Chapter II: Part I: The Arrival (2)

She reached this secret nook quite out of breath. Of course there was no real need for all this haste. She knew there wasn't. But youth does not loiter on such errands. She flung herself down in the hammock and for a time lay still. It was cool here, and hazy with dawn. To one side of her the scrub thicket, sprinkled with sturdier growth, lay almost stygian; to the other side was the Betsey road, a bright, tortuous band of morning, threading the Betsey woods as though it were the path of some exploring courier of Sol. Through the flimsy façade of leaves the light of morning streamed into Hilda's bower with a mistily tempered shine. Though ample, this screen afforded plenty of peepholes; and naturally Hilda knew them all. If a storm threshed through the forest and wrenched wisps of woodbine into a different position, or whipped the heavier undergrowth into a new pattern, temporary or permanent as the case might be, the girl was quick to perceive the new order of things and to train her eye to the altered scope of vision. She lay now in the hammock, regaining her breath, and swung herself gently back and forth with the aid of a stout wild grape tendon.

There was a great deal of wild life all about her: birds and squirrels and chipmunks and queer little humming, whirring, chirping insects. Some seasons certain of the cottagers brought up household cats with them from town, when it might be observed that the birds and squirrels were much less in evidence--much more wary and reserved in their deportment. But as it chanced, this year there wasn't a cat on the Point, and the woods were full of day-long frolic.

Hilda had some time to wait. The two persons on whom her innocent espionage was designed, loitered, as we have seen, through their breakfast; and the little girl was almost ready to persuade herself that Louise and Leslie must have taken the much longer, circuitous northern route, when suddenly she heard their voices.

They appeared to be talking softly, as though still imbued with dawn-cautiousness, even where there was no longer the possibility of disturbing any one's slumber. Hilda, lying there so still and expectant, saw them walking together along the road. Leslie's eyes pursued the ground he was treading, but Louise was glancing anxiously up at him.

"You would think we couldn't even be friends any more," she was saying.

And then Hilda heard the lad beside her mutter: "Friends!"--in that tone that appeared to embody so much....

"I'm sure we'll always be the best sort of friends, Leslie," Louise said warmly.

And then they were almost beyond hearing. However, Hilda caught Leslie's thick communication about going back to the city, and it troubled her a good deal. She slipped out of the hammock and peeped through the shielding leaves. She thought to herself: "How well they look together!" And she seemed suddenly full of a vague unhappiness. Out of a subsequent observation: "Louise always looks well with men," Hilda did not for some reason or other, glean the poor ounce of consolation, regarding Leslie, that might appear nestling there.

She left her bower and returned to the cottage in a rather soberer mood, along the open road they had so recently traversed.

The summer rising of the parent Needhams regularly occurred about seven. In town, during the season of lengthened nights, the household was suffered to slumber perhaps a half hour longer; but matinal "dawdling," as the Rev. Needham put it, was a symptom of decadence to be scrupulously shunned. The Rev. Needham had a rather definite persuasion that all the people in the East inclined towards late rising. He had a theory that a day well begun was bound to end well. It didn't, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned--at least there was nothing at all dependable about it; but these collapses, these drab failures of the real to coincide with the ideal, these sloughings off from a kind of Platonic scheme of perfection, constituted what stood as perhaps the reverend gentleman's most distinguishing quality. Here was a man marked for a kind of almost rhythmic disaster. The wheel of life never ran smoothly, but kept bumping over sly pebbles of chagrin and disappointment. The Rev. Needham was like a Middle Age (or perhaps early Chinese) delinquent, strung up for chastisement, his arms pinioned to a beam overhead, and the mere points of his toes permitted to touch the ground. An inch or a few inches relaxed, and he would be all right. If he could only get his heels down! But that, alas, was just the trouble with the Rev. Needham: however dignified and calm he might appear externally, there never was, there never could seem to be, an entire and sincere consciousness of solid ground under his feet. Sometimes he would sigh: "Ah, at last!" But anon there would be a devilish tingling in the heels, which would remind him that they were still upreared. The poor man's destiny seemed eternally a thing suspended. It dangled and flopped, like a rope's end in nervous, persistent gusts.

Anna Needham relinquished sleep at the hour specified by her spouse cheerfully, as a rule, though there were also occasions when raillery and even discreet rib-proddings entered into the program. Mrs. Needham was, of course, well inured to these regularities of routine, just as her very fibre was toughened and moulded to the ministerial caliber generally. Fundamentally, she was a person of slightly less strenuous tendencies than her husband. Anna Needham was the type of woman whose life is very largely shaped, as is her destiny largely determined, by the man with whom she lives. Her nature was naturally somewhat more amenable than his. Still, she had her distinct rebellions, too. She could take a stand of her own in an hour of crisis. The Rev. Needham's was a nature that did not weather storms any too well. Yes, in time of storms Anna was the more seaworthy. For one thing, perhaps, she had fewer ideals. Thus she did not experience quite such blasting shocks over upheavals and cataclysms. But it must be confessed that this apparent stability was touched, perhaps one might say, rather, a little diluted by a few parts moral or intellectual laziness. Comparative criticism of the Needhams, husband and wife, usually fell into two major divisions. There were, in other words, two factions: those who maintained she was less profound than he, and those who would insist that she had more common sense. But that they were economically well-mated seemed pretty generally accepted. It was a coalition in which appeared the very minimum of waste, since one was always ready (or in her case perhaps merely inclined) to shut off the spigot of the other's temperamental excesses.

