Chapter XII: Stories (1)

Stories are sometimes called _Artistic Narrative_ in contrast to the other and various kinds illustrated in the preceding chapters, all of which are known as _Informational Narrative_. The reason for this distinction in terms is readily seen by one who has examined the form and the subject matter of the story. Reminiscent, biographical, expository narrative, the sketch, the account of travel present alike incidents, situations, circumstances, persons, objects, landscapes, reflections--all in an orderly and a pleasing manner, to be sure, but without giving any especial heightening or stress to what might well have been an exceptional situation with significant causes and most interesting consequences. This singling out a situation, this simplifying of a mass of unrelated material to a few weighty details all bearing upon one another, this presentation of causes with their inevitable results, this selection of a few outstanding characters whose lives and fortunes have been for a short time in conflict over a great matter or in collision over a small one--these are within the province of the story-teller; and because such work demands a sense of form in the arrangement of material to the best advantage, a sympathetic understanding of character, and a perception of what certain surroundings and circumstances may mean to persons in a given situation, the story-teller is called upon to exhibit a kind of art which is not demanded of the writer of informational narrative.

Mr. Bliss Perry in _A Study of Prose Fiction_ defines a story-teller as one who “shows how certain persons do certain things under certain circumstances.” In this definition there are clearly suggested three possible and entirely distinct sources of interest in a story: the author may be concerned most of all in the behavior of his characters, in the series of actions and events which make up the plot; or, instead, he may wish above everything else to depict some one character who seems to him outstanding and unusual enough to command the attention of any reader; or, again, he may be one who sees behavior or character entirely in the light of environment, to whom setting is a great, even an overwhelming force in a person’s life.

If the first of these sources of interest is of paramount importance to him, then he will write a story in which plot is uppermost, in which the action is more significant than the portrayal of character or than setting, a story in which “things happen.” This Mr. H. C. Bunner has done in “A Sisterly Scheme.” Here, although the setting of the story is well and clearly given, although the two sisters and Mr. Morpeth are capitally portrayed, it is the _action_ of the story which holds our attention and our curiosity to the end. Indeed, the reader will easily see that no setting is given except that which is absolutely necessary and that the characters are almost entirely depicted by what they do or by what happens to them.

In the story called “Two Friends” by M. Guy de Maupassant, however, character portrayal is uppermost. The plot action is relegated to little more than an incident; and yet M. Morissot and M. Sauvage, in their quiet dependence upon each other, in their common love of fishing, which makes them forget “the rest of the world,” and finally in their splendid and pathetic heroism are imperishable. Here, too, at the close is illustrated a device valuable to the writer of the character story in the contrast which is afforded by the picture of the Prussian officer, and which serves to accentuate the simplicity, the kindness, and the valor of the two little Frenchmen.

And Mr. Francis Buzzell in “Lonely Places” has given us a story of almost pure setting. To be sure, there is action in plenty; to be sure, the characters of Abbie Snover and of Old Chris are clearly and beautifully portrayed; and yet the reader is every moment conscious that the action rises out of and because of the setting, that the environment has been and still is responsible for the careless cruelty of the children, for the attitude of their parents, and for the pathetic consequences which Old Chris and Abbie must undergo.

These three stories, however, distinct as they are in their respective and single impressions and effects, all contain plot _in some measure_, even though the action may seem subordinate to the portrayal of character in one of them and to the depiction of the setting in another. Most stories, in fact, contain more or less of the plot element. Yet there are those narratives which possess too many of the features of a story to be called an incident or a sketch, and too little of the form which we have come to think necessary to the well-constructed short-story. Sometimes they are called stories without plot. Such a story is Miss Willa Cather’s “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” It is, in form, little more than an incident and the circumstances attendant upon it; and yet there are few stories anywhere that surpass it in brilliancy of characterization, in strength and vividness of setting, and in the consistent art of its atmosphere.

A study of the four stories which follow will illustrate better than any precept can do the impressions which the story writer must seek to attain after he has made his choice of a subject and after he has decided upon his way of approach and of treatment.

M. E. C.

A SISTERLY SCHEME

H. C. BUNNER

Away up in the very heart of Maine there is a mighty lake among the mountains. It is reached after a journey of many hours from the place where you “go in.” That is the phrase of the country, and when you have once “gone in,” you know why it is not correct to say that you have gone _through_ the woods, or, simply, _to_ your destination. You find that you have plunged into a new world--a world that has nothing in common with the world that you live in; a world of wild, solemn, desolate grandeur, a world of space and silence; a world that oppresses your soul--and charms you irresistibly. And after you have once “come out” of that world, there will be times, to the day of your death, when you will be homesick for it, and will long with a childlike longing to go back to it.

Up in this wild region you will find a fashionable summer hotel, with electric bells and seven-course dinners, and “guests” who dress three times a day. It is perched on a little flat point, shut off from the rest of the mainland by a huge rocky cliff. It is an impertinence in that majestic wilderness, and Leather-Stocking would doubtless have had a hankering to burn such an affront to Nature; but it is a good hotel, and people go to it and breathe the generous air of the great woods.

On the beach near this hotel, where the canoes were drawn up in line, there stood one summer morning a curly-haired, fair young man--not so very young, either--whose cheeks were uncomfortably red as he looked first at his own canoe, high and dry, loaded with rods and landing net and luncheon basket, and then at another canoe, fast disappearing down the lake wherein sat a young man and a young woman.

“Dropped again, Mr. Morpeth?”

The young man looked up and saw a saucy face laughing at him. A girl was sitting on the stringpiece of the dock. It was the face of a girl between childhood and womanhood. By the face and the figure, it was a woman grown. By the dress, you would have judged it a girl.

