected their hearty co-operation.

 

Mr. Jack Newbold had just comfortably installed himself in the 1.50 B. and A. train, when it occurred to him that he might possibly have made a mistake as to the time Miss Thayer expected him. He pulled out the note which he had received from her, and read it again.

Mr. Jack Newbold was not a particularly vain youth, but he had a slight feeling of satisfaction on perusing that note which made him settle himself even more comfortably in his seat and resign himself cheerfully to the short journey.

“Had no idea that article would make such a sensation,” he was saying to himself, “and I’m glad she expects me by this train. Of course she will bring her trap to the station for me. I believe the college is quite a little distance from the town. Nice little trap—she drives well for a girl, I remember.” And then he fell to wondering whether he had selected just the right things to wear. “Girls are so deucedly critical,” he soliloquized, and it had been rather hard to decide on just what would be in good taste for an afternoon call and would still do without change for the concert in the evening, and he rather complimented himself on his judicious selection, and was assuring himself that the particular shade of his gloves had not been a mistake, when he found that he was at the station.

Miss Thayer welcomed him effusively.

“I knew you wouldn’t have the vaguest idea of how to get up to the college,” she was saying, “and so I came down for you myself. No, I didn’t bring my trap. I knew you would enjoy the walk up, and I wanted to show you it myself. I remember how fond you were of walking, last summer,” she added, with a bright smile at him.

Newbold stared a little.

“I don’t think,” he began doubtfully; but Miss Thayer interrupted him quickly—

“You cannot imagine how anxious the girls are to see you. Each one wants to show you what she is particularly interested in. Really you are quite a martyr—I mean a hero—in our eyes! We will go up this way,” she ran on. “It’s a little longer and there is a pretty bad hill, but of course a man doesn’t mind a little extra exertion, and it’s even more beautiful than the other way.”

Newbold said he would be charmed to go any way that Miss Thayer might choose, but that he didn’t want to lose any of his visit at the college, and that perhaps it would be wiser to take the short cut. But Miss Thayer said that if they walked a little faster they would get there just as soon, and he would see the finer view, too. So they started off briskly, and Newbold wished that he had worn the other pair of patent leathers, and finally, when he felt ready to drop, and thought they must have walked about five miles, and she told him they had only two more to go, he blamed himself most severely for not having firmly refused anything but the short cut and a cab. One of Miss Thayer’s friends who met her told her the next day that she was glad to see that she had joined the Pedestrian Club, and that she had often wondered why she had not done so before.

“I hardly think it is worth while to go into the drawing-room now,” remarked Miss Thayer, argumentatively, as they strolled up the broad drive to the college. “I see Miss Atterbury down there on the campus playing tennis, and I promised to bring you to her immediately,” she went on. Newbold felt a horrible inclination to say that he didn’t care if he never met Miss Atterbury, and that personally he would very

much prefer going into the drawing-room and stopping there for the rest of the afternoon, in the most comfortable chair to be found; but he managed to murmur a weary assent to Miss Thayer’s proposition, and together they started down the steep hill at the bottom of which stretched the campus. But he could not seem to keep up with Miss Thayer, and by the time he had reached the tennis grounds and had decided that in all probability his heart would never beat normally again, he was conscious that he was bowing, and that Miss Atterbury, flushed from playing, was standing before him and was laughing and saying—“I don’t often give acquaintances such a warm welcome!” The next thing he knew was that someone had thrust a racket into his hand, and he heard, as in a dream, Miss Thayer telling her friend that Mr. Newbold was a splendid tennis-player, and that she would have to do her best to beat him, but that she hoped she would for the honor of the college. And then he found himself, somehow, walking over to the court, and, before he could protest, Miss Atterbury was on the other side, and was asking him kindly but briskly if he were ready to play. He thought he was as near ready as he ever would be, so he said “Play!” and waited resignedly for her serve.

It was just after Miss Atterbury had piled up an appalling number of games against him, and he had come to the conclusion that he knew what it would be like to stand fire from a Krupp gun, and had decided that tight patent leathers and a long coat were not just what he would have chosen to play tennis in, that he saw Miss Atterbury, to his intense relief, throw down her racket and run up the hill a little way. She was back in an instant with Miss Thayer and a tall, handsome girl, carrying a lot of golf clubs. When young Newbold saw the golf clubs he felt so tired that he thought he would sit down on the cold ground, although he knew how dangerous such a proceeding was, especially when he was so painfully aware of how hot his head was and how clammy his linen felt.

“Mr. Newbold!” he heard Miss Atterbury say, “I want to present you to Miss Yale. She is the captain of the Golf Club, and I knew you would want to meet her. Anyone who is such an authority on the subject as you proved yourself to be in that article would, of course, want to see the links out here.”

“Ah! thank you!” murmured Newbold; “but I play very little, you know, and I wouldn’t interrupt your game for the world!”

But Miss Yale told him how interested she

had been in his article, and that she wouldn’t feel that she had done her duty by the college unless she showed him the links, and that he really must come with them and tell them whether the meadow-land was too stiff a bit of ground to be gone over. And so Newbold found himself trudging wearily along again between Miss Atterbury and Miss Yale, who seemed as fresh as though they hadn’t moved that day. The links seemed distressingly far off, and the holes absurdly distant from each other. His arms ached so from tennis that he could scarcely hold the driver Miss Yale gave him.

“I wish you would drive off this tee once—men do that sort of thing so much better than girls,” she was saying, admiringly. “They don’t seem to need any practice at all—just comes natural to them.” Newbold had a very distinct impression that it hadn’t come at all natural to him, and he would greatly have preferred not trying before Miss Yale and the knot of young women who had drawn together at some little distance, and were very obviously watching him under the shallowest pretence of hunting for a lost ball. He felt desperately nervous, and his nervousness did not tend to disappear when he made a frantic try at the ball, digging a hole in the ground about a foot in front of the tee, and almost hitting Miss Atterbury, who jumped back with a little cry very unlike her ordinary calm self.

“I—I beg your pardon,” he began, desperately; but Miss Atterbury assured him that she was all right, and urged him to try again. He did so, and although he balanced himself cautiously on one foot and then on the other, and snapped at the ball several times before trying to hit it, and wobbled his driver after the most approved methods, he topped his ball miserably, and had the mortification of seeing it land in a most difficult hazard. And then he watched Miss Yale drive off with a good backward swing of her club, which hit the ball “sweet and clean,” and sent it a good ninety yards.

“Of course, as you said in your article,” remarked that young woman, picking up her clubs and starting off energetically after the ball, “this is no game for women. It is pre-eminently a man’s game, and a woman’s short collar-bone is never such an obvious mistake as in golf. A man can do so much with a driver or a cleek or a lofter, and the walking is so easy for him, and he is so entirely independent of the weather.” Newbold murmured inarticulate assents as he walked wearily by her. He wondered if she could keep up that pace all around the course, and he especially wondered how far around it was. He had a great deal of difficulty in getting his ball out of the hazard and lofting it up a steep hill, and he savagely wished that he had joined that golf club all his friends were urging him to join, and decided firmly to do so before he slept that night, and to engage the professional’s services for himself, and to practise till he could drive a ball off without utterly destroying all the turf in the vicinity.

They were on the second round, and Newbold was roughly calculating that his erratic plays had made him walk about three miles, and was wondering if he could live to get up the hill in front of him, when he saw Miss Thayer and Miss Yale, who were three holes ahead of him, coming back toward him.

“You look awfully tired and hot,” said Miss Thayer, sympathetically. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like golf? But what an absurd question! Anyone who could write the article on athletics you did must like it. Only, I suppose, girls seem such duffers at it, to you!”

Newbold looked at her sharply. He had an uneasy suspicion that she was laughing at him, but he was too tired to think of any way of finding out whether she was or not, and so he walked on taciturnly and sufferingly.

“I have such a nice surprise for you,” ran on Miss Thayer. “But I won’t tell you what it is yet.” She pulled out her watch. “It is just a quarter to four now, and I think the surprise will not be ready until a quarter after. Can you possibly wait that long?”

Newbold said he thought he might if he could sit down; but Miss Thayer said she disapproved of getting over-heated and then cooling off rapidly, and that she thought they had better keep moving until it was time to see the “surprise.” So they strolled across the grounds, and the two girls seemed to meet an astonishing number of friends, all going their way. And while Newbold was vaguely wondering what their destination might be, and what new torture was in store for him, he heard Miss Yale say, in what sounded to him like the voice of an avenging angel:

“I think we had better show Mr. Newbold our new running-track while we are waiting. He is so interested in such things, and he might suggest some improvements.” And then Newbold felt himself irresistibly compelled to walk on farther and farther. He wondered sadly why they thought he knew anything about running-tracks for girls, and decided that his humorous remarks on the subject in his article had been a great mistake.

“Do you think it’s a fair track?” inquired Miss Yale, anxiously, as they came in sight of it. “It is an eight-lap track, you see, and of course a great many girls only go around four times at first—girls get tired so absurdly easy! Now I suppose men think nothing of making two miles at a time—it is just play for them. Men are so strong—that is their greatest fascination, I think,” she ran on enthusiastically. “Haven’t you seen foot-ball players after a hard practice game start off and run two miles around the track, and seem to think absolutely nothing of it?”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Newbold, unwarily and warmly. “Fellows are so different from girls, you know. A girl cries when she’s tired, doesn’t she? Well, a man just keeps going, you know, and doesn’t let it make any difference to him.”

“I am so glad to hear that, Mr. Newbold,” said Miss Yale, with prompt and suspicious sympathy, and a sudden firmness of tone, “because I wanted dreadfully to ask you to try the track, but hated to do so, for I knew you were tired—at least you look so. But since you just keep going, and it doesn’t make any difference to you, why I would be so awfully obliged if you would run around three or four times. I want to see just how you hold your head and arms. I don’t believe we do it in the best way, you know.”

It was a rare and pleasingly curious sight that Miss Yale and Miss Thayer and a great many other young women assembled near the track, apparently by a strange coincidence, looked upon. It is not often that one has the chance of seeing an immaculately dressed youth, with flushed and desperate countenance, tear madly around an eight-lap track in the presence of a number of flatteringly attentive young women. It occurred to Newbold as he dashed around and around that it would be far preferable to keep going until he fainted away or dropped dead, than to stop and encounter the remarks and glances of those young women. They would at least feel sorry for him in that case, he thought, gloomily. But even that modest and simple desire was not granted him. As he started on the fifth lap he heard Miss Yale call to him to stop. He had a wild inclination to pay no attention to her, but to keep going on and on, but as he got nearer he saw her step out toward him and put up a warning hand.

“Thank you so much,” she said, warmly. “I think we have all had a lesson in running which we shall not forget soon. I hope you are not tired?” she went on, anxiously.

Newbold said, “Oh, no!” but he felt very tired indeed. His feet ached horribly and his head felt hot and dizzy, and there were queer, sharp pains shooting through his body which made him think forebodingly of pneumonia.

“The surprise is ready—Miss Atterbury is going to have the crew out for your especial benefit!” went on Miss Yale, triumphantly. “Don’t you feel complimented? And you are to pull Miss Thayer and myself about while they go through a little practice for you. Not much, you know, but just enough to show you the stroke and speed we get. The boat is a beauty—but then, of course, you know so much more about it than we do! I imagine from your article that you must pull an oar capitally. Miss Thayer says a cat-boat is your especial hobby, though.”

“Did Miss Thayer say that?” began Newbold, hotly. “Beastly things, I think—hate ’em!”

Miss Yale smiled incredulously and brightly at him.

“How modest you are!” she said, admiringly. “Ah! there is Miss Atterbury!”

Newbold saw some one waving frantically at them.

“Come on!” exclaimed Miss Yale; “we want to see them start off—that’s the best part.”