On this particular July morning there wasn't a hint of friction over the proposition of getting up. The Rev. Needham began his brisk, determined stretching at the first stroke of seven. Anna lay passive till the last stroke; but as the strident and spiteful clangour of the Dutch clock downstairs resolved back again into a monotonous though hardly less crabbed _tick_-tock, _tick_-tock, the lady yawned deeply and with just a concluding gurgle of relish. There was a guest already in the house, another guest on the way. Hostesses, however soft the bed, aren't likely to surrender to tempting inertia under such circumstances.

As a matter of fact, the bed was not a very soft one. Or rather, it was very soft in places and very hard in others. Perhaps one of the enduring charms of small resort cottage life is the amusing inequality of things. The best and the worst hobnob. Lo, here is a true democracy! And virtues utterly commonplace in your urban ménage may very easily be given a most heavenly lustre in the wilderness.

"Well, Anna," he said, in his best tone of fresh, early morning cheerfulness, "I guess it's time to get up."

"Alf, you don't mean to tell me that was _seven_!"

She had counted the strokes; but it was customary to have a little conversation about the time of day before arising: a sort of pleasant, innocuous tongue-limbering, a lubrication of the way to more important themes later on. Such gentle, indirect prevarications may perhaps be looked upon indulgently, even when, as in this case, they crop out in clerical families.

The Rev. Needham proceeded to dress and shave.

He was in a good, confident, substantial mood today; rose singing. The Rev. Needham was very apt to arise with song in his mouth, bravely defying the chance of his going to bed with a wail. This morning the selection was that fine old _Laudes Domini_ which seemed peculiarly appropriate, both fitting the hour and reflecting the joyous state of the singer's heart.

"When morning gilds the skies
My heart awaking cries:
'May Jesus Christ be praised!'"

The Rev. Needham had a tenor voice of fair quality, though not altogether true of pitch. In the wilderness, so far from pipe organs, pitch however, dwindled to comparative unimportance. It was the _spirit_ of song that counted.

Now, one might observe that in this hymn the Rev. Needham would come out very full and strong on the more purely ecstatic lines (such, for instance, as depict the spread of morning across the heavens, the awaking of a fervent heart, etc.), and that, almost invariably, those more climactic, particularly the more ecclesiastical, lines would issue a little muffled, as the singer found it urgent to immerse his head in the washbowl's morning plunge, or apply a towel vigorously, or perhaps bend suddenly over to lace up his shoes--by this movement naturally cutting down the egress of breath. They were subtly odd, these mufflings. It was almost as though Fate had determined sedulously to deny to this unfortunate man an indulgence in his very life-mission: praising his Maker! For another than he the intervals of competition might very easily have fallen less saliently. Yes, another would have found it possible to cloud over, if necessary, the heavenly gilding and would have been suffered to come out free, triumphant, on the diviner phrases. But not the Rev. Needham. No, alas, not he. It was a part of the Rev. Needham's destiny that the better and more satisfying arrangement of life must be withheld, or temporarily awarded only to be broken rudely off. Inquiry ought to pause here. Yes, it delicately and righteously and above all humanely ought. No, it ought not to lead one away, fiendishly to lure one on to a certain door in one of the three-quarters partitions, beyond which the slumber of a human being was giving place, at this stage, to the more irregular sounds signifying a return to consciousness. Ah, better to leave out altogether the thought of any mortal responsibility for the muffling; better to cling decently just to the adverseness of an obdurate Fate. And yet, the tenor of the conversation which now ensued between the Rev. Needham and his wife might favour the suspicion--let us call it by no stronger name--that the person beyond that door in the three-quarters partition _had_ something to do, however slightly, with the matter of vocal emphasis.

"Anna," he asked softly, "do you suppose your sister's awake yet?"

"I don't know, Alf. Perhaps I'd better go tap on her door."

"Oh, well, I wouldn't disturb her just yet. Eliza is always late with breakfast." He sighed as he beat up the lather in his mug. "We can't expect things to run along quite as smoothly as when we're just by ourselves."

"I told Marjie we made a practice of getting up at seven," said Mrs. Needham a little anxiously. She slipped a coloured silk petticoat over her head and tied its tape strings round her waist. Mrs. Needham was growing a bit stout. "She told me if I didn't hear her moving around I'd better tap on her door."

"It's this air, I suppose, makes people sleep so," he remarked. And then he added, displaying a strong touch of nervousness in his tone: "I think, Anna, your sister is changed, somehow."

"You think so, Alf? How?"

"Well, I don't know. Perhaps it's our not being used to her after so many years."

"You may be right, Alf. But she talked real sensibly to me yesterday. We had quite a long talk in the afternoon, while you and Hilda were out after berries. She seems real sensible, Alf. Of course she does say things--"

"Yes, she makes remarks, Anna, that I could rather prefer our girls not to hear."

"You mean like what she said at dinner about the natives of Tahulamaji?"

"Yes--things like that." And then he confessed with a nervous little gesture: "I can't seem to figure out where Marjory stands any more. She talks with a freedom.... Anna, I don't think I ever heard any one talk just the way Marjory does."

"You mean--about religion, Alf?"

"Well," he resumed, "it may be her way. But I can't say I ever knew a woman to talk like that. I think Marjory's very good-hearted. She no doubt means the best in the world. But somehow...." He turned toward his mate, poising the razor in the air. He looked, without of course suspecting it, almost terrible. But he went on with merely the same inflection of nervous timidity: "Anna, there are times when I suspect she doesn't believe the way we do any more."

