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AIRMAIL TO EDEN

Most people would have said that Andrea Farr had everything—beauty, poise, intelligence, and a lovely home which she shared with her brother, amid the rich farms and vineyards of Nova Scotia. And, indeed, though love had not yet touched her, Andrea found life full and pleasant.

It was unpardonable therefore that Jane, her incurably romantic friend, should have written secretly and intimately, in Andrea’s name, to a stranger in England—a stranger whose heartwarming replies, as secretly intercepted, had convinced Jane that here was the man who, one day, would come to Edenvale and with whom Andrea must surely fall in love.

But, at last, Andrea had fallen completely under the spell of John Chanter, a young and captivating journalist—whose ardour, to her bewildered dismay, had suddenly, inexplicably, chilled. From England he had learnt of her letters which promised so much to another man—letters she did not write.

An enchanting story, by a popular writer of romantic novels, of a girl whose love, once given, was for all time; of another girl who, in love with love, nearly wrecked the happiness of two men and her own.

All the characters in this book are purely imaginary and have no relation whatsoever to any living person.

Airmail to Eden

There is always the day when we look in the mirror and glimpse for a fleeting moment another face—older, more staid, with eyes in which the eager lights have burned lower, that seek no longer to see what’s just around the next turn, knowing full well that it won’t be vastly different from what lay around the last.

Andrea Farr knew that moment the September day the letter came, and she wondered if there could be any connection between the two happenings—the sudden, sinking fear when that thing like a cloud-made shadow had passed across her face in the mirror, when a voice had whispered, “You can’t be always young or ever fair—” and then the coming of the blue letter with the London postmark, addressed to:

Jane Wyatt, her secretary, had left the mail in late last night and Gussie Fuller, the maid, had brought it up to her along with some business-letters that she had expressly asked to be given to her as soon as they came. She was looking in the tall mirror that made the wardrobe door, gazing pensively at the girl with the thick ash-blonde braids, the blue black eyes, the clear-skinned pointed face, full-lipped, slender-nosed, whose beauty seemed so fadeless.

“Gussie,” she said, looking broodingly at the girl in the mirror, drawing the green robe tight about her boyish, rangy form, “do you ever think about growing old?”

“You bet, Miss Andy! Every time I buy a jar of face-cream or a henna rinse, I ask myself if I’m not fighting a battle I can’t win—with the old guy who lugs that big scythe around—”

“Call it a delaying action, Gussie. And you have lots of time. You haven’t a grey hair in those red curls of yours and not a wrinkle—”

“Right now that’s so, but I’m thinking of the time when there won’t be a red hair in these grey curls and my skin will look like some of your Aunt Phoebe’s old china or a pattern for a spider’s web. What made you ask me that, Miss Andy?”

“An old dame in there—” Andrea waved a brown hand at the mirror. “She came and went in a flash, but I knew her—she was Andrea Felice Farr not so many years from now and I’m not sure I was too happy to make her acquaintance.”

Gussie shook her head. This was all beyond her. These Farrs were an odd lot anyway. This Andrea, for instance—pretty as a picture, with all the education money could buy, with the chance to travel where she wished and do what she pleased—burying herself here in the Vale on a fruit-farm, which she and her brother Lauchlin worked together. Of course, she had horses to ride, and cars, and she seemed to enjoy life. But there were no lovers—none that ever seemed to matter. And that, to Gussie, as to all the other girls in Edenvale and the nearby town of Colville, was a howling wonder and a crying shame.

“Love will pass her by,” mused Gussie as she left the room and went downstairs, bent on finishing the short complete novel she was reading in Cinema Secrets. She figured she could do it before Andrea and Lauchlin came to breakfast. The heroine reminded her of Andrea Farr, only she had several lovers wild about her, ready to suffer for her and, if need be, to die.

Her mistress, oddly enough, was thinking much the same thoughts—about love making a permanent detour around the youthful person of Andrea Farr. She hadn’t, before this, given much thought to it. There was certainly no dearth of men. At Edgemere School she had met dozens of boys, and at college, scores more, and there had been dances and dates and visits at the houses of girls whose brothers had fallen hard for the slim, blond beauty of The Blossom Queen—a title she had won in the annual festival of the apple-blossoms in her Junior year.

But The Blossom Queen didn’t find any princes to her liking among the boys she met. She liked them well enough. She had bestowed a few shy kisses that came only from her lips but in her heart was a locked place to which none of these good youths had found the key.

She went to the window, swung wide to let in the dewy freshness of the Autumn, and looked out on the rolling banks of mist, gold-tinged by the early sunlight, steaming and melting away to give glimpses of tree-tops, of the smooth water of the Basin, of the low coastal hills where the flamboyant hues of Fall—scarlet, gold and yellow—were splashed helter-skelter among the dark ranks of the conifers.

Andrea loved the beauty of these mornings, the cool kiss of the wind, freighted with sea-savour and balsam, with apple-smell and grape-smell, all mingled in a fragrance headier than the spices of Cathay.

“What more could I ask?” she asked the morning. “What more do I need?” She could see their own orchards and vineyards now forming hazily out of the mist—“apple and peach tree fruited deep,” vines laden with the dusky purple and dull green grapes; Damsons and Medlars with all the beauty of Eden. Always this place, Farlake Farm, and the long valley called Edenvale had given her all she ever wanted or sought from life—in childhood when her mother and father lived, when she and Lauchlin had dwelt in a golden paradise, in a land of rich farms and vineyards, sea-caverns and long miles of sandy shore; of plodding oxen and slow friendly folk, where the long estuary called the Basin on which their house looked down reflected hills and skies of ever-shifting loveliness.

She had been so happy, but here today the shadowy figure from the future had paused beside her for a moment to look with fading eyes in the mirror and whisper, “You can’t be always young or ever fair.” And now she was troubled and in her was a strange wanting, almost a craving, for something she could not name.

She picked up the letters that Gussie had dropped on her desk. She did most of the buying and selling for the farm while Lauchlin looked after the fruit trees and vines. These letters covered the disposal of the fruit which was now being harvested—the hundreds of boxes of McIntosh Reds and Delicious: the thousands of baskets of grapes. Concord, Agawam and Black Roger, the plums and peaches and the hickory and hazel-nuts.

But what was this long blue letter with the English stamp and the London postmark? She had friends in England, but letters from them were very rare. With no great curiosity she slit the letter open with the paper knife Lauchlin had carved for her from a piece of whalebone and took the letter to the window-seat to read it—

Andrea stopped right there, a great light bursting upon her—someone, one of those workers in the orchard or the packing sheds, had put a note in a box of fruit and signed her name to it. She felt her cheeks burning and knew they were apple-red. What a silly trick to do and why, anyway, didn’t they sign their own name? It wasn’t a punishable offence, though sometimes she thought it should be made one, under the public nuisance category—like notes tied to Christmas trees, inserted in tobacco tins or stuffed in bottles and entrusted to that ancient postman, Neptune, who seemed to deliver them all to Ireland.

“I should throw it in the waste basket,” she thought, but she knew quite well that if she did she would only fish it out later or Gussie would find it and get started on an emotional spree which it would take a few dozen love stories to assuage.

“Well, what harm anyway? And it is a lovely letter and maybe it’s some lonely soul in some forgotten place—maybe a hospital or the like—and the letter was an event in his life. Come to think of it, it’s rather an event in mine—”

She bent to the letter again—

Andrea sat there day-dreaming—a rare occupation for her—until she heard Gussie ringing the breakfast bell. She hurried then, into a red jumper and grey tweed skirt and stout tan brogues. These were busy days at Farlake. They had a crew of twenty—eighteen of them transient workers—to harvest and pack the crop. And this would be a day for work—cool, golden, rich with the viny scent of Autumn.

She folded Adam Brand’s letter and tucked it in her pocket. Presently, she would burn it. She would of course ignore it, the work, no doubt, of some of those silly girls who were always running to movies, swooning over this star or that—

“I see myself writing to him—just ‘A Little Lonely Heart,’ I could sign myself and he could be ‘Your Unknown Lover’ or we could be Hero and Leander or Abélard and Héloïse or Tristan and Iseult—fun and games! I should tell Lauchie—I should tell him, he’s always teasing me about growing into an old maid, that I have a mysterious lover and one who’s been around too, not some simple rustic or stupid kind who’s never been out of sight of the smoke of his own chimney. No, indeed!”

But she didn’t tell Lauchlin. She knew he didn’t at all approve of the workers putting notes or even their names and addresses in the neat red-labelled boxes with the perfect fruit and the proud name—Farlake Farm of Edenvale. He had discharged one girl whom he accused of trying to run a matrimonial agency: this one was sending out pictures of herself and her girl friends, and getting answers from the oddest sources. Lauchlin liked fun but she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be his idea of fun—someone signing his sister’s name to a silly come-on letter that might find its way to any sort of man.

Gussie, who was setting a platter of grilled mackerel fillet and a dish of steaming rolls on the bright blue and white checked table in the breakfast room—Gussie would have loved it, but Lauchlin’s lean brown face and bronzed topknot were bent over some market reports which he found so interesting that he all but poked a piece of roll into his eye.

“Hi, Lauchie boy!” Andrea rubbed her hand over the close cropped hair as she passed him. He was three years older than she and he bullied her and teased her and adored her. “I have those vouchers from Newfoundland, an order for a thousand boxes of Macs from Pelerin Frères, in Gaspé. Looks as if we’ll sell ’em all.”

“If we can pick them all and pack them.” Lauchlin’s light blue eyes swept her face appreciatively. “Lord, but you’re pretty! It seems cruel somehow to have so much that is lovely shared by so few. You had better take a jaunt this winter—Bermuda, Florida, the Mediterranean. We’ll make money, no matter what happens; even if these workers quit on us or get drunk or prove as hopeless as they look. Oh, for the days of quid pro quo, when the labourer was worthy of his hire and a man took honest pride in a task well done—”

“Yes, doctor!” Lauchlin’s college had given him an honorary Doctor of Science degree, which had made him furious at the time and progressively so on each occasion when any one called him by his title. He glowered at Andrea now, but she ignored him and concentrated on pouring the tea. “Them days is as far gone as the days of the Kerry dancing. You’d better concentrate on the machine. What about a super-robot who will pick ’em, pack ’em and peddle ’em?”

“We have it,” grunted Lauchlin. “Me! I put in almost eighteen hours yesterday and I expect I’ll be working overtime today. You’re putting in a pretty full day yourself, Andy.”

“I like it—I like every bit of it.”

“Yes, I know.” He studied her, frowning slightly. “It seems to appeal to you more than anything else and I suppose as long as you’re happy—”

“Now what are you trying to tell me?” But she knew, and again the bright flags burned in her cheeks.

“I guess you know,” he said gently. “I don’t think I have yet met the man I’d gladly see you go with, but he must exist somewhere and I fail to see how you’re ever going to find him here in Edenvale—”

“ ‘Where the years go softly by’,” she said dreamily.

“All too softly,” agreed Lauchlin, lighting a cigarette to smoke with his tea. “And all too swiftly. We’re young, I suppose, as ages go today, and we don’t yet feel the years crowding on each other’s heels. We go along busily and happily and maybe never even notice the turn of the tide—and then we’re old—”

“I know.” She thought of that fleeting shadow in the mirror, as if the curtain of the years had been jerked aside for an instant. “But if one is happy—And what about you? What about that girl you met at Ste. Anne de Bellevue when you went to the fruit-growers convention last winter—?”

“Married,” grinned Lauchlin. “Married a guy with a big apple-ranch in the Okanagan Valley, so you see she’s competition for us now, with her old British Columbia fruit. I’ll travel this winter maybe and scout around and find me a wife—if you’ll go find yourself a husband, Handy Andy.”

“I’ll think about it.” The letter rustled in the pocket of her skirt. “We could, of course, stay home and try to get mates by mail-order.”

“I don’t think T. Eaton has put in such a department yet. I haven’t looked in ‘The Book’ lately. I don’t think the love-by-mail idea is any good. Take these wenches who are always sticking billets doux in the boxes of apples. Take that French kid—what was her name?—Gisèle Laprade. She started swapping letters with some Frenchman in St. Pierre and they met in Halifax and the Frenchman talked her out of the thousand dollars she’d saved, and ran off with the bridesmaid the night before the wedding. It is better to get a line on their background. The world is full of wolves and wolfesses. I have to run. Watch my smoke, baby.”

He almost collided with the girl who was coming in the door that opened on to the back-porch—a small, brown-faced girl with the thick black hair and jetty eyes that told of some Indian blood far back in her ancestry. He caught her by her elbows, lifted her easily and set her down in the place he had just vacated.

“Hot tea for Miss Jane Wyatt, please. Our master-mind, our alter ego, our strength and mainstay and the only one who can spell good.”

“The only one who ever did any studying, you mean. Some people are born spellers but most of us lean hard on Webster. What’s the difference anyway? Soon nobody will know how to spell and we won’t be able to find fault with each other.”

“Oh, happy day!” grinned Lauchlin, and made a beeline for the packing sheds where his workers were sitting around in the sun waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

“Hello, Jane.” Andrea gave her some tea in a blue cup that was her favourite. “Looks like another busy day.”

“It doesn’t seem to daunt you, Andy. Don’t you ever get fed up with this life or are you so wedded to it that if you ever went to the city you’d want to start a fruit-store?”

“My! We’re acidulous this morning, Miss Wyatt.” Andy raised her dark brows in mock amazement. “What sort of spirit is that to show here in this terrestrial Eden?”

“Eve must have got fed up with Eden, if you want to ask me,” muttered Jane, glowering out at a scene of sheer beauty which no Eden could ever surpass—blue water and green hill and paler blue of sky and the gold and crimson banners of the Autumn. “I can see why she went scouting around for snakes. How can you stand it, Andy? It’s not as if you had to—”

“Et tu, Brute! What’s got into everyone this morning, anyway? Is some malignant deity casting a dark spell over Eden? First—” She hesitated, but she and Jane Wyatt, who was her helper, had been friends since childhood and Jane’s father had been their foreman all his life—“first, I see a ghost of things to come in my mirror—I see me when I’m old—”

Jane understood. “I get what you mean. Someone walking over your grave. For a moment you feel like a crone, old and dim-sighted and toothless—”

“Something like that. I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of life and I wondered what it would be like to come to the place where there is nothing more for us—sans hope, sans love, sans hate, sans everything. I thought my life was so full of things I loved that I should never need to think of such a time—”

“Is anyone’s life so full?” Jane Wyatt’s black eyes were deep beyond all sounding. “Don’t we all know we’re bound to have moments when we’re empty and naked, when there seems nothing for us, when only God has the answer and you’re not quite sure He’ll hear.”

“Could be. That I felt anyway. Then Lauchlin starts in—thinks it’s time that, like Dame Marjorie, I was settled in life. Talking of husbands, wooings, weddings, birthings—”

“Lauchlin’s right.”

“And now you! What in the world’s got into you, Jane?”

Jane Wyatt studied her sun-burned capable hands. She and Andrea had gone to the Colville school together; later, when Andrea had gone to Edgemere and McGill, Jane had studied journalism and handicrafts. She had a craft-shop where the road from Edenvale to Colville swept out on to a headland overlooking the Bay of Fundy. The summer trade was slackening off now as the tourists, like birds of passage, went their southward way. She worked mornings at Farlake, helping with the work in office and in the orchard. But always, Andrea knew, she was chafing at the gentle restraints of the life she led; that, while she sold the pretty hooked-rugs, the homespun tweeds, the quaint wood-carvings, shell ornaments and picture-maps that lent to her shop the colour and variety of an Oriental bazaar, while she haggled over prices with the thrifty Yankee visitors, her thoughts were far away—perhaps in the deep forest where her far-off Indian forebears had roamed so wild and free, perhaps on the distant oceans, in storied cities of the sea, where her sailing-ship grandfathers had anchored the proud Bluenose clippers that they built in the cove below the old house on the cliff.

Now she said, not looking at Andrea: “It’s so easy to get set in this pleasant rut here in the Vale. Talk about the land of the lotus-eaters! This place just drips with some opiate atmosphere. These hills and this mirror water and the slow oxen and the too, too noiseless tenor of our way—”

“You’re not content, Jane. I know that.”

“But that’s the trouble, Andy, I’m too darned content and I have it too easy. Sometimes I think I’ll go to the Labrador or the far north and do mission work among the Eskimoes, but there again—the Eskies have radios, soda-fountains and soon, according to Uncle Louie St. Laurent, they’ll have television. No, I guess I’ll just stay here in the Vale and sell my objets d’art Canadiens and grow lovely—maybe—growing old, as so many old things do. And maybe that’s best for me. I’m not beautiful like you; berry-brown and country-built and for me there is no high romance. All I can look forward to is being swung around at the square-dances—”

“You could marry any one of a half-dozen men right here in the Vale, Jane Wyatt—and you know it.”

“Sure I could. That’s just what I mean. Men here in the Vale—Anson Clyde, the principal of the Regional High School—writes poetry, looks like Bradley Headstone—no thanks. Phelps Dewdney, lawyer and member of parliament, so heavy the earth shakes at his stride—not for me; the summer-crop of painters and writers. Nothing there for me—nor for you.”

“Well, what would you have me do, Miss Discontent?”

“I’m not sure. I know you can’t just sit here till your knight comes riding. If you wait that long, your eyes will be so dim you’ll mistake him for the Fuller brush-man. What’s this coming up the drive—oh, I know, it’s that new fellow who lives out on the island. I’ve seen him a few times in the village. Name is—some funny name—he’s old Brun Snyder’s nephew, sailor home from the sea or something—lean and lank and brown—”

“His name is John Chanter,” said Andrea. “I heard Lauchlin saying something about him. He’s helping old Brun get out the Colville Weekly Coastguard.”

“Another misfit, no doubt,” murmured Jane. “The Colville Weekly Coastguard belongs to the Tatler-Spectator chain—still carries ads. on the front page. Trouble is, Brun never stirs out of the office on Water Street and he has no press-wire. I expect to see a banner headline any day now saying the Riel Rebellion has been quelled. Better ask Mr. John Chanter in for a cup of tea, Andy. He’s not bad looking in a lean and hungry way, but he’s got the city pallor and needs fattening.”

Gussie, with the true hospitality of the Bluenose, had already ushered the stranger into the breakfast room and set a chair for him, so that he was placed between the dark girl and the fair one who occupied the settle-benches facing each other.

“Good-morning, Miss Farr. And Miss Wyatt, isn’t it? I’ve seen you both in the village. I’m John Chanter, of the reportorial staff of the Colville Weekly Coastguard—”

“Canada’s leading weekly,” murmured Jane.

John Chanter smiled, a wide pleasant smile, and threw it right back—“We progress with the country. Know anything about journalism, Miss Wyatt?”

“Studied it at school,” said Jane sadly. “Hope you know yours.”

“Studied it in a dozen city-rooms.”

“Leading right up to the Colville Coastguard. Congratulations, Mr. Chanter. I suppose you’re looking forward to winning this year’s Pulitzer prize?”

“We all do.” The stranger’s easy good-humour stayed with him in the face of Jane’s acid remarks. “Right now, I’m after a story on the prospects for this year’s apple-crop. With the loss of almost the entire English market you growers must be faced with a—”

“Crisis is the rare word,” said Jane. “Andrea here will tell you all about it. Me, I just work here. You might put in your story though that, with all the swell new diseases they’re dreaming up, an apple a day is no longer sufficient—you need at least three.”

She waved an airy hand at John Chanter and with a muttered, “See you in the salt-mines, Andrea,” went off to work.

John Chanter’s eyes, like his thick unruly hair, were brown and wise and quick to laughter. They followed Jane Wyatt, a neat figure in tan slacks and blue blazer, with quiet appreciation as she crossed the lawn to the low-eaved packing shed where the office was.

“Bright girl, that,” he said, turning to Andrea, who was pouring him a cup of tea from the fresh pot Gussie, scenting romance right here at Farlake Farm, had brought from the kitchen. “She works for you?”

“With us. Jane is like one of the family. She was an only child. Her father was foreman here and since her mother died when she was very young, she grew up with us. But she has her own business. You must know it—the handicraft shop out on Folly Head.”

“Oh, yes. Now I know. She surely doesn’t believe in using buttons on the foils, but I do like matching words—or crossing swords—with her. Pulitzer prize, forsooth! You’re lucky to make a week’s pay on Uncle Brunswick’s paper. Still, I rather like it. This is a grand country, this Edenvale, and I’ve never anywhere met such people. You’re a rare race of individualists.”

Andrea smiled. “We think for ourselves—that comes from living in one of the world’s backwaters. A lot of the people only turn on the radio for the weather, the market prices and prayers.”

“Well! Right there you have it all, haven’t you? What more could anyone want to know? Some of them make their own soap too, don’t they?”

“Oh, yes. It’s pretty old-world, here in Nova Scotia. We have a larger Gaelic-speaking population than Scotland and right here in the Vale we have many descendants of the Acadian French who planted these orchards around Port Royal. And we have oxen, and the pace of life, while not quite geared to them, is still quite leisurely. Where is your home, Mr. Chanter?”

“Where I hang my hat,” he said a bit ruefully. “I was born in England, brought to British Columbia when I was a kid, lived in Vancouver, London, here and there. Brunswick Snyder is my mother’s brother and the nearest kin I have. I thought I’d look him up and he’s asked me to stay for a while.”

“And you will?”

“I think I will.” The brown eyes met hers for a slow moment. “It’s nice to vegetate for a change. But I’m keeping you, and Uncle Brun is holding the presses—together with baling wire—mind if I ask you some questions about the apples?”

“Shoot. But be sure to check with some other growers before you print it. As you say, we are all individualists here and others will surely have ideas different from mine.”

“I’ll watch it, Miss Farr. But I’d like to write a little sketch of you, as well—how you helped to make this place one of the finest fruit-farms in the Dominion—”

“I helped a little. It is my brother, Lauchlin, though, who is the big wheel: I’m only a very small auxiliary, and Jane Wyatt is another. And before us all, you can go back to the Scotchman, Isaac Melanson, who was among the first settlers of Port Royal and was more French than the Doucets, the Chiassons and all the rest. My mother was descended from Isaac and it was he who started the orchards here in Edenvale. My Aunt Phoebe Marchand can tell you tales of him she heard from her own grandmother. She’s almost ninety now—I mean Aunt Phoebe.”

“You were Queen of the Blossoms one year. I saw your picture in Uncle Brun’s files. You were very lovely.”

“You are very flattering. I was drawn from a hat—my name from among a dozen girls with just as much claim to wear the crown of blossoms as I had.”

She gave him facts and figures of production, told him how the orchards in the Vale were coming back to full fruition after an almost complete change-over from the old varieties—Gravenstein, Bishop Pippin and the like, to the ones the market now demanded, mostly McIntosh Reds and Delicious. “I loved the old ones,” she said. “We still kept some trees. It was heart-breaking to see the others destroyed by the thousand. It was what Père Lacombe, the French curé, called ‘The Massacre of the Innocents.’ Of course, one must follow the demands of the market and if you stay in a rut you’re pretty sure to perish, but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to go down with the old loved things we knew, rather than start in afresh with a lot of new ones. I miss the lovely colours of the Russets and Gravensteins and the smell of the Pippins. However, the new varieties are selling, and I guess the only criterion of the worth of anything these days is—does it sell?”

“Can you tell me something of the romance of orchardry, Miss Farr?” He didn’t look up from his notebook in which he was busily writing down her remarks. “Or is there any?”

Involuntarily her hand went to the pocket of her skirt, to the letter from far away, and she was tempted to tell him about it and make a joke out of it. The temptation passed. The letter had been meant for her eyes alone and it would be mean to make public fun of it.

“Romance? Oh, I suppose there’s quite a bit of it. Lauchie was talking this morning about one of the girl’s putting her picture and her name and address in a box she was packing. The box found its way to St. Pierre-Miquelon and the picture fell into the clutches of some gay deceiver on the island. Romance—if you want to call it that—was kindled and flamed up, letters were exchanged and the trusting maiden with her savings of a thousand dollars went to Halifax to meet the groom. They met all right—and he ran away with the kitty and the bridesmaid the day before the wedding.”

“I won’t put that in.” John Chanter shook his head. “Have you no happier incidents? Can’t you tell me of some other maiden fair who found true love through the orchards and vineyards? You yourself—”

She flushed slightly and shook her head. The letter in her pocket gave her a guilty feeling. How he would laugh if he knew that she, who was telling, tongue in cheek, the tragic story of poor Gisèle Laprade—who had come back to the Vale and married a rich widower with seven young children—had this very morning received a letter from an unknown man in a far-distant country, and the letter originated from a note in a box of apples, and dripped with what he would call romance.

“I wouldn’t dwell too much on the romantic angle, if I were you, Mr. Chanter. There are some lovely passages in Longfellow’s Evangeline, though, dealing with the orchards, that you might ring in. You know the poet, of course—the part about the sunshine of St. Eulalie—”

“Can you quote it for me?”

She quoted it in her low, rich voice and it had an old, sweet haunting beauty there in the sunny room in the storied land of which the poet wrote—and she herself, so young, so freshly fair, had she been wearing the Norman cap and kirtle of blue and the ear-rings brought in olden time from France, might have been the reincarnation of the sad lovely maid of Grand Pré—

He listened to her raptly and into his eyes came a look that startled and unnerved her, so that she wanted to be up and away, yet found her greatest happiness in staying right where she was.

Who was this stranger, anyway, and what was there about him that made her so conscious of herself, that awakened in her stirrings new and strange and wonderful—she who had been pursued by experts? But those clear brown eyes and the look in them—not of abject worship or of bemused infatuation, but of something even deeper—

Nonsense, she told herself—I’ve only seen him a few times and this is the first I’ve talked to him. I’d better send him on his way and get to my apples.

She stood up, her cheeks burning, gathering her papers from the settle beside her. “I should think you’d have enough there for your story, Mr. Chanter—unless the Colville Coastguard is putting out a special harvest-supplement.”

“Swell idea,” said John, “but I doubt the old printing-plant would ever bear the strain. I’ll try to write you a good story: and thank you for helping me. I studied Evangeline in school.”

“Who didn’t?” smiled Andrea. “I love it. Some of my own forebears went on that sad excursion but they found their way home again. Now if you’d like to learn the real inside of the business, just follow Lauchlin about for a while. He won’t mind—he will probably put you to work. One day he drafted the Unitarian minister, a book-salesman and two schoolteachers. Uses press-gang methods if persuasion fails.”

They walked together down to the packing sheds. A team of oxen, picturesque and of the core of earth, as in Biblical days, was hauling a great load of crimson fruit up from the orchard, the automobile tyres on the wheels of the long steel-framed wagon and the bright scarlet jockey-cap and black and red check shirt of the driver linked the far-off time with the streamlined present. The huge, white-faced beasts, held together by a sturdy six-foot wooden yoke, pulled their load without any visible effort.

“Hoof-hoof!” yelled the driver, urging on his team.

“Lunenburg Dutch,” said Andrea. “There is one for your book. That’s Henry Zwicker. He’s from ‘through the woods’—from the south shore and his team has been broken-in in Dutch. Most of them answer to ‘Get up’ and ‘Whoa,’ and ‘Gee’ to go right and ‘Haw’ to turn left. Wouldn’t you love to see him driving that team down St. Catherine Street or Fifth Avenue!”

“They’re beautiful. You’d expect to see some bearded frontiersmen and women in poke-bonnets. I took a picture of a team in Colville, parked between two Cadillacs.”

“I’ll show you one of two oxen pulling a Cadillac out of the mire. They’re still very useful, apart from their picturesqueness. There’s Lauchlin getting off that truck. I think you can manage now? Good luck with your story.”

“Good luck with your harvest.”

He looked back at the slim graceful figure, the long legs carrying her swiftly over the gravelled yard, through the deceptively slow-timed movement of the harvest, until she entered the door marked “Office.”

Jane Wyatt was sitting at the typewriter tapping out bills of lading. “Did you give him anything of ‘human interest?’ That’s what those boys dote on—something to tug at the heart-strings, squeeze the tear-ducts, make you reach for your hankie. Some of them can find it in a glue-factory.”

“He was looking for the romantic angle.”

“Oh! Well, of course, there’s the bees, cross-pollination, things like that—”

“I didn’t think of it. He was asking about—about letters or notes that were slipped into apple-boxes to be shipped to distant places.”

“Yes? How odd!”

“How is it odd? It’s done, you know. I told him about Gisèle Laprade and the way she was swindled out of her money.”

Jane tapped a final period with a hollow plunk. “You didn’t tell him about the airmail from London you got this morning?”

It grew so still there that the buzzing of the late bees in the larkspur outside the wide window sounded like a bass-fiddle and the old clock’s slow strokes were like hammer blows.

“How did you know about that?” Andrea leaned against the desk and stared at her Girl-Friday. “Am I right in sniffing a mouse here? Has that fine Canadian hand of yours been messing about with my life—”

“It’s my job to get the mail and I left it in late last night on my way home from the dance at Coll’s Corners. I saw the letter and I guessed—”

“How could you? Unless you had something to do with writing the one that it came in answer to.”

“Something to do with it? Why, I wrote it.”

“And signed my name to it! Why didn’t you sign your own?”

“Who? Me? Plain Jane Wyatt? Why, even with a thousand bucks like Gisèle I couldn’t get to first base with an octogenarian. Tell me—” the black eyes were alight with avid interest—“what did we catch?”

“What if I burned the letter?”

“It’s in your skirt pocket, Andy. I saw the blue envelope peeping out when we were having breakfast. I deduced then it must have been rather interesting or you would have chucked it away.”

“Well, if you must know, Lady of Misrule, it was one of the loveliest letters I’ve ever received. To punish you, though, I think I’ll just deny you the privilege—”

“Aw, Andrea! You wouldn’t be so—so—”

“Why wouldn’t I? What in the world possessed you to do a thing like that?”

Jane’s eyes were stubborn. “Because it seemed the thing to do. The way you live you’ll never meet a man—the man for you. You’ll shrivel up, wither on the vine, grow old and sad or pathetically sweet. You know it. You said yourself you saw a witch in the mirror this very morning.”

“Jane, you’re hopeless! Well, here it is—read it and weep or laugh or do what you want to with it. You may keep it. And let me alone to do my work or Lauchlin will be jumping on my neck.”

Silence again took over, the silence of the slow-ticking clock and the bees’ deep bourdon, as Andrea bent to her books and Jane Wyatt to the letter from Adam Brand—

The silence lasted so long that it made Andrea look up from her tasks. She found Jane staring into the blue space beyond the shining waters of the Basin, with eyes unseeing and full of dreams.