Newbold never remembered afterward how he got across the intervening space, or how he got into a boat with the two young women. The first thing he heard was Miss Atterbury asking him anxiously how he liked the new sliding-seats, and what he thought of the proportions of the boat, and about outriggers in general, and where he thought they could be built best and cheapest. Newbold felt about as capable of instructing her on such points as of judging the pictures at a Salon exhibit, and he longed, with a longing born of utter exhaustion and desperation, to get away. As he wearily pulled the heavy, unwieldy boat about after the light practice-barge, which kept an appalling distance ahead of him, he decided within himself that the physical development of women had been carried to an absurd and alarming extent, and that men simply were not in it with them when it came to endurance and enthusiasm, and that he had made the mistake of his life when he wrote that article on athletics in girls’ colleges, and that his chief might talk until he was blue in the face before he would ever consent again to write about anything of which he knew so little.

They were very disappointed when he told them firmly that he could not stay to dinner or to the concert, but that he had a pressing engagement that would take him back to the city. And they said that there were still the Swedish gymnastics and basket-ball and pole-vaulting to see, and that they were afraid he had not enjoyed himself or he would have got rid of that engagement in some way; but he assured them impressively that he had never spent a more instructive or peculiarly interesting afternoon in his life.

Miss Thayer took him back to the station in her trap, and remarked on how much shorter the way seemed with a good horse; and when she bade him good-by she told him that she would be looking out for another article in his paper, and that she would be much disappointed if his visit had not inspired him to write something. To which Newbold replied that that was his pressing engagement—he was going back to the city to write another article on athletics in girls’ colleges, and that he thought it would be different and better than the former one, but that he would not put his initials to it this time.

IT was a sort of farewell party, and the young woman who was going away and who was the object of so much solicitude and tender concern was sitting, enshrined as it were, on a divan covered with a Navahoe Indian blanket and surrounded by innumerable cushions, while the rest hung about her or took up precarious attitudes on the table in dangerous proximity to the student lamps, or settled themselves in steamer-chairs, or sat upon the tiger-skin on the floor. That is, the American girls did; Kan Ato, the pretty Japanese who had come arrayed in a gorgeous new kimono—dull blue embroidered splendidly in silver—sat upright and very stiffly in the window-seat with the dark red of the curtains showing off her jet black hair and her gown wonderfully well; while the tall Scotch girl, a cousin of the guest of honor, had trusted her generous proportions to the only large, comfortable American chair in the room.

There was a great deal of noise and confusion and questioning, and Miss Lavington, as she leaned back against her cushions, half wished that after all the doctor had not let her come. She had been very ill—a short, sharp attack of typhoid—and although she had enjoyed tremendously the wine jelly, and the violets, and the hushed, anxious tones of her friends as they inquired after her at the infirmary, and the many remarks about her good qualities and how clever she was in Conic Sections—“just as if she were really dead,” as she said—still she felt rather too weak properly to appreciate her friends’ enthusiastic sympathy at such close range. And then the thought of going away—and so far away—had made her feel blue and dispirited.

She was a very pretty English girl, whose father—a colonel in an Indian regiment—had sent her to America in the care of a sister of his who had moved to “the States;” and so it had come about that, instead of being a Girton or Newnham girl, she had matriculated at this American college. And now her father had written decisively for her to come out and join him in India, and her college friendships and ties were all to be broken. He had been writing about it for some time, and her illness had finally precipitated the affair. She had only waited until she grew strong enough to start, and the following day had been decided upon. The long sea-voyage would be the very thing for her, the doctor had thought.

She was trying to explain to the interested young women just what route she would take, and was rapidly filling their souls with envy at the familiar mention of Brindisi and Cairo and Aden, when there was a knock and a quick opening of the door and a girl came into the room. She was a very beautiful young woman, and when she sat down on the divan beside Miss Lavington she seemed suddenly to absorb all the attention and interest, and to become in some magical way the guest of honor and centre of attraction. She met with a very enthusiastic reception, for she had that afternoon gained the tennis championship for her class—she was a senior—and had not yet changed her white flannel suit with scarlet sumach leaves worked on it, and as she dragged off her soft cap, one could see that her hair still lay in damp curls upon her forehead.

After she had entered the room one would have realized that they had really been waiting for her. Her mere presence seemed to make a difference. It was this magnetic quality which rendered her so irresistible and all adverse criticism of her so absurd. People might differ as to her beauty—there were some indeed, who said that she was too large, or that her eyes were not very expressive, or that her mouth was too small, but they all fell under her influence in some remarkable way, and were very much flattered when she asked them to drive with her, and never failed to point her out to their friends as “the College Beauty, you know;” and even those who honestly wondered how she ever got through her examinations were forced to admit that she had a great deal of natural talent, which she did not always care to exercise. She was a fine tennis player too, using either hand equally well, and when the Tennis Association got itself into debt and she saved the situation by beguiling, in some inexplicable way, the famous musical organization of a certain university into giving a concert for its benefit, her popularity reached its climax. To the less sought-after girls, her composure and ease of manner while surrounded by an admiring circle of college men was nothing short of marvellous, and the recklessly generous disposal which she made of these youths to her less attractive friends seemed to betoken a social prodigality little short of madness.

Miss Lavington looked at her imploringly.

“Make them keep quiet, won’t you?” she said. The Beauty looked around her—“Are you trying to make her ill again, so she can’t go?” she asked.

Her words had the desired effect, and the girl who had been twanging abstractedly at a banjeurine put it down.

“She oughtn’t to leave!” she declared, plaintively. “It’s a shame! Here we are, just beginning the semestre, and she’s only half through her college course anyway, and just because her father wants her she has to give up everything and go.”

“Yes, and you know she’ll be sure to have jungle-fever or get bitten by a cobra or something, and die,” suggested someone cheerfully, if a trifle vaguely.

The girl lying on the tiger-skin looked up.

“I know why her father wants her,” she began calmly. “There is an officer—young, handsome, well born, a fine place in Surrey or Devon or Kent, been in the family for generations, old uncle, no children—just the thing for her. Her father will take her up to some place in the Himalayas to spend the summer, and he will arrange for the handsome, young, etc., officer to be there, and next fall we will receive the cards. It sounds just like one of Kipling’s stories, doesn’t it?”

They were all laughing by the time she had finished, but The Beauty, looking at the girl beside her, suddenly stopped smiling. There was a conscious flush on Miss Lavington’s face which set her to thinking, and then she glanced over to the big Scotch girl and waited an instant.

“Tell us all about it,” she said finally to Miss Lavington. The girl looked up quickly and then dropped her eyes again.

“There isn’t much to tell,” she began. The others were listening now. Even Kan Ato, smiling in her pensive, oriental way, leaned far forward so as not to lose a word.

“He isn’t rich and he hasn’t any place in Surrey—or anywhere else that I know of, except perhaps in India,” she went on. “But he is young and handsome. We used to know each other when we were children—he is a sort of cousin—but I haven’t seen him for years. We used to be very much in love with each other.” She smiled. “My father writes me that he says he is still in love with me, and so—perhaps we are to be married.”

“I knew it,” sighed the girl on the tiger-rug, in a satisfied sort of way.

The Beauty looked at the English girl curiously. “And you haven’t seen him for years? and yet you think of marrying him! How do you know you will love him now?—you are both changed—you may be two totally different people from the children who fell in love.” She had spoken vehemently and quickly, and Miss Lavington gazed at her with languid surprise.

“You are not in love with him yourself?” she said, smilingly.

The girl made a quick, impatient gesture.

“I am speaking seriously,” she said. “You are several years younger than I am, and you don’t know what you are doing. Don’t let your father—don’t let anyone—persuade you to bind yourself to a man you don’t know, whose life has been so vitally different from your own as to render the possibility of sympathy between you very slight.”

Miss Lavington looked at her rather coldly.

“You are interesting yourself unnecessarily,” she said; “I loved him not so many years ago—it cannot be possible that so short a time would change us completely.”

The Beauty leaned her head back with sudden wearied look on her face. “A few years at our time of life makes all the difference in the world,” she said, earnestly. “What pleased and interested and fascinated us at eighteen might very possibly disappoint and disgust us at twenty or twenty-two. I do not mean to preach,” she said, smiling deprecatingly and turning to the rest, “but you know as well as I what an influence this college life has on us, and how hard it is to go back to former conditions. If we get stronger here we also get less adaptable. We are all affected by the earnestness and the culture and advancement of the life we lead here for four years, whether we will or no, and it is very hard to go back!”

They were all looking at her in amazement. The Beauty was not much given to that sort of thing. She stopped abruptly as if herself aware of the sensation she was creating, and laughed rather constrainedly.

“Don’t marry your handsome officer unless you are in love with him!” she said insistingly still to the girl beside her. “Don’t mistake the childish affection you felt for him for something deeper. You have your whole life before you—don’t spoil it by precipitation or a false generosity or a reckless passion!” There was an anxious, troubled look in her eyes.

The girl still stretched out on the tiger-skin glanced up again at The Beauty. “I seem to have started a subject in which you are deeply interested,” she said gayly to her. “And one in which you have had enormous experience too. Do you know you have an almost uncanny way of fascinating every man who comes near you. It’s a sure thing. None of the rest of us have a chance. I believe you could marry half a dozen or so at any time that you would take the trouble to say ‘yes’!”

The girl addressed looked openly amused—“Please take a few off your list,” she said. But the other refused to notice her remark and ran on in her light way.

“And they are all so nice too—it is really hard to choose, but I think on the whole I prefer a certain young man who shall be nameless. Now, would you call his devotion to yourself ‘mad precipitation or a false generosity or a reckless passion?’” She moved herself lazily over the yellow skin until her head rested against the girl’s knee.

“And he is such a nice, eligible youth too. I hope you are not going to spoil his life by refusing him. Only think how lovely it would be to have one’s father-in-law representing the majesty of these United States at an Emperor’s court,” she went on, turning gayly to the others. “And he is so handsome and clever! He will be representing Uncle Sam himself some day, and she will be reading up the rules of court etiquette and receiving invitations from the Lord Chamberlain to dine with the Queen, and fuming because the Grand Duchess of something or other has the right to walk in to dinner before her.” She was not noticing the girl’s significant silence. “Of course he is just the man for you—you wouldn’t make any but a brilliant match, you know, with your beauty and society manner. But just for the present—well, next winter you will début, and you will be much talked about, and the youth will not be with his father at the European capital, but will be very much en évidence here, and then—after Easter we shall get your cards!”

She twisted her head around, smiling, so as to get a look at the girl’s face above her. It wore so grave and hopeless an expression that she gave a little cry.

“Forgive me,” she said, confusedly, “but you do love him, don’t you?”

The Beauty turned her eyes away and shook herself slightly, as if awakening from a dream.

“As confession seems to be the order of the hour,” she said in a dull tone, and smiling peculiarly, “I don’t mind owning that I do love him very much.”

She got up abruptly and moved toward the door amid a chorus of protests, but she would not stay. At the threshold she turned to Miss Lavington.

“Send your things down by the coach,” she said. “If you will let me I will be glad to drive you to the station myself to-morrow.”

 

When she got to her own study she found a letter thrust under the door with the familiar number of her room scrawled upon it in pencil. She picked it up, and as she looked at the address an expression of profound dislike and weariness came into her face. She opened the door slowly and put the letter down upon her desk, looking at it thoughtfully for a few moments. The handwriting was irresolute and boyish. She shivered slightly as she took the letter up with sudden resolution and tore it open. As she sat there and read it a look of hatred and disgust and utter hopelessness, strangely at variance with her usual brilliant expression, settled harshly upon her lovely, young face.

“My Dearest Wife,” it ran, “Forgive me! but this is about the only luxury I indulge in!—calling you in my letters what I dare not call you as yet before the world.

