Chapter VII: Part 7

"Why, course I sha'n't speak of it till I have to." He took up his cap, and then with an air of aggrieved dignity turned to the door. "But the time'll come when I've got to speak of it. Lot Collins was tellin' me only this mornin' over to the blacksmith's, how his father's took him into partnership, and Lot's only twenty-one this spring. His father ain't wasted a day."

"Well, that's a real business, blacksmithin' is," his mother hastened to reply.

"So's farmin' a real business. And father's treated me from the word 'go' like a hired man and nothin' else. He's bought and sold without openin' his head to me. I wonder I've grown up at all. I wonder I ain't in tyers, makin' mud-pies. If 'twa'n't for you and Annie, I shouldn't think I was any kind of a man."

His angry passion was terribly appealing to her. It made her heart ache, and she had much ado to keep from taking him to her arms, big as he was, and comforting him, as she used to, years ago, when he came in with frostbitten fingers or the dire array of cuts and bruises. But she judged it best, in the interest of domestic government, to quell emotion that could have, she knew, no hopeful issue, and she began breaking eggs into her mixing bowl and then beating them with a brisk hand.

"Father never was one to talk over his business with anybody, even the nearest," she rejoined. "You know that, Hermie. We've got to take folks as we find 'em. Now you go ahead down to the long lot. He'll be wonderin' where you be."

Herman strode away, after one incredulous look at her, a shaft she felt through her downcast lids. It demanded whether father and mother had equally forsaken him, and gave her a quick, sharp pang, and a blinding flash of tears. But she went on mixing cake, and battling arguments as she worked, and when her tin was in the oven, washed her baking dishes methodically and then sat down by the window to read the weekly paper. But as she read, she glanced up, now and then, at the familiar walls of her kitchen, and through the window at the trees just shimmering into green and the skyey intervals over them. This was the pictured landscape she had worked on, framed by these wide, low windows, for all the years she had lived here, doing her wifely duties soberly, and her motherly ones with a hidden and ecstatic buoyancy.

The house, the bit of the world it gave upon, seemed a part of her life, the containing husk of all the fruitage born to her. It was incredible that she was to give it up and undertake not only a heavier load of work but a new scene for it, at a time when she longed to fold her hands and sit musing while young things filled the picture with beautiful dancing motions, and the loves and fears she remembered as a part of the warm reality of it, but not now so intimately her own. It was as if the heaped-up basket of earthly fruits had passed her by, to be given into other hands; but she had eaten and was content, if only she might see the banquet lamps and hear the happy laughter. She began to feel light-headed from the pain of it all, the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, the fear of anticipation, and turned again to her paper with the intent of giving her mind to safe and homely things. But something caught her eyes and held them. A window seemed to be opened before her. She looked through it into her tumultuous past. Or was this a weapon put into her hand for the exacting future?

That night Myron Dill came into the sitting-room after his chores were done, and lay down on the lounge between the two front windows. He composed himself on his back with his hands placidly folded, and there his wife found him when she came in after her own completed list of deeds. He did not look up at her, and she was glad. She did not know how her eyes gleamed behind the glittering plane of their glasses, nor how deep the red was in her cheeks; but she was conscious of an inward tumult which must, she knew, somehow betray itself. For an instant she stood and looked at her husband, in what might have been relenting or anticipation of the road she had to take. She knew so well what mantle of repose was over him: how he liked the peeping of the frogs through the open window, and what measure of satisfaction there was for him in the consciousness of full rest and the certainty that next day would usher in a crowding horde of duties he felt perfectly able to administer. Mrs. Dill was a feminine creature, charged to the full with the love of service and unerring intuition as to the manner of it, and she did love to "see menfolks comfortable."

"Don't you want I should pull your boots off?"

This she said unwillingly, because she was about to break the current of his peace, and it seemed deceitful to offer him an alleviation that would do him no good after all.

"No," said Myron sleepily. "Let 'em be as they are."

Mrs. Dill drew up a chair and sat down in it at his side, as if she were the watcher by a sick-bed or the partner in a cosy conversation.

"Myron," said she. Her voice frightened her. It sounded hoarse and strange, and yet there was very little of it, deserted by her failing breath.

"What say?" he answered from his drowse.

"I found a real interestin' piece in the 'Monitor' this mornin'. It was how some folks ain't jest one person, as we think, but they're two and sometimes three. And mebbe one of 'em's good, and t'other two are bad, and when they're bad they can't help it. They can't help it, Myron, the bad ones can't, no matter how hard they try."

"Yes, I believe I come acrost it," said Myron. "Terrible foolish it was. That's one o' the things doctors get up to feather their own nest."

"No, Myron, it ain't foolish," said his wife. She moved her chair nearer, and her glasses glittered at him. "It ain't foolish, for I'm one o' that same kind, and I know."

His eyes came open, and he turned his head to look at her.

"Ain't you feelin' well, Caddie?" he asked kindly.

"Oh, yes, I'm well as common," she answered. "But it ain't foolish, Myron, and you've got to hear me. 'Double Personality,' that's what they call it. Well, I've got it. I've got double personality."

