Chapter III: Part I: The Arrival (3)

His voice seemed suddenly ringing in her ears, as it had rung when he cried: "Friends!"

And she sighed.

Oh, Eros, wicked god! She is waiting for one lover, and you torment her with others! You revive for her sweet, irrevocable loves of the past, when one would think the present love enough....

7

Louise looked at her watch. It was half past seven. The day was clear and beautiful. Out against the marine horizon stood a ship. That must be Lynndal's. It would be in at eight. She decided she would stroll down the length of the main street and then return to the wharf.

Although the hour was still so early, the little town displayed about as much life as it ever did. There were women with baskets on their arms, examining produce displayed in the few shops where supplies were procurable. There were carefree resorters already about, enjoying a freshness which must soon evaporate under the scourge of the mounting sun. The main street boasted a good many quaint little curio shops, which somehow managed to do a living business. A typical drowsy Northern Michigan small town--not much of a town, yet of course infinitely better than no town at all.

Louise, as she walked down the one business street of the place, scarcely looked to right or left. She knew every nook and angle of the town--at least so she believed. Having come up now so many summers, wasn't it reasonable to suppose that one would eventually exhaust all the slender resources of a place like this? And yet, had her eyes been really open she would perhaps have been amazed to behold spread about her a wealth of life undreamed of. Something rich and new in _Frankfort_? Yes, possibly even here. For those individuals in aprons, weighing out sugar and measuring potatoes so humbly, are not, as a matter of fact, mere shop fixtures, as they have always seemed. The clerk at the soda fountain, who will cheerfully dish up ice cream for the hoodlums when they return hot and famished from their walk on the pier, has, after all, other interests in life than syrups and fizz--unimportant, it may be, yet interests, nevertheless. Yon fat and shabby patriarch, who sits so calmly all day long tilted back in a red armchair outside the drygoods store, is something more, at least potentially, than a painted barber's pole. Inside the drygoods store, although Miss Needham has overlooked her, is the old man's grand-daughter, busily working, dreaming. She works hard all summer so she can go to school winters in Grand Rapids. She has a sweetheart in Grand Rapids, who is taking a business course; they are planning to be married sometime in the sweet by-and-bye.

But one with the enormous and stirring preoccupations of Louise Needham could hardly be expected to look on life with open eyes, or, so to say, analytically. Appreciations must bow and conform. A breezy, impressionistic sort of synthesis is the background such a mentally and emotionally active person seems inevitably to evolve. As it was with the sunrise, so was it also with the people of the world not personally bound up in her destiny. It really wasn't a deliberate narrowness, but simply a sensible recognition of time's limitations. Certainly the living of one's own personal life must always count first.

Reminiscent and dreaming, she passed down the street, while out at sea the steamer drew closer and closer. In one gaily decorated shop window was displayed an array of summer fiction: alluring titles, with often most astonishing jackets--all the season's best sellers, backed up by certain surviving relics of bygone seasons. There were actually volumes in this window (though now badly faded and of course occupying appropriately inferior positions) which had been the avowed, the lauded best sellers during that summertime, long flown, when Louise and Harold Gates indulged in so free an interchange of kisses. There had been, as a matter of fact, rather a profusion of kisses in the best sellers that year, also: how true they were, after all, to life--that best of all best sellers!

Miss Needham paused before the window. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to examine the miscellany, fruitage of so many seasons, badges of so much smart selling. In the midst of the conglomeration she spied a certain volume, modest in title and hue as compared with some of the others, though still extravagant enough of text, which Leslie had been telling her about. It was a long historical novel, and Leslie had expressed himself as well pleased with it. He hadn't, as a matter of downright fact, read the book all through, but had skimmed along, omitting all descriptions and the pages where the author philosophized about life. But he had captured the gist of the story, and had retold it to Louise one afternoon while they strolled together in delicious solitude through Lovers' Lane. And she had promised him she would read the book some time and give him her opinion--it going without saying that her opinion, at least to him, would be of moment. Louise was no great reader--certainly not an inveterate reader of long historical novels. Nevertheless, as her eye now encountered it nestling there in the window, a sudden caprice swept her right inside the shop. It was a most amazing thing, but the next moment she found herself telling the clerk she wished to purchase the volume. And then--he fished it out.