“I am in a retrospective mood to-night, and feel like writing all sorts of things which I am afraid you won’t much like. Do you know I think that college is doing you harm! Don’t get angry at this, but sometimes I’m afraid you have repented of our boy and girl runaway match; but God knows I haven’t, and I’m glad I didn’t go to college but came out West and went to work for us both. I haven’t succeeded very brilliantly and may be the life has roughened me a bit, but I guess you can have the best there is out here, and I am still as devoted to you as in those old days of the summer before you went to that confounded (excuse me!) college, when you were just eighteen and I barely twenty-one. How interminably long four years seemed to wait then! But it was a case of getting married secretly and of waiting, or of not getting you at all. Sometimes I can hardly stand it, and I’d come back now and take you away, if I wasn’t so afraid of that blessed old father of yours—but I’m just as big a coward as I was three years ago, when I couldn’t screw up courage enough to go to him and tell him that he’d have to relinquish his pet scheme of sending his daughter to college, for she belonged to me. Whew! what a scene we’d have had! It was best to wait, I suppose.

“After all, only a year and then I can claim you! Have you changed any? I’m afraid you’re way ahead of me now. I always had an uncomfortable suspicion that you were very much my superior, and I have half fancied that perhaps you only loved me because I was so madly—so passionately in love with you. Did I over-persuade you? have you ceased to love me? Sometimes I get half sick with fear. You are all I have! But after all I feel safe enough—I know you too well not to know that you will never break your promise—even one you hate. But you know I’ll never hold you to that marriage—though it was all valid enough—if you don’t want to be held. I can simply blow my good-for-nothing brains out.

“I won’t write any more to-night. There is so much swearing and noise down in the street that I can hardly think; besides I don’t feel just like it, and lately your letters have only irritated me. But I won’t complain, for I know how generously you have acted and what brilliant prospects you have given up for my precious self!

“Devotedly yours and only yours,

“G. G. B.”

WHEN Miss Eva Hungerford married Stanhope there was one young lady intensely glad of it, although it was whispered that there were also two or three who were quite the contrary. But Mrs. Renford Phillips—once Miss Violet Featherstone—had particular reasons for rejoicing, and she wrote a long letter to Miss Hungerford when she heard of the engagement, and said that she hoped “by-gones would be by-gones now, and that she was sure her friend would be a broader-minded and more perfect woman, if that were possible, now that she was going to have the additional experience of getting married.”

Miss Hungerford wrote her a most cordial reply, and the two girls, for several years slightly estranged, became again the friends they had been during the first three years of their college life.

The blow had fallen very suddenly, and Miss Hungerford had found it hard to forgive what she called, in her heart, her friend’s tacit deceit and culpable silence. But, as she wrote in her reply to Mrs. Phillips’s letter, her opinions had undergone a decided change, and she felt that perhaps she had been a little hard on her friend and had not understood her feelings and the pressure brought to bear upon her, and she acknowledged that circumstances might materially alter one’s views and actions. And Miss Featherstone, who had been the most talked about girl in college during the last semestre of her junior year, and who had suffered acutely under Miss Hungerford’s indifferently concealed displeasure and surprise at her conduct, replied that now she could be truly happy in her husband and her home, and insisted that Mr. and Mrs. Stanhope should visit her in the Berkshire Hills that summer.

This they did, and though, of course, each thought her husband much the handsomer and more distinguished-looking, still they were very affectionate toward each other, and planned to be at Cowes together the next summer for the yachting.

As has been said, their estrangement happened very suddenly and came about by an unfortunate occurrence one morning in the office of the college.

Anyone who has never had the privilege of being in that office on a Monday morning, just after chapel, can have but a faint idea of pandemonium. The whole seven hundred students seem to be revolving about. There are the young women standing around, waiting to take the next train into Boston, not having been able to go on the early express because they had foolishly forgotten to get a leave of absence on the Saturday previous, and who are furtively trying not to see their friends who are not going on at all, so as to keep from having to attend to their commissions; and there is the girl who is telephoning for roses to wear at the concert that night, and those who are booking boats and tennis courts, and others reading bulletins; and when there is an extra commotion and the crowd is forced back a little to let the cords be pulled up around the desk so as to clear a space; and when the carrier comes in and tumbles the big mail-bags into the middle of it with one hand and unlocks them at apparently the same instant with the other; and when about ten young women fall upon the bags and rend their contents from them, and begin to assort and number and tie up the letters, all the time besieged by their excluded friends to give them their mail on the spot as they are going away, the noise and excitement reach a climax.

But it is all very pleasant and enlivening except the telephone bell, which rings constantly and is wearing on the nerves. It rings not only for all telephone messages but for all telegrams, for the college, being a mile or so from the telegraph station, everything is simply telephoned up to save delays, and that a long and continuous procession of small messenger boys may not be forever circulating between the college and the station.

It was this unfortunate custom of telephoning telegrams, unknown of course to the majority of outsiders, that precipitated the affair. On that particular Monday morning, when the confusion in the office was at its worst, the telephone bell suddenly rang unusually loudly and long, and the nervous Freshman on duty jumped toward it with a warning motion to the rest to keep quiet.

“Hush! it’s a telegram,” she said in a moment, and instantly there was silence, for a telegram is always dreaded where there are so many to whom it could bear ill news. She reached for a pad of paper and a pencil to take it down. From the other end came “Important. Repeat slowly as I deliver it.” The nervous Freshman said “All right,” and braced herself against the support to write.

“To Miss Violet Featherstone.” The docile Freshman repeated it and then said “Wait!” and looked around.

“If Miss Featherstone is here,” she remarked, “she can come to the telephone;” but someone volunteered the information that Miss Featherstone had left by the early train for Boston, and the telephoning proceeded.

“My darling—” the Freshman gasped a little and then repeated slowly “My darling.” There was some suppressed commotion for an instant among the crowd around the doors, and the two at the telephone went at it again.

“I have not heard from you for three days.”

“I have not heard from you for three days,” mumbled the Freshman.

“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”

“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”

 

When Miss Featherstone reached the college that afternoon she thought she detected a suppressed excitement about the whole place, though she felt rather too tired to think much about it, but when she got to her room she found a telephone message for her which made her sink weakly into a chair.

An appalling vision of the consequences rose before her. She tried to think connectedly, but the effort was too much. Her only thought was of the effect it would have on her friend Eva Hungerford. She would go to her immediately and find out how much she knew.

As she went along the corridors more than one acquaintance smiled knowingly at her, but she only hurried on. When she reached Miss Hungerford’s rooms, she found that young lady looking dejectedly out of the windows. Her melancholy turned to stony haughtiness, however, when Miss Featherstone approached her tremblingly.

“Yes, the whole college knew of it,” she assured her. “The message had been telephoned up when the office was crowded, and by this time everyone was aware of what her best friend had not known.”

Miss Featherstone rebelled a little under Miss Hungerford’s chilling glance and attempted to explain, but her friend was very sad and firm, and said she did not see how any explanation could do away with the fact that Violet Featherstone had broken the solemn vow they had made together never to marry, but to devote themselves to serious study as a life-work. But when Miss Featherstone quite broke down under her friend’s disapprobation, Miss Hungerford relented a little and asked her if she were really so fond of Renford Phillips, and if she thought life with him in Morristown would compensate her for the loss of Oxford and the Bodleian. Miss Featherstone cried a little at that, and said she thought it would, and that she had started a hundred times to tell her dearest friend about her engagement, but she knew how she thought about such things, and how she would lose her respect for allowing anything to interfere with their plans for mental advancement. And Miss Hungerford only sighed and wrote that night to her mother that another of her illusions had been dispelled, but that she was firmer than ever in her determination to make something of herself.

Miss Featherstone did not return for her degree, but had a pretty church wedding that summer at Stockbridge, and Miss Hungerford sent her a very handsome wedding gift, but refused to be present at the marriage. They did not write to each other much the next year, and Miss Hungerford worked so hard that the Faculty had to interfere, and when she left college with a B. S. degree, smiling sadly and saying that she would be a bachelor as well as an old maid, everybody remarked what a superior girl she was to her friend Violet Featherstone.

SHE was always called that, and there were very few of the seven hundred students who really knew or cared whether it was her little name or her family name. The uncertainty about it seemed particularly appropriate someway—her whole personality was vague. That is at the beginning; later——

For the first month she passed comparatively unnoticed. In the wild confusion of setting up household gods and arranging schedules, hopeless as Chinese puzzles, of finding out where the Greek instructors can see you professionally, and when the art school is open, and why you cannot take books from the library, and when the elevator runs, anyone less remarkable-looking than an American Indian or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands is apt to be overlooked. But after the preliminary scuffle is over and there is a lull in the storm, and one begins to remember vaguely having seen that dress or face before somewhere, and when one no longer turns up at the history or art rooms instead of the chemical laboratories, and when one ceases to take the assistant professor of physics for the girl who sat next to you in the trigonometry recitation—then the individual comes in for her share of attention.

“Miss Rose” possibly got more than her share. Curious young women soon began to nudge each other, and ask in whispers who she was. And just at first there were covert smiles and a little cruelly good-natured joking, and the inevitable feeble punning on her name and withered looks. There were some who said she could not be more than forty-five, but they were in the minority, and even the more generously inclined could not deny that her face was very old and wrinkled and tired-looking, and that her hair was fast getting gray around the temples, though her eyes still retained a brilliancy quite feverish, and an eager, unsatisfied sort of look that struck some of the more imaginative as pathetic. As a freshman she seemed indeed to be hopelessly out of place—though not so much so, perhaps, as the little Chicago beauty who was so much more interested in her gowns and looks than in her work, that at the beginning of her second semestre she went home with an attack of pneumonia, brought on by having been left out in the cold after an examination in conic sections.

That type, however, is not uncommon, while “Miss Rose” was especially puzzling. They could not quite understand her, and there were even some among the august body of ridiculous freshmen who somewhat resented her entrance into their ranks, and wondered rather discontentedly why she did not join the great body of “T-specs” to which she so evidently belonged.

But it was characteristic of this woman that she preferred to begin at the beginning and work her way up—to take the regular systematic grind and discipline of the freshman’s lot—to matriculating in an elective course where she could get through easily enough if she were so inclined. She saw no incongruity in her position; she rarely seemed to notice the difference between herself and the younger, quicker intellects around her, and she worked with an enthusiasm and persistence that put most of the young women to shame. That she had taught was evident—in what little out-of-the-way Western town, or sleepy Southern one, no one knew; but sometimes there were amusing little scenes between herself and the professor, when the old habit of school-room tyranny which she had once exercised herself was strong upon her, and she lapsed unconsciously into the didactic manner of her former life. And sometimes she became discouraged when the long lack of strict mental discipline irked her, and when she saw in a glimpse how far she was behind the girl of nineteen beside her, and how hopeless was the struggle she was making against youth and training. There were moments when she realized that she had begun too late, that the time she had lost was lost irretrievably. But the reaction would quickly come and she would work away with renewed energy, and they were very patient with her and would lend her a helping hand where a younger student would have been let most severely alone, to sink or swim after the approved method.

But if her mathematics and chemistry and Tacitus left much to be desired, there was one field in which she shone resplendently. “No one could touch her”—as one young woman slangly but enthusiastically remarked—“when it came to the Bible.” There she was in her glory, and her vast knowledge of the wars of Jeroboam and Rehoboam, and her appalling familiarity with Shamgar and the prophets, and the meaning of the Urim and Thummim, and other such things, was the envy and despair of the younger and less biblically inclined. And if at times she was a trifle too prolix and had to be stopped in her flow of information, there was very genuine regret on the part of the less well informed.