And you would have been confirmed in the latter opinion by the fact that the young person was doing something unpardonable for a young lady, but not inexcusable in the case of a youthful tomboy. She had taken off her canvas shoe, and was shaking some small stones out of it. There was a tiny hole in her black stocking, and a glimpse of her pink toe was visible. The girl was sunburnt, but the toe was prettily pink.

“Your sister,” replied the young man with dignity, “was to have gone fishing with me; but she remembered at the last moment that she had a prior engagement with Mr. Brown.”

“She hadn’t,” said the girl. “I heard them make it up last evening, after you went upstairs.”

The young man clean forgot himself.

“She’s the most heartless coquette in the world,” he cried, and clinched his hands.

“She is all that,” said the young person on the stringpiece of the dock, “and more too. And yet, I suppose, you want her all the same?”

“I’m afraid I do,” said the young man miserably.

“Well,” said the girl, putting her shoe on again, and beginning to tie it up, “I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Morpeth. You’ve been hanging around Pauline for a year, and you are the only one of the men she keeps on a string who hasn’t snubbed me. Now, if you want me to, I’ll give you a lift.”

“A--a--_what_?”

“A lift. You’re wasting your time. Pauline has no use for devotion. It’s a drug in the market with her--has been for five seasons. There’s only one way to get her worked up. Two fellows tried it, and they nearly got there; but they weren’t game enough to stay to the bitter end. I think you’re game, and I’ll tell you. You’ve got to make her jealous.”

“Make her jealous of me?”

“No,” said his friend, with infinite scorn; “make her jealous of the other girl. _Oh!_ but you men are stupid!”

The young man pondered a moment.

“Well, Flossy,” he began, and then he became conscious of a sudden change in the atmosphere, and perceived that the young lady was regarding him with a look that might have chilled his soul.

“Miss Flossy--Miss Belton--” he hastily corrected himself. Winter promptly changed to summer in Miss Flossy Belton’s expressive face.

“Your scheme,” he went on, “is a good one. Only--it involves the discovery of another girl.”

“Yes,” assented Miss Flossy cheerfully.

“Well,” said the young man, “doesn’t it strike you that if I were to develop a sudden admiration for any one of these other young ladies whose charms I have hitherto neglected, it would come tardy off--lack artistic verisimilitude, so to speak?”

“Rather,” was Miss Flossy’s prompt and frank response; “especially as there isn’t one of them fit to flirt with.”

“Well, then, where am I to discover the girl?”

Miss Flossy untied and retied her shoe. Then she said, calmly:----

“What’s the matter with--” a hardly perceptible hesitation--“_me_?”

“With _you_?” Mr. Morpeth was startled out of his manners.

“Yes!”

Mr. Morpeth simply stared.

“Perhaps,” suggested Miss Flossy, “I’m not good-looking enough?”

“You are good-looking enough,” replied Mr. Morpeth, recovering himself, “for _anything_--” and he threw a convincing emphasis into the last word as he took what was probably his first real inspection of his adored one’s junior--“but--aren’t you a trifle--young?”

“How old do you suppose I am?”

“I know. Your sister told me. You are sixteen.”

“Sixteen!” repeated Miss Flossy, with an infinite and uncontrollable scorn, “yes, and I’m the kind of sixteen that stays sixteen till your elder sister’s married. I was eighteen years old on the 3d of last December--unless they began to double on me before I was old enough to know the difference--it would be just like mamma to play it on me in some such way,” she concluded, reflectively.

“Eighteen years old!” said the young man. “The deuce!” Do not think that he was an ill-bred young man. He was merely astonished, and he had much more astonishment ahead of him. He mused for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “what’s your plan of campaign? I am to--to discover you.”

“Yes,” said Miss Flossy calmly, “and to flirt with me like fun.”

“And may I ask what attitude you are to take when you are--discovered?”

“Certainly,” replied the imperturbable Flossy. “I am going to dangle you.”

“To--to dangle me?”

“As a conquest, don’t you know? Let you hang around and laugh at you.”

“Oh, indeed?”

“There, don’t be wounded in your masculine pride. You might as well face the situation. You don’t think that Pauline’s in love with you, do you?”

“No!” groaned the young man.

“But you’ve got lots of money. Mr. Brown has got lots more. You’re eager. Brown is coy. That’s the reason that Brown is in the boat and you are on the cold, cold shore, talking to Little Sister. Now if Little Sister jumps at you, why, she’s simply taking Big Sister’s leavings; it’s all in the family, anyway, and there’s no jealousy, and Pauline can devote her whole mind to Brown. There, _don’t_ look so limp. You men are simply childish. Now, after you’ve asked me to marry you----”

“Oh, I’m to ask you to marry me?”

“Certainly. You needn’t look frightened, now. I won’t accept you. But then you are to go around like a wet cat, and mope, and hang on worse than ever. Then Big Sister will see that she can’t afford to take that sort of thing from Little Sister, and then--there’s your chance.”

“Oh, there’s my chance, is it?” said Mr. Morpeth. He seemed to have fallen into the habit of repetition.

“There’s your _only chance_,” said Miss Flossy, with decision.

Mr. Morpeth meditated. He looked at the lake, where there was no longer sign or sound of the canoe, and he looked at Miss Flossy, who sat calm, self-confident, and careless on the springpiece of the dock.

“I don’t know how feasible--” he began.

“It’s feasible,” said Miss Flossy, with decision. “Of course Pauline will write to mamma, and of course mamma will write and scold me. But she’s got to stay in New York and nurse papa’s gout; and the Miss Redingtons are all the chaperons we’ve got up here, and they don’t amount to anything--so I don’t care.”

