Chapter XXXII

Time's Jests, and now the Perfect Apology, to stand a
Lifetime in Brick and Stone; concluding with a Little Scene,
which she will remember while she lives.

She had called him untruthful once for speaking the truth about the Works. Now she would make her apology due, to stand a lifetime in brick and stone. This Cally did for the man of the slums to-day; and this she meant him to understand without much speech, since speech, in the circumstances, would be somewhat difficult.

But then, of course, she could know nothing of those colloquies Mr. V.V. had had in his time with O'Neill, the hard-joking Commissioner, of inner conflicts he had had of late all by himself. Nor did she even take it in how far her advancing thought of him, and of all this subject, had outrun anything she had ever put into word or deed before. So she was far from imagining what a miracle she made for him this afternoon, like a midsummer dream come true; far from guessing how he, with his strange unconsciousnesses, would think of it all as just a beautiful but detached happening, a glorious coincidence....

He wore for this meeting, not his holiday raiment of blue, with the sprigged waistcoat that his Uncle Armistead might have left him, but that selfsame suit she had seen upon him all last year; including that other memorable day in her life when she had come clicking down the stairs to find the tall outlander standing here in her familiar background. Only there was no feeling in her now that he was an alien in the Heth drawing-room. No, here V. Vivian seemed to belong to-day, the best and worthiest thing in the room.

To her, that was; but it was not so with others. The one speck in the perfect balm was that, to have this man here at all, she had had to manage it secretly, as if it were something discreditable....

The greetings were over; they were seated; he was advised that it was about a building matter that she desired his help; and even when, as talk progressed, she placed her building lot for him at Seventeenth and Canal Streets, the doctor's manner, which was quite eager and interested and pleased at being summoned for help, showed no signs of understanding.

"Seventeenth and Canal Streets," he repeated, alert and businesslike. "Yes? It's to be a business building, then?"

"There's a building there now, but I'm going to pull that one down," said Cally. "I don't like it."

And at this moment it was that she saw consciousness burst into the unconscious; burst with the strong suddenness of an explosion.

"_Seventeenth and Canal Streets_!... That's the Heth Works corner!"

"That's the building I'm going to pull down. I--I've taken a dislike to it."

The tall young man came to his feet, slowly, as if hoisted from above by an invisible block and tackle. All in a moment, his face had become quite pale.

"What do you mean?" he asked, in a queer clipped voice.

"I mean ... I don't think you will have to say anything about my father in your articles.... We're going to build a new Works--_now_!"

He stood staring a second like a man of stone; and then turned abruptly from her and walked away. But in that second she saw that his petrifaction was already scattering, and his face wore the strangest look, like a kind of glory....

So Cally thought that he understood now; and that was all the reward she wanted. Sitting silent, she looked after his retreating back. She perceived, with a queer little twitching in her heart, that the polished spaces upon Mr. V.V.'s right elbow had thinned away into an unmistakable darning. And then it came over her quite suddenly that the reason he wore this suit to-day was probably that he had given his blue suit away, to one of his sick. She seemed quite sure that that was it. And oh, how like him, and like nobody else in the world, to give away his best one, and keep the patches for himself....

And the first thing that he said, returning to her after his thunderbolt surprise, seemed also beautifully characteristic of his strange faiths.

"Well, it's wonderful," said he, in quite a natural voice. "Of course, the greatest thing that will ever happen to me.... And yet--it may seem strange to you--but I've felt all along--I've _felt_--that something like this might probably happen any time."

Moved as she was, Cally could have smiled at that. But when she saw the intense honesty of his face, which still wore that half-startled yet shining look, the look of a man with a sudden secret all his own, she did not smile, and her own thought was given quite a new course.

"Perhaps you're a nice sort of mind-reader," said she, gently, "for you were right to feel that way, at least as far as my father is concerned. I specially wanted you to know about that. Papa has been planning for six years to put up a new building--only last month he had arranged to spend quite a lot of money in repairs. I just came to understand all this to-day. The trouble has been," said Cally, looking up at the old family enemy with no sense of hesitation or reluctance--"I've always been too expensive, you see. I've never left him any money to carry out his plans...."

She would not say anything about horse-leech's daughters, not, of all things, wanting to embarrass him to-day. But possibly his mind filled in a hiatus here, and there was no mistaking that what she said about her father impressed him profoundly.

"I ... I really seem to have known. You might call it a sort of--of premonition--if you wanted to ... Though you'll naturally not think I've acted that way."