And in time she came to make a great many friends. Her peculiar ways no longer struck them as comical, and if anyone had dared make reference to the plainness of her gowns or the strict economies she practised to get through, that person would have very soon discovered her mistake; and they pretended not to know that she would not join any of the societies because of the dues, and that she did her own laundry on Monday afternoons. Indeed, she was so kindly disposed and so cheerful and helpful, and seemed so interested in all the class projects and even in the sports, at which of course she could only look on, that little by little she came to be a great favorite, and the one to whom the rest naturally turned when there was any hitch or especial need for advice. And then, of course, as she was not to be thought of in the light of a possible candidate for president or vice-president or captain of the crew, or any of the other desirable high-places, those misguided young women who did have such literary, social, or athletic aspirations would go to her and confide their hopes and fears, and in some strange way they would all feel very much more comfortable and happy in their minds after such confessions. And so she got to be a sort of class institution in a very short while, and the captains of different stylish but rather un-nautical freshman crews vied with each other in invitations to “come over the lake” with them, and the president of the Tennis Association sent her a special and entirely superfluous invitation to the spring tournament on the club’s finest paper, and the senior editor of the college magazine, whose sister was a freshman, was made to ask her for a short article on the “Study of the Bible,” and at the concerts and receptions many young women, kindly and socially disposed, would introduce her to their brothers and other male relations who had been enticed out, before taking them on to see the lake, or a certain famous walk, or the Art Building, or the Gymnasium.

 

It was about the middle of the winter semestre that it happened, and of course it was Clara Arnold who knew about it first. Miss Arnold had liked “Miss Rose” from the beginning. She had taken a fancy to the hard-working woman, who had returned it with wondering admiration for the handsome, clever girl. And so Miss Arnold got into the habit of stopping for her occasionally to walk or drive, and it was when she went for her to go on one of those expeditions, that she discovered the trouble. She found “Miss Rose” sitting before her desk with a crumpled newspaper in her hand, and a dazed, hopeless expression on her face which cut the girl to the heart. Her things were scattered about the room, on the bed and chairs, an open trunk half-filled stood in one corner. Miss Arnold stared around in amazement.

“The bank’s broken,” said “Miss Rose” simply, in answer to her questioning glance, and pointed dully to the paper. “I might have known that little bank couldn’t hold out when so many big ones have gone under this year,” she went on, half speaking to herself.

Miss Arnold picked up the paper and read an article on the first page marked around with a blue pencil. She did not understand the technicalities, but she made out that the “City Bank” of a small town in Idaho had been forced to close, and that depositors would not get more than five or ten cents on the dollar.

“Every cent I’ve saved up was in that bank!” The woman turned herself slowly in her chair and laid her face down on the desk with her arms above her head. She spoke in muffled tones into which a strange bitterness had crept.

“I’ve worked all my life—ever since I was twenty—to get enough money to come to college on. I had barely enough to stay here at all—and now—” she stopped suddenly, breathing hard. “I haven’t been here a year yet,” she broke out at last.

“Well, I’ll have to go back to teaching. Great heavens! I thought I’d finished with that!”

Miss Arnold seated herself on a clear corner of the bed.

“Look here, ‘Miss Rose,’” she said, excitedly, “of course you aren’t going to stop college now, when you’re doing so well and—and we all like you so much and—and you’re just beginning your course.” She stumbled on—“Has everything gone?—can’t you do something?”

“Miss Rose” looked up slowly—“Everything,” she said grimly, and then, with the pathetically resigned air of one who has been used to misfortunes and has learned to accept them quietly, “I’ve worked all my life, I suppose I can go at it again.” She looked around her. “I’ll be gone this time to-morrow, and then I won’t feel so badly;”—she put her head down on the desk again.

Miss Arnold looked thoughtfully at her for a few minutes and then, with a sudden movement, she got up and went out, closing the door softly behind her.

It was about nine o’clock that evening and “Miss Rose” had almost finished packing. She was feeling particularly disheartened and was taking the books from the cases one by one in a very mournful way, when she heard footsteps and a subdued but very excited whispering outside her door. She got up languidly and threaded her way among the books and cushions and odd articles of clothing heaped up on the floor. As she opened the door, the light from her student-lamp fell upon the very red face of a freshman propelled apparently into the room by the two or three others behind her, who seemed to have a wild desire to efface themselves entirely.

“Miss Rose,” gasped the blushing freshman in the van, “here—here is a letter for you. We’ve just had a class meeting—” she looked nervously at the others who were edging away.

There was an indistinct chorus from them which sounded like “hope you’ll accept,” and then they retreated with as much dignity as possible, but in great haste.

“Miss Rose” opened the letter and gave a little cry as a check for a good round sum drawn on the class treasurer fell to the floor. And then she sat weakly down on the bed and cried a little from pure happiness as she read it all over.

“The class of ’9—have just heard of ‘Miss Rose’s’ financial embarrassment occasioned by the failure of the —— City Bank, and being most unwilling to lose so valuable and appreciated a member, beg that she will accept the enclosed and continue with the class until the end of the year.”

A COLLEGE for women is generally looked upon by the outside world and the visiting preachers as a haven of rest, a sort of oasis in the desert of life, a Paradise with a large and flourishing Tree of Knowledge of which one is commanded to eat, and where one is happily ignorant of the “struggle for life,” and the woes and evils of the world.

Such views have been so often expressed and inculcated that it appears a little ungracious and stubborn to insist that the bishop who comes out and delivers a sermon once a year, or the brilliant young graduate from a neighboring seminary—who is sent because the dean has been suddenly called away and who is quaking with fear at the ordeal—cannot possibly know all about a girl’s college life and its temptations and its trials and its vanities.

When the heterogeneous mass of humanity which makes up a big college is got together and in close relation for ten months at a time, there is bound to be action and reaction. When New York society girls and missionaries’ daughters from India, and Boston Latin-school girls and native Japanese, and Westerners and Georgians and Australians and “Teacher Specials,” and very young preparatory-school girls, are all mixed up together, it inevitably happens that there is some friction and many unexpected and interesting results. One of these is that it not infrequently happens that a young woman leaves college an entirely different person from the girl who took her entrance examinations, and sometimes the change is for the better and sometimes for the worse, or it may be unimportant and relate only to the way she has got to wearing her hair, or the amount of extra money she considers necessary. At any rate, a noticeable change of some sort always operates in a girl during her four or five years’ stay at a college, and when she goes home “for good” her friends will criticise her from their different points of view, and will be sure to tell her whether she is improved or not.

When Miss Eva Hungerford returned for her senior year at college, having been greatly disappointed in one of her friends, she determined to make no new ones, but to work very hard and keep a great deal to herself. She succeeded so well in her efforts that, after she had been there three months, she became aware that she knew absolutely none of the new students. They were an indistinguishable mass to her, with the exception of two or three noticeably pretty, and about the same number of extremely homely young women whose physique rendered them conspicuous. To her uninterested gaze the large majority seemed to be distressingly like all previous freshman classes, and endowed with the same modest amount of good looks and intellectual foreheads.

But in college life it is a strange fact that while upper classes find it rather difficult to become acquainted among the lower ones, owing, of course, to the unwritten code which prevents a senior from appearing interested in any but those of her own class, yet the incoming students are allowed and take every opportunity of ingratiating themselves with upper-class girls, without injury to their dignity. But Miss Hungerford, who had surrounded herself with quite an impenetrable air of seniority, and who was so extremely handsome and distant-looking, by her appearance and bearing had exercised a rather chilling influence on young aspirants for an introduction, and was secretly very much looked up to and feared.

She was not entirely unconscious of the effect she produced, and was therefore decidedly surprised one day to receive a call from a freshman who lived only a few doors from her, but of whose existence she had not been aware. She thought the child—she was very young, not more than sixteen—uninteresting, and that it was an evidence of extremely bad taste, and unconventionality on her part to call in that unprovoked way. But she was very polite to her uninvited guest, and asked her the usual questions, and the girl, who was very naïve, replied with a loquacity quite trying to her hostess.

Miss Hungerford was rather indignant after her visitor had gone, and wondered why she had had to be interrupted in an analytical study of “Prometheus Unbound,” to listen to a child tell her that she had never been out of Iowa before, and that her mother had not wanted her to come to college, but that her father had always said she should have “a higher education,” and so, after presumably much domestic wrangling, she was there. Miss Hungerford could not remember much else of what the young girl had told her, having listened rather absently to her replies, but she had a distinct impression that her visitor was not at all good-looking, with only a fine pair of eyes to redeem her pale face, and that her clothes were atrocious, and that she was

gauche and decidedly of a social class that Miss Hungerford was not in the habit of mingling with away from college. For even in a very democratic college there are social grades, and although it is the thing to meet in a most friendly way at all class functions, still, a narrow line of distinction may be perceived on social occasions.

Altogether Miss Hungerford felt rather aggrieved and hoped she would not be bothered again. But she was. Miss Betty Harmon, of Sioux City, Ia., had had a fearful struggle with her timidity and retiring nature, when she called on Miss Hungerford, and having gained a victory over herself, she had no intention of resigning the benefits. So she would smile first when they met in the corridors, and was not above showing how much she appreciated a few words from Miss Hungerford in praise of her tennis serve, and that young woman was even uncomfortably conscious that her youthful admirer had more than once followed her to the library, where, under pretence of reading, she had stolen furtive glances at her. Later there were notes, and roses, and requests to go boating.

Miss Hungerford strongly objected to such proceedings, not only because she did not wish to be rendered ridiculous by an insignificant freshman from Iowa, but also because she was a very sensible girl, and entirely disapproved of the “eclectic affinity” business, and she had no intention of allowing the young girl’s admiration for herself to develop into that abnormal sort of attraction that exists between girls in so many schools and colleges.

The temptation to exalt some upper-class girl into an ideal and lavish upon her an affection which in society would naturally fall to the lot of some very unideal boy, or man, is one of the greatest ordeals a college girl goes through, and one who successfully resists all inducements to become a “divinity student,” or who gets out of the entanglement without damage to herself, is as successfully “proven” as was Lieutenant Ouless after his little affair with Private Ortheris. Even the least romantic girl is apt to find unexpected possibilities in her nature in the way of romantic devotion, so that it was not surprising that Miss Betty Harmon, unimaginative and unsentimental as she was, should have admired so extravagantly as handsome and interesting a girl as Eva Hungerford. The crude Western girl found something extremely attractive in the senior—grace, a social ease and distinction, and that indefinable magnetism which a wealthy, consciously beautiful girl possesses.

But Miss Hungerford, who had no notion of getting herself talked about, and whose Eastern sensitiveness and prejudices were continually being shocked by the younger girl’s crudities, so persistently frowned down upon and ignored her under-class admirer, that even Miss Harmon’s devotion paled, and the roses and notes and boating excursions ceased. She began to perceive that the faint line of social distinction, so rarely perceptible in the college, had been drawn in her case.

During the last semestre of the year Miss Hungerford, who was very tired and busy, seemed almost oblivious of the young girl’s existence, and even forgot to smile at her when they met on the campus. And when on her Baccalaureate Sunday a box of white roses—the last mute expression of Miss Harmon’s expiring affection—was handed her without any card, she wondered who had sent them and concluded they must have been ordered by a man she knew.

 

Three years after leaving college Miss Hungerford married, much to her friends’ surprise, and a year after that she and her husband went abroad. Of course they went to Paris, where Mrs. Stanhope, who had spent much time there after leaving college, had a great many friends, and innumerable dinners were given to them and they enjoyed themselves very much, until it got so cold that Mrs. Stanhope said she must go to Cannes. Of course it immediately struck Stanhope, who adored his wife, that it was entirely too cold to stay in Paris, and so they went south, though their friends made a great fuss over their departure.