Myron Dill put his feet to the floor, and sat upright. He was regarding his wife anxiously, but he took pains to speak with a commonplace assurance.

"We might as well be gettin' off to bed early, I guess. I'm tired, and so be you."

"I've felt it for quite a long spell," said his wife earnestly. "I don't know but I've always felt it--leastways, all through my married life. It's somethin' that makes me as mad as tophet when you start me out to do anything I don't feel it's no ways right to do, and it keeps whisperin' to me I'm a fool to do it. That's what it says, Myron. 'You're a fool to do it!'"

Myron was touched at last, through his armor of esteem.

"I ain't asked you to do what ain't right, Caddie," he asseverated. "What makes you tell me I have?"

"That's what it says to me," she repeated fixedly. "'You're a fool to do it.' That's what it says. It's my double personality."

It seemed best to Myron to humor this inexplicable mood, until he could persuade her back into a normal one.

"That wa'n't the way I understood it," he told her, "when I read the piece. The folks that were afflicted seemed like different folks. Now, you ain't any different, rain or shine. You're as even as anybody I should wish to see. That's what I've liked about ye, Caddie."

The softness of the implication she swept aside, as if she hardly dared regard it lest it weaken her resolve.

"Oh, I ain't goin' to be the same, day in, day out," she declared eagerly. "I feel I ain't, Myron. It's gettin' the best of me, the other creatur' that wants to have its own way. It's been growin' and growin', same as a child grows up, and now it's goin' to take its course. Same 's Hermie's growed up, you know. He's old enough to have his way, and lead his life same's we've led ours, and we've got to stand one side and let him do it."

Her husband gave her a sharp, sudden glance, and then fell again to the contemplation of his knotted brown hands that seemed, like all his equipment, informed with specialized power.

"Well," he said at length, "I guess you need a kind of a change. You'll feel better when you get over to t'other house. There's a different outlook over there, and you'll have more to take up your mind."

She answered instantly, in the haste that dares not wait upon reflection. Her eyes were brighter now, and her hands worked nervously.

"Oh, I ain't goin' to move, Myron. I might as well tell you that now. I'm goin' to stay right here where I be. I don't feel able to help it. That's my double personality. It won't let me."

Her husband was looking at her now in what seemed to her a very threatening way. His shaggy eyebrows were drawn together and his eyes had lightning in them. She continued staring at him, held by the fascination of her terror. In that instant she realized a great many things: chiefly that she had never seen her husband angry with her, because she had taken every path to avoid the possibility, and that it was even more sickening than she could have thought. But she knew also that the battle was on, and suddenly, for no reason she could formulate, she remembered one of her own fighting ancestors who was said to have died hard in the Revolution.

"That was old Abner Kinsman," she broke out; and when her husband asked, out of his amaze at her irrelevance, "What's that you said?" she only answered confusedly, "Nothin', I guess."

At that the storm seemed to Myron to be over, and his forehead cleared of anger. He looked at her in much concern.

"I guess you better lay late to-morrer mornin'," he said, rising to close the windows and wind the clock. "I'll ride over and get Sally Drew to come and stay a spell and help you."

Something tightened through her tense body, and she answered instantly in a clear, loud note,--

"I ain't goin' to have Sally Drew. Last time I had her she washed up the hearth with the dish-cloth. If I want me a girl, I'll get one; but mebbe I sha'n't want one till Hermie brings Annie into the neighborhood to live."

She stood still in her place for a moment, trembling all over, and wondering what would happen when Myron had wound the clock and closed the windows and turned the wooden button of the door. He did not look at her, nor did he speak again, and when she heard his deep, regular breathing from the bedroom she slipped in softly, made ready for bed, and lay down beside him.

She slept very little that night. He seemed to be a stranger, because there had been outward division between them; and yet, curiously, she felt nearer to him because she might have hurt him, and the jealous partisanship within her kept prompting her to a more tumultuous good-will, a warmer service.

Next morning, when Hermie had left them at the breakfast-table, and gone silently to his tasks, his mother leaned across the table as if, for some reason, she had to attract her husband's attention before speaking to him. He was just taking the last swallow of coffee, and now he set down his cup with decision, and moved away his plate. She knew what the next step would be. He would push back his chair, clear his throat, and then he would be gone.

"Myron!" she said. She spoke as something within Myron remembered the school-teacher speaking, when she called him to the board. The something within him responded to it, and without knowing why, he straightened and looked attentive. "You noticed Hermie, didn't you?" she adjured him. "You noticed he didn't have a word to say for himself, and he wouldn't look neither of us in the face?"

"What's he been up to?" Myron queried, with his ready frown. "He done somethin' out o' the way?"

"No, he ain't. I should think you'd be ashamed to hint such a thing, Myron Dill, your own boy, too! All he's done is to stay here, and work his fingers to the bone, and no thanks for it, and he's right down discouraged. I know how the boy feels. Myron, I want you should do somethin'. I want you should do it now."

Myron gave his chair the expected push, but he still sat there.

"Well," he said, "what is it? I've got to be off down to the medderlands."

