The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Girl Of Virginia, by Lucy M. Thruston.

"Good morning!" The voice was cheery, insistent. It brought the young girl on the porch above to the white wooden rail about its edge.

"Beautiful day!" persisted the young man saying inanely the first words he could think of for the sole purpose of keeping her there in sight.

"Lovely!" cried the girl enthusiastically, leaning a little further over the rail. A vine, which had climbed the round pillar and twined its tendrils about the porch's edge, set waving by the slight motion, sent a shower of scarlet leaves about the young man below; one fluttered upon his breast, he caught it and held it over his heart as if it were a message from her to him; and then he fastened it in his button-hole.

The young woman laughed carelessly as he did so; she was too used to students to exaggerate the meaning of their words or deeds, and there was no answering flash in her gray eyes as she looked down on him.

"I'm not in," answered the girl turning her head to look up at the blue arch of the sky overhead.

"Oh, well"—the young fellow bit his lip, and flushed hotly,—"you know it's—Come, take a walk across the quadrangle," he added boldly. "There's no one around."

Frances leaned further for a survey of campus and corridor. "All right!" she cried, and he could hear her footsteps as she ran down the polished stair in the big old house. When she opened the great hall door she was charmingly demure. "Glad to see you Mr. Lawson!" she exclaimed mischievously to the young man, who stood hat in hand by the wide step.

"Delighted, I'm sure!" he flashed back, holding the hand she extended as long as he[Pg 3] dared,—so long that the young woman had drawn herself up quite straight and was looking gravely along the corridor when he released it.

"You haven't mailed your letter!" she said looking at the missive he still held.

"See how it commands everything else," said Frances, pausing at the sunken, well-worn steps in the terraced corridor to look about her. The morning shadows of the maples on the quadrangle stretched to the brick pavement at their feet, scarlet and yellow leaves, blown across the green grass, rustled about them; the picturesque buildings on the other side the campus loomed in deep shadowings, for the sun was yet behind them. A late student slammed his door and went hurrying down the corridor, his footsteps echoing along the way.

"Don't you hear the men raving over it everywhere? Those from a good long distance especially—Oregon, for instance, that's my state you know; but you Virginians—"

"There you are! You are"—"a queer lot," he was about to say, but remembered himself in time. "You are—" he blundered; "one scarce knows how to take you."

"Now, Miss Holloway," deprecated the young man, "you see, the things other people think you would be proudest of, you don't care for at all, and the things other people don't care for—"

"Perhaps there are some people who don't talk about the things they care for most. Perhaps," she went on, her flushing cheek and darkening eye belying her light tone, "that's a secret you haven't found out, and[Pg 5] it may be the reason you don't know how to take us," she repeated.

"I'm not going to quarrel about it a morning like this," declared the young man as they went up the wide steps to the Rotunda and along the marble floor of the east wing which roofed over the rooms devoted to the learning of law.

"No, nothing is worth it," answered the girl as she leaned against the balustrade at the edge and looked off towards the mountains, and they both were silent.

It was a scene the young man had not yet gotten used to, nor the girl either, though she was born in its sight. Beyond the stretch of the outer grounds of the University, beyond the far-reaching roofs and spires of Charlottesville and the narrow valley of the Rapidan, rose, high and bold, the last spur of the Ragged Mountains. The blue haze veiled it even at this early hour; the frost clothing much of it showed all colors save those of sombre hue; and, set on its crown, just where it began to dip downwards, shone the whiteness of Monticello.

The girl nodded. No one ever sat thus, the buildings of the University stretching at their feet, Monticello gleaming on its mountain crest and asked the name of the man they lauded.

"You know your lesson quite well," with a little tinge of sarcasm; "if you stay here long enough you'll find he did a great many other things. Ah! he knew the beautiful. Look! were there ever any buildings more in harmony, more exquisite in design, more fitted for living—Pshaw!" she broke off petulantly at the young man's laugh, "you've made me boast! You've seen Monticello?" she asked a little haughtily, as she straightened from her leaning position.

The girl's eyes darkened as she stood looking down the campus from her point of vantage, and though she was too proud to speak again of its beauty—for it was her home—the young man's glances followed hers and he noted it all; the inner quadrangle framed in its buildings of quaint architecture, the velvet green of the campus, set with maples, and dipping thrice and then deeply toward the gleaming buildings at the end; the long stretch of corridors and white pillars, the professors' houses rising two-storied above the students' homes: and about these, outside, the wide grounds, the embowering trees, yellow and russet and red; rows of cottages showing their tops here and there; and far off, rimming it all, the misty, hazy mountain tops.

"I'm going into the library," announced Frances, all the banter gone from her voice.

"Haven't you? Oh! you are lazy! You[Pg 8] must go at once. Mrs. Lancey won't save it for you."

"Yes she will!" He followed her into the fairy white interior of the Rotunda, with its great pillars bearing above their Corinthian pilasters the carved circle on which were written the names of the giants of the book world.

He had some faint desire to see before which of the cases she would pause. He was proud of his knowledge of his fellow beings, but this young woman puzzled him. It was a pleasure to his beauty-loving eyes to gaze on her—tall, slender, but well set up, frank-eyed, clear-skinned with an air of utter independence; the things he had heard her say and seen her do kept her from any place in his category.

The long serge gown rustling softly on the marble pavement, she went straight to the books she wanted. It was late, and she wished to avoid the stream of students that would soon be setting roomwards and hallwards.

She took down the volumes instantly[Pg 9]—Fiske's "Old Virginia and her Neighbors," and Byrd's "History of the Dividing Line." If Lawson was astonished she gave him no chance to express it.

The young man looked down at the sunlit quadrangle. "Won't you go for a drive about ten?" he asked abruptly.

"Susan wants some chickens. I promised her I'd get them. You are not going out?" severely.

He strove for answer, but the young woman's nod was positive. It sent him to the mess hall, while she hurried along the corridor, hurried to avoid the crowd that would soon be abroad. So she had been trained, and such was second nature. She was not afraid of any student or of all of[Pg 10] them. She had had delightful friends among them. But she was not a students' belle; her dear father's abhorrence of such had kept her unscathed.

She lived among them, but the traditions of her household kept her apart. She was motherless, but her mother's influence had set her feet in the path of freedom and her father saw to it that they kept their way. In all the gay students' life that surged about her she was somehow untouched. She was keenly alive to its phases, to all the life as a whole, but not to any unit forming it. She saw the belles of the season come and go at Christmas, at Easter, or the Finals, without the least desire to outshine them, or shine with them; yet it would have been easy enough had she wished it. Had she social aspirations she would find many matrons in the professors' homes to chaperon her; had she been sentimental she could have made many a bosom friend in the young girls of the town; had she been trained otherwise, her record from her first long skirt might have been one of reckless[Pg 11] flirtations—for there is no limit to a student's daring—but as it was, she lived among them quite simply.

She ordered her father's house; she read, few knew how deeply; she rode, she drove, and went her own way happily.

One lesson she had at heart. She took the young men about her without an atom of seriousness. It was this which nettled Frank Lawson.

His attentions had been taken quite seriously usually, too seriously once, he might have remembered. It aroused his insistence; it sent him loitering by the gate to the grounds when Frances came driving down the ribbony road winding outwards.

"Jump in!" Frances pulled the horse around and left the wheels towards him hospitably opened.

Lawson thought of the beauty he had driven the afternoon before, of the roses on her breast for which she had thanked him so graciously, of the shining skins of[Pg 12] his horses and the glittering wheels of his carriage, and he set his teeth; but he climbed up into the trap and sat down by Frances' side.

"Out towards Monticello and down beyond the University and Park Street; but you don't know this."

Frances had turned towards town, and was driving smartly past Chancellor's and Anderson's, bookstore and drug store and loitering grounds of the students, though the porches were empty now, along the long street, across the high bridge spanning the narrow valley through which the Southern railroad swept into the town, on down a steep hill; and then she pulled sharply to the left, down a rough road past negro cabins, another sharp hill, across a clear mountain stream, and they were in the country.

"You've never been this way before," repeated Frances as she began to point out the features of the country. She spoke of house and cabin and mill; but Lawson's eyes were turned towards the misty mountains. The keen air blew in his face, the frosty touch sent his pulses tingling: the smell of green grass and falling leaves and fresh earth was abroad, and over there, to right to left, swam the mountain-tops in purple mists. Each hill they topped showed vistas of hill and valley and far-reaching crest.

The horse went at a good pace; his driver was the most companionable of drivers; Lawson was absurdly happy.

"What's that little blue flower?" he asked, pointing to a starry bloom, daisy-shaped, blossoming on a weed-like stem.

"That's another of the beauties for which we thank Jefferson, that and the Scotch broom in the woods; you saw it?"

"Don't ask me! Scotland, also, perhaps; here we are!" She pulled up sharply before[Pg 14] a cabin by the road, and, before he could take the reins she threw down, sprang out.

Lawson sat feeling like a chagrined schoolboy. It was one of the small accomplishments of which he was proud, to lift a woman from carriage or saddle. He had strong muscles well trained, and he had a fashion of putting his hands at the woman's waist and giving her a lift, quick, light, and sure, and setting her on her feet with a look of pleased astonishment in her eyes; now he sat holding the reins like any good boy and watching the flutter of a blue skirt around the clusters of zinnias and marigolds by the cabin corner. And then he heard voices and laughter and the squawks of terrified chickens.

Frances was coming back,—a colored woman, with a bunch of chickens in either hand, walking by her side. He listened to the woman with intense amusement.

"Hi, honey!" cried the delighted darkey, "is dat him? La, chile, now he suttenly is a nice beau!"

"Aunt Roxie," said Frances haughtily, "put the chickens in the back of the trap. You're sure you've got them tied all right?"

Lawson, delighted with Frances' discomfiture, was fussing about, helping the colored woman.

"Jes lissen at her, jes as mighty as you please," she muttered to him, and then quite loudly, "some folks suttenly is hard to please; yuh praises dem, dey got nutten to say; yuh praises de beau an' dey looks mad!"

"Never mind!" cried Frances, "never mind! I'm not going to bring you any tobacco next time I come!"

"La! Miss Frances, what mattah long yuh now—yuh know—hyar, chile, lemme pull yuh some dese hyar flowers; de fros' done totch dem anyhow!"

But Frances was not listening; she was off[Pg 16] fast as her horse would trot, the chickens squawking indignantly, and Roxie by her zinnias and marigolds gazing in open-mouthed astonishment. Lawson was shaking with laughter. He was even with her he felt, and perhaps a little ahead. He was sure he was ahead when, just outside the University gate, one of the chickens, freed after much straining, fluttered under the edge of Frances' skirt and shrieked a loud and triumphant squawk. Frances sprang to her feet; but for Lawson she would have been out and under the wheel. There was no laughter about that young man for one swift instant, when he threw his arm out, pulled her back into the seat and snatched the falling reins. The danger past, he caught the offending fowl, fluttering now in the dash-board, handed it gravely to Frances and then, without a word of excuse, leaned back and laughed until the tears were in his eyes.

As for Frances, she was white, she was cold. She had been frightened for the first time in her life into a silly deed. She was mad through and through, but it was useless.[Pg 17] Under that ringing laugh all else gave way; she must join in it.

"Never mind," she declared, when Lawson drew rein outside the quadrangle and lifted her out impressively. "I shall have that chicken for supper."

Frances lingered in the dining-room after dinner was done. She pretended to be rearranging the flowers on the table; in reality she was thinking what to say to the little, spare, bent colored woman who was busily clearing away the dishes.

"Dyar's half a one hyar now," grumbled Susan with a flash out of her dark eyes that were like live coals in the wrinkled face.

Susan had taught Frances the mysteries of cooking and was inordinately proud of her pupil's skill, but she wanted it practised[Pg 19] when it suited her; and that afternoon had a vision of rest and mending.

"And," went on Frances, to finish now that the subject was broached, "I got those chickens right out the coop. Roxie says they are nice and fat. That Dominico now, how would it do to have it smothered?"

"An' yuh wants to hab smothered chicken an' floating island an' cake an' eberything else I'll ben' my po' back to cook?"

"Your smothered chicken is always so good!" wheedled Frances, who had managed Susan ever since she could talk.

"Why don' yuh say so den, jes say yuh's gwine hab company to suppah an' be done wid it."

"Well, we are," laughed Frances, "and I want everything good, like you always have it."

"Wondah who 'tis now?" Susan's eyes,[Pg 20] black and still as ink pools in her yellow, wrinkled face, looked dreamy as they often did when she thought of Frances. As long as she was blithe and content so was her faithful care-taker, who had nursed her father when Susan was a child of ten, and he was a bad infant. She had married and had her own cabin and her own children when fortune freed her. She had seen her "old man" and her children die, all of them, there in the cabin in the mountain-side, except one boy, Bill, and he had gone off to Baltimore; and she had been glad in her heart when "Marse Robert" and his bright-faced young wife had driven out to her home back there and asked if she would not come and live with them. Susan locked her cabin door and looked up and down the view of misty valley and purple mountains she had looked on for so many years, and then went with them gladly.

But the cabin she kept. She would rent it to no one, she would not sell it. It grew weather-beaten and rotten; the sage and mint and bergamot were choked with weeds.[Pg 21] But whatever Susan had lived of her own life had been lived there. She had been happy, she had been miserable; she had worked in gladness, she had worked in despair. She had borne children, she had seen them die, in those four log walls.

The joy, the sorrow of that cabin were hers, and she would keep its memories. No rude touch of alien life should spoil them. She put the big key of the door in her pocket and went to be part and parcel of "Marse Robert's" life; the flame of her devotion to him burned but brighter as she stood by him when his daughter was laid in his arms,—as she stood by him, ten years after, when his wife closed her eyes on life and closed his heart on life's keenest joys.

She had watched his daughter with a delight that knew no limit. Over most of the negro race beauty holds a potent sway; and had Frances been less fair, her saucy independence would have been Susan's pride.

"Nebbah see her hangin' 'roun' wid dem stujints," said Susan to herself, as she finished[Pg 22] her work in the dining-room, "Yuh sees 'em dribin' through hyar sometimes, de young men an' de ladies, and de ladies dey's fair sickenin' er hangin' on to ebery word; an' long 'bout closin'-up time"—which was Susan's expression for "Finals"—"den 'tis fair scanderlous. But Miss Frances—hm—she gib em jes as good as dey sends, an' she r'ar her haid up in de air, an' I tell yuh now she's got one pretty haid to r'ar up, sho's yuh born!"

"I's gwine see who's comin' hyar dis ebenin'," she ruminated. "Miss Frances she don' nebbah 'vite much company nohow; 'tis Marse Robert mos' always. I's gwine see who dis is, I's gwine watch 'em, sho."

And so she stood in jealous guard over the supper of the professor and his daughter and their guest. Perhaps it was her watchfulness, her half-jealous disapproval of Frank Lawson which made things go so badly, or perhaps the jar began before that when Frances in the professor's study announced there would be company and she would bring them in there to spend the evening.

"Yes, but 't would be cold anyhow; the air would feel as if it had been on storage."

"And it would look so proper and prim, there would be no papers lying around, and I—I should have to talk so hard," she wound up by tucking her bare arm under the professor's; and he, looking on her winsome face and soft white neck and shoulders, forgot there was a question and only smiled at her.

"Well," she confided, cuddling close to him, "they do talk such nonsense, you know, if you've got them off to yourself. I can't stand it—you needn't laugh!" She rubbed her cheek along the worn broadcloth of his coat—the professor gave little heed to his clothes— "You wouldn't like it either."

The professor's laugh rang through the house, but there was a heartache under the laughter; his little comrade daughter was a woman grown, and these questions of womanhood, slight as they were, puzzled him. And so it was the guest was ushered into the room on the left, instead of the one on the right, which was properly given over to the gods of company.

The guest gave a start when he saw the shimmer of Frances' white gown and the gleam of her bare neck and shoulders, and he looked quickly at her father, but the professor was in ordinary attire. The young stranger had to learn later that it was merely a local custom, and to wonder while he learned why the women did not freeze going so clad on a winter's evening in the wide, high ceilinged, and cold brick houses.

He recovered himself quickly and came forward with jaunty assurance, but the professor's careless hospitality and the demeanor of his hostess left little of it when the evening was over. He felt his vaunted ease ebbing from him and he was amazed that he[Pg 25] should so feel it. Even at the table he was angrily critical. Had it been his mother's board, the damask and lace had been strewn with flowers, and its tinted shades of candles shone here and there, and soft shod waiters come and gone, were a guest bidden to a meal; here the electric light from the single shaded bulb swinging overhead shone on spotless damask, where it shone at all between the multitudinous dishes—chicken and ham, rolls and biscuit and "batter-bread," pickles and preserves, cake, and, with its tremulous crest of white, floating island shining with a yellow gleam in its glass dish all before him at one serving.

Still, the young man being healthy and blessed with hunger, and seeing that his hosts were hungry folk likewise, forgot all comparisons in the urging of their hospitality, and not only followed their example, but set the pace. Susan was fairly mollified.

"Knows good vittels when he sees 'em," she muttered in the recess of the pantry as she eyed his ruddy cheeks and broad shoulders through the half-opened door.

But, the easy hospitality of the supper over, Lawson's discomfiture began again. In the morning he would have sworn it was happiness to sit before the glowing fire which the chill evenings of the mountains demanded, and to have Frances Holloway so near that one could watch the color flicker in her clear cheek and catch each tone of her round low voice and note the curve of white shoulders and dimpled arm.

Instead he felt himself growing steadily angry. Made conversation and an effort which showed itself at being entertaining and faintly expressed regrets at an early departure, were not in his line. What he opened his room door on, was more so.

Three young men had the light oak table drawn up before them. The books from it were flung on the foot of the narrow white-iron bed: the table-cover hung on the brass foot-rod.

One of the men leaned back in Lawson's Morris chair, another was seated a-straddle the only other chair the room contained, his[Pg 27] chin resting on the high back. A third was on the trunk pulled close to the table.

"Shut up!" Lawson flung his Prince Albert over the books, crushing the chrysanthemum he had fastened in his button-hole so carefully earlier in the evening.

"I should say so, trot 'em out!" There was a box of cigars on the mantel. He lit one, the rest were already smoking.

"That's the stuff, set it here!" The cards were shuffled away for the bottle and glasses. The window curtains were drawn tightly, the door was closed and the portière hung in[Pg 28] stiff folds across it; the coal snapped in the grate and the young men settled down for the evening.

But Frances was not winding up her own affairs so nearly to her mind. The professor had lain down his book as soon as the guest departed. "Daughter," he began uneasily, "I didn't know you knew Mr. Lawson."

"Somehow, he's different from most of the students here," her father went on, putting his half-framed opinion into words; "he's older and he looks a man of the world, and he's not over studious," he added a little sarcastically.

"These older men," the professor went on, "if they don't come for good hard work, they—they are the most troublesome kind we have to deal with. The young fellows, now, they have their faults, but they are the faults of youth. When these older men graft their knowledge of the world to their students'[Pg 29] folly—well—well—" he was silent for a moment.

"He's rich too; his father owns immense lumber tracts in Oregon, and his people live in great style, and—I scarcely know—He's in none of my classes. But, somehow, he doesn't seem— I wonder you invited him."

"I believe you always are!" The professor never knew at what hour he crept to bed, but his daughter's sleepy-headedness was a constant jest. He never failed to pause at the threshold of her door and listen to the deep, long breaths of her slumber and to feel warmed to his heart's core to know[Pg 30] she was there, his own daughter, the joy of his life.

"Good night!" She leaned over him, rumpling his dark hair. "Why, there's the telephone! What can it be so late?" She was hurrying along the hall.

The father turned to watch with lazy interest the lithe figure and bright face and bent head, as she stood, red lips pressed together, the receiver at her ear.

"Father, they are going to have a fox-hunt to-morrow—Orange Grove, you know—meet at eight o'clock. Mr. Payne bought the fox from a colored boy to-day, he has it[Pg 31] out at his house. They are going to turn it loose on the hill. It's a big red fox, he says." She slipped down on the side of his chair.

"Daughter," the father was speaking quite sternly, "you know I told you I never wanted you to ride behind the hounds again."

There was dead silence. Frances got to her feet and went over to the mantelpiece, eyes downcast, red mouth down-curved.

"Now, it's late!" began the professor, not[Pg 32] liking to be taken so literally at his word. "I don't think there is any one at the stables."

The professor listened anxiously to the whir and then to the monologue in the hall.

"Is Mr. Carver there? Yes! So glad!" and then, after a minute's wait, "Can you send Starlight and the trap up by seven? Seven? Yes! And Mr. Carver, please see that he is hitched up strongly, will you?"

She hung up the receiver. At the foot of the stairs she paused. "You don't mind if I drive along the road and follow them a little if I can, do you?" she asked laughingly.

The professor ran his hand over his perplexed face and picked up his book; he had no answer. At any rate he felt he had had his say about young Lawson and so he must not be too severe about this. He little knew he had given that young man the very clue he needed: for some hour of that night when the stars grew pale and the gay party in Lawson's room was breaking up, one of the men vowed he must have an hour's sleep[Pg 33] to steady his nerves for the fox-hunt to-morrow; it was Saturday, and—

The fox-hunt was sufficient, but Lawson's last waking thoughts were the professor's words, spoken carelessly that evening, "Frances hasn't missed a fox-hunt for years."

III

At seven o'clock Frances was warming her cold fingers over Susan's red-hot stove and making some show of drinking the coffee and eating the toasted roll the old darkey, with much grumbling, had gotten ready.

"Don't see what yuh wants to go trapsin' off for dis time o' day, nohow, ridin' arter dem hounds. Dey's low down dogs, anyhow; always did 'spise er houn' ebin ef 'tis chasin' er fox."

"Don't, don't I? Well, I 'spec I knows sumpin' 'bout de time dey brought you home las' wintah laid out in a drag wid de blood all ober yo does an' dat cut right up dyar, right on de forehead; little more to de lef, an' yuh wou'dn't be standin' hyar; an' yo' hyar jes does hide de scar now. Tell yuh, honey," she went on solicitously, coming up close to[Pg 35] Frances, "young gals cyarnt tek no chances wid de looks nohow, dat's a fac'! Don't go smash yo'self up!"

"There's the trap!" cried Frances, delighted to put an end to such forebodings. "Good-by; give father a nice breakfast!" and she went running out into the hall.

She opened the heavy outer door softly. The frosty air struck her like a blow. She looked over her shoulder. Susan was not watching her off. She ran back and swooped down on the black skin rug at the foot of the polished stair and flung it over her arm.

She closed the big door quietly. Her father was asleep. Outside, the long corridor stretched deserted and dusky; the quadrangle was in heavy shadow; the white frost glittered on the grass, on the edge of the brick pavement to the corridor, and on the balcony rails running from house to house overhead; the scarlet and yellow leaves drifted from the maples; the young girl caught a whirl of them in her long skirt and[Pg 36] carried them rustling in her train as she hurried along. Starlight was tied to the rail outside the quadrangle and she laughed as she saw the linen robe.

"I'm ahead of them this time!" she said to herself as she stood up and folded the great rug about her and turned up the fur collar of her coat and snapped the heavy driving-gloves on her wrists. The mountain air was cold at that hour, the tingle of it was in Starlight's blood as well as in his driver's. He gave a few friskings of balancing on his hind legs and pawing with the others wildly in air before he settled down to business. Frances, turning her head for fear Susan would see, had one swift gleam of the old darkey's wrinkled, anxious face at an upstairs window, watching her off, after all. She had only a glimpse, Starlight, his head tucked down far as his rein allowed, was tearing down the drive.

She took the short cut this time; down the steep hill beneath the lower quadrangle where the buildings towered straight overhead like a sheer precipice crowned with[Pg 37] white, and flecked with scarlet where the ivy crept; out by the curving road from whence she glimpsed the far-off crests of the Ragged Mountains showing the morning light upon their tawny sides; through the town, for a short distance, and then sharply off to a country road.

The trap bumped and jostled. Sparks flew from Starlight's heels when they pounded the rough rocks; sparks flew from the wheels as they rolled over rock and hard red clay. Down in the valley, where the mist still clung like a veil above the clear brown stream, the little plank bridge rattled loudly as they flew over; and now, as they breasted the long high hill beyond, the frosty air echoed with the clear mellow music of a horn wound lustily and with the deep impatient bayings of the hounds. Frances leaned over the dashboard and shook the reins impatiently.

Again the horn wound its call—clear, shrill, the soul note of the frosty morning. Frances turned her head; behind her were horsemen clattering down the way; on the[Pg 38] road which met hers at the hill-top she could hear the sharp sounds of beating hoofs. The sun was rolling up the gray clouds on the horizon's edge, and the blue vault overhead, with slow reluctance, was throwing off the soft veil of fleecy clouds; the gray of the early autumn morning was changing to opalescent hues above the mountain tops.

The horsemen behind were closer, were abreast of her; she turned to see Lawson on one side, his fellow-student on the other.

"Heard we went fox-hunting up here before he came," accused Frances mentally; "got them all ready for the occasion."

But in truth Lawson was not conscious at all. He had lost his head, as every one else was doing, at the clattering hoof-beats and the insistent clarion-callings of the[Pg 39] horn and the wild, impatient bayings of the hounds.

On the plateau cresting the hill-top, the whole scene burst upon his view; roads from many directions met and intersected beneath the oaks, on all of them hunters were hurrying—women, men, dogs. Beyond showed the white façade of Orange Grove, the fence before the lawn lined with carriages.

Frances was earlier than she thought. She turned in the road behind the master of the hounds, who, grown too stout for riding, had a nag and a buggy could race on any mountain-road. He leaned out and called back to her.

As they drove past the front of the house, the big gate beyond the stable-yard was flung open and the whole train, horsemen, carriages, dogs, swept out on the open rolling hillside beyond.

"Leave a space there! Clear the way there! That's where the fox will be started!"

Lawson rode up to the trap. "What are they going to do?" he asked in bewilderment.