They stayed away much longer than they had intended, having been enticed into going to Malta by some American acquaintances, and when they got back to Paris hundreds of interesting things seemed to have happened in their absence, and a great many people and events were being talked about of which they knew nothing. But the wife of the American minister, who was an old friend, went to see Mrs. Stanhope immediately to invite her to an informal dinner the next evening, and stayed the entire afternoon, telling her of everything that had happened and who all the new people were—the New American Beauty for instance. She could not believe that her friend had not heard of nor seen the New Beauty.

“Why, haven’t you ever seen her pictures—and the notices of her?”

Mrs. Stanhope was slightly aggrieved. She knew absolutely nothing about her.

“And I am completely astonished that they aren’t talking of her at Cannes.”

Mrs. Stanhope reminded her friend that she had been immured at Malta since leaving the Riviera.

“Oh, well, of course her fame has reached there by this time. Why, all Paris is talking about her—and you know yourself”—observed that astute lady, impressively—“how much it takes to make Paris stop and look at you.” Mrs. Stanhope said “Yes,” and wanted to know who The Beauty’s people were, and where she had come from.

“Oh, I don’t know,” declared her friend. “No one seems to inquire. She is so beautiful and sufficient in herself that one does not care much for the rest. They are immensely rich—recently, I believe—though you would never know it from her manner. She is charming and thoroughly well-bred. Her father, I hear, is a typical American business man—not much en évidence, you know. He leaves that to his daughter, and she does it very well. He is a Senator—or something—from the West, and made such a name for himself at Washington that they thought he was too bright to stay there, so they sent him over here to help settle that international treaty affair—you know perhaps—I don’t, I only pretend to.”

“How did she do it?” demanded Mrs. Stanhope, in that simply comprehensive way women have when talking about another woman.

“Oh, she just started right in. Courtelais raved over her, and her father paid him twenty thousand dollars to have her painted. The Colony took her up, and the rest just followed naturally. The portrait is really charming, though she was dressed—well, I don’t think any French girl would have sat in that costume.”

“Is she really so beautiful?”

“Well—not regularly beautiful, perhaps—but charming and fascinating, and awfully clever, they say—so clever that very few people suspect her of it, and—oh! well, you can judge for yourself to-morrow evening. By the way, everyone says she is engaged already—Comte de la Tour. You used to know him, I think.” She rose to go. “He is very much in love with her, that is evident.” She thought it best to let Mrs. Stanhope have that piece of news from herself. She did not wish her friend to be taken at a disadvantage, especially in her own house.

Mrs. Stanhope felt the least bit startled. She had known the Comte de la Tour very well indeed in Paris, several years before, and he had been very much in love with her, and had appeared quite genuinely broken-hearted when she refused him. She had not seen him—he had not been in Paris when she was there during the earlier part of the season—but with the comforting faith of people who have never been in love, she had always believed that he would get over his devotion to her, though she felt a rather curious sensation on hearing that her expectations had been so fully realized, and she felt a pardonable curiosity to see the girl who had made him forget her.

She dressed very carefully for the American Minister’s the next evening, and looked a little more than her usual handsome self, when her carriage turned rapidly into the Avenue Hoche. She was somewhat late, and although the Minister and his wife were old friends, she felt worried with herself, for she had made it a rule to be punctual at all social functions, and when she entered the rooms she could see that the guests wore that rather expectant air which signifies that dinner is already slightly behind time. She hurried forward and denounced herself in polite fashion, but her hostess assured her that several others had not yet arrived, and, much relieved, she turned to speak to a bright newspaper man, an old acquaintance, who had arrived in Paris during her absence.

“I am so glad to find you again,” he murmured in his drawl; “they tell me you have been to Malta. How fortunate for you! I suppose now you have been happy in an idyllic, out-of-the-world way, and have not heard a word about Brice’s accident, nor the newspaper duel, nor the New Beauty——”

“But I am not happy, and shall not be until I see your Beauty,” protested Mrs. Stanhope. “I’ve heard about her until I have an all-devouring curiosity to behold her. I haven’t even seen the portrait, or a photograph!”

He fell away from her in mock surprise and despair, and was about to reply, when the portières were drawn aside and Mrs. Stanhope saw coming into the room a very beautiful young girl, with a rather childish, mobile face, and magnificent eyes. She seemed to know everyone, and bowed and smiled right and left in an easy, bright sort of way. Mrs. Stanhope would have known this was The Beauty, even if her entrance had not been accompanied by that significant hush and rather ridiculous closing up of the men in her wake. There was a special charm about the soft contour of her face, and the heavy white satin of her gown, though rather old for such a young girl, set off her beauty admirably.

“Looks just like one of Goodrich’s girls, doesn’t she?” murmured the man at Mrs. Stanhope’s elbow. But that lady was not paying any attention to his remarks. She was looking in a puzzled fashion at the girl’s face, and wondering what there was about it so familiar.

“Isn’t she deliciously beautiful?” he insisted, “and clever! I found it out quite by accident. She’s very careful about letting people know how well informed she is. She’s been to a college somewhere,” he ran on. Mrs. Stanhope was not listening. She was still looking, in a rather abstracted way, at the young girl who was holding a little court on the other side of the room. Her hostess rustled up.

“I am going to send my husband to bring The Beauty to you,” she said, laughingly, and swept across the room. In a moment Mrs. Stanhope saw the girl take the Minister’s arm, and, followed on the other side by the Comte de la Tour, start toward her. For some inexplicable reason she felt annoyed, and half wished to avoid the introduction. The newspaper man was interested. Mrs. Stanhope had never posed as a professional beauty, and she was too noble a woman to have her head turned by flattery, but that did not alter the fact that she had been considered the handsomest woman in the American colony at Paris, and, of course, she knew it. He thought it would be interesting to see how the acknowledged beauty received the younger one.

When the two women were within a few feet of each other, and before the American Minister could say “Mrs. Stanhope,” they each gave a little cry of recognition, and it was the younger one who first regained her composure and extended her hand. She stood there, flushed and smiling, the lights falling on her dark hair and gleaming shoulders, making of her, as the newspaper man had said, one of “Goodrich’s girls.” The childish look had gone out of her eyes, and a little gleam of conscious triumph was in them. There was just a shade of coldness, almost of condescension, in her manner. While the Comte was looking from one to the other, in a rather mystified way, and the American Minister was saying, “Why, I didn’t know—I thought—” Mrs. Stanhope’s mind was running quickly back to her first meeting with the girl before her, and she could only remember, in a confused sort of way, what this girl had once been like. And so they stood for a moment—it seemed an interminably long time to the men—looking a little constrainedly at each other and smiling vaguely. But the older woman quickly recovered herself. She had no notion of being outdone

by the girl before her, and spoke brightly.

“I did not recognize you! How stupid of me! But you see the ‘Beatrice’ confused me, and then the French way everyone has of pronouncing H-a-r-m-ö-n completely put me off the track!”

She tried to be very friendly, and the young girl smiled and looked easily—the newspaper man thought almost defiantly—at her, but it was plain to the three onlookers that in some inscrutable way the meeting had been unfortunate, and they each felt relieved, in an inexplicable fashion, when dinner was announced and the snowy, gleaming length of damask and silver and wax lights stretched between the two women.

. . . . . . .

That night the Comte thought a good deal about the reception of his fiancée by the woman he had once loved, and decided that the American woman was a trifle exigeante, and wondered whether Mrs. Stanhope had really expected him never to marry.

The American Minister confided to his wife that he was disappointed in Eva Stanhope, and that she had always appeared so free from vanity and so superior to the little meannesses of women that he was very much surprised at the way she had acted.

The newspaper man, being exceedingly wise in his generation, smoked three cigars over it on the way to his hotel, and then—gave it up.

MISS ARNOLD found him wandering aimlessly, though with a pleased, interested look, around the dimly lit College Library. She had gone there herself to escape for a few moments from the heat and lights and the crowd around the Scotch celebrity to whom the reception was being tendered, and was looking rather desultorily at an article in the latest Revue des Deux Mondes, when he emerged from one of the alcoves and stood hesitatingly before her. She saw that he was not a guest. He was not in evening dress—it occurred to her even then how entirely out of his element he would have looked in a conventional dress-suit—but wore new clothes of some rough material which fitted him badly. He was so evidently lost and so painfully aware of it that she hastened to ask him if she could do anything for him.

“I’m lookin’ fur my daughter, Ellen Oldham,” he said, gratefully. “Do you know her?”

He seemed much surprised and a little hurt when Miss Arnold shook her head, smilingly.

“You see, there are so many——” she began, noting his disappointed look.

“Then I s’pose you can’t find her fer me. You see,” he explained, gently, “I wrote her I wuz comin’ ter-morrer, an’ I came ter-night fur a surprise—a surprise,” he repeated, delightedly. “But I’m mighty disappointed not ter find her. This is the first time I ever wuz so fur east. But I hed to see Ellen—couldn’t stan’ it no longer. You see,” he continued, nervously, “I thought mebbe I could stay here three or four days, but last night I got a telegram from my pardner on the mountain sayin’ there wuz trouble among the boys an’ fur me ter come back. But I—I jest couldn’t go back without seein’ Ellen, so I came on ter-night fur a surprise, but I must start back right off, an’ I’m mighty disappointed not ter be seein’ her all this time. Hed no idea yer college wuz such a big place—thought I could walk right in an’ spot her,” he ran on meditatively—“I thought it wuz something like Miss Bellairs’s an’ Miss Tompkins’s an’ Miss Rand’s all rolled inter one. But Lord! it’s a sight bigger’n that! Well, I’m glad of it. I’ve thought fur years about Ellen’s havin’ a college eddication, an’ I’m glad to see it’s a real big college. Never hed no schoolin’ myself, but I jest set my heart on Ellen’s havin’ it. Why shouldn’t she? I’ve got ther money. Hed to work mighty hard fur it, but I’ve got it, an’ she wanted ter come to college, and I wanted her to come, so of course she came. I met another young woman,” he continued, smiling frankly at the girl before him; “she wasn’t so fine-lookin’ as you, but she was a very nice young woman, an’ she promised to send Ellen ter me, but she hasn’t done it!”

Miss Arnold felt a sudden interest in the old man.

“Perhaps,” she began, doubtfully, “if you could tell me what her class is, or in what building she has her rooms, I might find her.”

He looked at the young girl incredulously.

“Ain’t you never heard of her?” he demanded. “Why, everybody knew her at Miss Bellairs’s. But p’r’aps”—in a relieved sort of way—“p’r’aps you ain’t been here long. This is Ellen’s second year.”

Miss Arnold felt slightly aggrieved. “I am a Senior,” she replied, and then added courteously, “but I am sure the loss has been mine.”

She could not make this man out, quite—he was so evidently uncultivated, so rough and even uncouth, and yet there was a look of quiet power in his honest eyes, and he was so unaffectedly simple and kindly that she instinctively recognized the innate nobility of his character. She felt interested in him, but somewhat puzzled as to how to continue the conversation, and so she turned rather helplessly to her magazine.

But he came over and stood beside her, looking down wonderingly at the unfamiliar words and accents.

“Can you read all that?” he asked, doubtfully.

Miss Arnold said “Yes.”

“Jest like English?” he persisted.

She explained that she had had a French nurse when she was little, and afterward a French governess, and that she had always spoken French as she had English. He seemed to be immensely impressed by that and looked at her very intently and admiringly, and then he suddenly looked away, and said, in a changed tone:

“I never hed no French nurse fur Ellen. Lord! it wuz hard enough to get any kind in them days,” he said, regretfully. “But she’s been studyin’ French fur two years now—p’rhaps she speaks almost as good as you do by this time—she’s mighty smart.”

Miss Arnold looked up quickly at the honest, kindly face above her with the hopeful expression in the eyes, and some sudden impulse made her say, quite cheerfully and assuringly, “Oh, yes—of course.”

She was just going to add that she would go to the office and send someone to look for Miss Oldham, when a slender, rather pretty girl passed the library door, hesitated, peering through the half-light, and then came swiftly toward them.