"I want you should make over the Turnbull place to Hermie, and have him fetch Annie there as soon as ever she'll come, and let him farm it without if or but from you and me."

Myron was on his feet. He looked portentously large and masterful.

"You better not think o' packin' the chiny," he said, in his ordinary tone of generalship. "We can set it into baskets with a mite o' hay, and it'll get as fur as that without any breakages."

His wife slipped out of her chair, and went round the table to him. She laid a hand on his arm. Myron wanted, in the irritation of the moment, to shake it off, but he was a man of dignity, and forbore. His wife was speaking in a very gentle tone, but somehow different from the one he was used to noting.

"Myron, ain't you goin' to hear me?"

"I ain't goin' to listen to any tomfoolery, and I ain't goin' to have anybody dictatin' to me about my own business."

"It ain't your business, Myron, any more'n 'tis mine. Hermie's much my son as he is your'n, and what you bought that place with is as much mine as 'tis your'n. I helped you earn it. Myron, it's comin' up in me. I can feel it."

"What is?"

In spite of all his old dull certainties, he felt the shock of wonder. He looked at her, her scarlet cheeks and widening eyes. Even her pretty hair seemed to have acquired a nervous life, and stood out in a quivering aureole. Myron was much bound to his Caddie in his way of being attached to his own life and breath. A change in her was horrible to him, like the disturbance of illness in an ordered house.

"What is it?" he inquired again. "What is it you feel?"

"It's that," she said, with an added vehemence. "It's my double personality."

Myron Dill could have wept from the surprise of it all, the assault upon his wondering nerves.

"You spread up the bed in the bedroom, Caddie," he bade her, "and go lay down a spell."

"No," said his wife, "I sha'n't lay down, and I sha'n't give up to you. It's riz up in me, the one that's goin' to beat, no matter what comes of it, same as old Abner Kinsman stood up ag'inst the British. Mebbe it'll die fightin', same's he did, and I never'll hear no more from it,--and a good riddance. But Myron, it's goin' to beat."

Her husband was frowning, not harshly now, but from the extremity of his distress. He spoke in a tone of well-considered adjuration.

"Caddie, you know what you're doin' of? You're settin' up your will in place o' mine."

"Oh, no, I ain't, Myron," she responded eagerly, with an earnest motion toward him, as if she besought him to put faith in her. "It ain't me that's doin' it."

"It ain't you? Who is it, then?"

"Why, it's my double personality. Ain't I just told you so?"

Myron stood gazing at her in the futility of comprehension he had felt years ago, when Caddie, who had been "a great reader," as the neighbors said, before the avalanche of household cares had overwhelmed her, propounded to him, while he was drawing off his boots for an hour of twilight somnolence before going to bed, problems that, he knew, no man could answer. Neither were they to be illumined by Holy Writ, for he had offered that loophole of exit, and Caddie had shaken her head at him disconsolately, and implied that the prophets would not do. But when she had seemed to forget that interrogative attitude toward life, he had settled down to unquestioning content in knowing he had the best housekeeper in the neighborhood. Now here it was again, the spectre of her queerness rising to distress him.

She looked at him with wide, affrighted eyes.

"You set here with me a spell," she adjured him. "I'll lay down on the sofy, and you take the big rocker. If you see it comin' up in me, you kinder say somethin', and mebbe it'll go away."

Myron, though in extreme unwillingness, did as he was bidden. He wanted to bundle the whole troop of her imaginings out of doors, and plod off, like a sane man, to his fencing; but somehow her earnestness itself forbade. When they were established, she on the sofa, with her bright eyes piercing him, and he seated at an angle where a nurse might easiest wait upon a patient's needs, the absurdity of it all swept over him. The clock was ticking irritatingly behind him. He looked at his watch, and took assurance from the vision of the flying day.

"Now, Caddie," said he, in that specious soothing we accord to children, "you lay right still, and I'll go out a spell and do a few chores, and then mebbe I'll come in and see how you be."

Caddie put out a hand, and fastened it upon his in an inexorable clasp.

"No, Myron," said she, "you ain't goin'. If I should be left here to myself, and it come up in me, I dunno what I might do."

Myron felt himself yielding again, and clutched at confidence as the spent swimmer reaches for a plank.

"What do you think you'd do, Caddie?" he demanded. "That's what I want to know."

"I can't tell, Myron," she returned solemnly. "True as I'm a livin' woman, I can't tell you. Mebbe I'd go over to the Turnbull house and set it a-fire, so 't I shouldn't ever live in it. Mebbe I'd take my bank-book, and go up to the Street, and draw out that money aunt Susan left me, and give it to Hermie, so 's he could run away, and take Annie with him. If that other one come up in me, I dunno what I'd do."

Myron gazed at her, aghast.

"Why, Caddie," said he, "you can't go round settin' houses a-fire. That's arson."

"Is it?" she inquired. "Well, I dunno what it's called, but if that other one gets the better o' me, mebbe that's what I shall do."

Myron held her hand now with an involuntary fervor of his own, not so much because she bade him, but with the purpose of restraining her. An hour passed, and her blue eyes were fixed upon him with the same imploring force. He fidgeted, and at last longed childishly to see them wink.