“But why,” inquired the young man, and his tone suggested a complete abandonment to Miss Flossy’s idea, “why should you take so much trouble for _me_?”

“Mr. Morpeth,” said Miss Flossy solemnly, “I’m two years behind the time-table, and I’ve got to make a strike for liberty, or die. And besides,” she added, “if you are _nice_, it needn’t be such an _awful_ trouble.”

Mr. Morpeth laughed.

“I’ll try to make it as little of a bore as possible,” he said, extending his hand. The girl did not take it.

“Don’t make any mistake,” she cautioned him, searching his face with her eyes; “this isn’t to be any little-girl affair. Little Sister doesn’t want any kind, elegant, supercilious encouragement from Big Sister’s young man. It’s got to be a _real_ flirtation--devotion no end, and ten times as much as ever Pauline could get out of you--and you’ve got to keep your end ’way--’way--’way up!”

The young man smiled.

“I’ll keep my end up,” he said; “but are you certain that you can keep yours up?”

“Well, I think so,” replied Miss Flossy. “Pauline will raise an awful row; but if she goes too far, I’ll tell my age, _and hers, too_.”

Mr. Morpeth looked in Miss Flossy’s calm face. Then he extended his hand once more.

“It’s a bargain, so far as I’m concerned,” he said.

This time a soft and small hand met his with a firm, friendly, honest pressure.

“And I’ll refuse you,” said Miss Flossy.

* * * * *

Within two weeks, Mr. Morpeth found himself entangled in a flirtation such as he had never dreamed of. Miss Flossy’s scheme had succeeded only too brilliantly. The whole hotel was talking about the outrageous behavior of “that little Belton girl” and Mr. Morpeth, who certainly ought to know better.

Mr. Morpeth had carried out his instructions. Before the week was out, he found himself giving the most lifelike imitation of an infatuated lover that ever delighted the old gossips of a summer resort. And yet he had only done what Flossy told him to do.

He got his first lesson just about the time that Flossy, in the privacy of their apartments, informed her elder sister that if she, Flossy, found Mr. Morpeth’s society agreeable, it was nobody’s concern but her own, and that she was prepared to make some interesting additions to the census statistics if any one thought differently.

The lesson opened his eyes.

“Do you know,” she said, “that it wouldn’t be a bit of a bad idea to telegraph to New York for some real nice candy and humbly present it for my acceptance? I _might_ take it--if the bonbonnière was pretty enough.”

He telegraphed to New York, and received, in the course of four or five days, certain marvels of sweets in a miracle of an upholstered box. The next day he found her on the veranda, flinging the bonbons on the lawn for the children to scramble for.

“Awfully nice of you to send me these things,” she said languidly, but loud enough for the men around her to hear,--she had men around her already: she had been discovered,--“but I never eat sweets, you know. Here, you little mite in the blue sash, don’t you want this pretty box to put your doll’s clothes in?”

And Maillard’s finest bonbonnière went to a yellow-haired brat of three.

But this was the slightest and lightest of her caprices. She made him send for his dogcart and his horses, all the way from New York, only that he might drive her over the ridiculous little mile and a half of road that bounded the tiny peninsula. And she christened him “Muffets,” a nickname presumably suggested by “Morpeth”; and she called him “Muffets” in the hearing of all the hotel people.

And did such conduct pass unchallenged? No. Pauline scolded, raged, raved. She wrote to mamma. Mamma wrote back and reproved Flossy. But mamma could not leave papa. His gout was worse. The Miss Redingtons must act. The Miss Redingtons merely wept, and nothing more. Pauline scolded; the flirtation went on; and the people at the big hotel enjoyed it immensely.

And there was more to come. Four weeks had passed. Mr. Morpeth was hardly on speaking terms with the elder Miss Belton; and with the younger Miss Belton he was on terms which the hotel gossips characterized as “simply scandalous.” Brown glared at him when they met, and he glared at Brown. Brown was having a hard time. Miss Belton the elder was not pleasant of temper in those trying days.

“And now,” said Miss Flossy to Mr. Morpeth, “it’s time you proposed to me, Muffets.”

They were sitting on the hotel veranda, in the evening darkness. No one was near them, except an old lady in a Shaker chair.

“There’s Mrs. Melby. She’s pretending to be asleep, but she isn’t. She’s just waiting for us. Now walk me up and down and ask me to marry you so that she can hear it. It’ll be all over the hotel inside of half an hour. Pauline will just _rage_.”

With this pleasant prospect before him, Mr. Morpeth marched Miss Flossy Belton up and down the long veranda. He had passed Mrs. Melby three times before he was able to say, in a choking, husky, uncertain voice:----

“Flossy--I--I--I _love_ you!”

Flossy’s voice was not choking nor uncertain. It rang out clear and silvery in a peal of laughter.

“Why, of course you do, Muffets, and I wish you didn’t. That’s what makes you so stupid half the time.”

“But--” said Mr. Morpeth vaguely; “but I----”

“But you’re a silly boy,” returned Miss Flossy; and she added in a swift aside: “_You haven’t asked me to marry you!_”

“W-W-W-Will you be my wife?” stammered Mr. Morpeth.

“No!” said Miss Flossy, emphatically, “I will not. You are too utterly ridiculous. The idea of it! No, Muffets, you are charming in your present capacity; but you aren’t to be considered seriously.”

They strolled on into the gloom at the end of the great veranda.

“That’s the first time,” he said, with a feeling of having only the ghost of a breath left in his lungs, “that I ever asked a woman to marry me.”