With a cry of inexpressible tenderness and delight the old man sprang toward her.

“Ellen!” he said, “Ellen!”

She clung to him for a few moments and then drew off rather shyly and awkwardly, with a sort of mauvaise honte which struck disagreeably on Miss Arnold, and looked inquiringly and almost defiantly from her father to the girl watching them.

“This young woman,” he said, understanding her unspoken inquiry, “has been very kind to me, Ellen—we’ve been talkin’.”

Miss Arnold came forward.

“I think we ought to be friends,” she said, graciously. “I am Clara Arnold. Your father tells me this is your Sophomore year.”

The girl met her advances coldly and stiffly. She had never met Miss Arnold before, but she had known very well who she was, and she had envied her, and had almost disliked her for her good looks and her wealth and her evident superiority. She comprehended that this girl had been born to what she had longed for in a vague, impotent way, and had never known. She wished that Miss Arnold had not witnessed the meeting with her father—that Miss Arnold had not seen her father at all. And then, with the shame at her unworthy thoughts came a rush of pity and love for the man standing there, smiling so patiently and so tenderly at her. She put one hand on his arm and drew herself closer to him.

“Father!” she said.

Miss Arnold stood looking at them, turning her clear eyes from one to the other. It interested her tremendously—the simple, kindly old man, in his rough clothes, and with his homely talk and his fatherly pride and happiness in the pretty, irresolute-looking girl beside him. It occurred to her suddenly, with a thrill of pity for herself, that she had never seen her father look at her in that way. He would have been inordinately surprised and—she felt sure—very much annoyed, if she had ever kissed his hand or laid her head on his arm as this girl was now doing. He had been an extremely kind and considerate father to her. It struck her for the first time that she had missed something—that after providing the rather pretentiously grand-looking house and grounds, and the servants and carriages and conservatories, her father had forgotten to provide something far more essential. But she was so much interested in the two before her that she did not have much time to think of herself. She concluded that she did not want to go back to the Scotch celebrity, and resolutely ignored the surprised looks of some of her friends who passed the library door and made frantic gestures for her to come forth and join them. But when they had moved away it occurred to her that she ought to leave the two together, and so she half rose to go, but the man, divining her intention, said, heartily:

“Don’t go—don’t go! Ellen’s goin’ to show me about this big college, an’ we want you to go, too.”

He was speaking to Miss Arnold, but his eyes never left the girl’s face beside him, while he gently stroked her hair as if she had been a little child.

And so they walked up and down the long library, and they showed him the Milton shield, and dragged from their recesses rare books, and pointed out the pictures and autographs of different celebrities. He seemed very much interested and very grateful to them for their trouble, and never ashamed to own how new it all was to him nor how ignorant he was, and he did not try to conceal his pride in his daughter’s education and mental superiority to himself. And when Miss Arnold realized that, she quietly effaced herself and let the younger girl do all the honors, only helping her now and then with suggestions or statistics.

“You see,” he explained, simply, after a lengthy and, as it seemed to Miss Arnold, a somewhat fruitless dissertation on the splendid copy of the “Rubaiyat” lying before them—“you see I don’t know much about these things. Never hed no chance. But Ellen knows, so what’s the use of my knowin’? She can put her knowledge to use; but, Lord! I couldn’t if I hed it.

“You see it was like this,” he continued, cheerfully, turning to Miss Arnold, while the girl at his side raised her head for an instant and uttered a low exclamation of protest. “We lived out West—in a minin’ camp in Colorado—Bowlder Bluff wuz its name. Awfully lonesome place. No schools—nothin’, jest the store—my store—an’ the mines not fur off. Ellen wuz about twelve then”—he turned inquiringly to the girl, but she would not look up—“about twelve,” he continued, after a slight pause, and another gentle caress of the brown hair; “an’ I hedn’t never given a thought to wimmen’s eddication, an’ Ellen here wuz jest growin’ up not knowin’ a thing—except how I loved her an’ couldn’t bear her out of my sight” (with another caress), “when one day there came to ther camp a college chap. He wuz an English chap, an’ he wuz hard-up. But he wuz a gentleman an’ he’d been to a college—Oxford wuz the name—an’ he took a heap of notice of Ellen, an’ said she wuz mighty smart—yes, Ellen, even then we knew you wuz smart—an’ that she ought to have schoolin’ an’ not run aroun’ the camp any more. At first I didn’t pay no attention to him. But by an’ by his views did seem mighty sensible, an’ he kep’ naggin at me. He used to talk to me about it continual, an’ at night we’d sit out under the pines and talk—he with a fur-away sort of look in his eyes an’ the smoke curlin’ up from his pipe—an’ he’d tell me what eddication meant to wimmen—independence an’ happiness an’ all that, an’ he insisted fur Ellen to go to a good school. He said there wuz big colleges fur wimmen just like there wuz fur men, an’ that she ought to have a chance an’ go to one.

“An’ then he would read us a lot of stuff of evenin’s—specially poetry. Shelley in particular. And yet another chap, almost better’n Shelley. Keats wuz his name. P’rhaps you’ve read some of his poetry?” he inquired, turning politely to Miss Arnold. Something in her throat kept her from speaking, so she only lowered her head and looked away from the drawn, averted face of the girl before her. “He wuz great! All about gods an’ goddesses an’ things one don’t know much about; but then, as I take it, poetry always seems a little fur off, so it wuz kind of natural. But Shelley wuz our favorite. He used to read us somethin’ about the wind. Regularly fine—jest sturred us up, I can tell you. We knew what storms an’ dead leaves an’ ‘black rain an’ fire an’ hail’ wuz out on them lonesome mountains. An’ sometimes he’d read us other things, stories from magazines, an’ books, but it kind of made me feel lonesomer than ever.

“But Ellen here, she took to it all like a duck to water, an’ the college chap kep’ insistin’ that she ought to go to a good school, an’ that she showed ‘great natural aptitude’—them wuz his words—an’ that she might be famous some day, till at last I got regularly enthusiastic about wimmen’s eddication, an’ I jest determined not to waste any more time, an’ so I sent her to Miss Bellairs’s at Denver. She wuz all I hed, an’ Lord knows I hedn’t no particular reason to feel confidence in wimmen folks”—a sudden, curious, hard expression came into his face for a moment and then died swiftly away as he turned from Miss Arnold and looked at the girl beside him. “But I sent her, an’ she ain’t never been back to the camp, an’ she’s been all I ever hoped she’d be.”

They had passed from the faintly lighted library into the brilliant corridors, and the man, towering in rugged strength above the two girls, cast curious glances about him as they walked slowly along. Everything seemed to interest him, and when they came to the Greek recitation-rooms he insisted, with boyish eagerness, upon going in, and the big photogravures of the Acropolis and the charts of the Ægean Sea, and even a passage from the “Seven against Thebes” (copied upon the walls doubtless by some unlucky Sophomore), and which was so hopelessly unintelligible to him, seemed to fascinate him. And when they came to the physical laboratories he took a wonderful, and, as it seemed to Miss Arnold, an almost pathetic interest in the spectroscopes and Ruhmkorff coils, and the batteries only half-discernable in the faintly flaring lights.

And as they strolled about he still talked of Ellen and himself and their former life, and the life that was to be—when Ellen should become famous. For little by little Miss Arnold comprehended that that was his one fixed idea. As he talked, slowly it came to her what this man was, and what his life had been—how he had centred every ambition on the girl beside him, separated her from him, at what cost only the mountain pines and the stars which had witnessed his nightly struggles with himself could tell; how he had toiled and striven for her that she might have the education he had never known. She began to understand what “going to college” had meant to this girl and this man—to this man especially. It had not meant the natural ending of a preparatory course at some school and a something to be gone through with—creditably, if possible, but also, if possible, without too great exertion and with no expectation of extraordinary results. It had had a much greater significance to them than that. It had been regarded as an event of incalculable importance, an introduction into a new world, the first distinct step upon the road to fame. It had meant to them what a titled offer means to a struggling young American beauty, or a word of approbation to an under-lieutenant from his colonel, or a successful maiden speech on the absorbing topic of the day, or any other great and wonderful happening, with greater and more wonderful possibilities hovering in the background.

She began to realize just how his hopes and his ambitions and his belief in this girl had grown and strengthened, until the present and the future held nothing for him but her happiness and advancement and success. It was a curious idea, a strange ambition for a man of his calibre to have set his whole heart upon, and as Miss Arnold looked at the girl who was to realize his hopes, a sharp misgiving arose within her and she wondered, with sudden fierce pity, why God had not given this man a son.

But Ellen seemed all he wanted. He told, in a proud, apologetic sort of way, while the girl protested with averted eyes, how she had always been “first” at “Miss Bellairs’s” and that he supposed “she stood pretty well up in her classes” at college. And Miss Arnold looked at the white, drawn face of the girl and said, quite steadily, she had no doubt but that Miss Oldham was a fine student. She was an exceptionally truthful girl, but she was proud and glad to have said that when she saw the look of happiness that kindled on the face of the man. Yet she felt some compunctions when she noted how simply and unreservedly he took her into his confidence.

And what he told her was just such a story as almost all mothers and fathers tell—of the precocious and wonderful intellect of their children and the great hopes they have of them. But with this man it was different in some way. He was so deeply in earnest and so hopeful and so tender that Miss Arnold could scarcely bear it. “Ellen” was to be a poet. Had she not written verses when she was still a girl, and had not the “college chap” and her teachers declared she had great talents? Wait—he would let Miss Arnold judge for herself. Only lately he had written to Ellen, asking her if she still remembered their lonely mountain-home, and she had sent him this. They had strolled down the corridor to one of the winding stairways at the end. He drew from his large leather purse a folded paper. The girl watched him open it with an inexpressible fear in her eyes, and when she saw what it was she started forward with a sort of gasp, and then turned away and steadied herself against the balustrade.

He spread out the paper with exaggerated care, and read, with the monotonously painful intonations of the unpractised reader:

As he read, Miss Arnold turned her eyes, burning with an unutterable indignation and scorn, upon the girl, but the mute misery and awful supplication in her face checked the words upon her lips. When he had finished reading, Miss Arnold murmured something, she hardly knew what, but he would not let her off so easily.

What did she think of it?—did she not think he ought to be proud of Ellen? and was the “gleam-lighted lake” the lake they could see from the piazza?

He ran on, taking it for granted that Miss Arnold was interested in his hopes and dreams, and almost without waiting for or expecting replies. And at last he told her the great secret. Ellen was writing a book. He spoke of it almost with awe—in a suppressed sort of fashion. She had not told him yet much about it, but he seemed wholly confident in its future success. He wondered which of the big publishing houses would want it most.

Miss Arnold gave a quick gasp of relief. There was more to this girl, then, than she had dared to hope. She glanced eagerly and expectantly toward her, and in that one look she read the whole pitiable lie. Ellen was looking straight ahead of her, and the hopeless misery and shame in her eyes Miss Arnold never forgot. All the pretty, weak curves about the mouth and chin had settled into hard lines, and a nameless fear distorted every feature. But the man seemed to notice nothing, and walked on with head uplifted and a proud, almost inspired look upon his rugged face.

“When will the book be finished, Ellen?” he asked, at length.

The girl looked up, and Miss Arnold noted with amazement her wonderful control.

“It will not be very long now, father,” she replied. She was acting her difficult part very perfectly. It occurred to Miss Arnold that for many years this girl had been so acting, and as she looked at the strong, quiet features of the man she shuddered slightly and wondered how it would be with her when he knew.

 

When the carriage which was to take him to the station for the midnight train into Boston had driven from the door, the two girls looked at each other steadily for an instant.

“Come to my study for a few moments,” said the younger one, imperiously. Miss Arnold acquiesced silently, and together they moved down the long corridor to Miss Oldham’s rooms.