"Don't you want to see the doctor?" he ventured.

"No," said Caddie, in the same tone of wild asseveration. "Doctors won't do me a mite o' good. Besides, doctors know all about it, and they'd see what was to pay, and they'd send me off to some kind of a hospital, and there'd be a pretty bill o' costs."

"I don't believe a word of it," Myron ventured, with a grasp at mental liberty. He essayed, at the same time, to draw away his hand, but Caddie seemed to fix him with a sharper eye-gleam, and he forbore.

"There's Hermie," she said. "I hear him in the shed, rattlin' round amongst the tools. You call him in here, and when he's here, you tell him he's goin' to have the Turnbull place, and have it now. Myron, you tell him."

Myron made a slight involuntary movement in his chair, as if he were about to rise and carry out her mandate; but he settled back again, and Herman, having selected the tool he wanted, went off through the shed and, as they both knew, down the garden-path.

The forenoon went on in a strange silence, save for the sound of the birds, and an occasional voice of neighbors calling to Herman as they passed. Myron had still that sickening sense of illness in the house. The breakfast dishes were, he knew, untouched upon the table. The cat came in, looked incidentally at the sofa as if she were accustomed to occupy it at that particular hour, and walked out again. Myron drew forth his watch, and looked at it with a stealthiness he could not explain.

"Why," said he, with a simulated wonder, "it's nigh half after eleven. Hadn't you better see about gettin' dinner?"

"I ain't a-goin' to get any dinner," his wife responded. "I don't know as I shall ever get dinners any more. Myron, it's comin' up in me. I feel it." She dropped his hand and rose to a sitting posture, and for a moment, yielding to the physical relief of the broken clasp, he leaned back in his chair and drew a hearty breath.

"Myron," said his wife. There was something mandatory in her voice, and he came upright again. "Now I'm goin' to do it. I don't know what 'tis, but it's got the better o' me and I'm goin' to do what it says. But 'fore I give way to it, I'm goin' to tell you this. You've got as good a home and as good a son and as good a wife, if I do say it, as any man in the State o' New Hampshire. And you can keep 'em, Myron, jest as they be, jest as good as they always have been, if you'll only hear to reason and give other folks a chance. You've got to give me a chance, and you've got to give Herman a chance. I guess mebbe I'd sell all my chances for the sake of turnin' 'em in with Hermie's. But you've got to do it, and you've got to do it now. And if you don't, somethin' 's goin' to happen. I don't know what it is. I don't know no more'n the dead, for this is the first time I ever really knew I had that terrible creatur' inside of me that's goin' to beat. But I do know it, and you've got to stand from under."

She turned about and walked to the side window, looking on the garden. She was a slight woman, but Myron, watching her in the fascination of his dread, had momentary remembrance of her father, who had been a man of majestic presence and unflinching will.

"Herman," his wife was calling from the window. "Herman, you come here."

That new mysterious note in her voice evidently affected the young man also. He came, hurrying, and when he had entered stayed upon the threshold, warm-hued with work and bringing with him the odor of the soil. His brown eyes went from one of them to the other, and questioned them.

"What is it?" he inquired. "What's happened?"

Myron got upon his feet. He had a dazed feeling that the two were against him, and he could face them better so. He hated the situation, the abasement that came from a secret self within him which was almost terribly moved by some of the things his wife had spoken out of her long silence. He was a proud man, and it seemed to him dreadful that he should in any way have won such harsh appeal.

"Herman," his wife was beginning, "your father's got somethin' to say to you."

Herman waited, but his father could not speak. Myron was really seeing, as in a homely vision, the peace of the garden where he might at this moment have been expecting the call to dinner if he had not been summoned to the bar of judgment.

"I guess he's goin' to let me say it," his wife continued. "Father's goin' to give you a deed o' the Turnbull place. It's goin' to be yours, same as if you'd bought it, and you and Annie are goin' to live there all your days, same 's we're goin' to live here."

Herman turned impetuously upon his father. There was a great rush of life to his face, and his father saw it and understood, in the amazement of it, things he had never stopped to consider about the boy who had miraculously grown to be a man. But Herman was finding something in his father's jaded mien. It stopped him on the tide of happiness, and he spoke impetuously.

"She's dragged it out o' you! Mother's been tellin' you! I don't want it that way, father, not unless it's your own free will. I won't have it no other way."

It was a man's word to a man. Myron straightened himself to his former bearing. In a flash of memory he remembered the day when his father, an old-fashioned man, had given him his freedom suit and shaken hands with him and wished him well. Involuntarily he put out his hand.

"It's my own will, Hermie," he said, in a tone they had not heard from him since the day, eighteen years behind them, when the boy Hermie was rescued from the "old swimmin'-hole." "We'll have the deeds drawed up to-morrer."

They stood an instant, hands gripped, regarding each other in the allegiance not of blood alone. The clasp broke, and they remembered the woman and turned to her. There she stood, trembling a little, but apparently removed from all affairs too large for her. She had taken a cover from the stove, and was obviously reflecting on the next step in her domestic progress.

