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Parson Willoughby, sitting at his study table, was deep in scrutiny of a sheet of paper held at varying distance from his eyes, as if his interest was but a matter of focus; Hannah, his agreeable-looking daughter, standing in the hall and regarding him through the doorway, smiled in a manner to indicate that, whatever was going on, she meant to be found on his side.

“It was in this little drawer,” said he. “I haven’t happened to go there lately. She must have left it to surprise me.”

“Why, yes, of course before she sailed. It seems to be something about the housekeeping—directions, I should say—what we ought to know to keep things on as usual.”

He continued to scan the paper, frowning more and more, until his glasses themselves seemed to recognize the importance of it and fell off, and then Hannah, seeing they were likely to have a long job of it all, father and she and the glasses and the paper, stepped in and sat down by his table, acquiescent, sympathetic, everything she meant to be while she and her father swayed the household and the universe alone.

“You see,” he said, putting the glasses on his nose and beginning to peer again, “she’s left us these suggestions of weekly menus, tentative, probably—oh, yes, tentative! Memoranda of places to buy certain things. Now, this—it’s all alphabetical, but this catches my eye (it’s part way down)—this as to sweetbreads: ‘Wilbur’s fresher than Tuttle’s. Order Tuesdays. Never has them very near end of week. People ordering fish Friday. Might have to hold over sweetbreads till Monday.’ ”

“That’s immaterial,” said he. “I may not prefer them to plainer food; but many do. However— Then here under ‘beef,’ here’s ‘Roast, Saturday. Ensures cold meat for Sunday night supper.’ ”

“That’s easy,” said Hannah. “Though cold meat suppers are frightfully uninteresting unless somebody comes down on you, missionaries or things of that sort. Still, there won’t be any now, I suppose, Mother gone and you—” Here she paused taken aback as she often found herself in these first days at home for lack of the right phrase to cover his having resigned from his parochial charge. “That isn’t all, is it?”

“No,” said he. “Here’s something I don’t fully grasp, down here by ‘sweetbreads’: ‘Soda for kitchen use at druggist’s, not grocer’s. Ask for bicarb.’ ”

“Oh, that’s no mystery,” said Hannah. “Even I know that. It’s soda for biscuits. She likes it better than baking powder. I wonder she leaves out the cream o’ tartar. Go ahead, dear. Give us a harder one.”

And while he went compliantly along the road of his humiliation, she looked at him and thought how beautiful he was. She had become used to hearing that he looked like a clergyman of the olden time, a high dignitary of the church, Roman or Anglican. He was, by birth and conviction, a Protestant, but so sympathetic toward all types of mind that his Catholic friends accepted him in an affectionate though perhaps whimsical fellowship. What could you do, they seemed to ask, with a chap like Willoughby who, from the look of him, might be a belated Christian martyr and, if you knew him, you’d call him “Catholic at heart?” Hannah, sitting there and regarding him with eyes of filial worship, thought what good service his looks had done him in the outward flourishes of his calling—that long pastorate here in Bridgnorth—and now in the dignified seclusion of his retirement. Sufficiently tall, and with every indication of sound health, his strong features, thick white hair, brown eyes with a direct glance, and black eyebrows, made him distinguished among men. He had a naturally serious yet appealing address, rather irritating to him because he was of a reticent nature and, knowing all about the “typical clergyman” cult, hated it wholesomely. His well-born and rigidly conventional wife, who had now gone abroad leaving these directions for the household routine, was of another sort, and their daughter Hannah, sitting here while father wrestled with the unfamiliar problems of sweetbreads and cold meat, was now in her thirties and had begun by growing up in an obedience conformable to the older Bridgnorth and was—what she was: a little chancy, perhaps, amiably loyal to what was expected of her at home but frankly curious over strange gods, though not likely to accept them. (For some of them mother wouldn’t like and others—far more of these!—father would undoubtedly exorcise by virtue of his own special bell, book and candle.) Mother was made by rule, her manners derived from the “best” people of her youth, and her way of taking the present world qualified, so far as seemed best, by enlightened lectures and a theory that life is “very interesting” but must be grappled with in some mysterious way, or you’d find yourself nowhere. But father, his vision and his creed, were one. To Hannah, they were the pillars of the sky. How pleasant this was, she thought, to be here at home, looking at him while he studied the foolish paper before him probably wondering what good manners would allow him to do with it and, like her, growing sleepier and more at ease. She let her mind rove back and forth over the past in the luxurious lethargy of freedom, and wondered if this mightn’t be the way old people felt all the time. Delicious it was, being a little too warm and conscious of its being vacation and June, and, since mother had gone, nothing necessarily to happen for a long time, or ever, unless you invited it. And whether he liked it or not, how becoming it was to the parson to have retired from his pastorate and find nothing before him but to read the Church Fathers and look picturesque! About his retirement there were things she didn’t know, and these mother had not thought it wise to tell her. But to him, dutifully eying his wife’s written precepts, those things were never absent, an aching memory in his mind.

It was when the present era came in, somewhere from 1928 into the ’30’s, that the congregation began to say, with varying degrees of emphasis, that it almost seemed as if Parson Willoughby lacked initiative. The times were changing, all about them, and he did not know it. Then most of the young people stopped coming to church and on Sundays went off in cars to the uncharted region known as “some place,” and though he looked a little wistful over the sparseness of his flock, he did not seem to know how it came about. Mrs. Willoughby knew perfectly, but she did not tell him. However hotly her energies seethed within her, they were never allowed to touch him with the smallest hint of warning cautery. To him, she was what she called a helpmeet, and of such capacity as to include his office as well, a colleague, a bosom with which God had miraculously endowed him, though he had, for many years, ceased to regard it in all its bounteousness. This could hardly have been otherwise, she was competing so breathlessly with the ages, whereas the only age entirely vivid to him was that when he saw God as moving in Nazareth and Gethsemane. So, although she found the church weakening under his ministrations, she only exerted herself the more nervously to bring new blood into it. But there was no such blood to bring. Bridgnorth was a small place with a charming village street running the length of it, and its people, descendants of those who had, as they would tell you, always lived there, knew the limit of what Mrs. Willoughby had to offer them, and it brought them no nearer Nazareth and Gethsemane, nor had the wonder story the parson told grown more credible with the years and his acceptance of it. To him, it was so integral a part of the nature of things that he found within himself no way of making it an amazement and a potency, as he knew it should have been. He had no way of making the fact of his breath moving to other people. He breathed, that was all, and the air entered him and the blood ran through his veins. Sometimes when he talked about the articles of his faith, he seemed to be in a dream; but though at first this caused them to exalt him, in a patronizing way, finally it discouraged them, and the modern-minded, seeing the world dash on without him, said this was his job and there was no sense in his lying down on it. His wife had redoubled her efforts to make churchgoing attractive, but she was not quite clever enough. They were the efforts of a passing era, and again nobody would hear to them. She talked about a fair: but who would make holders and aprons such as had been the by-products of female piety in a day not likely to return? She suggested a dramatic society and a reading circle; but everybody knew she would naturally be manager of any undertaking, whether to make money or cement a weakened fellowship, and nobody listened. She had persuaded to her utmost, but they slipped away. It may have been a matter of wonder among those who knew her loyalty to recent customs that she followed them so clumsily; but she was not an imaginative woman and she could not see that this youth which would not go to church was really different from that of the past. And if it were different, she would have told you, from a clear-eyed conviction, it could be controlled, and if it was to be fed from bottles by its responsible elders, they should be the type of bottle indubitably known and sterilized. For there was no way for her to learn the power of that unreasoned spell which is to “go places.” How should she, a parson’s wife and of later middle age?

It is thought that some unauthorized advisers then suggested to Parson Willoughby that he should resign. No one has ever been sure how it came about, but it is known that on a Sunday he appeared at church as usual and that he was not himself. He was stricken. He was bewildered. He preached an old sermon that day, one not in any way applicable to the date, and he was listened to with a sympathetic interest he was not now used to rousing. For something had happened to him, and before long everybody knew what it was. He had been told, for the first time, that he was old. And as soon as might be he sent in his resignation, and announced from the pulpit that God was love. That might have been all he was capable of thinking: for again he preached an old sermon and seemed himself to be surprised by its lack of fitness. It was on the Prodigal Son, one he had hitherto kept for academic or other assemblies of young men, and when he had offered it to them something seemed to warm them up, and the boys ended by thinking great things of him, in spite of its being “old stuff” and commended him among themselves, in their particular lingo, afterward. But having delivered it on this last Sunday of his active ministry, he went home and became a private citizen, and when his successor was installed, proceeded faithfully to hear him but, as it seemed, in an abiding dream. And since he had met his people with such instant coöperation, they continued to respect him, in an abashed way, though they let him pretty well alone. The world was moving on, and the sermons they heard by radio were really more to their taste than the one the new minister was preaching, being by men widely known. And why not hear them at home where you could have a pipe, if you wanted it? and after all, there was a good deal of sameness in sermons any way. So the church still lagged behind the expectations of its more advanced members, and though Mrs. Willoughby, sadly and with a stimulating air, tried to induct them into the new ways of life, it didn’t change very much from what it had been in her husband’s declining day.

And now, this being June, Hannah came home as usual for her vacation. She had taught for a little over ten years in the Normal School at Bucksford, a town even more old-fashioned than Bridgnorth, and the changes in educational methods had begun to attack that, too, so that she wondered how long it would be before her father’s fate came upon her and she was asked to resign. Might it not be at any time, in this world where youth seemed to have gone mad with surprise over its mere youthfulness? She began to look at herself a little critically at “proms” and other stirring activities of scholastic life, and question whether keeping up with the new educational fads had been enough. What could she emphasize about herself to stress her fitness for holding a job? How old did she really look? She wondered, and wished she could ask some ruthless colleague to tell her. For she was an old-fashioned looking person, and her thirties might well be forty, so far as modern verdicts went, and though the age limit lay far away, still there was a zone of popular favor she did not want to leave. Look at father! he wasn’t old; but they called him old and had for years. His very title, parson, she had never known to be in use anywhere else, except perhaps in books of a bygone time, and Bridgnorth had somehow fitted it to him almost at once after he began his pastorate, perhaps in love and perhaps because he even then looked more than his years and lived unconsciously in the solitude of his reputed sanctity. But to her the world was not the porch into Elysium. It was the world, and, in the measure of her fitness for it, hers. She had frank enough envies, but no hatreds, and she delighted in the spring loveliness of youthful flesh she saw about her and, as days went on, wanted it for her own, perhaps even at the price of living over again her unfledged foolishness and arrogant simplicity. She would far rather have had that than her reputation as a brilliant woman and a conscientious teacher. Yet while she owned it, to her very private inner self, she knew it was not because mere youth was not as unsatisfying to her as any other creation nature had sketched in, but because she had lost her lover—through absence, through time, through some of the causes of things that are not easily known; and in the homesickness of this changed estate she wondered whether youth, if she had it, could charm her back into goodly life again. And this summer, when she fancied herself as getting away from her uncompleted story by a trip abroad or even to Canada, Uncle Peter, who was her mother’s brother, had a nervous breakdown incident to the death of his wife, and asked Mrs. Willoughby to go over to England with him for three months or so: the parson, too, since he was free of his charge, though of course, Peter said, with the frankness of a man who had begun to think of himself first, any addition to the size of the party might mean an added liability. It was not traveling he wanted. His sister could go about by herself, leaving him to his prescribed regimen; but she was executive, and he would know she was on deck. The parson, hearing his wife read the letter, said quietly that he entirely agreed. If Peter needed her, she must go. As for himself, he had a great deal to clear up at his desk; but even if he were free, nothing seemed less desirable to him than to change his skies when he was so entirely certain that his mind needed nothing but to stay here in Bridgnorth. Hannah, still in school when the invitation came, telephoned her mother that she must surely go, saying, in addition: “I shall stick by till October. Longer, unless you’re back.”

The parson was rather silent through these days of decision, but he referred Peter’s invitation to the goodness of God in vouchsafing so pleasant a thing at the particular time when the Willoughby roots seemed to have been torn out of their familiar habitat and might well be refreshed and enabled to ramify anew. He used that word a good deal, the verb “to enable.” It seemed to have a kind of holy magic more potent than a simpler one, and he now asked God to enable his wife to decide rightly and, if she could bring herself to think so, to accept Peter’s offer and go. Mrs. Willoughby had for many years regarded him as a gifted but childlike creature whom it was her privilege to convoy through tasks too practical and therefore too hard for him, and now that he seemed to be bending on her the persuasive power of an intellect no less reasonable than her own, she was at first surprised and then incredulous. It was almost as if something as imperative as Foreign Missions were behind her, pushing her along. And, at the first possible moment, Hannah did come home and addressed herself to the details of packing, and the parson prayed his wife away and she was gone. He was very silent on the last days when all these activities were weaving themselves about in the house, benignant as always, a courteously attentive figure when they appealed to him, usually to agree with them. Hannah thought he was the most beautiful person in the world, the very most, for though Anthony West, her lover, was like nothing and nobody else in point of the unique charm she thought she only knew, you could not call him beautiful. But here was father, always beautiful, always “old,” moving with a slowness that had brought on him the implication of age before he was out of his prime, and that way of bending to listen when you spoke. His great brown eyes had life and beauty but seldom mirth, and though the black brows over them could be contracted in thought, it would hardly be in anger. Often he had to smile when Hannah told him how proud she was of his nose and chin, taking back, she insisted, to the colonies and the elder statesmen. “And that smile!” she allowed herself to continue, though only to herself, for fear of making him uneasy and weakening that magic whereby he could win a Sunday School to decent quiet or, for the moment, charm a Humanist from his pinnacle. They were right, she thought, they who tacked that “typical parson” on his reverend habit. He certainly was cut to pattern, almost absurdly so, the parson of illustrations in good books. For his brown eyes, she was as grateful as if he had come by them through good wit of his own, and they were repeated in her and with her thick chestnut lustre of brown hair made, she felt, her only comeliness. The rest of her healthy body she scarce dared think of, save to keep it well dressed and cared for. It wouldn’t do to get discouraged utterly. And now while she sat there in the study and waited for him to get mother’s instructions into workable shape or repudiate them wholly, all these things ran in and out of her mind like little living voices, motes dancing in the sun. She was more than half seas over in sleep, but so determined not to lose herself that she was able to snatch at an idea as it came and went and get some reassurance out of the belief that she was really thinking. Father’s retirement, mother’s going abroad, the Normal, a feeling of gladness over the natural wave in her hair, sweetbreads, Anthony West whom she hadn’t seen for so very, very long—all these and more seemed to make a pleasant confusion in her warmly contented mind, and when she suddenly awoke to a sound outside that happy activity within her—a paper-knife falling or father’s shutting a drawer—she sat up, blinked herself awake and thought how dreadful it would be never to get back into such a world again; she would miss it tremendously, the more from having been in it so long.

“Was that all?” she heard herself saying. But did her voice always sound so far away?

“Was what all?” father asked, though without interest. He seemed to have given up the page of household instructions, and was opening an old brown book, the species known to her, since childhood, as “father’s books.”

“You,” said father judicially, but as if he wouldn’t hold it against her, “have been asleep.”

“Was that it?” asked Hannah. “But the room looks just the same and the sun’s there on the paper-weight where it was, and I’d been thinking the longest time. It ought to be night from the time I’ve been thinking—that paper, you know, and what mother wanted you to do.”

“Yes,” said he, taking up the paper from where he had laid it beside the book. “The paper! Well, you were asleep about a minute, and I ran through it again, and it was very kind of mother, and I’ll tell her how much we appreciate it—but I really think we might leave things just as they are and let Celestia take charge of them—and that’s about all.”

Celestia, there in the kitchen, as she had been for years under mother’s competent sway, and as much a part of it as the pewter and the blue blazonry of china on the shelves!

“Of course!” she said, “but you needn’t take that up with mother, need you? Let it go by default, I’ve heard them say. I don’t know exactly what default is. Father, was there any more of it—besides the sweetbreads?”

“Quite a little,” said he, cheerfully. “Oh, I can tell you, and with no trouble! It’s alphabetical in places toward the end. Beds. Biscuits, green apples for dowdy, ham—oh, yes, it’s a very painstaking list and very kind; but I believe I’ll lay it right back here in the drawer and we can consult it if we need to. See.” He opened the little drawer, laid in the sheet of paper and shut it up, all as if in great appreciation and respect.

Hannah wanted to ask a question. She wanted to say: “Now isn’t mother the very dickens and all, to keep her finger on us like this?” No, it wouldn’t do, and not only because father was a clergyman and not a mere earthly husband, but beyond that he was one of the incomprehensibles. You couldn’t, except in the matter of Bible history, tell what he thought. But she did allow herself one comment, still feeling that it didn’t prevent her from being as irreproachable as he.

“That seems to be about all you can do. Celestia’s a grand girl. If she can’t take care of us, nobody could. Now I’m going upstairs and get drunk on sleep as I was just now. I thought of all manner of things.”

Once in the hall, she turned aside into the parlor and camped on the old sofa, so old it might be in the habit of encouraging warm, half-and-half consciousness, not knowing it was sleep. But the spell was broken, and she thought merely of Celestia, whose name had been last on her tongue, and how masterful she was over the things of earth mother could get so energetic about, and how calm. Hannah often had unruly thoughts which she was not in the habit of mentioning because most people stared at them, evidently not wanting to take the trouble of pursuing them further. Sometimes she would ask a question to which she herself knew the answer, because there were stories she liked to hear over again. This was a child’s trick, the trick of “Tell it again,” and she knew it wasn’t fair; but there had to be conversation, as human creatures had decreed it, in their various tents of a night, and this had a pleasant repetitious sound. And later, when she and father were at the supper table, she sitting at the side instead of the end because she felt he might not like to see her in mother’s place, she had one of those unaccountable impulses toward a tell-it-again tale, and this time it hit upon Celestia. Wasn’t Celestia an unexpected name for her to have? For Celestia was tall and broad and deep-breasted, and might easily have sailed under Boadicea or any name that rang like steel on steel. And tonight she was walking about the dining-room serving what she had made for them out of her craft of cookery, and, seeing them contentedly engaged with it, went off into the kitchen, and Hannah spoke, believing a little talk might keep father from thinking too hard about mother, gone gallantly off to New York with Uncle Peter, to sail the seas.

“Father,” said she, “isn’t Celestia a queer name for Celestia? If it was Cecilia now! lots of people are Cecilia, aren’t they? I suppose that’s out of legend, isn’t it? and art.”

The parson had prayed that the food before him might be “blessed to our use,” and he was doing his own part by eating his omelet and rolls in a manner appropriately attentive and in no sense greedy. He looked up at her and said quietly, as if it were not going to surprise her or, if it could, certainly must have done it long ago:

She could always seem brightly interested. You had to be, if it was a game, even if you’d played it a million times. Did her father know it was a game? Never mind. He was answering.

“It wasn’t very tactful of me, but then I was a young man, alarmingly young, I’m afraid. Her mother herself was doubtful of the name she had pitched upon. It was going to be a great drawback to the child, and so I said. She’d begun to be doubtful herself—the mother, I mean. And when I told her what I felt, she simply said: ‘You name her then.’ And I named her Celestia.”

“Without asking anybody else?” pursued Hannah. She was watching the door and neglecting her food, though it had been blessed to her. “How about the father? Didn’t anybody ask him?”

“He was not there,” said the parson, with a brevity which was also a warning, and Hannah knew she was to understand there had been no rightful father. That was like the parson. He was always suppressing facts which might be eagerly awaited and so conclusively that you felt they must be actually lost, perhaps under a landslide or at the bottom of that very old and deep well where even Truth, if she is still living there, couldn’t somehow lay hands on them.

“But why Celestia, dear?” pursued Hannah, thinking it might divert him to tell a little thing like that, even if he had done it a myriad times before. The parson’s face lighted in that way it had when he thought of the inherited imagery of his calling, and he said:

“It’s a very beautiful name. One of the most beautiful. It recalls the heavens that are His handiwork.”

That was it, she thought, the continual scene-shifting in his darling mind, in and out, quaint, happy legends and immemorial symbolism—the unseen servitors of lovely habit in his memory perpetually dressing the stage for him, clearing it away and, when the scene changed, dressing it again. She had to choose that symbol, for it was always the stage, with her. It was the natural love of her life, but she had never got near its actuality and never would, because, as she had told herself, when hope began to die in her: “I’m plain! I’m plain!” She was very humble, and if it came to her own charms, humility itself. The possibilities she had, she never saw. In these days when woman sifts herself all over with extraneous bloom, stupid Hannah remained lithe, good, sweet but, in her own mind, plain.

“Yes, father,” she said now, “I understand. You liked the name. It made you think of nice things. You never imagined she’d grow into the great big creature she is now.”

At that moment, Celestia came in bringing one of her surprises to be blessed to their use, a squash pie with ginger in it, and Hannah glanced up at her in a sudden fear lest she had heard. No, she had not heard. And how sweet she looked! She was a glorious creature, with no delicacy of beauty but full of health. Her hair wanted so intemperately to curl that it was almost always unruly and her eyes were sweet with a look of intent service. She paused a moment by Hannah, to get the pie safely balanced before setting it down, and Hannah looked up at her and smiled, as if there were recognized understanding between them, and Celestia smiled slightly in return. She knew what the understanding was. It was that Hannah was glad to be at home. But it meant more than that. Hannah loved the abundance of her, the way she walked and stood and her dominance over sugar and flour and milk and meat. But she said only:

“Yes, take my plate. Father, you’re ready, aren’t you? See this lovely pie.”

And Celestia, having set down the plates and brought the tea things, went out, herself satisfied.

Now the parson had come to the moment when he fell silent at table, and his rigidly observant wife had been used to leave him to his thoughts. He did things episodically, but because there were pauses in his daily habits, she assumed that they, like everything about him, must have a sacerdotal meaning and, when he ceased speaking, ignored him so determinedly that he floundered and got deeper in. But with Hannah it was not so. She interrupted, and it had been one of mother’s unsolved anxieties: whether to forward the development of her individuality by respecting such interruptions, or whether they also should be sacrificed to the parson’s mood. Now it was he who spoke, with a little start, as if, Hannah thought, he must do something to fill up that blank opposite him where mother had been at nearly every meal since they could remember, like a rock of admirable weight. Mother was not there to talk and so, perhaps, he must. He fluttered his eyelids slightly. He had a way of blinking himself awake and then settling his forehead again, while the little humorous look came about his mouth, and the brows and mouth seemed to say: “Speak, if you want to. I can talk.” But this time he asked Hannah the question which, as he supposed, would interest her more than anything in the world:

Hannah sat with her fork lifted, her interest in supper apparently over, and stared at him, for a second, before answering.

“But you knew, dear,” she said, “he isn’t at the Normal nor anywhere near it. He’s in New York, ’way up-state. What makes you say ‘leave’ him? I haven’t seen him for three years—yes, and three months,” she added, with a precision which might have been significant.

“Yes, dear, I know; but he was one of your staff there at first, wasn’t he? That was where you met him.”

“Not one of the staff,” said Hannah. Her face had taken on the flush she secretly deplored; she knew its hot discomfort so well and thought it nothing but a riotous circulation devoid of beauty. “He only happened to be in the neighborhood then, tutoring a boy, a nephew of those two Miss Raymonds. You know. I’ve told mother a lot about them: how they live alone in that big house on the top of the hill with just one maid, nearly as old as they are, and their niece—no, their grandniece. It’s another generation—she’s broken down, has exhaustion. I’m terribly sorry for her. She isn’t like them, you see, just queer as anybody might be from living shut up on the top of a hill in the wind. She’s actually a little off. I go to see her sometimes and it seems to please her for the first few minutes I’m there. I know what she feels about things—some things—and I’m sure she isn’t afraid of my telling her to do this or that, as the doctor did, when they had him for a while. He wanted them to give her a change, send her away, and they dismissed him. So what can you do?”

The parson, although he listened sympathetically, seemed to be lingering at some point she did not see. Was he waiting for a pause, to get back to Anthony West whom he had started with?

“And what is he doing now?” he inquired, and Hannah found herself, after a little involuntary start, looking at him in a quick-eyed interest.

“Is this,” she thought, “the way he waits for mother to finish before he goes on with what he really wants to talk about? Am I going to be a mother to him? Well, if I am, he’ll have it all his own way, if I can manage it.”

“Why,” she began doubtfully, wondering how much it was desirable to tell him about Anthony West who held a professorship in an obscure academy, teaching literature and philosophy and, because there were so many things he did not believe in, fighting all the way. What would father think of that? “He’s teaching, you know, and a lot of the time tutoring boys for college—Latin and Greek—and that he likes better than his actual job—says there’s some reality in it. He writes a little, too. Essays: I sent you one of them. ‘The Tree and the Root’: that was the name, I believe.”

But she did not merely believe. She knew the title and that mother had read it and duly sent her a well-considered opinion with advice touching any further literary work he might do. But whether father had read it she doubted. He was in the habit of looking dubiously at inconsiderable modern print and returning to what he called, in a rapt way, as if he had secret rendezvous with them, “My studies.”

“Shall we go into the sitting-room,” he inquired now, and she rose and went with him, side by side because she loved him very much and liked to feel her arm against his as they stuck for a second in the doorway. For it was one of his impossible and lovely qualities, to her mind, that he never concerned himself with the passage of time. She was, even in practical things, still the very little girl who used to hold his hand and find no difficulty in any such strait passage as a door. They could always, she used to tell him, jam themselves through, and this they still believed. Once in the sitting-room, she paused a moment to listen for Celestia, who seemed miraculously to know when they had finished and, without waiting to be summoned, would begin her deeds at the table in an earnest but noiseless haste. Yes, Celestia was there, and happily, for she was humming “Loch Lomond” in a way Hannah called brumming, it seemed to come from so far inside her remarkable organism, a frame so adequate that it might be supposed to harbor swarms of bees. The parson had said “sitting-room,” but it was not his habit to settle down there. Five steps would take him back to his study and there he always went in the end, to fall at once into his tranquil solitaire of Eternal Life. “That’s his game,” Hannah concluded, as she saw him making for the study door. “He thought he could stay here and keep me company. But he can’t. He doesn’t even know he can’t. I suppose he thinks he’s kept me company by thinking he ought to, and there he goes. Darling, there you go!”

But she did him wrong. He had forgotten for the minute, but he came back to her and something he felt in her as a haunting need. He referred it to mother, now, with all her energies uncorked, sailing the seas so fast. For this was Hannah’s vacation. Mother being gone, perhaps the child was lonely. There at the study he stopped and looked at her.

Hannah was there in an instant, ready to jam through that door also, lest he change his mind. And then they were in the square low-browed room and he had given one wistful glance at his worn elbow chair by the great table, relinquished hope of it, and said to her, as prettily, she thought, as if she were a returned missionary come to tell him about the lack of belief in Siam:

They did sit down in the two chairs, placed at an inviting slant, and Hannah wondered how unhappy he was going to be if she allowed him to act as charmingly as they had begun. However, once wouldn’t count, and tomorrow he should go back to his studies and his dream. And the hearth was a very cosy place to sit, although it was too warm for a fire, and there were misty asparagus branches in the sooty hole of it, instead of wood. She asked him a hurried question, lest, if there were silence between them, he should diverge to the Atlantic Ocean and mother so capably ruling it. And yet, would he? Was mother so necessary to him as all that?

He gave a running glance round the study walls, as a chimney swallow might flit, having achieved its tumbling way down from the sky and, sitting on the centre table in its sooty vest, inquire of itself: “How the blazes—and the soot—did I come here, anyway?”

Hannah went on talking. He was wholly incapable, she knew, of regarding a house as more or less than a shelter where you could study and pray and sleep and invite long dreams about another house, eternal in the heavens.

“Sometimes they ask me,” she said, “the teachers do, the new ones that probably want to know why I’m so countrified and queer, if I’m ‘New England.’ That’s what they always say. Makes me feel as if I were the whole assortment—Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, you know—but that’s only as they say ‘I’m Christian Science.’ And when I up and tell them my father’s a minister, they say ‘then I live in the parsonage’ and I say ‘No,’ because my mother owned this house when father began to preach, and it was good and large and so we live in it. Father, don’t you think it’s a darling house?”

But the parson’s mind was on his table where a thesaurus, loose-backed from its troubles of tireless usage, lay, comfortable yet expectant.

“Yes, my dear, yes,” he said, at once recalling himself. “Very agreeable, very livable, for one so old.”

“Ah, but you shan’t escape me,” thought Hannah wickedly. “We’re going to talk if I have to improvise it all the way.” And she went on, staring him unflinchingly in the face, because she remembered what had already been done by a “glittering eye” and might be again. “And when they say, ‘How does it look?’—I don’t know that any of them ever did, but if they did, I should say—‘Well, it’s a very old house, very old indeed, long, rambling, as some of those houses are. And the rooms are big, but low, and they have paneling and doors with those great crosses on them, and big fireplaces, and sometimes you go up a step or down a step to get into a room—’ dearest, what are you thinking about?”

For he was looking straight at her and suddenly he seemed sharply awake. Not so was she accustomed to seeing her father when he was about to speak, either of Syria or the Aramaic tongue.

“Hannah,” he said, “I don’t think I ever asked you—but how old is he?”

Hannah stared back at him. So might a bird feel, hitting the telephone wire and arrested in full flight.

“Your friend, Professor West. I think you said he is professor? At least, I’d gathered so.”

“Oh, yes,” said Hannah, “he’s professor all right. Full-fledged. He has a degree or so—two, I think. Oh, you’d like him, down to the ground! He studied theology for a while and got mixed up in it and never went on. He’d sit and talk with you about palimpsests and correct readings and how Jerusalem looks today. Want to see him? Want him to come here?”

“I should like it,” said the parson. “I hadn’t quite got to that, but if you know him very well, if it would be—customary—by all means have him come. I never happened to think of it in that way before. Your mother had spoken of him, and I gathered that he was a valuable friend for you to have—somewhat older than you, as I recall—” This was all tentative, in little kind phrases. He seemed to be implying “I want to sound as fatherly as possible; but if I’m not doing it the right way, tell me where I’m wrong.”

Again Hannah had grown uncomfortably red, and she spoke with an adverse tone of voice. It did not chime with his, which had been, even humbly, offering her something she might greatly like.

“No,” she said, “I don’t really want to invite him here. Chiefly because I don’t believe he’d care very much to come. To see you, he might. He knows about you, of course, knows you’re a scholar, and you’d probably have a lot to say to each other. But as to coming—well, if he came I should want it to be to see me.”

“By all means,” said the parson, in the tone of one who has meant something admirable and only succeeded in bringing a hurt with it: as you might offer your friend the ripest peach only to see on it, in the instant of his touching it, that gummy excrescence the fairest peach may wear. “That would be of course. I knew you wrote to him, formerly, that is; and I thought—”

“You thought I write to him now,” said Hannah, steadily, yet with an edge on her controlled voice. “I do. But once I wrote every minute—I mean, in my mind I was writing every minute, and I got it down in reams often and often—but now I write once in ten days or so and tell him the things I’ve seen in the new books from abroad. He doesn’t see them so regularly. He’s wrapped up in the classics. And sometimes he answers in ten days and sometimes he doesn’t. He’s very busy, you know.” As she said this, she herself thought about her voice: that it certainly had an edge. She wondered if a voice mightn’t be like a rapier in the days when rapiers meant something very near the human heart and its pace of action. You could wear a rapier of a deadly sharpness, but, having power over the hilt, you could keep it from hurting. It could play its delicate, graceful game, but it needn’t let blood, however you felt. So with your voice. It might show the flash of that terrific edge, but you could control it. You needn’t hurt your father with it by making him suffer a little as you were suffering yourself.

But he was speaking, only two words and they did not sound commonplace, little as they were, but adequate. “Dear me!” said Parson Willoughby. “Dear me!”

Hannah wasn’t really hearing them. She was stricken with wonder that here in the house she loved she was telling this perhaps unregarding clergyman whom also she loved, more of her waking, breathing self than she had ever told anybody—that is, anybody but Anthony West and that telling was long done. But one of her father’s questions, with its implication of a grave interest, she had not answered, and she proceeded to do it now, not waiting for it to be repeated. And, she noticed as she began to speak, the rapier edge had not gone off her voice.

“You said you thought he was somewhat older than I. He is. He is four years older. But he hasn’t always been,” she ended foolishly, and did not explain: it seemed so obvious that when he had begun to be in love with her, he had not seemed to himself older. And now he did, though to her nothing could ever have made him anything but young as youthful love.

“Ah!” said her father, in a monosyllable that sounded cordial and no more. “So now that would make him—”

Her father seemed to her more nearly alive to this world and this house and what had happened in it, than she had ever seen him. Yet he had hardly changed, she would have said, in all the years since her childhood when he was simply father and she never stopped to think about him except that he was father and, that old word, “beautiful.” Now he was beginning to speak with hesitancy, as if he half doubted his wisdom in doing it at all.

“Your mother mentioned him. I think I told you. That was some time ago. She had an idea you might think seriously of the young man—that is, of course, he was younger then than he is now. But as time went on, she didn’t speak of him again and I’m afraid I forgot.” His brows came together on this and he looked distinctly troubled. “Should I have remembered?” the questioning forehead seemed to ask. “But you say you’re still writing to him, and I hope—well, that is like real friendliness, a good sound understanding between you”— Here, finding himself bogged, he managed to take a long step, or perhaps a leap, to firmer ground beyond: “However, it would be very agreeable to me if he came here, for a week-end even, and you could renew your acquaintance on—well, whatever basis you liked.”

He ended haltingly, but Hannah was again conscious of loving him more, more than she had ever loved him in her life. She could see now what they meant—the congregation when they had still needed him—by saying there was nobody like him when you were “in grief.” He had just one medicine for it: he hadn’t much grip on this present life, but he did have a way of taking you elsewhere,—to that unbelievable place or state or whatever it was where he felt himself most at home. And now it was she who saw how hard he was trying to get into her house of life and help her sweep it up and dust the furniture, if so be it needed it; but she couldn’t talk to him any more about Anthony West, who was a part of her, whose absent mind and soul she had spent too wastefully many of these last years in exploring. Why did he say this, in his later letters? why did he say that? Was he tired of her? Was her serviceable mind no longer of any value to him? Or was he changing mentally with the years and should she try, by the divine guesswork of absent love, to foresee the possibilities of what he wanted in her? Because the letters mustn’t cease. No amount of foolish self-respect would support her in feeling that she could live without them. Why had he not married her years ago when love—her love, at least—was at its full and he had believed he wanted her? First, there was his mother. He was not earning a very good living and he thought it unwise to make one household with wife and mother also. Hannah thought so, too, yet it was an unease she would passionately have chosen if he had been less wise, more fond. And then his mother was ill in an enduring, nervous way, and at last she died. But somehow, by that time, absence had had its cruel little way of cooling the blood of expectation, and their very faithfulness kept them apart. At first she wrote him mad, dashing letters, letters that took him off his feet with the wind of their audacity—and, so he said—their beauty. But when his, in return, became, with the years, as she once told him, those of distant cousinship, she diluted hers, rapidly, at first, to see if he would notice, and then, as he did not, with a carelessly innocent, though a vicious, pen.

In the first night of being at home, she thought of these things perhaps the more idly because mother was not there. She recognized that and, as she stepped about her chamber unpacking and putting things away, thought—and smiled in thinking, because there seemed no disloyalty in it—that when you were in the house with mother you could scarcely breathe without her getting the rhythm of it and wondering, if it seemed to her fast, whether you were tired, or slow and that might be exhaustion. When mother laid her spell on you and discovered things, she was always anxious to do something about them—the utmost that could be done. “Dear mother” said Hannah, in an absent way, but smiling and really meaning it. She was so grounded in daughterly affection that she allowed herself to think about mother exactly as she was, and saw no harm in it. She was such a high-powered mother, such a sweeping, energized—yet accurate—mother at the oar of household life! Now that she was away, you did more than miss her. You felt, at every instant, the difference it made in the rhythm of life itself. It might almost seem as if she had been a troublesome wind blowing, and now the wind had stopped. Did that mean peace? No, far other than that, for might it be you would get lonesome and wish the wind would blow again? And suddenly, after moving about the room for an appreciable time and seeing no great effect from it, in the way of small articles laid accurately in drawers and those hung up which were fated to be hung, she stopped short because she had an overmastering desire to go down to father and talk. She had already talked to him more deeply than she remembered doing in any whole vacation. It was delightful, and she must interrupt him and go on with it. Was this the reason, she thought, as she ran downstairs: that they had been talking about Anthony and up to this time, after the first delirium of knowing him and mentioning him to everybody possible, she had spoken of him to no one? They too had lived in the crystal globe of their own inwoven lives. Other people might have seen them there if they had had the eyesight to peer through its curved secrecy and wonder who lived there in the globe. But nobody did. “You have to announce things,” she thought, as she went down the stairs. “And I especially. Nobody’d think I had anything to announce, I’m so plain.”

Now she had passed the sitting-room and was at the study door. There he sat, the parson, before his books, looking the part exactly. She stood, half contrite but silent, in the doorway, and he glanced up and smiled at her, pushing his book a reassuring inch away. That was what he always did, she thought, he’d got so used to interruptions, lawful interruptions from the parish whenever mother thought it best; and this was only a lovesick daughter who wanted talk.

“I haven’t a shred of an excuse,” said she. “Only you began it. Talking. So I’ve got to come in.”

“Sure,” said he, in one of the colloquialisms he sometimes horribly snatched at, thinking they brought him closer to his kind. “Where’ll you sit? opposite there? or both of us by the hearth?”

Hannah thought it would be best to leave him in his chair so that he might carry on the habits that were useful to him, fingering the paper-weight of the marble from Rome or seeming to select a pencil carefully and then, remembering there was to be no use for it, laying it gently aside again. She sat down opposite him and, feeling it wise to give him no advantage of perhaps finding himself beguiled away by debated meanings in the Aramaic tongue, she began at once.

“Father, do you want me to tell you why I consider letter-writing between people who seem to belong to each other in a way—why it’s so frightfully important?”

“It is important, of course,” said he, in his acquiescent tone of awaiting further confidence. Perhaps it was not always a very interested tone, but he had drawn his brows together and was looking at her keenly.

“You remember, don’t you,” said she, “what I began to tell you: about the Miss Raymonds, the old ladies on the hill and their niece?”

Yes, he said, he did remember her mentioning them, and that the niece was not “in her perfect mind.” The last four words he used with a certain happy simplicity Hannah knew. It accompanied any phrase, even the smallest, he could snatch from the nobler works of man, and she saw his mind stroking it, as it were, loving it and saying to itself: “That’s from Shakespeare.”

“No,” said Hannah, “she’s not in her perfect mind, and you see I know why she came to be as she is. I can’t tell you how I pity her. And at the same time I’m frightened; for I don’t see why I shouldn’t be that way myself, in the end, if I got lonesome and queer.”

“No, not at once,” said she. “It would be a long time first, but it could happen to anybody without their being so very much to blame. I’ve heard her story in little bits. The family told me—the two old ladies—without knowing they did it, and the people in town know. And it’s a case of one idea: wanting a letter that doesn’t come. She and her father lived over in that bleak region beyond the Ridge, and they seem to have been fairly comfortable: as much as the rest of the people round them, anyway. Her mother died when she was very young and she kept house for her father and then—not really against her will but because her father wanted her to—she married a man near by and he and her father farmed together and tried to carry out some fool idea of raising tobacco. That never worked. It couldn’t, you know, soil and climate like that. But any way she got awfully sick of it all—she hadn’t known much about marriage as marriage—and she ran away. It was in one of those big storms they have there, and nobody knows how she made it; but she did, and got to Bucksford and the Raymonds, pretty nearly dead and more afraid of the storm than she’d been of the two men.”

“Had they abused her in any way?” asked the parson shortly. He looked dangerous. Not so were people accustomed to behave in this pleasant village where he had found his comfortable lot.

“Oh, no, no,” said Hannah. “But you’ve heard about the kind of people they are over there beyond the Ridge. Winter’s harder there than anywhere, summer’s hotter and thunder showers are always breaking down the trunks of trees, and in the winter there’s always a wildcat or two—oh no! it’s another country altogether. No, there wasn’t any cruelty. Only she was simply another sort, more like the Raymond side. And I’ve an idea that until she ran away to them the Raymonds held themselves a little above her and her father; but when they saw how things really were, they soon got over that. And Miss Milly told me—she’s the older Raymond, and shocked almost to death, as her sister was, by the girl’s running away—she told me the only reason her father put pressure on her to marry when she’d no interest in it was that he wanted to make sure of her being all right in case of his death. He’d begun to have queer ‘spells’ with his heart and thought he might die any time, and there she’d be alone. He was a handsome man, Miss Milly said. Tall and dark and looked as if he ‘was somebody.’ Miss Milly seemed to have a sort of family pride in it, as if that made the tragedy all the worse.”

“No. That was Act One. The tragedy was that Ann, the girl, had an illness after her awful journey, and when she got better they didn’t dare tell her what had happened to her father not twenty-four hours after she left. He’d started off to find her and died before he got out of the yard. His tricky heart, do you see? But she began to write letters to him and when he didn’t answer she got so frantic they had to tell her. And that was all the worse. She said she’d killed him.”

“Oh, he seems to have behaved as well as you’d expect! He came to see her along toward spring—Miss Milly had written and told him where she was—but the doctor forbade her seeing him. It was all a number of years ago and I believe he got a divorce and married again. So he’s out of it. But she keeps dwelling on her father and thinking if she can get a letter to him he’ll forgive her and come back.”

“Oh, God help us!” said the parson, and she looked at him, surprised. If she had guessed he was to be so sharply moved she might not have told him. She had got more or less used to it. All Bucksford had, in the way of country folk. It was the way things were.

“But why,” said he, “why in the name of everything that’s right and decent do you say you could be like that?”

“Because I could,” said Hannah, a little white about the mouth but standing to her guns and being obstinate. “I should do my best, you know, fight like a tiger, ward it off—if I could. But maybe I couldn’t. Have you ever thought what it might feel like to wait for a letter that never comes? You think of it. Think hard. It’s a little inanimate devil that might just as easily be like other letters that were angels and did come. Did you ever think there’s no cruelty like silence between people who have thought for a long time that they were showing each other their very hearts? Why, dearest, don’t look like that.”

“Poor child!” he said. “I don’t mean you. I mean that poor bewildered Ann. And didn’t she have anybody to go to, anybody but the two old aunts? Hannah, do you think she prayed to God?”

“I judge not,” said Hannah. “On both counts, I mean. I don’t believe there was anybody she could bring herself to tell. About God, I don’t know. She doesn’t seem religious in any way, but you can’t be sure. And, Father, when I go to see her—they let me see her alone, the aunts do—they’ve a kind of trust in me—Father, what do you suppose she does? When I go away, she takes a little slip of paper from some she has by her on her desk and folds it up and says to me—she whispers, not always, but when she speaks of that—and she says: ‘Will you mail this for me?’ ”

“Now what do you say?” asked the parson, as if he almost failed to trust her, the issue was so vital to a thinking mind.

“Why,” said Hannah, her eyes wide open on him, because he ought to know, “I say ‘Yes.’ What could I say?”

“Good girl!” said he, and reached across the table to touch her hand. “My good, dear girl!”

“And why I tell you,” said Hannah, “is because I know all about it. I know how we’re at the mercy of the letter that doesn’t come. A love letter, now! I’d rather have a man swear by all his gods he doesn’t love me—”

“No! no!” the parson broke in upon her. “I know what you mean, dear, but we mustn’t speak lightly of the gods. Even if we make it plural! Not the gods!”

Hannah took no notice, save to give him a little compliant nod. She went on. “Or kill me, like Rogue Riderhood. But silence, Father, silence! Did you ever read Swift’s letters to Stella and Vanessa?”

“Yes, my dear,” said the parson in a tone which was meant to indicate that he could in no sense accept them as argument. “He was Dean of Saint Patrick’s, as I remember.”

“Yes, he was,” said Hannah. “And two women loved him. And one of them, at least, seems to have died of it. And do you remember one of her pathetic sentences: ‘You might command a moment to write to me?’ And other things she said, things that wring your heart. So whenever I see that poor child over there with those two old women on that windy hill, I think of Swift, and curse him good and hard.”

“My dear! my dear!” said the parson. He put his hand out now, palm upward and, being ashamed of herself because she had hurt him, at first she did not give him hers. But he left it there and she did put hers in it, and so they sat for a moment, not looking at each other, but with heavy hearts. Then Hannah took her hand away, but before he could take his she bent and kissed it. The parson, drawing it back, looked at it surprised, ingenuous, as if he said: “Well, of all things! This never happened to me before.” Then he asked a question, looking at her keenly, seeming to say he had to do something about it all and must know how.

“I am going to pray for her,” said he. “I like to know their names. I begin to see them then. I take them with me more—more earnestly—when I go—to Him.”

She ventured a question of her own. She had hardly talked with him about what he called the things of the spirit. There had never been the sense of leisure, of space, if she might put it so, simple and quiet as he had always been with her.

“Many of who?” he asked, not concerned with the form of his pronoun but rather the homely sound of it.

“Yes,” said he, in a doubtful way, “though they are not usually people I know. If I read of any one who is suffering great affliction, sins of his own, results of sins of other people, I pray for him. Hannah, does it ever seem to you as if this place—as if Bridgnorth—was contented with itself? That’s where I’ve fallen short. I’ve never made them see they haven’t really got much of anything, after all. We haven’t, any of us.”

“It’s terribly comfortable,” said Hannah. She was amused beyond telling at being taken by the hand and trotted up to the confident ego of Bridgnorth which couldn’t remember any crimes and remorses to save its soul by and had had its three or four daily meals, cooked by inherited recipes, so long that it might reasonably believe it would always have them, and when it came to leaving this earth could enter the predestined way with an equal unconcern. “But, Father, you’d rather it would be happy, wouldn’t you? What’s that about the happiest nations, the ones that ‘have no history?’ ”

“It isn’t that,” said he. “Only, it’s the way we’ve been living, all of us. Hannah, do you know how long I’ve been here?”

“Never mind! never mind! Only I’ve been as comfortable as anybody else. I’ve sat here at my table and written sermons as I liked to write ’em whether anybody understood—oh, never mind!”

For the first time, she saw him angry. In that instant, she caught the picture of him as he was drawing it for his own hurt mind to wince at: a man who, seeing what he believed, had no right to a sheltered life. His small shallop had been safely moored on this stagnant inland sea. Could he have put up sail—did a shallop have sails?—and somehow got ashore and waded through the bogs and over crags of unbelief and halloaed to other men to follow him? He might even have gone across the Ridge. What right had a priest to sit at his table and sentimentalize about heaven? Wasn’t this his fighting ground? Wasn’t this— She spoke impetuously.

“You wish you’d fought with beasts at Ephesus. I don’t know about that. There wouldn’t have been mother perhaps. And then there wouldn’t have been me.”

Next morning, they felt a little shy of each other as reticent men and women do find themselves when they have been surprised into an amazing confidence. Celestia was in high feather at breakfast time and brought them food so savory and abundant that Hannah, who had grown used to wondering over motives among the students of her dormitory, could not help probing this a little, silently. Was it like her own flood of confidence toward father, a sign of the general ease since mother had gone away? Hannah had still no blame for them, for herself or father or Celestia. She had long done with blaming people very much. It seemed to her there were unexpected snags in human life. You hit them even in mid-current and your boat swerved or went down. There was weather, too, capricious human weather. Perhaps you were foresighted and had prepared for it, or perhaps you went out without your coat. But she did feel justified in noting that her father was neglecting the product of Celestia’s invention and eating his allowance of dry toast. It was always set beside his plate, and whatever unchartered delights Celestia ventured on, she never omitted to leave it, cooling, as she sadly thought, but where the hand would find it without aid from his unseeking eye. And Celestia could not venture anything, but Hannah could.

“Father,” said she. “See what’s in front of you. I’ve had some of it and you’ve got the rest, being civil and waiting for you and cooling every minute.”

“What?” said he. “What’s that?” At least he was glancing at it, though absently. “No, no, thank you, not this morning.” And he had forgotten it.

Celestia, looking on, was woebegone. Not pale, Hannah reflected: Celestia couldn’t turn pale. There was too much blood in her, valiant blood that would be ashamed to slink away and hide. But Celestia minded. She had brought her gifts to the altar and they were not received.

“Father,” said Hannah. She called to him again, and more demandingly. “Celestia’s made us a lovely dish: eggs and tomato and little sausages ringed all round. ‘In a lordly dish!’ ”

The last she added recklessly, because she knew that for him there was no lure like that of words. The parson came awake. He was in that land where he seemed to retire for miles upon miles and yet, so mentally equipped was he, to be back in a minute if you wanted him,

“Ah!” said he. “Oh, yes.” And he helped himself lavishly. It was the three words that did it: a lordly dish. But when Celestia, now in a high state of triumph, had gone with her empty platter, Hannah ventured to inform herself.