The clerk, it must be communicated--a man, by the way, with all sorts of interesting and even enthralling human complexes which Louise did not dream of suspecting, since she knew the town so well--was rather surprised that his early morning customer should desire this particular book rather than some of the more gripping things: _Diana's Secret_, for instance, which was easily one of the most successful works ever exploited in Frankfort. However, since he had long ago given up all hope of ever selling the historical romance, and since he expected to run out of _Diana_ copies before the season was ended, the clerk naturally offered no comment upon her choice. Covertly blowing a little dust off the book she had asked for, he wrapped it up, and handed it over the counter.

Louise was by this time mildly self-reproachful. "How silly of me to walk right in like that and buy it!" she sighed. "With the money--let's see. What could I have bought instead ...?"

But however nimbly her mind might exert itself in estimating the complete badness of her bargain, the book went under her arm. Just a kind of giddy, final fling, she argued.

As she proceeded on her way, the girl kept assuring herself that the embrace of the historic romance was decidedly more playful than serious. It would be amusing later on--oh, perhaps a great deal later on--to show Leslie she had been as good as her word. Possibly she might actually _read_ the book--who could tell?--just to please him. Poor Les! After all, he was only a boy. She was two years his senior. It would be foolish of them to think of each other, even were her heart perfectly free.

"Of course it's all right," she said, "for us to be the finest sort of friends; but it must stop there. If I'd guessed how serious a thing it was going to turn out for him I'd have seen it wasn't right to let him think he had any chance...."

This, to tell the truth, tended to put it all rather more satisfactorily than had hitherto seemed possible. She was quite pleased, in fact, for it left her in the attitude of repeating "Poor Les!"

Well, yes, she had thrown him over, she admitted--in a certain sense. But only in a sense; and anyway it had to be so. However shallow her reasoning might often appear to others--however often it might fail of horizon--Miss Needham was herself seldom conscious of the slightest insincerity at the time. She had inherited, it is true, a certain intellectual shiftiness from the parent most afflicted with a similar disorder; but however often she might fluctuate to a new point of view, so long as she actually held to it the conception possessed for her all the earmarks of probity and permanence.

"Poor Les! No, no.... I shouldn't have encouraged him so much...." But she hadn't thought at first that Lynndal was coming. And Arizona is very, very far away--especially on fine summer nights, when one isn't wearing any ring....

Yet presently the book under her arm began to appear a somewhat awkward possession. However easy it might be for her to _tell_ Leslie they must be merely friends now, and however blithely she might _ask_ him, after an ancient and at best pretty hackneyed ideal, to look upon her as a sister, it was going to be very hard--for him. Wasn't it? Could it be otherwise than hard for him? Wouldn't her having bought the book, even, especially if he learned she had bought it, make it all still harder?

Louise was naturally so quick in her sympathies that it troubled her when others couldn't attain as convenient solutions for their problems as she generally did for her own. And being herself party to another's unhappiness would, of course, tend to add certain pricks of conscience to any of the more abstract, though still altruistic, sentiments she might feel. "Well," she admitted, "I guess I shouldn't have bought the book, after all--at least not just now." But of course she could keep it hidden. "I needn't show it to Les right away." For that matter, need she ever show it to him? "I suppose--I really suppose I might drop it into the harbour, and be forever rid of it!"

As though, indeed, determined to act upon this dramatic impulse, Louise turned and walked down amongst some fishermen's huts at the water's edge. Most of the fishermen were out at sea, having not yet brought in the morning's haul from the nets. The rude little huts, where the fish were cleaned and packed in ice for shipping, and where the nets were washed, stood idly open. The early sunshine lay across their doorsteps. Some children were at play, running in and out; and before one of the huts a very old woman sat mending a net, working her hard fingers in a quick, intelligent way.