“I should think so,” said Miss Flossy, “from the way you did it. And you were beautifully rejected, weren’t you? Now--look at Mrs. Melby, will you? She’s scudding off to spread the news.”

And before Mr. Morpeth went to bed, he was aware of the fact that every man and woman in the hotel knew that he had “proposed” to Flossy Belton, and had been “beautifully rejected.”

* * * * *

Two sulky men, one sulky woman, and one girl radiant with triumphant happiness started out in two canoes, reached certain fishing grounds known only to the elect, and began to cast for trout. They had indifferent luck. Miss Belton and Mr. Brown caught a dozen trout; Miss Flossy Belton and Mr. Morpeth caught eighteen or nineteen, and the day was wearing to a close. Miss Flossy made the last cast of the day, just as her escort had taken the paddle. A big trout rose--just touched the fly--and disappeared.

“It’s this wretched rod!” cried Miss Flossy; and she rapped it on the gunwale of the canoe so sharply that the beautiful split bamboo broke sharp off in the middle of the second joint. Then she tumbled it overboard, reel and all.

“I was tired of that rod, anyway, Muffets,” she said; “row me home, now; I’ve got to dress for dinner.”

Miss Flossy’s elder sister, in the other boat, saw and heard this exhibition of tyranny; and she was so much moved that she stamped her small foot, and endangered the bottom of the canoe. She resolved that mamma should come back, whether papa had the gout or not.

Mr. Morpeth, wearing a grave expression, was paddling Miss Flossy toward the hotel. He had said nothing whatever, and it was a noticeable silence that Miss Flossy finally broke.

“You’ve done pretty much everything that I wanted you to do, Muffets,” she said; “but you haven’t saved my life yet, and I’m going to give you a chance.”

It is not difficult to overturn a canoe. One twist of Flossie’s supple body did it, and before he knew just what had happened, Morpeth was swimming toward the shore, holding up Flossy Belton with one arm, and fighting for life in the icy water of a Maine lake.

The people were running down, bearing blankets and brandy, as he touched bottom in his last desperate struggle to keep the two of them above water. One yard further, and there would have been no strength left in him.

He struggled up on shore with her, and when he got breath enough, he burst out:----

“Why did you do it? It was wicked! It was cruel!”

“There!” she said, as she reclined composedly in his arms, “that will do, Muffets. I don’t want to be scolded.”

A delegation came along, bringing blankets and brandy, and took her from him.

* * * * *

At five o’clock of that afternoon, Mr. Morpeth presented himself at the door of the parlor attached to the apartments of the Belton sisters. Miss Belton, senior, was just coming out of the room. She received his inquiry after her sister’s health with a white face and a quivering lip.

“I should think, Mr. Morpeth,” she began, “that you had gone far enough in playing with the feelings of a m-m-mere child, and that--oh! I have no words to express my _contempt_ for you!”

And in a most unladylike rage Miss Pauline Belton swept down the hotel corridor.

She had left the door open behind her. Morpeth heard a voice, weak, but cheery, addressing him from the far end of the parlor.

“You’ve got her!” it said. “She’s crazy mad. She’ll make up to you to-night--see if she don’t.”

Mr. Morpeth looked up and down the long corridor. It was empty. He pushed the door open, and entered. Flossy was lying on the sofa, pale, but bright-eyed.

“You can get her,” she whispered, as he knelt down beside her.

“Flossy,” he said, “don’t you know that that is all ended? Don’t you know that I love you and you only? Don’t you know that I haven’t thought about any one else since--since--oh, Flossy, don’t you--is it possible that you don’t understand?”

Flossy stretched out two weak arms, and put them around Mr. Morpeth’s neck.

“Why have I had you in training all summer?” said she. “Did you think it was for Pauline?”

Henry C. Bunner, _Short Sixes_. By permission
of Charles Scribner’s Sons, the authorized
publishers.

LONELY PLACES

FRANCIS BUZZELL

She was not quite forty years old, but so aged was she in appearance that another twenty-five years would not find her perceptibly older. And to the people of Almont she was still Abbie Snover, or “that Snover girl.” Age in Almont is not reckoned in years, but by marriage, and by children, and grandchildren.

Nearly all the young men of Abbie’s generation had gone to the City, returning only in after years, with the intention of staying a week or two weeks, and leaving at the end of a day, or two days. So Abbie never married.

It had never occurred to Abbie to leave Almont because all the young men had gone away. She had been born in the big house at the foot of Tillson Street; she had never lived anywhere else; she had never slept anywhere but in the black walnut bed in the South bedroom.

At the age of twenty-five, Abbie inherited the big house, and with it hired-man Chris. He was part of her inheritance. Her memory of him, like her memory of the big house, went back as far as her memory of herself.

Every Winter evening, between seven and eight o’clock, Abbie lighted the glass-handled lamp, placed it on the marble-topped table in the parlor window, and sat down beside it. The faint light of this lamp, gleaming through the snow-hung, shelving evergreens, was the only sign that the big house was there, and occupied. When the wind blew from the West she could occasionally hear a burst of laughter from the boys and girls sliding down Gidding’s Hill; the song of some young farmer driving home. She thought of the Spring, when the snow would disappear, and the honeysuckle would flower, and the wrens would again occupy the old tea-pots hung in the vines of the dining-room porch.

The things that made the people of Almont interesting to each other and drew them together meant nothing to Abbie Snover. When she had become too old to be asked in marriage by any one, she had stopped going to dances and to sleigh-rides, and no one had asked her why. Then she had left the choir.

Except when she went to do her marketing, Abbie was never seen on the streets.