“Well, what in the name of all that’s—!”

“Brother!” said Jane in a near-whisper. “Can that boy lay it on! Songs of Araby and Tales of Fair Kashmir and ‘Come weez me to ze Kasbah’—I surely picked you a five-star pen-pal, Andy. Didn’t it bowl you right over? Didn’t you feel all feathery light and feel stars bursting in you and—and—”

Andrea met Jane’s dark gaze for a long moment, a revealing moment. Jane read the truth in her eyes.

“So you did like it!”

“I think a girl would have to be less than human not to feel something. We’re far from the days of serenades and sonnets, of lays and roundelays, but still the old Eve is in us and we’re suckers for sweet-talk and flowery compliments. I don’t think I’m as susceptible as you are, Jane—you’re positively ga-ga over Mr. Adam Brand’s letter.”

“Well, who wouldn’t be thrilled? You cast your bread upon the water—”

“And, lo, it cometh back all covered with whipped cream, cherries, cachous—”

“What do you suppose he does, this Adam Brand? Airlines pilot—”

“Maybe writes the travel-folders. He’s certainly been around. He can weave the spell of far places.”

“It makes you feel buried, lost here in Eden, when he talks of the desert of Gobi, of Baghdad, of China—you feel your fetters grow heavier—”

“You galley-slaves got those bills ready yet? We’re all—” Lauchlin’s big form loomed in the door, John Chanter behind him. He stared at them and scratched his head. “Hey! What is this—a sit-down strike? This is going to be our biggest day. I’ve just been telling Chanter here what dynamos you two are—and here I find you having a kaffeeklatsch while the fruits of Eden die on the vine—get going, will you? I’ll be back in half an hour.”

They got going. The typewriters clattered wildly and blue, white and yellow sheets piled up on the desk.

“Apples and apples and apples—until I die. Lord! How I’m beginning to hate that fruit.” Jane took some of her pique out on the invincible old typewriter, striking little hammer blows with the keys. “I wonder if orange-groves would be different? Or coconut plantations or watermelon patches or—Well, maybe they’d all inspire one to hara-kiri.”

“Jane, you’re getting punch-drunk. You must be hanging around the cider-mills too much.”

“I haven’t—but it’s an idea. There, we must be about ready for that Simon Legree, Lauchlin. Oh, for a man with a soul above apples!”

“Lauchlin has his moments,” defended Andrea. “But none of them happier than these—and that’s a good thing.”

“He will look like a pippin when he’s seventy,” said Jane. “I have a prize idea for a line of Toby-jugs with apple-heads—you know how in stories they say a character is apple-cheeked, like a Ribston pippin or a russet—don’t stop me—I must get it down. It will be grand advertising too for Edenvale. There I go! I’m sold on the place too.”

Lauchlin sent a boy for the bills of lading. They saw him and John Chanter helping to load a truck, piling up neat, spanking new boxes of apples.

“The ruin of a thousand doctors,” said Jane. “What are you going to do about this letter from Adam Brand, Andrea Felice?”

“Why, I—Nothing, of course. What would you have me do?”

“Answer the letter, darling. It’s the logical thing to do. When you find a man like that—”

“How do you know what he’s like? You can’t tell—”

“The style, says Buffon, is the man himself. You can tell with half a brain-lobe that this Adam Brand is something. With every word, every sentence, he builds up a picture of himself.”

“And then we exchange photos and he turns out to be some old fellow with a beard and lumbago. No, thanks: I’m not having any.”

“Well, I think you’re being very foolish. Here I go out of my way to find you a lover and with my first try I hit the jackpot—and then you refuse to play the game. It will serve you right if you grow into an old maid, alone and forsaken, and the kids will call you Aunt Andy and feel sorry for you sitting there alone on your porch, rocking and knitting socks and peering over your spectacles. Better listen, Andrea, while the ears are keen, to the songs of Araby, the tales of fair Kashmir.”

Andrea shook her head. “I think not. I suppose I could drop this man a note telling him that the letter he found in the box of McIntosh Reds was not from me, that a silly romantic girl, a dear friend of mine, signed my name to it—”

“I think you’d be making a mistake. But suit yourself. Romance beckons and you turn away your head. And with you it will be always like that.”

“Why don’t you adopt him yourself, Jane? Tell him how it all came about—”

“I’d like to, Andy. I’d love it, but look at me—”

“I think you’re lovely.”

“I’m plain. I’m not the kind of girl to drive men mad or even to the point of proposing matrimony. What sense would there be in my writing him and building up a beautiful friendship, only to have him meet me one day and fail to see in little Jane Wyatt the fair princess of his letters? What a let-down for both of us! But how I should love to be beautiful like you. Believe me, I’d not turn a deaf ear to any music so lovely as this man makes.”

“Oh, Jane, you’re being silly, and crazily romantic. I don’t want a man so badly that I’d go to such extremes to get him and, anyway, it’s a dumb method of finding a partner.”

“How is it? Love, no matter how you meet it, is a gamble. How do most love-affairs start anyway? A look, a smile, a word—and away we go. Well, why not a letter? By the time you’ve swapped three or four, unless you’re awfully stupid, you have a pretty good picture of the one you’re writing to—a truer picture than you’d get if you were meeting him personally, for you wouldn’t be distracted by his looks or his voice—or his caresses—it’s really a trial courtship, come to think of it.”

“You certainly can juggle facts to get the right answer,” laughed Andrea. “The answer you want, I mean. Shall I mention your name when I write to Mr. Brand? I could tell him how grand you are and that you have all the sterling qualities—”

“Men aren’t interested in sterling qualities in a sweetheart—electro-plate will get ’em every time—more shine to it. And no, please don’t bring me into your letter. Just say, if you want to, that it was a girl who thought you were losing out in the game of life and love—a silly girl, if you will, who wanted you to have what she might never have herself—”

“Oh, Jane!”

“Well, it’s so.” Jane’s chin was stubborn, but her wide mouth was soft and trembling and she stilled its weakness with an angry toss of her head. “I know I’ll never walk the High Roads and never see all the wonderful places I dream about—not the way I want to walk and not the way I want to see them. I won’t ever have anyone sing to me of Araby and I—well, I try to be resigned to it. But for you it could be so different! You could have so many of life’s supreme moments—”

“What do you call ‘life’s supreme moments,’ Jane?” Andrea’s voice was gentle. She loved Jane Wyatt like a sister and it touched her deeply to have the strange girl bare her heart like this.

“The moment when you meet Beauty,” said Jane, “the moment when you meet Love, the moment in your lover’s arms when you know love, when you feel that, even if you should die right then, you at least have lived—so many others—so many others, Andrea, that are not given to us all.”

“You’re not happy, Jane.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be happy. All my life has been a compromise and I’ll spend the rest of it, I suppose, making the best of what comes. Sure, I could marry some good, solid-and-stupid-citizen and make him ‘a good wife’ and cook his meals and mend his socks and give him children and raise them in the paths of righteousness—and all this with my heart far away and my dreams dying—”

She turned to her typewriter. “Okay. Tell Adam Brand it was all a hoax. Maybe you’re right at that. I do the craziest things. Trying to find you a lover was probably the craziest, but, believe me, I meant well.”

The rest of the day, as the tempo of work in orchard and shed speeded up, was a mad, unremitting rush, giving neither of them much time to think even fleetingly of Adam Brand. Jane kept the letter. She asked Andrea if she needed the address but Andrea said she knew it off-by-heart, that it was the first love-letter she had ever received.

“Probably the last too,” said Jane. “You’re really going to do what you said—cut the poor fellow off short, snip the golden thread of his dreams—”

“Yes, I am. It’s really your letter, you know—and not mine.”

“I did it for you, Andrea. You could carry it off. For me to build up an affaire de coeur with this man would be only foolish. And I did so want to see something come out of my letter—”

“What did you write anyway?”

“Oh, I told a little of my dreams, of my wantings, of the deep frustrations in my soul. I wrote of the sameness of life in Eden. I said that living here made one understand Lucifer and Azrael and the other bad hats among the angels—you get so you just feel you have to upset the apple-cart or you’ll go crackers. And it was wonderful to find a man who understood so quickly and so fully. Tell him thanks for that, won’t you?”

“I don’t want him to write again, Jane—and that’s final. I don’t want to find my true love that way—out of a fishpond.”

“I told you it was as good as any other way. Well, don’t say I didn’t do my best for you. I hope you will find some better prospects, but I think it’s a mistake not to track this boy down and at least find out what sort of fellow he is.”

Andrea was tempted, but she fought the weakness hard and successfully. Before she left the office she answered Adam Brand’s letter—

She watched Jane to see what her reaction would be when Jane picked up the mail to take it to the village, but Jane’s face, when she checked over the letters, wore what the Farrs called her “Indian look”—an impassive, inscrutable expression—or rather lack of it, the eyes not seeming to focus on any one thing but to be seeing many.

“Goodnight, Jane.” Andrea put the cover on the old portable they both preferred to the gadgeted electric machine that a smart salesman had unloaded on Lauchlin. “See you in the morning.”

“If I don’t die in my sleep,” said Jane glumly. “Every night I dream of apples, torrents of apples, Niagaras of apples and they’re all about to shower down on me. So far I’ve managed to escape before I got my brains beaten out, but there may come a night—there must come a night—”

“Maybe you’ll dream of—of Adam Brand for a change.”

The great black eyes still held that veiled and guarded look. “Adam Brand? Oh, you mean our mysterious letter-writer?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about him already?”

Jane shrugged. “It’s not for me to forget and isn’t for me to remember. He was never for me, Andrea. He was for you. Maybe you will dream of him—maybe he will come to you in your dreams and awaken you.”

“I never dream, Jane.”

“I always dream.”

John Chanter worked long and hard on his story of the fruit-harvest. He read endless books and leaflets and toiled into the silent hours of the night in the dusty, cluttered-up little office on Water Street whence, for nearly thirty years, faithfully each week, issued the Colville Weekly Coastguard, his Uncle Brun’s pride and joy. The typography was terrible, the proof-reading bad, the format unchanged since the turn of the century, but the items were what the people of the Vale wanted to read and the editorial page had a salty zest, a homespun humour and a sound philosophy that had several times won the little paper the highest award in the Weekly Newspapers Association.

“You fixin’ to put the big city boys in their proper places, John?” Old Brun’s white hair was long and wispy, his face one of those Jane Wyatt had classified as Ribston Pippin, smooth and ruddy, his nose huge and his blue eyes sharp as awls. He wore glasses, but most of the time, as now, he did his looking over their thin gold rims. “You shouldn’t go at it so hard, boy. Practise moderation in work, same as in everything else. I’ll give you a good definition of moderation: it’s all right to scratch your back but there’s no sense in tearing the hide off yourself. Always remember that.”

“I’m learning,” smiled John. “I’ve learned plenty in the month I’ve been here. I was impatient at first: no one ever seemed to hurry and no one seemed to give a darn whether or not school kept, but I’ve begun to find out that things get done and done better than in the city with all its sound and fury, and that school always keeps. This story of the apple harvest really got me—”

“So I notice. You did a fine job, boy. You gave the Farr girl quite a play, I see.”

John studied the empty bowl of a venerable briar-pipe for a moment or two before he reached for his pouch. “Did I? Well, she was the one who gave me most of my information—she and Lauchlin; and she seemed so in harmony with the life she led, so cleanly lovely and fragrantly fresh—”

“Whoa there, boy! Don’t get too lyrical about her or you’ll have all the beauties in the Vale writing in to cancel their subscriptions. You don’t need to tell anyone in this neck o’ the woods how lovely Andrea Farr is. She was Queen of the Blossoms—you know that. Well, to my mind and to most of the male minds hereabouts, she should be queen every year.”

“I wish I had seen the coronation,” said John wistfully. “I’ll see it next year but of course it will be some other girl—”

“Has to be. And you think you’ll be here to see it next year, eh?” The old man sounded pleased. He had carried on alone, with only Miss Grace Till, who did the personals and the cookery and home-hints pages, and Trueman Lank, who alone knew the secrets of the ancient printing-press. He had felt the burden grow lighter on his still sturdy old shoulders since John Chanter had come.

“I like it here, Uncle Brun. You get your full sixty minutes out of each hour of your life down here. Time to breathe, to think, to live—”

“To love,” said the old man smiling. “Don’t leave that out. We build slowly, but we build for keeps; we may draw out our courtships a little but our divorce cases aren’t drawn out—we don’t have many. You could do worse than settle down right here, nephew. You’ll never be rich, but you can be very happy and maybe you’ll find some girl who will double your happiness.”

“I’m not looking.”

“Neither was the man who found the diamond ring, but he pounced on it just the same. You seem to have liked Andrea Farr.”

“Who could help it? Just to look at her and listen to her was sheer pleasure. I’ve met dozens of the famous lovelies of stage and screen, some real, some phoney as a Chinese peace-offer, but this Farr girl is the real thing. She wouldn’t take a second look at me—a tramp-reporter—”

“Maybe not. But when you get to be an editor-in-chief of the Coastguard it may be a different story.”

John looked at the old man to see if he was kidding, but Brun was quite serious; to him the little weekly was the Times of London, the Montreal Gazette and the Herald Tribune all in one. He and his paper had been quoted the world over and he knew his worth and had his proper estimate of his own ability.

“I’d better get out to the fair-grounds this afternoon, Uncle Brun. You’re sure you want me to do that story, are you?”

“Quite sure. I’ve been writing it for thirty years and I’ve seen enough oxen do enough pulling to move the earth itself. Yes, you get out there and keep your eyes and ears open. You’ll get all the atmosphere you want and you’ll bring a fresh viewpoint and the zest of youth to the piece—which will be a change and a help. Same as it is in your story of the Crimson Harvest. Good, that! And quoting Longfellow was smart too.”

“She—Andrea put me up to that. She knew it off-by-heart, the part about Sunshine of St. Eulalie.”

“Well, it’s good. Makes us look real literary, makes a story folks want to read. Writers these days are all getting the same literary disease—everything’s got to have a message, or put over a point, or persuade or poison. You keep in mind, son, that people read primarily to be entertained, only secondarily to be informed or pointed or persuaded. Dullness is the great sin. Don’t ever let ’em accuse you of being dull.”

It would be hard, thought John, as he was swallowed up in the colour and movement of the fair-ground, to write anything but what was gay and bright about this event. The people of the Vale had turned out by the thousands and from all over the province thousands more flocked to see the ox-pulls, the Scottish games and dancing; to hear the pipers, the Gaelic singers, the fiddlers. Here the bright tartans of the clans woven by the crofters themselves with skills handed down from those who had left long ago, “the lone shieling of the misty island,” vied with the startling reds, greens and yellows that the habitant French and the Acadians threw in as their colour-contribution. Over all flooded the music of the carousels, the calliopes, the shouts of the barkers, the singing chant of the bingo-boys and the hubbub of the crowd.

John Chanter loved it and was impressed with the deep enjoyment the people drew from such a simple event. He wandered from booth to booth, studying the displays of weaving, of Indian bead-work and basketry, of wood-carving and primitive painting. He joined the huge throng that had gathered to watch the ox-pull, a contest to determine the best team of oxen, the one that could drag the heaviest load. On a forty-yard-long cinder-track the huge teams pulled, hitched by head-yoke and shaft to a flat wooden drag, weighted down with two or four hundred pound boxes of gravel. The oxen must move each load two feet within three pulls, the load being increased after each successful pull and the top weight load added before the team reached the finish. John saw Henry Zwicker, the Farr’s drower, with his team of mighty animals, their white faces and brown coats gleaming, the bright harness adorning their heads in patterns strange and barbaric, their hoofs shod with caulked shoes to give them a grip on the track.

Henry’s team was pulling now and he stood at their heads urging them on with prayers and threats and strange words, half-Dutch, half-English, brandishing the whip he was forbidden to use. John watched as the ox-team, called Diamond and Bright, inched the terrific load towards the finish. In his notebook he marked down the weights called out by the announcer: “Weight of this team from Farlake Farm, 2,570 pounds; teamster, Henry Zwicker of Lunenburg (loud cheers and yells of ‘Hoof-hoof!’ and ‘You show ’em, Dutchy!’ from the crowd); weight of pull 11,980 pounds.”

“Getting it down right, Scoop?” John turned and gazed into the black eyes of Jane Wyatt. He showed her his notes.

“Looks like something copied from the walls of a cave where early man made his first marks,” said Jane. “Mine are always unreadable when I get them home, but you always seem to remember the highlights. I worked on a farm-journal in Montreal for a while but I left before the hayseed got too thoroughly embedded in my brain. Be sure to give my handicraft-display a big blow-up in the Bugle. That apple story of yours was a honey.” She looked up at him with respect. “Maybe you will win a Pulitzer prize some day, at that. Andrea loved it.”

“She did!”

“My, what big eyes you have, grandmother! Is that so important to you, Mr. Chanter?”

John looked uncomfortable: this dark witch was altogether too observant. It was important to him that Andrea should like his story; she was its inspiration and she had been in his thoughts all the time he worked on it.

“Miss Farr gave me most of the ideas for the piece,” he said a bit stiffly.

“Any other ideas?” Jane Wyatt’s bright eyes were full of mischief. “Some of the story, quite apart from the lines you lifted from your fellow-hack, Mr. Longfellow, were quite lyrical, really inspired.”

“It was an easy subject to wax lyrical about, Miss Wyatt.”

“Oh, call me Jane. You know—as one old newspaper-man to another. I’ll call you John. What are you doing down here anyway? Your stuff is big-time. I can tell.”

“I got tired of what you call ‘big-time,’ Jane. I was fed up.”

“Not licked, I hope. Not too soft to stand the pace? Wasn’t booze, was it?”

He grinned. “What a brash little thing it is. No! it wasn’t any of those things. I just realised one day that I was in pretty much of a squirrel-mill, going nowhere at some hundreds of miles an hour. Same story everywhere I’d been—Montreal, New York, London—”

“And not the same in the Vale.”

He shook his head, smiling. “Far, far different. I love this. I like people who find real and honest pleasure in the simple things of earth—like watching those biblical beasts pull half the world around.”

“Oh, they’ll talk about that till next year. You should interview our teamster, Henry Zwicker—Dutchy—there’s an ox-proud man.”

“I certainly plan to talk to him.”

“Right now you’d better hurry over to the big ring if you want to see some plain-and-fancy riding and jumping—Miss Andrea Felice Farr on her lovely Palomino, Musette, might give you some more ideas. I must get back to my booth. Good scribbling, John.”

“Thankee.”

He stared after her. Swell kid, he thought. Not what you’d call pretty, except in a strange, bitter-sweet, elfin way. The straight black hair and jetty eyes were lovely, and the clear brown skin and sturdy boyish form. He liked her.

He thought, as he made his way to the big judging ring in front of the grandstand, of Andrea Farr, of the way Jane had teased him, of the way he had reacted. He was already quite vulnerable where Andrea was concerned; the mere mention of her name did things to his heart-beat, the mere conjuring up of her fair image filled him with lovely music. But he wasn’t fool enough, he told himself, to aspire so high, to think he stood a chance with her.

He saw her now, in blue jacket and tan jodhpurs, a fawn felt hat perched on the flaxen braids, as she mounted a beautiful Palomino pony and rode around the track like a lovely centaur. Class—that was the word for Andrea—the class that he’d always despised a bit until his brief meeting with her. Yet she had put him in his place.

He thought of the morning he had interviewed her, of how in the meeting of their eyes some new wonder had come to him, far more than the mere reaction of a man to a lovely woman. And she had felt it too—the way her blushes had coloured the skin of her fine-boned face. And she had stiffened and with a cool glance from the dark eyes put him quickly in his place.

“Not for me,” he thought, watching her now. “Too much of la haute noblesse about this Andrea Felice. Champagne and caviare—me, I’m just cakes and ale.” Yet she had spoken proudly of her own peasant ancestors, the rugged yeomen who had settled around Port Royal, who had first put roots in this Vale of Eden. But she was definitely not for him, and her heart-hungers, he was sure, were not such as he would be able to assuage. With her background and her money she could, if she willed, find a plush-lined niche in the big cities where she could rub shoulders against mink instead of homespun.

On a horse she was something beautiful to behold. She and the Palomino made a picture that he longed to have done in colours so he could hang it on the wall above his desk and remember this day of blue sky and pennoned fair-ground, wild music, the lowing of cattle and the whicker of the spirited horses; a mournful piper playing “Lochaber No More—”

The little mare Musette tripped and stumbled and threw Andrea on the grass-verge almost in front of the spot where John Chanter was standing. It all happened so fast that the crowd was stunned. It was John who got to her first and gathered her in his arms. Her hat had rolled away and the ash-blonde braids were awry, the pale blue-veined lids veiling the dark eyes.

“Miss Farr—Andrea—” The supple slender strength of her body amazed him as she came close in his arms, as the eyes flew open, failed to focus for a moment, then blazed with life. She shook her head to clear it.

“Okay, thanks.” She loosed herself from his arms. “I was only stunned. Musette—”

“All okay, Miss Farr,” said a boy in the crowd. “There is a hole in the track there. They’d better fix it.”

She was on her feet now, brushing the grass from her habit, fixing her hair with deft hands. She smiled at John Chanter. “Do I make the headlines in the next Clarion, Mr. Chanter? Or is it news when a girl falls into a reporter’s lap. I almost did.”

“It should be on the press-wires within the hour, Miss Farr.”

“Play it down, please. And clear Musette’s name—” She rubbed the mare’s white neck when a track-steward led her back. “It wasn’t her fault, the darling—I’m so glad she wasn’t hurt. Get that hole filled up, Herbie—won’t you? I wanted to make a showing in the jumps.”

“Sorry, Miss Farr,” said the steward. “We’ll see to it. You’ll cap the next one. I bet on you.”

“I liked your story of the Crimson Harvest.” She turned to John and looked at him in a way peculiar to her as if studying each line of his face intently, so better to remember it—a disconcerting thing until you got used to it and realized that she really was giving you all her attention.

“Well, thank you,” he said. “It’s a long time since I worked on anything I liked so much or that gave me such pleasure in the writing. I can see why the older men in newspaper work do such a better job; they write—or used to—in a leisurely way about things that didn’t move so fast as to prevent one’s seeing them. You can’t write about the lovely scenes of the harvest in staccato prose nor about an ox-pull in martile. These things call for the slow and sonorous, the rounded period and the resonant word. No place for the modern school of Bright Berties—words of two syllables only and ‘pregnant’ on every other page.”

“I think you belong right down there with Brun Snyder on the Coastguard,” laughed Andrea. “Between the two of you, the English language will be saved from complete destruction.”

“Oh, he’s worse than I am: His literary models are Addison and Steele, I’m up to Walter Pater at least—but anyway we have models, which is something.”

He walked with her to the paddock. “You’re not hurt, Andrea?”

He had hesitated only a moment about using her name. He saw that she didn’t mind, and he was glad. He always thought of her as Andrea—as Andréa Félice, the way Jane Wyatt pronounced it.

“Not in the least. I was brought up in a way that keeps me from bruising easily. I’ve taken worse tumbles on skis. But it was good of you to come so quickly to my rescue.”

“I couldn’t help myself.” And he knew it hadn’t done him much good. He could still feel the soft yet firm beauty of her body and smell the fragrance of her hair and he would see in his dreams the depth of her eyes when the creamy dark-lashed lids opened and she looked at him with that searching, studying look. It hadn’t done him, he thought, a bit of good to be so near to so much loveliness. He had kept himself clear of emotional entanglements and certainly he didn’t want to be involved with this girl.

“As if she would want me,” he thought when he left her and went over to watch the young girls from Antigonish and Inverness, in their grand tartans and proud bonnets, dancing the Highland Fling and the sword-dance to the wild music made by the tall pipers from Cape Breton.

Soon he had more than enough to write his story. He talked briefly with Henry Zwicker and got a picture of the prize-winning ox-team to go with the article. He was leaving the fair-grounds when Jane Wyatt in her noisy little car pulled up beside him and called, “Going my way, Scoop? I’d be proud to have you ride with me, sir.”

He thanked her and got into the bucket-seat beside her. She shot away with a screech of tyres and a clash of gears. She was smiling wickedly.

“That was beautiful,” she said, “the way you rushed to her aid. That scene wouldn’t need a retake in Hollywood.”

“Jealous?”

“Who? Me?” The black eyes slanted at him. “Now what makes you think that? I was glad it was you who turned out to be Johnny-on-the-spot. What did you say?—‘Darling, speak to me. For my sake, come back from the darkness—’ ”

“Nothing of the kind. Andrea wasn’t hurt.”

“No, but you were.”

“What do you mean? I wasn’t—”

“There was a wonder in your eyes when she looked up at you. Why, I could see that starshot look from away across the track. You aren’t falling for her by any chance, are you?”

“What would be the use?”

“Exactly what I had in mind,” said Jane frankly. “You’re a swell Joe, Chanter, but I can’t see Andy Farr as the wife of any tramp-journalist.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, skip it, won’t you! How in the world can you women travel so fast? I’ve just met the girl twice—”

“Ah, but each time there was that instant reaction, that rapprochement—from your side anyway. If I were you I wouldn’t go getting ideas about Andrea. She’s not for you, my boy.”

“Much what I was thinking, Miss Vinegar, but just the same it’s not nice of you to tell me so. I know my own insignificance without your announcing it over the public-address system. But there’s the old saying about the cat being free to look at the king—it surely goes for the queen too.”

“Okay! Just don’t expect the queen to pour you out a saucer of cream.”

“I won’t, Jane. Believe me, I’ll be content to worship from afar and maybe just lick my whiskers a tiny bit.”

“Now you’re shouting. You are a sensible guy after all and I like you and I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt. And that girl is all ice.”

“You think so?”

“Think so! I know it. I grew up with her and I have still to see any deep stirrings of the tender passion within that gorgeous thing called Andrea Farr.”

“Maybe it—the passion—has never been awakened.”

“You don’t think you’re the one to do it?”

He shook his head. “Not I. So don’t worry. Really, you sound like a mother-hen clacking over her pet chick. And you flatter me by merely thinking—”

“All right. Dream your dreams, dreamer, but, I pray you, take no hurt therefrom. As you so nicely put it, I am a bit like a mother-hen with her chick. I’m no older than the chick in this case, but I’ve always sort of mothered her, even when she had a mother and I had none. And I want her happiness more than I do my own. I do want her to have the best husband in the world—”

“Hey! You’re right back where we started from. You put me out of the running anyway—I’d probably be only the second or third best husband in the world.”

“You aren’t fooling anybody, Chanter. I worked on newspapers—”

“A farm-journal, you said, I think.”

“Well, it still rates—”

“Nonsense! You seem to get your ideas of newspapermen from some corny movies like The Front Page. We all wear funny hats, smoke strong pipes, talk out of the corner of our mouth and would sell our old mother into slavery if we could get a story out of it—”

“And, you forget another point—you’re always broke.”

“I’ve seen some solvent newspapermen in my time.”

“Name two.”

“Bertie McCormick and Lord Beaverbrook.”

“Check. But they’re exceptions. You fellows make poor husbands—”

“I tell you that’s a slander—”

“Comes from the way you have to live, from the rules—or rather the lack of them—of your trade; from the hours you keep, the beer you drink—”

“I give up. You have an image of a newspaper-reporter fixed in your mind. It’s an image created by Hollywood and comes nowhere near depicting ninety-nine reporters out of a hundred. We’re just home-bodies at heart, just men doing a job that has very little glamour in it.”

“Oh, you’re probably different from most of them.” She looked at him again and the little car headed for the ditch until his big hand on the wheel yanked it back. “Thanks, I can drive with no hands too. What I was saying was: you don’t look liverish or ulcerous or generally diseased like most of your tribe, but maybe you just got to look this way since you came to Eden.”

“No, I’ve always been pretty healthy. Most of the tan, though, I got here—from the Sunshine of St. Eulalie.”

“All roads lead to Andrea Farr, where you’re concerned, don’t they?”

“Not all, Jane. I’ll have to find one that takes me away—or make a new one. Or I could fall in love with you—”

“Oh, no, you couldn’t. You know that—not while she is so near. The child in the garden will pass the plain little buttercup any day and reach for the sunflower. That’s the way life is.”

“I suppose you have a lover anyway?”

“Loads of ’em. Haven’t you noticed all those handsome men trailing me everywhere I go?”

“Maybe you can’t be serious long enough for a man to fall in love with you.”

“Oh, yes, I can. You’d be surprised, John, at how very serious I can be. Especially about love. I think love is grand. You know your books the way I know mine, so you know Tom Moore—

And the black eyes were bright now and as she braked the car in front of the grimy window that had on it in faded gold letters colville coastguard she sat staring straight ahead of her for a silent moment that John Chanter seemed to understand.

Gently he laid his hand on the small brown paw on the Renault’s wheel and gently, too, he spoke: “I hope you find it, Jane. I hope you find your dream and its fulfilment.”

At first Jane was, for her, very nervous and afraid of what she was doing. She had never been one to look far ahead or to weigh the after-effects of any action that seemed the right thing to do at the moment. This, perhaps, was part of her Indian heritage, for it is characteristic of the Indian to take little thought of the morrow and never to worry while he has enough and never to work when he has money.

Jane Wyatt thought the love of a man such as she pictured Adam Brand to be would be something really worthwhile, something more precious than gold or rubies. She thought it a terrible pity as well as a shame that Andrea Farr should cut it off with a sharp little note; that this man, so warm and human and friendly in his writing, should be told that his letters weren’t wanted.

A terrible pity. “All my life,” Jane thought, “I shall wonder who and what he was. It will bother me until I’m old. Not Andrea—it won’t bother her, I should think. She can have so many lovers. But I found Adam Brand—I really did—and I have some proprietary right in him and it wouldn’t be the thing to let him go out of our lives—”

As Andrea had said, Jane could juggle the facts any time in such a way as to bring the conclusion she wanted. She had no long grim struggle about making this decision; she wouldn’t send Andrea’s letter of dismissal to this man in England. She would send him a letter of her own. And she did, and it was a warm, friendly letter that came from her young heart, that was sweet and shyly intimate, and like a conversation between two who could, with time’s swift passage, be lovers. And she signed it Neota and told him to answer her if he would but to direct his letter to a box number in the post-office. And the letters came—airmail to Eden. She did not tell him that Neota meant “Flower That Grows in Shadow.” The address was Andrea Farr. Care J. Wyatt.