Frances looked at him uncomprehendingly. She had been calling gay badinage to one and another of those about her.

"Oh!" with a long intonation of comprehension, "why, we've got the fox with us; first catch your fox, you know—"

"Why, Mr. Payne has him. Every boy in the county knows he will pay a big price for a fox. They have their traps out and when they catch one they bring it in to him, and then—" a comprehensive wave of her hand finished the sentence.

"Oh they put the dogs up in the stables, don't you see? Watch them!" she turned in the trap seat and Lawson wheeled his horse.

A boy stood guard at the stable door. One by one their masters were coaxing and coercing the dogs inside. Their calls echoed all over the field. "Here, Dixie!" "Here, Duke!" and now and then an impatient master wound his horn to call his dogs to his feet, whereat every dog inside the big echoing stable went fairly mad with barking.

"H-e-r-e, M-u-s-i-c!" "H-e-r-e, S-a-l!" Two frisky dogs were careering down the hillside, their masters in wild pursuit.

Lawson, tired of the dogs' antics, turned his attention to the scene about him. The hill rolled from where they waited down to a wide stream at its foot. It was waste land, and the long grasses were deeply green or purple with seed-pods or browned with[Pg 42] sering weeds; down by the stream was a tangle, scarlet and yellow leaved, and gray and purple-stemmed, a tangle of sumach and blackberry and bramble; and beyond, on the climbing land, was the great forest where the pine showed vivid green and the chestnut flared like gold in the sunshine gilding the hillside and pricking out all its colorings—the oaks' persistent russet, the changing hues of the tangled undergrowth.

About him were riders of every description; smart vehicles filled with bright-faced women, the farmer in top-boots astride his nag, the Englishman from his fancy stock farm in the country hard by on his bobtailed horse and wearing the toggery of his irreproachable hunting outfit, women in jackets or long skirts on skittish-looking steeds, and women in tailor-made habits exact in set and fit, with stiff derbies on their smooth hair and heavy crops in their hands.

The hounds were all prisoned at last. The men who had dismounted hurried to their horses. Those who had not, settled themselves in their saddles. In the tense[Pg 43] silence all the sounds of the morning could be heard, the deep breathings of the horses, the creakings of the saddles, even the wind stealing through the grasses and singing in the trees of the forest across the way and the gurgling of the stream about the rocks in its bed.

Mr. Payne got nimbly out of his buggy, holding a big bag of burlap, with a squirming something inside. He walked to the middle of the cleared space and laid the tied bag down carefully, the mouth turned to the hillside. He bent over the cords. There was a sharp, triumphant bark.

"Good Lord!" he groaned as he snatched up the bag, tossed it over his shoulders and ran for his buggy.

Music and Sal had nosed wildly around in the stable until they had found a loose board, had broken cover, and were baying their triumph to the countryside, a dozen venturers at their heels. The boy who guarded the door was pressing the board against the other prisoners and calling loudly for help.

"Oh!" groaned Frances, "they've got it[Pg 44] all to go over again!" and she settled back in the trap in comic despair.

Lawson by this time was growing impatient. He was used to seeing things differently managed. He was concluding secretly that this boasted Virginia fox-hunting was somewhat overrated. Music and Sal still bayed upon the hillside.

"He's a beauty!" He unfastened the bag carefully and peering down into it she saw first a red fluffy curl and then two big jewel-bright eyes, looking pathetically scared.

But Frances had no bright answer ready; she was seeing just two dark scared eyes and that big fluff of a tail curled about the pointed face. The hunt did not seem as joyous as a moment ago. She did not notice that the baying had ceased, that Mr. Payne had gotten again from his buggy with his burden, and[Pg 45] then her startled eyes saw a flash of reddish yellow straight down the hillside, a flying leap across the stream and a swift taking to cover.

She heard Mr. Payne's "Quick, pull in behind me!" as he drove out to the middle of the field. She saw the riders range to left to right, she saw the fringe of carriages by the fence corner where the sober ones waited to see the start; but she, in the trap, was close behind the toughest rider in the country. She heard the snapping of the watches in the tense silence and the low "How many minutes?"

"Seven!" cried Mr. Payne, thrusting his watch in his pocket and standing up in his buggy. He waved his arm.

And then Frances forgot everything. She was driving down the roadless hillside swift as the wind. The trap lurched to right to left. The wind cut her cheek. Horsemen dashed past. The hounds were almost underfoot, running straight; the chorus of their voices filled all the echoing valley.[Pg 46] The stream was crossed with a swift splash. The nag ahead was running straight up-hill and Starlight was following. The wheels struck a rock and jolted her to her knees; she slid back on the seat again. The riders were in the woods now, but their course lay straight as the road ran. Fences and woods and fields of stacked corn and wayside cabins slid past, but they kept the pace.

Then Starlight went more slowly, the heavy trap was telling on him; the gray nag and her driver were nearly out of sight, the driver waving an impatient hand at the loiterer as he sped around the last turning. Worse too, the baying was growing less and less distinct; she urged Starlight on. He gave a burst of speed, the wheels went rolling over a rock, and in a breath the trap was going down—down—and Frances rolled quite easily into the dry ditch.

For a moment she lay still, dazed. She watched the deep, intense, blue of the sky overhead and the screen of oak branches against it and the buzzards floating lazily high up in ether. She stretched her limbs and[Pg 47] found them unhurt, and then she turned her head on her arm. "Father will never let me go again!" she moaned. She got to her feet. "I wonder what is the matter, anyway!" she muttered; but the trouble was easy enough to see. The violent wrench had turned the wheel inside out and broken every spoke off short at the hub.

"Turn your head, you old goose; it isn't my fault either!" she vowed to the woods and the fallen leaves and the empty road. "That man at the stables hasn't been washing the wheels as he should; he's let them get too dry!"

But it was useless to patch up any such excuse as this even to herself; she knew quite well it was her own reckless driving that did it and she knew there was a scene with her father ahead; but she set her lips firmly and turned to the work in hand. She got the trap as best she could out of the road, she unharnessed Starlight and flung the black rug upon his back. "I suppose I will have[Pg 48] to ride you home so— My soul!" She jumped a foot. A little creature running swiftly down the fence rails, sprang to the ground just ahead of her and flashed into the woods.

It was a full second before she knew what it meant. Then she heard the baying of the dogs.

The fox, close cornered, had taken to the fence rails to throw the dogs off its scent and then, seeing her, he had leaped across the road. She sprang to the fence; far over in the field beyond the dogs were running aimlessly about. She climbed up, standing sharply silhouetted on the high fence of chestnut rails, and waved her hand frantically. Some one saw her, understood, came pounding that way, others at his heels, calling the dogs sharply.

Frances sprang on Starlight's back and went crashing through the woods. A dog sped by her, another. She heard a rider close behind, but she was still ahead; and then she and the dogs pulled up short before a narrow stream and a wall of tangled [Pg 49]vine-clad rocks on the other side. They had run the fox to earth, but he was safe. Even then she was glad.

The dogs were baying like mad about her, Starlight was in a lather of foam and breathing heavily, the loosened tendrils of her hair whipped against her scarlet cheek, her eyes were gleams of fire.

"First, first!" she cried, as the rider she had heard broke through the woods.

Lawson rode with Frances home. The whole field followed. Never had he seen a madder frolic. For many a beast and many a rider crowding the country road, the noon sun shining down on them hotly, he had learned a wholesome respect. Some stiff jumping and hot riding he had seen on those rough mountain fields, and he was inordinately proud of himself for so holding his own and proud of the spirit of the girl by whose side he rode.

They went straight to the stables. Mr. Carver stood speechless at the remnant of the turnout he had sent to the professor's home early in the morning.

"Mr. Carver," announced Frances coolly, as she slipped from Starlight's back, "the trap is up the road, just this side of the fork. I wish you would send for it."

"One wheel missing, that's all," as if that were a slight affair. "And Mr. Carver," coaxingly, "just have it fixed as soon as you can, and don't say too much about it. It's not a bad break, just one wheel!"

"Bless my soul!" Mr. Carver, with an innate love of beauty, gazed admiringly at flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, "Of course, of course! Come into the office; let me brush your dress for you, it will never do to go home that way." The cloth skirt was covered with long black hairs from the rug.

"Starlight run away?" he asked, as they stood in the little office, while he was busily whisking her skirt.

"Oh, no!" Frances was looking through the open door at Lawson as he went down the stable aisle, his horse's bridle across his arm. He was walking with quick, confident step, shoulders well back, head carried high. She watched him out of sight.

Frances told it as briefly as she could, winding up with her triumphant boast, "But I was first at the finish."

Frances looked around at the open littered desk, the ink-crusted pen and splashed blotter and loose papers, at the thin oak partition of the walls covered with calendars and sporting prints. She was sobered. "I don't know," she said suddenly; "I am going to see. Good-by, thank you!"

She hurried out, she had just missed her car. She waited at the corner impatiently. It was long past the noon, the long string of carriages which had filled the street at an earlier hour was gone, the shops up and down looked deserted, some belated driver drove briskly past, an empty buggy or two waited here and there; the autumn sun blazed on houses and pavement.

"Why—" It nearly slipped her lips that, having started alone, she expected to return alone; and though she caught the words before their utterance, the look of her thought[Pg 53] showed so plainly on her face that the young man read it easily enough.

He assisted her in and seated himself by her side; and though the car was deserted save for motorman and conductor, he found he had nothing to say, nor had she either.

They rode silently up the street, over the high bridge spanning the railroad, between the twin guardians of the University's approach—Chancellor's and Anderson's—out to the University gates. But it was not in Lawson to be silent, a winsome young woman by his side, along any such road as the white, winding way under the scarlet maples and russet oaks, through the grounds to her father's door.

"Sunday! That's the busiest day in the week. We go to Sunday school, church—that's in the morning; school again in the[Pg 54] afternoon at the mission; then we go for a walk, father and I."

"Driving! that's one thing father is emphatic about; he will never allow Starlight out of the stables on Sunday."

Lawson set his teeth. He had no thought of Starlight when he spoke of driving next day, and was half angered that she was so unconscious of his meaning.

He saw plainly there was not a moment for him unless it was made, and that the young woman had no thought of making it.

"Then I shall not see you for a day or two." Glimpses about quadrangle or doorway he counted as nothing. "Good-by!" He held out his hand with elaborate courtesy.

Frances laid her own, heavily gloved in his for an instant and looked him frankly in the eyes. "Good-by!" she said. "What a ride it was, but—" a little sigh was on her lips as she opened the heavy door.

Susan, watching for the young woman's approach, keeping her dinner warm and warming her own wrath as well, saw the leave-taking.

"Hm! hm!" grunted the old negress, "what Miss Frances doing comin' home dis way, dat man 'long her too?"

The Faculty might be cosmopolitan; Susan was Virginian to the backbone. "An' he a fur-away-er," which was Susan's term for people from anywhere except her own State. "An' he a fur-away-er," she muttered, as she betook herself to the kitchen.

Frances marched straight to the study, where the professor always lingered a short space after his dinner, and told her tale briefly. She expected many words. The professor, like many another man in an emergency, had none. His daughter was worse scared than if he had stormed. When he did speak she felt she had no idea what he would say. Would he forbid her riding altogether?

She went to her dinner, but he laid down his book and looked long at the glowing[Pg 56] coals, then got up and went his way. She was his motherless daughter, sweet, true, beloved. A girl must have some fad, he supposed. Sweethearts, or horses? He chose the latter. He never dreamed of both.

But there was a possibility of both. There was vein of sentiment through the bed-rock of Lawson's worldliness which had shown brightly once or twice, had been broken off suddenly, and which, had it been worked by skilful hands, would have yielded rich returns. When he had come east, along with the powerful reasons for his doing so had flickered now and then the glimmer of his traditions of a Virginia girl. He thought in a nebulous fashion that she should be slight, dark-eyed, dark-haired, fascinating as a woman only can be, and flirtatious as a kitten. He had met one or two of the pictured type. But from the moment when he had stepped from his own room far up the corridor one day and seen a tall, supple, well-built young woman with clear cheek and ruffled hair and serene gray eyes, holding her long white gown from the worn brick-way and walking with careless grace[Pg 58] towards him, he had decided instantly that this was the woman of whom he had thought, and had begun to cluster his traditions about her. None would fit. If there was a grain of coquetry about Frances it slumbered; so did some other deeper feelings. He had watched, striven, for a flash of her eyes or a flush on her cheek; he had seen it, but it had been careless companionship which evoked it. And his thoughts, striving to fit her to a place she would not fill, clung about her more and more. There would be no hour for him on Sunday; it only irked him. He remembered the women he had met who were nearer the ideal of his illusions. He sought them.

Frances finding at last, and most unexpectedly, a free hour, and scarce knowing what to do with it, wandered aimlessly about the house. It was so much her custom to be abroad with her father and watching the sunset over the mountain tops, that now, when he was kept by an old friend, she could not content herself. She would have her walk alone.

The pageantry of the autumn days was veiled. The wind was whistling about the chimney-tops and bending the half bared branches of maple and oak; far away the soft gray clouds closed about the high mountain crests, shutting the vision in narrow horizons. Many of the students were loitering about corridor or cottage as she sped away from all along the road winding to the mountain top crowned by the observatory. Here, beyond the immediate environments of the many buildings, a short road across the fields led to the football grounds, where the high fence and higher stand of seats loomed weather-beaten, deserted; there, on the other side of the wide highway, rolled the golf links over the hillside, the winds moaning above them fitfully and rustling the dead vines on fence and roadside, and the scarlet fronds of sumac, and whirling the dead leaves about her feet and tossing the oak-branches overhead.

She was at the edge of the wood which ran to the mountain top. A double arch of oaks met overhead. Beyond these, where[Pg 60] the grove was cleared for a space, was the resting place of the University's dead. Her father went often through the gates, but it always smote her like a blow, the sight of those grass-grown swells and gleaming marbles and white sweet roses; and in the midst the great shaft, with many names about its base of those who, when there was need, had marched from the bright dreams of their college life to the grim deeds of war—had marched, many of them, to rest in some obscure corner of their state or of others, but to be remembered each one in that list of those who had dared and done and paid the one and everlasting price of their beliefs.

Where the path under the arching oaks ended, and in sight of the white palings and clustering shafts, Frances paused. Just here she and her father had stood on many an afternoon while the sun, crimsoning the sky above the mountains, hung scarlet banners over the valley dipping sheer between them and the Ragged Mountains, dyeing in crimson and purple and clear green the heavens, against which were sharply silhouetted the[Pg 61] crests, red and rocky, or clothed to the top with the verdure of the pine or showing the gorgeous hues of autumn. Now the heavens shut them in closely, even the far brilliant forest showed cold against their dull leaden grays; on the other hand, beyond the links where the land rolled and dipped and climbed again upward, showed the chimney-tops of houses, the smoke-wreaths close about them telling of warmth and cheer. It was the day and hour for fireside comfort. Frances turned homeward.

So loud had been the moaning of the wind in leaf and tree that she had heard no other sound. Now as she turned she saw a smart buggy driving rapidly towards her, almost abreast of her.

The top was thrown back. A girl whom she had known as one knows some neighbors all the years of her life was in it. Her slim figure showed exquisitely against the linings of the carriage, her rich furs framed a face delicate and spirited as a miniature, her wide hat and long black plumes brought out every shifting hue of her golden hair and[Pg 62] rosy cheeks. She was known in Richmond and New York as a beauty; she was known in Charlottesville as a "students' belle." A man like her attendant was a godsend to her, already wearied, as she was, of too easily pleasing. She leaned toward him impressively. It was Lawson. His face was ruddy and his eyes alight. His bays were trotting gloriously. The girl he was driving was more than interesting, she was daring. He looked deep into her eyes. The girl's bow to some one startled him. He turned to give Frances an astonished glance as she came around the slight curve into sight. But Frances had seen the picture and its atmosphere. It was not love, and that she did not know, but it wore its guise charmingly.

Frances heard the moaning of the winds across the links and it held a deeper note, a note of desolation, fading glories, and swift-coming night.

The library looked doubly cheerful when she was within doors. The coals in the grate were glowing red, the heavy curtains of the windows were partly drawn showing[Pg 63] but a breadth of white lace between and through its film a glimpse of the darkening quadrangle. There was a savory smell of coffee kitchenward, as Susan came in.

"Yo' pa done sont a message," she said, "he done 'phoned up he gwine stay to de hotel for suppah." Susan had been induced to overcome her deadly fear of the telephone more by her shame at seeing "Marse Robert and Miss Frances" exposed at any time to a danger she dared not touch than by any other feeling, and had learned the mastery of the machine. "Yuh'll hab to hab yo' suppah by yo'sef. I'se fryin' yuh some ham now."

Susan lingered. There was a look on Frances' face she did not like to see. "Yuh ain't lonesome, honey?"

The sunshine of the girl's nature flashed at once to the surface. "Not a bit! This fire is just glorious; it's cold out-of-doors, cold as Christmas, and the coffee smells delicious, and the ham—hurry up! I'm so[Pg 64] hungry, I'll be back in the kitchen if you don't!"

Frances loosened her jacket and slipped the hat-pins out of her hat and put the hat on her knee; the firelight shone on the brown velvet of it and on her trim brown gown, and her slender foot stretched out towards the hearth, and lighted up the warm tints of her scarlet waist and the rose of her cheeks reddened by wind and fireshine.

A litter of papers and magazines was on the table behind her and an electric globe overhead, but the firelight and her thoughts were best company. There was a sting back there in her memory somehow she was vaguely conscious of and resentful of; she was feeling for it with senses unused to such searching, and by and by, being unsuccessful, she wandered to other thoughts, which was the surest cure for the sting, had she but known it. She slipped her arms from her jacket and that slid to the floor, her attitude relaxed more and more, she was half [Pg 65]dreaming when the sharp ringing of the bell and Susan's footsteps echoing along the polished floor of the hall brought her suddenly to her feet. Before she was quite wide awake a visitor stood in the library.

Lawson pointed mischievously to the half drawn curtain. Frances walked swiftly to it and sent the rings clashing along the pole.

"Shut out the wind, shut out the weather," his heart was saying to him; he had forgotten the rest of it, but he knew the last word was perilously dear sometimes—"together."

"Together!" It was the first time he had ever really felt the significance of the word with her. Even if there were none others near she had made him feel as if there were a crowd always. Now, the dusky firelit room, the startled look on her face, the half-hesitancy of her speech, he would not miss[Pg 66] a tithe of. He stooped and picked up her gloves and hat-pins, and as he handed them to her his hand shook a trifle, awkwardly, and he pricked her.

"Let me see!" There was a round red drop of blood at the finger's tip. "I would not have hurt you for worlds! How stupid! Let me—there!" He was wrapping her hand in his handkerchief and stanching the slight flow at the dainty pink point of her fingers, and blessing the pin, even if it did hurt. How small her hand had seemed, how white, how warm; he unwrapped the swathings and held it palm upwards, looking solicitously and wondering inanely which finger was hurt. The pink palm was unlined as a child's. Lawson eyed it swiftly; he had some idea of palmistry.

"Shall I read your future?" he asked gayly after one quick glance at the marriage cross on the soft flesh under her forefinger.

"Why, can you?" cried Frances, flushing a little at the question and a little that he should still be holding her hand.

"Suppah is raidy!" Susan, coming quietly to the door to beckon her mistress and ask advice about the serving of the meal, had come upon the tableau. She broke it up.

Lawson moved toward the door and Frances stood, uncertainty on her face. "You have just come—" she began.

"Oh no, not long after I saw you!" he was quick to retort. "What were you doing without your father?"

Lawson put his hand on the door-knob. He saw he must go, but Susan, impatient at even this delay and so furious at what her eyes had seen that she scarce heeded what she was doing clanged out the supper bell and then poked her turbaned head through[Pg 68] the portière. "Ef yuh don't come on, eberyting will be col'!" she declared.

Frances, angered through and through at the old woman's interference, tilted her chin high. "Come out and have supper with me, Mr. Lawson," she said, "it's lonesome by myself!"

"Fo' Gawd!" muttered Susan, knowing she had overreached herself and brought about worse than she had tried to avert, "fo' Gawd!"

Susan, plate in hand, came slowly to the table where they waited. "I ain't gwine put it at de foot, Gawd knows," she told herself, "I'se gwine put it at de side, de lef' side too, an' I hopes to de Lawd he'll burn hisself agains' de coffee-pot; it's good and hot, I knows!"

Lawson was duly satisfied where he was; he could watch her hands, shaky a little at first, hovering over the queer-shaped silver pot of coffee and the low wide cream-jug and open sugar-bowl, and he listened delightedly to her questions as to his tastes; he could[Pg 69] enjoy too, seeing the example of his hostess, the good food Susan had unwittingly prepared him.

There was no criticism now of house or table. The great high-ceilinged room with its heavy furniture of dark mahogany, its dusky corners, and its single light shining above his hostess' head and lighting every tint of her loveliness, seemed the perfection of home atmosphere.

When they went into the hall and heard the rain beating on the corridor roof, and Frances opened the outer door for one instant to glance out on the storm-swept quadrangle, the gleaming lights pricking the darkness here and there, and to speak uneasily of her father, before she closed the door upon the storm and came back to her seat by the library fire, he felt all the happiness he had dreamed of that other evening which had turned out so differently.

The difference was to affect other things, also, for as he rose to go he said laughingly, "You know I am asked to go on the eleven?"

"No!" Football was the only one of the[Pg 70] University sports for which Frances had any enthusiasm.

"Yes, Marsden's hurt is more serious than they thought; they want me to take his place, for the time at least."

"I think so; it means hard training and," with a short laugh, "abstemious living, but I think I will."

"I am glad!" cried Frances impulsively. At the warmth of her friendliness the young man's eyes spoke a warmer language yet. The girl's glances fell.

Lawson made an impulsive step forward, drew a long hard breath, his hands clenched, though he did not know it; then, "Good night!" he said quietly, "and thank you for a very pleasant evening."

"Frances," the professor had said every Court-day since she was old enough to be out on her own affairs, "Frances, this is Court-day," and that warning was sufficient.

It meant that his daughter must not be far afield on the country roads in the morning when men from farm and mountain-cabin and homes near by and nooks far away would be riding by twos and threes—a led horse, perhaps, by one, a cow driven before another, to be traded in town—or driving a wagon-load of farm produce, a calf in the rear bleating prophecies of his fate; and that she should avoid the roads when these same men were going home, some of them the worse from their visits to the saloons dotted plentifully through the town, and disposed to be quarrelsome, and none too ready to give a woman the right of way. But most of all it meant that she must avoid the congested streets[Pg 72] about the Court-house. This was an unwritten law of the town.

This morning he forgot. His mind was still filled with thoughts of his visit and his friend, a man whose ways, unlike the professor's, had led him into many highways and byways of the world and taught him strange things. Their lives had not touched for many years and now the point of contact had sparkled with helpful brilliancy for both.

Frances, used to being reminded, took no thought for herself. She ordered up Starlight for a morning's ride with some gay badinage over the 'phone as to his condition.

"He's a little nervous this morning," Mr. Carver called back. "Hasn't gotten over his run-away."

"Well, I'll tell the boy to rub him down well and bring him up. Don't ride him too hard."

The town was quiet enough as she rode[Pg 73] through and turned out Park street. The wide way was drifted with wet leaves; under the carpet of them on lawn and yard the grass showed vivid green; chrysanthemums flaunted their colors in every door-yard; at window or porch the rider glimpsed many a friendly face and bowed cheerily. As the houses grew more scattered the land fell away from the ridge over which the road wound showing sunlit vistas of valley and mountain to left and to right, crest upon crest towering away to the sky line. The coloring everywhere was brilliant after the storm of the night; the clay of the road, where it climbed the mountain-side far away, showed deeply red; the ruffled pools underfoot mirrored the blue sky; crows were calling jubilantly overhead; the wind blew softly against Frances' cheek. Starlight and his rider went on fast and fleet, and farther than his rider had intended.

They were crossing a ravine on the high bridge which spanned it, and Frances had drawn rein to look with delight up and down at the clear stream curving on its way through[Pg 74] a narrow valley of rich meadow-land, where the corn was stacked in sere wigwams across the field, and to gaze down at the wild gorge below, tree-clad, with the stream foaming at its base; or just across, where the land dipped suddenly and a ruined cottage, moss-grown, tree-hidden, clung to the hillside. She was wondering whether she should try the steep hill beyond, slippery from the rain, when she saw a man riding slowly down it, another followed him, and another. Their splashed top-boots and loose-fitting coats and wide soft hats bespoke the mountaineer. But Frances, remembering the level stretch of road beyond, where Starlight could take the top of his speed, rode on. Before she breasted the hill she met a farmer driving his wagon, full to the brim with yellow ears of corn, and a man on his sure-footed mule riding carelessly by his side, talking the topics of the county. Then she remembered the day.

She looked at her watch,—it was after ten; when she got back the hubbub would be at its height, and her way, of necessity, lay by[Pg 75] the Court-house. She turned her horse's head.

All the way homeward she thought of her adventure gleefully; it was no fault of her own she was abroad, and as she must go through the throng, she was going to see it all. She had always wished it because it was forbidden, now she would have her wish.

About the Court-house the streets were thronged for a square on either side—horses, carriages, men. The autumn court was an important one. Farmers were not so pressed, there was leisure to look outside of their own fields; men of the town, of distant towns, of farms far and near, of mountain cabins, thronged the steps and the bit of green about the house and the street, back to the small houses and narrow pavements built about it like a court when the town was a village a century and more ago.

They made way for her as she came riding slowly through the press and eyed her curiously, but Frances, when she should have hurried, took her time. She was exhilarated. Here the men had cleared a space and a[Pg 76] negro was trotting a horse up and down, the onlookers noting his points sagely; there, drawn close to the curb, were the small wagons of the negroes who were vending things to eat and to drink, queer and curious. And there standing straight in her wagon and looking out eagerly for chances of trade was Roxie. She spied Frances through the crowd.