For fifteen years after Amos Snover died, Abbie and Old Chris lived alone in the big house. Every Saturday morning, as her mother had done before her, Abbie went to the grocery store, to the butcher shop, and to “Newberry’s.” She always walked along the East side of Main Street, Old Chris, with the market-basket, following about three feet behind her. And every Saturday night Old Chris went down-town to sit in the back of Pot Lippincott’s store and visit with Owen Frazer, who drove in from the sixty acres he farmed as a “renter” at Mile Corners. Once every week Abbie made a batch of cookies, cutting the thin-rolled dough into the shape of leaves with an old tin cutter that had been her mother’s. She stored the cookies in the shiny tin pail that stood on the shelf in the clothes-press of the down-stairs bedroom, because that was where her mother had always kept them, to be handy and yet out of reach of the hired help. And when Jennie Sanders’s children came to her door on their way home from school she gave them two cookies each, because her mother had always given her two.

Once every three months “the Jersey girls,” dressed in black broadcloth, with black, fluted ruffles around their necks, and black-flowered bonnets covering their scanty hair, turned the corner at Chase’s Lane, walked three blocks to the foot of Tillson Street, and rang Abbie Snover’s door-bell.

As Old Chris grew older and less able, Abbie was compelled to close off first one room and then another; but Old Chris still occupied the back chamber near the upstairs woodroom, and Abbie still slept in the South bedroom.

Early one October afternoon, Jim East, Almont’s express agent and keeper of the general store, drove his hooded delivery cart up to the front steps of the big house. He trembled with excitement as he climbed down from the seat.

“Abbie Snover! Ab--bie!” he called. “I got somethin’ for you! A package all the way from China! Just you come an’ look!”

Jim East lifted the package out of the delivery cart, carried it up the steps, and set it down at Abbie’s feet.

“Just you look, Abbie! That there crate’s made of little fishin’ poles, an’ what’s inside’s all wrapped up in Chinee mats!”

Old Chris came around from the back of the house. Jim East grabbed his arm and pointed at the bamboo crate.

“Just you put your nose down, Chris, an’ smell. Ain’t that foreign?”

Abbie brought her scissors. Carefully she removed the red and yellow labels.

“There’s American writin’ on ’em, too,” Jim East hastened to explain, “cause otherwise how’d I know who it was for, hey?”

Abbie carried the labels into the parlor and looked for a safe place for them. She saw the picture-album and put them in it. Then she hurried back to the porch. Old Chris opened one end of the crate.

“It’s a plant,” Jim East whispered; “a Chinee plant.”

“It’s a dwarf orange-tree,” Old Chris announced. “See, it says so on that there card.”

Abbie carried the little orange-tree into the parlor. Who could have sent it to her? There was no one she knew, away off there in China!

“You be careful of that bamboo and the wrappings,” she warned Old Chris. “I’ll make something decorative-like out of them.”

Abbie waited until Jim East drove away in his delivery cart. Then she sat down at the table in the parlor and opened the album. She found her name on one of the labels--ABBIE SNOVER, ALMONT, MICHIGAN, U. S. A. It seemed queer to her that her name had come all the way from China. On the card that said that the plant was a dwarf orange-tree she found the name--Thomas J. Thorington. Thomas? Tom? Tom Thorington! Why, the last she had heard of Tom had been fifteen years back. He had gone out West. She had received a picture of him in a uniform, with a gun on his shoulder. She dimly recollected that he had been a guard at some penitentiary. How long ago it seemed! He must have become a missionary or something, to be away off in China. And he had remembered her! She sat for a long time looking at the labels. She wondered if the queer Chinese letters spelled ABBIE SNOVER, ALMONT, MICHIGAN. She opened the album again and hunted until she found the picture of Tom Thorington in his guard’s uniform. Then she placed the labels next to the picture, closed the album, and carefully fastened the adjustable clasp.

Under Abbie’s constant attention, the little orange-tree thrived. A tiny green orange appeared. Day by day she watched it grow, looking forward to the time when it would become large and yellow. The days grew shorter and colder, but she did not mind; every week the orange grew larger. After the first snow, she moved the tree into the down-stairs bedroom. She placed it on a little stand in the South window. The inside blinds, which she had always kept as her mother liked them best--the lower blinds closed, the top blinds opened a little to let in the morning light--she now threw wide open so that the tree would get all of the sun. And she kept a fire in the small sheet-iron stove, for fear that the old, drafty wood furnace might not send up a steady enough heat through the register. When the nights became severe, she crept down the narrow, winding stairs, and through the cold, bare halls, to put an extra chunk of hardwood into the stove. Every morning she swept and dusted the room; the ashes and wood dirt around the stove gave her something extra to do near the orange-tree. She removed the red and white coverlet from the bed, and put in its place the fancy patch-quilt with the green birds and yellow flowers, to make the room look brighter.

“Abbie Snover loves that orange-tree more’n anything in the world,” Old Chris cautioned the children when they came after cookies, “an’ don’t you dare touch it, even with your little finger.”

The growing orange was as wonderful to the children as it was to Abbie. Instead of taking the cookies and hurrying home, they stood in front of the tree, their eyes round and big. And one day, when Abbie went to the clothes-press to get the cookie-pail, Bruce Sanders snipped the orange from the tree.

The children were unnaturally still when Abbie came out of the clothes-press. They did not rush forward to get the cookies. Abbie looked quickly at the tree; the pail of cookies dropped from her hands. She grabbed the two children nearest and shook them until their heads bumped together. Then she drove them all in front of her to the door and down the path to the gate, which she slammed shut behind them.