Louise walked out upon a little plank dock which was flung, at this point, into the harbour. The fishermen used the dock when they unloaded their cargoes of fish. It did not extend a great way; but from its extremity, as she faced westward, she perceived the approach of a steamer, still out in the "Big Lake," but nearing the harbour channel. It was probably Lynndal's boat, though it might possibly be one of the Ann Arbor car ferries from across Lake Michigan. She must hurry to the wharf. Still, the notion of throwing the book away persisted. She must rid herself of every vestige of the past. She must come to Lynndal--and it was quite thrilling to put it that way--empty-handed! This would seem to be a formal, a conclusive, even a rather grand way of marking a close to this surreptitious, this unfortunate, yet this of course sufficiently innocent little affair with Leslie--poor Les! Yes, it would be the fitting mark of conclusion; after that her heart would be swept clean. She grasped the book. At first she thought she would fling it far out; then that she would just quietly drop it in. But after all, she slipped the book under her arm again, and made her way hurriedly back to the village street.

Her mind was busy with explanation and a readjustment not, a moment ago, foreseen. "It would have been foolish and stagy to have done that. No, it wouldn't have been _right_! Perhaps--" yes, perhaps Hilda would want to read it some day. She brightened. "Leslie said there was much instructive reading in it." Why, yes--the book would do for Hilda, if not for her. Mightn't Hilda even do for Leslie, now that she had thrown him over? Ah, it might be so! The idea occurred to Louise at first as a mere flash of whimsy; however, second thought made the possibility rather too possible to be altogether agreeable....

"Why, I should think it would be the most natural thing in the world," she assured herself. "Of course Hilda's awfully young, but I should think it would be perfectly splendid if they came to care for each other in time. I'm sure it would make it ever so much easier for _me_." She remembered how oddly her sister had behaved earlier in the day, whenever Leslie was mentioned; how Leslie himself had promised Hilda he would be back in time to play in the tennis tournament with her. "I think it would be just splendid!" she thought. "I'll encourage it, of course, all I can!"

At last, she felt, there was a real solution in sight for poor Les. It would be the very thing! She was so pleased that she laughed aloud as she passed the fat and shabby patriarch tilted back in his red armchair before the drygoods store. But it is possible that even the patriarch, in a philosophy of age as opposed to that of youth, merely thought, as he saw her go by: "Another of the resorters." Indeed, it is even possible that he did not see her at all.

The steamer drew in through the channel. It was the coast steamer from Ludington, and connected with the Milwaukee line. Louise stood eagerly beside the freight house, peering up at the passengers on the deck. Naturally she was very much excited, and experienced a swift, enveloping sense of joyous romance in being there to welcome the man she expected some day to marry.

To marry!

Suddenly it occurred to her that, after all, she had hardly thought of it _once_ that way! Yes, Lynndal was the man who would be her husband. Marrying him--no, she had somehow barely thought of that part.... Nevertheless, though the discovery was a little staggering, she strained her eyes quite gaily for a first glimpse of him; wondered if he would look to her just the way he looked during those few days when they had been together in Arizona. But just how, by the way, did he look then? All at once she thought of Lynndal Barry as an almost absolute stranger! It was an inexplicable but quite vivid, a rather terrifying sensation. It made the roots of her hair faintly prickle. No, for the life of her she couldn't think of any one's being a more perfect stranger than Lynndal!

Louise wasn't mystically inclined. Yet what she felt seemed almost a kind of foreboding. Then she laughed to herself, a gay little nervous laugh. And she told herself it was only natural one should feel this way, and that it was all a part of her charming, her really absorbing romance.

8

He was standing by the rail on the upper deck of the steamer, beside a man with whom he appeared to be in conversation. She had no difficulty, after all, in recognizing him. Barry was still the tallish, brown-moustached, quiet-eyed man who had so generously exerted himself to make her brief stay in Arizona agreeable.

She saw him first, the advantage giving her time to look away again before his eyes discovered her. Just why she should want to look away was in the nature of a mystery; yet avert her eyes she certainly did, as she might have done in the case of a stranger whose presence had casually attracted her notice. The feeling that, despite what had passed between them under the discreet propulsion of government postage, she did not really know this man, returned stronger than ever. She smiled a little--she had to--at her own manifest perversity; and flushed vaguely, too.