His letter thrilled Jane Wyatt, fed her hungry, questing, restless heart—the very food it craved. Letter and answer were exchanged in less than a week and soon she knew to the day when the blue airmail envelope would be in her box. She called it her “blue-letter day” and she would hurry from the little post-office and drive to a shady spot in the autumn-bright woods above the Basin and open her mail with eager fingers.

Oh, no, thought Jane in panic. Not you and I, Adam—it must be you and Andrea Felice. Before you come, if you come, I must tell her what I have done and let her see your letters and let me tell her about you—and she cannot fail to love you. And I shall have to give you to her and try to be resigned—

But with the passing weeks she knew how hard that was going to be. She had started out with the one hope of finding a lover for Andrea, but she took his words to herself and cherished them for her very own. If only she dared think that they were hers, that they were written to plain, commonplace Jane Wyatt—Neota, the Flower That Grows In Shadow. She had taken the name because it seemed to fit so well one who had grown up in the shadow of the gorgeous flower that was Andrea Farr. Now, for this brief while, she was coming into the sun, for the letters that Adam wrote each week acted on her mind and spirit like some powerful stimulant.

Andrea noticed it and wondered. There was a new sweetness about Jane and she had lost the rather waspish attitude she had once shown towards so many of the simple aspects of life in Eden.

“What has come to you, Miss Wyatt?” Andrea asked one lovely October day when the last apples were being picked, when the drying leaves were dropping in golden showers from the trees and the blue water of the Basin had a sleeping, torpid sheen, reflecting the fading hills. “You’ve been all sweetness and light of late. Gone are the barbed words of cynicism, gone the stinging wise-cracks and the sharp retort. Has something new been added to your life?”

Jane’s brown cheeks showed a tinge of deep rose. “Why, I wasn’t aware—”

“That’s just it. I don’t think you’re aware of it yourself, but I’ve noticed it and so has Lauchie. Are you in love?”

“Who is there to fall in love with in this lotus-land?” Jane parried the question deftly. That was the beauty of her love, its warm deep secrecy. She could have her happiness and there were none to see, none to smile.

“I’ve been wondering. You drove John Chanter home from the fair. He seems to think a lot of you—”

“He does! Well, I’d never guess it. He calls me Miss Vinegar and for my part I can’t say that I think much of his tribe—the vaunted Fourth Estate. He thinks he’s settled down here in Eden and he has grandiose schemes of making Uncle Brun’s paper a cross between the London Times and the Montreal Gazette—a really Canadian paper, not an imitation of the American journal.”

“Well, isn’t that good?”

“Sure it’s good—if he will stick to it. But just wait and see wha’ hoppen. He’s going great guns now and I will say his stories on the fruit-growing and the fair and about my handicraft shop were really fine and rang the bell. But I wonder if he’s made for the long pull; if he won’t soon tire of this quiet place and its quiet people and placid ways.”

“Not if there’s sufficient here to hold him—”

“What would there be?” The black eyes carried the battle to Andrea now. “Maybe it’s you that he dreams his coloured dreams about. I still have a picture of the way he looked when he picked you up from the ground after Musette stumbled. But surely he has too much sense to fall in love with you.”

Andrea studied her fingers, outspread on the keyboard of the little portable. “Now just what do you mean by that?”

“You know what I mean. Of all the men in the world I should say John Chanter would be just about the last one for you—the slap-dash, happy-go-lucky scribbler, the type who hates to be fettered even by the light gold chains of love or the warm ties of family, home and children—”

“He hasn’t proposed to me yet,” laughed Andrea, but she felt a strange warmth in her, a quickened interest, when Jane talked of John Chanter. She had not seen him since the day of the fair, but the few times she had passed the Coastguard office in Colville she had found herself looking at the place, hoping for a glimpse of him. The windows had been washed for the first time in ages and there was a chance of seeing through them, but all she could glimpse was Uncle Brun’s white mane as he sat with his chair tilted back, his feet on the window ledge.

“He’s wise,” said Jane, “in his fashion. I think he knows his place and it’s not with you, Andy.”

“Are you sure you really know what’s best for me, Jane? Not so long ago you were finding me a husband by sending out S.O.S.’s in an apple-box, and you really thought that something good and worthwhile would come out of such a wild shot in the dark.”

“So I did,” said Jane. And so it can, she thought—so it has. Already something fine and beautiful and warm and loving has come from it and Adam Brand, who writes from the quiet of an English country-place, is in love with a girl he calls Neota, whose name he thinks is Andrea Farr. And he will come to you some day and will love you and speak to you of love and you must listen to him—you must—or I shall hate you.

“He hasn’t written again,” said Andrea. “He was at least gentleman enough to take the hint I gave him.”

“Administered with a stiletto, no doubt. I can imagine how you settled the poor young man.”

“You still think he’s young, Jane—this Adam Brand? I had an idea he’d be old and a bit stuffy and suffering from what the Germans call weltschmerz and that he wrote to the girl in the apple-orchard just to see what would come out of it—a sort of caprice of a great man or a tired man.”

You’re so wrong, thought Jane. But she could not correct Andrea—not yet. And she hated already to think of the day when she must, when Andrea should see Adam Brand as he really was. The thought that Andrea might not like him and most certainly would not like the deception practised on him in her name, if it occurred to Jane at all, was quickly dismissed, reasoned away without any trouble. Andrea must like him.

She wrote to Adam Brand that night. The letters, like his, were all typed, usually on the beaten-up portable in the office, on which she had so impulsively composed the first one—

It was so easy for her to write these letters and without shyness or self-consciousness she told Adam Brand about life in the Vale—her life that was Andrea’s life too, so much alike were their tastes, their interests, the things they did, the books they read.

He will never know, unless she tells him, that it wasn’t she who wrote these letters, and yet—sometimes her heart spoke without her willing it, sometimes when she was sad or lonely, when she thought: In all the world I have no one to call my own and now I am making this man my own, even while I know that he can never really belong to me. Who will chase the moth and scorn the lovely butterfly, who will choose homespun when silk is offered or take beer in preference to Moselle? He would have to be a bit more than human, this Adam Brand; and I don’t look for that. He would have his love tall and most divinely fair, he would have one such as Andrea Felice—

Jane’s work at Farlake Farm was about finished now. Much fruit was stored in the frost-proof sheds but this would gradually disappear as orders came in through the late fall months. Now they were making cider and vinegar and apple-butter from the culls and de-hydrating such of the crop as would find no market.

Her shop she still kept open; a considerable number of sportsmen came to the province in the fall to hunt deer and most of them wanted some souvenirs to take home with them, especially the ones who failed to bag any game. Jane had a supply of carved wooden animals, exquisitely made by Abraham Sirois, a half-breed, who lived at Meteghan, and these she sold for a good price, along with miniature snowshoes and beaded moccasins, bright coloured sewing-baskets and little bark-canoes.

She lived in the small white bungalow next door and there John Chanter found her one early November evening, sitting in front of her fire of apple-wood salvaged from “the massacre of the innocents.”

John could see her through the big window when he walked up on the verandah, sitting in a high-backed old chair, not curled up in that utterly kittenish way that so annoyed him, but upright, her strong back against the cushion, a book in one hand, an apple in the other. The room was lined with book-shelves; there were some good flower-pieces on the walls and two oilettes, scenes from Evangeline.

He had to knock twice before she heard him. He saw her start, then her hands flew to her hair in woman’s immemorial gesture, smoothing its black, glistening beauty. She showed no surprise at seeing who her caller was, but then she never showed much surprise at anything.

“Mr. Chanter! How do you do? Glad to see you and please come in.”

“Hello, Jane. You did look a picture of solid comfort sitting there in front of your fire, surrounded by your books—Alice-Sit-By-The-Fire. A bit lonely though—”

“ ‘I got a dog, and I got a cat’—but they’re out chasing each other somewhere.”

She led him into her living-room, thinking he was nice—so big and bony and craggy of face with a rather long chin and high-bridged nose, with strangely gentle brown eyes, his hair thick and tumbled after he took off the bright red cap which sensible people wore to distinguish themselves from deer and spare themselves the risk of being shot at.

“I’m doing an article on country dances for a Toronto magazine,” he said, declining the cigarette she offered and digging out his pipe and tobacco. “There’s a big square-dance tonight at Coll’s Corners. I was wondering if you’d let me take you.”

“I’d love it. I was just wishing someone would come along and drag me out to a night-spot—felt a tingle in ma toes, suh. You just sit there and smoke and I’ll be with you in no time, after I put on a little war-paint.”

“You don’t need much, Miss Vinegar. You look rather sweet tonight—rather like a forest-flower—”

She was at the door; she turned and looked at him searchingly, sharply, an odd light in her eyes. “Do I really?” And her voice was soft and young. “You’re not just kidding me, John—not just trying to do the right thing by the girl you’re taking out—morale-building and all that.”

“You know me better, I think. I don’t go buttering-up anyone and certainly not you, after all the knock-down and drag-out arguments we’ve had. I’d tell you that you were a hag if you really were; I tell you that you’re lovely because you really are. There’s something about you, Jane—”

“Now you are laying it on. But I’ll take the other things for truth and thank you for them. I’ll really dance tonight.”

She had loved being told she was pretty—she who had prided herself on being hard-boiled, impervious to flattery and not to be moved by compliments. She had felt and reacted like a schoolgirl when John had given her the tribute of his looks and words. She sang as she dressed herself in gay red shirt, full-flowing black skirt and stuck a white flower in the night-black of her hair. And she sang to herself all the way to Coll’s Corners as Uncle Brun’s ancient sedan rolled sedately over the moon-marked road.

The Vale people loved to dance. Fiddle and drum and “A-cordeen” were giving out with a polka when they drove up, and Jane all but dragged him from the car to join the gay and laughing crowd in the big community hall. “Come on, John!” She tugged at his sleeve. “We’ve missed two dances already. Let’s get into this one.”

“Look, Jane—I’m a bit rusty. I haven’t square-danced since I was a kid in British Columbia—”

“It’s like swimming and skating—you never forget. It will all come back. I’ll stamp on your foot when you make a miss.”

“Good girl.”

It did come back. Soon, after a few awkward turns, he was drawn into the rhythmic swing and movement of the dance, clapping his hands and shouting and laughing like the rest, his eyes meeting the challenge in the bright eyes of the girl who faced him, his strong arm encircling her pliant waist and swinging her clear of the floor in a mad whirl and settling her down starry-eyed and breathless and eager for more.

Music and light and colour. No staid black and white here, no stiff formality or stifling convention; men in the wildly bright lumberjack-shirts they loved, in patterns that should have shocked the eye but when viewed in movement together made a kaleidoscope of beauty; women in colours just as gay, hair flowing free or tied with bright bandeaux, their only jewels the bright gleam in their eyes—“All hands, change! Ladies, promen-ade—” The voice of the caller rose above the crowd whose movements he directed with an unsmiling, priest-faced dignity. This was serious business, this square dancing in the Vale, and the caller thought his job quite as important as any director at Rockefeller Centre or Roxy’s.

John Chanter was loving it all, thinking what a wonderful thing it was that this age-old, tribal rite still lived so strongly in the quiet, lost places of the land and was growing in popularity the world over. Here one saw the real heart of a people, saw them with their fears, their worries, for a while forgotten and the masque of care removed. Jane Wyatt was like a wild thing, a forest nymph, so light on her feet that she seemed to float in his arms.

“Thistledown and feathers!” He smiled down at her, thinking her even prettier than in that moment in her living-room, thinking that it was no chore at all to hold that supple, vibrant body in his arms.

Then, over her shoulder, he saw Andrea Farr. She was hatless, her face framed like a flower in the high-collar of a blue sheepskin reefer, and the piled-up hair like a crown of pale gold. Lauchlin was with her and a slender dark man with a pale red-haired woman; but these he barely saw.

“Ah!” Jane spied them too. “I see the sunrise in your eyes. The ice-queen cometh. Those strangers are friends from Montreal, he’s in the fruit business: name’s Ferrier. Well, I suppose you’ll dance with her and find her lighter than air.”

He almost trembled at the thought of dancing with Andrea Farr, but it was inevitable that she should come to him in the brisk exchange of the dance. In a daze of happiness, of near intoxication from the music and movement, he found himself looking down into her eyes.

Andrea Felice, he thought, I love you. In all my life I have never seen your like and if I should live a century I’ll never find another to approach you. But he thought, too, of the pauper and the princess, the cat and the queen and of Jane Wyatt’s words of discouragement—“She is not for you.”

Still, as his arm encircled that exquisite slender form, as the sweet contour of her breast under a gay green jumper touched him and the blond braids brushed his cheek he told himself that here was something worth more than all else the world could offer—to hold such beauty, to be so near it was a thing of wondrous joy, to own it would be heaven.

“Business or pleasure—John?” The full mouth parted and, watching it, he forgot for a while to answer. She could so easily do this to him, rob him of cool reason and leave only the desire to hold her close and possess her.

“Eh? Oh, I’m sorry, Andrea. I was thinking of something else. It’s a combination of both. I came to get a story, but I’m really having fun.”

“Do you get so preoccupied when you have fun? What were the deep thoughts?”

“Poetry. You always make me think of poetry.”

“No!” She passed it off with a smile. “If I have that effect on all men I could make money selling Golden Treasuries or Oxford Books of Verse. And I think you do trifle with me, sir—when I came in you were dancing with Jane Wyatt—and from the look of stars in her eyes, you could have been telling her the same nice things you tell me.”

“Well—I—perhaps I was. I did, I know. Jane is lovely—sometimes, especially of late, she is beautiful.”

“Really!” He caught—or thought he did—the ancient feminine inflection in her tone. Oh, no, he thought—impossible; she couldn’t be jealous of Jane. She doesn’t think anything of me; she is just playing the old game that women love to play with men.

The dance grew faster and they did not talk. He saw Jane dancing with Lauchlin Farr, then with the dark, saturnine Mr. Ferrier. The polka ended with Andrea still his partner and they followed a number of other couples out into the cool of the night.

The community-hall at Coll’s Corners was on a hill that sloped down to the waters of The Basin where the round cold moon was mirrored with its attendant stars. They walked slowly down the road to the beach, swapping cigarettes, passing other couples out to cool off from the heat of the hall and the strenuous pace of the country-dance.

And the spell of her loveliness was still upon him and he could not, try as he would, reason with himself as he would, curse himself for a fool as he did, could not seem to shake it off.

“You’re very quiet,” she said. “You’ve scarcely said a word since we left the dance.”

“I—just thinking—wondering—”

“Thinking of what?”

“Of this.” He drew her into his arms, his heart hammering like a sledge and a weakness in his body as if all the strength were going out of him through his lips that sought so thirstily for her mouth—

Thirstily, yet they touched those soft lips with a gentleness that belied the passion behind them. From Andrea, for a moment, there was no response, then she returned the kiss with a quick pressure and broke away from his encircling arms.

She didn’t speak. He wondered if it had meant to her anything like what it had to him, if she had known in that timeless moment the meaning of man’s love for a woman, the power of a desire that will never be sated, the depths of passion that will never be plumbed.

He didn’t say he was sorry, for he wasn’t. He didn’t ask her if she was angry with him, because he feared she might be. They walked back to the dance. It was round-dancing now. They heard the sweet strains of “La Golondrina,” saw the dancers moving in the measures of the waltz. In the brightness of the foyer she smiled at him and said, “Goodnight. We won’t be staying. We only planned to drop in for a little while. The Ferriers—we’re driving them to the airfield. He has a private plane and they’re going back to Montreal.”

“Goodnight, Andrea.” He tried to read in her eyes, in the sweet face, the verdict, but he could tell nothing. Only a bit later when her party was going out of the door did he see her turn and search the dancing-floor as if looking for someone. Then she was gone, and the lights, for him, were dimmed and the music faint and muted.

He found Jane presently, dancing with an air-force fellow from the R.C.A.F. Station at Greenwood. He cut-in a bit timidly, prepared for at least a cold douche from Jane’s tongue, if not a dash of vitriol. But she was strangely gentle—for her.

“Getting a good story?” They were dancing an old, old fox-trot—‘Under the Stars’; and it was beautiful, with the golden, mellow, nostalgic beauty of a better and fuller time.

“I think I am.” He looked down at her expectantly, waiting for her to scold him about Andrea.

“Playing with fire too, weren’t you? There’s a tiny smudge of lipstick—ha-ha!”

She laughed delightedly when his hand flew to his mouth.

“You little fiend!” He shook her lightly. “You were just trying to trap me, weren’t you?”

“So you did kiss her then?”

“Oh, Jane, please—”

“And it wasn’t a success. It wasn’t, was it? I can tell from your puppy-dog look that you made no conquest there. Well, don’t let it kill you, Chanter. Other fools have tried before you, believe me, and kissed her too and failed to get what they were seeking. What gave you the idea that you might succeed where so many others have fallen down?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Jane. And I wish you’d forget it.”

“If you only would, John!” She was serious now, her rounded body moving with exquisite rhythm to the swing of the waltz. “I like you and I’d hate to see you hurt. Oh, she wouldn’t hurt you deliberately; she’s good and kind, but you’re not the one to carry her off those tiny feet or even beat her ears back or really make her aware that she is a woman and that all the lavish gifts of the flesh that she was endowed with weren’t given her just for her to look at in the mirror—”

He didn’t want to talk about Andrea; not right now. At any other time he would have listened to Jane dilate upon her beauty and good qualities for as long as she cared to talk. Just now, the flaming wonder of that kiss was still with him and he still seemed to feel the tingling warmth of her mouth against his own, the pulsing life in her youthful body.

I want her, he thought, even as he went mechanically through the movements of the waltz, and why should I not have her. It’s a free country and a man is entitled to seek love where he wills. Suppose she didn’t fling herself into my arms; she didn’t smack my face and say “How dare you?” And she didn’t laugh at me and before she left the hall she was—well, she might have been—looking for me.

“Flattering, I’m sure.” Jane Wyatt pinched him. “Am I woman or am I a dummy? Here I am warm and pliant and full of sweetness and light in your manly arms—and you, I know it—don’t deny it—you are dreaming of another woman.”

“Sorry, Jane. I guess I’m an awful washout. I’m spoiling your good time.”

“But you’re not.” And he wasn’t. Nothing could spoil what Jane had in her heart, the lovely secret treasure that was hers alone. She, too, was being a fool, she told herself—far more of a fool than John Chanter—by letting herself fall in love with a man she had never seen, who thought she was someone else, who, when he did see her, would be incredulous first, amused later and maybe angry. Oh, surely not angry—

But then a little spark of a new hope had been born in her when, in her own house that evening before they left for the dance, John had told her she was lovely. Her swift, joyous reaction to that rare tribute had astonished her, who had never been vain nor too discontented with the gifts of face and form that God had given her.

But now she thought: If I have a little of beauty, if it shines from my eyes and shows in my face and betrays itself in my voice and in my laughter—it is Adam who gave it to me. He speaks to me and makes love to me in his letters and I answer him quite shamelessly and sometimes I feel as if he had really held me in his arms and I had actually known his kiss. And I know I want him for myself, that my heart will break when I know I can’t have him; but he will turn to her—if she wants him—if she wants him. Still—the thought cast her down into the depths—if she doesn’t want him, it won’t mean that he will come to me. If only he could look on me and find me fair—

So she dreamed. She was very quiet on the drive back from the dance. John chided her. “One rarely finds quiet in the boisterous Miss Wyatt,” he rhymed. “Did the dancing wear you down, Jane?”

“Oh, no! I could dance forever. I adore it and I enjoyed every minute of tonight. You’re not so bad yourself when it comes to tripping the light and airy. What are you going to put in your story?”

“You can guess. We’ll give Longfellow a rest this time. What about Keats—‘dance and Provençal song and sunburnt mirth—’ ”

“Fair enough. I didn’t notice many of the boys tonight who had been having beakers full of the warm South; when they do, the dancing is something that would give pause to the wild Cossacks. Will you bring Andy into it? You had her in the apple-harvest and the country fair. You’re a grand press-agent, but she doesn’t really need one. When she goes to Montreal or New York, to the horse-shows or the like, she always lands in the picture-papers—‘Charming young horsewoman from Nova Scotia’ or ‘Beauty from the Bluenose country’—you know—”

“I can imagine. It hasn’t spoiled her, though.”

“Not in the least. Do you know, John, sometimes I think I’d like to see her cry. I never have.”

“But why ever would you want to see her suffer? I suppose that’s what you mean. I thought you loved her.”

“I do. Is that any reason why I shouldn’t want to have her know a little pain? Maybe if she felt sorrow a few times, she would know happiness when it beckoned.”

“And you don’t think—?”

“I despair sometimes. It doesn’t seem right. If the proper study of mankind is man, it’s doubly true that the first interest of a girl, especially one like her, should be the male—and a particular male.”

“Give her time, Jane. Maybe it’s just that the right one hasn’t showed up yet. Now don’t go asking me again if I think I could be the one—”

“I won’t. I just wanted to put you right about Andrea and not see you wasting a promising career pursuing a star. Wandering over the rough ground with your nose pointed towards the sky, dear John, you’re pretty sure to stub your toe or to trip over some of the boulders in your path.”

“I’ll remember your words of wise counsel,” he said. “But if I were in love, you know, it wouldn’t matter what you or anyone else said.”

They had come to Folly Head now. Jane’s cottage, the long low log-structure that was her shop, was drenched in the pale moonlight that magicked the hills and the smooth sleeping water.

She asked him in for some cocoa, but it was late and he thanked her and said he would go on home and jot down a few things while they were still fresh in his mind. He was staying with Brunswick Snyder in the old man’s house on the outskirts of Colville, having moved from the little cottage on Friar’s Island where he had spent the first months of his sojourn in Eden.

Much as he liked Jane Wyatt, he was glad when the door closed on her and he drove away slowly and was free to think his own deep, wondering thoughts without her probing, sometimes nagging, interruptions. He loved Andrea Farr—“As fair art thou, my bonny lass, so deep in love am I.” Robert Burns had said it long ago.

“It’s no use kidding myself.” He talked to the night and the stars and the fields where the hoar-frost glistened—“the belle dame sans merci has me in thrall—and how! I never in my life before felt this way about a girl. Lord! What she can do to me, just with those eyes, that way she has of looking at one—It’s no use for Jane to make like Cassandra and prognosticate nothing but woe and breakers ahead for me; I think I’d have to go on loving her, no matter what. And I don’t think she was angry with me. Maybe it just didn’t mean anything to her at all. No reaction. Maybe that is why she didn’t say anything either of rebuke or consent. But she did look back.”

Brun or the housekeeper, Tilly Boyse, had left the porch light burning. It was long past midnight when John, after carefully putting the car away—it was a 1930 Marmon which grew more precious with the years—let himself into the house and tiptoed up to his room.

He didn’t feel like sleeping; music still sang in his brain, rhythm flowed in his body; bright eyes laughed up into his and soft lips and warm rounded arms offered still their ancient seduction. There was a fever in his blood and in him a hunger akin to craving that filled him with a strange new happiness and a deep unrest.

He had a big table in the attic room at which he loved to work late—a table littered with pens and pencils, pipes and pipe-cleaners, notes on scattered squares of paper, old envelopes and match-book covers. He sat down at it now and stared at the white sheets before him—and there was the sweet, smiling face of Andrea Felice, and he lost himself in dreaming.

Tomorrow, he thought—tomorrow I’ll go to her and I’ll be able to tell—I know I will—whether she likes me, whether there is any use in my loving her, but if there’s no hope; if, as Miss Jane insists, she is not for me, then I won’t linger here. I’d just go mooning about and I’d never get any work done. Words on paper seem so futile after you’ve held her in your arms. She makes me want to write an epic and at the same time robs me of the power to think any thoughts but those in which she figures—

So, as with youth since the world was, he knew the joys and the sorrows that love can bring; the ecstasy and bitterness, the cloud-feeling of a kiss, the clay-feeling of being unwanted and rejected, of his own unworthiness.

He sat there, smoking, dreaming the old, old dreams until the tall clock on the landing struck three and only then bethought him that old Brun’s Quaker rule insisted on prompt attendance at breakfast—seven o’clock; and no excuses.

He felt a weariness even in his young, hard body, when the old man hammered on his door and called, “ ‘Up and at ’em, Cap’n Adams!’ While it may look like the middle of the night, it’s really half-past six.”

John rolled out in the chill November morning and thought fleetingly, as do all dwellers in the north, of lands where it’s always warm, and wondered why people ever stayed in a spot where you need a fire more than half the year. But soon, he knew, the dawn would come with colours rare and soft and exquisitely lovely, or in a burst of gold or a flash of flame, and in its wonder he would forget the momentary hardship of cold floors and draughty old halls.

The goodly smell of Tilly’s buckwheat-cakes and Lockport kippers and coffee met him on the stairs and at the table in the sunny breakfast room was old Brun, his cheeks red and his white hair upswept in a senator’s mane. He was proud of that hair and washed it in blueing, vain as any woman, to give it a proper whiteness.

He was reading the Halifax Chronicle now and sneering at an editorial on the perennial topic—Canada’s Century.

“We’re getting to be worse chauvinists than our Yankee neighbours,” he grunted. “Quite a trick to get any glory in the world today. The Russians have ‘firsts’ in everything; the Yankees have ‘the biggest and best’ in everything, the English ‘the fastest.’ Now what’s left for us, I ask you.”

“We have the best dollar in the world, Uncle Brun.”

“Yes?” The old man stared at him. “Ever try to buy anything with it? I think it runs about neck-and-neck with the yen. We used to have a twenty-five cent scrip—you wouldn’t remember them, son—just like little dollar bills, only worth a quarter, but, believe me you could buy more with one of those cute little notes than you can today with a two-buck bill—and I’m not fooling. Some claim to glory, that—the highest-priced dollar. How stupid can we act, I wonder. Tell me about the dance.”

“The dance?” John was studying his grilled kipper with deep appreciation while he loaded his toast with homemade orange marmalade. “Oh, yes, the dance—”

“Well, you were to the dance, weren’t you? Too busy swingin’ the lassies, I’ll bet, to think about writing a story.”

“Oh, no. I’m quite sure I can write you a story. There’s a deep social significance—”

“Ha!” The old man choked on his coffee. “You and your social significance. You write about the dance and spare us your s.s., eh? Those s.s. initials suggest something else to me besides social significance.”

“What, sir?”

“Schutz staffel—know what that is?”

“Why, yes, that was Hitler’s strongarm-squad, wasn’t it?”

“Something like that. They were to make sure that everything had its social significance. God of our fathers! Even here some louts were going around grinning like fools and yelling, ‘Joy—joy everywhere—’ ”

“Kraft durch freude—la joie partout la joie—haven’t heard much of it lately.”

“No,” grunted old Brun. “Joy comes from an inner beatitude, not from slogans. Don’t forget. Well, it’s heavy stuff for breakfast. I hope you found some joy last night.”

“Oh, I did.”

“I can imagine. Did you dance with the Blossom Queen?”

“Yes, I danced with her.”

“And held heaven in your arms, eh?”

“You might say,” admitted John. “Your country girls are as light on their feet and as aery in your arms as any ballerinas. And believe me there was joy and plenty of it at that party.”

“Came from an inner beatitude,” said Brun smugly. “No signs tacked up on the walls with ‘Smile Damn You Smile’ on ’em, were there?”

“None.”

“Q.E.D.” And the small-town Socrates attacked his breakfast with fresh relish, asking the odd question between mouthfuls and describing the dances of his youth and the Indian fiddler who could play fifty variations of “Red Wing” and drank only straight alcohol for refreshment; the dances always lasted till dawn in those days, putting the later-day marathons to shame, while the dancers went direct from the frolic to their work of milking the cows or putting out to sea to tend their weirs and their nets.

John did not see Andrea that day. He met Jane in the Colville post-office, turning away with downcast face and a small-girl look of disappointment from an empty box: she had been expecting a letter from Adam and Thursday was the usual day.

“So he didn’t write!” taunted John, at her elbow. “He must have found another.”

She looked at him sharply, almost stormily, before she realized he was only teasing her. “Maybe he has.” She said then. “But you needn’t crow. The object of your far-fetched and hopeless dreams has gone off and left you.”

It was his turn to look glum. All the brightness had gone out of the day. He had felt so full of hope today, of optimism, of faith in the power of his love to awaken a response in the heart of its object. And now she had gone.

“Where to?” he asked. “You dark witch! You little sadist! You want to see her cry and now you torture me—”

“Ha-ha! I like to see you suffer. Pain is purifying and anguish of heart is love’s best tonic. You know—absence makes—”

“Yes, yes, I know. You wander off worse than Uncle Brun when he starts reminiscing. Where has Andrea gone? And with whom? And for how long? And how did she travel?”

Jane ticked the answers off in her fingers: “One: Mo’real. Two: With the Ferriers. Three: Probably a week. Four: By air—par avion.”

“But she didn’t say anything last night—”

“They just decided to go when they reached the air-port; called Gussie and told her to tell me the news this morning. I’m to look after Farlake while they’re away. Nice to be able to do things like that on the spur of the moment, to get in a plane and fly off to the city of light. Tonight she will be dancing on the Normandie Roof in a gorgeous evening-gown which she will buy in Henry Morgan’s this afternoon and she will look like a princess—you know, the girl you were thinking of asking to share your hut and eat yogurt and apples—”

He didn’t say anything to that. All his bright dreams had faded. Jane must have seen the young hurt in his eyes for she laid a hand on his arm and her voice was gentle. “I’m sorry, John. Don’t mind me. I shouldn’t be such a crêpe-hanger. I’m quite sure she won’t meet anything better than you even if she climbs a lot higher than the Normandie Roof. But just the same—”

“Okay, little Miss Whey-att. Sour milk. Just because you’re so mean I won’t ask you to my wedding and when I whiz by in my new Cadillac—”

“Want a ride to your office in my old Renault?”

“Well, I’m not proud and since you insist—”

They were both laughing now, feeling better. “I’ll tell you the moment she returns,” promised Jane. “I’ll have three loud blasts sounded on the town fire-siren.”

“Fine! I’ll be listening.”

But, even had Jane gone to that extreme, the blasts would have meant nothing to John Chanter: the day before Andrea did return there was a letter that changed, for him, the whole picture, and killed the burgeoning hope that had made him happy all week and brought lightness to his step and speed to his fingers as he typed his stories for the Weekly Coastguard.

The letter was an airmail from England, from a country-village that John remembered from the years he had spent over there with the Air Force. It was a longish letter and his face when he started to read it showed happy anticipation, the joy one feels when hearing from a friend. But gradually the look faded, first to one of surprise, then of puzzlement, and then of pain.