“Yes, oh, yes!” said he. “That is, I believe so. Hannah, I want to speak to you about the poor young woman. Let me call her Ann. Could you come out to the grape arbor and sit awhile? Celestia wants to do the study. She just mentioned it. She always does it Thursday, so she said, and your mother—”

Here he stopped, as seeing it was of no importance, and Hannah, foolishly vexed by so small a thing, began impetuously:

“Father, if you don’t want it done—” But again it became unimportant, for he was looking up inquiringly. He didn’t care. None of them cared, people like him and Anthony, whose minds were on the battleground of the printed word. “Yes,” she ended mildly. “Let’s go out. The arbor’s nice.”

But her mind kept on spinning. She had a little picture of him in her memory, left over from last night. How lovely he had been then, how humbly solicitous over pain! Could you get worn down to that bright lustre of life unless you had been ceaselessly wrought upon by the will of others? Last night she had seen that it was his wife who had tyrannized over him and now unwillingly had left him free. But if mother had merely delivered him over to Celestia, to be kept in the ruts of habit the years had worn for them all, then he was by no means free. Could he be released daily, a little easement here, a little there, and remain oblivious of it, as he always was of everything save things unseen? But it would have to be done inch by inch, a broadening of the rut from day to day, cutting away a little here, filling in there, until you got level ground, an ample highway, and father careering off on it—where? That was it? He must not guess where. He must not even know by the feel of it that he was getting on at such a pace, perhaps finding himself at last on a slope of easy going where he really couldn’t stop. There were few things wilder, Hannah herself believed, than her adventurous mind. When she “got going,” that is: what was it then? A hawk, she told herself sometimes, a hawk was wild—a fox—a leaping fire that had got the best of man in its passion of hunger for a dry old house—these were wild, but nothing to that fool, Hannah Willoughby. Now she was out on the doorstone waiting for him. He had gone into the study for his pipe, and she suspected he might have seen an open book that looked up piteously and so forgotten her altogether.

And he came. The arbor was straight away from the back porch, a wide path leading to it, and the grape-vines were so thick and tight on it that it looked solid green to Hannah as she went along, thinking how happy home was in summer if only you did not feel life had somehow defrauded you until you had to say to yourself: “In a minute I shan’t be young enough to be loved. And there’ll be nothing before me but to be elderly and then old.” At the entrance to the arbor, she stopped and waited for father who was coming along, pipe in hand.

“Here I am,” said she unnecessarily, for he could see her and there was no other way to go; but she knew by everything about him, his walk, his frowning look at the ground, that he was thinking of matters far away and disturbing to him. She stepped into the arbor and moved two chairs into place for comfortable talking, one of them near the table, so that he could lay his pipe down in its frequent state of being forgotten and burnt out. He came in and took his chair and she took hers facing him, and then he came awake to her and looked up and smiled that smile of his nobody ever got quite used to, it was so brightly, almost gaily, of this earth, after his mind had seemed to be in some lost region of the skies.

“Well!” said Hannah. Then they laughed a little, and she went on: “You said you wanted to talk. About Ann Denison?”

“Ah!” he said, “isn’t it, my dear?” and reflected. “Ah!” He sat for a few minutes looking down at his hands and frowning as if he wondered how they could be useless in a world that needed so many things done. He looked at her, obstinately resolved. “Hannah,” he said, “I thought of it in the night. What if I should write to her?”

She sat a moment and considered him. She thought she knew the state of Ann’s unhappy mind. What good would it do her to have a letter from an unknown clergyman who would tell her God is love? But she must think of him, too. If this were one of those little secret benevolences with which he tried to meet the sorrow of the world, it would be a pity, if only for his own sake, to deny it to him.

“I don’t believe,” said she, “they would let her have a letter. They’d think it bad for her.”

“Oh, surely not,” said he, “when it’s a letter she wants, and not getting it has driven her out of her mind. Surely not, Hannah.”

“But what would you write? How could you introduce yourself? Say you’re my father? or just that you’re a clergyman? About me, I’m not sure of her remembering me. I’m not sure she even knows my name. I go in to talk with her, and that’s about all. But she does realize I’m a harmless sort of person, and trusts me with the bits of paper.”

His moment of indecision was gone. He was looking at her with his clearest look. He had been exploring the ground. Here was the path he wanted.

“I should write it,” he said, “as if I had good tidings for her. It would be a love letter.”

Hannah gave a little gasp. Father had been all kinds of embodied goodness, but he never seemed fantastic, never emotional. Was this another outcome from the removal of mother? Were they both a little dizzy, it was so queer to have her gone? A few hours ago it hadn’t been too absurd to get fanciful about it. Then she had allowed herself to picture mother as something like the lid of a boiling pot; but now it had whipped round into earnest. The lid had been lifted off by one of the gigantic hands occasionally meddling with human brews, and father’s confined potencies were hissing off in steam. It was no more than a fancy, but what if it were true? What if mother had been here to be told about Ann Denison and it was to her that father had made his eccentric confidence. What would she have said? But father probably wouldn’t have told her and it was Hannah he did tell. And she must answer.

“Do you mean,” she said weakly, “to have it seem like a letter from her father himself? You couldn’t mean that.”

“My dear!” said he. “No, of course I couldn’t mean that. I should like to begin quite conventionally: ‘Dear Ann,’ and I should want it to continue in some of the most beautiful words in the world—those that are believed to signify the love between Christ and His church. And you would sign it, because there is at least a chance of her remembering your name. You would tell her where you found the words and that they had been waiting for her all her life and now you send them to her because she is lonesome and in grief—and they are the words of love. They are figurative, abstract, but they are the words of love.”

She wanted to stand with him, echo him, obey him, but there were things she had to know.

“I mean,” he said, “we can’t give even the memory of her father back to her in any sense she’d understand. But we can, in patience, in gentleness, lead her to the very fount of love. Because she’s had a shock, through her affections, do you see? As it often is with men and women who are lovers and some misfortune separates them: it is an actual calamity, a shock, not only mental but physical—the heart, the mind, the flesh. Don’t you know it is?”

“This girl is as much an instance of it—almost as much—as if she’d lost a lover, not her father. In its effects, I mean. She is sick, and only God can heal her. And since words are what her mind is dwelling on, I can see Him healing her through them: passionate, beautiful words. How could I ask her to fix her tired mind on God? She would have to be imaginative or devout in some degree. She hardly seems to be that. You haven’t found her so.”

“No,” said Hannah, “she’s just a pathetic creature out of a Mary Wilkins story.”

“So I felt. She’s been starved, and now she’s cried out against it. She asks for words, words that comfort the heart.”

“You never used to preach so,” said Hannah impulsively. “You’ve been intellectual and dogmatic, if you’ll allow me to say so, Parson, but not like this.”

“No,” said he, “perhaps not. Perhaps I’m different. But this is so unusual. It comes so near. It might be you.”

“The very word is a call to her—love. She loved her earthly father and that might be a step to loving the Father of us all. Perhaps it’s been a long time since she’s even heard the word. I shouldn’t expect the two old ladies to use it to her.”

“Oh, no,” said Hannah. He seemed to be slightly academic in his hopeful fantasy. “And you know we don’t talk much about those things in everyday life. You’re a little bit up on the mountain tops, don’t you see? It’s a lovely place to get to, but I hardly think we could expect to find Elsie and Milly Raymond there. And I’m not sure—”

“What is it you’re not sure of?” He seemed, in his own mind, to have explained it very clearly. He had reached a point where he could act.

“Well,” said Hannah, “personally, I don’t know much about modern theories for treating the insane. In a case of this sort, for instance, I shouldn’t be sure whether a patient who had a fixed idea like this ought to be encouraged in it or have her mind taken up with other things, led away from it, made to forget.”

“And yet,” she thought, as she said it, “do I want to forget? Isn’t the memory of it too beautiful to lose? Would there be anything in what people call happiness of other sorts, to make up for losing it?”

“Why, my dear,” he said, “we mustn’t forget what we’re talking about: love, the most beautiful of all things, the most sacred. No, I won’t say I have a theory. It’s nothing so arrogant or definite. But it’s my conclusion, what I’ve concluded from living in this world: that love is the root and flowering of our life here, and when we die and go—elsewhere—it will be the same there. Only different. You see”—he smiled a little, whimsically, “I’m preaching at you. And I never could preach without notes. But if I write this child what I’ll call a letter, I must make myself clear. Would she read a book?”

“I don’t believe she does,” said Hannah, recalling the aspect of the dull room. “I don’t remember seeing any lying round. It’s my impression she only plays with slips of paper, sometimes making marks on them, sometimes not. And the pencil isn’t sharpened. Once I offered to sharpen it for her and she looked surprised and wouldn’t let me. She said it was sharp enough. Didn’t I see it was?”

“Well,” said the parson hopefully. This was his professional hope, Hannah thought. She had often wondered whether he found it an actual stimulant, and whether he really did hope as much as he told people he did, also telling them that it was a necessary part of their business here below, and a prelude to that unknown good which has been called “things unseen.” “Well,” he repeated, “I wish we knew a little more about her, though it’s really immaterial. The first thing to do is to send her a few lines to start her heart to beating—with their beauty, do you see? And when our hearts begin to beat—why, we’re alive again.”

“Father,” said she, though hesitating, for she felt too little acquainted with him as yet to gainsay him in anything, “when you say love is the root of our life here, do you mean love between men and women?”

“I mean all love,” said he. “Between mother and child, father and child, all the human relations. Well-wishing toward the world. And friendship—that is a very pure love because it wants nothing for itself—or ought to want nothing. Not like the love between man and woman: I suppose that is the most terrible thing on earth—and beautiful, oh, beautiful!”

He stopped short, as if knowing this might be more than it was wise to say. Again she wondered. Had his sermons always been so uselessly academic because he was really shy and his soul refused to burn itself out before a congregation of men and women who might afterward lift their brows and say: “Wasn’t that a queer sermon? Could you follow it? I couldn’t—hardly a word.”

She was thinking of the silent man up-state in New York, who had certainly felt the terror of desire and its imagined flowering, but who had given over its guardianship to her—its silent guardianship. “Flowering!” she thought. What a word for the sterility of silence and dumb longing! If love had been a flower, now it was fallen withered from its stem, and likely to find its only being under the snow of years. They said there was safety under snow if it was deep enough. You could survive all winter, perhaps. At least, you weren’t thrashed and battled by the winds.

But the parson seemed to be thinking, and she put her question again, a little differently:

“Because it is not only according to God and nature, as it must be, but it’s enchantment. The two, the lovers, are supremely beautiful to each other. They must possess each other utterly.”

“Father,” she wanted to say, “what quick, warm English you speak. Your sermons never were like this. You never were anything like it here at home. Did mother ever hear you speak like this?” But none of it did she venture, lest, if she turned his mind on himself, he might grow shy and dumb. She had seen him so when he had haltingly tried to tell mother about certain discoveries he had followed among students more adventurous than he—linguistic, tribal, the life of a vanished world he was most at home in—and mother, though she listened intently, perhaps answered that if he could make a popular résumé, he might sometime publish a little book.

“But why, why,” she said, still thinking of the silent man up-state, “why is it so beautiful—and so dreadful, too?”

“Because it is creation,” he said, with assurance. “We call souls to the earth—like you, Hannah. You always seem very young to me—and small. I called you—we called you, and you came.”

She thought of the horde of books nuzzling about among secret sins and the voices clamoring “sex,” and wondered if he could be as remote from all this travesty as something born far off from it and not troubling to dwell near its dull ribaldry. What was he like? She could only think of something as removed and elemental as perhaps a medicinal plant growing in the woods, sown there by a wandering wind and, though fitted to the use of man, incurious of the diseases it might heal. But he was speaking.

“I don’t like to say ‘dreadful.’ I mean natural, powerful, moving with an intense life like storms and everything untrammeled in the outer being of this earth; and it has to be. Nature has to find her equilibrium. And ‘love’—it quiets of itself.”

“Ah,” she thought, and was relieved for that moment, “you and mother have quieted. It isn’t that you’ve forgotten things.”

“It begins to ripen,” he said, feeling his way along a path he seemed to have discovered at the moment, and was looking into with wonder: the bordering green, the birds, perhaps, and a bright beetle on a leaf. “It flowers. It has its seeds of graciousness and patience and a million quiet beauties it never knew in youth. It renews itself. We die and live again. And it lives, too, Hannah. Yes, it lives.”

Hannah, to her own shame, lost patience with him. What business had he to weave this insubstantial drapery about the meek shoulders of Ann Denison, shut up in her four walls and asking nothing but to tear paper into bits and ask to have them mailed? Wasn’t it an indignity to drag her out into the imagery of a world that talked of heaven—though not so raptly as the parson did—and here on earth let you live as you could manage?

“You ask a poor starved creature like her to get as drunk on words as you are yourself, and when she’s unhappy here you believe they’ll waft her off somewhere else. They won’t, Parson. Oh, no, no, they won’t! They wouldn’t do it for me, and I’ve got a lot of your unreasonable hope in me. No, and they’ll never do it for her.”

She had recalled him from his incomparable dream. He was humble again, a poor country parson who had lost his job and only at moments could take these brief flights into imagined certainties. And he spoke with humility:

“Perhaps not, my dear, perhaps not. And I am unreasonable. I’ve no doubt of it. But I do want to write something to her, very plainly, very simply. And then, if she reads the letter—for though it’s Biblical, all in that beautiful phrasing, it will seem like a letter, do you see? if she reads it, and perhaps others of the same type, she will know somebody is thinking of her. And there will be your name, and though you’re not sure she has any association with it, perhaps she has. And step by step, it might be, she could be led on through earthly affection, even the words common to it, and gain confidence enough to be told there is something else, hers, all men’s, all women’s—the love of God. That’s what we’re working toward. And doesn’t it seem worth while to you—and possible?”

He looked at her so urgently, yet in such continuing humility, that her heart melted within her and, for the first time, she felt herself seeing him as he must have been when he was young. Or, her audacious mind told her, as he was before he came here to earth, when he was still not far from the “young-eyed cherubins.” Tears sprang to her eyes and she smiled a little, thinking how long it had been since she had cried over anybody but herself.

“Yes, dear,” she said. “You do it and I’ll help you, if you think I can.”

The next morning after breakfast he went directly into his study and she did up her own room and his. Celestia was busy in the kitchen. It was ironing day and mother always made a point of being helpful on such days, though Hannah had sometimes doubted whether Celestia would not have liked better to follow her own way among the household tasks, alone. You could not tell. Celestia had a protective silence, a weighty stillness that was never threatening to the common peace, although it could be felt. She was like a woman molded out of a smooth warm hillside, for gracious and special uses. There were seeds of columbine and pennyroyal and hardhack in the hillside, and at odd times they sprung up and came to bloom and surprised you when you had got used to thinking of it all as plain good earth. Hannah thought these things, or had a vague feeling of something like them, while she was making her father’s bed and then lingering a little in the room, poking about it with purposeless steps and eyes half curious. She had always thought it one of the nicest rooms in the old house: a mother’s room she had once called it, in her growing youth. Mother’s rooms were different from all others. They were used to giving up almost anything the rest of the house needed, and kindly accepting the overflow of out-dated things which were yet too dear or too useful to be thrown away. Here was the ottoman with the embroidery of a dog’s head, a pathetic dog because the wrong shade of wool had been used for his eyes, and when that was discovered, in the working, one eye had been rectified and not the other, because the first one had been done by mother’s own little sister, Nelly, who died, and the other one by Aunt Grayson who had a sense of artistic rectitude with the needle, but was not allowed to pick out the little girl’s mistaken fancy.

“No,” mother had told her seriously, when she herself was a little girl and it was probably thought well to admit her to the grave decencies of family life, “no, you mustn’t think of it or speak of it as if the doggie had a funny eye. Little Nelly did it when she was hardly any bigger than you, and she did it the best she could.”

Hannah had deep loyalties of nature, and when the brief maternal sermon worked its will on her, she would not now have had the wildly different eye other than it was. It seemed to be the one thing left to make pathetic little Nelly alive in a world where she might have been happy if she had kept her small feet on it until she grew up into the lovely, golden-haired girl she would surely have become. Hannah knew nothing about her looks, but having always prayed for golden hair, in place of her heavy brown mop, she was sure Nelly, having been selected for the wonder and importance of dying, could have had nothing less than gold.

There was a pincushion made of a basket crocheted and stiffened by some kind of gum and a cushion inside it; there were braided mats made by Aunt Grayson herself, and in the bay-window—discarded at some ambitious moment of family prosperity—a child’s cot, the little mattress covered by a piece of blue and white woven quilt, and sitting at the foot, leaning stiffly against the rail, her own doll, Lucretia. The sight of her always gave Hannah a queer feeling, never lessened by any length of absence. She met Lucretia, not so much with affection as in acknowledgment of a tie never to be broken and which Lucretia, as well, might be bearing patiently. There she sat, round-faced and smiling, but one might doubt whether she had a mind to smile on an earth where she seemed condemned to a tiring immortality. Hannah said a few words to her, as she made the bed. They relieved her own mind for not feeling more warmly toward her.

“You see,” she said, “you’re not any more modern than I am. If I bobbed my hair, or even had it waved properly, I should be a sight. Are you tired of this? Tell me if you are, for I could bust you all to pieces and you never’d have to sit there another minute, smiling at the headboard. I’d tell mother I took you up to look at the pretty underthings she made you and I was clumsy and dropped you and there you were. Do you s’pose mother liked you so much because you were mine and that’s why she keeps you sitting there? Or keeps the cot there? Or does she do it because it’s proper to like you and like the cot—and me?”

And this she was conscious she would not have said if the queer buoyancy of father’s mind had not made her wonder whether he was not disporting himself so freely among the hours—the loves, the graces, and the hours, how gaily the pencils of dead artists had depicted them!—because mother had gone away. She had finished the bed and stood looking at it with a measure of conceit over her own prowess in doing perfectly deeds she took no natural pleasure in: the spread was smooth, the corners were square, the pillows plumb.

“I’m a black imp,” she said to Lucretia. “A demon. I can think of more wicked things in a minute than you’ve thought all these years sitting there grinning at the wall. But there’s one thing I can do and you can’t: I can make a good bed.”

She turned about, to go, but paused in the doorway to wipe out all her unholy imaginings and leave a charm for father and his rest. She raised her hands as if to invoke the higher powers and chanted in a swift mumble impossible to be heard in the kitchen or the study:

Then she threw a satirical kiss to the unregarding person on the cot and went down to find Celestia.

The long kitchen, paneled to the ceiling, had the clean scent of newly-ironed clothes. Celestia stood by the board midway between windows, ironing, with the slow precision she put into everything. There was no showy lifting and thumping of the iron. There was never, as in moments when the best of irons do get intemperate, the smell of scorching doth. Hannah drew a chair near the head of the board and sat down, and Celestia looked round at her, smiling widely yet with no calculated display of teeth. She knew, in everything, how to “use all gently.”

“Celestia, why don’t you go somewhere for a little visit? Take a few days off? Now while I’m here. D’you see?”

Celestia stayed her hand an instant to look up in a quick, almost emotional appeal. It was such as Hannah had never expected from her. This was apprehension and Celestia had always been of an unmoved calmness; or she had smiled.

“No,” said she. “I ain’t got anybody to visit. And I shouldn’t feel to, if I had. I don’t want anything better than staying right along here.”

She reproved herself for that sudden benevolence. It ought to have had a pleasant sound, but now, seeing its effect, she wondered whether it had been like undervaluing the faithfulness of that long past and implying it would cost nobody anything to break with it for a time. Simple natures, like Celestia’s, were easily hurt.

“That is,” she said lamely, “if you were tired, doing the same things every day.”

How silly! she thought. What was life but doing the same things every day? Celestia seemed to be saying it herself.

“Why, that’s what I come for,” said she. “Somebody’s got to do ’em, and I know their ways now, your mother’s and your father’s, if he can be said to have any. Half an hour after dinner, I don’t believe he could remember what he’d eat, not if you asked him.”

“Well,” said Hannah with the false cheerfulness we adopt when we have to make things right (after you’ve begun it wrong, she thought, laying the pattern on another way), “I don’t want you to go, heaven knows. I’m a lazy tyke, and it’s the last thing I look forward to, standing here and ironing sheets and probably scorching the board and having to cover it again before you got back and found me out.”

“No,” said Celestia soberly, looking down at her work. “It would only upset me to pack up and go off some’er’s I don’t know where. I’m better off as I am.”

“It’s been wonderful,” said Hannah, “and your doing everything mother’s own way. She wouldn’t know how to get along without you.”

“I’ve tried,” said Celestia. “I did from the first. That’s no more than right.” She paused an instant, her iron ready, looking at the board. Standing so, in her Demeter pose of strength and ease, her long lashes veiled her brown eyes. She was very moving to Hannah. This was earth witchery as well as a deep dutifulness learned of life. “I didn’t know as I should always stay,” she said, setting her iron again to work. “There was a time—”

Here she paused and the Demeter moment was broken. Was she going to tell some tale of disaffection between her and mother? Whatever it was, Hannah spoke at random, to forestall it.

Celestia stared at her in amazement. It might have been terror of a sort. “Perhaps,” thought Hannah, “she thinks I’m crazy.” But Celestia was answering, and rather stiffly.

“I don’t know what you should want to say a thing like that for. I’m nothing to look at.”

“You’re splendid,” said Hannah, carried a little beyond herself. But why not see how far she could go? Celestia had probably never heard of Demeter, but if you spoke simply she’d understand the Demeter motive. “You’re so strong and quiet—and you look as if you were sweet all through.”

“I’m strong enough,” said Celestia. “There ain’t hardly anything I can’t lift, outdoor, either. But when I said I didn’t think I should always be staying on, I thought of something that happened to me here in this kitchen, not fifteen years ago.”

She spoke as if fifteen years were a short time indeed, hardly to be considered, and Hannah said, “But fifteen years! you couldn’t have been much more than a child.”

“Oh, yes, I was! You think back and you’ll see I was more’n twenty years old. Anyway, I was grown up, big as I am now and I guess my skin was better. Maybe my hair. I’ve often thought o’ that. This being pretty or not pretty—well, I never was much concerned about it before that. I never’d gone about with young folks much. Not with men anyways. I’d had to work too hard.”

These began to seem important matters they were entering on. She would not, for anything, seem to leave them curtly.

“Well,” said Celestia indifferently, “I never got any of what you’d call attention. I guess I was a crooked stick. A fellow would speak to me at a fair, or so on, and when I looked at him—and I wanted to be civil—I’d rather have been like the rest of the girls—the nice ones—he’d say something about the weather and walk away. Maybe he thought I was a great clown of a girl and I could take him up with one hand and run off with him. But that’s the way it was.”

She paused here to rearrange the clothes on the wooden horse where they were drying, and so absorbed was she always in what she did that Hannah, watching her, felt her heart sink. She was like a child in her disappointment. This was the end of the story or what promised to be a story, and no hour of play with Lucretia, in those childish days, had seemed to her so beguiling as the prospect of this. Celestia had never talked to her before except about recipes and the need of flour and the pump’s running down; and now, because she had turned away to put clean linen to dry, the thread was broken and she would not go on. But she paused by the clothes basket, selected the tight smooth roll of a small table-cloth and returned to her board. She, too, must have awakened to the story, after these lean years of silence, for she took it up with as evident an intention as she had taken the dampened doth.

“Getting married—that was what I expected, as much as ever I expected anything in my life.”

“But Celestia!” Hannah rushed in upon it. “I never heard of that. Why hasn’t mother told me? Didn’t she know?”

Celestia shook her head over the ironing board. She was working, Hannah thought, with an even more expert delicacy than before, bringing out shining acorns and oak leaves in the damask of the cloth, beginning on the intricate border and as if she loved it.

“No! oh, no!” she said. “Not your mother. Oh, no! nobody had any idea of it but me, nor ever has had from that day on till now.”

“No,” said Celestia, absorbed whether in her love story or the damask of the cloth, no one could have told. “It was this way—and when it all happened ’twas about this time o’ year. I s’pose that’s why I begin to think of it along about now, summer coming on and all. It was one early morning, same as if it might have been today, and I’d overslept myself a minute or so, and I ran down here to the kitchen in my white petticoat and corset-cover, not my dress. I knew your father wouldn’t be round so early and I wanted to hurry and be sure my bread I was rising hadn’t run over the bowl. And just as I got there to the bread, the outer door opened and he stepped in—a man, I mean. That door wa’n’t always locked. We used to leave it for the milkman, and them days nobody was afraid. He stepped in—the man, you know—and he got to the middle o’ the floor and stopped short. He see me there standing over the bread. I looked up at him. He was the handsomest man I ever see. And different. Tall, broad-shouldered, straight, colored something as I be, only lighter. His hair and face, I mean. About his eyes I never could be sure. Sometimes I think they were brown, but I don’t know. He spoke just two words. ‘By God!’ he says. It didn’t seem like swearing. And he come for’ard—he stepped long and I guess ’twas only three steps he took—and he put his arms round me and begun to kiss me. And I put my arms round him,” said Celestia quietly, “and I kissed him.”

“I can’t bear this,” said Hannah, to herself, but aloud she said: “O Celestia! O my dear!”

Celestia was taking no notice of her. She was speaking to the shining fabric under her hand or to the inexorable spirits of life that bring about such strange credulities in the human mind.

“I don’t know how long we stood there, his arms round me and mine round him. And I felt as if he’d been hunting for me all his life and I’d been waiting for him to come and—I don’t know how to put it—no, I guess I can’t.”

“I know,” said Hannah, in a high sharp voice which was not her own as she knew it. “You felt as if there was one thing for you to do, and that was to stand there kissing him and let the clock strike and the milkman drop dead and old Tab miaow for her milk and mother come down the stairs—”

“How’d you know?” she asked. “Your mother did come downstairs. We heard her the same minute when she was half-way down, and he took his arms off of me and pulled mine away from his neck—I didn’t—I didn’t know enough—and he was out o’ the door and your mother stepped in and she says: ‘Oh, you’ve got here first! You remembered the bread.’ And she laughed a little, pleasant and nice—she was always that to me—and I sat down by the window, my hands in my lap, and how I got breakfast I don’t know. But I must have, for nothing was ever said about that morning from that day to this. Oh, and I forgot to tell the whole. When he run for the door he says—quick and sharp as if he was all choked up—I can hear his voice now—this very room it was—‘I’ll come back.’ ”

“Well?” said Hannah, violently. “Well? And how long was it? Did he come—that day?”

“No,” said Celestia simply, with an air of having learned that no one ever came. “He never come at all. Oh, no! You’d ha’ known it if he had, for I should ha’ walked right off with him. I shouldn’t be here now.”

“But he wrote,” said Hannah, feeling at her heart the sickness of ill news. “What did he say?”

“No,” said Celestia, cleverly running the point of the iron up among the gathers of a sleeve. It was uncanny to see how absorbed she could be in getting the linen straight. It was done mechanically, to be sure, as things are when we have done them many times; but Hannah could not help a childish wonder to see her put aside the lost passion of a life for a hot iron and a bit of cloth.

“Oh, yes,” said Celestia. “I found out after a while. Not that I ever asked anybody. You can’t, you see, a thing like that. But old Mis’ Huntoon up to the street—she’s dead now—she was a great invalid, confined to her room. Well, her grandson, he’d come down to see her. He was a sailor, followed the sea, and he brought another feller with him, first mate he was, but they thought the world of each other, and they’d spent the night and had to be off that morning. I don’t know as they’d have come at all, only the Huntoon boy done it to please grandma, she being in bed so—and the other one was visiting him and he come, too.”

“I used to ask myself that,” said Celestia, unmoved except by the intricacies of a delicate ruffle. “I thought then ’twas the hand o’ Providence; but putting two and two together, as time went on, I found out how it was. It was one day your mother was over to Mis’ Huntoon’s, to carry her a bit o’ something same as we always did—something different, she being in bed so—and she come home laughing and said Mis’ Huntoon had had them two to spend the night and in the morning the boys were late getting off—’twas that afternoon they were to sail—and grandma said they’d better have an early breakfast and sent one of ’em down here to see if Parson Willoughby knew when that first train went. And the strange boy, the one that was the first mate, he said he’d go and leave t’other one—the grandson, you know—to set with grandma. And what if he didn’t come back and hadn’t asked his question at all, and seemed to forget what ’twas he went for and says ‘I couldn’t find the house!’ And she laughed,” said Celestia, in a kind of wonder that life could be so strange. “And Grandma Huntoon laughed, she said, and they concluded he couldn’t be much of a first mate if he couldn’t see anything the size of a house.”

“And didn’t you know his name?” said Hannah, in her own despairing wonderment over blind fate and blind Celestia and what they could do between them. “The Huntoons could have told you.”

“Yes,” said Celestia, “but that wouldn’t have done me any good when there he was sailing the sea and every minute further away. I remember how the wind blew, along about that time your mother went over to Grandma Huntoon’s and brought home the tale—a strong west wind. And I thought every minute it was taking him further away, and I says to myself ‘I never can bear it in the world.’ ”

“No,” said Celestia. Her ironing was done now and that seemed somehow to have power over the story and snip its thread. “Grandma Huntoon died and that was the end.”

Hannah sat watching her as she put away her board and set the irons on the soapstone shelf of the sink. What was there to say? Even if Celestia had looked for comfort, what comfort could be given her? Was it possible that this calm, deep-chested creature who had come almost to middle age among the loves and lusts of country living, had found nothing but ironic fate in her early morning visit from a man who had kissed her into adoring passion and promised to come again? Gigantic fate! not the body’s impulse of a creature all blood and fire, suddenly confronted by the beauty of what the earth had made for his assuaging, but holy sacrament. For Hannah, also, the bond of man and woman was holy, but she did not expect the angel of love’s annunciation to be waiting in every kitchen or every bush. She went back a little in the story, wondering if she dared, now that Celestia, done with the rhythm of the ironing, was perhaps asking herself: “How did I come to talk so much?”

“And you thought,” she said, and hesitated, “he meant he was coming back to marry you.”

She had forgotten Hannah. She was rapt with it. He had kissed her so, and by virtue of it she was his and he was hers, though he had been gone many years, and even the ocean’s rim seemed near compared with the line of absence that divided them. Hannah found herself lost in the mazes of it.

“Nothing,” said Hannah. “Only—haven’t you ever spoken of it at all? Does my father know?”

“The parson?” said Celestia. She laughed a little. “No, I never spoke to anybody, and I shouldn’t to you only somehow things seem different this summer, and this is about the time o’ year— But your father! Speak to him? I guess he’d think I was out o’ my head.”

Hannah was conscious that the interview had come to an end and she wanted to get away before the inevitable minute when Celestia might say to herself: “What made me tell it?” What had made her open the door of the secret place where she had wandered with a memory who might be only a man she had startled into the frenzy of man’s passion, or who could have become the embodied mate of her unawakened spirit? The man himself was fragmentary, not to be put together into bodily shape worthy of the spirit’s fealty. But Celestia herself had been all loveliness: a child answering nature’s murmured “Come!” or the touch of her true mate—for there were true mates or Shakespeare could not have lived or Héloise greeted her cold conventual abnegation with a kiss. Or Hannah Willoughby, plain and within the verge of middle age, writing her queer musty-minded lover the dull academic letters he awoke to answer when the moon of his life seemed to be in the right quarter for no disquieting talk between them. And her mind, in that minute, dreamed off more and more, into the wonder of love, at first “a fountain rising higher and higher” and then falling into a stream that perhaps, if you were as gods and managed it, might turn a mill wheel or even carry boats to sea. It might have been lovely, as lovely and stupendous as Celestia thought it. She didn’t believe it was, but any time it might be. For the minute of her sitting there in the solitude of her own thoughts, Celestia looked at her, the knife idle in her hand.

“Well, there,” said she, as if it were Hannah who was the child unused to life and must be gentled into forgetting it, “I guess I’ve stirred you up enough for one day. You mustn’t think about it. It was one o’ them things that happen, I s’pose. You can see how they might.”

Yes, Hannah said—and afterward hoped she had not said it sorrowfully—she could see how they might. Now Celestia had stayed the work of her hands and stood communing with herself.

“No,” she said, “I never did speak of it before. I shouldn’t have felt I could. I don’t really know why I did now, but maybe this summer I feel as if ’twas all getting further and further away. Somehow it’s different.”

Hannah could not answer. That innocent reason was a little reminding stab. Somehow it was “different!” Was it really because mother had gone? But she had thought too long in that disturbing vein.

“Hannah!” came her father’s voice. She hurried out into the hall and found him at his study door. He held a sheet of paper and it quivered a little, as if his hand were trembling. Yet father had never, to her eyes, shown telltale signs of age or weakness, least of all that of an uncertain hand. He turned back into the study.

He sat down at the table and she took the chair opposite. Here they had sat at the beginning of their first halting recognition of this new confidence, and it gave her a child’s pleasure to wonder if they were going to talk as they did then: would it grow, this late-born intimacy, strange, exciting prelude to her better knowledge of him who, though he had always proved gravely aware of his responsibilities toward her, was, in a way, a stranger? Why had it never been before? Could it be that mother—but here she cut herself off. If mother really had pervaded the world of his unprotesting mind, it had not been mother herself. It had been the tide of her overflowing energy—and there she was again, reasoning it out with an exactness that ought to have been impossible to a daughter’s decent loyalties.

“What is it, Father?” she said. “You make me frightfully cocky, being willing to stop and talk with me. Something you’ve been writing?”

“I thought of it in the night,” he said, smiling a little in a shamefaced way, as if nobody would believe so simple a task could be so hard. “About that letter, you know, to Ann. Writing her, to begin to pry open her closed mind, and make her feel somebody’s hailing her from outside. You remember.”

Oh, yes, Hannah said, she remembered. It was a lovely thought; but how far had he gone?

“That’s it,” said he. “It seemed perfectly easy when we first got it up—”

“I didn’t get it up,” said Hannah, finding it important to set him right. “You did. It’s all yours. If I’d had the cleverness while I had the chance! there I was, right under her nose, and I never tried to get into her lonesome little mind. I just went to see her and carry her some flowers, maybe, and even that was a mistake. She couldn’t bear the smell. The aunts told me they had to move her into another room because there was honeysuckle outside her window and she couldn’t endure it. Now if there was something in that, oughtn’t they to have got at it, so they could understand her better? Would a doctor have done that? Perhaps it was in bloom some happy summer she may have had when she was a child, at least.”

The parson shook his head but, she could not help thinking, as if he, too, believed in more things than he dared put into words.

“We mustn’t be too fanciful,” said he. “Still we might guess. Now my letter to her: Do you realize you can be perfectly sure of what you want to write, but when you get it down, it’s laughable? Perhaps”—And his face fell into a musing ruefulness—“perhaps that was one trouble with my sermons. I had—no, not visions. I never was gifted, never exalted, as you might say, but I seemed to see the things that had been promised us—and how beautiful they are, the words of Holy Writ!—and when I came to speak of them—now, what could you expect?” he asked and laughed a little at an old man’s folly. “There was my language, too. I was always reading the Scriptures and the ancient books, and my very language—how could you expect this generation to model itself on maxims out of the mouth of an old codger who very palpably takes back to Noah? He’d understand me very well, Noah would, and my way of thinking, too; but these aren’t Biblical times, Hannah. They’ve had their day and we’re different. We don’t wait to say ‘he slept with his fathers and Manasseh reigned in his stead.’ No, they don’t wait for us to die. Manasseh begins to reign. Oh, I mustn’t talk! I haven’t talked so much for years.”

“It’s me,” said Hannah, “the pedagogue in me, trying to get everything into lists and card catalogues—and my everlasting curiosity to know everything about everything and coming to you for it. I know a little bit about the world, but it’s heaven I don’t know and you do. What’s the matter with the letter? Couldn’t you get it to your mind?”

“It’s so difficult,” said he. “Hannah, it’s so vague. When we talk about unseen things, why have we got to sound so stilted?”

“We do! we do!” cried Hannah. “Oh, bless you for that word! Now this about Ann: you’re all off, dear, and because you’re trying to do two things. You’re so sorry for her you want to tell her she’ll get her father back again, and you know she can’t. And then you want to offer her the love of God, and you know it won’t mean a blessed thing to her. Now will it? Has it ever, to the people you’ve offered it to, when it’s the earth they want? Father, it’s the earth here. Don’t you realize? This is the earth! the earth!”

Was she “getting mad” about it, as she used to say she did about things that seemed to withstand her when she was a child? He looked at her as if he too were mad in another way, torn by doubt, trembling in the pillars of his house.

“Hannah,” said he, “what’s the matter with me? I believe in”—he seemed about to repeat his creed—and pulled himself up—“I believe—what I believe. But when I offer it to other men they’re civil about it, but it’s nothing to them, less than nothing. And here’s this girl. I can’t get her father back for her—the old, old cry!—But I do want to give her the feel of earthly warmth and tenderness. It’s what we live on, if we’re lucky enough to get it, and it keeps us alive till we can take another step, reach a hand out—no, Hannah, I can’t help talking about the love of God.”

He had never himself seemed so lovable to her in an unhappy way. Had he always been stumbling about among the mysteries of human pain when he had seemed to be most absorbed in ancient tongues? Was study his anodyne and not altogether his delight? It was strange to know him a little better now, though it occurred to her that nobody knew anybody so very well.

“About her father,” she said, because there had to be some sort of response to keep his mind still open to her, “he may have been a poor fish and she’s better off without him; but a father’s a father and that’s something to the good. There’s a kind of royal patent on him. He’s marked sterling. But a lover—if he’s no good, why, there’s the end of him. You can’t lose your father—really. But if you lose your lover, there you are.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s true. Such things do happen, perhaps oftener than we think.”

Hannah, at that moment, loved him almost angrily. “Of course such things happen!” she wanted to cry out. “Do you suppose all cyclones are holy water and all lovers who seem to speak with the tongues of men and angels are angels and not men? Is it possible you don’t know any more than Celestia about this three-ring circus that is the world?” But she was used to these untempered storms of remonstrance within her and knew there was almost never an occasion when you could let them drive wildly where they would break the windows in the house of life. There was a time when, after she had got away from her mother’s just and not too heroic punishments, she let herself go, in the exigencies of teaching, and spoke wildly yet merrily, and thought everybody would understand. But they seldom did. The freshmen thought she was a queer Dick and, though they themselves were untrammeled in their speech, it was the lingo of the period. It wasn’t generated by the moment’s need, bristling with illustration and well-peppered outcry. And the ones who had been there longest were more tolerant, but their own conversation, if not all yea and nay, was more or less according to formula. So now she spoke humbly, lest the very beginning of her intimacy with father should go the way of the undesired and uncouth.

“Aren’t you going to let me read it?” she politely asked. Father seemed like a fascinating bird on a bough. He mustn’t be scared away. “Or you read it to me, will you, please?”

This was what he wanted, but he had such doubts about it that he began with hesitation, almost as if it were not plain to him and each word had to be scrutinized.

“Ann, dear, dear Ann:” He looked up at her over his glasses. That was his most attractive look, the one she liked best. There was everything paternal in it, protective and kind, as if he had just learned she needed him and had left everything else to come. Perhaps it was even more a grandmother’s look than a father’s: a person who thinks of you first as very young and in everything treats you with tenderness, out of knowledge of the long way youth has to go.

“Do you think we might do that?” he was asking her. “Put that emphasis on the adjective—using it twice, you see? But she is dear to us, very dear, by reason of her misfortunes. I want that to be the first thing to strike her: affection, everything all right, no more brooding, no more bits of paper—no need of them because everything’s all right. Love!”

“Yes,” said Hannah. “And I’m to sign it, am I? Oh, yes, I will! She may not understand, but we can try it on.”

“You don’t think it would be a deception? You don’t—you shrink from it?”

“No,” said Hannah, “not in the least. And call it a deception, if you like. I don’t much care if it is. You’d tell a lie, wouldn’t you, to a patient who was out of her mind? tell her the bromide was poison if poison was what she thought she wanted? And give her a night’s sleep? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. But I would. I’ve seen too much suffering. I’ve had too much of it myself to stop for scruples if I can ease it up a bit.”

The effect was other than she hoped. He laid down the sheet of paper and looked at her, alarmed and pitiful.

“Hannah,” he said, “don’t tell me that. Suffering? how have you suffered, child?”

“Oh, nothing to speak of,” she said, inwardly cursing herself for a fool. “Once I broke my arm, you know. That was when I fell out of the swing. And I used to have earache like the very dickens. You remember. Oh, yes, I can tell you what pain is. If you want to know, ask me.”

She was not sure whether, being a fool, she could escape the results of her folly. Fools ought not to, else where should we be? He continued looking at her and Hannah wondered whether, at full gaze, her eyes could be called honest. She was anything but honest now. He seemed to her to be building up card houses a breath might flatten, but she could not tell him so. “How do we feel,” she wondered, “when we’re really innocent, not putting up a bluff? Do the innocent say to themselves: ‘How nice I feel!’ Are they like a clear lake inside and if they told a lie, would it be a terrible business, like throwing in a stone?” But she had, for one thing, made him definitely uneasy, and he said:

“I think I’ll sacrifice one ‘dear,’ ” took up his pencil and crossed it out. He went on reading, thoughtfully, as if seeing he might have to discard everything.

“Dear Ann: I ask you to believe in love. To believe that if you love any one, something beautiful will sometime come out of it. And when you are loved, something beautiful comes out of that. Love is a living thing. It does not die.”

“Does it not?” she thought. Amazing statement! Where did he get it? But though so innocently open to debate, the dissenting voice should never come from her. At the moment when she had seen the resolute pencil cut out that superfluous ‘dear’ which was, she knew, his passionate alms to the prisoners of love, she had given up the job. He must write his letter as he liked. Strangely, she had never thought anything about his possible tenderness over suffering. She had taken it for granted in him, but she had never seen it in action. Now it seemed to be born before her, every struggling word an oblation to the mystery of human pain and to the God of his belief Who had inscribed it on the earth in various signs for man to learn by. She recalled herself.

“Not quite all.” He laughed a little, a low, musing note which was really his accustomed comment on his own unfitness to swim in foreign waters. “But it took me all night to write it. I wanted it to sound personal, don’t you see? A letter! just a letter of the kind she wants. But not false! It mustn’t be false. You see that.”

“Yes,” said Hannah. “And it isn’t false. It’s written out of kindness, affection of a sort. It’s as you said. You do care what happens to her. So do I. Very likely she won’t understand it, but it may give her a jolt into another state of mind.”

“We’re sweeping her mind clean,” said he, rehearsing his task uneasily. “Sweeping out the demons, whatever they were. You can’t give a name to such—enemies, we could call them. And we’re setting up an image in their place: love, the thought of the earthly love she’s gone crazy over. And then the love of God. It’s always waiting. Close the door on it, but it’s there outside. Open the door, sweep out evil and it enters in. Our Lord will enter in. Wait, my dear. We’ll see.”

He took up his pen, forgetting her, and she sat looking from the window behind him, all a green shadow of lindens where the bees had begun to hum. The parson was writing. “Hurrah!” she wanted to call to him. “It’s going well, isn’t it? You’re writing fast.” She sat as still as a good child who has been told not to disturb the mysterious affairs of Christendom, and she did not think of Ann Denison waiting in her distracted seclusion for the letter that was to come, but of Celestia. Could one believe that all the growing womanhood of Celestia had been buried in the secrecy where she had shut it, perfumed by a love that had never been? And could anybody who knew the raw materials of what is still called love believe that the child—for she was a child—had taken a man’s coming, as his going, for the mysterious working of dull fate? or was it, indeed, too far away from the prosaic likelihood of things even to think of it as fate? Probably she had never pictured him as changed from his young hardihood and the hotness of his lustful blood. He had been one of the embodiments of earthly life that fall from the air like petals in an orchard, and when you see them wither, in their turn, you merely think: “But they were beautiful.” She herself was far from such paradisal innocence. Dwelling inevitably on her own lover and remembering how she had seen the complexion of his mind change from April’s promise to the dry rustling of leaves that are autumn’s last, she felt more or less dry and dead herself—beside Celestia. “But I could come alive,” she told her fighting mind, with the fierce bravado of the earth-child who holds its playthings desperately in a wilful hand. “I could be more alive than ever, if he wanted me.”

“Now,” said the parson, scanning his page anxiously. “I don’t know whether I’ve done much better. But you see.”

He was immensely troubled over it, and Hannah thought she would not have missed this childlike hesitance. She had never guessed that, in his sermonizing, he might have written as anxiously as here when he was trying to sacrifice worthily to the divine Eros, to rescue a woman from the sickness of her faded wits. The letter began stiffly, and she trembled for it.

“You will forgive me,” he read, in a voice doubtful and even shy beyond her knowledge of him, “if I remind you that all earthly love is, like everything earthly, but the stepping stone to the love of God.” He looked up at her. “I’m afraid!” he said. “It sounds like a sermon. Do you think it does?”

“Go on, dear,” said Hannah softly. With this last, her own interest had shifted further, and she knew that the salvation of Ann Denison’s mind was nothing to her compared with his satisfaction in his childish task. He was reading:

“ ‘My love, my fair one . . . the winter is past. . . . The time of the singing of birds is come. . . . The flowers appear on the earth.’ Among them is the honeysuckle, the vine you loved. When you smell it, remember its sweetness is the sweetness of the past. It was blooming at your window when your life was new, but life, though it changes, is always new. Love that flower as of old and draw its sweetness into your mind, and let your memory be as a pleasant chamber after the good housewife—who is God’s mercy—has aired and washed it free of doubt. For the house of love ‘is of cedar and its rafters are fir.’ ”

He looked up in a troubled questioning, and the paper shook in his hand. He laid it down.

“It possessed me,” he said, in a low tone, as if begging her to understand. “That song. It has always possessed me. Years ago, it got into my mind, the beauty of it, the sweet smell, whether it was a song of earthly love or of Christ and His church. But if it is earthly love, its fragrance rises up to Heaven. You know what it is, Hannah? You know those words.”

She answered quietly, with forethought and caution. Not for all the knowledge in libraries of commentary, would she have questioned his passionate workmanship, the varicolored mosaic he had tried to make.

“Yes,” she said. “I know the words. They’re a kind of magic, aren’t they? A spell. She can’t help feeling it.”

“And,” said he anxiously, “it doesn’t shock you? I depend on you, Hannah—more than on myself. You have the heart of a child.”

No, she thought, it was he who had the heart of a child, and so unspoiled that he might well use the medicament of words set aside and known as holy, and do it without offense. Wouldn’t you take a sacred cup to give the dying drink? She laughed a little, to lift him out of the sombreness where he was getting himself hemmed in.

“Don’t you know,” she said, “some of the old people round here used to tell us there was never a disease but it had an herb to cure it? Now, those words—the sound of them! They’re the medicine of love!”

And her mind, in the way it had of running along in a commentary on the puzzling things of mortal being, asked her if she had ever, in the days when Anthony West found passionate favor in her eyes—had she ever let the ancient Canticles sing for her and thrown the echo back to him? What if she did it now—would he hear?

The parson sat thinking. It was a toss-up, she knew, whether the letter would be sent off on its amazing mission or whether, in a minute or two, it might be torn across and find its way into Celestia’s hand to build next morning’s fire. She’d better save it.

“Give it to me,” she said. “You want me to sign it, don’t you? I’ll address it, too, and you can get it off tonight. At least, it can’t do any harm.”

“No,” said he, “not yet, at least. I’m undecided. Shall I always be? Is it because they asked me to retire? Did it destroy something in me? I never thought I should act like this.”

There he stopped, and she put down the pen and waited. He was doubting himself, and she found that hard to bear. They seemed to be getting into trouble. Was it partly because mother had gone away? She herself, save in her new mood of confidence, might never have spoken of Ann’s disordered brain, and if she had, father might not have taken it up and spun a web about it to reach from here to the rich imagery of heaven. And there would never have been time for it. With mother in the house, there never was time for anything but rational duties swiftly done, a processional father was always trying to escape, to hide himself in coverts of Aramaic phrasing. And if he had, by some miracle of ease and liberty found it well to write a letter to an unknown girl in the care of the Misses Raymond whom he had never seen, and done it in the language of the Song of Songs, what would mother have said then? She would have been patient, but it couldn’t have been explained in any possible way she would understand. Even at this distance, Hannah was afraid of her. Mother’s ghost was here. It must be propitiated.

Her voice sounded kind, and he realized how tired he must be to want a voice to sound like that. It wasn’t quite a daughter’s voice. It might have been a mother’s or a friend’s. It was his mother’s, probably, echoing back to him, and he took off his glasses and rubbed them clear again, and hoped he didn’t look as devastated as he felt. But Hannah seemed not to realize that he was not entirely himself.

“I’ll address the envelop,” said she, “and you can send it or not as you like. No, I’ll put it down for you: Miss Ann Denison. In care of the Misses Raymond, Windy Hill.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is pretty bleak, a bit like Wuthering Heights, take it on a March day. But a day like this! why, you know what I told you about the honeysuckle. It grows and grows and smells so you have to stop and get your breath, when you go up the hill. There! that’s the address. You do what you like, Parson Willoughby. Don’t you hear to any of us. But I wish you’d tell me—”

No, she must not hang upon him. She must leave him to his freedom in his own world. Still there was one question. She might venture that.

They stood looking at each other, and he answered at once, with a gentle courtesy, as if a stranger had asked the way.

They looked at each other gravely, and what he said seemed right and adequate. He could have given her reams of dissertation and left her stranded in a state of mind. But the question couldn’t be bounded. There were no words for it, or too many. They flooded him, and he could no more have talked than a man with Niagara in his mouth.