"Oh, Alf--do you mean--is it as though she'd gone into some other church?"

"Well, I don't know." He resumed his shaving in a troubled, fidgety way.

"Alf," she said solemnly, standing in the centre of the room with her hands on her hips, where they paused in the act of adjusting the band of her skirt, "Alf, you--you don't think she isn't a _Christian_ any more?"

The Rev. Needham nervously cut himself a little. He laid down the razor with a startled sigh.

"Anna," said he, "how do _I_ know? If it _is_ true, then it's one of the things I've always dreaded so--having atheism break out right in the family!"

"Oh, Marjory _can't_ be one of those people!" her sister cried earnestly. "Alf, we ought not to judge her so harshly. She's lived in foreign countries so long that I suppose she's kind of gotten into new ways of speaking. She talked so sensibly yesterday, Alf--I kept wishing you could have been there to have heard."

"Well, Anna," he said quietly, "Marjory's your sister, and, whatever the facts, naturally I've nothing to say."

"You try and have a good talk with her, Alf. I never felt you two understood each other very well. She don't talk so flippantly when there aren't other people around. I'll fix it so you two can be alone together. Oh, Alf," she concluded, almost piteously, "Marjie may have gone into another church, but I _can't_ believe she's drifted any farther!"

"I hope not, Anna." He tried to speak with an air of charitable calm; but the impression conveyed seemed rather that a disturbance of his own convictions was troubling his heart than that he was primarily moved with concern over his sister-in-law's spiritual well-being.

All persons with whom he came in contact influenced the Rev. Needham. They influenced him one way or another, however transiently. In fact, when it came to that, there was seldom what one would call any really permanent influence exerted. Contacts with life merely kept him hopping back and forth or up and down. They augmented, were perhaps more largely than anything else responsible for, the poor man's perpetual inner unrest. He could not seem to settle down to cool, steady views; could not feel his soul impregnably at peace. But then, in this regard he seemed, though perhaps in a rather acutely pointed fashion, logical fruit of his time.

To be, for the moment, quite ruthless in one's musing upon him, what would the world say if it could really pry into the tumultuous inner consciousness of the Rev. Needham? Might the world call him melodramatic, stagy? Could it actually be brought against this minister that he was, in a sense, theatrical? What a blow--and at the same time what a terrific coup of irony; for the Rev. Needham would be the very first himself to cry out against any such trait as staginess! Staginess, he would say, must certainly have something to do with the so-called "culture." But the world could never bring this charge against the Rev. Needham, because the world, one realizes with an instinctively grateful sigh, was denied the license of prying inside. No, to the world this minister appeared a being not essentially removed from the usual run of beings. The world by no means thought of him as a Chinese or Dark Age delinquent strung up for punishment in such a manner that his heels were perpetually off the floor. He might not, perhaps, strike people as a man of intense and dynamic, of unfailingly clean-cut personal persuasions about religion--or, for that matter, perhaps, about anything else in life. Nevertheless, he scarcely stood out as vivid or eccentric; scarcely like a sore thumb; because nobody realized what he was really like inside.

But now, to return to cases, here was Marjory, his wife's own sister, lodged right under his roof; and she baffled him. He couldn't deny it--could not get away from it. Yes, she _baffled_ him. He felt nervous in her presence. Sometimes when she would laugh, or look at him in a certain way, it seemed to him--it seemed to him--why, as though he didn't know where he stood any more....

Marjory Whitcom was his sister-in-law, one of the family; and at his own hearthside, somehow, he could not feel quite free. He could not feel cheery and at ease. And dimly it troubled the Rev. Needham to realize that he felt this way.

5

That Miss Whitcom was indeed up and stirring became evident. They heard her gaily calling out to Hilda, who was coming up the stairs.

"Dear child, see here a minute!"

Two doors opened then: hers, briskly wide; the Rev. Needham's a furtive crack.

"Yes, Aunt Marjie?"

"Honey, there isn't any water in my pitcher--would you mind ...?"

"Oh, I'll fill it right away for you, Aunt Marjie!"

"Only half full, honey. I'd slip out myself to the pump, only I'm afraid of shocking Eliza with my wrapper!"

"I won't be gone a minute, Aunt Marjie!"

She took the pitcher, extended by means of a plump bare arm, and sped off with it.

"Alf," said Mrs. Needham, "I forgot to tell Eliza the pitcher would have to be filled every day."

"I suspect Marjory is a bit wasteful of water," he observed.

Here at the Point there was water, water everywhere; yet the Needhams employed far less of the fluid in their daily toilets than they did in the town. This is perhaps not infrequently the case at summer resorts of the more primitive kind, where one attains the frugal attitude generally. Then, too, having to go out to a pump for water alters its preciousness. Besides, as all the Needhams would argue: "We go in bathing so often." So the pitchers weren't refilled _every_ day. They were generally refilled about two or three times a week. Miss Whitcom's pitcher, however, would have to be put in a class by itself. That was only too clear.

The Rev. Needham tied his cravat before the dresser glass. A few tiny drops of perspiration stood out on his forehead. "Yes," he sighed, "it does upset things some."

"What say, Alf?" asked Anna, who was bending over an ancient trunk in which clean linen was kept.

"I say, Eliza will just have to get used to filling her pitcher every morning."

"I guess so," agreed Mrs. Needham, straightening, her face flushed.