There it was.

He read the letter twice, started it a third time—he knew it by heart then. He felt sure he would be able to quote that letter the day he died, should he live to be ninety.

“What a fool!” he muttered. “What a prize, purple-ribboned, purblind ass you are, Chanter! A real boy-scout too—doing a good turn for your poor sick buddy, good old Adam Brand—my pal Adam of the dear old days in the R.A.F., a prince of a fellow—a guy who has everything—brains, money, looks—and you, High Heart, blithely hand him, in a box of apples, the only girl you’ve ever loved. Oh, damn my stupid soul!”

He was sitting in Brun’s car outside the Colville post-office and a chill wind made the dust eddy and dance in the road and only a few dry and yellow leaves clung to the tall maples that lined the street. A glaring bright Autumn day, sad somehow and holding little of promise—only the threat of the long cold bitter time ahead.

He sat there a long while, staring at nothing, careless of the fact that the Coastguard was waiting for some of the mail that lay neglected on the seat beside him. He had forgotten the Coastguard.

“So that,” he muttered, “was why my kiss brought nothing in return. Adam Brand could charm an angel. I never dreamt when I sent him that box with her note in it—”

He swore deeply and fervently. He recalled that day in early fall when he’d been driving out on the Colville road towards Farlake and had met one of the fruit-farm trucks with a huge load of boxes of apples, and a bit farther on found by the roadside a box that had toppled from it. The box was damaged, the lid sprung. He had been in a hurry to get home, but he’d called Lauchlin Farr at once, and Lauchlin had told him to keep it, to give them a plug in the paper. He’d found Andrea’s note when he was fixing the cover preparatory to sending the box to Adam Brand, recovering from a bad smash in far-away England. He’d thought it would be good therapy for Adam to write to some pretty girl.

So Adam got the letter, and Adam got the girl.

Neota! What a lovely name, he thought. But no lovelier, certainly, than the name by which he would always think of her and love her—Andrea Felice. Neota—must be some Indian name. And he thought he’d ask Uncle Brun its meaning or find out from some of the Indians; but then he decided he wouldn’t. He might have saved himself a lot of heartache had he learned that it meant, Flower That Grows In Shadow—a name that never in the wide world could fit the sun-bright creature that was Andrea Farr.

Dark days in Eden. Cold, windy, hopeless days for John Chanter, going, “like a Zombie,” said old Brun, from work to home, from home to work, without life or interest. He didn’t have Jane Wyatt to contend with—she was off to a Handicrafts display in Halifax—and for that, at least, he was thankful. He couldn’t, right now, have begun to cope with the dark girl’s “I told you so,” or “Didn’t I warn you that you’d get burnt?”

It had been such a sudden, overwhelming shock. He had all but forgotten about sending the letter to Adam. He had figured that Andrea had written it for a joke anyway, that maybe Adam was too ill to bother with it, that anyway it was just a bit of foolery. And instead it had been the seed from which a rare flower had bloomed.

He could understand it. Knowing Adam Brand so well from long years of close association in the services and in civilian life when Brand had worked for a while on the London Herald, he had no trouble in seeing quite clearly just what had happened; and he told himself he might have foreseen it, might have realized that, even at a distance of a few thousand miles, Brand could reach a girl’s heart and make it his.

And, just as Jane Wyatt had felt that she with her dark, quiet good-looks could never compete with the shining loveliness of Andrea Farr, John was sure that he would run a very poor second in any race, be it for love or fame, with Adam Brand, who was one of those men on whom the gods have lavished their most precious gifts.

Dark as a Spaniard, with black eyes and hair, slender and supple with the beauty of a Toledo blade, Brand had, with good looks, a flair for mechanics that had brought him both fame and money at an age when most men were just shaping their careers. He was a director of Alland Airways and of De Halland Aircraft Corporation, one of whose jets he had been testing when he crashed. He was, withal, a modest, likeable fellow, fun-loving and gay. He would be a fit partner for the lovely lady of Farlake Farm; they would make one of those couples that make people say, “They were made for each other, those two,” and beam on them and think how beautiful love is, sometimes, and how kind, sometimes, the gods can be.

“So I’ll go on my way alone,” thought John, trying not to be bitter, trying to take this cruel medicine like a good little man. “Tramp-reporter”—Jane Wyatt hit it right on the nose the first time. That’s all I’ve ever been or ever will be. I must have been getting soft anyway, getting punchy from eating too many apples of Eden—they have had a worse effect on me than lotus-leaves. “Pale hands I loved, like lotus-buds that float—” Who the hell did I think I was anyway? I’d never get far—editor-in-chief of the Colville Weekly Coastguard, maybe some day editor-proprietor, let the Beaver and Sulzberger beware: here comes Chanter!

Old Brun was quick to sense that all was not well with his nephew, the boy on whom he had begun to look with growing fondness and the first newsman he’d met who seemed to show promise of being great enough to take over the Coastguard when it came time for him to write “40.”

He knew, of course, that Andrea Farr was away on a holiday in Montreal. Grace Till had written a little piece about it for the Social Scene column in the Coastguard:

It didn’t impress old Brun. He hated the Social Scene but was wise enough to know that people love seeing their name in the paper—in the right column. He knew the young Farrs, had known their grandparents, and there was no nonsense about either of them. Andy—he always addressed her so because her father, Andrew, had been his close friend—Andy was a real person, no nonsense about her. She loved horses because they were lovable not because she looked like Diana when she rode one. And he had decided that she might be a good wife for John, though he doubted she’d be much help in getting out the Coastguard.

“What’s got into you?” he demanded, wriggling his white furry-caterpillar brows at his nephew. “You beginning to lose interest? Here in this week’s issue, under ‘Words in Season’ you’ve put ‘Rain and Fog.’ Here on the Coastguard we pride ourselves on not making the stupid, small-town blunders that hold so many rural weeklies up to ridicule in the metropolitan press. Hem! You in love?”

“Yes—I mean no, sir.” John roused himself from his dismal contemplation of Water Street and the unloading of an ox-cart piled high with cordwood. “I’m sorry about that mistake. I’ll have to smarten up—”

“She won’t be away long—never does stay long. No tomfoolery about that girl. She likes it here in the Vale and hates the cities like all wise people—‘Nothing sweet in the city but the patient lives of the poor’—John Boyle O’Reilly. You should read him. Or maybe right now Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ would be more in your line.”

John tried to smile and pass it off lightly, but it was an effort to keep his mind on his work, and the doings on the Grand Banks or in the big woods or in the scallop-beds were dull indeed compared with his unhappy imaginings of what Andrea would be doing in Montreal, of what she wrote to Adam Brand and he to her. And always before him was her fair, sweet face—in the morning sunshine at Farlake, in the coloured whirl of the County Fair, in the magic light of the moon that night at Coll’s Corners, the night he had kissed her—

He had started several letters to Adam and had torn them all up and thrown them in the waste basket. He didn’t know what to say, he who was seldom at a loss for words. This was the kind of letter he had never thought would be for him to write, a letter in which he must seem to be glad for the man who had taken all he ever wanted in this poor world.

He got one off at last, but his heart was sick when he sent it and he promised himself that he would be gone from Eden when Adam came to claim her for his love, and he would never—never—stand at the altar and see her go into the arms of another man.

Andrea Farr danced at the new night-club Fleurs de Juin to the music of Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, and a tall, slightly grey man with a story-book profile and wearing the ribbon of la légion d’honneur on his dinner-jacket, was her partner, and it was like a fairyland of light and colour, of flashing jewels and gorgeous silks. Andrea herself was lovely as a fairy queen in a strapless gown of blue velvet with a gardenia in her hair as she smiled up at the tall Frenchman, Charles d’Aubigny, and spoke to him in his own language.

This was a different Andrea Felice, a changeling; she closed her eyes for a moment and she was another girl—a laughing sprite in a green jack-shirt and flowing grey skirt and moccasins, being swung in the arms of a tall brown-eyed youth in a crowded country dance-hall to the mad music of fiddle and accordion—and that was the real Andrea Farr, the happy one.

She didn’t yet know why she had come on this junket. Lauchie had been all for it and the Ferriers had been most insistent, promising them all sorts of good times and the key of the city, and the first thing she knew she was in the snug cabin of the plane and the moon-silvered waters of the Bay of Fundy were below her.

Perhaps she had consented to go because of this strange new happiness that ran like fire in her veins, that brought a lightness to her limbs and made the world suddenly a different, better, happier place to live in. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, in her heart a song—and all because a man had kissed her.

Not “a man,” she thought—the one. She had been kissed before and by experts, but the kisses had meant nothing, had left her wondering what was so wonderful about love, the thing that could build empires and topple thrones; left those who sought her favour wondering too—that one so lovely could be so cold.

She was not cold. Far, far from it. She had known that tonight and felt herself possessed of a desire that made her knees turn to water, that swept through her like a fiery tide and left her weak and spent. She could not even trust herself to speak, could find no words for what was in her. When the stars had resumed their orbits and the moonlit world righted itself she could only walk by John Chanter’s side and let herself be lost in this new-found wonder.

She had been looking for him when, at the door of the club, she stopped and gazed back—looking for him to tell him, with a smile, with a wave, that it was all right, that she had loved his kiss, but in the fast-moving crowd she could not find those kind brown eyes of his nor see his slow, warm smile.

She wasn’t on the Ferriers’ plane long until she wished herself back in Eden, back on the silvery strand where the small waves broke and whispered, with John Chanter’s arms about her, his lips on hers.

“I lived,” she told herself. “For the first time in my life, I think. I felt the fullness of my being and knew what there could be for me if I reached out to take it. With him I found out; never with any of the others who held me and touched my lips. It was heaven—”

She thought: I shall write to him when I’m in Montreal—just a note with a line or two in it to tell him why I did not speak—because I could not; to tell him why I went on this trip, because I was slap-happy and didn’t know or think about what I was doing, didn’t realize that I’d be away for days from all the things I most want in the world.

But in Montreal, when she sat down at the little escritoire in her room at the Ferriers’ big house in Côte des Neiges, with the crested paper in front of her, she could find no words that said what she wanted to say.

We won’t need words when we meet, she assured herself; a look, a smile, a touch of the hand will tell him all he needs to know about how I feel for him. But perhaps I’m taking too much for granted—perhaps he was just kissing a girl at a dance and I was only that and it would have happened to any other girl who had been with him at the time.

No. She wouldn’t let herself think that. She—it had been she alone he wanted. He had not spoken of love, to be sure, but perhaps with him it was as it had been with her, and he could not utter what was in his heart.

“Soon—I’ll see him soon.” Through the days that followed that hope of reunion with him brought her more happiness than all the gaiety the city could offer. She went to concerts and on long shopping expeditions with Yvonne Ferrier; each night there was a party or a tour of the bistro and always there were people playing Montreal, being sophisticated with much strain and effort, quoting dull platitudes about duller topics, aping the jerry-built culture blowing up from the States and hailing Sex as a brand-new discovery.

Andrea didn’t like it. Some of the people were true and genuine—the Ferriers, who were country-bred and still owned an ancient seigneurie along la grande fleuve, the great River St. Lawrence, granted their family by the King of France; Charles d’Aubigny, a Parisian, who had large mineral-holdings in Ungava, whom she had met several times before and who had asked her to marry him when she had been visiting the Ferriers the previous Spring.

“And you refused le beau Charles!” Yvonne Ferrier could not imagine any girl being so foolish as to let slip such a grand match. “Que t’es folle, Andrea Felice! But you are amputating your nose to make mad your face. Charles is superb—’andsome, reech, of ancient family—and—why you will refuse him? Not for one of these demi-sauvages, these so pathetic young men who are not long out of the woods?”

Andrea had never been tempted to say yes to Charles. He was all that Yvonne said; not yet forty, his black hair thick and greying at the temples, his eyes lustrous and his face handsome, cut like—as Yvonne said—une médaille ancienne—meaning an ancient Roman medal.

He wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honour for his exploits with the French resistance as well as for his present work in metallurgy. And he could make love with all the ardent power that Frenchmen are supposed to have and so seldom do.

But he was not for Andrea. He had not been before and he certainly was not now.

“You are, per’aps, in love with some other one—some of those Bluenose fellows?” probed Yvonne. “Oh, they are big and strong like an ours—w’at you say?—a bear. But who want to be loved by a bear, I demand you.”

D’Aubigny himself was quite philosophical and had taken her refusal of the previous April with a shrug and a rueful smile on his dark face. “I think you do not yet know what it is, love. You are so innocent, so utterly virginal, petite Andrea. It’s that in you that I adore. Now you do not feel that love, that worship of mine. When again we meet, it may be different. I do not know. I can only hope.”

But his wise eyes saw quickly, when they did meet again, the first night of her visit, that the flower had begun to open and the gorgeous petals unfolding were seeking their god, the sun. His dark eyes were a bit sad and wistful as he looked down at her while they danced, and he said, “So it has come to you at last, Andrea Felice. You know now, I think, what I meant last Spring when I said you were a flower that needed the sun, le doux baiser de l’aurore—the sweet kiss of the dawn of love. You show it—in your smile, in your eyes, in your mouth which is a flame to draw man’s desire. One other has done this thing, that I hoped to do. You do not deny?”

She looked up at him, in the searching, earnest way she had, studying the clean-cut face that had in it an old nobility. She knew it was no use trying to deceive him. He was smiling at her, regarding her fondly, and she knew that his love would have been a splendid thing, that the woman lucky enough to possess it was a woman blest.

“I don’t think I can deny it, Charles. I couldn’t fool you anyway.”

“I can see clearly, ma mie, because I see with the eyes of love and in the beloved I can detect each nuance, each shade of feeling.”

“But I—it is only a little while since I have known—”

“Time does not signify here; a moment, an hour, a day, a year—even a lifetime; for love it is no matter. You can find it in a moment or you may not find it until the end of your life. It is good you have met it when you are so young. I hope you will be very happy.”

“But I’m not sure—”

“But you are! Ah, one can tell, chérie; by your eyes, those wondrous eyes of the night-sky darkness, in which there is a light that was not there before, in which there is a glow like the soft glow of the altar-light that will never be extinguished; in your mouth that waits so sweetly for the pressure of his, in the very lightness of your body that would be given to his caress. How I envy him, this man, who will possess so much of beauty. I hope he will worship at your feet as I would have.”

She thanked him with her eyes and felt sorrow in her heart as all women do when a good man who loves them must be sent away, put aside for one who may not love them better but whom they themselves desire. She was not fatuous enough to think that Charles d’Aubigny would go through life lamenting her and wearing the dismal look of the lover denied. Not Charles! There would be others and with a sigh, a shrug of regret but of farewell, he would forget the Andrea Felice who had been for him l’univers, l’étoile de sa vie et reine de son coeur—the universe, the star of his life and queen of his heart—and fall again into the abyss of love for some fair Mimi, some bellissima Biondina, no doubt with full success.

Wrapped warmly in furs, in a new grey caracul coat that Lauchlin had bought her, with high princess collar framing her face and her hair like a white gold crown, she rode with Charles in a horse-drawn sleigh up to the top of Mount Royal.

It was a drive she had always loved, from her student-days at McGill when a good part of her pocket-money had gone to the cochers, the ageless coachmen, who drove the calèches in summer, the jolly sleighs, with their belled and brightly harnessed horses, in winter.

There had been a good fall of snow and the Mo’realers greeted it with the joy of children; skiers were out by the hundred and the Canadian love of colour got full expression, the candent whiteness of the slopes was splashed with the scarlet, blue, green and yellow of the crowd. Atop the mount the huge cross glistened against the cold blue sky.

“Give me this,” said Charles, “any day in preference to Montparnasse, Montmartre or any other of the puny hills of Paris. They are old and their paint is peeling and their smell is stale; this is young and fresh and shining.”

From the Lookout on top of the mount one can see the distant American hills, the Adirondacks, on clear days, but even on this bright afternoon the growing smog-banks of the lower city were blotting out the view.

“Wonderful!” said Charles. “It gets thicker every day and soon all you’ll see is smog, then we’ll be ‘just like a big American city.’ That’s one thing about Paris; it never tries to be like anything else in the world; these fools never cease playing the sedulous ape to the folk next door instead of thinking for themselves and leaving the neighbours alone to work out their own doubtful destiny. You are the loveliest thing of this lovely day, Andrea Felice. If it were carnival-time you would be the queen. I must have a picture of you as you are now to treasure along with the rest that are in my heart.”

He didn’t have long to wait for one. A news-photographer spotted them on the Lookout and asked them to pose. He knew Charles d’Aubigny and he recognized Andrea as the stunning blonde who had been photographed at the Club Fleurs de Juin with the same d’Aubigny.

“Will you look at it when you’re old, Charles? And remember? Or will you say, ‘Now who in the world was that Canadian girl I was with that day—let me see—let me see’—and tap your spectacles against your nose and fail to remember.”

“Mais non! I will remember always, little Andrea—and so I think will you—this day of gold sunshine and blue sky and dazzling snow and the bright colours of the skiers and the spires and rooftops of Mo’real.”

“Yes, I’ll remember, Charles.” She looked up at him gravely. “And I’ll remember you.”

“And perhaps regret?”

“And perhaps regret.”

“A little, je te prie, ma petite—only a little. I would not have you regret. What is it your poet Rossetti says—‘better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember—and be sad—’ ”

“Lovely, Charles.”

“Always lovely. And there is happiness, I can tell you, in really sad things—a strange, hurting happiness. L’amertume—you know the word—bitterness—but bitter can have its overtaste—like sound its overtone—of sweetness. So will it be with my memories, I think. Bitter-sweet they will be, but they will make a good drink for my old age and I shall taste them with zest.”

He had to drop her at the dentist’s office on the way back for a four o’clock appointment. “I shall suffer with you, mon ange,” he said commiseratingly. “That dentist—I shall hate him for any twinge of pain he may cause you. Would you have me go with you and scowl at him while I hold your hand? I hate the monster, just thinking of him.”

Andrea laughed. The dentist was Bill Donnelly, a wild Irishman, and an old friend from down east, who wouldn’t hurt her in the least and whom she would readily kick in the shins if he did.

“I won’t need you, Charles. Anyway, I’m not afraid of pain.”

“Because, my small one, you have never known it.”

And with that and a bow, his black Persian-lamb cap held close to his heart, he left her.

She had a little time to wait in the Stanley Street office and she spent it looking over the reviews which, in this unique waiting-room, were kept up to date. In the Illustrated London News she found something that touched with a soft twang a chord in her memory.

It was the picture of an aviator, in helmet and flying togs—a young man with a dark, intense face and a frank smile. She looked at the face and liked it and read the caption idly: “Adam Brand, former wing-commander in the R.A.F., and noted jet-pilot, flies again after a complete recovery from the injuries sustained in an accident last summer—”

Adam Brand! She stared at the smiling, boyish face, remembering Farlake, remembering the airmail from London, even the return address—“care Alland Airways.”

“It must be,” she told herself. “Well, how strange, finding him here. And what a man! Won’t Jane crow now? She surely is vindicated. I wonder if I’d seen this picture before I got the letter if I’d have written him.” She shook her head. “I think not. Yet he must have been ill at the time, recovering from this accident. Maybe he was lonely—maybe I should have written, maybe, as Jane would put it, Fate beckoned and I turned away. Ah, well—”

She forgot Adam Brand, his picture faded, and she was standing in the moonlight by the silvered water and she was in John Chanter’s arms and it was what Jane called one of life’s supreme moments.

“Next, please!” said a crisp-looking nurse. “The dentist is ready.”

Lauchlin Farr was having a busman’s holiday, spending every hour he could spare out at the experimental farm at Ste. Anne de Bellevue and consulting with orchardists, entomologists and anyone else he could find who knew a Spy from an Avocado. However, he did manage to find what Jean Ferrier called a new variety of Pippin—a small brunette English girl who had come to McDonald College to study orchardry methods in Canada.

She was at the Ferriers when Andrea came home from her short session with the dentist, and Andrea looked from her bright eyes and happy smile to the boyish face of her brother and thought, “Well, this is it at last. He never before showed that much enthusiasm except the time he discovered a new variety of Gravenstein. And of course she would be in the orchardry business, so he can talk shop without interruption.”

“I fell in love with her the moment she told me she was a pomologist,” said Lauchlin. “Any girl who can announce a thing like that without cracking a smile is one in a million. Then when I learned her name was Janice Pomeroy, I was lost. I was bemused and utterly bewitched. Pomeroy the pomologist, says I—that’s for me.”

The English girl took their kidding in good part. “Don’t mind him, Janice—” Andrea liked her from the first. “He’s just a big apple-knocker from Eden. If ever he gets out of hand just call him Dr. Farr. In a mad moment the university gave him an honorary doctorate because he stumbled on a new variety of the forbidden fruit—”

“Yes,” growled Lauchlin. “And it shouldn’t happen to a dog. Now I’m in the same scholastic boat as all the politicians, tycoons and empire-builders who are called doctor and take the title without batting an eye while a poor devil who has to earn the degree has to sweat blood for three years and dig down into his jeans for maybe his last kopeck in order to have his thesis printed. ‘Doctor’ my foot. You call me doctor, Janice, and I’ll call you a pomologist right in front of everybody.”

“Okay, doc,” smiled Janice, who had picked up the idiom in fast time. “I dig you.”

At dinner, Andrea told them about finding Adam Brand’s picture in the Illustrated London News and about the letter Jane Wyatt had hidden in the box of apples.

“When I saw his picture I was sorry—well, almost—that I didn’t answer the lovely letter he wrote—a dream of a letter that promised all sorts of fascinating things that a girl adores to hear—”

“You should have answered,” said Janice Pomeroy. “He’s a grand fellow. I happen to know him. My home is quite close to his aunt’s house in Surrey and my sister Joan helped to nurse him when he had that mishap with the turbo-jet he was testing. Almost killed him. For a while he hovered between life and death, then he began to mend. But his nerves were shattered and they said he’d never fly again. Now he’s right as rain. I had a letter from my sister yesterday and she told me he’s as good as new. If you had written to him, Andrea, I’d say your letters saved his life.”

“Evidently he didn’t need them. I feel mean now for writing him such a curt note. If I’d only known—”

“Might have got yourself a husband,” said Lauchlin who, she could tell, was right now a man who highly approved of matrimony. “You’re so hard to suit, Andy. I take it you and Charles d’Aubigny—”

“You take it right, I take it,” said Andrea. “Charles and I are the best of friends.”

“Frenchmen don’t make good friends for lovely women,” advised Jean Ferrier. “It’s against their nature. But they make astonishingly good husbands. You would have been happy with Beau Charles, Andrea, but then love is a queer thing and about as predictable as lightning or Russian diplomacy. You will find your true love one day.”

She could not tell them, these bright, smiling friends of hers, that, for her, the quest was ended almost as soon as begun, that she had never had to go far nor yet to debate with herself over the rightness of her finding. You knew—that was all there was to it. One moment you scarcely suspected, the next you were as certain as you could ever be that this was what you wanted—this man’s love, this man’s caress, this man’s company right to the long day’s end.

She had brought a copy of the News with the picture of Adam Brand and she showed it to them now and took their admiring comments and commiserations and good-natured teasing.

“Ordinarily,” said Lauchlin, “I consider people who put notes and the like in apple-boxes as rather low-grade morons, and I find it hard to imagine Jane Wyatt doing such a juvenile stunt. But there you are. We all have our Achilles heel and some of us have an Achillean backside. I don’t think I could have been angry if you’d written to this guy, Andy. He’s quite a lad.”

“It’s too late now, Lauchlin. And anyway he got along quite well without the doubtful stimulus of my letters. But I’m really afraid to tell Jane. I’m going to take an awful tongue-lashing. I told her, when she wanted me to write him, that I didn’t think it was a good way to find a lover—”

“Good as any other,” said Yvonne. “It is all one grand lottery, this love; you buy your ticket with a smile, a kiss, a small letter, and of course everyone gets some kind of prize. You, Andrea, were given a ticket which would have taken un grand prix and you do not want it.”

No regrets, thought Andrea—none whatever. She studied the dark vividly handsome face of Adam Brand, read of his exploits, his career that rivalled in its upward progress the spectacular speed of the planes he tested. Terrific was the word for Adam Brand. No wonder he could write such a letter. He had been everywhere, seen all the things he spoke about and many more. He was the new pioneer, the first of the new adventurers who would explore the mysteries of space and voyage beyond the moon, beyond the sun perhaps, the new Magellans and Drakes, the twentieth-century Raleighs and Cabots. Another Elizabethan age would see new immortals of exploration and conquest.

She put the magazine carefully in her travelling case to take home with her for the edification, not to say vindication, of Jane Wyatt. Maybe she would show it to John Chanter too, after—after he said the words she longed so much to hear from him, after he said, “I love you, Andrea—I want you.” She would tell him then of Adam Brand so that he would know that love had beckoned to her before.

She was impatient to return to Eden. Montreal was fun, lively and rich with colour and life, with music and gaiety, and she enjoyed herself and danced and sang with the rich zest the country-dweller brings to such enjoyment, the late hours having little effect on her strong vital young health, the garish lights and the smoky air paling not at all the deep golden tan of her cheeks.

But she longed for Eden. It was Lauchie, with his new-found love, who kept putting off their return, Lauchie who up to now, to the moment of his meeting Janice Pomeroy, had preferred the apple to the woman who offered it.

“You seem to have it this time, brother.” She did not demur when he suggested they stay a bit longer. “I’d say you’re in a bad way over this little Pomeroy—”

Lauchlin nodded. “I guess you’re right, Andy. This seems to be it. I never felt this way before about a girl. It’s funny—it hits you so suddenly. Do you suppose it’s better, a love that comes like a lightning-stroke or the one that matures slowly?”

“They all come fast, I think. The ones that mature slowly aren’t love until the moment when you know beyond doubt that this is the only one, the one for you.”

Lauchlin looked at her quizzically. “You speak with authority, sis. How can you know? Has love come to you? Has the lightning struck? If so, I haven’t noticed it—or have I? This last week—well, you’re always happy, Andrea—always so serene and lovely. Have you fallen in love?”

“Could be. I’ll tell you in good time, Lauchie—when I have anything to tell you.”

She was building on so little, rearing such a splendid shining castle with towers and minarets of gold, all on one short kiss in the moonlight.

“You must have the best,” said Lauchlin, slipping an arm about her, resting his cheek against her hair. “And that will be none too good.”

“I’ll be all right, Lauchie. I’m glad you’ve found what you want. Janice is a sweet girl and she will make a fine mistress for Farlake Farm.”

He fell silent, thinking. “Yes,” he said at length. “It hadn’t occurred to me. If I—if we get married, she will be the chatelaine and take over the keys from you. I—I can’t seem to picture it—”

“You’ll get used to it,” hummed Andrea. “Every day you’ll like it more and more.”

“I suppose so. But I won’t hurry her—”

“If you love her you will. Don’t wait, Lauchie—and don’t let her wait—one day longer than you have to. You know you don’t want to wait, you big faker. You’re wild about this lovely pomologist; it shows all over you when you look at her. Better to marry her soon and settle down.”

“And you?”

“Don’t worry about me, I tell you. I have lots of time.”

“You just about told me that no one has lots of time.”

“ ‘Pluck the flower in season before desire shall fail’,” she quoted thoughtfully. “I don’t think I want to wait much longer.”

“Sometimes I despair of you—thought you’d be that most pathetic creature in God’s world—a beautiful old maid. Not one whose lover died or left her or whom Fate held back; but one who never has been awakened, who never met the man who could make her feel she was a woman.”

“Do you think it’s so bad to die a virgin, Lauchie?”

He turned red, but laughed when she started to laugh at his confusion. “The age of frankness,” he muttered. “Well, since you ask me that question, I do. God made it so that you have to have even two apple-trees—”

“Whence, no doubt,” teased Andrea, “originated the expression—‘As sure as God made little apples.’ Come off it, Lauchlin Farr! I don’t plan to be any pathetic spinster, lost and bewildered, knitting little things for my big brother’s little apples. I’ll find love, Lauchie—I think I’ve already found it.”

“Well, you certainly have managed to keep it a secret. Won’t you tell me who it is? Heaven knows you have any number to choose from. That picture-paper had you and Charles d’Aubigny all ready to gallop down the aisle. It said so in that picture they took of you at the night-club.”

“Those boys love to guess; they’re the most surprised people in the world when they guess right. They took another picture of Charles and me up at the Lookout. I suppose that will settle things for fair.”

Andrea attended a levee that afternoon for an author who had written a deep book proving that since the French and English in Canada had lived peacefully side by side for nearly two hundred years, they would be at each other’s throats a week from the following Thursday. Everybody praised it; nobody read it.

She went with Yvonne Ferrier, who wrote clever essays, in French of course, for several reviews and had had a frothy little roman published in France. Yvonne knew all the writers and their number was legion. She introduced as many as she could to Andrea, who was quite bewildered until she heard one of them say, “You’re from the Land of Evangeline, aren’t you, Miss Farr? From the apple-belt around Annapolis? Ever run into a guy named Chanter?”

It was like a breath from the Bay of Fundy, a breeze off the Annapolis Basin. She could have fallen upon the neck of the stout, bespectacled fellow, hair neatly parted in the middle and hanging down in horns on either side, who had been presented to her as Mark Farjeon. She wanted to embrace Mr. Farjeon’s embonpoint and tell him she loved him—and loved John Chanter. She had been so lonesome among all this scintillating, superficial mob.

“Yes.” She smiled bewitchingly at Mark Farjeon and deftly manœuvred him into a corner whence there was no escape. He didn’t mind in the least. Authoresses are almost invariably characters from a Walpurgis Eve gala and tend to gush like lady-geysers. “Oh, yes, Mr. Farjeon, I know John Chanter quite well.” In fact he kissed me down on the shining sands the night I left Eden. He kissed me and I was in heaven. I can still feel the hard warmth of his lips and his arms about me and I get weak just thinking of it and I feel sick with the desire to have it again.

She wanted to say those things right out for all to hear. She was so happy, so joyously uplifted when she thought of John.

“He’s a friend of mine too,” beamed Mark Farjeon. “A grand guy. Used to work with me on the Star. We had some good times together. I never could quite figure out how he got the courage to get out of this rat-race and find himself a spot in the sun. That’s quite a place that he’s in now, isn’t it?”

“It’s Eden,” smiled Andrea proudly. “He’s in Colville, a town in Edenvale. He’s working with his uncle on the paper—the Colville Weekly Coastguard.”