"I guess you better bring me in a handful o' that fine kindlin', Hermie," she remarked, in her wonted tone of brisk suggestion, "so 's 't I can brash up the fire. I sha'n't have dinner on the stroke--not 'fore half-past one."

THE ADVOCATE

"You goin'?" called Isabel Wilde from the road, to Ardelia, sitting forlornly on the front steps.

It was seven o'clock of a wonderful August morning, with all the bloom of summer and the lull of fall. Isabel was a dark, strong young creature who walked with her head in the air, and Ardelia, pretty and frail and perfect in her own small way, looked like a child in comparison. Isabel had been down to carry a frosted cake to her little niece Ellen, for Ellen's share of the picnic at Poole's Woods. It was Fairfax day, when once a year all Fairfax went to the spot where the first settlers drank of the "b'ilin' spring" on their way to a clearing.

"You goin'?" she called again, imperiously, and Ardelia answered, as if from some unwillingness:--

"I guess so."

"Now what do you want to say that for?" rang her mother's voice from an upper window, where, trusting to her distance from the road, she thought she could speak her mind without Isabel's hearing. "You know you ain't. Oliver's gone off to work in the acre lot."

Isabel had heard. She stood regarding Ardelia thoughtfully, her black brows drawn together and her teeth set upon one full lip.

"Ardelia," she called softly, after that moment of consideration.

"What is it?" came Ardelia's unwilling voice, the tone of one who has emotion to conceal.

"Come here a minute."

Ardelia rose slowly and came down the path. She was a wisp of a creature, perfectly fashioned and very appealing in her blond prettiness. Isabel eyed her sharply and judged from certain signs that she had at least meant to go. She had on her light-blue dimity with the Hamburg frills, and her sorrowful face indicated that she had donned it to no avail.

"What time you goin', 'Delia?" asked Isabel quietly, over the fence.

Ardelia could not look at her. She stood with bent head, busily arranging a spray of coreopsis that fell out over the path, and Isabel was sure her eyes were wet.

"I don't know," she said evasively; "maybe not very early."

Isabel was looking at her tenderly. It was not a personal tenderness so much as a softness born out of peculiar circumstance. She knew exactly why she was sorry for Ardelia in a way no one else could be. Yet there seemed to be no present means of helping her.

"Well," she said, turning away, "maybe I'll see you there. Say, 'Delia!" A sudden thought was brightening her eyes to even a kinder glow. "If you haven't planned any other way, s'pose you go with us. Jim Bryant's goin' to take me, and he'd admire to have you, too. What say, 'Delia?"

Ardelia's delicate figure straightened, and now she looked at Isabel. There was something new in her gentle glance. It looked like dignity.

"I'm much obliged to you, Isabel," she returned stiffly. "If I go, I've arranged to go another way."

"All right," said Isabel. "Well, I guess I'll be gettin' along."

But before she was half-way to the turning of the road she heard Mrs. Drake's shrill voice from the upper window:--

"He's begun to dig, 'Delia. Oliver's begun to dig. He won't stop for no picnics, I can tell ye that."

It seemed to Isabel as if the world were very much out of tune for delicate girls like 'Delia who wanted pleasure and could not have it. She paused a moment at the crossing of the roads, the frown of consideration again upon her brow. "Makes me mad," she said to herself, but half absently, as if that were not the issue at all. Then she turned her back on her own home-road and the house where her starched dress was awaiting her, and where Jim Bryant would presently call to take her to Poole's Woods, and walked briskly down the other way.

Isabel stopped at the acre field, but she had no idea of what she meant to say when she was there. Oliver was digging potatoes, as she knew he would be, and she recognized the bend of the back, the steady stress of one who toiled too long and too unrestingly, so that his very pose spoke like a lifelong purpose. She stood still for a moment or two before he saw her, gazing at him. Old tenderness awoke in her, old angers also. She remembered how he had made her suffer in the obstinate course of his own will, and how free she had felt when at last she had broken their engagement and seen him drift under Ardelia's charm. But he would always mean something to her more than other men, in a fashion quite peculiar to himself. She had agonized too much over him. She had protected him too long against the faults of his own nature, and now she could not be content unless, for his sake, she protected Ardelia a little also. Suddenly he lifted himself to rest his back, and saw her. They stood confronting each other, each with a sense of familiarity and pain. Oliver was a handsome fellow, tall, splendidly made, with rich, warm coloring. He looked kindly, but stolidly set in his own way.

"That you, Isabel?" he asked awkwardly.

They had met only for a passing word since the breaking of their troth.

"Yes," said Isabel briefly. "I've got to speak to you. Wait a minute. I'll come in by the bars, and you meet me under the old cherry. It'll be shady there."

She turned back to the bars, ducked deftly under, and, holding her skirts from the rough land, made her way to the cherry in the corner of the lot. Oliver wonderingly followed. She felt again that particular anger she reserved for him, when she saw him stalking along, hoe in hand. It was a settled tread, with little spring in it, and for the moment it seemed to her a prophecy of what it would be when he was an old man, with a staff instead of the hoe. She was waiting for him under the tree.