Mr. V.V. stood by a spindly table, carefully examining a small but costly vase, the property of Mr. Heth, of the Cheroot Works; and now he went on with a kind of diffident resolution, the air of one who gives a confidence with difficulty, but must do so now, for his honor.

"You may remember my telling you once that I was--was sorry to write the factory articles you just mentioned. The truth is I've hated to write them--especially as to--as to the Works.... It's just the sort of thing I've wanted for a long time to write, too. I had the argument thought out down to the bone. Oh, they're good.... I--I was going to send the first lot to the 'Chronicle' this week.... And yet--well, it's been pulling against the grain somehow, every line of the way. It seemed strange.... And now I see that I must have felt--known--all along.... But," said the strange young man, setting down the vase and hurriedly running his fingers through his hair, "I--I realize that this must sound most unconvincing to you. Probably foolish. No matter...."

But Cally felt by now that she understood him better than he understood himself.

"No, I think I understand," said she. "And if you hadn't felt that way--don't you see?--it never would have happened."

He turned on her another strange look, at once intensely interested and intensely bewildered. But she glanced away from it at once, and would give him no chance to ask her what that might mean.

"I've got so much I want to tell you, so much I want to ask your advice and help about," said she, rising, with a change to what she regarded as an excellent business voice and manner. "Perhaps we ought to go into executive session at once--and let's go into the library, too! I know you're awfully busy, but I do hope you've come prepared to make a good long visit."

The article-writer neglected to reply at all, moving after her with his queer, startled look....

So these two passed from the Heth drawing-room to the Heth library, to talk about business: the new Heth Works, in fine. They came into a room which was intimately and poignantly associated with Hugo Canning. Memories of the departed greeted Cally upon the threshold, and thereafter; only they were not poignant now. Hugo's face kept rising mistily beside the so different visage of the man he had instinctively disliked, his ancient hoodoo....

This was to be a meeting like none other Cally had ever had with the stranger in her house, a _happy_ meeting, troubled by no shadow. They sat down across the great table from each other, in good business style, as she considered; and then she began to talk eagerly, recounting to him without any embarrassment, though of course with some judicious expurgation, what had been going on in her mind, and out of it, during the last five days; beginning with the afternoon she had seen him at the Cooneys', and culminating with the long talk she had had with her father at, and after, luncheon to-day.

And he, the only confidant she had ever had, sitting with his patched elbow on her father's table, and his chin in his cupped hand, attended every word with his singular quality of interest. He was unique among all the people she had known, in that the things he seemed to care most about were never things for himself at all....

"So that's how it stands now," said Cally, presently. "My father was naturally surprised at first, as I've never shown any interest in his work before, and of course he said he wouldn't do it,--wouldn't take my money, I mean, though it's really his all the time. But at last I did get him to talking about it seriously, and then he grew more and more interested.... Oh, I know he's going to do it! I _know_ it!--That's all settled! And I do think he'll let me have a hand in really planning it--that is, if I can show him that I--I know anything about it.... Well, of course I _don't_, you see--nothing, nothing!--and that's where my problem begins. I've got to learn everything, from the very start, and do it quickly.... Do you think I possibly can?--"

"_Books_!" he cried, throwing out both hands. "What're they for but to teach us everything, _right away_?..."

In fact, her problem there was really no problem at all, it seemed. Pond himself had at hand a fine little general library on all these subjects; there was the State Library; there were the bookstores of the world: all waiting for her, all packed with meaty information. Perhaps, just as a starter, she would let him make out a sort of preliminary check-list to-night, out of catalogues, out of some bully advertisements in the backs of Pond's works....

"Oh, you _are_ nice!" exclaimed Cally. "You can't guess what it means to be encouraged!... I do so want to go into it seriously."

He talked further, indicating the procedure: first her own idea of what she wanted; then an architect to sketch some plans; then a builder to figure after the architect. The thing began to shape up, rapidly, definitely. She found him an inspiriting soul....

"I ought to say," she explained, quite excited, "that I mentioned fifty thousand dollars only because that was the sum I happened to have, in a lump. But we're going to make it _good_, no matter what it costs. I have a little more money of my own," said she, "about eight thousand dollars, and of course I'll put that in, too. And I know my father will feel the same way."

But no, V.V.'s belief was that the sum she mentioned would be far more than necessary. She could get a rough sort of estimate at once, if desired, given the dimensions of the lot and a general idea of the style of building she wanted. His friend, Jem Noonan, he who was just now starting out as a contractor, would be only too delighted to do some figuring on it.