“I know it. I edit a picture-paper here and he’s sent me some of his stuff. He will go places, that Chanter—if he wants to, if he isn’t just content to bury himself down there. I’ve seen no end of good guys get lost in the sticks, fighting a losing fight—”

“Against what, Mr. Farjeon?” She felt afraid—at once on guard against anything that threatened to take him away from her. “What is there to fight?”

“I mean a losing fight in the writing-racket. It’s not a game; only mugs who should be playing monopoly or doing charades call it that. A game has rules; writing hasn’t any that I ever heard of. Chanter, you may be sure, wants to write—we all do—a novel, a book of essays, of travel—just something to leave behind us, something to give us the illusion of immortality. Some men leave kids; writers leave books. What I meant was that he’s so far out of the swim—”

“I—I wouldn’t know. He seems happy there in Eden—”

“That’s just it,” said Farjeon. “You aren’t supposed to be happy. You get soft and smug and lackadaisical and when you think about the book you’re going to write you put it off and say ‘I’ll start tomorrow’—and then you’re old.”

“But are you sure?” All these new thoughts bewildered her. “You can’t know—it may not be at all like that with him. His uncle, Brunswick Snyder, owns the Coastguard, and Brun is an old man and, from what I understand, he wants John to stay with him and take over. John has been doing wonders with the weekly.”

“I’ve seen it. Some good stuff. That Crimson Harvest, all about the apple-orchards, and the piece about the country fair. If he likes it there and can keep up his writing and not get sloppy, with soup-stains on his vest—why, maybe it’s the best thing for him. But he could have been a big-shot if he’d stayed on with the big-time.”

“He must have known what he was doing,” said Andrea defensively. “He certainly doesn’t give one the impression of being a lost soul. He told me he liked it there in Eden—the work, the people, the peace.”

“Newsmen,” pontificated Mr. Farjeon, “are like sailors, in a way. Sailors always dream about retiring to a little place in the country; reporters always think they’ll buy a rural or small-town paper and run it the way they want to; but the proportion of sailors who buy farms is about the same as the number of us who ever fulfil our dreams. Maybe Chanter is one who has had the courage and the chance to do what he wants to.”

She felt better after that. She encouraged him to tell her more about John, listening avidly to stories wild and strange of journalistic adventures that he and Chanter had shared, told in true newspaper-fashion, which makes up for in vividness and human-interest whatever it may lack in honest-to-God truth.

“We’ve run a couple of pictures of you, Miss Farr,” said Farjeon after he’d run out of tales of front-page calibre. “One at the Fleurs de Juin, another of you and Charles d’Aubigny at the Lookout on Mount Royal. Is there any truth in the rumour that you and Aubigny—?”

“None whatever. I wish you hadn’t put that in your paper.”

“Well, we got it from a pretty reliable source—or I guess we did. If you like, I’ll say it’s all off.”

“Say it never was on. Don’t you ever think when you publish a big lie on page one that maybe the few lines of denial a week later on page umpteen, down in the corner with the shipping-intelligence, are hardly sufficient to inform the readers of the truth?”

“Oh,” said the stout fellow cheerfully, “we’ve got some big new guesses by then. Anyway, the public loves to be fooled, believes the wildest lies and soon gets fed-up with the truth.”

And with that epitome of his journalistic credo Mr. Farjeon went back to his toil and a big story with the banner—Hitler Seen in Rio?

He had given Andrea much to think about and what he had told her about John Chanter troubled her a lot. Maybe John was lost down there in Eden, maybe he was wasting his talents, writing squibs when he should have been turning out epics, playing with his pen when he should have been dashing off great books. But if so, he had chosen the life and it was none of her doing.

“But maybe it will rest with you,” the small voice said, “whether or not he stays there, doomed for the rest of his life to be a small-town editor—”

There are far worse fates, she thought, retorting on herself. It’s a good and satisfying life and a man doesn’t burn himself out the way he would in the city. Why, Brun Snyder is almost eighty and I’ve never known a happier man in all my life. If John turns out as well—

She found herself blushing like a schoolgirl caught writing “John Chanter—Andrea Farr—Andrea Chanter—Mrs. John Chanter,” in her copybook.

“I surely travel fast,” she said smiling at her own imaginings. “I’m cooking his breakfast and darning his socks already. And maybe he’s forgotten me by now.” But she smiled wider when she said it, for surely he would feel as she did, surely this glory that was in her must be reflected from a similar light that was burning in him; surely love must awaken love. If it did not, if she had been only deceiving herself, if this was for him nothing but a passing fancy, a wish that all men had to kiss a pretty girl in the moonlight—

“It was not like that—it wasn’t. And he is not the sort of man to go butterflying about from one bright bloom to another. He’s a pretty serious student, the same John Chanter.”

She was a happy girl when Lauchlin at last realized that while the Ferriers’ hospitality was bigger than their house with its twelve rooms, it might be a good idea to put an end to their visit, though when he suggested to Andrea that they should go home he looked like a Russian bigwig who has been given a cosy berth at the mouth of the Indigurka, with orders to leave at once.

“You’ll be glad to get home anyway, Andy. Oh, I will myself of course—”

“But not so glad as other times,” she said, and thought a bit sadly that she was losing him, that from, now on she would be sharing him with another girl. Yet she was glad for him. If he had wondered at the small part men played in her life, she, in turn, had wondered about him and often thought that such complete absorption in a job as he showed towards his orchardry was not really a good thing. A man, more so, perhaps than a woman, needed a safety-valve—women have their tears and their secret sorrows, real or fancied.

“Well, we’ll get away tomorrow. Jean offered to fly us down but I told him we always liked trains and it was ages since we’d had a ride on one. So, Handy Andy, we leave Windsor Station tomorrow night at seven bound for the sea-provinces and the peaceful Vale of Eden.”

And you, thought Andrea, will leave your love here behind you, but I will go to mine.

Jane Wyatt hummed her own paraphrase of the ancient sea-chanty she had learned down on the Digby docks when she wore pinnies—

She had left Farlake in the competent care of Gussie Fuller, who could run the house with one hand while turning over the pages of her favourite heart-throb tale with the other; and Henry Zwicker, that ox-proud man who directed the outside work and was always happy as long as he was within calling distance of Diamond and Bright.

Jane was living like a duchess at the Lord Nelson Hotel and having a grand time at the handicraft-exhibition, which had brought some really fine and striking pieces to the attention of the trade—especially the tartans from the Cape Breton Highlands, that were a glory to behold and a joy to touch. Jane, as she was proud to proclaim, had a drop of Scotch in her and was never fazed when anyone asked “Haig or Walker?” She ordered prodigious quantities of the tartan cloth, for it was always popular and never an American tourist stopped at Folly Head who wasn’t related to the Camerons, McFarlanes or Stuarts.

There was also a grand collection of Indian bead-work and basketry. Some wise heads had discovered that the Malicetes, whose handicrafts, from moccasins to canoes, had once been the finest in North America, had begun to woo them away from the usual curse of the country—imitating stock-patterns—and now their native skills were shown in beaded bags and leather-work and exquisite baskets that were all of their own design and were a wonder to behold—for here were the colours of the autumn woods, here the blue-green of the Fundy tides and the glory of the sky as their own eyes saw and loved them.

She had written Adam Brand a long letter from the evening quiet of her hotel-room, telling him about all the wondrous things she was seeing, letting her thoughts and her pen run free, painting far better than she realized the beauty and fullness of the life she led.

On and on, until she knew the airmail-stamp was going to run into money; on and on, forgetting that she was just a female John Alden building up, pleading, another’s love. He was for Andrea, not for her. But maybe he would like her and be her friend; and maybe she would be content with that.

For who shall pluck the violet before the rose? He would be dazzled, as all men were, by the beauty of Andrea Farr. Still Jane spent hours in the shops and spent more on clothes than she had in many years and felt a glad excitement as she saw herself in the big mirrors and realized that even the plainest bird looks good in gorgeous plumage. Maybe—maybe—

Then she bought Newspix on her way back to the hotel one night and there were the pictures of Andrea at the night-club and at the Lookout—Andrea looking lovelier than ever, exquisite, queenly, drawing the eye like a magnet, the sun-goddess, the creature of light.

She finished her letter to Adam Brand and her pen stabbed the signature—Neota. She was tempted to write after it—Flower That Grows in Shadow.

John Chanter stared at the rainbow-bright pages of Newspix and felt darkness and loneliness creep deeper into his spirit. It was a grey, blustery November day with snowflakes, driven by the blast, spattering against the Coastguard’s grimy window. It was early afternoon and Water Street was practically deserted, left to the eddying dust and a few last dead leaves that danced and whirled about in the gusts.

John had never felt his spirits at lower ebb. They had been going down all week as loneliness grew upon him and now, with the impact of these pictures from Montreal, they hit the lowest level.

“Miss Andrea Farr, lovely Queen of the Apple Blossoms from the storied Land of Evangeline, pictured on the Lookout Mount Royal, with Mr. Charles d’Aubigny. Rumour has it—”

Ah, but she was lovely! The eyes in the picture seemed to laugh into his, the sweet face seemed to show amusement, the small bud of a mouth to say, “Oaf! Peasant! Churl! Look at me now and try to realize what a presumptuous fool you were to think of me the way you have been thinking, to believe that such beauty could be yours, to dream of asking me to share your dinner of herbs when I can have a stalled ox and love besides. Look at this man who smiles down at me with adoration—one of the great ones of earth—”

But he did not believe the “rumour has it” piece at all. He had worked on feature-papers like this too long not to know that rumour could have just about anything any way it wanted: you can’t rebut rumour very well and only very rarely can you track it down. He knew Puffy Farjeon, the editor of the paper; with Puffy the slogan was “anything for a story” and this romance-angle was the one he loved best. Well, he seemed to be quite a man, this Charles d’Aubigny, but there was a brighter star in her life in the person of Adam Brand.

“I’m out of my depth,” he muttered—he was looking at her now in the flash-photo taken at Fleurs de Juin—in the low cut velvet gown, a flower in the proud coronet of her hair, the soft lips smiling, saying now: “This is where I belong, this is the life I’m made for, to walk in the streets of light, to wear jewels and furs, to be loved and admired—not to be a small-town editor’s wife, worrying about bills, wearing old clothes, dragging out a drab existence and trying to kid myself that I’m happy—”

He shook his head, like a fighter trying to clear his brain after being clouted hard on the ear. “ ‘Chanter, I beg thee, fling away ambition’!” he quoted sadly; “ ‘—many summers I have been as little wanton boys who swim on bladders; but far beyond their depth.’ Seeing her like this, with her own people, in her proper place, I begin to realize what a mug I was. Adam’s letter made me see it first, but this is the clincher. This is the life she will have with Brand—never with me.”

He hadn’t even heard Brun’s footsteps coming from the back shop where he’d been watching Trueman Lank perform a few miracles on the printing-press which John swore was the one Caxton had traded-in. The old man was peering over his shoulder and snorting like a grampus before he woke up from his dark musings.

“Rubbing a bit of pictorial salt in the wounds, eh? Feeling sorry for yourself, eh? Like to be there, sitting beside her, drinking champagne and whispering sweet nothings in her shell-like ear. Like to be up there on the Mount with her—”

“I’d like to be in hell—with her, Uncle Brun. I mean I wouldn’t notice its torments if I were.”

“You got it bad, nephew.” A big hand rested on his shoulder. “Real bad. But that’s the way to love ’em when you do. All out. A real man isn’t afraid to let himself go over a woman, and few women will deny a real man’s love. What’s the matter with you anyway—getting one of those inferiority complexes the Americans invented and flooded the Canadian market with. You afraid she’s too hoity-toity for you—”

“Well, I ask myself what the hell I’m doing in this galley, unk. and can you blame me?”

“Sure I can. Why—”

“I’m not up to that stuff. I mean all the high-life, the thousand dollar furs, the ways of the great. I can’t offer her anything like, say, this Frenchman—with millions, a great man in France as well as in Quebec—”

“Shucks! You have Andy Farr all wrong if you think that would make a smudgin’ of difference with her. They always had money—enough anyway, but they would never be afraid of going broke or being poor. You should worry; you can keep her in vittles and you never see her around here dressed up like Mrs. Ally McCann or the Queen of Sheba—slacks and a sweater and moccasins and sunburnt hide. Don’t let all those fripperies fool you, John.”

But he wouldn’t be convinced. He knew better. If it wasn’t d’Aubigny then it was Adam Brand or someone else. And he, poor clown, had been dreaming mad hopeless dreams, all started by a kiss. No wonder she hadn’t said anything about it. She had been either too flabbergasted or too amused at his clumsy caress.

“Well,” he muttered, “it might have been a lot worse. I might have babbled my head off about being in love with her—and really given her something to laugh at. As it was, I didn’t say anything and I can pretend it was just one of those things that happen when you’re a bit drunk with music and dancing and the madness that comes from holding beauty in your arms. I can let on it meant no more to me than it did to her. After all—” he grinned wryly—“a man has his pride.”

But he knew he didn’t have a great deal of pride where Andrea Farr was concerned—if he had any. He had gone off the deep-end for her, he had let himself fall utterly under the spell of her beauty and abandoned himself to the dangerous practice of dreaming, of letting himself indulge in bright visions and golden hopes that had no real prospect of ever being realized.

“And newspaper work, and prying into the secrets of others and seeing at first hand each day the mess people make of their lives and seeing the skull behind the blushing face—these things are supposed to make you cynical and hard-boiled. Seeing women who have divorced three husbands and men who’ve had more women than Solomon should make you take a pretty dim view of true love and make you immune to its contagion, but it doesn’t.”

And he wondered how long Andrea would linger in Montreal, how soon he would see her again—“There I go. It seems I never learn. What’s the point in my seeing her again? I’ll just take another beating. It will simply make things worse. But if I stay around here, I’m bound to run into her; that is if she spends the winter in this place.”

“Do the Farrs stay here all winter, Uncle Brun?” he asked. “Or do they follow the sun?”

“Hell, the sun never goes any place different that I ever saw. Of course they stay here. They’ve been to Bermuda a few times for a short cruise, but they’re not the kind who’d sooner go south than wear woollen-underwear—if they even bother. They stay around here and go skating and ski-ing and to the hockey-matches in Halifax and they seem to have a pretty good time. Don’t worry, she will be around, the two of you can build forts and throw snowballs at each other.”

Oh, no, thought John, I think not. I doubt that I can stay around here and be so close to her and hope to find any peace of mind. If I’m wise I’ll up-stakes and hightail it back to Montreal or Toronto and try to forget about this excursion into the Vale of Eden. I’m getting soft, sentimental. Next thing, I’ll be writing poetry and joining the authors’ association.

The Farrs crossed the Bay of Fundy from Saint John in the Digby ferry, the Princess Helene, and arrived home in the middle of the first snow-storm of the year.

Even under a blanket of snow to which the Old Lady Up In The Sky, plucking away at her geese, was busily adding extra layers, the Vale looked beautiful to Andrea. Home. Here had been lived all the best hours of her life and she asked for nothing more than to be allowed to stay here among these scenes of which she could never weary.

She thought of Jane Wyatt and of her restless craving for strange lands and far places and could not understand it. She wondered if it really was the far-adventuring that Jane wanted; if it wasn’t some restlessness in her, transmitted from her far-off ancestors of the forest, who seldom became rooted in one spot but followed the migrations of the game-animals that gave them food.

She knew Jane had been in Halifax; Gussie had written her a report of how she and Henry were getting along at Farlake. Well, it would be good to see Jane again, good to be back in her own place with her books, her dogs, her kitten, with Musette and the great oxen.

Henry Zwicker met them at the pier in Digby with the estate-wagon and there, too, was Grace Till, society-reporter for the Weekly Coastguard, with her bird-bright eyes and her hair in a bun that no hat she had ever owned had been able to sit straight upon.

Andrea was glad to see her, glad to see anyone from the paper—his paper. Grace, of course, had devoured the pictures with their surmising captions from the Montreal paper. However, she was one of the Vale and while she “dearly loved a lord,” or as near as one could come to that exalted rank in a country like Canada, and adored reporting people’s doings, there was little of the snob about her. There were no “classes” in Eden.

“Hello, Andy. Hello, Lauchie. Welcome home. Had a good time, I’ll bet. We saw your pictures in the Montreal paper at that swanky night-club and up on the mountain. That’s a grand new coat, Andy. Makes you look just like a queen.”

“Thank you, Grace. Anything new in Colville or in the Vale?”

“Old Mrs. Cosfield died—a hundred and four years old last October and feelin’ fine but fell and broke her hip. Ever notice that about old people; they always die of the wrong thing. You got any statement for the press, you two?”

“We think,” said Lauchlin, “that this is Canada’s century, that we, the young Colossus of the North, are destined to keep the commanding lead we have won—the highest-priced dollar, highest-priced liquor, highest-priced—”

Grace giggled and wrote it all down for Brun Snyder’s delectation.

“You gettin’ married to that big handsome Frenchman, Charles de Gaulle or something, Andy? Says in the Montreal paper.”

“I am not, Grace. Tell my public in big type that I’m not getting married nor am I even engaged to the man.”

“Thought not. I just couldn’t see you along with him. Hope I’ll be reporting your engagement to someone else soon.”

“I’ll tell you first, Grace—I promise.”

“Now that’s real sweet of you, dear, and I’ll make a real ‘beat’ when the story breaks. You got anyone in view yet?”

“I’m sorry, Miss Till, but I must refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it might surprise some poor young man.”

“Surprise him happily, that’s sure. Well—” The Jane Arden of Edenvale, who was well past sixty, sighed deeply—“there is no danger of your ever bein’ left on the shelf anyway.”

She rode with them as far as the newspaper-office, telling them on the way all the minor gossip she could think about. Lauchlin paid her no heed whatever; he was thinking of Janice Pomeroy and planning another trip to Montreal if he could not persuade her to come down for the Christmas holidays. But Andrea listened to Grace’s yakety-yak with the delighted appreciation of the true Vale woman. Grace Till knew her stuff; she was one journalist who didn’t go in for the “rumour has it,” or “we have upon good authority that” business; Grace got it right from the horse’s mouth—and she knew the horse too.

She reported that Jane Wyatt was home again from her visit to Halifax. “Never saw such a change in anyone as there is in Jane. You’d swear she’s discovered some magic-potion that brings beauty. Of course, I always thought she was pretty, she just didn’t seem to care about her looks, going around with her hair a temptation to the birds to nest in and her shirt-tail hangin’ out. You should see her now. She bought a grey kidskin jacket in Halifax and a hat to match and she’s something to behold. And you should see the stuff she’s getting for her trading-post—scrumptious things.”

She finished this speech while Henry raced the motor in front of the Coastguard office. Andrea’s eyes strayed to the window but the snow was thick and clinging and she could see nothing. She wanted to ask about him but she had to ask about Brun first and then she found herself tongue-tied. Well, she’d see him soon—very soon.

The plough was ahead of them on the road to Farlake and as it plodded along, bucking the drifts, Henry had to go most of the way in second gear. It had been drifting badly, driven by a stiff nor’easter, but now the sky was rifting, patches of blue peeping through the driving clouds, and the snow had ceased. The water of the Basin looked viscous, turgid, but the hills in their robes of purest white were sparkling and beautiful, the evergreens looking like white-cowled monks marching up the slopes.

There was no smoke coming from Jane Wyatt’s chimney when they passed Folly Head and Henry informed them that she was most likely at Farlake waiting to greet them. “Brought that Gussie a whole libbery of love stories from Halifax,” complained Henry. “Kitchen’s cluttered up with hearts a-flame an’ hearts smashed to pieces. Honest, I never seen such a girl for readin’ about love, seems to satisfy her the way beer does a man.”

Jane was at the front door, waving to them, when finally they got rid of the plough and turned up their own driveway—Jane in a red sweater and grey skirt, her black hair in a new fashion that gave her olive face a mature loveliness; she was no longer the tomboy, the forest-maiden, slapstick and careless of how she looked.

Lauchlin whistled at her and Andrea hugged her tight, then held her off and studied her. “Jane! You look wonderful. Don’t tell me you got all that done in Halifax! Your hair is lovely. You look like Claudette Colbert did twenty years ago. I’m dying to see your new clothes—”

“Oh, Louella Parsons was at the boat, I take it. Well, I really did myself proud when I got into those shops in Halifax. But I’ll look just like a little sheared goat beside your gorgeous caracul, Andy. Of course I know all about your new duds too. I bought that picture-paper in Halifax and there were you and this handsome brute Lauchie smeared all over it. Gave me a big bang, mes enfants, to see you two rustics out of your dungarees and dressed up fit to knock Hollywood’s eye out.”

She didn’t say what else it had done to her—how the dazzling loveliness of Andrea had thrust her back into the shadow after her brief timid emergence as she tried on lovely silken things in the store. It would hurt Andrea to know that she ever, even inadvertently, caused the slightest sorrow to another, especially to this girl, dearer to her than a sister.

Andrea had bought her a gift, a wood-carving by the celebrated Fernand Fabre, of Longueuil—a pietà with an exquisite reproduction of the Christ. Jane and she both treasured these wood-carvings, which, they were wise enough to know, were works of art and could be to the coming ages what the masterpieces of the Greeks and Romans were to the present.

It was not until they had finished luncheon that Andrea thought of the News with its picture of Adam Brand and hurried up to her room to fetch it.

“This has been a week for seeing old friends in picture-papers. You’d never guess whom I came upon smiling up at me from the pages of the Illustrated London News while I waited in the dentist’s office on Stanley Street?”

Jane, puzzled, shook her head. “I can’t think of any of our pals rating the high honour of being mugged for that paper. Don’t keep me in suspense, Andy—who was it?”

“The man you picked for my big moment, the mysterious pen-pal you conjured up for me merely by putting a message in a box of McIntosh Reds. Ah, I see you haven’t forgotten—”

Forgotten! If they could only know, these two young Farrs, of the stack of letters, of the deep friendship—yes, more than friendship—that existed between her and this man in far-away England—

Andrea opened the magazine at the page and handed it to Jane Wyatt, not noticing that the brown hand shook a little as it reached out, that the smooth tanned cheeks had spots of red and the shy black eyes were wide and bright.

“I give you—Adam Brand!” said Andrea with a radio-announcer’s corny showmanship—“Test-pilot extraordinaire—twentieth-century knight-errant of the stratosphere—probably the only man who walked away from a plane that hit the ground faster than sound and lived to put letters in apple-boxes—Adam Brand!”

Jane’s head was bent over the picture and it was all she could do to fight back the tears—of joy, of surprise, of wonder, of despair. This man—this was he—Adam—he whose last letter lay warm now against her young breast—a letter in which he had said, not for the first time: “I love you, my Neota—love you—and I do not need to ask if you love me. One day I shall hold you in my arms and know your body as I know your soul—”

“Stricken dumb!” laughed Lauchlin. “What’s the matter, forest-maiden—Mr. Brand too much for you? I should think he’d make you squeal like a bobby-soxer at the sight of her hero. He’s quite some guy, this Adam Brand.”

Jane was able to face them by now, though there was still a storm, a tumult, in her breast and her thoughts raced wildly and the wonder of this discovery made it hard for her even to speak coherently. She had known from his letters that Adam Brand was something special, but she had never dreamed of anything like this.

“I told you, Andy,” she said, but with no ring of triumph, of faith vindicated, in her voice. “You insisted he’d be old and—what was it you said?—suffering from weltschmerz, from world weariness—and just look at him—”

“I’ve been looking,” admitted Andrea. “Looking and wondering.”

“Wondering—?”

“Wondering about what would have happened if I’d written him a nice friendly letter in answer to his. ‘Songs of Araby and Tales of Fair Kashmir’ effort—instead of the one giving him the old heave-ho almost before he got his foot in the door. What do you suppose would have happened, Jane!”

“He would have fallen in love with you, Andrea,” answered Jane softly. “He would have loved you from the second or third letter and you would have loved him. Something beautiful and lasting would have grown between you, holding you together like a silken rope woven of a thousand strands of intimate thoughts and words.”

She knew—oh, how well she knew, who had seen that silken cord grow thick and strong, and loved each tiny strand of poetry, of thought, of mutual liking, that went into its structure. The cord was woven for Andrea if she wanted to take the end of it which Jane would surrender to her.

And she must take it—she must. She was the sort of girl that Adam would have pictured his Neota to be; she was the one a man’s fancy would conjure up from the letters Jane had written.

I should tell her now, thought Jane—I should give him to her now and get it over with, for the longer I keep up this sorry play the harder for me to stop. It will go on to a hopeless ending—the moment when he meets me and looks upon my poor beauty, if you can call it that. Better to straighten it out now and say, “the letters were written and answered and they were such as you and he could have exchanged. He is yours if you want him—and you must want him—”

She opened her lips to say these things but no words came, for her heart held them back—her heart that would be only a dead, empty shell if she gave its treasure to Andrea.

“I can’t—I can’t!” she thought wildly. “Not now. It’s gone too long, too far. I can’t turn this precious thing over to her with a smile, a shrug. It’s all the beauty I’ve ever had in my life, all I’ll ever have. And I helped him. I know I did. There were things in his letters I didn’t understand but that I know now meant that what I wrote had done much for him—things like—

The Farrs were looking at her with affectionate amusement. They knew their Jane. “The Indian Look” had made of her face a mask, impassive, unreadable, and in her eyes was a distant, dreaming light. Yet no; it wasn’t the vacant look of the dreamer but of one who saw far-off things.

But she could not have told them what she was seeing. She knew she was in an impasse, that she could not surrender her love to Andrea, even if Andrea would take it. She wasn’t at all afraid that Andrea’s letters would be different from hers or hold less of beauty. Far more than she, Andrea had read and loved poetry and there was in her a deep sensitivity, a quickness of feeling that let her see beauty wherever it was.

Such an impasse! What shall I do, she thought, when he does come here? Shall I meet him first and tell him—what can I tell him? That I was only stringing him along, subbing for another girl, that I don’t care—He would see the truth in my eyes. Maybe I will write to him and tell him the story, tell him about Andrea, tell him to burn my letters—that I’m just a plain Jane, a country wench at whom he wouldn’t take a second look. I could send him these pictures of Andrea—and that would do the trick—

But she knew she would not. Easier for a long-time addict to give up his cocaine or opium than for her to put an end to this strange love that had come to play such a great part in her life.

“We met a girl,” said Andrea, “named Janice Pomeroy—a pomologist.”

“Huh?” That awakened Jane from her deep musings. “You met—”

“Look at Lauchie, Jane. With your unerring instinct you can read the whole story in his face.”

“No!” Jane did look at him, who had been as much her brother all through the years as Andrea had been her sister. She saw his confusion, the defensive grin that he wore against these two women in his life whom he knew so well, to whom now he was bringing another. Andy, he knew, loved Janice and he hoped with Jane it would be the same.

“Lauchie found her at Ste. Anne de Bellevue—English. She’s studying orchardry at McDonald College, and she’s a pippin.”

“Must be a prize pippin if she really made any headway with you, Mr. Farr. A man whose dream of life is apples, apples, apples. It is really serious?”

“Well, it is,” said Lauchlin. “It is time I got free of the tender clutches of you two witches.”

“Can she type?” asked Jane.

“Sew?” said Andrea.

“Cook the lovely fish-dishes of our homeland?” added Jane.

“Darn your socks and mend your clothes?” continued Andrea.

“I dunno. She’s awfully pretty and she knows her apples. She has a new idea of cross-pollination.”

“I’ll bet,” said Jane. “Well, I guess she’s in. We’ll see some new varieties at Farlake, and I dare say it’s time. I hope you’ll be happy, Lauchlin.”

“Hey! I haven’t even asked her yet—”

“If she’s as sweet as you say, she will know already, don’t worry.”

“She knows this Adam Brand,” said Andrea, looking at the picture once more, liking it as much as ever. “She lived near him in England and her sister Joan helped to nurse him when he was smashed up in this plane accident. She says he’s a peach of a fellow.”

“Told you so, didn’t I?” It gave Jane no satisfaction to say it. She thought how much better perhaps it would have been had Adam Brand turned out to be what Andrea had expected. It would have solved her problem anyway.

“Yes,” continued Andrea, tracing Adam’s chin in the picture with a slim forefinger, “she thought it was a great pity I didn’t write to him.”

“Well, you wouldn’t do it. I just about begged you to, on my knees, but you weren’t having any part of it.”

“She said if I had written him, that she would think my letters helped bring him back to health. I feel low when I think that, at the time he wrote, he must have been pretty ill. Janice didn’t say so, but I rather got the idea that his illness was psychosomatic rather than any serious body hurt.”

“That sounds like a Montreal word,” said Jane. “I take it, from my small knowledge of Greek and smaller store of pseudo-science, that you mean he was getting a bit staggery in the cerebellum, punch-drunk, slap-happy—”

“His nerve was gone.”

“It’s a psycho-neurosis. Right back at you, Miss Farr. Yes”—thoughtfully—“letters, some kind of letters, will help such a case.”

In her deep heart she thanked God that she had destroyed Andrea’s cold little note and had written out of her own warm and ready friendliness a letter that had in it something a man, lost and afraid, groping in the shadows, could cling to. She understood now the quick spontaneity of his answer, the rapid ripening of their friendship into this strange love. From her he had been getting the treatment his illness needed; the strength, the will, the courage, not to give in but to shake off his fears and go again into the battle—

She had quoted the lines to him once, in answer to something he had said about being weary of the battle. She had written him—she must have had some woman’s intuition about his plight—many things like that.

“Well, psycho-whatever you like, Jane, it’s odd how he’s popped up in our lives again—odd that your bread-on-the-waters letter should have reached this one billet, gone to this one man out of all the thousands it might have hit.”

“Yes, I’ve often thought of that. You shoot an arrow into the air, it falls to earth you know not where. Mine landed on Mr. Brand’s doorstep along with a box of apples. Funny—”

“What’s so funny about it?”

“It just struck me; we weren’t shipping any of those very early Macs to England. I think they were going to Newfoundland. Well, someone there could have relayed the box along. Must have been that.”

“Have you still his letter, Jane?”

Jane hesitated, but nodded shyly.

“Among your souvenirs, eh?”

“You might say. I’ll always keep it, though it wasn’t sent to me. He was writing to Andrea Farr.”

“No—not to me; to the girl who wrote him the letter in the apple-box. He must have sensed some loneliness in you, Jane—some unhappiness. For you were unhappy at the time. Strange—” She looked pensively at her dark side-kick—“you changed after that, seemed to become happier, certainly you became more beautiful.”