"Forgot! I got caught!" said Frances, just loud enough for her to hear. Starlight was close to the wagon's wheel and for the moment they were held in the crowd.

"La! Miss Frances, you don't want none. Dyar's a watermilyun dat's been down in de bottom o' de spring eber since Augus'! It's red as a rose an' I'se gwine sell it fur five cents a slice; 'twill fairly fly at dat. An' dyar's some 'simmon beer—"

"Roxie," said Frances, her eyes shining with amusement, "you know I want some persimmon beer."

"Miss Frances," replied the old darkey, impressively, "I'se gwine sabe yuh some and bring it up to yo' house, if yuh'll jes' buy me some 'baccer. Dyar's dead loads of it hyar to-day; yuh know whar dey sells it, right on de street below dis; 'taint no such crowd dyar as dyar is hyar. Ole Ike, he driv right befo' me terday, an' he had de prettiest lot, an' I tried ter swop him fur some all de way in. 'Lowed he didn't love watermilyun, de ole liar, and he nebber drank 'simmon beer—'cause he's honin' fur sumpin' stronger—an' de smell o' dat 'baccer blowin' back to me de whole way 'long! Go 'long, chile, de way is open clear to de end o' de square. Ole Ike, he's right 'round de corner dyar."

Frances, tingling with fun, rode on slowly. Around the corner, as Roxie said, the way cleared and around the corner from that was a scene at which Frances drew rein. Running the length of the square, wagons of all[Pg 78] sorts were drawn close to the curb. They were stored with brown tobacco leaves, well-cut, well-dried, and now to be sold. Men were going from wagon to wagon, pricing, sorting; the buying had hardly begun. One old negro, shabbily clad, hobbled by, his face shining with happiness, his arm rounded over a big sheaf which meant comfort and cheer on many a winter's morning and night by his cabin hearth. On the square beyond were horses and cows for sale before the cattle sheds.

But Frances' eyes were diligently searching the square below for old Ike. He was not there. Ike, venturing on a little original business, had driven first to one or two houses of "de quality," where he hoped to make some sales. The venture had prospered. He came driving back gleefully, his best wares sold, the money in the pocket of his patched vest. The morning air was chill to his old bones and he had wrapped himself up well in his wife's best quilt when he climbed into his shaky "jersey" before his cabin door back on the mountain side;[Pg 79] but the sunshine and his success had warmed him. He had loosened the wrappings of the quilt about his limbs, though it still flopped about his shoulders, pinned with his wife's bonnet-pin under his lean and bristly chin.

As he drove with a showy spurt of speed close by Frances the wind caught the quilt end and slipped it squarely in Starlight's face. With a snort Starlight was off. He plunged the length of the "jersey" and darted past the other vehicles too swiftly for any of the men to act. Frances sitting carelessly was taken unawares and slid half way from the saddle; for a blinding moment she saw nothing but a fall which might be fatal before her, then by a superhuman effort she regained her seat; but her hands were fairly nerveless. Starlight, head down, was racing along the street which crossed the railroad; in one bewildering flash she saw the running people, the opened doors and windows, the long white guards across the street and the heavy freight train on the far track drawn off to make way for the western express.

Fear nerved her. She tugged at the bridle. Starlight gave no heed. She was close upon the guards. She felt a strong grasp, she was pulled from her seat; for one dizzy moment she knew nothing. When she was again conscious she looked up into an anxious face above her, and looked on. In fear, excitement, anxiety, all thought of environment had burned away. It was a second's space she looked, a breath's space, when the soul, oblivious of the body, sees and seizes the great things of life. The face bending over her was fair, frank, and young, strong and serious, the eyes blue.—Then she came back to the everyday knowledge that she was leaning on his shoulder, his arm holding her close against him, his face bent above her; that she was on his horse before him, that he must have snatched her from the saddle at the last moment. She struggled to sit upright.

"I don't know." He smiled as he looked[Pg 81] at her, a little flash of consciousness showing in his own face. They were riding up a narrow side street.

"You see I had to race after you and I couldn't pull up at once though I managed to turn off up here. Wait!"

In some fashion, awkward enough with her there on the horse before him, he dismounted and held up his hands to lift her down. Frances allowed herself to be taken down meekly. Her eyes were dim with tears of mortification. She stood on the sidewalk, which was black with cinders from the ever passing trains, and saw the curious faces at the doors and windows of the small, sooty houses, saw the crowd running up from the station, and hated the whole adventure to its smallest detail. But before the crowd ran a man with Starlight tugging at the bridle rein he held.

The young man flung the rein of his own horse across a paling's point, knotted it hastily and ran forward.

"So! so!" he cried, smoothing Starlight down the face and talking to him softly as he brought him to his rider.

"Before they are all here! I'm not afraid! Don't you see?" Her hands were on the pommel; she was in mad haste to escape the crowd almost upon her.

The stranger knelt, held out his hand, tossed her in the saddle and she was off, Starlight trotting decently and quietly, the quivering of his flesh and an indignant snort alone betraying his rashness.

"I must see how he goes at first," he apologized, and the mastery of his tone added to Frances' discomfiture.

She rode with crimson cheeks and downcast eyes, a square—two; she could stand it no longer; she drew rein at the corner.

"I thank you very much," she said as[Pg 83] courteously as she could; "I am going this way," and she turned off.

She took the quietest way home in bitterness of spirit. Never could there have been a worse moment for such adventure. The affair would be known from town to farm, from farm to mountain top, by sunset. There was the spice of danger in it that would insure its telling, and the talk would lose nothing by its many recitals. It would be told to the young man's advantage, too. None of the glory would redound to her. There was no excuse for her being where she had been, no pardon for such an escapade. It would be made the point even for a parent's caution. The thought was maddening.

She crept to her room, glad to close the home doors about her. Susan found her there.

"Yo' pa done 'phoned up dis bery minute he's gwine bring company home ter dinnah."

"Hm!" said Susan going down the stairway, "ain't no talk of floating islan' an' cake now, but I'se gwine hab sumpin' good all de same. Marse Robert he laks good things ter eat, ef he doesn't mek any fuss. I'se gwine see dey's dyar on de table as long as de meal holds out in de barrel."

Frances sat down in her room. There was no fire there and she was chilled and miserable. The physical discomfiture chimed with her mood and she was resentful of the bright sunshine that came streaming to her feet. When she got up and took off her riding habit, she dressed without a thought of the guest her father was bringing to dine with him. She heard the opening of the heavy front door, footsteps in the hall, and her father's voice in pleased tones of cordial hospitality. She went down to the library. The door was opened, but the portière hung in heavy folds across the inner side; when she pulled it away she looked full into the face of her hero of the morning, who stood[Pg 85] in the middle of the room, looking back at her with the amazement on his face which must have shown on hers.

"Frances," the professor was saying, so full of his own pleasure he was not noting their embarrassment, "this is Edward Montague. You've heard me talk of Tom Montague, went to school here when I did, settled out in Rappahannock; this is his son." He laid his hand affectionately on the young man's arm. "He has bought the old Northrup place, you know; I hope he'll make a good neighbor. He has made a fine beginning. Some girl's horse was running away with her in town and he raced up behind and snatched her out of the saddle just before she got to the railroad guards; funny he doesn't know the girl's name."

"And some one there knew of the adventure. He was glad enough to get away. Came up to me as soon as he saw my mail,—the names on the envelopes I mean."

"I had intended visiting you to-day," but, strangely enough, the young man's voice was past courtesy, it was fairly pleading.

"Well, well, I wonder—" the professor's gaze, comprehensive at last, fell on Frances, shrinking back against the portière.

There was dead, unbroken silence. In the tense awkwardness of the moment the young man, not knowing what to say, was noting shyly the curl of the girl's dark lashes against her scarlet cheek and the droop of her red mouth.

The girl raised her eyes and gave the visitor one swift look, indignant, imploring; her impulse was to run from the room back to her own, but she could not; she walked quickly to the window and half turned from them instead.

"It was the strangest thing you ever saw," began the young man so hurriedly, his words tripped over one another. "I was just behind her. I saw her riding down the street. It was a curious sight—the farmers, the[Pg 87] negroes with their tobacco for sale, you know. Just as she stopped"—another break he felt; she would think he had been watching her all the time—as he had from the moment he caught sight of her across the crowd at Roxie's wheel. "Just as she stopped, an old darkey rattled close by her; he was a sight!" the young fellow laughed nervously; "he had a quilt flopping all around him and as he passed the wind flapped it squarely in her horse's face and he was off, I after him. Pluckiest thing I ever saw, I thought she was gone down on those cobbles there." The professor made a little smothered exclamation. "She was half out of the saddle but she got back somehow, got control of the reins, too. But the horse was headed for the railway. I got up to her just in time."

Frances was facing him, gratitude in her eyes, not for the rescue but for the telling.

"Frances—Edward—" began the professor brokenly. He covered his face with his hand for a moment and then he went up close to the young man and spoke his [Pg 88]gratitude in such warm words as brought a flush to his guest's face and to his daughter's.

"Of course!" he said quickly, and for the first time she felt a feeling of warm kindliness to him. She had been on the verge of quite the opposite feeling before.

It was some time after this that the professor, who had been quiet and thoughtful, and limited his conversation largely to table affairs, said suddenly, as if he had at last arrived at a conclusion of his thoughts, "Frances, this is the third accident you have had in less than a year."

"So it is sure to be the last, father," said Frances gayly from the head of the table. She had been growing steadily more cheerful as he went on talking with young Montague, "Ask Susan!"

Susan was hurrying with delight about the table. She had known Edward's father and his mother. He was one of "her folks."

"If a thing that never happened before[Pg 89] happens once, it's bound to happen three times. It's all over; I'm safe!"

The professor began some remonstrance. He had intended then and there to lay down a severely strict law. Instead, "I think I'll look you up a safe horse," he said lamely.

"Perhaps Miss Frances will let me ride with her sometimes," ventured young Montague.

"In that case, I shall be glad to go," sedately, "but I shall not wait for you."

"There will be no waiting!" They were going into the library and he was holding the curtain to let her pass. Frances looked up at him laughingly, and in that instant she forgave him for playing the hero's part.

VII

The professor was deeply interested in Edward Montague's plans; well as he had known his father, there was much of that father's later life of which he had no tidings. He had to learn what a house full of children was back there in the valley home, had to learn how Edward was compelled to give up his hope of college training—and this he learned between the lines—and how he had resolved instead to strike out for his own fortunes.

"I should have gone back to farming anyhow," the young man answered to some expression of the professor's, "it is my bent, you know, but it needs brains and training as well as any other profession," a little proudly, for he thought the professor would challenge it.

But it was the professor's own deep rooted belief. He listened delightedly as[Pg 91] his young guest went on to speak of the farm he had bought and what he hoped to make of it. The old Northrup estate, some three miles out from Charlottesville, was a well known one throughout all Albemarle. A big brick house on the sunny slope of a mountain whose crest towered to the sky-line behind it, it had held many people, loved and known in the state, and had been the centre of a gay full life. But the old life had drifted away from it; some of those who had lived in the brick walls slept in the graves under the thick oaks not far away from the house; the rest were scattered, north, south, and west. The place had gotten into the hands of speculators. A northern farmer, thinking to make his fortune on cheap lands in a sunny climate, had bought it, but to face labor conditions of which he was ignorant and to find the only hopes of the fortune he sought were in a country store. He had nearly lost his life fording one of the mountain streams, between store and farm, after a freshet, and was desperately afraid of a second [Pg 92]adventure. He sold it for nearly half its cost. Montague's investment had a good beginning and a better promise.

The professor kept him talking of it to the last moment he dared keep away from the lecture hall. "Come and see us," he urged when he was at last compelled to go. "It's going to be lonesome out there"—the estate was away from the beaten track—"come and take dinner with us, Sunday?"

Edward, glancing at Frances' bright face, thanked him as warmly as he had spoken. "I will walk down as far as the hall with you," he said. "I have some business in town I must attend to;" and he added shyly, "I shall be glad if you and Miss Frances will come and see me when I am established. Dr. Randall's wife will come with you, I think."

"Bachelor's hall isn't very attractive," the young man went on deprecatingly; "the house is very bare."

"'A house's best ornament is the presence of a friend,'" quoted Edward, a glint of mischief in his eyes as he went to say good-by.

The professor had not been so pleased in many a day. The young man, the son of his old friend, fulfilled all his traditions; well-born, well-bred, well-read, with the advantage of a pleasing personality, and, a woman would have added, a face none the less handsome for the look of grave determination upon it. Then, too, the professor, being a student of the classics, was interested in agriculture by way of contrast, and was filled with theories concerning the farming possibilities of his own state, and most particularly those of his own county. There was not an experiment which had been tried there in the last twenty years that he had not at his fingers' ends: the Englishman with his fancy breed of sheep or cows, the stock farmer with his registered horses, the man who had turned his fields into apple orchards, the man who had[Pg 94] planted his hillsides with vineyards,—he could talk of all far more fluently than the workers.

There was a vineyard on the Northrup place famed as being of the best. The professor went across the quadrangle talking eagerly of it and of the merits of Concords and Catawbas and Isabellas; and he parted with an assurance of an early visit.

He went, and came back more enthusiastic than ever; went again and carried Susan for a stay at her log cabin a half mile down the valley from the main road.

Three or four times a year Susan went "home." She would make her way through the rotting gate and weed-worn pathway, open the battered door and window to flood the cabin with air and sunshine, fling feather-bed and pillows and quilts to the sweetening winds; would war with dust within and weeds without; and then, when all was in order again, would sit in the worn doorway, her hands folded, looking down the narrow valley threaded by the mountain stream and up to the purple tops closing in the horizon.[Pg 95] Long thoughts went through her mind, too narrow to be forgetful, bitter-sweet memories of the childish feet that had pattered about the doorway, of her strife, and her happiness. When the team to take her back was in sight she would lock her door and go down the pathway to the road, her hand on the key in her pocket. The feeling of its possession gave her strength to lose her own life in the life of others.

But always when she clambered into the trap it was with one question on her lips. "I wonder whar Bill is?" Sometimes she added, "I spec he's dead, I'se mightily feared he is!" and sometimes "He mus' be libin' somewhars; if he was dead I spec I'd aheard it somehow."

As for Frances, her father found it hard to interest her in the old Northrup estate. She had another enthusiasm. The football team was in hard training. They played every afternoon on a little plateau between the rolling hills opposite the terraces of the Rotunda. The roadway winding some twenty feet above the grounds between it and the[Pg 96] "Gym" was crowded on practice hour with carriages and interested watchers.

It was then near the close of the short afternoon. The sunset lights, were the day fair, would be shining westward; trailing, scarlet, fleecy clouds would be floating overhead, clamorous crows flocking homeward. One by one the carriages of many drivers, going one way or another, but all returning in time to watch the team work, would pull in on the road overlooking the grounds till it was filled with champing horses and grinding wheels.

Frances was there always until the men went for a last run around the grounds, sprang up the steps, darted across the roadway and up to the "Gym." Then Starlight went spinning away for a drive in the fast closing afternoon. It was an old habit, too, of driving the horse to the stables and walking home. The tingling air made it delightful exercise. The streets were filled at the late afternoon hour with all the town, it seemed, a long procession out and in,—young girls and older women and men strolling out[Pg 97] Universitywards; students in pairs and groups, and crowds lounging down toward the centre of the town, and many a student promenading with a young woman beside him. It was the holiday hour of the town.

Somehow, somewhere in that procession of men and maids would be one man walking alone and searching the crowd eagerly, for all his air of careless assurance, for a young woman who walked briskly with shoulders well back and head in air, whose eyes were shining with health and content and whose lips were curving with happy thoughts, and though his life held bright days in spite of an old sorrow long past, and though there were bright days to come, there would never be any again with the intangible charm of the chilly afternoons faded well-nigh to dark, the evening star shining clearly in the pale green west, the tops of the tall trees rocking against the "primrose sky," and those two walking gayly along the paths of the University homewards.

Sometimes there was a moment's pause in the library, sometimes an evening visit; but[Pg 98] strangely enough, Lawson with his hard training had settled down to hard study likewise, and was giving an unexpected turn to the Faculty's thoughts of him; for those with whom he had first come in touch feared the results of his wealth and good-natured easy comradeship and not altogether admirable ways of living, upon the younger men.

Through all his intercourse with Frances there was the most delightful comradeship, the girl yielding unconsciously to a friendliness from which she had always steadily held herself.

True, Lawson was fairly irresistible. The strength of his nature which had much savagery under its gloss, the beauty of his physique, showing better each day of regular hours and cleanly living, the indomitableness of his resolve which set itself on winning always the want of the hour, were a power could scarce be turned aside.

Fresh from the keen exercise and the shower-bath, smart, immaculate, strong with the impulses of an untrained nature, the crowd faded into insignificance when Frances[Pg 99] would glimpse him swinging down the street.

He had ceased to ask permission to turn back with her; it was a matter of course. Their talk usually was of the lightest.

"It's lovely walking," he might say inanely when she had finished, looking down at the girl's cheek, red like a rose with a clear spot of white in the centre of the red—"the rose's heart," he told himself, watching the flicker of it.

"Mr. Saunders played well to-day!" Frances would say enthusiastically, and they would plunge at once into a keen discussion of every point of the play, of the game, of the teams, and of the match games and of the first big one soon to be played on their own grounds.

Lawson began to have a feeling he was playing for more than the victory of the team game. He grew more and more anxious about it each day, and more and more set in[Pg 100] his resolve to win. Once only had he played a losing part in life and the thought of that when it touched him, filled him with sickening revolt.

"We'll win!" he declared one afternoon, after a discussion of the other players.

They were standing at her door. The quadrangle was deep in twilight, the lights pricking the dusk here and there; some students were chaffing each other gayly far up the corridor, a negro lad was hurrying with a hod of coal for a belated fire he should have started an hour ago.

Frances was leaning back against the door, her hand behind her on the door-knob. "It's well to feel confident!" she said lightly, fighting against something she heard in the tones of his voice.

"It's not a safe rule always," she fended. She heard the little exclamation he made under his breath. "But it is a help [Pg 101]generally," she added, foolishly striving to undo the hurt she scarcely comprehended.

"And there's no rule for it, like everything else, but a blind follow-your-leader," he said bitterly.

There was a second's silence, and in it they heard footsteps hurrying along the corridor. The quadrangle was not a secluded spot even at its quietest. Frances fumbled at the door-knob.

His hand came upon hers in the dusk, held it closely, tightly. The shock of the joy of its touch, the sound of her hurried breath went to his head. He followed her into the hall and shut the door behind him leaning against it, looming masterfully against its darkness. The light from the globe overhead cast a white circle on the polished floor; they were outside it. Beyond the half-drawn portière they glimpsed the professor, back towards them.

Lawson dared say no word, he only stood a second, a minute, caressing her with a long[Pg 102] look from head to foot, and with the look of loving, was mixed joyous delighted triumph; then he opened the door softly and was gone out into the darkness.

Frances drew a shivering sigh, as she went slowly into the library. A vague uneasiness possessed her. She dreaded even the thought of seeing him again. Next afternoon she was off for a hard ride the other way from the practice grounds. Lawson, wandering aimlessly about the quadrangle at twilight, saw her hurrying up the corridor holding her habit tightly about her. He hastened across to find a closed door and blank windows. Inside, Frances was telephoning for a boy to take Starlight to the stables and then making a gay pretence of weariness and hunger to Susan. So for a day or two.

When they met again Lawson was icy with anger. Frances had avoided the practice grounds, but the fascination of the game overcame her. She drove up at last, and sat looking down on the players below.

Lawson, for some reason, was not one of them. Frances did not see him at first, but he, sitting on the last of the steps sunken in the terrace, was chaffing the players and talking lightly to the men about him. He turned at the sound of wheels, and saw her, as she pulled up, sharply silhouetted against the hill-slope beyond. He was elaborately unconscious of her. By and by the Beauty drove in behind Frances. Lawson was at her side in an instant, doffing his cap to Frances as he passed her. She sat quite still, disdaining to turn her head at the sound of the gay voices and laughter behind her, and watched the practice below without seeing a point.

Other carriages had passed in before her and on the side; she was held prisoner to the end of the hour. Then Lawson, going by as she held Starlight's rein taut and looked to left and right for chance of escape, stopped suddenly at the wheel. He had not intended it. It was the look on her face impelled him. Had it been either sorrowful or scornful he would have read her mood and passed her[Pg 104] by; she was neither, and, being puzzled, he paused.

"Yes!" she assented, turning her head impatiently—a carriage had just pulled across the road, blocking her in.

"I didn't see much of it," he blundered. There was not a flicker of expression on her face to show she saw it, only polite interest.

The young man's haughtiness broke in an instant, "Take me in with you!" he pleaded, though his pleading startled himself as much as her. "It's delightful for a drive; I've been shut in all day."

And though there were moments enough, as they spun along, for either protest or pleading, the young man dared neither.

VIII

Frances had her enthusiasms; so had Edward Montague, with the saving difference that hers were for her amusement and his were concerning his life-work. Still he found time for other things also. He accepted the invitation to dinner promptly. The University was by no means a byway homeward, but he found many an odd moment to spend there when he rode in for his mail or for other affairs. He came the following Sunday and the next, and made the round of Sabbath-school and church and mission and late walk with the professor and his daughter.

Lawson, who had not seen Frances since the short drive she permitted him, was loitering that last Sabbath afternoon before the doorway of a student in the West Range—a monkish row of rooms fashioned as those on the inner quadrangle are, but unbroken by the professors' houses and facing [Pg 106]westward; he was thinking nothing of what he was saying, and was noting vaguely the fading lights of sunset on the far-away mountains, and the bared branches of the trees tossing softly against the opalescent sky; but he was conscious through and through of the missed comradeship of the hour. He wondered if he dared go and ring the bell and pay a call quite boldly, setting aside the fact that the day had been debarred him. The more he dwelt on the bare chance of finding Frances alone, on the thought of the joy it would be to strive skilfully to slip again into the grooves of their delightful friendship, to fence against the cold reserve she had once more placed as a barrier between them, to see it melt, perhaps, against the strong personality he had come to know as one of his factors in any fight, the more he wished to try and see her; the very thought of it, the very remembrance that there was a test of skill, too, in it, was urging him irresistibly.

"Hold on!" called the student, who had some thought of accompanying him. But when he had gotten his hat and coat, Lawson was striding far down the corridor. At the end of it the road from the mountain of the observatory curved into the wide drive through the grounds. Lawson looking upward was angered unreasonably, violently, unbelievingly. He left such moods to others, mostly. He turned instantly into the short cut across the campus. He could not hurry enough even when outside the grounds, but he must swing himself on the car clanging townward.

He left behind a gay, unconscious trio. The professor and Frances and Edward Montague were walking briskly homeward, when they glimpsed him. The professor's face, when interested, was strangely frank and boyish; Lawson was used to seeing him look a trifle bored and a trifle more absorbed. To see him, as he had done that one swift instant, alert, wide-awake, to see a tall, fair, young man talking to him with careless ease—the University men were always in[Pg 108] awe of him—to see Frances between them, laughing, rosy, her coat collar turned high about her head, framing her bright face distractingly—the trio shut him out. They were quite sufficient to themselves, or seemed so.

The young man looked at the fading sunset lights of the sky and hesitated. He thought of the ride before him and he thought of the empty house awaiting him; he looked in at the cheer of the house showing through the open door and at the young woman standing in the hall listening for his answer. Her face neither invited nor forbade; he followed the professor.

But the contrast he had drawn for a minute haunted him. He cared not a whit for fine furnishings, scarce knowing them when he saw them, except for the air of comfort and the atmosphere of home they might give; but those two were requirements. He was too busied all the days and too tired all the nights to think how they were now denied[Pg 109] him, but while he had no time to bemoan a loss, he had time for dreamings. The vision of a sweet, frank face beset him oftener than he knew; he was building castles taller than he thought and frailer than the castled clouds of sunset beyond the mountains. This reality was charming.

"What's the use of going home, now?" the professor reassured him as they went in to the fireside; "it would be dark when you got there. You couldn't do anything; just have an evening all to yourself."

"And father wants to talk grapes to you," Frances added gayly; "he's just gotten some pamphlets—"

"Here they are," teased his daughter, "with your report on agriculture," she held up dramatically the big book she had dragged from beneath the papers on the table. "I have been listening to hear him begin [Pg 110]talking of it every moment. He's just been waiting the right time,—you know you have," to her father.

The professor fingered the pamphlet nervously. "You know, here—the secretary says—"

Edward listened. There was much to awaken his keenest interest. He was devoted to his pursuit, theory and practice. But he was listening too, with all his inner consciousness, for a light footstep, and when Frances came quietly back with an amused look at the two, his eyes flashed her amusement back at her, as with much show of not disturbing them, she slipped into a chair before the fire. The professor was unconscious; he was in full swing and went on glibly.

The young man's face was turned attentively towards him; the father did not know that just so Frances' face was in the line of vision, but Edward knew. It needed but the flicker of an eyelid for him to watch the[Pg 111] supple figure in its careless lounging; the fluff of the dark hair above her forehead, the curve of the long black lashes as she gazed thoughtfully into the fire. A cosy fireside, an easy chair and this same occupant for it flashed for a moment on the horizon of his dreamings. It was but a dream he dared not name even to himself,—a vision that dazzled him. He put his hand over his eyes.

"Well, here, take this home with you when you go! Read it for yourself, and see what you think of it; I expect some others," he added shamefacedly.

"Father!" cried Frances mischievously, "Mr. Montague, he's started," she added comically, "there's no stopping him. He'll go with no particular interest for ever so long, then something attracts him," she spread out her hands as if in dismay, "we are flooded with papers and pamphlets; he[Pg 112] won't let me touch them. When it is all over I gather them up and—" she made a gesture as if flinging an armful of trash into the fire. "You have touched him on his most vulnerable point now. I don't know when he will stop."

"You had better stop, yourself," said the professor chafing a little under her teasing.

"Now, daughter!" he knew what she was going to say, "you know I never interfere with other people."