"Oliver," she began, speaking out of an impulse hardly yet approved by judgment, "you goin' to the picnic?"

Oliver looked at her in wonder.

"Why, no," said he slowly.

"Didn't you promise 'Delia you'd go?"

"No, I guess not. I said mebbe I'd be round if I had time, but I ain't found the time. These 'taters have got to be dug."

The red had surged into Isabel's full cheeks. She looked an eloquent remonstrance.

"Oliver," she said impetuously, "'Delia's sittin' on the front steps, waitin' for you to come. She'll be terrible disappointed if you put her aside like this."

Oliver took off his hat and passed a hand over his forehead. She noticed, as she had a hundred times, how fine his hair was at the roots, and was angry again because he would not, with his exasperating ways, let any woman love him as she might. He seemed to have nothing to say, but she knew the picture of lone 'Delia sitting on the steps was far from moving him. It did cause him an honest trouble, for he was kind; but not for that would he postpone his work.

"Oliver," she continued, "did you ever know what 'twas that made me tell you we must break off bein'--engaged?"

He was looking at her earnestly. His own mind seemed returning to a past ache and loss.

"I understood," he said at length--"I understood 'twas because you kinder figured it out we shouldn't get along well."

She stood there, a frowning figure, her lips compressed, her eyes stormy. Then she turned to him, all frankness and candor.

"Oliver," she said, "I never give you any reasons. What's the use? I was terrible fond of you. I was. I don't know 's any girl ought to say that when you're engaged to somebody else, and I'm engaged myself, and happy as the day is long. But what 'twas--what come between us--you never made me have a good time."

He stood leaning upon his hoe, very handsome, very stern in his attention to her, and, as she could see, entirely surprised. The child in her, that rare, ingenuous part she kept in hiding, came out and spoke:--

"Why, Oliver, we never had any fun! You were awful good to me. You'd worry yourself to pieces if I was sick; but we never had more'n one or two good times together, long 's it lasted, and them I planned. And I got terrible tired of it, and I says to myself, 'If it's so now, when we're only goin' together, it'll be a million times worse when we're married.' And then when you took a fancy to 'Delia, I was real pleased. I says to myself. 'Maybe she'll know how to manage him. Maybe 'twas somethin' in me,' I says, 'that made him not want to have a good time with me, and maybe now 'twon't be so.' And when I see you goin' on the same old way, workin' from mornin' till night, I says to myself, 'Something' 's got to be done. I ain't goin' to have 'Delia put upon like this.' 'Tain't because it's 'Delia. I ain't so terrible fond of 'Delia, only we went to school together. But don't you see, Oliver, I couldn't say it for myself? No girl could. But I can for 'Delia."

"Well," said Oliver, "well." He was entirely amazed. Then as he looked at the field, a general maxim occurred to him, and he remarked, "The farm's got to be carried on."

"No, it ain't, either," said Isabel, with a passionate earnestness, "not as you do it. Other folks don't work themselves to death the way you do, and you're forehanded too. It's because you like it. You like it better'n anything else. You were born so, and it's just as bad as bein' born with an appetite for drink or anything else."

"I never knew you felt so, Isabel," he said gravely. "I don't see why you didn't speak on 't before when--old times."

"I'd rather have died," she declared passionately. "Any girl would. 'Delia would. Maybe she'll cry all the afternoon if she finds she ain't goin'; but if you call over there Saturday night, butter won't melt in her mouth. She won't tell you how 'shamed she is before folks to think you didn't take the trouble to go with her. Anyways, she won't if she's any kind of a girl."

Oliver had plucked some wisps of grass from the edge of turf under the tree, and he was wiping his hoe thoughtfully. Isabel began to laugh. She was trembling all over from old angers and the excitement of her new daring, and she kept on laughing.

"One thing," she said, as she brushed away the tears with an impatient hand, "'Delia's mother's got her spy-glass on us this very minute. What under the sun she thinks I'm here for I don't know and I don't much care. You can tell her anything you're a mind to. Only you come. Come now, Oliver, you come!"

Oliver quite meekly hung up his hoe in the branches and waited for her to lead the way.

"I've got to ketch the colt," he said. "Mother took Dolly to go after aunt Huldy. Mother's always made a good deal o' the picnic."

There was a beat of hoofs upon the road, and Isabel, her present mission stricken from her mind, turned to see. It was Jim Bryant, driving by to call for her.

"My soul!" she said, under her breath.

"What is it, Isabel?" Oliver was asking her, with concern.

She had caught herself up, and she laughed in a sorry mirth.

"Nothin'," she said. "You catch the colt."

They walked out of the field in silence. At the stone wall he paused.

"Isabel," he said solemnly,--and with that double sense she had had all through the interview, she thought this was the look she had seen on his grandfather's face when he led in prayer,--"Isabel, you'd ought to spoke to me before. Why, I've been tryin' to get ahead so 's to make her comfortable, when--we set up housekeepin'."

Isabel was not sure whether he meant her or Ardelia. At any rate, it was the woman to whom he was determined to be loyally kind. She also paused and looked at him with earnest eyes. It was the last moment in all her life to convince and alter him.