"Of course the best way of all to gather ideas at the start," said he, staring through her, "is to go to the Works--go often.... There's no other such way of seeing what the actual needs are."

"Yes ... Yes, of course that's true," said Cally.

But what she felt like saying was that she didn't want to go to the Works at all, unless he could go with her.

"I want to get _your_ ideas now, please," she added--"everything you can think of. You can't have any notion how ignorant I am.... But--oh, there's one thing I wanted to speak to you about first. I suppose--even at the best--it would be some time before the new building could begin?"

Oh, a few months, no doubt, before all plans would be ready, and her father's arrangements made to move.

"Do you think the floors in this old building are very _strong_? The man who was with me the day I went there didn't seem to think so--and I didn't either! And some very heavy-looking new machines were being put in the bunching-room, and I believe some more are going to be put in to-morrow."

"Oh!... You mean you think they might overload the floor?"

"Don't you?"

"Well--it's possible," admitted Mr. V.V., slowly, and one could see that he didn't altogether like the idea of anybody's criticizing Mr. Heth's conduct of his business. "But--ah--really I don't--"

"Couldn't we fix it, in some simple way--brace up the floor somehow?"

"Oh, yes. You'd have no trouble in fixing it.... Far as that goes."

"Don't you think you could manage to say _we_ once?"

"Oh!" said Mr. V.V., pleased. "I could that!... I didn't know, you see, how far you cared to let me in."

Cally smiled at him over the library table.

"Hasn't it occurred to you that you are in it, that you've been right in the middle of it all along?"

He gave her one of his original looks, and said: "Well, I can't say it had.... But it's where I'd rather be than anywhere else in the world."

"You can make nice speeches, at any rate.... Do you know you're the strangest man, I believe, that ever lived?"

"No, that's news. Am I?... Well, in what way am I so strange?"

"Oh, it's a long, long story. But I'm going to tell it all to you some day.... Do go on and help me about the floors. Papa won't. He didn't seem to like my speaking about them at all. He says they'd hold hundreds more machines if he only had the room--"

"Well, he _knows_.... He's--he's had the strain figured out. Of course."

So had Time, the master-humorist, reversed positions between Heths and Vivians. The old Arraigner, for his part, seemed to feel now that, to all intents and purposes, papa _had_ put up the building six years ago....

But Cally explained how floors and machines had got upon her nerves. This was, she said, _our_ first point to settle. And thereupon the young man at once addressed himself to the question of remedies; sketching with his finger on the table-top, till she got note-paper and pencils from mamma's desk in the corner, switched light into a reading-lamp, and came and sat down beside him. On the paper V.V. obligingly produced an outline of the three floors of the present factory, accurately locating stairway and elevator shaft; even the point where the cloak-room was to be knocked out to give the space needed for the new machines....

"How in the world do you know so much about the Works?"

"Oh--well, you see, the shipping clerk there is quite a friend of mine," said V.V. "A very nice fellow, sort of a Lithuanian, named Dolak. Don't be offended, but I--I've been down there once or twice at night."

However, he seemed stumped as to the best method of support, admitting that it was not so simple as it seemed. And presently, when he had tried and condemned columns from floor to floor, the girl said, hesitatingly:

"Dr. Vivian, do you think props--outside--would do any good?"

He turned his intent gaze upon her; he was frowning absorbedly and looking rather doubtful about it all.

"I mean iron braces running from the ground on each side of the building," said Cally--"and holding up girders, or whatever you call them, under the bunching-room floor?"

He gazed a moment, and then exclaimed:

"Oh--good! _Oh, that's good_!... That would do it--do it perfectly!..."

He proceeded with eagerness to sketch in her square-arch braces under his bunching-room floor, and he said again: "Perfect solution!... Why, you ought to have been a builder!"

"Oh, I--just happened to see a picture of something like that in the encyclopædia this afternoon."

Her tone was depreciatory, not suggesting that she had looked some time before she happened to see that picture. But within she was feeling the strangest, the most exhilarating thrills.... Oh, the clearness of being a _fellow-worker_; of praise that had nothing to do with a candidacy for matrimony!...

"But the difficulty," she said, "is to persuade papa to let me do it. Of course, I've no right to expect him to take me seriously.... I know _you_ could persuade him."