"It's true, every word of it!" but Frances saw that her father was hurt a trifle. She came behind his chair and put her arms about his shoulders, laughing over his head at Edward who was watching her with half envious amusement.

"Professors should be bald," she said lightly, "now look at this!" She ran her fingers through his thick, dark hair, wavy about the temples where the gray showed in the black. Her father looked up at her adoringly, his eyes—which were often stern—dark and loving.

Young Montague was silent, but Frances, looking up, saw his eyes. She slipped back to her chair.

"I'm going to make some day a near day," he said persistently. "Mr. Holloway, I'm going hunting Tuesday. I've a good deal of game about my woods. Come out Wednesday; I'll see you have some for dinner."

"I asked her to-day after church; she said any time this week. I shall look for you in the afternoon, as early as you can make it."

So it was they arranged. Edward watched the peaks apprehensively; but the fine weather held. His hunting was successful. There were a score of partridges and a brace of rabbits in the big basement kitchen and he was cautioning his cook fussily, when he heard the roll of wheels.

"I 'clar' I's glad dey's come!" muttered the cook, as at last she was free to go about her work.

Edward had been nervously anxious all day. The bare house was swept and scrubbed to the last point of cleanliness. He hesitated long over the propriety of entertaining them in "the chamber," over across the hall from the parlor, but it was the only furnished room of the house except the basement dining room. He got all of his belongings out of sight and locked the closet door on the disorder. He wondered if he should leave his pipe upon the mantelpiece and at the[Pg 115] last moment forgot it. He wondered, while he raged, why the curtains looked so awry and if the rug were the color he should have chosen. But the walls were white with whitewash, the hearth was newly reddened, and on the andirons in the huge fireplace a fire roared hot enough for Christmas; in the kitchen below was a scared cook who knew she would hear some hot language did anything go wrong in her domains.

Edward was as glad as she was to hear the wheels. He hurried out on the porch and down the long flight of steps. He had hoped to help Frances from the trap and say some pretty words of greeting, but she had already sprung out and met him at the steps. The professor was assisting Mrs. Randall.

"Father says you are going to take us all over the place," called Frances at once. "Let's go now; Mrs. Randall wants to, also!"

"Of course!" chimed that pleased matron; "we want to see all the establishment. When we come back, I'm going down in the kitchen."

Mrs. Randall, who had no children of her own, had a mother's heart for all: she had been longing to get out to this bachelor's establishment ever since it was set up, but the doctor was always too busy. She was going to make the best of the opportunity, and if this "boy" had any need her bright eyes could see, she was resolved to help him fill it.

"We'll go out to the vineyard first," suggested the professor, hurrying ahead, with Mrs. Randall close behind him, in the narrow path beaten along the tangle of yellow Jerusalem apples and prickly Spanish needles and wild grasses.

The farm was still in sorry order. The ground of the orchard close to the house was covered with tangled, browning weeds, in some of the trees the late winesaps shone[Pg 117] red and ruddy. Frances stopped to fill her hands with them.

"These are fine!" She set her white teeth in the red fruit. "I like these best, I like to pull them."

"You look it," she assented, with one quick look at his fair face and a swift noting of his sturdiness.

But the professor had paused at the pig-pen near the orchard's edge. "Fine hogs!" he called back to his host, "Cheshire?"

Edward joined him reluctantly. "That one is," he said, pointing to the pinkish-white sides of a lazy, fat wallower.

"Who's going to make your sausage and dry your lard?" asked Mrs. Randall quickly.

"Come on, Frances," called her father, for that young woman was still loitering under the apple-trees.

Mr. Holloway took the lead towards the vineyard. The Northrup estate numbered many acres, but not many valuable ones. They were too high up the mountains, which ran steeply to their crests a bare five hundred yards behind the house. This narrow valley at its base sheltered from the north was fertile, and wound straight at the foot of the peaks for nearly a mile. Close to the house was the vineyard; beyond the vines, the cornfields, above there on the mountain side, the woodland.

Frances followed, but her words of praise were for the autumn woods, the towering[Pg 119] peaks, or, far down below them, the misty valley. About the house was more the women could praise.

There was the pipe bringing its clear mountain water from a far off spring to the kitchen door, there was the great ground floor room of the wing stored with apples shining redly against the white of the walls. Here Mrs. Randall paused.

"I am going into the kitchen," she announced. But the professor and Frances and Edward went up the stairway to the covered porch joining the wing to the main building, and by the rear door of "the chamber" into the house.

The professor begged off. "No, I'll sit here; it isn't often I see such a fire as this. I've been over it before, and many times, years ago."

The professor was lost in the memory of the happy days he had spent in the old house when his years were less than young Montague's, of the lives which had drifted[Pg 120] far away, of the strange fate that had brought the deserted homestead into the hands of a schoolfellow's son, of the odd feeling which beset him when he was being made to feel at home where he had happily been at ease so many days of his young manhood; for the professor was a dreamer, and his dreams showed him often the realities of existence, true and strange. He lived and he saw life. He knew that the strangeness of its fortunes were matched in no tale written or to be written, because at the vital truths humanity stops fear-stricken at the unveiling of the God of the innermost Holies. Still it is the God and still it is the Holy and still the veil hangs there. The Divine hand alone is strong enough to touch it, the Divine eye alone is pure enough to see within, pitying enough, merciful enough. Talk of life's shadows, its sunlights, its surface play; leave the Holiest to Him!

The man saw bright faces there in the flames which went roaring up the great chimney, read old tales in the gleaming [Pg 121]embers on the hearth, lived old days, while the echo of gay laughter floated down to him.

Frances and her host were walking through the empty rooms upstairs, the young man pointing eagerly to views of towering peaks silhouetted against the reddening sky, their sides tawny with the russet leaves of oaks or vivid with the evergreens, or gray with bare tossing branches.

From the windows opposite those framing such vistas, she looked into a wide deep valley of clustering hill-tops, low, soft, round, green, crowding close together, running water between,—though this she could not see.

"The grass is green down between those hills the whole year through," he was telling her, "and the water never freezes; that's why it is such a splendid stock-farm. Mr. Payne is very successful. I have been wondering if I should try some stock here."

Frances was scarce heeding, she was looking down on the circle of the lawn before the door, tangled, weed-grown; noting that the[Pg 122] long arms of the spirea needed trimming, that the clump of jonquils should be freed from weeds, the waxberry trained, and the roses freed from their long dead branches; it was pitiful to see all this plenty of beauty run to waste.

It was. But it was empty and cold and dusky. Frances went over to the high, black-painted mantel and leaned against it looking down on the fireless hearth. She was thinking how desolate it was. He, for one flashing second, saw again his vision. For an instant it shone—the fire, the furnishings, the happy woman.

He stepped forward impulsively. "It lacks one thing," he blurted, without a moment's thought of what she would think of his speech.

"Furnishings as well," he said in his mind, "furnishings and a mistress," he repeated in his heart, but before he could open his lips, she was saying, "Two!"

Frances stood astounded at the sudden anger in his face as he turned on his heel and strode away, leaving her in the cold, dusky room alone.

When she went across the hall and into "the chamber" he was gone by the other way; Mrs. Randall and her father were deep in a discussion of his affairs, farm and household. Frances was left to her own reflections; they held a vague feeling of having stumbled somewhere and failed to measure to a greatness. She was quiet for the rest of their visit, beyond the custom of that cheerful young woman. As there was more time for thought she became conscience-stricken; she felt she knew where she had offended, she had derided the home of which young Montague was so proud and that while a guest within it; she strove to make her peace, but he gave her no chance, until[Pg 125] they waited on the steps in the moonlight for the trap.

Mrs. Randall was down on the walk, the professor was looking anxiously to Starlight's harness; Frances had lingered purposely.

The road home was rough, ruts and steep hills darkened by thick woods. Mr. Holloway was looking carefully to the fastenings of Starlight's harness, unwilling to trust too much to the hands of the boy who had brought him to the door. Mrs. Randall waited near him, Frances lingered purposely on the broad high steps of the porch.

The moonlight flooded the world; its white light gleamed on the drive about the circle where the tangled shrubbery cast weird shadowings; the dusk under the trees on the further lawn lay heavy and black; far-off loomed the oaks above the graves of those who had lived and died in the old house on whose steps they stood. The air of the autumn night was chill and still, save for the restless movements of Starlight. With the shadowed, unreal face of the night a feeling of awe touched Frances. She made[Pg 126] a step nearer to the young man standing by her, his tall figure towering above her, his fair face shadowed by his big soft hat.

"And it's such a beautiful old place—beautiful; you must trim up your roses and—"

There was no answer, and the young woman began to realize this was not a case for cajolery, but for open candid speech.

"You must think me very, very—" she could not bring herself to say "flippant" no matter what self-accusation said. "You know I was only jesting, and we have thoroughly enjoyed our visit. I want to come again if you wish us," plainly throwing herself on his mercy and bidding for kind speech.

"You are not angry?" she questioned quickly and softly, as they went down the steps.

"No!" was all he said, yet Frances was quite satisfied with his friendliness as he put them in the trap and tucked the robes about them.

"Mind the old hill," he cautioned her father; "there's a new road through the wood to the left now—"

"And a tree is cut down across the old way; but it's dark in there and you might get into it."

"No danger!" assured the professor; "but Edward," as if in sudden remembrance, "there's another danger in the road to town—the freshet."

"Has no one cautioned you? The streams flood the country after a heavy rain. The[Pg 128] one below the big hill is especially dangerous. Don't forget it when the heavy rains set in, and don't be venturesome; there have been some dreadful accidents there."

"Then you had better heed," declared the professor sententiously, as he stepped into the vehicle, "and when the water is out over the bridge, stay on the side you happen to be caught on."

"Not for a day or two," owned the young man reluctantly, as he stood, his hand still on the wheel; "there's the ploughing for spring wheat."

"Yes, yes." Starlight was twisting restlessly across the drive from one side to the other. "Good night, we've enjoyed it immensely."

"Good night!" called the women, and they left him there in the circling drive, the great[Pg 129] empty house looming behind him, a light in one window—the window of his own room. He went up the wide, high steps slowly. The evening had not been all he dreamed it might be, nor had it been a failure; and they were coming again. She had said she wished it.

He threw himself into the chair the professor had lounged in and began to live over again the hours of her visit, leaving out the bitter and hugging to his memory the sweet. He recalled her supple figure, her gay words as they wandered about the old place; he remembered their tour of the house and reddened at the thought of his rudeness. It was only a careless speech, she could not have known how it jarred upon other deeper feelings. He recalled with a wave of tenderness, the subdued young woman of the evening, and smiled at the memory; it was a mood he had never seen before, and it won upon his heart; and dwelling on the thought of it, he began once more to dream what the old house would be were it full of life, to plan what could be done here and there,[Pg 130] without and within, for cheer and comfort and beautiful living.

It would be several days he had said, before he could come to town again; it was ten. The Sabbath had been promised to a neighbor back in the country. The ploughing took longer than he thought. A field which had been allowed to run to waste must be burned over; and while the weather held fair and windless, the undergrowth encroaching from the woodland must be cut and burned. The fodder was not yet stacked, and all the work was pressing upon him. Good hard work in the clear, pure air, sound sleep, and contented thoughts made the days speed by.

When the Sabbath, his holiday, came again, he was abroad in the red frosty dawn, hurrying from stable to breakfast and away. When he rode into town he still had time to go up to the University before the service. He left his horse at the stable and hastened up Main street. The town was yet quiet. On the bridge above the railroad he paused a second looking down at the station below.[Pg 131] A train was pulling out. The shriek of the locomotive echoed shrilly among the hills, the smoke hung in billowy clouds close about the smoke-stack, and the tops of the coaches gliding away were white and glistering with frost. Edward had a comfortable feeling of home and cheer as, standing there, he looked down and beyond on spires and housetops and chimney-tops smoke-wreathed; but as he turned to hasten on, he saw, coming slowly along the platform, the professor. Edward hurried back to the flight of steps sunk in the hillside.

The very look of Mr. Holloway gave him a feeling of dismay. His coat collar was turned high about his face, and the pallor of his clear white skin, bitten into purple and red by the chill of the morning, showed clearly framed against it and by his thick black hair streaked with gray. His dark eyes looked solemnly thoughtful. He had an air altogether desolate and distraught. Edward called to him. He started, looked up, and brightened wonderfully.

"Ah! I am glad to see you." He had[Pg 132] reached the head of the stairway. "Frances," he added dolefully, "has gone away; I have just been to see her off."

Fool! While he had been standing there happy with dreaming of seeing her, she had been slipping away from him in the glistening coaches he had watched so idly.

"Don't know what possessed her. It was a sudden fancy. Last night she took it into her head all at once. It isn't like Frances to do such things! She was going this morning, she said, and she had us up by daybreak; she was bent on making this early train."

"Keswick! Her cousin, you know; she can telephone to the store near his farm and have them send out for her. But," he repeated, "I can't think what possessed her."

Had the professor been able to think, to know what sent his daughter running away from him, his wrath had been hard for some one that day.

The day before had been the match game.[Pg 133] Frances, though some vague, half-delicious instinct of fear and distrust had made her keep from the old friendly footing with Lawson, had grown wildly enthusiastic at each day's practice. At three o'clock of that afternoon she had been driving out towards the ground. An orange and blue rosette was pinned in the breast of her smart brown jacket, and an orange and blue pennant lay at her feet in the trap.

Carriage after carriage was winding up the road already in the enclosure. The wind was soft, the sunshine of Indian Summer brooding over the land; the blue haze of the mountains, intensified, hung about their slopes and peaks. Here and there the late leaves still clung, blackberry and sumach flaunted their scarlet in the fence corners, and on the bit of rock-fence bordering a field the poison oak and ivy flecked the dull hue with red and bronze. Far below, where the land dipped to the valley, the country shimmered in the sunlight.

Inside the grounds, Frances pulled up close beside the ropes. The grand stand[Pg 134] had scarce an occupant, but all the enclosure outside the ropes about the arena was filled with carriages, the young women calling from one to the other. The University men were crowded close on the other sides of the ropes, calling, hurrahing, yelling, or, more sociably inclined, lounging around the barriers and talking to the young women in the carriages.

One of them came up to Frances and imperturbably possessed himself of the seat by her side. It was far more fun in his code, to be sitting by a pretty young woman, than to be crowded with the fellows over there. They were envying him he knew, and he leaned back in enjoyment of his unlooked-for position.

The reins were thrown across the dash-board, trusting Starlight's scant sagacity. In the whip-stand was thrust the stick of her pennant. It fluttered in the soft air, the first unfurled, and the boys beyond the barriers cheered it lustily. It was not destined to stay there. Before the game was half over,[Pg 135] Frances, standing on her feet, was waving it wildly above her head.

The home team was playing magnificently. The visiting eleven had beaten them the year before: they were not doing so now. The field was wild. Call after call, college yell, keen irony, a cheer for this play, a jeer for that, urged on the University men. The visitors held stolidly to their work. The boys beyond the barriers were doing everything to rattle them, but the game went close. The home team made one score, the visitors had nothing, the field went wild with cheering; the visitors scored, there was silence. Once more the home team made a point; the umpire snapped his watch, called time; there was a pandemonium of yells.

Frances, standing, the pennant in her hand, watched the team jump the ropes, spent, worn, but happy with victory. Lawson was still in the arena, easing the defeat of the visitors by skilful flattery of their play, when she drove out. She watched the men, as she drove down the road, running along the field path through the sere grasses,[Pg 136] their arms close to their sides, their sweaters up to their chins, the hair on their foreheads heavy with sweat. Lawson overtook them just where the path came out into the road. He was the last. His play had gone far to winning the day. Frances with quick fingers unfastened the rosette on her breast and flung it to him as she went spinning by.

Lawson crushed it in his hand and ran on; his bath, his clothes, they cost him short time. He slipped from his room, down the quadrangle before the crowd was well back.

As it chanced, Frances, when he rang the bell of the professor's house, was half-way up the stair. An open door and drawn portière showed an empty room beyond, the firelight shining in the library darkened by the coming twilight. The hall was dusky. Frances' supple figure leaned over the banister.

Susan banged the door as she went through. She was not yet won to "fur-awayers."

"It was splendid, splendid!" cried Frances, coming slowly down, her hand slipping along the banister.

He stood at the foot, silent, looking up at her, his hair damp and tossed into heavy locks on his forehead, his face ruddy with work and haste—strong, alert, nerved to forgetfulness of everything save one feeling. His eyes, masterful, drew her to him, slowly, steadfastly, step by step; on the last stair she paused, her hand trembling about the carving on the newel post, she could not look in his eyes, she saw instead her rosette in his button-hole.

For him, the cap he held in his hand fluttered to his feet; he held out both hands.

His eyes met hers. Her breast rose in a long breath. The dusky hall, his face shining there, the world empty save for themselves; it was the setting of fate. In one whirling thought the pages of all the old romances she had dreamed over held and impelled her, she was one of them. She was throbbing, sentient with the spirit they rhymed. It was this that beat to suffocation in heart and pulse, and held her helpless. She leaned heavily against the banister. And[Pg 138] just below, his face on a level with hers, his eyes, with neither laughter nor triumph, but passionate pleading, searching her face, he stood. He put his arms about her gently, closed them around her passionately, and kissed her,—a joy he had not dreamed he or any man could feel, surging through him; and then she had wrenched herself from him and sped upward.

Frances sped upward to her room. Susan had lighted a fire in the grate. She flung herself into the chair before it and covered her face with her hands.

It was unbelievable! Without the excuse of one word of love-making she had allowed what even the Beauty would have fenced gayly against and held off, for a time, at least. All her training, the traditions of her childhood and maidenhood, beat against her fiercely. She slid from the chair to the rug, pressed her face into it, her arms close flung about her head, shutting out the accusations the dusky room was pulsing with; but she shut them the more closely in her heart and they rang there. They were wordless, but she knew them, was conscious of them from head to foot.

All her sweet dignity and gay ease—though she thought not of herself in such[Pg 140] manner, only in hot, resentful scorn—were set at naught, and she had played to its full the part she had strenuously held herself from, the love of an hour of a University man.

She was suffocated with shame, hot with anger. There was no memory of a swift sudden joy, such as swept over Lawson that moment, standing in his room alone; remembrance was burnt out by angry resentment at herself and him. She hated him for the agony she felt. It was against such an hour as this her first instincts had warned her and she had not heeded. She would heed now. She would never see him again, were it possible; and, that being impossible, she would find ways of putting days before the evil moment.

When she heard her father in the hall she stumbled to her feet, she bathed her hot face and straightened her stock and smoothed her rumpled hair; but when she flashed the electric light into the bulb above her mirror, she shrank back affrighted from the face pictured there. She could never go down with such a tale written on[Pg 141] it as she herself could read. She began slowly walking up and down her long, high-ceilinged room, pressing back her tormented thoughts behind the doors of resolve. Had she been given to headaches or sudden small illnesses, how gladly would she have pleaded them, but such would have been so abnormal as to demand a physician. She smiled as she thought of her father's and Susan's dismay and Dr. Randall's swift summons; and, thinking of others, she won self-control.

She went down the stair, slowly at first, and then, near the foot, with swift step and eyes averted from the spot there beneath the circle of white light.

Her father looked up with dreamy eyes. He was absorbed in his books. Frances drew a little sobbing breath of relief. She would not be called upon to make any effort. She picked up a well-thumbed and well-loved copy of Burroughs and slipped into her chair. The book lay open on her knees; she knew her father was heedless of the unturned leaves.

But at the supper table, a cup clattered against a saucer as she handed them, Susan saw; the food on her plate was untouched, jealous black eyes from the half-opened pantry door watched—she was white, her gray eyes were dark and troubled—jealous eyes of an old bent darkey who would have shut every trouble from her, heeded, and keenly enough contrasted them with the brilliant laughing face she had looked into when she opened the door in the dusk of the afternoon. There had been one visitor since then; she knew at whose door to lay the blame.

When Frances came into the kitchen an hour later with a great pretence of gayety the old woman read her through and through.

"Think I'm gwine let yuh go widout anything ter eat," snapped Susan, cross in her anxiety. "Whar yuh gwine?"

"Down to Cousin Tom's; he says he wants me to come; he wrote to father to-day." Frances was making powerful use of a casual invitation at the end of a business note. "Father has just told me. I'm going to-morrow. It's the very time, the weather is lovely. We'll gather walnuts and—and persimmons."

The constrained manner had no effect in fooling Susan. "Plenty walnuts up de road," she grumbled, "and as for 'simmons, 'simmons! I don't see nuthin' else in de fence corners anywhars, myself."

"Em—hm! So I thought, wants to go!" Susan opened the stove door and flung in a piece of wood—she could never be persuaded to cook with coal—and banged the door wrathfully. "What yo' pa gwine do widout you? How's I gwine get erlong?"

"You will get along all right. You know a lot more about housekeeping than I do. What I know you taught me."

The young girl straightened herself proudly and looked her tormentor straight in the eye.

"He's never been 'trapsing,' as you call it," she said with cold haughtiness, "and there'll be neither getting along with or without him as far as I am concerned." She turned and walked out of the room, head high, shoulders straight; and she banged the door a trifle behind her.

"Hi—yi!" chuckled Susan, delighted, "dat's de stuff! Aint gwine git erlong wid or widout him! Aint no dy-away-ed-ness 'bout dat!"

She showed her favor by the hot delicious breakfast she had ready early next morning, and she went cheerily about coaxing Frances to eat and taking no notice of her pale languor except to say, "it was suttenly hard to start abroad befo' sun-up dese mornin's," and altogether bolstering and buoying up Frances.

"Don't stay too long, honey, don't stay too long; I's gwine take good care o' Marse Robert, but don't stay too long," she urged at last, as Frances stood on the low step leading down to the corridor, looking furtively up and down. It was deserted. Susan's one swift glance had told her that, and the quadrangle looked cold and bare: frost glistened on the grass and on the naked branches of the maples, the vine rustled its dry tendrils about the pillar.

"Hurry erlong, chile, or yuh'll miss de train," warned Susan, watching them hastening across the campus before she went back to her work.

The professor, with discomfiture besetting him, had hurried on with Frances. It was [Pg 146]altogether too cold and uncomfortable for talk. They caught a car, just made the train; he had scarce had time to think when he came slowly up the stair in the hillside to meet young Montague at the top.

"I meant now," said the young man with a short laugh; "there's scarce time to get out home," he added briskly. "Come, walk down town and we'll go to church after a while."

"Well!" the professor turned townward with a strange and unwonted distaste for the empty house back there facing the quadrangle. "You will come back out with me," he insisted, thinking of the loneliness.

The young man nodded his assent. Once there, however, if the loneliness did not so much oppress the professor it was like a weight to his guest.

The theories of agriculture and stock-raising had lost the flavor of their charm.[Pg 147] They needed the bright face across the hearth sometimes listening in amusement, sometimes lost in dreamings, but always with the happy curve of the lip, the kindliness of her innocent eyes. He found himself listening for the sound of light footsteps in the hall or the tones of a low, musical voice. The place was haunted with memories. It was insupportable. As soon after dinner as he dared, he rose to go.

The guest pleaded some excuse. Then as he saw the other's aimless distress, "Why don't you come out with me?"

"But the more reason now. We'll drop in on our way down and get some one to take it."

That little word, and the emphasis on it,[Pg 148] the thought of what it meant, decided him. "I'll just tell Susan," he declared briskly, as he went down the hall.

The professor paused, his hand on the knob of the kitchen door. "I will," he declared, "I will." And he went off as gayly as a boy. He too was a runaway.

But there was a stay-at-home who, as the day wore on and he passed the empty house and repassed it, and went across the quadrangle for a long look at the windows and found them blank, was strangely perturbed. He saw the professor and the young man he had seen with him once or twice before come home from church, no bright young woman jealously guarded between them. He saw them go out alone. But for some tingling memories and some vague fears, he would have gone boldly across and asked for Frances then. But the house looked prim and silent. The curtains of her windows were drawn with exactness, and no white hand stirred them. At evening, going that way purposely, he saw no gleam through the library[Pg 149] window or through the transom of the wide hall door. The house was utterly given over to the silence and the dark. This, when he was fierce with heart-hunger to see her, to say a hundred wild things, to touch perhaps the height of the joy of yesterday. By the afternoon of the next day it had grown an impossibility not to know the meaning of this silence.

He got up from his Morris chair, in his room where he had been vainly trying to study, when he came at last to this moment of decision, picked up his cap and went with firm ringing step down the corridor to the professor's house.

A scant five minutes before Susan in the kitchen had been startled by the ringing of the telephone. She climbed up on the stool, placed there for her short, spare self, and put the receiver to her ear.

Frances, far off in the rear of a store on the mountain-side, made a little exclamation that carried to Susan as she stood with pendant lip and wrinkled forehead, the receiver at her ear.

"Dunno! Marse Edward come to dinnah an' he 'low as how he's gwine back wid him."

"All right! Susan," with sudden brisk energy, "my small trunk is packed, I want you to send it to me."

"I need the dresses; I thought I might, and put them in there, so that if I did—and Susan, wrap my riding-habit up, fold it carefully, and slip the bundle under the trunk-straps."

"Miss Frances, you ain't gwine ride none o' Marse Tom's horses?" Tom had a stock-farm, some beauties, some beasts, all of them fiery.

Susan hung up the receiver. As she stepped off the stool the door-bell rang. She went to answer it nimbly, though she was bent with rheumatism. A young man stood on the single broad step above the pavement of the corridor.

He doffed his cap, but Susan stood stiffly[Pg 152] in the middle of the doorway. "Marse Robert is not at home," she said coldly.

The young man flushed, looked half embarrassed and started to pass her. "I would like to see Miss Frances!"

"When will she be back?" asked the young man, angered at the old darkey's manner.

"Tell her that I will call and see her a few moments this evening." He unbuttoned his coat and fumbled for his card-case.

Susan waited until the bit of cardboard was in her hand. "She won't be hyar!" she said in a perfectly expressionless tone, as she turned the card over in her yellow palm and eyed it curiously.