“I know,” said Hannah. She was extraordinarily happy. “Yes, I understand.”

They smiled at each other, small creatures who had found the universe and its Maker for a moment clear to them, and she went upstairs leaving him standing there, the paper in his hand.

His project haunted her. Was it fantastic or was it common sense? And if the love of God was curative, as he thought, it must be the supremest common sense of all. But what sort of a letter is that, she thought, its passion clinging to the skirts of legendary drama? And on that same night she went early to her room, leaving him deep in some of his academic jugglings, and sat down by the window to smell the laden air and think of Ann Denison and the letter that had not gone. Perhaps it would never go, and maybe that was well. Who could guess what waves of turbid memory might be stirred by it and to what disorder of present pain? And her thoughts shifted to her own life as Anthony West had made it. She thought of him coldly, half cynically, as, from time to time, she found it inevitable to do. Those moments were, she suspected, with the wisdom lent her by habit, only another aspect of discontent: nature’s own medicinal revulsion to save itself from continued lamentation and regret. What a waste it all was, this dedicating your very being to a sterile love! Something beyond mere suffering ought to bourgeon out of it, to justify its having been. And there was Celestia, still loving a dream and patiently doing her daily work, not even expecting it to take her nearer any sort of bright reality. And Ann Denison! But when she got there her rebellious mind cried out against the marplot who is Life and all its cruelty, and she turned away from the window, put on the light and sat down at her desk. She would show them what to say to a girl who had broken her heart and cracked her brain, and she herself would play the girl, if not she, Celestia. Let old clergymen—darling old clergymen, if they were all like Parson Willoughby!—let them dally about among the lilies and cedar of church imagery, but she would write to an unhappy girl. Was it as Anthony might write to her and save her from Celestia’s frost-locked nunnery?

Dear Loveliness, and if there are other things to call you, I call you those. The night smells of the glory of God Who made its flowers. And He made them for you, Dearest, only for you. If they had been made for any other living thing they could not be so sweet. I say God, as I never have before in talking to you, because I have heard there are those who believe in Him entirely and that nothing happens on this earth but it is His will. Or that we can somehow take it so that it becomes His will, a stouter will with stronger hoops and bands than it could have had if we had not taken it so. Was it the will of God that you and I were separated? Was it my fault? I know it was not yours. Nothing is your fault. You are altogether lovely. Say that to yourself, if you are unhappy. Say: “I am altogether lovely. There is one person on earth who believes that and thinks it with every breath.” Will you think that, my dearest? that there is one person to whom you are more beautiful than the day or the night and who wants your happiness more than night and day? Why we are separated I do not know. How long it will continue I do not know. But I do know that we shall be together at last. Will you believe me, my dearest, my only dear, and be happy in knowing that we shall be together at last?

She wrote in a tumultuous haste and at the end drew a sharp breath and threw down her pen. It sounded like father, not like her. Had he, not knowing it, “poured his spirit” into hers while he searched about among his healing herbs o’ grace? Was it like some of his sermons that went smoothly on until the congregation, lulled by the even flow of them, seemed to stop listening, and she herself, admiring but sleepy, had wondered whether a sermon shouldn’t be some sort of an awakening? But she didn’t read the thing, whether her own or his. She put out her light and went back to the window where the darkness seemed less given over to mystery, even smiling a little at her perfervid art. Could this be a letter to be sent to Ann Denison who cut up slips of paper to serve as her heart’s advocate between it and another heart lost somewhere in the wastes of unguessed being? No, father was wrong. There was no such thing as reaching her by words of this or another sort. Any one who had seen her in her prison-like seclusion would know how foolish a project it was, this of drowning grief in argument.

She set soberly about her preparations for bed, thinking now, not so much of Ann or Celestia or of Anthony West, blown away into the wastes of commonplace where there is neither man nor maid—only the dull programme the world has set for them—but of her father sitting there in the room below, building up argument from ancient records and their revelation of the will of God. To him, nothing was problematical. He knew what he knew and chiefly that the immemorial arguments would bear him out. But after all, did he know as much as she who had warmed and fed love in her own breast and seen it pay its score by thrusting her inside the gates of bitterness? What did he know about love in absence, love in the poverty of forsakenness? Was that what he had at any time felt for mother who, in all these years, had been his scourge and his pillow, but chiefly his business manager? But what right had she to know what he had at any time felt for mother? To know was a part of the bad manners of life as it is. And yet she did know, for had he not, that very day, asked her to run over another letter beginning “My dear wife,” to see whether he had adequately covered the ground of household happenings, and had it not seemed to her as arid, though so kindly, as her own dry leaves of life from the letters of Anthony West? To what end was it that the most intoxicating beauty of life should be compressed into its short capricious spring? “As to father and mother,” she said, “I was the answer. It was for me to be brought into the world—me, a fool like me.” And she set herself to the task of going to sleep, since what was there left for a fool but sleep?

Down in the study, oblivious of the multiple soft activities of night, what was the parson thinking? His eyes and his pen had been at work, and he had transcribed various extracts from the writings of men wiser than he, or who at least had the certified air of wisdom. And now he was jotting down the unformulated thoughts of his more leisure time since there had been no weekly sermon to write and no church affairs to call him forth. This was his journal, written on loose leaves, and begun with no thought of the permanency of print or even the eyes of wife and daughter after his death. He was merely searching his heart, as he put it to himself when the idea seized him. He wanted still to understand his own life, if that could be, since he had little hope, in his further progress, of understanding anything else. There had been but a few pages written and those after his wife’s going. He would have felt no freedom to work on them before that. She would not have questioned him about what might seem his new occupation, or, if he had told her, she would never have referred to it afterward, and no human casuistry could have enabled her to turn on them an inquiring eye. She was tact itself in the household and her code, you might have thought, had been inherited from all the legends of parsons’ wives back to Trollope and admirable ladies of church history. Yet there was a tension about her and it was not until she had gone that he could enter upon the foolish garrulity of a journal without unconsciously referring it to her in his thoughts. And now it seemed like the very best sort of summer weather and it was pleasant to have Hannah at home. He could begin to write.

This [he wrote] is my journal. I am writing it because I want to set my mind in order and regain a decent calmness before I go hence and am seen no more. I pray my wife and my daughter to destroy it as soon as practicable after my burial. They may read as far as this without offense. Otherwise they would not know what to do. But I pray them to go no further.

I am not, as I see it, a very old man in years, but I have become old in that I have been asked to give up my work as a minister of the Gospel I have preached ever since I was young. This is grievous to me, though not a bitter grief, for I do not feel more than half alive. It seems to me as if the earth had retreated from me, as if it had gone farther away. My congregation gave me a parting gift: a purse of gold. They meant it kindly, and God bless them for it. I put it into my wife’s hand on the night it was presented to me and told her that, since we had some small savings of our own and from inheritance it would please me if this went into a fund for disseminating the Christian faith. If we had not done that during my lifetime, I should hope that she would be enabled to do it after my death. But if I live too long and she has not enough for her own wants, she must make use of it. For I should desire to save her that last ignominy of the body and fiery furnace of the soul which is a dependent old age. And now I know what is meant by the valley of the shadow of death. This is it: old age. The soul is alone with God. It has always been alone, save for God, but in youth and middle life it has so many gay companions, the harps and the tabors sounding merrily somewhere within hearing and saying “Come! come!” and always a greener mountain farther on. And though God, too, is present, it is more as a great darkness in the distance. One who rewards and punishes—but think as you may that you love Him with all your might, you have to love Him through the hurtling crowds that surround you and dance along with you on your way to Him. One day, long ago, I was in a city street with my little Hannah. She held my hand and we were going to meet her mother at a fine restaurant where she would have ice cream “and lady fingers.” She kept saying, “Lady fingers, Father! lady fingers!” and after that we were all three going together to buy her a doll, which was already named because we had planned our little festa for so long. And as we hurried, for we were late, and mother would be waiting for us, I realized that I, being tall, had my head out in the air among others who were a good height, but that she was pushing her valiant way down there among their legs. And suddenly she called up to me—and how piercing their little voices are when they are in trouble!—“Father, I can’t see you. It’s all legs down here.” And I stopped and snatched her up and carried her, and that, I thought, is our life among men. We are led by something that is higher than we—God and His Saints and all the lovers of the world—but we have to struggle our way along down below among the legs. The saints’ legs, too: for no saint was ever, I suspect, saint all the way down. And then suddenly the arms that are waiting for us snatch us up and carry us: that is God, or at least His compassionate will for us. And by that I do not mean to compare myself and my way with little Hannah to His All-Mightiness—but ah! why do I explain this to my journal which is only paper and pen and ink, the solace of my own old age? It is the disease that comes of always explaining, and saying “My brethren” and “Secondly” and “Fourthly” and all that rust of the mind which comes of doing the same thing—even a sacred thing—too long. But—old age! I go back to old age. Perhaps it had been upon me a long time before I knew it: for I have always led a quiet life between the pulpit and my books and there were no rough tasks to make inroads on my body, and as to my mind, how do we know what is happening to our minds? It is our daily intimates who know, because they call on us for things we cannot manage lightly, as before, and they ask us for a name we have forgotten, and they put an arm through ours and say: “Be careful, Parson. There ought to be some gravel here.” And sometimes it is out of the kindness of their hearts and sometimes it is that patronage which makes the comfortable say: “Here is my car. Oh, no, Parson! you don’t want to walk.” But whatever it is, the earth itself is saying, in a variety of tongues: “Room! room! move along and let them stand where you are standing. For you are not likely to stand there very long or with any imposing aspect, and they are very straight and their legs are strong.” And these things you do not think of until those others think of them for you, but when they do you want to answer: “Yes, I am ready. I will go. But I pray you do not elbow me away.”

And the earth itself! even its beauty is of an unfriendliness I had never thought to find in it. I had a friend, many years ago, who went to a high altitude near Zermatt, and his breath failed him and he was all but dead before they could revive him. I asked him what he thought of, how he felt. Was it only bodily discomfort or did he think of death as death and fear, or did he long for it? (He was not a very happy person at that time.) He said: “I felt only the hatred of the earth for me. She was hostile. If I was to be revived, it would have to be in spite of her. There was an arid vegetation where I was carried down and black birds drinking out of small black pools—and they too hated me, birds and earth and grass and water. It seemed to me the earth was saying: ‘Get away! get away! I have done with you. I put you here to serve my purpose and it is done, whether well or ill, it is done. Now, go.’ ” And that was I. I had preached for many years, and life said “Go.” I cannot tell myself even now how I felt, though I remember all the words and actions of the three friends who came to talk it over with me. I did not feel resentful. I knew, for the first time, how fast the river flows—the river we call our life—and how soon it finds the sea. And now I am nearing the sea and these small slight activities of every day at my study table or the talks I have with my old friends, these are the spreading of what was once a swift deep current with defining banks. It is a delta, not a wide harborage, but countless little streams and the quaggy land of what, in a minute, will be small threatening ailments. And that will be really old age, the delta and then the sea. Now when I have thought that, and on days when my courage is strong enough, I say to myself: “But let me not forget, there is the sea. Of a certainty there is the sea. And whether it is the sea of glass mingled with fire I have been for years promising the children of God, whether it is an apocalypse of beauty and delight, it is something—something where the quaggy river even comes to rest and where the dull eyes of earthly sin and folly shall see God.” I am writing foolishly, for this is only a journal for the recording of events, but, after all, the events left me in these latter days will be the daily weather of the spirit, since the activities of the body are nearly done.

Here he laid down his pen and told himself it was unhealthy and he’d have no more of it. But his mind was wilful. Back it went to the immediate past, and he had to follow it. He put it to himself as a working-man might who had been discharged but without assuaging phrases or commemorative gold. He had lost his job. He was fired. It was common enough. What then? And his rebellious mind replied hotly: “I am a spirit, but also I have excellent use of my hands and my eyes and my brain. Give them something to do, those dear servitors that used to work for me. My people, I am a spirit and I have tried to teach you that you, too, are spirits. I have thought it all over and I own I do not speak your modern tongue. But give me something to do.”

It had seemed to him that the mere writing of these things had been some slight solace; but suddenly he recoiled from it and from himself. Was it really only a welter of egotism and folly? And the writing itself: it was somehow familiar, perhaps the accustomed rhythm of his sermons as if, in spite of his prohibition, he really expected it to be read. Had he been the typical clergyman so long that now he was molded to his part and, even when he was speaking familiarly to his own mind, had it got to sound like an echo of pulpit oratory? He threw the sheets into a drawer and went back to his dallyings among the deductions of other men.

Next morning, Hannah overslept and, when she went down, Celestia was ready to bring in her coffee.

“What makes you get up so early?” asked Celestia. “Or I’d fetch it up to you.”

Hannah was thinking it was almost too much to smell all Araby and Brazil and Java in one shining pot and see the light at the window through stirring vines.

“I love to come down,” said she. “Having it with father, chiefly. But last night I lay awake till all hours and this morning I was drunk with sleep. Don’t you know you think you’re asleep and ought to get up, but you can’t?”

She went into the kitchen and Hannah sat thinking about her. How lovely she was, how like a maiden of an older time, always serving people, in that only half intent way of not having to think of it, she had done it so long, yet doing it perfectly: and by reason of her gravity and her beauty, like a king’s daughter who could stoop to all sorts of lowliness without losing her royal grace. Who was it she was like? Electra at her menial tasks? or Nausicäa? Yes, that was it: Nausicäa ever to be remembered with sweet smelling linen and the sea.

Then, having finished her coffee and her toast, she got up and went, as softly as she could, into the hall, to see whether the study door was open, because it seemed hardly possible to begin the day with what would prove all its delightful happenings without a look at father and, if he was not too deep in heaven or hell and their polemics, a little word with him. There he was at the table, but not writing, though the paper was before him and his pen in hand. He was leaning back in his chair and staring, as if the air were full of question-marks and he might presently begin to answer them. Or could it be they had been harrying him and without his knowing what to say? At the slight movement of her coming or perhaps her gaze on him, he looked up, and Hannah was immediately happier still, after the joys of coffee and a waving vine, because he was glad to see her.

“Well! well!” said he. “Come in, slug-a-bed. What are you so late for? ‘You used to come at ten o’clock, but now you come at noon.’ ”

“Yes!” said the parson. “I am, too. What do you think I did last night?” He hardly waited for her to say she did not know. He went on. “I began a journal. Or a diary. Call it anything you like.”

“For every day?” said she. “The things that happen?” And she wondered if this was to write up the life of the house for mother, either to be sent her in letters or to be read when she came home.

“No,” said he. “Oh, no! just digging into my mind and finding out what’s there. You see, I’m very idle now. There’s nothing I’ve really got to do, and I thought it would be an occupation of a sort—to set it down and see what came of it.”

“Is it—learned stuff?” said she, not knowing how to put it so that he might be sure anything he did would be the most delightful possible. “Or just you—and me?”

“Why, yes,” he said, “it is you, too, though I didn’t realize it when I began. But it can’t be I without being you, too, especially this summer when we’re here all by ourselves—” There he stopped, and she believed the words had given him pause. Intentionally or not, she flew off on another tack.

“My dear,” he said, “do you want to know what my journal begins with? It begins with old age. If you read it—and I shan’t let you—it would tell you how it feels to be old.”

“I don’t like the way it begins,” said she. “You’d better begin with me. I’m old. Or Ann Denison. We’re old because we think about what’s gone away from us—and think about it all the time. Father, let’s have another try at a letter to her. You haven’t given it up?”

“Why, bless you, no,” said the parson. “We talked that letter over and I tucked it into the envelop and sent it along. I’d had my doubts of it, but that has always been my trouble. I temporize. I wonder if things are going to be as right as they can be, and I wonder so long they don’t get done. Yes, I clapped it into the envelop and sent it off.”

“And mine,” thought Hannah, “my prize love letter, written when I should have been asleep, shall I send that off, too?” There was a wildness at her heart. She knew that hurried tempo. When hearts begin to beat like that you had to do something to slow them down a little, tire them out, and then you could go back to being dull again.

“Yes, Father,” she said agreeably, “you were quite right. And it reminds me—I’ve a letter of my own to mail. You go on with your journal, dear, and when I’ve done it I’ll come back.”

Anthony had written her last, and if her answer was to wait as long before going, she would write to him in three weeks. But what had father said, father who was, if only by the habit of his dedicated life, the slave of moderation? It was, he said, his fault to temporize, and so he had clapped his doubtful letter into its envelop and sent it on. So would she clap her letter into an envelop and send it, and it should be addressed to Anthony West, and he might make what he liked of it and the gods of chance be with it: for that letter would need all the help it could get. What sort of thing was she used to saying to him? she asked herself when she slipped it under cover and sat down to write the beloved name. Yet she knew. It was all a foolishness of what happened and how the world looked to her, and she had to put it down so fast the words ran into each other she was so afraid of not getting them all in.

“And you said they were beautiful, Anthony West. You said my letters were beautiful, and you said you couldn’t write any that were worthy of them. But when you said they were beautiful, that was enough.”

She wasn’t used to this talking aloud to him or to herself when she was alone, but there was a wonderful freedom of pleasure in it now, like pouncing on father at his journal or being late for breakfast. You couldn’t talk to yourself in the dormitory, it was such an interrupted life. What if a girl came to ask if she ought to tell her boy friend she couldn’t be kissed if he felt at liberty to kiss Violet as well, and heard the dignified Miss Willoughby inside closed doors calling “Anthony West! Anthony West!”

“But I can do it here,” said she to herself, with her vacation sense of riot and warm weather, and she called “Anthony!” all the way up the scale. But even here it seemed he was forbidden her, for Celestia tapped at the door and when she opened it was found, dustpan in hand, explaining:

“I thought I heard you, and then I found you were singing. I wouldn’t have knocked if I’d realized. You’ve got a real pretty voice.”

“You have, too,” said Hannah. “Your speaking voice. I never heard you sing. You do, don’t you?”

Yes, Celestia said, she sang a little, at prayer meeting chiefly. She didn’t know whether that made it wrong, but sometimes she felt as if it was what she went to prayer meeting for—just to let out her voice.

“Come in,” said Hannah. Life itself, anything that looked like life, was tempting her. “Here! let me shut the door. Let’s try your voice. No, no, not scales. ‘Coronation!’ you know that, don’t you?”

Yes, Celestia said, with her gentle composure, she knew “Coronation,” but she’d got to go down and sweep out the woodshed—

“Come on,” said Hannah. “You take the alto. You can, can’t you? ‘All hail’—”

They stood there looking at each other with the earnestness of two choristers newly come to heaven and wondering what choiring they might be fitted for. And on the table lay the letter that was to shake Anthony West to the foundations of his academic being. In the instant of the last word of “Coronation,” a change ran over Celestia like a shadow over sun.

“My!” said she. “I don’t believe I ever sung in this house before except trying out something a minute when everybody’s gone away. I don’t know what your mother’d think.”

And then, all propriety, realizing she had unwittingly said “what she should not,” she opened the door and was gone. Hannah herself had been recalled as suddenly. What was it about mother that had been so deadening to the house? For the very house was aware of her and, now, being rid of her, it was more and more alive. Mother would never have objected to singing. Sometimes, on a cold night, the choir had come in to practise, and mother was hospitality itself and gave them cake and coffee at the end, and everybody loved it, protesting: “I shan’t sleep a wink.”

While Hannah rode round the universe on the horse of her freed fancy, Parson Willoughby was beginning the next section of his journal. He took yesterday’s pages out of the drawer and looked at them in doubt and remembered hostility. But he gave himself no time to think. Yes, he wanted to go on. He was even eager to get back into yesterday’s mood, half reminiscence, half unworthy discontent. There wasn’t much life in it. But even to think that, was only another form of egotism. He began:

I wasn’t quite thirty when I wrote a sermon on old age. It was in the week of Mr. Jabez Horne’s eighty-second birthday and I thought it not only a friendly act to commemorate the day but an encouragement to those who, though not so old, were nearing the same bourne.

There, something caught his eye. He stopped short, said to himself frowningly, “I won’t!” but in the midst of the rebellious frown, began to twitch a little shamefacedly about the mouth, ran his pen through the last phrase and wrote instead: “were pretty near being.”

“There,” he said to his impertinent mind, “you can’t call that fine writing, can you?” He went on:

I said that when we had passed threescore and ten, which was the appointed milestone, everything beyond that being borrowed time, the passions which had in youth made life a battleground of things desired and things denied, had quieted into their appointed moderation. At first, they were like an untrained puppy who overeats himself, who tears whatever he can find, even the most precious fabric, in his play, but later settles into the staid guardian of the house of life. That is not true. The passion of the body does yield to the oncoming years but the passion of the mind and the intangible entity we call the soul, goes on protesting and hungering. Have I not myself, in these later years, hungered and thirsted, not for righteousness alone, not always—and may He forgive me!—for the living God, but the beauty the poets and the seers celebrated so abundantly and which could be mine only at second-hand. I did not want merely a house eternal in the heavens. I wanted life, life here in its splendor and its innocent delightfulness. When I removed myself from this earthly scene to Shakespeare’s plays, I wanted to be there, there, loving and even fighting and brawling with his mimic men. But when I was under thirty I did not know that this would be. In my sermon for Jabez Home, I said also that from the pinnacle of old age we view the life about us and see that all is well, and therefore we are exquisitely at peace, not only with the nearer world but far off, as far as news can carry. That is not true. We are not at peace, because we know, with an increasing vision, that all is not well in the world as man has made it. It is the will of God that is everlastingly well, but having given us the freedom of our own will He sits apart and waits for us to do nobly. As I grow older, I say to the world I was once able to accept in a fool’s contentment with things as they are, “It is not well with the world. It is very ill with it, and you, David Willoughby, you, with all other mankind, have made it so. Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am among the chief of sinners. Only do not have mercy on me if it means looking aside while I escape my just punishment. Burn me with fire and whip me with scorpions until I go and sin no more.”

“Don’t you like that? Is it too parsonish? Oh, let me alone! for what’s the fun of doing it if I’ve got to think of you?”

Also I told Jabez Home and the other old men and women that the love given to the old is a peculiarly beautiful love in its gentleness and protective quality. It is not devoid of compassion. It seeketh not itself to please. But I am far from thinking so now. It is like the love given to children, except that the love of children is a possessive eagerness which says: “I made you. You are mine.” And this is as it must be or fathers would not go through the dark alleys of self-sacrifice to bring their children to manhood and a gentle mother would not become a tigress, fighting for her young. But toward the old the human heart is dutifully kind, when it is dutiful, in accomplishing a task it would gladly see completed. And when it is done and the old are carried to their graves, with suitable lamentations and panegyric, then those who have gently carried them can say, “Lo! here is a new piece of vacant standing ground for me and my children to stand upon.” And they take their places on it in the security of such as have done righteously toward the earth and fulfilled its commands, and few there be who think that the immemorial usages of time will be fulfilled also upon them, and that the standing ground they have taken, when the feet of the old have left it, will be in turn taken away. I find also that tenderness toward the old is not unaccompanied by a humorous appreciation of father’s ways of a child, now that he is no longer fully a man. And these things must be so, and they are to be taken with patience; but I do not say it makes for happiness that they should be so. I also, in my youthful essay on old age, told my readers that the old, having reached a higher standing ground, were able to judge life with a greater clarity because it could not only see what is but compare it with what has been. But does not that also add to its discontent with what is? for it is seldom that the course of life runs evenly from century to century, and the old man finds himself in the midst of new problems and customs strange to him and, if he compare them with his past, it is not to increase the boundaries of his confidence in the onward rush of man but to sink into the loneliness of an alien world. As to myself and my obligation to conform to the wishes of my people and give place to a younger man, there was nothing for me but to go.

No, that wouldn’t do. The pen itself was running away with him. But if he wasn’t to write the truth, why write at all? He went on, obstinately:

It has left me desolate. I knew—or I thought I knew—how to serve God among my people, the people I was born with. Things went smoothly. There was no extreme suffering: only the misadventures common to ordinary life among a class which had been used to the comforts and decencies of the present world. Did I forget what suffering could be, not in the large but for the individual? The times changed. Men and women were different. I was speaking to them in an alien tongue. And that is what I should wish my hearers to consider, if I were reading them these mad wanderings, hoping to convince them—of what? Not that the plight of the old is to be regarded as tragedy and that a man should, like a tree, stay planted where he has grown. No, the course of human life is decreed. It is just and right. We live. We have had what we have had, be it little or much, and when the time comes we must go but, heaven help us! not at once down into the dark room which is the grave but into that cruelly lighted hall under the public eye where old men and old women sit in the sombre clothing of their thoughts, waiting for him who says: “I am Death, and you may come.”

Now as to Death: I do most truly profess the Christian faith, though I need not say here how easily or with what heaviness I carry its weight of tradition and dogma: for it is I, and I only, for whom these pages are written, and as to my inner certainties I know what I know. And I do most wholly and heartily believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting; but strangely, at this moment, my belief seems to be no defense against the hunger and cold of these later years which are the lean years of the failing eye and hand and the chill of knowing I am only on sufferance in this world because nature—yes! yes! of course by God’s good grace—has made it so. And I cry to Him, to God Who is my refuge and my strength: “Look at me. See how cold and hungry I am. Look on me and love me, O Lord of All, because, being of so poor a nature as I am, I need it more than all the others You have made. And if You would do good to me, O Lord of All, it would be this: Let not the heat go wholly from the embers of this fading day. Let the sun warm me and the winds quicken me, and let me set my hand to a deed for You, or send me where You would have me go. And if You ask me, Lord of my life and breath, why it should be I asking to drink of life full measure while other men lay down their work in silence and are taken by the hands of others whether they will or not, there is no reason, except that I have gone a short way into the valley of the shadow which is death and I do most terribly long to be for another moment—only for a moment—alive.”

He had been writing fast, not stopping to collect himself as he was accustomed to do in his sermonizing, and not looking back over the wildness of what he had done. And now he was tired, not by the act of putting down what came so irrepressibly and with a liquid heat, but because he remembered again that it had, as a task, no significance to any one, not even to himself. And hearing Hannah in the sitting-room, he called her to come in, and when she came, said to her, in a smiling but troubled way:

“It’s the journal, Hannah, the diary, whatever it is. It’s got beyond me. I’m crying into it now. I’m begging for things I can never have.”

“No, I wouldn’t let you see it. It would be you if anybody. But not anybody.”

She was considering him. More than anything she wanted to leave him free to take his own path through the hours of these quiet days when there were no sermons to be written and no parishioners to be visited and mother— But he was looking at her and he laughed a little, from love of her. What a strong, well girl to stand there and let him take that foolish irrational pleasure he had in thinking she was his, a part of him! And her mother: did she ever look at her now with that possessiveness she had when the new human thing was a baby a foot long and as miraculous to them as if she were not out of their own flesh? Beautiful Hannah! without question, she who was plain to her own eyes seeking herself in the glass, was beautiful to him. She would have been amazed if she had known how she walked the hidden chambers of his mind. She had never found herself so constant a dweller there until they had begun to have these grave confidences about Anthony West and Ann Denison. “We are,” Hannah was thinking, with humility and pride, “intimate friends.”

“About Ann,” said he. “When should you think we ought to hear from her?”

“Why, good gracious, Parson,” said Hannah, “how do you expect to hear at all? The letter wasn’t signed. Don’t you know it wasn’t? Not unless you signed it, in one of those absent-minded fits of yours: ‘Most sincerely your masquerading friend, David Willoughby.’ ”

“No,” said he, “I didn’t sign it. But I question whether I should have written it. What will they do with it, Hannah, those old ladies? Will they give it to her?”

“Not without reading it,” said Hannah. “And they wouldn’t read it. They’re too polite. You’re worried, aren’t you? I am, too, a little. What if I should run over there in the morning, early, and come back at night? I should know the minute I saw them—and then I could do what I thought best. Perhaps tell them—the aunts, you know.”

“Yes,” said Hannah, “now you’ve scared me, there is hurry. And I’ll go and tell Celestia. And good luck to you, Parson Willoughby, you and your journal. ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’—”

For he knew her little rite after bed-making and that she was likely to repeat it any time. They were “not a kissing family,” as mother had been wont to say, but Hannah kissed him now, rather solemnly, as if she were going on important matters and would like to have it understood. And he went back to his table for what proved to be an idle hour, looking at his manuscript and thinking it was humanly weak to have written it, though after he had mused a while about old age and the inhospitable earth, he began to laugh softly. For what had he done? He had put down, in the unsafe permanence of words, his distaste for that widespread conspiracy of helpfulness toward the old, and here was he on the most enchanting terms with his own child, and he was not afraid. Here was youth beside him, ready, he was persuaded, to serve him, mind and as Celestia would say, “hand and foot,” and might not other youth be as comrade-wise and fond? Perhaps not: for this was Hannah.

When Hannah opened the kitchen door, she found Celestia standing by the table, over a pile of white linen, and she thought amusedly that even if there were all sorts of fabrics sold to women for their diaphanous underwear, in unprobed corners of the mind such garments were still “linen.” In scriptural narrative, it was “a linen garment.” Also, there was “fair linen.” And to carry it on, down to Celestia and her kitchen—how beautiful! Celestia’s hand was on the pile of folded garments and she kept it there and looked at Hannah.

“No,” said Hannah. “There’s nothing crazy about nice underthings. And I vow they’re hand-made! Did you do all that fine work yourself?”

Celestia began lifting the garments, one by one, and she looked at each in a sort of troubled wonder.

“Ain’t it queer,” said she, “how the world changes? There ain’t a single one o’ these that mightn’t ha’ been made before the food. There ain’t a girl here in Bridgnorth that would wear ’em. They’d die a-laughing. Here’s a nightie. That was the handsomest one. See this yoke, all crochet. I thought ’twas nigh being sinful then. Anyways, I thought I was pretty sure to get cold in it. And only you look at it! wide enough for Old Pomp! and high neck, and long sleeves!”

“But it’s lovely,” said Hannah. “And what little stitches! You needn’t have done it by hand, though. Mother would have loved to let you use the machine.”

“Yes, I know,” said Celestia, “but I wanted ’em hand-made. There used to be a good deal of feeling about that. And see these skirts. This flounce! I embroidered it, but now you couldn’t give it away, not for love nor money.”

“And you sat up in your room and sewed,” said Hannah, “and never wore them. Why didn’t you, Celestia? You’d have had the good of them, and now—”

“Why!” said Celestia. She looked at Hannah gravely and her face, cast in such lines of gentle harmony, had the sadness of reproach. “They were my going-away things. You must see.”

Hannah stood for a moment looking down at them, her hand lifting an edge here and there, in pretext for her silence. So the child had made her wedding clothes slowly, from the savings of her years, and the world changed and the bridegroom had not come. How pitiful it was! How innocently we play our little games under the very shadow of that gigantic hand which is necessity! Or is it the Fates, playing their own game, regardless of us? But,

And now Celestia had sweetly given herself into her hands, and must not be assaulted by a tragic sympathy. She must, if that could be, get used to living in the world as it is. Hannah transferred herself to the present.

“Don’t you suppose ’most all of them could be made over? I’ve heard of taking in a skirt and turning it into a slip. They’d make lovely slips.”

Celestia put out her hand and again laid it on the pile. She seemed to be protecting it. She could not speak.

“You see,” said Hannah, “there might never be a time in your life, or mine either, when clothes will be so full again. Oh, yes, you’ve got to make them over! These skirts—you’d look as big as a tub. And see how slender you are! I’m terribly big compared with you.”

Celestia stood silent for a moment more, her hand on the sacred pile. The nightgown with the crocheted yoke was uppermost and it seemed as if she were protecting it more passionately than all the rest. This Hannah saw and she knew it wouldn’t do. Nothing in this brutal world would do, unless we denied ourselves the sick fancy of worshiping a bridal nightie. The earth couldn’t wait for us to do that. “Come! come!” it would call to us out of its caverns of darkness where strange deeds are conceived before they reach the outer air and are knit into action by us who fondly think we have ourselves conceived them. “Don’t lie there clutching piles of white cloth to your breast and calling it sacred. Give it up, fool, give it up and get into the procession that’s going from life to death and then from death to life again.”

“Celestia,” said she, “I almost think it would be nice for you to give this away.”

Celestia answered at once, in a voice not very much moved. But her hand, still on the nightgown, began stroking it.

“Make it over?” she asked quietly. “Take it in all the way down and rip out the sleeves and make it low neck?”

“No,” said Hannah, “not low neck. The person I wish you could give it to would like it better as it is. I don’t know why I think so, but I do.”

“No, oh, no! not really young. But sick. And her mind is—different. There’s very little any one can do for her, but I think somehow a pretty nightie would be a kind of pleasure to her. You see, her things are plain and good, but not what you’d call nice. Not such crochet as this! And the cloth! Celestia, I don’t believe I realized. It’s linen, isn’t it? handkerchief linen! Oh, no, she never had one anywhere near so nice.”

But Celestia hardly seemed to be considering the qualities of the nightgown or her devotion to it, though she still kept her hand on it in that possessive quiet. She had an abstracted look, but Hannah saw there were things going on in her mind.

“Yes,” said Hannah. What more could she tell? This was one of the times when you had to guess, and then, perhaps, shoulder your mistake. Certainly, if you temporized a moment, you would not speak at all. “She and her husband parted and then her father died and she has never been the same.”

Was she thinking beyond the simple gift of a garment? Or had it a significance? Would it be like a ceremonial, a transference of some sort of fortune—good or ill, and who could say?—from one bankrupt to another? But at least it is not ill to give. Take it, Fortune, take the gift of sadness and see what it works in another chamber of life. All these things, it seemed Celestia might be feeling, though she could never formulate them, but certainly she had made her decision not to shrink from anything, whatever she might give or keep.

“Yes,” she said, in a roughened voice, though quietly. She lifted her hand from the pile of linen and was at once Celestia, whose destiny was work of every sort and who asked only what she was to do next. “Shall I fold it up for you? I’ve got a nice white box. And you can write the address on it and have it from you.”

“Yes,” said Hannah, “you put it in the box and I’m going there tomorrow and I’ll take it along. She doesn’t have many presents, I fancy. They’re quiet people, sober, a little solemn, you know. Now about tomorrow.”

She should want breakfast half an hour earlier, and she hoped father wouldn’t get up.

“Think it over, Celestia,” she said, at the door, and speaking as if it were a simple matter to upset a scheme of life and one’s historic underclothes. “About the skirts. I know I’ve heard you can put on new tops and make them into slips. They’d be a dream.”

She went back to her father. There was something she had to say, and it was Celestia’s nightgown that bade her say it. The nightgown itself needn’t mean anything—even with its crocheted yoke!—but it was still of vast importance: for it was going out into the world to find Ann Denison and ask her if there wasn’t medicine for a mind diseased, in such stitches and such lace. And father, too: its ministration to Ann might make his own folly of benevolence toward her easier, bringing Bucksford a little nearer, here and now. A homespun incident, the chatter of two girls about linen and lace, and then the old clergyman’s written word! There he was, bending over his table and writing hard and wrinkling his brows as if he knew he should hate it all tomorrow. She went in softly, but he was too absorbed to see her until she was at the table, facing him.

“Just a minute,” said she. “I’m going in the morning, and I want to say now, so you won’t forget it and think all day how lonesome you are with no special things to do—I want to tell you I know what’s the matter with you. It isn’t growing old. I am, too, and it knocks me silly, but not the way it does you. The trouble with you is, you’ve had a shock. No! no! don’t look like that. Not palsy: just being taken up and bumped off somewhere else. You were living your life the best way you knew how, and you’d always lived that way, and suddenly they took you up and pitched you into this room and told you to be contented. And all your nerves began to swear at once, and you think it’s old age. And it isn’t, darling. It’s the damned way life is made.”

He forgave her the word; or perhaps he didn’t hear it. She thought his lip trembled a little.

“A shock,” he said. “A reaction. That’s a kind way to put it. But I think I’ll go on a little about old age. There are a few things more to say. Oh, I shall get up to say good-bye! And I’ll pray you off and pray you back. And you’ll give love to her, some way, won’t you? to Ann? The love of God—that’s what I want to send her. Fathers don’t matter—yes, tell her that, if you can—and old age doesn’t matter—but the love of God does. Tell her an old, old parson sends it to her for a present.”

Two presents, Hannah thought, on her way to bed: “a bridal nightie and the love of God.” And why not allow herself to put it so, if it helped her own queer struggling mind? and why not hope the nightie, besides being handkerchief linen, was, from its mission, a tangible reminder of the love of God?

Next morning, on her way to Bucksford, Hannah thought as she always did, going or coming, how she loved this road from the marshes of Bridgnorth to the first of the green hills which were not overpowering in their height, not the scenic call to majestic imagery, but a bewitchment of line and vaporous color. She could always remember how it moved her on that first day when she “went away to school.” She had never seen anything of the earth above sea level and its few uplands that were no more than small reminders of staggering things the earth can do when she really piles herself up into the heights that disdain the foot of man. But his mind is quick to scale them, and where the mind goes the foot follows, and they are conquered, as everything earthly is destined to be in the end. You stood amazed at them, but you couldn’t love them as you did the billowy outlines of the small green hills. Her train ran through covered bridges over foam and rocks, taking clefts that led amazingly into upland meadows and a nearer range of green, and she smiled at her childish pleasure over the country place names she had learned. They were the small change of speech in rural settlements never to be verified by maps: Twin Maples, Badger’s Hole, Elephant Rock and the like, records of resemblances or local happenings, as if life from day to day were as important as the inner changes of the earth itself. She knew the region almost foot by foot, or so she told herself in the pride of what had been her active life in it. She had ridden over it, driven over it with stout hill-bred horses and taken this railway journey many times. And then, exhilarated, what with the upland air and her pleased recognitions along the road, she had reached Bucksford, found the stage ready and, after a few greetings from surprised residents who had not expected to see her there again before September, she was left at the beginning of the lane that leads up Windy Hill.

The stage went on, and she stopped by the roadside to confer with her sense of happy familiarity and homecoming though after so short an absence. There was the Normal over there in its great tree-shaded park, its imposing but rather pretentious tower against the sky, and here was Windy Hill to climb, to that square defensive looking house at the top where Ann Denison was awaiting a new nightie and the love of God. It was a kindly walk, up Windy Hill, not hurled straight up to discourage your eyes and take your breath away, but with gentle curves—there were three of them, so wise had been the vision of the first Raymond who had built there—and, chiefly owing to the low ebb of the family fortunes, so that nothing about the place was kept in the order of an older time, the roadsides were tangled with all the greenery New England country breeds of its own will. Many things would show themselves later, being only greenness now; but she knew them all and what colors would flaunt their summer pride: tansy, St. Johnswort, Joe Pye Weed and Queen Anne’s lace. Oh, what a happy day! It was by no means that this was more a home than her own Bridgnorth or that she loved hills better than marshes and the sea. Only this place had a secret in its heart that was Anthony West. They had walked here together in roads and hidden paths. They had talked and laughed and looked up at the sky, and when it came about that they knew each other better than the sky or the earth or man or woman, they had kissed and found they knew the secret of all things and even that they were the only two lovers who had ever quite understood it to its height and depth and amazing likeness to God Himself Who betrayed it to them.

And then—but this was what seemed many years ago—Anthony went away and she kept tryst with the memory of him and was not unhappy, believing their separation would not last so very long because he would come again and then they would be together, world without end. But he did not come, and gradually she began to feel herself a guardian of all the sacred places he had left to her and the wraiths of memory which still haunted them. And in these later days when her greater experience of the way life changes, yet still is life and shows plausibly it cannot do otherwise—then also it was so, when life itself would have told her how foolish it was to take his absence tragically, since this thing had happened over and over, and one sunrise is not like another and not all loves march steadily on till death. But he, her troubled mind replied, was different. He was so serious. His books, his devotion to the ascetic life, had made him what he was, and it was only when he found her—came upon her, he wrote her once, like an exotic flower in a desert waste—that he awoke to the bright aspects of life itself. And because she had wondered over him so often in the places where they had walked together, the memory of it saluted her when she came to the places again, as if a familiar perfume were always exhaling there. But the memory! had it ever slept? Had she seen it drowse off into acquiescence, or had it become a part of her loyalty to keep even her loneliness alive? But this, too, was the weakness of the will untempered, the nerves unstrung, and she went on up the hill, smiling a little at herself and wondering if this were so, or was it the pedagogue in her that reminded her to be philosophical and think it so? And here she was before the ancient door with the fanlight at the top, and had knocked by means of the brass ring in the lion’s mouth, and knowing how long it would take Miss Elsie to come down the stairs and open the door, she looked about her at the grass-choked pinks and struggling peonies and realized that everything was as it had been when she saw it first. She knew the habits of the house, as it was easy to do, for nothing changed. This would be Joanna’s washing day. Therefore Miss Elsie would come to the door. Miss Milly would not be free to come, because she might not have finished making the beds, and a task once begun in this house of precedent was never willingly delayed. And the reason Miss Elsie would have to come down the stairs would be that she was sitting with Ann while her sister made the beds. There was the sound: the worn, wide heels on the uncarpeted stairs. The door was open an inch, a foot, then to a sweeping width.

They both laughed with pleasure and Hannah stepped in. Miss Elsie was the kind of person of whom the unthinking say: “What a beautiful old lady!” but who had traveled such dusty paths in the process of making herself so that she had no more sentiment about old age than she had about an old knife that won’t cut or a priceless velvet worn to rags. It was she to whom Hannah had shown the parson’s youthful sermon on old age, and who returned it with the comment: “It’s beautiful, dear, beautiful. But it isn’t true.”

Wasn’t it true? Hannah wondered as she looked at her. She had white hair, really brilliant in its whiteness. She had great brown eyes and black brows and a nose too large for youth but distinguished in old age. Her mouth had fallen in a very little, enough to show she wasn’t troubling herself with any wise expediencies. But her hand was tremulous, her foot unsure. Did her picturesque fitness for exquisite portraiture, if there were a hand and eye to use it, compensate her for this pathetic fight against the foes of life? No, surely not! She, too, was merely bearing what she must, and God be with her and bless her for the outer calm and sweetness of it all!

“Come in, my dear, come in,” said she, though Hannah was already in the hall beside her. “I wanted to see you. We both did. Something has happened.”

They were in the parlor now, seated together on the unwelcoming sofa. Miss Elsie, as she had often done, began stroking Hannah’s skirt over her knees with a caressing finger, as if to wheedle her into something, perhaps into staying a long time. Once, Hannah had laughed a little and said it was a pretty habit, and Miss Elsie, too, had laughed, but in a slight shamefacedness.

“I’m not very outspoken,” she said. “But I feel somehow as if you came nearer to us than most.”

Hannah had allowed herself to wonder whether she was not outspoken because she did not like to kiss and was afraid it might challenge others to kiss her in turn: but that was a line she never ventured to cross and now the shy finger kept on at its mystic task. She asked at once:

“As well as usual,” said Miss Elsie. This was the family answer to all questions on family affairs. “But she’s had a letter.”

“A letter!” echoed Hannah. She had not been conscious of guilt, but the guilt was there, for it spoke up boldly within her and said: “Answer! answer! if you can.”

“Addressed in a very good hand, rather a bold hand, a gentleman’s I should say.”

“Why, no, and that’s the trouble. We didn’t give it to her. How could we, not knowing who he was?”

“Oh,” thought Hannah, “we’re a poor lot, father and I, with our sentimental meddling, one of us bad as the other!”

“But the postmark!” said Miss Elsie. “Of course that told where it was from, but we were no better off than before until sister said—wasn’t she bright?—‘Why, it’s Bridgnorth. Isn’t that where Miss Willoughby lives?’ And it is, isn’t it, dear? And now I’ll get it and you tell me if you know the hand. There couldn’t be many gentlemen to write a hand like that.”

She went to the cupboard by the fireplace, the one where old books and pamphlets lived, in the seclusion of an unwanted knowingness, and took out the daring letter which had no name. Hannah knew why it was not in the desk where other letters were neatly ranged in pigeonholes, and she was ashamed. She and father had done this. It had no right to be alive at all, hiding away in cupboards lest Ann, coming downstairs on one of her rare adventures, should find it and be amazed. Miss Elsie held it out to her in all its guilty innocence of father’s strong, firm hand.

“Your father?” said Miss Elsie, “your dear father who wrote that beautiful sermon on old age? Well, that settles it. She shall have it at once. Anything your dear father would write! Of course, as I told you, the sermon on old age was not entirely—well, dear, it wasn’t so, but your father was not old enough, at that time, to write any differently. However, as I say, that settles it, about the letter.”

“No,” said Hannah, “it doesn’t settle anything. I’ve read it, but still I’m not sure what effect it would have. Father’s a minister—yes, I know you know that, but what I mean is that they’re different. They’re always thinking about salvation and the love of God and all the abstract things—and I might be thinking about a pretty nightie, don’t you see?”

“We spoke of her,” said Hannah. “Ann, you know, and I told him she was—unhappy. And not quite herself. And he never can bear to have people unhappy, and he almost thinks they needn’t be, for there’s just that one remedy for it—the love of God. And he wanted to give her a pleasure by showing her she wasn’t forgotten, as she might think, and he did get all mixed up in it between Solomon’s Song and the love of God. And of course it was a silly piece of business, because it was to come out of nowhere, maybe from God—though he never’d say that—it was the love of God, anyway. You see that, don’t you, Miss Elsie? I’m not even sure he didn’t think he was going to heal her—the miracles, you know.”

She felt much like a confused child confessing for father and for herself and not quite knowing where the blame lay or whether it was all admirable as the deed of a man must be who could write a sermon on old age which, though all wrong, was beautiful.

“Dear soul!” said Miss Elsie. There were tears in her eyes. Did she mean father or did she mean Hannah who sat there beside her, incoherent and struggling? “She must have the letter at once.”

“But aren’t you going to read it?” said Hannah, not knowing whether to be the more confused.

“Not if your dear father wrote it,” said Miss Elsie, placidly. “Come, we’ll go up together and I’ll give it to her and tell her it came by mail, as indeed it did, and if it puzzles her, why we shall be there to help her realize. And how lucky it is you came! For I never should have ventured it, never in the world.”

“But that’s why I came,” said Hannah, smiling a little, but not removed from the body of her fear. “We got scared, father and I. We wondered if we hadn’t done a horrid thing to her. (We’re a little bit alike, very rash, both of us, though I hadn’t known he was. I’m just finding out.) Anyway, we spoke of it last night and we felt the same way and I said ‘I’ll go over tomorrow morning and make it right.’ ”

“All that long tiresome trip!” said Miss Elsie. “Well, we’ll run straight upstairs with it and I believe I won’t go into the room with you. I’ll stop in the east chamber—I think sister must be there doing a little picking up—and I’ll tell her about it and we’ll listen a minute and, if it’s best, then we’ll come in.”

She put the letter into Hannah’s hand and Hannah, bearing her two gifts, the nightie and the love of God, went up to Ann. On the landing she stopped a minute to recall herself to the laws and habits of this world which were all on the side of behaving yourself with calmness and at least as if it were literally the best of all possible worlds and not a madness man had made of it. Then she stopped another minute at the open doorway and looked in. The scene might not have changed in a line or shadow from the one she had always found there. The fine old furniture, each piece where it had been when Miss Elsie was little and perhaps when her father and her grandfather were born, looked as if it had been asleep for generations and felt its posture to be so exactly right that it had no idea of waking up. There on the desk was the neat pile of little slips kept in unvarying order, to be mailed, and Ann herself sat by the fireplace, her feet, in their worn slippers, put out as if for warmth. She was thin, blonde, blue-eyed and so absorbed in thought or drugged by torpor that Hannah had spoken twice before she raised her sunken head. In that moment Hannah had time to think, as she often did, that Ann had beauty of a sort. There were potentialities in her, if she could come to life, a charm of a subtle, delicate type, given over, in painting, to angels, saints and unresisting martyrs. What was she, really? What would she be if she came alive?

She always made a point of a lively greeting, and often smiled at herself for its clumsiness, though she saw no way to better it. The voices of the aunts were low. They had the quality of age and she wondered if a “saucy roughness” might sometime wake an echo in that ancient house. She held out the letter and again ventured her “Hullo.” “Here’s a letter for you. It came by mail.”

What would happen? Would Ann cry out? Would she clutch the letter to her heart as a common stage business might direct? But she did nothing.

She had got out of her chair and Hannah knew it was to make that careful selection among the papers on the desk, and in this she was most anxious, most methodical. You were to mail a letter for her, but it must be a certain one, none else. Hannah spoke again, not loudly, but calling to her.

“Ann!” she called. It seemed to her one of the great moments in a human life. If she could not fix the girl’s attention now, turn her about and set her feet even stumbling anywhere else so it were not here, could it ever be done? “Ann, look at this. It’s a letter for you. Open it, dear. Or let me—and read it to you. It’s a letter. For you. And about love. Love!”

Was it a madness of her own to use the word? And what double madness might it rouse in those jangled wits! Ann stopped on her short way to the desk and turned about to say, this in a tone of mild surprise:

Hannah put out a hand and began smoothing a fold of her dress. She thought she might be used to Aunt Elsie’s gentle strokings. They stood looking at each other, and Hannah wondered if she had ever before met her direct glance. Was this as mad folk looked? There was nothing of wildness in those eyes, or even a clouded misery. They were no more than sad. And the girl stood quiet, listening.