She held a fresh towel in her hand, which he eyed with glancing suspicion.

"I got to thinking," explained his wife. "Perhaps she's used to having a clean towel every morning, too."

The minister compressed his lips almost imperceptibly as she went to her sister's door, the towel over her arm. Hilda, with the pitcher of water, arrived at the same moment, so that mother and daughter stood with their respective burdens on Aunt Marjie's threshold, and even spoke together, like rival hucksters proclaiming their wares.

"Gracious!" cried the favoured lady, opening her door and accepting the alms. "Such magnificent service! Anna," she added, "don't you let me put you out. I can easily live on the view. You really don't know what this means, after being cooped up in a place like Tahulamaji!"

Miss Whitcom was tall, and rather fine looking. She was a trifle taller, for instance, than her brother-in-law, and had a way, when any discussion with him was in progress, of standing up quite close to the minister, so that she created the illusion, a little, of towering over him. She was not, of course, actually a great deal taller, but how one could make the sly inch count at such times! Her sister looked almost dumpy beside her.

"I suppose," observed Mrs. Needham, "you do feel kind of cooped up in those foreign places." That phrase of hers "foreign places," was in the nature of a stock term. It was expansive, elastic, comprehensive. She spoke of foreign places a little as her husband spoke of the East or of "culture." Neither had travelled any to speak of. In a sort of whimsical way it seemed to Mrs. Needham that one might expect to find Bombay and Peking supporting much the same conditions of life. Or even Dublin and Rome, for that matter. "I don't suppose," she added, "there's anything like this where you've been."

"I should emphatically say _not_," her sister assured her. "At Rato-muh--that's the capital, you know--we've nothing but a dirty little river. I'm dying for a glorious swim!"

"We go bathing nearly every afternoon, Aunt Marjie," Hilda announced.

"You do? Well, I'm with you!" She was just a trifle loud. "Do there happen to be any convenient islands one could swim out to?"

"Oh, no, Aunt Marjie, there aren't," replied the girl regretfully, almost with a touch of naïve apology.

"Well, no matter. You can always swim round in a circle, of course. Only I do like having a definite goal."

And then she paused a moment, even suspending her toilet; for having a goal--hadn't that been, with almost amusing steadfastness, her aim all through life? Of course, it was quite true: there had been perhaps a hundred goals, all told; but each, in its own way, and at its own time, had seemed the golden, final one. And always so incorrigibly _definite_. She had gone vibrantly and humorously on from one pursuit to another, determination taking multiple form. And yet there appeared now to have been, all along, just one permanent and unswerving determination: not to marry O'Donnell.

Miss Whitcom sighed briefly and went on hooking herself up.

"Speaking of swimming," she continued. "I won a gold medal once. Yep. A very long time ago."

"A medal for swimming, Aunt Marjie?"

The aunt nodded. "I entered a five-mile endurance and time. Entered against thirteen men, and got there first!"

"Oh, how _wonderful_!" cried Hilda admiringly.

"Yes, it was wonderful," the other admitted; then frowned. "The only trouble was that I had my subsequent doubts of its being really fair."

Mrs. Needham, who had been standing in the doorway, a faint and musing smile on her lips, received the news of the swimming match with a hurried comment about having to go down and see how Eliza was getting on with breakfast. She was always, and especially with Alfred in mind, mildly shocked at the glib way in which her sister talked about men.

"How do you mean it wasn't fair, Aunt Marjie?" demanded little Hilda, sitting down eagerly on the edge of the bed.

"Came to suspect one of them."

"One of the men?"

"Um-hm."

"Of _cheating_, Aunt Marjie?"

"Um. Turning lazy at the finish."

"You mean he let you win?"

"Afraid so, Hilda."

"But I've heard papa say that women ought to be treated...."

"That men ought to go lazy at the finish and let you pull in ahead?"

"Of course papa never put it _that_ way. I don't believe he knows about women going into regular contests like that, with men."

"I daresay not, Hilda. Such things wouldn't conspicuously have entered into Alfred's training."

"What did you do when you found out about it, Aunt Marjie?"

"What do you mean--when I'd convinced myself he hadn't played fair?"

"Yes."

"Sent him the medal." She shrugged.

"You _did_!"

"Um. It belonged to him, not me. Yes, sir--it went right straight off to him, with a polite note. The note was terribly polite. I told him I hoped he'd get just lots of comfort out of it. Real, solid comfort." And she snorted with wrath.

"_Then_ what did he say, Aunt Marjie?"

"Then he said--say, look here, Hilda, what _is_ your capacity for asking questions?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Aunt Marjie! I didn't realize how many I was asking."

And she really was sorry. Nevertheless, her eyes continued to shine very brightly. Aunt Marjie had a stimulating effect on Hilda--Hilda being just at the age of hero-worship. This age, in the life of the individual, is somewhat akin to the prehistoric age in human history; it bristles with ever such fabulous things. And the only natural thing to do when one encounters fabulous things is to ask as many questions about them as one can think of.

But Marjory Whitcom hadn't, as a matter of fact, spoken with any dominant impatience. She had asked Hilda's capacity for questions in a spirit of ridicule which, in a conscious sense of boomerang satire, amply included her own loquacious self. And yet, for all that, there was a slight flush on her face. What brought the flush there? Ah, there are deep things in the human heart. The flush lasted quite a long time. Indeed, it had hardly faded out altogether when she was seated with the family at breakfast.