As soon as Lynndal Barry discovered Miss Needham down on the dock his face lighted, and he grasped the arm of the man standing beside him.

"There she is!" he cried.

His companion looked, but was a moment or two trying to decide which of the several very possible young ladies standing about near the freight house might prove to be _she_. To facilitate the other's search, Barry pointed. And Louise, observing the gesture out of the corner of an eye, coloured and turned still more away, maintaining, after all, though she had been just on the point of abandoning it, the pretense that she had not yet seen the man to welcome whom she had risen so early and come so far.

Somehow, a wrong note had been struck. Even the Rev. Needham--and his views on culture were widely known--had often cautioned his girls against pointing at persons or things in public. Lynndal ought not to have pointed. Yes, it was a wrong note--and a wrong note just at the most critical time. Of course in poising this action of his, Louise, it is quite patent, now failed to consider one thing; she failed, because perversely and momentarily she was out of mood, to consider that a young man who has travelled hundreds of miles to see a young lady he expects to marry would rather naturally be so carried away at the first sight of her that manners wouldn't count for the full weight of their every-day prestige. Great events sanction great exceptions. But Louise, now, was not prepared to make the requisite allowances. She had thought that her heart was swept clean; but it wasn't. What demon was it which had lured her into thinking so long about Richard and Leslie and--and all the others while she waited for the boat to come in?

Yes, to her it really seemed that a wrong note had been struck. Miss Needham found herself in an oddly cool and critical mood--certainly not the mood she had anticipated. The next moment it softened; a feeling of shy warmth stole upon her. Still, she half wished that she had decided, after all, not to come to Frankfort, but had been content to await him quietly at home. That would have given her, if nothing else, a certain reserve of dignity, which she felt now was somehow sacrificed. Did not her being here on the wharf to meet him make her appear too eager? Would it not have been much better to come forward gracefully out of a romantic nowhere, perhaps even after keeping him waiting a few minutes? Then, at least, she needn't have undergone the minor humiliation--wasn't it almost that?--of being pointed at. She pressed the book under her arm. Suddenly she thought of Richard and his exquisite manners....

Lynndal was waving his hat now, trying desperately to attract her attention. The captain of the vessel was making rather a poor landing, and the sharp little reverse and forward signals in the engine-room kept sounding repeatedly. A strip of water still lay between the ship and the wharf, though crew huskies stood ready to heave out the gang-plank as soon as it became possible to establish shore connections. Louise interested herself in the rougher activities aboard ship, and did not yet raise her eyes to the man who now stood almost directly above her. She felt conscious of a sum of stares in her direction. All the girls on the wharf had taken full note of the pointed finger and the waving hat. Each knew--and some, perhaps, not without regret--that these demonstrations did not apply to _her_. A quick inventory of wharf possibilities had convinced all present that it must be Miss Needham who was the impetuously favoured individual. He had seemed to look quite squarely at her, and she alone had not bestowed on his pains the gaze of unfortunately lacking acquaintance.

At length one of the younger girls, standing near her, touched Louise's arm. "Some one's trying to catch your eye," she said. And she nodded up toward Barry.

He observed the girl's action and called down: "Louise, dear, here I am--up here!"

And then it was that she relented, at last--thrilled a little--raised her face coyly to him, and smiled.

No, she would not appear too eager. Let him not think he was winning her too cheaply. "Did you have a pleasant trip across?" she asked.

Just the faintest shade of disappointment crossed his face. "Oh, yes," he replied. "Smooth as glass. How are you, dear?"

She merely nodded. The historical novel slipped out from under her arm and fell to the ground. She stooped hurriedly and picked it up.

"My, it's good to see you!" he communicated through a hubbub which really made it difficult to be heard.

But she was again prevented, or spared, a reply, by having to step quickly aside as the gang-plank was run out. The ship was at last securely moored. Barry's grey-haired companion called his attention to this fact, and then the two men seized their bags and hurried down.