“Wait a minute,” said Hannah, though Ann was waiting. Hannah was breathless with the tension of it. Something, she did not know what, had to be done, quickly, she did not know how. “Wait a minute,” she said again, stupidly. “This letter. Look at it. Your name is on the envelop: Ann Denison. Mayn’t I open it?”

Ann did turn her head by a little and glance at it, but without interest. She did not answer. Hannah resolved to dash on before and show her the thing she should have done herself. What would medical science say? An alienist—hideous inhuman word! what would he direct and in what firm or amiably indifferent fashion would a nurse obey?

She tore the end across and drew forth the letter. It seemed to be not so much Ann Denison’s as her own, she had had such part in it. She unfolded the sheet and held it from her, to be read. But Ann did not look at it. She looked at her instead. It seemed a half-troubled inquiry, and she did not speak.

“Oh, I see,” said Hannah, with that false air of discovery we put on when we approach a mind that baffles us. “You’d rather I read it to you. Listen. It begins—”

She plunged, with a desperate slow distinctness, into the fragmentary measures of the Song of Solomon and what father had ventured from his own remedial treasury. She looked up. Her forehead was wet with it, her lips were trembling. And Ann was lost in a patience that seemed as deep as the unthinking stillness of the old chairs and table and the mirror that had created so many images of Raymonds, to throw them back again, but which in itself kept nothing and expected nothing, not even to go on with its game of throwing back beauty and horror and delight and pain. Ann had at all times a low voice with a vibration in it, but now, so well did her patience serve her that even that arresting thrill failed and left it lifeless. She spoke quietly:

Hannah was routed. These were the ragged armies of mental anarchy, and they defied her even to summon the forces of life in her and attack again.

Her finger was still stroking down the fold of cloth, but Ann turned about, not noticing, and went to the desk, made an anxious selection among the slips of paper and came back with one. Her face had wakened slightly and she said, in a voice warmed a little by its artless thrill:

Her own voice had lost its determined liveliness, but she managed to smile a little at the two sisters now standing in the doorway, and aware of her defeat. Miss Milly was a little in advance. She was the elder, but she looked younger by ten years, short, round, red in the cheeks and all alive with interest in daily circumstance. Now they came into the room and Hannah, laying the letter on the desk, said to Ann, but really for their hearing:

“See, Ann, here’s your letter. You’ll want to read it by yourself. Perhaps you’ll all want to,” she added, and the sisters made little murmuring noises to say they might.

Hannah felt, even through her defeat, that she was still in command of the situation and must keep on. She couldn’t go back to father with the interview torn to rags, the letter unread and her mind as wavering as before. And there was still one part of her mission not yet done. She had brought Celestia’s package up with her and dropped it on a chair, perhaps to be taken away again, unopened. If father’s letter did its work, what was the nightgown but a foolishness hatched out in women’s minds, those brooding places for small senseless things? Ah! but the letter had been tried, and it was lying there forgotten. What about the nightgown, if only to fulfil its destiny before Celestia and tell her it also had tried and failed? She opened the parcel, took out the nightgown and held it up, full size in length and width.

“Ann,” said she, “here’s a present for you. A nightie. It’s hand-made.”

Ann seemed to hear and Hannah, like a salesman vending some incredible rarity, spread forth the sleeve.

“Look,” said she. “Feel of it. Handkerchief linen and all that lace! And the yoke, Ann! just look at the yoke! I don’t know how long it must have taken to crochet that lace.”

Ann heard. She understood. She put out her hand and stretched the snowy amplitude from side to side. And then she said:

The two sisters, not looking at each other but as by one consent, turned, each to a chair and sat down. Ann had spoken. After the Yes and No of all these dead years, she had made a sentence which was not to refuse something or to put her one unvarying plea. Hannah, aware that she was now occupying the stage alone with her and that the old ladies, if their shocked intelligence served them, were listening in a silence so determined that nothing would tempt them to break it by any irrelevancy of comment, felt the actor’s desperate resolve to play up to what the scene required. Ann was evidently deliberating, in a reasonable way, on the adaptability of a nightgown to changing times.

“I should think,” said Hannah, who after all had never played this part and was rather tremulous over it, “I should think you’d have to take out some of the gathers where it goes into the yoke. That’s easy, isn’t it?”

Ann ran a finger along the gathers. There were a great many of them, her finger was telling her how many. She understood. Some of them would have to come out.

“If I were you,” said Hannah, “I should sit down now and begin to rip. You need a small pair of scissors, a little pointed. And you’d have to be careful. Those stitches are very fine. Miss Milly, you bring your scissors, please. You must have small ones, haven’t you?”

Miss Milly rose and darted from the room. Miss Elsie stayed, and behind Ann’s back, began making faces at Hannah, shaking her head and forming her lips into a large round “No!” Then, Ann being absorbed in pulling the yoke delicately, a little here, a little there, as if to see how frail it was, Miss Elsie got softly up, went to the desk and wrote on one of the slips of paper waiting to be mailed and held it up to Hannah: “We never let her have anything sharp.” But upon that Miss Milly was back again, eager, astonished at life for being like this—and the scissors in her hand. And still Hannah was playing up to what father and the gods expected of her. But it wasn’t the gods. It was God Himself Who had sent Ann a nightie to make her well.

“You sit down here,” said Hannah. She drew forward a small rocking chair. That, in the high tension of her mind, looked to her in keeping. It was what one would call a sewing chair. “Here, Ann. You’ll work better in this. I’ll take the cricket, I’m so big and all. That’ll bring me on a level with your knee.”

Ann sat down, the nightgown in her lap. It seemed to be billowing over her. She was a little bewildered now, but Hannah, the great histrionic Hannah as she had to call herself, to keep her courage up, wasn’t going to let herself be booed. Down, stage fright! Go home, critics, two old ladies in the front row! this play is going to be a winner. And there she was at Ann’s knee and the shining scissors were in Ann’s hand.

“Shall I begin it for you?” said Hannah. “No, you’d better do it yourself. Your hands are smaller. I don’t believe I ever did any such fine work. Yes, that’s right. After the first it’s all plain sailing, don’t you think?”

Ann did not seem to hear her: for slowly, with an intense care, she was ripping the gathers from the yoke. Hannah did not venture to look up lest the sisters grimace at her and shake the heads of warning. A look might summon them on in the scene where there was, as yet, no part for them. Would they recognize their cues? Would they wait until they really had a cue? And—since her ignorance was equal to theirs—would she know when to make her own exit and leave the stage to them? For Ann, it might have been as if they three were in a different universe or she alone with life itself, destined to bring about an event: the separation of linen gathers from a yoke. The front was half done.

“There!” said Hannah. “Isn’t that enough for one day? Ripping’s tedious work, and when we’re tired we’re more likely to cut the cloth.”

Could she take the billowing heap away? Would Ann allow it? No, it was a risk and failure was unthinkable. Ann might forget it, but the sisters never would, and to them also she must be the star round whom the drama moved, or how would they support her when they were on the stage alone?

“That’s right,” said she. “Now let’s fold it up. Don’t you want to lay it on the bed? It’s big to fold.”

Ann got up and put it on the bed and folded it with care. She had laid the scissors down beside it. She looked at Hannah.

“They’re empty,” said she, “all of ’em. Put it in the next to the top. That’s what I should do.”

Evidently it was a matter of precedent that nightgowns should not acquire residence at the top. Hannah understood that. The top drawer would be for things known in the household as dewdads: little boxes of jewelry, if there were any, perhaps handkerchiefs and gloves. She opened the second drawer.

“There!” said she. “Lay it in, Ann. Maybe this afternoon you’ll work a little more.”

Ann laid it in and returned to her chair, bemused a trifle, it seemed, by the quick course of things, though not troubled: surely not troubled. But the scissors—what to do about them? And where were they? They were now in Miss Milly’s charge, held in a grip that turned the knuckles of the pink hand white, and now she rose, holding them to her body as if never to let them go, rose and hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

“There!” said Hannah. It was the only noncommittal word that occurred to her whereby one might be cheerful and do no harm. “Good-bye, Ann. I’m going now, but I’m coming back. You’ll do the nightie, won’t you? Do it nicely—but I know you will. It’s lovely cloth.”

Would she come back? She had not thought of it until that moment. It seemed unlikely that she would want to leave the parson to his journal and delay here for a purpose she might have undertaken only to her own bewilderment. “I had to,” she found her mind asserting, as she went down the stairs. “I had to lie to her. Any doctor’d tell you that.” But would he? A murrain on him if he wouldn’t!

Miss Milly was at the foot of the stairs. She was flushed not only in the cheeks that were always red but all over her face from hair to chin. She was breathing fast and Hannah wondered, as she often did, how Miss Milly had managed to keep the flesh on her bones, she lived so furiously. It seemed as if there was something to be said and they went into the parlor and Miss Milly spoke. Was Hannah to be blamed for her histrionic act? No, and the surprise of that was wonderful.

“I don’t know as you know it,” said Miss Milly, “but you’ve done a wonderful piece of work up there. But how about the scissors? They’ve got to be thought of now.”

Hannah considered rapidly. How about the scissors, indeed! She herself would like to know, but though she wondered she must show no hesitancy. She was still the star. She couldn’t allow herself to muddle things up, especially now, with fortune and victory on her helm. And the thing to remember was to show no indecision and certainly no fear.

“It’s gone perfectly,” said she, with some airiness. “So far. And now I’d give her a chance to work a little every day, but not too much.”

“How about the scissors?” repeated Milly inexorably. “We can’t leave ’em in the room. And if we take ’em away every time, won’t she see the reason why?”

It was likely, but Hannah bade reason step aside an instant and give place to the high courage of audacity, the voice out of the air, the one likely to be wiser than the toiling brain.

“But,” she said, “Ann never has shown signs”—she paused. It seemed to affront some ancient honor to mention violence in the quiet house.

“No,” said Miss Milly. “She’s as gentle as a lamb. And if she did do anything to anybody, it would be herself. Don’t I know! If ’twas anybody else, she’d give up and die.”

“Yes,” said Hannah, gaining boldness. “And if I were you, I’d fill the drawers with things, her clothes, her little dewdads, just as she might have had them. I should think one great point was to make everything look as it always did.”

Miss Milly was silent for a minute, staring out of the window as if she saw strange doings, though it was only life going on there as it does in summer, all the unconcerted babbling of the things of earth: leaves moving, wings in the honeysuckle and a quick shower of down from the linden tree. Was she meeting for the first time the vision of bareness in an empty room?

“Yes,” she said, but as if she spoke to her own assaulted mind, “them drawers are empty. We’ve bought her things right along since she came, and let her have ’em there, same’s you would in your own room. But I got thinking, and I cleared out everything with my own hands. They’re in the parlor chamber.”

“Well,” said Hannah. “Well!” She must not meddle too far, but she could allow herself a moment’s foolishness. “I should want my things round me, as many as I could get. They seem to understand us, you know. They’re kind to us.” Now she was romancing, as Anthony used to say she did. “Things we have round us—I dare say they like us and can’t bear to be set aside. Oh, I’m getting foolish! It’s because I was up so early. Miss Milly, if I’ve made a mess of things, would you please write me? Just a word?”

Yes, Milly would be glad to, certainly she would. And they might need advice and all. And would Hannah tell her dear father how kind it was of him—with all his parish duties and everybody knows what they are—to write that beautiful letter? It must be beautiful if her father wrote it, for it was he that wrote that sermon and she hadn’t forgotten it and never should. And now she’d run upstairs and put the scissors in with the nightie and stop a spell while Elsie came down to say good-bye. Unless Hannah could stay to dinner. Why, of course she could!

No, Hannah said. She had made arrangements for that. She was going to run over to Low River and see if there was any early cardinal flower—this being a conception of the moment—and she had a sandwich in her bag, and she must take the four o’clock home. They smiled at each other, with pleasant glances, instead of handshakings, and Miss Milly went up the stairs and, after a little talk between them, Miss Elsie came down. What would her verdict be on interfering visitors who thrust unfounded theories into the sleeping air of an ancient house? Again Hannah wondered, but hardly dared think of answers possible, Miss Elsie came so slowly and with such upright dignity. She put out both hands and laid them on her shoulders.

“My dear,” she said. “Oh, my dear! what a change you’ve brought about this day!”

Hannah was afraid for her. She might have to be disappointed. She turned her head and kissed her sleeve, and then Miss Elsie, remembering she had perhaps seemed too familiar, took her hands down and said:

“You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I’m a good deal worked up over this. Come in and sit a minute.”

She led the way into the parlor and they sat down together on the sofa. Hannah could have borne to be blamed for, after all, she had been headstrong, forgetful of materia medica, forgetful of tabulated facts; and now she could not quite bear praise.

“But we’ve got to remember,” she said weakly, “it may not lead to anything, after all.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” said Miss Elsie. “It isn’t what it’ll lead to. It’s what happened. When I think of her sitting there ripping that seam just as it might have been when she was about the house—well, it’s more than I can bear.”

“It’s more than I can bear either,” said Hannah. “And the letter—may I tell my father you forgave him for it? For after he’d sent it he felt all sorts of ways—as if he’d taken a liberty and even worse: messed things up and made them harder.”

“My dear!” said Miss Elsie. It was inconceivable, she seemed to say, that an aged clergyman who had written such a beautiful yet unsound sermon on old age, should not have all the privileges of oracular speech. “And the letter! I was coming to that. I’ve been looking at it. Don’t you think it might have stirred up her mind a little—the words, you know, all those words out of the Bible—so she was ready to look at something pretty—the nice crochet and the linen—lovely, it was—and feel—like anybody else? I hope I make myself plain. You do see, don’t you, dear?”

Yes, Hannah saw, and ventured to add that if anything happened to the nightie and it had to be given up, there were plenty more and she thought there could be other things sent—more and more, her runaway mind told her, until the empty drawers in the bureau were tight with hand-made clothes. For Celestia, she had begun to guess, was no less extravagant than she. Such as Celestia give more and more, even to the treasure of their love, and if that prove wasteful spending, then they thrust their bounty anywhere and never look to see whether it might still be waste. Hannah rose to her feet, and, again irresponsibly, she wanted to do a little more. Miss Elsie, at least, should know that this transaction was as holy as ritual, like the giving of food and drink.

“Miss Elsie,” said she, “I want to tell you who sent the nightie. She was a girl who had made her wedding things, and then there wasn’t any wedding and she packed the things away. And she’s just taken them out, to look them over, I guess, and I told her about Ann’s being—different—I didn’t tell her the name—and so she sent it to her and I thought it was all very nice.”

Miss Elsie thought so, too. Her eyes were a little suffused, and she shook her head slightly as if forbidding them to cry. But she answered obliquely, as we sometimes do when words are too much for us—and Hannah understood.

“It don’t seem as if it had been kept so very long. It’s as white as snow.”

And then Hannah did say good-bye and went hurrying down to the wide meadowland along the road, and crossing it, marked out in its curved length by alders and unpruned growths, Low River, which she loved. It was a shallow stream flowing without bluster over a rocky bed, and must have had source in abundant springs or feeding pools, for, in the driest of summer weather, it was never wholly gone. It would sink and sink but not below the level where cardinal flowers were safe, and so it long ago became Low River, a temperate sort of pleasantness that, in spite of its boulders, would never brawl nor get above itself even in time of melting snow. Hannah loved it and the trodden path beside its fringy banks, and she loved it the more that she and Anthony had been used to walking there, going on a few steps, while he swished the bushes with his stick, and then stopping for him to tell, always angrily, how he meant to convince the press especially of its responsibility. He was of those who are in perpetual torment because, in any question, they seem to themselves to see all sides so clearly. He had burning theories about the wrongs of man, but he no sooner began to fulminate—and he was always fulminating—than he had to find himself confronted by an enormous boulder labeled “But—” and would pause, bewildered, and then recover himself, accept the check and still go on: “But—” and find himself arguing on the other side. Hannah loved his honest contrariety. It made her sorry for him. For being at war with the world as it misbehaved, he was also at war with himself and his habit of mind, tired of condemning here, approving there and then suspecting he might have made the balance tip too far if he had managed the business himself. For a time she kept the path by the fringing alders, glancing through the spaces that were like windows into the course where the river ran quietly, reminiscently, as if it had brushing footsteps on the grass to remember and think over in its nightly solitude; and soon she came to the bank, screened in by green, so that you could sit there in seclusion and only the river know you had come. She seated herself and gave her mind over to abstraction as great as the voluntary withdrawal of the soul into silence. Everything was moving a little, though not enough to make a windy day: the leaves, the water and the active little forms of life that live near moisture and are nourished by it. Only her thoughts were still, as in a pool of their own. She was thinking about Ann and the disease of wasted love. Was it not a disease when it could overthrow the reason and disguise the soul? And how beyond measure foolish, here in a world uncountably rich, where, if one sowing failed you, there were other harvests coming and you could sow again! You might not love again, but was that necessary, or even desirable? Wasn’t great love as rare as genius? And she remembered:

and said it over aloud. But it has a being. It is something that is born into the world and exists as a power like wind and sleep and vapor; or if it is denied, it is the mold that crept over Celestia and silenced her. And would it creep over her? And then Anthony seemed to be sitting there, his stick tapping the rock at her feet, and he was arraigning the world as he inevitably arraigned it for some abuse or another, and she laughed out as she had been used to do when he was really there, and asked him what he should think it best to do about it: the love that must not alter when it alteration finds? When it found itself receiving dry little chronicles of books read and theories fought and vanquished—or almost vanquished because there was always the other side you had to consider, if you had an open mind—this, instead of the breathless “I want you. When? when? when?” How was she going to meet the sinking of the torrent into the level of a Low River? Must she find herself coated with the rust of tears and, like Ann, keep old women imprisoned night and day, counting her heartbeats and listening to her breath, or like Celestia, meekly serving at an altar of remembrance where the spark was gone and the chalice dry? No! no! no! she found herself saying aloud, as if Anthony could hear her, and a crow, off in a field at the right, cawed three times coarsely: Haw! haw! haw! At that, she laughed and wished she could have speech with the crow, they seemed so likely to agree, abandoned “meditation and the thoughts of love,” took out her sandwich and ate it and, still hungry, walked to the road and so to the station, and waited for her train.

When the train drew into Bridgnorth, she found a crimson and sulphur sunset, amazingly threaded with light green. There were the two rickety cabs at the station, but she was not tired and walked along thinking it over and how she should present to her father what she still looked upon as the drama of the nightgown so that he should see it as ample compensation for the letter which had fallen short. It was pleasant to have the sunset in front of her, so flaming now in its warmth that it seemed to have some emotional significance belonging to the day itself: perhaps of supper and the charm of bed. There was a pleasure in father’s expecting her and Celestia’s being glad to have her come; and so, with an overflowing sense of well-being, she walked up the path and found Celestia on the step waiting for her. Celestia, too, partook of the day’s significance, almost of the sunset. She did not smile, but you might see how welcome Hannah was, because she was all over alert and shining. And when Hannah had reached the steps, Celestia bent down to her and said:

“There’s a gentleman here. He’s with your father. He came this forenoon and we had him to dinner, and your father’s as pleased as ever you see.”

Either Celestia had got her story too well arranged and must tell it as it was, or a name seemed of no importance compared with other things.

“I’ve put him in the east chamber,” said she. “He took his car down to the garage. Now don’t let me keep you here. You’ll want to get fixed up.”

She turned about and went in and up the stairs, and Hannah was afraid. Her skin prickled and her tongue was dry. Suddenly it came to her that she had always known how it would be; and now it was here. There were all the signs of it: the voices of two men talking in the study, her father’s and that other one, only, as she had dreamed it, mother’s voice would be there, too, gently dominating them. But mother was in England and Ann was working on Celestia’s nightgown, and it was a flaming sunset and a mad world and the voice was here at last. She stopped a minute to take off her hat, and opened the study door.

These they were, her father and Anthony West, sitting at the table, leaning toward each other and talking absorbedly, but in tones so quick, so eager, that she could distinguish only a phrase here and there. Doubt—belief—the Real Presence—the Virgin birth—these came to her clearly, as if they were arrows winged by their own intent, and then, from her father, short, quick comments, full of feeling:

“And you’d always wanted it. And couldn’t bring it about. You got stranded in unbelief. Too bad! too bad!”

Then Anthony came in, defiantly, she thought, in the way it used to be when he was arguing that he was as he was and could be no other. Yet it was not always the same way. Were those moments to return when, after he had argued himself to some rock of apparent certainty he would plunge and strike wildly out for another height where he was almost sure to be uncertain and plunge again? He was here indeed; but was he here unchanged? She knew what they were talking about. She had been with him, over and over, along the course of it. He had intended to be a clergyman, but he could not, because he lacked a pure belief. And so he had taken refuge in teaching and was no more content. For the modern philosophy he had to expound was too arbitrary in its predictions of the weather in that strange world, the human mind. It thought it had plumbed the mystery. But it did not seem to him he could escape, for his mother’s small means had been spent on his education and he must see her through in comfort and philander no more among belief and non-belief. And perhaps now his bewildered spirit was too tired with all the fruitless divagations it had made and he could find only strength to keep afloat. These things Hannah knew, in the moment she stood there, memory flashing before her the mirror of his past, and she had that tiring pang of the heart which comes with the sudden knowledge that nothing has changed. Nobody has grown better in growing older, the knots of natal destiny are still waiting to be untied. But if love itself remains, then the dull face of circumstance might be made to look bright as Achilles’ shield. You could see the sky in it. And here she must have made a little movement, and they were aware of her. Anthony was sitting with his back to the door; but as her father raised his eyes and saw her he also lifted his head a little, though he did not turn. It was her father who spoke her name and in a pleased surprise that was moving to her.

The two men rose to their feet, and Anthony was facing her. There he was as she had imagined him over and over again, in the tired habit of longing, and curiously he seemed to her almost unchanged. When he was young, he had looked old and now that he had crossed so many rivers and swum so many puddles the mind of man has grown used to skirting, he was only a little more serious about the eyes—“crow-footed,” Hannah thought—and his straight brown hair was no thinner, though slightly grayed, and at the temples only. He was, as in those younger days, the typical scholar, of a good symmetrical size and slow moving, and he wore spectacles. These gave him an appealing sort of solemnity which was, as she knew, a part of his inner life, though it had never come so plainly into evidence. He took a step toward her, and she put out her hand. He had not, she had time to think humorously, summoned the composure to put out his. Yet when they had parted in Bucksford, they had kissed and turned away and with one impulse returned to kiss again. It was she who spoke.

They achieved the handshake of friendliness and she went round the table to her father who was shuffling some of his papers together into the order he was always cheerfully pursuing and never attained.

“Hullo, dearest,” said she, perhaps with a hateful implication in the endearment, though she was only conscious of a fierce humiliation and a desire to share it with somebody in a world where she was apparently of no great consequence. “I’ve had a nice day and done the trick and here I am. Sit down again, both of you, and let me tell you.”

They did sit down and she took a chair near the end of the table and began her story. Yet while she told, it was savagely in her mind that Anthony’s hand, as it rested on the table, was trembling a little. At that moment she thought she loved the hand more than she did him: for it alone of all life under her eyes seemed to be moved, at least a little. But after the first glance, she could not trust herself to look at it. She knew its comeliness, the strength of the square outline, the fingers with what always looked to her like beautiful mechanical aptitudes so foreign to what were really the tendencies of his mind. Yes, the hand was trembling. It had more perception of the present than his halting soul. She loved it, and could have bent her head to kiss it as it lay there before her in its unsteady might. Yet for the man who sat there looking at her in a bemused way through his defensive spectacles, she felt only the composure of a hardness which suspends judgment until it knows. “Am I angry?” she questioned herself, and could scarcely believe in the possibility. This was Anthony, and she had thought there was nothing on earth she could not forgive him—certainly not the faults of his clouded will. Yes, she was angry, but it was the one thing she must not seem to be, and she began speaking, chiefly to him, though a glance, from time to time, included her father. All at once, she felt very prosaic and confident. Anthony had, of course, been duly interested in not finding her at home and father had explained to him; but she could explain again and open a channel for those little toy ships of talk which men and women seem bent on sailing when they find themselves together. But how foolish! Why not say to Anthony: “In the name of God Who made us, what are you here for? Tell me—and then go.”

“I’ve been to Bucksford,” said she pleasantly. “To Windy Hill. You know Windy Hill, Anthony. The two old ladies, the Misses Raymond—you remember them?”

Yes, he said, he remembered them, and his voice, low and slightly hesitating, moved her afresh, but not to anger, this time. It was exactly as he had been used to speak, though only in the ordinary ways of life. Sometimes and, she believed, to her only, it had been different. Those hours down by Low River when they sat and talked of his shifting fortunes and there were pauses where he broke off to tell her what it was to him to have her there beside him, understanding, always understanding as nobody else ever had or ever could—then the voice was movingly different. The low remembered music of it flooded back upon her and she could scarcely bear the impact of it because that was Anthony, she told herself with a little gasp of wonder over time and change—and where had it gone, the voice that had been for her alone? But before even the memory of it her anger turned, in the shame of utter rout, and fled away. “Courage,” she bade herself. “Brazen courage, Hannah Willoughby! Don’t crumple up before them, these two talking over their blessed dogmas, and begin to howl about what you’ve either lost or not lost. Whichever way it is, howling never’ll help you.”

“And,” she continued, to make all plain to Anthony, “do you remember Ann Denison, a kind of niece, who isn’t quite—well, not quite all there?”

No, he didn’t remember her. When he was in Bucksford the two old ladies made the family, and he often ran in with the boy he was tutoring.

“I see,” said she. “This girl was after your day. Well, she had an unfortunate marriage and it ended in a way I never’ve really known much about; but she hasn’t recovered from it and I told father and we both thought I’d better run over and see how she was. About the letter, Father.” She turned to him where he was still standing beside his chair as if in doubt whether to go and leave her to make Anthony as welcome as she would. “I gave it to her, and we needn’t have been concerned about it: for it meant nothing to her, nothing. But I had a present for her, a nightgown that was old-fashioned and too big, but lovely—beautiful work in it—and that, if you’ll believe me, took her eye at once and I left her ripping it, to make it over.”

“Well!” said the parson. “Well!” He was accepting it in the way he had learned to accept so many futile sowings of good-will. “Now!” said he, with that rapid shifting of ground she knew in him. When one stone turned under his foot he took another step, more firmly. “I have invited Anthony to stay with us for a few days, as long as he can, in fact. And now I’m going down to the arbor to smoke a pipe and I’ll leave you two here to renew acquaintance. And at supper we shall meet again.”

He seemed to bless them with his benignant parson smile and Hannah looked after him, half in despair over the situation he was accepting so simply, and wondered what they had been saying to each other to justify his mandatory attitude. Did he assume that this scholarly middle-aged person was to be his son-in-law? or was he leaving her the fullest freedom to make over the relation to suit herself? Anthony! he called him. Anthony! That might mean something, but it must not mean too much until she had looked over the ground and decided whether it could be a burial plot or a garden full of herb o’ grace. Meantime Anthony was staring at her. She dropped into her father’s chair.

“Sit down,” she said, with a commonplace cheerfulness she found needful. “I shall have to run upstairs in a minute and get brushed off. I’ve been away all day, you see. What time did you come?”

“Something after ten,” he said, still staring as if, she thought, he could hardly believe it all. Did she look very queer, or was it life itself that looked queer to him, as it did to her, and were they both in unconscious accord, trying to seek about and find some clever way to take them somewhere? “Your father,” he began again, hesitating a little, “has been most kind. He told me about a garage and I put my car up. Leaving my bag here, you understand. Most kind. I didn’t know how you’d feel about it, but you were away—”

“Of course,” she said, again in that lively falsity of voice. “That’s what all our friends do. Mother has lots of company. She’s all kinds of things—maybe you didn’t know—D.A.R.’s and that sort, and unknown women are always being asked to take their bonnets off and stay. But she’s abroad now—did father tell you?—and he’s quite right in asking you.”

He was looking at her desperately. Was this the pallor of emotion on his face, and why was the face so strangely drawn? What was it, she wondered despairingly, that was always so wistful about him, so appealing? Yet it wasn’t sentimental, it wasn’t whimpering. Whatever he felt, you could be sorry and without despising him. He was, she saw, entirely unchanged, plodding along in the queernesses of this world, not being able to save himself from them or allow himself to be saved. He raised his voice a little, an old desperate device of his when he was about to say something he dreaded and which yet had to be said.

Then he repeated it again a little more loudly, and she was near saying: “Don’t! Celestia’ll hear you.”

“You must know why I’ve come. You couldn’t help knowing after—your letter.”

It had to be stopped. Supper was within twenty minutes and if this was to be lovemaking or indeed any kind of emotion, it was no time to begin. She got up and stood looking at him—placidly, she hoped—while he looked desperately at her. She didn’t know what she was to say, but her heart was ready and prompted her.

“Dear old Anthony,” said she, “not now. It’ll be supper in a minute and I’ve got to wash my face. Are your things upstairs? Celestia said she’d given you a room. The one over this? Yes, that’s right. Come on up, and I’ll take a look at it.”

So they went up together, and she found it in the array Celestia would have compassed, and a copper can of hot water, shining as the sun.

“Yes,” said she, “Celestia’s fixed you up. There isn’t any bell or anything; but come down when you’re ready. We’ll wait if you’re not there. Father doesn’t mind. There’s nothing he minds. You’ll have found that out.”

Then she went down the hall and into her own room at the back, and there she stood for a minute looking at herself in the glass. Was this Hannah, this woman suddenly wild and gleaming, eyes “all a wonder and a wild desire” and lips that trembled on themselves? It was only for a minute, and she turned and lay down on the bed and buried her face in the pillow to wonder what had come to her. And who had come? Was it Anthony with late love in his hands, or was it a dark certainty that had been tracking her all these years and now had found her? The moment of decision—this was it. About their loving each other, there had been no doubt. She had been sure of it from the moment when she met his seeking eyes, apprehensive, as they seemed, of all the problems waiting for them in this inhospitable world, and knew she was to look where they were looking and help them find the way. And now the way had led here to this quiet room with supper only a few minutes before her and nobody to know whether the decisive word would come that very night. She got up and even then, considering the nature of what mankind briefly pleases itself to think the eternal bond of love, had spirit to grimace at herself, tribute to her beautiful hair, as if it, too, knew the pathetic mockery of being the only beauty the glass could yield her. No—her hands! They were fine, and carefully kept. Thank God for them! The torches in her eyes died out, and she was glad. What would father think to see them flaming there? And when she went down she found them both in the study, and Celestia in the dining-room waiting for the last moment to bring in the tea. Suddenly, when the food had been blessed to them and Celestia was gone, she began to feel absurd, as if, indeed, they were all absurd, even Celestia and her premature trousseau and her uncomplaining faith that her lot was as it had to be and no other. And that sunset fire burning up the sky and God saying, “Look! look! I’m sending you all these things, flaming suns, and stars to follow, and roofs and honeysuckles and hot biscuits, and here are you going mad over an uncertain passion you call love!” But she had to talk and these things were such as you could not say, or the very joints of family life would fall apart and leave you on the other side of nowhere, shivering.

“Isn’t this a happy smell?” she asked Anthony, when Celestia had left them to their pleasant eating. “In this room, I mean. Do you know what it is?”

No, he couldn’t guess, but it was nice and he was sure he’d smelled it before.

“You do,” said she, to the parson. “Biscuits, hot biscuits. There’s nothing wholesomer, more human. Sometimes I think they’re Celestia’s breath, her soul’s breath, you know, that nice soul she’s got.”

Her father took no notice of this except by his slight and promptly answering smile, an automatic response he had learned in the course of his parochial duties. But Anthony gave a little involuntary laugh, one note instantly mute and leaving him graver than before. This she remembered, and it stirred her to a sudden desperate resolve to govern their unexpected meeting, smile it away, talk it down, as she sometimes had to do when there was insurrectionary trouble with raw young women in the dormitory. “I’ve lost my lover,” she thought. “There he sits eating biscuits, but presumably I’ve lost him. Would it feed my vanity to convince him that he’s the loser, himself, that he’s lost me? No, that’s cheap fiction. It won’t wash.” But she wasn’t governing the situation. Still they must talk.

“Do you read a lot, Anthony?” she asked, with interest. “I don’t mean for your work, but browsing—old poets, you know. You used to do a good deal of that when I knew you, seven years ago.”

“It isn’t seven years,” he answered, accurate as of old. “It’s six and five months.”

“Yes, of course! Father, could you believe I’d been at Bucksford over seven years? It was there we saw each other, Mr. West and I. Anthony, I went down to Low River for a minute, today, and sat on the boulder and wished the cardinal flower was out.”

“Yes, my dear, time goes very fast. We know we have reached a certain terminus but it never occurs to us we shall not be allowed to stay there. We don’t think of that until somebody pushes us along. Mr. West, you won’t have heard that I am a superannuated clergyman—retired, and wanting to keep myself busy, you understand, but not quite knowing how. That won’t happen to you for a long time, a very long time; but I hope you needn’t be so childish about it as I am.”

Anthony looked up at him in a startled way, and Hannah felt her heart melting at the affectionate sweetness of the look.

“He understands,” she thought. “He sees father as he is, God bless him! Will he see me as I am, not much like the girl that sat on the boulder and said ‘I love you?’ What am I to him, after all? Nobody will know, not even I, until we sit down together and he begins to tell me why he came.”

But Anthony was answering the parson, speaking carefully, as she might have known he would, and saying exactly what any well-equipped scholar might, of the recorded achievements of the old. Was it only legendary that Cato learned Greek at eighty? And the great Œdipus at Colonus! He could well believe that Sophocles was at an advanced age when he wrote that and Iophon’s bringing him up in the courts as not competent to manage his affairs and being routed by the majesty and beauty of the great chorus, was simply common fact. He went on with a serious exactitude, and Parson Willoughby listened in compulsory attention taken over from his parochial manner when he was besieged by babble alien to his ears and only waiting to lead it gently toward that land he loved to talk about, which was the kingdom of God. No, he told Anthony, no, as to being retired, he didn’t complain. But there was the vineyard where he felt well able to serve. Only, he didn’t quite know how. Then he shelved it all abruptly and turned to Hannah.

“About Ann,” he said. “You found it a mistake? It didn’t mean to her what we hoped, the love that was going to lead her to the love of God? And what was it about the garment you gave her. Was that to be something symbolic, like a robe of righteousness? And did she understand?”

“Oh, dear, no!” said Hannah. “It wasn’t to be anything but a vanity put into her hands, so she could touch it and feel all sorts of womanish fancies waking up in her. And they did. You could see they did.”

Just here Celestia came in with a relay of hotter rolls and, after she had put down the plate, turned away and stood transfixed, listening. And now Hannah, seeing this, seemed to herself to be speaking to her alone. What would a man, even an angel like father on his way to an eagerly awaited heaven, know about the exquisite feel of lawn—or linen, whichever it was—for she wasn’t over-wise herself—and the sacredness of its destination? She went on, to Celestia alone, beautiful Celestia with her breath of hot raised biscuits and her starved heart that had found itself able to survive on the meagreness of an impossible constancy.

“You never in your life saw anything so pretty as her handling it, the way she did, smoothing the gathers because she knew she’d got to rip it, to make it smaller, and she had to find the stitches. And in all the times I’ve seen her, this was the only one when she seemed to be anything but an empty shell—I don’t know how to put it, really—but just a woman here on this earth, doing homely things.”

“I have been praying for her,” said the parson musingly. “I had her on my mind all day yesterday and I carried her with me to Our Lord.”

Anthony looked up at him in a startled way, but Hannah as yet could predict so little of this new Anthony that, whatever he was feeling, she had to leave him where he was. She spoke, to her father.

“Yes, dear,” she said, with the tenderness of their new intimacy. Of course that was what he would do. He would be simple in his acts. He would pray. He did not need to be consoled by memories of historic old men who kept their brain cells to the last. He was not less than when he had been pastor of a church. He was more. He had entered into a wider space where, though he might feel himself outcast and alone, an “immortal garland” was to be “run for, not without dust and heat.” “Yes, I knew you’d pray for her. Perhaps you were doing it that very minute when she put her hand on the gathers. What is it, Anthony?”

He started, in much embarrassment, and shook his head. He was historically-minded and had begun to think of the casting out of devils; but that seemed to him afar from consolatory nightgowns and lunatic girls. Perhaps he thought of possession by devils because the parson also was thinking of it in so intense a muse that a sympathetic mind might well have caught it from him.

“Why, yes,” said Hannah, in some surprise. “I’m sure you could. They’re very nice to me, you know, the Miss Raymonds, and they’re always talking about you and the beautiful sermon on old age. Yes, we could go over any time. Anthony, wouldn’t you take us over in your car?”

Anthony, unprepared for this, was entirely willing, though he said he ought shortly to be getting back. But if they could go pretty soon—

“I hope,” said Parson Willoughby, with his gentle courtesy, “you will not think of leaving us. You have been a long time in coming. I should be glad if you would make a long stay, so far as your teaching will permit.”

“Not no!” Hannah’s protesting heart cried out within her. “Not a long stay if I am not to love him, and perhaps not if he’s not to love me. Heaven or hell—which is it? I’m ill prepared for either.”

And Anthony, whatever he felt, wriggled out with a proper and grateful courtesy, and he and the parson somehow drifted into talk about Erasmus and his lumbago and whether he was cured of it by Saint Paul, after he had offered up the immediate completion of his book as an inducement, or by the capricious course of nature. Celestia, finding no meat for her in this, had given up listening and slipped away into the kitchen, and Hannah seemed to devote herself absorbedly to her supper, but wondered again, in a wild anticipation, just why Anthony had come. When they had finished and gone into the sitting-room, her father looked about him a little discontentedly, as if he had not anticipated further conversation, and asked Anthony: “Do you smoke?”

“Sometimes,” said Anthony prudently. He was not used to archaic-looking gentlemen who seemed to be clouded by a Biblical haze. “Do you, sir?”

Yes, Parson Willoughby said, he felt it to be one of the good gifts of earth, though he tried not to be unduly attached to it. Now if they two would occupy themselves for a time, either here or in the arbor, he would be excused—his study—a little correspondence he had to look over— And he was gone, completely, as Hannah used to tell him when he vanished before guests who were not parishioners and had no spiritual claim on him. There was never anything so absolutely not there as father when he escaped the casual visitor and returned to his books.

“The arbor?” said she. “Got your pipe on you, Anthony? I don’t seem to see you with a cigarette.”

But he didn’t want his pipe just now. He wanted her, he said, with an awkward haste. He’d got to see her. And with an air of hurrying to get it over, as it looked to her, they went down the path, where the peonies were in their first week of bloom, and into the arbor all green light from trembling leaves. She had an absurd feeling that he was going to kiss her and perhaps get that over, too, but he pulled forward a chair an inch or so, enough to give an impression of ease and courtesy, and when she sat down drew forward another, so that he was to sit facing her and very near.

So many things had battled back and forth in her mind since he came that she had forgotten the letter, half angry passion as it was and half emulation of father who had thought he could dash off a soul’s rhapsody and had to go back for it to Solomon.

“Oh, my letter!” was all she could say. “Never mind that. I’ve got a lot of things to ask you. I don’t even know where you live. Is it still with that nice widow who was taking such good care of you? There was a little girl, too, I remember.”

“Pretty name,” said Hannah absently. “Rose Holland. She’s in school, is she?”

“No, no,” said he. “She’s older than that, much older. In fact she’s twenty-eight. I don’t believe I told you, but she lies in bed all the time.”

Hannah was light-headed with it. Her mind had been running so desperately in the one track that she could only think of girls in bed as lying there deserted. Were all lovers “false, fleeting, perjured” and were all women going under by various degrees of what used, in the old days, to be called love-sickness? Was it an epidemic? Must she take care that no woman caught it from her? “Oh, I’m stark mad,” she thought. “It can’t be so.”

“It’s her back,” said he, in a voice of such tenderness as she had not yet heard from him. “A motor accident, five years ago. And she’s got to lie there. Nothing can be done.”

“Do they know that?” she asked. “Do the specialists know? Of course those things cost infernally, but sometimes they can do it.”

“No,” he said, “nothing can be done. Mrs. Holland wouldn’t stick at anything. She’s in modest circumstances, you understand, but we’ve looked into things thoroughly. Everything has been tried.”

“Not always. Nearly every evening I can read to her, and sometimes, for a few days at a time, there’s almost no pain at all.”

The triumph in his voice when he said that! “My boy!” she thought, “my dear old boy! So that’s it, is it? And what shall we do now?” There seemed nothing more productive than to go on questioning. Had she a right to everything in his heart? Yes, her own heart told her savagely, however she might come by it. For she was either to love him or not to love him, and only he could tell her which it was going to be.

“And she had a good mind?” she said to him, in what seemed a quiet interest. “She’d been used to books and appreciates what you’re doing and what you’re thinking of?”

“Oh, I should say she could,” said he, in the quick recognition of an unexpected sympathy. “I’ve had my ups and downs, you know. The time I came near being fired for taking the part of those boys that struck because they weren’t allowed to drop Latin! I wrote you about that. And I was right. They saw I was, in the end. I had told her about it and it was her common sense, just sheer common sense, that kept me to my guns. It was what she said.” His voice trembled a little with amusement—pride, also, that his friend had been so wise. “ ‘The little ninnies!’ said she. ‘You might drill it into them for a hundred years and they’d know less about it every day. I know those boys,’ she said. ‘Some of that crowd used to board with us, the year mother gave meals. And they’re cleverer than all the staff—except you.’ (Me, you know.) ‘And they’re right; they never’ll want to be anything but brokers and politicians.’ You can’t think how it encouraged me. ‘You sit tight,’ she said, ‘and the first thing you know, the Faculty’ll be seeing it as you do.’ And they did.” His pride in her was tremendous. It seemed the greater part of him.

“And she’s like that all through?” asked Hannah. “Sensible, I mean, not imaginative and all that.”

“Oh, she’s imaginative, all right! Not a commonplace person, you understand. Very fanciful really, loves poetry and has the nicest taste in it, very well read in the classics, but always open to new things. When you see her, you’ll know far better than I can tell you. She isn’t like anybody else. The best company—but you’ll see for yourself. Hannah, that was a wonderful letter.” His inscrutable eyes were shining upon her with a brightness which might have meant his love for her, for the letter, or the impartial goodness of God in allowing such letters to be written, whatever goal they might be meant for. And he concluded, as if only after great deliberation: “It was a love letter, Hannah. Did you realize how beautiful it was, and how I should come straight over here and tell you we’d got to be married—now, I mean—so you could go back with me? No, you probably didn’t think of it that way. But that’s the way I had to take it, and here I am. And will you, my dear? Have your father marry us and you come home with me?”

He had put his hand on hers and his eyes were shining quite amazingly. Something must come of it, they seemed to tell her. Nobody could have a letter like that and then go on teaching English and a philosophy he couldn’t half believe in simply because nobody could.

Hannah remembered the common sense of Rose, just now so highly commended, and bade herself show something half as serviceable.

“Now, my dear,” said she, “how do you expect me to answer a question like that, living here with father and he out of a job and being as dazed over it as a cat in a strange garret, and mother abroad? What would she say to it, that nice friend of yours who settled the Latin question in short order?”

She was half laughing at him and hoping he saw how tenderly she did it, but the effect of it was like a sudden stab at her heart. It was, she thought, as if she had struck at him, for his face had changed. He was distressed.

“Rose?” He withdrew his hand from hers. He seemed to have no more need of that reminding touch. “Oh, poor child! Such things aren’t for her—marrying, you know. They never will be. No, Hannah, no! We mustn’t even remind her of it. She can’t have a home of her own or—anything.” His eyes were no longer bright with the knowledge of love letters and having to follow their persuasive call. They were suffused. They implored her to understand.

“I see,” said Hannah. She was all gentleness. “You’re terribly sorry for her, aren’t you? Yes, I see. You’ve been taking care of her, in a way.”

“How you understand!” he said, as if any decency toward such tragic misdeeds of life had been too much to hope for. “Yes, I suppose I have looked out for her. I do know she depends on me. But she’s stronger than I, very much stronger. She makes up her mind to a thing and there’s the end of it. No regrets, no whimpering.”

“I suppose,” said Hannah, in what seemed an adequate interest, “she would have done something, if this hadn’t happened to her, had a profession probably. Her mother isn’t very ‘well off,’ you said, or she wouldn’t be taking lodgers. Even you!”

“That’s right,” said he. “And I went there by chance. Just blundered in and asked if they could let me have a room. We’ve often spoken of it. Only the other night we did. She said—there’s a pronounced religious streak in her, you understand—she said it was the finger of God. O Hannah, you’ll like her down to the ground!”

“And what would she have done? Would she have written or taught or—what was her line?”

“Languages,” said he. “The classics. We’ve been reading Italian and she’s uncommon good at it; but of course her Latin helps her there. Hannah, could you live very simply, do you think?”

She was smiling at him in what seemed an affectionate interest, and for the moment it was easy enough to keep within those bounds she had determined on: not to run off the track into the bordering quagmire of untempered speech. There it was, the quagmire, talk, mere talk and outcry, bidding him understand what he was doing, telling her he loved another woman and so naturally and irrevocably that the threads of it were wound in and out of the secret places of his heart and he was hardly aware of them except as being the heart itself.

“And you’d be willing to again? Yes, I know you would. You’d see how pleasant Mrs. Holland makes everything, and Rose—you’d love Rose. You couldn’t help it. Nobody could, after once seeing how she takes her life. All as a matter of course and—gaily, as you might say, as if what knocked her out could have happened to anybody, only it came her way—and there it was.”

Hannah needed her forces, all of them; but now they were falling away from her. No use, they told her, no use to follow the old manœuvres. Some of them they’d never learned, and this was new ground anyway, and they weren’t fitted to it. ‘Don’t go skirmishing round. Have it out with him, own you’re defeated and done for and then go upstairs and shut yourself in.’ But she couldn’t retreat: not yet, at least. She couldn’t surrender. She was looking at his eager face, the light in his eyes that was not the light of youth but something far more moving to her, and she felt a curious compassion for him which might not be the love of woman for man but seemed as terrible. Was she jealous? No, that other woman was scarcely a feature in the strangeness between them. She was a pathos which couldn’t be ignored. The whole framework of her life was pathos, not to be pushed aside.

“You don’t mean,” said he, “you’d really make it a point not to marry while your mother is abroad? She could visit us, the minute she got home. So could your father, now, at once.”

“Oh, that!” said he. “I haven’t thought that out. There’s a house next door. That’s Mrs. Holland’s, too, a little venture of hers. She’s made it into apartments, simple, you know, but quite in keeping. She had to borrow money to do it. Hannah, don’t you want to come?”

“And why,” she fancied he would go on to say, “why did you write me that letter? If you don’t love me enough to marry me and come to watch over Rose Holland in her martyrdom, why did you write it? Why?” Often in her dormitory, when things went ill, she found this inner familiar of hers saying silently to a rebellious girl “Come! come! you’ll have to do it in the end. I’m cleverer than you.” And it upheld her. It was of great use in a fight, that inner certainty: “I’m cleverer than you.” This was the man she had thought to be her man, and she delighted in believing that he was worthily her lord and governor. But in the small diplomacies of life, perhaps he should be led, whither he did not know. He must be led, even through darkness, to his heart’s desire. But was that Rose?

“My dear—” said she, and couldn’t you call any man “my dear” if it eased you off to safer standing ground?—“I’m too tired to talk. Seeing you like this, so suddenly, after all this time! Why, it’s been three years, Anthony, three whole years and over. I’ve got to get used to you. Come on in and have another crack with father. You’ve a lot to say to each other, you two old bookworms nibbling along in the dark.”

“But you don’t mean you’re different,” said he. There was that catch in his voice which was as much he as the look in his eyes or the voice itself. It might be three years or it might be their meeting in what the parson called eternity,—she knew it was the instability of life he was dreading, as he had always dreaded it. “You don’t mean you don’t care about me?”

“There!” said she. “Do I? Of course I care about you, ninny. Wasn’t that what your Rose called the boys that struck? Yes, I care tremendously. I don’t see but I shall always have to. Whenever you call me, I shall come. But we don’t need to talk about marriage and apartments tonight. I’m too tired. Do you drive your car? You’re probably tired as a dog, yourself.”

And now, with her hand in his arm, he found himself telling her he’d rather drive than eat, and her inward counselor encouraged her, saying: “You see! You’ve come out on top. You can again if you remember ‘I’m cleverer than you.’ ”

The study door was open a foot or so, indicating that the parson could be interrupted without peril to his work. Indeed, in these exciting circumstances of a returned daughter and a prospective son-in-law who knew Romance languages, Hannah ventured to think they might be really welcome. She stopped at the door and pushed it a daring inch or so. The parson laid down his pen.

“Hannah,” said he, “I want to talk a little more about that girl. Yes, come in. You can help us, Anthony. You must be very familiar with psychoanalysis. Your teaching requires it of you. Now what would an alienist say of a mind like that?”

Hannah had taken the seat opposite him at the table and Anthony took the chair at the end. The brightness had gone out of him. He looked an older man and fagged as well. “Dear child,” thought Hannah, “I could marry you this instant if you wanted me. But how’s a body to know? And could I live out my life next to your Rose and perhaps drive her mad, and you, too?” He hadn’t answered Parson Willoughby. He couldn’t answer, she thought, without getting hopelessly tangled among the things he believed and the things he had merely learned. The parson turned to her.