“Perhaps,” said Jane daringly, knowing that Andrea would never suspect the truth—“perhaps I heard him sing his songs of Araby and his distant voice whispered the tales of Fair Kashmir, and they were the food my starved soul needed.”

As he had done—as they had been, for even as his shattered system had gathered strength and courage from Jane’s letters, her own life had found in his response the answer to her longings, her deep-seated, not understood hunger of soul. Ah, it had been in every way a good exchange, a fair exchange. They had been good for each other, had brought an equal richness into each other’s lives.

“I must go over with you this afternoon to Folly Head to see the things you bought in Halifax. I didn’t buy so much. Lauchie bought me the coat for a birthday gift. Revillon Frères. I love it. I bought the velvet evening-gown in Ogilvy’s.”

“I guessed Morgan’s when I saw it.”

“I bought some ski-togs and boots—some for you too. Come, see. We’ll have to clear all our stuff out of here, I suppose, when the new mistress comes.”

“She won’t want me to have the attic room, I dare say.” Jane looked wistful. “What’s she really like, Andy?”

“Good apple. Just what he needs. You’ll get along all right with her. We told her all about you, all about Eden, and you know what press-agents we are when it comes to sounding the praises of our ain folk, our ain land.”

“Better than Texans talking about their home state, I’d say. However, we’ve got a better press-agent than either of you now. A real pro.”

“You mean—”

“Yes, him—Chanter. He has the masthead story in Travel Tales, beautifully written and, as they say, lavishly illustrated in colour. You should see Henry Zwicker with Diamond and Bright all done in technicolour. It’s a feast for the eye. And the beautiful display of handicrafts in Jane Wyatt’s trading-post, not to mention Miss Wyatt herself with an armful of baskets looking rather like a little Malicete girl going off to sell them at the city-market.”

“Oh, I’m so glad. Have you a copy of the magazine so I may read it—until I can buy one myself. What’s it all about?”

“You, it seems to me—though he doesn’t mention you by name specifically. He writes of the beauties—meaning the women—of Eden—‘Canada’s fairest daughters’ he calls us, which should make the rest of the Dominion pretty furious. He tells all about our quaint customs, our fondness for fish, our simple pastimes, and makes us sound rather like some lost tribe that he stumbled on while he was out looking for four-leaved clovers. But it’s the kind of thing people love, much like those ‘In Search of’ books of Morton’s. That’s a thought we must pass on to him. He could get out a collection of his pieces and call it ‘Quest for Eden.’ Might sell.”

“That’s a splendid idea, Jane. I met a fellow in Montreal at one of the mutual-admiration literary-teas. His name is Farjeon. He edits this Newspix weekly and he asked about John Chanter; used to work with him on some paper. He says John will go places if—”

“If what, Andy?”

“If—oh, something about the good guys he’d seen go off into the sticks to fight a losing fight in the writing business. Something about getting out of the swim, and getting soup-stains on your vest—”

“Quite,” agreed Jane. “I think Mr. Farjeon is a very astute man. Chanter is big-time. He’s a Met star singing in a town hall. Still, he seems to like it and with what the Coastguard makes—and you’d be surprised at old Brun’s shrewdness—and what he gets from his free-lancing, he should be able to live pretty well. He got fed-up with the cities—afraid of getting run over, I dare say. That’s the kind of guy comes down here to dodge traffic and gets trampled on by an ox.”

“Cheerful.”

“Well, after you flew away on him, he went around in such a daze of grief or something that Henry the Zwick could have run over him with those two little pets he drives. What did you do to him the night of the dance, Andy?”

“What did I—?” The tell-tale flush came to her cheeks. “Why, I—”

“You knocked the poor fellow’s props from under him—‘Say I’m stupid, say I’m dumb—but Andy kissed me’—”

“He didn’t tell you—”

“Heck! You fellows don’t need to tell anyone when you start to buss each other—it sticks out all over you.”

The lowest moments in life are those which follow what you hope will be the highest. All through those bright and brittle hours of fun and gaiety in Montreal, Andrea had dreamed of just one thing, all the days had been lived through with the thought—“One day nearer to my going home; one day nearer to seeing him.” The journey home by train and boat had been a happy one, because she was coming nearer and nearer to her heart’s desire. Then there was Home, and soon would come the loveliest time—when she would see him again.

The day following her return she met him in the street, almost in front of the Weekly Coastguard office, met him face-to-face—and there was nothing.

Nothing at all of what she had dreamed about. She had seen him in the distance. He was wearing a fawn sheep-lined reefer and corduroys and high-boots and his brown head bare. She had felt a lift inside her, a quick fluttering of her heart, a lightness. Soon in his eyes she would see what she wanted and hear in his voice the confirmation of all her hopes—

But his eyes, those kind brown eyes, were merely friendly, not the eyes of a lover gazing, after a long parting, on the face of his beloved. They had a cool, aloof, withdrawn look that seemed to say, “Oh, yes, Miss Farr. Been away, I believe, and now you’re back again and what’s it to me? Just one of the girls of Eden Vale—merely that. Not a girl I kissed only a few weeks ago in the moonlight; never a girl in whose heart I kindled a fire that lighted the darkest corners of her being.”

He must have forgotten that or it had meant so little to him that remembering brought him no great joy. Well, if it was so with him, so it would be with her. She was proud and she came of a strong breed and no man was going to see the hurt in her; certainly not this big-boned, tousled fellow, who could scarcely even lay claim to good looks. In spite of herself she contrasted him with Charles d’Aubigny and the comparison was as odious as most such are. But there it was: John Chanter could do to her what Charles, with all his charm, all his distinction, had never succeeded in doing.

“Hello, John,” she said, being as cool, as casual, as unconcerned as she could manage—and she was a good actress. “How are things?”

“As ever,” he said. “Nothing unusual. We keep the noiseless tenor of our way—”

“Far from the madding crowd, eh?”

“You must find it pretty slow and stupid after your sojourn with the madding.”

“Yes,” she lied, and she felt a near-vindictiveness. He had hurt her, dashed her hopes, her silly dreams to the icy pavement. She hoped she could hurt him, and her hope was fulfilled. But John Chanter, too had his pride and pride is the very devil when it comes between two who love each other. “It’s pretty slow,” she went on. “I don’t know if I’ll stay the winter.”

It was the first time she’d even thought about not staying the winter. She and Jane Wyatt had planned a thousand and one things to do, any number of activities that would keep them busy until the Spring. But now, just because she felt low and unwanted and rebuffed, it was the first thing that came into her head—to get away from him, from the place where he was and where she would be likely to meet him at every turn.

“Can’t blame you,” he said. “The world is yours to range over.”

I hate you, she thought—oh, I hate you. And what a fool I was to let a kiss, a thing that meant nothing more to you, it seems, than a handshake, do this to me. Never again, she promised herself—but never. All the dreams I had—all those warm, sweet, coloured dreams for which there never was a reality. And she wanted to hurry away from him as fast as she could, away to some dark and quiet place where she could give way to what was in her, where she could let the smiling mask fall and not be afraid that he would see the tearful face behind it.

No, she couldn’t run. In a little while I’ll be away and I can let my hair fall and weep and wring my hands and maybe swear a little, but right now I have to let him see that I don’t care—

The words of an old song her mother used to sing came to her now—“Let him go, let him stay, let him sink or let him swim—”

“How was Montreal?” he said inanely. It was warm enough there in the bright December sunlight. “You must have had fun. I saw your picture in the paper—lovely.”

“Thank you.” It seemed the whole world had seen those pictures. She hated them now. I should have had one taken of myself with mournful eyes, gazing towards the distant valley by the sea and had Farjeon put it in his silly paper with the lines—

I wonder if it would mean any more to him. How could I have been so wrong about anything—Andrea Farr—Andrea Chanter—Mrs. John Chanter—

“I met a friend of yours,” she said, wanting to get away, yet afraid that if she went off too abruptly he would see that it mattered to her, that she was angry and upset.

“You did. Who—”

“One Farjeon—Mark Farjeon—edits that picture-paper that is a press-agent’s dream. I met him at a levee.”

John looked pleased. “That’s good to hear. Fine fellow. I suppose he told you we worked together and gave you a complete account of our exploits.”

“Made me love the both of you for the dangers you had known,” said Andrea lightly. “Yes, he briefed me pretty well on your career before you came down here to vegetate—”

She couldn’t resist the dig. She hated herself for giving it to him, but then she hated him and loved him both.

“Is that what Puffy thinks I’m doing? Or is that what you—”

“I really wouldn’t know.” And she was Andrea Farr now, the Andrea of the high places, of the seats of the mighty. “He said something about newspapermen getting submerged in towns like this, out of the swim, soup stains on their weskits—”

She saw his wide mouth draw in and harden. She knew that she had hit him where he lived, probed into some secret tender spot, and now she was sorry for it and wished she could take back her words. But the harm was done.

“I get it,” he said in a low but carrying voice. “I know what they think and it could be that they’re right. Of late, I’ve been thinking much the same thing, wondering if, instead of just a desire to get out of the rat-race it wasn’t rather a form of cowardice, of refusing to face the hard facts or an inability to stand the pace. But it’s easy to let yourself go here in this lotus-land.”

“Farjeon, I think, envies you.”

“You think so? Well, he might pretend to or maybe he can really kid himself that he’d like to be in my shoes. But I have my doubts. Those joes probably look on me the same as front-line soldiers do on a guy who wangles himself a spot fifty miles behind the lines.”

“Battles aren’t fought entirely in the front line,” she said. “Your work down here—well, they all like the stuff you’ve written—”

“That’s always good listening,” he said. “I don’t think I really know what I’m doing, but whatever it is it doesn’t seem to be the right thing. I suppose you have to work out your own destiny. I have this little flair for writing and I love the work, but I’m not sure that the little talent and the desire to write are really enough.”

“What more could you have?”

“That I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find the answer. But maybe I’m looking in the wrong place.”

She thought: I don’t seem to enter his calculations. It’s all himself—the soul-struggle of John Chanter. I had a foolish hope that we had begun to find the answer to everything and that together we would come upon it. Now I see I was indulging in a lot of wishful thinking, just deluding myself. Maybe love doesn’t enter into his problem at all. Maybe in his work it’s especially true that he travels fastest who travels alone. But, oh, I hoped—

Her hopes had gone as a box of flimsy lovely flowers would go if they were set down in the shadow today where the thermometer said five above zero. She felt like a different person from the one who had awakened this morning in the sunny room at Farlake and gazed out dreamily on the white and dazzling world that was a perfect place, a wonderful place.

“Well,” she glanced at him briefly and looked away. His face was dark, the eyes troubled, “I’d better start moving. I’m probably holding up the presses, staying the onward race of Canadian journalism.”

“Oh, no! There’s nothing much to do today. We’re getting the big Christmas issue ready. Old Brun loves Christmas in the true tradition—something like the big celebration in Pickwick, at Dingley Dell, with frolics and dances and wash-coppers full of wassail, games of blindman’s buff and all the rest of it. Today he’s composing a thunderous editorial against the way the feast is being commercialized. He’s always playing Don Quixote—always championing lost causes. I love the old fellow but, believe me, it’s as well he lives in this cool sequestered Vale of Eden. The things he still believes in—”

“Oh!” She didn’t like the tone of his speech, the faint hopelessness in his dismissal of Brun Snyder’s quixotry. “Isn’t it a good thing that there are men like him—a few of them—left? There isn’t so much beauty in the modern world but there’s much that is ugly, much that is terribly shallow and the young haven’t much to cling to. I always liked your uncle’s old-world ways. He used to spend long evenings with my father when I was very small, playing chess, talking about books and men and affairs. Good talk. Young as I was I loved to listen to them.”

She saw Jane’s little car stop in front of the Colville post-office and it gave her an excuse to get away from this idle encounter. It was nothing—nothing at all—that she had expected. She felt old and empty and she thought, “If I should look in my mirror now, I’d see the ghost again, the fading face, the greying hair. And what’s to stay it? There’s nothing, no one.”

“Good-bye,” she said. “There’s Jane going into the post-office. I have to see her. I—I hope you’ll be able to work out your destiny, John.”

He looked at her squarely then. “And I hope you’ll be able to work out yours, happily, Andrea—I know you will. I—that night at the dance at Coll’s Corners—I hope I didn’t offend you. I know now how out of order I was. You’ll forget it, won’t you?”

“Yes—” She did not return his look. “I’ll forget it. That’s the thing to do, isn’t it?”

“Yes—that seems to be the thing to do.”

She went from him blindly. Just like that it was over. A few words—good-bye—forget me—and there was nothing—nothing at all but the brittle golden sunshine, the nipping frost, the eternal snow. Never Spring again, never Summer, never the soaring song in her heart or the bright dreams of bliss. Only good-bye.

Jane Wyatt was standing by the bank of private-boxes where she had just opened her own. She was reading a letter and the sight of it, the blue-grey envelope, gave Andrea a start. She recalled the last letter she had seen on stationery like that—the letter from Adam Brand. But of course lots of people used that sort of paper. She knew that Jane got most of her mail here at the post-office in Colville; most of the Farlake letters came out to Eden by the rural free-delivery.

She watched Jane’s face as the dark girl read her letter and wonder grew in her—wonder at the look in the long-lashed jet-black eyes, at the way her lips moved as she followed the lines, at the transformation in her, as if a nimbus of light played round her head—wonder that she had ever thought Jane plain-looking, an ugly duckling.

“Hi, Wyatt!” she called as Jane looked up, like one awakening out of a lovely dream, from her letter. “What’s he say? Does he still love you? Any Songs of Araby and Tales of Fair Kashmir?”

She saw the startled, almost terrified look, the near-panic in Jane’s eyes, but still she did not guess its reason. It was gone in a moment. Jane’s face wore its immobile Indian calm, and she folded the letter quickly and thrust it into the pocket of her Red River coat.

“Sure,” she said. “He loves me with a love undying and eternal.”

“You looked very happy when you were reading it. I couldn’t help noticing. Must have been somebody ordering a half-dozen suit-lengths of homespun—”

“Or the chieftain of the Clan MacWallpaper bespeaking a new set of drapes in the family tartan for the three hundred rooms of his castle. Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Andrea’s eyes studied her face, feature by feature, line by line.

“I rather would, you know,” she said softly, her eyes steady on Jane’s, a little smile at the corners of her lips.

Jane met her gaze unwaveringly, on her face the forest-look; what went on in her mind there was no telling. She had at first been afraid that Andrea had guessed her secret, that she knew this letter was from Adam Brand, but calm reason told her Andrea could have no idea of what went on. There was nothing devious about Andrea; guileless herself, she was slow to sense guile in others.

“I’ll tell you some day, Andy.”

“I’d really like to know what magic was there to make your eyes so bright. You looked like a woman in love.”

Jane did not answer. She could find no words, think of nothing to turn aside the question in Andrea’s eyes. She thanked the old gods of her race that Sewell Bain, the postmaster, hailed her from his wicket with news of a registered parcel for her.

She hurried over to claim it with the speed and glad relief of a condemned man who has been told to step down from the gallows. She was pretty sure that Andrea had no idea of the origin of that letter, but just the same—

I’ll have to tell her soon, she thought, as she collected her parcel from old Mr. Bain, but I don’t want any showdown with her right here or right now. Even if she does suspect that I’ve been writing to him she would never ask me directly, she’s not like that.

Andrea said no more about it. Jane, in fact, gave her no chance. They went to the coffee-shop across the street from the post-office and settled into a booth. “How’s the white-hope of Nova Scotia journalism?” asked Jane. “I saw the two of you deep in conversation in front of Jelk’s hardware, oblivious of the cold.”

“I felt the cold,” admitted Andrea. “Two cups of chocolate, Heber—is that what you want, Jane?”

“Good. You mean he isn’t carrying the torch for you?”

Andrea shook her head. “Not at all. Did you think he was?”

“I wasn’t sure. He’s a queer egg. Seems to be all mixed up. Doesn’t seem the type of man who knows what he wants and goes right straight after it, come hell or high-water.”

“Maybe his problems aren’t so easy. I wouldn’t know. I should have kept my big mouth shut, though, about his friend Farjeon in Montreal saying he was lost down here, out of the race, and all that—”

“Took it to heart, I suppose. Hurt pride and all the rest of it. Men are a scream, sometimes.”

“Yes, he took it quite seriously. I hope he doesn’t brood on it and decide to quit Eden and leave Brun Snyder in the lurch. The old man needs him and the paper is a hundred per cent better since he came to work on it.”

“We won’t dispute that. But the guy is really good. I should think that’s what Farjeon meant. Anyway, it’s what occurred to me. He could be the best journalist in the world but who the heck is ever going to know it if most of his yarns are published in the Colville Weekly Coastguard—circulation circa 4,500!”

“He will have to work out his own destiny,” said Andrea, as she had said it to him. “No one else can really settle those things for a man.”

“You don’t think so.”

“I don’t. Oh—” She looked a bit confused—“someone else might help him come to a decision. That is not what I meant. The decision wouldn’t necessarily be the right one.”

“You’ll miss him if he goes away.”

“So will you. So will a lot of us. He’s been good for Edenvale. He’s done a lot for us.”

“Well, we did quite a lot for him. He wasn’t too happy when he came here, as I understand it. No peace of mind. No star to steer by. Sort of a lost soul—the kind the world’s over-populated with right now. He found peace in Eden. He liked us, liked the place and his work. But it’s just what I told you; those birds aren’t made for the long pull. They soon weaken, soon tire. I suppose he’s getting fed-up now and hungers for the flesh-pots. Apples can be sort of a stultifying diet, you know.”

“So I haven’t heard you remark for quite a long time, Jane.”

Jane, for a rarity, looked slightly abashed and for the first time since last fall, when she had begun to write to Adam Brand, it struck her that she had indeed lost her restlessness, her dissatisfaction with life in the quiet of the Vale.

“I must have forgotten to complain,” she said lamely. “Or I’m becoming resigned to my lot—”

Andrea lit a cigarette and looked at her through the haze of smoke with eyes that questioned.

“No.” She seemed to be answering herself. “It’s not that at all. You’d never resign yourself to anything you didn’t like. There is something funny about you, Jane, and I can’t seem to dope it out. You look like a fellow on the Indian-list who has discovered a secret pipe-line to a brewery. You’re a cloud-walker.”

“Oh, stuff! You—”

“I hope you stay up there, babe,” Andrea smiled at her fondly. “I hope you’ll always be happy and never get a let-down.”

“If I’m cloud-walking, as you say, I’ll get an awful bump when I do fall.”

And that’s the truth, she thought—the plain, unvarnished. I’m riding high and riding for a fall. But, oh, it’s been a wonderful ride, a grand walk on the clouds and I’m glad I did it and I’d do it again if I had the chance. He was mine all these months. If I lose him to her I will have that to remember—that it was I he loved in his letters and it will be good to remember. It’ll be, when I’m old, like Ronsard’s mistress, when “Some winter night, shut snugly in, beside the faggot in the hall—old tales are told, old songs are sung, old days recalled to memory—you say ‘When I was fair and young, a poet sang to me—’ ”

Songs of Araby he sang to me, and his voice was low and tender and haunting. I could hear it across the mountains and the seas, murmuring close in my ear his words of love and longing; tales of fair Kashmir he told me and in his telling was a charm, a sweet seduction, and I listened to him in my heart, my eyes closed, and I wanted to follow him to the ends of the earth—

They lingered in Heber Van Tassel’s coffee-shop until they spied Henry Zwicker driving up and down the street in the grey estate-wagon, seeking his mistress. Andrea left Jane still sitting there and Andrea’s heart was heavy; nothing this day seemed to be right. She felt sick with the pain of loss when she thought of John—of all the wondrous things she had hoped would be. Such lovely longings, and instead there was nothing at all.

And Jane Wyatt was drifting away from her. Jane was away off in some other land, some far, beautiful country, and she was inviting no one—not even her oldest, dearest friend—to walk its flower-bordered paths with her or to wander by its lovely waters. There was something closed and secret and utterly self-contained now about Jane, who had always been as free and open as the dawn of a clear day.

There wasn’t much at Farlake to console her or lift her out of herself. She went ski-ing with Lauchlin, who was as much in the dumps as she was and had already made a long-distance call to Ste. Anne de Bellevue—a call in which the silences said more than the words but, strangely enough, cost just as much money.

“Will you ask Janice to come visit us at Christmas, Andy, please? She’s never seen this part of the world and—”

“It’s time she did then. Yes, I’ll write her at once so she will have lots of time to get ready. It’s hell, isn’t it, Lauchie?”

“Eh?” They were sitting at the top of Bear Mountain eating the sandwiches they had brought along on their ski-trip. Lauchlin held a sandwich half-way to his mouth and stared at her. “What are you talking about? What’s hell?”

“Love.”

“Lo— Why, come to think of it, sis, it does cause a man a lot of torment, a lot of soul-searching and heartache.”

“ ‘All other pleasures are not worth its tears’—some wise bird said something like that. Do you suppose it’s true?”

“Right now, I think I agree with him. I know I’ve fallen for Janice and it’s a wonderful sensation, but, Lord, it’s awfully lonely with her away up there and—well, you never really think how short life is or how valuable is time until you realize all you are missing.”

“Cheer up. It’s only three weeks until Christmas. We’ll ask her for Christmas and New Year’s. She has no relatives in Canada and not many friends. It will be good for her. We always have such fun.”

“We do indeed. But you, Andy—what’s with you? For a while there it seemed that a bright light was burning inside you; then suddenly it went out.”

“So it went out, Lauchie. That’s all there is to the story—it went out. It was the light that failed.”

“But I don’t understand—”

“Nor do I. But let’s not talk about it. I was just kidding myself the way girls will sometimes.”

“I don’t get it.” Lauchlin shook his head. “I’ve never seen the man who was good enough for you. I’ve never seen you encourage any man. Sometimes, Andy, I wonder if they’re not a bit afraid of your looks, your beauty—”

“If a man loved me, Lauchlin, he wouldn’t be afraid of anything. If he really cared. And I wouldn’t be bothered with a man who let anything stand in his way if he did want me. I’ll—”

She was going to tell him again that she would meet the one some day; that her prince would come, but now she wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t at all sure that there’d ever be any grand passion in her life. How many girls, she wondered, had set their hearts on one man and then found out he didn’t care for them? And what did they do then? Were they content with second best? And did they forget or did they sometimes remember in the long hours of the night while they lay wakeful by the side of the man they married, that there had been another long ago and wonder if it would have been different, if it would have brought fulfilment of all their young bright dreams?

She wrote to Janice Pomeroy that evening, sitting at the little desk in the living-room at Farlake while Lauchlin sat on the bear-skin rug in front of the hearth playing with Orlik, the big white Samoyed, while Rags, the ancient brown cocker, looked on with wistful eyes and an occasional hoarse bark of approval.

“I have to write to Yvonne and Jean Ferrier—”

“Ask them too. They like it down here. Ferrier was born on a farm and I don’t think he ever learned to like the city. Maybe if the weather is half-decent they can all come down in Jean’s plane. I think Janice would like that. I hope she likes it here.”

“She will like it, don’t worry. I think she would like any place you are, good-looking.”

“Me! I’m just a big farmer. I’m not even sure she will—”

“ ‘He either fears his fate too much’—”

“Yes, I know. Oh, I’ll ask her. You don’t think it’s too soon though, do you, Andy? Should I wait—”

“No.” Her voice was harsh. “Don’t wait, brother. Seize the day! Don’t fool with love or take chances on it. After all, it means your life’s happiness.”

“You sound forlorn, Andy. As if your own love had passed you by. What is it? I wish you’d tell me. Perhaps I could help.”

“That’s what everybody in love thinks—that they can help the other fellow. You have so much happiness that you feel you have plenty to spare for the less fortunate. But you keep your own, Lauchlie. You deserve it all.”

There was a summons from the brass-knocker on the hall door and they heard Gussie open the door and say, “why, yes, I’m sure they would. Henry’s not here but Lauchlie will give you a hand. You better come in.”

John Chanter’s big awkward form, still bulkier in his fawn sheepskin reefer, loomed in the door. Gussie spoke for him and it seemed as well for he looked uneasy and abashed.

“Mr. Chanter’s car is stuck in a snowbank at the foot of our drive and he needs help to get her out.”

“I’m sorry to bother you.” He had smiled briefly at Andrea, but he addressed himself to Lauchlin. “I was driving over to Roedale and I guess I wasn’t watching what I was about. I struck a patch of ice and put Old Ironsides into a snowbank. She weighs two tons, that old car, and I got my wheels dug-in trying to back her out.”

He’d been thinking of Andrea, gaping up the Farr’s driveway—and that was when the car slewed on him. Thinking of Andrea and picturing her just as he saw her now, her pale hair a bit awry, a blue peacock robe swathing her lissom body, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the fire.

From the heat of the fire and the sudden joy of seeing him. Lauchlin stared at her and his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. Well, for God’s sake, he thought—women! Here she has the pick of the crop and she wants this poor newspaper-fellow and he—I’d swear he’s afraid of her.

“Be right with you, Chanter,” he said. “I had the tractor out ploughing our roads this afternoon and I’ll get it now and yank you out of there in no time. You want to wait here and Andy’ll give you a drink while I’m getting under way?”

“Thanks. But I’d better go along with you. I—”

Lauchlie saw ready confirmation of what he had surmised. The poor devil didn’t even trust himself to stay alone with her. And she—he thought he had never seen her look more lovely or more shy—not anyway since she was a little girl and there was a surprise party for her, or the like.

“I’ll drag this guy back by the ears,” thought Lauchlin, “after I get him out of the soup. So that’s her little secret. Funny I never guessed it. I couldn’t figure just who around here was the sort of man she’d ever want to let her hair down for. He’s such a quiet chap. All okay, I guess, or old Brun wouldn’t have him around.”

John followed him into the hall as if he were afraid he was going to lose him. Andrea had merely said: “It’s a lovely night isn’t it? Cold enough. It said two below when I looked at the porch thermometer a while ago.”

“It’s as bright as day,” he said, thinking; as bright as the night at Coll’s Corners, Andrea, when we strolled down to the shore, when I held you and heaven in my arms and kissed you—I see you’re writing letters—writing to Adam Brand, no doubt, telling him about the quaint types you meet in Eden—telling him that one kissed you and it was fun—just fun.

He rode down the drive with Lauchlin on the tractor and helped hitch a chain to the rear bumper of the old Marmon. It came out with no trouble and stood chugging stolidly on the road.

“Why not come up for a while and get a warm?” suggested Lauchlin. “You have quite a drive ahead of you to Roedale—”

“You’re kind—” Scared again, thought Lauchlie—“but I’m late as it is and I’d better get crackin’. It’s good of you to give me a hand, Lauchlin. I’ll keep my mind on my driving the rest of the way.”

“Okay,” grinned Lauchlin. “Good wheeling to you.”

He stood and watched the old car’s tail-lamps vanish around the mill-pound curve. “Another one caught in the toils, I’d say. Poor devil! A fat chance he has to get away if she really wants him. Still, she’s proud as they come and she will never run after him, that’s sure. I wonder when all this happened. Oh, of course, he’s been around, getting the dope for his stories. Seems a pretty good head; I thought so the first time I talked to him when he found that box of Macs we lost off the truck.”

Lauchlin would have been a very surprised young man had he been told of the long and devious chain of events that the single incident of a box of apples falling off a load had given rise to, events that would help shape the course of four lives at least and that had already meant pain to some and joy to others.

“He wouldn’t come back, Andy,” he said, looking at her with a wise little smile, when he returned to the living-room. “I wanted him to, but he said he was a bit late as it was for his appointment in Roedale, and off he went. What’s the matter with him? He seemed to be afraid.”

“Maybe he is.”

“Of what?”

“I can’t really tell you—of life maybe—perhaps that’s why he gave up working for the big city papers and came down here to help run the Coastguard.”

“Or of love maybe—perhaps that’s why he couldn’t get out of here fast enough.”

“Oh, Lauchie!”

“He’s the one, isn’t he?” And when he saw her hesitation, her unhappiness, he continued: “You don’t need to mind telling me, Andy. I could guess it the moment he came into the room, when his eyes rested on you. He looked—I guess he looked much the same as I do when I see Janice. But what’s the holdup? He seems to be a good, steady, likeable chap—”

“He’s all that. He’s—Oh, don’t ask me what’s the holdup, Lauchie. I can’t make him out. It must be that he just doesn’t care for me—”

“You know better, Andy. If you don’t, I can tell you he’s in love with you. He certainly shows it.”

“I thought—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I was just indulging in a bit of self-deception. And I’m not throwing myself at his head or any other man’s.”

“I believe you. Maybe the poor guy is just bashful—”

“He’s not that bashful. It’s something else. Now he’s got it into his head too that maybe he’s sort of a failure, that he admitted defeat when he came here seeking—whatever it was he sought: peace, happiness—I don’t know. Probably he will pick-up his portable and betake himself back to the city. I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“And you—”

“Oh, I’ll survive,” she said bleakly, in her heart not really knowing how she’d survive nor caring very much. She had hoped for such a different future. She had hoped she would be walking, riding by his side—like tonight under the winter-moon it would be good to ride by his side; but here she sat alone by her fire. Only Lauchlin to talk to, and brothers, however kind and understanding they may be, are only brothers.

They tuned in the broadcast of a hockey-match in Halifax and Gussie made them cocoa and they sat there late, happy in their fashion, for this had long been the pattern of their lives. Soon now, they both thought, it would be changing. It would be a different one sitting on the other side of the fire. Lauchlin could see Janice Pomeroy’s face, open and sweet, across from him, and he knew a longing and hope of happiness that outshone everything else. But Andrea could see no one. Sometimes John Chanter’s brown eyes would smile at her and look into hers with love and longing, but then his image would fade and there would be no one; and when she went up to her room at last, she did not look too long in her mirror, fearing the strange visitant might come again.

It was one of the quietest Christmastides that Farlake had ever known. Janice Pomeroy, for whom the carpet was being rolled out, the fatted calf slaughtered and the old house generally turned inside out, had to call off her visit and fly to England to the death-bed of the aunt who had raised her and her sister Joan; the Ferriers had booked reservations in Nassau and it was only the usual party that sat down to Christmas dinner in the dark-panelled dining-room overlooking the snow-covered hills and the ice-blue waters of the Basin.

Andrea and Lauchlin and Jane Wyatt; the ancient Aunt Phoebe Marchand, bright as a chickadee and as greedy for her food and wine, and old Brunswick Snyder with his mop of white hair, looking like a shaven Santa Claus. John Chanter had gone to Montreal; not to stay, the old man insisted, but to try to find some new parts for the printing-press.