Susan looked at him, her black eyes in her wrinkled face still as pools of ink and as fathomless.

Light was breaking in on the young man, light and darkness; light as to the deserted air of the house, darkness as to Frances and her motives.

"And you don't know where she went?" He stood for a few moments, his eyes on the worn pavement at his feet. Presently his hand slipped again into his pocket. "If you can, tell me where she is," he said suavely; "save me an envelope of a letter, you know."

Susan nodded, comprehension all over her face. He slid a bill into her hand. One quick glance out of the tail of her eye showed Susan the V in the corner. Tremulous with delight she clasped her hands over her treasure under her apron.

The young man stepped down on the[Pg 154] pavement; as if in sudden thought he turned back. "Who was that young fellow I saw with Mr. Holloway yesterday?"

Susan grinned with affability. Having lied once with ease, she did it now with grace. "Dat? Dat's Marse Edward Montague, sah!"

Susan, when she saw the look which flashed into his eyes, knew she had scored for many things; she had scored for Miss Frances' white cheeks and dark, troubled eyes; she had scored for her own loneliness without her.

It was ten days later that, as Lawson hurried down the corridor past the professor's house, the curtains of the library window were stirred slightly and a skinny finger beckoned him.

He was still scornfully angry, but he was anxious; he stopped. The door was set ajar and Susan's face peered through the crack. She was grinning joyously.

He frowned, but he obeyed her. With one lightning glance about him and one swift memory of the last moment he stood there, he shut the door behind him and waited to hear what the bent and shrivelled old woman had to say.

She drew a paper from the folds of her dress. "Hyar 'tis!" she exclaimed, handling the envelope lovingly. "I cyarnt read, but I'd know dis writin', anywhars; 'tis straight up an' down, an' clear an' hones'!"

Lawson seized it quickly. The envelope was directed to Mr. Robert Holloway. He gave a smothered exclamation. The writing was clear and decided, the postmark, "Keswick." The glance he flashed Susan was scathing, but she stood innocently attentive; her manner might have deceived a man of her own State; it did deceive Lawson with his western ignorance of her race.

"She don't write much, Miss Frances don't." Susan had no word to say of the daily message over the telephone, and Lawson himself never thought of that way of communication.

Susan nodded. "Dat's whar she was when she writ, but she 's visitin' 'roun', an' we nebber did know jes' whar she was; but dat's all right."

Lawson hurried into the library. The daily paper of the town lay on the table; he turned the pages to the railroad schedule, Susan eyeing him watchfully from the door.

His morning lecture was important, he could not cut it. There were no trains he could make down and back in the afternoon; he would drive. His mind full of the determination he came out in the hall. He did not even notice Susan, eagerly expectant, as she stood there, of another bill to add to her hoard. His eyes were fixed on the carved newel post where Frances' trembling hand had lain when last he had seen her. Could the distrustful old darkey have read his heart she might have forgiven him and befriended him, for at that moment it held nothing but strong, intense love for the girl she herself idolized, and the resolve to see her, to make his peace with her, to overcome whatever barrier, ghostly or real, had risen between them. He was not a whit afraid of any rival. The only effect such declaration had had was to crystallize his dreaming to decision for action, and to fairly madden his impatient nature that was held in leash, action being impossible.

He was the first in the dining-hall that noon. While the sun was still overhead, he[Pg 158] was driving behind his bays out of town, over the dusky bridge where the rafters were draped with cobwebs, fold upon fold and dusty and gray,—and where the Rapidan ran deep and yellow far underneath, up the long winding hill from whose top he might see the rolling hills, the house-tops and spires of the far-stretching town, and circling peaks, and, there to the right, the crest of Monticello. But he never turned his head. He saw his horses and the hard red clay road, perfect in this season as a stretch of asphalt; hills closed about him, as he sped on, or opened showing valley and mountain, bare washed hillsides vividly red, or fresh-plowed fields, or pale green shoots of wheat over fields of brick-dust hue, or sere pasture lands, or stubble fields. Beyond the care for his driving he saw nothing but a vision of a drooping face, the rose-red of confusion flushing it, downcast eyes and tremulous mouth. He dreamed of it, but it was something more than dreaming, it was dreaming translated to resolve. He saw nothing ever that he wanted, without reaching out strong[Pg 159] hands for its possession. He was doubly resolved, doubly strong for this, according to the intensity of his desire.

At the village of Keswick, where the road crossed the railway, he stopped for information, and, having gotten it, rode on. Soon he was off the main road and driving along a way which led through thick woods with many branching roads right and left. His directions were confused. Far down in the forest he paused before one of the branchings, wondering if this were the way, and in the silence he heard wheels and waited. The tread of the team was slow. He could hear the creaking of the wheels, the joltings of a farm wagon and a boy's voice, fresh and clear, urging on the horses. Over and above it all was the low resonant song of the pines and of the bare branches of the forest trees, and the sound of dead leaves rustling in the wind; and for a moment the young man's mood was in sympathy with the mood of nature, sad and solemn, there in the heart of the woods in the hush of a November day. Then the wagon came in sight.

"Yes!" cried the boy, "drive straight ahead until you get to the big pine tree; there are right many turns and wood roads in there; you'd better let me go first."

The boy nodded. Lawson pulled out of the road and the boy drove abreast of him. He had a wagon-load of dead branches he had been gathering up through the woods. He reined in to say, "Mr. Carroll is my father."

"I've been getting wood for the kitchen stove; it burns better than the green wood," the boy volunteered by way of conversation as he drove ahead.

The boy standing on the board in front of the wagon, the reins in his hands, looked back, "Who?" he called.

For one moment Lawson sat speechless. He saw the dark vistas of the wood, the desolate road, the bare trees and whirling leaves and thin undergrowth. Then he felt he must speak, "When, did you say?" dully.

"Oh, yes! Whoa! whoa!" the horses hurrying for stable and supper, now that they were set on the homeward way, were starting off. "Come on!"

"I don't believe I will," called Lawson after him, striving to collect himself and not to seem the fool he felt himself to be. "I was going down the country," he called, "and I thought I would stop and see her. I'll go on," he bawled after the fast disappearing wagon, "as she's not there."

It was a half hour later that, drawing rein in the deserted road—he had been too proud and too stingingly hurt to turn short on his way—the dusk of night settling over the country, an indescribable air of dreariness[Pg 162] with it, he suddenly remembered he had not asked where she was gone.

She was not at home, he was sure of that, when he began to reason it out, and he would not ask that wretched old negro again, he was sure of that, also; though Susan, when he glimpsed her, was innocently friendly. He would find out and he would wait. Meanwhile he settled down to grim work at law and at football; practice was heavy again and the Thanksgiving game was booked for Richmond. The University men would play against the North Carolina boys from Wake-Forest.

He heard nothing but the games talked of everywhere. A special train was to take the team and their friends down. The Beauty was going and many other young women of the neighborhood. He learned it was one of the events, social as well as athletic, of the year. Theatre parties were being formed by those who would stay a day or two of the holidays there; plans for sightseeing and drives and visits were being made; and Lawson, in the current whether[Pg 163] he wished it or not, heard yet no word of Frances. Still the house looked blank and empty, still he saw the professor coming and going with little company save the tall, fair young fellow Susan had named to him.

Finally, coming along the corridor one day as he passed the professor's house, Mr. Holloway hurried out.

The impulse was irresistible. Lawson doffed his cap, held out his hand. The professor paused on his doorstep.

Lawson talked hurriedly of the weather, of college affairs; finally for very desperate fear that the professor would go and his chance be lost, he blurted "Miss Frances is away?"

Her father smiled a little sadly, "I am not used to doing without her," he said whimsically.

"Where is she?" Lawson could hear the heavy throb of his heart when the question had been put.

"In Richmond," the professor answered, as if it were quite a question without special interest to any one. "Good-day!" he added as he looked at his watch, "I'm due! Come and see me, some time!"

The professor had been touched by the anxious air of the man and set it down to diffidence. He wished the students would not show that awe of him. None of them knew how friendly he would like to be; but he was studying, working, reading, dreaming, all the while. He dwelt in a world of abstractions and carried the atmosphere with him. It was an alien atmosphere and kept him apart.

"Richmond!" said the young man to himself. "Richmond!" he could have shouted. His boot heels rang it in the pavement, his pulses throbbed it. "Richmond," and they were going there to-morrow. He rushed to his room, threw down his books, and began singing:—

"Hello! What's the matter with you?" called some one through the door he had forgotten to close tightly, "it's time for practice."

The man entered. They had not been receiving many invitations to Lawson's rooms lately.

"What's the matter with you?" he repeated as he leaned against the mantel. "Good news?"

The young fellow leaning against the mantel, though he was clad in full toggery of padded trousers and sweater and socks showing the University colors gaudily, was yet no comparison for Lawson, and they both knew it. Lawson was far and away the best-looking man on the eleven. The very garb served to show his fine physique and animal beauty, and with this look of flushed pleasure and full life—

Lawson ran his arm through his visitor's arm and they went singing across the quadrangle—

XII

As the train rocked down the mountain-side next day, past tobacco-fields stripped bare, and orchards where no red fruit shone, and fields now brown and sere, and as it sped over the low country, Lawson had one thought. He would see, when the train pulled into Richmond, somewhere in the throng about the station Frances' bright face and serene shining eyes. She would be there with those of the city who came to welcome them. The travellers laughed and jested, sang and cheered and yelled, Lawson with them, his heart light as a boy's; but all of this outward atmosphere was like a dream to him,—the reality was the vision he saw of a girl's face. He was first out of the coach. His eager eyes searched the crowd. In all the press was not one face he knew. He was half resentful when he was hurried away, and glum and silent in the midst of the joyful hubbub around him.

Then he pulled himself together; she was out on the grounds, of course. When the game began, his inattention and wretched play fairly lost the day, until the wrath of the captain called and kept him to the work in hand. He stayed the night in Richmond, went to the play, loitered about the shopping streets next day, and saw only strangers or those who had come down from the mountains with them.

Late that afternoon, tired, disgusted, self-scornful, he took a train for home. When he passed the professor's house he saw a beam of light shine out on the quadrangle on a spot where no gleam had shone for many a night.

He walked deliberately out on the sward and looked up. He cared not who saw him or who chaffed him, and a University man has to order his life with care if he wishes it not to become a burden to him. Fortunately it was late, and there were no men about corridor or campus. He stood watching; it might be the old negress there for all he knew.

The curtains were pulled aside, the casement opening on the balcony was flung open, and a tall supple figure stood outlined sharply against the flood of light behind her. His heart seemed pulsing in his throat and choking him. Then Frances stepped lightly out on the porch and began to unfasten the heavy shutters from the clasps holding them back to the brick wall.

He walked quickly across till he stood under the balcony's edge; the vine climbing the pillar was bare, its dry branches rustling in the night wind.

There was no answer, and he heard a light footstep across the porch and a rattling at the other shutter.

The voice called again; she leaned over the railing and saw a tall figure below looming in the star-lit dusk. "Who is it?" she asked, a quick catch in her breath.

"Mr. Lawson?" the voice was low and full,[Pg 170] and the intonation gracefully easy, with the old ring of cheer in it. Hard riding, hard thinking, hot scorning, and firm resolving had made many changes in Frances; best of all it had restored her old manner of gay ease.

"When did you come back?" If there was any tender reproach in the voice, the young woman up there did not heed it.

Yesterday! when he was searching for her, longing for her,—and she was here. "Why didn't you stay for the game?"

"I couldn't; I am expecting some friends from Richmond. I had to come home and see that Susan had the house in order."

There was a second's silence. The young man below stood motionless: "I want to see you," he said firmly.

Frances leaned faintly against the rail. It was over, the moment she had dreaded unspeakably, and she was in her rightful place again. She knew it; she blessed the night whose darkness had given her assurance. She blessed the unexpected meeting when there was no time for awkward confusion. She tapped her finger-tips on the rail and smiled to herself as she stood there, but the icy touch of the frost already forming roused her to a sense of the cold and chill. She hurried in, locked the shutters and then went running down the stairs.

"Father," she said with a happy laugh, "father, I am so glad to be at home." She leaned over his chair and put her arms about his neck.

"Are you?" there was a sparkle of joy in the professor's dark eyes; "so am I!" He slipped his arm about her and pulled her down on the arm of the chair. "You mustn't run away again; I don't know what to do without you; you must never run away again, too far!"

Lawson, though he was not given to poetical comparisons, was remembering with keen pain the first hour when he stood beneath the balcony and Frances had talked with him. It was morning then, it was night now; the sunlight was in the sky, only the cold stars now; she had come down to him blithely that warm, bright day when the world was a flood of sunshine and color; he had gone alone now, and it was cold and dark, and the color had drifted from the outside world and the joy from his heart.

XIII

About five o'clock the next day, Lawson, from sheer restlessness, was one of a crowd of University men waiting on the platform of the station in the ravine for the trains from the west and south already due; chaffing, singing, laughing, guying, cheering, they were waiting, according to the daily custom of a holiday hour, for whatever fun the arriving coaches might furnish.

The electric arcs swung white light up and down the station, the smoke of a sidetracked freight hung low and heavy in the valley, the teams of the afternoon drivers were rattling across the high bridge, their occupants looking with laughing interest on the scene below. Suddenly with shriek and roar the Southern train was in.

The men gave a great yell. A young girl in one of the coaches flung up a window and looked out.

The young girl snapped down the window. Another face, curious and likewise pretty, showed at the pane. The young men were wildly enthusiastic.

"Vir—gin—i—a—" The yell drowned all other sounds, and Lawson was astonished to see, as it ended, Frances springing from her trap a few yards away and hastening forward. The conductor waited gallantly at the steps of one of the coaches, the porter came down another flight, laden with bundles, and at the door, their cheeks showing red with suppressed fun and excitement behind their veils, appeared the two pretty young women.

"Vir—gin—i—a—." The yell died away as the men saw the professor's daughter greeting the arrivals with laughing welcome. They fell to guying each other mercilessly.[Pg 175] But Lawson, standing not far away, came at once to Frances' assistance.

"Oh, thank you! Mr. Lawson, these are my Richmond friends, Miss Rowan, Mr. Lawson! Miss Martin!"

The young women held out their gloved hands and Lawson welcomed them impressively. He assisted them into the trap with careful gallantry, the strangers, both of them, in the back seat, the packages stored at their feet. Frances was subduing the antics of Starlight, who after standing quietly when there was need, took occasion to seem shocked at the engine now that his driver was in place and he felt the touch of the reins on his bit, and to stand protestingly on his hind feet and paw the air.

"Sit still!" commanded Frances, shortly.[Pg 176] "Come down, Starlight! behave yourself!" she reached for the whip.

"Don't strike him! There's no telling what he would do!" begged the visitors. Lawson, near, stalwart and interested, seemed a godsend.

"Do come with us!" pleaded Elizabeth Martin, who in all emergencies turned to the nearest man.

"Jump in!" laughed Frances, nodding to the empty seat; she pulled Starlight around, waited a second for Lawson to get in, and then came down sharply on Starlight's flank with the whip. The horse made a plunge, straight for the platform, the men scattered right and left, and Starlight went snorting up the winding road to the street above.

Frances looked laughingly at the young man beside her. That other opportunity and this were all she could have wished to put them on a commonplace footing. The[Pg 177] old position and power and knowledge to hold her own, were all she wished for. Lawson looking into the clear, gray eyes felt a thrill of gratitude for the fortune which had befriended him.

Still, her answer may have held some hidden meaning for him, for he flushed a little when he heard it. "I prefer to hold my own reins myself," she said carelessly; "you know I never would stand much managing."

Lawson turned to talk to the young women behind him; so, he could watch furtively Frances' face and her cheek where the rose hue flickered, the white in the midst of it.

The streets were filled with the afternoon crowd, students in groups or alone, young women, older women, children; fancy turnouts and farmers' wagons, high carts, and heavy low ones filled with cordwood, young women in short skirts and heavy boots, young women in all the finery of new fall clothes and furs, loitering by the houses set flush upon the street, or by box-hedged gardens, the houses far back, or by smooth lawns.

The crowd was dense, but through it Frances glimpsed Edward Montague. He had seen her a minute earlier and was watching her wistfully, with a keen pang at his heart that now when he had seen her first for so long a time, she should be one of a gay party with that handsome young fellow at her side. She drew rein, soon as she saw him, and Edward hurried out to her.

"So glad to see you, Mr. Montague!" She leaned and gave him her hand. "Let me introduce you!" She named the young women. "You know Mr. Lawson?"

"He did not mention it, but," quickly as if[Pg 179] in defence of his absent friend, "I left him waiting for you at home."

"Good-by!" He did not add that the professor had insisted on his return, and that he had accepted, but he carried with him a happy consciousness of the fact.

Frances had the same cordial invitation for Lawson, when they parted. She knew well that the young city women visiting the University in the middle of the term expected a good time, and a good time chiefly along one line. So while the professor was welcoming them in the hall, she lingered on the doorstep.

"You must help me make them enjoy their visit," she said, knowing she could not ask a better aide.

"I wonder—Elizabeth, Mary, are you very tired?" she called through the open door.

"Very well—this evening!" She gave him her hand. He stood a little to the side of the step and they were out of sight through the half-opened door. He held her hand closely and looked straight in her eyes, questioningly, compellingly, but Frances looked back calmly and carelessly, and wrenched herself free. "Good-by!" she called from the door.

Lawson went on to his room and threw himself moodily into the chair before the fire. It was smouldering. He punched it viciously and banged the blower over it.

"Beastliest way of heating a fellow's room I ever saw!" he grumbled, "I vow I'll freeze before mid-winter!"

He slipped into his smoking-jacket, turned on the glare of the light, pulled table and Morris chair before the fire, and sat down, book in hand, to some pretence of study, but other cases than legal thronged his mind. He flung the note-book on the table, wrenched off the blower, and then, with a half sigh of content at the blazing coals in[Pg 181] the grate, he sank back in his chair. He watched the flicker of the flames in the chimney's mouth; yellow and white and red and violet, the tongues of burning gas flared up the rough, black chimney's mouth, and the coals below glowed red and redder. But Lawson, looking at them dreamingly, was seeing the way he must go, and was growing stronger in his determination.

He would win her, yes! He had begun merely as a diversion from the study he sometimes liked and sometimes disliked, sometimes dreamed to win fame through and sometimes was intolerantly impatient of, counting, in a bitter moment, nothing worth effort.

He had begun, too, by draping traditions about Frances, every one of which, she had freed herself from; and he had ended by unquestioning acceptance of the fact that this woman, puzzling beyond his ken, was the one thing of the hour he desired.

The memory of Susan's words only strengthened his obstinacy. The shield Frances kept about her, thin as gauze, [Pg 182]impenetrable as steel, which he had fended aside once and once again, but made his fight the more interesting. He had no fault to find at any point of the situation,—only a wild impatience that he should have been thrust back when he felt attainment within his grasp.

XIV

With the advent of visitors the professor's house became the centre of gayety in the quadrangle. The women of the other households were glad to show friendliness to the young girl, in whom they felt a warm interest, but who had seemed in her content to need no one. Visits and invitations, drives and supper parties transformed the quiet household.

The professor made one stand for himself. Susan had asked for a scullion and named a boy, who was promptly engaged. "And, Susan," the professor had commanded, "see that he keeps a good fire in the parlor; show every one who calls in there. Leave the library undisturbed."

"I must have some peace!" added the professor to himself, who found this whirl a trial, but endured it for Frances' sake. For Frances seemed to thoroughly enjoy this[Pg 184] dispensing of hospitality; she planned gayeties far ahead. She accepted and returned the invitations from their neighbors. She spent hours in the kitchen while her guests were dispatched on pleasures, and fought Susan's wrath for each of those hours. There was no idle moment when accusing thoughts might sting, or when some seeker for such opportunity would find her alone.

Lawson, he scarcely knew how, was made the special attendant of the visitors; and though he was restless and chafing, and keenly watchful for his chances, he yet enjoyed the gay expeditions and the presence of the pretty, fun-loving young women.

Montague, when he came, was warmly welcomed and made one of them; but it was a busy season on the farm; he was kept away enough to have something of the feeling of an outsider and to see the things one from the outside sees. He was vaguely conscious of a troubled atmosphere, and he saw, too, what no one else did, that there was a feverish restlessness about Frances and a constant guarded effort at control. His [Pg 185]instinctive thought of her warned him that in spite of her apparent blitheness she needed befriending. He was constantly alert for her, constantly watchful. Whenever he was with them Frances felt, somehow, helped and more at peace with herself. So for the allotted time of the visit. The days had nearly sped by when Frances found the professor one morning gathering up his books and papers for the day's lectures.

The contrast between the quiet room, lined with bookshelves, the grave, scholarly man standing there by the paper-littered table, and the room across the hall, from which floated the sound of chatter and laughter, smote the professor's daughter keenly.

"Does all this visiting and calling and confusion bother you?" she asked, as she slipped her hand through his arm and ran her soft palm childishly up and down the heavy wool of his sleeve.

"Not at all!" The professor looked lovingly into the eyes of his daughter, who was as tall as he was.

"Because," she went on whimsically, "they are going to stay longer!" She made a pretence of holding her breath.

The professor thought of the loved quiet of his home and the still more loved comradeship of his daughter, and was silent.

"Then it's all right!" He slipped a rubber band about his papers and laid them on his books. "I drove out to young Montague's yesterday," he said to his daughter, standing idly before the fire. Frances had found so few moments alone with her father lately that she was making the most of these.

"It's dreary out there," the professor complained; "these winter days are going to be hard for him."

"Do you think so," said the professor eagerly, "now, lately he hasn't seemed so—so bright as he used to be. I thought perhaps he was finding it lonely. He is an excellent farmer, do you know," he said with sudden enthusiasm, "he has sold enough wood off the place to pay half of the cost of it."

"The hills will look so bare; I shall always remember the beautiful forest sweeping up to the mountain tops."

"Oh! the wood will be cut far up the range and there is enough about there for the country not to suffer for the want of it. We went over it together."

"He's working too hard," the professor went on, keeping to the topic in which he was so keenly interested.

"You know this is a busy season; after a[Pg 188] while he can rest. You know what you often say, winter is the farmer's holiday."

"Yes, but shut up out there! I must send him some books." Frances watched in amusement as her father went to the shelves where his light literature was kept. "Pope's Iliad," he said thoughtfully, "read it in the original of course; Herodotus, I wonder how much Greek he knows; Carlyle, hm! Drummond, that will make him think at least—What?" for Frances was leaning against his shoulder and was laughing.

"What do you like yourself when you are idle or half sick, when there's a good hot fire to read and dream before?"

The professor reddened with conscience-stricken remembrance of a pile of paper-bound novels in the attic. "Get him something yourself, then!"

"I dare say he will like it better," retorted her father, who, blind to Lawson's attentions, had begun to suspicion Montague's, and to think with a half-pleased apprehension that[Pg 189] it might be a desirable thing for some far-off day.

The old woman came briskly into the room. "I dunno! Some sassy niggah jes' poked dis box at me an' run off." Susan was always ready to find fault with the manners of the rising generation; she put the box down gingerly just on the professor's papers.

"Here!" he snatched it up and set it forcibly on the hearth. "Flowers! And the thing is wet!"

Frances, delighted, knelt by the box. "Miss Frances Holloway," she read; "give me your knife! Oh!" for the top wrenched off disclosed a sheaf of chrysanthemums, white and yellow, and a card, "Mr. Frank Lawson."

"They are for all, of course!" she filled her arms with them and got to her feet. "Take this box in the kitchen, Susan."

"We are going shopping in the morning, and there is a tally-ho party to Monticello this afternoon."

"I scarcely think I shall go. I have been up to Monticello so often, and I think I'll stay at home and make a cake."

"It will be a chocolate cake," she was laughing at him over the sheaf of chrysanthemums, "and you shall have all you want!" And the professor was disarmed.

Some one else had noticed this same tendency of housekeeping. When Frances was busily beating eggs in the kitchen, the bell rang. She went on with her work without a thought of visitors, for the tally-ho party was large and included all their friends, the younger ones at least. Susan had gone on an errand, and the boy, [Pg 191]hurrying carelessly through kitchen and dining-room and library, left each door open as he went through.

"T'aint no one home but Miss Frances," he said to the young man on the door-step, "and she's busy in the kitchen."

The young man went past him into the library; through the doors he glimpsed Frances, back towards him. He stepped out of the line of vision, "Very well!" he said in a low tone to the boy gaping in the doorway, "you need not tell her; I'll announce myself!"

The boy, green, untrained, as Lawson knew him to be, hastened on through the back door of the hall to his work at the woodpile. Lawson trod softly across the rooms. The swift beater in Frances' hands deafened her ears to other sounds. He came close behind her, and spoke her name before she knew the warm sunny kitchen held any but herself.

Lawson had thought of some flattering[Pg 192] speech to appease her; instead his anger flared as hot as hers. "Did you not know I would dare anything?"

The piteous red flushing over the pallor of cheek and forehead told him the shot had told brutally.

"Did you not know I would dare anything to see you?" He pleaded conscience stricken at his blunder. "I asked you, I told you, the night you came home, to give me an opportunity to—to see you."

"You know what I meant, not with a crowd about you, but when I—I—you have made a hedge of your visitors," he accused. It was exactly what she had done, and done wilfully. "You knew I longed to see you."

Frances rolled down her shirt-sleeves and buttoned them coolly. "Will you walk into the library?" she asked icily.

"I did not know you were fond of the kitchen. Have this chair," pulling Susan's low flag chair beside the window.

Lawson took it from her. His eyes were red with wrath, but Frances took no heed.

"God forbid!" he blurted, with a flashing memory of the chef presiding there in the kitchen.

The calm was coming back to Frances' manner; she felt herself yet mistress. "Sit down; I will show you what a Virginia kitchen is like. I'll bake you a cake," she added, with a saucy air, for all the fear that was tugging at her heart, "if you are a good boy."