That, spoken impulsively, she hurriedly covered up in conversation; begging him to go on at once and give her his ideas of what the new building should be like. She had gathered by now, that, whatever he considered wonderful in all this, it was not the fact that he, she, and her father should be, so to say, planning it shoulder to shoulder. But this fine unconsciousness of his she herself could not match; not at least till she had had more time to smooth things over with her father....

However, talk of mere temporary repairs in condemned old buildings was quickly swallowed in plannings for the splendid new. Here the man from the outskirts indubitably shone; he bristled with illuminating ideas. He, it seemed, was for a four-story building, brick, with concrete floors. Much he had to say on the subject of fire-escapes and patent-doors, lunch-rooms and rest-rooms with lockers, enclosed stairways and elevator shafts; shower-baths, too, if one simply must have the best and never mind the expense. And then his pencil began unconsciously to work as he went along; and presently there emerged upon a fresh sheet of mamma's best note-paper the first visible presentment of the Works that would be. There it actually _was_, for you to gaze at, dream over; the perfect apology: the front and side elevation of a fine, dignified, businesslike building, plain yet undeniably handsome, very substantial and roomy, very full of airy windows. Not like a marble palace, after all; but a child could see that nobody was ever crowded in there, nobody ever the least faint. Nothing homicidal here, Mr. V.V., look where you will....

"You can _draw_, too!"

"Straight lines," said V.V., modestly. But he regarded his handiwork with passionate approbation, and finished it off gallantly with a flag flying from the roof and two stately motor-trucks (so he said) wheeling by the door.

"Oh, how beautiful!" cried Cally Heth.

And it was all so curiously exciting to her, so intensely interesting. No prospect in her life, it seemed, had ever stirred her like this strange one; a new cigar-factory, born of her purse and heart....

Once, about at this point, the young man threw out with mysterious delight:

"I'll like to see old Sam O'Neill's face, when he hears about this."

In the midst of the animated talk came Annie, the parlormaid--and Cally started at the sound of the approaching feet, and hated herself for it--to say that Dr. Vivian was wanted at the telephone. The doctor seemed annoyed by the summons, though not surprised; he had had to take the liberty, he explained as he rose, of leaving word at his office where he could be found, in case of necessity--words of this sort being left, as we know, with his paid assistant, Mrs. Garland, the world's biggest office-boy.

So V. Vivian was led away by Annie to the downstairs telephone in the butler's pantry; whence he was back in a moment, looking relieved, and assuring Miss Heth that it was nothing in the least urgent or important. There was no hurry at all, it seemed. But Cally felt that the business talk was drawing to a close, with a good deal still left unsaid....

Returning with eager interest to his drawing, Mr. V.V. fell to planting shade-trees of the best quality all down the Seventeenth Street side of the new building. So engaged, he observed suddenly:

"Don't worry any more about those floors, please--will you? That's all going to work out very nicely.... I'll get a figure from Jem Noonan right away on that plan of yours. And I'll see that it's a low figure, too,--it's got to be low!... Good heavens!" said V.V., eyeing his drawing with a queer little introspective smile. "We can't be expected to spend anything much on a building that's going to come down in a couple of months, you know."

She looked, smiling a little, too, at his unconscious face, fine, to thinness, which had once made Mr. Pond think of a bishop who never grew up. And her look became suddenly full of tenderness....

"I don't worry," said Cally, "now that I've got you to help me."

The man from the Dabney House spoke again:

"I was just thinking, out there at the telephone, that if there's no further business before the house, you might feel like beginning that long story you--you spoke of just now."

That took her by surprise. She seemed to be less and less at her ease. But now surely had come her moment to take her courage in her hands, and render him his due.

"I believe I ought to," said she, lightly--"a chapter or two, at least. For I don't think you'll ever work it out for yourself.... And I'm glad you're that way."

He made no reply, going on carefully with his arbor-day practice.

"When you said just now that this was wonderful," said Cally, beginning to lose the light touch already--"you meant that it was a wonderful happening, didn't you? Your idea seems to be that all this just happened."

But no, Mr. V.V. denied that vigorously, and stated his logical theory: that her father had chanced to postpone his intentions, merely through the well-known fact that men get accustomed to conditions that they constantly see; but that she, going there with fresh eyes....

"I might have gone there a hundred times, but I'd never have thought of it as having anything to do with me--don't you know it?--if it hadn't been for you."

He looked at her briefly; and she saw that his look was as bewildered as a battle-ground.

"Oh!... Do you mean that you _are_ doing it because of--to--to avoid the--that is, on account of the articles?"

"Oh, _not_ the articles!--_no_! That's just what I don't mean. I've never thought of the articles! I don't think of you that way at all...."