The Rev. Needham asked the blessing in a faintly grim manner. He spoke it off with a defiant assurance. His sister-in-law, he had just been deciding, _wasn't_ to intimidate him at his own table. He kept his eyes tight shut and spoke on almost doggedly. There were a number of graces in the minister's repertory. He was in the habit of using now one, now another. This morning, though the choice was, of course, as always, entirely spontaneous and unconscious, he chose the shortest of them all.

Breakfast was simple and bountiful. The Needhams were rather hearty eaters. There was no stomach trouble in the family, although very strong emotions had, naturally, the same effect on them as on most people. Following Louise's affair with Richard, as they remembered it, the unhappy girl had eaten almost nothing for months--or it certainly was weeks--and had grown extremely thin. In fact, during the first week following the sad climax _none_ of the Needhams had eaten quite normally, except little Hilda. She, only a child of twelve then, came up regularly enough for second helpings, despite her sister's trouble and the general depression of the household. Childhood is, when not perverted, a blessed span, the heart seeming to stand entirely out of touch with any of the homelier and more prosaic organs.

This morning there were wild raspberries--early ones, and not very large--which the Rev. Needham and his younger daughter had themselves gathered in the woods and along the sunny roadways the afternoon previous, while Marjory was conversing sensibly with her sister. After the fruit came a cooked cereal, which Mrs. Needham was annoyed to find a trifle lumpy. And then after that there followed pancakes--pancakes, pancakes--_hundreds_, it seemed, coming in three at a time, which was the griddle's limit.

Just subsequent to the blessing, Aunt Marjie occasioned a very slight flurry in the domestic arrangements by asking Anna if she might have a glass of hot water.

"I'm supposed to drink it now," she explained, "before each meal. It's living so long in the tropics, I suppose."

Mrs. Needham tinkled the bell for Eliza, and glanced, half unconsciously, at her husband. The Rev. Needham, it is to be feared, was growing rather opinionated about his wife's sister. There is, when one stops to view the matter wholly without passion, nothing really criminal in the request for a glass of hot water, just as there is nothing essentially felonious about using all the water you want up in your room. Of course, in such places as deserts it may often be essential to employ circumspection; but scarcely on Point Betsey, where there lay the vast resources of Lake Michigan behind even an extravagant indulgence. And as for having the water hot, well, what are kettles for? One poises the issue. Still, of course, such implications as these are hardly fair to the Rev. Needham, who was animated by no real spirit of parsimoniousness at all, but who merely disliked seeing vaguely devastated the quiet, orderly routine of the house. To tell the truth, while he didn't honestly grudge her the water, the clergyman looked upon his sister-in-law as something of an intruder. However legitimate it might be--and of course nobody could possibly deny that Marjory had a perfect right to be here in their midst--intrusion still was intrusion. The trouble was, he distrusted--all but feared her. And when men fear others, they will often be found taking exception to minor failings, real or fancied, which a sometimes surprisingly acute vigilance discovers in those who inspire their fear. The Rev. Needham, however, _said_ nothing: merely pressed his lips together, as he had previously done before the mirror upstairs when informed that his relative would have to have her pitcher refilled every morning. It was these repressions which permitted the world at large no too salient suspicion of what was really going on inside.

A pleasant, wholly unremarkable conversation was kept up. It wasn't the sort of talk to invite preservation, but was, on the contrary, just a normal and uneventful flow. True, there seemed an unwonted excitement in the air. The day upon which Mr. Barry was to arrive must necessarily be considered a red-letter day, and might even be expected, in a sense, to deliver up talk of some special brilliance. But to tell the truth, the great event had already been discussed in all its possible phases and from all conceivable angles, there remaining at length absolutely nothing but for Mr. Barry to put in an appearance.

Throughout breakfast the Rev. Needham maintained as consistent an attitude of dignified prosperity, beneficence, common sense, and scrupulously informal godliness as possible. Above all, he tried in his demeanour to emphasize an unobtrusive yet firm head-of-the-house bearing--and indeed succeeded, for the most part, so well as almost to persuade himself that he _was_ master of his destiny, after all; that his life was growing more solid, more dependable now.

Hilda, of course, chattered a great deal, after her wont, acquainting her hearers, for one thing, with as full an account of Louise's early departure as seemed politic. She blushed, mentioning Leslie. Miss Whitcom noted that: noted it and sighed. It was obvious the blush was no accident. Another young thing, just starting out; the rough and not always so romantic world ahead of her--and boy-crazy! Marjory Whitcom sighed again. So futile, she told herself. But another valuation just slipped in: so sweet!

Toward the end of the meal, the pancake process, hitherto quite smooth and regular, hitched very badly. No fresh cakes came in, and the supply on the table dwindled alarmingly. The Rev. Needham affected not to notice this. The management of the household, thank heaven! was not on his shoulders. His burdens were the weightier and more important _family_ matters--aside, that is, from the business of tending to his own rather unmanageable soul and looking after his flock. There was a great difference between household matters and family matters; pancakes were not in his department; so that, not being himself responsible for the present embarrassment, he could afford to keep up a very good and cheerful front indeed, even when his eyes assured him the kitchen door hadn't opened for fully five minutes.

Mrs. Needham flushed. She always grew more or less excited when there was a break like this in the table service. As concerned her own plate, she, of course, stopped eating, directly it began to look as though the supply of cakes on the table could not possibly survive till there was a reinforcement from the griddle. She nibbled heroically at the cake already unavoidably on her plate, and suddenly began talking with great animation.