Once outside the gate the children ran, yelling: “Ab-bie Sno-ver, na--aa--ah! Ab-bie Sno-ver, na--aa--ah!”

Abbie, her hands trembling, her eyes hot, went back into the house. That was what came of letting them take fruit from the trees and vines in the yard; of giving them cookies every time they rang her door-bell. Well, there would be no more cookies, and Old Chris should be told never to let them come into the yard again.

That evening, when the metallic hiccough of the well pump on the kitchen porch told her that Old Chris was drawing up fresh water for the night, Abbie went out into the kitchen to make sure that he placed one end of the prop under the knob of the kitchen door and the other end against the leg of the kitchen table.

“It’ll freeze afore mornin’,” said Old Chris.

“Yes,” Abbie answered.

But she did not get up in the night to put an extra chunk of wood in the stove of the down-stairs bedroom.

“Ab-bie Sno-ver, na--aa--ah! Ab-bie Sno-ver, na--aa--ah!”

Old Chris stopped shoveling snow to shake his fist at the yelling children.

“Your Mas’ll fix you, if you don’t stop that screechin’!”

And they answered: “Ab-bie Sno-ver, an’ old Chris! Ab-bie Sno-ver, an’ old Chris!”

Every day they yelled the two names as they passed the big house. They yelled them on their way to and from school, and on their way to Giddings’s Hill to slide. The older boys took it up, and yelled it when they saw Abbie and Old Chris on Main Street Saturday mornings. And finally they rimed it into a couplet,

“Ab-bie Sno-ver, an’ Old Chris--
We saw Chris an’ Ab-bie kiss!”

It was too much. Abbie went to Hugh Perry’s mother.

Mrs. Perry defended her young son. “He couldn’t have done it,” she told Abbie. “He ain’t that kind of a boy, and you can just tell that Old Chris I said so. I guess it must be true, the way you’re fussin’ round!”

Mrs. Perry slammed the door in Abbie’s face. Then she whipped her young son, and hated Abbie and Old Chris because they were responsible for it.

“That Abbie Snover came to my house,” Mrs. Perry told Mrs. Rowles, “an’ said my Hugh had been a-couplin’ her name with Old Chris’s in a nasty way. An’ I told her----”

“The idea! the idea!” Mrs. Rowles interrupted.

“An’ I told her it must be so, an’ I guess it is,” Mrs. Perry concluded.

Mrs. Rowles called upon Pastor Lucus’s wife.

“Abbie Snover an’ Old Chris was seen kissin’.”

“It’s scandalous,” Mrs. Lucas told the pastor. “The town shouldn’t put up with it a minute longer. That’s what comes of Abbie Snover not coming to church since her Ma died.”

On Saturday mornings when Abbie went down-town followed by Old Chris, the women eyed her coldly, and the faces of the men took on quizzical, humorous expressions. Abbie could not help but notice it; she was disturbed. The time for “the Jersey girls” to call came around. Every afternoon Abbie sat in the window and watched for them to turn the corner at Chase’s Lane. She brought out the polished apples which she kept in the clothes-press all ready for some one, but “the Jersey girls” did not come.

“You haven’t heard of anybody being sick at the Jersey house, have you, Chris?”

“Um? Nope!”

“Haven’t seen Josie or Em Jersey anywhere lately?”

“Seen ’em at the post-office night afore last.”

“H’mp!”

Abbie pushed the kettle to the front of the kitchen stove, poked up the fire, and put in fresh sticks of wood. When the water boiled she poured it into a blue-lacquered pail with yellow bands around the rim, carried it up the steep stairs, and got out fresh stockings.

An hour later Old Chris saw her climbing up Tillson Street. He scratched his head and frowned.

Abbie turned the corner at Chase’s Lane. The snow, driven by the wind, blinded her. She almost bumped into Viny Freeman.

“My, Viny! What you doing out on such a day?”

“Seems she didn’t see me,” Abbie muttered. “What can she be doing away down here on such a day? Must be something special to bring her out of her lonely old house with her lame side. My! I almost bumped that hand she’s always holding up her pain with. My!”

Abbie turned into the Jersey gate and climbed the icy steps, hanging onto the railing with both hands. She saw Em Jersey rise from her chair in the parlor and go into the back sitting-room. Abbie pulled the bell-knob and waited. No one answered. She pulled it again. No answer. She rapped on the door with her knuckles. Big Mary, the Jersey hired girl, opened the door part way.

“They ain’t to home.”

“Ain’t to home?” exclaimed Abbie. “My land! Didn’t I just see Em Jersey through the parlor window?”

“No’m, you never did. They ain’t to home.”

“Well, I never! And their Ma and mine was cousins! They ain’t sick or nothing? Well!”

The snow melted; the streets ran with water and then froze. Old Chris no longer came into the parlor in the evening to sit, his hands clasped over his thin stomach, his bald head bent until his chin rested upon the starched neckband of his shirt.

They ate in silence the meals which Abbie prepared: Old Chris at one end of the long table, and Abbie at the other end.

In silence they went about their accustomed tasks.

Abbie, tired with a new weariness, sat in her chair beside the marble-topped table. The village was talking about her; she knew it; she felt it all around her. Well, let them talk!

But one day Almont sent a committee to her. It was composed of one man and three women. Abbie saw them when they turned in at her gate--Pastor Lucus, Lorina Inman, Antha Ewell, and Aunt Alphie Newberry.