“Why, I don’t know,” said Hannah. “Just as she always has, since I’ve known her, like a girl who’s lost her wits. Now, Father, you mustn’t expect me to testify like an alienist in court, for I simply can’t. I never saw an insane person in my life except her, and I dare say she’s no worse than the rest of us, if we let ourselves go. We’re all more or less mad, aren’t we? Anthony, how is it with you?”

Anthony, apparently finding this mere talk, seemed not to consider it, but answered by a question of his own:

“I don’t know,” said Hannah, “except that things got bad, probably worse and worse, and she thought she couldn’t bear them any longer. Maybe the weather had something to do with it, the cold and being snowed in with her jailer. Not that he knew he was her jailer or probably did anything but be as he was. But certainly she ran away. Perhaps there was a note on the pincushion. I don’t know.”

“On the pincushion?” echoed Parson Willoughby. “Oh, I see! Telling where she had gone.”

“And since then,” said Hannah, “she’s been sitting up in that room cutting slips of paper and asking the aunts and me to mail them for her.”

Anthony spoke, so suddenly and with such fierceness that she gave a little gasp at finding him so moved.

“That’s one of the most damnable things I ever heard. A Mary Wilkins story, Rose would say. I can hear her saying it. Mr. Willoughby, you’re going over there to see her, aren’t you? I’ll take you over. Of course I will.”

“We must pray for her,” said the parson. “We must all pray. And I do feel responsible in a high degree. It was I who sent her that letter Hannah went to inquire about. She may have read it, all by herself, and it may harm her in some way we hadn’t conceived of. Certainly I must go.”

“And the father,” said Anthony, under his breath, “handing her over to another man, when she seems to have been no more than a child—certainly with not much more than a child’s intelligence. Oh, this taking people’s lives into your hands and breaking them up so you can stick them together in your own way! God!”

Parson Willoughby’s hand was at its work on the table moving about the tools of his trade, and now he was looking at them in a vaguely troubled way, as if they also were being wantonly interfered with. But he recalled himself.

“Now,” said he to Anthony, “think back to your philosophy. There must be formulæ for a case like hers. You’d call her a case, wouldn’t you? a sick human mind.”

“I don’t know anything about the human mind,” said Anthony, and Hannah liked the sound of it, the affectionate roughness. He trusted the parson to understand him at his worst. He was going on. “I know less about it every day. I’ve memorized their lingo and sometimes I think it’s as good—almost—as the terminology it’s displaced; but most times I don’t. Yes, Hannah, I know! I know! I do teach it and perhaps I’m a crook, or I should turn it down; but it’s a fact I do have, most of the time, an uneasy sense of the human mind sitting there and grinning at me. You know far more about it than I do, Mr. Willoughby. You’ve had to do with men and women on their emotional side and of course they’ve trusted you and been more or less honest with you. But there’s one thing I’d swear to. No respectable alienist would shut a woman up with nothing to do but cut paper into slips and try to have ’em mailed. He’d give her something to get busy about. Why, now, take Rose!” He turned to Hannah, his face alight with his convincing memories. “Of course she’s got an exceptional mind, but what do you s’pose would have happened to it if she’d lain there in bed with nothing to do but dwell on her own misfortunes? No outlook! no nothing! What do you think?”

Hannah made haste to answer. Anthony, in his honesty, would give himself away: though father, in his own honesty, might not understand.

“A friend of Anthony’s. He’s been telling me about her. She’s an invalid, quite helpless, but with a brilliant mind, and she’s leading a splendid intellectual life, quite the same as if she were on her feet.”

“That’s very moving,” said the parson. “Anthony, it’s like a message to us. You must have been sent to us at this very time when we are so bewildered over Ann. You may be able to tell us what to do. I am not very wise—certainly not, when it comes to the unexpected. I’m beginning to find that out. I’m afraid I have to be told.”

“Yes,” Hannah could hardly forbear saying, “perhaps he has really come to tell us about Rose.” But it could not be said. Could anybody be half honest with these two, she wondered, in a quick savagery of anger, father wrapped up in his faith and talking in church imagery and Anthony on guard over Rose? And since you loved the creatures so, was there anything for it but to be yourself a hypocrite? What if, in one of her wayward impulses, she thrust on them the key to her rebellious heart?

“Yes,” said Anthony, in a quick alertness touched with pride, with compassion and the old regret that has everlastingly moved the world. “She’s young and she’s beautiful. She ought to have everything. But she can’t have anything.”

“Yes,” said he gravely. “And when you see her you’ll be sorrier still. Not but that she’s beautiful. There’s nothing of the other sort, you understand. Nothing unpleasant. Just sweet.”

“Yes, I see,” said Hannah softly. “Sweet! Now Father, about Ann. Want to write her again? Or take our chances and go over there? They’d be delighted to see you, the old ladies. About her, I don’t know. I don’t believe she’s seen a man since the doctor stopped coming and that’s a long time.”

“Oh, yes,” said Anthony. “Come on over. I’d like awfully well to take you. We could make a day of it. And then if I spent one more night—” This he put to Hannah, and humbly, as if she would please to understand he’d have to stay on a little, anyway, to clear up this business of marrying her and taking her away to learn for herself that Rose was beautiful.

“By all means over night,” said the parson warmly. “And other nights and days. Hannah!”

“Yes, indeed,” said she, smiling upon Anthony, in the perfection of her guile. “Many nights and days.”

That being settled, they left her to plan for the trip and themselves returned to some scholastic bone of contention unfamiliar to her, and worried it, snatching it back and forth, and needing, as she thought, nothing but an undertone of growling, for complete reality. There was no doubt that they delighted in each other as adversaries and perhaps neither wanted to triumph utterly, for that would end the game. Was this the way Rose argued with him, or would he refrain from cudgeling her because she was a woman, helpless and beautiful? He could never fight with Hannah herself on such a point of law or gospel. She wasn’t learned enough, and never could have been. It was all dust to her. She had her own kind of God, a beautiful benevolence, almost a person, not a Logos or anything that could possibly pervade the scriptures. He pervaded the universe and the human heart and beyond that she left it to father to keep Him in His niche and see that their combined devotion tallied with the divine legend. And just now, suddenly, while her mental superiors were battling, she wanted to cry out to Him, away there in His defended Heaven:

“Oh, help me! help me! Show me what I’ve got to do. Do You want Rose to have him? Is that what You’ve sent him here for? Do You want me to give him up? Or shall I marry him and see him through this world? He can’t make it alone. And see her through! It would have to be that or not at all. What father calls a handmaid! Oh, help me, You! Help me! help me!”

There was the sting of tears in her eyes, and she closed them for an instant, but was not allowed even that small solace: for Anthony’s kind voice was saying: “You’re tired.”

So she got up and yawned, in a rude but confirmatory way, behind her hand, and said she was tired and she’d leave them to their potations. Yes, when it came to theology, they were six-bottle men, weren’t they? And so, “Good night.”

But she left the door of her room open a little and lay down on the bed, and it seemed to her that she had never been further from sleep. The study door, too, was open and she could hear the intermittent brum-brum of the two voices, debating on something as remote as “fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,” if not actually that. “Don’t talk any more,” she found herself sending down to them, in a voiceless message. “You’ll have a hard day tomorrow, father, charming the devil out of a poor girl’s mind. But tired or not, you’ve got to see me a minute before you go to bed. Oh, come along, Anthony! Stop talking. Say good night.” And whether her will did get in its conjuring work on his, a little after eleven he did come upstairs, and when he had shut his door she slipped off the bed and ran down to father. He had no idea of sleep. There he sat at his table, paper and ink before him, but looking as it might be through the opposite wall, perhaps at the hills whence his help everlastingly came. Hannah went in and softly shut the door. Anthony wasn’t to be tempted to appear again, no matter what argument sprung untimely up in him, to end their battle. She took the chair opposite father and leaned across to him. His inquiring face was very near.

“Asleep?” said Hannah, What was this conspiracy to send her to sleep when what she needed was the freedom to watch beside what she loved and keep it as safe as a child is kept with mother awake and near? Perhaps Anthony was her child, and that was it; she was somehow to safeguard his unworldliness against the world. “No, I’m not sleepy. There’s always time enough to sleep. Father, do you think a body might be allowed to marry for anything but love? For good hard common sense, for instance—only, not love?”

He was looking at her with a sudden keenness, and sternly, she thought, though the sternness would never be for her. But she saw in it his long experience of being judge and advocate, even among this small people who seemed to her so unresponsive in their comfortable lives. At the moment, she had ceased to be merely the child of his love. She was a soul bringing its load to him, to be relieved of it or told how to carry it with a better will.

“I want,” said Hannah perversely, “to talk about being in love.” She would be vague. She had to be and let him assume what he might. For Anthony, from the habit of years, had become hers. She could not give him away. “I want you,” said she, “to talk to me about it—and about marriage. Suppose you were going to marry four or five couples in your parish”—ah, but that was a mistake! He had no parish—“and you were going to preach them a sermon. What should you tell them about love?”

“I should tell them it is a sacrament,” said he. “Of the body and the soul.”

“Father,” said Hannah, “we’re terribly knowing about those things nowadays. We know we can have a tremendous passion and find it’s no more than a temperature, and, if it’s treated properly, no surer to last. But there’s the old saying: ‘All for love and the world well lost.’ Is the world ‘well lost,’ or have we got to bring in our philosophy and our common sense and make sure it isn’t lost?”

“It’s very difficult,” said he, at last. “You see, I don’t know what’s in your mind. No, don’t tell me.” For she was about to speak. “You hadn’t meant to. Don’t, if you’d rather not. But about love: let’s not say it’s altogether the affair of the body. Let’s talk about the soul. And it is the body, also. It is creation. It’s the spark of life brought down from God and made the seed of the life to come. I’m talking all round it. I can’t help it, because I don’t know what’s troubling you. But there is a wilderness of passion that might trouble a soul like yours, and all I can say is, don’t be afraid of the love of the body any more than the love of the soul. Only the soul must come first. I can imagine many a marriage where there’s what I might call a transformed passion. The two souls love each other with a heavenly love. The two bodies are forced, for some reason, to live apart. Now that young friend of Anthony’s—what was her name?”

“Yes, Rose. Well, he said that plainly. He said she was shut off from the things that make women’s lives complete and happy. I suppose he was thinking of you and the contrast between you. Here were you in the full bloom of health, and you were beautiful to him. And here was she, crippled and shut in, but so beautiful in other ways that it wouldn’t be strange if a man who had loved her in her pride should find it his highest destiny to keep on loving her.”

“Yes,” said Hannah, “that’s it. A man might love her. But the other woman, a woman that loved him—what could she do? Could she—I’m going to say it just as you did, Parson Willoughby—could she love him with her body and her soul, though the other poor child hadn’t any body to love him with? Wouldn’t it be a kind of horrible mix-up—a desecration—I can’t tell you—”

He sat looking down at his busy hand; it seemed a long time. Then he said, but not looking up:

“I don’t think any third person could tell her. I think she’d have to decide by herself. Only not by herself. Never that. She’d pray to God.”

“The worst of it is,” said Hannah, half crying in her torment, “you won’t let it be a clear issue. You say there’s the body and the soul. Now I could decide for either, but not for both. I could see how to give a man a wholesome sort of life here on this earth, a rude comfort perhaps, but still comfort, plenty of leisure to fight over doctrine with his father-in-law; but here you’re telling me he’s got to weave some kind of a spell about it all and they’ve both got to refer it to all kinds of things you say are eternal in the heavens. Parson Willoughby, what are you going to do about me? Are you going to let me be a plain materialist (no! don’t tell me I’m plain!) and spend the rest of my life knowing I’ve messed things up and robbed another woman, not of anything that looks very splendid on the outside, but all we’ve either of us got.”

“Well,” said she, “what do we do now? One thing: get to bed and be ready to go knight-erranting for Ann.” Now she began to laugh with a good heart. “Father,” said she, “I do have the queerest thoughts. Wouldn’t it have been funny if it hadn’t been her father Ann got dotty over? If it had been a lover gone, missing, parti? Then there’d have been three of us.”

“Three of you?” said the parson sharply. “What do you mean by three of you?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Hannah. “Girls, just girls. I’ve been teaching the old ballads. Don’t you know how popular heartbreak was then? There was the girl that sang ‘All a green willow’ and the other one—and she said,

Still things aren’t quite the same. In the old days, the lover could love and ride away. Now, the girl could catch him up. She drives her own car. Good night, blessedest.”

He came round from his place and put his hand on her shoulder and looked at her a long minute. Then he pronounced upon her one of the majestic and beautiful blessings of the church, and she bent and kissed the sustaining hand. But it was not possible to say any more to him: for in this he seemed not only to be loved by her in the ways of her childhood, but removed and sacred, and in a kind of ceremonious quiet she went away.

The next morning came so infused with color that Hannah, at the east window, thought it looked less like sunrise than incomparable happiness flooding all creation instead of only Bridgnorth: and happiness meant that Anthony was here and the years of his arid letter-writing like a prison sentence gaily over. She had a genius of belief. Her heart was credulous. She could believe “the winter is past. The rain is over and gone.”

The house, as if it, too, felt the portentous weight of living, was still. Celestia, busy in the kitchen, was quiet. It was a part of her ritual of work, on the most exacting days, as it was to wash and cook without smearing herself. But when Hannah went downstairs she found the study door shut, and stopped to listen. Yes, it was going on. The two were in there talking in a steady interchange, as if they had just discovered the mutability of life and must get out of it what they could. Let all beware when two mad scholars met! It wasn’t lovers only who couldn’t deny themselves each other’s company. It was such as these who had an abiding thirst. As she put her descending foot on the last stair, they came out, and they were laughing.

“But that was only Erasmus,” father was saying. “He’s no more to the point than Luther, and I don’t bank on either of them. Hullo, Hannah! We’ve been colloguing since six o’clock. That’s why I shut the door, so you wouldn’t hear us and lose your beauty sleep.”

“There isn’t any such thing,” said she. “Beauty sleep! We buy it at the counters now. Once they did things like washing their faces in May dew, but now, if we’re haggard of a morning, we call in paint and whitewash and repair damages—and there we are. Anthony, have you realized it isn’t a minute since we were the younger generation? And now, look at us!”

They were sitting down at table and Anthony said No, he hadn’t thought about it specially. Of course pedagogues were always an older generation because they had to be. As for himself, he believed he’d been known as Mad Anthony in academic circles, he didn’t know how long, but it was as good as anything.

“Mad Anthony!” said she. “From Mad Anthony Wayne! That’s rather good. You are a little mad, you know.”

“Oh,” he said, “it didn’t mean anything! Just words! And pretty soon it was Danthony and then Dan. That stuck, for some reason I don’t know.”

But it didn’t interest him, she reflected jealously, nor did anything except Rose and the recondite fables he and her father were engaged upon.

“She?” he said. “Why, ’twas she that told me. And that’s what she calls me herself. If she wrote me a letter—and I half thought she’d write me here—that’s how she’d begin it: ‘Dear Dan.’ ”

“ ‘Dear Dan,’ ” repeated Hannah. So his life had the embroidery of household catchwords. “Want me to call you Dan?”

Here her vigilant mind rebuked her. She was giving herself away. But Anthony was far from guessing it. His mind was with the parson’s, running neck and neck: for though they fought on debated points of scholarship they had a fundamental good-nature of agreement pleasing to them both.

“No, oh, no,” said he. “Not unless you want to. Things of that sort don’t matter, and I’m used to my own name. I’ve had it quite a while. But with her—well, it got to be a kind of joke with us.”

Yes, Hannah said, she could see. And she’d continue to use Anthony. Nobody talked any more, for breakfast had to be hurried and the hour after used up in doing the things that let us spend a day away from home, if we sacrifice rightly to them in advance; and Anthony, going down to the garage for the car, found it also rather exacting in the way of small attentions he hadn’t thought to mention when he left it there. But it was soon in tune, and he was driving up to the door with everything “all set,” he called to them. Did Hannah want to sit by Anthony? her father asked her, and she told him, No. She could see it was going to be hard for the two of them to be separated, only they must promise not to argue themselves and her into the ditch. But what a way to die and escape all the hurly-burly, she thought, with the present recklessness she allowed herself: she and father and Anthony tossed out of the world into some other where the inconveniences would be at least different from what they were in this.

She need not have troubled her mind with the vision of two possessed scholars so mad over eternity that the car, left to the caprice of a wavering hand, might hurl itself into kindling. The parson was absorbed by the folly of his quest, and Anthony, a joyous yet masterly driver, gave his mind to the car. Hannah had never seen him driving, and she soon realized it was more than driving: it was letting himself loose in a universe where he so often felt constrained and out of gear. He loved his car. He loved it so much that he had made it a part of him. The magic of it, the wilfulness of the machine added to the controlling power of his own intelligence, turned him a little crazy. It was friendly to him, this alarming embodiment of energy, so long as he played the game properly, but it could kill him if he betrayed it by one false move. He tried, as if it were a game, to get the most out of it and out of himself in daring he didn’t know he had and prudence he must every instant invoke. And other things ceased to be when he got his hand on the wheel. Abstract good and evil, the forbidden and the commanded, resolved themselves into an autocracy over steel and gas, and he was as far outside himself as a child with the perfect toy. It was early in the day and traffic was light, and they sped smoothly and fast, Hannah, in woman’s fashion, trying to fit her conjectures to the minds of the other two. What was father thinking? With him, she came rather near. He was thinking of Ann, of miracles, of the evil spirit of madness, and whether he could be allowed to conjure it away. Something further she thought of him, and this was true. The parson was praying. Every turn of the wheel was a little prayer, not articulate, a breath more than a conscious word. Of one thing he was sure: he was going forth to fight. But was it for himself or Ann? Was it egotism, he wondered, his unconquerable egotism that let him wonder whether such a task had been given him to heal his own wounded spirit, cast out, as he believed, from among men? Or had he been cast out, through prevision of the heavenly Powers, because this one task had been chosen for him, and his own discomfiture was not too much to pay? He held firmly to the intention behind every activity in the universe. Nothing walked “with aimless feet.” Believing in miracles, he had to believe that, if it was the will of God for him to heal a girl’s sick mind, he could do it. For all was God.

So they drove, each absorbed in vague wonderings, the road following the line Hannah had taken yesterday, and only she noted the places dedicated to old memories, the places Anthony, too, might find in his own mind if he glanced there for them. But he was doing his job of turning power into speed, and father was reaching toward the healing arts of Galilee, and she was perforce at the immemorial task of woman: the musing and remembering. When they got into Bucksford, nobody had spoken a word, but coming to Low River, she did allow herself to say:

He nodded. Yes, he knew. He knew everything, now he was lord over a car. And when they were on the rough curving driveway, they slowed down so that there was no announcing noise of their coming, and in a moment stopped before the door. Parson Willoughby straightened a little and seemed to be awake, and Anthony, again looking himself and not the rapt slave of ruthless energy, came about and opened the door for her.

“Nice trip,” said Hannah, smiling at him and thinking she knew a trifle more about him than before she had seen him at the wheel. It was not so much a car he was driving. It was a djinn that gave him his way of escape. It took him off the planet, not to those courts of father’s worship, but into space and distance where he could forget his troubled mind. Parson Willoughby was waiting for her, very intent and straight, not the meek parson he might have looked, bowed into his musings a few minutes before, but the emissary of Him Who could send healing if He would. Hannah glanced up at the house. She knew its habits at all times. As it was yesterday, it would be today. It looked asleep, but its small activities had been going on since early light, and now it was in order, perhaps watching Elsie at her mending in that room upstairs where Ann might be taking stitches in white cloth or tearing slips of paper. She went up the steps, the two men following, and Anthony put a hand out to the bell.

“No,” said she, “the wire’s broken. You can knock, if you will. I always give three knocks, and they know it’s I. Rather loud: they’re likely to be upstairs.”

But his “loud” was louder than any she had ever knocked, and the sounds ran through the house as if they had the Fates behind them or signaled the curtain’s rise on tragedy.

“There! there!” said Hannah. “That’s enough. She’s coming, Miss Elsie. I know her step. Father, stand up here, please, so you’ll seem to be the one.”

He did it because she asked him, though he was not anxious to be “the one.” It was a delicate matter to meet the poor child he came to see. Even if it turned out that he was the emissary of the Lord, she ought to have some preparatory knowledge of him. He must not frighten her. The door came open slowly and it was Miss Elsie who stood holding it with her fine old hand.

“Miss Elsie,” said Hannah, “this is my father.” She had to get it over quickly. Let them once know it was only father and all the strangeness would be gone. “He’s come to see Ann. You, too, of course, but I’ve told him about her and he’d like to see her, if you please. Miss Elsie, could he?”

She had no idea that she would need to beg for it, but suddenly it looked very important: very tragic, if it turned out badly, and tremendously beautiful if it turned out well. It was Miss Elsie who, in her simplicity, seemed the great lady of the occasion.

“Your dear father!” said she. “How do you do, sir. Come in. This is an honor, I assure you. We couldn’t have expected such a thing.”

She had opened the door fully, and now the parson had taken her hand and they went together into the parlor. There she looked him in the face again and smiled, and now she turned to Hannah.

“This is very good of you, my dear,” she said. “And this gentleman—” She was smiling at Anthony who had been forgotten but did not know it, life seemed to him so simple if he need take no active part in it, except as he might drive a car. But Miss Elsie knew him. “Why,” said she, “it’s Mr. West. You were our Jack’s tutor that summer he was so backward. Well, I certainly am pleased.”

And then they two shook hands and they all sat down and Parson Willoughby began at once in what Hannah thought his best manner, the way he had of presenting his spiritual credentials. The beauty of it, she always thought, was that he had no awkwardness, as if to be the messenger of the Lord were in any way different from any other high responsibility. To pray was the spiritual commonplace of his life and he always spoke of it quite simply, there being no rigidity in approaching the courts of heaven. You didn’t have to be apprehensive about it. You weren’t appearing before a dignitary whose attitude was not inevitably to be counted on.

“I have been praying for her,” said he, and, since Ann was in their minds, he did not use her name. This was not by intention. She was simply the most important person in the house. The house itself might have existed from other times to be the nest and refuge of her who most terribly needed it. “Then it occurred to me that I might do better if I could see her. I have asked God to give me some actual help to bring her. If it should be His will.”

Miss Elsie was listening intently, her eyes on his face. Whatever effect he was to have on Ann, on her it was of the utmost quietude and calm. Only her hands, lying in her lap, were trembling.

“She’d be pleased to see you,” said Miss Elsie. She was like a child before him. “Anyway”—she broke a little here, evidently remembering the unresisting creature in the room above—“anyway we are, sister and I, no matter how it goes. I suppose you’d like to pray with her.”

Parson Willoughby smiled at her in his unconsidered way. But it gave her confidence. No tricks, it said, no solemn conjuring.

“I don’t know,” said he. “Really I don’t know. But I won’t do anything to trouble her. Prayer is troublesome, at times, the sound of it. It’s so different! The words and all, beautiful as they are. She might not know where I was trying to take her with them. I have an idea we must get her used to this world again. Make it a pleasant sort of place. Not heaven at once, you know. There’s been a good deal of popular gloom about heaven. Too much, perhaps.”

He was smiling a little, really at his own thoughts, and Hannah was proud of him, for he had taken a straight way to Miss Elsie’s heart. It was not by intention. It was simplicity. And here was another Raymond at the door: Miss Milly, and her heart also had to be reached.

“Come in, Milly,” said her sister, in some relief. “Mr. Willoughby, this is my sister.”

Milly came in and shook hands decisively. Was it all to be gone into again, Hannah wondered, and must father translate himself to her also? But he had it over in a moment. Milly’s nature lay open to him, as clear as the testament of her blue eyes.

“I’ve been asking for Miss Ann,” said he. “I want to make her a little call.”

There were no subtleties for Miss Milly. She, too, liked him overwhelmingly. He was a minister, he was making them a call, it was an honor—almost an excitement—for she, like Miss Elsie, had read the sermon on old age but thought it beautiful without reservation. She turned to Elsie.

“Shouldn’t you think he’d better go up?” she asked. “I don’t seem to want to bring her down here—so many of us all together.”

He apparently thought well of it, and though Miss Elsie had not answered except by one of her murmurs that might mean anything, Miss Milly announced conclusively:

“Yes, you can. You come right up and I’ll go in with you and we’ll see what we can make of it. You look out for that rug in the hall. There’s a mite of a rip in it. I’ve been going to mend it all the week.”

So they went up the stairs, Miss Milly commenting on the difficulties of keeping an old house “anyways decent,” and the others, left below, fell into talk about Jack, Miss Elsie now recalling more and more as to Anthony’s steadying effect on him in his indolent past.

The chamber door was open, and Miss Milly stood aside to give their visitor place. Ann was sitting by the window, and the sun fell warmly on her hair and made it beautiful. To Parson Willoughby, it wore a glory not its own and not the sun’s. It was like youth or the crown of sainthood, and only when she turned her face to them did he see it was the only glamour her poor body had been allowed to keep. She bent again to her work, the white garment in her lap, and her posture was one of an unconsidered meekness, her eyes downcast and her slight shoulders pathetically drooped. Miss Milly spoke her name, but she did not answer, and again:

She took no notice, and he gathered that they must have been so constant in their watch over her that she had ceased to see or perhaps hear them. They were only the small noises of the day. After a moment, moving slightly to rearrange her work, she did look up, and her eyes met his. Life ran into her face, surprise, wonder. She could not look away, and she dropped her hands on the sewing in her lap and stared at him. Miss Milly stood aside a step that she might see him fully, and she rose and let her sewing fall. He crossed the room to her and held out his hand. But her hands were at her throat, pressing in her laboring breath, and he stood still and waited. But not to take her hand. He gave that up.

“Well, child,” said he. “Well! I’ve come to see you. Sit down a minute, will you?”

But she could only look at him, and perhaps she tried to speak and did no more than hold her frightened breath. He picked up her sewing and Miss Milly took it from him and laid it on the bed. Then Ann began to speak, one word, over and over: “Father! Father! Father!”

“Her own father,” said Miss Milly, at his side. “She never’s mentioned him. Shall I tell her, sir, or will you?”

“Sit down, child, and let me tell you why I’ve come. You’ve been sick, you know. I’m worried about you. I came to see how you are.”

A trouble ran over her face, the eyes, the trembling lips and chin. She wanted to know about him, to know everything, but she would not put out her hand to touch him by a finger-tip, to see how real he was. For perhaps he was not real. Such sights had been before, and she had waked in the dark chamber and known them for what they were. A punishment: that was what they were. But this was different and she looked at him from an adoring wonder. There was aloofness in it also, and she could not place him. He was hers and yet not hers. He had been dead and was alive, but there was something between them which was not familiar love. And the weight of it all crushing upon her, she did the only thing possible to her, and begged him to stay. If he was her father, her father had no such comeliness as this; but what if it was her father as he might be after death? Whatever he was, he had come.

Parson Willoughby stood looking at her for a long minute. He seemed to be considering, but he was doing something else as normal to him. He was praying God to do for her what he himself did not know how to do. But she must be listened to. He must not leave her.

“No,” he said presently, “I won’t go back unless I take you with me. Should you be contented? Would you go?”

She nodded, her bright eyes fixed on him. Miss Milly was looking on, confused and horrified. Did he know what he was saying? Was he going to mislead the child? He was a holy man and he had written a beautiful sermon on old age, but was this all he knew? He spoke now to her, confidently and with a certain appealing kindliness she found herself believing in.

“Will you go downstairs and ask my daughter to come up? We shall have to plan a little, and do it here. I can’t—”

Yes, she understood. He couldn’t leave this room. Ann had bound him to her anguished needs. She ran downstairs and came back shortly, Hannah following and, in a moment, Miss Elsie. And while he had stood there waiting, he had begun, in a low voice: “Our Father, Who art in heaven.” Would Ann remember? Would she, from habit, echo him or follow him in the words? No, but she still looked at him with adoring eyes and her long hands, their muscles loosened, were lovely in their pathos, and she was in all ways quieter. Then there were the footsteps on the stairs and the three women coming in.

“I’ve told them,” said Miss Milly to him, not whispering but in a quick, removed way, not to break the moment; and he understood. She had told them what Ann believed and what might lie before them.

Hannah was ready. She regarded this as one of the queerest moves in this queerest of all worlds. But why not? Ann might be mad. So might the parson be, but no more lunatic than the rest of the world which was really half-witted and didn’t know it. And if these were mad, it must be in some self-respecting way.

Ann gave no sign of hearing. She still looked at the parson as if her eyes were jailers to detain him there. They must not let him go. The sisters had ranged themselves side by side, and Miss Elsie was trembling violently; but Miss Milly, like Hannah, ready for a bout with life, stood squarely waiting for the signal. “Now!” it would say. “Begin!”

“You will let us, won’t you?” said the parson, looking, Hannah thought, his most parsonical, both gentle and commanding. “A little visit. A change of scene.”

“Yes,” said Miss Elsie, trembling forth the word, he being a holy man and she but a pawn in such strange circumstance. “Not, of course—you didn’t mean quite now?”

“Now!” said the parson. “I have given her my word. I cannot go unless I take her with me.”

Ann herself spoke, the one word, “Father!” and it was not the agonized recognition of the moment before. It was relief ineffable, and Miss Elsie thereupon began to cry again, and could only say:

“But oh, not now,” said Milly faintly. “You give me a day or two, and if it still seems best I’ll pack her up—”

“No,” said Hannah, “no, Miss Milly, she must come now while it looks nice to her. I’ve got plenty of clothes. She’s slenderer, but we’ll make them do. Father, you take her. Ann, run along with him.”

But he had already put out his hand and Ann laid hers in it and they were going, as if this were the appointed way. Hannah called after him:

Anthony would understand—or he wouldn’t, as the mood took him; but the incredible thing must be rushed or it couldn’t be done at all. The two sisters were engaged with each other, Elsie speaking through tears and saying:

But Miss Milly was plainly on the side of the adventurers, for she made no answer except to call fiercely—and Miss Elsie afterward remembered and said to herself in awe and wonder: “She almost screamed—”

“You get out from under foot. I’ve got to go up attic and find her hat. Where’d I put it? Don’t you know? Where’d I put her hat?”

So she, too, vanished, and Hannah bent to Miss Elsie, dropped a kiss on her wet cheek, seized the nightgown on the bed, folded it and ran downstairs and out of the house where she found Anthony standing beside the car and her father and Ann serenely sitting in it and looking as if all warfare were accomplished and all tears were dried.

“My coat, Father,” said Hannah. “There beside you. Ann, hop out a minute. Slip your arms in. I’m going to tie this scarf over your head. It’ll keep your hair down. Pretty hair! Now! All aboard, Anthony. ‘Home, James.’ You might ‘step on it,’ if you want to. I fancy we’d better get along.”

He was rounding the curve. This was the last point for looking back at the house where the sisters might be waving them off, and Hannah turned to see. And there was one of them; it was Miss Milly, and she was running after them bearing a hat with blowing plumes, and with this she signaled them. But it was too late. The curve was behind them and they were away.

To Hannah, remembering the drive, it was absurd. There was Anthony speeding up by daring but inexorable degrees, there were the two sitting behind her and looking the calmest things on earth. The parson, she believed, made a remark from time to time, probably, in some form, commending his charge to God’s mercy; but she caught no reply. Once or twice she turned directly about to look at Ann, and it seemed as if what she had known as an impassive face had been in some measure changed. Had it been clarified? There was certainly a change. Little threads of bright hair had escaped from the scarf and blew about her eyes; but she seemed not to notice them. She was as immobile as the figurehead of a ship, and as arresting to the eye. Had she been so long in the prison of her unheeding room that the motion of the car was forgotten life to her and the wind an awakening call? About midway, they stopped to buy sandwiches at a roadside house and she ate obediently; but an ice cream cone amazed her as it might a child unused to faerie, and she brightened even a little more. It was late afternoon when they drove up to the door of home and Celestia came out as if she had been on the watch for them and found nothing strange in the silent person who seemed not to know she was to leave the car but did so instantly when the parson held out a hand. It was Celestia who saw the folded nightgown on the seat and took it in with her, while Hannah, a hand on Ann’s arm, told her they’d go upstairs and wash their faces and leave father to wash his, and then it would be supper time.

“This is the study where he works,” said she. “When we come down, he’ll be here waiting for us.”

Ann showed no interest in the house, no wonder over the strangeness of being there, and Hannah drew her on up the stairs and through the door of her own chamber.

“This is your room,” said she. “I shall be just outside that other door. In the hall. We often have a couch out there. Oh, the scarf! Drop it in here for now.” She opened the top drawer of the bureau and swept its not too orderly small fry into the back. “There! that’s yours. It’s all yours. Ann, what pretty hair! There’s a comb in that little box. I had it for an emergency, if somebody came. Not that your hair needs anything. I’d leave it as it is.”

Ann was looking at her dutifully and seeming to follow her words, but with no expression save that slight frown of mild bewilderment. Could it be that she was a little changed? Hannah allowed herself to wonder. No, that wasn’t possible; but the blessed wind of their motion blowing into her face and setting all that lovely hair flying! it must have done something to her, if only to rouse the atoms of her, drugged to death in the air of her bedroom—to curiosity, at least. She deferred her own freshening and flew at the bed, to drag off coverlet and sheets, and when she brought fresh linen Ann saw what was doing and got up from the grandfather chair where she had sunk with an air of taking refuge. She stood hesitating.

“Yes,” said Hannah, apparently thinking of beds and not of mental sickness, “you take that side and we’ll get it done in a jiffy. Yes, tuck it in. I’ll do the foot. Here’s the top sheet. Mercy! I’ve got it wrong end to. How many pillows?”

But Ann was back in the chair and didn’t seem to know. So Hannah flung them on, gathered up the discarded linen, threw it into the hall closet, and returned to the room and her mirror, which had reflected her face so often through her growing up that it seemed less a mirror than a tribunal, the unseen faces crowded there behind the glass waiting to pass judgment or keep pleasant company with her as she did ill or well. She put up both hands and smoothed her hair, which had ways of its own, and gave a laughing nod at her wind-blown face. Was she so plain? And with that her mind ran back to Anthony. Perhaps not so plain as she often felt obliged to believe when she studied herself anxiously. Perhaps just now with excitement in her eyes, the laughing terror over the deed she and father had done, she could pass muster as a healthy creature with a cheerful grin.

“Ann,” said she, wondering if any woman’s vanity ever really died, “we’re lucky, you and I.”

Ann merely looked at her. Perhaps there was apprehension in her eyes and Hannah, seeing it, hastened to go on:

“In our hair. The worse it looks, the better. The more untidy. Mine is a great trouble to me, but when it gets to flying, I know it’s doing all it can for itself. Yours is a glory, don’t you know it is? A perfect glory.”

In her audacity, she was conspiring with the unlikely, the impossible. She was ignoring her own unwilling thirties and treating Ann like another girl. Dare she invoke cosmetics, the bare mention of them? What would Ann say to lip salve? Had she ever heard of it? It was to be hoped she hadn’t seen it, in its commoner manifestations, poor frightened child! but would its mere existence seem to her of fairyland and lovely transformations—or the devil and his crew? But father had said there could be miracles. They were promises to us. Ann opened her trembling lips and spoke:

Had father gone away? Hannah’s heart melted within her. She wondered if her very bones would melt under the sad childishness of it all. She made haste to answer:

“Father? No, he’s downstairs in the room where we left him, and in a minute we’ll go down. We must give him a little time to rest. He’s had a long day. I’ll change my dress and then we’ll go.”

So she raced through her own toilet, coming in and out from her closet and the bathroom, with here and there a comment on this, on that, the length of dresses, the change in sleeves, only to keep the eye of her mind on the girl and, if necessary, take her down at once to father. But Ann had acquiesced and sat straight upright, her hands in their desperate clasp, her eyes distended with questions she could not frame.

Ann, showing no more than an extreme timidity, rose and followed her, and, as Hannah anxiously hoped, they found the study door open and Parson Willoughby at his table.

“Want to see us, sir,” called Hannah, in her false gaiety, and he rose and smiled at them.

So, with the little bustle of giving Ann the chair at the end of the table and Hannah’s taking her own place opposite him, the waves of apprehension certainly were stilled. But what to talk about? Well, father believed in miracles. Let him call the tune. She smiled a little, meeting the untroubled candor of his face, and waited. But with a glance at Ann, she was melted to her first unreasoning faith that what father said was true. There was the miracle: Ann’s adoring look.

“Ann,” said he, seeming to remind her that he was an old man and could find her as dear as he liked, “this morning you said to me, ‘You’ve come back.’ I didn’t think much about it at the time, but now I’m wondering. Where did you think I’d been?”

“In heaven,” said she, with the simplicity of saying he’d been in a familiar place.

“Ah!” said he. “You thought I’d been in heaven. How did you think I’d got to heaven, my dear?”

She wasted no words on her surprise at it or what was now her budding happiness.

“Now,” said he, “I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to stay here in this house a while and see how happy you can be in it. Do you see?”

“Oh, bless you, yes! I shall stay and Hannah will stay and none of us will go away without telling you. And you mustn’t go unless you tell us you want to, and perhaps we’ll all go with you. Promise!”

Hannah, watching her, thought she looked incredulous of such a simple road to happiness; but plainly she wanted nothing else. Still she had to assure herself again. She spoke, as if, even before he answered, she believed.

Nobody knows what she would have said then. Hannah thought afterward that she might have kept on, in her greed of his assurance, making him promise over and over again. But a sound arose in the next room, a tinkling tune, “Loch Lomond.” It was mother’s old piano, and Anthony was playing it. She had seen him come in at the front door and turn that way and she knew his uninstructed art with a piano. His mind was a storehouse of old songs and detached musical phrases and, in his lonelier moments, they had a way of tumbling out: not to express anything he recognized within himself. He wouldn’t have said he was musical: only, this was easy and he liked to do it. He sat with his head thrown back and his eyes fixed on the wall. Or was it on Rose? She went up to him, touched his shoulder with a finger-tip and waited to be spoken to. The tune went on through the last bar and he turned his head. Too bad—if he had been with Rose!

“In there with father. It was getting a little difficult and I thought I’d leave it to him. She thinks he’s come from heaven. (And perhaps he has. He’s equal to it.) And I heard you here.”

“Anthony,” said she, “you mustn’t make yourself think of me in ways you haven’t been thinking. Just because I wrote you a letter. My dear, these things are deadly serious. We mustn’t play at them. They’re life and death.”

He was gazing at her frowningly. His jaw was fixed. She had not thought of him as looking so hard a man.

“But we can’t talk now,” said Hannah. “Ann, you know. Play some more, not sad things like ‘Loch Lomond.’ That’s enough to drag her out of her chair and send her home crying. Nice dancy ones, and quick.”

Anthony nodded and ran into “Come Lasses and Lads” and Hannah went back to the study door and looked in upon them. Her father was at his task of putting the table in order, moving the papers into their exact parallel with something in his mind, and grouping pencils in the tray. Talk had come to an end. Ann sat, her head bent forward, listening. She was absorbed in the jocund tune, the return to outdoor jollity. What wonder, when the sounds in the old Raymond house for so many years had been only the dutiful going about of women’s feet? Seeing that things were at a more or less pleasant standstill here and believing Anthony would go on until somebody told him to stop, Hannah went into the kitchen to take Celestia a little further into her confidence. Celestia would see how queer things were; she must be prepared for their being queerer still. She stood at the table folding over rolls for their last rising, and she did it with an absorbed care and a sort of tenderness for the creatures of her hand. It almost made them live, Hannah thought, with one of her extravagant notions. They were soft and plump and about to be plumper by their own zeal in rising: for Celestia’s hands were instructing them on that point. That was what Celestia did. She made life to live. Things about the house came alive and did her bidding and grew clean and shining or warm and eager, to be eaten or looked at or slept in as she decreed. Hannah was in a hurry. It was easy to think these things. They raced through the mind like horses out of Elfland, but she could not stay to bridle them. One intemperance she did allow herself.

“No,” said Hannah, “I can’t be. But never mind. I want to tell you a little more about our visitor in there. You know she went all to pieces over her father’s death, shocked by it—not knowing what to do—and now she’s got an idea father—my father, you see—is her father. He’s been in heaven and he’s come back. That’s about all I can tell you, and I dare say you won’t understand it, bearing it in a rush like this. But what I hope is, she’ll get better here, with father on the job, and being so good to her and all. And you’ll have to help us, Celestia. Don’t you see you will?”

“Oh, yes,” said Celestia gravely. “I’d be happy to.” Her hands returned to their delicate persuading of the little plump creatures destined to grow into rolls. “It’s pretty hard, ain’t it?” said Celestia.

“Yes,” said Hannah, “it’s very hard, but father has an idea she might get well. Only we’ve got to watch her—and not seem to be watching—and nobody knows how it’ll turn out. Celestia, have you any long-sleeved nighties?”

Yes, Celestia had, and she’d get one out. Of course, those she’d made up so many years ago— Here she hesitated, and Hannah said No, they could be altered later, and that might be work for Ann. The first one was almost done, and very nicely.

“Maybe,” said Celestia, “we could sit down together, she and I, and do the others.” She took leave of the rolls by a glance, as having no more to say to them and trusting them to fulfil their destiny. “And there’s your mother’s machine. That’ll make a difference. Them long seams!”

Hannah said Yes; but she was listening to Anthony’s necromancy of remembered times. Now it was from the Henry VIII music, again a dance. Oh how gay! what twinkling feet! What enchantment to be in the puzzling game of life with him and father—and Celestia gravely ready to play her part!

“Now,” said she, “can you leave things here and come upstairs a minute? She’s going to have my room. You know that cot mother takes her naps on in the parlor chamber? I want to put it in the hall, close by my room door. I’ll sleep on that, to be near her, you know, so if anything is queer or she gets timid—you see, don’t you?”

Yes, Celestia saw without question and they went up to the parlor chamber and moved the couch, Anthony tinkling reassuringly below, and Hannah rushed through her woman’s gear, to make sure she had it all of a sort not to seem unfamiliar to the little plain bird of the dun feathers, and it was Celestia who reminded her of the tooth-brushes mother kept in the medicine closet in case of forgetful ministers’ wives or those who came for an afternoon and stayed over.

“Like Doctor Johnson,” Hannah found herself saying absently, “Do you suppose he had his tooth-brush with him when he went to Mrs. Thrale’s?”

“I don’t know,” said Celestia. “I never heard him spoken of. Was he somebody round here?”

“No,” said she. “He’s in a book. A very nice person. But a great stayer. He went to make a call and stayed for years.”

“My!” said Celestia, but she expressed no curiosity. She seldom felt any, being well grounded in wonder at the happenings of this world and having learned that, at their most fantastic, they had a reason.

It looked a dubious task to entertain so strange a guest, especially that first night when she was scarcely used to them. But she effaced herself, submissive under their goodness, yet “lonely as a cloud.” When they came out of the dining-room, the two men, as a matter of course, stopped at the study door, which was the entrance to their fighting ground, and Hannah laid a hand on hers and drew her along to the parlor.

“You might come in later,” she called back to Anthony. “We may want some more music.”

But the parlor! What was there to please the child in that sedate room? The Raymond house was far more notable. There the furnishings were all of one period and, though so simple, hinged on the magnificent, while these, having been added to, from time to time, by inheritance, were all on the side of comfort.

“This is my mother’s old piano,” said Hannah. “It was her mother’s, too. Did you notice how thin it sounded, when he played?” She struck a chord or two. “But I love his bits of dance music. We’ll have him play some more. Maybe you and I could waltz.”

But had waltzing been known to the walls of that old house in Bucksford? Certainly no more modern dance could have found footing there. Or would Ann find in any sort of levity an offense to the retributory justice that called fathers to sudden death? What answer was there going to be to Hannah’s empty talk? Ann, standing there by the piano, was looking up at her. She was not less tall than Hannah, but her bent shoulders gave her a suppliant air, and her eyes seemed to ask what all this might be about. She glanced at the unfamiliar room and then out into the hall.

“Father?” said she. “No, he isn’t going. He’s there in the study where he writes. Want to come and see?”

Making pretense of its being a mischievous and secret thing, she drew her into the hall and tiptoed to a point where they could peer in at the study door.

“They’re both there,” said she, from her show of secrecy. “They’ve got a lot of things to talk over: books and sermons and—oh, I don’t know! Anyway it’s important. It’s got to be done. Just look at them!”

There they were, facing each other, each with his elbows on the table and their heads not far apart. Anthony felt their presence and looked round at them. The parson, though it was he who faced them, was too deeply swamped in the Middle Ages to hear or see. Anthony got up and drew forward chairs, and the parson came awake to this present world. He looked at them agreeably and Ann was immediately at ease. But it set Hannah pondering. What was to be done with her? It had been like stealing a young bird out of its nest. The nest might have been soaked by spring rain, the faithful mother drowned, and if the fledgling was not rescued it would die. But you did not know whether it wanted berries or worms! and then there was the cat ready to fulfil its destiny and pounce, and you couldn’t be on guard all the time. Panic seized her. She wondered if it had seized father and Anthony with other of its octopus arms. Could father be thinking that here was a daft girl on his hands, and would he watch as well as pray? Celestia’s voice fell upon the momentary silence. They turned to her. There she was, near the doorway at the back, calm as Demeter and as pleased as the earth goddess with a new kind of apple to grow.

“There’s a stray kitten,” said Celestia. She spoke to Hannah, but she looked at Ann. “The cunningest you ever! It’s a maltee.”

She picked up Ann’s hand and Celestia followed them. The minute of their being in the kitchen, Hannah saw the aptness of Celestia’s artifice. There is no room, as Hannah knew, so entrancing as a kitchen at twilight, no matter at what season of the year. If it is fall, you welcome the early warmth, the bare lilac twigs tapping at the window with a reminding sound, saying all is not as cosily defended everywhere and you may well be thankful. Throw a kiss to your selfish luck. Or, as now, in early summer, the windows are open and there are shafts of light as well as shadows, and perhaps you get the last note of a robin: not his cat note but his go-to-bed.

And this kitchen was in its twilight bloom and, by the stove, as if she knew it to be a hearth, though there was no heat from it, sat the maltee, hypocritically washing her face. She was scarcely a half grown person and had always been washed by the maternal tongue, but within her deepest cathood she knew she could never carry off the ignominy of being a stray so casually by anything as by satinizing her own fur. And doing that, the mite! she looked as old as Egypt. Hannah made no conciliating remarks, but smiled broadly at her and waited to see what Ann would do. Celestia had pulled forward the old Boston rocker. A glance invited Ann. She was to sit down.

“She’s had her milk,” Celestia said. “You let me put her into your lap and see if she knows you. I’ve been pooring her this long while, but she’s sick to death of me. Le’s see what she’ll say to you.”

Ann, in obedience that was half bewilderment, slipped into the chair, and Celestia put the kitten in her lap and left her broad hand on it a moment until the stroking could be taken over. And immediately it was, with an expert firmness beyond praise, and Celestia said admiringly:

It was purring indeed. It was, as Celestia had heard from her old grandmother, spinning linen on a little wheel, and she stood by for a moment entranced, and then said to Hannah, who might be dismissed, the kitten having assumed the task of supervising Ann:

“I’m going to be here doing things. Maybe you’d like to set with them a spell”—“them” being the two men at their philosophizing.

Hannah touched Ann’s hand, busy at its gentling, and Ann looked up at her, not inquiringly, not lost or wandering, but with some sort of acquiescence in the kindness of a strange place and the magic of a little cat.

“I’ll be back shortly,” said Hannah. “But if you want me, Celestia’ll call me and I’ll come.”

Celestia drew up a chair to the rocker. She put out a forefinger and gave the kitten’s forehead an artful scratch.

“Once I had a little cat o’ me own,” said Celestia. “It was when I was quite small and grandmother, that come to visit us, walking all the way from Hawks’s Mills, picked it up by the side of the road. There was a great rain the day she come, and it was she told me the kitten rained down in it.”

And Hannah, seeing from this that they would get along very well without her, went back to the study door. There they were, the two man creatures who had scarcely known each other, and that only by hearsay, roaring with the laughter of those who see the same kind of joke—which is more important than the kind of joke it is.

“Well,” said Hannah, “it’s evident you’re not worried, whatever the rest of us are.” She took her place by the table and looked at the parson as if he were strange to her. “Father,” said she, “I never heard you laugh like that.”

“I’m laughing,” said the parson, “because he told me to. And he’s laughing to show me how. We’d been talking about that poor little girl. Anthony said she’d got to be waked up, see life going on, anyway. ‘And people laughing,’ I said, and he said: ‘Let’s have a go at it.’ And he reminded me how two men begin it on the stage and they whip it up and in a minute they’re lost. They can’t speak for laughing. Try it again, Anthony. You begin. Now!”

They began, first antiphonally, in broken gusts, and ended with eyes on Hannah, waiting to be praised.

Hannah was amazed at them. She couldn’t tell them how silly she thought them, how impossible, how young. And was this green boyishness in father and nobody had known? No, they’d have to play their games out together and she’d be the mother spirit and assume her heavier part, but join them when she could.