Louise stepped aside to wait; realized an augmenting sense of strangeness and quandary--her heart in a kind of flutter. She felt now hot, now cold. An odd, frantic resolve raced through her brain: "He mustn't kiss me!" And yet--for there was a conflicting after-flash--to have him make no attempt would constitute the very essence itself of pique! In the midst of this rather extraordinary mood, Louise recoiled, as it were, and shook herself. She called her mental turmoil silly and maudlin; she even called it wicked. Then Lynndal came, and the terrible moment passed, leaving her banners waving. Emphatically it had been in his mind to kiss her; any one could plainly see that; the act itself, however (for he must _not_ feel too sure), she forestalled by a very delicate but at the same time unmistakable gesture of repulsion, unto which he bowed with a graceful disappointment that, for the time being, very materially lightened the prospect. She had won in the first skirmish; and the knowledge of victory, the delicious sense of power in her it seemed to emphasize, put her in an easier, more cheerful frame of mind.

Instead of kissing Lynndal, she held out her hand to him with shy cordiality. She fancied, in a whimsical flash, that she was meeting him all over again, for the first time. A subtle sense of romance in this new aspect of their relationship quickened her heart....

Barry's shipboard companion was still at his side. Or rather not quite at his side, either, but holding discreetly back--even courteously discovering a sudden optical interest in another quarter of the compass. From this thoughtful detachment he was recalled and introduced as Mr. Barrett O'Donnell.

Miss Needham was delighted to make his acquaintance--Miss Needham would have welcomed, just then, an acquaintance with the man in the moon, no matter how outlandish he might prove. For the moment, if in a way delightful, was also complex and curiously taut. O'Donnell jollied things up. His was a ready tongue, with, now and then, just a whisper of Irish; his smile was droll and cheering, though perhaps rather too facile--too facile, that is (for it was perfectly sincere), to be ever quite enveloping. Louise walked between them, and the three made their way to the railroad station, where the locomotive of a "resort special" was puffing quite prodigiously, and pretending, after the manner of locomotives, to be ever on the verge of pulling right out, mindless of schedule.

Miss Needham skipped with hectic and perverse coquetry. She stimulated herself anew upon the assurance that it was great fun having a lover to meet. And it was really fine, for another thing, to be able so perfectly to dominate the scene, disposing all according to her whim--best of all, to have another man right there on the spot to behold these palpable wonders! She remembered, with a tiny obscure pang, how she had wished Richard might be present to see what amazing progress she had made. Richard she could not have; but fortune provided a substitute in the unsuspecting person of jolly Mr. O'Donnell.

Louise's mood of almost saucy pleasure was sufficiently generous to overflow in Barry's favour, else the poor man would surely have shivered himself to death ere this. She smiled up at him with more artlessness than really consorted with her triumph.

"Hilda was afraid you might not come," she chatted pleasantly, flirting a little with the corners of her mouth.

"She was?"

"Yes, she was dreadfully worried--you know how children are. She'll be awfully relieved when she sees you."

"But you," he asked, half jestingly and half in faint earnest, "--you weren't afraid?"

"I? Oh, no!" She laughed along with the denial. "Not _I_."

The locomotive was coughing and wheezing and snorting, with an air of absurd importance. All at once there was a tremendous exhaust which sent steam geysering in considerable volume to either side. They were so close that the roar brought a tightening to the girl's throat. Barry touched her arm, gently insinuating her out of the path of the steam's dominion. She felt the momentary pressure of his fingers. And through the hiss and dizzy vibration in the air it was as though he were saying to her: "You are mine, all mine! You are mine forever and ever! You can belong henceforth to no one but me!" She trembled and felt faint. Her heart was beset with goblins and ghosts....

When they had settled for the diminutive journey, Louise was more than ever glad of Mr. O'Donnell's presence. But now it was no longer so much that he might behold the brilliance of her autocracy as that she might lean upon him while striving to adjust herself to the almost alarming situation Barry's arrival had precipitated. And O'Donnell, for his own part, was not a little flattered at being so deluged with attention from a pretty woman--especially since she had a real, live lover sitting right beside her! The lover himself took everything in a perfectly philosophical manner. Naturally she didn't want to reveal her heart to the wide world, his comfortable acquiescence seemed to say. She was reserving all that for him alone. And in the meantime it was very decent and intelligent of her to be nice to his friend. As a matter of fact, Miss Needham's conduct wasn't by any means so sheer and vivid as the complex which produced it; she was not behaving nearly so strangely as she felt.