“I want to explain,” she began, breathlessly, leaning against the closed door and watching with strained, wide-opened eyes Miss Arnold’s face, upon which the light from the lamp fell strong and full.

“I want to explain,” she repeated, defiantly this time. “You had no right to come between myself and my father! I wish with all my heart you had never seen him, but since you have seen him I must explain. I am not entirely the hypocrite and the coward you take me for.” She stopped suddenly and gave a low cry. “Ah! what shall I say to make you understand? It began so long ago—I did not mean to deceive him. It was because I loved him and he thought me so clever. He thought because I was quick and bright, and because I was having a college education, that I was—different. In his ignorance how could he guess the great difference between a superficial aptitude and real talents? How could I tell him—how could I,” with a despairing gesture, “that I was just like thousands of other girls, and that there are hundreds right here in this college who are my superiors in every way? It would have broken his heart.” Her breath came in short gasps and the pallor of her face had changed to a dull red.

Miss Arnold leaned forward on the table.

“You have grossly deceived him,” she said, in cold, even tones.

“Deceived him?—yes—a thousand times and in a thousand ways. But I did it to make him happy. Am I really to blame? He expected so much of me—he had such hopes and such dreams of some great career for me. I am a coward. I could not tell him that I was a weak, ordinary girl, that I could never realize his aspirations, that the mere knowledge that he depended and relied upon me weighed upon me and paralyzed every effort. When I loved him so could I tell him this? Could I tell him that his sacrifices were in vain, that the girl of whom he had boasted to every man in the mining camp was a complete failure?”

She went over to the table and leaned her head upon her shaking hand.

“If my mother—if I had had a brother or sister, it might have been different, but I was alone and I was all he had. And so I struggled on, half hoping that I might become something after all. But I confessed to myself what I could not to him, that I would never become a scholar, that my intellect was wholly superficial, that the verses I wrote were the veriest trash, that I was only doing what ninety-nine out of every hundred girls did, and that ninety-eight wrote better rhymes than I. There is a whole drawerful of my ‘poetry’”—she flung open a desk disdainfully—“until I could stand it no longer, and one day when he asked me to write something about the mountains, in desperation I copied those verses of Matthew Arnold’s. I knew he would never see them. After that it was easy to do so again.” She stopped and pressed her hands to her eyes.

“I am the most miserable girl that lives,” she said.

Miss Arnold looked at her coldly.

“And the book?” she said at length.

Miss Oldham lifted her head wearily.

“It was all a falsehood. He kept asking me if I were not writing a book. He thought one had only to write a book to become famous. It seemed so easy not to oppose the idea, and little by little I fell into the habit of talking about ‘the book’ as if it were really being written. I did not try to explain to myself what I was doing. I simply drifted with the current of his desires and hopes. It may seem strange to you that a man like my father should have had such ambitions, and stranger still that he should have ever dreamed I could realize them. But one has strange fancies alone with one’s self out on the mountains, and the isolation and self-concentration of the life give an intensity to any desire or expectation that you, who live in an ever-changing world, cannot understand.”

Miss Arnold looked at the girl curiously. She wondered for the first time if there was any excuse for her. She had a singularly strong moral nature herself, and she could not quite understand this girl’s weakness and deceit. The fact that she loved her father so deeply only added to the mystery.

She arose. “If I were you”—she began, coldly, but Miss Oldham stopped her.

“It is all finished now,” she said. She, too, had arisen, and was standing against the door, looking down and speaking in the monotonous tone of someone reciting a lesson.

“I have decided, and I shall go to my father, and I shall say, ‘I have deceived you; I have neither courage nor honesty. There might have been an excuse for another girl—a girl who did not understand you or who did not love you, or who did not know just how much her success meant to you. For me there is none. I, who knew how strange the idea at first seemed to you of your daughter’s being an educated, accomplished girl; I, who knew how little by little the idea became a passion with you, how proud and how fond you were of her, how you worked and prayed that she might be something different and better than the rest—I, who knew all this, have still deceived you. There is but one thing I dare ask you, Will you not let me go back to the mountain with you, and serve you and be to you the daughter I have not been as yet?’”

She stopped suddenly and looked at Miss Arnold.

“That is what I must do, is it not?” she asked, dully.

Miss Arnold went over to her.

“That is what you must do,” she said, gently.

It was almost two weeks later when Miss Arnold, coming in from a long walk, found a letter lying on her table. It bore an unfamiliar postmark, and the superscription had evidently been written in great haste or agitation. She tore it open with a feeling of apprehension.

“My punishment has come upon me,” it ran. “My father is dead. I got a telegram at Denver—they met me at the foot of the mountain. I cannot say anything now. As yet I have but one thought and one comfort—he never knew! Think of me as you will—I am glad he never did!

“E. O.”

IT was the usual scene at College theatricals. There was the inevitable six-foot tenor in a white muslin dress, abnormally long blond plaits, and a high falsetto which would descend every now and then into a barytone; and there was the German bass-villain who took unpardonable liberties with the tenor-maiden, considering the latter’s muscular superiority; and there was the wicked and beautiful maid with very much blackened eyebrows and very much rouged cheeks, who forgot every now and then and winked knowingly at some particular chum in the audience; and there were the usual hitches in the curtain, and the heat and lights, and crowds of students and rapt young women from neighboring institutions of learning, who were gazing with mingled admiration and pity at the wonderfully large hands and feet of the prima-donna and soubrette.

Every now and then, chinks of daylight came in from lifted blinds, damaging the looks of the tenor’s complexion considerably, and the German villain was getting hoarse, and the ballet refused to repeat the “butterfly” dance, and the student enthusiasm was beginning to flag. At last, however, the finale came. The tenor fell happily, if a trifle heavily, into the arms of the barytone, whose operatic raison-d’être had up to that moment been rather obscure, the German villain gave a last gasp, and the chorus came out firm and strong on the pretty refrain, and then everybody got up and walked about, and the men introduced their friends to the young women with them, and everybody said it was a great success, if a trifle warm, and then they all went home and said it wasn’t as good as “last year’s.”

Miss Elise Ronald and her chaperon and party stood near the door, talking to several men, and waiting for the tenor, who was a particular friend and who had invited them over. It seemed to them that he was a great while making his appearance, and they were very anxious to know what he was doing. They would have been much shocked if they had known. Mr. Perry Cunningham was swearing. In his frantic hurry to get out of the extraordinary muslin dress and blond wig, and wash the paint and mongolian and pearl powder off his face, everything seemed to have gone wrong. To add to the excitement and worry his “dresser” had misplaced some of his things, and the stage-manager was trying to buttonhole him to talk business.

The chaperon, who was tired standing, said she would walk on with the rest, and that Miss Ronald would please follow the moment Mr. Cunningham arrived. So the girl said “yes” very obediently, and was left standing, talking with her brother and a youthful freshman who had asked to be presented. As time passed and no Mr. Perry Cunningham appeared, Miss Ronald delicately hinted to her brother that he had best hunt him up and tell him that she was waiting; but that amiable youth, with delightful optimism, assured his sister warmly that “Cunningham would soon be out of his fancy togs and would turn up all right,” and disappeared in the direction of Hemenway.

It was only a short while later that Mr. Cunningham did come up, breathless and profusely apologetic, and the freshman with rare discreetness, divining that his presence was not absolutely necessary, bowed and moved off.

“Awfully sorry, Miss Ronald,” gasped Cunningham, “’spect I kept you waitin’ an awful time. That—that ‘dresser’ of mine put half my things with another fellow’s and I had a time getting them straight.”

Miss Ronald said it did not matter and that the chaperon had gone on with the rest, and that they were to catch up.

“You know we must get that 5.50 train back to the College,” she explained. So they strolled up Harvard Square, and Miss Ronald assured Cunningham that his solo in the second act was the gem of the operetta, and Cunningham was saying impressively that he was glad she liked it, when it occurred to both of them that the chaperon and the rest of the party had somehow disappeared.

“Did they intend getting the train in Boston or going over to Allston for it?” asked Cunningham.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” replied Miss Ronald, helplessly. “How stupid of me—I never thought to ask!”

Cunningham said it would be rather easier, he thought, to get over to Allston, and that they had probably gone that way. So they boarded a car and got to Allston at ten minutes of six—“excellent time,” as Cunningham remarked walking inside the station to buy the tickets. He was gone so long that Miss Ronald started in after him, fearing every minute to hear the train come thundering up. When she saw him she knew by his face that something was the matter.

“The ticket-man has just told me this confounded train doesn’t stop at Allston,” he said, coming quickly toward her. “It’s an outrage—the company oughtn’t to run its trains so irregularly. It’s a beastly shame! How’s a person going to remember where a train stops and where it doesn’t?” he added excitedly, and a trifle vaguely.

Miss Ronald was very much disturbed and a little indignant. Cunningham felt very sorry for the girl and inclined to blame himself for the mistake, but Miss Ronald assured him that it was not his fault, and that what he had to do now was to think how best they could get back to the College. It was while they were standing on the platform “thinking,” that the 5.50 from Boston rushed by and they caught sight of the anxious face of the chaperon at the window.

“Nice people to go off and leave me this way,” soliloquized Miss Ronald, indignantly. Cunningham walked inside to scrutinize the time-table. When he came out his face wore so hopeful an expression that Miss Ronald brightened visibly. “I have a scheme,” he declared. “There’s a train into Boston that comes along in fifteen minutes and that will get us in there at 6.25—too late to get the 6.22 out; but we can go to the Thorndyke and have a little dinner, and catch the 7.30 which will get you to ‘the College’ at 8.17. You see it would take us at least two hours to drive over, so that by my plan we shall have our dinner and get back as soon as if we started now with a trap. And if you will wait here a minute, I’ll telegraph your chaperon that we will be out on the 7.30, so she won’t be uneasy about you.”

He was so evidently pleased and relieved with his arrangement that Miss Ronald hadn’t the heart to offer any objections. They got up to the Thorndyke and secured a delightful table by an open window, and by the time they had ordered a rather elaborate dinner, Miss Ronald’s righteous indignation at her abandonment by the chaperon had stifled any feelings of remorse at her consent to Cunningham’s “scheme.” So they ate in peace and talked about the operetta and their friends, and she was enjoying it all immensely, and had quite forgotten her anxiety to get back to College and her keen doubts about the propriety of the adventure, when her eyes happened to fall upon a bronze clock on the mantel at the other end of the room, and she gave a little cry of dismay. Cunningham followed the direction of her gaze and said “by Jove” under his breath in a very forcible sort of way. He pulled out his watch and found it tallied uncompromisingly with the clock. He beckoned sharply to the waiter.

“Is that clock exactly right?” he demanded, excitedly. The waiter assured him that the clock’s record was unimpeachable.

“There is simply no use trying to make that 7.30 in three minutes, Miss Ronald,” remarked the youth, mournfully. “It’s all my fault. I was enjoying myself so much that I never noticed how late it was,” he went on, remorsefully. “Now I suppose you’ll be in no end of a scrape. What do they do to you when you come in late? Send you to the dean?”

His evident anxiety and utter ignorance of the rules of the College would have amused Miss Ronald if she had not been so hopelessly dejected. As it was, she made an heroic effort to brighten up and smiled sadly at Cunningham. “No—they only put us on bread and water for a week,” she said, at which feeble attempt at a joke they both laughed miserably.

Cunningham called the waiter again.

“Bring me a Boston and Albany time-table,” he said. When the man came back with the precious bit of paper, the girl and the youth bent anxiously over it.

“There’s a train at nine o’clock and one at nine-thirty,” he said. “The nine o’clock is a slow train, stops everywhere, and only gets you to the College ten minutes sooner than the other.”