“Oh, yes,” said she, “I know all that. She’s got to like us—or go home. She likes you, father, and she likes Celestia. She’s in the kitchen now, listening to Celestia and pooring a cat. But what’s it going to be next? Think what we’ve done. We’ve butted in on tragedy—a case, the medicos would call it—and we don’t any more know how to treat it than if we were all back in the fifteenth century and shut her up in a cell and gave her a bed of straw.”

Yes, they had taken her away from the place of her sorrow, but only to fetter her in another sort of strangeness: this confusion of good-will. And they mightn’t know what to do with her. Parson Willoughby was far from fool’s laughter now. He was very serious, absently looking down at his tapping hand on the table.

“You see, Hannah,” he said, at length, “I looked for a miracle and my impulse to take her away from there seemed to be the beginning of it. Not to be resisted! I shouldn’t have dared resist. But we are told that words will be put into our mouths. We shall be taught what we shall say, and I have no doubt it will be so.”

“Yes, dear,” said Hannah. “But it is difficult, isn’t it? Practically, I mean. We just took her, that’s all, and left Miss Milly waving her hat. And what’s the programme? What are we going to do?”

She had forgotten Anthony. He had been so far from answering her thoughts of him for so long a time that she did not turn to him for those confirming looks and comments that are the outcome of happy intimacy. But unexpectedly he spoke.

There was the silence of a moment while she adjusted her mind to it, and she asked him softly:

Her father, she found, was looking at him with attention but no surprise. It did not seem in any way strange to him to be told what Rose would do. Anthony frowned a little, in the effort of exact remembrance.

“Rose,” he said, “is more alive than almost anybody you can imagine. There she is, tied to her bed, but full of sheer life and go. Sometimes I wonder it doesn’t put an end to her, dammed up like that, no outlet anywhere.”

Hannah was watching him in what seemed a pleased attention, and when she spoke her voice had the same quality, interested, but not too much.

(“Oh, how dull I am,” she thought savagely. “Have I taught so long I’m dyed in the wool? Have I got to call on those infernal clichés when my heart’s broken? In another minute he may tell me. He won’t mean to, but he may.”)

Anthony was thinking. He, too, was set aback. There was the portrait of Rose in his mind, in his heart: but could he lift the curtain and ask them to look at her with any likelihood of their seeing her as she was?

“I don’t wonder you ask,” said he. “But there’s nothing I could say—except commonplaces. And she’s anything but commonplace. That’s the last thing! She has the most extraordinary sense of the beauty of things. The world, you know, and life—just living. It all goes back to that. Ha! I’ve thought of something. It was what I did once. It isn’t that I did it, but it’ll show her to you as she is. She’s mad about games, any game so long as it’s out of doors. Football! She was always asking me about it. How was this? how was that? And when a game was on, she’d get it through the radio, but there’d be all those things she didn’t understand. And I’d explain, of course, and she’d take it in perfectly, but you could see she wanted to be there and go dotty over it, as you do, you know. Well, we put one on for her—a regular game.”

“You see, there’s a big empty field opposite the house, and I told the boys I wanted them to take it for one of their afternoons. Instead of their own field, you know. It wouldn’t be the same thing, of course, the fans and the yelling and all that, but it would be a game all right, sketched in, you might say. I told them the sick girl in that house wanted to see it, and two or three remembered her when she was well and somehow the idea struck them just right, and her mother and I set up a couch on the balcony and carried her out there, and the boys played like all possessed and cheered her at the end. It was a great time, I tell you. They’ll never forget it. Took their fancy somehow. You’d see how it might.”

“Yes,” said Hannah composedly. “It’s a pretty picture: the girl on the balcony and the boys taking it just right. And you think, knowing how she likes to see things going on, she’d manage this little difficulty of father’s running away with Ann. Well, I wish she could. I wish somebody could, don’t you, Father?”

He had put on the game for Rose, and now unconsciously he was staging the scene of the girl’s dependence on him, and was it not enough? Did she need to know more? The angry nerve beating its alarum in her, told her, with the brutality of the body’s anguish, that he was besotted over the girl. How foolish men could be when they were in love, how innocently determined to betray themselves, so weakened were they and yet so strong from the mere animal pride of it!

Yes, the parson said, he should be glad of counsel, especially as to diversion. It might not help her sick mind, but if it meant a minute’s forgetfulness, that would be something.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hannah. “I dare say there hasn’t been a note sung in the Raymond house since the roof was raised and the last rafter hammered in.”

“Hymns!” said the parson. “They must have heard them in church. And then there are those nice things Anthony’s been playing. My grandmother had a memory of English and Scotch ballads, and very often when I’m in doubt about anything, I find myself humming them.”

“Unnatural parent!” cried Hannah, from their new intimacy. (Yes, it was since mother went away.) “And you never told me. I know your nice prayer meeting voice; but is there another I never heard, not even when you sat beside my crib or walked the floor with me?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say, as to that,” replied the parson. “But I could write you out the words of a dozen or so English airs, and I could teach them to Ann, if she’d like me to.”

“Don’t tell me you know ‘Loch Lomond,’ ” said Hannah. “It’ll be all over the house.”

“I didn’t know she sang. Hannah, we must have more noise in this house, pleasant noises, you know. Voices and the old piano. You go and get Ann. And Celestia. Anthony, you go in and play.”

It was a part of Anthony’s seriousness toward life that, if you seemed a reasonable person, he was off at once to help you, and he had risen and they heard him at what Hannah called “Believe me if all those endearing” almost, it seemed, before he had time to cross the hall and get to work.

“No,” said Hannah, “he’s really as old as the Pyramids and always has been. But there are streaks in him. That’s the reason you have to love him so. You do like him, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said the parson. “No doubt about that. Now you go and get Ann to come and sing. And Celestia: tell her I said so.”

Hannah, opening the kitchen door, heard Celestia’s voice in one of the old stories of the world.

“And he tied his garter round the tussock of grass in the bog, the one where the gold was buried. But when he got back there in the morning, he found a garter round every single tussock in the bog, and where the gold was he never knew.”

Hannah stood listening. Did Ann Denison understand? She sat there, the image of a mysterious repose, her face set forward and her hand on the kitten in her lap. The two looked up. Celestia was smiling a little, shyly. She did not know she had taken the matter of Ann into her own hands and reached the conclusion of the three learned ones in the study; but she did know Ann was somehow like a child, and a child must be made much of and told simple things. The thread between them was broken for the moment and Ann was looking at Hannah with her old lost questioning. Would she ask her old question? But it was not, “Will you mail a letter for me?” It was the new note of her freshly wakened sense of something alive and kind to her, the something she might love.

“No,” said Hannah, “he’s in there, and he wants us to come and sing. You, too, Celestia. He sent you word. He knows a lot of songs—the ones Mr. West knows, too, and we’re all to sing. We shan’t know the words; I shan’t, anyway. But we can sing ‘la! la!’ and make a big noise. Come along, Ann. Leave your kitten in the chair. Hear him at it. Mr. West is singing, too.”

She seemed to sweep them away with her, and Celestia, seeing what the game was, disposed of the kitten by one gesture and drew Ann onward with another. The parson, standing at Anthony’s elbow was, Hannah felt proud to see, a splendid picture, carrying the “Minstrel Boy” while Anthony gave him an erratic bass. And Celestia knew the “Minstrel Boy” and began to sing, in a full assured contralto. Hannah thought she looked like a child new come to heaven but, having lived near it, she had heard echoes of its songs and was prepared for them. Whether Ann was singing she did not know, but kept a hand on her hand, hanging at her side, and felt it quiver.

“That’s good,” said the parson. “Sing out, won’t you? I’d like to have this a noisy house, myself.”

Anthony had not been shy about talking dogma with him, but now when they had come to secular things which meant a certain give and take, he felt himself of small account. It was like blundering into the parson’s heart and stumbling over what was hidden there. So he strayed into an air he thought anybody might like, and felt the parson loosen up, as if indeed he liked it. Did he love it perhaps, like all the Mermaid fellowship?

“You could sing that, sir,” said he, in an offhand way, though his heart was beating fast with love of it. “Try it, won’t you? just you alone.”

“Ain’t that a beauty? (Yes, Hannah, I’ve got to say ‘ain’t’ when I hear that sung.) Rose says it’s the loveliest song in the world.”

So Rose was there, even among them while they sang! Was she always where he was? thought Hannah, and was cold at heart.

“No,” said Anthony cheerfully, as if it made no matter, she did so many things beside. “But she’s very funny about it. She does a kind of chanting to herself, half speaking, to little tunes she makes up. Only to please herself, you know, when she’s alone—and dull, I suppose, though she never mentions that. But about really singing, she says if she could sing, it would be like—I don’t know just what, but angels in heaven or one or another of her fancies. Want to sing a hymn, sir, something we all know? You said you did.”

She was tongue-tied. She looked at him unhappily, and could not even say she did not know. Anthony began striking wandering chords and then, as if unwillingly constrained, he fell into a queer little tune such as a child might sing to itself when alone, but unafraid. He began, half chanting and half speaking as he had said Rose sang her tunes, and the words were these:

There was a shy little rillet of memory running under his voice, like a trembling hand offering a cup, as if to say: “I do it clumsily, but remember it is sacrament.” Was he thinking how Rose had sung it? Hannah felt her eyes hot with tears; but it was Ann who spoke, and to Anthony.

Then, not having known she was going to speak, she dropped her head, unused to the sound of her voice except in its accustomed words. Anthony took it beautifully, as if they might at any time have been talking together and she was not so much of a stranger that he did not know what to do with her.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s true. But the girl that made it said she loved stories about islands and she was going to have it so.”

Now the parson spoke, as if they were all so very attractive he found it hard to part from them, and, so Hannah thought, as if everything were especially dedicated to God, even the old piano and Rose’s song, which, he might have seen, had broken another woman’s heart.

“We must go to bed,” said he. “We’ve had a tiring day. Let us say a prayer together. Our Father—”

So they stood and said the prayer, and Hannah could see why he had not asked them to kneel. He did not know what form of worship Ann had been used to nor what chill of unbelief. He raised his hand and blessed them, but he spoke last to her, possibly, as it seemed, because she was a new-come guest.

A little reassured, a little uneasy, not knowing what to answer, she let Hannah lead her away, and before ten she was in bed and Hannah lay on the couch outside the door and Celestia had gone her accustomed ways. Hannah could scarcely believe in such a quieting down. They had invited disaster. They had been reckless beyond words, and yet here was the house in its ordinary calm and Ann peaceably silent if not asleep. Now what was Hannah to think about while she lay awake as she must and felt the drip-dripping in her heart which seemed to be actually what the old words meant when they told you the heart bled? She could hear the two voices brum-brumming down in the study, though cautiously, as if the queerness of things up here had crept down to them, like a warning, and said “Hush!” What had Anthony unconsciously told her? What had he not told her? Almost every word had been betrayal: Rose in the balcony, watching the game he had put on for her, Rose chanting her little poem to him and he bringing it to them with complete unconsciousness of its being evidence. She would have said afterward that she lay and thought all night. But really it was before eleven when she sat up in bed and listened for Ann’s breathing. There was a little sound of it, she thought, and then a movement of the clothes, as if she perhaps turned over; and though Hannah was on guard she wanted desperately to go downstairs and talk to father, for a few minutes even, not for counsel alone but companionship. There were things she must do, and at last, perhaps for the first time in her courageous life, she stood off and looked at her own sense of danger. She questioned her capacity to judge. The parson must tell her. She got up softly, put on her wrapper and stepped as cautiously into the hall. Celestia’s door was open. That was never so before and she understood. Celestia, her mind on Ann, was also watching. And as she stood there, Celestia appeared, heroic, lovely, in her nightgown and a simple wrapper, and came up to her. She whispered:

“Yes,” said Hannah with an equal vigilance. “Asleep, I think. I’ve got to see my father. Celestia!”

Why did she whisper Celestia’s name? Only that she was so deep in trouble, shaking with the weight of it, and, if she could tell her, Celestia would understand. But she could not tell her.

“You go right down,” said Celestia. “He’s there. Stay as long as you want to. I’ll sit and wait. Don’t hurry.”

She disposed herself in the great chair in the niche of the hall where it continued into the rear, and Hannah went down to her father. He was at the study table, but not at work. He sat leaning back in his chair, his head bent slightly, his eyes downcast. For an instant, she thought he was asleep. Several sheets of letter paper lay before him and an addressed envelop was at his hand, the ink still wet. He had been writing to mother. Hannah had an instant of wondering whether it was in the love that is longing or the love that is only kind, and whether he was asking himself if he had done well. He rose at once.

“No,” said Hannah. “She’s all right. Sit down, dear. I had to see you. But we must be careful. I think she’s asleep, and anyway Celestia’s there.”

She took her own chair opposite his, and he sat down and waited. She was afraid she might talk wildly; but if she did, it couldn’t be helped. She had been throttling her silent mind, and now something had to break.

“Father,” said she, “it’s about Anthony. I didn’t think I could give him away to anybody, even you. But it’s got beyond me. It’s Rose. Don’t you see he’s in love with her, and he’s come here to ask me to marry him because he thinks he must?”

“He thinks of her every minute,” said Hannah. “And it isn’t that I’m so sentimental I’ve got to have love and dove rhyming round me all the time—” she laughed a little, hysterically. “That’s rather good isn’t it, ‘love and dove’! Only don’t you see, he can’t marry her. She’s out of it, poor girl! And he’s got to marry me because he promised to. And he means to go through with it, bless him! Father, you see he’s a fool, don’t you, unworldly, imbecile? but don’t you think there’s something heavenly in being a fool? That kind? And if I did marry him, it wouldn’t break up his life with her. I wouldn’t let it. Only he’d have two wives, don’t you see? One would be what you’d call the wife of his spirit and the other—O Father, that would be me! And it isn’t because I want to split hairs about it, as you would, Parson, but I should be pestiferously jealous all the time and the thing would be unwholesome, don’t you see? Father, I’ve got to see Rose.”

“But what good would that do you?” said the parson. “You couldn’t ask her—”

“No, no, but I could find out what fascinates him, whether it’s only a fascination. I could judge. Don’t you see there are things I can’t ask him, and if I could even look at her I should know? A woman knows about another. We’re infernally bright about that.”

“O dearest, no! How could I arrange it? How could I put it into his head and have the whole business go by the board? He’s perfectly at ease now, perfectly innocent of any intent to deceive either of us, and if I pried his eyes open, his little Eden would be done for. So would everybody’s, hers, mine. O those verses! Eden Isle! That’s what he’s living on now: Eden Isle. And if I bring into it the least little snake, a viper’s egg—they lay eggs, don’t they?—he never’ll stop mulling over the horrid metaphysical tangle as long as he lives. Don’t you know he won’t?”

She blushed. She hesitated. She couldn’t help laughing over such an infantile gaucherie.

“A peddler. Sell something. Ask for subscription to a magazine. Take orders for fly poison or vanilla.”

“You couldn’t go to his house and expect not to be found out and recognized. You might meet him in the street.”

“But bless you! I’m not going to wait for him to get back there. I’m going now and ask him to stay here with you and Ann, I should say I have to go, but Ann would give you too much anxiety, left alone with her.”

The parson’s lips twitched a little, but if it was in amusement, it was one he did not countenance.

“And what,” said he, “would be your reason for leaving home while he is here?”

“I should say Aunt Marjorie was ill and had sent for me to come without delay.”

“Yes, dear, yes. And now you’re going to say I haven’t any and never did have, and that’s true. But it won’t occur to him I haven’t merely because he hasn’t heard me mention her. Anthony’s a mystic, just as you are, dear. The only things you see are those that aren’t there. Oh, and I know how I should get into the house! I’ve got a lovely négligée. I never wore it. One day when I was in New York with a pupil who had to have her eyes looked at, I saw it in a shop window, and it’s a dream. And I should tell whoever came to the door that I heard there was a sick lady in the house and I was selling négligées and this was the only one I had left and might I see the lady?”

The parson looked at her. He was an image of blank wonder. Then he threw back his head in a way he had perhaps once a year in so serious a world, and she saw he was about to roar with a great laugh.

“No! no!” said she. “You can’t make that noise. ‘Consider what a great girl you are! Consider what o’clock it is.’ And Ann upstairs and all!”

So he heard to reason and shut his mouth and became all parson again. He spoke seriously.

“It’s all very well to be as funny as you can, but not when it’s going on midnight and Ann likely to wake up and try to think where she is. My dear, you’re tired and you’re worried and something’s got to be done about it. And you’re carrying it off with a high hand, but what you want is sleep—and then we’ll talk again. And I think you should talk with Anthony, too. And pray to God. And I will pray. And we’ll both of us pray for Anthony: that he may search his heart and find out, of himself, if his mind is fixed on you. But don’t get up fairy tales about it, dear. They’re funny, but we mustn’t waste ourselves on them. Pray to God. It’s the only way.”

“Yes, darling,” she said, “you pray for me. And Anthony. Pray for him. That’s to mother, isn’t it?”

She turned the envelop about to see, and in that moment his face changed. She seemed to have shifted the weight from her own heart to his. What about mother, after all these years? Did he miss her with whom he had wished to be one spirit and one flesh? And was it profane of her who had sprung from the mystery of that union to wonder if it had kept its magic and he could recall it, though in a soberer form, and thank God if it still held?

“Yes,” he said. “It’s to mother. I haven’t told her about Anthony’s coming or our going over to Bucksford. I didn’t know whether things might seem disturbing to her. She’s so far away.”

What if mother knew and was suddenly concerned about them? for these intimate family happenings were exactly of the sort to raise the demon of efficiency by which mother was ridden and set her on the road familiar to that house as “something to be done at once.” She would come home, whatever Uncle Peter might say, and the household fabric couldn’t stand up against her. Hannah had never been so ruthless with herself about mother, nor so disloyal. Out of her very virtues was mother condemned. She must not come home.

It has been said of Parson Willoughby that if you gave him a book he would never know whether he ate or slept. Tonight he felt no drawing whatever toward sleep. He was wholly alive to the need of clarifying his mind, now that all these foreign substances had got into it. And how could he do this more efficiently than by writing in his journal, that ingenious outlet he had made between himself and nowhere? Hannah had set him to thinking, not only of what might affect her and Anthony, but what affects all men. And he began writing in his book:

I must talk to somebody, and it’s got to be you, Dave Willoughby, though you needn’t read it after it’s done; for if you did read it you might laugh at yourself for an old chap that had lost his job and couldn’t stop whimpering about it. I cannot be willing to sit down and grow old. I have gone to God with my trouble, and said to Him “Help me to bear it.” Possibly I am a little nearer understanding why my people do not want me. I have not rendered unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. I had failed to understand the mind of man, how it may be blown here and there nor ever come to rest. I had thought it could, by seeking, come to rest in God; but it could not have been that I made that clear to them or they would have seen how needful it is beyond all earthly things. A new world has come into power and I did not have the sense to know it and fit my ministrations to its changing needs. I should not have had to violate one article of my belief. I should merely have said to them: “The altar is here, but the way to it has a different look. Do not be disturbed by that. Only come.” Perhaps my mind is but half a mind, for always the kingdom of heaven has been more real to me than all the kingdoms and republics of the earth. But we are living on the earth. It is on the earth that some Cæsar or other reigns and exacts his tribute; and should I not have warned my people—warned them constantly—either to resist Cæsar when he is wrong, and, in any case, to pay tribute of righteous living to life itself and so redeem the earth? But I have never been able to say, with any convincingness: “Be good and make the earth a heaven.” I have said: “Be good so that you may go to the Lord of heaven where He is.” And it is apparent that the earth has fallen into great ignorance and madness. And still I do not know what to do. It is not because I am old. It is because I do not understand. There are certain things which have been told me about myself and perhaps my vanity was fed and I liked the sound of them. “You are a mystic,” they have said. “You are a visionary.” This they have told me, as I believe, partly to excuse themselves for not following me into the obscure ways I loved; but however all that is, I want now to understand the world, I want to make its rough places plain, and since I may not do it through the church I must look about me for means to do it in solitude, perhaps in this quiet room with my books. I am homesick for heaven. Are they not all homesick for it who are denied the heaven they hoped for here? I have fixed my mind on them. I pray for them without ceasing, those who are lost in bewilderment and pain. Hannah laughed and said it fondly; but she asked me if I wanted to fight with beasts at Ephesus. Yes! so long as there are beasts of prey ravaging the earth, what right have I to let other men fight them and hold myself immune to follow the life of quietness I love? Because this is a comfortable little town with scarcely any actual poverty, it has dug itself in, like an animal, from the winter of the world’s discontent. It is torpid, like all animal life that has dug in. And I, here at my table in the student’s dream, I, too, have dug myself in and let the earth turn over in her sleep without my knowing it. My people are no worse than I. We seem to be in the same measure guilty, they in setting up false gods to worship—gods so many and so grotesque that I do not know their names—and I because I have given my life to the cloistered bliss of learning. I have been accepted as a scholar, and no doubt in the beginning they were proud of me; but I perhaps became a fungous growth on a civilization gone to rot. Not so were the priests of the old heavenly dynasties who carried Christ into far regions and welcomed sufferings so terrible you cannot read of them without wonder and, though death must have been sweet to them, forbade themselves to pray for it because self in them had ceased to exist as self: only as something vowed to life. But I, too, am of the calling of a priest, and I have not fought at Ephesus.

Now, could it be true that God has taken account of me in my sin and that He has sent Ann to me, not only to save her from her trouble of mind but to save me? Are we two shipwrecked waifs clinging to one plank? Young as she is, life has done with her. It has done with me. And I am overwhelmingly thankful. If I can set her on her feet, perhaps I can feel like a man again. But more, oh, more than that! there is my own child who also is lost in bewilderment and pain; and partly knowing, partly guessing at the cause of that, I have been praying for her blindly. But now I think I understand. I have been allowed to look into her unquiet mind, and I find love there, love received and entertained and now an aching memory. And I have begun to ask myself what love is, and I could do it with a bravado of courage not to be thought of if I asked it for myself. For what is within us is silence. That has been said for us, as so many things have, by a greater than we, and so simply: “The rest is silence.” But when I thought of Hannah and other of the young and passionate and innocently demanding, I knew I must inquire further above love, and ask of God. I had asked myself and myself could not tell me; but when I asked Him I saw anew that it is sacrament, the holy thing which is of Him because He is creativeness and of that the essence is love. It comes upon us and it says: “Each of you has within him the seeds of life, and when you are false to life you are false to God Himself. This is His deepest bond with you, and He lets you mistake it, if you will. He has wrapped it in mystery. He has wrapped many things in mystery, so that it is as easy to go the false way as the true.” Why? We do not know. He shows the outward parts of them and you are misled and say to yourself: “This is the way of nature. Therefore it is my way, although it is the beast’s way also and what the beast does, that do I.” And because the beast which knows not reason (but I am not sure!) will traverse the fields and swim the floods for procreation of his kind, you must not say it is with men as with the beast. For though the beast is mad with life, your madness, that seems as his, must be consecrated to the fiats of eternal life itself. It must be of God, born of the fulness of beauty He longs to share with you. And why, why has He so cunningly wrapped it in mystery as He wraps the flower in its sheath? Again, I do not know. Here, I shall never know. But I do know that he who makes the love of man and woman his mirth or scorn had better be drowned in the depths of the sea. And what if we mistake the madness of earth for the madness that lays hold on heaven? For I know no way to think of that most excellent beauty which is right living save as heaven, that other land, wrapped, like God, in mystery. To me, it has to be a land. I am of this earth. I know its beauty which I touch and see. And what can I know of heaven, save as I might touch and see? And here on earth is my daughter, lost, bewildered, as Ann is for another cause, and how can I guide their vision from earth to that brightness which is heaven? Or is it our own darkness that cuts it off from us as clouds obscure the sun? O fool! Dave Willoughby, you are a fool. You mix yourself up among the heavenly bodies—heaven itself, poor fool!—and you must come back to earth and Hannah and her poor Anthony: for he loves his other love, not her—and what can poor Anthony do? And what can she do? For no bond they can make between their two bodies can keep his soul from running off from her to Rose—and heaven. Hurry, little planet! for you are a planet in the skies, my Hannah, hurry back into the orbit that must be waiting for you and let Anthony swing back into his. Oh, my poor little planet! I know—I know—

And he thought: “Do I write this as if somebody were looking over my shoulder? Is it as I should write a sermon? Am I spoiled by sermonizing? How do you turn an old student sitting at his table into a man of muscle who wants to fight with beasts at Ephesus?”

Hannah found it a quiet house now, and so did the parson, who had plainly said he wanted noise in it. Everything was different. The house itself seemed to be acting under new conditions more obvious even than mother’s going away. Very few of the townspeople came running in as they were used to doing before the parson was retired. Hannah could account for that, and did it more or less reasonably. It was known that his decision came from some unauthorized interference, and the church people felt a vague discomfort. They were under the cloud of seeing him displaced in their affection, if only by life itself and the way things were going, and in the manner of the human animal when in doubt, stayed away, hoping things would clear themselves up with no trouble to anybody. And the house had become sanctuary for Ann. The domestic air was tempered to her, and they were all alert lest it blow too hot or cold. She was silent, she was gentle, and always awake to Parson Willoughby who perhaps looked only half real to her; and she meant to trouble no one. But the centre of control—if one assumed she had to be controlled—had shifted. It was Celestia who became her chief companion and, as it seemed, most naturally. Ann was different when she was with her. She took her for granted, in a quiet way. After little moments with Parson Willoughby when he did all the talking and “about nothing,” as he told Hannah, and longer ones with Hannah sharing the small comedies that play themselves in household life, she drifted back to Celestia. They were seen doing household deeds together. Celestia made them easy for her, and it came about so smoothly that she seemed always occupied. One morning when Hannah was leaving the kitchen, after talking over the programme for the day, Celestia came in on the heels of it and asked a question, quickly, as if to do it before her courage failed.

“No, oh, no,” said Hannah. “It’s lovely for her. I don’t believe she was allowed to do anything at home. They were so kind to her they kept her in her room and waited on her. They are tremendously fond of her, but it was like being a prisoner.”

“I don’t want to know anything you wouldn’t want me to,” said Celestia hurriedly. “But if there was anything about a letter—There! I’ve got to tell you. She come to me yesterday with a little piece of newspaper in her hand—tore off square-cornered, it was—and she says: ‘Will you mail a letter for me?’ ”

Hannah stood unmoved, but her muscles crawled in that thrill which is the signal of an old fear returned. “Art thou there, truepenny?” says the heart, and warns itself to be ready. She spoke indifferently.

“I didn’t say anything. I just stood and looked at her. And she looked at me, and in a minute the color begun to come up in her face—she’s got a real pretty skin—and she turned round to the stove and took off a cover and dropped in the paper, and it ketched and burnt. And I was just going to put on my beets and I didn’t know any better than to go right along with that.”

“I shouldn’t have known what to do either,” said Hannah. “But I’ve an idea you did right. Yes, for a long time she’s been thinking about a letter that never comes.”

“Oh!” This was only a little moan from Celestia, not in grief perhaps, but surprise that life can scatter such things, like petals from a tree. You found them everywhere.

“And her father—I told you that: how he died suddenly and it broke her up completely, and she thinks she writes to him, because there’s something she wants him to forgive her for. But whether she really believes my father’s her own father come back, I don’t know.”

“No matter! She sets the world by him. Do you think—” she hesitated—“it would do any good for me to tell her I know all about folks’ going away and never coming back?”

“I’m not sure about that,” said Hannah. “But I should say not. I should think—and I know father does—the thing for her to do is to begin to live again, do things, as she’s doing them with you and just go along from day to day and stop brooding—if she can. And you know my father’s always saying if we lose anything—well, love, you know, if we lose that—we can find something he calls the love of God and that’ll comfort us. Maybe it’ll show us why it all had to be. And it’ll be enough.” She was conscious of never having been more mawkish, more spiritually commonplace. “But he’s a minister, you see. That’s the kind of thing he knows. I don’t.”

“Yes,” said Celestia gravely. “He knows.” They were silent a moment, each a little shy before the other. “There’s one more thing,” said Celestia. “We’ve done the nightie. She sews like a bird.”

Does a bird sew? It didn’t seem like slang. It was a possible eccentricity in nature and became at once attractive to Hannah: a bird mending its own ruffled breast with flashing needle and fine thread. Celestia went on. She was absorbed in it.

“What should you say to my bringing out some more o’ my things, one at a time, and doing ’em over? You spoke about slips, and when I set down to it I see how you could make an elegant slip out of a petticoat, just rip off the waistband and put on a top. I’ve got plenty o’ fine cloth.”

“I think,” said Hannah, “it would be beautiful. You follow your own judgment, Celestia. It’s better than mine. And if you make a wrong guess, we’ll go to father and let him straighten us out.”

“But can he straighten me out?” she thought, as she went into the hall and saw Anthony on the porch smoking his pipe and, for the first time, it seemed, deprived of father’s company. She halted, but he heard her, laid his pipe on the rail and came a step to meet her.

If life had been as it was those years ago in Bucksford, she would have put her hand in his arm and laughed for joy of seeing him. Talk? she would have said. They could talk anywhere; but now—now, not knowing what was to happen between them or what she might cause to happen, she demurred. This was from instinct, not by choice. She was far from ready to join battle, though perhaps the time had come.

“Let the beds alone,” said Anthony. “I’ll make mine. I do, in camp. Besides, it’s an awful superstition that beds have got to be made every day. Come down to the arbor and talk.”

She seemed ready enough, and on the way between the borders they spoke of Oriental poppies and whether they’d bloom the first year. In the arbor—very pleasant, very brown of wood and full of light and shade from the moving leaves—she took one of the old chairs and he sat down facing her.

She considered. It struck her not as monstrous but interesting that she was not entirely averse to lying to him. Evidently life sometimes came to that. You cared so much about something that truth dickered a little before you, in the wind that was blowing, and possibly it was blown out. Was that what diplomats felt when peace and war, at their dire game, demanded a black counter when you had a white one in your hand? Was that what the doctor told the shattered patient when he’d got to be put together and there was no anæsthetic? Was that the plausible commonplace she must pass over to Anthony, to save him everlasting regret for taking a woman’s love and then forgetting at the last?

She gathered herself up, all the crumbling forces of her, and did answer reasonably:

“But, dear child, don’t you see how upset everything is with us here? Suppose I did do such a sporting thing—marry you and get out—don’t you see what a hole I should leave behind me? First, there’s Ann. We’ve run away with her, and though it’s father that did it, I don’t believe I could dump it all on him.”

“Very well. If you put it that way, I won’t say ‘now.’ But later, even as late as your mother’s coming back—”

“O Anthony!” Of a sudden she was honest. This truth wouldn’t hurt. It could be told. “Mother’s coming back? You couldn’t think of anything worse.”

“Wouldn’t she like Ann’s being here? I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

He was determined. Not so did he look, she thought absurdly, when Rose sang him her little verses or talked over “the game.” But again she could tell the truth.

“Mother’d jump at her being here. I’ve told you how energetic she is. She’d make it a cause. Ball games aren’t in it with mother’s philanthropy.”

“Hannah,” said he astutely, “I never thought of it before, but—don’t you like your mother?”

“Oh,” cried Hannah, wrinkling her forehead in laughter and despair, “have you got to be so literal? People don’t think of their mothers that way, whether they like them or whether they don’t. They’re just mothers, and that’s all there is about it. I mean, she’d play the very devil with Ann and father and me, have in specialists, go by schedule, take her temperature—oh, no! no!”

“But,” said Anthony, “what if you’d better have in a specialist? Ever thought of that?”

“Often,” said she wearily, “morning, noon and night. But it would be deserting, don’t you see? Saying, ‘we won’t play that way any more.’ And she’s begun to be happy, with Celestia and all—no, not happy, but she does seem more or less alive. And besides, this is the only way father can play.”

“I see,” said Anthony thoughtfully. “But what’s coming out of it, the very best you could make of it? Is she going to live with you?”

“Anthony,” said she, “I couldn’t tell you to save my life. But we’ve brought her here, and some way or other, we’ve got to see her through.”

“No, but they write to father. That is, they have once or twice, little stiff, grateful notes. And he sends them bulletins about her. I haven’t read them, but I know he does it almost every day. And, Anthony, I’ve a suspicion in my poor weak head: I think she may have been physically worn out in that lonesome hole ‘Over the Ridge,’ and then her father’s dying and—oh, I could go all to pieces without being technically insane, and so could you. Let her wash dishes with Celestia—and give her a chance.”

She could not tell him. If she let it drop to the level of an idle freak, how abominable it would be, how it would invade the memories of that time when he was her lover in a self-forgetting sincerity and perhaps debase even the past into moldy commonplace. That letter! all roads led to it. This, thought Hannah, in one of her crises of uncanny amusement, was an occasion for the truth. She simply hadn’t the brain for anything less obvious. Yet, when it was out, how unconvincing it would sound, how savagely he might look at her! it would take an intelligence far less subtle than his to find it sterling. Said she, as speciously as she could manage:

“You mustn’t ask me. How can I tell? There are high lights, you know, for everybody. Sometimes we see things differently—and we say things—we mean them, in a way, but they’re different. They’re a transfiguration, a kind of splendor, though often we can’t live up to ’em. Don’t you see?”

“No,” he said. “Not when you talk like this. The words sound all right, but they don’t mean anything—not when it comes to you and me. And that letter! Why, it’s a wonderful letter. I’ve never written such a letter in my life.”

“Oh, yes, you have,” it was saying within her. “To me. In the first of it, when it was all new and you hadn’t seen Rose. But for over a year now you’ve told me how well the classes were doing and what the weather was and ended with ‘Love, Anthony.’ ”

“Will you think it over,” he said, “and write me again? Not definitely as to time—our being married—I don’t want to be exacting. Only, how things seem to you here. What the prospects are, how it looks to you about Ann. You see I’ve stayed on and on. It’s been ten days now. Your father asked me to, but I’d no idea of doing it when I came. It’s been wonderful. I don’t remember anything just like it. But it’s got to end sometime. In fact, I’m due there now. You write me, dear.”

“Like him? I should think I did! He’s the best ever. But he won’t say one word about you—in relation to me, I mean—our marrying. He’ll only talk about marriage in general: not you and me.”

“I don’t know,” said he, “that I can tell you. I see things as he does, in a way: public affairs, philosophy, dogma, things of that sort. But he’s a mystic. When he gets up into the clouds, I might think I’d followed him, but I shouldn’t have anything to hand you when I got down again. For instance, marriage. A sacrament, he says. He keeps on saying it.”

“Oh, yes! yes! but he goes so infernally far. You can’t stop him short of eternity—and not then. Falling in love, now: he says—well, I don’t know—he seems to say it’s a kind of madness, and it isn’t all so you can marry and keep house together and have children—not wholly that. You’ve got to be so tremendously mad about each other you do great stunts, you meet all challenges, and when you die you don’t just die; you walk off into eternity with it. And he seems to know what eternity is. I don’t. That’s why I can’t tell you. No, sir! I can’t. You mustn’t expect me to. Ask him. He’ll tell you fast enough. It’s a, b, c, to him.”

She found him very lovable, very much of a boy, scowling over the divine Eros translated to heaven and not knowing what to make of it. Yet as she remembered him, he had never balked at the dragons in their way, the mangy little dragons of economy that kept them from an earlier marriage. He had just elbowed them aside for the moment, knowing sometime he could kick them farther and they wouldn’t be there. He would have had no difficulty about eternity then. It was scarcely more than a word to him compared with what he felt. Eternity? Yes, of course, but he could thrust it aside and go on thinking about her. But now that father had dragged it in, it made him uneasy. Could it be that now this somewhat shopworn material world was about all he dared face with her? Was he out from under the spell of younger love? Did its mantle no longer adorn or cover her? For young love was accustomed to stick at nothing, not even the image of a constancy beyond death itself and the sight of the Immortal Gods. Poor Anthony! she would not plague him further.

“Yes,” said he, “if you can’t make up your mind. It isn’t that I haven’t had a wonderful time. You’ve been no end good to me, both of you.”

“It’s this,” she said. “I may want to go away for a day and leave you here with father. I could go early in the morning and probably get back at night. But father’s not to know.”

“He’d disapprove. He’s disapproved already. I’ve spoken of it. No, don’t ask me things. It’s to Aunt Marjorie’s.”

“Nor anybody else.” Hannah was playing now and quite happy. “She’s imaginary. I thought maybe you could swallow her, but I see you can’t. No, Anthony, I want to be away for a day on business of my own, and if I’m not at breakfast in the morning, you tell him anything you like. Only say I left word for him I’d be back at night.”

“I’d rather you’d stay here with him. He’ll be put about enough anyway. Telling me not to go and then my being gone!”

“No, the train’s less trouble. Oh, do it for me, dear! Start him off on the Aramaic tongue and he won’t know I’m gone. Don’t you know he won’t?”

Yes, he seemed to know and she looked pleased with him and got up to leave him with the memory of it.

“Wait a minute,” said he. “We’re never alone. It’s Ann, I suppose, and my being so confounded clumsy, too. Do you know I haven’t kissed you yet?”

“Haven’t you?” said she. “You’ve set me crying over it anyway. Not over not being kissed. Only I live with young things, don’t you see? some of ’em just out of the shell, and they make me feel like everybody’s aunt. Who’d want to kiss me? That’s what I’m crying for. Only the parson—he’d kiss me anyway. It’s his business to.”

“You’re not my aunt,” said Anthony. “Hannah, do you really like me as the letter said?”

“Maybe not quite in the same way,” said she. “But you’re a dear, Anthony, and I’ll kiss you good-bye.”

“Yes, because I’m going to Aunt Marjorie’s tomorrow, and God knows what I shall be when I get back.”

His arms were about her and her hands on his shoulders, and they kissed like lovers, perhaps careful to kiss acceptably, and but once. She drew herself away and went back to the house, he following, but with no talk. And next morning she was not at the breakfast table, and he told Parson Willoughby she had gone to her Aunt Marjorie’s and would be back at night; and the parson looked at his plate and said nothing.

When Hannah found herself at the door of the house where Anthony had lived so long and her letters had come to find him, she had forbidden her mind to wonder whether its present adventure were wise or even decent. The house looked familiar enough, as indeed it might because Anthony had, on first going there, sent her its photograph, and it seemed, in an inevitable way, to be a figure in the web of life. It belonged to his past and to hers also, and now she had to find out what it thought about the future and whether she was to have a share in that. Her heart grew very grave over it: for what we call hearts do seem to pause and wonder, equally with the mind. It failed her a little, and yet she knew it would be sure to carry on: The house was of an uninteresting gray, of no distinguished period, and her casual eye noted that it needed paint. A veranda ran around the three sides visible from the street, the one on the front continuing at the second story. The floors were worn by long usage from many feet, and the square pillars had a shabby look as if from nondescript banging when varieties of articles were brought in, all heavy enough to make a dint. It looked, in the main, as if “boys” had lodged there and carried on the trampling activities of academic life. That would be before Anthony came; and when Mrs. Holland had wanted a quieter house for Rose she had perhaps been too absorbed in the daily problems of it all to notice the battered aspect of the place or even afford to touch it up.

Hannah knocked lightly and then stepped back to look up at the second story veranda where Rose must have lain on her couch and watched the game the boys had played for her. It seemed as if she had been looking about her a long time, but finally there was a brisk step within and Mrs. Holland opened the door. Hannah, in her forecasting mind, knew her at once: a somewhat heavy but lightly moving woman with an inquiring look as if she were used to interruptions and liked to get them over as soon as possible and go on with other things. She was of medium height, but she had a dignity which was not heavy, perhaps because of her light-footedness, and her bright blue eyes had done a good deal of smiling. This was apparent from the lines about them, etched into the plump cheeks. Yet now, when she was not for the moment being challenged either to gravity or mirth, they were serious eyes, sad eyes, as those of a mother whose daughter lay upstairs incapable of all but the life inside the brain and heart. And she was, above everything, a mother. In the instant of their meeting glance, Hannah had time to think a multitude of thoughts about her. She had suffered, she was suffering, like her daughter, all the time. She must not be disconcerted or hurt by new aspects of her daughter’s poverty in the mere simplicities of everyday life. And immediately Hannah began her “patter.” It was all ready. She had been arranging it in the train and now she stood, box in hand, and the merest conciliation of a smile on her face as if to own it was eccentric to have but one article to show, and introduced her desirable négligée. And she wished—deprecatingly—she might come in, please—for wasn’t there a sick lady who would like to see it? And at once it was alarming to her, the petition and its response, it all followed so neatly in the lines she had laid down for it. Yes, said Mrs. Holland, in a husky, sympathetic sort of voice, she herself would like to look at it.

“Come in. If it’s suitable, I’ll have my daughter see it, too. She’s a good deal of an invalid, but if—”

The rest seemed to be merged in her opening the door with a wider hospitality and, as soon as Hannah had stepped over the sill, indicating a parlor of a worn grayish tone and excusing herself to go upstairs where her daughter lay abed. Hannah did not go into the parlor. It looked too undesirable: a carpet with an age-obscured figure, a centre table—there she ceased enumerating. It might not be entirely base to stand here in the hall, having effected her entrance feloniously, but she couldn’t let herself spy on the parlor, she was so sure of hating it. And presently the hurried feet were on the stairs again and Mrs. Holland said, in her husky voice, with even a shade more warmth because this was to be a pleasure to one so destitute of the sweetest sentience of the body—its fellowship with sun and earth:

After that it was easy, so easy that Hannah was again afraid. Had some imp arranged it all for her undoing? There she was at the top of the stairs, and now at the open door of the invalid’s chamber. She went in, and before she could even speak to Rose lying back on pillows in her bed, an anxious voice came from the hall, calling Mrs. Holland’s name. It called twice and Mrs. Holland said, as if she were going to lose something very pleasant here:

She was gone, and Hannah, not speaking to the girl in the bed, went to a card table by the window and began to undo her box. She took out the négligée, shook it a little, lovingly, as if there might be folds to loosen, but knowing there weren’t because she had padded it about so tenderly, held it up by the shoulders and let the shimmering blue and silver length of it fall and ripple as she cunningly moved her hands.

Rose looked at it and she looked full at Rose. “Why,” her amazed mind said to her, “she’s a child!” Then her eyes began to tell her things. There was never anything, they told her, so white as that bed, not in the way of hospital beds which are merciless in their rigor; this was something like white lilac and cold spring flowers. Was she extravagant in her fancy? Was it because she knew Anthony must have seen it so? But Anthony was no poet, nor was she. Yet out of her sharpened apprehension she could see how the room and all its settings must appeal to him. It would talk to him of Rose. It might cry out. It might sometimes sing. One lack of balance in it—and yet of a pleasant homeliness the eye could not resent—was an addition designed for happy use: a recess thrown out near the bed, and in it a small upright piano. This, thought Hannah, was where he played to her, where he improvised accompaniments for her little songs. But her eyes went back to the bed and there on the counterpane, teaching it “a whiter hue than white,” lay, for additional wonderment, the girl’s delicate hands, painstakingly kept and all loveliness in their lax contour. She saw them with aching love, and with a pang. They had not, she knew, met the adversity of pen and ink and chalk and pencils and she remembered, from that fount of beauty, the Shakespeare even raw girls on the trail of diplomas and degrees could never spoil: “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.” Then the lightning heat of her curiosity ran up again to the face on the pillow: a rosy face with seeming health in its plump red and white. The mouth held a sweet curve in readiness. Did one still call it Cupid’s bow? The eyes were blue and large. The hair was an ordered luxuriance of bright brown, with a braid on each side, running down over the white of the counterpane and perhaps ready to fall into curls if it were let loose. “A child! a child!” thought Hannah, in what would have been a passionate despair if the heart could allow itself to lament over anything so delightful and seemingly untouched by dark anticipations. “No wonder he loves you. And he does. I see he does. How could he help it? O my God! a child!”

Her charms had not ended with her eyes and skin. She had a voice amply suited to her surprising face: low, like her mother’s, with an added thrill in it. The huskiness might come later when other things fell upon her: experience, riper age. (Yet what deep things had she not experienced, lying there in youth?) Hannah slipped on the silken bravery and it became her height and poise. She paraded through the room holding her head proudly and looking all the magnificence she could manage, and for the moment her mind ceased its admonitory chant: “You’re plain! You’re plain!”

Hannah was stunned. She had never thought of that: only to get into the house and see if he had to love her. But to be paid for her perfidy! Could the child of Parson Willoughby stoop to that? She slipped it off, so slowly and gravely that the uncalculated act had all the dignity of dramatic art. She hung it over the high back of a chair and stood before Rose, caught, tried, convicted in the courts of her own coward mind.

“Four dollars,” said she, in a small voice. “And eighty-nine cents. It’s a sale.”

“But that’s absurd,” said Rose crisply. “However—will you look in the drawer of this little stand? There’s a five dollar bill lying loose. Mother dropped it in this morning when somebody wanted her.”

The stand was close beside the bed and she turned her eyes that way. The beautiful hands couldn’t help her, but one wouldn’t have known from any flicker on her face that they had ever tried. Hannah had plucked up spirit.

“I couldn’t,” said she regretfully. “They don’t allow us. I take your name and address and you send cheque by mail.”

“Oh,” said Rose. “I see.” There was a new look on her face. She was all smiling beauty. And mischief, a trace of it? Hannah wondered, and was afraid. “Sit down a minute, won’t you? Draw up that rocker. No, a little nearer, so I can look at you.” This sounded commonplace enough and again Hannah was emboldened. Again she believed in luck. If there was intention in what seemed the wanton happenings of life, as Parson Willoughby had told her, this was intended. She had resolved upon seeing the woman Anthony loved, and here they were, alone. She drew up the rocker and sat down. “What made you come,” said Rose.

“Yes,” said Rose, as cool as Siloam’s shady rill. This was the confused echo in Hannah’s mind. Father was always talking about Siloam and its shady rill. “Did he send you?” She broke into a little amused laugh; yet not wholly amused, except in a way of carrying on the talk, and Hannah began to see that she, too, was put about by the strangeness suddenly sprung up between them. “Now don’t say ‘Did who send me?’ ” cautioned Rose, still lightly, though with a clear intent. “Just to put it off. Anthony. Yes, I mean Anthony. Did he send you here to see me—to tell me something? They’re always saving me,” said she, with a fleeting bitterness of which her child’s face gave no warning. “Because I’m sick. They don’t see I can bear anything but not knowing. If anything’s happened, I mean.” Then she did break slightly, not in the expression of her face, but in her voice. “Has anything happened to him?” she asked. She was a little outside her bright control. “Is he sick? Is he—”

There she stopped and her hands were shaking. Instantly Hannah was herself, and calm, because this was youth, no older in its apprehensions than the girls who came to her in her daily work, putting a case, asking advice, but really to hear themselves stating it aloud, to find their inward passion answering it.

“No, he’s as well as any man could be who sits all day and ’way into the night making love to an old minister and getting wireless from heaven and hell. But what makes you think you know who I am?”

The girl recalled herself. She smiled a little with that look which is neither wholly of one emotion or its foil, the face a playground to that complexity when tears are ready at their impetuous fount, but are not allowed. They haven’t the right of way. Rose knew all about tears, but she was a gallant creature, chained there to her rock, and she could manage them.

“Because I know,” said she. “You’re Hannah Willoughby. Go out into the hall, my dear, turn to your right and you’ll find yourself in a long passageway. You’ll see a shabby door with a knocker—I know it’s shabby because it sticks like everything else in this old house—mother’s too hard worked—she can’t get time—and I’ve heard him kick it, over and over again. Open the door—be pleasant with it and push down the latch—you won’t have to kick—and you’ll see a great big room, all books, and your picture on the desk.”

“His room!” said Hannah, before she could warn herself. And her picture on the desk! But he’d had to bring it into this room for Rose to know there was a picture. And did he say to her: “I keep it on my desk?” But she must answer.

“All that way?” asked Rose. If she was satirical, it was gently so, the merest tinge in a voice well practised in the softer implications. No hard hitting, whatever you may feel! It might hurt, and if you’re hurt all day long yourself, you grow shy of roughness. “No, perhaps it isn’t so very far. All places are far, to me. Did he send you?”

“Oh, no,” said Hannah. “I told him I was off to the South Pole or somewhere—I didn’t get much farther than that—and I’d be back tonight.”

“I know,” said Rose. “You wanted to see where he lived—visualize it—mother, too, and me. But one thing I don’t understand.” Her fine decisive brows came together. “The négligée. I don’t understand that.”

“Oh,” said Hannah lightly, “it isn’t a négligée. It’s a stage property, a pretext, a subterfuge. I did want to see you—though now it seems queer—a little silly—a little presuming—and the amount of it is I crammed the thing into a box and—don’t you see?”

The face that seemed the face of a child had become mature and grave. But the child was not displeased. Possibly it looked to her like making a great thing out of little. For it was a small thing for people with strong back and legs to come even long distances to call. That was the way the present world amused itself, all speed and talk and action.

“Oh, but I’m glad to see you,” she said. She had dismissed all doubt, whatever there had been, at least until the next of her quiet hours for thinking things over. “I’ve tried to imagine you, but I wasn’t right. You’re not the same.”

“How was I?” Hannah asked, in humility, because of course any woman would envisage another from the random things she had snatched out of the man’s mind. And of what sort were they, blowing round there in Anthony’s mind?