"Don't you see, Oliver," she urged, "that's what folks are together for, chiefly, to have a good time. I don't mean they've got to be on the go from mornin' till night. They've got to work hard, too. Why, what's 'Delia marryin' you for, anyways. 'Tain't to stay at home and work, day in, day out. She can do that now, right where she is. 'Tain't so 's she can see you workin'. She can take her mother's spy-glass and have that, too, till she's sick to death of it. You go along, Oliver, and catch the colt."

He looked at her very kindly, gratefully, too, perhaps, and turned away toward the live-oak field. But Isabel, hurrying homeward, stopped and called him.

"Oliver, you say your mother's gone?"

"Yes."

"She lay your things out?"

"No, I guess not. I told her I wa'n't goin'."

"Well, I'll see to it as I run along."

Laying out the things of the men folks of the family was rigidly observed in this household, where Oliver was regarded as the cherished head. He had been brought up to a helpless lack of acquaintance with his best clothes. He knew them only as lendings apt to constrict him a little when he got them on, and to rouse in his mother a tendency to make unwelcome remarks about his personal charms. Where they lived, between those times of warfare, he scarcely knew.

Isabel laughed a little to herself, in a rueful fashion, as she hurried along the road. Her own swain was waiting for her, but not for that would she abjure the quest. She ran up Oliver's driveway and, without pausing, opened the blind where the key, she knew, was hidden, and snatched it forth. She unlocked the door and crossed the kitchen, rigid in its order, with Oliver's cold luncheon set out on the table under wire covers. She made her way upstairs, and in his room, also in beautiful array, stood for a moment looking about her. Isabel gave a little laugh. "I should think I was crazy," she said to herself; and then she opened bureau drawers until she found the careful display of bosomed shirts she knew were there. She laid one on the bed, his collar and necktie beside it, and took down his best suit from the closet. She gave the collar of the coat a little unnecessary brush with her hand. It seemed almost a wifely touch, and she was angry with herself. Yet it was only that this was mating-time, and the tender and the maternal strove blindly in her, and brought forth a largess great enough to touch other lots besides her own.

Then she sped downstairs and went away to her own home. Her mother--a little woman, all energy--met her at the gate. She had on her best bonnet and carried her Paisley shawl. She was shading her eyes with her hand and looking tense in a way Isabel declaimed against, for it made wrinkles in her mother's nice forehead.

"For mercy sake, where you been?" she called. "Ain't you seen Jim?"

"No," said Isabel lightly. "Where is he?"

"Well, I dunno where he is," said her mother reprovingly. "He come here after you, all dressed up, an' I told him you was gone down to Ellen's to carry the cake. So he said he'd go along down an' fetch you up, an' I told him he better stop to Ardelia's an' see if you wasn't there. An' then he come back, ridin' like the wind, an' he said I could tell you Mis' Drake said you's goin' to the picnic with Oliver. She see you through the spy-glass, an' Oliver'd gone to ketch the colt."

"There's father," said Isabel steadily. "He's drivin' out the carriage-house now. You got the cake in the buggy?"

"You do worry me 'most to death," said Mrs. Wilde. Her face had tied itself into a snarl of knots, from which the kindly eyes looked angrily. "Who you goin' with, Isabel? You ain't been an' took up with Oliver again, after all's said an' done?"

Isabel laughed, but her voice shook a little, and not with mirth.

"I'm all right, mother. Don't you say anything to anybody. That's all. Here comes father. Take care your dress. You'll get wheel-grease on it."

Her strong hands were lifting the little creature, and Mrs. Wilde found herself driven away. She was turning a glance over her shoulder to the last, and calling, "Isabel, you tell me--" But father, who had Isabel's masterful purpose, whipped up, and they were gone.

Isabel, still smiling, as if the sun itself could judge her and it was desirable to keep up some appearance before it, went into the house and closed the door behind her. She took off her hat and hung it on its nail in the front hall. Then her muscles seemed to weaken in a strange way, and she went into the darkened parlor where no neighbor would find her, and sat down by the centre-table. She bowed her head upon the great picture-Bible, and unmindful of the cross and anchor in perforated paper below and the green wool mat with its glass beads, began to cry. Isabel hated tears with a fiery scorn. She liked to stand on her two feet and face the world as her father did; yet here she was, sobbing over the centre-table and drawing quick breaths of misery. Even then, in the passion of her grief, it did occur to her that in all the anger she had felt toward Oliver in times past, she had never wanted to cry. Something now had hurt a deeper heart than she knew she had.

She had got over the first tempest of her grief, and sat drying her eyes with a wondering shame, and suddenly there was a sound of a horse driven rapidly. Hope flooded her face with color. She sprang up and slipped to the window and peered out at the side of the curtain. But it was not he. It was Oliver, erect and handsome in his best clothes, and Ardelia beside him. Oliver glanced up at the house as they went by; but he bent to Ardelia again in a way that looked fondness and protection at once. And Ardelia was openly in paradise. She was looking up to him with no eyes for any face at the window, and as they whirled out of sight Isabel saw her lift a hand and with an intimate, pretty motion brush something from his coat. Then they were gone, and immediately the neighborhood seemed to settle into a quiet. All the town was at Poole's Woods, and Isabel was left behind.