Miss Ronald looked so miserable that Cunningham began to feel very desperate indeed. He determined to do something to lighten her despair.

“Suppose we go up-town and see Sothern in ‘Sheridan?’” he suggested. “We can get down to the station for the nine-thirty, and we can see the first two acts. It’s a charming play—ever seen it?”

Miss Ronald said “No—o,” and was not sure that they had better go to the theatre, but she did not wish to go to any of her friends and tell them of her rather ridiculous predicament, and there was nothing for it but to consent to the theatre plan. So Cunningham called for the bill and they strolled slowly up to the theatre to kill time. They took seats far back so as to be able to escape easily. “Sheridan” is a very pretty play, as everyone knows, but Cunningham felt so responsible for the girl that he was much too nervous properly to appreciate it. He saw, however, that Miss Ronald was enjoying herself very much, and he decided to stay till the last moment, but kept his watch open in his hand for fear of running over the time. He knew they could get to Kneeland Street in seven or eight minutes with a cab, and so, at exactly fifteen minutes after nine, he arose and told Miss Ronald it was time to go. They wasted a few moments getting out, and then Cunningham called a cab and told the driver to go to the Boston and Albany station as fast as he could.

It may have been these unfortunate directions, or it may have been Fate—at any rate, at the corner of Washington and Essex Streets there was a sudden commotion and noise; Cunningham and Miss Ronald felt a terrible jolt, and a great many people seemed to have sprung suddenly out of the earth and to be asking them if they were hurt. As they were not at all hurt they were rather indignant, and Cunningham jumped impatiently out of the cab to see what all the fuss was about. He was not long in ignorance. The horse lay on its side with a broken shaft sticking up and the harness half off him. The coachman was swearing impartially at the people about him, and an ice-wagon with which the cab had collided stood by unhurt, the driver of it in a hopeless state of intoxication and wrath. Cunningham looked anxiously around him, and to his consternation not another cab was in sight. There seemed to be a lull in the traffic of the street, and very few people or vehicles were to be seen except those collected around the scene of the accident. The two drivers were wrangling and swearing at each other, so that nothing was to be got out of them. Cunningham made use of some strong language for his private satisfaction. He looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes after nine, and they would have been at the station if the break-down had not occurred. He went quickly back to the cab.

“Miss Ronald,” he said, “the horse has fallen down and broken the shaft. There isn’t another cab in sight, and we mustn’t waste any time getting away, or the police may detain us to tell what we know of the accident. I don’t see anything to do but to run for it,” he added, with a frantic attempt to speak cheerfully.

The girl got quickly out of the cab. “This is terrible, Mr. Cunningham,” she gasped. “We must catch that nine-thirty train. The College is locked at ten o’clock, and I am obliged to be there by that time.”

Cunningham grabbed her hand firmly in his. “Now run!” he said. There were a great many people who stopped to look at the two figures tearing down Washington Street, and they particularly enlisted the sympathetic attention of a great many small boys along the way. One policeman, thinking it was a case of abduction, started after them but gave up the chase before long, having never gone in much for sprinting, and it being an unusually warm night in May. It was indeed a rather uncommon sight. The girl’s clothes and correct air made her particularly noticeable, while Cunningham in a silk hat, Bond Street coat, and patent leathers, was a conspicuous object as he swung lightly down the street under the lamps and electric lights.

When they turned into Kneeland Street, the girl’s courage and strength failed her. Kneeland Street itself is a disgrace to Boston. It is not by any means the street a young man would choose to walk on with a young lady in the evening—indeed it is not the street one would choose to walk on in broad daylight with a policeman in hailing distance. Cunningham could have cursed himself for the whole thing. He drew the girl closer to him and walked swiftly on. When they got in sight of the station he glanced fearfully at the big clock. It stood at exactly half after nine, but he comforted himself with the thought that the outside clock is always fast, though he was not sure just how much.

“Can you run any more?” he asked anxiously of the girl. For answer she started ahead feverishly.

The man was locking the gate. “Can’t open it—train just pulled out.” Cunningham looked viciously at the official.

“Can’t you whistle her back?” he demanded, furiously. The man smiled derisively, and commenced talking to a trainman who sauntered up just then with an oil-can and hammer in his hand. Cunningham went back to where Miss Ronald was standing. The girl burst out laughing somewhat hysterically.

“We need a chaperon badly, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, nervously. “We don’t seem able to take care of ourselves at all.”

“Yes,” assented Cunningham, gloomily. “It seems easy enough in the abstract to catch a train, but some way we don’t seem to understand quite how it’s done,” he added, ironically. “I will go and find out when the next train leaves, and may be if we are careful and start for it an hour before time, and if the station doesn’t burn up, or all the cab horses fall down dead, or the trains stop running, we may be able to make it.”

Cunningham walked up to the ticket-agent. “When is the next train out?” he demanded, sternly.

The man glanced up impatiently from a calculation he was making and said, shortly—“11.10.”

Cunningham strolled back to the girl. “It is obviously impossible to wait here an hour and forty minutes,” he said. “Suppose we go back to the theatre and see the last act. We’ve only missed one act at most, and the last is the prettiest of all.”

Miss Ronald was too miserable to object or make any suggestions, so they got into a cab and Cunningham gave minute instructions to the driver not to fall off the box and kill himself, or let the horse walk out of the harness, and to be particularly careful about the wheels coming off, and not to try to demolish any ice-wagons that might be harmlessly roving the streets. The driver took these remarks good-humoredly, but was naturally much mystified, and after thinking it over concluded that Cunningham was either very drunk or very crazy.

They got back to the theatre in a short time and saw the success of “The Rivals,” and the duel and the just exposure of the infamous Matthews, and wished heartily that their affairs were as happily wound up as those of the fair Miss Linley and Sheridan.

It was just ten minutes of eleven when they started back for the Boston and Albany station. Cunningham had retained the cab they had come in and had given still further and more minute directions to the driver, so that as they settled themselves back on the stuffy cushions, they thought they could reasonably hope to get the train in time and safety. When they entered the waiting-room Miss Ronald saw with a sigh of relief that it was just eleven o’clock. There was plenty of time, and it was with a somewhat triumphant air of having conquered immense difficulties, of having fought bravely a hard fight, that Cunningham walked up once more to the ticket-office.

“Two tickets, please,” he said briskly as he handed out a dollar bill. The man looked at him for a moment as if making an effort to remember where he had seen him before.

“This is the through express to New York. You’ll need more stuff than that to get two tickets,” he said, jocosely.

“You told me”—gasped Cunningham.

“Yes,” asserted the man. “You asked me when the next train went out and I told you. Of course I thought you knew where you were going,” he added, derisively.

Cunningham began to feel very desperate indeed.

“Well,” said he, slowly and carefully. “If there is a train that leaves any time to-night for Wellesley, break the news to me gently, and then come and put me on it half an hour before it starts, and tie my ticket to my coat, and put me in charge of the conductor. Otherwise—” he went on impressively, “I may get lost, or wreck the train, or stop the locomotive.”

Then he went back to Miss Ronald and told her the news. She had had a very pronounced liking for Mr. Perry Cunningham up to that time, but it occurred to her that he seemed terribly lacking in practicality, and that she was very much disappointed in him. She decided firmly what her answer would be to him if ever he should propose—though it is but fair to state that Mr. Cunningham had no thought of proposing, unless it was proposing how best to get back to College.

At 11.25 the last accommodation train pulled out with a very miserable young woman and a very remorseful young man on it.

At exactly 12.9 it left them standing on the platform of a pretty station, with not a cab to be seen, wondering how they could get up to “the College.” Miss Ronald said she thought they had better walk, by all means; that they had not had any excitement or fatigue all evening, and that a mile walk at midnight would be just the thing for them; that they might run part of the way if they found walking too slow, and that she often went out and ran around a while in the middle of the night just for the fun of the thing. (Miss Ronald was getting sarcastic—misfortune had embittered her naturally sweet disposition.)

Mr. Cunningham said hotly that he understood what she meant, and that no one could possibly be more sorry about the whole thing than himself, and that if necessary he would come over in person the next day and explain it to the President herself. But Miss Ronald said haughtily that, owing to the telegram they had sent, everyone probably thought her safe at the College, and that there would be no need of explanations. If any were to be made she preferred to make them herself.

After that they walked swiftly and quietly up the long shaded paths. The fresh, earthy smell of the sward and early spring flowers, and the cry of the night birds, and the big College buildings standing out every now and then sharply defined in the moonlight, or shadowed by the great trees, with here and there a solitary light shining at some professor’s window, made it a very beautiful and impressive scene. But Miss Ronald was too unhappy to think much about it and walked haughtily and silently on, and Cunningham could not enjoy it for the remorse he felt and the knowledge that Miss Ronald—however, unreasonably—was angry with him. Besides, he was wondering what on earth was to become of him for the rest of the night. It was three miles to the nearest hotel, he thought gloomily, and he would have to take the first train into Boston in order to get over to Cambridge in time for a lecture which he did not wish to miss.

 

Miss Clara Arnold awoke very suddenly and very thoroughly. Her heart gave an awful bound and then stood quite still in a most uncomfortable sort of way. There was no doubt about it—there were people on the piazza just outside her room and they were talking in low but excited tones. All the horror of her situation came upon her, and in one instant she wished more fervently than she ever thought she could wish for anything, that she had taken her friends’ advice and had not decided on a room on the ground floor opening on a piazza. All their warnings and talk of burglars and tramps came vividly to her as she lay there quaking with fear. She could hear quite distinctly the tread of feet outside, and the gentle but firm shaking of the big doors that opened from the broad corridor on the piazza. A sickening sense of fear possessed her and a suffocating pressure was on her lungs. She wondered with all her soul where the night-watchman was, and whether she had better scream or lie quite still. She was trying to decide this when she thought she heard her name called. She sat up, listening intently. And then she heard quite distinctly a girl’s voice saying, hopelessly:

“It’s no use—you can’t get that door open and I can’t make Clara hear!”

Miss Arnold gave a gasp and then jumped out of bed and into a tea-gown and Turkish slippers. She went quickly into her study and called softly to the girl outside.

“Elise, is that you? Just wait a minute!” and then there was more muffled talk outside and a man’s voice in a relieved way saying:

“Oh, it’s all right now—how glad I am! I—I wish I could begin to tell you, Miss Ronald, how awfully cut up I am about it”—but the girl stopped him.

“I quite understand, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, stiffly. “You had better go now. I am sorry there is no hotel nearer.” And then Miss Arnold heard a muttered good-night and the crunch of footsteps on the gravel, and as she opened the doors a moment later Miss Ronald fell limply into her arms.

They sat up and talked it all over for an hour, and Miss Ronald said she was intensely disappointed in Perry Cunningham, and that she could never, never forgive him. Miss Arnold contended that she did not quite see what there was to forgive; it had all been unfortunate, and she thought that Mr. Cunningham had done all he could—that he hadn’t kept the train from stopping at Allston, nor did he make the cab run into the ice-wagon, nor could he compel the New York express to stop for them, and that if he forgot to look at his watch at the Thorndyke—why, she did so too. And she told Miss Ronald frankly that she might have been more civil to him, considering that he had had all the trouble on her account and was now walking three miles in order to get a place in which to sleep for three hours. And she added that she thought if anyone was to be angry about the affair it was herself, since she had taken Miss Ronald for a burglar and had been frightened nearly to death. And finally Miss Ronald grew rather remorseful at the thought of how she had sent the boy off, and of how truly considerate he had been through the whole affair, and of what good friends they had once been, and she went to sleep with the good resolution to write him a very nice note the next day. And on the following morning, when an immense box of roses came with Mr. Perry Cunningham’s card tucked humbly in one corner and almost out of sight, Miss Ronald restored him to full favor and wrote him a charming letter inviting him out for the next week to Float-Day.

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