"No," thoughtfully; "well, it's good to be truthful. I'll give you a cake for that."

She leaned back against the table's edge as he came close to her. She clenched her hands, striving for the hot words she wanted, which would not come.

For one instant heart and pulse stopped. "Marry him—marry him—" All her fancies and conclusions were whirling in her brain; flirtations, of which she had accused him, were not apt to go so far.

"You know how I love you, long for you. Why have you kept this distance between us, Frances?" He put his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her drooping face. "You will be my wife?" but at that word a sudden swift memory smote him icy cold and speechless. Frances looking shyly up thought it anxiety for her answer. Into the gray eyes came stealing, flashing, the look he had dreamed of, had resolved to kindle there and read, himself glorified as he read. With a sob in his breath he caught her to him. "Frances," he began hurriedly, soon as speech would come, "there is something I must tell you now, you must know—" but Frances, covered with confusion, was pulling away from him. She had heard[Pg 195] Susan's step outside, "Susan is coming," she panted.

Lawson gave her one passionate look, that hardened into triumphant love as he gazed deep into her eyes. "So be it," he said within himself; "I accept!"

He slipped through the doors, closing them as he went. When Susan came into the kitchen he was softly shutting the outer one. He went triumphant. For one instant the joy of possession had fought with a deeper and higher love, but desire had won.

Through the hours of that night Frances heard the strong north wind about the house, singing the song of vibrant trees on the mountain-tops or the low tones of the rolling hills and narrow valleys. All night she knew the world outside grew cold and colder, while the mist clouds which had condensed into rain in the early evening were swept from the sky. As the fire in her grate burned low and the insistent wind rattled at window and door and blew in gusty breaths down the chimney's mouth, the furniture contracting and snapping, made weird noises which mingled with the clashings of the maples on the quadrangle.

Whether she slept or whether she waked, it was the same mood of restless excited happiness. It seemed but a reflection of it from the world outside when she flung open[Pg 197] her heavy shutters in the morning and saw the sky clear as crystal, bluish green at its zenith and, over above the houses opposite, flushed red as a rose. The maples rocked in the wind, along the corridor across the way the shallow rain pools in the worn pavement had turned to ice, making shimmer and shine but perilous footing. The wind and the rocking and the singing were her own restless mood, which made her vibrant to a song which she knew not for joy or for some feeling yet unnamable.

It was not wholly joy, for her first thought of others struck her with dismay. Susan, before she had dressed, came into the room, a great box in her hands.

"Dat boy done said p'intidly dis time 'twas for yuh. He 'low dat Mr. Lawson call Mr. Cook up to de 'phone las' night an' said as how dey was to be hyar befor' sun up dis mornin'."

"Oh!" cried Frances with a long ecstatic sigh, as she uncovered the sweet red roses and buried her blushing face in their fragrant hearts, "how beautiful, how sweet, how—"[Pg 198]—"thoughtful" she was about to add, when she remembered Susan and her secret.

But Susan could read the tale of that shy, sweet delight in Frances' face and her own grew more anxious and wrinkled.

"Yuh'd bettah hurry up an' dress," she said, grumpily. "'Tis nigh upon eight o'clock and yo' pa won't eben think his breakfast taste good if yuh isn't there." It was the first shot she could think of, but it told.

Frances laid down the great handful of beauties she had been holding ecstatically close to her face. "I will be down in a moment," she said soberly, and, then, as Susan still lingered, "you had better hurry yourself and see that everything is ready."

As she brushed the rebellious dark hair into the waves above her forehead she saw her reflected face through a mist of tears; once, twice, in the happy evening before, the thought of her father had come like a stab through the joy still only half believed in and shyly dreamed of. She had not dared follow that thought to the end. It would[Pg 199] show her the deep sorrow of her own heart were she to leave him to live her life many hundred miles away amongst people and surroundings not of his kind and beyond his ken; it would show her, what was harder still, the desolation of his loneliness without her. She could not face it yet, but must put it away from her with all the tremulous uncertainties quivering into life in her heart, and must live in the moment.

She fastened a great red rose in her dainty waist and then picked up a smaller bud. "This is for you," she declared, as she hastened into the library before the breakfast bell had rung, and found her father waiting a trifle impatiently before the fire.

So it was that a young man, hurrying across the campus in gay mood, gave a start of astonishment when he met the professor, and guessed the rose in his coat to be one of those he had dedicated to this first happy day of a love striven for against long odds and won.

It was not the better part of him that had triumphed the day before, and it may have[Pg 200] been the fight within which made him so readily resentful and so quick to show it, when he paused at the window of the professor's house to greet the gay trio there. And it was some baser part of him which, when he read Frances' tell-tale face, the faint flush, the droop of the lids, while he talked gayly with Elizabeth Martin, urged him to see how far he might torment her. Having played the daring game once, he must play it again and again in the few short stormy days which followed. Prompted by some unknown devil within him, bred of the fight which he lacked the courage to face and to decide, he must watch her tell-tale face to see how he had aroused feelings Frances had never dreamed of and hated while she suffered them—must laugh and talk with Elizabeth Martin with admiration in his eyes and flattery on his lips, and to see, meanwhile, the wonder in Frances' eyes, and the pride which in the end concealed it—must seek, at last, some hour alone with her, manœuvre for that hour, and watch the resentment she disdained to name,[Pg 201] die away beneath the magnetism of his love-making.

Even then a fierce joy ruled him, prompting him to a lavish generosity in which the whole household shared.

"Ise done sick o' seein' dat flower boy," declared Susan, savagely, to Frances, in a kitchen interview. "Sho' as de brekkus bell rings, he rings de nex', an' he's gettin' sassy as if he run de whole business an' brung 'em heself."

"An' if yuh eats much mo' dat candy layin' erroun', I'll be plumb scared o' yuh eatin' yo' vittles."

"Me! De Lawd knows I don't want none! I'd ruther hab one o' dem plump partridges Marse Edward brought yestiddy dan all de choclits yuh can rake and scrape."

"Humph! dyar'll be jes' ernuff." Susan was not going to serve the game one young man had taken a long tramp to shoot, for another who did not stand so high in her graces. Young Montague had been in the day before.

With some intuitive understanding of Frances, her excited mood and Lawson's manner, when he saw them together, left him desperately anxious and heart-sick. It was a story he could not read, nor the actors themselves. But he divined that, in spite of the brilliancy he had never seen so great in her before, Frances was unhappy. He saw enough, also, to fear the drift of her life was to a love which would not bring her peace, and which would leave him desolate. He saw that the professor was just beginning to wake to a vague uneasiness, and his resolve to befriend her, no matter at what cost to himself, was strengthened.

The next day he came in for the observatory party, which was to be the last gayety of the visitors, who were going on the early train of the morning following. Lawson[Pg 203] had arranged the expedition, and had ordered the big drag from the stables for the ride up the mountain in the moonlight just beginning to tinge the highest peaks. A whispered word placed Elizabeth Martin on the driver's seat beside him; Montague was quick to seize the opportunity of seating himself by Frances' side, and was thankful for the chance. Frances, herself, was wrapt in the beautiful moonlit world through which they rode. Her dreamy eyes saw the rolling hills and the distant lights bespeaking home; her fine listening heard the song of the night winds in the oaks, as they wound up the mountain side, and the music of the rustling leaves under wheel and hoof-beats. As the road mounted higher she turned to watch the lights in the valley, the clustering sparkle of them in the town, and, above the crests of the Ragged Mountains, the moon, swinging over all and flooding the world with mystic light.

On the mountain crest the world seemed strangely hushed. The observatory gleamed ghostly in the shadowings of the oaks; the[Pg 204] red light shining from the window of the work-room and the young man it shone on inside were a human touch distinctly needed. His welcome, the glowing stove in the room, the bright lamp-light shining on book-shelves and easy chairs and tables, were a cheer for which the chilled visitors were grateful.

"You had better keep your wraps on," he cautioned them, as the women began to unfasten furs and coats, "I think it is a little colder in the observatory than outside."

An icy blast through the door he opened confirmed him. The metallic sides of the great telescope gleamed in the cold white light as they entered. Frances waited as her visitors mounted the frail-looking stairs and peered through the great instrument at the moon they had seen rising over the mountain, so small, so far away, now, through this medium, swinging in space a great globe of light.

She herself was never tired of the marvel, nor of the long look through the huge telescope at the circling rim of the luminary,[Pg 205] broken with deep craters and wrapped in luminous mists.

The student, seeing her enthusiasm, dropped his alphabetic talk, and began telling of some juxtaposition of the stars they were watching.

"Would you care to see it?" he asked, as he commenced to swing the top of the great dome about and the telescope with it.

Frances, deeply interested, scarcely knew when they were gone or how long she lingered; for there were other things to be shown eager eyes, writ in such entrancing language on the heavens, that the young man whose duty it was to keep watch of them was glad to show the manner of their writing.

When, half frozen, they hurried back to the working-room, they found a comfortable group waiting them. Mary Rowan and Edward Montague and one other man were huddled together about the stove. Further[Pg 206] away, apart, by one of the tables were Elizabeth Martin and Lawson. The lamp-light shone full on her face. She was looking up at him. It might have been coquetry that brought the expression Frances saw as she opened the door, but at least it was in response to something of language or look in the man who leaned over her. So much Frances told herself instantly. The thought sent a sickening feeling from head to foot. She reeled slightly; Montague, watching her, sprang to her assistance.

"How cold you are! You can hardly walk! Sit here!" as he pulled forward an easy chair. "Take off your wraps as soon as you are warm," he cautioned, "or you will not feel them when you go out."

Lawson, hearing the solicitous speech, frowned and turned so as he could see them; but he saw only a supple figure cuddled in the depths of a chair, the face turned from him. He came up to the fire. "It's beastly cold," he declared, "I don't see how you stood it so long."

Frances never lifted her lids. She was[Pg 207] absorbed in warming her icy, trembling fingers. Once and again he strove for a word with her, but she was coldly indifferent. At the side of the drag he took matters in his own hands. "You are going to drive down with me," he declared.

"But there is something I want to say to you; Miss Martin, Miss Frances is going to drive back on the seat with me." He was frightened, and anxious to make his peace; there was something he had just settled with Elizabeth, and she was frightened too.

"Of course," she assented quickly; "Mr. Montague, I am going back with you." She gave Frances no time for remonstrance, as she claimed Montague's help at once and sprang into the drag. The others were already seated. Frances must go as Lawson demanded, perforce. She was angered at the scene she had come upon and angered at being so managed.

The young man beside her found her simply and icily civil, and that the words he must say to her were most difficult to frame; but[Pg 208] well down the mountain-side, the rest talking gayly, he felt he must seize his chance. With his free hand he felt for hers under the buffalo robe, and found it. Frances did not withdraw it, nor was there a thrill of life or love in its touch.

He was manly enough to be quite open as to what he had to say. "I am going to Richmond to-morrow." The fingers quivered slightly; from the lips came no sound.

Montague, behind him, caught the tone and clenched his fists, even while he was answering Elizabeth Martin's raillery.

He left her to find out for herself what she had already divined. When she drove with her guests to the station next morning she found him waiting.

XVI

When Frances drove from the station, for the first time in all her healthy young life she found herself dreading the day which stretched before her. She tied Starlight outside the quadrangle and walked up the corridor slowly. Every window of her house was opened wide. Susan, beturbanned, met her at the door.

"Honey," she said, "don't yuh want to go in yo' room dis damp day an' res' yo'self?"

Frances gave a little shiver at the idea of being shut in her room all the morning. Her expression was answer sufficient.

"Want! Yuh jes' step in hyar one minute." The old woman pointed with [Pg 210]dramatic hand towards the empty shelves, and began a list of all the eatables she could think of.

"We needs 'em fur shuah!" she ended. "Ise gwine begin my Christmas cake termorrer; Ise jes' been waiting to git de place clar, an' I tell yuh fer a fac' I wants dis house all to myself dis one mornin'. Ise tiahed o' dried-up flowers an' empty boxes an'—an'—sich! Honey," she wheedled, "if yuh gits through early, yuh might go visitin'."

Frances was laughing at Susan's earnestness, when she went out again. There was nothing in the day, though the mist dripped from shrub and tree and bespangled the grass and veiled the mountains, to foster heartache. The streets were filled with carriages, mud-splashed and encrusted, the horses red with clay above their fetlocks. The stores were bright with holly and cedar. Before the grocers' shops were coops of turkeys and strings of hams and barrels of oysters. The confectioners' windows were piled high with oranges and dates and nuts and raisins and candies. The dry-goods[Pg 211] windows showed alluring furs and coats and breadths of cloth. Waiting at the curb was a string of carriages, their occupants calling gay greetings from one to another. Frances pulling close into the press felt herself one of the Christmas crowd. A shopper stopped at her wheel for a word or two; the busy clerk, when he at last found time for her order, had a ready jest: there was store after store to be visited. Frances felt the cheer of the blessed commonplaces. She was as bright as any of the crowd. Her cheeks were reddened with the soft damp air, her hair curled rebelliously about her forehead under the brim of her big hat.

It was long past noon when she turned homeward. She went slowly. The crush of carriage and cart, of farm wagons loaded with cedar and holly, and ox-carts piled with cord-wood, demanded careful driving. She was nearly out of the shopping district when she heard her father call her.

"What have you been doing?" The professor flushed with a guilty knowledge of the Greek cameo in his pocket.

"Oh, I have been helping him select some Christmas presents. He's going home, you know, for the holidays. Here he is now. Can't you go out with us?" asked the professor, soon as the young man had greeted Frances.

"I wish you would. Have you time to see my new horse?" he asked, as Frances drove slowly and skilfully along the crowded street.

"No? I have been intending to ride her in when you could see her, but you have had so little time—"

"But I have time now," said the young woman, enthusiastically, as she stopped [Pg 213]before the stables. "Can't we go in and see her?" to her father.

The young man put his mare through her paces up and down the stable aisle. "I want you to ride her some time," he declared, as Frances waxed eloquent over the horse's slender head and liquid eyes and shapely legs.

"Shall I put your saddle on?" questioned Mr. Carver, who stood with the group admiring the animal.

Edward had one fleeting vision of the work awaiting him, then he put it out of his mind. "Certainly," he said, "if you will allow me to reconsider. I will go out with you, and Mr. Carver can send the horse to the house."

"You had better go with her," declared the professor, who was never quite sure of his daughter when it was a question of horses. "Can't you ride Starlight?"

Montague's eyes were questioning Frances' face; he saw the quick look of pleasure, as she cried, "I shall be delighted."

They went up the long street together. As they crossed the high bridge above the railroad, there was to each of the young people a quick unwelcome memory. Frances recalled a young man's debonair manner as he made his adieux that morning, and Edward had a swift remembrance of the still, frosty morning when he stood there, unconscious, and watched the glittering coaches slipping away, Frances in one of them; and he thought of all the tangle since.

Frances had wondered with secret amusement what Susan would say to the guest. The old darkey was the soul of affability. The house was in its regular, quiet order, and was spotless. She waited on the table, brisk good humor in every movement. The boy was out of sight.

Soon as the dinner was over she asked "Marse Robert" to step into the kitchen. "I done discharged dat boy," she announced briefly.

"I got no need o' him nohow, an' Ise tiahed o' his sass, an' Ise tiahed o' seeing so many folks aroun'."

"He wants his money," went on the old darkey, shamefacedly. "He 'low as how he's comin' back dis ebenin'."

Susan named a sum, and the professor handed it to her, and hurried on into the library. He had had no such opportunity for days for a talk with Montague, but he found that young man so inattentive a listener that he was not sorry when Frances pulled aside the portière and called that she was ready and the horse was there.

Frosts and rains had made the roads rough, but here and there by wayside path or sandy stretch, the mare showed her gait, swift and smooth. It was a beautiful world through which they rode, the mists closing about them shutting in the distant peaks and clinging to the bare fields' breast and [Pg 216]condensing in jewelled drops on fence and bush and dried brown grasses; and the exhilaration of movement, the comfort of thoughtful, watchful companionship which roused no hateful mood, cheered the young girl to forgetfulness of all else.

But there was the next day for remembrance, when the rain shut her in, and the storm lashed along the mountains and beat across the quadrangle; and the next, when the clouds held sullen guard over the hill-tops. Three days had gone by, and Lawson had not returned. It was the evening of that third day that, sitting in her old chair before the library fire, while her father was reading absorbedly not far away, Frances heard the bell ring sharply. She did not know that every nerve in her was tense as she heard the voice in the hall when Susan opened the door.

"Mr. Lawson," said Susan, coming into the room; "he walked straight on into the parlor."

Frances kept her face turned away; she felt the hot flush there, as she got to her feet[Pg 217] and pulled her fleecy scarf about her bare neck. There was a strange feeling of suffocation in her throat, but she set her lips firmly and held her head high as she walked across the hall, her gown rustling about her.

What she saw in his face and what she felt in her own heart held her speechless, but to Lawson it looked adorable confusion,—the warm flush and lowered lids, and red, proud mouth.

"Frances!" He strode across to her and would have put his arms about her, but that she shrank back.

His eyes showed quick amusement. He loved her a hundred times better so, with all her changeableness; he was never quite sure of her or of her mood.

"You do not know how I have longed to see you," he whispered. Her eyelids fluttered up, he had one searching look from darkened eyes, and then he knew he must make his peace.

"In Richmond," he began—"but you are not going to stand here?" He stood aside as she went past him, her scarlet skirt swishing against his feet, and he watched her with a delight he would not let her know for worlds. So she was angry!

He followed her and leaned against the mantel. She, too, was standing, as if to intimate that what he had to say were best said quickly.

"In Richmond," he began again, and hastened on, "I didn't see—you don't know what I wished for you,"—he would act as if there were no possible shadow between them,—"I searched the stores and searched. I went to Washington—" Surely this were explanation enough, though he had a swift and guilty remembrance of the one brief day in Washington, of the theatre party and the supper at the Jefferson when he came back to Richmond that night, which Elizabeth Martin had been so quick to arrange at his invitation and to promise not to write of, and then of the german next night. They had trusted to Frances not hearing, and she had not, nor ever did.

He drew from a pocket of the overcoat he still had on, a satin case and laid it on the table, watching Frances with keen delighted eyes. The mouth was drooping a little now, the cheek paling, there was even a suspicion of tears about the lowered lids.

"Are you not going to look?" he asked softly as he touched the spring and threw back the lid.

Frances scarcely turned her head, though the sparkle under the electric light was magnetic. The young man made a step closer to her, put his hand upon her shoulder as if to turn her face toward the table; but Frances shrank back into the chair close by and hid her face against the cushions.

All her anger, her jealousy, were but a part of her own wretched self, and he was innocent, her generous heart accused; she was shamed to the quick.

But Lawson had no key to this. He was genuinely frightened, and quick as the fear was the old ungovernable will to win. He knelt by her, striving to pull her hands from[Pg 220] her face, whispering all the endearing words he could muster.

He cursed his folly and the insanity that had beset him. He knew, why had he ever thought of it lightly, that she was the one thing the world held for him desirable. He was wild with fear. He would try one other way.

"Frances," he pleaded finally, as he got to his feet, "if you do not look at me, speak to me, I shall—I shall know you do not wish to at all," his voice was as firm as he could command it.

It was many minutes later that he began to talk to her of the jewels. They were magnificent. Frances' simplicity was affrighted. It was a part of his composite nature to remember her with passionate devotion while he was outwardly forgetful and to search for the finest gems he could find.

"But you will, and many others," he assured, as he went on ardently to tell her of[Pg 221] all he should do for her, not obtruding his wealth, yet not losing sight of it; but when he was done he was astonished at Frances' answer. She was looking at something in her own heart and striving to show it to him.

"Do you know," she began falteringly, "there is something I must tell you. You must be quite sure—you may think you do, but you must be sure you—you"—the voice sank very low—"you love me!"

"Love you," pleaded Lawson, "there are no words to tell you how I do!" and there were none for the depth and height of the love he felt then as he looked into her wistful eyes.

"But I am afraid I am unreasonable—or—or— Let me tell you," her voice was distinct and decided now. "I cannot stand a half-hearted devotion, a devotion to be shared with—"—"every pretty face" her heart said, but her lips—"with any one. Better nothing at all. Don't offer it to me!" She was speaking wildly, perhaps, remembering some things. "A man's whole love I should demand, pure, sincere, unshared, or nothing.[Pg 222] I—" she faltered, seeing Lawson had grown white to the lips.

Lawson turned away, strode back to her and looked questioningly, sternly, into her eyes. Even in her excitement she knew he was white as his shirt, that his eyes glowed strangely and his hand as he grasped her arm was cold as ice. She felt herself trembling as she leaned against the mantel, awaiting his words breathlessly. As she had appealed from the depths of her being, so she expected the truth from his. Were he given to wavering it were better, it were the only manly thing to do, to tell her even now and free her. She could live through that. The other were impossible.

But he made no answer. She saw his chest heave as a woman's might in anguish, she saw the set of his face, strong, determined, though the pallor lingered. Then he spoke suddenly.

"I am going to speak to him, Frances." He took her hands gently, "I am going to ask him to give you to me."

This, then, was his answer. Her lips trembled. Lawson looked long and searchingly, saying no other word. He bent, kissed her, almost as if in consecration, and walked with quick step across the room.

Frances leaned, shaken with tremulous happiness; she saw the glitter of jewels on the table and smiled happily, she took from its case the hoop of diamonds and ran it on her finger, her eyes too dim to watch its sparkle aright. The others she left untouched. She heard the voices across the hall, and she remembered again, with a shock of sorrow, what this would mean to her father. How could she leave him; how could he let her go? She walked across the room restlessly, she heard a chair pushed[Pg 224] back—Lawson's footstep. A sudden shyness possessed her.

Down at the end of the room was another door, opening on the hall behind the stairway, she closed it softly, and stood there hidden as Lawson's quick step rang across the hall; then she slipped into the dining-room, and pulled aside the portière.

Her father's head was sunken on the table, his arm flung above it. She ran up to him. "Father," she pleaded as she bent over him.

He pushed back his chair and faced her. "Did you know," he demanded, "did you know Lawson was a divorced man?"

XVII

"Divorced!" She felt herself reeling, hands outstretched before her, feeling for something tangible. "Divorced!"

"Then—why—" Frances put her hands up to her throat. Her father swept his arm about her and half lifted her into the dining-room and into the kitchen beyond. They would have no scene which that rascal there could look upon—the professor never varied his term again—say no wild words he could hear. The kitchen was deserted, Susan abed. The father put his daughter down in the darkey's old flag chair beside the stove where the fire yet gleamed.

"Yes, he told me," grimly, "he asked me—he said he had your consent, Frances."

She felt for his hand on her shoulder and clasped it, she knew he would do anything he felt would make for her happiness.

"I had not thought much; I had not even—I had thought—" he blundered, daring no word of what he had borne dimly in mind. "How blind I have been! I should have known!"

There was dead silence between them, only the crackling of the dying fire in the stove. The dark was insupportable. The professor felt for the electric bulb and flashed up the light; it gave him courage.

"When he first spoke, I was dumbfounded. I asked him if"—he came back to his daughter's side. "He told me"— Again[Pg 227] the silence. "Then he began to speak of settlements, settlements! He hesitated along time, and then he said, 'You know, I suppose, I am a divorced man!' I felt—" He clenched his hands, the veins stood out in his forehead. No need to put the emotion into words.

"I shall!" She walked past him, drew a glass of water from the spigot above the kitchen sink and drank it.

"I must!" she said more gently, "and, father, you must trust me. No!" as he made some motion to follow her, "I shall need no help!" proudly.

She went in by the door through which she had left, went softly, and Lawson did not hear her. He stood before the fire waiting, all his soul burned and scorched with the agony he had felt when first he faced what, spite of his brave words and courage,[Pg 228] would ever be to his inmost self a stigma—waiting!

For one instant all her heart cried out for him, as she saw the attitude, the droop of his face, unlike the bravado she had sometimes thought too gay. Then she went across to him.

He had not dared to turn. That first look, he knew, would tell him all. He had not dared. She stood near. "Mr. Lawson." Ah, that tone told the tale! He held himself upright and turned to look at her calmly.

"My father has just told me," she began; then, one look into his eyes at the suffering she saw there, "Why, oh why did you do it?" she cried, as she flung herself into a chair.

Lawson never touched her, never spoke, though she was sobbing bitterly; but when the sobs quieted, "Do what?" he asked coldly.

"I knew every paper reeked with it five years ago—that I could not pick up a sheet without seeing the shameful words. Every man I met home or abroad showed his knowledge of it. It's been branded on every hour of my life since that cursed day."

"Is it a pleasant tale to tell? No!" with slow bitterness, "I should not have told. Then you would have married me, and I—oh God!"

"You speak as— You! You would have been my legal, loved, idolized wife. Listen, for you shall know! My God, it's hard enough! I was a fool, young! I had to send for my father to sign my license, and he, he was taken in too. She was beautiful. Her family, her position— Well, all she[Pg 230] wanted was money, and she got it. I paid her enough for my freedom, God knows. She fooled us both."

"You loved her, and you have forgotten her! How do I know," blazed Frances, "that you might not forget me?"

"Frances, you cannot dream, I cannot tell you. She—she wanted only a man to shield herself behind"—the girl he spoke to could not know what he meant, and he could not dare to make her understand, even to excuse himself—"and the money for jewels and clothes and fine living and show." He could[Pg 231] not tell her of the life that woman led, which might be fast and might be worse. "I'm no saint, but I could not stand it. She took scant time to show me what she thought. Once—once—

"I tell you with truth I thought at first that you knew it. I thought every one, wherever I should go, would know. It was a spicy enough scandal for the paper's headlines; I thought it blazoned everywhere, even if it were five years ago."

"As to you knowing, Frances," he said gently, "I knew you did not. I tried to tell you once, and then, the opportunity gone, let myself stray in this fool's paradise." It was paradise to him, now the gates were closed. "I feared your crude views; you will never know the temptation I fought to be silent."