Anna had always felt, obscurely yet unhappily, that her sister did not consider her a really expert housekeeper. In the old days, before weddings and deaths had disintegrated the family, it had always been Marjory who could do things best and most handily. She had seemed a very prize of domestic efficiency. Every one said Marjory would be married off first. There were even unkind asides to the effect that Anna would probably linger on and perhaps eventually run into perpetual maidenhood. Ah, the queer pranks of life! Anna had been carried off first, after all; and Marjory, the acknowledged flower, had gone all these years unplucked.

Anna Needham was always anxious to make a good household impression on her sister. Of course, many sorts of allowances would be made up here at the Point. Still, there seemed no valid reason why the cakes should cease coming in. At last she tinkled her bell. She tinkled it resolutely. Her husband had just helped Miss Whitcom to the last cake. Hilda still had unmistakably a hungry look.

Eliza opened the kitchen door and thrust in her head.

"Did you ring, ma'am?"

"Yes, Eliza, I did. We would like some more cakes."

"Yes, ma'am."

Eliza withdrew her head and closed the door. But while it yet remained within their view, the face of Eliza had something dark and ominous in it.

They heard her making desperate sounds about the stove. One minute, two. Mrs. Needham grew more and more excited. She talked loudly and steadily. The Rev. Needham sat with his hands on the arms of his chair, like a statue of patience. Presently, however, he began to drum with his fingers. Miss Whitcom, realizing the dilemma, adjusted herself to it--made the last cake go a wonderfully long way.

Finally Mrs. Needham pushed back her chair, excused herself hurriedly, and went out into the kitchen, the retreat being valiantly covered by her sister, who began telling her brother-in-law fresh tribal characteristics of the people of Tahulamaji.

Out in the smudge of the kitchen Anna Needham faced her cook.

"What is the _matter_, Eliza?"

Eliza was hot and hopeless. She pointed to the griddle upon which were three cakes, still quite pasty, and which had obviously ceased baking.

"What is the matter with the stove, Eliza?"

"It must be the oil is all gone, ma'am."

"But I thought there was plenty to last until the morning delivery from the store."

"Well, ma'am, when I came down I found two burners going, and there was the remains of breakfast on the table. Did Louise go away somewhere early?"

Eliza called the Needham girls quite simply by their first names. She might have honoured them by saying Miss Louise and Miss Hilda. But she hadn't begun that way. She hadn't done that at her last place, nor at any of the other places which constituted her Middle Western retrospect as a domestic; and Anna, in such comparatively unimportant matters as this, found it less frictional to let instruction slide.

Louise had flown, leaving the burners on; there would be no more pancakes for the remaining Needhams and their guest.

The Rev. Needham sighed, and somehow felt that the day was not beginning so very well. However, Marjory began laughing in a singularly hearty way.

"It reminds me," she grinned, "of something in an old melodrama I saw years and years ago at an impossible little theatre. The 'comic relief' was a tramp, whose weakness was the flask. He pretended, as I recall it, to have palpitations of the heart, or something like that, and at one stage of the proceedings went into a series of alarming spasms, each of which would be instantly allayed by a swig from a flask belonging to one of the other characters. The other character dared not refuse the flask, for fear of fatal consequences, but eyed its diminishing contents with profound regret. How well do I remember! At length the tramp, in one of his worst spasms, was informed that the whiskey was all gone; whereupon he very decently revived, looked out at the audience soberly, and said, in his most mirth-provoking tones: 'Thank heavens there was just enough!'"

The Rev. Needham, as they left the table, looked at her in a half startled way. These stories of hers were never in actually questionable taste, yet they somehow contrived to upset him. There seemed to be always something just behind them which might, as it were, spring out. It was such he seemed to fear most of all: the things in life that might spring out.

"Hilda," said Aunt Marjie, still chuckling over the whole affair, "did you tell me Louise had a young man in the kitchen with her?"

"Yes, it was Leslie. But Aunt Marjie ...!"

"Ah, then that explains it!"

"Oh, but Aunt Marjie, Leslie isn't the one. You see, Louise is _engaged_!"

"She is?" demanded the lady more seriously, yet mockingly, too, as though the communication represented fresh news. "Well, then"--for Miss Whitcom refused to be daunted--"the empty burners are no doubt all the better accounted for, Hilda." She laughed again. Then she put her hands on Hilda's young shoulders. "Hilda," she said with great solemnity, "are you quite _sure_ Leslie isn't the one?"

Hilda blushed, and did not look squarely at her aunt, but instead a little bit beyond her.

"Oh, _yes_!" she cried softly.

6

The first sunlit hours of the day fully realized the brave promise of the dawn. The air was fresh and delicious, though inclined to sultriness as one travelled inland away from the coast. The song of the locust was shrill in the trees.