She stopped precipitately, somehow divining that she was mysteriously wounding him. And then suddenly she understood that that _was_ the way he thought of himself, exactly; that he, who unconsciously moved mountains by his gentleness, somehow saw himself only in the light of his "terrible" (but still unpublished) articles. It was as if he reckoned himself as either an article-writer, or nothing....

"Though it's true," said Cally, gently, with hardly any pause at all, "that through most of the time I've known you I've thought of you ... as a hard man ... terribly uncompromising."

His, it was clear, was not a tongue that spoke easily about himself. He finished putting a flower-box into the window of the new Works, before he said:

"I hope we needn't trouble now about anything at all that's past."

"That's what I hope, too ... more than you could. And besides--I've always liked you best when you were gentle. And ... it's because of what you've taught me--at those times--that I'm doing this to-day."

Again he turned his singularly lucid gaze full upon her; and now his look was absolutely startled. Color was coming into his face. His short, crisp hair, which had been parted so neatly an hour ago, stood rumpled all over his head, not mitigating the general queerness of his appearance. And yet his mouth wore a smile, humorous and disparaging.

"May I ask what you consider that I've taught you?"

"Everything I know," said Cally, lacing a pencil between her fingers.

"Why!... When we've never even had a real talk about it before!... I told you once that you were more generous than--"

"No, I'm never generous enough. That's my trouble, among others.... But if you think that it's a nice and happy thing for us to be putting up this building, I want you please always to remember ... that you've done it all yourself."

There was a tense silence, out of which his voice spoke, no longer with any trace of humor.

"Don't be polite.... I couldn't quite stand it. Do you mean that?"

"It's all a failure if you won't believe that I do."

"Then I do believe it."

This time the silence ran somewhat longer, and again it was V.V.'s voice, greatly stirred, that broke it.

"I don't understand, but I do believe it.... And it makes me pretty proud. By George, pretty proud!... Why--I've talked a lot--but it's the first thing I've ever accomplished! _The first thing_...."

His voice showed that his mind had swept away from her, over spaces; and Cally raised her eyes and looked at him. He sat gazing wide-eyed into the dull-green glow of her lamp, on his face a curious and moving look; a look humbled yet exalted, gloriously wondering, and to her the wistfullest thing she had ever seen in her life. He, who had given away his patrimony, who was giving away his life every day with a will, thought that this was the first thing....

All that was sweetest in the girl, all that was maternal and understanding, rose fiercely within her, stormed her with a desire to mother this man, to protect him from his own royal yet somehow infinitely sad self-denials. For this moment she felt far stronger than he. His hand, with the pencil in it, lay on the table close by her, and Cally closed her slim fingers over it with a firm clasp.

"Ah, don't say that, Mr. V.V.--don't look that way. It hurts me, in my heart.... Can't I make you believe that you've accomplished more than anybody else in the world?..."

He did not move at the shock of her touch, at the sound of his little name upon these unaccustomed lips. She was aware only of a subtle contraction, a sort of tightening going on somewhere within him. So Cally finished her small speech with her hand over his. But at just that point, a stir seemed to shake through the man; he was seen to be turning his head; and in the same breath, her moment of high strength broke abruptly. The veins fluttered queerly in the forward hand; she felt a quick flush rising somewhere within, spreading and tingling upward into her face. So Cally rose hurriedly, her hand withdrawn, and moved away. But she did her best, for her pride's sake, to envelop her movement with a matter-of-fact air; and when she had got about four steps away from him, she remarked, quite distinctly:

"Don't get up.... I ... want to get something."

And she did, in fact, go on to mamma's desk and attentively select three more sheets of note-paper, which would no doubt come in handy for something or other some day.

And out of the stillness behind her came Mr. V.V.'s voice, just a little husky now:

"No one ever did anything so sweet to me before."

But that only made things worse, turning a white light, as it were, on thoughts she had had before now of the loneliness of his life. So she, finding herself not strong enough to be a comforter after all, said in a resolute kind of way:

"I never like to hear my friends depreciated. So please don't do it any more.... What was the name of that book about factories--the one you said that Mr. Pond had?"

Silence behind her, and then: "'The New Factory Idea,' by T.B. Halton."

She noted this information carefully on one of her sheets of paper, thus proving that she was right to go and get them, all the time.

"I thought," said she, "I might see if Saltman had it. Then I could begin to cram to-night."