“Best damn press in North America,” said Brun, brandishing a drumstick from one of the Farlake turkeys and glaring at Aunt Phoebe, whom he revered, but who, being older and having, withal, a better memory than he, could and did contradict him on many matters of local history. “Yes, sir, the best,” he repeated. “My father took over the Coastguard in 1893—”

“Nine-five,” piped Aunt Phoebe Marchand. “It was in 1895, Brunswick. Your father bought it from Chandler Foss’s widow, Huilota Breen. Chandler died so young. She’s been a widow fifty-seven years so you see if your father bought it from her it couldn’t have been in ’93—she hasn’t been widowed that long—”

“All right! all right!” yelled Brun, who believed or pretended to, that the old lady was deaf—which she was not. “We’ll say 1895. Anyway—now you’ve made me forget what I was talking about. The—”

“The printing-press,” helped Lauchlin. “You were telling us what an improvement it is on the one Gutenberg used to print his bible.”

“You too, eh!” Old Brun gave him an Olympian scowl. “You and my nephew—always belittling, deriding, poking cheap fun and making quips of dubious merit about a fine piece of mechanism—”

“John Chanter says it’s never been right since you switched from the Gothic type it was made for,” contributed Jane. “Says it’s time the ‘s’ stopped being printed like ‘f.’ Parts for it, he says too, are becoming harder to find than refills for a barrel-organ.”

Brun roared with laughter and held out his glass for a refill of Henry Zwicker’s peach-brandy. “I love that press,” he said. “It’s to me like—or was—like the mill in ‘The Miller of the Dee’ ”—and he trolled out in his rich voice—

“—well, I can say ‘I live by my press—and so it’s been.’ But I find now I think more of young John than I do even of the plant and he’s going to get a big surprise when he goes looking for parts in Canada—”

It was always “Canada” up there to Old Brun, who never recognized Confederation, called anybody from over the northern New Brunswick border Canadians and held them in about as high esteem as if they were North Koreans.

“Surprise?” said Lauchlin. “He expects one—if he finds the parts especially.”

Brun chuckled. “He’s going to find a whole spanking new printing-press. I ordered it last fall when he began writing those grand stories of his. Of course,” he said stiffly, “we didn’t really need a new plant, but he’s young and Trueman Lank’s old and if ever the old press had a nervous breakdown and Trueman had one at the same time—so we’ll start the year with as fine a printing-press as any paper in the Maritimes or Canada—”

“Oh, Uncle Brun!” Andrea’s eyes were alight with excitement and happiness. “If that isn’t like you! And it’s splendid. It’s just wonderful.”

“I’m glad you’re pleased, my dear.” The old man beamed fondly on her, his eyes a-twinkle. “Of course, there was, as Aunt Phoebe used to say before her English improved—a met’od in my mad—”

“I can believe that,” said the old lady complacently. “You wouldn’t spend a penny that hadn’t got verdigris on it from being in your jeans so long.”

“Didn’t think she could hear me,” apologized Brun. “Well, the method in my madness was to keep John happy, to keep him here in Eden. To be sure, I’m young yet—”

“Like the printing-press,” sneered Aunt Phoebe. “Good as new.”

“. . . young yet; not senile like some of the oldsters; but I can’t expect to last forever and I’d leave the Vale a lot happier in my mind if I knew that there was someone strong and capable and good-in-heart to take over after me. So the press is a sort of bribe, you might say. John’s been restless of late and I’d do anything to make him happy and keep him here. This place has a future—”

“Been having one since I was a girl, seventy-five years ago,” put in Aunt Phoebe.

“Eighty-five,” muttered Brun; but still she heard him and bowed smilingly. “You have the privilege of your profession, Brunswick—that of being only about fifty per cent right twenty-five per cent of the time.”

Brun snorted and prepared to discharge a broadside on the high-point accuracy of his paper, but Andrea forestalled him; “Maybe the new press will be a hundred per cent accurate, Aunt Phoebe. You have no idea of the miracles of modern science.”

“Oh, yes, I have—what they call miracles anyway. I don’t see anything miraculous about them though. We travel faster, to be sure, but we always reach the same destination, it seems.”

Brun was describing the new printing-press to Lauchlin, showing some folders he had brought with him. He spread them out on the card-table after dinner and explained its workings and its wonders to them with such enthusiasm that it touched them all, even Aunt Phoebe, who grudgingly admitted that maybe now she wouldn’t have to wear glasses when she read the Coastguard.

“And you think this expensive new toy will please Master Chanter so much that it will keep him amused and content to stay in his little play-pen the rest of his days?” Jane Wyatt was in her old form. “Well, I do hope you’re right, Uncle Brun. Everybody likes his stuff. He belongs in the big leagues.”

“Look, young one,” growled the old editor. “It doesn’t matter in life what league you play in; what counts is how you play. Each man has his own private league anyway and he knows in himself whether he’s doing the right thing or not.”

“Maybe.” Jane was stubborn. “I suppose there are players who will give of their best when there’s only a handful to see them—”

“Yes, daughter, there are,” smiled Brun. “And a few who will give of their best when there’s none to see them—give of their best and work their hardest so that they can answer to themselves when the job’s done, and not be ashamed.”

“ ’Tis sweet to be rewarded,” murmured Jane. “Especially in a trade like yours, like writing. It’s pretty arduous work and Samuel Johnson said—”

“Omigod!” said Brun. “That man and that dull saying—‘no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’.”

“Well, isn’t it true?”

“Of course it isn’t true. Johnson himself wrote a devil of a lot and if he was following his own philosophy of writing he must have been a pretty poor writer—for he never made any money but cadged around most of his life.”

Lauchlin made Andrea play Christmas carols on the organ then and got them all singing and away from arguments, which always made Brun redder than ever and always stimulated Jane to exquisite feats of sword-play in words. Christmas was no time for debate or discussion or bitterness. It was a time for love, yet none of these three young people had near them the ones their hearts were set upon.

They sang the old songs of the season and Aunt Phoebe in her lovely old voice that seemed to call for the accompaniment of spinet or recorder, sang—

And it was very lovely and they knew peace and happiness in their hearts and hope that greater joy would come. When the evening was over and Lauchlin had driven the old people to their homes the three of them sat around the fire and gazed into the glowing caverns of apple-wood on the hearth and talked little and thought deeply their long, long thoughts.

In January, Lauchlin and Andrea took a cruise-ship from Halifax, bound for Nassau. The Ferriers had taken a big house there and wanted them to visit. “Ah,” said Lauchlin, “we might as well be in Nassau as anywhere else for all the good we’re doing here.” So off they went.

Janice Pomeroy was still in England, held by some business about her aunt’s estate; the world for Lauchlin was an empty place. John Chanter was back from Montreal and the printing-press had arrived and, though Andrea did not see him, even to say good-bye, Jane told her that he was happier than a six-year-old with a set of electric-trains.

“What a chimaera is man!” moaned Jane. “I think that is what some Frenchman said, and, brother, did he utter a mouthful! I watched him and old Brun and Trueman Lank tinkering with that oversize ink-piano and I realized—perhaps not for the first time, but still most forcibly—the truth of Byron’s ‘love is of man’s life a thing apart—’ ”

“What about ‘ ’tis woman’s whole existence’?” asked Andrea. “Don’t you go for that part of it?”

Jane looked at her a bit sadly, the black eyes like strange unsounded deeps. “What do you think, Andrea Felice?”

“I asked you.”

“I guess you know the answer.”

“You believe.”

“Credo.”

They wanted Jane to go with them, but there was no tempting her away from the Vale.

“No chance. If you could see the stuff I’ve ordered you would understand. It will start coming in soon—some of it has already. Those old Scots dames—the auld carlins—up there in C’Breton are faster weavers than the Fates. I’d soon be swamped if I wasn’t here to catch it as it comes. And the wood-carvings and the ship-models and the baskets and the beads.”

“We’ll send you some rare fish from Nassau so you can stuff them,” offered Lauchlin. “Hammer-head sharks, a small whale or two—”

“Send me a postcard—that’s all I’ll have room for.”

She drove them to Halifax and said good-bye and stood on the dock and cried a little and drove home at terrific speed to get her weekly letter from Adam Brand. Nassau—she didn’t want to go to Nassau, nor the wondrous Land of Kilmeny nor Hy-Brasil nor heaven—as long as she could go to the post-office and find the blue envelope in which were contained more things of beauty than all those fairy climes could offer.

He will come to me—and he will know me the instant he looks into my eyes—oh, no, she thought. He won’t know me. He will see Andrea Farr and he will know her because he will want it to be so. He will want her for his love. She will be the complete fulfilment of all his dreams of fair women. I could not be.

And she will love him. For a while, it had seemed to Jane, that Andrea was falling for John Chanter’s quiet charm and patient worship. She had been afraid, yet there had come a small, growing hope in her heart that perhaps there really would come a strong passion between them and Andrea would no longer be free when at last Adam came to tell her of his love.

But whatever there had been, if it really ever amounted to anything, between Andrea and the Coastguard’s writing strength, must have died a-borning. She had not seen them together since the day Andrea almost discovered Adam’s letter, and he had gone off to Montreal, she to Nassau, without even a good-bye being uttered on either side.

She knew Andrea was unhappy, uncertain; for maybe the first time dissatisfied with her life. Time now she found a mate, the one man who would bring her happiness. In the Spring she will return, thought Jane sadly, and he will come then; they will meet and for each of them it will be heaven and I—I will step aside, having served my purpose. Wyatt the Matchmaker, Jane the Go-between, Neota the Unknown.

Through the long winter months she stuck to her weaving, to her work in the shop, with only a few short trips to Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, one across the Bay of Fundy to Saint John. She longed for the Winter to end, for the coming of Spring, and yet she dreaded the time and her heart was numb and dead when she thought of the day when she would come to the little box in Colville post-office and find it empty, when there would be no more airmails to Eden, no more need of the written word of love.

She saw Chanter a few times in the street in Colville, but each time it seemed one was afoot and one awheel and they exchanged only a friendly smile, a wave of the hand. She was glad he had made up his mind to stay. For a while she had been afraid he was going to admit defeat and go back to the city. He must have decided that there was something worth his mettle, that maybe if he tried he could find here a task worthy of his talents.

It was not until mid-April, on an afternoon when the first faint rustlings of Spring could be heard in the voices of the melting brooks and rills, in the water running down from the green-forested slopes, and in the warm caress of the sun one could feel Summer’s promise, that she met him face-to-face walking up the road that led from Friar’s Island to the Colville turnpike. He had been to the island to see how Brun’s cabin had weathered the wintry blasts and had found everything in order.

“How did you winter, Jane?” The question people in the rural places always ask each other in Spring.

“Wintered well.” She had and she looked it, the dark roses under the perennial tan of her cheeks, the bright gleams in her eyes, in the black meshes of her hair under the gay scarlet beret. “Worked like a dog. And you? I think you got thinner. Been working hard?”

“You bet. The new press is a lulu, but it’s a hungry brute and it reproaches me if I don’t feed it regularly and generously.”

“The Coastguard looks swell since it had its face lifted. It really does.”

“Thank you—on behalf of the proprietor, Lord Brunswick, and my humble self—the staff. We’re going after more circulation and we’re putting out a travel-book—”

“Of those pen-pictures you made—the Crimson Harvest, the Country Fair—”

“The Trading-Post, the Country Dance.” He nodded. “That’s it, Jane. Think you can sell some in your shop?”

“I can and will. That’s one of the best things you’ve ever thought of and I hope it goes over big. Pictures?”

“Some woodcuts by that young Indian—Pierre Sapier. They’re darned good. And the cover is designed to simulate birch-bark and it’s called ‘In Quest of Eden’.”

Jane’s eyes widened. “Well, of all the—Are you psychic? I discussed a book like this with Andrea last fall and that was the name we hit upon.”

“You should have copyrighted it then.”

“You can’t copyright titles, Scoop. They merely identify the work that’s copyrighted.”

“Gosh, Wyatt!” He swept off his corduroy cap. “You know everything, don’t you?”

“Well,” said Jane modestly, “there are a few things I’m in the dark about.”

“Name one.”

“What happened between you and Andrea?”

He looked at her pensively for a moment. “Nothing,” he said then sadly. “But nothing.”

“What happened that nothing happened?” persisted Jane.

“You should have been a lawyer. I really can’t—”

“You were sort of carrying the torch for her, I know that. Say! it wasn’t because of me, was it? I mean you didn’t get cold feet because I said you were a tramp-journalist and that newsmen make lousy husbands—all that cold water of mine didn’t numb your pulsing heart and—”

“Helped, maybe. There was a lot in it.”

“What did the trick? What gave it the quietus then?”

“A guy named Adam Brand.”

She stared at him in frozen wonder, her lips parted, her eyes alive with a bewildered, frightened look, the fear she always knew, the mad heart-race, when her secret love seemed threatened.

“I don’t see—”

“Letters,” he said. “The pen is mightier than the spoken word, Wyatt—that’s often true in matters of the heart. This Brand is an old friend of mine—”

She knew a weakness, a panicky fear and only with a great effort could she control herself. Let him talk, her heart warned her; let him tell what he knows. But, despite that warning, the words came out—

“He wrote her a letter after he found one—”

“That was it.” John nodded glumly. “He found one from her in a box of apples. The hell of it is, Jane, I was the one who sent him the apples and the letter.”

“You!” She shook her head, utterly bewildered. “I don’t understand.”

“It was this way; that particular box tumbled off a truckload they were taking to Colville from Farlake Farm. I was driving out to the camp that day early last fall. I found the box and took it with me. I was in a hurry. When I called Lauchlin, he told me to keep it, to give the apples a plug in the paper. I found the letter when I was re-nailing the lid to send the fruit to England, to Adam—he was ill—and I relayed it, thinking it would give him something to do to take his mind off—”

“Oh, John!”

“You knew about this?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, wondering what she dared tell him, how much he knew, how much he should know. “I knew about it—”

“Well, she answered and things grew—burgeoned is the word in Springtime—” He smiled bitterly—“into love. Adam wrote me. He’s a grand chap, a prince. He’s wild about her and she about him. Who am I, Jane, to try to come between them? I’m a small candle; Adam Brand is a flame of fire.”

So, she thought, is it with Andrea Felice and poor Jane Wyatt the gorgeous rose, the shy woodland violet—Flower That Blooms in Shadow.

“Neither of us ever dreamt you knew Adam Brand. We—we knew about him—about his work; saw his picture in a London paper—”

“The letters, I think, saved his life, his sanity.”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes! He wrote me all about it. I suppose you knew he was almost killed in a plane accident. One of the jets he was testing blew up on him. It left him in bad shape—all shot to hell, I take it—nerve gone, just about washed-up. Then she started writing him and—well, you know what she’s like as well as I do. She took him out of himself, gave him something new, something fine and beautiful to cling to and something lovelier still to hope for—”

“Yes,” said Jane, so low, so faint her voice, that he could scarcely hear her. “Oh, yes, John. I can understand that. And he—he told you—”

“He told me what she meant to him—her love, her lasting affection. Do you think I’m the sort of guy to step between them, to spoil a thing like that—even if I could? And as if I could!” He laughed. “You’d have to know Adam to understand.”

“I think you under-rate yourself, John.”

“Maybe I do. But you’ve changed your tune, if you really think so. Has Andrea ever mentioned him to you, told you about the letters?”

“She never told me about the letters.”

“Love’s secret,” he said, with that same wry grin. “Well, I never told her that I knew about this literary courtship. I didn’t want her to know about my part in it. I’ve cursed myself a thousand times for ever sending him her letter. I was just giving him all that I ever would want in this world. Now you know why I was tempted to run away. I still am—but I think I’ll stick it out now—until he comes. I don’t hope for anything, though.”

Poor John! Poor fellow! She looked at him mournfully. This was more of her handiwork, more of what she got for meddling in people’s lives. If she could only tell him that he had still his chance with Andrea, that she knew little or nothing of Brand, that it was still a question whether she would like the man. She could tell him, but what about Brand? What would he think when he found out about the game that had been worked upon him?

“They’re coming back in a few weeks’ time,” she said. “The Farrs. I had a letter from Andrea. They’ve had a grand time, but they will be glad to get home. Lauchlin, you know, is engaged to some English girl and will probably be married this June.”

“I didn’t know that. And Andrea—”

“I don’t know. If Ad—if he comes here—”

“Oh, he will come, never fear. He will come; he will see; he will conquer. You don’t know Adam Brand.”

But I do, she protested in her heart—I know him, every inch of him, every facet of his mind and every hope of his heart. I know him, he knows me. But you know as well as I do, Chanter, that he will have no eyes for Jane Wyatt.

They parted, both of them much subdued, with a “See you later,” from him; a “Keep your chin up,” from her. She knew he would hate her if he ever found out the trick she had played—hate her or love her. She still thought that he was not the man for Andrea Farr, but she wasn’t so dogmatic about it now. She knew him so much better, knew what a decent, solid sort of chap he was. And she wished she could give him his heart’s desire.

“But what can I do?” she asked herself, as she trudged back to her cottage. “I’ve got everybody into a prize mess and I don’t know how to keep from hurting someone—most of all myself.”

The high-life in Eden section of the Colville Weekly Coastguard, entitled “The Social Scene” and presided over by the chief-gossip and news repository of the Vale, had a new look and a decorative heading that showed two ladies gadding away over the tea-cups. The heading read—“The Social Scene As Viewed By Grace Manlove Till.” The issue of May 10 contained the following intelligence—

It was wonderful to be back again. The Farrs had the young, driving energy of northern folk and they could enjoy just so much of basking on sandy beaches and soaking up the sun. They took it all, towards the end of their holiday, rather like medicine or as a sort of health-insurance against the future.

“I’ve lapped up enough ultra-violet rays and rum-swizzles,” said Lauchlin, “to see me through an Arctic night. I was starting to get sore at the sun. You may have your south-sea paradises with their bugs and crawlers, give me ‘the true North strong and free’.”

Andrea echoed him. She had enjoyed herself with the Ferriers and the rest of the sun-worshippers, and the golden tan that made her, with her ashen hair, look like a Viking goddess had deepened. She had swum and danced and laughed and flirted a little, but it was the same old story. The young men hovered around her, pale moths around a gorgeous golden butterfly, and the glow of her beauty seemed to let them go just so far and then, by its very intensity, be driven away. None of them caused her to give him a second thought; her heart was in Eden, on the snowy hills, the icy roads, beside the burning hearth-fire.

Lauchlin was happy to be back at his work in the budding orchards. He and Janice Pomeroy had exchanged frequent letters and he wore at times the bemused look of the man for whom “the marriage-month is drawing very near.” They planned to be married as soon as Janice’s course was finished. “She will be able, after a short honeymoon,” grinned Lauchlin, “to help me with the spraying. I suppose Grace will have an item about that in the Social Scene.”

Jane had met the Lady Nelson in Halifax and driven them home. It was an early Spring and the fields were turning a new fresh green and the poplars and maples and birches putting on their first shy summer-garments, lacy, delicate, lovely things, prelude to the opulent dress of Summer. The frost had long since been out of the ground and the road-repair men were busy levelling out the boils and bumps that in this cold clime were Winter’s legacy to Spring.

Jane seemed unusually quiet, thought the Farrs—preoccupied, even troubled. She chattered away about the doings in the Vale, told them about how the new press had given a big boost to the Coastguard, told them of John Chanter’s book—In Quest of Eden.

Andrea’s eyes lighted then and she looked as pleased as a small girl who has just been given a lovely bracelet.

“But that’s the title you thought of, Jane, the time we were discussing his stories, remember?”

“I remember. I taxed him with it, but he thought it up all by himself. It’s going to be a lovely thing, with a cover that looks like birch-bark, and illustrated by woodcuts. That Malicete fellow, Pierre Sapier, is the artist. I’ve seen some of the proofs; Brun showed them to me one day last week when I was arranging for some announcements for my shop. I liked it fine. I’m going to sell it at the trading-post. The Yanks are going to know plenty about Nova Scotia after I unload a few hundred copies on them.”

“How is Chanter making it?” asked Lauchlin when Andrea seemed to want to ask but was held back by shyness. “Not letting his hair grow and turning literary, is he?”

“No. He—” She groped for words, she who had rarely a hiatus in her swift easy speech. “Oh, he’s the same old John. Happy enough, I guess, with the new press and the book and all—”

Her low, husky voice trailed off; she knew she was lying, knew that John Chanter was not happy and her silence, her preoccupation, stemmed from the guilty knowledge that she, in a way, was the cause of his discontent.

“Well,” said Lauchlin, “it will be nice to see him again—and Brun and Grace and all the good people. You really should go to Nassau, Jane; you’d see some rare new species of the genus homo—”

“I can imagine. But I have no inclination to go anywhere much—”

“Lost the wanderlust completely?” Andrea, sitting between her and Lauchlin, who was driving, studied the dark face, the full mouth and firm round chin, the high cheek-bones that were part of her heritage. “I’m glad of that. It doesn’t seem so long since you were acting like a caged eagle and dreaming of Shangri-la, of places strange and exotic. What made you see the light?”

“Hard to tell.” She evaded the question as she had before. It wasn’t at all hard to tell. She felt no longing to be up and away, she who had heaven at her door. She was happy. She could be always happy if life went on like this. She could not bear to think of what it would be when this play she loved so much must end, when her dream-world would disintegrate and be as nothing. Adam Brand had not said definitely when he was coming, but come he would. Chanter had told her it was likely he would be flying a new jet over to the big R.C.A.F. air-base at Greenwood, no great distance from Eden.

And I must tell Andrea before he comes, she had decided. I must put it all before her and try to make her understand what happened—that I could not help myself, that it got away on me—like a fellow lighting a little grass-fire and suddenly finding that it’s got into the big woods and there is nothing he can do. I’ll tell her as soon as she gets home and settled down—

She didn’t have to make the hard confession. Among the stack of letters on Andrea’s desk was one from Janice Pomeroy that she read a few hours after her return, sitting at her little desk in the living-room where a fire burned cheerily against the chill of the evening—

The letter started out quite unspectacularly, an answer to one Andrea had sent, welcoming Janice into the family. Lauchlie’s proposal had been a combination affair—“Sort of a club-proposal,” he called it—of telephone-talk, letters and cables. But anyway it had worked—

“Jane!” Her voice was a mere whisper, shocked, startled, for a moment outraged as she thought of what Jane had done; for only the second or third time in her life she felt the urge to lay hands on one of her kind and do some violence to her. She restrained herself, tried to think calmly, to reason this thing out, there in the quiet living-room with only the soft murmur of the fire, the occasional snort from the old brown spaniel, nose on paws, stretched out on the rug.

She understood now so many of the things that had puzzled her since last Autumn. Here then was the explanation of the near-miraculous change in the discontented, acidulous girl who had been on the way to having an actual hatred for the life, the good, useful, worthwhile life, in the Vale, who had longed for she knew not what, hungered for what she could not name.

She had found the answer to her longings, the food for her starved soul, in the letters this man had written to her and those she had written in reply. Andrea recalled the day in Colville post-office when she had watched Jane reading the blue letter, when suspicion had touched her, light as the brush of the wing-tip of a passing bird and as soon forgotten. Why had she not guessed then what was going on?

“But to use my name—to let this man think that I—Oh, I know why it was. At least, I know why and how it was in the beginning. She was simply playing a John Alden to my Miles Standish, pleading my cause, finding a lover for me. And she’s been hoist—I can see it clearly. She’s crazy about him herself and she’s afraid when he sees her he won’t care for her—The poor kid! But it serves her right for pulling such a trick. She is going to get hurt and this fellow Brand—What am I to do? What can I do? I wonder what she thinks will ever come out of it. Now I can see why she’s been so quiet and withdrawn, why she seemed so different on the way home from the boat.”

It was not yet nine o’clock. Lauchlin had gone to Roedale to a meeting of the fruit-growers’ co-operative and there was no one in the house but Gussie Fuller, reading about love in the kitchen. Andrea put the rest of her letters aside, tucked Janice Pomeroy’s in the pocket of her tweed skirt and called to Gussie that she was going over to Folly Head to Jane Wyatt’s.

The young May moon was bright in the pale-blue sky, the last light still lingering in the west. The chorus of the swamp-dwellers rose like a great oratorio from the swamps and sedges and the wailing plovers winnowed the air high, high above. Andrea drove the farm pick-up truck, jolting over the rough spots still remaining from the Spring run-off.

“This is going to be a real showdown,” she said grimly. “And wait till you hear the arguments she will put up to justify herself. They’d better be good. I wonder if she realizes just what she’s done and what a spot she’s got us both into—”

More—there was more that Andrea did not know. She could not guess that herein too lay the explanation of John Chanter’s withdrawal. If she had she would have been still more upset and the quiet even temper that was always hers might really have boiled over.

Jane, in the living-room in her old chair in front of her own fire, did not hear the truck drive up and Andrea climbed the steps and from the porch looked in and saw her sitting there the same as John Chanter had done that other night of the dance at Coll’s Corners.

Andrea watched her for a while, all her anger melting swiftly into compassion; so forlorn she looked, and woebegone and lost, sitting there alone staring into the fire of driftwood, her ginger cat curled up at her feet, her old deaf collie Angus stretched on the hearth-rug—

The jingle came to her from some old, half-forgotten movie she had seen “in the long, long ago.” But what was Jane thinking of now? And what was she going to say—

She seemed to know, with some of her forest instinct, that there was someone watching her. She sat up, taking her chin from the cradle of her hands, and looked directly at the window. She jumped up then and met Andrea at the door.

“You startled me,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come. Didn’t expect you. I thought you’d be too busy tonight to bother with me.”

Andrea followed her into the room and stood by the hearth, her face a bit grim, unsmiling. “I had a lot to do, Jane, but, you know—first things first.”

“Why—what do you mean? What has—” But she knew. She sensed it in a moment and in her eyes was a trapped, harassed look, so much like that in the eyes of the forest creature cornered by the hunter that Andrea had a hard time to keep from going to her and taking her to her breast.

“I know what you’ve been doing, Jane. I know all about it.”

“But how—how did you find out? Oh, I was going to tell you, Andy. I’ve been in hell this past few weeks. I was just thinking about it now, wondering what I could do. I—I’m glad you know, but your knowing, I’m afraid, doesn’t help much.”

“Lauchie’s Janice told me. She knows this man, lives near him in England and her sister nursed him when he was smashed up. Jane! Jane! Do you know what you’ve done?”

“Oh, I know.” The soft mouth began to quiver. “I know quite well.” She grew defiant then and the black eyes held fire in their depths. “But I’m not sorry! I’m not! I did what I set out to do—to make him love you. So he loves you; so now it rests with you.”

“I knew you’d reason it out to get your own answer—or is that the answer you really want?”

“He loves you,” said Jane stubbornly. “And you will love him when you meet him.”

“Oh, Jane!” Andrea shook her head. “How absurd you are! He doesn’t love me; he loves the girl who wrote him the letters. Why, oh why, didn’t you sign your own name?”

“I did.”

“You—” It was Andrea’s turn to be startled out of her calm, assured self. “You signed your own name?”

“Neota.” The dark head was bent, the eyes in their misery fixed on the fire. “I signed the letters ‘Neota’—my name—it’s my name. It was my old great-great-grandmother’s—half-French, half-Malicete—Neota.”

“What does it mean, Jane?”

The proud head bent lower; the voice was scarcely audible: “Flower That Grows In Shadow.”

“Oh, my darling!” Andrea went to her then and took the rigid form in her arms and only then did Jane cry and then only for a little while. The strength, the stoicism of her nature came to her aid. She straightened herself and moved, but not abruptly, from Andrea’s arms.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “He still thought it was you he wrote to. But after a while—”

“After a while you were speaking for yourself—is that it?”

Jane nodded. “I’m afraid I was. It got too much for me.” She looked at Andrea pleadingly. “But you see how impossible it is. He is coming over here and—”

“How is it impossible?”

“Need you ask? Surely you’re not foolish enough to think that he will give me a second glance?”

“Why not?”

“Who reads by a candle when the sun is bright? Indian proverb. You know what it will be. He will love you, Andrea. He will want you.”

“But it takes two for love.”

“You must love him.”

“Must! I don’t see how you can expect me to fall in love off the bat with a man I’ve never seen—”

“But you will. I know you will.”

“I’ll tell him the truth, just as I did when he first wrote me. I’ll tell him—”

“If you do, Andrea, I will hate you.” And there was that in her voice, in the black eyes and the set of the mouth, that told Andrea she did not lie.

“But, Jane—”

“Listen! This—this means a lot to him—this friendship that grew to love. What did that English girl say about it? Tell me—”

“I brought the letter—There—you may read it.”

Jane took it slowly, almost reluctantly, as if seeing in it the beginning of the end of what for her had been a wondrous interlude, the happiest time of her life. She was losing so much that mattered to her, surrendering the love she had stolen—was that the word? No, better, borrowed for a while. A harmless, happy thing. It was good. It was all right. Now what little harm there might have been in it would be purged away.

She read the Pomeroy girl’s letter, her face set in its calm mask of the stoic, only the eyes showing her deep feeling. When she had finished, she folded it and gave it back to Andrea and for a while just stared at the fire.

“I certainly started something, didn’t I?” she said bitterly. “Oh, the tangled web we weave—But you—it was your fault, Andrea.”

“Now you’re being childish. You’re looking for an ‘out.’ It was in no way any fault of mine and well you know it.”

“If you had written to him when that first letter came last fall. I remember it—I brought it to you, picked it up and brought it to you on my way from the Square-dance at the Corners. And I guessed what it was. Then the next day we were talking about something—about love passing us by, and I asked you about the letter, and you showed it to me and—and it was wonderful. You admitted it was wonderful.”

“So I did. So it was. But that in no way—”

“But all you could send in answer was some stiff little denial that you had written it—”

“How did you know what I wrote?”

“You told me. I asked you and you told me.”

“But I might have written—otherwise. Did you ever think of that? I might have—”

“You didn’t. I’m quite sure you didn’t.”

“Well then, I did not. I put an end to the business there and then and you—you never mailed the letter, did you?”

“No. I wrote him another—the kind of letter that his called for. A warm letter, a friendly letter. And for that I’ll always thank God—for he was ill and he needed help; he was looking for bread and you—would have sent him a stone.”

“Go on!”

“I felt guilty about using your name. It was I who spoke and I took the old name that our women had because we were so dark—Neota.”