The journey back to Beulah, disproportionately lengthy if measured on the dial of one's watch, was under way. All the coaches were packed with resorters plying off in search of adventure--adventure which, in its most substantial form, could they but know it, they were to discover inside those mysterious covered baskets stowed away under seats and, sometimes rather precariously, on the metal racks overhead. For eating is, after all, the Great Adventure in Middle Western resort life. One might perhaps hesitate about putting it ahead of canoes in the moonlight, and that indispensable adjunct of every resort that ever was, the Lovers' Lane. But whereas the latter phenomena appeal to only a single age or mood of society, the adventure of filling the stomach appeals to everyone alike, old and young, mighty and humble. So far as the present excursionists were concerned, the furtive covers were soon flapping; and the air grew tropical with the persuasive aroma of bananas.

Louise sat beside her lover in the midst of these not unfamiliar scenes; and the outcome of her half agreeable, half harrowing mental complex was a slightly hysterical gaiety. So long as Mr. O'Donnell was with them, she felt secure. But why _was_ this? Why was it she suddenly dreaded the thought of finding herself for the first time alone with Lynndal? Phantoms swarmed. In her letters she had given him every promise. Yet now he was with her again, she dared not let herself go. Phantoms of old delight; phantoms, too, projected into the scope of an imagined future.... The words she had seemed to hear while the steam brought that queer stuffiness to her throat, still echoed troublingly: "You are mine, all mine! You can belong henceforth to no one--but to me!" Her mind was all charged with a brooding unrest. Externally she sparkled and was blithe; but within lurked a vague fever of apprehension....

Things like this may conceivably be going on in almost any one's mind at almost any time; but they are never shown. We are adepts when it comes to guarding our guilty struggles.

The train was winding its way through dismal swamp country. Stark trunks of trees, stripped of verdure, with the life in them long extinct, stood knee-deep in brackish water. Though the day was quite bright, an impenetrable veil of melancholy lay over the swamplands--a gloom never lifted, which seemed the child of silence and stagnation. The sad blight of the landscape seeped into her heart. She was twisting her life this way and that, absorbed, as usual, in the mystery of her own fascinating if at present rather menaced ego.

Lynndal Barry and his companion, chatting, seemed unaware of the girl's momentary absorption; her curious, almost breathless, detachment. Although detached, she was nevertheless looking at Barry with serious, half-seeing eyes. And all at once she found herself thinking of him respectfully, even tenderly. There was something conspicuously ordered and kindly and calm about him. She seemed, abruptly, conscious of a great patience in this man who had come to her out of the West; had scarcely discovered in his letters how essentially mature he was. But the next moment this vaguely annoyed her. She seemed to miss in him the thrill of fire and passion which her nature craved. He seemed to be relaxed upon the snug hearth-rug of life--yes, in slippers! Barry was, actually, not much above thirty; but his seemed to her now a poise unwelcome. She fingered the book in her lap with nervous, groping fingers; even shuddered a little as she gazed off across the swamp.

Barry, however, seemed aware of none of the girl's emotional fluxes. Why should he be? How _could_ he be? Barry didn't even in the least suspect that she had any such things as emotional fluxes in her make-up; nor, for that matter, was it likely he would quite know an emotional flux if he should meet it. This must not, however, be taken to signify that Barry wasn't sensitive, for he was. And he had a way, too, of biding his time, which sometimes deceived people into thinking him invulnerable to the finer antennæ of feelings. However, though his ear was not entirely deaf to the unstrummed music of life, he did not as yet suspect--or if so, not more than just glancingly--that there was to be a flaw in his eager little romance.

"Oh, yes, it will surprise her completely, of course," O'Donnell was saying.

"You haven't written at all, then?"

"You see, I've only just learned she was back from Tahulamaji. I learned about it in town. I may say I learned of it only yesterday!"

"It's queer, isn't it," remarked Barry, with almost a flash of imagination, "we should have happened to come up on the same steamer?"