But no, he said that Saltman hadn't it, but would order it, of course. And then the scraping of a chair-leg advised all listeners that Mr. V.V. was violating that injunction laid upon him as to not getting up....

He advanced round the table-end, his hand raised in his nervous and characteristic gesture. So anyone who wished could see that deficiency at his elbow, about which he himself seemed so splendidly indifferent. He was as tall as Hugo; but Hugo, with his lordly good looks and beautiful clothes, was certainly a much more eye-catching figure. And yet, as she straightened now and looked, the knowledge shot suddenly through Cally that this doctor in his patches somehow looked, that he had always looked, rather the finer gentleman of the two....

"Johnson's the publisher," said V.V., coming to a halt in front of her. And then, taking the sheets of note-paper unconsciously from her unresisting hands, he added, looking down:

"But--how'd you mean just now ... that I--I've accomplished so--so much?"

By now Cally could smile, in quite a natural-seeming way; and this she did, full under the prophetic gaze, revealing shining white teeth and glimpses of a rose-lined mouth. And if "he was a Hun, she had always been the loveliest of them, God wot....

"I'm beginning to believe," said she, "that you're not such a very strange man, after...."

So she ended; her gaze shifting, the smile dying on her lip. For the door of the library had opened authoritatively, and that difficulty which had embarrassed her all through the afternoon suddenly confronted her upon the threshold.

Mr. Heth, of the Works, en route to his study, was briefly surprised by the little tableau he had stumbled upon. But seeing young men about the house at all hours wan no nine days' wonder for him; and he came on in with quite his usual air.

"Ah, Cally! Didn't know anybody was in here," said papa; and he glanced from her, with amiable expectancy, toward the stranger. "What's this confabulation about?"

Cally felt herself turning white. She steadied herself with one hand on the writing-leaf of the desk.

"We were talking about the new Works," said she.... "Papa--I want to introduce a good friend of mine--Dr. Vivian."

"Oh, Mr. Heth!... I'm so glad to know you, sir."

Thus the fearless young voice at her side. But Cally was gazing, transfixed, at her father, on whose face the friendly greeting air was giving place to astonished displeasure, not untouched with indignation. He had stopped short in the middle of the floor, and the hand he had been automatically putting out fell dead at his side.

"Oh!--Ah!--Dr. Vivian!" said Mr. Heth, with the stiffest inclination. And then, his look going from one to the other of the two young people, he added, as if involuntarily: "_Vivian_?... Ah! I'd--have expected a different-looking man!"

The pause then, the suspense of all action from the world, was infinitesimal. But it seemed long to Cally. And she thought she could never forgive her father if he turned away, leaving this slight upon her friend.

"Papa," she began, unsteadily, "I don't think...."

But once again her sentence hung unended. V.V., advancing, came then into her line of vision; and Cally saw that he had no thought for the cover of her skirt. Her father's forbidding deportment had not escaped the young man; there were both a diffidence and a dignity in his bearing. And yet she saw that his face wore like a flower that guileless and confiding look he had, the look of a man who cannot doubt that, in their hearts, all mean as kindly as he himself. He moved upon her silent father as if singing aloud an immortal faith in the goodness of his fellows: _Though he slay me, yet will I trust him_....

But what his audible voice was saying was very simple, and a little embarrassed:

"I've felt that I've just come to know you to-day, Mr. Heth ... to understand things better. I suppose it's too much to hope that you can forget what's past, all at once. But I'd be mortified to feel.... Ah, sir!--I've felt honored by your House to-day...."

That was all; the mists lifted. He saw no difficulties, and so there were none. Papa's face was thawing back, through several surprised looks, to its natural kindliness; he had taken the offered hand, in the middle of the little speech; and then, within a minute, he was saying, quite amiably, that well, well, we'd say no more about it ... s'posed the thing to do was to let bygones be bygones....

And papa's daughter, Cally, turned away quickly from that spectacle, winking furiously, and wondering when she had got to be such a baby....

* * * * *

Strange things had been happening of late, it seemed; strange memories gathering for backward thought hereafter; novel pictures ranging in the immaterial storehouse that opens down the years. But in all Cally's invisible collection, then or thenceforward, there was never a scene that she saw so vividly as this: herself standing silent by the newel-post in the wide hall; her father, distinct and genial in the light through the open door, observing to Mr. V.V. that hard words buttered no parsnips, as the fellow said; and V.V., half-smiling at her over papa's broad shoulder, and saying to her with his eyes that of course this was the way it was meant to be, all along.