She started to speak, but he raised his hand deprecatingly. "Leave me no bitterer words to remember," he begged. "I shall say good-by!" He spoke with steady dignity.

She held out one hand unsteadily. He took both, and, looking down, they saw the sparkle of his ring on her finger. Without a word she slipped it off and gave it to him. He thrust it into his pocket.

"Good-by!" he said once more. "I shall not say I will not see you again. I am not given to heroics. I," he spoke bitterly, "am commonplace, quite. It is likely I shall stay here as if nothing had happened, but this is good-by!" He raised her hand, kissed it where his ring had been, and was gone.

XVIII

It was five years since he had had any word from her, that woman who bore his name out there in the West, and whom he remembered with fierce shame, or put away from his thoughts with cold bitterness.

He sat all night in the chair in which he flung himself when he came back from the professor's house to his room. The fire died in his grate, he did not heed it; he was cold as ice, he did not know it. The stars paled and faded as he sat there. He was making no plan of life, raking no old memories; he was stunned, dazed.

The negro whose duty it was to kindle his fire, hurrying in at his unlocked door, found him there asleep, his face white and ghastly under the glare of the full light. The coal scuttle the boy held fell with a clatter to the floor. Lawson stirred and opened his eyes.

"I'se late, monstrous late dis mornin'," he blurted, still scared at Lawson's look. "I'll mek yo' fiah in no time!" He knelt before the grate and began cleaning it out with trembling hands.

Lawson still sat, the light shining full on him, his evening clothes, the wilted rose in his button-hole, his heavy coat enwrapping him.

"Pos'man done been long," said the darkey as he slapped on the blower and squatted on his heels to wait the fire's catching, "lef' yuh a lettah." He pointed to a white envelope just under Lawson's fingers. The postman had given it a shove through the slit in the door-panel made for such uses, and it had slidden almost to Lawson's fingers.

He took it listlessly, turned it over, and dropped it as if it had scorched him. Then he picked it up again, looked at it uncertainly; as he read it, all the ghastliness fled from his face.

He sprang to his feet, searched for his suit-case and wrenched open his closet door. He thrust some few clothes in the case.

"John," he commanded, "let that fire go out, lock up, and keep everything straight! Straight, now, you hear!" He felt for a bill and flung it to him.

John's fear fled at the sight of the money. "Dat I will, Marse Lawson, dat I will. I'll tend to ever'ting. Is yuh gwine erway fur Christmas?"

Lawson was locking his suit-case; he stopped and looked at the negro a moment, strangely. "Yes," he said, slowly, "yes, I'm going away for Christmas."

XIX

There were many other locked doors on the corridors and on East Range and West Range. The quadrangle looked deserted. Edward Montague had gone home. The friendly women in the other houses about the campus were too busied in household doings to have time for visiting. Frances was left to herself and to her house.

The Christmas-tide had always been a joyful holiday for her father and for herself, a time of genuine merry-making and of real rest, when Susan's cooking provided all good things, and the professor allowed himself the luxury of lighter reading, and the two of them were free to come and go as they chose. Frances was brave enough and proud enough to leave no part of any preparation neglected; but her close-shut lips and dark-circled eyes and white cheeks smote her father as nothing else could have done.

After a few brief words that bitter night there was nothing more he could say to her, and to watch her silent fight was agony.

Christmas day dragged miserably. The professor, watching his daughter furtively, felt he could bear it no longer. He laid down the book Edward Montague had sent him as a holiday gift and which he had been making some pretence of reading. "Frances," he said suddenly, "how would you like to go to Washington?"

"I have been wanting to go for a long time," her father went on hurriedly. "There are some books in the Congressional library I want, and I can get them nowhere else, some manuscripts, too. I never seem to find the opportunity to go. Suppose"—with boyish impatience, now that the topic was once broached—"suppose we go to-morrow?"

There were tears in Frances' eyes she did not wish her father to see. She got up and went to the back of his chair and slipped[Pg 238] her arms about his neck, and by and by she laid her cheek on his thick black hair where the gray showed in the waves. Neither spoke.

Then the professor cleared his throat. "Suppose you run up and see about my things and yours; we can take an early train and have part of to-morrow there."

He had much to say of rare books on the journey next day, but when he came back and met his friends and talked of his holiday, it was of picture galleries and concerts and fine new buildings he spoke. The listener would have guessed few hours with rare tomes, and would have guessed correctly. The professor had spent one day in the library he had been longing to visit for two years, and that he spent there because Frances declared she would go nowhere else.

When Edward Montague came from his home visit and brought an offering of a fine old ham from his father, over which Susan gloated in the kitchen, and a box of delicious cake from his mother, and another of geraniums and violets from the cherished plants[Pg 239] in her flower-pit, the professor had so much to say that the young man, lost in the brilliant flow of criticism and description, had no time to notice Frances' quiet, and thought her unwonted pallor no more than the result of the dissipation her father so gayly talked of. Montague found himself in his old position in the household. There was something in Frances he could not understand, but her manner was most kind. There was a new friendliness, too, in her intercourse with others. Her simple content no longer made a shield about her; instead, the careless happiness gone, the fight with sorrow bred no selfishness in her generous nature, but brought a thoughtfulness for others, a gratitude for the human touch and the little unnamable kindnesses that link friendly folk to their kind. She found, too, a pleasure she had not dreamed in the simple neighborliness of other households.

Lawson, back at the University, was an alien, who, failing to find his place amongst them, was again one of the student world. But he was one of the students of whom the[Pg 240] professors were beginning to talk. He resigned from the eleven, doing no practice work now, and settled to grim, hard study that in a month showed good results and promised the brilliancy the Faculty had half suspected and half despaired of. The men who found the way to his room expecting something of the old cheer, found the way out again, and kept it. There was nothing in the reticent, haughty fellow, who had cut athletics and cut the women, too, and settled down to a steady grind, to attract them.

His room lay up the corridor; he changed his dining-hall, there was no duty to take him down the quadrangle, and he kept to his own way.

He avoided Frances, but he saw her oftener than she knew. When he saw what he read rightly as the heart-ache that showed upon her face, the baser part of him cried out with a great temptation. When he saw, later on, the flicker of color in her cheek, the spring in her walk, he thanked God that he had not yielded to that cry. He had never spoken more than a word of greeting. He[Pg 241] had met her father somewhere on the grounds, and, though he had doffed his cap readily, his bow was as cold as the professor's was.

But when he saw Frances going about with something of her old cheerful air he ceased to avoid her. It was not necessary, he told himself, with bitter self-disdain. And when he glimpsed her one day walking in from town through the gates and along the way they had come in the autumn days, he walked straight on, bowed, and passed her. He saw her startled eyes, for she had been looking down and walking slowly, and despite his pride he turned and watched, half longing he might walk by her side along the ribbony path under the arching trees. He knew, with sudden swift memory, that so the skies had looked, primrose on the horizon and in the west clear green and far above the blue, and so the bare branches had rocked against the sky as they walked home together. But Frances' footsteps were quickened. So! he would go his way. And Frances, hurrying faster and faster, fleeing[Pg 242] the very memories he was recalling, and yet carrying them with her, felt her hard-won control gone at a breath. As one who strives and strives, and believes he has at last attained, faces, at some unthought-of trifle, failure,—it is not always failure; it is often fear which shakes him, and which, when it is conquered, leaves the bulwark higher and firmer.

But Frances ran past Susan at the door and up the stair. Her heavy furs were stifling her; she flung them off. What should she do? she was asking herself wildly. Own herself defeated, say to herself there was a voice in her heart stronger than all else? She threw herself face downwards on her bed, and shook with her sobbing; and though her cries were stifled, Susan, in the hall where she had stolen, startled, scared at what she had seen in Frances' face, Susan heard.

Susan went softly back down the stairway. "Lord," she moaned as she wrung her skinny hands, "Lord, what we gwine do now? Dyar's Marse Robert away, an' a good[Pg 243] thing too; dyar's no mother, nuthin' but me, Lord, what is I gwine do?"

"Honey," she declared briskly as she opened the door, "Ise gwine mek yo' fiah, it's gittin' col', fer shuah!" She fussed about the hearth, clattering tongs and shovel, and though there were no sobs from the bed, there was no word. Susan was fairly beside herself. She swept the hearth, the fire was aglow. She walked slowly to the footboard and folded her thin arms on it and looked down at the face beneath her. The eyes were closed, the lids red with weeping, the lashes wet, and the mouth trembling pitifully. Susan looked long and searchingly. There was suffering she saw there, suffering that she knew the hall-mark of, but there was not the dumb white look of heartbreak. Frances had been nearer that a month ago.

The old woman drew a long breath of relief. She pulled Frances' own low chair to the bedside and sat down in it.

"Honey," she said, "yuh mustn't do so, 'twill brek Marse Robert's heart." But her only answer was a fresh sobbing. "I don't min' seein' yuh cry, no; 'twill do yuh good, but folks dat don't cry much, cries hard; an' when yuh's done, yuh mus' stay done!

"'Tain't meant," she went on, "fer young folks to go wid long faces, no; not till dey knows what sorrow is."

"Sorrow, real downright sorrow; does yuh know what't is, honey? No! an' I hopes to Gawd yuh nebber will. 'Tis to see de chile on yo' lap a-dyin', a-dyin' day by day, an' yuh sittin' dyar, an' knowin' dat all yuh can do is to watch de life flutterin', 'til by an' by it's gone! an' den to know dat nobody cares but yuh; 'tis to see de man yuh done married to wo'thless, lazy; to see yo' chillun hungry, an' to feel yo' bones achin' as yuh wuks an' wuks to buy 'em vittils, an' den fer dat man what ought ter be wukkin, too, to tek dat money an' spen' it, maybe on some fool 'oman; to see him die jis' as he libed, no bettah, no wus; to see yo' chile[Pg 245] yuh's raised go off an' sen' no word back." The old woman was rocking to and fro. She was telling the tale of sorrows which wrung her heart when she lived them and wrung it now to recall; and she was doing it purposely, with keen watchful glance, to rouse that other sorrower to thoughts beyond herself.

She could see nothing gained. She sobered herself and looked down on the knotted hands in her lap. She made up her mind.

"Miss Frances," she said, so suddenly and so decidedly that the girl there on the bed started and opened her eyes, "Miss Frances, is yuh moanin' fer yo'self or is yuh moanin' fur somebody else? If yuh's moanin' fur yo'sef, hab it out an' be done wid it!" There was a touch of asperity in Susan's voice; it had hurt her that Frances seemed so untouched.

"But if yuh's moanin' fur some man, he ain't wuth it, dat he ain't!" looking straight into Frances' startled eyes; "dyar ain't no man in dis worl' wuth breakin' yo' heart about."

"I guess Ise got sense ernuff to know dat! but if yuh's a-pinin 'cause yuh's feard yuh hurt someone else, 'tain't wuth nary tear. Dyar ain't a man a-libin', spite o' all his swearin' an' tearin' aroun', dat's gwine to moan all his days, as he's eberlastin' 'clarin' he's gwine to do, ober any 'oman; an' no 'oman ain't got no bizness to, neider."

"You must think, Susan, I— I am not so conceited as to think anybody will go 'moanin'' for me," angrily.

"There's father," declared Frances with sudden energy, "he never—you know he never loved any one but my mother," she said the last words very tenderly.

"He's had his books," sagely, "an' he's had his chile, an' he's had me to look after de house.

"'Long when I was a gal," went on the old darkey, as if in pure reminiscence, "an 'oman if she didn't hab 'er fambly to look after, an' was too ole to go cavortin' 'roun',[Pg 247] didn't hab nuthin' to do but sit erroun' an' stay in de pa's house or de brother's an' be tookin' cyar of; an' dey'd be wishin' all de time dey'd took dis one or dat one or any one, so's not to come to dis. But laws-a-me! if yuh don't git married nowadays, dyar's a plenty to be a-doin'! Dyar's Miss Robin— Honey, does yuh ebber specs to be married?"

She saw the indignant flash of Frances' eyes, and chuckled inwardly. She wouldn't be crying there long at that rate. The tears were gone now, and soon the marks of them would be.

"Does yuh think yuh'd like to git married?" protested the old woman remorselessly, "'cause, if yuh do 'tis time yuh was lookin' aroun'!"

"Dyar, ef dat don't fotch her," declared Susan to herself, "nuttin' will!" But it did.

Frances sat upright. She had a wholesome respect for matrimony, and the speech had told. "What do you mean?"

"Jes' what I says!" calmly. "Dyar's two[Pg 248] or three young men Ise got my eye on; some o' dem is mighty nice!"

Susan knew, perfectly well, the only matrimonial danger she had ever feared for her darling had passed, but she shouldn't pine for that one, not as long as the old darkey had breath in her body.

"I tell yuh, Miss Frances," she said, "I suttenly is sorry fur young gals; dey goes erlong so bright an' so easy, eberything their way, an' when dey runs up all a-sudden on a big wall dat's got 'trouble' writ all ercross it, dey don't know how to get erroun' it nohow. Den, too, it suttenly does seem to me dey has some mighty hard questions to settle when dey know a mighty little, a mighty little."

Frances slipped to the side of the bed and put her hand lovingly on the old darkey's knee.

"Susan," she said, with a look that told the old darkey how thoroughly understood she was, "you have wasted enough time on me."

"But I sha'n't forget it, nor all the other things—all the other things, you know, since I was so high!" spreading out her hands in a line with the height of the bed.

Frances got to her feet briskly, "Bring me some hot water, Susan," she said in her everyday cheerful manner, "and I know you are dying to get to the kitchen."

Susan, as she told her troubles for another's healing, thought of them as past and gone. There was a fresh sorrow at her door. She asked for an afternoon's holiday, got it, and went away. She came back, ashy and shaken.

"Marse Robert," she told him, soon as he and Frances came in the hall door, "Ise gwine leab yuh."

"Ise gwine leab yuh!" The old woman steadied herself against the frame of the library door. "Bill—he's come back!"

"Out there!" exclaimed Frances, in dismay, and then she asked practically. "What's the matter with him?"

"De Lawd only knows! He's jes' all crippled up, an' his— Lawd! Lawd!" The old woman broke into loud sobbing.

"Now, Susan!" comforted Frances, "don't worry; of course you want to go, and you shall."

"I'm glad of that!" said the professor. He had little sympathy with the prodigal who only came back to be a care.

"I'll carry you both out to-morrow," declared Frances, "but don't you think you ought to go and warm the place up and get everything comfortable?"

"He ain't so bad as he was," said Susan meekly, "he been in de horsepittle a month, he said."

"Marse Robert, he said—" She stopped, knowing the flimsiness of Bill's excuses,[Pg 252] "He's de onliest chile Ise got," she added sullenly.

"All right! all right." The professor took off his hat and coat and hung them up carefully.

"There, father!" Frances laughed as she slipped her hand through his arm, "you haven't a word to say!"

The professor was cornered. "That's so!" he acknowledged, as he looked proudly at Frances' bright cheeks and eyes—not so careless as he had seen their glances, but with a sweeter thoughtfulness looking out of their dark, gray depths.

Frances looked back over her shoulder and laughed. She had already begun to say, "Susan, you must take sheets and blankets—"

"Miss Frances, if yuh'll jes' go into town an' buy me some things, Ise got plenty o' money, Marse Robert so good to me, an' he pays me my wages steady; Ise jis' been savin' 'em up. Here's ten dollars now." She felt in the folds of her turban and brought out the bill.

Frances' hands were full for many days; she had to take the old woman and Bill out to the cabin, to help straighten it, and air it, and stock it with provisions, to go out day by day at first, and then whenever she could; and to straighten out household affairs with Roxie at the helm.

"One pet at a time, Susan, is enough," teased Frances with a glance through the opened cabin door at Bill warming his "rhumatiz" limbs before a glowing fire and looking the picture of lazy comfort.

Susan turned away discomfited, but only for an instant. "Hi-yi!" she cried, "who's dat comin' down de lane? 'Fore de Lawd if 'tain't Marse Edward. I 'clar'," she went on, watching Frances' reddening cheek with satisfaction, "he suttinly has been good to us. We's been hyar nigh 'pon fo' weeks, an' ebery now an' den— Mornin', Marse Edward."

Frances walked quickly down the narrow pathway to where Starlight was fastened to the fence.

"Wait!" called young Montague, who had seen the manœuvre. "I'm going into town for my mail!" he declared, soon as he flung himself from the horse; "don't you want to[Pg 255] ride Lady? Here, Susan, I shot this, this morning; you can make Bill his rabbit stew now!"

"How is he? You will wait a moment?" he hurried into the cabin and out again. The valley below lay bathed in misty sunshine, the green of the grass by the stream and the red tips of the branches on bordering willow and shrub showed where the February sun shone longest and strongest. To young Montague, valley and hazy mountain peaks and the hillside cabin were a fair winter's scene, and the girl waiting there by the gray weather-worn fence was the heart of it.

"I will be ready in a moment," he declared, as with deft fingers he unbuckled the saddle-girth from his horse.

"Is there anything else Bill would like?" he questioned, as he fastened Starlight's saddle on his own horse.

"Bill, he did say," the old woman answered hesitatingly, "as how he was honing for a 'possum. Dey ain't good much now."

He held his hand and tossed her into the saddle. "Good-by!" Frances called. "I'll be out again soon. Good-by!"

The old darkey stood watching them. "Lawd, if eber two folks was made fer one 'nother," she said to herself, "dyar dey is; Miss Frances she's jis' naturally born to rule some man in dat sassy, sweet way she got, an' Marse Edward he look lak he suttinly would lak to be dat man; but Miss Frances," the old darkey shook her head, "I don't know 'bout her, dat I don't."

Miss Frances was putting Lady through her paces, despite red clay and mire and shallow pools where the water yet stood. Heavy black clouds were shouldering above the mountain peaks; the wind was from the east and stung sharply against their faces.

"Oh, not to-day." Montague was seeing nothing of brown sodden fields or long stretch of red road; he was wondering, wondering if he dared translate to speech the wild beatings of his heart.

But the swift ride and Frances' gay speeches gave him little chance; the cloud, forming long out of sight and coming up with ominous swiftness, made fast riding imperative; the red clay splashed them from head to foot; the wind, strong and damp and chill, whipped the loosened tendrils of Frances' hair about her face and billowed her short riding-skirt. Before they reached town the first drops were falling.

"Then you'd better go that way; I'll take this road." Frances bent above the saddle; the rain was lashing her face.

When Montague reached the University the rain had become a steady downpour. Frances had to leave him to entertain [Pg 258]himself while she straightened the household affairs, which Roxie had tangled in her absence. The professor, coming in, was delighted to find him in the library.

"I declare," he said, "I was just wishing you were here. There are some things I want to ask you about, and I have a leisure afternoon. We can go down town after dinner."

"In this storm?" protested Frances, who had just come in through the dining-room door.

Truth was, the professor was intent on investing money in a new stock company forming in town for putting up an ice plant; and as he had been bitten once or twice, and as he had a good opinion of Montague's shrewd business judgment and enjoyed also the companionship with him, he had been hoping for some such chance. They were off soon as the meal was over. From office to bank, from investor to stock floater they went. Once in town the weather did not[Pg 259] matter; but coming back on the long walk from the cars across the grounds, the storm struck them squarely, lashed and drenched them. At his door the professor drew a long breath. "Pretty severe," he declared. "Edward, you'd better stay in to-night. Telephone to the stables about your horse, and stay. We'll take care of you gladly enough."

The wind and rain lashing along the corridor and across the quadrangle argued with him.

"I scarcely know," said Montague slowly, as they thankfully closed the door behind them.

Frances, coming down the stairway, heard. There was a line of anxiety on her forehead. "I have been thinking of Susan," she began, as she reached the last stair.

"Just look at us! Edward, I'd offer you a suit, only—" The older man measured the younger's height with a laughing glance.

"No matter," Montague assured him, "and as for Susan," to Frances, "you need not be uneasy. The cabin looked comfortable enough to-day, and it has weathered many storms."

Frances' real fear was of the stream at the foot of the hill that must be a raging torrent now, of the narrow bridge, and the tale her father had told her that moonlit night as she drove across.

"This is one of the most dangerous places in the country," he had said; "Mason was drowned here; he rode into town one day, and a heavy storm came up. When he rode back at dusk he saw the water out and ventured on. He was swept away. Miss Marion too; she would have gotten over safely, but she mistook the bridge;" and Frances, shivering at his side, had begged him to hush. Now she seemed to hear it over and over again, through the howling of the wind and the lashing of the rain.

Edward, looking into her eyes, dark and[Pg 261] grave and troubled as they were, lost his head. "Not if you say so," he began unsteadily. Frances, startled at his tone, and the sudden flashing light of his blue eyes, shrank back.

"Come into the fire, man; don't stay out there in the cold, wet as you are." The professor's knees were already smoking before the hot coals.

He had lost his opportunity; but slow to decide and swift to act, once the decision was made, he resolved to find it once more—to make it if necessary. He made it. In the evening Frances pushed back her chair. "I must go and see Roxie about breakfast," she said reluctantly. The group about the fireside, the fire, the bright lights, while the storm beat without, were very attractive.

Edward rose too. "I wanted to ask you," he began as he walked across the room and held aside the portière, letting it fall behind them, and closing the door likewise, "I wanted to ask you," as if it were an [Pg 262]everyday matter at first, but then his tone suddenly changed, "to marry me!"

A ripple of laughter, half hysterical, broke from Frances' lips. She had expected a question of his domestic affairs. It was, but not of the kind she thought. She steadied herself against the dining-table. "I thought you wanted—"

The crucial winter days had taught Frances a bitter humility and distrust of herself. Her lip trembled. "I am not worth giving."

"You will trust me to decide," coming a step nearer, a light of hope in his face, and then, seeing that her own nervous fear was greater than his, he took his reticence in both hands.

"I love you," he said very low, for remembrance of that other who might be auditor. "You know it!" She shook her head. "You should! I think I have loved you from that moment when I held you." Unconscious of the gesture, he held out his arms and looked down upon his breast. Frances, remembering how she had been sheltered, saved there,[Pg 263] felt the hot tears stinging under her drooping lids.

"Don't think of me," she pleaded, none the less wildly for her whispering, "don't think of it. I—I will be—"

He came closer to her, leaned over, his eyes searching her face. "Because I shall always love you, always, and I'll never give you up either. Never! I shall always hope, strive for you, unless," he added brokenly, "the day comes when you marry some other man. But," he pleaded, "you will not, you will not." He slipped his hand over hers where it rested on the table, "And I love you, will love you always!" He waited a second in silence, straightened himself, and, though he was deathly white, smiled at her. Then he turned on his heel and went softly out of the room.

Before Frances could waken Roxie, asleep before the kitchen fire, she heard the outer door slam. She ran out into the hall. Her[Pg 264] father stood there, anxious perplexity in his face.

"He didn't give me a chance"—the professor was thoroughly provoked—"just said he was going! Listen!" as door and window rattled in a great gust and they could hear the rain lashing across the quadrangle and beating on corridor and house-top.

Frances could find no word to say of the horror and fear which possessed her, remembering all the way he would go through the storm homewards, the desolate road and wind-whipped, bleak fields and woods, and, down there between the hills, the narrow valley, torrent-riven.

XXI

At the breakfast the professor was irritably anxious. "I wish I knew of some way of getting at Montague this morning; he ought to have a telephone put in!"

The cup Frances held clattered in her trembling hands. Sleep! She remembered the big fire, the bright light she had kept all the night; she remembered how she had walked her room, had undressed, gone to bed, gotten up, dressed again, and sat by the fire shaking like the trees outside before the heavy blasts; remembered how she had resented the blue of the sky, and the rose of the sunrise flushing the east, while far off the fringe of heavy clouds fled away, when she flung open the shutters to the morning;[Pg 266] and how every moment since she had held herself tense, listening, straining, for the tragedy she felt the night held.

"That old woman might attend to the 'phone," said her father, going back to his grievance. Montague had said long ago that with his all morning and all afternoon absences from the house while his work took him from field to vineyard, from vineyard to mountain-top, a telephone was useless.

"I think I'll call up Frazier," he said at last, as he pushed back his chair, "he's near and might know."

"Father, you must not; he would never understand his trying to reach home last night."

Uneasy! Frances worked that morning as she had never done in her life, swept, dusted, cleaned from one room to another. Susan would not have allowed the labor for an[Pg 267] hour; Roxie was glad enough to get it done for her. Frances worked, piling up the moments, worked, and yet heard every footstep in the corridor outside; at each fresh footfall her heart beat to suffocation, then as they died away she drew long breaths and turned to her tasks. At last, beyond the noon, the telephone rang. Frances had the receiver at her ear, before the ringing stopped.

"Well!" and over the long distance wire faintly was coming, "that old woman, Susan, sent a boy over here just now, and said to 'phone you to come out there right away and bring the doctor!"

"Bill is worse," she told herself, as with trembling hands she rang up first the stables, and then the doctor.

"Montague is drowned!" he cried. "My God!" for Frances had gone down in a heap on the hall floor, the receiver swinging from side to side where she wrenched it as she fell. "Susan! Roxie! bring me some water!"

"No!" Frances was struggling upright, "let me go, father! I don't want anything!" to Roxie; "go on!" she waved her back to the kitchen impatiently. "How did you hear?" she whispered as the scared darkey shut the door behind her.

"His horse was found this morning, dripping, spent, riderless." The professor was white as his daughter. "I—I must telegraph his father!"

The professor cut her short with a motion of his hand. "If he were, don't you suppose[Pg 269] we'd know! And he left my house!" he said bitterly.

It was not of others' words she was thinking; it was what her own heart was telling her in great heavy throbs. "You have killed him! You killed him!"

"Frances!" Something in her face, her heavy drooping as she started up the stair frightened her father, "What are you going to do?"

"I'm sure Susan wants me, or she would never have given such a message. If there is anything I can do for her I ought to do it!" Her broken sentences were spoken from the stair as she went up.