Louise's way took her a good distance from sea and then brought her back to it again, circumlocutionary travel being one of the features of Point Betsey existence. It might fantastically resolve itself into a paradox: to go an inch you must go a mile. Her destination was the town of Frankfort, situated about four miles south of the great stone light-house and the cottages on the Point. The distance could easily be covered on foot, the pedestrian taking his way along the smooth curving beach of the "Big Lake." But Louise was rather a poor walker. She preferred to lie in a hammock, or, if ground _must_ be covered, to depend as largely as possible upon artificial locomotion. Those who declined to walk and had no motor, must, to reach Frankfort, enlist the respective conveyance of boat and train--an almost complicated journey. There was a regular passenger ferry running on Crystal Lake, back and forth between the resorts on the west shore and the village of Beulah. This ferry boat, propelled by gasoline, was called the _Pathfinder_--a name always preparing passengers new to the route for unimagined nautical adventure. Passengers seemed cheerfully and nonchalantly asked quite to take their lives in their hands, or rather, which might be even worse, to sign them over entirely into the precarious keeping of the boat's owner-pilot-engineer-and-fare-collector. And yet, after all, there was nothing so very terrifying about a trip from one end of Crystal Lake to the other. On the _Pathfinder_ Louise would doubtless have travelled this morning but for the fact that the official ferry service was never to be depended upon at so early an hour. Absence of competition had led to a really deplorable state of independence, so that Leslie's little boat was indeed a blessing at such times, in spite of its general decrepitude. He escorted her, as we have seen, the first nine miles of her journey, due east, away from Lake Michigan. Then the train carried her nine miles back again, though somewhere in the proceeding the four miles separating Frankfort and Point Betsey were annihilated. The journey consumed something like an hour and a half.

Louise stepped out of the dilapidated coach. The station stood within a few rods of the seashore--a situation once accommodating the convenience of an enormous summer hotel, which a few years previous had taken fire and vanished in smoke. With it had vanished also the fondest hopes of the town. However, the ornate railroad terminus still stood just where it had stood during the days of glory. Thank God it was spared, for it had about it a relative magnificence which the impoverished hamlet could ill afford to lose. It might, of course, be more centrally located; still, there was a kind of grace in its sad vigil.

Miss Needham, with considerable time to waste, surveyed the age-softened ruins of the vast hotel and quite cheerfully revived, for her amusement, memories of the time when she was Hilda's age and used to come here to dancing parties and occasional dinners with her family. She paced up and down upon what had once been the walk leading grandly to the hotel from the wharves and the railroad station. Now the way was rank with grass and weeds.

Ah, yes. She had promenaded here in that long-ago time, nor had she walked alone, as she was walking now. Oh, no. And a slight flush, even after all these years, crept into her face as she remembered Harold Gates. Yes, he had walked beside her here, and they had talked together of many things, and laughed a great deal. How she had laughed in the old days! How gay they were! And over there on the channel pier, close to the bowling alley, she had let Harold kiss her, also. Before the summer was over she had let him kiss her rather a good many times. Of course they did not really _love_ each other. They were only just awfully good friends. Harold was residing in the hotel with his parents. Louise only saw him when the Rev. Needham decided they would go in to town and dine. Harold kept promising that he would come out to the Point some day and see her, but he never came. Oh, yes--how memories swarm back, once the tide of their return has set in! Yes, once he did come; but it was only as a member of a picnic party from the hotel. They brought baskets with them and had a fine revel on the beach, quite near the Needham cottage. In the evening they built a fire. But Louise saw her hero only for a moment on that occasion, after all. They walked down the dark beach a little way, and he put his arm around her, and she let him kiss her; but when he said he had to go back to the fire again, there was naturally nothing to do but let him go. The trouble was, he seemed to have a special girl in the picnic party on whom his attentions must be lavished. So young, yet already such a dashing man of the world! But for Louise it wasn't very satisfying.

"What a fool I was!" she cried to herself, almost angrily, even at this comfortable distance. And then she laughed: "What a _silly_ little fool!"

Harold Gates was all nicely married and settled down now; a Chicago girl, and they had a baby. Harold had mailed her a postcard with the baby's picture on it, and across the bottom of the picture he had written, in his firm business hand: "Merry Christmas from the three Gates." Was it not strongly to be doubted whether Harold at length even remembered how lover-like they had been that summer, he and she? Well, it was rather to be hoped he didn't remember; and yet, with a queer little pang for just a moment, Louise thought she couldn't endure his having _entirely_ forgotten....

Well, she had certainly been free enough with her affections in those days! Yes, she had been very free. As Louise quitted the ruins (which had an odd, symbolic aspect this morning) and wandered off along the beach, snatches of the prodigality of her past flared up, distressing her, thrilling her a little, filling her heart with gloomy though not exactly acute aversion. Ah, she thought, the kisses that had been spent in vain! And yet they had not seemed entirely in vain at the time--not all of them, at any rate.

From a glancing inventory of those more trifling indulgences of her early days, she soared to the vastly more vital affair with Richard. That, indeed, was different. Yes, that was another matter altogether. Richard was her first real lover. The others were mere boy-sweet-hearts, or they were, like Harold Gates, just awfully good friends. Richard had always seemed mature to her: a _man_. She had always felt herself a woman in his presence. Their affair, wretchedly as it had turned out, was undeniably animated by the love that flashes between men and women. It had a new tenseness, a new dizziness, a new depth. It was magnificent and gripping; had the true ring of authority and surrender in it. Yes, it was a thing of intense intoxication, and maintained, so far, at least, as she was concerned, an unfaltering white heat.

"And yet--for him," she told herself as she walked close beside the little waves, "it wasn't like that. No, it couldn't have been, even--even during those wonderful times, when we...." And she flushed, as though not even solitude were an utterly dependable guardian of her crimson thoughts. She lowered her eyes, lest impartial nature suddenly be caught up into an impersonation which should cry shame against her.

Oh, yes. She had given her whole heart to Richard. Almost, almost.... She shuddered. "What a terrible thing it is!" she told herself. "What a terrible thing, being deceived in a man! But how is one to know? How can one always tell?"