“I can’t quite say,” said Rose. Yet she was thinking back and forth and trying hard. “One thing: you were very strong.”

If that was what he said, it wasn’t fair. It was unmerciful. He shouldn’t have brought the picture of a striding Amazon to this couch of little ease.

“No, your character, your mind. It always discouraged me, because I saw you bearing things—hard things—heroic, and not being downed.”

That was best, Hannah decided, in a quick rush for safety, best for them all. It was her part: the tougher fibre that could bear anything. Well, she would bear anything. She really would; she needn’t always lie because she had lied today. But there was “something too much of this.” It was getting dangerous.

“Oh, no! no!” cried Rose. She was distressed. “Why, you’ve just come. There are lots of things. I lie here and think of them—and you’re the only one that knows.”

“No, my dear,” said Hannah, smiling at her and wondering how you looked when you were so strong you couldn’t be downed. “I don’t know. I’m not the kind that knows. You are. You’re imaginative. I’m literal. My father’s imaginative, too. You’d think the world of him. Anthony’ll tell you all about him when he comes back. I go to bed and after I’ve been asleep hours I hear them down there in the study, pounding away about the universe and the probable age of man.”

“You do?” said Rose, incredulously. But was she pleased? “I shouldn’t. I never’d go to bed. You wouldn’t either if you knew what bed can be. When it gets hold of you, I mean. Do you truly go to bed?”

“Yes,” said Hannah, “and in the morning they let me dust the study. But that doesn’t interrupt their celestial gossiping.”

“They never think of anything,” said Hannah. “Especially what’s under their noses. They’re too busy bounding the universe—and finding they can’t—but not giving it up, you know, not for a minute. Only taking something different. Striding off from pole to pole. Talk of discovering the South Pole! They’d discover a gold mine under the study table if you’d let them alone and not sweep and dust. Only they wouldn’t know it till they’d banged into it. Gold mines are the least they want.”

She was conscious of her own excitement, that rising tide which is the fun of finding yourself apparently fascinating to somebody who has fascinated you. But Rose was, of a sudden, serious. She seemed about to put a question, and yet to hesitate. It was one she often asked herself when she lay in her wakeful bed at night; and now it was plain to her that Hannah was the only one to answer it. Yes, she would ask it. Only stupidity could wilfully invite the clamor of more wakeful nights.

“How does he seem to you,” she said slowly, “after so long a time? It is a long time, isn’t it? over three years.”

Hannah’s heart missed its beat and she put her hand to it in the gesture we have adopted as a phrase of our silent counsel to it: “Don’t fail me. Go on beating, little faithful one. Remember my thick walls are round you. They’ll keep you warm and tight.” She spoke, steadily and with what seemed a quiet interest.

“Well,” said Rose, “I suppose I mean whether he’s done more than you thought he would, or less. Whether he’s changed a lot—and how.”

“As to that,” said Hannah, temporizing, “he never was like anybody else.”

“He wasn’t, was he?” said Rose, eagerly. “I know he isn’t now. But what was he then?”

“I wonder,” said Hannah, “if I can think.” She was feeling her way prudently, but meaning to tell no lies. This was too serious. Besides, the truth would serve. “You know he never could be expected to make his way in this sort of world we’ve got now. Perhaps not in any world short of heaven. He’s no idea of diplomacy, and he’s against a lot of things and hasn’t any hesitation in saying so. My father, now! He’s against most of the tommy-rot we call civilization, but he doesn’t offend people. Though that’s because his heart is somewhere else.”

That was where her own heart was, with the beloved one, and it was where Rose was straining forward to be with the one man they both loved. But father! that was another matter. Again there was but one answer, and she made it.

“I see,” said Rose, as if it were a grave commonplace and not a matter for surprise. “You don’t mean heaven? Oh, what do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Hannah, “my father’s a sort of stranger here. He can’t be happy. Who could, in his place? a country parson among people just prosperous enough never to think beyond it so long as they’ve got radio and a car. And with every year he’s retreated further and further into the past. The mountains stand up good and large there, you know. And you said ‘heaven.’ That’s it actually: only it’s the heaven over Galilee—and the one prophesied.”

“No,” said Rose sadly. “Anthony never’d be like that. I often think he could be—if he could!”

“But how can he be?” said Hannah, furious with a world at odds with him. “Anthony’s a fighter. He hates present conditions. He’s ashamed of settling down in them and cramming boys for a degree. I wish he’d been a mathematician and taught things that are so. Or seem to be: anyway, so far as we can judge, two and two do make what we call four, now don’t they? But philosophy and literature, both of ’em! Just now they’re like a temperature chart with the peaks running over the top, they’re so definite and so easy—and so innocent looking! You’d think they were the last word of God, and all the literal and the unimaginative do think so. And Anthony’s got to join the chorus and sing it in their key because there’ll be an awful discord if he doesn’t and maybe they’ll stop singing, just as it was with my father. Though you don’t know about that. And Anthony’s an honest child and hates it all like poison. Don’t laugh. It’s nice to talk to you. That’s why I can’t stop. Sometimes people look bored. But you’re lovely. You’re not bored—yet—or you’re clever as the mischief and you hide it.”

“Oh, no! no!” said Rose. “But you don’t mean he only half believes in things and teaches them to get a living.”

“No,” said Hannah. “Not that. Only this age is transitional, don’t you see? everything a mess. But he thinks he’s got to teach it as if it was all God’s truth as people used to think about things, and he isn’t clever enough to separate the good grain from the bad, behind the scenes, you know, and then feed out the good. I got that from my father, about the good grain and bad. Perhaps he said chaff. I heard him saying it to Anthony. And Anthony took it like a lamb. Don’t hate me, Rose.”

“Hate you?” said Rose. She was even lovelier when she laughed. “You’re the nicest thing I ever saw. I thought you wanted him to make good and he knew he couldn’t and that’s why—”

“Of course,” said Rose, quickly as if she were overcome by it and had to say it at once or not at all. “Of course! I see. I mean—you love him—terribly.”

“I love no man,” said she, as loftily as she could, “beyond what he wants me to.” Then, remembering father and his quotations, she had resort to Shakespeare. “ ‘No, nor woman neither.’ ”

Rose stared at her as if it meant life and death to get to the bottom of it all. Said she:

“Oh, yes, I am—happy enough,” said Hannah. “Now I am, anyway. It’s all plain sailing. It’s fog that rattles me—not knowing, not seeing an inch ahead.”

“I can understand that, too,” said Rose quietly, “though of course it’s the other way about. I know exactly what’s ahead. For me, I mean.”

Were they coming to that also? were they to talk about it as if it weren’t so monstrous a fate it ought to be hidden except at those moments of gay bravado when some practical need might challenge it to seem lighter than it was, one of the ways that nature takes to steady us? She hoped it wasn’t to be even recognized. No matter what possibility of friendship might exist between them, this was too violent an approach. If Rose must speak of her crippled state let it be to Anthony who loved her, not to an unknown Hannah who might look all kinds of things to her after she was gone. Rose may have thought so too, for she flushed a little deeper and said, with no less warmth but not the headlong impetus of that other speech:

“It isn’t possible you’re here. I can’t believe it. And I’d wondered so!”

“Your clock!” said Hannah. “Is that what time it is? My train’s in twenty minutes. I must be off.”

“Oh, but you can’t,” said Rose. Her body moved a little, ineffectually. It wanted to rise up in bed, lay hands on her and constrain her into staying. “You must see my mother. You must spend the night. I haven’t said any of the things I want to say.”

“Yes, you’ve said everything,” said Hannah. She was standing now. “I shouldn’t know any more about you if I stayed till Christmas. You’re lovely, your body and your soul. And you could make anyone—anyone that loved you—you could make him happy till the end of time.”

“No! no!” cried Rose. There was horror in her voice. There were remembered agonies. One could see, at that moment, the hidden side of the flimsy draperies hung about her fleshly prison. “Don’t you know what I am? If he didn’t tell you, don’t you see?”

Hannah dropped down by the bedside and kissed the white hand nearest her. She was talking fast, in a very secret voice:

“I’m going to say what my father would. He’d tell you God has made you very beautiful, soul and body, but above all you mustn’t forget your soul. How it shines out. How you’re a creature of light and anybody that lived near you would be—oh!” said Hannah ineffectually. She came to her feet. “He’d be the luckiest dog alive. Now, the négligée! It’s a present—dear, kind négligée that helped me in here! Tell your mother anything you like. Though not too much! Better be conventional, if you can, a little about Anthony and Bridgnorth, but nothing much about me. I leave it to your invention. A girl who can make up songs and follow a ball game! Good-bye, dear darling child! If ever you get into deep water and can’t swim for it, tell Anthony to fetch my father over here and—well, I don’t know what he’ll do, but he’ll come anyway and roll the waters back and you’ll go through dryshod. Good-bye.”

She was gone and running down the stairs. Rose called: “Come back!” and her mother ran out of the dining-room where she was talking with a delayed workman and hurried up the stairs.

“Oh, what are you here for?” Rose cried out to her. “Look down the street. Scream at her. Tell her to come back.”

It was after breakfast of that same day. The parson, looking a little whimsical, went on to the study and Anthony followed him.

No, Anthony thought it was a good morning to stay in. Pretty nearly as good as the arbor anyway. The leaves at that window! House looked north and south didn’t it, just as a house ought to? They settled down at the table and began talking where they left off, and it was precisely like old cronies who’d done it long enough to have habits. When the parson, in the warmth of controversy, let his pipe go out, Anthony gravely provided him with a match as if he might not have remembered the usages of smoke, and when ten o’clock struck they were still arguing and agreeing, in great contentment. Then something happened. A noise, a little busy interfering noise, came from the floor above and the parson stopped on a word and listened. He was frozen to attention. His hand on the table lay still. Anthony was shocked at the mysterious change in him.

“What is it?” he asked, beginning to listen and even looking about at the door as if something hostile might be there. “What is it, sir?”

“It’s only—” he said, and was perhaps the more surprised at not feeling able to go on. He laughed a little.

“Very foolish,” said he. “I suppose I’ve heard it nearly every day for years. It’s in that little room upstairs.”

“Yes,” said the parson quietly, “it’s a sewing machine, in that little room. They call it a sewing room. Of course I knew what it was, but for the moment it seemed—No, I don’t know how it seemed. Celestia’s at it, of course, but for a minute I thought—”

Then he went back to their tapestry weaving of dogma and the mended stitches in it, repairing the gaps of time and unbelief; but his inmost self, that which couldn’t be at once repressed when it felt the call of natural shrinkings and desires, told him the sewing machine had conjured up the pervading presence of his wife whose going had left the house submerged in this delicious calm. Did he mind the little dominating whirr? By no means: but he had been at peace with his freed spirit, and it reminded him that peace would not always last. He had known that, of course, though he had been too decent to recognize it, and it took this little busy drudge, with its self-important energy, to break in upon him and surprise him into realizing he had not known—he had not let himself know—that something in him rebelled against that other energy which had filled the house, had almost filled the town until the town had escaped from it, not knowing it escaped, but only wanting so much to indulge the common madness of desire to “go some place” that it had done well for itself and run away.

“No,” he said. “It reminded me, that’s all. I’ve rather got Ann on my mind, now Hannah’s gone, and if Celestia’s sewing—I’ll go up and see.”

He went up to the little room, and the intermittent voice of the machine growing louder as he went, it seemed more strangely evident that mother should be there. And he wanted her to be there, only it was more restful to have her gone. There were indecencies of thought, he had time to recognize, as he went up the stairs. Why was he a priest of God if he was to live a sheltered life and bathe himself in the cold, clear waters of scholarship when he ought to be hungry and sleepless and dirty, if that had to be, and among the beasts at Ephesus? And how had he the face to make a prayerful issue of it, this case of Ann and her poor spoiled life, and do nothing of himself to mend it for her? He was at the door of the little room and there they were, Ann at the sewing machine and Celestia sitting beside her, putting out a competent trained hand, at moments, and telling her to do thus and so. And he could see that Ann, though she had never used a sewing machine, was doing very well. She must have known the nature of machinery, for she was gentle with it and waited to be told. Celestia looked up and saw him.

Ann turned about in her chair and sat looking at him, but she was absorbed and, for the first time, more interested in this new enchantment than in him. The parson was ashamed and humbled. It looked to him a beautiful scene. Here was Celestia bringing her the service of a humble knowledge—and he had only prayed. But that’s it, he thought. That’s the answer. Celestia’s the answer, not theology.

“I did hear it,” he said, “and it reminded me, and I thought I’d come up and see what you were about and perhaps—” and now that Ann’s brief excitement had cooled a little and she was paler, she looked dulled out and he saw there’d been enough sewing for the moment. Hannah was clever about that. When Ann waked up, she did not let her stay awake too long.

“Celestia,” said he, “it’s going to be a dull day for us, now we’re left alone. We’ll go for a ride, if Mr. West will take us. Can you manage it?”

And Celestia could. “Certain, sir!” she said. And again there was expectation on the face of Ann.

When, about the middle of the evening, Hannah walked into her father’s house, it looked a house very much at ease. There was a light in the dining-room and she found her own place set. The parlor had that dusky pleasantness which is inseparable from summer, the unseen presence of the outer world. Standing there by the door, she wondered what made it so exciting, this late summer dusk. Anthony was at the piano. He had struck some announcing chords and now he was playing “Eden Isle.” At the end of it, there was father’s voice from the great winged chair near the piano.

“Yes,” said Anthony. “Though she’d laugh at me for telling. I think the words are good—better than the tune. She makes nothing of words. Says they come to her.”

Hannah could not bring herself to listen while they went on about Anthony’s friend. She thought she had more immediate knowledge of her than Anthony himself. His would be all a matter of fact: for what did he know about the woman’s hidden love for him? She fell back on her old formula, “I’m cleverer than you!” And she took off her hat and went in to them.

“Why!” said Anthony, turning his head and then getting up to meet her. “Why, it’s you!”

He looked pleased, on the whole, and she wanted to say: “Yes, and I’ve seen Rose.”

But father was speaking quietly. There was no reproach in his voice: only a little amusement and much tenderness.

Hannah went over to him and laid her hand on his shoulder. He would have risen, but the hand bade him sit at ease.

“Go on,” said she, “both of you, just as you were going. And where’s Ann?”

“Ann,” said her father, putting up his hand and laying it on her detaining one, “Ann is in the kitchen with Celestia. And we’ve been out in the car, the four of us, and up to the top of Jimson’s Hill and we ate our lunch there, and Ann looked off over the miles and miles you get on a clear day like this and didn’t say anything. But Celestia said: ‘Do you think that’s the sea?’ The Ridge, you know. It was bright blue. I should have thought it was myself, if I hadn’t known. And I told her it wasn’t, and asked her if she liked the sea, for she could go some day, and then she broke all up and said: ‘No! no! not the sea!’ Has anybody near her been drowned, do you think?”

“O Father! Father!” said Hannah. “What a queer world it is! What a strange, beautiful, awful world! But how did you dare to take Ann within sight of the Ridge? Didn’t you think she must remember what was on the other side, in that dark hollow? It’s her old home, you know, the one she ran away from.”

“Yes,” he said, “and that’s why I thought it might be well to take her there and let her see it from this quarter and how beautiful it was, and begin to face the thought of it. Maybe I was wrong, but I think if I had been Celestia would have told me. She seemed to know exactly what to do. When they sat there sewing together, Ann looked happy, actually happy, just as Anthony does with his car. A machine! What is there in a machine? But there’s something—or there was for her.”

“Yes, very happily. And I’ve seen her at her needle and she loves that, too. That’s her bent, Hannah. Celestia saw it was. I should have been a hundred years in finding it out, God help me!”

He looked so humble over it that she had one of her moments of sorrow for him, very like those she had for Anthony. Why weren’t they both lunging about the world like rough-maned animals, bent on what they wanted and striding over the necks of other animals to get it? Yet what did they want? Perhaps only the will of God: that it should be done, and let “come what come may.”

“Well,” said she, “if its sewing she likes, that’s easy enough. I could keep her at it all day at the Normal. The linen department’s been in a shocking state for over a year, and me getting in casual women to mend! Now you sit down again, the two of you—did you know, Parson, you’re very much alike?—and I’ll have a bit of supper and we’ll sing. Oh, you’ve got my hat, Anthony! Hang it up in the hall, will you, or throw it on the table. Any old place.”

She saw them glance at her as if her flightiness rang false to them, and she wanted to call out: “Yes, yes, it’s Rose. I’ve been talking with her. Up to the sky we went, far as we could. Very cloudy up there, very cold, no place for dear parsons and mad Anthonys!” Before going upstairs she looked into the kitchen, to see them as they were without her. Celestia was at her kneading. She would never use the bread mixer, saying she “couldn’t very well” and that she had “learned the old way.” Ann was under the light, knitting white cotton into the shape known as a shell, a work of infinitude: for it took untold numbers of them to make a quilt. It was a peaceful scene and Hannah, grown humble by having that day gambled for her lover and by no means won, was grateful because Celestia brightened at the sight of her.

“Let me get my hands out o’ this,” said Celestia. “You’ll want a cup o’ tea.”

“No,” said Hannah, “no tea. Anything you had left. That’s nice, Ann, what you’re doing. How fast you knit!”

“It’s for that old quilt up in the shed chamber,” said Celestia. She was going back and forth, collecting dishes for a tray. “The one your great-aunt never finished. Your mother showed it to me. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“No,” said Hannah. “I’d love to have it finished. Come in to the dining-room, Ann, and see me eat my supper. Couldn’t you have some more?”

Ann laid her knitting in the little basket Celestia had brought her, and stood for a moment holding it. Then she went up to Hannah and spoke in a low voice, not shyly, but with a troubled air, as if she might be wrong and wanted to be told. And she looked toward the door, for she knew where Parson Willoughby was and that he must not hear.

“I want you to tell me.” But there she stopped, either to put her question reasonably or because she was afraid of it. She caught her breath and hurried on: “Is he my father?”

Hannah, too, was afraid. Was this what the Ridge had done? Perhaps she ought to tell her as much as her wits would bear. Father had said she must face the Ridge, but could she face everything? As to herself, she had started out, that morning, on her desperate quest, ready to double and turn if the way proved impossible, and do as best she could with her own shame over it. But suddenly she was different. Things began to challenge her. Truth itself stood in the way, arms barred against her. Was it not to be told? But was she the one to tell it? Should she send her to the parson himself? He would have the insight of those who undertake the embassy between man and the unseen which is God. But in the delay of getting to him and putting her question, might not the troubled surface of the girl’s mind glaze over again, when the frost of denial struck and chilled it. No, she herself must answer. Ann stood there holding the little basket to her body, like a child given a precious thing to guard, and looked about beseechingly as if, though she did not answer, some one might come who would. Hannah laid a hand on hers, the free hand hanging at her side.

“No, dear,” said she. “Not your real father. He died and went to heaven. The one in there”—she could not in mercy call him her own father. How rich she seemed to herself and Ann how poor!—“he is your father in the church, the one God gave you to help you and pray for you. And when you go to heaven, your earthly father will find you and he’ll know how sick you’ve been, and you’ll all three be together—and good friends.”

It sounded very childish to her, but though it was childish, was it less than right? Ann began shaking all over her body, first her arms and then her trembling lips biting on words, perhaps another question. Hannah had always been afraid of coming too near her, she seemed so aloof in the strangeness of her hidden mind; but now she put her arms about her and said, she did not quite know what. The words were words love has always known for his, only now they were not those of childish comforting or persuasion. They were the litany of the spirit between what suffers and what has itself learned what suffering is—and is helpless and sorry. There, too, in a minute, was Celestia, the cup-bearer, letting Ann keep her basket but freeing the other hand from Hannah and pressing into it a kitchen mug that wouldn’t be likely to break if you dropped it, however you might tremble. And it was full of hot milk. How did she have time, thought Hannah wonderingly, to get things hot before you knew you needed them?

“Drink it,” said Celestia, in her conclusive voice, as rich and round as Demeter’s when she calls the buds to bloom. “We had supper early. Miss Hannah, you let go of her, please. She can just lean on you, but le’s not make her. You drink it, Ann.”

She had called her Ann! A bond had been made, a link clasped into another link. Convention and soul weariness had kissed each other, and Ann drank and gave back the cup.

“What if you should have supper now,” said Celestia to Hannah, in the most reasonable of her voices, and Ann gave a little start, looked, bewildered, at her basket and somehow entered into another phase of the life they were building up before her. It was like a house. It had rooms in it. But could the rooms be lived in?

Ann did not go into the dining-room. She sat down again under the light and took out her work, but only to lay it back in the basket.

“That’s right,” said Celestia, stopping a moment in her ordered progress about the room. “I wouldn’t do any more. They’ll be calling us to sing and she’s terrible tired, Miss Hannah is, being away all day. More tired than common somehow, seems to me. We can sing good and hard and get it over, and the sooner we’re in our beds the better. I’m tired myself, that long ride. Ain’t you?”

But if Ann was listening, she did not answer and the rest of the evening went off as Celestia had foreseen. They sang a little while. Ann sat by, and when the parson blessed them, she looked at him in a questioning way and Hannah wondered what she was thinking or whether the reality of things had robbed her of her fictitious comfort and she could not think at all.

Days went by before Hannah felt brave enough to tell the parson what she found when she ran away to Rose, or before he told her she was forgiven for being a little sinner. For they were all watching Ann. She was silent most of the time, and brooding, and she had laid the half-knit shell aside. Once when Hannah went into her room in the morning to tell her there was a thinner dress waiting for her, she found her standing before the dressing table, her hand on a little pile of paper slips like those she had been used to tearing at Bucksford when she was “out of her mind.” Hearing a step, she took her hand from them and turned about, though still standing there, perhaps to hide them. But Hannah spoke at once, ignoring them:

“I found a blue dress you could wear. Let’s slip it on and see what we think. Celestia’s been basting it in by guess, and I believe it’s going to be rather nice. I want to see you in something different. That’s the worst of being sick. You have to begin to feel different, and when you do—well, that’s the first step, isn’t it?”

All platitudes, thought Hannah, like most benevolent patter! But she stood there with the dress over her arm and Ann looked at her. The dress she did not seem to consider, by a glance. But she spoke:

“Just slip off your dress, won’t you,” said Hannah. “We’ll try this on. No, you look well enough. And pretty, when you have a little color. That’s what made me think of it, the blue is so nice for your eyes. Yes, it’ll have to be a little shorter on the side. I’ll put in a pin.”

Was Ann interested? It was impossible to tell. She did run her hand down over the silk and it was pleasing to the touch. But she had not been fully answered.

“No,” said Hannah. “But you’ve been sick, you know, and you’re getting well. Father prays for you. Did you know that? He prays for you to be well.”

“Oh, we needn’t call it that,” said Hannah, in a rush. It was the pace at which she had to take these crises she couldn’t govern. “Not sick. Unhappy. Your father’s death—that was a great shock to you. Perhaps you had other troubles you didn’t tell. You shut them up inside you and they hurt like the very mischief. Troubles do. They’re like a pin you can’t get out. If you’d known father then—that father in there, yours, mine, everybody’s because he’s sorry for everybody—he’d have told you what to do. He’d have said you hadn’t lost the ones you lost so long as you kept on loving ’em. That’s his medicine for everything—love—love.”

Did it waken anything she remembered, or was it only the tyranny of a word? Hannah knew what the next step would be: that is, if father had been there to take it. But could she venture it, she who was only, as it might be, his almoner? No, probably not. There were things father could say because he had the professional habit. That was the beauty of ritual. You dared the most majestic images and they came out quite simple, in the ways of life. But she couldn’t meddle with them. She was shy before father’s commonplace: the simple, old, unbounded love of God.

Ann said no more. She smoothed the gently answering silk and looked down at it musingly; but whether she thought of dyes and fibres the human creature has created to clothe himself withal or of God, Who is Love, Hannah, humbled and discouraged, did not know. And that same night, after quite a wild singing of militant songs—and by chance, no mention of Rose—Hannah ran down to her father’s door and found him filling his pipe. He looked up at her with what she had begun to think his intimate look, only for her.

“Want me?” he asked. “Or Anthony? He’s out on the porch. I was going to have a pipe with him.”

“No,” said Hannah, “I don’t want you tonight, not especially. But soon. I must see you soon. He’ll be talking about going, and I must know what to do. Father, I went, I saw her, and it all fitted in. Father, she’s lovely.”

“Told him I saw her? No, nor ever shall, either in this world or any other. It’s my secret—and hers. I didn’t ask her not to tell. But she won’t. You’ll see.”

He had lighted his pipe. It was drawing finely, but it had no charm to clarify his thoughts on human suffering. Now he got up from his chair and came round the table to her where she stood all alive with health and the passion that draws blood into the cheek and darkens the telltale iris of the eye.

“Yes, Father, yes,” said Hannah. “I’ll keep it secret to my dying day. And after: for what’s the use of keeping things till then, as if that’s the end of it? And you say it isn’t the end. That’s what you’ve told me, Parson, haven’t you?”

He was looking down in thought, as if tempted to tell her something else, of grave import, and wondering if he should.

“Hannah,” said he, “I’ve been thinking. About men and women and their marrying. I suppose really I was thinking about you, and I wrote it down in what I call my journal. I could do it better so. I said what I couldn’t say by word of mouth. But I’ll tell you one thing, now. If you’re going to marry Anthony, don’t begin by lying to him. This going to see Rose and making cause with her against him! Don’t do it.”

Hannah was suddenly in great spirits, chiefly because she saw herself beginning an untried way and did not know whether it led through pain to ease of mind or, after a while, to death. And how natural, to couple death and love! Love and death! At moments of apprehension they are as closely linked as death and sleep. But she answered trivially because small floating things were all she found to catch at in her mind.

“Don’t you ever deceive mother? Not in big things. Little things. The way you feel inside, and the way you want her to think you feel? Don’t you keep anything from her, ever?”

He stood looking at her for a long moment, perhaps considering how to answer, and suddenly she found him strange, haggard, the victim of old enchantments, the survivor of old wars.

She herself may have looked stricken. She thought that afterward, for she had felt so. Her eyes were first to drop, and he got back his habit of composure.

“There!” said he. “My pipe’s out. Anthony’s got his going, full blast. Smell it? Well, he’s waiting. Want to come?”

She wanted something else, wanted it beyond measure, but after the effect of her question she hardly dared ask for it.

“I suppose,” he said, “that’s what I hoped I could do: show it to you instead of talking. I don’t know how to talk any more. I don’t know how I’ve talked so much.”

“But you do know,” said she. “You talk beautifully. It’s your profession. It’s expected of you.”

“That’s it,” said he, drily. “Well, never mind. The thing is in that drawer.”

Hannah laughed out. She was at ease again. They had got back to childish things such as were so when she was born. In that little drawer at the right had been the great key to the church, and she could look back to the time when she thought there was no other key and that when anybody wanted to get in to sweep, or dust the pulpit, they had to ask father for it. But her pleasure was short-lived. What must it be recalling to him, for whom the little church had been another home and now was strangely different?

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I was going to give it back, but, for some reason, they wouldn’t take it. I dare say I looked—some way. Well, the journal’s in there, first thing you see. When you’ve done with it, put it back as it was. Good night, darling. You won’t be down again?”

She shook her head. When had he called her darling? And now she had surprised him into lending the record of his life to her and gone away to Anthony, leaving her to open it at her will. Was mother there in it, mother who was never mentioned between them save in the scrupulous honor of his courtesy? No, that couldn’t be. Hannah was aware of his fine secrecies. But when next morning Parson Willoughby opened the drawer, the leaves of the journal lay there as he had left them, and he wondered whether she had deferred her reading and, half guiltily, took them out and really hid them this time, in another place. And he was the more at ease as Hannah, knowing the solitary habit of his mind, was sure he would be and unless he asked her, would not tell.

Now it was after breakfast and the day seemed to be settling down as usual: nothing to fret about so far, no wakening of that terror which is hiding behind the accustomed figures of daily life and saying, “No, you needn’t start up and listen. We’re not going to open on you yet.” Ann was with Celestia, wiping dishes. Anthony, yellow-pale and fagged in sheer fright because he was not sure of mastering his uneasy task, waited for Hannah and, when she came along from the kitchen, seized her hand and said, with a fierceness which was not for her but all those threatening phantasms which are the enemies of life:

“I’m going tomorrow. I’ve promised, do you see?” Had he promised it to Rose? “You must tell me now.”

It was a strange moment, everyday life at its most ordinary, and yet about it a certain unreality which is of the stage. But real or not, it must be acted plausibly, and above all with composure. She must not only be calm, to keep all her bodily forces ready, but she must look so. He was not to carry away with him the memory of a distraught woman whom he had unhappily brought to the tragedy of the heartbreak known of old. The faces of women known in story, Medusa, Phaedra, rose up before her, their mouths square-opened on lament, and she shook herself, thinking: “This won’t do. In a minute, shall I, too, begin to scream?”

“No,” said she, with a mildness that surprised and heartened her. Could she really do it as well as this? “No, not cold. It’s going to be warm, isn’t it? See the sun there on the floor. Oh, yes, Anthony! I’ll tell you. But not now. You sit down with your pipe and let me speak to father a minute. I’ll come back.”

She went into the study and shut the door, but Anthony did not go on to the porch as she thought he would. He went into the parlor and presently she heard him at the piano, striking the meditative chords that seemed to make some outlet for his troubled mind. She stood a moment by the table, listening.

He was finishing a letter, and her eyes followed his hand in the clear signature: “With love, my dear. David.”

“It came yesterday. Read it when you can. I’ve been writing to her, just about the house, but I shall have to take hers up later when I’ve talked with you. I can slip in a line at the end. What are you listening to?”

“His playing,” said she. “No, it’s not ‘Eden Isle.’ I thought it would be. I was afraid—”

He sat looking at her, frowning, in what mood she could not guess. But she troubled him.

“Sit down,” he said, and she took her chair and asked him in as ordinary a way as she could manage:

At first he hesitated. Was it best to hurry her on to what might be her own confession or delay her a little and let her get her mind back? He could see: it was not wholly there.

“Well, she talked about Uncle Henry. Went into it at length. Said they might stay on into October. The trip hadn’t done for him what they hoped and he was willing to stick it a bit longer. You see, she’s been trying to keep his mind occupied, traveling as much as he’d consent to, and he’s evidently hated it. Wants to settle down. And she’s begun to think our quiet life here might suit him rather well. She’d like him to come home with her and spend the winter. What do you say?”

“You like him,” said Hannah. “That’s the main point. He wouldn’t trouble me any more than a cat, if I were going to be here. Would he you?”

“No,” said the parson. “I’ve no objection. I like Henry. But you, my dear! you say, if you were to be here. Aren’t you going to Anthony?”

“Would you believe it?” said Hannah. She was laughing wildly. “You ask me that, and he strikes up ‘Eden Isle,’ as if your asking were the cue for it. Father, what makes us so scornful about books when they seem overwrought and theatrical? What’s so theatrical as life?”

“No,” said Hannah, “And I don’t mean to, not till tomorrow morning. If I tell him tonight—Father, I don’t see how I could live through such a night. Not with Anthony in the house! I should have to go in to him and put my head on his shoulder and make him watch it out with me. I’ll ask him to go before noon tomorrow, and I’ll tell him before he goes.”

“But what is it you’re going to tell him?” said he. “Is it that you won’t marry him?”

“Yes,” said Hannah, and she thought he looked more unhappily moved than Anthony would look.

“I suppose I do,” said she. “I suppose I love him damnably. And probably I’ve got the nerve to go through with it: marry him, I mean, and live with Rose—practically live with her, make her a sort of child to both of us, and he loving her all the time. And perhaps their never suspecting, either of them. But their spirits, Father, their spirits! You’ve got me all stirred up about spirits, and you mustn’t fail me now.” She stopped there and looked at him as if her eyes, beyond her words, besought him not to fail her. “Father, it isn’t just words and because you’re a parson? You believe in the spirit? You do believe?”

“Yes,” he said, “I believe in the spirit. And about your spirit, Hannah? How is it serving you?”

“I can’t get so far as that. But Anthony and I should be one flesh. It would be marriage. Probably we should have children, and that would be monstrous. I can’t have children by a man who loves somebody else. Oh, don’t let me talk! I mustn’t. Tell me what mother said.”

“She misses you. I’m not at home long enough to be missed.” And she went on thinking: “You don’t miss her either, and while you’re sure she’s well and busy you’d rather she’d be there than here. But then you’re not one spirit as Anthony and Rose are—and I’m not one spirit with anybody.”

He spoke without emphasis, but she knew he was determined. No gentler memory of mother who had been missing them could change her in his eyes. She was still a perfect mechanism fitted to move among the forms of things and keep them orderly. She was energy incarnate, but out of her very energy would come the ruin of Ann’s little world.

“Couldn’t we go on for a time,” said Hannah, “and see how things turn out? With Ann, I mean.”

“Oh, yes! we can go on for the present. Now about Anthony. If he’s going tomorrow, what about today?”

She had that ready for him, though it had come to her scarcely a second before. Her mind seemed to be racing, these first minutes after breakfast—last minutes, too, she thought, the last minutes of her being Hannah Willoughby as she had been for over thirty years and who now seemed like another kind of Hannah Willoughby, keeping Anthony waiting for her to give him sentence. Life or death for Anthony! Either was going to be a kind of death for him: to marry her whom he had learned to live contentedly without or bind himself to Rose and forego the earthly strife which is earthly love for a sacrifice to earthly tenderness. And to the spirit! Let none forget the spirit for which Parson Willoughby gave the voucher of his amazing certainty.

“Father,” she said, “I want today to be exciting, lively. A drive perhaps, all of us, Celestia, too. Back to noon dinner. Then in the afternoon Anthony’ll be all blown up with air—and driving!—and a little sleepy, and he and I’ll sit down and talk and talk. Unwise, perhaps, but it’s for the last time and I must have it.”

“Now why do you say that?” she asked him fretfully. “Why not poor me? I’m sending him off on a great adventure, don’t you see I am? Father, have you thought of that? It is an adventure, isn’t it? To find his girl, to say to her, ‘You’re Ariadne bound to the rock. I’m going to liberate you, or chain myself down beside you, for maybe that’s all I can do.’ And, Father, you’ve got an adventure, too: mother’s coming home.”

“Yes,” said the parson, in a grave acceptance that showed her mother coming in at the door and his kissing her in his stately and yet humble manner, and mother’s seeing him as tenderly hers and not knowing he might never have been for a minute hers, in all the years.

“But Rose and her adventure, that’s the best of it: her lover driving to her, speeding, fast, fast. Oh, what a funny world! And Celestia! but she’s given away her nightie and somehow I feel as if she wouldn’t be so lonesome now she may have begun to suspect other girls can lose their lovers, too. Perhaps it pays her to go through all those years to understand Ann and help her bear what’s come to her. Father! Father!”

She seemed to be crying and laughing together, while she held his arm with both her hands; but she was soon over it and wiping her eyes adroitly so that no one should know. “It isn’t anything,” she said. “If a girl in my dormitory behaved like this I should tell her she was hysterical and to shut up. Perhaps throw cold water on her. But it’s only because it’s all so f-f-funny.”

He smoothed her hair and told her again to be sure. She knew what she was to be sure about. She was to consider Anthony as well as herself, because she might really be sending him forth on an adventure or she might be condemning him to a long imprisonment. Long or short, it would be imprisonment, either with Rose whom he loved, because he would share her heritage of pain, or with her whom he did not love—and into that she could not go.

“Yes,” she said, “I’ll be sure. But you say your prayers for me. Say them every minute ’way down in your mind, and if we go out in the car and anybody asks you a question about the heat or having a lime fizz at a drug store, just growl out: ‘Don’t bother me now. I’m praying for Hannah.’ ”

He opened the door and Hannah went into the kitchen to tell Celestia what was toward and that she and Ann must be ready, and Ann looked up from the dishes she was piling and seemed to quicken in her movements as if she understood how pleasant it might be. After that, there was Anthony to find, and she called over the stairs and then ran down to the arbor, and saw him, not at the observance of his morning smoke but sitting, eyes down, hands hanging loosely between his knees.

He put out his hand to the table and moved it a little where it lay, as if the pipe were the thing that made him so strange and still. He got up and his lips were trembling.

“No,” said she, “it isn’t ‘Well, Hannah’ yet. It’s ‘I will, Hannah,’ you must say. We want to drive off somewhere this morning, father and I and the others, and we want you to take us. Will you?”

“Of course,” said he. “The car’s in good shape. I had her looked over yesterday. Hannah, what is it? Why can’t you tell me yes or no?”

“Anthony,” said she, “I can’t tell you yet. I couldn’t to save me. Not that I’m not sure, but it’s the last day and I want it to be everybody’s having a good time—Ann, Celestia, father, all of us. And this afternoon you and I’ll have to ourselves, to talk over the universe. And tomorrow morning, as I told you, I’ll say my say, and you’ll go off home. But nothing of that sort today! O Anthony, look at it! See what a day!”

He did look at it out of the arbor which was green and dark, to a world every minute brighter, and he seemed to come awake.

“Yes,” said Hannah. “Shortly. I’ve got beds to make. But you go down for the car. And if we’re not ready, you sit down and play something for Ann—something gay. Anthony, shouldn’t you think something jigging in her mind all the time would help time her up a bit? Nothing too emotional, nothing to distress her, but dances and little ballady things?”

Yes, he thought so, and on the way to the house they began to talk of music and Hannah’s mind seemed a little mad to her as she went upstairs to make beds and find Ann a hat conformable to the trip. Excellent pretext! what did people do who had no ritual of housekeeping to follow, no teasing little tasks to keep the mind from shrieking itself into coma, crying: “I can’t! I can’t!” What a defense—or a medicine—Ann had been to her and Celestia, now that she was more and more a part of the household life. The change in her had been a marvel; why not call it a miracle? They had thought her insane, and her cure had begun, even in this brief time. Father had cured her because he had conjured with the love of God and the spell of the words had wrought on them all. And then, smoothing down father’s spread and with one part of her mind, as always on her own benedictory “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,” she laughed softly. She seemed to have taken up a lens and looked through it into Ann’s mind and her own mind said to her: “Insane? She wasn’t insane. She was knocked silly just as I should be if I hadn’t the parson to conjure for me, with the love of God, just as Celestia would have been if her heart hadn’t been a temple of obedience where the Holy Ghost came in and kept it sweet. They put a spell on her, those dear old Raymonds. It was imprisonment. It was the grave clothes of solitary confinement they’d wrapped her in, and because she’s a gentle soul she folded them round her and slipped deeper and deeper into the underground which was her cell. She’s no more mad than I am,” said Hannah, smoothing the parson’s pillow into place and using the word that was of Shakespeare and the tragic muse. “Mad!” she repeated. “That’s what happens to all of us when we don’t keep our feet on the ground and our eyes where father’s are.”

His bed was made and his bureau orderly and the little table, with his devotional books on it, nicely dusted, and she uttered her own last line of the conjuring that was for him alone: “Bless the bed that he lies on.”

The forenoon ran away like silk, as she had planned. There were no knots and no tangles. Anthony drove like Jehu, the son of Nimshi, not toward the Ridge, this time. The parson had selected the route and perhaps he thought it too soon for Ann to look toward home again; but at last they went up a long hill where great elms lived in a solitude broken only by picnic parties on warm, windless days, and always sheep distraught by company. And nobody talked except about the incidents of the road, until they got to a vantage point where they could look out over the immediate world, and again Celestia breathed, “The sea!” and again the parson told her she should go there before long, if she liked it so much, and Anthony looked into the west and Hannah thought: “Yes, that’s where you’re going tomorrow, and Rose at the end.” If the parson thought of wind or sun or grade or gears, nobody knew; but it was he who said they were later than they’d expected to be, though they’d driven so fast, and why not have luncheon at the little inn farther on, not waiting to get home? And this they did and it went off competently, as a social occasion, even Ann, though silent, looking from one to another as they spoke, and as pleased as Cinderella at the ball. Anthony, who was quick at smoothing the way before uncertain feet, was quietly aware of her in all he said, and Hannah deftly helped him. They talked of Bucksford, and the two aunts were brought in, a little stiffly, though not with violence, and Ann listened—they could feel her listening. Was this Aunt Elsie he was quoting, her wakening face seemed to ask? Did Aunt Milly really go to the County Fair in her old bonnet, and when she remembered which it was, throw it into a cattle pen at a favorable moment and after it had been well trampled, refuse to claim it, standing bareheaded with her hair blowing and Jack, the grand-nephew, beside her, whispering: “Keep it up, Milly! keep it up! Good for you!” And Aunt Elsie, all dignity, but on the brink of tears?

“No,” said Anthony. “No, of course not. No right-minded person would. It was the summer I was tutoring Jack, and he was a rascal, you know. He told me heaps of things.”

They were not home until four, and then there was tea, and now, back inside the walls where daily habits were waiting to engulf them, their very minds grew drowsy, and it was not until after supper that Hannah found Anthony waiting for her in the hall just outside the door of the study which the parson had shut behind him, almost in their faces, as it seemed.

She was ready. She had asked for her day and he had given it to her. The rest of life was his. But she would not go down to the arbor. It was too dangerous. There in the summer dusk they would hardly be conscious of each other as Hannah and Anthony who were to have straight talk. They would be suffering intelligences lost in this huddle of discord which is earth, and wanting nothing more than to rush together for mere safety and companionship.

“With Celestia, doing dishes. Don’t you hear Celestia talking right along? Telling stories, maybe. Nice voice, isn’t it?”

On their way in, she shut the front door, for it had turned cool and she found herself shivering. There was a fire laid and she sat down at one end of the broad hearth.

He had, but kept it in his hand after the fire had shown its willingness, mechanically smoothing the chestnut-colored bowl.

She felt quite equal to it all. There were things she must tell him—though there might be only one—and things she was not to tell, because he could never remember them without misery and the sense of having fallen short. And the thing of all that must not be told was that she had seen Rose. She opened her lips and spoke:

He turned to look at her and she felt obliged to meet his look. They were both pale, as if the words had been a charge of shot and blood was draining out of them.

She expected questions, but not the one that came. Evidently he was not wasting time on her ways of getting across country.

“Beautiful,” said Hannah, knowing that, by the grace of God or the humor of the devil, she was in for it. “Anthony, she’s the most beautiful person I ever saw.”

He put his hand over his mouth and held it there, a scholar’s gesture perhaps, studious, thoughtful; but it seemed to mean that he was suppressing words, and with all his force, because they struggled desperately. She never knew what became of his pipe. Somehow it must have taken care of itself, for next day it went away with him. He looked strange to her, and she thought he was going to cry.

“Anthony,” said she, in a voice she did not know, it was so far away, “Anthony—dear—don’t.”

He took his hand down and they were composed again, two persons talking before the fire. Hannah found she was not willing to have him tormenting himself with questions. It was for her to speak.

“In the first place,” said she, “Rose is beautiful: outwardly, you know. There’s something about her lying there—well, it’s marvelous. It isn’t like being sick. It’s more as if she wasn’t made to do things like the rest of us, getting up on her feet, or lifting things. And she’s beautiful.”

“Yes, I know,” said he, in his suppressed way, “but it’s wonderful you should see it. Wonderful! How long were you there?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hannah, beginning to speak warily. “Half an hour, perhaps. Then it was time for my train.”

“No. Somebody called, and she had to be downstairs. She’s nice, too, Mrs. Holland, but just like anybody else. Rose is different.”

“Well, for one thing, she told me where your room was and asked me to open the door and look in.”

Would he say: “And did you?” Would he care whether or not this Hannah, who had seemed to love him, had loved him enough to want to know how his room looked when he was away from her? But that was not what he asked. He spoke musingly:

“Oh,” said Hannah, “it’s simple enough. Lots of people are interested in rooms. But, Anthony, there’s another thing I’ve got to tell you and that’s true.”

“Oh, yes, yes, but I mean it isn’t anything about Rose being a beauty and my seeing you there together. It’s where father comes in. Anthony, don’t you know how he’s talked to us about love and—the spirit? I saw, if a man loved Rose, it would have to be just that.”

“Oh, how can you?” he broke in hotly. “How could you see her lying there, tied to that damned bed, and come away and say a thing like that?”

She had never seen him angry, but he was furiously angry now. Perhaps that made it easier to fight roughly, passionately—yet with what calmness! It couldn’t be really anger in him, poor Anthony! Only these thoughts were perhaps too new to him. They were old tenants with her.

“It isn’t a damned bed, dear,” said she. “It’s—no, I can’t tell you what it is, but don’t you see? It’s something that doesn’t let a grain of earth come between you. I suppose it’s because it’s your business to love her and the only way you can do it is as my father says. You know what he says.”

“Yes,” said Anthony, in a dull neutrality, “I know what he says. But—” Here he asked himself a question. He had forgotten Hannah. “Do I love her?”

“Yes,” said she, as if it were the response in a ritual known to both of them. “Yes, my dear, you love her. O Anthony! Anthony!”

“What is it, my girl?” said he. “What is it, dearest girl?” He seemed to come awake, straightened himself, took one of her hands and began stroking it. “Tell me what it is?”

“It’s me,” said Hannah. “The foolish way I’ve acted. I was going to talk about you and me and get all the things said, all except the last. And leave that till morning. But now I’ve told you about seeing her and in a minute I shall tell you something else—something that frightens me—and we shall both think of it all night, and in the morning you’ll be gone.”

“The chances of life, the awful chances. Your knowing you love her—my knowing it—and our not having the plain sense to act on it before it’s too late. Before we’ve all three settled down again into life as it’s been for these last years, and then—oh, I don’t know what! Death, I guess, or growing old and not caring any more. Being like all the rest.”

“Anthony,” said she, “listen to me. I think of them because I’ve got to have everything go right—between you and Rose, you know. They’ve got to be. Anthony, we can’t let ourselves go to pieces. It’s ludicrous. It’s silly. Look at Ann. Those nice old women bejuggled her wits and that’s why we had to run off with her, to see if we could get ’em into order. And father says—I have to go back to him or I shall be daffy, too—he says it’s got to be the spirit. And I won’t have you do any sickening business of marrying me because you promised to. I want you to marry that woman over there, broken back and all. And he’ll be saying prayers for us, father will—and darling, darling, these things have got to be. There’s no other way for it. They must. Now, kiss me once. No, I don’t believe it’s wrong, for it’ll be—”

She began to laugh and he shook her as she lay against his shoulder and put his cheek to her hair and said inarticulate things she could never remember, even the sound of them. But she would finish:

“About kissing—I don’t mean anything silly—only medicinal, I guess. That’s it—medicinal.”

“It’s the thing for you to do, Anthony. Don’t you see it is? And it’s the thing you’re dying to do. Not to have tragedy. To refuse it. To see how ludicrous it would be and laugh before it begins to get its work in and drive us crazy. That’s the only way: laugh before the bug gets into your brain—for after it does, you can’t. And Rose is wise, God bless her! She’ll help you, dear. Oh, what a lot of words! Now you go in and talk to father a bit about dogma or any of those trifles that don’t matter, and make him say a prayer for you. And keep on doing it after you’re gone. It’s all understood, isn’t it? You know—you see—nobody like you, Anthony. Don’t forget that. Good night. Only”—she turned back to him—“no moping, either of us. Just knowing it had to be and so it was.”

She knocked at the study door and then went on upstairs. There she sat down on her couch outside Ann’s door and began mechanically to smooth her hair without loosening it for brush or comb. It was surprising to feel nothing and she remembered somebody’s telling her about seeing a horse that had broken his leg in the pasture but went on feeding. “Curious!” she thought. “How curious it all is! Can it be we’re duller than we think? Or does nature drug us, put our pain to sleep and let us wake up later and go mad with it? Anyway, it’s good to sleep.”

In a minute, while she was smoothing her hair, she heard Anthony coming up to his room. He had not stayed down there with father, and nothing was as she had planned. She stretched herself on her couch and shortly was asleep. At least, she was not there.

Anthony had duly knocked at the study door, but there was no answer, and he went on upstairs. Parson Willoughby had meant to leave them to their talk; but knowing what sort of talk it was to be, he was unable to fix his mind on its familiar tasks. Suddenly he realized that he was only waiting for them and that he had had enough of it. He was afraid of them, afraid to see them come in either at one in an insubstantial loyalty or still two warring natures separated by their own entangled wills. A faint pulse of memory began beating in him, and he opened the little drawer at his right hand and took out the church key. If it had been a talisman, he could not have held it closer, and the touch of it was firm and kind, a persuasive tenderness that had once had power over him and might be depended on to act again. He went quietly out of the house and, by a path through an empty building lot, which was more like an uncultivated field given over to grass and coarsely blooming weeds, to the old church he was accustomed to call his. This was the way he had always gone when seeking sanctuary, and now there was no one in sight and the oncoming dusk helped him to feel alone. He ran up the steps as if something might catch him at the last, put in the key and turned it, though not softly, for that would have been impossible. It had an obstinate way with it, and this he knew and loved, as we love an old friendliness which has to be as it is. He opened the door and went in. The comfortable magic of the place fell at once upon him and he sat down in a pew near the back, wholly subdued to prayer, though he could not manage the words of any, feeling very little and young as well as very old, and, as for praying aloud, his throat was too choked and dry. But he did kneel finally and stayed so for what seemed a long time and the angels of legend and inherited belief came and went on the ladder that is said to stretch between earth and heaven and sometimes, briefly, he could feel as if he had wished his soul into a tangible place of certainty and bliss it had never known before. And presently he could command himself and ask the questions he wanted to ask: of Infinity which, for him, was somehow at home in the little old church. The questions were not for words. They were no more than the breath of the soul, but he could put them here as nowhere else, and knew they would be answered and his remorse be stilled. For his trouble was not over Hannah and Anthony. It was for himself. He had come to be forgiven, to confess his sin of having been content with darkness and his desire to live hereafter in the light. And when the silent passion of his prayer was over, he got up from his knees and sat for a long time with the dusk growing thicker about him, but not disturbing himself to think back to the days when it seemed as if the place belonged to him in a special way: only that it was a darkness where he was at home.