When she came down the trap was waiting. Her father went out with her, put her[Pg 270] into the vehicle and tucked the robes about her. The world was flooded with sunshine, the grass down in the folds of the hills was vividly green, the tree-tops, gray and brown, were tossing softly; the professor thrust a bill in his daughter's hand. "Tell the doctor to get whatever he thinks Susan might need."

It seemed a senseless thing, but he did as she pleaded. The afternoon was full of duties for him. He went through them mechanically and before he was done had a sharp message from the doctor, "Come out at once!"

Frances had driven around for the doctor, told him briefly what she feared for Susan, gave her father's message, and then, white and dumb, had no other word to say through their drive. The doctor, glad of an hour's quiet, lounged in his seat, as they made what speed they could through heavy mud and mire and great pools of water; the dull sodden fields and green patches of winter[Pg 271] wheat and far-off hazy mountains claimed scarce a glance, but once or twice he looked curiously at the face of the girl by his side. He had held her, a new-born babe, known every phase of her childhood and girlhood, and it cut him to the heart to see that stricken look. He had his own dread of the cause likewise; for the tragedy the professor told was one which had stirred the town.

Soon as they glimpsed the cabin, they saw Susan's spare figure standing on the step, the door closed behind her, while she strained her anxious eyes for help.

She hurried to the trap. While the doctor fumbled with his medicine case, Frances sprang out on the other side. She hastened at once to the door; she did not even hear Susan's anxious "Honey, maybe yuh'd bettah not go in dyar!"

"Great God!" cried the doctor as he pushed her roughly aside, for there, on Susan's bed,[Pg 272] with closed eyes and no signs of life showing in his face, lay Edward Montague. The doctor ran his hand under the covers over the man's heart.

"He's in a swoon. Bring me my medicine case! Give me a spoon! Chafe his hands and wrists!" The doctor worked anxiously; there was a faint flicker in the pulse, a slow beating of the heart. "Come away!" he commanded as they went over to the window. "Where did you find him?" asked the doctor.

"Down dyar!" Susan pointed down the valley with shaking fingers, "ebery day o' my life Ise used to comin' out an' lookin' up an' down an' ober to the hills, an' thinkin' 'bout de Bible an' de hills dat gib strength. Dis mornin'—" Frances made an impatient movement, but the doctor quieted her. He knew Susan must tell her story her own way.

"It sho' was a sight! Dis mornin' de meader was jes' as wet, an' de grass was all flat where de watah done run off it, an' de[Pg 273] crows was flyin' an' callin' up in de sky. I kep' goin' to de do' an' lookin' an' lookin', an' by an' by I sees sumpin' down by dat little fringe o' trees, an' I knows, jes' lak dat, dat 'twas a man. I says to Bill—he 's been hobblin' roun' right smart lately—'Bill, yuh come 'long, dyar's a man down dyar.' An' when we got dyar we seed 'twas Marse Edward, an' dat's all."

"Oh, we got him up, eben if he is right sizable." Susan had little to say of her own feat, and of Bill's.

"I pulls off his clothes and gets him into bed wid a hot brick to his feet, an' den I runs out to de road an' de firs' pusson I sees I sends to Mr. Frazier's."

The doctor had been holding the whispered talk near the little window. He had done all he could, and while he waited he made Susan tell the tale, for the sake of the girl who leaned against the cabin side, that stricken look yet in her face.

"Ain't I been libin' in his house all dese years," whispered Susan back indignantly, "an' don't I know he's nebber to be 'sturbed when he's at his work. He's down at de hall now!"

The doctor went back to the bedside. He motioned Susan and bent to his work again.

By and by the inert figure stirred; there was a faint flush of color in the white face; the doctor put a spoon to his lips, again and again. The young man opened his eyes, looked at him without a glimpse of recognition, turned a little on his side, and fell asleep.

A smile twitched the doctor's mouth, but he went on gravely enough. "Is the brick hot?"

"Keep the fire going all you can!" to Bill. Bill before the fire piled log after log with utmost quiet. The doctor pushed a flag chair noiselessly towards Frances; Susan, used to long waiting, drooped by the footboard; the doctor walked to and fro with noiseless footsteps from bed to window. Out there, the narrow valley was flooded with sunshine, the stream running full and red with the clay of the fields it had ravaged; in here lay the victim of the flood. He took out his watch, slipped it back again, looked long out of the little window towards the distant purple peaks, went back to the bedside, looked, leaned over,—turned, his face beaming.

"Perspiration!" he whispered, as he touched the edges of the young man's forehead.

"He's all right, for the present, if he doesn't have pneumonia. My dear child!" for Frances went white to the lips.

The doctor laid his hand on her shoulder gently, "I shall send for your father at once, and when he comes you must go."

"Nothing that we cannot do!" And he listened to no argument. He scarcely allowed the professor to stay long enough to let slip from his lips the joy that brimmed his heart, but with significant look at his daughter sent them homewards at once.

It was dusk then, and they went quietly both with joy in their hearts, and both with memory, likewise. The father, all the deep waters of his life stirred by the despair and the gratitude held so closely together, saw, as in a vision, the love of his life who had driven along this way so often by his side, and sent his whole heart out to the memory of her. His daughter saw first a pleading, earnest face, and then the white unconscious one; listened to earnest words, that pleaded more strongly now the speaker's lips were[Pg 277] closed, remembered all the thoughtfulness and kindliness in which she had read only friendliness, and in which she read now deep, strong love, a love that placed her own happiness above all else. To each their vision, sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet.

XXII

Montague escaped the dreaded pneumonia. He rallied, at first it seemed rapidly. He begged a letter should be written home making light of all exaggerated rumors, and that he should be moved to his own home; but heavy cold and wrenched nerves and bitter memories were poor aids to health in his big empty house, where Susan stood guard over him and Bill kept watch in the kitchen.

The doctor went to see him and the professor. Two weeks went by, and the doctor was first surprised and then discouraged. Driving in from one of his visits he saw the professor on the sidewalk. He drew rein.

The doctor shifted the reins he held carelessly. "So, so," he said lightly, "not so well as I thought he would be by this time; it's dull out there."

The professor was listening, an anxious furrow down his forehead. "I will take him out some magazines."

"Company, I guess. Helen"—Mrs. Randall—"wants to go out. Every time I go I have so many other visits to make I cannot manage it."

"Suppose you do. Beautiful weather," the doctor wandered on aimlessly; "feels like spring."

The professor listened impatiently; he was hurried, and had no time for weather comments.

"There's a honeysuckle in bloom out there!" he pulled a great sprig of it carelessly out of his button-hole, "it's sweet, smell it!" The professor sniffed at it disdainfully and handed it back. He felt it a travesty that two of the busiest men in the neighborhood should be standing on the busiest street of the town, its life surging[Pg 280] about them, talking of spring weather and honeysuckle.

"Give it to Frances!" and then, as if in afterthought, "take her out too!" He had made some curious prescriptions in his practice; "It will cheer him up!" And he was off at once, driving rapidly down the street, chuckling to himself as he looked back at the professor still standing there, honeysuckle in hand.

Take the doctor's wife out, and Frances? Why not? The doctor's wife was anxiously willing; the professor was half angered that Frances was not; only he gave scant heed to her indecision. "We are going this afternoon," he said; "if you have anything you think he would like to eat, fix it up for him," and Frances was forced to hide her reluctance in active preparation.

The professor was worried, too, to notice, once they were there—and the joy of their host was pathetic to see in his white, worn face—how few words Frances had to say of their thankfulness at his recovery. He had been looking after the affairs of the farm on[Pg 281] each visit he made. When he got up to go out to a distant field Susan saw him. She had been talking to Mrs. Randall, who was busied in the storeroom putting away the custards and jellies she had brought.

"Marse Robert," Susan called, soon as she had nearly caught up with his rapid steps half way across the orchard. "Marse Robert, Ise comin' back soon as Marse Edward is well. He is well 'nuff now!" she sniffed, remembering some of his crossness.

The professor stood looking down on the ground. "Susan," he said, when she had finished, "I'll come for you when you are ready. As long as I have a home, there's a place for you; but I tell you now, I will not have Bill hanging around!"

"She!" Susan pointed with dramatic forefinger to the narrow high window of the basement kitchen.

"She's ten years older dan he is if she's a day, but Bill say she can cook to beat de ban'!" The slang slipped glibly from the old woman's tongue.

"What's he going to do?" asked the professor, after a moment's astonished silence.

"First, he 'lowed as how he wanted me to give him de cabin, but, Marse Robert, I suttenly didn't want to, an' while I was projictin' roun' in my min' 'bout it, Marse Edward he want to know if Bill won't come hyar to work. His rhumatiz is most gone. An' den when he heard dey wanted to git married, he jis' laff an' say 't will suit him jis' as well; dey can lib in de out-do' kitchen.

"Marse Edward seemed mightily tickled," went on the old woman, slyly. "Seem lak he got some notions o' his own."

The blow told. The professor flushed, turned as if to go back, but turned fieldward again. Doubtless Mrs. Randall would be there even now. "Go on, Susan, into the house," he commanded.

Susan went into the kitchen. If that young man up there wanted to say anything[Pg 283] and ease his mind, she swore she would give him a chance; maybe he would be more peaceable if she did. She sat down by the kitchen fire quite unmindful of the fact she was spoiling the love-making Bill was clumsily striving at, while he smelled the chicken steaming and the hot rolls baking for the early supper, which Montague had ordered soon as he had caught sight of his guests.

When she heard Mrs. Randall's slow footstep up the stair and hurried up the other way, she found her charm had worked; her patient was peaceable as a lamb.

On Frances' face was a look it warmed the heart of the old woman to see,—the flushed, faint flickerings of the beginnings of a great happiness.

XXIII

Lawson's hard study was bringing its own reward. There were high opinions forming of him on quadrangle and in hall. But he gave no heed to them. He was holding to a grim determination, and the interest he felt growing stronger and stronger in his work was an incentive he had not expected. It was not often his mind went back to idle memories, or forward to visionary hopes; he lived as he swore he would do when he came back to the University, and he kept to his purpose with the self-will he had used in every other pursuit. As the days lengthened and the grass greened on the quadrangle and the maple blossoms drifted on the thick sward, the contest with himself grew harder. He had followed the bent of his humor always, and, with spring-tide abroad, the old desire for wandering came upon him. He had tramped, driven, roamed, lived [Pg 285]out-of-doors; had known a camp life in the Rockies, and the long lazy days by the ocean's swell at Santa Barbara, and the lazy loungings in foreign cities. Now when soft winds brought through his opened window a breath of fresh fields and opening leaf-buds, and the languorous odor of violets and hyacinths, and the hum of bees and the songs of mocking-birds, his room, with its worn floor and ashy hearth and dusty hangings, seemed stifling. The outside world called him.

He pushed his books from him, and his thoughts ran idly into a channel forbidden. He got to his feet and picked up his cap. He would have a long tramp up the sides of Mount Jefferson. As he opened the door the postman, going his afternoon rounds, called to him, "Mail for you," and held up a bunch of cards and papers and a letter.

Lawson glanced at them, stepped back into his room and closed the door. The letter was from his father, in his own handwriting. He wrote seldom. There was little he would say to his son through his secretary; and[Pg 286] what he said in his own style was ill-spelt, and his son was college-bred.

His son tore the letter open, devoured it with quick eyes. "My God! My God!" he half sobbed, as he leaned against the mantel, his face hidden on his arms. But it was not anguish which drew the cry, nor joy; for sorrow he would have set his lips and gone his way; and joy he dared not yet name this feeling which surged in his heart. He was suffocating. He opened his door, looked quickly up and down—he would see no one—almost ran down to the Serpentine walk and so out beyond West Range to the road, mountainward. Now he knew that the sun shone, that flowers were in bloom and birds a-wing, that winds were soft and skies were blue.

He pushed his cap back from his forehead so that the wind might blow across it, and he felt as if bands of torture and bitterness were melting at its touch.

Overhead, the buzzards floated in lazy luxury of flying, the crows called loudly; beyond the football grounds the farmer was[Pg 287] planting the red, fresh-ploughed field in corn; the golf links were green with new growth. He leaned his arms on the fence and watched some distant players, the opening buds of the wayside bushes making a screen about him. Then his gaze strayed to the oaks beyond, their red buds tossing softly. Farther on, the chestnuts showed pale leaves no bigger than a squirrel's ear, and up the mountain-side the forest ran in delicate waves of color, green upon green, and gray and red.

As he walked and breathed the pure air in an ecstasy of appreciation, he saw coming down the path under the red-tinted oaks one who might have been the spring expressed in physical form. Frances, her hands filled with dainty blossomings and leaf-buds, was walking blithely toward him, her face bright as the sky, and the peace that brooded upon it sweet as the sunshine on mountain and field. He could not have moved if he would, and he would not if he could. Hidden by the tangle of cedar and vine and bramble, in the fence corner, he could watch her through half closed eyes whose glance was a caress.[Pg 288] Turning his elbow on the old chestnut rail fence he watched her, scarcely breathing till she was abreast of him. Then he spoke, but only her name.

"I startled you! You must pardon me: you see I have been watching the players." He motioned towards the golf links. "Will you not wait a while," he begged; "I was thinking of you the moment I saw you. It was a dream come true," he added softly, "Thank God our dreams do come true, sometimes!

"There is something I must tell you," he said, after a moment's silence, while he strove to find speech for the thoughts he could not frame to words, but which were choking him for utterance. "You will wait?" for Frances had been too astonished to say anything beyond her murmured greeting, and stood startled, as if for instant flight, the red and white coming and going on her clear cheek.

"Last winter when I came to you," he blundered, and then the anger in her face gave him sudden cool courage, "I was not[Pg 289] free to do so—so you thought, I thought otherwise; you will do me the honor to believe it," coldly; "for fear of some misadventure I told you—"

"I have not forgotten," said Frances gently, as if to save him the pain of putting the thought into speech.

"Now, now—I have not said it yet, scarcely told it myself!—do not let me frighten you—I am free!"

The delicate flowers slipped from Frances' nerveless hands down to the ground and lay there in the path between them.

"Frances, I am free. Do you know what it means? That woman who bore my name is dead;" if he never spoke her name in reverence before he did so now, "she is dead. Did you think I went away for pleasure, Christmas?" he hurried on, almost breathlessly. "She wrote to me. I had not heard from her for five years. My lawyer was told never to mention her name to me. But she wrote that very day, no, the next,"—he put his hand to his head confusedly, he could not tell her all the pain, the bitterness, he had[Pg 290] felt,—"she wrote begging me to come. She was dying, she said. I went; I telegraphed my father to meet me there. She saw us both; she had not been so bad, perhaps, as we thought; it was the devil of show and selfishness and restlessness which possessed her, and I must have seemed to her at the first, long ago, to be a very fool, to be wheedled, to be—I don't think she ever dreamed it was in me to leave her. She had taken her divorce in half-angry, half-amused carelessness; so long as she got what she wanted, what did it matter, and that was wealth! I must tell you this, Frances, once for all, then it shall be dead between us, as she is. The doctor said she would live a week. I came back, knowing this. I saw you! You will never know how I was tempted, but there was a vileness I could not sink to! I could not build dreams of happiness upon the shortness of her life!

"If I had not studied until there was no thought day by day, week by week—work! They think I love it. God! I have been[Pg 291] buried, dead, have been buried, and now am alive!"

He put his hand on hers, clenched before her. "You are thinking how unlike I am to anything you ever dreamed of me. I am! I do not know myself! Think if you can—five years of shame, and now freedom and the world—and you! You are not shocked, Frances, that I am glad?"

There was no answer, except the breath of the wind over the fields, and the rustling in the wayside bushes about them.

"Frances! Look at me!" he put his hand on her shoulder and felt the convulsive sob that shook her. "Sweetheart, my darling," he began, with broken words of love.

"No, no," cried the girl wildly, "you must not speak such words to me! Wait! wait a moment."

By and by she lifted her head, looked long over the fields which lay, the shimmer of[Pg 292] heat pulsing over their greenness, and then she turned, courage and decision in her dark eyes, though the tears still clung to her long lashes.

"You have shown me your heart, and I—I am not the one to look into its secrets. It's spring-tide there," she hastened on with poetic simile—did she not keep to some such fashion she could not speak—"and there are blue skies, and bird songs and flowers—"

Frances drew her breath sobbingly, "'Tis not the time of roses," she said. "It is youth, and life, and ambition—"

"You are not; you are here; you are mine, Frances!" with his old masterful manner.

"It is impossible!" he cried, never willing to own any other victor where he fought.

"You must! It is true!" she put out a shielding hand, "and I think, I know, it is best! I did not know it then, I do not know how I know it now, but sorrow teaches much."

"Sorrow and you, Frances! But you shall never know it again." He owned no defeat; it was his to make her happy.

"Did you think you alone had suffered?" she asked, a little bitterly. "I learned many things in those long days. I learned the meaning of much that had been but empty words. I learned," she went on lower, so low he could scarcely catch the words, "much of myself. We would not be happy, you and I together. No! I listened to you. Listen now! It must be truth!" her sentences were broken. "I am selfish; it may be the fault of one who has known so little divided affection."

"And yours will always be so, on the surface; in your heart you may be true. There is many a woman might trust you so, always; but I must see that I have all a man's heart or none. I told you my weakness once before." Even as she spoke, simply baring truths she had learned, as she said, from sorrow, she was wonder-struck that she could find words for them, deep as she had hidden them always in her heart.

"I would always love you, always! Can you not see," indignantly, "how a man can adore one woman and yet not be blind to all others?"

"No!" with hot energy, "I would not share my love with every pretty face and every new ambition."

"No! By and by when your life would be full and happy, and you would hail each new phase with eagerness, I, if I were by your side, would be growing colder and less attractive in my iciness, and we should be—Oh no!" with a dramatic gesture, "it is better so!"

Again there was a dreamy silence, the winds sighing softly over the fields and singing in the trees.

"You have all your life before you once more," said Frances, after many moments, "youth and wealth and freedom!"

"I!" she smiled softly, "think of me as the unattainable, and so," and she showed how keen her knowledge of the man was, as she said it, and how true her words of knowledge gained through sorrow, "and so you will never forget! Good-by!"

"That other man," he insisted, without a notice of the finality of her speech, "he loves you as you demand?"

"And you love him?" he asked brutally, while he watched her breathlessly, watched and saw, at the sudden question and the thought it brought, the divine light stealing into her eyes; he had seen it before, and for him!

He strode close to her, passionate words of pleading on his lips, and he stepped on the delicate blossoms scattered at her feet.

She looked down at them, and his glance followed hers and then went back to her face; he read her thoughts. So he had crushed with blundering footsteps other blossoms more delicate.

But he, wrestling with the passionate thoughts surging through him, strode up the mountain-side farther and deeper into the solemn woods, away from any man's track, alone, for his fight. He threw himself down on the carpet of last year's leaves, far up on the crest, and lived again her words. He had lost, and lost what he had come most to desire; but back of it, like a strong sweet[Pg 297] song vibrating through him as the evening wind did in the tree-tops, were words she had used and his father had written, and his heart now repeated. They set themselves to one chorus "Free, free, free!" He could feel no bitterness, only a mighty attunement to the vital influences of the spring-tide world and a virile pulsing of might and ambition. He took out his father's letter and read it again. There were sentences in it he could never forget.

"I have blamed myself for much of what looked like your failures." "I should not have put so much wealth in the hands of a boy." "Fortune is fickle; I wished to secure yours while I had the chance, so that you might never know the poverty I had suffered."

He thought of the stalwart old man and how his heart must have been wrung before he could write with such humility.

"I sent you on your way—to ruin, I feared, for many a day." "When at last you pulled up and determined to take up your old studies far from every memory, I hoped much; now I hope everything."

"When you have taken your degree, I need you." "I have claims enough to keep you busy." "I want somebody with brains; I have thought you had them, once or twice." "And remember you are your mother's only son."

XXIV

The professor had the faults of an absent-minded man, and the peculiarities of a reticent one! Once his confidence was gained, there was little he withheld, and he never quite remembered what he had told or not told, and so, sometimes, blurted out a secret unwittingly.

It was with no thought of mischief that he said to Montague, "The fellow's wife is dead!"

"He met me on the quadrangle this morning and told me." The professor did not[Pg 300] add that his haughty manner of doing so had been a most unpleasant and rankling memory all the day; nor did he know that his uneasiness was the cause of his confidence.

"Said that, as I had known the other, he wished me to know this; as if it mattered," testily.

"Since—since Christmas." The professor was hot and cold, and saw with lightning glance his blunder.

But Montague's manner assured him quickly. His instant return to the subject in hand, his quick and voluble speaking on the affairs they had come out to discuss, blinded him. He had been a fool, he told himself, but it made no difference. It did.

They had been sauntering about the farm and out to the edge of the corn-field. Bill at the farther end was replanting. The crows overhead called raucously, the mountain at their side ran sheer to the sky-line with its waves of color, gray, green, and vivid green. The valley far below [Pg 301]shimmered in the heat, and the far-off mountains beyond it lifted slumberous peaks into the veiling blue haze. Montague had felt all its beauty to the full; with his soft hat pulled over his eyes, and his hands thrust in his pockets, he had been loitering happily about showing the professor his spring work.

It had been a season of unnamable happiness to him; joy after joy undreamed, because it was unknown, had blossomed in his heart, like the sweet spring flowers in the circle of the flower-plot, unseen, unthought-of, until they lifted their heads into the sunny atmosphere, and all the world was more beautiful for their coming; hopes and plans were unfolding about his life like the leaves on the old oaks, slowly, sturdily, of beautiful growth, and steady persistence; the sunny atmosphere of love enwrapped him and brought into his life—restrained and chary of giving its best gifts, though steadfast, true, and deep—thoughts beautiful as the butterflies unfolding their wings, and sweet as the apple-blossoms flushing the[Pg 302] orchard behind the great house, which was no longer empty and lonely, but was filled with a visionary presence.

Now its sunshine was blotted out at a word. He shivered a little as they turned back. "Bring the mare around to the front!" he called as they passed the stable. "I think I will ride back with you!" he added to Mr. Holloway.

He left the professor to attend to some affairs in town, and when he got out to the University he found that Frances was lazily asleep. He sent to ask if she would take a ride, and waited with no show of impatience until she came running down the stair, habited and gloved.

"A ride!" she called. "How delightful! If I had had Starlight, I should not have been so lazy, but father was out with you. Has he any new suggestions?"

"Not one!" Montague smiled, and in the darkened room, Frances did not notice how white he was.

Montague opened the door as she spoke. The shadows of the maples stretched long across the quadrangle, and the corridor and houses across the way shimmered in the low and golden sunlight. The vine about the pillar stretched brave new tendrils upward, and proudly waved its glossy leaves.

Frances, with quick sight for each beauty of the outside world and ready speech of field and flower and wayside growth and bloom, kept her own blithe atmosphere about her, as they rode.

Far out where the road climbed high, she drew rein. They were in time for the sunset glory. It flooded the valley below them with mystic light, kindled the skies beyond the hill-tops with scarlet fires, against which the peaks loomed dark, and sent banners of trailing clouds far over the zenith.

With hands clasped upon the pommel, she watched the scene with delighted eyes. Montague pulled his horse close to hers, and leaned over, his hand on Starlight's mane. So, with the golden light of the sun [Pg 304]streaming around her, he could see every line of her face.

What he had to say to her he had determined to say shortly, bravely, with no embroidery of verbiage.

"Frances," he said as he watched her intently, "I heard to-day that Lawson's wife was dead; did you know it?"

Frances straightened in her saddle as if she had been struck. Her eyes, which had been dark and dreamy, flashed. "Yes," she said shortly, "I knew it!"

"It's not a question of daring," he said simply, "but of truth. You remember last winter—" he went on mercilessly.

Frances pulled up her loosened reins. "We had better turn here," she said coldly.

But Montague never moved his hand. "'Turn here'?" He spoke of the way of their love and she read his hidden meaning aright. "Perhaps, but not now. You know, I know that you know, that I value your own happiness beyond my own. I have[Pg 305] thought—but maybe your happiness does not lie with me, Frances?"

"No!" she flashed, "I am sure of nothing, certainly of nothing a man will say or do!"

"It is no time for such words," said Montague; "you know I love you, I could never tell you how much! Day by day I might show you, prove to you—

"I believe," he flushed a little as he spoke, "I could make you happy. But I must give you this opportunity; if there has been any mistake you—you can turn back.

"Only if you wish." He had begun with renunciation; manlike he was ending with pleading. "We have been so happy," he pleaded. He saw the tremble of her lip, "I believe, I believe I could make you happy," he pleaded the old words again.

The reins hung loosened on Starlight's neck, Montague's hand slipped along the horse's mane until it rested on hers.

"Knows so little, knows so little!" rang a[Pg 306] voice in Frances' ears. She stole a glance at him as he waited. She knew, looking through veiled lids, the lithe figure, the strong, earnest face and grave, serious eyes; knew his sunny nature, his strength, his clean, honest love for her. She remembered the agony of the day she thought him dead; she remembered the joy of finding him alive; she remembered the happiness of the days afterward—for they had been happy.

She straightened herself in her saddle, and picked up the reins. There was a demure smile on her red lips, and a flash of amusement in the dark eyes the young man could not see for the drooping lashes.

"Suppose we take the road ahead and ride around the other way home—then," with a careless look along the road behind her, "then we need not turn back."

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	PAGE
CHAPTER I	1
CHAPTER II	18
CHAPTER III	34
CHAPTER IV	50
CHAPTER V	57
CHAPTER VI	71
CHAPTER VII	90
CHAPTER VIII	105
CHAPTER IX	124
CHAPTER X	139
CHAPTER XI	155
CHAPTER XII	167
CHAPTER XIII	173
CHAPTER XIV	183
CHAPTER XV	196
CHAPTER XVI	209
CHAPTER XVII	225
CHAPTER XVIII	233
CHAPTER XIX	236
CHAPTER XX	250
CHAPTER XXI	265
CHAPTER XXII	278
CHAPTER XXIII	284
CHAPTER XXIV	299