And then, being just a delightful, sane, normal individual, O'Donnell said what _had_ to be said--what is _always_ said when talk reaches such a point: He said that the world was small.

Louise came back to them with an effort. The train was beginning to draw up out of the swamp region, and on to a plain better adapted to rural uses. The sunshine lay very bright upon the grass. An emotion of hope stirred in her heart. Everything was bound to turn out for the best--_her_ best, she thought. Of course it would! She felt all at once radiantly, boundlessly happy. And she forgot the words in the steam, when his fingers had touched her arm.

The subject of this miraculous meeting of Barry and O'Donnell still animated a conversation which she entered with almost desperate eagerness.

"You weren't acquainted before you met on the boat?"

"Never laid eyes on each other," laughed the Irishman. "We began talking about dry-farming in the gentlemen's lounge, and from that, gradually...."

"The fact is," put in Barry, who wanted to see what little mystery there was cleared up as quickly as possible, "we found we were both on our way to--"

"--to besiege ladies living under the same roof!" concluded the other's readier tongue.

Barry coloured a bit at the bluntness, but rather with pleasure than embarrassment.

"I guess I don't quite understand," remarked Louise a little coolly.

"Well, you see, the fact is we're very old friends, Miss Whitcom and I--"

"Aunt Marjie!"

"Yes--Marjie...." He repeated the name slowly, and with the sly relish of one who is not quite sure whether he would dare perpetrate such an indulgence in the presence of the adored herself.

"Why, how perfectly _romantic_!" cried Louise. And she ceased entirely, for the moment, to be concerned about the puzzling and rather tangled romance of her own life.

"You say you haven't seen each other for years?"

"Five years," he nodded.

"Oh, how surprised she _will_ be! I do certainly want to be there when she first sees you!"

For of course it went without saying that they were lovers. Only fancy! Well--as much had been said outright. He was coming to besiege Aunt Marjie, just as Lynndal....

Her heart clouded a little with the mist of perplexity which seemed, now, to have begun settling the moment she heard Leslie's step outside on the hillside at dawn....

But O'Donnell went on nonchalantly enough: "Oh, but there'll be nothing remarkable at all. Miss Whitcom, if you'll pardon my speaking quite freely of your relative, has the most extraordinary control. Perhaps you've noticed it. I can tell you just what she'll do. She'll talk about the new wall paper in the throne room of the Queen of Tahulamaji's palace. Or else it will be still some perfectly commonplace remark about a tiresome old swimming medal. But exclamations in the true sense? No, there won't be any, Miss Needham, I assure you."

Oh, Eros! Here, sitting all perplexed beside the man she has promised to marry--all besieged by ghosts of her past loves, and the ghost of one scarce passed as yet--is a woman. And yonder in a cottage, covering the unlucky shortage of pancakes with mundane chuckles, is another woman who has been pursued for twenty years by one dauntless lover, and who, when he comes, will talk about the paper on the wall.

The journey drew to a screeching and bumping close; the brakes whistled, and the locomotive fell a-panting most lustily, as though to proclaim that it had done a mighty thing indeed in hauling a few laden coaches a dozen miles across the swamp-lands.

The intrepid _Pathfinder_ lay at the dock, waiting. All Beulah had turned out, it really seemed, to welcome the train; and now all Beulah swarmed down to bid those who would embark farewell.

There was the mayor--or so one fancied; and there were aldermen--could not one fairly see them sitting in solemn council? There was the Methodist minister in his half-clerical week-day togs; there were all the old men of the town, and all the old ladies; all the boys and girls and babies; together with just as many others as could possibly be spared from conducting the business of the town. The dock was quite crowded. Yet Louise and her two companions were the only passengers the _Pathfinder_ was to bear away.

There always seemed something vaguely symbolic about these important departures of the _Pathfinder_. The townsfolk seemed to gaze off with a kind of wistful regret--yes, from the mayor down to the tiniest babe. It always was so: as though the _Pathfinder_ were bound for free, large spaces of ocean; for ports in Europe, or the Indies. And the townspeople could only assemble on the shore and silently watch this ship's glorious westward flight. So life went.

Many are called, but few are chosen!