Hannah, waking in the early morning, began to think everything was going to be quite easy. Good manners, the ritual of civilized life! How tremendously it counted, if you remembered what it was really for: to wrap the soul in decency—yes, some beauty—of soul behavior while it got strong enough to live naturally, not only today but all days until the end. Days! there was a marching army of them, and the army didn’t come in its full strength to overwhelm you and have done. It straggled and there were snipers. But no! this wouldn’t do. She’d got to talk, after the insane habit of the human animal bound to be making noises all the time. They’d all got to. Father played up beautifully and, she had an idea, though she never could remember afterward, told some stories out of Plutarch, and Anthony listened with grave courtesy as if Plutarch were new to him, but ate his toast savagely and smeared his egg. That helped her. “The darling!” she thought, seeing the yellow humiliation and, when breakfast was over, brought a wet napkin and scrubbed it off. Perhaps he didn’t know what she was doing, for he seemed to be in a dazed obedience to ordinary life where everything must go as it should; and after he had brought his traps down, he went to find Celestia, and as Ann, too, was there, he said good-bye ceremoniously to them both and came back to give the car its last look over, the parson and Hannah standing by. And each of them put out a friendly hand and he took it. And that was almost all. For when he had got in and his hand was on the wheel, Hannah found she couldn’t have it quite like that and called to him, louder than she need, as if he were far away:

“Anthony! tell her I told you. About seeing her, I mean. Tell her we send love. Father, too. You do, don’t you, Father? And father’s blessing. I told her—”

But what she told Rose she could not manage, and still Anthony did not go. It was only a minute he stayed, as if he too had words to hunt for. They were mysteriously lost—and there was no use, no use. And he was gone.

“Come in,” said Hannah. Her hand was on father’s arm, and she wondered whether they were meant to squeeze through the doorway together and behave, at all points, as if she were very small and he very large and strong. She had a sudden sick feeling that perhaps she had never really told him how much she loved him; it was a pity not to do it and she might as well begin now. But all she said was: “It’s going to be a nice day, isn’t it?”

Then at the moment of his going in at the study door and her wondering whether she should leave him there to conjure up the Middle Ages in peace, Celestia came and asked what she would please to have for dinner, and the old life had breathed its last and was miraculously dead and buried, and here was the new.

Hannah never went back to that day. She had a belief that it was very busy, whether she willed it so or the household activities seemed to close in upon it and make it theirs. She was conscious of trying to pin her mind to Ann and see that she was saved from dullness, but even Ann was blurred a little: visible perhaps, but with Celestia who apparently found tasks for her. And the day went on and the dark came and it did not seem possible to bear it any longer. What could they do, for Ann’s sake, to make a good going to bed of it when the time came? Had Anthony been the centre of it all, with his tinklings at the piano and his Eden Isle?

“Come, Father,” she said, at the study door at last. “Couldn’t you come and sing? We’ve got to have some kind of a noise in the house to go to bed on. Nobody’s happy and the world gone to pot.”

Ann sat by the window, the kitten in her lap, and Celestia was putting away cups and pans. Ann seemed not even to hear and Hannah thought, “We’re going to the everlasting bow-wows if we can’t get busy and act as if we’re alive.” But she left them to their ways and went on into the parlor, and presently they came in, Ann, for the first time, bringing the kitten with her. And Hannah absently began striking chords and picking out the melody of “Eden Isle,” and the parson, coming in on it, thought it might as well be stopped. He moved two chairs forward a bit for Celestia and Ann and himself took the one near the piano. He had a sudden desperate resolve.

“Hannah,” said he, “why don’t you take the big chair. I don’t seem to want to sing yet. I want to tell a story.”

Hannah left “Eden Isle” with an abruptness that said to it: “I don’t know what you made me play you for. Now be still and go back where you were, before a girl put you together to torment me.” She got up and took the great eared chair as father had said, and he began by a question he put to Celestia first and then, by a look, to Ann.

Ann said nothing, but looked at him in polite interest, absently stroking the kitten now in her lap.

The parson put the tips of his fingers together and considered. He had evidently made up his mind that he very much needed a story, and he was off. To Hannah, he seemed to be talking to himself. And yet, from time to time, he did glance up at her, as if to say doubtfully: “Is it too trifling? Shall I go on?”

“Bears,” said he, “are not all alike. Some of them can tell stories, but not all. You see,” he broke off to say to Celestia who sat listening in a way that bade fair to move Hannah either to tears or laughter, she hardly knew which, “you see, their telling stories proves it: they can talk.”

“What can it be about her,” Hannah wondered, “what can it be about Celestia that makes her like a mountain goddess, or a Muse or a fate, all of a heroic size? And from the way she looks, father might be bringing her a message from old gods, and she waiting to get it patiently, with dignity.”

“There are things,” said he, “that all bears know, things about blueberries and honey and cold and hot, and denning up for winter and coming out in spring—things the mother bears teach them and the father bears whack them into learning. If they never learned them they couldn’t keep house or get their dinners or tell when to fight and when to run. But besides these there are a few that think they know certain things all bears do not, and these things have to do with a beautiful place where good bears go when they die. And these good ones are all the time traveling—shuffling along, you can’t think how fast—to get to the beautiful place. But the ordinary bears don’t think very much about it anyway. You could tell them every half hour, but they’d forget it as soon as told. And the ones that tell them: some of them are good, faithful bears and some are not. Some are always walking to find more bears to tell their good news to and they never mind heat or cold or wet or dry. They are always talking about the beautiful place and how bears must keep its laws or they won’t get there. But the bear that’s in this story was not a first-rate bear. He was one of those who are supposed to travel all over the earth telling his brothers about the beautiful place and how to get there; but he didn’t travel at all. He knew a place in the woods where a bear could live and think of bear things all day long and be sure of a safe spot to den up in, in the fall. And he lived there and blinked at the sun coming through the trees and thought how safe it was. And if a bear went by and asked him the way to the beautiful place, he told him pleasantly. But for himself, he liked to be comfortable and that was about all. Though this he did not say. It was only something that had got under his hide and made him queer and old. And now all the other bears saw he was queer and old, and at last—well, at last the sun burned him and singed his hair off and the cold froze him and his feet felt heavy and he was no kind of a bear. And a great many bears went by his den to the beautiful place, but at the last of my hearing from him, he didn’t go himself. He’d been too busy being comfortable and growing queer and old and he’d lost the way.”

Ann was looking at him in a grave questioning. She had cupped her hand over the kitten’s back, and Hannah thought that touch of fur was her chief consolation in a puzzling world. Celestia sat gravely looking at the parson as if, life being as it is and nobody knowing anything, what could you expect?

“Tell the rest,” said Hannah. “Father, you can’t leave him going nowhere. I shan’t sleep o’ nights.”

“No,” said the parson, “probably you won’t. But that’s all there was in my book. The rest was torn out. And if you’ve got to know what happened after that—” he laughed a little, still looking at Hannah—“tell it yourself.”

But Hannah was not going to be trapped. She thought: “You’re talking against time to fill the evening up and make it seem like conversation, and your bears are painted bears and they’ve got sticks for legs and they belong in Noah’s Ark. But I see what you mean by them and I’ll make more words for you. But not more bears.”

“I don’t like bears very well,” said she. “They have nasty tricky ways with them, going up rivers when the salmon have their picnics in the spring. The salmon think they’re going on a great pilgrimage, Old Home Week probably, and I dare say they’ve heard the bears are going, too, though they can’t stay at home for all that. And the bears do go, and eat themselves sick on salmon, the greedy pigs!”

Here Ann joined in so seriously she seemed to say: “Listen! I am going to talk.”

“Creatures are always eating each other up,” she said, and Celestia added, with a grave placidity:

So she went to the piano, and they did sing two or three hymns, and then there seemed to be nothing to do but scatter off to bed; and after a little time for Celestia and Ann in the kitchen, and a little more for Hannah to wander about upstairs going in and out of Ann’s room with absent-minded remarks about clothes and sunset skies and the complaining robin on the linden, though there was no cat apparent, it grew more dusky, but not much. And then, through the kindness of circumstance, a cat did stroll up from the neighbor’s across the field and they all three went out and drove her away and the robin was at peace. But when it was really evening and the house in order and night had to be faced with its folly of going to bed when you couldn’t sleep, Hannah sat down on her couch and asked herself silently: “What am I going to do?” Was Anthony so important as all this? Was he so compellingly charming that, because he had gone away, they couldn’t play their foolish games any more? No, probably he wasn’t charming at all, except to her who perversely loved him. Only, until now, up to this night when life itself had drawn its black line across the page, there was an Anthony somewhere, and if she needed him enough she could cry out for him, if only through the wireless of the mind, and he would come. And he was still there if she needed him, only now she must not call. She went downstairs and found the study door open and father with his light burning as usual, but no work before him.

She sat down in her place across the table and looked at him and, for a moment, could not speak. It was not because she was too moved within herself. She was calm enough, as she thought, with a little scornful flick of the mind at her own tragedy. Crying wouldn’t help her. Indeed, she would have had hard work to whip it up. Instead, there seemed nothing adequate to say. But she was afraid. “Tomorrow and tomorrow”—tomorrows were coming in an endless line, and how should they be met? But the first thing was to behave like a creature who took life in ordinary ways, and satisfy what seemed to be the mysterious human appetite for talk.

“That,” said he, “wasn’t a story. It was confession: not about bears—about me.”

In what she had begun to think her new knowledge of him she wondered if he was seeing it as better, to talk about himself than about her. It might be true. Perhaps Anthony hadn’t been gone long enough for her to face it.

“Every morning,” said he, “I’ve sat down to a good breakfast. And I am a preacher of God’s Word.”

“But,” said Hannah, “isn’t a preacher to have his breakfast? He’s not always to begin by fasting. Or is he? An observance, I know. But every day!”

“No,” said he. “I’m using it as a symbol. I am telling you how comfortable I have been all my life. I’ve been a gentleman, something of a scholar, and I’ve had the effrontery, all this time, to preach the doctrine of men who were wanderers and poor and humble—and probably dirty and uncombed. No wonder these people here wanted to turn me out.”

“But they’re comfortable themselves,” said Hannah. “They’ve had their morning shave and some of the boys have had their hair waved—or I’m mistaken. And if that isn’t the top notch of living, I don’t know what is. No, Parson, don’t tell me religion consists in not having a bath.”

“But,” said the parson, unmoved, though with due gentleness, because if she didn’t understand he must even shock her into it, “but if I were a fisherman of Galilee I might not have time to have a bath except when I got soused with cold water in the way of nature. Hannah, I mean this. I’ve been charged with the most tremendous message ever sent this earth. And I’ve delivered it. I’ve told them if they sinned they’d be punished and if they loved the Lord God and tried to obey Him they’d go on into His everlasting habitations and try to find Him and keep on trying and that it’s the most astounding occupation the human soul could have.”

“Well,” said Hannah, “haven’t you preached it? What more could you do?”

“Oh, yes, I preached it,” said the parson, “but it was poetry, the most exalted poetry, and what did it mean to them? Nothing. They just went home to their Sunday dinners and I went home to mine. I ought to have yelled at them in the words of a fool—but an honest fool—and told them the pit was at their feet and they were more than half into it already—like me, fat with comfort, stultified by reason, deafened by radio, drugged by gasoline. I ought to have gone about the streets like old John Bunyan’s Christian, crying ‘Life! Eternal Life!’ ”

“You couldn’t, dear,” said Hannah wisely. “Mother’d have had you psychoanalyzed.” She was not much moved by his intemperate talk, but she saw through it down to his unquiet mind, and that did trouble her.

Her spirit quailed within her. Mother was speaking now, absent but irresistible, mother who had lived here within the bounds of custom and built strong walls about her.

“Oh, no!” said he, “and I doubt if they’d give me one. And wherever I went it would be the same. I should find the same people, the same materialism, and they’re too clever for me. The world has changed. It changed while I sat at my table here in a kind of dream, thinking of old times, when I should have been informing myself about this new spirit of man and learning how to meet it.”

“No,” said he, sadly. “It’s a very pitiful, poor spirit, because man has learned to invent clever things for his own comfort and he has forgotten they should be his servants, not his masters. He should learn how to rule them so that they would do some of his jobs for him and give him more leisure, not for idleness and folly, but to make beauty in. And worship God. It’s all in a phrase: he has forgotten God.”

“But,” said Hannah, “what could you have done? It’s the whole earth that’s changing. Do you think you could have kept your hand on Bridgnorth and held it still?”

“I could have understood,” he said immovably. “I could have seen where we were tending with the rest and I could have warned them. Instead I talked to them in poetry. The highest poetry, you understand. It told them what they would find if they obeyed God and kept His commandments. But it told them in imagery and symbols, and because they had closed their minds to the things of the spirit, they were like children and didn’t understand. It seemed folly to them, that’s all, an amiable folly. An archaic way of speaking, good to form your literary style on, but no more.”

“I don’t know,” said he. “Cut out my own indulgences perhaps. I’ve had no hardships: none, mind you. I might at least have let them see that when I said I believed a thing, I really did believe it. They might have said I was crazy, but that’s not so bad. A crazy man attracts some attention, at least. Like a drunken man. They stop in the street to watch him, if only to see what he’ll do.”

“Mother never’d have let you,” said Hannah. “You couldn’t have done any of that Saint Francis business, despising the body and eating scraps—not with mother at the helm—and Celestia to cook. Father, was it necessary—is it necessary to despise the body? Wasn’t that crazy? I don’t say it was, mind you. Not Saint Francis. He was beautiful and he’d love your bears—but why not be clean?”

“It wasn’t madness,” said he quietly. “It was the only thing he could do. It was the only way he could prove his passionate conviction that the earth is nothing, nothing—either the beauty or the rare comforts a few of us have or any separate thing or the whole of it together, compared with the kingdom of heaven. Hannah, I’d give everything God has given me—I’d give it back to Him—if I could somehow prove Eternal Life to—even one person. That would do.” He laughed a little, boyishly. “I’ve been converted,” said he. “Don’t you see? It’s been working in me ever since I stopped preaching, and last night the very church walls talked and sang.”

“My own unhappiness,” said he simply. “Their not wanting me. It turned my eyes inward on myself. I saw what I was. I had been a faithless steward. I was so sorry for myself that I sat down and began a journal—I told you—to tell how miserable I’d been. It wasn’t for anybody to see, but it was a remarkable document. Sheer egotism! I cried into it, you might say. It was like bottling my own tears.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” said Hannah. “But I thought differently. I thought when I got courage I should beg you to go on with it and sometime publish it, a record of all the things you’ve lived and thought. It would be beautiful. And valuable. I even got the title: Parson Willoughby’s Journal. Or, An Old Man’s Journal. For everybody’s got to suffer, growing old, and it would help them to know a beautiful person like you suffered, too, going the same road. Not that you’re old. But you think you are and that’s pretty nearly the same thing.”

“Too late,” said the parson, light-heartedly. “Can’t be done. The journal never will be written. And what has been I burnt up last night, here on that hearth.”

“I was ashamed of it,” said he, conclusively. “And I’m ashamed of you, Hannah, if you think you want a sobbing parson round the house.”

Hannah sat silent for a little, looking at his hand on the table, not playing its uneasy game of pushing pens and books into a fictitious order, but a relaxed hand, a quiet hand. It might not mean that he was quieter within, but it certainly looked acquiescent, resting until it had work to do.

“You spoke of preaching,” said she. “And you don’t want another parish. How are you going to manage it?”

“I intend,” said he, as if it were a commonplace of ministerial life, “I intend to be a traveling preacher. Go here, there, anywhere, unannounced if necessary. Over to the Ridge, for instance. I don’t believe they’ve heard a sermon there for fifty years. Shame on me for not knowing it.”

And then, at the same instant, they thought of Anthony and his mastery over speed and safety, and the very room was dark about them: and Hannah again faced the picture of a world with no Anthony in it and the parson, knowing, faced it with her. But he went on talking.

“It’s easy enough in summer weather. I can tramp it. I’ve excellent legs. And there’ll be a schoolhouse to speak in, almost anywhere, and if not I can go into houses—lonesome houses—at random and ask if I can sit down and talk a bit and perhaps offer a prayer.” He laughed. “And pretty soon they’ll really say I’m crazy and there’ll be a legend of me, and that’ll be rather nice, for they’ll be sorry for me—and maybe laugh at me a little and call me poor Parson Willoughby. And then I could say anything I liked and they wouldn’t think it was Bible talk but just a fool’s folly—and like it really—and some of it might stick. There’s something in us all that makes us patient with a fool: if he’s enough of one.”

“The things the Lord God reveals to us,” he said. “Not only what is written, but the little things every day. How He wants us to be happy—in Him, in His beauty and His air and His sky and His flowers, and Brother Ass, the poor body, even if it is dirty—no, no, Hannah, we won’t have it dirty if we can possibly help it; but we’ll remember there’s nothing we can withhold from Him. If we’re sent on an errand we must go, even through the mud.”

“It’s evident,” said she, “we’ve got to have our car and have it now.”

“Dearest,” said the parson, “I hadn’t got so far as that. But if you propose going—”

“I do,” said Hannah. “And I’ve no doubt Ann and Celestia—they’ll catch the fever and go, too.”

“And the kitten,” said Parson Willoughby. “It would be amazing, wouldn’t it? Like gypsies, like wandering tribes, like—but I say this humbly—like those missionary priests that carried the Gospel into far places. But you mustn’t think I couldn’t go alone.”

“You must remember though,” said Hannah, “that we’re planning for summer and a car. (That is, I am. I want the car.) And the Ridge—you say the Ridge—they don’t break that road out in winter except for ox teams and a sleigh.”

“Ann did it,” said he quietly, “when her mind tormented her and she ran away. We must see that no woman over there has such a tormented mind again and needs to run away. At least, if we have tormented minds, we must have the remedy for them too—ready like an antidote. Hannah, isn’t it extraordinary, about pain? What a medicine it is—what a change it works in us.”

“I wonder,” said Hannah, the dull persistence of it coming back on her at last. “I wonder what it will do to me.”

“That was a thing I hadn’t meant to speak about,” said he. “It was your trouble—the nearest, the most acute thing that ever happened to me—that was what really showed me what pain is and how we must be ready with our remedy.”

“What is the remedy?” she asked in a dull way, wondering if it was the old one he had always preached, or if his own troubles had wakened some keener insight in him. No, it was the same.

“The love of God,” said he. “But there’s something very strange about it. And that’s what I’ve always believed, as a matter of faith, and it’s only now I see it clearly. Seeing you suffer. Seeing Ann die out and wither. And even Ann—no, I shouldn’t have known how important it was to bring her back to life if I hadn’t had my own knock-out and watched my own life go to pieces. No, Hannah, we’re all members of one body, and until we realize that, we’re only on the fringe of life. I’m preaching, dearest! What a vice it is!”

They talked a good deal more about the practical side of his going out “on the road,” and Hannah said, as if it needed no discussion, that she should hurry down street in the morning and inquire for a good used car. There was a clever man at the garage and she had ideas of her own. Many a girl at the Normal had wanted a car if she could find one cheap enough, and Hannah, who was known to be of sound practical sense, had engineered the purchase and come out well. And when the parson said it would be her car, for he should give it to her, she refused it and told him why.

“I’ve got quite a lot of money,” said Hannah, “here in the Savings. And it’s for a car. Yes, Parson, it’s been there a long time now and I never’ve taken any out. And now I never shall.”

“No,” said Hannah. “It’s for a car.” And her mind was going over the things it had been saved for, the whole futile list of them. For they had all been for her and Anthony together, first to help out with the housekeeping while his mother was alive, in case he found he really couldn’t live without her and said, in defiance of common sense, that she must come now—now—and they’d all be poor together. But that never happened; and then it seemed to be for building a house for themselves alone, the house Anthony couldn’t afford. It had been used up in fancy a great many times while it lay there, ticking away so snugly, while Hannah went on working and no one knew it was there, not even Anthony. And again the parson prophesied her wanting it; and she said again, with a certain carelessness, that she’d always wanted a car. “And now the time has come.”

When she was leaving him that night, she turned back to say, hoping it would solace him for having fallen short in service to his Lord:

“Father, you think you haven’t done the right thing for people. You have, when they’re in trouble. Look at Ann. You didn’t talk Bible poetry to her and stop there. She wanted to go with you and you took her, straight off, and you’ve been on the job ever since. You’ve even made up a story about a bear.”

“Ah,” said he, smiling at her, but with a little ruefulness, “that’s true enough, but I’d learned my own lesson then. That’s why we have to suffer. ‘The gospel of pain’: it teaches us.”

“But, Father,” said she, “there’s been lots of trouble here in Bridgnorth, all these years. Nothing tragic, perhaps, but sickness, death, the common run of things. And you’ve stood by. What if it has been poetry you’ve given them? And if they haven’t understood it, is that your fault?”

“I can’t explain it,” said he, “but, as it seems to me now, I’ve lived, in a quiet way, like a comfortable man of the world. And I’ve administered the Gospel faithfully, but I’ve made it a dream. No use, Hannah! I can’t tell you. But a pit has been opened at my feet and I see—I see—no use, my dear! Perhaps I see the world as it is, not as it says it is when it goes to church. And myself as I am. And I’ve got to live with pain and sin wherever I can find it, and nowhere else. I can’t live with fatness any more.”

In a few days from Anthony’s going, two letters came from him, one for Hannah and one to the Reverend David Willoughby, this last an irreproachable expression of gratitude from the departed guest, and long enough to take up some disputed matters they had talked about together, on which Anthony thought he had a little more light shed from a certain book in a neighboring library. And at the end he thanked Parson Willoughby warmly and with dignity for the very great pleasure he had had in knowing him even so little through a time which was—it was a trifle blurred and hastily untidy here—but the script went on as if Anthony had had enough of it and couldn’t go back to write it over—a time which was unlike any other in his life. And he was the parson’s, “Very gratefully, Anthony West.”

Hannah’s letter had no beginning and at the end only the initials “A. W.” But the hasty lines of it told her: “I don’t know how to say anything worthy of you, but however we go on—all of us—I’ve got to tell you the truth. She won’t marry me. But it was the truth you told me. She was glad to see me, and I do love her. And I love you. How can I love both of you? I don’t know. But there are other things besides the ones we can say. A. W.”

Was the letter to be answered? She thought not, and in her heart she knew that when the habits of his life with Rose began to enclose them in thicker and thicker walls of sad and pleasant company, he would still think he loved her in some deep spot of his heart, but there would be nothing to say. We do not always choose not to say things, but the things themselves retreat further and further into some remoteness of memory and deny us there.

The first time Parson Willoughby went away on his preacher’s errand, it was after careful preparation and, as Hannah reminded him, not to preach. It was to make calls and announce his purpose, if it proved possible, in the houses on a lonely road the other side of the mountain, about fifteen miles from home. The little settlement lay outside the Bridgnorth parish, and it had no church of any persuasion. This was not so great a lack of late years, when everybody owned cars of a value proportioned to their prosperity, and if they had had a churchgoing mind, it would have been a little matter to go elsewhere for what were still known as gospel privileges. But most of them had radios and they stayed at home. It was a hot July day when Hannah drove the parson and Celestia and Ann along the narrow wooded road where the wetness on each side, in whatever season, smelled of quagmires and rotten leaf. Celestia and Ann sat in the repose of incurious content which served them as happiness. They had not been told why nor where they were going, not because it needed to be withheld but because it was complicated with other things that were afar from them. But they knew the two superior intelligences they loved were pleasantly excited and that there was luncheon, with hot coffee, on board, and this was of interest to them because it was they who put it up.

At the end of the narrow road, they turned into one not much wider but of a different look from the slight elevation of cleared fields and mowing, and went on for perhaps a half mile before coming to the first farmhouse. This was a square story and a half house, unpainted and gray from age, and with a long shed extending back nearly to the barn. It was evidently one where the old intent of building had lasted over: spacious quarters for the livestock and their fodder and the house small and defensive, as if for winter snugness. And there was a noise in it: radio, at its most determined. Parson Willoughby walked up the narrow footpath to the door. He knocked, and, surprisingly—for the radio seemed gaily protesting against anything being heard but itself—a woman came at once, a tall, well-proportioned woman in a bright red working dress, and stood inside the screen door, one hand on its flimsy framework, and looked out at him. Hannah, in acute curiosity, watched them, but all she learned was that father took off his hat, in his accomplished manner, and that presently the woman opened the screen door and stepped out and the door swung to behind her. And still they talked, but it was evident that father was not to be invited in. The radio seemed to be aware of it as soon as Hannah was, for it burst into a man’s loud laughter and Hannah, well as she knew the disturbing naturalness of the thing, started a little. It seemed as if the farmer himself had appeared and heard that father wanted to pray with them and was deriding him. When Parson Willoughby turned to go, the woman walked a few steps with him and Hannah liked the shine of the sunlight on her well-kept hair and the directness of her speech. But it was a worn face. In spite of radio and its impudent cheerfulness, there were memories in the eyes and about the mouth, as if they went back to winter loneliness and the expedients of life when it is snowed in. Mid-way in the path she stopped and Hannah caught the last words. They were not unkindly, though it was evident she could be sharply decisive when she liked.

“I don’t know how ’twould be. There’s the schoolhouse, ‘most a mile further on. You could look in the window, if you wanted to, to see what you thought. One o’ the selec’-men lives beyond that, third house—no, fourth—and you could talk with him. I s’pose he’d ask you somethin’, a few dollars, maybe. And I don’t know as anybody’d go. Sundays we’re out in the car, mostly, when it’s any kind of a day. But I dunno.”

She turned abruptly and went back to the house, stood a moment looking down at them and then disappeared behind the defense of the screen door. The parson was smiling to himself, what Hannah knew as his secret smile, and it meant he was not prepared to tell. But this time he was, and did it of his own accord.

“I didn’t get in,” he said, when he had seated himself beside her and they had started on. “You saw. ‘He’ didn’t like to have her let strangers in when he wasn’t there. Isn’t it good, in a kind of a nice way, to think the man of the house is still ‘he,’ as if suffrage and all the rest of it hadn’t arrived and he’s still the head of the tribe? Oh, stop, stop! There’s a house there at the end of that long path. Looks shut up, doesn’t it? But maybe not. I’ll go up and see.”

It proved to be open with not even screens to be hooked against the world, and he was gone a long time. When he came back, he was looking very grave. A woman, he said, and a little boy, perhaps twelve or so.

“She is so stiff she can just hobble round. Her knees, she said. She didn’t seem to mind having me come in. The boy was shy, but they saw I was all right. She let me say a prayer; but the boy—well, I didn’t know about him, whether he’s bright or not.”

“I don’t know,” said he. “She didn’t tell me. Of course I couldn’t ask.”

“Oh, yes, you could,” thought Hannah, “you ever-blessed, no-good district visitor! You could have marched into their secrets and sat down there and put them through a third degree. And you only said your prayers and came away.”

After that, they had varying fortunes. Several times they were greeted by radio which seemed to have saved its most irrelevant announcements for the moment of Parson Willoughby’s coming, and only once did it snap off into silence, to let him speak. And they saw the little schoolhouse, as he had been told, and he did get out and looked in through a window, and then proceeded to the fourth house beyond, stopping at the doors on the way. And the selectman was at home, and saw no reason why Parson Willoughby should not conduct a service in the schoolhouse, if he was so minded, though he could not give him a definite answer, until he had consulted the other members of the board. No question was made of pay. He was a lean, hesitating type of Yankee, as if trying hard to show how faithfully he took back to an older type, and it was only when the parson was going that he seemed to bring himself to say he had come near placing him.

“Very likely,” said the parson. “I live over there in Bridgnorth. Have, for a good many years.”

“Well,” said the selectman, “times change, don’t they, one down and another come on. No, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t have the use of the schoolhouse—summer weather and all and no question o’ heat. That’d make some difference, maybe. I dunno. But I wouldn’t bank on gettin’ any kind of a congregation. Folks ain’t turned that way, now they’ve got radio and cars and all. Times have changed round here same as everywhere, and there ain’t no use sayin’ they ain’t. Well, so long. See you again maybe, sometime.”

But after this Parson Willoughby was thoughtful and though they stopped at all the houses in the little settlement—which was, according to old custom, called more intimately a neighborhood—only twice was he invited to go in to say his prayers which seemed to him now, in his low estate, less for his tolerant hosts than for himself. He grew more and more silent and then he smiled a little, his secret smile.

“Hannah,” said he, “do you think you and I could set up an old-fashioned singing school?”

“You’re crazy, dear,” said she. But she amended it. “No, Father, you’re not. It’s only the world that’s crazy and you’re the one sane man in it. All you need is to learn the common tongue. But we can’t teach singing, you and I, now can we? We’ve never been taught ourselves.”

“Oh, yes, we can,” said the parson, with composure. “We can teach old English songs. And there’s a schoolhouse to try it in. They advertise spelling matches; don’t you know they do? People will do anything if you let them stand up and do it for themselves.”

It was astounding, the effect of her rare speeches. This might have been a voice from the dead. Hannah started a little and wanted to laugh. How wonderful it was not to have her asking about bits of paper, but frankly listening and remembering there were “instruments!”

“I know,” said she. “Melodeons, they used to call them. I’ve seen them in Bucksford, though I never heard them played.”

“Yes, an instrument. But I don’t believe it’s necessary. A pitch-pipe would do. I used to know an old man who taught singing school, and that was all he had.”

“But,” said Hannah, “you know they can hear all manner of beautiful things by radio.”

“Ah,” said the parson, “but that isn’t singing themselves. We could begin with a little prayer and end with one. And in between there’d be the secular songs; and why not, if it’s what they prove to like?”

“Crafty business,” said Hannah, in a voice he only heard. “The Song of Solomon to blaze the way. And then the love of God.”

“It isn’t that,” he said. “It isn’t calculated. Only, I’ve got to know people. I’ve got to see what’s in their hearts. They’re very ignorant. So am I. And if they can’t live by the great epic beauties of our religion and if I don’t know enough to teach them—well, we must begin all over, that’s all. With the simple things, the earth, men and women—no, Hannah, I can’t set it forth, even to you. But we don’t love lovely things and we’ve got to go back a good many years and begin all over.”

But while they waited for him—and here he was invited in, and allowed to talk, for the first time, about old singing schools—she wondered, with her queer sense of the ironies that illumine life, whether it would be only old English songs or whether she might have to teach them “Eden Isle.” Would the mysterious spirit constrain her to do that?

“I would,” she thought. “I’d do anything to get a hair’s breadth nearer him—and Rose. She wouldn’t know it, but she’d feel it somehow, lying there getting messages out of the air. She’d know her ‘Eden Isle’ was being sung.”

And then, after a half hour or so, Parson Willoughby came out, his face touched with the tremulous excitement of his more secret moods, but he said only:

“It was very nice in there. Two elderly women and a little boy. They’ve taken him to board. He’s very lame, and sits about all day. He was doing a puzzle and got stuck. They asked me to come again.”

It was an early morning, a few days after this, when Parson Willoughby was told a man would like to see him. Some kind of a farmer, Celestia guessed. He’d come from over beyond the Ridge to get a load of lumber somewheres—she didn’t know where—and he’d turned off here to find out if he could see Parson Willoughby. And the parson said: “Of course. Ask him to come in.”

He stood at the study door to receive him and the man came heavily through the hall, a tall, broad-shouldered man with no adequate control of his muscles, to the end of grace or lightness, but evidently very strong. He was like a giant rudely made to serve the harsher uses of life but not their more persuasive ones. He was all brown, eyes, hair and skin, as if he had been made out of earth and was uneasily homesick to get back to it. His hair was thick and, though shaven, you could imagine that his beard, if it were allowed to grow, would be a curtain he could live behind. As he stood for an instant in the doorway, it looked as if he might hit the low lintel, going in, and indeed he did bend his head instinctively as if used to conciliating beams of wood.

“Sit down, sir,” said the parson, who was always ceremonious to what seemed a more old-fashioned type. “Going to be warm today?”

But the giant had no time for introductory easements. He sat down and dangled his cap between his legs. And though he was so big, the small worn cap did not seem inappropriate. It added, rather, to his fitness for perhaps disappearing somehow into solid ground.

“I understood,” said he, “Ann Marden’d come over here to live—she that was a Denison.”

So this was the husband she had run away from through the snowy night and who had got divorced from her and married again.

“Yes,” said the parson. “My daughter and I have invited her to stay with us indefinitely. We have made some plans for her, but we haven’t talked with her about them yet.”

The giant wrinkled his forehead and it made his face very anxious. But he still sat round-shouldered and stared at his dangling cap.

“See here,” said he, now straightening and bending a serious gaze on the parson, “is she out of her mind?”

“No,” said the parson, “decidedly not. She’s not a very strong person, but I should say she would be sane enough to”—to do what? how to put it so that this as yet unexplored intelligence would know how to take it in?—“I should say she was equal to any ordinary work usually done by a young woman of her ability.”

“They tell me,” said the giant broodingly, “she’s out of her mind, and I concluded I might as well get to the bottom on’t. Now you say she ain’t.”

“Yes,” said the parson, making himself one with him in the matter of speech, “I say she ain’t. But suppose she had been?”

“I dunno,” said Marden heavily. “I ain’t very forehanded, myself. I work for everything I get. But I shouldn’t want to see her packed off, nobody knows where.”

“It’s very thoughtful of you,” said the parson, “but I don’t believe you need feel that particular responsibility. You are—married—I understand? You were divorced and remarried.”

“Yes,” said Marden, finding, now they were started, that he need not depend on his cap but could look at the parson, man to man. “I’m married, have been some few years. She’s a good woman. You have to have a woman on a farm.”

At that moment, it moved the earth gods that order the smaller affairs of men, to send the kitten staggering in. She went straight for Marden’s large foot, climbed on his shoe and gave his ankle a reminding rub. He stooped and picked her up in one great paw, laid his cap on his knee and disposed her in it carefully, as if it were a nest and she a particularly precious egg. And she, who had temporarily spent her high spirits by a mad game with a string and ball Celestia had attached to a chair-back in the kitchen, curled round and was instantly asleep. And throughout the interview the giant, though he seemed to be holding her absent-mindedly, did not intermit the serious business of keeping her still and level. And the sight of her had given him matter for argument.

“But,” said he, “I never laid hands on her so to speak. And I wouldn’t ha’ hurt her no more’n you would this ’ere cat.”

“But what are you goin’ to do with her?” said the giant persistently. “You ain’t adopted her, nothin’ like that?”

“No,” said the parson. “I have a daughter somewhat younger than she is. Perhaps you knew. She is very much interested in Ann, just as I am, and we’ve made a little plan for the fall. My daughter teaches over at Bucksford—”

“Yes, the Normal Institute. And she’s very sure she can get Ann a place in the linen room, mending, keeping things in order. That would be three or four days a week, and the rest of the time she’d be at home. With the Miss Raymonds, you know.”

“Where she run away to,” said Marden, thoughtfully, and now his eyes had the unappeased look of a dog’s eyes when he asks for what neither he nor anybody else can tell.

“George! d’you know she went through the snow that night? Anybody tell you about that? And there wa’n’t nothin’ that happened then any more’n any other time. But she run away.”

“Mr. Marden,” said the parson, silently praying for words to be put into his mouth, “we get frightened in this world. Here we are with all sorts of queer things round us, and we’ve got to do our best, and sometimes we don’t know how—it’s like a horse shying on the road when he sees something he can’t account for. A circus! When I was a boy I saw an old mare—we boys thought she was old enough to die—she was feeding by the side of the road when a circus parade hove in sight. And when she saw the elephant and smelt the whole concern, she dashed off so fast you couldn’t have overtaken her with any power we had then.”

“No, she slacked up when she’d got well away. Probably she thought it over and put it down for a bad dream.”

“I dunno, I dunno,” said Marden, shaking his head. “So there ain’t anything I can do?”

“No,” said the parson. “And I don’t believe there’s anything that would be wise to do. You’ve taken the step you felt to be right, getting the divorce and marrying again. And seeing you—well, that might be disturbing to her.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s right. I don’t know, either, things bein’ as they are, whether it’s hardly accordin’ to law to go back to what’s past and gone. But I guess you can see how ’twas. Sometimes I begin thinkin’ about it when I wake up in the night.”

“Yes, and I’m glad you’ve told me,” said the parson. “When you wake up and begin to think, why don’t you say a little prayer for her?”

“Pray?” said the giant. “I ain’t a church member. I never said a prayer in my life.”

“Let’s begin now,” said the parson. “No, you needn’t kneel. You’ve got the kitten. But I like to kneel. Puts me where I belong. Been a good many years in the ministry, and got used to its ways.”

So he knelt by his chair and said neither prayer from any book nor the ornate petitions so fluent on trained lips. It was only three or four sentences, not informing God about the case, but asking Him to give Ann His help in keeping well and happy, “and this man here, her friend who’s been so good to come; help him to be honest and kind and be with You in heaven at last.”

When he got up from his knees, he found Marden regarding him with astonished eyes and the cap had tipped dangerously, so that the parson righted it and said, “Take care! She’ll tumble out.” Then he began to ask questions about the Ridge, its schoolhouse, if it had one, and if many of the farmers had cars, so that they could drive to church, and whether Marden thought they would be interested in a call, once in a while, from an old minister who thought he knew the way to heaven. Or whether they’d like to meet sometimes, to sing old songs. And about these things Marden was widely hopeful, though monosyllabic, and it was an hour before he got up to go. When they had shaken hands and he was at the door he stopped and said:

“Yes,” said the parson, “but I’d rather not speak to her. Not quite wise, you see.”

“No,” said Marden clumsily, and becoming aware that he still held his cap full of warm oblivious kitten, put it down on the study table to take out the little ball of fur and hand it to the parson like a parcel, understanding how merciless it would be to set such sleepy members on the floor, expecting them to stiffen into legs. “No, things bein’ as they are, we’ll let ’em be. I’m obliged to you, sir, much obliged. And when you feel like comin’ over to the Ridge for any of your prayer meetin’s and things, you send me a card and I’ll be on hand.”

He was gone, and out of the yard, and the parson who had stood listening to the footsteps upstairs and their quick progress from room to room, in all the morning deeds of bed making and dusting, knew he had got away unseen, and that there was no fear of Ann’s meeting him and being shocked back into memory of a winter flight and hostile snow. But in a few minutes she was there with him, white as the snow itself though with no snow-like beauty, and her hands were shaking.

“Did he come after me?” said she. “Is he coming back? Have I got to go?”

The three questions came so fast they seemed to be all one, and he pulled out a chair from the table, put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her into it.

“He’s a good man,” said he. “A good honest man. He only came to see if you were all right, and if you weren’t if there was anything he could do to make things easier for you. I liked him. He’s a good man.”

“Yes,” said she. The blood was coming faintly into her cheeks, but her teeth chattered on the words. “He’s a good man. But I couldn’t go back there. I never wanted to be there first, but I didn’t see—my father didn’t tell me— Maybe I ain’t quite bright.”

Mechanically she drew a sheet of paper toward her and her trembling hands began folding it in the old pattern of the little slips she knew. He took it from her as casually and tossed it into the fireplace.

“Ann,” said he, “that’s a habit, a bad habit. Don’t do it any more. You won’t, will you? We don’t like to have you. Hannah doesn’t. Celestia doesn’t.”

She looked at the paper, withdrawn from her, and then up at him. She was like a child, and honest.

“No, but don’t do it. When you find you’ve begun, throw the paper away and keep saying, ‘Help me! help me!’ ”

“Will that be to you?” she asked. “Shall I call you, so you’ll be near?”

“No, it will be to God. He helps us in the very least things we do. Hannah!” She was going by the door, glancing in once only, perhaps with a sense of queer things happening. “Hannah, come in and tell Ann about the linen room and what we’ve planned for her.”

So Hannah came in and sat down and began telling the tale of the linen room and how Aunt Elsie and Aunt Milly had been consulted about it and how they thought it the most beautiful plan that ever was. And what did Ann think? It was easy to see what she thought. She was enchanted.

“Up at the Normal?” she asked incredulously. “That room looks on the lindens. Then there’s the field where the girls have their games.”

She had not made so long a speech before. To Hannah, it was, in itself, a triumph.

“There!” said she. “It’s all decided. Father, don’t you think a linen room has a lovely sound?”

To him, it did sound wonderful. He saw soft-speaking nuns darning fair linen in conventual peace. And more: the Virgin and Saint Elizabeth, sewing together and musing on what they could not say. Some of this he had to share with them.

“It makes a picture,” said the parson. “An old Italian picture. I see the Virgin Mary and Saint Elizabeth, handling fair linen, but not speaking very much because they know things they don’t know how to tell. And perhaps an angel in the background. And the angel knows.”

And then, though it was so soon after breakfast, Celestia came in with a plate of warm cookies from her baking, and everybody pretended to want one, and Celestia gave Ann the kitten to carry back into the kitchen and Hannah was left with father.

“Ann’s face! She was making a bed with me and we both chanced to look out of the window and there he was coming up the walk. She stiffened into horror, and I knew. So I kept her up there. Though it was the last thing she wanted—to come down. Father, is he very awful?”

“Yes, in a way, but he didn’t need it. He was concerned for her. But when he’d asked a few questions he saw—and that’s all there was to it. A good fellow. But not one to give a child to, if she didn’t love him. And didn’t happen to know what it’s all about.”

But he knew too much for that. Was her mind with Anthony? Was it with Rose? Where was her unquiet mind? But she seemed much the same, doing household deeds, planning little trips for all of them and organizing the first Singing School evening in a schoolhouse over beyond the mountain. And that was the way it was all to continue for some weeks to come.

It was toward the last of August and the feeling of migration in the air: not of the birds, but of human creatures who, though not all schools would open immediately after Labor Day, felt the seasonal difference. It was incredible to Hannah that she was in the midst of such activities, such hasty improvised bits of gaiety and life. She did not remember ever working so hard in a vacation or seeing it weld such an unbroken chain of luck. The only preparation they made was to ask for a schoolhouse, here or there, put an announcement in the county paper of a singing school evening to be held in it on such a date, and have sheets of the old songs printed to be passed about, when the evening came. And then father taught them the tunes and they were ready with the words. The parson did it beautifully. He told them plainly he knew nothing about singing, but he loved to hear those songs and if they tried hard, he thought they could manage them and they would at least have the pleasure out of them the olden people used to have at their tasks, in the field, in the house. And he always began with his little prayer and ended with some beautiful one from a ritual they did not know how to follow. And presently Bridgnorth people, finding out what was going on, would come to the singing school, not only because it was Parson Willoughby’s but because it was summer and good to have a little spin after dark. And the younger ones said “Good for him!” and his successor in the pulpit blessed him and called him, “My dear sir.” And he found life no less tumultuous and bizarre than it had been, but said his little prayers for himself, asking to be told how to get acquainted with the common life and serve it humbly, without compromise. For still it did not seem beautiful to him, nor did he for an instant think its gods could ever be his own. And one late afternoon he and Hannah were sitting in the parlor because it was cooler there, his study having been inundated by a party of strangers who were interested in his “delightful singing school” and came to know how he had begun. And they were so brisk and intelligent and chattering that the whole atmosphere seemed to smell “of mortality” when they were gone, and he gladly followed Hannah into the more untainted air. They had had tea and Celestia and Ann, clearing it away and washing cups in the kitchen, could be heard at their low-toned talk.

“Could you believe it?” said Hannah. “That’s Ann, Father, Ann! She is really talking with Celestia, back and forth.”

“Oh, things Celestia tells her! Queer old folk things, Irish sometimes. I’ve often thought Celestia’s part gypsy, too. She knows all sorts of ancientry: signs and riddles and old remedies she wouldn’t use for anything. She knows they aren’t so, but she loves to conjure with them. And Ann is pure Yankee. She knows they’re not so, too, but she loves the sound of them. Father, what do you make out of mother’s post-cards?”

“Why,” said the parson, “she’s busy, I suppose. I try to think so anyway.”

“But not like her,” said Hannah. “She’s a perfectly dauntless letter writer. She’d stop on the top of a volcano and write you a description of it, and say the lava’d begun to flow. Father, what is it? What are you looking at?”

The parson was sitting by the window, with an idle glance from it here and there; but now he came to his feet and said quickly:

“What is it, Father?” she asked. “Mother’s in London. It’s your eyes.”

“She’s coming up the walk,” said he. “Go upstairs and stay there till I call you. Quick, Hannah, run. Something has happened and I’ve got to find out—”

And Hannah went, flying, because he seemed so tense about it, but she looked out of the window, in a flash, and it was true. There was mother coming up the walk. The parson went to the door and had it open before his wife could put her hand on it.

“Elinor, my dear,” said he, and drew her in. “What are you walking for? My dear!”

He kept her hand and led her into the study and there shut the door. She took off her hat and tossed it on the table. And then he saw how different she was: haggard, with straight lines up and down her cheeks. They had not been there before.

“Don’t call Hannah,” said she. “Not till I’ve told you. I don’t want any one to see I’m frightened. Only you.”

There was an old sofa across the back wall, a relic that hardly remembered to be a sofa, it was so piled with books of reference too cumbersome for the table, too tall for shelves. But the parson knew how to manage books. He took them, by heavy armfuls, and laid them on the floor.

“Sit down, my dear,” said he, and gently put her there. “Now! Your head here, on my shoulder. Old place! What is it, dear?”

“I had to get to you,” said she. “I’m frightened, David. I’ve been saying that nights, ever so long, when I couldn’t sleep. I wanted you.”

“I don’t know. You see he hates me. He says I’m a damned domineering woman—it wasn’t ‘woman,’ but never mind—and I’ve dragged him all over Europe and he’ll be damned if he ever puts himself in such a hole again.”

“Well, that’s all right,” said the parson. “Henry’s not himself. He’s broken down. That’s understood.”

“Yes, I know. But he said other things. You and me. The way I’ve treated you. You’ve had a dog’s life. Have you, David?”

“Oh, the devil take him,” said the parson, forgetting his decorum. “But is that why you’ve come home on your two feet instead of in a cab? And where’s your luggage, silly?”

“I left it at the station,” said she. “I told them they could bring it in an hour. No, it wasn’t a foolish way to come. It was the only way I could. I couldn’t have them meeting me in the hall and smiling at me, and me kissing Hannah and smiling at Celestia. But Hannah’s well?”

“Hannah’s splendid, but I told her to run upstairs and not come down till she was called. Let me look at you.”

He put a hand under her chin and lifted her face to look at it. How strange a face for one that had been so unwrinkled and gave so bright a glance! The dark eyes were sombre, the mouth was trembling, the cheek was pale. He kissed the trembling mouth.

“Darling,” said he, “you’re tired, traveling. And Henry! Let me get at Henry. That’s all I ask of him.”

“No,” said she, “it isn’t being tired. It’s this.” She put her hand on her left breast and held it there. “It’s here. And when I found it out, I wanted you, and when he told me those things I got frightened because I thought if they were true what could I do? You never’d want me any more.”

“What do you mean?” said he. “Your heart? I don’t believe it. You’ve got a valiant heart.”

“Not my heart,” she said. She was whispering now. “It’s something growing, David. It changes every day.”

“Oh, I have,” she told him. “In London. Then in New York. But don’t tell Hannah. Not till I ask you to. How is it about the young man, young West? Has she spoken of him?”

“Yes, and he’s been here and it’s over and done with and she’s very game.”

“That’s it, David. To be game! Oh, but Hannah! Poor child, Hannah! I can be game, too, now I’ve got you. That’s it. Nothing matters, if I have you.”

“O my dear,” said he, “and you’re so different—so small and young and lovely. When you went away, you were tall and splendid and not in need of anybody.”

“I’m not tall and splendid any more,” said she, with a little smile. “Now call Hannah. She mustn’t think I don’t want her. And I do! I do! Only it’s you, David, it’s always you—for both of us.”

He put her away from him and called up from the hall: “Hannah! come! Mother wants you—quick!”

Hannah came, running, and knew at once that there were strange things mother had brought with her. But the strangeness did not frighten her. Nothing could ever frighten her, she thought, after the sight of her father’s face. What was it? Was it old love come back? Might it be that the same look was on the face of Rose and the face of Anthony? And mother! She was different, and how beautiful! What was it that had touched them equally? It was something as terrible as grief and joy together, as human, deep and holy. All this was in the instant of kissing mother softly and feeling safe because they all seemed to be rounded up into father’s care. And whatever he knew, whatever bright eyes of danger he had seen peering at them, he was not afraid.

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