Ah, how indeed? She went on a little way, thinking darkly and arriving nowhere.

"And yet," she wavered, a look of intenser and clearer pain drifting into her eyes, "he was--so dear! Ah...."

If Richard were suddenly to come toward her out of the past; if he were to come toward her here, along this brown beach; if he should hold out his arms to her and bid her to come back.... No, no! She clasped her hands, for it was all so real. "No, no," she whispered. "I would not go back. I would not _dare_ go back." She had seen him coming toward her many times in fancy, stretching out his arms to her, speaking to her after his wont. And she had learned to play out her prohibiting side of the terrible ordeal so faithfully, so often, that at length the only emotion she felt was that sense of dullness that goes with things which are irrevocable.

"No, Richard," she would say. "I gave myself to you once. You might have had me then. But not now. It is too late."

She would dismiss him, calmly and sorrowfully; would permit her tongue to utter no words other than these. And yet.... She walked slowly along, pondering her life.

What changes had come with the years! What changes! Now her heart was given to another man. This was another sort of love, another sort altogether. Lynndal and Richard were so unlike! Louise wondered whether the love of any two men could be so strikingly unlike as she saw the love of Richard and of Lynndal to be. Indeed, it rather pleased her, as she set them off, one against the other, that the distinction should be so great. It seemed to argue an indeterminate yet quite thrilling variety in herself--not of course, a mere vulgar facility in shifting or adapting herself to types as chance flitted them across her horizon--ah, no!--but a real sense of _understanding_, a genius for grasping the salient elements in many men, a cleverness in appraising their worth. She bolstered her troubled and ghost-ridden heart.

Lynndal was the opposite of Richard, in every way--in every way, that is, except that he, too, loved her. No, she would say in _every_ way, for she knew now that Richard had never really cared, while Lynndal, that was certain, cared very deeply and enduringly.

Her heart quickened now as she thought of her lover. She began reviving, in a happy, drifting way, the slender accumulation of noteworthy items in their romance, hers and Lynndal's: thought of their first meeting, in the lobby of the hotel in Arizona, when she was with her father on one of his infrequent "business" trips. The Rev. Needham owned a little property in the great dry-farming district of Arizona. "This is my good friend Mr. Barry," her father had said. And she had said she was pleased to make his acquaintance, and she had given him her gloved hand. She had thought little about him at the time. And that, perhaps more tellingly than anything else, argued the palpable differences. For Richard she had loved at first sight. He had captured her, madly and hopelessly, alas, quite at the outset. Not so Lynndal. Oh, no.

Louise was much given to musing and contemplation of this sort, which often took, as now, an odd conversational expression.

"I didn't love Lynndal at all, in the first place," she told herself, as though this were the first really definite understanding of the case. "I didn't begin to care until the week was half over. But I saw _he_ cared. I knew that I attracted _him_ from the beginning."

And then she left the beach and strolled up into the village.

Three couples passed by, arm in arm, youth and maiden, going for a promenade on the pier. They deported themselves in just the customary Middle Western summer resort manner. The couple ahead would confer in whispers. Then a simultaneous laugh would disturb the lazy stillness of the street. And then it might be that the girl would turn as she walked and whisper something in the ear of the girl behind her, who would laugh out also, at whatever it was the young man ahead had originally confided to his partner. And the companion of this second young lady would look bored and very much left out, while perhaps the young man behind him might mockingly exclaim that secrets in company weren't polite. Then the next minute all six would be singing the chorus of some contemporary rag. And when that was done there would be another chorus. Or else the young lady ahead would shout back to the young lady in the rear and demand of her in tones of such vehemence that they could be shared by all the town, whether she'd heard from John yet--or Harry or Jim or Robert, as the case might be. Whereupon the young man in the middle, who had been mocked by the young man in the rear, would very likely turn and grin, feeling, if rather obscurely, that the frivolous odds of the hour were now more evenly distributed.

Louise glanced at these careless, gay young persons as they passed, and a feeling of comfortable security crept into her heart.

"Well, I'm glad I'm past all _that_!" she thought with a sigh. "They all act this way at one time or another, and it's certainly a blessing when it's over!"

She turned and looked after the noisy spooners as they bent their steps toward the pier. Suddenly, it seemed for no reason at all, she thought of Leslie. He seemed, quite vividly, to be right here beside her for a moment. It was ever so curious. She wondered why she should think of him so vividly just at this moment. Presently it occurred to her the reason was simply that Leslie, though so young, wasn't boisterous and silly, like the hoodlums she had just passed. No, she could not fancy his ever having behaved like that in his life. Nor could she conceive of his having yet to go through any such gauche, vapid period. With her he had always been very serious. Of course, she was a little older. But Leslie's whole nature was serious, she argued, and somehow--somehow _deep_. She was in the mood now, perversely, to do him the most elaborate justice. Yes, she thought he might be called, in a way, really deep. Certainly she had never known any one like him. She did not, just then, consider that she had never known any one just like Richard, either, when it came to that--or even any one like Harold Gates. All she could seem to think of, for the moment, was that Leslie had come to fill a unique place in her life.

A feeling of tenderness crept upon her. Yes, they had grown intimate during the short span of their acquaintance. She had been rather lavish. It was Leslie's first summer on the Point. Vaguely she wished it might all have been otherwise, that he might have come into her life sooner, or that.... Ah, what was it she wanted?