Abbie walked to the center of the parlor and stood there, her hands clenched, her face set. The door-bell rang; for a moment her body swayed. Then she went into the bay window and drew the blinds aside. Antha Ewell saw her and jerked Pastor Lucus’s arm. Pastor Lucus turned and caught sight of Abbie; he thought that she had not heard the bell, so he tapped the door panel with his fingers and nodded his head at her invitingly, as if to say:

“See, we’re waiting for you to let us in.” Abbie’s expression did not change. Pastor Lucus tapped at the door again, this time hesitantly, and still she looked at them with unseeing eyes. He tapped a third time, then turned and looked at the three women. Aunt Alphie Newberry tugged at his arm, and the committee of four turned about without looking at Abbie, and walked down the steps.

A few minutes later Abbie heard the door between the parlor and dining-room open. Old Chris came in. For a moment or two neither spoke. Old Chris fingered his cap.

“Abbie, I lived here forty-two years. I was here when you was born. I carried you around in my arms a little bit of thing an’ made you laugh.”

Abbie did not turn away from the window.

“I know what they came for,” Old Chris continued. “Your Ma--your Ma, she’d never thought I’d have to go away from here.”

Abbie could not answer him.

“I don’t know who’ll keep the furnace a-goin’ when I’m gone, nor fill the up-stairs woodroom.”

Still no answer.

“I’m old now--I’ll go to Owen Frazer’s farm--down to Miles Corners. He’ll have some work I can do.”

Old Chris stroked his baggy cheeks with trembling hands. Abbie still looked out of the window.

“I’m a-goin’ down to the post-office now,” said Old Chris, as he turned and went to the door. “Be there anything you want?”

Abbie shook her head; she could not find words. As Old Chris went down the hall she heard him mumble, “I don’t know what she’ll do when I’m gone.”

That night Abbie sat in the parlor window longer than usual. It was a white night; wet snow had been falling heavily all day. Some time between eight and nine o’clock she arose from her chair and went into the long, narrow dining-room. The pat-pat of her slippered feet aroused Old Chris from his nodding over the _Farm Herald_. Finding that the hot air was not coming up strong through the register over which he sat, the old man slowly pushed his wool-socked feet into felt-lined overshoes and tramped down into the cellar, picking up the kitchen lamp as he went. Abbie followed as far as the kitchen. The pungent dry-wood smell that came up the stairs when Old Chris swung open the door of the wood cellar made her sniff. She heard the sounds as he loaded the wheelbarrow with the sticks of quartered hardwood; the noise of the wheel bumping over the loose boards as he pushed his load into the furnace-room. She went back into the parlor and stood over the register. Hollow sounds came up through the pipe as Old Chris leveled the ashes in the fire-box and threw in the fresh sticks.

When Old Chris came up from the cellar and went out onto the porch to draw up fresh water for the night, Abbie went back into the kitchen.

“It’s snowin’ hard out,” said Old Chris.

“Yes,” Abbie answered.

She led the way back into the dining room. Old Chris placed the kitchen lamp on the stand under the fruit picture and waited. For a few moments they stood in the blast of hot air rising from the register. Then Abbie took up the larger of the two lamps. Through the bare, high-ceilinged rooms she went, opening and closing the heavy doors; on through the cold, empty hall, up the stairs, into the South bedroom. While she was closing the blinds she heard Old Chris stumble up the back stairs and into the chamber he had occupied ever since she could remember.

The night after Old Chris had gone, Abbie took the brass dinner-bell from the pantry shelf and set it on the chair beside her bed. Over the back of the chair she placed her heavy, rabbit-lined coat; it would be handy if any one disturbed her. Once or twice when she heard sounds, she put out her hand and touched the bell; but the sounds did not recur. The next night she tried sleeping in the down-stairs bedroom. The blue-and-gray carpet, the blue fixings on the bureau and commode, the blue bands around the wash-bowl and pitcher--all faded and old-looking--reminded her of her mother and father, and would not let her sleep. On the wall in front of her was a picture in a black frame of a rowboat filled with people. It was called “From Shore to Shore.” Trying not to see it, her eyes were caught by a black and white print in a gilt frame, called “The First Steps.” How she had loved the picture when she was a little girl; her mother had explained it to her many times--the bird teaching its little ones to fly; the big, shaggy dog encouraging its waddling puppies; the mother coaxing her baby to walk alone.

At midnight Abbie got out of bed, picked up the dinner-bell by the clapper, and went back up-stairs to the South bedroom.

The tall, bare walls of the big house, the high ceilings with their centerpieces of plaster fruits and flowers, the cold whiteness, closed her in. Having no one to talk to, she talked to herself: “It’s snowin’ hard out--why! that was what Old Chris said the night before he went away.” She began to be troubled by a queer, detached feeling; she knew that she had mislaid something, but just what she could not remember. Forebodings came to her, distressing, disquieting. There would never be any one for her to speak to--never! The big house grew terrible; the rooms echoed her steps. She would have given everything for a little house of two or three small low-ceilinged rooms close to the side-walk on a street where people passed up and down.