For a long time, it seemed to her, she sat there, trying to still her breath and school herself into her old serenity. Then, with her handkerchief, a little wet ball, tight in one hand, she rose, went to the glass that even in the darkened light showed her a miserable look, made a little face at herself, and walked out into the kitchen. There she stood idly for a moment, debating what she should do. Jim Bryant had not lived long in the town, but she knew him well from these few weeks of intimacy. He was tempestuously devoted to her, in a way that stirred her blood. There was plenty of fire and passion in him; he had a temper, and he would not come back. Isabel set her lips. "I guess," she said to herself, "I'll have the burnfire." She thought of baking pound-cake, but all the day before they had made cake for the picnic. She might wash the blankets, or begin quilting, or clean the cistern. These dramas were hardly exciting enough. The bonfire was better. She tied on her father's hat and kilted her skirts. Then she brought out the iron rake from the barn and settled the brush-heap anew. It was on the square of land where she had had her perennial bed for three years, and now she had decided to sow it down to grass. The litter of the garden was there, with splinters of shingle and dried weeds, and next week her father meant to burn it.

Isabel touched her match and stood by, watching, while the flames curled and crept. Then they crackled among the brush, and she held them down and got excited over it, and for an instant forgot Poole's Woods. It was a good little fight out-of-doors in the hot sun, with a stream of fire when it caught something dry, and then a column of smoke that made a tang in the air and stirred her blood deliciously. Isabel was like a creature of the earth combating something for the earth's good, and getting hotter and more breathless every minute.

"What you doin' there?" called a voice from the gate.

She forgot the bonfire, remembering her father's hat and her kilted skirts. Jim Bryant threw the gate shut with a clang and came striding across the yard. He was tall and brown and sturdy. Isabel knew exactly how he looked with his brow set and his blue eyes blazing.

"I've got a burnfire," she said, and raked the harder.

Jim came up and took the rake out of her hand. It seemed to be for no purpose save that he had to do something. Isabel put up her head and looked at him. There was hostility in her glance, but it was the challenge of sex that meets and measures.

"I see the smoke comin' up over this way, an' I thought there was the devil to pay," he said harshly. "What you carryin' on like this for?"

"I ain't carryin' on," said Isabel, from tense lips. "This is our land, and I guess I can have a burnfire if I want to."

"Why ain't you at Poole's Woods?" The fire was dying down a little, but one persistent flame moved like a snake in the dry stubble, and he savagely stamped it out. "Why ain't you? I come after you."

"You didn't wait, did you?"

"Old Mis' Drake said you were goin' with Briggs."

"Did I tell you so?"

He weakened a little.

"N-no! But she said you'd been down talkin' it over an' Oliver'd gone to ketch the colt. She offered me the spy-glass."

Isabel's lips had a little line of white about them. She looked full at him now.

"Did you take it, Jim?"

"Take it? No!" he roared at her. "Do you think I'd do a thing like that?"

They stood looking at each other, glance holding glance, their eyes blazing. Suddenly he threw the rake as if he had been throwing down a shield and held out his arms to her. Isabel walked into them, and while they kissed, her father's straw hat slipped back over her shoulders, and she laughed and never missed the fluffy headgear lying in her room upstairs, waiting for Poole's Woods. Suddenly she remembered that they were out in the broad sunlight, in sight of the road, and then she bethought her that all the town had gone to Poole's Woods to leave them the world alone to kiss in. She remembered, too, that old Mrs. Drake's spy-glass might be trained on them at that moment.

"I don't care," she said, and laughed.

"Don't care for what?" asked her lover, his lips at her ear.

"For anything. There! let me go. Here's some more fire in the grass."

They stamped and raked quite soberly for a moment, and then Isabel began to laugh again. She looked wild and beautiful in her fight with the earth and her own heart. Jim laughed a little, too.

"What is it, Bell?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, in the ecstasy of happiness. "I guess I like a burnfire."

When it died still lower, they walked toward the house, hand in hand, and sat there on the steps watching it.

"Well," said Bryant, smiling at her, "you want to go to Poole's Woods?"

Isabel smiled back.

"I guess so," she said. "We can be there by luncheon-time."

"All right. I'll go home an' harness up." Half-way down the path he stopped and turned. "Say, Isabel!"

She answered from the porch on her way in to don the muslin dress.

"What is it?"

"You never told me what you were down there for."

"Where?"

"Down to Oliver's."

She shook her head and laughed.

"No, nor I sha'n't, either." His brows were coming together. "'Twas an errand," she called to him. "It wa'n't mine, either. You got to know?"

Again they stood looking at each other, this time with a steady challenge as if more things were decided than the moment's victory. Then suddenly, as if in the same breath, they smiled again, and Bryant gave her a little nod.

"Get your things on," he called. "We're goin' to Poole's Woods. That's all I want to know."

THE MASQUERADE