“It was lovely, Jane. He must have loved it. And your letters—”

Jane could not talk about her letters, those heartfelt, burning, pulsing things that welled-up from the deep springs of her nature.

“He liked them. But they were only such letters as any girl in love might write—as you might have written.”

“I don’t believe it. He would know that I was not the one who wrote them. In a very short while he would know.”

“He wouldn’t care.” There was utter hopelessness in the way she said it. For so she believed. He wouldn’t care. He would forget those intangible, lovely things the letters had told; he would see only the dazzling beauty of the girl he thought had written them.

“What would you have me do, Jane?” Andrea went restlessly to a chair and sank wearily into it, taking a cigarette from the lacquer box on the table and lighting it and smoking nervously. “This, I will grant you, is one sweet mess. You did it with your own little tomahawk and now you expect me to straighten it out.”

“It will not be hard. You know Adam Brand—what he is, what he looks like—you won’t find it hard to care for him.”

“How easy you make it all sound. What am I supposed to do—rush up to him and fling myself into his arms—”

“I don’t think so. You two will meet. You will like each other; in a little while you will love him. He already loves you.”

“I can’t do it. I don’t like it—not a single bit of it.”

“You have to do it. You cut him off once, when he first sought you. Now he comes to you again—and you must not turn him away. This time—the Pomeroy girl says so in her letter—you may do him serious hurt.”

“How you reason, Jane! I, you say, may do him harm. None of this is my doing, yet now you talk to me and look on me as if I were the responsible party. Sometimes I love you a little less than at others, and right now is one of the times when my affectionate regard for you is sort of diminished—if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, I know, Andy. Just—just don’t rub it in. I’ve made a botch of things. I always prided myself on being so practical and hard-headed—”

“Well, you are that, my child, in most things. When it comes to buying and selling your lovely craft-goods, you outshine the shrewdest trader in Nova Scotia, but when it comes to that magic thing called love—well, you just seem to go haywire.”

“Don’t we all?” Jane looked sad but stubborn. “I knew in my heart I was doing the wrong thing by writing those letters and even after the correspondence had become—well, pretty intimate—I told myself I should stop. But then it was too late.”

“What do you think he will be like, Jane? You seem to know him so well.”

“I know him well. He will be one you’ll love, Andrea. If I hadn’t believed that from the start, I never would have gone on with the game. He will be the man for you. I feel it in my bones. You know that few men have ever appealed to you, even in the slightest. Oh, John Chanter is all right. He’s the kind of man most girls could go for, but—”

“But what?” Andrea stiffened. “What’s wrong with John Chanter, I ask you.”

“Why, nothing. I just said—”

“You’ve always been against him—”

“But I haven’t!”

“Well, against my—my friendship with him. Why?”

Jane did not answer. “If you’ve been meddling between John and me, if there’s any more of your fine Acadian handiwork in—in my affairs, you can hate me freely—for I’ll hate you!”

They were looking at each other now, Andrea’s eyes full of smouldering anger that could readily build into flame; Jane’s sullen and withdrawn in their look. Yes, and a bit afraid. She couldn’t tell Andrea that she had been meddling, that Chanter’s trouble and hers was another by-product of her work. If she did, she well knew, there would be little hope of Adam’s finding an Andrea Farr who would listen to his love.

And it was Adam Brand she thought of. It was for him alone, she told herself now, that she was doing this mean and underhand thing, deceiving the one she loved most in all the world. When Andrea met him, got to know him and love him, she would forget John Chanter; she would realize that, fine as he was, he had never been the one for her.

“We had better sleep on this.” Andrea spoke after a long silence. She didn’t for a moment suspect that Jane had had anything to do with her unhappy little love affair with John Chanter. She could imagine no remote connection between these letters, which, she decided, must have made those of Abélard and Héloïse look like printed billets exchanged by convent girls; and Chanter’s sudden withdrawal into his shell of aloofness.

And Jane Wyatt was actually afraid to tell her, afraid she would find out. She was very happy the next day when Grace Till, whom she met in the post-office, told her that John had gone to Inverness in Cape Breton to cover a story of a family named MacIsaac who were entertaining a poltergeist.

“And what’s new at Farlake?” demanded the lady newshawk. “I understand Lauchlin is engaged to some Canadian girl he met when they were in Montreal last Winter. I haven’t been given the announcement yet, but I plan to see him soon. What is she like?”

“I don’t know. I never met her. She is English though—a pomologist.”

“A—did you say—you don’t mean a woman who tells fortunes, do you? Surely not!”

Jane never had any trouble keeping a straight face. Lauchlin Farr said she was the finest poker-player he ever met. “No,” she informed Grace, “you’re thinking of a ‘palmologist’—one who reads palms—life-lines and all that sort of thing; this girl reads pommes—you know—apples—those things that keep Eden prosperous and healthy.”

“Well, you don’t say!” Grace was charmed. She loved romance in the same fashion as Gussie Fuller. And here was something right up her alley. “A pom—pomologist. How’d she get that way?”

“She comes from the orchard-country of England and was studying our methods at McDonald. Lauchlin was out there to see some of the big apple-experts and he met her—and she must have offered him the forbidden fruit or hit him on the head with an Alexandra. Anyway, he fell for her.”

“It will make a grand story,” gushed Grace. “We can bring in Eve and the Garden of Eden—”

“You can bring in just about everything but the kitchen-sink.” She wondered fleetingly what Grace would do when she learned about Adam Brand. The Social Scene would probably outdo the gossip-columns of New York and Los Angeles. There were big things happening in Eden, great days ahead for the Colville Weekly Coastguard.

There was another letter from Adam Brand today, another airmail to Eden. Ever since the day that Andrea had come upon her all unbeknownst to her and all but found out her secret, she had looked carefully around to see who was at hand. It came to her with a start now, as she saw only Grace Till and Heber Van Tassel, who ran the coffee-shop, and old Mr. Hartt, the retired blacksmith, that there was no longer any need for secrecy nor any occasion to be afraid. Andrea had been the only one to fear, and Andrea knew the truth.

She looked at the letter with mournful, wistful eyes, at the bold firm writing that had become so familiar to her in the past months. And, “How many more?” she asked herself. “Or will this be the last? And is it really mine to read, now that I have told her the story, now that I have given my love to her?”

But she could no more resist opening it than a man dying with thirst could turn away from a glass of sparkling, crystal-clear water. Here was a draught that she must drink, that, having come to love, she could not readily surrender—

If that letter should be the last he is to write me, she thought, I shall love it best of all those he sent me. I shall treasure it most.

She tucked it away against her heart, under the tartan shirt, and it was warm there and now and then she touched it like a schoolgirl with the scrawled note from her first lover.

She drove down to the Coastguard office; the books were due today by express from the bindery in Halifax. And they had come! Grace Till, her precarious turban still balanced on her grey bun, was putting a display of them in the window and already the Vale folk were stopping to look and admire and to go in and buy.

Jane climbed over the stuck door of the little old car and joined them, delighted at the sight of the fresh-looking slender volumes in their gay dress of art-paper that looked for all the world like bark peeled freshly from the tall, slim birches of the forest, and were beautifully lettered in Gothic script—

And there was a decoration of a canoe with an Indian paddling it at the bottom and at the top it was festooned with apple-blossoms.

“Sacré blanc! Que c’est beau ça!” Jane in her moments of greatest excitement lapsed into the French her mother and the good sisters of Sacré Cœur had taught her in childhood.

She hurried into the office and shook hands with Brun, with Grace, with Trueman Lank.

“Guess that puts us right smack in the middle of the literary-map,” chuckled the old man, leafing over a copy. “Guess Colville is destined to be the new publishing-centre of this country. We’ll show those tuppenny book-jobbers and publishers’ agents who pose as publishers up there in what they call T’rantah—we’ll show ’em what the Maritimes can do. This book will rock ’em right back on their heels. I’ve arranged for good reviews—”

“You’ve ‘arranged’ for good reviews?” Jane stared at him over the copy of In Quest of Eden she was fondling. “What do you mean, ‘arranged’? How can you be sure of good reviews if the reviewers haven’t read the book?”

“Reviewers don’t read books, child. Do you mean to say all my friends on other papers and especially those who will carry an ad. for this book will dare to say anything bad about it? Where have you been all your life?”

“In church, I guess,” muttered Jane. “Well, it’s a grand-looking volume. Too bad John isn’t here to welcome it.”

“He’ll be back in a day or so. He’s got a big story up there at Inverness. This poltergeist, it seems, empties a basin of oatmeal porridge over old MacIsaac’s head every morning.”

“Seems the best thing to do with it. I always knew it would serve some useful purpose.”

“Ah! I see you share your friend Dr. Johnson’s opinion of oatmeal. He said it was a grain which in Scotland nourishes the people and in England is fed to horses—”

“Which gives England such fine horses and Scotland such fine people. Ha-ha! I read my Boswell, Uncle Brun.”

“Sometimes, Jane Wyatt, I think you should have been spanked more when you were a brat.”

“Sometimes, Uncle Brun I agree with you with all my heart. If I—”

She stopped, staring at the open copy of John Chanter’s book, at the dedication page, wide-eyed and startled out of her habitual insouciance. Old Brun was watching her warily, a little smile twitching his lips. He had been wondering when she would find it, eager to hear what she would say.

“But how nice!” she murmured, almost to herself. “How—how thoughtful and lovely. She will love it and I’d say she deserves it for it was she he went to first when he came here and started to write about us apple-knockers—” And she read the dedication:

“You know, Uncle Brun, it must be almost as nice to have a book dedicated to you as to attain the immortality of book-covers yourself. You’re sort of immortalized along with the author. I’m so happy for Andy. She never dreamed—”

“Well, she should be proud. He was kind of afraid to do it—asked me if I thought she’d mind or think it too fresh of him or presumptuous or some of those crazy things you young people say. Of course, I told him she’d be nothing of the kind. She’d be thrilled right out of her slippers. Just like giving her a lovely bouquet of forget-me-nots or a bottle of perfume that never loses its fragrance—”

“How right you are! She will always prize this. She will say, ‘When I was fair and young, a poet sang to me.’ For he is sort of a poet, your nephew—some of his stuff is prose-poetry and reads along like old Henry W. Longfellow.”

“Well, maybe Andy will see now how much that young fellow thinks of her, maybe she will realize that she doesn’t have to go outside the Vale to find a man fitten to be her husband.”

Jane shook her head. “I don’t know about that. Oh, your nephew is a grand chap and any girl who married him would be lucky, but Andrea Farr—well, Andrea’s something special—”

“To you I know she is,” admitted Brun. “And to us all. To you it seems the only mate suitable for her must come direct from Mount Olympus. Maybe she’s a throwback to the days when the high gods came down to earth and carried off mortal maidens—”

“A young god will come for her,” said Jane, her voice so strange, her tone so earnest, almost mystic, that the old man looked startled. Then he laughed and shook his head.

“You’re dreaming, Jane.”

“But I’m not, Uncle Brun. You will see. There will be a young god come down from the sky and he will be the one for her—a dark young god who will make even John Chanter look a poor choice.”

“If I didn’t know you, Jane Wyatt, I’d suggest you have one of those psychiatrists look down your brains.”

“Well, don’t be surprised when it happens; and if you and the Coastguard fail to score a beat on it, don’t say you weren’t tipped off.”

She loaded the Renault with a hundred copies of John Chanter’s first serious literary effort, loving the new, crisp clean feel of it, the smell of ink and paper, the hopeful freshness there is about every new volume when it’s just come from the press. So young it seems, so eloquent of all the hopes and dreams, the pains and heartaches, of the one who wrote.

“Oh, may it go far,” she prayed. “May thousands read it and love it and may it bring him fame and honour. That is my wish for it and him.”

It was a sincere, heartfelt prayer. She was taking Andrea from him, robbing him of the one he wanted most; well, maybe fame and money from his work would help make up for that. She began to think of various ways in which she could promote the sale of his book and her chipmunk-mind ranged from literary-teas to quiz-programmes on the radio, to putting signs on Henry Zwicker’s ox-team with “Read About Them in John Chanter’s book, In Quest of Eden,” in big letters.

She did not stop at Folly Head a moment longer than it took her to unload her parcels, then she headed, as fast as the jalopy would take her, for Farlake Farm, to be the first one to show Andrea the book, to see the look on that lovely face when she saw the dedication.

She found Andrea in the orchard with Lauchlin and Henry Zwicker and the helpers busy at their work of grafting, and watched with professional approval while Andrea’s slim hands inserted the scions into the split bark and covered the jointure with wax.

“When the interviewer found Miss Farr to tell her of the honour that had been bestowed upon her, she found the young lady busy in her orchard working with her apple-trees at the pleasant if laborious task of grafting. Miss Farr professed to be overwhelmed—”

“Now what?” Andrea dusted her hands and looked at Jane warily. “What have you done now?”

“Not me. It’s this—look!” She brought John’s book from behind her back and held it, with a rabbit-from-hat pride, in front of Andrea.

“Oh!” The reaction was satisfying. Instinctively, Andrea reached for it, like a child for some lovely toy impossible to resist. “Let me see it, Jane. Isn’t it dreamy. What a lovely design!”

She took the book reverently and fondled it and did what Jane had hoped she would do—opened it from the start, lingered over the title page, then came to the dedication—

“To—” Her breath caught and the lovely lips stayed parted over the small perfect teeth. “Why, it’s to me—he dedicated his book to me!” And in her face was a glory and a happiness beyond words. “Oh, Jane, wasn’t that a lovely thing to do, but really I—I don’t—”

“You helped him. You told him a lot of things about the Vale, about apples, and you inspired him to do great things. Remember, behind every great man—”

“I’ll always prize this. It’s something I never expected and never would have hoped for. I—I thought he had sort of put me out of his life. I—” She looked stormily at Jane. “Now what do I do when this man comes from England—the man you’ve been playing post-office with, letting him think I was the one. What shall I say and what will John Chanter think of me—”

Jane’s face clouded. For a little while she had let herself forget. “Oh, don’t ask me, Andy. We can only wait and see.” She hesitated. “I had a letter from him this morning. I think—I don’t know—would you like to read it?”

Andrea looked at her gravely, then a slow smile curved her lips. “I don’t think so, Jane. That is like asking me if I’d like to look inside your heart. It is all yours, isn’t it—a precious thing to you. How can you ever think of giving it up?”

“I’m not giving it up, I never really had it. Simply that.”

“But someday he must learn who wrote those letters that meant so much to him—”

“Some day, yes—when it doesn’t matter. If he knew now he might think he owed it to me to—to pretend he loved me. He would be like that. And I wouldn’t want it that way and I would never be sure—”

Only of her own love for him would she be sure. She went home and after re-reading his letter put it with the stack of others in a wooden candy-box which she had always treasured, which Andrea had given her years ago for a doll’s hope-chest.

She went to her shop then and arranged a display of In Quest of Eden, painted posters to draw the trade and sold three copies to a party of air-force lads on their way to Greenwood, smiling joyously as the cash-register made its merry sound.

“Chanter,” she announced, “you are on the way to being a best-seller—here in Eden anyway. Better start thinking about a new edition or another volume in what you might call ‘The Quest’ series—like ‘Quest for Love.’ That should be a big seller. I’d buy one myself. I’m going to need it after a while. Anyway, I guess I know what I’m looking for—know it too well; but I don’t think I’ll ever find it again.”

Young George Lank, Trueman’s son, whom John Chanter called the circulation-chief, came along on his bicycle delivering the new edition of the Weekly Coastguard. There was a huge announcement of John’s book and a review in which old Brun really went to town, likening his nephew to Burton, Doughty, Haliburton and other great writers of travel books, making it clear that anybody who didn’t become acquainted with “this living, scintillating, richly mellow portrait of the glorious Vale of Eden” was sure to be looked on by his fellowmen as an illiterate low-brow. “This,” went on the favourable reviewer, “is the greatest literary event in Canada since the publication of Maria Chapdelaine.”

Then there was John Chanter’s story of the unhappy Murdo MacIsaac and his equally benighted family in their little stone cottage at Inverness, where the poltergeist was still throwing bowls of porridge about, turning off the radio and performing other obnoxious works. MacIsaac was a coal-miner and it was said that the union was being asked to do something about it—probably, Chanter wrote, to investigate the poltergeist and see if he or it was properly organized and receiving enough pay for his work.

There was also a Canadian Press despatch telling of the projected flight of some new turbo-jet from England to Greenwood—“one of which will be piloted by the famous war-ace and test-pilot, former Wing-Commander Adam Brand.”

“ ‘Some day my prince will come’,” sang Jane Wyatt softly, thinking how nearly like heaven it would be if he were really coming to her. She studied her face in the mirror, her eyes, her hair, the short snub nose, the wide mouth, and saw beside her, in fancy, the flowerlike face of Andrea Farr, and felt sad in her heart and wondered what it would be like to have such beauty.

To him, when he sees me, I’ll be just a person, a girl who works for Andrea sometimes and who is favoured by her friendship, “who helped preserve the delicious secrecy of our courtship by letting me send my billets d’amour to her post-office box—Thank you, Miss Wyatt—thank you, Jane—sporting of you, I’m sure.”

“Ah, well—” She turned away from the mirror that gave her the same old answer—“they also serve—I’ve done what I set out to do, I think. I’ll dance at their wedding if it kills me.”

All through the Acadian land, from Minas to Meteghan, the orchards were white with blossoms and nowhere else in such riotous, breath-taking beauty, in such pastel shades of pink and rose, in such ethereal fragrance, as in the Vale of Eden.

Farlake Farm was a glory to behold as the trees burst into beauty and new life stirred in field and garden. Always there was the fear of a late frost, of a wild gale from Fundy, to nip the delicate buds or scatter the fragile petals, giving the trees a setback that would be reflected by meagre crops in the Autumn. But no frost came this lovely May and no gales roared in from sea. The swallows and the purple martins, the finches and tits came chattering and dancing; back from the south, finding their old haunts, going madly to work at the task of house-building, careless of restrictions, zoning-laws or minimum down-payments.

In the fields Henry Zwicker’s great oxen tugged and laboured and Henry’s loud “Hoof! Hoof!” rang out on the clear, scented air as his ploughshare turned the earth up in long even rows of rich reddish loam. In the kitchen Gussie Fuller sang and didn’t read so much, dreaming of young Nate Corscadden, her fisherman-lover, away now with the big dragger, Myrtle T., on the Grand Banks. Gussie didn’t need to read of love now; she and Nate were engaged and for her too “the marriage-month was drawing very near.”

Jane Wyatt worked in her shop, readying her wares for the influx of American tourists which had already begun with the arrival of the first enthusiasts, the salmon and trout fishermen, who came ahead of the birds, before the ice was out of the rivers, and the tuna and sword fishermen, the big sea-game hunters, heading for Soldier’s Rip on the South Shore to battle with the kings of the ocean.

Andrea had not seen John Chanter since his book had appeared. Causing a real stir in the Vale and bringing much praise from the rest of the country and, better still, selling among the people at an amazing speed in a land where the attitude of most folk was, “we already have a book; what do we want any more for?”

Andrea had read her copy through twice and picked it up a dozen times a day to leaf through it, to read the dedication, to read again the colourful pieces about the fair, the country-dance, the apple-harvest. She wanted to see him, to tell him how much she liked his work and how good it made her feel to have it offered to her, to see her own name there in a volume that would go into the archives of their land.

But the work in house and office and field kept her busy now and only once in a while did she have a chance for a ride on Musette or occasion to go into Colville. The story of the poltergeist of Inverness, the ha’nt of the MacIsaacs, had petered out as most such stories do, without any satisfactory explanation of the strange shenanigans at Murdo’s cottage, though some of the “brither Scots” were mean enough to say the poltergeist was Murdo’s wife, Elspie, who had such a wicked disposition that it was quite probable the spirit was at least some near kin.

From Farlake Farm, high above the Basin, one could see Friar’s Island, the little wooded eyot where Brun Snyder had built a log-cabin as a retreat from the hectic and gruelling work of getting out the Coastguard. Brun rarely went there now; getting too old, he said. He gave the place to John, so it must be John, figured Andrea, who had lighted the brush fire this late May afternoon when her work was well in hand and in her spirit a strange restlessness that overcame fear and shyness and all the vestiges of maidenly reserve that still obtained in the Vale of Eden.

“I’ve been wanting my copy of In Quest of Eden autographed so long. I’ll go out to the island and have him sign it for me—”

She drove the two miles to the shore and left the car at the end of the gravel-causeway that joined the eyot to the mainland and was covered at flood tide, but was now bare and dry. She could see no one about but the fire of old brush and rakings from the little garden still smouldered and the cabin door was open.

He was sitting at the big table, chin on hand, his pipe clamped in his teeth, scribbling away, his brown hair on end, his brow furrowed. She stood there for a long time, watching him, liking the lean tanned face, the still boyish freshness of it, the earnest way he worked.

“You should have a warning sign—‘Genius At Work—Do Not Disturb,’ Mr. Chanter,” she said softly. “Why, after what you’ve done the world will beat a path to your door.”

He stood up, almost upsetting his chair. “It has,” he said. His eyes adored her.

She caught his meaning and she could feel her cheeks turn hot. She was almost sorry now for her boldness in coming here; she wanted to run, to get away from what she saw in his eyes, away from the danger of his seeing what must surely show in hers.

“I—I brought my book, John—my copy of In Quest of Eden—for you to autograph—”

“But I have one to give you, Andrea. Things have come to a pretty pass if the dedicatee doesn’t get a presentation-copy of her book.”

“It is my book, isn’t it?” she said proudly. “You have no idea how much that meant to me, having my name in it for all the world to read. I almost cried for joy the day Jane sprang it on me.”

“It meant so much to you then?”

“So very much. I can’t tell you—”

“Well, it was you, I think, who inspired it. You were the first one to make me see the deep romance and beauty of this land, to make me want to get to the rich, warm heart of it, to try to capture some of its mellow old colours and put them down for others to see and love them too.”

“Well, you have succeeded. Everyone loves your book and, what’s almost as nice, everyone seems to be buying it.”

“I feel good about it, Andrea. It’s our book—yours and mine. Remember the first day I came to you, notebook and pencil in hand, to ask you about the apple-harvest? I can still see the golden Autumn sunlight in the room at Farlake and you and Jane Wyatt sitting there like the lovely incarnation of Day and Night, the one so sun-bright fair, the other so starry dark—and then you quoted from Evangeline, remember—”

“Yes, I remember quite well—about the Sunshine of Saint Eulalie—”

“It was lovely. I’ll never forget that morning—the first time I ever saw you near at hand. It was like being close to the sun.”

“The sun soon was clouded over for you then—or grew dim—or—or something—”

Her mouth trembled and her eyes misted with tears and for a moment—only a moment—he stared at her helplessly, then took her in his arms and held her close and kissed her lips, her wet lashes, the thick fairness of her hair, and said: “Why do you cry, Andrea? You—you have nothing to cry for—”

“No! How can you say that to me. You—you—” She moved away from him, pride coming, but slowly to her aid. “I’m sorry, John—sorry I made such a fool of myself. But you’ll forget it, won’t you? Forget it—that is what you said about the other time you kissed me—the night of the dance—when I thought you—”

“What did you think, Andrea?” His face wore a look of utter misery and helplessness.

“Well, you make me say it? I—I have no pride with you any more. That night—I thought you kissed me because you loved me, and I was so happy, so completely happy and up in the clouds that I just couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell you. I tried to see you before we went away, Lauchlin and the Ferriers and myself—to see you and let you know that I cared, but I missed you. And all the time I was in Montreal I thought of you and I was happy only because I believed that when I returned to Eden I would be returning to you. Then I came back—and there was nothing—nothing at all and I knew you did not care—did not love me—”

“I loved you, Andrea—as I love you now—as I’ll always love you. Why, you must know that. If I didn’t love you I—Oh, what’s the use! And you—how can you say you love me while all this time you’ve been telling the same thing to another man? What goes on anyway? You—surely you couldn’t be so cruel as to play a game—a silly girl’s game—on a man like Adam Brand?”

Her eyes were almost wild. Here was more of it—more of Jane’s damnable mischief. “Look, John.” Her voice was dangerously low, “I don’t know what you think or what you know about this business of the letters, but get this into your head: I didn’t write to Adam Brand—except for one letter—one only—telling him that I didn’t put that crazy come-on note with my address in the box of apples—”

“You didn’t! Then who? In God’s name who has—”

“Jane Wyatt.”

“No! I can’t seem to believe it.”

“Oh, yes; it is so. She didn’t mail my letter to Brand. Instead she sent one of her own and kept on writing when he answered and built up this—this weird romance—and now he’s coming here and she expects me to fall in love with him. She signed my name at first, then the Indian name, Neota—”

“And Adam thinks he’s been writing to you and he thinks, too, that you love him and—”

“I don’t love him, John—I love you.”

This time he took her strongly, urgently, into his arms and his mouth on hers stayed long, drinking deep of her sweetness, of the flaming passion that rose in her.

“It’s going to hurt him,” he said at last. “It’s going to play hell with him.”

“But, look here—he could love her, couldn’t he?”

“Love her? After he has seen you—not likely. She’s pretty enough—sometimes when you look at her she’s as beautiful as a night of moon and stars and as glamorous and suggestive of dark mystery. But she’s not like you—a woman like the sun—”

“I’m for you, John—if you want me. I don’t mean anything to this man. And no matter what he is it will make no difference, I’m yours if you want me—”

“Oh, my dear—if I want you. Brand will hate me—hate the both of us—but I don’t care now. I must have been nuts to think I could give you up, but I was sure—I believed in those letters—”

“Forget them—forget everything. Brand, Jane Wyatt and the world along with them.”

“We might as well,” said John, smiling and pointing out the window—“the tide is over the gravel-bar and there is a leak in Uncle Brun’s dinghy. We’re marooned, Andrea—you and I—”

“How lovely! How fitting too. I love being marooned with you. And you can write a piece for the Coastguard on ‘The Woman I’d Like Best To Be Marooned With On A Desert Island’.”

“I brought some lobsters with me,” said John. “And some clams. So we won’t starve for a while.”

“Who cares!” said Andrea. And she meant it. She was happier than ever she had been in her life before. “Write something in my book, John—‘lest we forget’.”

He looked at her for a moment, took the book she held out to him and wrote on the dedication page under her name, Andrea Felice—“whom I love with all my heart and this until death.”

And there, on the tiny eyot that was Friar’s Island, set like a stray emerald in the still blue waters of the Basin they lingered while the slow tide rose and fell, and made a fire of fragrant driftwood on the beach and watched the first shy stars come in the pale sky after the flame of the sun had died to a glow beyond the dark rim of the forest.

Jane Wyatt, in her chair by the fire, was reading In Quest of Eden and liking it. Besides the pieces she was familiar with—the harvest-story, the fair, the country-dance, he had included some others that had not appeared in paper or magazine and a few delicate, fanciful tales of the forest—and it was these she loved best; the legends of the Malicetes, the stories of the Acadians, handed down by word-of-mouth, the adventures of the French noblemen who had first settled in Port Royal and established there The Order of Good Cheer to lighten the rigours of the long Canadian winter—

Jane dreamt of those far-off times, of those high adventures and bright amours in which her own ancestors had taken part. She was deep in her reading and in her dreams and the old collie, Angus, was deaf now and the ginger-kitten gave no alarm.

He was there. He was in the room, looking down at her in the last golden light of the sun. She stood up slowly. She had washed her hair that afternoon and it hung down from a middle part in lustrous braids of beauty, framing the sun-browned, cameo face, making the great eyes larger, accentuating their depths; small and slender as a forest flower she looked in the gay red blouse and tan skirt and the moccasin slippers, gaily beaded, on the tiny feet.

It seemed that neither of them could break the silence. She knew him in a moment—the thin dark face and the life that seemed to live separate in his eyes, the black hair cut close to his head, the look of eagles in the poised, steel-hard body; withal the gentleness, the boyishness of his smile.

“You’re Jane Wyatt,” he said at last. “You’re the J. Wyatt—” his smile was good to see—“the J. Wyatt of ‘In care of.’ I knew you in a moment.”

“And you’re Adam Brand.”

“Your servant, m’am!” He bowed. “I knocked, you know; but you didn’t seem to hear me. I could see you from the porch, sitting there with your dog and your kitten—I watched you a long time.”

Jane felt a little strength flow back into her body, into her knees that had become as water. This was it—the moment she had dreamed about, prayed for, waited for—realizing it could never be hers when it did come. He had said he would know her the moment he saw her. Now he was looking at her, but he was seeking Andrea Fair—and her heart knew pain and darkness, for he was all she had ever thought—fine and strong and gentle and she could feel the magnetism of his manhood touch her even from across the room.

“You—you’re looking for Andrea Felice,” she said. “Well, she may be home now, but she wasn’t a while ago, for I phoned there and she’s off somewhere.”

“Andrea Felice,” said Adam softly. “What a lovely, lovely name, the way you say it. And she is lovely too, isn’t she? Lovely as the blush of dawn, fair as the morning—”

“You will know when you see her. Lovely—yes, she’s the loveliest woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Yes, I agree with you. I’ve seen her—”

“You—when did you—”

“Pictures. I saw them in a magazine in England. They were taken when she was in Montreal.”

“You know then too—how wonderful she is. You will love her. You will be happy—”

“There would be something very much wrong with a man who wouldn’t be happy with a woman like that. But she’s not for me—” He came quickly to her side. “She is not for me, my Neota!”

And his hand came up and touched her cheek, her hair and the other one followed it, cupping her face in their strong warmth, tilting her head back until the eyes, wide and frightened as those of the forest creatures, looked up into his.

“Neota!” he repeated. “Did I not say I’d know you the moment I saw you? So it was. When I stood there looking in the window at you—I knew and I could have shouted for joy—for you were the girl I had known so long, the one I made from your letters. The one you created with the wonderful things you wrote. Somehow I never could see myself with that fair girl—it was you—dark, lovely as the blue-black night. And you—do you find me—as you hoped—?”

Her lips seemed to beckon to him and he bent and kissed them and it was one of what she had told Andrea were “life’s supreme moments.” It was the loveliest moment. And lovelier still were those that followed, for they needed to talk so little, they who had poured out their hearts to each other for so long.

And there in the soft May darkness with only the light from the fire, Andrea and John Chanter found them, a pile of much-read pale-blue letters on the cushion between them—airmail to Eden.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

Some pages of advertising from the publisher were excluded from the ebook edition.

[The end of Airmail to Eden, by Louis Arthur Cunningham]