A night came when Abbie forgot that Old Chris had gone away. She had been sitting in her chair beside the marble-topped table, staring out into the night. All day the wind had blown; snow had piled high around the porch. Her thoughts had got back to her childhood. Somehow they had centered around the old grandfather who, years before, had sat in the same window. She saw him in his chair; heard his raspy old voice, “I married Jane sixty-eight an’ a half years ago, an’ a half year in a man’s life is something, I’ll bet you. An’ I buried her thirty years ago, an’ that’s a long time, too. We never tore each other’s shirts. Jane wanted to live a quiet life. She wanted one child, an’ she was tenacious ’bout that. She never wanted any more, an’ she had three, an’ one of ’em was your Ma. She never wanted to be seen out with a baby in her arms, Jane didn’t. I made her get bundled up once or twice, an’ I hitched up the horse an’ took her ridin’ in my phaeton that cost two hundred dollars.--You’ll be in your dotage some day, Abbie. I’ve been in my dotage for years now.--Oh, I altered my life to fit Jane’s. I expected I had a wife to go out and see the neighbors with. By gosh! we never went across the street--I’ll take on goodness some day, Abbie. By goll! that’s all I’m good for to take on now.--Oh, it beat all what a boy I was. I and Mother broke our first team of oxen. When you get children, Abbie, let them raise themselves up. They’ll do better at it than a poor father or mother can. I had the finest horses and the best phaeton for miles around, but you never saw a girl a-ridin’ by the side of me.--Some men can’t work alone, Abbie. They got to have the women around or they quit. Don’t you get that kind of a man, Abbie.--Oh, she was renowned was my old mare, Kit. You never got to the end of her. She lived to be more’n thirty year, an’ she raised fourteen colts. She was a darned good little thing she was. I got her for a big black mare that weighed fourteen hundred pound, an’ I made ’em give me ten dollars, too, an’ I got her colt with her----”

Abbie suddenly realized that she was shivering; that her feet were cold; that it was long after nine o’clock. Old Chris must have fallen asleep in his chair. She went to the dining-room door and opened it; the dining-room was dark. Why?--why, of course! Old Chris had been gone for more than three weeks. She took hold of the door to steady herself; her hands shook. How could she have forgotten? Was she going crazy? Would the loneliness come to that?

Abbie went to bed. All night she lay awake, thinking. The thoughts came of themselves. What the town had to say didn’t matter after all; the town had paid her no attention for years; it was paying her no attention now. Why, then, should she live without any one to speak to? “I’ll go and get Old Chris, that’s what I’ll do. I won’t live here alone any longer.” And with this decision she went to sleep.

In the morning when Abbie opened the kitchen door and stepped out onto the porch, frost lay thick upon the well pump.

She drew her shawl close around her and took hold of the pump-handle with her mittened hands. When she had filled the pail she went back into the kitchen. The sound of the wind made her shiver. To walk all the way to Mile Corners on such a day required green tea, so Abbie drank three cupfuls. Then, as on the day when she went out to call upon “the Jersey girls,” she carried hot water up-stairs and got out fresh stockings.

About nine o’clock three women of Pastor Lucus’s church, standing on the front steps of Aunt Alphie Newberry’s house, saw Abbie struggling through a drift.

“Why, there’s Abbie Snover,” said Jennie Chipman.

“She’s turnin’ down the road to Mile Corners,” added Judie Wing.

Aunt Alphie Newberry opened the door to the three women:

“Whatever’s the matter to be bringin’ you callin’ so early?”

“Ain’t you heard yet?”

“We come to tell you.”

“My! my! my! What can have happened?” Aunt Alphie exclaimed.

“Old Chris died last night----”

“Just after bein’ middlin’ sick for a day an’----”

“An’ they say,” Judie Wing interrupted, “that it was ’cause Abbie Snover turned him out.”

Abbie reached the end of the town sidewalk. Lifting her skirts high, she waded through the deep snow to the rough-rutted track left by the farmer’s sleighs. Every little while she had to step off the road into the deep snow to let a bob-sled loaded high with hay or straw pass on its way into town. Some of the farmers recognized her; they spoke to her with kindly voices, but she made no answer. Walking was hard; Owen Frazer’s farm was over the hill; there was a steep climb ahead of her. And besides, Owen Frazer’s house was no place for Old Chris. No one knew anything about Owen Frazer and that woman of his; they hadn’t been born in Almont. How could she have let Old Chris go down there, anyway?

“Whoa up! Hey! Better climb in, Abbie, an’ ride with me. This ain’t no day for walkin’. Get up here on the seat. I’ll come down an’ help you.”

Abbie looked up at Undertaker Hopkins. In the box of his funeral wagon was a black coffin with a sprinkling of snow on its top. Abbie shook her head, but did not speak.

“Guess I shouldn’t have asked you,” Undertaker Hopkins apologized. “Sorry! Get along as fast as you can, Abbie. It’s gettin’ mighty, all-fired cold. It’ll be a little sheltered when you get over the hill.”

Undertaker Hopkins drove on. Abbie tried to keep her feet in the fresh track made by the runners. She reached the top of the hill. Owen Frazer’s red barn stood up above the snow. Undertaker Hopkins and his funeral wagon had disappeared.

“He must have turned down the Mill Road,” Abbie muttered.

She reached the gate in front of the low, one-story farmhouse. A shepherd dog barked as she went up the path. She rapped at the front door. A woman appeared at the window and pointed to the side of the house. Abbie’s face expressed surprise and resentment. She backed down the steps and made her way to the back door. The woman, Owen Frazer’s wife, let her into the kitchen.

“Owen! Here be Abbie Snover!”

Owen Frazer came in from the front of the house.

“Good day! Didn’t expect you here. Pretty cold out, ain’t it? Have a chair.”

Abbie did not realize how numb the cold had made her body until she tried to sit down.

“Maggie, give her a cup of that hot tea,” Owen Frazer continued. “She’s been almost froze, an’ I guess she’ll have a cup of tea. Hey! Miss Snover?”

“I want to talk to Old Chris.”

“Talk to Old Chris! Talk to Old Chris, you want to?”

Owen Frazer looked at his wife. Abbie Snover didn’t know, yet she had walked all the way to Mile Corners in the cold. He couldn’t understand it.

“What’d you come for, anyhow, Abbie Snover?”

“Now, Owen, you wait!” Owen Frazer’s wife turned to Abbie: