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Below the Salt

The O’Sullivan sat in his place at the head of the table and at the moment hammered loudly on the dark wood with the horn handle of his knife.

He was a big man of about seventy years old and commanding, even military, in appearance. There was no question at any time of the attention he got when he demanded it. The young faces around the board looked up and froze into various expressions of listening.

“Hark ye all!” he said with the rich touch of brogue he had inherited from his father, who had brought it from the North of Ireland. “Hark ye and mind what I am telling ye, ivery one. There are gypsies camped on the edge of Hennessy’s farm where my land runs into his. They are right nigh the place ye call the swimming pool, where the river goes under the willows, and well ye know the pool touches both properties.

“The Hennessy’s farm being left idle this year, with only a hired man and his wife there to not half look after it, and the owner away gallivanting in Europe with his daughters, there’s no one with enough authority to turn off this sort of rabble—except the County Constable or a Justice of the Peace—themselves too surfeited with quiet, or too indolent to turn over in bed. What they are good for I don’t know. But for me, I’ll not be having anny one of ye going up that way, nor passing the time of day with these vagabonds, nor having anny truck nor trade with them whatever—and so ye hear!”

From under his beetling eyebrows, strangely dark in contrast to his thick silvery hair, O’Sullivan looked down the long board fiercely.

At his right hand sat his mother, a small weazened lady of ninety, whose little ivory-white face time had etched until it looked like a Chinese masterpiece. Her still bright blue eyes seemed frilled with fine black lace, so heavily were they lashed, and her long upper lip was racy of the soil from which she sprung, which was the Scottish border.

Like an eager bird she turned her head about inquiringly, for she gleaned little of general conversation by reason of deafness—only the words spoken to her directly reached her with any certainty. However, her son was her greatest living interest and she missed no move he made, and grasped more of what he said than he realized. Though often brusque and short with others, with her he was always courteous and gentle, and so she saw but this side of him alone, would have believed in no other, and credited him with every virtue and all the graces.

He, the eldest, alone was left of her family of six children. Two had died at birth. One baby by accident, a married daughter when her first child was born, and her son Brien, the last of them all, had been lost at sea. Those who had passed in early infancy, now were but dream children that flitted through her memories.

On opposite sides of the table were the two young daughters of the house, Kathleen and Gail. Both were lovely. Kathleen with black hair and eyes like her grandmother’s, and Gail with hair of auburn, and the complexion of exquisite pink and white that goes with it. Her face had not the classical beauty of Kathleen’s, but with its charming irregularity and animation held the eye longer, while her eyes were of a colour not to be defined—at least they were the greenest of things blue, the bluest of things grey. Her brother Shannon, when he teased her, referred to them as lynx eyes—but that was nothing she need have minded, for the wild cat of the woods has eyes of such startling beauty, that once seen they are remembered. Many a storm he roused thereby, and it added much to the zest of his life, for when things flagged, and the farm seemed but a dull round, there was always his little quick-silvery sister to take on in merry battle.

Gail was in her twentieth year, and Kathleen four years older, while Shannon, their only brother, and Robert Kelly, their cousin, who had together graduated from a Canadian University, were the same age, twenty-six.

This was the family gathered around the beautiful old table that had been brought long ago from the home overseas. Time had done little to mar it, and as always it was graciously supplied with all that healthy young appetites could require for the noon-day meal. It was served, as were most of the others, in this long, low-ceiled, rather dark kitchen, that was shadowed by a wide porch. The house was large and a formal dining-room lay beyond, but it was not a popular room.

Below the salt cellar sat O’Sullivan’s two hired men and a boy of fourteen. One of the men, Tom Grey, and the boy Walter, were typical farm-hands. The other was a young blonde Norwegian, tall and strongly built, named Nils Olsen.

The great salt that so distinctly divided the table into two parts was the one invaluable household thing Marcus O’Sullivan’s father had carried from Ireland seventy-five years before. Its age had been lost in a vague mist of antiquity, but it had always stood upon some O’Sullivan table as far back as history of them in song and story.

The old emigrant whom evil fortune had driven to Canada with his very young wife, was the head of the family and last of the line, and among the possessions he could not bring himself to leave behind was the black oak table, and the great salt cellar he had always seen upon it.

High and softly luminous it shone on the dark wood, as arresting to the eye now as when some ancient silversmith, master of his craft, had beaten it out of the metal and engraved the rough coat of arms of the family upon it. The motto that had been cut below in a half-moon of Latin words, was now worn by much polishing to such a fine thread of letters that only a priest familiar with the Latin could read them. Two twisted handles like the horns of a young ram were on either side, and sunken in on top was the deep silver cup that held the salt—something more precious in those far-off times when it was new, than now.

Above this high salt cellar no one in the O’Sullivan service had ever sat, writhe in spirit as he might. On this Ontario farm near the lake, land at one time had cost little, but money was scarce, and help hard to find. So the first O’Sullivan had reverted to the custom of his forefathers, when master and men used one common table in whatever great rush-strewn hall there might be under their roof.

He had found this to his advantage and convenience, and his son, Marcus O’Sullivan, still found it so. Since the children could remember, a middle-aged, dumb woman, named Phyllis, had been their housekeeper and cook. With the help of an old coloured woman, Aunt Pansy—who with her husband Uncle Gideon, lived nearby in an old log house—Phyllis did everything, and seemed never to wish or require the help of the farmer’s daughters. Indeed she almost resented it, and as their father did not like to see them in the kitchen or dairy, they lightly accepted things as they were, and occupied themselves in other ways.

Now casting his keen eyes down the table at his two farm men and the boy Walter, O’Sullivan fixed the far one as by a dart.

“Olsen!” he thundered.

The young blonde giant rose slowly to his towering height.

“Yes, Mr. O’Sullivan?” he answered, the colour rising in his face, and then taking his seat again.

“I saw you talking to one of those Romanys last night, didn’t I? I had walked by their camp an hour earlier, but coming home through the orchard I am certain it was you I saw talking to a man riding a grey horse. You were down the road a bit.”

“Why, yes, sir,” he nodded, “I stopped a moment on my way to the house to give a stranger some directions. He had left the road up the concession, and wanted to follow a lane up to Hennessy’s, thinking it was nearer. He told me he was in charge of a small clan of people, Basques, he said, and he wished to have them settle here, as recently they had come through great tragedy in their own country. They have a little English, and he speaks it easily.”

“Well! Well! I want to hear no more about them, Olsen. They are birds of passage, I have little doubt, with a lick or two of every language on their tongues, and a few pennies, they have picked up here and there by trickery and fortune-telling. The sort who jump over a broomstick for a marriage ceremony, take their directions from a pack of cards, and sleep under the stars or in a covered wagon. I hear they rode up here in three or four covered wagons, and on horseback. We won’t stand for that sort of settler in Ontario, no matter how far north! They can spoil their own continent, but not this one—not mine, for I was born on it and count it as mine.

“Take heed at what I said, Olsen. Though we can’t throw them off maybe just at once, have nothing to do with them—and that goes for all of ye.”

With a flourish of his big, toil-worn hand he rose and pushed back his chair noisily.

Olsen got up, as did Tom Grey and Walter, and, with the shadow of a smile, glanced up the table at the two exquisite young faces of Kathleen and Gail, as a man might glance at some flowers growing nearby. He gave a little respectful bow to old Mrs. O’Sullivan, and went out of the cool, dark room, with his companions, on to the sunny porch.

When their father had gone out into the September sunshine, followed by his men, those left at the table all began speaking at once it seemed. The old deaf grandmother watched them curiously, and smiled at the general liveliness, while the dumb woman, deftly clearing the table, might have been listening or might not, for her face expressed little. She was not in the least deaf—they all knew that—but they took Phyllis for granted, just as she was.

“Dad is becoming dreadfully intolerant—can’t you all see it?” Gail said with sudden soft bitterness, shaking her short dark-red curls. “He is a regular—old—old Pharaoh!—I don’t believe I can stand much more of it, Shannon!” looking at her brother.

“O you haven’t heard anything yet,” Shannon laughed. “Wait until you have something powerful hard to tell him as I have. That you don’t want to farm the old place for instance;—or that you do want to go hell-bent for the mining country or adventuring into the Hinterland. Then there’ll be blood on the moon, my hearties.”

“I want to farm,” put in Bob. “I don’t want to do anything else but—one enthusiast putting his whole heart and soul into raising crops ought to be enough even for Uncle Marcus.”

“Well it won’t,” Shannon shrugged. “Father is land-mad. He has a peculiar passion for this old farm that I cannot understand. He cannot be happy any length of time away from it. It has a call for him wherever he is. I imagine this nostalgia for your own place is a germ that gets into the blood—say after a certain age. So far I’ve discovered no trace of it in mine.”

“Dad is not really intolerant—nor is he a tyrant, Gail,” Kathleen said suddenly with soft violence. “And he has a perfect right to feel as he does about the farm, too—yes—the farm or these gypsies or anything else! He’s perfectly splendid, I think, and you know he has been most indulgent with everyone of us. No wonder he is fond of this place. See what Grandfather O’Sullivan and he made of what was woods and wild land! It is a model farm now. Even the black walnut-trees on it—worth so much now—Grandfather planted.”

“True, O queen!” Shannon agreed. “Help Grandmother upstairs to her room. She is nodding, Kitty.”

“Yes, poor darling, she is.” Gail said, going over to her. “We are like a lot of bees buzzing around her, Kit. Come, we’ll all go.”

Slowly they helped the fragile old lady upstairs. There was an unusual flush on Kathleen’s face.

“I wish,” she began, “Shannon would not go against Dad. It has taken such endless work to bring these eight hundred acres into shape, and with so little brought from Ireland to begin with.”

“I know, Kitty,” Gail smiled, “and of course father is wonderful. But if Shannon wants to mine for gold I don’t see why he should have to plough and plant and thrash grain and all the rest of it.”

A misty look came into her strange, black-lashed eyes. “I know it is hard for Dad to realize that it will be Bob, not Shannon, who will love the place. But, O Kitty, can’t you see everyone has to live his own life?”

“No!” Kathleen returned. “O no, Gail. Some live lives of sacrifice and self-denial from start to finish.

“I am puzzled to know what Shannon should do. He owes everything to Dad, as we do, too. He has worked harder than we will ever have to work, and I for one could not disappoint him or go against him,” she ended with spirit.

“I hope he won’t put me to the test,” Gail said carelessly.

Then she touched her grandmother on the arm as she was gently rocking in her low chair.

“Are you listening, darling?” she said, pinching her ivory cheek. “If you are you have heard all the nice things Kitty has been saying about the light of your eyes. It’s a great son ye have entirely, as Himself would be the first to say!”

The old lady smiled and nodded. What it was all about she did not know, but she liked Gail’s way of talking to her. She had a look of Brien, this one—of her beloved who had been lost at sea. O, the red hair of him!

“It’s very nice all you say, Gail dear, whatever it is. I agree with both you and Kitty, for why wouldn’t ye both be right then?”

“Go and take your nap now, Grannie,” Kitty coaxed, putting one arm around her.

“Yes, Gran, let Kitty help you over to your couch. Sleep keeps you young.”

Little she gleaned of what they were saying, but a warm glow was in her heart at their little ways with her, as she drifted into pleasant sleep.

Gail’s face wore a petulant expression as she went downstairs again—decidedly pretty, but petulant. She had known since yesterday that there was a gypsy camp on the Hennessy land—at least it was supposed to be a gypsy camp—and she had determined to visit it and have her fortune told. The idea of the adventure had fascinated her and been in the back of her mind all morning while she was doing her small share of the upper floor housework, and then a two hours’ piano practice that her father insisted upon. To a fashionable school in Montreal she had been sent, as had Kathleen, and the piano she had been expensively taught and it was not in Marcus O’Sullivan’s plan that any such teaching should be wasted. The piano also, a Baby-grand, bought recently, had dug deeply into the carefully guarded exchequer. To keep the peace, Gail practised, and fortunately enjoyed it, but it cut into a morning.

However, here was the afternoon on her hands and it had been her intention to seek the Romany Camp. Bizarre and unusual the people would probably be, which would add to their charm, but at least they would be harmless. So far she had never flagrantly disobeyed her father, though she had been guilty of minor transgressions, but when he thundered laws at his family and laid them down in black and white, one and all obeyed them. At least Kathleen and Gail did; they couldn’t be sure of Shannon and Bob.

“But then,” she considered, “men were different. Wider liberty was naturally accorded them. Even her father would not consider his commands as binding on them.” So she mused going on through the house to the kitchen. It was a purely Victorian point of view, but one she had been brought up to accept. Occasionally rebellion rose within her, but so far she had kept it under.

Shannon and Bob, who had been talking on the porch, were just putting on their wide hats to go through the hot sunshine to what were called the lower cornfields. For land in this vicinity, the corn was exceedingly good this year. Gail watched them until they entered the first lot where the stalks were higher than their heads. They were taking stock of the ripe ears, she knew, and looking for possible rust or other trouble, going over the hills carefully to bring back a fair account to O’Sullivan himself against the day, now about due, of cutting. It had been a hot summer, a ripening summer, and now this first week in September the weather was still warm.

Still she stood on the wide, shady porch hung with morning-glory vines, and looked out at the blue and gold day. It was very quiet in the old house. A scent of thyme and savory and sage drying in bunches hung from the porch rafters drifted down to her. They would soon be taken down and put away for winter use, but now the bitter-sweet scent was strong on the air. In the kitchen the dumb woman moved about her tasks, wiping the old china and with little noise putting it on to its shelves.

The table was cleared now except for the high salt that stood a trifle below the centre. Phyllis went over and with a flannel cloth gave it a little polish. Then she straightened the red silk square beneath it and put some marigolds that were in a blue pitcher before old Mrs. O’Sullivan’s place into fresh water. With deft hands she shook the hand-knitted short curtains, and drew them across the four low, wide-seated windows. Then she hung the bird cage outside the door in the shade. A small Canadian greybird knew this as his home, for Kathleen had found him with a broken wing a year ago and the cage had been bought for him then. But the door of it was always open, and he fluttered in and out at his pleasure. He had the sweetest short song in the world, Gail thought, a little song with minor notes running through it, that caught at the heart.

She plucked some shepherd’s purse that grew at the edge of the steps, and put it through the bars of his cage absent-mindedly.

“I’m going for a little walk, Phil!” she called to the dumb woman. “I may get a bunch of black-eyed Susies on the riverbank or some red bear-blossom. Have you noticed the King Billy butterflies are gathering in the willows? Yes, thousands of them! Going to migrate with the birds, I imagine. O Phyllis, do make macaroni for supper, like a dear! And some banbury cakes to-morrow, if you’ve time—the little round ones with currants, you know.”

The woman who had come to the door nodded her grey head and smiled. They had all grown used to her speechlessness though it had never been accounted for to them.

“Thanks, Phil dear! And my blue muslin you damped down; just leave it. I’ll iron it when I come in.”

Gail waved her hand and started off through the kitchen garden—when a slight knock made her turn. The woman pointed to her head and nodded.

“My hat?” questioned Gail. “O, I don’t need a hat. Don’t be silly, Phyllis! It’s not really hot.”

The woman nodded again.

“You’re sure I do?” Gail laughed. “Well, hand it to me then. It’s on the rack.”

Phyllis came out with a floppy leghorn, and reaching up put it on the bright auburn hair. The yellow leghorn melted into the shade of Gail’s yellow print dress. Into her strange, green-grey eyes came a sort of gentleness.

“You do bother so about me, Phyllis,” she said looking up at the woman on the step. “I believe you were afraid I’d get a sunstroke.”

She nodded again and smiled, patting the girl’s shoulder.

“Well, I just put it on to please you,” Gail called, running down the little path.

In her mind was no definite plan of going. Some irritation at her father’s command still rankled as she hurried towards the little river that ran south through those well-cultivated acres, coming from beyond their ken. It went into a deep round sort of pool between the next farm and theirs, then went flowing on again between lovely flowering banks till it reached the lake. Gail sauntered slowly along, ready at any moment to change her course should it seem worth while. There were flowers of every hue in the big square garden in front of her father’s house—cultivated lovely blooms. Late rambling roses, white and pink and darkly red; larkspur, love-in-a-mist, verbena, sweet-scented stock, small yellow bitter-buttons, mignonette; O, a wealth of them! And she did not particularly care for black-eyed Susies, but there were none in the garden, so these she would have. However, as the sun was hotter than she had expected it to be, she crossed a field into a small birch wood—a silvery-green invitingly cool place she had always loved.

The trees were getting old there, and some of them would soon come down, she knew. Apart from one long bush they owned, where part of the primeval forest still stood, her father seemed bent on clearing the land. A tree taken here and there from this birch wood kept the open fires going in the house. Only trees the wind blew down were ever touched in the big bush.

Hazy thoughts went through her head about many trifling things as she entered the silver-stemmed fairy grove with its faintly yellowing branches. Then suddenly these thoughts crystallized.

“I will not be treated like a naughty child!” she said half-aloud, sitting down on a fern-covered log. “I will not be ordered to do this and that or not to do things I desire to do—perfectly harmless, natural things that won’t hurt anybody. Dad has forgotten he was young. I don’t believe he ever was really young. He had to do too much work.—He is more like my grandfather than my father—O, poor darling!—and granny is ninety, anyway! How can one bear being old like that. Why should we? Butterflies don’t—nor birds—nor the beasts for that matter. At least they never change very much. Old or young they look the same.”

As she spoke a dog came running into the woods, evidently looking for her. He was a magnificent red setter, but a little grey about the muzzle. He ran up to her barking joyously.

“O Rufus!” she laughed, patting him. “I might have known you would find me.” He lay down panting hard. “At your age you shouldn’t run like that,” she chided. “You are not four, but fourteen, old dear.”

A squirrel jumped down on the log beside her, a living protest against the encroachment of age.

Just then a man came towards her whistling. In one hand he swung an axe lightly, and his hair shone like gold in the dappled sun and shade falling through the leaves. His woollen shirt was open at the throat and the rolled up sleeves showed the strength of his mighty forearms.

“I saw your yellow gown against the white tree trunks, Miss Gail,” he called as he came along. “It added to the day’s sunshine.”

The girl did not seem surprised to see him, and beckoned him to the log.

“I suppose you are cutting down some of the oldest trees,” she said, “but I didn’t hear the chopping. Come and sit down here. I want to talk to you, Nils.”

“Thanks. Over there my pipe would be too obvious,” he returned smiling and filling his pipe as he leaned against a birch.

“I like tobacco,” she averred. “Some day I am going to take up cigarettes—they look so—so sophisticated, and woman-of-the-worldish.”

“O, I don’t know,” he said shrugging. “Why cultivate expensive habits, you are so charming without?”

“You are not a bit like—like a hired man, Nils Olsen,” Gail exclaimed. “They seldom talk that way.”

“If they do occasionally then I am all right.” He blew a cloud of pearl-white smoke into the tree. “I want to keep in character. What is it we are to talk about?”

“Lots of things,” she answered. “This seems to be the time and the place.”

“On the contrary, I am here to chop trees.”

“I can’t bear to see them cut down. This is my way of preventing it, for a little while. Now tell me—if it is not a rude question—why are you so—well, so different from Tom Grey and every other man father has employed.”

“How different?” he asked, a slight foreign accent sounding in the two words.

“You know perfectly what I mean,” Gail insisted. “I don’t have to explain. It’s very unpleasant to have to explain anything like that,” she ended, rose-colour rising in her face.

“I think you mean I have the English grammar perhaps?”

“O no! That is only part of it. You know a great deal—and you have a manner. O, why did I ever ask you such a question, anyway!”

The man looked amused at her evident discomfiture.

“You are trying to say I might be a gentleman, are you not?”

“I couldn’t put it just that way,” she said hurriedly. “Of course you are one. I mean—well—that you might be a University man like Shannon or Bob.”

“It is nice of you to think I am a college type. I suppose I am a bit different from the usual farm men about here. You see I am really foreign. I came to your father to learn Canadian farming and I am exceedingly grateful for what he has taught me. Tullamore is a model farm. But really five years in America have not changed me much, I fancy. My English is better than it was at home.”

“O, did you speak it in Norway?” Gail exclaimed.

“Yes, after a fashion. My mother spoke English with my brother and me when we were little boys. She had been born in England, and thought the language would be useful to us. You see,” he said whimsically, “outside of my country Norwegian is rather a handicap.”

Gail nodded. “Your mother was very wise, Nils.”

“And adorable also,” he echoed.

“I wonder you could have left her to come so far,” she said softly.

“I did not leave her,” he explained. “She left me. She died.”

“O, I’m sorry I spoke!” Gail broke in. “So sorry.”

He bowed, accepting her words. “How should you know?” he said. “There is nothing to tell of that life except that my father married again. He was a sea-captain and much away. There was only my young brother and I. And my stepmother—well, that is something else again. My brother died suddenly, and I left home at twenty-one. First I went to England to distant relatives. Then to the United States and other places. Afterwards I came to Canada to the Eastern provinces. There was nothing there for me, so I tried Ontario and I shall stay here, for I have wandered long enough. Here I seem to belong and I am contented.” He paused, and pulled at his pipe. “I must now try to go on with my work. But I blistered the palm of my hand badly yesterday, and am not much use with an axe to-day. Otherwise I would not have talked so long. Your father might not have allowed it,” he ended with a smile.

“My father has absurdly old-fashioned ideas,” Gail laughed. “He never can forget the O’Sullivans we sprung from. I think Spring is the word in Ireland.”

Olsen assented. “Kings they used to be, he says, Miss Gail.”

“O, Kings!” she repeated half scornfully. “Who cares about Kings nowadays, Nils? Look at Alphonso of Spain, and the Portugal one, and the Kaiser and the poor Czar, and the others.”

“Norway and Sweden and Holland you have forgotten,” he smiled, “and there is King George yet.”

“O, of course—our King. But that is different,” she said dismissing the subject. “Do come over here and sit down a moment. I want you to tell me about the gypsies.”

“Ah!” he said sauntering over and taking a seat on the fern-trimmed log, “Now we are getting to the root of things. What shall I tell you?”

“I believe you have been up to their camp, Nils, and you did not mention that to father. Something makes me think you have been there.”

“Why, yes, I walked over last evening while it was light.”

“O, let me know about it! Have they a fortune-teller? If there is a fortune-teller, no matter what Dad says I’m going to the camp too!”

“I did not see one. No one about there offered to tell my fortune. They all seemed quiet, and a little sad, I thought. One, a young woman, very pretty, is ill. She was lying in a hammock under the trees, and looked white and exhausted. The man whom your father saw me talking to by the field—the rider—was telling me they had a very sick horse. It was in great pain. So I took it over lotion, and together we worked with hot applications. Its leg was poisoned. I cannot endure seeing animals suffer,” he ended.

“O, No, No! Nor I,” Gail added. “I am glad you helped them, Nils. You are the sort of man who would help.”

He flushed to the edge of his temples.

“Of course, anyone would have gone, your brother, or your father, or Bob.” He put out his pipe and rose. “I must try this axe again, blister or no blister.”

She got up from the log, shook out the yellow gown and picked up her hat.

“Come Rufus!” she called to the drowsy old setter. “I was going to the riverbank for black-eyed Susies—but I won’t now. What I want to do is to go up to see the gypsies.”

Nils Olsen shook his head. “Don’t, Miss Gail. Your father meant what he said; and it would anger him. My going was different.”

“Dad is just a Dictator,” she frowned. “There would be no harm in my going. Perhaps one of them does tell fortunes. I want to know mine frightfully! Gypsies—real ones—have strange powers—occult powers, you know.”

The man looked down gravely at the lovely, petulant face.

“Yes, I understand,” he said, “but don’t go against your father. Evil might come of it, Gail.”

“O, you too, Nils!” she cried, noticing the informal little name. “I did not think it of you. I obey Dad, unreasonable as he is, ninety-nine times—but the hundredth I intend to use my own judgment.”

He gave a slight shrug, a very foreign movement, bowed, and strode away. Gail stood a moment before taking a homeward path, and as she went she heard the ringing of the axe.

“How absurd for Nils Olsen to give me advice,” she said half impatiently, strolling along through the sweet-scented birch wood. “That is going a little too far.” Then with a long sigh, “O, I don’t know; I suppose he is right. He looks like the sort of man who would be right. It does not matter to him whether he sits above or below the salt. His indifference is magnificent!”

The next day was Sunday and the peculiar feeling belonging to that day, which would make one aware of its arrival even in the midst of desert waste where track of time was lost, permeated the air.

Marcus O’Sullivan as usual gathered as many of his family as he could into a still dignified light conveyance, which Shannon called the b.c. on account of its antiquity. There was one seat behind and one in front and a fringed top. Originally it had been the glass of fashion and the mould of form, and the springs and coverings even yet bid defiance to the years. It was rarely used now except for church-going, and Shannon insisted an odour of sanctity pervaded it.

In splendid contrast the horse harnessed to it was in the full bloom of youth, and with knee-action unsurpassed. Motors were anathema to her, as she could not compete with their speed, but nothing else passed her on any road.

The four-square little stone church, four miles off in the village of Kimberley, was of Presbyterian denomination, but the pastor did not stress this point, and most of the non-Catholic villagers attended it, the Catholics keeping to their own small building crowned with its golden cross.

Marcus O’Sullivan, whose father had helped build it, had for years been precentor, and had sat beneath the pulpit and raised the tunes with a tuning-fork. But time had changed all that. The youth of the congregation talked the tuning-fork out of business, and in spite of a few dissenting voices had installed a little organ, which Kathleen played to everyone’s admiration, while a small choir sang in what they called the organ loft.

But tuning-fork or no, O’Sullivan’s great rolling voice still carried the hymns, and to all intents led in the praise of God. Without admitting it, he had a passion for music, and a beautiful voice charmed him as few other things could.

He loved to listen to Kathleen or Gail playing, but never said so, though insisting that they did not neglect the piano. A cold man on the surface was the old farmer, but Kathleen, at least, knowing him best, often played the Irish airs he loved but would not ask for.

Kathleen and Gail sometimes wondered if a change had not come over him after the death of their mother, for their grandmother often spoke of his boyhood as being a very happy one, with all its hard work. She would say she wished she could hear him laugh as he did when he was young.

He had not been a young man when he married Margaret Carey, a daughter of old Judge Carey, known throughout the whole province. In those days he might not have been as dour and exacting as he was now. Perhaps though, the two girls thought, a certain hardness had always been in him, though less evident then, and an exaggerated pride. He had always gloried in his work on the land and the building up of the finest farm for miles around. The eight hundred acres of it were inexpressibly dear to his heart.

But they agreed he must have become more concentrated on his possessions and in his family after his wife had gone. She had died suddenly at the time Gail was born, and Phyllis and their grandmother had brought her up. Kathleen was four then and Shannon seven, and both had also been given much love and indulgence. They had all gone to church with their father from the time they were very small.

Their grandmother seldom went, and Phyllis did not go at all. Her stopping at home was accepted as a matter of course. There was the midday meal to prepare for one thing, and it was after a while hinted among them that perhaps her theology was not sound. There was no way of telling except that she was never seen with a Bible, the book read every day by their grandmother.

Church plainly did not interest her, or its picnics and bazaars. She was not stirred by even the occasional revival in town, and for miles around most of the people working on the farms took pleasure in these emotional upheavals.

This Sunday morning it was delightful to travel the road to church. There seemed to be a shimmer of golden light over the resting fields, and laden orchards and far rolling land. The trees caught it on the edge of their leaves and the buttercups, that seemed to come and go all summer, filled their cups with it. Mauve and purple asters grew close to the highway, and milkweed silk was on the air fantastically fairy stuff.

Bob sat in the rear seat of the so-called B.C. with Kathleen, lovely in light green with a floppy leghorn hat, and Gail was in front with her father, still more distractingly lovely, her red hair aglitter under a close little cream coloured hat, and her muslin gown of the same soft shade. There was nothing to detract from her own colouring—so far quite her own. As for the horse, she was arrayed in a Sabbath cover of netted twine with small yellow tassels. This was supposed to discourage flies, though wearing it but once a week she never got used to it, and preferred the flies.

O’Sullivan glanced over his shoulder.

“This mare is a bit too mettlesome, Bob. Slow down on her oats.”

“I will, sir; but at three years old they are mettlesome, you know.”

“Yes—yes,” he returned gruffly. “But slow down on her oats just the same.”

“Oats are champagne to Cherry,” laughed Gail. “Or perhaps, Dad, it’s just that she likes to take us to church.”

O’Sullivan gave the charming figure at his side a silent scrutiny.

“What do you know of champagne?” he questioned.

“Not as much as I’d like to, Dad. But when Kathleen and I were at school in Montreal we went to a wedding where they said it flowed like Niagara Falls! One of the girls at school—Kathleen’s roommate—had a sister who was married and we were invited to the wedding. It was simply heavenly!”

O’Sullivan frowned.

“So!” he said, “that was what you were doing down there.”

“Only once, Dad.”

“You didn’t ask my permission, either of you.”

“No,” Gail answered, “No, darling. We were afraid you would refuse it.”

No one but Gail dare say such things to the old man, and she, not often.

He drove on grimly, after muttering something in his throat.

“Let me tell you about it, Dad!” she went on. “It was in a house on the mountain. The reception, I mean—the wedding was in a church—a very fashionable one.”

“They have fashions in churches do they, down there?”

“I mean they called it a fashionable congregation that attends it.”

“Oh!” He bit off the word sarcastically. “A fashionable congregation.”

“You understand, Dad, rich people—aristocratic—old families like—like ours.”

“In the sight of God all are alike,” O’Sullivan commented.

Gail glanced at his proud old face, then changed the discussion back to the wedding reception.

“I did wish you had seen the house. Such a house! Up on the mountain, you know, and quite a park around it. There were lots of servants, and a butler;—not just one or two, like poor Phyllis or Aunt Pansy—but French-looking maids in black with white ruffled aprons and little fly-away caps. Kathleen says she doesn’t think Phyllis would wear a cap.”

“No,” said the old farmer slowly. “No, perhaps not. I wouldn’t suggest it.”

“Of course not,” the girl said lightly. “It might hurt her, and I wouldn’t hurt her for the world. But it was all very exciting—first the wedding, with eight bridesmaids in gowns all the colours of the rainbow—it was a rainbow wedding, Dad—colours everywhere—then the breakfast they called it, and toasts to the bride and bridesmaids, and an air of hilarity and joyousness about everything.”

“That might have been the champagne,” he suggested.

“Perhaps,” she nodded. “It is like taking a glass full of diluted lightning.”

He smiled, melting a little. “You seem to take kindly to that sort of thing, my girl.”

“O decidedly,” she said with a little laugh. “May I have champagne at my wedding, darling?”

“It depends upon whom you marry,” he replied, then suddenly took the slender whip from its socket and snapped it lightly touching the horse.

Cherry indignantly leaped ahead and all were jerked back against their seats.

“O Dad,” Kathleen cried, “that quite frightened me. Cherry doesn’t need a whip—she is perfect!”

Gail flushed a quick pink. “Please don’t do that again, father,” she said, “or I won’t come to church.”

No one ever spoke to him in that determined tone, and for the moment he seemed about to resent it savagely. Then he gave a little hard laugh and turned Cherry into the driving shed.

“O, it was just a gentle reminder to the little mare—not to hurt her, but let her know who is master.”

That left nothing to say, so they all went decorously through the winding path of the old graveyard.

The church had been built four-square to the wind and of grey stone quarried nearby seventy-five years before. Now the greatest war of all the centuries had come, and like an upheaval of the earth, gone in a red mist of blood and tears. Yet in a deep outward serenity the church still stood with its background of the old Canadian Northumberland low hills, and around it the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept. It was out of proportion in size to the village, which in earlier days had been expected to grow into a town. But a town had developed up on the lake and its fine harbour brought in a good deal of shipping. There was no chance now of Kimberley being much larger, but farmers came in from round about to the church. It was a sort of social centre as well as a religious one, and it was beautiful in a way—shadowed by century old trees, and with fine dark wood pews and pulpit. Those who had died in that part of the country had been buried, for the most part, in the graveyard surrounding it.

The windows were long and narrow, and there were four on each side; and near the communion table a tablet with the names of those who during the four years of the war, had gone from the village or the nearby farms, and who had not come back. The crosses that marked their place of rest were in Flanders, and not the slumberous old cemetery, where many of the grey stones slanted a little, while the heat quivered up from the ground in summer and the snow piled high in winter, and in spring and fall the old mystery of the coming or going year wove its spell.

To-day, the church was nearly full, and so warm, an occasional palm-leaf fan was waved indolently. Marcus O’Sullivan and Bob walked into the family pew and Kathleen and Gail went to the little organ loft back of the pulpit. Kathleen took her place at the organ and Gail, with the rest of the choir of eight, faced the congregation. When the old bell which had cracked with the frost many years ago, ceased its ringing, and the hands of the clock showed it was eleven, the Reverend Benjamin Baxter, in his voluminous gown and white tab tie, mounted the pulpit, which he occupied through the service. The great Bible lay impressively before him—his glass of water was at hand. Came the Doxology, the short prayer, the first hymn, the reading of the scriptures in a voice peculiarly freighted with religious fervour. No everyday natural tone seeped through it. It belonged to the pulpit as entirely as the red velvet cushion to the great Bible. The Rev. Baxter knew the power of his speaking voice and revelled in it. As the perfume clings to a flowering bush, some perfume one happens not to be fond of, perhaps, so the essence of the Sabbath, the heaviness of it, clung to the sepulchral tones of this Minister of God. The dolefulness of verses aching with pain of life, and the upward striving of puzzled souls, brought an atmosphere into the building impossible to describe, but wilting in its effect. To endure it gave the congregation a sense of virtue acquired. Came the long prayer, when those of the complete fundamental school of thought invariably stood. The O’Sullivan always stood, and Bob out of compliment to him stood also.

The choir sat on chairs that were new enough to creak a little. Through the pews the summer gowns rustled crisply, and also in the choir loft where the fresh habiliments of the tenor, baritone and bass gave forth occasional small sounds. The bass, a middle-aged butcher from the village, breathed with a peculiar noisiness that seemed unnecessary, but might not have been.

The long prayer ended, the exhausted congregation slumped into their seats, another hymn followed and the sermon.

The text that was being rolled out was rather surprisingly some lines from the Song of Solomon. The exquisite words fell, for the most part, upon dull and tired senses, but one listener here and there caught their drifting beauty.

“He brought me to the banqueting house, and His banner over me was love.”

Kathleen rose from the organ and took her seat in a shadowy alcove beside it. The words seemed to fall upon her heart.

“O lovely!” she said to herself. “Lovely. I will read it all when I go home.”

The gentian blue of her eyes, fringed with their black lashes, grew misty. The wide leghorn hat shaded the creamy white of her face.

Gail glanced at her. “Kitty is more beautiful than she knows,” she thought, and smiled across at her.

“Gail is adorable,” Kathleen mused, catching the light on her shining hair and in the deep, strange-coloured eyes. “She never dreams of how perfect she is.”

Bob glanced at them both, but they were too unsettling. A man could not look at them and listen to a sermon. He fixed his eyes on the Rev. Baxter.

There was the slightest sound at the door of the church, and someone evidently entered. The restless heads turned a little and several saw a stranger step inside.

He was dressed in un-Sabbatical clothes, according to rural standards, for he wore knickerbockers of grey corduroy and a light grey flannel shirt, with low collar. He had on no coat, but a scarlet silk handkerchief was knotted about his throat, and he was belted with a wide brass-studded leather belt. In his hand he held a riding crop and carried no hat. He stood a half-moment, and then without waiting for anyone’s invitation, crossed himself, and sat down in the last pew in the church, one which happened to be empty.

The curious eyes that had caught a glimpse of him saw he was tall, lithe, dark and handsome, and perhaps in his late thirties. His actions were of one quite at home, for he had a foreign air, and on his own continent, wherever that might be, the churches, great and small, extended wide open doors to the stranger at the gate.

The disturbance had been so slight many of the most devout had not noticed it, and the sermon, with its lovely theme, droned on.

A lusty drunken bumble-bee who had been up too late, or else up too early drinking of some intoxicating nectar, boomed and buzzed up and down one of the long windows. Those who usually slept through the nearly-an-hour-long discourse, slept now as well as they could in an upright position and the discomfort of stiff garments.

But the choir did not sleep. All the members of it were astonishingly alert. The bass, who was sentimental but painfully conscious of his lowly social standing, was, as always on Sundays, overcome in secret by his close proximity to the beautiful daughters of Marcus O’Sullivan. Their nearness affected him as might some subtle Eastern drug. He became less of the body than of the soul. He seemed to float in ether, oblivious of such ghastly things as axes, meat-saws, knives and chopping-blocks, and he even forgot temporarily the white apron awaiting him on the morrow. On Sundays a revulsion of feeling grew in him against these things of his trade, and he cursed his fate that he must endure them.

The tenor and baritone, being married and owners of several children each, were perhaps less stirred by so much beauty close at hand, though they felt its pervading delight. The soprano and alto from the village, the Misses Blight, gazed upon it untouched, being perfectly satisfied with themselves as they were—both having that high-coloured brunette beauty which, figuratively, strikes one in the eye.

Through the sermon the bee was a disturbing factor. He occasionally left the window and swooped down over the somnolent congregation. Always threatening to alight, he never alighted. He left a sensation in his wake of anything might happen. However, at last he careened around the pulpit to the agitation of Mr. Baxter, and with a final whirl fell into the tumbler of water by the Bible. At this the beadle slowly mounted the pulpit steps and took the glass away. Everyone felt it had been a delightful interlude, and wished for another bee—though two during one sermon was more than could be expected.

But Gail O’Sullivan was oblivious to all minor disturbances. She saw nothing but the man in the last pew by the open doors. He stirred her imagination as no one ever had before. Never had anyone entered that little church at all like him.

He was reminiscent of far places, and summer cities, and, and—yes—perhaps carnivals, and colour and light. He was certainly not a part of Ontario winters, however sparkling and white. He did not belong to Canadian farmlands, however lovely their background of dark fir-spires and pine, sprinkled with silver-green of birch. He had a look about him of coming from places where there were many people, yet where he moved among them as one more or less alone. There was a freedom and grace in every line and every movement of his body, and a strange composure and strength that did not need to be made evident.

Kathleen, from her shadowy place, saw him, too. She looked at him rather critically, as one might at a rare and arresting picture seen by accident.

“The gypsy!” she thought. “The man Nils Olsen was talking to, when father saw them. I suppose his grey horse is tethered in the driving shed. I hope he hasn’t left him to wander among the old graves. Gypsies might do anything. But how extraordinarily good-looking he is! Whatever brought him into church? O, I remember, he crossed himself. Probably he thought it was Catholic.” Her wide blue eyes filled with interest. “Anyway, he is absolutely foreign.—So dark! But clever-looking. He is not as handsome as Nils. Nils never seems particularly foreign. But this man!—He is. He has such a—a finished look, polished.—No one can account for these things. For instance how gypsies could produce a man that looked as this one does. No doubt he is from the masses of the people—like Nils—and yet look at him, too!”

Evidently the old belief in the aristocratic breed of the Irish O’Sullivans had survived in this generation also. But the gypsy was disturbing. Kathleen determined not to glance his way again. In a fashion she resented him.

The sermon had reached its “lastly, dear brethren,” and the end of the hour that was its allotted time. Nothing could have been further from the ideas in Solomon’s richly coloured mind when he wrote the immortal song, than the grey web of platitudes the Reverend Baxter had been spinning about it. Early in the hour the exquisite lines of his text had been lost in the maze of them.

Gail fought against the queer magnetism which drew her attention to that last pew. She would not look there, she said to herself; and then she did. This time the stranger lifted his head and his eyes looked straight into hers.

“Why you!” said the dark eyes of the gypsy, a little expression of surprise on his face, and in some wordless way she answered. He no longer seemed a stranger, but someone she had met in a place she could not remember or name.

A wave of questioning swept across her mind and the dullness of the Sabbath magically disappeared. With a long and well-rounded sentence the minister brought his discourse to an end, and lifted his hand for prayer. Came the collection. No anthem lessened the tedium of this, but a mild rustling broke the silence. As the silver plates were passed Gail saw the gypsy looked surprised. He slipped one hand into a pocket, detaining the sidesman. The result was not satisfactory so he tried another pocket which seemed to be empty. Then suddenly Gail saw him lift a little length of gold chain hanging from his waist and with a swift strong movement of finger and thumb break something from it which he dropped into the waiting plate. He gave the sidesman a flashing smile as he did so. Gail tried not to look that way again.

The last hymn was “Jerusalem the Golden.” Kathleen slipped into her seat at the organ and played the beautiful old tune over clearly. Then they all stood and sang. But high and magnificent above all the voices in the little church, even above O’Sullivan’s and those of the choir, rose the voice of the man in the last pew.

Never before had that congregation been so carried along on the wings of song! Marcus O’Sullivan stopped singing, and turned partially around to see from whence came such silvery notes. The little choir sang with the man in an abandonment of joy, not just he with them.

Gail stood silent, for something caught at her heart and throat.

“It seems to come from Heaven!” she thought as the free velvety tones soared on high. “O, what a voice!”

The congregation faltered, then stopped to listen as had old Marcus O’Sullivan.

sang the golden voice gathering up the choir with it.

So the ancient hymn went on to the last line.

The Reverend Baxter peered down to find the singer, being shortsighted. The butcher’s bass grew more deep and sonorous. The tenor and baritone were swimming on waves of melody, carried on with the strange delight of being a part of transcendent beauty. The Misses Blight warbled with souls uplifted. They mingled their high notes in the silver flood of sound.

Only Gail was still. She trembled a little as she listened.

Kathleen turned a trifle and Gail saw her black lashes were beaded with tears.

As the last notes died away the man near the door stepped from the pew and went out of the church.

The benediction over, there was the usual little delay in moving down the aisles, for there were neighbourly smiles and greetings on every side.

Even out of doors, among the leaning tombstones that came up almost to the church, knots of villagers and farmers stood and talked.

Everyone commented on the man who had come in late and sung the last hymn with them. The sermon was put in the background. No one quite knew what it was about, and anyway no verse from The Song of Solomon was suitable as a conversational topic.

All agreed the man who had dropped in among them, who had sung as they had never heard anyone sing, must be from the gypsy camp pitched on Hennessy’s farm.

Presently the beadle came out to close the doors, and with him the minister and vestry clerk.

“My friends,” said the Rev. Baxter, “did any one of you drop a gold coin of unknown denomination in the collection plate—rather a large coin? If so, may I say I do not think it will be easily exchanged in the open market.”

No one replied. Marcus O’Sullivan went up to him.

“Let me see the coin, Mr. Baxter,” he said.

The minister produced a small red bag from his coat pocket, into which the collection had evidently been put. He loosened the draw-string, and took out the odd gold coin.

“There it is—and an extraordinary piece of money at that, Mr. O’Sullivan,” he commented.

“May I have a look at it, Uncle Marcus?” asked Bob. “I know a trifle about coins.”

Bob turned it over curiously a moment.

“Why, Uncle Marcus!” he exclaimed, “this is a Spanish doubloon. The date is not decipherable, but I should think it 1550 or thereabout. This is a rare coin, I fancy, and worth more than its weight in pure gold, which of course it is. If you will let me have it for twenty dollars, Mr. Baxter, I will take it.”

“I will not trade on the Lord’s Day, Robert,” the minister answered stiffly. “Anyway, how do we know this gypsy came by it honestly? Give it back to me, and we can discuss it to-morrow.”

Bob laughed a little. “I was very thoughtless. But I have a small collection of coins that were my father’s, and would like this, so will see you on Monday.”

Tom Grey, the farm-hand, and young Walter had left to walk home, and the family got into the old carriage and Cherry started down the road, this time Kathleen beside her father, who always drove. Gail and Bob being behind, the girl’s hands were clasped together tightly he noticed. Her face with its strange green-grey eyes was vividly alive with some intense feeling. It was more lovely than usual, and his not unsusceptible heart gave a quickened beat when a jolt of the wheels threw her against him.

“O, Bob!” she said softly, “did you ever hear such a voice! Did you ever hear anything like it?”

she sang below her breath. “O, I never knew that darling old hymn could sound like that.”

“It’s some hymn, Gail,” he remarked, but without her enthusiasm. “Give a little credit to the tune—it’s a great tune.”

“Of course, but no one ever heard it sound like that before.”

“It was a good voice,” Bob assented, “whoever owned it.”

She nodded absently. “Was it really a Spanish doubloon, Bob?”

“To the best of my knowledge it was, believe it or not, my lady; and 1550 maybe—before Queen Elizabeth. Yes, perhaps Henry VIII.—There or thereabout. The date was worn so I would need my glass to be sure.”

“O!” She drew a long breath. “Henry VIII!”

“I’ll get it from the old bird to-morrow,” Bob remarked disrespectfully, “and I’ll guarantee his price will have gone up. When I get it I’ll give it to you, if you like, Gail.”

She gave his arm a little pat.

“How dear of you, Bob! I should adore to have it, if it doesn’t cost too much.”

He smiled down at her. Never was there such red hair!—Every thread twisted with gold.

“O, it won’t cost too much,” he replied a little unsteadily. “Nothing would cost too much if you wanted it.”

“I want this coin,” she said with a certain soft violence. “I want it more than you can imagine, Bob dear, but let me pay for it.”

“No,” he said stubbornly, a sense of disappointment filling him. It was not as a present from him she wanted it. Then his spirits revived. Of course not, but because she was excited over having anything from Queen Elizabeth’s day, or the old wife-killer’s.

“I’ll give it to you,” he said, “we’ll call it a birthday present.”

“Well, my birthday isn’t until January. Make it a Christmas present, but give it to me now.”

“All right,” he assented, “anything you say.”

“Thanks, Bob, you’re sweet. But, Bob dear, you must not call Mr. Baxter an old bird. It has a sacrilegious sound.”

“Well, there are other things I’d rather call him,” he remarked.

Cherry picked up her young feet and hastened towards home and oats. O’Sullivan drove in dour meditation, Kathleen sitting in dreamy silence beside him. As they reached the gate to turn in, she looked at her father.

“That was beautiful!—Heavenly,—that last hymn, father,” she volunteered gently.

“Yes,” said O’Sullivan, snapping the unnecessary whip again above the startled mare. “Yes—damned gypsy.”

The Sunday luncheon was a more leisurely meal than the usual midday dinner and more elaborate, though everything was served cold as a concession to the holiness of the day. Then Marcus O’Sullivan insisted on a greater variety of fare, so probably Phyllis did not find the work lighter.

No one could tell what she thought. Her face was a pale mask and very thin, and her figure singularly graceful, but wraithlike in its slenderness. Still she was never ill, and certainly never complained. Without appearing to be very busy, she managed the house with a certain clocklike precision, and it was kept in beautiful order. Since any of them could remember clearly, Phyllis had been presumably housekeeper, though their grandmother was the nominal head and mistress of the place. But at ninety the flagging energies do not demand so much deference to their accomplishments. Old Mrs. O’Sullivan, deaf, and very feeble, was content to leave things to Phyllis and did not question her management.

Kathleen gave some time to her music, read a good deal, and rode in all but winter weather. It was Kathleen who kept up the old friendships of the family, was an active member of the Daughters of the Empire, and took an interest in work for the poor. A sense of duty was dominant in Kathleen, but she liked to arrange her own day, and willingly left housekeeping to Phyllis.

Not very much had ever been demanded of Gail, but in small ways she helped in the daily round.

So without usurping any authority, the dumb woman had gradually taken over complete charge of Marcus O’Sullivan’s house. For one thing—she was always there, always capable, and always the same. She did not resent or question anything they wished her to do if she were able to do it, and in return she was given great consideration, and a feeling that perhaps was affection. But they did not think of Phyllis; they took her for granted.

No one could have told her age with any accuracy. Her hair was a smooth pearl-grey, her colourless face unlined, her lips faded and set into an indefinite line. Her eyes, very large and at times brilliant, often searched the faces of those around her swiftly, with a sweeping glance. The brows were dark and beautifully marked, and in her firm chin was a dimple that belied its firmness.

She might have been pretty once, Shannon had said casually one day. But as a rule no one mentioned her. When Shannon had volunteered that she might once have been pretty, Gail had given a little laugh.

“What makes you say that, Shan?” she had asked, “I think she is—well, strangely lovely now; but bleached. No person could possibly tell what Phil was like when she was a girl. She is too—too——”

“Faded,” put in Shannon. “You said ‘bleached,’ you know.”

“That is different. They do not mean the same thing at all. But, yes, she is faded, if you like, though I did not mean to say it,” she added irritably.

“Well, flowers fade,” Shannon replied lighting his pipe. “Long ago when Phyllis came to mother as a maid—before you were born, Gail, when Kitty was two or so—if she had had any colour and not been transparently thin God knows what she might have looked like. That’s harking back a good way.”

Gail drew a long breath. “Poor Phyllis!” she said. “How dreadful to be dumb, Shan! I don’t see why such things are wished on us. It’s cruel.”

“I can’t imagine any affliction you would hate more, Gay,” her brother laughed. “But,” he had dropped his voice, “there’s some sort of mystery about her—her silence.”

“O she can’t speak,” Gail had said quickly. “I am positive it is real.”

“Of course,” he had said. “But it is queer—uncanny—and we better not discuss it, for if Phil got wind of our—say—curiosity——”

“I’m not in the least curious,” Gail had broken in, “and I wouldn’t hurt her for the world, Shan. No, it’s better not to talk about it.”

Then she had gone out and left Shannon to his pipe. But neither of them could remember this having been spoken of before, nor since.

So the woman who did so much for them all, went her quiet way. The Barnardo boy, Walter, now fourteen, helped her greatly, and she grew fond of him.

It was generally agreed that she rose very early, and accomplished wonders while others slept. It was also quite plain that she liked to do things this way; so one and all tacitly agreed it was the best way.

A little slate always hung with some keys at her waist with its pencil on a thin silver chain. When she urgently wished to say something she wrote it on this slate. But the urge came seldom.

She always wore a grey print dress and white apron in the morning, and a white one in the afternoon, with a ruffled apron. On Sundays she wore black silk and a little white apron. It was with her the badge of servitude, this apron. But she wore no cap, and her pearl-grey hair shone like a dove’s feathers, and was braided closely about her small head. Gail often looked at it wonderingly, hoping some time to see a lock astray. But none ever left its moorings. It might have been a perfectly groomed head in a hairdresser’s window.

On this Sunday luncheon was served as usual. Phyllis moved about the table waiting on them all quickly, and with ease. She never appeared to notice or hear the conversation that, like a ball, was thrown lightly from one to another of the young people at the upper end of the table.

Nils Olsen, Grey and Wallie usually were uncommunicative. It was a pleasant enough silence, for an amazingly good taste made them assume an indifference whether they felt it or not. Kathleen, Shannon and Gail resented this order of their father’s to have one table for all, but he still maintained it made less work for Phyllis, and he would have no other house-servant, except Aunt Pansy, the coloured woman from her little log house a quarter of a mile away in the woods.

Now and then O’Sullivan thundered a question concerning the crops or such things down the table to Olsen or Grey, but they always answered briefly.

This Sunday a certain restraint clouded them all. It was not easy to speak of the church service or neighbours they had met without mentioning the marvellous tenor voice that had swept like a wave of heavenly sound through the old building—and besides there was the Spanish goldpiece that had been dropped into the collection plate by the supposed gypsy. This had aroused curiosity and could not be set aside when topics of general interest were scarce. Gold coins were things seldom donated in that community, and this casual stranger from far places appeared to be a singularly free-handed man with his money. A grim expression on O’Sullivan’s face gave warning that their topics had best be chosen carefully.

The little old grandmother played daintily with her knife and fork, and ate little. Often her trembling fingers would lift a morsel, and then let it fall. Nowadays she came to the table chiefly to still make one of the gathered family. Glancing around she often nodded and smiled at them all in her gentle way. But her eyes invariably came back to her son’s face, and though she could not catch all he said, she always listened. He may have become so used to it that he regarded it only as the seeking look of the deaf, and was no longer conscious of its appeal.

Light conversation was not tossed from one to another to-day, for different emotions brooded around the table that all felt and none cared to arouse.

Out of doors the dreamy September day went from the warm blue of morning to the deep hot blue of afternoon. The fields rested, and through the rustling corn still standing, quail wandered in their eager, watchful way. Through the door and four open windows of the long kitchen—that was not until mid-winter a kitchen but a low dark beamed room—a facsimile of one beloved long ago in Ireland—came the sweet calling; “Bob-White! Bob-White!” The old red setter drowsing on the porch heard it and started up occasionally, his muscles quivering; of two minds about following it up. But he always settled back lazily.

Kathleen glanced down at Nils Olsen. In deference to the day he wore a blue serge suit that no one could criticise. Tom Grey and Walter were in their snuff-coloured store clothes. The colour was always associated in their later memories with a vague discomfort.

Olsen towered above them as they sat beside him. His thick hair was the shade of ripe corn, and his eyes far-seeing and sea-blue. His face was a bit rough hewn, and finely coloured.

He was undeniably good-looking, Kathleen thought;—arresting by his very size and strength. His shoulders—neither Shannon’s nor Bob’s—no, and not even her father’s, were as broad! No doubt Norwegians were like that. She looked away, and gave her whole attention to her luncheon, quickly.

Marcus O’Sullivan ate rather noisily, or at least with gusto, and Phyllis watched for his slightest request. They all did that unconsciously. He seemed to-day to desire quiet, and each one fell in with his whim in a guarded fashion.

Nils glanced at the two girls in their pretty summer finery. His eyes rested a moment on Gail’s radiant face with the cloud of dark-red hair waving about it. Her eyes were shining and she looked out of the windows absently.

“She’s enough to disturb a man,” said Nils Olsen to himself. “She is of a distracting beauty. But she is not going to knock me out.”

He smiled as the idea came to him. “No, not me,” then with a little mental flourish, “I have other plans, Gail O’Sullivan.” His eyes, far-looking sailor eyes, rested fleetingly on Kathleen. On the almost colourless charm of her face, the close-fitting blue-black of her hair and the midnight blue of her eyes. Serenity was in her every line. Even her hands were still, ivory-white, and indicating no inner tension. Her eyes met his that were fastened upon them for a fragment of time, but no signal passed between them. Such as perhaps involuntarily Gail’s eyes would have given the unspoken greeting of one kind or another. Yet that still glance, momentary and unnoticed by the rest, had left an indelible impression on each of them.

“He seems a little amused, a little eager to say something to me,” Kathleen thought. “O, the old salt cellar! I wish father wouldn’t have it there!”

For Nils Olsen—a line had suddenly crossed his mind. He saw it quite plainly by inner vision, printed in Norwegian in the big black family Bible at home. Like the text of the morning’s sermon, it, too, was from the Song of Songs.

“Thy lips,” he seemed to read, “Thy lips are a thread of scarlet——”

Then the voice of Marcus O’Sullivan suddenly boomed down the table.

“You were not at church, Olsen. You are not often there. Why not? Are you atheist or agnostic?”

“Possibly I am an agnostic,” the man answered, a slight foreign accent sounding in his voice, “if that means not being sure of things.”

“Of God, do you mean?” questioned the old man.

“Of what some call the eternal verities,” Olsen replied gravely. “I am not a theologian, nor do I wish to argue, but I have a God.”

“I am thankful to hear you say that.” He rose pushing back his chair. “No, we will not argue about religion on the Sabbath, Olsen, but some other time I would like to hear your idea of the Almighty.”

“When you wish, sir,” Olsen replied stiffly, rising. With a distinctly un-Canadian bow to old Mrs. O’Sullivan and her grand-daughters, he went out into the sunlight, Tom Grey following, while Walter stayed to help Phyllis.

Phyllis turned her still face towards the master as he was leaving the room. He looked back at her.

“Serve supper in the dining-room, not here,” he said, “for the family only. The Reverend Mr. Baxter and Mrs. Baxter are to be with us.”

Phyllis nodded assent. Gail gave a little shrug at Shannon, and Shannon distinctly winked back. The old grandmother smiled at them all impartially, and Kathleen tucked her hand within her arm and led her, trembling, away to take a nap.

In a small room they called his office, O’Sullivan would read and perhaps sleep for a while.

Shannon was going out as usual in his small car, and might not be back until late. Shannon was a law unto himself. Bob might do likewise, as he also had a car, being independent financially, a much more ambitious one. Gail always wondered why he drove with them to church.

“Would you like to go for a walk or ride, Gail?” he asked.

“I must help Phyllis clear and put the china away,” suddenly making up her mind to employ the shining hour. “You’d be bored waiting for me.”

Phyllis smiled at her and shook her pearl-grey head.

“Yes, I will help, Phil,” she answered, “and you’d get cross waiting, Bob. Men always do. Next Sunday, perhaps.”

The eager light went out of his eyes as he lit his cigarette and went out.

“All right,” he called back, “then I’ll go to town.”

“Be here for supper?”

“Perhaps,” he answered shortly.

“O dear!” she said softly, “it’s always like that! I am always annoying Bob by not doing this or that, and he was so sweet about the gold coin.”

She flew around gathering up dishes in spite of the silent protest Phyllis made. Old Rufus, the red setter, followed her in and out to the big pantry, where the dishes were washed. Two great windmills pumped a supply of water for the farm, that appeared to be endless, and a water-system carried it to the house, while the little river that ran down from the low hills was a joy and delight for the cattle and horses.

When the last bit of china and glass was put away, Phyllis wrote a few lines on her slate and held it up for Gail as she was patting her hair into place and taking off an apron.

“Was it nice in church?” the woman had written. “Did you enjoy it, Gail dear?”

Gail smiled at the words, then threw her arm around Phyllis and gave her a little impulsive kiss, for she had been her nurse and close companion through all her childish days.

“It was heavenly in church this morning, Phil!” she exclaimed, “just heavenly!”

The woman looked puzzled. Usually Gail went unwillingly church-ward and returned tired and depressed.

“Why?” she wrote on the slate.

“O, I can’t just tell you. There is no use in trying to. You couldn’t understand unless you had been there. Everything was different this morning.”

“Different?” Phyllis wrote questioningly.

“Yes, entirely. You see there was—well there was one of those gypsies in church. I suppose he came over from the camp at Hennessy’s. He was most extraordinarily good-looking. But it was not that—it was his singing. Phil, he sang like one of the archangels! Like Michael, or Gabriel, or Azrael.”

“Not Azrael,” the dumb woman wrote, “Azrael is the angel of death.”

“Well then not like Azrael, but like one of the others, and like King David also. You never heard anything like it, Phil.”

“Was he in the choir?” she wrote again, holding up the slate.

“O, no,” Gail smiled sitting down on the porch steps. “He came in frightfully late, and crossed himself, and sat down in the last pew, quite at home.”

“Crossed himself?” Phyllis wrote with a quick, eager air.

“Yes, like a Catholic. He only sang the last hymn with us, ‘Jerusalem the Golden’.”

Phyllis clasped her thin hands. “I love that one best,” she wrote.

Gail tossed back her shining hair and sang in her clear young voice,

The words faltered and stopped. When she looked up the dumb woman was standing with clasped hands and her eyes were brimming with tears.

Wallie, who was brushing up some crumbs, put his broom away. He stared at them both round-eyed. For once he had seen the dumb woman, always a mystery to him, shaken out of her perpetual calm.

Gail rose. “I am going to get my sun hat, Phil, and go for a walk. It is a most fascinating day.”

The woman wrote, “Your cousin wanted you to go with him, my dear.”

“O, Bob?” she laughed. “I would rather go alone this time. He would not care.”

Phyllis shook her head a little.

Coming out with her wide hat she stopped beside the woman rocking now in a chair on the porch.

“I wish I could stay out—not come home for supper, I mean, Phil. Mr. Baxter is—is—so tiresome. He preached an hour this morning! I loathe sermons, Phil.”

“You had better come home,” the dumb woman wrote, “your father—you know.”

“Yes, I know,” Gail said with a little twist of her red lips.

“And there might be gypsies about,” the woman wrote again, “so don’t go up to the north of the farm, please, my lamb.”

Gail broke into a short laugh.

“O, Phyllis, you never can remember I am grown up!”

With a backward wave she was gone, and with unreadable eyes the dumb woman watched her until she was lost in a turn of a cedar hedge.

The country was unbelievably quiet. A new road had been built to the south and the motors were all trying it. The crickets were chirping madly in the drying grass, and the quail calling, but these sounds intensified the stillness.

Gail went through the front garden, crossed the road and the great apple orchard, and turned into a lane that ran up towards the Hennessy farm. There was the bush to go through after she left the lane, and through this ran the little river that was her delight.

Old Rufus kept close to her, treating the quail with indifference, and only once flushing a partridge, which afterwards he disdained to notice.

Gail had no defined purpose in going up to the bush. Her mind was in a nebulous and uncertain state. At the moment she was not even sure of what she wanted to do. It was true she desired to see the gypsy camp, but whether she wanted to go investigating it alone, was another thing.

Rufus bounded ahead with a joyous bark, for at the end of the lane Nils Olsen came in sight. He was lying under a black walnut-tree, the sun chequering down on him through the lace of the leaves. His coat was off, his blue shirt open at the throat, and he was reading. At the short glad bark he looked up, and seeing Gail put down his book and rose.

“Hello, Nils!” she greeted him. “Don’t get up. Were you improving your mind or reading something else.”

“That’s a question!” he smiled, “I was reading Kant.”

“In the German, too,” she commented, glancing down.

“Well,” he returned, “it’s better in the original, you know.”

“But how should I know?” with a slight sarcastic turn of her lips. “Canadian farmers hereabout don’t read Kant, and if I had not by chance attended a lecture about—I think it was German philosophers—in Montreal, I might have thought he was an Esquimau. You are a most bewildering person, Mr. Nils Olsen. Ever since you came to father six months ago I have suspected it. Now I know it. Whatever brought you to Canada, to us?”

“My guardian angel,” he laughed, picking up a stick and whittling it. “You see, Miss Gail——”

“Gail,” she interrupted, “just Gail.”

“Thanks. Well, you see, I wanted to learn about Canadian farming, and they told me down at the town by the lake your father was an authority in this county, and wanted a man, so I applied for work and he took me. It was all very simple.”

“But the rest is not so simple—how you speak pure English and read German.”

“O yes it is, if you know how it came about. My father was a Norwegian sea-captain, my mother English. She became quite of his people and lived in Norway. My brother and I were sent to Heidelberg for a couple of years. It is best to know German and French if you are Norwegian and intend ever to go outside your own country. English we got naturally from our mother with our own language.”

“I see,” she said, her eyes very wide and astonished.

“But what happened, Nils, to bring you here?”

He looked out away over the pine-covered little hills. “My mother died just after my brother and I returned from college. After a year my father married again. My stepmother did not care for us, and my father was much at sea, so when I was twenty-one, and came into a little money, I left home. But my brother—my brother had died suddenly. We had relatives in England. With a cousin I travelled about for a few years, being very unsettled. Then I decided to try Canada and farming, but I was no farmer, as I told your father. He has been very patient, and I have learned a great deal. I will buy a small farm some day,” he ended.

“Soon?” she asked.

“Perhaps.—Who can tell. I will settle here anyway, for I am tired looking around.”

“Looking around, Nils?” she questioned. “Where?”

“Many places. My English cousin and I were in South Africa, and then the Argentine, and we tried the gold fields of Northern Ontario and the Yukon. We were in Alaska, too, and considered the salmon fisheries. Then I came here, and now I know I like this mid-Ontario best. The great lake enthralls me, the open country is a dream of beauty, and full of peace. I shall make it my home.”

She gazed at him, as at someone she had not seen before.

“But, Nils,” she said, “being what you are, knowing what you know, having seen so much, how could you, however could you submit to my father’s ways—and—and——”

“Sit below the salt?” he laughed, with a little shrug.

“O, it is all wrong! It is dreadful,” Gail cried, throwing out her hands.

“Why, it is nothing,” the man answered, taking his pipe from his pocket. “May I smoke?”

“Of course.”

“Do not give that a thought. It is only a rather amusing incident. I am benefiting tremendously by being with your father. Learning how to put in crops and take them off the land; how to fertilize the soil; to spray trees, to graft them; to fight weeds and pestilential insects, and how to manage that terrible machinery they use here for ploughing and the rest of it. I can assure you it was harder to take in than a little German. But I am becoming a farmer, and you see I had to work as a hired man, or not learn at all. The course at an Agricultural College would have been too long. Your father is a marvellous teacher.”

“He is very exacting.”

“Yes,” Olsen said. “He makes one learn, being a past master himself. But, as I said, it is all very simple.”

“It is very splendid—splendid of you,” the girl replied impulsively, colour rising in her face. “And thanks for telling me so much. It was nice of you, Nils. I am going for a little walk, so go on with Kant.”

He knew that in taking the position he had, no mention of going with her would be possible from Marcus O’Sullivan’s point of view. Gail knew it, too. More fixed than the laws of the Medes and Persians were the unwritten laws on this Canadian farm of O’Sullivan between his family and those he hired, whatever might be their type.

Whatever his forebears had been, an autocratic spirit had descended to him and he ruled his eight hundred acres back of the lake as the ancient O’Sullivans of Ireland might have ruled the dwellers on miles of bog-land or shamrock-grown pastures, centuries before.

He was living proof that the ruling instinct survives against long odds, and in a country where there was no meek peasantry, and no humble tenants to dominate, he concentrated on his household, his family, and two hired men and a boy. The men he constantly hired from the village, gave him a day’s work for a day’s pay, and were hard to handle at that. He found his scope therefore limited to those beneath his roof.

Gail started away swinging her hat by a ribbon.

“I am going through the bush to the river for black-eyed Susies,” she said, stopping and calling back. “Have you been up this way lately, Nils?”

“Yes,” he nodded, “to the camp at Hennessy’s. That horse is still sick—an infected leg. I think it will have to be shot. It’s a valuable horse, too.”

“How ghastly!” Gail cried. “Father knows all about horses. Do you think he would see it?”

“I wouldn’t suggest it to him.”

She shook her bright head. “On second thoughts I wouldn’t either.”

Olsen looked after her thoughtfully. “The camp is just beyond the bush. It might not be wise to go up that way, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Gail started away again, swinging her hat. “I don’t mind,” she said, waving back to him.

The woods Gail entered was a place beloved by all the O’Sullivans. As it had always belonged to them they felt it safe from invasion by tramps or casual picnickers. This was largely an illusion, for a branch line of the great railroad ran not far from it and on through the village. Also the town with its beautiful harbour was within walking distance, and hiking parties by taking one of the concessions had often reached this bush. The odd tramp spent long idle summer days there too. But all outsiders entered it at the risk of O’Sullivan’s wrath.

This afternoon in the gilded September light the Canadian bush was like a fairy forest. The mossy ground set with fern and wild flowers whose day was nearly over, was dappled into a thousand lacy patterns by the sun shining through the trees. These had passed their rich dark prime and the leaves here and there were lightly tipped with gold or bronze, though none had yet turned crimson.

It was still like summer, but in two weeks or more the equinox would come for a few days with wind and rain and the spoiling of lovely bloom.

Some of the old primeval forest still stood in O’Sullivan’s bush, and no trees here were cut unless they threatened to fall. Here and there one had been left where it fell, and was green with creeper and fern.

Gail went on swinging her hat and revelling in the freedom and beauty around her. One could not get lost, for little paths ran here and there to the river, on the other side of which the bush continued.

The beeches were particularly fascinating, she thought, so many squirrels and tiny red chipmunks flew around them. She gathered a few of the three-cornered nuts that were almost impossible to unshell unless one happened to be a squirrel. Still she always tried hopefully. A young raccoon froze into stillness as she passed, and a porcupine fled before her with his funny sideway swing, while a red-headed woodpecker hammered away at a hickory tree, the hardest wood he could find, with the determination of Noah building the ark. A soft golden gloom filled the whole place, and a perfume more exquisite than the scent of roses.

Gail stopped and drew a long breath. Nothing ever put up in crystal flasks could compare with this scent of the woods, she thought.

Beneath a century-old oak she came upon a group of the queer ghost-flower they call “Indian pipe.” Kneeling down she looked at the transparent loveliness of them, then decided to leave them untouched, which cost her quite an effort. But they perished too quickly if broken, and anyway there was something uncanny about them. She looked again, and shivered a little.

No, she would get some scarlet bear-blossom, and fire-weed and black-eyed Susies, and asters, and wild cucumber, by the river, about all the wild flowers left there, and they would fill the old blue ginger jars in the parlour beautifully. The room had been furnished when the house was built and her grandfather and grandmother were young. They had stayed in the log house until the other was ready for them, and little had been changed in it since. In the parlour only the Baby-grand piano was new, and the chintz curtains and covers. Shannon said this room reeked of ancient days, but Gail loved it, and always kept the ginger jars filled with flowers or cedar.

The Indian pipes had fascinated her, and she went back to look at them again, when a step sounded on some drying leaves close by. She turned quickly, her heart missing a beat. Very well she knew that she had been listening for that sound of a step, and that back of everything she had been fighting a wild desire to go on and up toward the camp of unknown people.

She stood expectantly watching, as a man came towards her through the trees. There was no doubt he was the stranger who had come late into Church—who had taken the last empty pew—who had sung.

A dazzling smile lit up the dark oval of his face as he came nearer. He carried his sombrero, and bowed, and Gail answered his salutation with a little nod and smile. Now the first startled sensation was over she was not at all frightened. All the O’Sullivans were very sure of themselves it was said, and she not less than the others. Perhaps they possessed an ingrained fearlessness, or it may have been a simple pose, or again that most comforting possession, a wholesome conceit.

“I think I saw you in church this morning,” the man said following up the foreign sort of bow, too deep a bow for any native son. “I hope I may be permitted to speak to you. I am quite a stranger here.” He spoke with a slight foreign accent, but in English.

“It is very wise of you to speak. One cannot be formal in the woods, for it is all so friendly here, don’t you think?” the girl said smiling back at him. “I saw you in church, too. In the choir we see everyone, and you were in the last pew of all.”

“Yes, and I was the last one in also. They were very good to let me in so late.”

“O, it was just church,” Gail laughed. “We have it written on the service board outside ‘Strangers Welcome’.”

“I took advantage of that,” the man answered.

“Why not?” Gail said quickly, “But I not only saw you, I heard your voice above all the others when we sang ‘Jerusalem.’ It was beautiful!”

“It is a beautiful hymn,” he said gravely. “Old Bernard of Cluny built better than he knew to have it last so long.”

“Bernard of Cluny?” she questioned.

“He was a monk I fancy. Probably he wrote it in his cell—some stone cell in one of the isolated monasteries.”

“When did he write it?” Gail asked impetuously.

“O many years ago—many centuries indeed. In 1100 and something, I believe.”

She smiled. “Isn’t that a fabrication? I mean in the histories.”

“A fabrication?” he said puzzled. “I have not the perfect English, you see, and am not acquainted with that word.”

“It only means something imagined, made up—not quite the truth.”

“Ah, but it is the truth about Bernard of Cluny. He was comforting his sad heart, his loneliness, with dreams. So many of us have to do that.” Again he smiled his quick, flashing smile.

Never, Gail thought, had she seen such dark and brilliant eyes, or such white teeth. The effect against the warm brown of his skin was amazing to her. Perhaps in the south of Europe it would not be so arresting, but here——

Rufus had been off on some investigation of his own; now there was a rush through the underbrush, and the old setter came dashing up to the girl. He walked around the stranger inquiringly, but did not growl or seem alarmed, for he lay down quietly by his little mistress.

“Why did you not follow me, Rufe?” she asked patting him. “You know you were on guard, and when I left Nils Olsen to come into the bush, you were gone! That was very bad of you. It is quite unlike him to leave me,” she said, while Rufus thumped his tail apologetically.

“I cannot at all understand how he could,” the man answered quickly. “But Nils Olsen—you know him then?”

“He is a man my father engaged. He lives at the farm, my father’s farm. This bush is part of it, you see. My father is Marcus O’Sullivan.”

“Ah!” he said shortly. “Yes, I have heard of him.” Then irrelevantly. “He is a great man, this Nils Olsen.”

She raised her strange grey-green eyes, rayed with their black lashes, to his so darkly beautiful.

“Yes,” she said. “I think so too. Nils told me he had been to your camp to help you with a horse that is sick. He is sorry that he could not do more, dreadfully sorry. You—you are one of the gypsies there, are you not?” she added hesitatingly.

“I am the head of the band of people who have come here. A very little band now. We are of the Basques, and great misfortune overtook this handful of us a year ago.”

“A great misfortune?” Gail said inquiringly.

“An avalanche,” he returned briefly. “We—that is those who are here, were living in their village at the foot of one of the Pyrenees. A great storm loosened an overhanging rock and it fell with tons of the earth. Only these escaped, and a few of the others who were away. The rest were buried.”

Gail shuddered.

“Such things do happen,” the man continued, his face pale and inscrutable. “The mountains are never safe, though people live on them and near them, and have always. These were good people. No reason can satisfy us as to why God allowed this. There are so many mysteries we must just accept—the pain of birth and death—devastating flood and fire and drought.”

He gave a little shrug, very foreign in its significance, then went on.

“The eleven of us who were left desired to go away from their country and come to America. They did not ever wish to look upon the mountains again, so resolved to change their way of living and settle upon the fertile land. We have some money, and because of that and of giving our word to become farmers—at least all but I—we were allowed to enter Canada. We may settle near this land.”

“O, not very near!” she exclaimed.

A flush rose in the man’s face.

“You do not wish us to come here?” he asked.

“Not I,” Gail returned, her eyes troubled. “Not I, but my father. It is not anything personal, only that he is conservative, and—and might be difficult with strangers.”

“He came here himself from some far country, did he not?”

“Not he, but his father seventy-five years ago, from Ireland. The land had not been cleared when they took it. Now it is cultivated except a bit of the old bush here and there. You see how he feels, do you not?”

The man shook his dark head. “No,” he said, “not quite.”

Gail had sat down on a log lying beside the great oak. The man was leaning against the gnarled, lichen-grown trunk. He looked down at the young, rose-tinted face, the strangely coloured eyes and lovely shining hair, and a light came into his own eyes that had been so sombre a moment before.

“May I say you are very beautiful?” he asked. “You will not be angry? In Scotland I have seen nearly the same colouring as yours. But not quite the same. No eyes there—or anywhere—are like yours. At home we speak more impulsively perhaps, than here.”

“My brother Shannon says they are like lynx eyes,” she answered with a little laugh.

“Lynx?” he questioned.

“The wild-cat,” she nodded.

“It may be. These wild things have unfathomable eyes, and strangely coloured often.”

“In Scotland—was it there you learned English?”

“Yes, and in other places. But does it mean nothing to you to hear that you are beautiful?—it does not seem to.”

There was an odd vibration in his voice, something that had come into it suddenly.

Gail glanced up into the dark poetic face of an older world.

“O beauty, you know,” she said lightly, “is where you find it. In one’s own eye perhaps.” She trembled a little for no reason it seemed but the unusualness of it all. “But you are wrong, I think. I am not beautiful, but maybe just a little pretty because I am young. My sister Kathleen is beautiful! So she will always be. But I—when my colour fades, and my hair loses its tints, and I grow older—why then I will just be an everyday person. It is Kathleen who will be beautiful through years and years. She is like something carved out of ivory.”

“Who is Kathleen?” he asked absently, his eyes on the curve of her throat.

“My sister. She was in church also, and by the organ.”

“I did not see her,” he explained. “I only saw you.”

A quick tightening came to her throat. She had no words for a moment.

Then she jumped up and shook out her skirts, and Rufus rose and stretched mightily.

“O, I must go! That is the sunset-red, through the trees.”

The man caught her hands.

“Will you not tell me your name?”

“I am Gail O’Sullivan. Really I must hurry. Do you know the minister is coming to tea, and Mrs. Baxter? Father will be furious if I am late.”

“My name is Benedict,” he volunteered still holding her hands, “Gabriel Benedict.”

“Why that is strange,” she cried with a little start. “I told Phyllis you sang like Michael, or Gabriel.”

“Ah,” he smiled, “that was adorable of you. But Phyllis—who is she?”

“Our housekeeper. She was my nurse—but——”

“Yes?”

“But she is dumb. Little and grey, and so still.”

“Dumb,” he repeated, “that is strange—and yet not deaf?”

“O no, she hears everything. See—the red is fading beyond the river. Now I must run! I really must.”

The man laid one of his brown hands on her arm. Gail felt the strength of it through her muslin sleeve.

“How can I see you?” he questioned, impetuously.

“O this is a chance meeting. It could not happen again,” she laughed.

“No, it was not a chance meeting. I was looking for you, and I think, as you came up this way, near the camp—you may have been looking for me;—forgive me if it is not so,” the man returned.

A denial rose to her lips, then was not spoken. Lies did not come easily to her.

“You should not say such things!” she cried softly, with a little catch of her breath. “I belong here. I often come to the bush. I love it. But you—you are foreign—a bird of passage my father said. He calls you—those of your camp—gypsies. He says you are here to-day and gone to-morrow!”

Gabriel Benedict looked at her intently, his eyes dare-devil, perhaps a little insolent and possessive.

“I might stay,” he said, “on a challenge. Your father—the O’Sullivan they call him, do they not—is a man of influence, and I hear proud of descending from an old race and name. Sacred heart! Any Basque is of an older race yet, and an older name I will swear! On this we are quits. Nor are we gypsies, nomads, nor of the Romany, as your uninformed father asserts.”

Suddenly his manner changed.

“Ah, I am sorry,” he pleaded, “I should not speak so to you. Come! Forgive me. Say you will again see me! I have more to tell—indeed.”

“Why, I will see you for a moment or two,” she demurred, “sometime soon.”

“That is too indefinite. Tell me at what time you will see me.”

“You are very difficult to refuse.”

“More difficult than you imagine,” Benedict answered. “Shall it be to-morrow, at three o’clock?”

“Well,—yes,” she nodded, hesitatingly. “To-morrow. Why not?”

“By the riverbank, where we see it yonder?” he asked with his flashing smile.

“Yes,” she nodded again.

Benedict lifted her hand to his lips.

“It is not late,” he said, “and now I will let you go happily.”

So she left him and hurried with the red setter through the darkening woods.

But it was late she realized nearing the house. The lights were lit in the parlour. As they had an early high-tea on Sunday, no doubt it would be over and done. Very well she knew the family would be assembled in the parlour now with the Minister and Mrs. Baxter. But Shannon would not be there. He seldom was. The others would comment on her absence; at least some of them would.

It was best to keep quiet and out of sight until she learned what excuses Kathleen had made for her. Also it would be well to know how she had kept within the semblance of truth and answered her father’s questions.

Blessed Kitty! She would always so gladly bear the lion’s share of blame.

Gail was the only one who dared attempt the light and insouciant answer when at times their father was particularly unreasonable. Shannon simply stayed out of his way; Kathleen dwelt within herself and was disconcerting in her tranquillity. But Gail was not easily suppressed. She occasionally answered him with arguments he could not refute, and once she had said to Phyllis after a reprimand, “O, Phyllis! I cannot understand Kathleen. She obeys father so meekly. She is so unmoved always. I think she feels too little,” and the dumb woman had taken her slate and written, “Or else too much, my dear.”

“Or else too much,” Gail sometimes thought, watching the beautiful face near her, “Too much.”

Standing in the garden near the house a moment, she heard Kathleen playing. She stepped nearer, and saw the minister and his wife resting in much contentment in the big chintz-covered chairs, listening to the music. Her father was sitting near, in a rather somnolent, after-supper fashion. Kathleen’s music was worth listening to, and no one was talking. Apparently the excuses for her absence had been accepted.

But it certainly was wise to slip into the house and go up to her room quietly. Thank heaven the stairs in the old house did not creak; neither doors nor stairs. O’Sullivan hated all indications of the passing of years. Nothing was handed over to moth or rust about his place, or to the rot from damp and dust.

Gail hurried to her room, took off the white dress, put on a kimono and threw herself on the lounge. Then she realized just how tired she was. It had not been the distance she had gone that left her so exhausted. It must have been something else. Something of the mind—of the emotions. She felt as though she had lived a long, long time since she left Phyllis at the porch to go out to the woods; had crossed strange places, thought strange new thoughts, and left something care-free behind her.

She had left Gail O’Sullivan as she had known her hitherto, perhaps. For, closing her eyes, and resting against the little lounge, she knew she was different—a different soul, since she had heard the voice of Gabriel Benedict that morning. Possibly different from the very moment he had stepped into the little church, and she had seen him from the choir gallery.

Who was it Shakespeare had written suffered a “sea-change”? She could not remember, but this was as real. She was not the Gail O’Sullivan of yesterday. A strange delight was in her she had never known before, a delight of the mind, of the spirit, of the senses.

The room was growing dark. A purple twilight came in through the open window bearing the perfumes of the garden, tender, alluring. She held out her arms to it, for all beauty had become so vividly real, so dear.

A step crossed the hall and Kathleen opened the door and came in.

“Thank heaven you are here, Gail!” she cried softly. “When did you come in?”

“Just now, just before it got so dark, Kitty.”

Kathleen drew a long breath.

“O Gail! Why do you do such things? Phyllis said she thought you might have gone to the bush for black-eyed Susies. That didn’t matter, but to stay until after-supper time, when the Baxters were coming! I was so worried. There are gypsies about, you know very well. Anyway, when Dad asked for you and there were indications of trouble, I was desperate, and told him you had a headache, and were lying down, that it was a severe one,—and that served.”

“But, darling, that wasn’t the truth,” Gail exclaimed. “The lie doesn’t appal me, but only that you should tell it. I do not suppose, however, it shocked you to do it. You seem as inexpressive as an ivory idol. But what if I had blown in with the bush flowers?”

“O, I sent out Walter to watch for you. I told him to tell you to go upstairs quietly if we were at supper, and by the other doors if we were in the parlour.”

“You were a dear, Kitty, to tell that story, and send out Wallie.”

“But where were you so long?” Kitty asked.

“Just in the bush, as Phyllis said. But first I saw Nils Olsen in the lane, and we had a little chat.”

“But in the woods?” Kathleen said questioningly, “Why stay two hours until it was almost dark?”

Gail gave a little happy laugh. “It didn’t seem like two hours, Kit. You see I ran across the—the strange man who was in church.”

Kathleen dropped into a rocking-chair. “You don’t mean the gypsy—the one who sang.”

“Yes, darling, if you call him that.”

“But isn’t he? Those unusual grey riding togs, the brass-studded leather belt. O, Gail, he is something wild western, or Romany, or anyway decidedly unlike anyone we know.”

Gail raised her arms above her head. Their round whiteness, and the thick waves of her short hair, caught the light of the new moon shining in at the window.

“Yes, Kitty,” she said, with a little catch of her breath, “he is entirely unlike anyone we know.”

In a blue light woollen frock the shade of the September sky, short-sleeved and plain, sandals, and a wide hat, Gail belied her almost twenty years, as she went through the kitchen the next afternoon.

Phyllis stopped her at the porch door with a little pat on her shoulder. She held up the grey slate. Gail read the words on it and laughed.

“You don’t look grown-up,” they said.

“O, but I am, Phil,” she answered. “There’s no getting around it.”

“You cannot vote till you are twenty-one,” Phyllis wrote.

“Can’t you?” Gale asked. “Well anyway, you can get married, and without anyone’s permission.”

A quick shade of fear crossed the woman’s face.

“You wouldn’t?” she wrote with trembling fingers. “You wouldn’t without your father’s permission, would you?”

“Don’t be so silly, Phil,” the girl answered, kissing her faded cheek. “What makes you think I would dare do such a thing! You have always taught me to regard Dad as the law and the Prophets. If you would like to know, I’m afraid of my father. If I seem not to be it’s bluff, Phil—just pretending. If he were angry, he could be relentless, I feel it.”

The woman’s face grew whiter.

“Yes,” she wrote, “he could.”

Gail laughed again lightly.

“Why, your hand is trembling, Phil! After all, it is only that here he is a sort of God, and you know we are told to fear Him as well as love Him.”

The woman wrote again on her slate.

“Be careful!” ran the words, “You might meet someone in town, or at a dance, or some stranger not of your station. Then if he fell in love with you, my lamb, serious things might happen.”

Seldom, if ever, did she write so long a sentence.

Gail read it, and gave her a light caressing touch.

“O, Phyllis dear, I believe you have been worrying about me. You are tired. Aunt Pansy must come over to help every day; not just when she feels inclined.”

“Are you going to see her?” the woman wrote.

“I think I will. I haven’t seen Aunt Pansy nor Uncle Gideon for two or three days.”

“All right. Please ask her to come over,” Phyllis wrote.

The girl waved and ran through the kitchen garden, and on through the flower garden to the road. Down the road a quarter of a mile, and in a little thicket of wild plum-trees was the original old log house the first O’Sullivan had built for his bride till the big farmhouse was raised.

Now an old coloured couple lived there, and in the town, two of their sons. Aunt Pansy was many years younger than Uncle Gideon. They called them by these southern titles, as they had asked to be so called, when, years before, dusty and tired, they had drifted up that way at harvest time. That was thirty years before. No very coherent reason had ever been given for their arrival, with two little sons, but they had been strong then and willing to work, and Aunt Pansy was a good southern cook. They had come to belong to the farm, and were useful and generally privileged. It was understood that as long as they helped when needed, they could live in the log house and certain money was paid them regularly.

So they stayed year after year, and their sons were not far away. Aunt Pansy had been a head-bound house-servant down south, and still wore a bright bandana wound around her head. No one had ever seen her without it, and it seemed part of her. Also she wore bright patterned dresses and wide white or blue aprons. Gail often said she was quite as ornamental as she was useful. That might have been so, but Pansy was exceedingly useful, and no one, however much she taught them, could ever make Maryland beaten biscuits as could she. And there were other things.

After Gail had seen the old coloured people she hastened through the orchard and the long lane and up to the bush. Her small wrist watch said three o’clock, but she had no intention of being on time.

Now, in the bush she sauntered slowly along through the exquisite golden-green light on towards the river. The air was warm, sun-drenched and scented. The very shadows seemed scented with sweet wild fern and the late summer herbs that are so different from the flowers in perfume. All have a pungent, bitter tang, that gives a strange exhilaration. Here and there in the woods were clumps of wild sage, and thyme, and near the river brittle grasses that were drying sweet as clover. There was a riot of honey-bees over the late flowers and wasps went by, that one had to dodge quickly. They, too, seemed to feel the intoxication of the air for they took so many directions all in the same moment.

As Gail came to the edge of the woods near the river she saw Gabriel Benedict under an oak, leaning against it, as he had yesterday, though now he was smoking. His clothes were less striking than those of Sunday, but he was belted with the same un-English looking, wide-studded belt. No Canadian would have dared to wear it, beautiful as it was. Some worker in leather had spent much time and patience upon it, there was little doubt. As she saw him the thought flashed into the girl’s mind that his clothes suited him as the bark suits a tree, and he wore them as indifferently.

Benedict started forward when he saw her, and lifting her hand kissed it formally.

“I knew you would come,” he said, “though it is after three.”

“I thought you might not wait,” she returned lightly.

He gave her a quick glance.

“How essentially feminine you are,” he commented, noting the charming blue frock and small sandals. “And how young! Alarmingly young to me.”

“I am nearly twenty,” she asserted.

He shook his dark head.

“Ah,” he said. “Twenty—or twenty anything—is very young. I must seem quite ancient to you, for I am——”

“Don’t tell me!” she exclaimed. “Let me guess. Twenty-eight? Thirty?”

“A little more,” he assented gravely. “Quite a little more.” Then his mood changing, “Yet come! It does not matter, does it?”

“No,” she nodded. “It does not matter.”

“I would like to tell you,” he said, “that you are even more lovely to-day than yesterday, but you might think me bold.”

“I do think you are,” she laughed, “if I may say so and not be too rude. But then all——” She stopped.

“I know what you would add, that all gypsies, as your father calls us, are bold and uncouth and not to be regarded seriously. Is it not so?”

The pink rose in her face again.

“I really do not think anything unkind about you. You just seem to me exceptional, different from the men, the few men I have met—a little daring, perhaps. I do not know any other—like you.”

“Come!” he said. “Please listen. Sit down on this old log beside me. I asked you to meet me here to-day, so I might tell you a few things—important to me, perhaps to you. Things I feel compelled to tell you.”

“But why?” she began.

“Because I have seen no one like you either. From the moment I saw you in the little gallery of the church you gave me joy. Just to look at you is to have happiness and realize what life was meant to be. You seem the very essence of joyous life. I said to myself, ‘Here, Gabriel, is beauty and goodness, and tenderness—yes and witchery!’ ”

“No, no!” she cried with a little protesting gesture and laugh. “You must mean Kathleen. She is so lovely, so perfect. I am different. Dad says almost every girl is pretty at eighteen or twenty.”

He threw back his head and laughed also.

“I waive that question.” Then in another tone. “Have you seen the Titian paintings? No? Some day you will; no matter now. But I must tell you the old master painted your hair, exactly. No living man knows how he caught that colour. Myself,” with a little lift of his eyebrows, “I cannot imagine, as he had never seen you.” Then irrelevantly, “Do you know who went up and down in the earth, and to and fro in it?” he ended.

“O yes,” she asserted, “Lucifer, wasn’t it? It is in the book of Job.”

“That is appallingly accurate!” Benedict exclaimed.

“Don’t ask me another,” Gail pleaded, “I remembered that line because it sounded so free and adventurous.”

“The great angel of darkness is adventurous and free,” the man agreed. “Don’t think me like him in other particulars, but in that one I am. I, too, have been going up and down in the earth and to and fro in it.”

“Your people do,” she agreed, “It is expected of them.”

“Ah, no!” he said. “You must discard the idea that I am of gypsy race. It seems ingrained in your mind. My people for the most part stay at home. They are easily content, and are not given to questioning God or Fate, or call it what you will. They accept their destiny in business, in love, in everything. There is a word,” he said with a puzzled air, “that expresses what I mean, but English words elude me often,—in regard to their marriages——”

“Wait a moment,” Gail interrupted, “Propinquity—perhaps that is the word.”

“Yes! yes,” he said, “They do not look far. What is near satisfies them. Sometimes fairly near even by ties of blood. But I seemed to have had a different spirit, even when I was a boy. I was not easily content. Always I have been seeking—seeking for the beautiful, the ideal, the unspoiled, the true.”

The man’s darkly vivid face was alight as he spoke. It was not the face of to-day, it was the face seen often in great pictures of cavaliers and courtiers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. A face that could be deeply sad and profoundly thoughtful when at rest, or bright as with the sun behind it, when interested joyous. A remarkable face keeping the pure lines and of race and the imprint of far days and dreams, when art had risen and enthralled the souls and hearts of men through many countries of Europe.

The little river rippled below them against its flowering banks. The sun was hot upon the damp mosses and fern, and sent its rays through the oak branches. Now and then an acorn fell with a soft thud; the chipmunks came and chattered at them. They seemed alone in a land of fairies; no discord or hint of trouble broke upon it.

“You see,” he said, “I have not been easily satisfied. I have been looking a long time for the reality of what seemed a dream, and I am not any longer really young. Then by chance I wandered into the little church, with all those old graves around it, and there I saw you.”

The girl looked at him through her long lashes, a fleeting look. Her voice was not quite steady, though she spoke lightly enough.

“You are a flatterer. I suppose foreigners are more extravagant in their—their compliments, especially the French and Spanish, or Italian—than Englishmen, or men of Canada. You may have been looking for a type, and perhaps I approach it.”

His face suddenly was very grave and eager.

“Ah!” he said. “At least grant me sincerity! Why should you not? Come a little nearer, and I will light my pipe again and talk to you. This is a very comfortable tree to lean against, and, if you will allow me to say so, I can look at you better here.”

Gail shook her head. “You will make it so persistently personal! I haven’t very long to stay, and you said you had a few things to tell me—of your people and of yourself. That is why I came, for I knew it would be just like a story.”

“Then I must make it interesting,” he assented, the blue smoke curling up from his pipe.

“And I regret to add, short,” she laughed. “I had a wild time when I got home yesterday. You see father expects us to be in for supper—especially when the minister is coming, with his wife. Do you know, Kathleen had an idea of what kept me? There are so few things one can do on Sunday afternoon on a farm, and so very few things to detain one on a little walk through our limited bush. If I had ridden to town my horse would have been gone. But Walter, our farm boy, had seen me go up the lane. So Kit concluded I had later met some one or gone to the gypsy—I mean your camp. She told Dad I was in my room with a headache, and that I believe is the first lie Kitty ever did tell!”

“Who is it said ‘Some lies are nobler than the truth’?” he smiled.

“It is a dangerous theory,” she returned, “at least Kathleen would never have done it for herself.”

“No?” he said a little sceptically.

“You doubt that?”

“On second thoughts, I don’t at all, but I think you an exceeding rare family. Still my own people are usually truthful.”

“That is qualifying the statement.”

“Yes, and I feared you would say that. But remember this is a new world. I come from a country, rather, from just beyond its border, where for years there was a Grand Inquisition, and for years a man called Torquamada. Sometimes when their lies were clever enough his victims escaped the Star Chamber. The race who knew centuries of persecution; and I do not refer to Jews alone, but to all those others they called heretics. Those who did not accept absolutely the dogmas of the Church. These might be forgiven for having their sense of the value of truth somewhat warped. An ancestor of my mother’s who was Spanish, escaped to the Basque provinces, fleeing on the old Roman Road from Saragossa, to escape the Fires of Torquamada. I am happy to think any truth survived in us. I will tell you more if you would like me to?”

“O, I would, Mr. Benedict!” she said eagerly, clasping her hands.

“Gabriel,” he said, his dark face that could flash into such sudden and startling beauty, leaning towards her, “Gabriel—please.”

“Perhaps,” she answered, “the next time I call you by any name.”

He laid his hand a fleeting moment over one of hers, white against the rough log.

“Now I will tell you something of us. You, and your father, have called me a gypsy. That means a rover, a nomad—of the Romany—one with no settled abode. Now listen. None of these names belong to us, or to me. From the time I was sixteen I have had a decided purpose in life. Though a far-away grandmother of mine was Spanish, she married into the Basque race. We are Basques—but a sort of branch of the main nation, which is small at best. For we are mountain folk, and being a little community, lived for the most part in a series of villages near the base of the mountains—the Pyrenees. You know they are a border range, a sort of Franco-Spanish frontier. Some are like a succession of great terraces, terminating in abrupt precipices, with dark and profound ravines and rough mountain torrents or little cascades. The wilderness is greater on the Spanish side of the Basque provinces, perhaps, but there are gay and sunny little plains where maize and wheat are grown, and there are vinelands, where grapes are made into the native wines.

“The village where my people had lived for many generations was near the foot of one of the greatest mountains. Looking upward the little houses seemed dangerously hung from the cliffs, but for years they had been safe, and steps were cut so one could climb to them easily. Near this steepness there was a pleasant valley owned by my father, and there he raised sheep and small and sturdy cattle and goats. All that land is home to me, and I know the difficult passes from Saragossa to Oloron. The country has the grace and charm dangerous places so often have. Love for the mountains was born in us. My father and my elder two brothers were guides through that part of the year when travellers came to climb. But I weary you perhaps?” he said, his eyes on hers anxiously.

“No! No!” Gail exclaimed, “I am carried away by what you say. I have seen so little. Do tell me more!”

“There is not very much more,” Benedict replied. “We had in our village about two hundred souls. With them my father and mother and my four brothers and one sister. Now my two elder brothers and my young sister are married and have children. Then there was an old beloved grandmother, and we had many relatives among the rest. Some were musicians and played very well the antique instruments of the nation. Also they studied and put on little plays, in different towns and even in the Spanish cities. The plays were pastorales, and learned by word of mouth in the winter evenings. They were not unlike the old English mystery plays, but being ancient and very quaint there was call for them at festival times. Besides these things different ones of them danced the Muchiko, a difficult, time-honoured dance, which has survived. During the days of the year when they were locked in more or less by the weather, they practised these things—arts if you will. Life was very simple. For a few months some of them were away, dancing the old Muchiko at the carnivals and fairs, putting on the plays, and making our Basque music. Then they would go, a handful of them, and wander through France and Spain. They would take their wives and children and travel in covered wagons. In a way they were travelling artists, but when they had made a little money they came back to their mountain village. They have preserved the old folk-songs, the dance and the plays. They were not at home ever called gypsies. As for myself——” he said and stopped.

“Yes!” she said breathlessly, “tell me of yourself. Did you go with them?”

“No,” Benedict answered. “I was the odd one in that little village at the foot of Maladetta, the greatest of the mountains. I herded goats for my father spring and summer, and carved wood, or played on a flute we had, or wrestled with my brothers and the other boys in winter, and then——”

“Then?” she echoed.

The man gave her his quick and dazzling smile.

“Then,” he nodded; “The Fates stepped in to change my life. A very great man who was going to climb the mountains stopped at our little house to see my father, who was a guide. This man heard me sing. Did I tell you I was always singing? No? When I was herding the goats I sang, and at home in my mother’s kitchen, and when any would listen. I must have wearied them often,” he laughed, “but this man who knew music, told my father he had found a new voice. He offered to take me away with him to Paris, to have me taught by the masters, and my parents consented to this, though doubtful if anything would come of it. I went gaily, and yet grieved at leaving my mother and the others. But they all thought I would soon return. Only I alone knew I would not—never to stay, that is.”

He paused and refilled his pipe. The girl drew a long breath.

“And then?” she questioned.

“Then,” he went on, “I was caught into another life. Everything was done for me by my friend, the man who took me to Paris. I had the most noted teachers there and in other countries. My voice did not disappoint him, and I worked incessantly. When I was twenty-one I sang in Opera, and from that time on I lived in a golden glow of success. I was as an adopted son to the man who was my patron saint, and repaid my debts to him as best I could with fidelity and devotion. For my own people and the others of the village I did all I could, having been so blessed myself. Not long ago my beloved benefactor died, and to me, he having no heirs, was bequeathed all his possessions. Everything I touched prospered, and as far as these earthly things go I was the favourite of the gods, so it seemed. Why I should have been singled out from the others is to me always amazing. Everywhere I went singing—everywhere life was kaleidoscopic, marvellous. Being a long time in England, singing in London, English became as my own language.”

“What happiness!” she said.

“Happiness is something apart from these things,” the man responded slowly. “It is within the heart, not without. I loved to sing, and it gave me much delight to hear my own voice filling the great opera houses and halls. In some characters—roles—I was almost happy, but never quite. Applause gives a temporary uplifting of the spirit, but it leaves dissatisfaction before the last echo has gone. If I had done creative work—written an opera, or composed a beautiful symphony—perhaps this would have filled my life, but singing left me with a vague discontent. I insensibly looked for what I did not have, for some one perhaps; for love, it may be. Even the gaiety of Paris and Vienna left a sensation of mockery behind it. There was nothing one could grasp, or hold.

“So some years went by.” Benedict paused, his face darkening. “But I have told you this before. Death—that hitherto had not crossed my path—sudden death and tragedy overtook my little village in the Pyrenees. During a violent storm at night a great rock high up on an overhanging cliff was dislodged, and there followed the avalanche. In the utter darkness none could escape who was in its range, even had there been time. No inferno, they told me, could have been more horrible. I, of course, was away, but all that little mountain village was wiped out, and all who belonged to it, except a few who were on the road playing and dancing at the country fairs, and ten others who chanced to be of my own family—my two brothers who were on the mountains as guides, with their parties, my old grandmother whose house was just beyond the track of the avalanche, my sister and her child who with her husband lived with my grandmother. Her husband, who had rushed out at the first sound of the falling stones was killed, and my father and mother and two young brothers, also were lost in their house. My elder brothers’ wives and three children were saved as by a miracle, for they had chanced that very day to go on a little visit to the next village. When day broke the whole formation of that side of the mountain was changed. Where the little houses had been and the green plains for the few cattle and sheep and goats, there was nothing to tell they had ever been there when my brothers, the guides, hurried back and their wives and children returned. Only my old grandmother, my sister, who was now widowed, and her baby were left in the shaken house beyond the debris.”

Gail had covered her eyes with her two hands.

“How horrible!” she cried. “O, how horrible!”

Benedict looked again through the green gloom of the woods, as though he saw something far off.

“I will never speak of it again,” he went on. “But coming here as we have, and being taken for the Romany gypsies, I felt I must let you know what kind of people we are. Just simple mountain people. There is nothing bizarre or strange about us; nothing at all.”

“But why did you—why did you wish to tell me all this?” she said hesitatingly.

“Because you see I do not think we are passing on.”

“Do you mean you really intend to stop in—in Canada?”

“I think we will,” he said gravely. “When I went as fast as I could travel from Paris to the place where my home had been, I found only this distracted handful of people. Their minds were almost unbalanced by what they had lived through, their nerves shattered. They had been gathered together in a town some ten miles away, my grandmother and my sister and her baby, my two brothers and their wives and three little children—ten in all. Everything was wiped out—all were destitute. A second fall of rock had destroyed the last remnant. Our parents, my young brothers, and my sister’s husband gone, and many relatives, my little sister was deranged with shock and grief. Not one of that small group could ever think of living on the mountainside again. They could not even bear to look up at them. Neither could they then decide anything for themselves, so I decided for them, what they must do. I told them we would all go away to a new country—to Canada—when they were able. We would cross the sea, and then drive slowly through the country in covered wagons, as those did who went to the fairs. We would see no more mountains forever. We would look in leisurely fashion for some pleasant place where we could settle away from all that might remind them of home, and my brothers could farm the land or grow fruit. I told them perhaps we had stayed too long in one place; change might be best for the children who were growing up. They let me make all arrangements, so shaken were they in mind and body, even those who had not actually lived through that night but had come back to find all they had known obliterated.”

He filled his pipe again and lit it slowly.

“That is all,” he said, “except that we sailed to Montreal, and came slowly this way. The fact that there was money to finance everything, and that my brothers intended to farm, that, and some influence, was enough to pass us into the country. I am responsible for them, the Government understands. It is a year since the great trouble,” he ended, “for nothing could be done very quickly. Now all, except my sister, are much recovered, and I——”

“Yes?” she said breathlessly, “—and you?”

“And I must return to Europe to my work. I have done nothing for this last twelve months.”

“Nothing?” she said. “O, you have done so much.”

“They have had my time,” he smiled.

Gail looked at the intense, dark face, more beautiful in its way, more given to quick changes of expression, than any man’s face she had ever seen.

“But,” she questioned, “what brought you as far as this county—Northumberland? Quebec is a wonderful province.”

“I know, but we wanted to see Ontario—the great lake. Then I read of a farm for sale, near the lake, with gentle rolling country around it, and it was this farm where we have camped until we settle in the house.”

“But this is Hennessy’s farm,” she said with astonishment, “John Hennessy’s.”

“Not now,” Benedict answered. “It was. We are told he and his family are abroad and will not return here. The place has been sold to me through his agents in the town nearby.”

“How strange!” Gail exclaimed. “How strange we did not know the farm was for sale.”

“It was listed in the papers a day or so.”

“It must have been. But we failed to see it. If we had, my father would probably have bought it, as he has always wanted to extend his land. We did not even hear of the sale.”

Benedict shook his head and smiled whimsically.

“I bought it as soon as it was on the market; having come up here by myself to see the land. The little river decided me to take it. But I have made a wrong beginning, by acquiring what your father desired—is that it?”

“It is a little bit unfortunate,” Gail admitted. “I mean, it does not help.”

“Why did not this Mr. Hennessy let your father know he wished to sell the land?”

The colour rose in the girl’s face.

“O that’s another matter. My father and John Hennessy did not agree very well.”

“Ah, I see,” Benedict nodded. “Well, we are to be neighbours. We will try to be good neighbours. My people will adapt themselves to the ways of the country as quickly as possible. They will work hard trying to forget. I hope peace can be kept with everyone. Forgive me for my long, unhappy story. I could not come here, and see you, and not tell you.”

Gail rose and went over to where he leaned against the rough bole of the oak. She touched his arm lightly, and her eyes were misty.

“It was a wonderful story of loyalty and devotion,” she said softly. “You did not know how much you told me more than the story.” Then she laughed tremulously. “How could Dad ever have thought you were a gypsy!”

“There are fine gypsies,” the man said. “Myself, I do not care for travelling in covered wagons, and I rode. But the others would not have liked the railway journey. Also they wanted to see the land. So we trekked, in the time-honoured way,—as your own American people crossed the western prairies following the sun-flower trail—as they went sometimes in Australia—as they go short distances in rural parts of Europe. But we did not use oxen—we have gone a step from the primitive,” he laughed. “Settling here my brothers will become good farmers. I will leave capable men to help and instruct them. Their children will be good Canadians. There is a rolling wooded country behind there, the beautiful lake to the south. There are no more mountains.”

Gail looked up into the poetical face, at the deep luminous eyes bent on her.

“It is all exactly like some strange, impossible novel,” she mused. “So apart from our own commonplace lives, I’m afraid, Mr. Benedict.”

“Ah, ‘Gabriel,’ please!” he requested, bending towards her. “But no! There are no commonplace lives, I have found. These Basques, of mine, are more simple than Canadians. More elemental, perhaps. More easily pleased, and more easily hurt—and they have the everyday virtues, but they are each one very distinct, and individual.”

“You,” said the girl glancing up through her dark lashes, “you, yourself, are quite terribly cosmopolitan.”

“But that means nothing,” he shrugged. “I am just like my brothers, the mountain guides, neither better nor worse. If one studies any art it takes one to the world cities. The Basque language is only useful at home, so we had French as well, and Spanish as a tradition and quite naturally as my mother——” again he stopped and looked far through the trees. “My mother,” he went on, “spoke it well.”

“You are like no one I have ever seen,” Gail said impulsively. “You and your story are apart from the things that touch my life.”

“Do not say so!” Benedict interrupted. “I am like every other man you have known, at least in this—that, seeing you once he must see you again.” A sudden flame burned in his eyes, and he ended unsteadily.

Gail shook her auburn head.

“You have seen me three times, Mr. Benedict.”

“Gabriel!” he said again.

“If it would make you happier,” she laughed. “It is a lovely name to say. May I add, if they go to supper again before I get home, Gabriel, I don’t know what will happen, but it will not be anything pleasant. My father is the possessor of the most rabid temper in the county, though his bark is a bit worse than his bite. Anyway, we all usually obey him.”

Gabriel Benedict lifted his brows.

“So?” he said.

“O yes indeed! He is the master of his Fate, and the captain of his soul, and ours too. Not but what he is a dear father. But we are all a little afraid of him, and I must hurry.”

“Still it is less late than yesterday,” he said walking along beside her through the scented shadows. “I would not have you find any trouble at home, by reason of me, and yet——”

“And yet?” Gail questioned in an amused way.

“And yet, even at risk of disquieting your august father, I intend to see you again—unless that is against your will?”

Disregarding his last words, Gail went on quickly.

“You must not misunderstand father. He thinks you are gypsies—just everyday gypsies. He is prejudiced and of course wrong,” she ended.

“He is entirely wrong,” Benedict said gravely. “Please tell him the truth. Tell him we now own the land. I have paid for it and hold the deeds. Now all the business is completed. And tell him we will endeavour to be good neighbours. About here, I believe, have settled some Germans, a Danish family and a Welsh. Also there are Scotch and Irish, and I have already met a man hired by your father, a Norwegian. He tells me he intends to farm in Canada.”

“Nils Olsen,” she said.

“Yes, Olsen. Typically Norse—like a Viking.”

They had come to the edge of the woods where the trees were fewer.

“May I go through the lane and across the field and orchard with you?” he asked. “I greatly desire to.”

Gail refused with a little positive shake of her head. “Better not. If my father is—is inclined to be friendly when you meet—which I do not expect—we may meet again. But, believe me, I will not sleep for thinking of all you have told me.”

“I will not sleep for thinking of you,” the man said, bending his dark head towards her. “Do you imagine I will let you go with any such slender promise to see me. When will it be?”

“Soon, probably,” she laughed. “The roads all run to the village or to town.”

He paid no attention to her banter.

“Do you ride?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“And by chance would you be riding to town to-morrow afternoon, at, say, two o’clock?”

“I must keep grandmother company to-morrow afternoon. We do not leave her much of late, she is so frail.”

“Then to-morrow evening? There will be a full moon.”

“You are difficult to refuse,” the girl said, drawing a quick breath.

“Ah, you will not refuse?” he said. “How could anyone be so lovely, so flower-like, and so young, and yet not be kind! I have not had much delight in life lately, and only to look at you is a delight.”

Gail glanced up at the man’s dark, old-world face, and suddenly remembered she had seen one like it. It was the face of a fifteenth century courtier, a Spanish or Italian courtier in a picture in an art gallery of Montreal, a picture painted by Velazquez; one loaned to the collection. It was of a man in a wide feathered hat and scarlet velvet cloak, and with a sword at his side. The face was of a type belonging to the Renaissance. Fine and yet strong in outline, deeply melancholy in repose, but yet which one felt could be swiftly alight or mirthful when stirred by emotion. A face with the imprint of race and long breeding upon it.

With a little start she realized she had been looking at him closely.

“Forgive me!” she said. “I have just realized that I know who you are like. You are like a courtier, a Spaniard I think, in a picture loaned to an art gallery in Montreal. I saw it when I was there at school. It was painted by—by Velazquez—if I remember.”

“O,” he laughed. “I think I know that picture. I am supposed to resemble one of his red-cloaked cavaliers. But come! You have not yet told me.”

“About to-morrow night?” she asked. “Let me think—but I should not even think about it.”

“Do you want to see me?” he questioned. “If so, tell me quickly.”

She shook back her auburn curls.

“Of course,” she said suddenly. “But let me think. To-morrow night father is going to a political meeting in town. Shannon and Bob will be out, no doubt. Kitty is spending the night in town at a friend’s—there is a little dance at the College there. Phyllis is always in anyway. Yes, I will see you. In the orchard if you like. The old trees are so friendly. Or we can walk through the lane if the moon comes up—and you can tell me more.”

“I promise you the moon,” Benedict told her. “Will it be just after dusk?”

“Yes,” she nodded, “at deep dusk. But see! You have nearly come through the lane with me! O, I must run!”

He stood watching her as she went across the field and into the orchard. Then she turned and waved to him, and was lost among the old apple trees.

“Beautiful!” he said softly. “O beautiful, and sweet! It is not yet six. She will be in time. This man they call ‘The O’Sullivan’—I must not let her be long afraid of him.”

Lighting his pipe again he went back to the farm that now was his, a new impatience in his heart, his eyes eager and young.

With a conscience a little troubled Gail flew along under the trees jewelled with their red and gold and russet fruit and then across the road through the garden and up to the house.

Her father had not come in, for all knew when he was in the house. His was a pervading presence. The long, dark table, beautifully set, still awaited the family. Besides the great salt cellar, there was a deep blue bowl of late roses. Gail stopped a moment to look at them. Never had roses seemed so entrancing to her before. Then she ran upstairs to change her gown for supper.

Kathleen opened the door between their rooms and called “Hello!”

“Hello!” Gail answered, wiping her hands with exaggerated care. “I see you got home from town early!”

“And you, darling,” Kathleen laughed, “where did you get home from?”

“O, the woods,” she threw back lightly. “The September woods, Kitty, golden-green—perfumed—heavenly! And the riverbanks are a dream. One wants to live forever just to see them every September. If Shakespeare had seen our little river he would have written ‘I know a bank whereon the wild grapes grow.’ ”

Kathleen appeared at the door, lovely, and with a little colour from her ride.

“Don’t be difficult, Gail,” she said. “Of course I know it wasn’t just the woods. I have a feeling it was the man who was in church—the gypsy. That you saw him again.”

The girl made no denial. She only smiled in a reminiscent sort of way.

“He is not a gypsy, Kitty. None of the people with him are gypsies. They came to Canada to forget—to escape the effect of a terrible tragedy.”

“I hear father,” said Kitty. “Tell me about it by and by, darling. Now, just hurry!”

They went downstairs and entered the long room together.

Their father was standing impatiently waiting for them, and the two hired men were there. Shannon was absent. Shannon so often was. Bob came in, handsome and sunburned.

Young Walter was helping Phyllis. A certain courtliness was always observed by the dour old man, and he held Kathleen’s chair until she was seated, his mother not being with them, and Bob politely grinned and held Gail’s for that most independent young person.

Nils Olsen gave his clear-eyed sweeping glance along the table, dwelling for an infinitesimal longer time on Kathleen.

“Still waters,” he said to himself.

Tom Grey was frankly hungry as a great ox that had been out in the fields. A healthy, pleasant-looking, simple fellow, Tom Grey. Wallie slipped into his place rosy and fresh. Phyllis went soft-footedly, serving all with a peculiar impartiality. She never seemed to listen, however interesting the conversation might be.

The O’Sullivan took his supper swiftly, and like the head of the nation at royal suppers, when he had finished, all were finished. This called for an expedient rapidity of choice, and little conversation until the end of the meal.

The girls took things daintily but with good appetites. Wallie gobbled with sundry reprimands from Phyllis’ eyes. Nils Olsen followed his master’s example with swift unobtrusiveness. He knew what he liked and made small work about it, being one of those who eat to live.

Finally O’Sullivan leaned back in his great black bog-wood chair, a relic of the ancient Irish home, and lit his pipe. Olsen and Tom Grey and Wallie rose to go when he hit the table with his knife-handle as was his usual call for attention.

“Wait all of you!” he said, his voice ominously calm, “and you go to your work in the buttery, Phyllis, and clear the table later.”

Phyllis faded from the room.

Olsen and Grey stood behind their chairs prepared to listen to something disturbing, while Bob sauntered over to the fireplace, to knock the ashes from his pipe. He looked slightly amused, at least his eyes did. He did not risk a smile. Kathleen and Gail still sat at the table. Kathleen a shade whiter than usual, Gail leaning forward in a tense listening.

“I told ye,” the old man began, “to have nothing to do at all with these road-folk up at Hennessy’s—trespassers on the land while the family’s away. They are common wagon-travellers, unbeknown to any of us. Romany gypsies likely. Now one at least of ye has disobeyed me!”

There was a sort of tingling silence and Gail caught a quick breath.

Then Nils Olsen stood up straight behind the chair where he had been leaning carelessly. Kathleen suddenly realized his unusual height and the suggestion in his frame of great strength. The men in the family, all large men, were not comparable with him in size.

In the sudden pause each one in the room thought swift, disconcerting thoughts.

Then Olsen spoke slowly, the words marked by his unusual accent.

“I think I must be the one you mean, sir. I have been up to what you call their camp.”

“You went after what I told ye all?”

“I did, sir. One of the men said they had a very sick horse, and would be glad of help,—the man I was speaking to, directing on his way, when you saw me. The horse he said was suffering, and he wanted a veterinary. But the veterinary is a long way off, and it would take time to bring him over. So as I know a little about horses, I took some medicine and went over myself.” Then as by afterthought, “It happened to be a very valuable horse.”

O’Sullivan had listened in a glowering silence. Gail’s little hands relaxed their tense clasp; Kathleen drew a fluttering breath.

“Well, Olsen,” the old farmer remarked grimly, “That’s a good explanation. A horse is no one’s enemy. We’ll pass it over this time. But you’d have done better to ask my permission and advice.”

“I understood you were in the village at the time, sir,” Olsen answered stiffly. “It was no case for delay.”

“Just let the incident drop then,” O’Sullivan said sharply. “Next time they’ll not be asking ye about a sick horse. Leave the foreign riff-raff alone. We are the dumping-ground for too many of them. What with the yellow peril they have let in on the Pacific coast, and the naked Doukabours in the west, and the rabid reds in the cities, it has come to a fine pass! The scum of Europe and Asia has been passed through the gates. God help us!”

Then his harangue stopped suddenly, and looking around he said in a direct way.

“There are rumours going about concerning these folk at Hennessy’s—rumours I’m not liking either.”

“There are more than rumours, Uncle Marcus,” Bob broke in.

“What then?” he asked vehemently. “Where did ye hear anything definite about them? They are just passers-by, fly-by-nights one would think.”

Bob smiled in his unruffled way. The situation amused him. There was no reason in his uncle being so disturbed. After all, he was on eight hundred acres of land, with the King’s highway running close by. No one could annoy him unless he gave them power to do so, and what newcomer would court unpopularity in the county by causing any trouble!

If they found land cleared and cultivated that was their good fortune. Certainly the work must be carried on by willing hands or the country would revert to the primeval. Deserted farms in both Canada and the States testified to how quickly work could be undone that had taken years to do.

“What did ye hear Bob?” thundered the old man.

“Why, I met Hirman Bent last night,” Bob said casually, “and he had heard about these people in town. They passed through and stopped a few days, it seemed. They are well-to-do, though travelling in four covered wagons, and on horseback—much better off and equipped than any Americans who crossed the prairie trail out west years ago. But he said he heard the leader of the party had bought the Hennessy farm, and was going to place the others there. There are eleven in all. One of the women to be very ill. She is young and beautiful and has a baby over a year old.”

O’Sullivan had half-risen.

“Do you know what you are saying, Robert?” he asked hoarsely. “Hennessy’s farm is Hennessy’s farm. Though he’s away he wouldn’t be selling it this way. No notice has been put up of any sale. It’s outrageous nonsense.”

“I know nothing definite,” Bob returned. “I repeated what I had heard, Uncle Marcus. But really I hardly think any word would have been sent—well—to us of Mr. Hennessy’s intentions. I have always understood relations between this farm and his were a bit strained.”

“The man knew I’d have bought his land if it were on the market,” O’Sullivan said in a tense voice. “To hand it over to foreigners is a crime.”

Bob flicked the ash from his cigarette.

“Hardly a crime, Uncle Marcus. There are Germans farming west of us, and a Danish family not far away. Nils Olsen himself has spoken to me of settling in Ontario eventually. All hereabout are not Canadian-born.”

The old man uttered a harsh oath. So seldom had any of them heard him actually swear, a surprised movement ran along the table. Things were serious when he did not keep within the limits of the commandments.

Kathleen rose. “Excuse me, father, I am a little tired of—of the discussion.”

There was a gentle dignity about her Bob liked.

Gail followed, the lovely red of her hair and rose tint of her face seeming to drain the dark room of all colour.

“Some of the early apples should be gathered this week, sir,” Olsen remarked, going towards the porch door with Tom Grey. “The early Baldwins. The Mackintosh Reds are coming on and the Spies. It’s been a fast ripening season.”

“I know, I know,” O’Sullivan said irritably. “We’ll look to it. The barrels are ready, and when they are packed I’ll see about the shipping myself.”

“Very well, sir,” the Norwegian returned, stepping out into the sunshine.

Bob left on affairs of his own. Wallie stopped to help Phyllis. O’Sullivan, who had risen, dropped back in his chair in moody silence, but the moodiness was like a smouldering fire.

Presently he called Phyllis. The woman came softly in from the summer kitchen.

“Listen!” he said heavily, “has any news of these covered wagon people come your way? Come! Don’t lie.”

She lifted the little slate and wrote, “I have heard that one of the men sang like an angel in church on Sunday.” Then apart by itself, “I do not lie.”

O’Sullivan glanced at the words.

“So you say,” he sneered. Then, “Who told you this man sang like an angel?” he added dangerously.

“Gail,” she wrote, lifting the slate towards him, and looking into his angry eyes with hers as always, cool and mysterious.

“Miss Gail,” the old man said with swift menace, “Miss Gail, you hear.”

Phyllis glanced up at him again, then with a slow, non-committal smile left the room.

O’Sullivan still sat there, his heavy brows drawn in thought.

“So Hennessy’s gone,” he commented to himself. “A good riddance. He was a poor farmer and a worse neighbour. All the weeds on his land flourished and seeded on my land. To Hell with him. For all of his airs he came of common stock.”

With a significant movement he lifted his fine silvery head and stared down the ancient table to where the high salt with its half obliterated coat of arms stood in its shining beauty.

“I’ll not have the land next mine go from bad to worse,” he muttered. “Nor will I have this county contaminated by the off-scouring of either the British Isles or Europe. The O’Sullivans cleared this farm and they’ll look after it. Ay! Trust them to do that! If what Bob told me is true, we’ll get these newcomers out root and branch; they shall not make it their abiding-place whether they have bought the land or not. I’ll none av them!—A rotten trick Hennessy played me selling it on the sly,—behind me back. A rotten trick no gentleman would play on another.”

He got up stiffly, for of late his limbs had surprised him by being unreliable. Then he hung up his coat and put on his hat, going out in his cool shirt sleeves as was his way, and turning his steps towards the orchard.

Phyllis from the buttery window watched him. Her lips moved but no sound came.

“He grows old,” she said silently, but pleasantly. “He grows very old—and tiresome.”

Kathleen and Gail went directly into the garden and along a path that led to the summer-house. The garden had been laid out long ago with cedar hedges and flower-beds filled with old-fashioned flowers. Many such gardens surround the fine farmhouses in that county, and this was only exceptional in having been more carefully tended than most. Some fully-grown walnut-trees grew here and there, throwing wide shadows, and a row of ancient locust-trees overhung the highroad that ran in front, with their lacy leaves.

A trumpet-vine covered the summer-house, a little rustic place with work table and comfortable chairs, where Kathleen often mended linen, or read.

To-day, though, there was a certain restraint between them, and their conversation flagged, though they sat and sewed for a little while in the pretty place. There was always some mending to be done. Then Kathleen threw down her work.

“I’m going over to the orchard to look at my apple trees. You know Dad gave me a dozen Mackintosh Red trees? Remember?”

“Of course. The day he gave me the little Jersey. Now I’ve two Jerseys, but you only have twelve trees still,” she said with a little laugh.

“But barrels of apples! I’m going to help pack them myself, and they are to be sent to England.”

“You should wrap a few sentimental lines plainly written around one of the Reds, something like this: ‘Whoever finds this apple may know it was grown on Kathleen O’Sullivan’s tree, Tullamore Farm, Northumberland County, Ontario. With this apple goes her warmest wishes. (P.S. She is young, not unattractive, and has a nice little intelligence.)’ Suppose it fell into the hands of a young duke or lord! And suppose he were filled, like the elephant’s child, with ‘saitable curiaosity’—and suppose he wrote to you or something. What larks, Kit!”

“Darling, your imagination certainly runs away with you. I never heard anything so absurd. By the way, that was a queer rumour Bob heard. You don’t think John Hennessy has really sold his farm to these camping people, do you, Gail?”

She paused a moment, then spoke gravely.

“Yes, Kathleen, I do.”

“Then you know more than you are telling me.”

“Perhaps.”

“Whom has he sold it to—what person?”

Gail smiled a little.

“To the man who came to church on Sunday, late: who sang. He is—well—the head of the family though not the oldest. He is taking care of them.”

“Is it a family then?”

Gail nodded. “Oh, I cannot tell you any more, Kitty.”

“But you know more,” Kathleen returned quickly. “You are too transparent, Gail! You have seen this man more than once. Of course I know that. Now listen, Baby, it won’t do to see him. You cannot amuse yourself that way; if Dad found out——”

“If Dad found out I had disobeyed him there would be blood on the moon!” she laughed; then the laugh died away. “Do you realize, Kathleen, we have a tyrant in father? An early Victorian domineering man whom we are afraid to cross. They pervaded England, Ireland and Scotland at that time. Elizabeth Barrett suffered from one of them. Father is a sort of—survival. He has queer complexes. Fortunately anti-marriage is not one, or we might end our days on the farm. His only proviso would be that he select the bridegroom. I am positive that our mother must have been like sweet Alice in the Ben Bolt song, and wept with delight when he gave her a smile, and trembled away at his frown. O, I hate talking this way, or discussing father! Run away to the orchard and leave me.”

Kathleen looked at the lovely, rebellious face.

“Dear,” she said, “do try and remember how generous he has been with us when he hates spending money: how hard he has worked; how he hates new foreign settlers.”

“He engaged Nils Olsen.”

“Anyone can see Nils Olsen is different,” Kathleen said. “It is perfectly evident he comes of fine people.”

“Well,” Gail returned, her red mouth curling a little, “he is willing to sit with Tom Grey, below the salt.”

Kathleen gave her a strangely impersonal glance. The serenity of her face did not change, and Gail could not know her clasped hands were trembling.

“Why yes, darling,” she nodded, “he is. He chooses to do so. Have you forgotten the words upon a certain royal coat of arms? ‘I serve’.”

Then she got up, dismissing the topic of conversation with a little gesture.

“I depart to look at my apple trees. After that Wallie must saddle Bronze, for I am riding to town. I’ve promised to stop over until to-morrow with Jane Clayton as there is a special meeting of the I.O.D.E. to-night. Be nice to Dad. He is so upset over the sale of Hennessy’s land. He has always said he would buy it if it were on the market.”

“Dad is land-mad,” Gail answered with a little shrug.

“It seems an obsession with him,” Kathleen admitted. “By the way, how odd it is that travelling folk coming here in covered wagons should have enough money to buy such a place! There is something extraordinary about the whole thing. It seems strange to you doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Kitty,” she answered absently. “Very strange.”

“Well, I fly!”—opening the gate for across the road was the orchard. “Perhaps you won’t be in sight when I come back. If I don’t see you, Gail dear, do be careful. I mean if you should chance to see the—the——”

“Gypsy?”

“Yes, darling. Don’t talk to him any more. Don’t give father cause for further annoyance.”

“He has no cause now, Kitty,” she said. “He only imagines he has. So run along and count your apples. And you also beware the serpent, O daughter of Eve! For me, I am going in. I saw an earwig!”

“I’m sure you didn’t!” Kitty called back. “It was just a young daddy-long-legs. Earwigs are English. We don’t have them.”

“Well, it was something that chirped and stood on its head!”

“Then it must have been a katydid,” came the answer from across the road.

“Anyway, I’m going in! I don’t choose to be alone with it—it is too complicated an insect!”

A light laugh drifted back to her.

The girl’s face suddenly changed and a new tension came into it. “The Red Mackintosh apple trees!” she said. “What have they to do with it? Kit has gone to the orchard because Nils Olsen is there.” She gave a little shrug and started towards the house. “Oh, Kit, why tell me to be careful,” she laughed.

Olsen and Grey and Walter were packing the Baldwin apples which were far from her own trees, when Kathleen reached the orchard. The ladders were all up, and the barrels being quickly filled. O’Sullivan was giving directions in his short, decided way, but he realized the Norwegian had a facility and intelligence no hired man of his had hitherto possessed. It was difficult to find any fault with him. Looking at him now from under his beetling brows, appraising his size and strength, O’Sullivan wondered at his gentle willingness to take orders and give obedience.

“He is like a soldier,” he thought. “Once having accepted his position he does not question any conditions or commands. I wish he were an Irishman, and not a damned foreigner.”

This afternoon a dangerous light smouldered in O’Sullivan’s eyes. More than the fruit shipping was on his mind.

“Olsen,” he said, “I see my daughter over yonder. The apples on her trees are about ready for packing. See she has what attention she needs, and that the barrels are separately marked and sent where she directs.”

A strange indulgence was in the dour old farmer for his children, and he played no favourites.

He might have been well content this golden September day, for never had there been a more generous year. The trains had left the little village of Kimberley laden with his crops, and there was more for them to carry. The corn was almost ripe, and the hay had gone to town in great loads. No beast about the farm would be underfed no matter how long the winter, and the old birch-logs were piled in satiny heaps for his fireplace in the kitchen, and parlour,—fireplaces that kept a back-log burning from November until late April. There would be no scarcity of any necessary thing this year.

No more independent man lives than the prosperous Canadian farmer, and O’Sullivan was all of that. In his Irish make-up was a great Scotch thrift caught probably by his ancestors from their next door neighbours. The two most independent callings were those of the farmer and the fisherman, he had often said, owing their living, the one to the soil, the other to the sea, and he was one who rejoiced in his independence.

Now looking across his orchard at his ladened trees he saw dollars hanging from the branches instead of emerald and crimson apples. The stacks of yellow corn standing in the river-side fields, turned into stacks of gold to his calculating eyes. Wheat and oats lay stored in his barn awaiting better prices, and he always sold at high tide. So it went, and a counterpane of invisible dollars was spread over his farm, quite clear to his inner eye.

Presently he went across to Kathleen.

“Well, my girl,” he said, “ye have a great crop. I’ve told Olsen to look after the fruit for you. Don’t go falling from the trees yerself.” He tossed her something resembling a smile, quickly gone. “I’m off to the village to find out if the stories about these birds up at Hennessy’s are true. If they have any intention of building their nests in this county, settled by Christians, they will be disillusioned. We’ll have none av them—and I’ll give them a short shrift.”

“O what can you do, father?” she answered, lifting her direct disconcerting eyes to his stormy face.

“Do?” he repeated savagely. “There’s plenty I can do, my girl! I’ll rouse the countryside! We’ll make it too hot for them. They’ll have no chance to take root here.”

Kathleen broke off an apple leaf and held it to her face.

“O, Father,” she said softly, “Why not let them alone, at least until you find out what they are like. They might prove to be good neighbours. At least they are not penniless emigrants.”

“Don’t talk to me!” he said sharply. “I know what I am about. If not gypsies, they are vagabonds from some little European State or other. They are not even straight Italians or Spaniards, but are straight undesirables in my opinion. They’ll not settle here.”

“That man who joined in the singing in church, Father, who sang in English—and as no one in our little church ever did sing before,—he was one of them.”

“I’ll not bandy words with you, Kit. Many of these travelling people pick up a bit of our tongue, and they are given to singing.”

“They don’t sing as he did,” she affirmed, her attitude unchanged.

A hot light burned in his eyes.

“I’ll not hear anny more from you!” he said finally, “nor have you side against me. I’m going to the village, and if what I hear is true, by to-night plans will be made to rid the place of the riff-raff.”

Kitty said nothing, but watched him stride away, his silvery head set defiantly on his wide, gaunt shoulders.

“There was a great strength about him yet,” she thought.

He was a forceful, even perhaps a dangerous man—though his family did not realize that.

She remembered a story she had heard of his father, her grandfather, the first settler on this land, and she drew a quick breath thinking of it. Her eyes widened as they followed O’Sullivan out of sight and her hands were tight shut.

Nils Olsen crossed to where she stood.

“Your father told me I was to give you any help you needed with your trees, Miss Kathleen,” he announced with his pleasant smile. “It will be a great pleasure,” he added.

“Thank you, Nils,” the girl smiled back. “I won’t have any packing started to-day, for you have your hands full. To-morrow perhaps?” she questioned.

“Yes, to-morrow,” he nodded, his clear northern blue eyes on her lovely face.

“Nils!” she said suddenly, “I am dreadfully worried because father is so keyed up about these people at the Hennessy place. He speaks of making them go away. My grandfather”—she paused—“my grandfather was a very hot-tempered man, I have heard grannie say.”

“The little old lady would know,” Nils put in.

“Yes. We did not know him, but once I heard her say ‘it put fear into me when Himself went into one of his rages.’ And well it might have, Nils. The story is whispered that he killed a man in Ireland—one he was jealous of, one who danced too often with my grandmother at a ball.”

“So?” said Olsen in a tense sort of way.

“Yes. She was a beauty in those days, the legend goes. My grandfather wrestled with this man too near the edge of a cliff and someway threw him over.”

“What did they do with him then, Miss Kathleen,” the cool voice asked.

“They did nothing—except that the judge before whom the case was tried advised him to leave the country. That was after he was acquitted. You see, he had been arrested on the charge of—of——”

“I see,” Olsen nodded.

“My grandmother said no jury in Ireland would bring him in guilty for a mis-step in wrestling. But—anyway he came to Canada after that.”

Olsen gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

“It’s a nice question,” he remarked slowly. “Maybe the other gentleman would have thrown your grandfather over had he had the better grip.”

“Of course he wasn’t my grandfather then,” Kathleen said with a little catch in her voice. “He was only twenty-one and just married.”

“I don’t blame him for being jealous,” Olsen commented shortly, “if——”

“If?” she questioned.

“If your grandmother was like you, in those days. Forgive me, I did not intend to say it.”

A little rose-colour came up in the magnolia whiteness of her face.

“O, it does not matter!” she said lightly. “It was a very nice speech. I believe gran does think I am like an old daguerreotype of herself.”

“That is interesting, and I would like to see the picture.” Olsen returned gravely. “Now your sister is quite different.”

“Yes, different rather, though my Uncle Brian, who was lost at sea, had red hair they say.”

Then she looked up with troubled eyes.

“O Nils! This is beside the question. I fear there will be trouble over these gypsies. What do you think father will do?”

“If they have bought the farm, as report says, there is nothing much he can do. Don’t let it worry you. Once passed into the country by the immigration authorities the law is on their side. Little can be done, though perhaps some trouble might be started.”

“Nils,” she said, her voice uncertain, “can’t you influence father to drop the matter; to leave them alone?”

“I?” he exclaimed incredulously.

“Yes,” she nodded, with a quick fluttering breath. “Yes, you Nils.”

In his eyes there burned a sudden blue flame.

“I will try,” he answered slowly.

“I know you will! Now I must run. To-morrow we’ll pack the apples.”

“I will be over here at seven,” he smiled.

With a little good-bye wave Kathleen started for home through the orchard, under the jewelled trees.

A vast quiet seemed to be over the O’Sullivan farm, called far and wide “Tullamore.” Always in September before the rains and wind came, there was this little satisfying pleasant time. Though the fruit was not all gathered, and there was yet work in the moving and storing of crops, still the hour of achievement had come. The gold was on the pumpkin, though not the frost. The white gold of the wheat, and deep gold of the corn was assured. The garnered fields were still beautiful in their way, as many rough things are.

Flocks of birds were gathering, and like Ruth among the alien corn, gleaning what the reapers had left. But the wild geese had not yet come sweeping down from the north, though duck were winging their way to Rice Lake for the wild rice, and to the great St. Clair flats.

Now the late afternoon light was a mellow glow quite different from the blue brilliance of July and August afternoons.

Even the little river running through the farm seemed to sing a song of content, and its banks were unbelievably charming, being a tangle of grapevines and Virginia creeper, set with medallions of black-eyed daisies and starry asters, scarlet wild salvia, and mauve mint.

At the water’s edge bull-frogs croaked at intervals, their spring gladness long past. There was good fishing in the stream, and the eager trout leaped out of the water at sundown, falling back in shining silver half-moons.

Now the quail ran happily through the rifled corn fields, suddenly calling “Bob-White, Bob-White,” and dropping into long silences. The crickets were quite mad, chirping for no reason one could tell all the hours in and out. The sound of them became a part of the September day, but about the country no one seemed to notice it.

Now and then the tinkle of a distant cow-bell floated across the fields like a sound from fairyland, and the ringing of a queer old sheep-bell brought years ago from Ireland, and still used on the wise old bell-wether who guarded the little flock at the north of the farm, drifted in like an echo from far years.

Quiet lay over the farm like a bloom, though in the heart of the old farmer himself was a seething rage.

Kathleen rode to town where she was to spend the night with her friends.

Bob had motored into the country to see about buying stock. O’Sullivan went early in his light buggy to attend a political rally. Shannon, as so often happened, had faded from the family picture after dinner, and after putting old Rufus through tricks he despised and no longer performed with the verve of former days.

Gail had wondered whether he would be at home in the evening or not. Probably not. But in a sort of desperation she hoped nothing would keep him.

If Shannon was at loose ends he might ask her to motor with him, for his car was his latest acquisition and his enthusiasm for it ran high. If Shannon were about, the difficulty of escape became increasingly difficult. Her heart beat suffocatingly at the thought, and she went out of doors restlessly.

Shannon followed with old Rufus at his heels.

The sun had gone down, and a silvery pink light flooded the garden; a fleeting beauty rare and unearthly.

“I think we are going to have a storm, Baby,” Shannon said, calling her by her nursery name and lighting his cigarette. “It is growing warmer, and these coloured atmospheric effects always seem foreboding. Some disturbance usually follows.”

Gail pushed back her cloud of red hair.

“It is hot,” she agreed. “We might try the summer-house. The trumpet-vine has kept the sun out all day. There’s not a breath of air stirring.”

“It means storm,” Shannon insisted.

“Do you think it will come soon?” she asked carelessly.

“O we may only have some sheet lightning. After all,” he said looking at the sky, “the real storms come at the equinox, a bit later. Well, as soon as I’ve smoked this cigarette I’m going to town.”

“For the evening?” she asked, a little tremble in the words.

Shannon grinned cheerfully. “Why yes, honey, for the evening.”

“I know there is someone,” she commented as they went along by the cedar hedge.

“What insight!” he returned.

“I am not in the least curious,” she said with spirit. “Don’t imagine I will ask a single question—though I know you would love me to. But, Shannon——”

“Yes?” he said lazily.

“Be careful, dear. If it is not anyone Dad would like, you know. He is most awfully on edge just now.”

“On edge!” Shannon echoed. “Ye gods! We are all sitting on a powder-barrel! One spark, and up go the gay O’Sullivan family. If it is true these wagon people have come here to take up land, especially if it is true Hennessy’s farm was on the market and they bought it, I fear, my child, we are in for a turbulent time. In his heart Dad has always coveted that bit of land,” he ended.

“I know,” she smiled ruefully. “But if it’s sold, it’s sold, and that’s all.”

“Quite, as the English say,” Shannon smiled. “And it’s nonsense to say he can do anything about it or run these foreigners out. Why there are Danes and Germans settled not a mile away, and Finns on the next farm but one from ours. So why discriminate.”

“They have been here a long time though, Shannon. He is used to them and their children were born here. These people he says are different.”

“It’s a distinction without a difference,” Shannon answered.

“But father says these are gypsies,” Gail explained, a little catch in her voice. “The covered wagons are too much for him.”

“Covered wagons!” Shannon exclaimed. “Some of the finest people in the United States crossed the prairies in them. I say ‘Live and let live.’ Of course there are innumerable immigrants who want to get into this country whom it would be rank folly to admit, but if they measure up to our standards, and come provided for, and with money enough to start, why should they be sent back in the face of the ones we have admitted, in many cases troublemakers, communists, physically unfit, and nudists—when the spirit urges them to parade like Adam and Eve in the garden. These are materially independent decent, good-living people I hear.”

“O, did you, Shannon?” she cried softly, her eyes shining.

“Why, yes, honey. So let them stay, would be my advice. But Dad is terribly autocratic. He has all the making of a modern dictator. However, this time he is probably barking up the wrong tree.”

The girl shook her lovely head. “He has a deep-rooted antipathy to this particular type of foreigner. He regards them as Bohemian, unstable. He does not realize they are only simple mountaineers, who lived on the border of Spain, by the Pyrenees. He does not know they left their home because of a—a—tragedy there. He has not heard that their leader, the man who brought them to Canada, is not a vagabond of the road, nomadic, unsettled, but is cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, singing in all the great cities.” The warm colour swept up in her face, and her voice broke.

“Why, Gail!” her brother exclaimed. “Why do you speak that way?”

“Because I hate injustice,” she said briefly.

“But how do you know what brought these odd people here?”

She gave a little shrug, as though casting off all serious thought.

“O I have heard,” she said casually. “Don’t let us talk about it, Shannon.”

“All right, honey,” he said. “Don’t let’s. I’m on my way—and as for you, don’t bother your pretty head over Dad’s idiosyncrasies. He’s a damn fine old boy, we all know that.”

“Of course,” she admitted a bit tremulously.

“Then run along in, Baby. There will be bats out in this half-light, and they make straight for red hair!”

“O bats!” she cried, holding her hands over her hair. “O Shan! I believe I see one zigzagging over the hedge!”

With a backward wave she flew towards the house, Shannon’s mellow laugh following her.

The old house was very still as the tall clock on the stair landing struck eight.

Phyllis was in her room, Nils Olsen and Tom Grey apparently in their own quarters. At least from Grey’s window came the sound of his piccolo, blown into a thread of elfin sound.

Gail came softly down the stairs. She had changed her light gown for a darker one, and her throat showed in the dusk, white as a pearl.

Dark dresses did not gleam against the tree trunks. But her arms were more dazzling. One could do nothing about that, it was too warm to wear a cloak.

Instinctively she knew Phyllis was listening. But that would be all. She would not follow. In some way she must give her the impression she was not going out. Girls were not supposed to roam the country at night.

Going into the long parlour, she sat down and played a little while. There was a lamp by the piano that sent its rays out into the garden. After a while she went into the kitchen and called Rufus. He came with a rush from his mat on the porch.

Yes, she felt Phyllis was listening. If she had old Rufus, Phyllis might be satisfied she was only going into the garden. It was lovely there. A firefly now and then lit its lamp against the cedar hedges. It was sweet in the garden at night, and safe. But she was afraid of so many things, Phyllis. Not for herself—never for herself, but for the others. For her; Gail. It was a little tiresome. Such devotion could be very smothering, like an invisible net closing one in.

Quietly she stole out into the kitchen porch.

“Come, Rufus!” she whispered, “and not a sound!”

The red setter went like a shadow behind her. The doors were left unlocked until O’Sullivan came home, and on warm nights wide open. Now a dim swaying light from the room made the darkness visible, and the moon would soon be up.

Gail flew across the kitchen garden and into the garden in front. By the cedar hedges she would be invisible. Now the summer-house—another little cedar walk—and then the gate. Crossing the road she was in the great orchard. It was fragrant with the delicate perfume of thousands of apples. It is only at night they seem to give out this rare essence, but sometimes for a few days at the season of their ripening, at night this perfume is almost like that of tropical flowers.

The girl lifted her face to the trees and took a long breath.

“O heavenly!” she said softly.

Gabriel Benedict came towards her as she spoke. He held out his two hands and took hers.

“Come,” he said. “We will go through the little field and on through the lane. I have been waiting a century!”

A new tone in his voice made her stop and look at him swiftly.

“I must only stay a short time,” she said breathlessly. “In the country every littlest thing one does is seen and commented on.”

“I know,” he said. “It was so in my village. Always so.”

“You see,” she went on, “if father knew I had come out after nightfall to meet a stranger, even in our own orchard—or if Phyllis suspected——”

“O no!” he interrupted, bending his dark head towards her. “Not a stranger! Do not say that.”

Gail gave her soft laugh. His voice so captivated her in all its tones her strength ebbed before it.

“Well,” she insisted, “you know I only saw you on Sunday.”

“Time has nothing to do with us,” the man answered. “It does not take long to know those we have continually met in our dreams. I speak for myself. You have been in my visions, in the back of my mind, almost all my life I think.”

He paused, then went on gravely: “I must tell you things quickly. When I was a boy of sixteen I dreamed of an angel whose hair was glittering red, and whose face strangely enough was like yours. She came and stood in the moonlight at the door of my tiny room, and her gown was silvery and Boated about her. She may not have been an angel, but only a woman; the phantom of a boy’s imagination. Her mysterious and lovely eyes smiled into mine, then as she came, she faded away into the night. When I was taken to Paris to study music I took this dream with me, though I spoke to no one of it. Involuntarily I found myself looking for a girl with the glittering hair of the vision at my door; one with the white throat and sea-coloured eyes of the north. The beautiful dark Spanish and French women I met were less real to me than this intangible one. I searched unconsciously for colour—the shining Titian colour. In my country they say a Spaniard may love a dark woman faithfully, one of white and gold fitfully, but a woman with hair of red will make him mad.” He gave a short laugh. “It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But many of the Basque sayings are like that. You cannot reason about them. They have come from the extravagant East up through the dead centuries; queer sayings that have survived God knows how.”

The girl glanced up at his vivid, poetical face. It was of a type she did not know at all, but one so often seen in Southern Europe, a survival from other days. The eyes dark pools of light, a face from the times when men lived every day dangerously and seldom lived long—when they staked everything on the play of the hour—when the present was all they had, and the future not to be counted on. It was a face capable of infinite expression, as was the man’s voice, and most intense and wonderful, she thought. One could adore it! Yet she only answered with a little feminine gesture.

“You are very unusual,” she returned, “to keep the memory of a dream, or vision if you will, so long. I fancy you must have seen the picture of a red-haired angel in one of your great churches, and it was impressed upon your young mind. Don’t you think that is the explanation?”

“No,” he said, “I saw no such picture. I had not been where great pictures are, at that time. Further—how do you account for the face being like yours?”

“O that is coincidence,” she laughed. “But you see hair like mine is not popular hereabout. In the country it has rather a stigma upon it. I have been called at school unpleasant names like ‘ginger’ and ‘sorrel-top’ and ‘red pepper.’ It made me furious!”

“Ah!” he exclaimed, “I would have dealt with those! Had I been there they would have eaten their words!” His lips wore a curve of amusement, as he spoke.

They were in the lane now going slowly under the choke-cherry trees and maythorns which grew thickly along each side. Here and there a great oak or elm towered above them, and beneath the shadows were inky black. The moon was rolling up, a full moon of unearthly radiance and beauty, and away on the low hills it touched the tall spires of the immutable pines with new silver.

For a moment they both stood entranced by the night.

“Yes,” said Benedict again looking down at her. “They assuredly would have swallowed those names, had I been there. Sorrel-top! What does it mean?”

“O the sorrel has a crimson flower—it really is flattering to be called for a flower.”

“That depends on the flower,” he demurred. “I do not like sorrel-top.”

“Do not think of it,” she said. “They were only teasing me, because nobody wanted red hair.”

“Ah,” he sighed, “what ignorance of beauty!” Again the little smile.

“No! It is Kathleen who is beautiful, I must tell you again,” Gail returned. “She is like a magnolia blossom, old Aunt Pansy says. Aunt Pansy came from away down south where magnolias grow. I perhaps am a little pretty, but real beauty is different. There can be no question about it. Critics may differ about its type or quality, but not its exquisiteness.”

“You are right,” Benedict said studying her in the silvery light.

“Yes,” she went on, “Kitty is a beauty. She is really one. She looks like an Egyptian Princess, I think. Her scarlet lips and long blue eyes, and the cloud of dark hair.”

Benedict leaned towards her, smiling at the lovely vivacious face and quick words.

“But you,” he half whispered, “you are a flame—a light. The words of the southern poet come to my mind when I look at you. Do you know them?”

She shook her head. “Perhaps not.”

He stood still, and spoke the magic verse slowly,—

She drew a quick breath. “Is there more?” she said.

“There are two more verses—but some other time. Come! Let us wait here by this oak. I must talk to you a little, and I will not—what do you say—beat about the bush. Many things may happen. Perhaps I cannot see you often again, so what I am compelled to say I must say now, and very quickly. I know I cannot keep you long.”

He drew her into the shadow of the old tree, and close to him. A trembling ran through the girl’s slight body. All was going so fast.

“Wait!” she cried softly, putting her hand against Benedict’s shoulder and holding him back. “Wait! You are saying too much. I must not listen. O no! Come back with me through the lane, now!”

“Not yet,” he said.

He took her hands in his and drew her closer still until she had no will or power of resistance against him.

“Little Gail O’Sullivan,” he whispered, “I have not said enough. My life would be too short to say to you all I desire to say—and this may be for a while my only time for speaking.”

About them was the silvery radiance, around them the enfolding darkness of the shadows. They seemed quite alone in a strange world. Swiftly Benedict caught her in his arms.

“I love you,” he said. “You are mine, and you know it. Mine, Gail! Not for to-night or to-morrow, but for whatever time God gives me here, and—then—afterwards. You are all I want.”

Swiftly he lifted her face with one hand and looked into it with a deep searching.

“I see here beauty and truth—and—love.”

She answered his look, for at the moment all uncertainty slipped from her mind.

“Yes,” she said, “I love you too, Gabriel. I am happier than I ever dreamed I could be.”

Benedict caught her close and with sudden surrender she clung to him as his lips met hers.

“O, what are we to do?” she said breathlessly after a moment. “There is danger everywhere! I did not think of this coming—not exactly this.”

“Did you not?” he answered, smiling in the dark. “For me, I have thought of nothing else since I saw you across that forever blessed little church.”

“I mean,” she qualified, with a quiver in her voice, “I mean—I did not think it would be to-night—or like this.”

“You thought I would not kiss you then, perhaps—yes? But why should I wait? Time has nothing to do with love. It comes in a flash. Some moments are more revealing to the soul than a waste of years. Is it not so?” he questioned, his lips upon the marvel of her hair, and against her throat.

“Yes,” she said. “O yes, Gabriel.”

“Look!” he said, “only the moon sees us. ‘A golden galleon sailing mid the stars.’ ‘On such a night.’ Come, darling—do you not remember what your Shakespeare wrote for Jessica? Ah, my sweet—who would desire to be quite sane and cool and calculating on such a night? The moon perhaps makes me a little mad, but I do not know how I am to live without you, till you come to me.”

With a quick soft violence she threw her arms around his throat.

“And I,” she said. “How am I to live?—Gabriel—But it has all happened so quickly! You do not know me, and I know nothing of you but what you have told me.”

“Is it not enough?” Benedict asked.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I will not ask to know more.” And then with one of her swift changes—“Yet there must have been women—so many lovely women you made love to in London and Paris and Vienna, and everywhere.”

“After a fashion, yes,” he admitted. “I am not a saint, my sweet. But I have not loved in this way. No. And I have asked no other woman to be my wife. I have not before known a dusky lane with silver-powdered trees and the scent of an apple orchard making me light-headed, and all I desire close by me. Hitherto when I have thought of love, it has been where there were lights, and intoxicating music and champagne. I assure you it was quite different, and next morning I had entirely recovered from the sensation. From this I do not recover. My mornings are as intensely full of you, as my dreams at night.”

The burning words were spoken with his face against hers.

“Come, listen!” he said suddenly letting her go. “Let us decide things quickly! When my people are settled in the house at Hennessy’s farm—my farm—which will be in a day or two, I will go and see your father.”

“O you must wait a little!” she cried softly. “O, Gabriel you must wait. You do not know my father. He is very difficult—very hard to change.”

“I will of course see him,” Benedict insisted. “There is no question about that, and the faster, the more to my mind. He is called ‘The O’Sullivan’ about here, is he not?”

“They do call him that,” she nodded, “because he is like the head of some clan, you know. Indeed he is the last of the old family in Ireland, and he has the ways of an older time, and maybe he is a trifle overbearing.”

“Domineering”—he asked. “Perhaps?”

“Yes,” she admitted, “a little.”

“He would not wish you to marry a foreigner, maybe?” he said questioningly.

Gail shook her head. “Not if he were of the blood-royal,” she nodded with a little tremulous laugh. “The blood-royal, of any foreign country—and you, Gabriel, and your family, he—he still calls gypsies. Dad is prejudiced and narrow and set in his views, even if he is splendid in many ways.”

“And he would not count love enough reason for tolerating me?” he suggested smiling.

“He would not count love at all!” she answered. “O, Gabriel, I am afraid trouble will come; that he will make trouble for you.”

“Have no fear,” he said, “no fear at all. Nothing matters to me but you. I have faced difficulties before, and will plan some way out of this.”

“I must go. I must. Phyllis may be waiting. I think she will know I have gone out.”

“Who is this Phyllis?” the man asked indifferently, taking her in his arms. “Why should we fear her also? See, you are trembling! In my little village I do not think we knew what fear was, but here I feel it around me everywhere. Who is Phyllis, my sweet?”

“She is my father’s housekeeper. She was my nurse when I was a baby—when my mother died. She is just a little grey woman like a mouse. I am not afraid of her, but only of distressing her. That is different!”

“Very different,” Benedict said, the foreign accent running through all his words making them sound more emphatic. “Very different.”

“And Phyllis is dumb,” she added as by afterthought, and difficulty. “Did I not tell you.”

“Dumb!” he exclaimed. “Perhaps you did.”

“Quite dumb. I have never heard her make a sound.”

“And, of course, she is deaf also?”

“No,” she returned, “not deaf at all.”

“That is strange,” he said, his face grave.

“One grows used to strange things,” Gail smiled. “This is so strange, my being here with you.”

“Not strange, but beautiful,” the man asserted. “Would I could ask you, as Romeo asked his love, to meet me at Friar Lawrence’s. All on the morrow. Would you do so?”

“I do not know myself any more. Yes, I think I would,—I know I would.”

“As it cannot be at Friar Lawrence’s—or until I meet your father, shall it be by the river in the afternoon, as before?”

“Yes, in mid-afternoon.”

“Then against my will I will let you go now. But first give me your hand—your left hand, Cara Mia.”

He slipped a ring from the little finger of his left hand, and put it on one of hers.

“We will have it made smaller, but for now it must answer. It is not very beautiful, but just very, very old, and full of history.”

She raised it to her lips.

“Dear,” she whispered, lifting her face to his, “I will wear it until I die. Now good night.”

“Good night, until to-morrow,” he echoed.

Then watched her as she went, the old faithful red setter following with her shadow.

As she opened the garden gate Gail saw Nils Olsen. He was walking up the road towards her with that swinging leisurely gait that took him so far and fast.

Catching the shine of her hair, he knew who it was.

“Why, Gail!” he exclaimed, “Miss Gail!”

“Just Gail will do, when it is you, Nils. You are not Tom Grey or Wallie.” Her words ended in an uncertain little laugh.

“It is getting late, isn’t it? I will go with you through the garden. The cedar hedges might hide a tramp.”

“Nonsense! You know there are none about. For you to worry about me would be just too much! It is late—but I have not been alone.”

“I did not think so,” he said grimly, walking towards the house with her.

“You will not speak of meeting me to-night, Nils?”

“The rack could not make me,” he answered.

“O Nils! How one could trust you,” she exclaimed softly. “Is Dad in?”

“Not yet. Political meetings are often long drawn out. I am waiting about to put up his horse.”

“That is good of you, Nils.”

“O no,” he smiled. “It is cheerless coming in alone. I will bed Cherry down for him.”

“You have had a long day, Nils.”

“Why yes. I find hired men rise early on farms. But as I intend to live in Canada, it is best to learn all I can.”

“Dad’s methods are unpleasantly hard,” she said. “I know he does not spare his men.”

“He does not spare himself,” the Norwegian answered.

“He only spares his family—Shannon particularly. We should not complain. He would always be very easy with us unless——”

“Unless?” queried Olsen.

“Unless we crossed his will. Here we are at the verandah. Good night, Nils.”

“Good night, I hear wheels, and must hurry.”

He strode away to help unharness Cherry, but his mind was uneasy. Very well he knew Gail O’Sullivan had been out in the moonlit night with some man, and as she gave him no name, but asked for silence, he was certain it was the head of the clan on the Hennessy farm. One so attractive, so unusual, was to be reckoned with. But not from him would any hint of this come.

“She is safely in this time,” he said to himself, striding on towards the farm gate where the motors and carriages entered. “And I fear what would happen if she were not. She is playing with fire. The old farmer sees red now when those Basques are mentioned. To me they are only simple peasant people, a bit dazed from long travel or new ways, or something else. One questions why they came here, or wish to settle. No doubt they are racked with homesickness, and it is fortunate they speak a little English. But for their leader, he is totally different! A citizen of every country. I do not wonder that she is dazzled by him.”

He looked back at the old farm house, but not at Gail’s window—at Kathleen’s.

Then he followed the light carriage into the driving shed.

“Who is there?” O’Sullivan called roughly.

“Olsen, sir. I thought I would put the horse up for you.”

“That’s good of you; but I don’t want my men to work the clock around.”

“No fear of that, sir,” he answered. “Did you enjoy the meeting?”

“I did not go to enjoy that, Olsen. I went with a different purpose. After the speeches I saw the farmers from around here, got in close touch with them, and a pretty hornet’s nest I’ve stirred up! I told them of these gypsy foreigners on the next farm, and how report said they had come to stay. It seems everyone knew even more than I knew myself. It is true they’ve bought the land. It was advertised for one day only in a rotten sheet, and these wagon-travellers saw it and the man who is their leader rode over and inspected the farm, then bought it from Hennessy’s lawyer, giving a marked cheque on a Montreal bank. It was just as short and smooth as that, Olsen. ’Twas like Hennessy, the whole deal. A fine neighbourly trick he paid me, going out. He knew I would buy the place were it sold, but he sold it over my head. Well, I wish him no luck. The old spirit of neighbourliness that used to be in men seems dying out.”

Olsen smiled in the dark. Well he knew of the long feud that had been between the two old farmers, and he had heard of the high and bitter words that had passed between them, and the commanded silence between their children.

“Yes,” O’Sullivan went on, “Hennessy’s gone, and I thank Heaven for that; but I’ll have none of these vagabonds for next door neighbours.”

“They seem to possess money,” Olsen put in cautiously.

The remark was like a match to tinder.

“Money or no money,” O’Sullivan thundered, startling the young man, “I’ll tolerate no loose-living fly-by-nights from a European State one scarce ever heard of, edging up to land in our possession these seventy-five years! They think to reap benefits they have not sown, and, yes, the like of good roads, telephones, electric lights, for which to this minute they were never taxed! They think to raise crops easily on acres not one of which they broke their own backs to clear! Let them try coming here, say I! Let them try!”

“You know, sir, some time that farm was bound to change hands. Hennessy had no sons,” Olsen said slowly.

“Had a born Canadian bought it, ay, or any British subject, though it was over my head, I’d have said nothing,” the old man snapped back, his knotted hands unbuckling the harness.

“You are tired, sir. I stayed up to do that,” Olsen said going to him. “A little sleep, and things will look better at daybreak.”

“No,” O’Sullivan returned. “They’ll look no better. Believe me I have stirred up the countryside even to the back concessions! Leave it to them. They feel as I do, and they’ll deal with these parasites, my man. Well, I will go up to the house. Thanks for waiting for me. It’s rarely anyone does.”

Olsen watched the tall lean figure on its way. O’Sullivan walked like an old man now, he thought, though there was strength in him yet, strength and pride. The wrong sort of pride that made him look down on men he considered of lesser station. Back in the family archives there might be the history of one who in the days when the castle of a feudal lord was his fort as much as his home, had ruled his handful of relatives and retainers with fierce dominance, and though perhaps unlettered and uncouth, as head of the clan had held a place undisputed. His land might have been bog-land, and his castle only a mighty pile of rough stone whose merit was its thick walls, conning tower and arrow windows. But in the one great hall, rush-strewn and beamed with smoke-blackened timber, some O’Sullivan had sat at the head of the one table with his family and the servants below the salt, and they all having emptied the vast trenchers had thrown the bones to their hungry dogs gathered round, and no one there disputed their lord or disobeyed him except at their peril. And in another sudden flash Nils Olsen saw the O’Sullivan of to-day, as a throw-back to that medieval ancestor. The same blood ran in the veins of both. Both had the same mental outlook, both had held their place at the same table. For it was the same, he realized, built to outwear the years. And the same salt cellar sat upon it. The same, beaten by hand out of raw silver in the far time when it was an honourable calling to be a gold or silver smith, and the man who worked in precious metals loved his craft and strove to make some imperishable beautiful thing that might carry with pride the work that assured its worth.

Yes, even as these things belonged to a far yesterday, so did their master. There was nothing of the modern in him. He was a throw-back, holding those around him in fear.

Olsen’s thoughts ran wild, as Cherry nuzzled her velvet face against his, and he bedded her down in new mown hay.

Then he shut the stable door and went out. The night air was aromatic, heavy with perfume from the garden. Tired as he was, he had no desire for sleep. Some disturbance was in the air. Olsen put out his pipe and betook himself and his wakefulness up the narrow stairs to his own room.

Kathleen watched the squirrels blithely flying along the fences and trying to attract her attention as she rode home in the early morning.

Though she had danced till the small hours at a college party, the thought of Nils Olsen under her apple trees waiting for whatever orders she had to give about the packing hurried her out of bed at daybreak.

She had stopped with some old school friends and one of them, Nell Kendal, was waiting for her when she came downstairs in her riding togs.

“My heavens, Kitty!” Nell had exclaimed, “you look lovelier in the ghostly dawn than by candle-light! I always have a sort of shock when you first appear. The eyes of you! The complexion of you—like a water-lily leaf or something—and that queer scarlet of your mouth! I suppose you do put it on, though I never caught you decorating.”

And Kitty had laughed. “Don’t be silly, darling. I wouldn’t dare. You know how father is about cosmetiques. But I’m not the beauty of the family, Gail is. O coffee! You lamb.”

“It’s fifty-fifty with you and Gail, I’ll admit. And yes, I understand how you feel about your father. Much as I admire him, he chills my young blood! He is so desperately upright, if you know what I mean. No one can quite measure up to his standards. But I always feel he divides people up a bit too much. Not exactly into sheep and goats but into masses and classes. And he is arrogant—like an old Cæsar.”

Kathleen put down her cup and sighed.

“Yes,” she said, “he is. You know, darling, that old salt cellar of ours?”

“Know it? I envy you that more than anything!”

“It is a quaint piece of silver,” Kathleen had replied with a little shrug. “But I often hate it. When Dad seats a man like Nils Olsen below it, it agonizes me.”

“Well, honey,” Nell had returned lightly, “even if he should be a gentleman in his own country, he is taking the place of a farm-hand here—a hired man, like the others. There is only one other way—a separate table.”

The colour had flown into Kathleen’s face.

“Nell, you know a man who is a gentleman in his own country is one everywhere. Geographical rules do not come into it.”

“O I don’t know,” Nell had smiled. “How about African kings, and Eskimo chiefs?”

“Don’t be amusing,” Kathleen had smiled. “Come! I am going, dear.”

At the door a gardener was holding her horse, and she sprang into the saddle, and was off, waving her crop to Nell.

“Save me an apple!” she called.

“A barrel, or two!” Kitty had called back.

The early morning had thrilled her with its magic. No matter how weighed with small frets and worries, or black grief and tragedy, the eternally new day has something of relief and promise about it. To most hearts the scroll is still being unrolled when the dawn breaks. And when it is all unrolled then is there invariably the deep peace that God knows some look forward to eagerly.

“Bronze,” her rather spoiled horse, knew something of the same ecstasy the girl felt. He tossed his brown head and cavorted a bit before settling into his stride. Kitty talked to him for sheer joy of hearing her own voice, and he pricked up his ears, and occasionally nickered, turning his head sideways.

They took the road running north—a branch of the King’s highway. Behind was the sparkling blue of Lake Ontario, the sun brightening the little ships at anchor; for the town had a fine harbour, and many ships came over the water from American cities. On the very border of the lake, below the town, lay a small settlement of Irish fishermen.

They had called it “Penhale” for a fishing village at home, and the name brought them some comfort. None of these Irish people had changed much since they crossed from the green Isle. They fished, and dried their nets in the sun on the warm sand, and their women went up town with creels filled with whitefish on their heads. They lived to themselves and kept the peace as well as most, though whatever government was in power they were usually against it. Births, deaths and marriages were their topics of interest along with the coming and going of the fish.

As at home, they had a wake when one of their number died, and the parish priest was the friend of old and young. The life of the town, a quarter of a mile beyond, was to them a matter of superb indifference. There, not only the fishermen smoked tiny clay pipes, but most of the older women smoked them also, and in a day when petticoats were fast disappearing, these women wore a goodly number—that is those who were no longer young, and there were not many young, for they usually departed and took places as domestics in the town. Before many years Penhale would be gone, though none seemed to realize that.

Phyllis had come from this tiny fishing village, so her grandmother had told Kathleen. That had been a good while ago, before Gail was born. But none of them thought much about where Phyllis had originated. In spite of that there was something of an air of mystery surrounding the dumb woman that at times oppressed each one unconsciously; Kathleen, most of all. Perhaps it came from her silence or her grey presence, or her strange devotion to them. Accepting her, and scarcely thinking about her, they yet wondered at her.

And about Penhale, from which Grannie had said she came, there was to Kathleen an indefinite sense of mystery. It was so detached a little place, so filled with the spirit of independence—an independence that is the birthright of all fishermen who take their living from the sea, and of farmers who take it from the soil.

At one point in the road where she could look back and see the lake best, Kathleen wheeled her horse and gazed down at Penhale.

“See, Bronze,” she said, patting him, “down at the fishing village they are up earlier than we are! I suppose Phyllis’ father was a fisherman—not that it matters now. No doubt he has had his wake. But really, Bronze, those people down there are as Irish as when they came over. The old women wear flappity-ruffled caps, and little red shoulder shawls, and smoke tiny clay pipes! I’m telling you, Bronze, you’d shy at them! They are the true foreigners, and have never turned into Canadians. I wonder what Dad would say if I told him that! But turn round, boy. Let’s make better time. Look, Bronze! There’s a soft maple with some scarlet leaves. Ah! Good-bye, Summer, good-bye, good-bye!” she sang a few bars of Tosti’s great farewell, softly, in a flute-like voice, then stopped.

“We don’t want to rouse the farmers’ wives, Bronze. They get up all too early anyway, poor dears. O, I would love to hear that gypsy, or whatever he is, sing again. Whoever thought Jerusalem the Golden could sound as it did last Sunday. It was like a song coming down from heaven. See, Bronze! Behold the cobwebs on the grass! All threaded with dew, do you notice.”

Bronze nosed around the edge of the road.

“The spiders weave them,” she went on. “So the fairies can have something to make their dresses, when they grow tired of flower petals. No! No! They are not good to eat. They only catch on to you and make you sneeze. Come! Come! Do leave the cobwebs alone! I fancy I can hear Oberon say to Titania, ‘Why do you buy that stuff, baby? It simply does not wear an hour.’ O, nonsense aside, ‘do push on,’ as the Cockneys say!”

Bronze nickered again and pushed on. He was used to Kathleen’s conversations. At home she was quiet, Shannon and Bob and Gail usually holding the floor, but out on the road with her horse she at times kept up a running fire of comment.

As they neared home, she reined him in.

“Ah, there is smoke from Aunt Pansy’s cabin, Bronze. Let’s go in and see her, and have some corn-cakes. Anyway, I haven’t seen Uncle Gideon in a blue moon. Don’t get impatient; we’re not stopping for breakfast, but to tell Aunt Pansy to come over oftener to help Phyllis.”

Kathleen took him up the narrow path under the trees, and chatted with the old coloured couple. After having eaten her corn-cake—a thing one might go miles to find—she rode on home. Bronze trotting briskly now; and when she dismounted, she took some cubes of sugar from her pocket and held them up to him. Then Wallie led him away and she went across to the orchard.

Olsen was coming in and met her under her own trees. Her heart skipped a beat, as it often did when she first saw him.

He was unusually grave, she thought. The smile with which he greeted her went quickly.

“Where is my father, Nils?” she asked.

“He has gone to the village, Miss Kathleen.”

“As early as this!” she exclaimed. “That is not like him. There is something brewing—I feel it in the air. What is it, do you know?”

He looked down at her hesitatingly from his great height, then nervously shook back his thick blonde hair.

“Why,” he began, “after last night’s political meeting these foreigners at the Hennessy farm were discussed. There is a bitter feeling stirred up about them.”

“My father did that,” she asserted. “He started the trouble. You know it, Nils.”

“I was not there,” he shrugged, waiving the question. “I was about the farm all evening. By the way, quite late when everyone was in, your father and Mr. Shannon and Mr. Robert——”

“And my sister?” she said.

“Of course,” Olsen nodded. “Quite late, as I said, someone went through the orchard and lane singing—a man.”

“What did he sing?” she asked breathlessly.

“That song from a Persian Garden, that is on one of your gramophone records—an old recording by MacCormick, I think.”

“O Moon of My Delight?” Kathleen said.

“Yes, that one. But he sang it in a foreign tongue. It was neither Spanish or French. Perhaps Basque.”

“Basque?” she exclaimed, “that strange language.”

“Yes, Basque I think. At least it was the loveliest singing I have ever heard. I was wakeful last night. Went up to bed, then out again into the orchard, so I heard. One does not sleep very well when the moon is full.”

A swift smile came and went on Kathleen’s lips.

“I was wakeful too,” she said, “but I missed hearing the Moon Song. You were luckier, Nils.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted. “At least it was something to remember.”

“He must be a great artist whoever he is, this gypsy.”

“A great artist,” Olsen echoed. “And now, Miss Kathleen——”

“O, please, Nils not Miss Kathleen; we are alone.”

“Then—Kathleen—there is a disturbance afoot. Your father with the farmers and their hired men for miles around, are set on driving these new people out. They are going to rally up at Hennessy’s and chivarie them. They intend to make so unbearable a racket every night, they will not be able to endure it and so take their departure.”

“When do they start this?” the girl asked, her face as grave as Olsen’s. “It seems very crude.”

“To-night, after dark.”

“This,” she said, “in spite of the Government permitting them to enter Canada! Nils, it is being done at my father’s instigation only, and because he coveted that land and also hates unclassified rovers.”

“They are not that,” he put in.

“They appear to be. That is enough for Dad. Well, Nils, I am in no mood to pack apples. Are they quite ready—ripe enough?”

“Yes, I would think so.”

“Then please look after the trees for me. Get what packers you need.”

“I will;—and I wish——” he paused.

“What—what do you wish?” with a swift eagerness.

“That there was more I could do for you, Kathleen.”

“Thank you, Nils,” she said. But it was her eyes lifted to his that answered him.

In the house Phyllis and Aunt Pansy, who had come over, were busy polishing and cleaning, giving that touch of perfection to the rooms they always wore. The scent of bees’ wax hung upon the air. Heavy but easy-footed, Aunt Pansy had the art of never being in the way, yet accomplishing wonders. She and the dumb woman seemed to understand each other in some occult way. While she adored the three young O’Sullivans, their father stirred within her a deep, almost a religious awe. If to her soul she pictured God, he probably took on the outward semblance of the austere head of the house. It was only when she was sure he was far afield that she broke into song, or crooned southern spirituals softly. She had bloomed into a delightful old age, while her husband, Uncle Gideon, was warped and rickety and small. But a sunny serenity filled their little ancient log house, and their two sons and grandchildren from town, were often there nowadays.

Kathleen stopped to admire their polishing, then went up to her grandmother’s room where she found Gail.

She kissed the lined, ivory-white face of the old lady, and presented her with a red apple she had carried in.

“From my trees, dear,” she explained. “Shall I pare it for you? Pare—you know with a knife.”

“She doesn’t hear,” Gail said softly. “Pare it, Gran. Shall we?”

“O pare!” nodded their grandmother. “No, my dear. I shall keep it to look at. Or, I’ll tell you what! I’ll make a clove apple of it! Stick it full of cloves, you know. Clove apples keep away moths—those damn little devils!”

They were not surprised at her words. Grandfather O’Sullivan had been a swearing man, and though she looked like a Dresden figurine, she had absorbed many of his peculiarities of speech and action.

“O Gran! They are not as bad as that. They must eat something. After all they are God’s creatures, don’t you think?”—with a quick glance at Kathleen.

The old lady caught the words. “No,” she said. “The evil things are not God’s creatures. Lucifer made them. Moths got into my mink muff this summer, did I tell you? Just ruined it, and I’ve had it forty-two years!”

“But they didn’t know it was your muff, darling.”

“They are pests,” she insisted unmollified.

Kathleen nodded. “Don’t think about them, Gran—and yes, they are abominations.”

“What does Kitty say?” she appealed to Gail. “Is she contradicting me? I say they are the spawn of the evil one!”

“O no, Gran,” Gail explained. “Kitty never contradicts you. She says yes, they are.”

“Then that’s all right, dearie. Now get me the cloves, and I’ll stick them into this nice, firm, red apple.”

“Very well, darling. I’ll ask Phyllis for some. Just wait a minute.”

“And Gail!” she called in her thin tremulous voice, “ask Phyllis for good strong long ones with round nubby heads. I don’t want any short ones with the nubs gone.”

“I fly!” Gail answered. Then to Kathleen under her breath, “O Kit, suppose Phyllis hasn’t any, or they are not nubby, or have been ground up.”

“I suppose then I’ll ride over to the village for them,” Kitty laughed back. “But hurry, for I’ve something to tell you!”

In a few moments she was back with a small glass jar of perfect cloves in her hand. But old Mrs. O’Sullivan had leaned her curly white head against the back of the cushioned rocking-chair, and was asleep, with the red apple held fast in her small, withered hands. She was entirely peaceful, so the girls stole out of the room and down to the garden.

“Granny’s asleep,” Gail said to Phyllis as they passed her. “Just listen, if she wakes and calls.”

Then they went to the summer-house covered now with the purple trumpet-vine flowers.

“Kit,” Gail began, sitting down in the doorway, “there is some trouble coming. I feel it! What do you know, for I know you have heard about it?”

“I don’t understand why you should have forebodings of trouble. There is a little unpleasantness, stirred up about these camp people at Hennessy’s, but it can’t be very serious. Nils Olsen tells me that father has roused the countryside against them, until they are up in arms, and have agreed to chivarie them every night until they leave the county, at least this part of it.”

“How barbarous!” Gail exclaimed. “How unthinkable! Our men—our hired men, are not in it, are they?”

“Certainly not Nils Olsen. I don’t know about Grey and Wallie.”

“And Dad?”

“O, he started the fire. I fancy he will just let it burn out, while Shannon and Bob would only regard the performance as a joke.”

“But it is no joke,” she interrupted hotly, her face losing its colour, and her hands clenched. “It is disgraceful to even countenance such an affair!”

“What has come over you, honey?” Kitty said coolly. “After all why should a disturbance among the farmers over some new emigrants upset you? You are not yourself at all.”

“O yes, Kitty, I am!” she cried suddenly. “Far more myself than I have ever been.”

“Why, Gail!” Kathleen said slowly.

“Don’t ask me anything,” the girl said rising. “Don’t say anything to me! We must just wait until to-night is over.”

“They may keep the noise up for many nights,” Kathleen explained.

“O they couldn’t. They couldn’t!” she answered angrily. “It would be worse than wicked—contemptible! Come, Kit, there is Dad crossing the road. Don’t ask him anything!”

“No,” she answered. “No, darling. Let’s hurry in.”

The midday dinner was taken quickly that day, for O’Sullivan ate hastily, and made the pace.

His grim old face was set in lines of uncompromising firmness. His dark shaggy brows were drawn together under the thatch of silvery hair, and the effect was not pleasant. His little ancient mother watched him stealthily, and with uneasiness. From him she took her weather. Whatever was amiss she was on his side. So at last her own small face with its many etchings set uncompromisingly also.

She looked around the table at the fresh beauty on all sides to see which one secreted some sense of a guilt or short-coming that might have angered her son, but one and all returned her scrutiny with a non-committal or even blank air.

Kathleen ate little and crumbled her bread fastidiously, for the birds, her grandmother supposed. A bad table habit.

Gail sat with her round white elbows on the table and scrapped gaily with Shannon. She would have to speak to her about the elbows. This was an unmannerly generation—the old lady thought, and sighed.

Bob seemed aloof, absent-minded. She was very fond of Robert, her dead daughter’s son, now an orphan. Both he and Shannon looked much alike, were near of an age, and had been through a Montreal university together. She nodded and smiled at Bob down the table.

Finishing his meal O’Sullivan began to speak.

“I’m going to tell all of ye that things have come to a climax around here. The farmers and their men are ready to deal with these gypsies, beyond, who talk of settling here. We’ll have no undesirables in this neighbourhood, and so they will learn. The Immigration Department may let them in, but it cannot foist them on us here.

“Those whose ancestors reclaimed the wilderness, whose fathers made corduroy roads with torn and blistered hands,—whose children were born in log houses without benefit of physicians,—whose people saw the woods dotted with Indian wigwams, and whose women lived in fear of the redskins—have first claim on the land now. For years they have paid taxes for good roads and now for electric power and the telephone. These are the people living in this country, and I with them want no European latecomers of vagabond stripe! The sons of the men who drained the beaver-meadows, and made the land ready for bearing crops, yes, and some of whom had great-grandfathers who fought in the War of 1812, should have some say as to those who settle here now. In the north-west they have discovered what the Doukabours are like as neighbours. On the coast they have drawn the line at the Asiatics; and we can take our lesson from them.

“They tell me these newcomers are from the Basque provinces. That means they are neither French, who have made good Canadians, nor Spanish, whose ways we might grow to understand. The Basques are to me an unknown quantity, and so impossible. And we will make them leave of their own accord, and without personal violence. There will be no broken heads or cracked bones. Though I hear there are but eleven or twelve of them,—from that many a dozen dozen may spring!”

The old man looked around at the young faces, a certain challenge in his fiery eyes and stern mouth. Then he struck the table with his clenched hand.

“So go they shall!” he said, venom in his tone. “The men from around here are marching over to Hennessy’s to-night, after dark, to chivarie them, and they will continue the same every nightfall until they depart in their wagons. There is no law I know of that prevents making night hideous with sound, or it would long ago have been enforced.

“My girls here, will stop at home, nor step out of the garden. You, Shannon and Robert, had better join the throng.” He smiled grimly. “My age will let me out from any active part in proceedings, but you, Olsen, and you, Grey, will join in the row.

“You had better stop here, Walter, for you are too young for a fray of any kind. Not that I am counting on its becoming dangerous. Nothing is to be thrown. The men will only attack with noise; and from our side of the land. No weapon of any kind will be carried; but something will be tried—a chivarie—that has been tried before, and successfully. A crude, unpleasant, but bloodless campaign, which has driven the hated settler out before this.”

The oration had been long, but all had given the old farmer keen attention. No one had interrupted him. The rich Irish-Canadian voice had rolled on at high tide with its flow of words.

Although strangely lacking in Irish humour, often bitterly silent, for no apparent reason, when he talked, his pent-up emotions had full sway.

Now he turned from the table and the others followed his move.

On Wallie’s round face was a resentful flush. “So he was to be kept home where the women were,” he said under his breath. “Well, let them try keeping him that was all.”

Gail had lost her assumed indifference and was as white as Kathleen. In her eyes was a blue rage, and a blue-green flame. Kathleen showed nothing that she felt. Bob and Shannon were evidently annoyed, for both swore softly, going out.

At the door Shannon turned towards his father. “I’d rather not go over with the rabble to-night, Dad,” he said. “Anyway, I have an engagement.”

Bob shrugged and lit a cigarette. “I hope, Uncle Marcus,” he smiled, “you will leave this to our discretion and not insist on our joining the merry throng. Chivaries are not in my line. I would try moral suasion first.”

“We have,” O’Sullivan answered. “This morning early a committee rode over and saw their leader, interviewed him, and told him the farmers considered foreigners of the roving type, the covered wagon type, unsuitable in a conservative English-speaking neighbourhood. The committee told him it would be advisable, if they wished to stay in Canada, to select a more lately peopled part. That they would not feel at home here for years, and their customs being so different, would change slowly.

“O, they let them know they were not welcome! Also on my behalf, an offer was made to rebuy the farm, and redress them for any temporary loss. You see, Robert, moral suasion has been tried.”

“With what result, Uncle Marcus?”

“With none. None whatever. Their leader, who was in our church on Sunday, I believe, simply smiled, and refused our requests.

“He said the Canadian officials had passed on him and his people in admitting them, therefore they were desirable settlers. That they were no different from other Europeans who had taken up land; that they had bought this farm in an open market and intended to remain upon it.

“After that the committee left. There is a report, however, that they have with them a demented woman; at least a woman suffering from extreme melancholy.”

Gail’s face grew a shade paler. Nils Olsen stood with a little enigmatic smile on his lips.

The two girls then left the room with their grandmother, who had not caught the drift of her son’s words.

Now Grey shuffled his feet uneasily when he waited on the porch a moment.

“You will go with the others, Tom,” his master said, raising his voice.

“I suppose so, sir, but I don’t like it.”

“Nobody likes it.” O’Sullivan bit off the words. “It is an unpleasant necessity. It’s let them stay or root them out in the least harmful way. And you, Olsen, you will go?”

“No, sir, I will not go or take part in this disturbance.”

The old man’s face blanched, and then colour rushed back into it. Well he knew he could not compel his hired men against their will. He could dismiss them, and that was all. But they were good men, and good efficient men were scarce.

“I will deal with this later,” he replied to Olsen. “But you, Bob, and Shannon, had better put in an appearance with the rest, to save our faces. I protested against these people as you know.”

Bob looked at him squarely. “I beg your pardon for annoying you, Uncle, but I will not be seen near these men to-night.”

O’Sullivan wheeled around to Shannon. “And you?” he said with quiet rage.

“O Dad!” Shannon exclaimed, “am I never to reach the age of discretion! This damn idea of a chivarie goes against the grain with me. I don’t get your point of view.”

The old farmer walked to the porch door. Olsen and Tom Grey had gone back to the orchard, and he was alone with his nephew and son, and Phyllis who moved about the table like a grey wraith, clearing it.

“Have a care!” he tossed the words at his son. “I have been an indulgent father, Shannon, but don’t try me too far! You will be seen to-night with the other farmers’ sons, and register your protest against these tramps, whether you desire to or not. That’s all I have to say.”

Putting on his shabby hat and hanging up his coat O’Sullivan stalked out into the mellow sunshine.

The afternoon had lost its gilt edge and turned cool when Gail was able to leave her grandmother. Kathleen had been called to the village. Formal visits and visits to the sick Kathleen took upon herself, and she let no old friendship drop. No death or birth occurred for miles around that she was not told of it. They looked for her in houses of mourning, and of joy.

Old Mrs. O’Sullivan had gathered just enough of what was said at the table to rouse her curiosity. So she plied Gail with questions, and there was no escape. She might be flippant and a little short with others, but never with this little old lady, who seemed to be something left over from a long past day. What Kipling calls “the high and far-off times.” Seventy-five years ago she had come a bride, younger than Gail was now. Gail wondered if she remembered that tragedy that had driven them from Ireland; of the man of whom her young husband had been insanely jealous—and that wild wrestling on the edge of a cliff, and the strong figure hurtling through the air to its doom. Romance, and tragedy. How they went hand in hand down the ages: youth and love and death.—And still romance and love ran like golden threads through the grey stuff of life.

No blot lay on the family escutcheon by reason of that old dead affair. But though the courts had not condemned him in that far day the people looked askance at him—and so that young O’Sullivan, who was her great-grandfather—had shaken the dust of Ireland from his feet and come to this place. Her father had been born five years after, and it was because of the long toil of the years and the small results at first, that he had not married until his youth was long past.

Now she dozed in her chair, the old old lady, as peacefully as though she had not lived through those days;—days when the roads were so terrible no doctor reached her until after the agony of birth. Days when she was quite alone and her husband in the bush. Days when wandering Indians came curiously up to the log cabin, and chilled her with fear, though they were harmless enough then.

Gail waited in a wordless impatience for Phyllis to finish her work and come upstairs, for someone must be near her grandmother. And after a while Phyllis came. A little trembling went through her when she thought of the coming night. Kathleen had left for some meeting in town. To-night meant nothing to Kathleen except a regrettable incident, but to her—Gail—it was everything.

“I am going out, Phyllis,” she said softly to the dumb woman, sitting now with her knitting beside the old lady.

Phyllis lifted her slate and wrote, “Don’t go too far, my dear. Be careful.”

“O, I must go out, Phil! The house suffocates me to-day. And there is something strange in the air—everywhere.”

The woman wrote again, “Perhaps danger.”

“No! No! Phyllis!” shaking her red-gold head. “Not danger, just a storm. Lightning is coming or wind, or heat.” Then she changed her tone, throwing off the sense of oppression. “Are you going to make a cake when Kitty comes in?”

Phyllis wrote again, “Pies.” Gail bent down and kissed her pale face in butterfly fashion—she had so long been her nurse.

“O, Phil,” she said affectionately, “you are a sweet old thing. But don’t worry about me. I won’t be awfully long. I wish——”

The dumb woman looked up, an unspoken question in her eyes.

“I wish that absurd row Dad spoke of could be stopped. It is so unnecessary; so ghastly. Don’t you think so?”

The woman nodded and followed the girl with wistful eyes as she ran downstairs.

She went to the window, and watched her flit between the cedar hedges of the garden, and caught glimpses of her white gown in the orchard. Then she lost her, but she knew it was to some rendezvous she had gone.

The girl went quickly on to the bush, a quivering excitement beating through her. She almost felt she might fall, yet held on. He would be waiting for her now—yet what to tell him! What to say of the horrible plans of the farmers. He must be told,—but how to tell him? Of the injury and insult to Gabriel she did not seem to think so much, as to the others. He was so able to rise above such a thing; but the thought of those with him, the handful of people trying to live down grief and tragedy far from the scene of it; his brothers with their homes and parents and brothers and friends gone—the little sister whose husband was lost with the others—she suffered for them; the strangers at their gates that were to be driven away.

Sudden tears filled her eyes as she entered the twilight green light of the bush. Beyond the trees a wind stirred, but under them it was still and scented and cool.

As she neared the riverbank Benedict came to meet her. He wore the grey corduroy riding clothes she loved, and the strange leather belt of Basque workmanship.

He came onward with a glad eagerness. Again the dark oval of his face and the swing of his lithe figure gave her a quick delight. He was as vivid and bright as the sunlight through the trees. There was no one anywhere like him she thought. That he was older than herself, apart from all she had ever known, a citizen of the world, whose home was more upon the stage in an atmosphere of unreality than elsewhere, meant nothing at all to her, though she was the little untravelled daughter of an unmovable Canadian farmer.

Fate had brought him to her, so he had said, and he had told her she was what he desired most. There had been truth in his voice; passionate, convincing truth, and adoration in his eyes.

The die was cast, and she accepted love as a gift of the gods. Something unexpectedly beautiful had happened, and she meant to hold it fast.

Benedict caught her hands and drew her to him; the bronze leaves of a birch tree were like a royal canopy over them; the branches bent down low and made a shining tent.

The man said some words rapidly that were in a foreign tongue. They were spoken with soft intensity, his face against hers.

“O!” she cried. “What is it you say, Gabriel? Tell me.”

“All the most beautiful words in Basque I can remember. All the sweetest words of love.” Then laughing, “I will say them all in Spanish to you next if you will wait, Cara Mia, and there are some in Italian you must learn—and then in your lovely English;—darling!—darling!”

“Wait—Wait, Gabriel!” she cried. “I have something to tell you at once! It is important, and I have so little time to-day.”

“Only you are important. Only you. Do you know your eyes are a blue-green—almost a metallic green to-day—and yesterday they were sea-grey.”

She put her hand upon his lips bent close to hers.

“You must hear me, and at once, Gabriel. You must.”

“Then if I must, come over to the riverbank, to the log under the oak. The river will want to see you, and I must not be selfish, my sweet. The river is a great lover. He sings all night to those he loves. He carries them gently in a little rocking boat, and still sings and tells them of peace.”

“You will not listen,” she sighed, sitting down on the old log, “and I am so desperately unhappy because of what I must say.”

“It is not that you have changed your mind about me? For then I would not listen!”

“O no! No! Not that.”

“Then it is all right, whatever you tell me.”

She shook her lovely head. “Ah, Gabriel, that is so sweet to hear; but you do not understand. Father would never let me go to you. I am his goods and chattels, and so is Kathleen. We all are. We do not go against him even in little things.”

“Well,” Benedict said with his quick amused smile, “this is something you must leave to me. Some fathers are difficult; but you are going to marry me. You have promised.”

“Did I?” she said.

“Of course you did, and that makes it final. Just as soon as it can be arranged you are going to marry me. I cannot stay here long, and equally I do not intend to leave you. I must see your father and show him I have very good credentials. O very good! I have bankers who can give me testimonials of my possessions here and there. Then I have not been singing for so many years without making some friends—friends in Europe and in the British Isles. A few have names of importance he would know. I am not unimportant myself, darling, in the world of art, should he care to inquire. Do you think any of these things would impress your father, or make it easier for him to part with you?”

She looked up into the eager, glowing beauty of his eyes.

“I cannot exactly explain how he feels—but—but father does not want us to go far away. He wants to keep us here on the land, when we marry, and to be part of this country. Art means nothing to him. Of great art he knows little. Traditions—and family, and possessions handed down—these are what he thinks of. Do you know,” she gave a little quick laugh that as quickly died, “he has a husband already selected for me. The son of a rich farmer about ten miles away.”

“Ah, so?”

“Yes,” she asserted. “It is as bad as that; and now I have not told you what I came to say, and at home Kathleen will be coming in and wondering where I am, and Nils Olsen may see me returning—he did before—and Phyllis will be watching for me.”

“The dumb woman?” he questioned, lighting his pipe. “Darling, you are too much watched. When you are with me no one shall watch you but myself.”

“That is wonderful to hear, Gabriel,” she answered.

The man blew a smoke-ring into the air. “I have not come here too soon, Mignonne,” he said, and took her hands. “Come! Now tell me what you came to say. I can bear it easily this way. Ah, Gail, you are beautiful! Always wear that creamy white.”

“You will not be serious,” she laughed. “You are not thinking of what I must say.”

“Yes! Yes! I am. Begin!”

“It is this,” she started, her face whitening. “The farmers around are incensed that foreigners have come and bought so much land, six hundred acres, the Hennessy farm—and——”

“I am sorry they do not like it, but I fear it is done. I hold deeds of the land and have paid for it in full. With the men I have hired to help my brothers it will soon be in order. Already the house is arranged, and two cottages are being built. I; no I mean—we—will have to leave before long.”

She looked up a little frightened expression on her face.

“Before long?” she said, a catch in her voice.

“Yes. But you and I. There are many engagements awaiting me abroad. I cannot drift this way longer. There are contracts I have signed, for the fall and winter.”

“It frightens me!” she whispered, leaning her head against his shoulder. Benedict caught her close.

“Tell me what you started to say, Mignonne. Something about the farmers resenting our coming. Is it because we are from southern Europe?”

“Not exactly. But because they seem determined to think you are gypsies. They have not known any people from the Pyrenees and the Basque provinces. As you came in covered wagons they are sure you are rovers.”

“They are very wrong. We are not the Romany—I have said though I have nothing against them. We are from an ancient race—a pure bred race. Keeping long pedigrees; living for the most part simple good lives. This I could easily explain to our neighbours. The Romany are capricious, unsettled. We are quite unlike that. You remember I told you this?”

“Yes—but they would not listen to you for they are prejudiced and narrow. O, I hate to tell you what I must say. The men are coming from all around to make trouble, to make a terrible disturbance—a chivarie,—” she ended with a little sob.

“So?” he said. “Go on, darling! You know no one can hurt us if we do not give them the power to do so. Tell me all.”

“How can I?” she exclaimed. “It is torture to repeat what father told us at noon. He is the one who stirred up the farmers. It is quite true, Gabriel; they mean to meet to-night on the edge of father’s land, where it touches yours, at the point near the Hennessy house—your house—and they are going to make this horrible noise and keep it up until you cannot endure it, and so move away. They will go on night after night until you go.”

“That is very primitive. It reminds one of the African drums,” he smiled. “That sound, too, often means war.”

“This is a sort of war, then. O if I were only a man and could fight them in some way!”

“Hush! Hush!” the man answered gently. “It will only trouble me if it troubles you. Let me think.”

She looked up at him with wide eyes. His face had suddenly taken on the impenetrable stillness of the Spanish face that can mask all pain or chagrin.

“Do you know,” he said, presently, “what you have told me is something I never should have imagined possible. I have thought we might not be welcomed gladly, but that we would be disliked, had not entered my mind. We are independent, and as our own language is so unused except at home, we carefully acquired a little of a few other languages. Spanish, of course, as our mother was of Spanish birth. Some French, and enough English to start with. I have told you. My people are not ignorant—so much as plain-living. I hardly know, darling, how I am to convey to them that they are to be spurned.”

“There is the law,” she said.

“O, not the law!” he replied. “I would not desire to appeal to your courts and so bring possible punishment on these noise-makers. If it were a riot it might be different.”

“It will only be noise, of course, and as they have permission from father to do this on his land, perhaps they will be within the law. But they should be punished, every one!”

“You are a sweet champion, but we won’t talk about it any more. I am happy that you warned me, for I will not be unprepared. So leave it to me. No harm shall come to anyone.”

Sudden tears filled her eyes. “O, Gabriel,” she said, “are you always like this? So calm, so kind?”

“I will at least be so with you,” he smiled.

She threw her arms around his throat with swift impulse, and they stood a moment without words.

Then Benedict spoke, looking down at her. “Life is going to be different for you, Cara Mia,” he said. “There will be much variety. London, Paris, Vienna, and other cities. I sing in many places, and you will be much seen. You are so perfect in these little gowns but by and by there must be velvets and satins and brocades and jewels! All I can give you. We will ride together along all the well-known bridlepaths of old London and Paris,” he gave an amused laugh. “One and another will say, ‘Who is it that is riding with Benedict this morning? Here is a new beauty! Someone we have not seen.’ And another will answer, ‘She is his wife. Yes, a new beauty in London. A Canadian, they say.’ And as the name of Canada stands now for romance, and a far and fascinating new land, all will wish to know more of you. Since the Canadian troops came over to France the world has been enlightened as to the sort and fashion of men you breed here. The name always holds them, abroad. O, everywhere you will be the sensation of the hour, Gail—all because I held to my dream, and followed it until it became reality in the little stone church.”

“Gabriel,” she laughed, “you are a most desperate flatterer, but I do adore to hear you!”

“Wait and see how true my words will prove. We will go to many places,” he went on. “To Florence in the time of lilies, and to old Verona, where I will try and find Juliet’s balcony for you; and we may cross the Bay of Naples some moonlight night, when I will sing their songs just for you! Then I have a little yacht that may take us on a cruise in the Aegean Sea, if you would care to go. But one thing is certain, you will hear a great deal of music. It may weary you, for we will live with it; music, operas, the old and the new, concerts, great orchestras. Constant music.”

“Will I hear you very often?” she asked.

“O very often—and others.”

She hesitated a moment. “Gabriel, will we not have a home, somewhere; a home, you know——?”

Into his dark face came a quick light.

“I can promise you that, for I have had none since I left the mountains when I was sixteen. Just a flying visit back, and away again to a suite of rooms in some hotel. Quite grand often, but not my own. Now we will have a home to return to whenever we can return.”

“I think I am dreaming of all these things.”

“No! No! This is very real.”

“Then I must hurry, for I have simply forgotten all about time! Be careful to-night, Gabriel.”

“I will be all right. But you, you must not leave your garden; and to-morrow meet me here, as you did to-day.”

“Yes—here,” she nodded.

“Then go now,” he said, lifting her hands to his lips.

At the edge of the bush she looked back and smiled to him, and he smiled back in his quiet, untroubled way.

In her heart was a sense of anger and helplessness, she had never before known. Anger against her father, and the farmers roundabout whom he had influenced against Benedict and his people. She noticed none of the beauty around her to-day, nothing of the purple and gold and scarlet of late flowers, in her father’s garden. It might have been a grey waste as far as she was concerned. But she did see there were little pink clouds in the sky floating like rose leaves up from the west, and so knew it was later than she thought.

Rufus rushed to meet her and she patted his head.

“Don’t bark, Rufe!” she said softly. “I want to make a quiet entrance. O, Rufe, I am so deliriously happy, and at the moment so frightened. If God would only make things go right. Of course Dad will never let me marry him! Then I will have to run away as they do in novels. . . .”

Never until this last week had Gail gone into her father’s house other than freely and openly. Now she entered with a watchfulness she hated. She did not want Kathleen to see her come in, nor Phyllis, nor her father. O especially her father!

Joyously she noticed Kathleen just riding in. It would take a few moments to change. She could go in with Kathleen to supper, though probably her father was seated at the table now, as he was invariably on time. And Phyllis would have helped her grandmother down. O well, if she went in with Kathleen nothing would be questioned. Perhaps a fiery look from her father;—then Olsen and Grey would sit down, and Wallie. She ran upstairs, brushed her hair, dabbled her hands in water, powdered a trifle and went down with Kathleen.

The thought of the coming night weighed heavily upon them, and they said little.

At the table also there was a constrained silence, broken by scrupulously polite remarks at intervals. The old farmer had lapsed into a sort of stony quiet, with set jaw and deep, dangerous eyes glowing under their heavy black brows. His hair was more luminously silver than usual, Gail thought.

The two hired men gave strict attention to their supper, appearing neither to see nor hear those at the other end of the table.

Old Mrs. O’Sullivan felt a tension in the air, without in the least understanding it. Phyllis moved about like a shadow, looking after the wants of all.

Olsen’s face as Kathleen glanced down at it, expressed nothing but a pleasant indifference to his surroundings. Then he caught her black-lashed eyes, with his of ice-blue, and for a fleeting moment the expression changed to something warm and eager; then it was gone.

He made some excuses and left the table early with Grey, bowing to Phyllis as he passed her. This brief courtliness always secretly enraged O’Sullivan, but to Olsen it was as natural as the air he breathed, as it had come from a youthful foreign training, an ingrained politeness, and observance of small kindlinesses towards servants as well as others.

To old Mrs. O’Sullivan and her grand-daughters he bowed more deeply, that was all. Both were natural gestures. He would have been amused to have been told he was more courteous than those around him. In Grey, and the boy Walter, who had been a foundling, one did not expect a finished manner, but from others it was taken as a matter of course to Nils Olsen.

Phyllis, in her unobtrusive way, gave the Norwegian a little especial attention at times, but only what might be done unnoticed. He had a deep pity for the dumb woman. Within his mind she stirred questions he never asked, and occasional wonder. Wonder at her long patience with her innumerable small tasks. At her disinclination, which was quite evident, to taking rest, or holidays. Gail had told him she could not be persuaded to these. She was a continual mystery to him. For one thing her age could not be guessed. The smooth pearl-grey hair might have belonged to a woman of sixty. But her face always colourless, was unlined, and her tired eyes still of a clear brown. Whether she listened to conversations about the table no one could know. Outwardly she seemed entirely concerned with the service needed.

To-night she looked even more absorbed by her work than usual.

When O’Sullivan rose he helped his mother from her chair, and spoke quickly to his daughters, his beetling brows drawn together.

“Ye’ll go up with your grandmother and keep her company this night until she goes to her bed. Then amuse yourselves about the house. I’ll not have ye going out.”

At his first words Olsen and Tom Grey left the room. Going rapidly they did not catch these emphatic directions.

“I wish to speak to you, Olsen!” the old man called.

“Very well, sir. I will wait outside.”

“Do you think Shannon and Bob will be in for supper, Dad?” Kathleen asked. “Will Phyllis keep something hot for them?”

“She will not,” he returned sharply. “Let them get in on time if they want supper. They try my patience I can tell ye! To-night they will be seen with the other farmers’ sons, and their men, at the reception we are giving these foreigners, or I’ll know why!”

Gail caught his arm. “O Dad,” she said gently “must that go on? It seems so——”

“So what?” he asked dangerously.

“So unkind to strangers,” she answered falteringly. “You know there has not been a chivarie for years near us, and this breaks all the old laws of hospitality that you yourself have taught us.” As she spoke her courage rose and her colour flamed back.

“Not another word, Gail!” he thundered. “Upstairs with your grandmother, both of you! Leave me to judge what is right or wrong in this house, my girls!”

Phyllis fluttered past like a frightened grey moth. As O’Sullivan left the kitchen she lifted her slate and wrote. Touching Gail’s arm at the stairs she held the writing towards her.

“Do not anger him,” ran the words. “Be careful.”

Gail leaned back, and brushed her white face with a kiss.

“Don’t worry, old dear,” she laughed nervously.

Phyllis shook her head, and across her lips went her slow, enigmatical smile as she looked at the girl’s lovely face. Kathleen was half-way up the stairs with the little old lady. It took a bit of coaxing to help her onward to-night. Gail caught up with them quickly.

“Shall we make a chair with our hands and carry you, grannie?” she laughed.

Mrs. O’Sullivan always heard that young voice.

“Certainly not, my dear,” she remonstrated. “I am quite able to walk. It is just my knees that are a trifle shaky. When your father speaks loudly in the tone he used to-day, it puts a sort of fear on me. Why do you all provoke him so?”

“It’s our sinful natures rising to the top,” she nodded. “You know we cannot all be as perfect as your son, darling.”

The ancient one shook her finger. “Do not joke about him, child!” she said. “I never said he was perfect.”

“O, grannie! This from you!” Kathleen exclaimed.

The old eyes studied their faces in a sort of troubled way.

“Come,” Gail said gently. “Come dear—let me help you undress and go to bed. You are over-tired. Next time you are so tired I will ask Nils Olsen to carry you up those long stairs. Nils Olsen you know! He is so strong, so big and golden. Like a Viking, don’t you think? He shall carry you up.”

“He would love to, grannie,” Kathleen said gently.

“Yes? You think so?” she said tremulously. “Then he may be a nice boy—that Viking. A nice, gentlemanly boy, Kitty. I hate to see him sit below the salt.”

Kathleen kissed her hand.

“He does not mind, grannie,” she said. “Nothing like that can possibly hurt him.”

So, together they tucked the little worn body in bed and left her sleeping quietly.

Below, on the porch, O’Sullivan was speaking with Olsen.

“It’s finally quite settled, Olsen,” he began, “that the men about here intend to root these gypsies out—and they go over there to-night. I thought I’d tell ye a committee waited on their leader this morning and requested them to leave this neighbourhood. He was told I would buy back the Hennessy land he now owns at an advanced rate, so he would be none the worse off. He was told calmly we did not want more Europeans—those of a roving type, in this old, long-settled country. I was not there, but they told me the man listened politely, but declined to go, or to accept my offer of repurchasing the farm. He seemed a man of worldly knowledge, speaking English well, though with a slight accent. I warrant he’s some paid agent of them.

“He told the committee we had a wrong view of them. That they were Basques and before long would overcome our dislike and what he called prejudice. He was very cool, and bowed them out in quite a grand way, so they said.

“That alters nothing, Olsen. I am determined they are to go, and go they shall, by one means or another. Damn all these new foreigners crowding in to these settled places! Let them go to the new lands west and north. Let them go up on the Peace river, or to the Mackenzie, or to Northern Ontario!” His empurpled face stared at Olsen.

“Hear me!” he said hoarsely. “They shall go! They shall have a dose of unutterable noise. It is a bloodless way to get rid of them. We will try it first; seeing they will not listen to reason. If they won’t we’ll try something else later—boycotting—perhaps.”

“This seems a crude way,” Olsen commented; “one I think that has never been tried on undesirables in my country.”

“I imagine you have few immigrants to Norway,” the old man said sneeringly. “People are more apt to leave it than to enter.”

“No, we have not many enter, I confess, but some undesirables do come occasionally—fugitives from justice—and so on.”

“That must make it interesting,” he returned.

“It is an ancient country, and a little tired. It desires peace. I wished to try new places, and came to this young country—as your father did, sir.”

O’Sullivan nodded.

“True; every worthy man to his choice. What I wanted to hear, Olsen, was something else. Do you intend to join the others who raise the tumult to-night? Tom Grey is under my orders to go. But I do not feel I can order you in this.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Then you will be along with them, Olsen?”

“No, sir.”

“You will go against my wishes?”

“Regrettably, sir.”

The old man stood very straight before speaking.

“As I said, I give you no orders, Olsen, but if you leave me in the lurch, and refuse to appear, you may find another situation.”

Olsen bowed slightly.

“I appreciate greatly having been with you, Mr. O’Sullivan. I have learned at first hand much from you on this beautiful farm. But I see the time has come to leave.”

O’Sullivan choked down his anger. He did not want to lose this man.

“Where are you going then?” he asked.

“I had meant to tell you, sir. I intend going to the county of Kent to try my luck at raising tobacco. It is successfully grown there and I know something about it.”

“You will hire to a Kent farmer?”

“No, sir. I will buy land. Recently, quite recently, a little legacy came to me from Norway, a part of my father’s estate. He—he was lost at sea six months ago.”

“A sailor, then?” O’Sullivan commented.

“A sea-captain, sir. His ship struck an overlooked mine in the Irish Sea.”

O’Sullivan gave him a shrewd glance.

“I wonder you took a menial position, Olsen.”

“That did not matter. I desired to work and learn, and I have. Kindly wish me luck now, Mr. O’Sullivan,” he ended with his boyish smile.

“Why should I?” he answered savagely. “You will make your own luck.”

The frank blue eyes clouded a moment.

“When do you wish me to leave?” he asked.

“Any time—any time,” O’Sullivan returned.

“Then I will say in two weeks, sir.”

O’Sullivan stalked off, a new annoyance burning within him. Hitherto he had employed no man as capable as the Norwegian, and he was departing. The world seemed out of joint.

To Kathleen and Gail the twilight hours dragged slowly. The garden darkened from silver-blue to grey, and from grey to deep purple gloom. The moon came up, a honey-coloured moon softly luminous. It drenched the world with its light and the flowers stood out in relief—silver flowers on silver stems.

The house became unendurable to them, and when at last Phyllis came upstairs to her room next their grandmother’s, they hastened into their white woollen coats and ran out and to the summer-house.

From there they could watch the road. Most of the men going to the chivarie would pass that way. A few would gather from the concessions. A night cicada broke suddenly into its shrill music. Some bats flitted by. A little grey owl that haunted the garden hooted softly. But these were peaceful sounds. They did not jar the senses, but were part of the September night and glamour of the moon.

As nine o’clock struck in the hall, light wagons and buggies and Ford motors came along the road and were parked and hitched by the orchard fence. More and more followed, and a number of men and boys riding farm horses. All carried weird and unusual instruments; cow-bells, sleigh-bells, ancient dinner-horns, cymbals, the horns from motor cars and moose-calling horns; rusty triangles and crow-clappers; drums borrowed from local bands; fifes, drums and bugles acquired from lodge bands; penny whistles in quantity. No discarded impossible instrument had been overlooked.

When about forty had assembled, they decided on the method of procedure. Years had passed since the last chivarie had driven out undesirable neighbours, but it was fresh in the minds of those who had been there.

A strange couple who collected cats of various breeds, apparently for the love of them, settled down on a tiny farm in the vicinity. When the progeny of these poor animals began to over-run the immediate land, and then flow onward in a furry wave to the farms round about, the time came to end it.

The undesirable people with as many of their pets as they could gather, left after one night of the fiendish tumult, as they were promised more, should they remain.

The cats seemed to follow their trail, for Maltese, Persian, tortoise-shell, tiger-striped, yellow-bloom and common cats all faded away.

It had been so successful an affair that the memory of it spurred them on now. Most of those who met were farmers’ young sons, and hired men and boys pining for a little mischief and a lark and nothing else. A few were unsuccessful and misanthropic fellows usually to be found in more or less lonely localities, their hand against every man’s. That the idea of a night disturbance had originated in the mind of O’Sullivan could not have been proved. These men had nothing to lose and a night’s fun to gain. They took this as they took a barn dance, or a frolic in certain taboo halls in town. Although often bovine and heavy of wit, their bursts of vast enjoyment and activity were continual matters of amazement to the church-going, conservative, settled land-holder. Most of these men were a floating population. Good or bad crop seasons were not of great moment to them. If the grasshopper was a burden he was not their burden, and if the rain did not fall either on the just or the unjust they took it philosophically, for until the exchequer was empty wages must be paid.

Different types of voices and accents drifted over to the girls. Only occasionally came a pure, unaccented Canadian voice. The Scotch burr, the shadow of an Irish brogue, Cockney English, and now and then a nice blending of all. Perhaps this was pure Canadian.

Ten o’clock came and the men with their motley instruments moved off together. They crossed into the orchard and took the road that ran through a field and the lane. For acres on either hand, spread out the newly-garnered O’Sullivan fields, fenced to perfection. Beyond the lane on one side ran the farm bush through which went the little river, and on the other was a great field that went up to the Hennessy farm where a line-fence divided it from that of Marcus O’Sullivan. But the Hennessy lane wound round the bush and touched the river at the swimming pool. Not far from the line-fence stood the old farmhouse.

As the men tramped up to this fence the house held all their attention, for it was brightly alight. It was a comfortable looking old house with a verandah and french windows opening upon it from what seemed a long main room.

The men neared the line-fence quietly. From there they could see in the moonlight the glimmer of three or four covered wagons standing near the barn. Here and there a few tents gave the place a gypsy look. They debated in whispers whether to begin their noise there or go around by the sheltered swimming pool, but decided this was much nearer the house.

The many lights there disconcerted them, and gave them pause. Then, growing used to them, they began to see plainly into the room—for the french windows were thrown back. They noticed a long dark table set bountifully. The furniture had evidently been bought with the house, for the heavy chairs and buffet loomed up indefinitely. Two women and three men moved about the room, and as they watched, came out on to the verandah, the men each carrying some kind of guitar.

In absorbed silence those by the fence stared and listened for what might come next. Some of them had temporarily laid their grotesque instruments on the grass, and now leaned against the fence lost in deep shadow. Others stood in little groups, but at the moment not one was ready to make a sound. Curiosity consumed them.

Then across the silence of the moonlit night came the lovely music of the guitars, and the voices of all on the verandah broke into sudden song. They sang an age-old wedding song of the Basque people, though their listeners were only aware of its potent beauty, for it carried a deep and passionate melody where pathos and great joy mingled.

The voices as they rose and fell were sweet and clear. Once or twice they broke a little as with some suppressed emotion, then went on bravely. Following this they sang a soldiers’ marching song in swinging rhythm. The feet of the men by the fence involuntarily beat time to it. When this ended there was a pause, and again they sang. Now it was the Brahms lullaby all the world knows, and after this came some simple folk-songs.

The farm men, many of them starved for pure music, were held there as though fascinated. Not one ghastly instrument was raised. All these now were on the grass, and damp with dew.

Silence fell on the verandah, and then two guitars together began a melody, that rose and fell in charming measures, and one man stepping apart from the others, stood alone and began to sing.

So beautiful was his voice, so exquisite the song, the men by the line-fence held their breath to listen. High as the notes of a thrush it went, and low and deep as the sound of waves against a great rock. All the shades of emotion the soul is capable of ran through the marvellous tones, though the song was only a simple ballad of life and love and death. The things these listening men knew. On and on it went to its perfect conclusion, the melody unknown to them, but the words falling on the night in English.

At the end one and another drew a long breath, as if coming up out of deep water. One or two swore softly but with amazing force. A young boy with his head on the fence gave a quickly suppressed sob, and a music-mad old German farmer suddenly broke into loud applause. One after another in a queer sort of way, the others joined in with him, the ideas they had brought scattered, their purpose forgotten. Presently their applause gathered force and the dark rang with it.

At the surprising sound the man who had just sung, swung himself down off the verandah, not waiting to reach the steps, and went rapidly towards the line-fence from which the sounds came. The farm men watched him coming, and wavered back and forth, undecided whether to hasten away, or wait. The man reached them before their slow-moving minds were made up.

“My friends! My friends!” he called. “Do not go! We heard there might be some neighbours come over to greet us, and my old grandmother, my brothers and myself, and all, would be sad if you did not come to our home. We have prepared for you, that you may have a glass of wine with us in this old house I have taken among you for my few people. Come! I would be unhappy to go back alone!”

The men shuffled from one foot to another, undecided, taken by complete surprise. Some were enticed by the suggestion of wine, and all were arrested by the invitation to the house, and a little overcome by it.

These were not the sort of gypsies they had come to annoy and disperse. These appeared to be kindly singing folk. The dark man who invited them to his house, and who had sung alone, was so disarmingly friendly they were puzzled what to do, and in the dark the colour surged to their faces. In the moonlight he looked tall, athletic and pleasant. He was dressed in a serge suit such as well-to-do farmers might wear, though possibly he wore it with a difference. They liked his flashing smile, and the rapidly changing expressions of his kindly face. There was nothing about him to criticize or resent except that he was from a distant place.

The fence between them—their ill-assorted instruments lying in the grass—a big, raw-boned young Scotch farm-hand spoke up.

“What’s to hinder oor takin’ the gentleman at his word, an’ goin’ along over to his hoose wi’ him? ’Tis a nice, cordial offer, and for meself I’m for acceptin’ it.”

He leaped the rail fence lightly, and, as the leader of the herd makes up the mind of the herd, the others without more ado, left their belongings, and, empty-handed, but pleasantly excited, followed their leader who walked ahead with Gabriel Benedict.

On the verandah the family group waited expectantly and anxiously, not knowing the strange ways of this country to which they had committed their fate.

Benedict had told them some farmers and their men might possibly come to visit them that night, but had said nothing of the fiendish purpose of their visit, trusting to the moonlight, the music and his invitation to frustrate their plans. He had so far succeeded beyond all his expectations, for here they were, quite docile, at least for the time being. Temporarily, at least, they had abandoned antagonism. He banked upon the mellow influence of a glass or two of wine, and the hospitality of his house to set their new acquaintance on another footing.

When the short introductions were over, Benedict and his brothers invited the men to enter the long room. There the table that had been Hennessy’s was laden with an enticing supper, and though it had to be served a la buffet, the result was good. Red and golden wine filled the big decanters, and was poured freely, but with care. No man became more than exceedingly cheerful. Following this, pipes and cigars and cigarettes were set on the table, and presently they all trooped out on to the verandah, a motley throng that overflowed it.

Benedict persuaded them to stay and smoke awhile, as the night was warm and delightful.

“We’ll stop a bit, governor,” one Englishman said, speaking up, “if you’ll jest tell us what brought you to this country, and where ye’re from? I think ye’ll fit in, in time, though ye don’t belong yet.”

Benedict told them to be at home, and take seats where they could, and he leaned against the verandah pillar. All were smoking and at ease; some looked in the dim light a bit puzzled and still surprised, but not one, not even the landowners, seemed at the moment unfriendly. They had broken his bread and taken his salt. In the rough most of them certainly were, but time, the miracle-maker, would create many changes; and the generation that followed would be different again. A strange metamorphosis often took place in farmers, and the sons of them who were born on Canadian farms. In this new country things did not stand still. The seeds of ambition took root in very humble hearts here, and great was the flower and the crop that came to harvest.

This Benedict sensed, as he looked around at the husky, seasoned men and boys. The hired men, often more bold and assertive than their employers. Those who had urged this adventure of the night had not for the most part come with them to carry it out. Few established farmers wished their names coupled with a chivarie.

In their hearts the men here knew this, and so they were the more ready to drop a plan that grew less appealing as it had matured.

The friendly lighted house, the music in the night, the kindly invitation to one and all had overcome them, and even swayed a few with sudden homesickness—they also being far from their own land.

Benedict knew the moment had come to tell them what he thought they should know. He realized now how high prejudice ran against the roving gypsy type of foreigner, and how completely he and his family had been mistaken for them. If they had come by train with ordinary luggage and farming implements their reception might have been different. He did not know. But the covered wagons, the unusual mountaineer dress of the men, and quaint garments of the women had placed them at once in a class apart from ordinary settlers.

The wine had warmed the hearts of his guests and the sense of embarrassment they felt at first had gone. A mellow mood had come, and in impatience they awaited his story.

Benedict picked up one of the guitars and softly struck a few chords. After a few moments he began to talk, not as though to anyone, but a trifle absently, as it might be reciting a saga of his people; an old, old story. For indeed the devastating tragedy of a year ago that had destroyed their village, taken his father and mother and two young brothers and his young sister’s husband, seemed to belong to history. It had so completely broken time in half for this handful of people with him. They spoke of what happened before it, and of what happened after. It would date the years of their lives always.

Benedict told of the simple lives of these mountain people, and of the avalanche; then of the overwhelming grief and distraction that followed. He told of how they could no longer live near the mountains or look up at them. He gave the reasons for bringing them away, and because at home they had used covered wagons in their short journeys, how he had thought it best to let them travel to their destination the same way. He spoke of the ease with which they were passed into the country by reason of the influential English names of his friends, and the fact that they were provided with money, and also desired to farm. He only briefly touched on his own life, which had been apart from the others, and given over to such great study and music. He said his brothers had carried letters and testimonials from officials in the Basque provinces, testifying to the truth of all these statements, and they also had kindly letters from their parish priests.

“We are what we say we are,” he ended, and again softly struck a few chords on the guitar.

No one spoke, and in a moment Benedict added. “I myself bought this farm, because it was for sale, in this beautiful country, and near the great lake. There are no mountains near,” he said, “only little hills.”

Presently the men rose to their feet from where they had been sitting on the edge of the verandah, the steps and even on the grass below. They were not usually given to expressions of sentiment, but something in this man’s story, or his way of telling it, had touched the least susceptible of them all.

They shuffled over to him to where he still stood at the top of the verandah steps by the grey column, and as they went by each held out his hand.

Benedict and his brothers took their hands warmly and the rough hard fingers gave back a friendly grip. Nearby stood the old grandmother smiling her sad smile, and the two young wives of the men. The sister was not there, as Benedict had feared this recital of his story, for her.

The Scotchman clapped Benedict on the back heartily.

“I’ve always heard,” he said, “that a few true words could oft clear up a misunderstanding. We know ye better now. D’ye think you could sing us a song as we walk back, or the brothers could play a tune on their banjos? A little music sprinkled on the night is a pleasant thing.”

“We will be happy to play for you,” he answered, with his quick smile. “Here Danio and Bazzo! Bring in the Kitharas! We will play the harvest festival dance. Here! Altogether now!”

As the ringing music began, the men trooped back the way they had come, waving farewells. By the time they had reached the line-fence and gathered up their unspeakable instruments from the damp grass, a sense of relief that the affair was well over swept through them and loosened their tongues. They realized now that no fine purpose had spurred them on to destroy the peace of these new neighbours and drive them out, but only a desire for a break from the monotony of their lives meted out to them as hirelings, and the excitement of a wild jamboree. But their plans had been reversed, and strangely they were satisfied. Not for long had they been so well entertained in any man’s house as they had been for the last two hours in Benedict’s.

The impression of warm welcomes, and pleasant though sad faces, lingered with them. The remembrance of heavenly music, a bountiful table, and sparkling wine would never quite fade from their minds.

Through the sweet-scented lane and the wagon-path down the orchard they went along, and faintly on the air the music still followed them. At the highroad they scattered, each to his own conveyance, and old buggies, rickety Fords, and bicycles clattered away. Not one of them all was in any mood to be called down or questioned as to why the night had not been shattered by discord. In their hearts each felt he had been made a fool, not by the simple, kindly people at the Hennessy farm, but by a dour old farmer and his associates, who had fomented contempt towards them, and who had sent them on a devilish errand they would not otherwise themselves perform. The man they cursed most thoroughly to themselves on their absurd attempted raid was Marcus O’Sullivan. Neither he, his son, his nephew or his hired men had gone with them. Tom Grey had appeared as they started, and then disappeared. The boy, Walter, had been seen by some of them near the Hennessy house, but he was only a boy and did not count.

What had The O’Sullivan ever done for any of them that they should listen to him, or be guided by his wishes, they muttered to themselves. It was true he seated his hired men at his own table, except on special occasions—but with the indignity of being placed in sight of his family, below the salt cellar.

As they rode home through the still night, frosted with silver radiance, the spirit of every man, even the small land owners, was rebellious within him. They had been made to look like fools, they said, as they heard the clock in the village strike one.

Kathleen and Gail stayed late in the garden after they saw the men assemble and go towards the Hennessy farm. The night grew warmer and very bright as the moon sailed high. A vague terror and apprehension made them intensely awake. Though Kathleen had been in the saddle all afternoon, and Gail unsettled and on a nervous tension, they felt no slightest fatigue now, but concentrated on listening for any faintest sound from beyond the orchard.

Where their father had gone they did not know, and Bob had been invisible since supper. Shannon had not been home since midday. No insufferable restrictions were placed on the men of the family such as exasperated Gail and often Kathleen.

It was after ten o’clock when they fancied the men must have reached the line-fence between the farms. Still all was quiet.

A night hawk flew overhead, giving a lost-soul cry. A loon laughed down by the river. From the stables came the whinny of an uneasy horse; then grew quiet. Through the grass the crickets chirped with a maddening monotony, and now and then a firefly lit its tiny lantern.

Softly the two girls crossed the road and went up into the orchard.

“They must have reached the dividing fence now,” Gail whispered. “Let us go through the field to the lane, Kitty.”

“If you want to, dear—but Dad wouldn’t like it.”

“O never mind that! Come!”

“You are trembling, darling,” Kathleen said taking her arm. “Are you cold?”

“O no! It’s just because this is such a vile and hateful thing the men are going to do; that Dad in some way suggested they should do.”

“But there is no sound!”

“No,” she said breathlessly. “Not yet. But there will be.”

They went softly towards the lane.

“Do you think father came in and went to bed?” Gail asked.

“I don’t know, of course, but I fancy he is somewhere out of doors; perhaps nearby.”

Gail gave a little shiver.

“We have turned into night prowlers, as a family. I hope if father is near he will not run across us, for why upset him further? But listen, Kitty! Listen!”

Across the stillness came the faint but inexpressibly sweet sound of the Basque guitars and voices singing.

Standing at the entrance to the lane they heard it with delight. There were several songs all in an unknown language and after a wait, the voice of Benedict.

“O, Kathleen, you know who is singing now! Don’t you think it is heavenly?”

“Heavenly!” Kathleen returned. “Like music from a star!”

The song died away, and deep silence followed.

“What is wrong,” Gail whispered nervously. “What is stopping the men from—from——” The words broke.

“Nothing is wrong, at least I think nothing is wrong. Something must have made them change their minds. Something has turned the current of the men’s thoughts. Perhaps the singing. Come! We must hurry home. If Dad found us here he would be fit to be tied, as Grannie says. Come!”

“O, if he would sing again, Kitty!”

“We can’t wait to listen. We must go home,” Kitty reiterated firmly.

“What do you think Dad will say in the morning? There will be more to this than meets the eye, Kit.”

“There will be more to it if we prolong this ramble and run into him,” she returned laughingly.

“I’m a little afraid of Dad,” Gail said breathlessly. “Are you, darling?”

“Not in the least,” she replied. “But I like to escape trouble. Here we are! Now go softly.”

A deathlike stillness pervaded the house, and only a dim light burned in the hall. The two girls said good night and went noiselessly to their own rooms. But Gail knew instinctively that the dumb woman heard her enter, and close her door.

“O, I wonder why Phyllis always listens for me!” she said to herself as she slipped off her gown and put on a kimono. “I wish she wouldn’t! O, I wish she wouldn’t.”

Then she brushed out her short shining curls and sat down by the window. The hall clock struck twelve. What a mysterious world it was from there. The sky a deep midnight blue, the moon now a great golden bubble floating in a coil of silver mist—a rain-ring. Then came the chirp of the crickets. They were sleepless too. She heard old Rufus move restlessly about downstairs, his ivory-nailed feet clicking against the hardwood floors. He had gone out with them to the lane and returned with them. But some of the family were still out, and he liked people to come home. A night hawk cried again far overhead. Downstairs Rufus gave a low whine. He hated night-hawks or any other thing that made long-drawn sounds of misery.

Through her window she could see across the garden to the road. After a while men and shadows of men and boys emerged from the apple trees, and dispersed in their various conveyances. They seemed strangely quiet and subdued. Only the sounds of cars being cranked, the creaking of harness leather when horses were untied from the fence, and the sudden rolling away of wheels, came to her. A high open window is a good vantage ground, she discovered.

The hall clock struck one. A little later the others came in singly, her father, Shannon and Bob. Old Rufus settled down on his mat, and Gail went to bed.

“O, I forgot my prayers!” she murmured to the dark. And said a very short and fervid one. After that it was easier to go to sleep.

Next morning was as beautiful as the night had been. The rain-ring had brought a late shower, which was over. But one knew by the mystical change with which the seasons grow older, that it was autumn, and near to the falling of the leaf. Migratory birds were gathering in the fields feeding on the aftermath of the crops. The little stay-at-home doves eyed them uneasily, strutting along the eaves on their rose-coloured feet, and vaguely lifting silver wings that knew some strange unsettling urge. Ebony crows crossed the deep September blue, coming and going on their unknown business. The wild geese were still north, but the time of peril for tiny butter-ball ducks and gorgeous canvas-backs was at hand. Already Shannon was polishing his guns, oiling and loading them and putting them in the rack near the wide kitchen mantel where the freshly painted decoys now sat in a disconcerting row.

Yesterday Phyllis had written on her slate to Gail. “Your brother is careless with his rifles. He has left one on the mantelpiece with the decoys.” And she had laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Phil dear. It is quite safe up there.”

“Well, don’t touch it, my lamb,” the dumb woman had written.

Gail had patted her arm and smiled. “O Phil, you are afraid of so many things!”

And Phyllis had put on her slate, “Yes, I am,” and gone her way.

A sense of apprehension filled the house this morning. Some feeling left over from the night.

The old farmer had taken breakfast early and alone, and left to interview the extra men who lived in the village but were employed by him at harvest and fruit picking times and other busy seasons. However, early as O’Sullivan had been up, Olsen and Grey had been earlier, while Wallie was around, wide-eyed, and quiet as though having been warned to keep so.

Later Kathleen and Gail rode to town, where they said they would stop for luncheon. An old friend had come to visit their grandmother for a few hours, and she was quite happy.

It was supper time before they all met, at a silent and uncomfortable meal—O’Sullivan in his black coat glowering at the head of the table; Shannon and Bob absorbed and distrait; Kathleen, for all her poise, evidently on a nervous strain, and Gail inclined to be light and flippant, as she usually was in times of crisis. Olsen and Grey seemed aloof and apart, Olsen occasionally sweeping the table with his ice-blue eyes.

O’Sullivan saw to it that his moods were reflected in some fashion in those around him. Gail was the one that most often treated them with indifference.

“I forgive him many things because he is so good-looking, Kitty,” she had said when they were riding that morning, “and because when he is mellow and kindly he is precious; but he cannot force his moods on me! Why should I care that the little lambs this year have come singly and not in battalions, or that his pet pear tree ran all to leaves? Yet these things colour his life, rich as he is.”

Kathleen sighed. “It is something more serious this time, dear.”

“O, I know! I know! And my thoughts are not his thoughts now either.”

So at the supper table Gail kept up a running fire of small talk and nonsense to one and another. It was as though she staved off some ominous moment—a thing coming nearer that she feared, when she looked at the forbidding face at the end of the table.

Her little grandmother looked about, nodding pleasantly, or withdrew into her own untroubled thoughts.

Phyllis, moving about in her shadowy way, was quite conscious of what was in the air.

Even Aunt Pansy, who had been working in the house all day, had heard rumours from old Uncle Gideon of the night and its frustrated plans. From the buttery where she was finishing a batch of beaten biscuits, she leaned out her turbaned head to catch any words from around the table.

None of importance came until O’Sullivan rose and helped his mother from her chair.

The men all rose at the same moment, Olsen and Grey starting towards the porch door.

“Wait!” the old man said harshly.

Gail still sat at the table, her round white chin cupped in her hands. Kathleen took her grandmother’s arm to pilot her away.

The old farmer swung his glance around, including them all.

“Not manny days ago,” he said, standing very straight, “I bid ye all, separately and together, to have nothing to do with the gypsies at Hennessy’s. I knew what I was talking about then and I do now. That sort of travelling folk bring nothing to a place, but it’s not saying they take nothing from it. Not one of them has the pioneer spirit, but they come to reap where others have sown. The people beyond came, it seems, to stay. By hook or crook they got into this country and hold of some money. Because of that the fools at the gates—the immigration officers—let them in. The land I wanted if it were iver on the market, was sold over my head to these foreigners. If ye think I’ll endure that quietly ye’ll find differently! The O’Sullivans have nothing put over them, I’m telling ye. In some States to the south of us they might have been driven out by bird-shot or fires in the night—mysterious fires. Point a gun at any of them and they would run. Here we wanted to avoid hint of violence or bloodshed. There was no help to be had from constable or Justice of the Peace. I tried asking them. So it was agreed by those around, to run them out by a simple chivarie, an old-time harmless method of getting rid of the undesirable. And what happened, think you? The men who went over last night armed with sleigh-bells and moose-calling horns and cymbals and the like, came back like whipped curs! Yes, sir! Like whipped curs! The people at Hennessy’s were too sharp for the farm-hands and small landowners. These gypsies greeted them with music, before they made one discordant sound, and they sang until they got our men listening and hesitating about starting the row. Then they asked them all in to supper and gave them all the wine they could drink! Can ye beat it? Every mother’s son of them laid down the things they had brought to make the row, and went over like sheep to the gypsies’ house—Hennessy’s house! There they were, feasting and wine bibbing and making a night of it, and a laughing stock of us! More than that, they made friends with these folk they had gone to disperse. I’ve told ye this to make it clear I know about it. Now answer me, were anny one of ye there?”

“You know I was not, Dad,” Shannon replied.

“Nor I,” Bob added.

Olsen looked the furious old man in the eye.

“I told you, sir, I was not going,” he said coldly.

“And did ye not?” he asked.

“That is a reflection on my word, sir,” the Norwegian answered.

“I fear you are getting very bold, Olsen,” he said sneeringly.

Olsen shrugged slightly, and strode out the door.

“And you, Grey? Were you there?”

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“And did ye blow a horn or rattle a gourd or thump a drum or make anny noise?”

“No, sir. None of us did.”

“And you listened to the music, and went up to the gypsies’ supper?”

“Yes, sir. We all did. Our plans failed. We had no heart for them. Then, at the house, the man at the head of the family told us his story. They are foreign mountain folk, who came from a village wiped out by an avalanche.”

O’Sullivan struck the table with his clenched hand.

“When I want an explanation I’ll ask for it!” he thundered. “Take this from me; your two weeks’ notice to leave dates from this minute.”

Gail was still sitting at the table apparently unmoved, but her colour had faded.

“For my daughters,” the old farmer said, “I do not need to ask. They may have been in the garden, as it was a sweet night. But if I thought they had gone as far as the lane, or in sound or sight of Hennessy’s house, knowing it was against my orders, I would not hesitate to lock them in their rooms for a week! But hear me again! I intend to get rid of these people though this first attempt failed. They do not hoodwink me with their false stories or foreign songs. And if I find from now on any one of my household so much as passing the time of day with them, it will be the worse for that one. While I live I am the head of this house, and I will be the controller of it. Mind ye that!”

He stood a moment, rock-like and grey; old, and yet unbelievably virile and strong; with the tempers of a thousand fighting men in him. Then he turned on his heel, took his coat off, hung it up, put on his wide hat and went out.

Tom Grey vanished, his heavy face scornful and hot. Gail drew a long breath, and rose, while Bob turned to Shannon with a short laugh.

“Uncle Marcus is taking the sale of Hennessy’s land pretty hard,” he said. “That is at the bottom of all this, really.”

“Yes,” Shannon nodded. “Pretty damn hard. He always wanted Hennessy’s land. It’s another case of frustrated desire.”

“It is just that,” Gail added. “If these—these Basque people had been a mile away he would have paid no attention to them. Anyway, it is humiliating to be told he would lock us up if we spoke to any one of them.”

“How do you know they are Basques?” Bob said quizzically.

“O, I heard,” she answered lightly. “I do hear things sometimes, you know.”

“Yes, beautiful, you do,” Shannon replied teasingly, as they left the room, “and in the most surprising ways.”

She smiled back at him, then flew to her own room and locked the door.

At the window she looked across the fields and trees to the old grey house, small in the distance, where Benedict had sung last night. She knew she must see him and warn him again that further measures would be taken against him. One thought swept her like a tidal wave—she must see him. Carelessly this time they had not arranged a meeting, feeling so sure they could not miss each other. Perhaps he might think she would come to the bush to-morrow afternoon. Perhaps he had waited there to-day. She had not dared to venture there to-day. Now there was her father, or all of them to avoid.

She had no slightest doubt but that he would watch for her. No doubt of him in any way entered her mind. That she had known him so little a time did not matter at all. Time had nothing to do with it. In a mad tumult of thought she gazed over at the grey blur that was the old farmhouse.

Kathleen had escaped the after-supper scene, and was still with her grandmother. It seemed one of her restless nights, for the tremulous voice was talking on and on of old days and old griefs. She heard the name of Brien, the son who was lost at sea, spoken over and over again.

Of course she should go in and give Kathleen release, but she rebelled. She could not listen to-night to those tales that seemed so unreal and fantastic now.

The dark had fallen quickly. It was cloudy and warm with a white mist over the garden. Nine o’clock struck from the hall clock.

She listened again. Kathleen was playing on her mandolin and the old lady was quieter.

“Play ‘Killarney’,” she heard the quavering voice say; and Kathleen touched the strings and found the lovely chords to the tune.

“Grannie will be all right,” Gail thought. “She is quiet now. Anyway I can’t go in! I am going out before anyone prevents me.”

Slipping on a cloak she ran downstairs and out of doors. The place seemed deserted. She had thought she might have found her father on the front verandah smoking, for he often sat there in the evening, as did Shannon and Bob with any friends that dropped in, but no one was there.

Her father had perhaps gone to the next farm south of theirs where an old companion of his lived. Sometimes they played cribbage or chess, but seldom late. Games would hardly hold him to-night and he might appear any time, this she knew. It did not matter where Shannon or Bob had gone.

A short, stocky figure rounded the corner near the kitchen garden.

“Wallie!” she called softly, “come here!”

The boy stopped, then went cautiously to the front verandah steps.

“You’ve been for a walk, haven’t you, Wallie?” she asked. “Did you see my father?”

“No, Miss Gail,” he said awkwardly. “I jes’ met another home boy goin’ to the village and went a bit with him.”

“O yes, of course you would,” she said. “And last night, Wallie——” She left the question unspoken, but he understood. He looked up at the lovely face, a little stern and white in the misty dusk, and realized the girl expected the truth.

“Last night, Miss Gail, I was off with the fellows to that there chivarie.”

“O!” she exclaimed, “and—and how did it go, Wallie?”

“Didn’t you hear your father talking, Miss Gail? Why it didn’t go. It jes kinda petered out. There was some grand music, an’ then the gentleman asked us up to the house. It was great up there. He’s a great gentleman, too, honest he is. I wouldn’t go for to chivarie him no more.”

“That’s right, Wallie,” she said, “and yes, he is a great gentleman.” Then her tone, changing, “Have you seen my father?”

“Mr. O’Sullivan is down to the village,” he said. “He took Cherry in the buggy.”

“And my brother and Mr. Robert—do you know whether they went with him?”

“They ain’t with him, Miss Gail, he went off alone. But their motors is hout. They left the garage doors hopen, which the master said time an’ again they hadn’t ought to.”

She smiled at the boy. “I’m sure you closed them, Wallie.”

“Yes, Miss Gail.”

“That was right. Well, good night. Don’t you think you had better run up to bed now?”

“Yes, maybe,” he answered smiling back at her in abject adoration. “An’ good night to you, Miss Gail.”

He lumbered away, and the girl went swiftly down between the cedar hedges to the gate. For the time being all was safe. When her father came in it would be by the lower stable gate. Shannon and Bob were always late.

Fear stirred in her heart, but stronger than that was the feeling that she must see Benedict. He must be told that this quiet was only a truce. That trouble would certainly be made for him soon. Yet if by any chance her father heard she met him to-night, or had any time met him, she knew his anger would be a storm mowing down all before it.

Bitterness over the sale of Hennessy’s land still rankled, and the frustration of last night’s plans had started a smouldering fire within him that might at any moment break into flame.

The scent of the cedar hedge in the misty darkness was strong and sweet. A little wind had sprung up, and the sound of it through the tassels of a group of pine trees near the gate was like the ancient sound of the sea. It made a peaceful music, she thought, where there was no peace. Which way to go now she did not know, and then she caught the glow of a pipe or cigar across the road. It would not be Bob or Shannon, and not her father. With a little cry she ran over the road.

Benedict was standing by the orchard fence, near the wagon gate.

“O!” she said. “You!”

“And you,” he answered, holding her close. “Will you not ask me over into your garden?”

“I dare not,” she whispered. “My father, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” he echoed. “It has been a long time since I saw you, sweet.”

“The day before yesterday,” she laughed against his sleeve.

“A good deal has happened since then,” he returned, “or might have happened.”

“Gabriel, there is a little summer-house in the garden, near the gate. Come over and tell me about—about everything, you can come that far to-night.”

“I do not like to go in except openly. I will tell you what I have to, here. I have been thinking very seriously. Now hear what I must say. We have much to arrange and it had best be done now.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“Everything, and quickly, so you may return to the house. I waited here for I knew you would come out to me. But if you are missed, or they search the garden, or by chance see me, it might force to conclusions, that which possibly may be brought about quietly.

“You know what happened last night?”

“O, I know!” she cried, her face flaming in the dark. “Don’t talk of it! It was hateful of the men to go, and more hateful of those behind it.”

“Yes,” he said lightly, and smiling at her intensity.

“It was not to have been exactly a beau geste, sweetheart; but something went wrong with their plans. I—what is it you say?—upset the apple-cart.”

“O, Gabriel,” she whispered, her face against his rough coat, “it was a perfect triumph for you! yet such a strange triumph.”

“They are very nice men,” he explained, his face bent down to hers. “I like them, those farm men. I sang for them. We all sang, and they seemed pleased. They also liked us, I think—and the supper.”

“And wine,” she smiled.

“O yes, wine I managed to procure. Not as good as the wine from my country, but it served. Our wine we gave them first, but unfortunately we had little with us. It was not difficult to make friends with your men here, but I must make friends with your father, or else depart with my people elsewhere. I have thought of this, desperately, for hours. Even you, my dear, were put in the back of my mind, and I have thought of nothing but you these three weeks. Now, I have decided what to do. We will not be unwanted neighbours. Some other more friendly place may be found—or my family can go to the Argentine Republic. Many Basques have settled there. I think it may be best to try South America. For myself, wherever I go will be all right, so you go with me.”

He stooped, lifted her hands and touched them to his lips.

“To-morrow,” he went on, “I will see your father. I have different things to tell him. I will tell him that since I saw you in the little church, three weeks ago, I have loved you, and that I desire to marry you. I will tell him—O yes—show him my credentials. I have letters from my friends—the King of the Belgians is one. I thought you should know I intended going to see your father to-morrow. When will he be at home, Gail?”

“O, let me think!” she cried. “It is going to bring such a storm!”

He took her clasped hands in his.

“Do not be afraid,” he said gently. “We have done nothing to regret. We but work out our destiny. Force il destino, my sweet.” Then in another tone, “Your father—at what time may I see him?”

“He comes in from the farm every morning at eleven. But it will be dangerous to see him, Gabriel,” she said, her voice troubled.

“It may be. I will come at that hour,” he answered.

Across the road old Rufus ran up to them joyously, then walked around Benedict in friendly fashion.

“Rufus has accepted me,” the man said, his quick smile lighting the dark. “Ah, I should have been unhappy had he not! Now you must go home.” He patted the big red setter. “Take her there safely, Rufus!”

The misty night closed around them, and they stood a moment saying no words.

Then Benedict watched them away and through the garden until a glimmer of light showed him a door opened and closed.

In the farmhouse that night there was a great sleeplessness. Old Mrs. O’Sullivan, as she sometimes did, wandered from one empty room to another, as though on a search, and Kathleen watched her until at last she went back to bed.

Phyllis spent the hours listening, and knew when Gail came up the stairs.

Marcus O’Sullivan played chess with his nearest neighbour until late, and came home with nerves unstrung.

Shannon and Bob may have slept when they came in, but that was at the first cock-crow.

In the men’s quarters Olsen lay wide awake. In two weeks’ time he would be away from this disturbing farm, and in two weeks there was much for him to do.

But Tom Grey, who had been so summarily dismissed, slumbered heavily, his nerves not being of a tingling variety.

Olsen strode to his window and leant out into the misted night. In him was a restless longing for the sea. He had been born near the sea and came from a long line of sailors.

“What money I have, and can make, will go into the northern gold mines, and if they pan out by and by, I will have a ship, or a little yacht—and Kathleen. O Kathleen!”

He left the window and threw himself on his bed, his blonde head buried in his arm.

And Gail did not sleep. It would be so long until to-morrow. Then, faithful as his word, he would come, so debonair, so gracious, so disarming. He haunted her mind, and a thousand different pictures of him rose and faded—all so compelling, so beloved.

There was a little grey in the wavy black of his hair. Time had not brought it there so much as the stress of life. The concentration on his work, the artistry that demanded the highest nervous tension. By and by that raven hair would be a “silver sabled,” and even more beloved. She saw the clear amber of his eyes with their straight brows, the poetic dark oval of his face with the quick flashing white of his smile. The picture of the Cavalier haunted her. So Velazquez would have painted him in any one of his unstudied poses, and would have given him the cloak of marvellous red,—the red the artist loved—and the wide befeathered hat he had given the man in the picture she had seen.

For he was of the type portrayed in those old pictures. One with the men who wore the velvet doublets and lace collars, and gold helmets and breast plates of damascened metal. The men who with their feathers and lace also wore a sword that had seen service.

O what would her father say when such a man came before him! How could one sleep when such a meeting as that was to take place on the next morning!

Very well she knew whom her father wished her to marry. Either Bob, her first cousin, or the son of a farmer nearby, one more than well provided with flourishing acres.

Bob she adored as she adored Shannon, and in no other way. The farmer’s son from the nearby estate was a person to fly from if she saw him in the distance. Not that he was ill-favoured, or cursed of the Gods, but simply that he had been selected by her father as her possible husband. So thought kept sleep away till dawn, when she fell into a troubled slumber that lasted until Phyllis called her.

A wind had swept the mist away and though the garden was beaded with its aftermath, and the grass wet, it was overhead a dazzling blue day.

However O’Sullivan felt, he went out and around his farm in characteristic dour quiet. Nothing escaped his scrutiny; no worn shingle or rusty hinge or sagging fence. Everything was kept in repair and under his own supervision. He was having a new garage built, and intended that his daughters should have a car. While not anxious to be up-to-date himself, he wished his family to be so. For this reason he had sent his son to College, where, against O’Sullivan’s will, he took an engineering course, instead of one in scientific agriculture. It was Bob who had taken that—Bob whom he wished Gail to marry, with small chance of success, and he had sent his daughters to school, taken them once abroad and once to California, that they might see the world and be in a class apart from the daughters of his neighbours. They were a credit to him, he admitted to himself, but inclined to a slight obstinacy that must be overcome.

Kathleen was beautiful, and Gail—he drew his brows together as he stalked about the farm and thought Gail was more than beautiful. The devil had used his paint-brush on her. That red hair, like—like the hair of one he remembered, his young brother Brien, so much younger than himself, and her eyes, sea-blue, or was it green and black fringed, and her white skin touched with pink, and her curved mouth that could be suddenly firm. She would be hard to manage—if she took a notion to oppose him.

He frowned again. An intolerable sense of chagrin was still in him over the fiasco at the Hennessy farm. If these bizarre people stayed, the country-folk should try freezing them out, boycotting them. There were other more unpleasant methods than a chivarie. They could be ignored as completely as a Chinese family might be—or a Turkish. He was not The O’Sullivan for nothing. Politically he was a power. There were but few farmers around about who did not owe him money. He held mortgages on many a bit of good land within ten miles. The rich could defy him, but there were not many of them. Still he did not intend to worry the subject as a dog worries a bone. He would drop it temporarily.

Gail passed with a blue pitcher in her hand.

“Where are ye going, my girl,” he called; then with a sort of grim humour, “Bedad, ye’re like the flag itself—the red of your hair, the white of your dress and the bright blue of that old pitcher.”

“How nice!” she laughed. “See! I have a pitcher full of raspberries.”

“The late growth,” he nodded.

“You shall have them with Devonshire cream. Phyllis has set some.”

“That will be fine,” he said. “Well, take them along.”

“Are you coming in, Dad? You’ve been out since eight o’clock.”

“Since seven,” he corrected. “I’ll be in at eleven. Then take a look at my stock book and rest till dinner.”

“You’ll overdo it sometime, Dad. You should rest more.”

“I have a fine farm and money to leave my family, and that because I haven’t rested.”

The girl’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“You are an awfully good father,” she said, trying to smile, “Don’t you know that?”

“I do,” he said. Then a shade fell over his face, “though there are things I regret, but I suppose every man might say that.”

“O yes,” she nodded. “Every man, Dad.”

O’Sullivan looked after her as she went home with the blue pitcher of raspberries.

“I don’t know she’s not as fair as Kit,” he pondered. “Belike she is not, but she’s more dangerous. I pity the man who loses his head over her an’ she don’t love him. Well, I’ll soon be going up to the house; it nears eleven.”

Gail went to her room, washed the red stains from her fingers and brushed her hair.

She laid one small hand against her heart.

“It certainly isn’t going right,” she said. “It’s far too fast. I suppose I must be afraid. O, I know I am afraid. What Dad will say or do is beyond imagining. O heavens! O heavens!”

O’Sullivan came in shortly and went to the little room he called his office. There was a desk, with his stock book and important papers, a lounge, two chairs and a shelf of books, containing Plutarch’s lives, Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, some Irish poets, and for lighter refreshment all of Kipling; an amazing choice of volumes.

It irritated him to find he got easily tired these days. He could not lose himself in hard work as he used to. He thought too much. Also it did not seem as essential now as of old, that his fortune should keep on growing. His investments had increased beyond his wildest dreams. The avid ambition that had burned in him at one time to leave his only son very rich, was fading out; for he knew that Shannon would never be a good farmer, probably never settle down here at all. So the money would be divided equally, and Shannon would not have the lion’s share.

Perhaps his old keen love of acquisition might have been kept alive had he known Hennessy’s land was on the market and he had had his chance to buy it. But going away, Hennessy had had his last fling at him. Though they had not been open enemies, they had enjoyed taking advantage of each other, and Hennessy had laughed last.

Now, after having made himself ready for the noon-day meal, he rested in the little office-room looking over the morning paper, sent always up from town. He nodded a bit as he read.

A knock came at the door.

“Come in,” O’Sullivan called sharply, his sleepiness vanishing.

Wallie opened the door. “There is a man—a gentleman to see you, sir.”

“A farmer?”

“No, that is I don’t think so, sir. He said to give you this card if you asked.”

Marcus O’Sullivan took the card. On it was an engraved name, “Gabriel Benedict.”

He looked at it a moment, his jaw setting on a hard line.

“Show him in, and see no one interrupts us, Walter.”

“Very well, sir,” the boy answered, going out hastily.

Presently he returned, Benedict with him, then vanished and the door was shut.

O’Sullivan remained seated but bowed coldly and pointed to the other chair.

“Good morning, Mr. O’Sullivan,” Benedict said with his quick smile. He had been riding and carried his crop. Evidently he had worn no hat, but the thick waves of his hair fit his head closely. His face was very frank and handsome, but not to the old farmer, looking at him through prejudiced eyes.

His clothes were those he had worn the Sunday morning he had entered the village church, and he was belted with the same wide Basque belt. If O’Sullivan was surprised by his bearing he showed no sign.

“Thank you, but I will not sit down, sir. What I have come to say I hope may be said quickly. I have done much thinking these last few days and have resolved to leave this neighbourhood with my people. It has been made plain to me that to the farmers nearby we are unwelcome. By great good fortune I was able to change the intended chivarie to a friendly gathering, but the men sent to annoy us were hirelings. I alone knew what they had been sent to do. So far I have been able to keep this knowledge from those with me. I do not wish them to feel they are undesired hereabout, so will go farther with them—perhaps to the Argentine where others of our countrymen have settled. It will not interest you to be told why we came to Canada, but I will say this, we are not of the Romany, we are not in any sense gypsies, but mountain people from the Basque provinces touching the Pyrenees.”

O’Sullivan looked up at the man from under his bushy eyebrows.

“Have you more to say,” he asked.

“O yes,” he answered. “A little. For myself—my life since I was sixteen, has been apart and away from my home, though until I was that age I tended my father’s little herd of goats and cattle.”

“Well?” said O’Sullivan, “what has that to do with me?”

“More than you think, sir, perhaps. It was discovered by a man—a very influential Frenchman who came to climb the mountains, that I had a voice, so my future was changed, for he took me away, and through his guidance, I became a singer. This, after great work. I had no home, but lived in one city after another. In Europe, and in England and later in America, my voice was in demand, and money came to me easily; further, my art gave me a position I could not otherwise have reached.”

“Very interesting, but why bring this information to me?” the old man said coldly.

“It is necessary I tell you,” Benedict said simply. “But apart from anything I have gained we are a people of a certain pride. For this reason it is best we go.”

Then he paused and gave a little shrug. “The land I am on is again for sale, Mr. O’Sullivan. I offer it first to you.”

A wave of dark-red surged up in O’Sullivan’s face, but he made no comment. Benedict gave him a slight bow.

“There is one more thing I have come to say to you, sir.”

“I am listening,” he returned, his voice hard and steady.

“I desire to tell you that from the moment I saw your daughter, Gail, in the village church three weeks ago, I have loved her. My greatest wish is to marry her, and she is willing to marry me. I have the honour to ask you for her hand. I have friends of high standing on the other side of the ocean, and a few in American cities who can vouch for all I have said—for my position in the world of art, and, as I must say it, my income and financial security.”

For a still moment no word answered him. The flood of colour in the hard-set old face ebbed, leaving it an appalling grey-white.

Then O’Sullivan rose stiffly to his feet, catching the arm of his chair to steady himself. He seemed to find his voice with difficulty, yet about him was an icy dignity.

“I thank you, Mr. Benedict,” he said, “for your call, and for the little information you have given in explanation of your presence and that of your company in Canada. I am not an immigration officer, and these details are nothing to me. But you came through the country in covered wagons, your people like gypsies. You gave the impression that you were birds of passage, and of those who are here to-day, and gone to-morrow. That you are a successful singer is of no moment to us. As for land you bought, and now wish to sell, this is what the casual traveller frequently does, and thereby you run true to form. No doubt you hoped to turn it over advantageously. Well, sell your easily acquired land in the open market, my man. Do not come offering it to me.” He stopped and his steely eyes met Benedict’s. “As for your proposal for my daughter’s hand, it is so preposterous I will pass it over without further comment,” he ended.

Benedict bowed again looking into the scornful old face.

“I see,” he said gravely, “that you have taken a stand against me, and nothing I can say will change it. What I have said is simple truth, and I will say nothing more but this—you cannot dismiss the question of my marriage to your daughter so summarily.” The words came more rapidly now, and the slight foreign accent was more pronounced.

O’Sullivan smiled his defiance.

“I assure you, sir, again, this question will not be easily set aside. Your daughter herself will decide it. She will need no dowry, if this is in your mind, for all she will desire I am able to give her with all my heart. Ancient and arbitrary ways of dealing with the young have been discarded, sir, in these days, since the war was fought and won by the young.” The dark face grew suddenly intense.

“The war, which I suppose you heard of,” O’Sullivan returned grimly.

“I enlisted with the French army when war was declared, sir,” Benedict said.

He laid his hand on the door knob.

“Good morning, Mr. O’Sullivan. I hope we will meet again.”

“I hope not,” he returned icily, “and I think not.”

The door closed and standing by his desk with unspoken rage on his lips, the old man listened to the firm footsteps of Benedict go down the hall, and out of the house.

O’Sullivan dropped into his chair and sat there until he heard the long silver note of the dinner horn blown by Wallie to call the men in.

It would be fifteen minutes before all were ready to sit down at the table. Lately he had been thinking of using the family dining-room for his family after these two hired men left. It was only because he had selected his men with the greatest care the present way had been possible in these later days. In fifteen minutes he must meet them all. Things were run in that old house with the almost painful regulation of an institution. Using the other dining-room would make more work. He did not like change, but at the moment his mind was not running on this. He was not thinking clearly at all. A strange confusion distressed him, and his knotted, toil-worn hands clinched hard on the arms of his chair. His little kingdom seemed to be tottering. Above every whirling thought rose the one of Gail’s disobedience. She had seen this man Benedict many times in the last three weeks. He did not doubt it. Everything this foreigner had said bore the stamp of truth. Also he did not doubt that the man loved his daughter and that she returned his love. Even to his prejudiced eyes he was a splendid and romantic figure, and for this as well as for all else his hatred burned the more fiercely.

Staring ahead unseeingly, different half-recalled incidents rose in his mind that told him how entirely Gail had been following her own will. How absent-minded, and withdrawn she had seemed of late. It was borne in upon him that Benedict had spoken only the truth concerning her.

O’Sullivan waited until distant sounds told him his family had assembled. Then he strode down into the long-dark-beamed room and took his seat at the table. He had resolved that until later no word of impending trouble should be spoken.

Those who knew of Benedict’s call did not mention it, and perhaps as a reaction for the late tension a wave of merriment went around the table. Shannon, ready for his duck shooting and later a trip to northern mines, was in high spirits, and Bob followed his lead, as did Gail, to the delight of Kathleen, who had missed her sparkling banter of late.

That their father did not laugh with them was nothing new. The flame of Irish wit that had originally been in him, had burnt itself out long ago. Often a sardonic humour showed in his critical remarks of people and things, but to-day there was not even that.

It was nearing the last of September and cool, so Phyllis had lit a fire of dried pine cones in the big fireplace and the warmth and scent of it filled the room. The brass candlesticks on the black oak mantel shone like gold and the blue willow-pattern china on the table gave vivid colour to the sombre room. A great orderliness was everywhere.

Below the salt cellar Tom Grey sat in indifferent silence and Olsen, like a young Viking fresh from the sea, kept his own council. Now and then his eyes rested fleetingly on Kathleen. The others he did not seem to see.

When all had risen, and Phyllis was taking away the blue china, O’Sullivan crossed to the fireplace and stood with his back to the burning pine cones. Of Phyllis he took no notice, more than he would have of a shadow.

“Gail,” he called abruptly as she went out onto the porch.

“Yes, father,” she answered, her eyes startled.

“Come into my office-room. I want to speak to you.”

Phyllis glanced swiftly at the old man, then went on with her work.

“All right, father,” she said lightly, though her thoughts whirled.

Benedict had seen him she knew, but had not heard, as she had resolutely ridden over to the village that morning, and indeed only Wallie had seen him enter and leave. A trembling went through her limbs, but she smiled bravely.

Entering the little room the old man sat down heavily and beckoned her to the other chair.

“What is it, father?” she asked.

“That is for you to tell me, my girl. But I fear you will say nothing unless I question you. I do not see into the minds of my children. The surface of their lives is all I am familiar with; their outside lives. But I am going to insist that their outside lives are above reproach while they remain under my roof and share my hard-made money.”

Fear eddied through her; a mad wonder as to what he would ask, and what she would answer. For all her thinking, she was unprepared. Kitty would answer him the simple truth always, she knew. But for her, that seemed impossible. She would entangle him in a maze of reasons for her actions, give him subtle, complicated explanations. O no, there would be no lies, but, cornered, she would be evasive. Her mind ran in different channels from Kit’s.

“Well,” she said, her voice still airy, “I have a feeling something serious is coming! O, don’t be cross, Dad darling.”

He picked up a little card and handed it to her. The card of Gabriel Benedict.

“O,” she said breathlessly, “he called?”

“You knew he was going to see me, did you not?”

“He said so,” she answered.

“Then you have seen him—you know him?”

“Yes. But many people about here have seen him.”

“How many times have you?” he broke off.

She shook her lovely head. “I don’t know. We—we have chanced to meet.”

“Chanced?” he said sternly.

“O Dad!” she cried. “What a catechism! Please don’t speak in that tone, you frighten me.”

“I will not be made a fool of,” he thundered, striking the arm of the chair with his fist. “I will have the truth out of you! You have disobeyed my orders and seen this gypsy over and over again, I am convinced! In my bush, perhaps. In the garden here—where does not matter—but you have met him knowing I would not have tolerated it.”

The girl did not answer. Her face drained of colour drove him to fury.

“How am I to know to what lengths you have gone?” O’Sullivan said ominously. “Meeting this travelling singer, this damn boaster, hither and yon in my woods! You little fool, with your carnal, common mind and unbridled desires!”

She gave a low cry, and rose as though to fly from the room.

“Sit down!” he commanded. “I’m not through with you, my girl. You should be punished with more than words for your disobedience and trickery. But I have regard to the fact that this man has experience of the world unknown to you. He is older and versed, even to my eyes, in wiles and ways perilous to a young maid’s fancy. It is he who should be dealt with. Ay! In the southern states they would deal with such a libertine!” The flow of his bitter words seemed to choke him, and they stopped.

She stared at him with wide eyes. Never had she seen him like this. When he spoke again, his voice was under control.

“You will not go against my orders any farther. You will have nothing more to do with this Basque traveller. He gave me little information, nor would I have listened. But I have heard all I need. As I thought, they are fly-by-nights, and are leaving here. They have not the stuff in them to stick it out in this community.”

She leaned towards the old man.

“O Father—he told you why they were going, didn’t he?”

“He made some excuses about the farmers not liking them. Real men are not driven away by dislike. It was a paltry excuse.”

Gail shook her head. “He judged the feelings of the other farmers by what he had heard of yours. He concluded life would be too short to overcome such prejudice. May I go now, Dad—may I?”

“Not yet. I wish to be telling you that this fellow who forced himself upon me had the effrontery to say to me that he was in love with you, and he asked for your hand. Of all things I have heard this is the most daring. Why, the man is a complete stranger! I only have his own wild story of his successes. That he should think I would accept him into my family is past believing. But I put it down to this. He found my daughter easy of conquest, and thought to find me the same. With much cleverness he has learned the full extent of my holdings and money, I have no doubt.”

“I will not listen to any more, father,” she said rising, her voice unsteady. “I am going to my room.”

“You are, my girl,” he returned coldly, “and you will keep to your room until I have learned these Basques have departed with their caravan. I will keep you under lock and key as I cannot trust you. You may come down to your meals or they will be sent upstairs to you, which you choose, but you will not be free to fall into any more snares.”

“I would rather they were sent up, Dad,” she said, the little ghost of a smile going over her face. “Wallie can bring them up. Phyllis has too much to do.” Then she looked up at him. “I’m sorry this has made you so dreadfully unhappy, Dad. More sorry than you know.”

He answered nothing but rang a bell on his desk and Phyllis came to the door.

“Phyllis,” he said quietly, “Miss Gail is to have her meals sent up to her room, until I tell you differently. I have good reason for this. Go up to her room with her now, and when she enters lock the door and bring me the key here.”

A strange look passed swiftly over the dumb woman’s face. She nodded to O’Sullivan and beckoned Gail.

The girl followed her. “I know you heard every word he said to me, Phil,” she whispered to her on the stairs. “His voice was not low, and I believe you were near. So you know what this is all about, don’t you?”

The woman took up her slate and wrote, “Yes, I listened.”

Gail smiled. “I don’t mind,” she said, “father is becoming a tyrant, Phil.”

Again she wrote. “Not, becoming, a tyrant.”

“You mean he always was? O surely not when you came first, before I was born and my mother died.”

A strange expression flitted over the speechless lips. “Yes,” she wrote.

The girl shook her head wonderingly, then entered her pretty bedroom. A bathroom lay between it and Kathleen’s room. When she tried the door, it was open on her side, and the door on Kathleen’s side locked.

“This can be a sort of prison, Phyllis. But the house really should have been built with dungeon cells,” she said whimsically.

Phyllis lifted her slate and wrote, “Do you love this gypsy, my lamb?”

Gail turned and kissed her.

“Yes,” she said softly. “Now lock the door and take the key to Dad, and—heavens! don’t let Grannie know anything at all.”

Phyllis gave the little key to O’Sullivan at once, but he turned it over, and then handed it back.

“Keep it, and see she does not go out till I tell you she may. By the way,” his old keen eyes looked into hers, “of course you listened as usual when I was in here talking to Gail. I left the door ajar to make it easier for you. You always listen.”

The woman lifted her slate and wrote, “and I am always dumb.”

He nodded. “That is true, that is true. Well,” he threw back his shoulders and rose, “see to it the girl is kept safely. I would not put it past these foreigners to try and get her away. They know I am worth money, and might try for a ransom.”

The woman wrote again, and a look of withering scorn passed over her faded face, as she lifted the slate. “It is a question of love,” she had written. “Love and an offer of honourable marriage.”

“Love?” O’Sullivan said with a short laugh.

“Yes,” she wrote again, “there is such a thing.”

He laughed again. “If so, what do you know about it?” he returned. “However,” he went on, the tone of his voice changing quickly, “Gail has disobeyed me. She needs a lesson. But no harm has been done I think. Only her imagination has been set aflame. She fancies herself in love.”

The woman wrote, “And so does this man. He is very fine. I have seen him.”

“They are two fools!” O’Sullivan said. He swung around in his chair. “I have talked too much to you! Now go, take yourself away,” his colour rose, “and see to it you do as I have said.”

Phyllis vanished and he was left alone.

Two weeks went by since Benedict had called on O’Sullivan and Gail had been shut into her room.

She accepted her loss of liberty without ado. A certain airy nonchalance that belonged to her did not desert her now. She dwelt oftener on her fear that she had really harmed her father by giving him reason for such distress and anger. He could no longer stand violent disturbance of any kind. She told Kathleen this troubled her more than anything else.

She now knew the pattern of her bedroom wallpaper—which had pale roses on a vine that twined upward—to the last detail. She commented on the overcrowding of the roses, and said the designer could have obtained the same effect with less.

Kathleen had smiled. “Well, darling, God overcrowds them on bushes, you know—and look at the crimson ramblers!”

“I’ve noticed there were too many. But then God can afford to be extravagant,” she laughed. “O Kit! I wish Dad would let me out of one room! Don’t you think he might let me have the run of the upstairs?”

Kathleen looked at the lovely little figure sitting on the side of the bed.

“I can’t understand you, for I would have expected you to be rebellious with two weeks of this. Grannie begins to suspect my reasons for your absence. In fact you are getting on everybody’s nerves. How long is it going to last?”

“I told you, Kit dear, until Gabriel has the little company settled somewhere else. They left the Hennessy farm two days after he was here, and are all at the Green Bay Inn—you know it—just beyond town.”

“And their wagons?”

“They sold them. There was thought of their going to South America—the Argentine—where some Basques have taken land, but they concluded to stay in Canada, and will go to a lake side farm out twenty miles away; there is a French settlement near by,—the French are their friends.”

Kathleen looked at her keenly.

“Someone is bringing you news, then.”

“O yes, darling!” she smiled, “all the time.”

“Who?”

“It’s wiser for you not to know, Kit. In case Dad asks you, you see.”

“Perhaps,” Kathleen said with a little shrug. “But I am growing exceedingly tired of having you shut up here. There is something wrong about it. Love, if it is love—anyway, what you think is romance—cannot be controlled by methods of this kind. They are medieval, obsolete, out of date.”

“Quite,” Gail agreed. “They are even a little funny, if Dad didn’t seem so serious about it. It’s just like something that might happen in the Sultan’s seraglio—only then there would be two black eunuchs at the door with scimitars! But I didn’t expect an outburst of rebellion from you.”

“And I did expect one from you, Gail.”

“I don’t rebel, Kitty, because I’m happy. I am unbelievably happy! I am like the caged bird that sings for delight of living, but longs to fly. You don’t know, darling, how I want to escape from this room.”

“O yes I do,” Kathleen said walking to the window. “O yes I do. Tell me, Gail, who brings you the messages?”

“Really—can’t you guess?”

“It is Walter perhaps?”

“O no. It is Phyllis,” Gail said softly.

“Phyllis!” Kathleen exclaimed. “I would never have thought it of Phyllis! How does she get them?”

“They are brought to her. I have a message from Gabriel Benedict every day, otherwise I could not endure this. But I won’t be here long, Kitty. We are waiting in the hope that Dad may by some marvellous chance change his mind—see things differently.”

“He never will.”

“No, I don’t think he ever will. But I am going to wait a while and see. He came up one evening and told me that as soon as I would promise not to see Gabriel, or communicate with him, I might be free. He would let me go away for a visit to New York with you. He said if I promised, he would trust me. But, O Kitty, how could I do that? The very thought of him has become the breath of life to me. I could not give Dad such a promise, though I hated to hurt him. Phyllis says he is restless and looks ill, but his mind does not change at all.”

Kathleen shook her head.

“He has been very wonderful to us all, Baby,” she said. It was a good while since any of them had called her by the only name she had answered to until she went to school! It brought a mist to her eyes.

“Yes, wonderful,” she assented. “We have not had the lives of the farmers’ daughters hereabouts. But he must not control—my—my destiny, Kit.”

“Nor mine,” Kathleen answered. Then dreamily, “I have often wondered if it was not father’s arbitrary ways that made Uncle Brien, who was so much younger, leave the farm.”

“I have wondered about that, too,” Gail answered. “But that was twenty years ago they say. We have newer troubles.”

Kathleen rose as Phyllis unlocked the door and brought in Gail’s luncheon. Kathleen was allowed to come and go by her own room, using her own key.

“Well,” she said as she left, “Brien O’Sullivan solved things, for himself anyway, and I fancy we will have to. I’ll run in again soon.”

“Yes, Kit,” she returned, “I fancy we will. But do return to the dungeon keep at least by set o’ sun.”

“By my faith, an’ I can outwit the watchers on the walls, I’ll see thee then!” Kathleen laughed back.

Now that October had come in, and the young moon—the Hunters’ Moon—hung like a silver sickle in the twilight sky, there was a lull in the activities of the farm. The transient hired men had gone, and Nils Olsen, Grey and Wallie could do what was needed. Already new men were engaged to take Olsen’s place and Grey’s.

The low hills rolling to the north country were wound about with a gauzy scarf of blue haze. A scent of wood smoke was on the air, and a quick frost had painted the bush into gorgeous shades of gold and Indian red. There were roses no more, but red rose-berries in the garden.

The beech leaves, that of all leaves held longest to the trees, glistened as though newly bronzed. On the riverbank small purple bunches of wild grapes showed through the metallic green and copper of the vines. Milkweed seeds were blown like little silken balloons on the wind and underfoot a million brown seeds tried to find anchor.

A few late bear-blossoms flamed against the feathery grasses, with spikes of golden-rod, Queen-Anne’s-Lace and small lavender asters. Birds were still gathering in family groups waiting for some mysterious message that would bid them depart. Some morning soon all would be gone. Every day now, a long V of wild geese flew over the farm like an arrow pointing south, with Wa Wa, the great leader, well ahead, and following the geese would come the blue heron, and duck with quick-beating wings, who desired rice marshes farther away.

Many would linger at Rice Lake and the St. Clair flats to their sorrow. The wild geese knew the sanctuaries where they could alight in safety, but duck seem to prefer taking chances. They would swim into trouble and rise in sight of the guns as the sparks fly upward.

By this time the quail had learned the art of hiding, and in danger, lay close to the ground among the corn stubble where their protective colouring blended in as does a part of a tapestry. Grey squirrels were like bits of quicksilver in the trees, and a mad activity possessed the little chipmunks. Small broods of partridges were seen in the bush, shyly taking to cover. On logs in the river tiny young turtles, greeny-brown freckled with red spots, sunned themselves in abysmal silence. Hedgehogs galumphed harmlessly through the woods, and the occasional raccoon or porcupine took the air each in his own peculiar way.

Few flowers were left in the garden, but the haunting charm of October and its opalescent loveliness made amends for all the beauty that had vanished. A fleeting warmth and glamour stirred the senses more than the hot blue of summer days.

The half-bitter scent of drying thyme and sage and savory drifted through the dark kitchen, and the exquisite perfume of newly-stored hay filled the barns. The whole countryside was almost oppressively beautiful, and yet everywhere there followed a feeling of loss. The sound of a distant sheep-bell was like the sound of a priest’s passing-bell in the night.

Marcus O’Sullivan, tramping home at sunset across his fields, did hear a bell. It rang from the little Catholic church on the road to the village, and was tolling for a great prelate who was being borne to the grave that day in Italy.

As the quivering notes fell solemnly at long intervals, a sense of irritation seized the man.

“That damned bell!” he exclaimed half-aloud. “Tolling for a papist dead across the sea. All tolling should be stopped. It’s akin to the keening of women at a wake, or the howling of Jews beside a wailing-wall. The British should have taught the world by this time how to take their grief quietly.”

Again came the dismal knell, far off, but unmistakable.

“It minds me of a dog’s death cry,” O’Sullivan said halting. “How he knows death comes to a house is a mystery; but he knows—he knows. I mind me well the night Margaret died. Ay! Ay! It’s so long ago it seems queer I ever had a wife; nearly twenty years ago it was. I saw Rufus, the grandsire of the old setter Gail has this day, point his nose to the moon and give that long, quavering cry they only give for a soul going out. I knew the sound of it, and dashed into the house and upstairs, and there she was lying on the bed—Peggie—with her best blue kimona on her. At that, I first thought she was asleep.”

Again came the tolling bell. The old farmer started, as from a dream, and straightened up.

“To hell with it!” he said. “I’ll get on up to the house and have my supper. Phyllis will have the lights lit and a fire. Phyllis,” he murmured, “she has been a faithful woman, more faithful than most.” Then suddenly in a burst of rage, “O to hell with it all! To hell with this thinking.”

Pulling his pipe from his pocket, he lit it and tramped through the silvery twilight to the farmhouse.

The two weeks Gail had spent in her room had worn and troubled O’Sullivan more than he realized.

He obtained word that Benedict was occasionally seen in town, and riding about the country. Also he learned he had abandoned the Hennessy place, and had purchased another, near the French settlement a few miles away; this a larger farm and better than the other. There appeared to be no end to his money. The Hennessy land was marked with plain “For Sale” signs. Though he bitterly craved the land his pride would not let him buy it from Benedict.

It made him furious to find that although he had moved his people the man himself was still in this locality. Still a danger and a menace to Gail, as he saw it.

He could understand how such a man could charm her, she so young and unsophisticated, and he so worldly-wise; he himself had experienced a shock of surprise on meeting him when he called, so utterly different he was from his preconceived ideas; but that was only on the surface, he had concluded. In reality Benedict had charmed the girl, he thought, as a snake charms a bird. His mind having come to this conclusion did not change.

But keeping her locked in hurt him. Phyllis and Kathleen alone had access to her room.

“It is terrible, Dad, to have Gail shut in so long,” Kathleen said to him once. “Let her be free in the house at least, if she promises not to go out. You can trust her surely?”

“Not that far, Kit,” he returned grimly. “I told ye all to have no doings with the gypsies, and she has been seeing the chief of them himself over and over. God knows how far it went between them.”

“O Dad! I can’t listen to such suspicions! Gail did not give you her word she would obey you. You expect too much!”

“You did not give me your word either, but you obeyed, Kit.”

“I had no temptation,” she answered with her soft smile.

“Well, I hear this man is about here still, and she will not get out until I’m sure he’s gone.”

Kathleen drew a long breath.

“Perhaps, father, it’s really love he has for Gail, and that she has for him. You couldn’t destroy that.”

“Love is a rare thing, my girl, and of slower growth than this that passes for it,” he said, his old eyes hard.

“Oh no, dear!” she exclaimed. “It can come in a flash! It can be a quick, devastating thing. All the old romances tell us that. All the great undying love stories of the past—you know that.”

He shook his silvery head. “They are legends—legends, and folk-lore garbled with long telling. I have seen little real love. It is a rare thing, and comes by degrees. It is no flash, but a slow fire in the heart, like the fire in the burning bush, that consumed not and did not burn away.”

“Well, Dad dear, even you must admit a fire can be very quickly lit.”

He leaned over and lifted her face with his rough hand, looking down into it.

“Ah, Kathleen,” he said with a sudden gentleness, “you are the beauty of the world! Have it your own way that love is easily set aflame.”

His voice changed, and he laid his hand on her arm. “One thing is sure, I intend it shall die this time for lack of fuel. How is she taking it?” he finished abruptly.

“Very well. She says she is tired of the wallpaper. I am to get her some new books. I should have told you that I took up two from your set of Kipling she had not read.”

“I warrant she galloped through them,” he said. “Then I’m glad she’s not taking it too hard. Faith, I thought she’d be fit to be tied, and giving me more trouble. I hope she understands I’m not punishing her, Kit, only keeping her safe?”

“O, she understands that, father.”

“I’ll get it into her young head that it’s only infatuation she’s suffering from. Ay, a fever of youth, and nothing lasting. When it’s on them the young would pay for three months’ glamour with a life-time of sorrow, my girl. I’ll help her to be reasonable.”

“Whoever heard that true love was reasonable?” Kathleen returned, her scarlet lips a little tightened. “My mother died so long ago I cannot remember what devotion you gave her. No doubt a perfect one.”

O’Sullivan looked out of the window absently; but his daughter knew he saw none of the loveliness of the October day, but only some vision of the mind.

“Well, well!” he said turning to the door. “I’ve many a thing to look after, Kit. You can say to Gail, when I hear this Basque fellow is far away she’ll not be kept in the house an hour longer. From what he told me he has to go abroad soon.” He gave a short laugh. “His idea was to take my girl with him!”

“To marry her,” Kathleen added.

“Yes, some such damn foolish thought was in his head. He might have intended some Catholic ceremony, God knows. But my people in the North of Ireland did not suffer for their Protestant faith for nothing. No Catholic will be married in our church, and none of mine shall be married in theirs. Let them find it out. I can be as stiff-necked as any Catholic, and so you can tell her.”

Kathleen shook her head a little.

“O Dad,” she cried, the tears rising in her eyes, “Gail seems so sorry you are troubled about all this.”

He waved his hand as casting something aside.

“I’m off now, Kit,” he returned. Then, “By the way, you knew Olsen was leaving I suppose?”

“Yes, Dad, I knew.”

He swung his great frame around. “These hired men with money,” he said contemptuously. “He is buying a tobacco farm in Kent.”

“He told me he was very grateful to you for all you had taught him here. I thought you liked him, father.”

The old man glanced at her keenly.

“I did,” he assented, “he is of a superior type—and a little too good-looking. I am sorry to see him go. It’s been to my wonder he would be taking a menial position annywhere, Kit, but I suppose there’s a common streak in him somewhere.”

“O no!” she exclaimed with sudden heat. “No! Olsen did not consider he lost caste by serving you, and therefore learning from you.”

“My father would have thought so, and his father before him.”

“There is a royal motto—I told Gail when she wondered at him, which means ‘I serve’,” she answered softly. Then impulsively she reached up and kissed the irate old face. “O Dad! I hate to jar you! We all do. You have been a marvellous father.”

“All right! All right, my girl,” he returned, giving her a rough pat. “We’ll say no more about it.”

For a fleeting moment Kathleen thought she had seen a mist rise in the fiery blue eyes, as she left him.

It was true Benedict had been seen riding near the farm. He had no intention of departing until the present deadlock with O’Sullivan changed. With infinite trouble, by cable and telegram he had postponed and rearranged his appearances in New York and abroad. He could not long delay his going, yet waited for he knew not what interference of Fate.

From the time he had left home when he was sixteen, with his beloved patron, an unusual determination of character had developed in him. He had made up his mind to repay in whatever way he could all that was being done for him. Though he was a Basque mountain-boy, unlettered except by a slight familiarity with the Spanish and French languages, he was eager to learn. Also he was strong and handsome in a darkly picturesque way. His only great possession was a beautiful, undeveloped voice. But during the oncoming years, far more than his patron helped him, he helped himself. Though then he had no knowledge of music, he became a master of music, holding world acknowledged degrees. English he acquitted, until it became to him as his own familiar tongue. And he studied German because of the many German operas, and in compliment to the master musicians of that country.

The man who had discovered him in the Basque province, singing and herding his father’s sheep and goats, never knew a moment’s disappointment in his venture, for the boy had given him a return in devotion and unremitting work for all his benefactions. He had lived to see his prophecies fulfilled, and his protégé recognized and acclaimed.

Money had come to Benedict with the greatest ease after his first success, and at the death of his friend and patron, who had been an unmarried man, the whole of his fortune had been bequeathed to him as to a dear adopted son—but this followed in the wake of the war.

During the war Benedict had been with the French army, and had been wounded, though not seriously. But on the march, or when back of the line, he had sung, and the war ending, he returned to the stage, his voice unimpaired, and his face older.

He had not gone to O’Sullivan to tell him any of these things, and if he had it would have availed nothing. He had gone to assure him the Hennessy farm would again shortly be vacant; and above that to ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

He had no reason to think he would be well received but betrothal and marriage in his country were serious things, and to go to the old farmer with his petition was the only thing, as he saw it, to do.

O’Sullivan’s attitude had been so deeply hostile, it seemed hopeless to expect it to change. Yet Benedict waited. An inscrutable fate had led him to this place and to love. Nothing in all his life had so completely possessed him as this love; and as steadfastly as he had pursued his art he would now pursue his happiness. Hitherto love had been a light and airy thing with him, something to gild the hours that were not absorbed with work. Beauty had betided him always as beauty—something to delight in, to wonder at, and he had seen all the world has to show. But he had never lost his judgment or changed his plans and great objective—which was music—for any woman until now. Having come from a simple but superstitious people, the strange recurring dream of his boyhood, the dream of the angel of the flaming auburn hair who had entered his room and gazed at him with some unspoken message burning in its sea-blue eyes, had haunted him always. The waving hair of a colour rarely seen in his own country was unforgettable.

When he saw Gail in the little church, she seemed by reason of her vivid colouring and beauty to be the reality of his vision. From that moment her face lived before him.

When he met her, he no longer questioned his love. It had grown with every passing day, and that she loved him seemed to be the only thing that could have followed. He dared not think of anything else. He had lived longer than she had, and this at times troubled him, but to her it appeared to be of no importance whatever.

By some insight he understood the dour nature of O’Sullivan and he did not think it unreasonable that the old farmer should not wish his daughter to marry an unknown foreigner, or any foreigner. He did not thrust his credentials upon him, but waited. “Forse il destino,” he said to himself. If what time it was possible for him to wait, brought no change in O’Sullivan’s views, he knew Gail would come to him, and it would not be difficult for her to escape. Benedict hated her imprisonment even more than she did. He himself had escaped from a prison camp during the war and knew what loss of liberty meant. But O’Sullivan’s method of trying to break a strong young will was so obsolete he smiled at it, while it hurt him even as a thought.

Meanwhile through the farm boy, Wallie, and by way of the dumb woman whom he had not seen, he sent Gail what messages he could. The exquisite October days, going by so slowly, filled him with a vast impatience. He had given his whole resourcefulness to finding a way to send Gail a note when he ran across Wallie. It was his half-holiday, and he was riding an old bicycle to town, town being his Mecca. Benedict stopped him, leaned down from his horse and smiled at the upturned brown face. He knew who the boy was.

“I wonder if you will do something for me?” he asked.

“Reckon I will, sir, but I be havin’ a half-holiday.”

“So I thought. What I want you to do may—well—go against your principles, you understand?”

Wallie looked at him blankly.

“I want you to take a note to Miss Gail O’Sullivan, and I’m afraid your master would not allow you to do this.”

“O,” said Wallie, his mouth ajar, “that’s it, sir, be it?”

“Yes, that is it.”

“I ain’t promised the master I wouldn’t carry no notes to no one.”

“But you know he would not allow you to take one from me to his daughter? No doubt there has been gossip.”

“Yes, sir. I sort a think he wouldn’t.”

“Then that’s all right. I wanted you to be aware of what you were doing. Now will you take it?”

Wallie did not hesitate.

“Yes, sir,” he answered. “I don’t hold with Miss Gail bein’ locked up for nothin’. I don’t see her. How’m I goin’ to get it up to her?”

“Who sees her?” Benedict asked, writing with a pencil on the leaf of a pocket-book.

“Miss Kathleen an’ Phyllis.”

“Phyllis?” Benedict said, finishing the few lines and folding the leaf, “that is the silent woman?”

“Yes, her.”

“Then give this note to Phyllis and ask her if she will kindly give it to Miss Gail. To-morrow bring me an answer. I am sure I can trust you.”

“You can, sir, but I can’t come as far as this less it be my half day.”

“I understand. Then walk out to the bush after your supper. I will wait near the lane.”

“Will ’e go out by our orchard road, sir?”

“No, by the concession road near the Hennessy farm.”

“The farm you bought and had to sell, sir?”

“Yes, but I did not have to sell it. I only thought it best to do so.”

“That’s different, ain’t it, sir?”

“Quite different. Here is the little note. I know you realize you must be careful. Be up near the bush to-morrow evening at about half-past seven, Wallie.” He leaned down, handing him the note and a folded bill.

“I’ll take your note because of Miss Gail, sir, but I reckon I ain’t doin’ jes’ right, and I won’t take no money for it.”

“No money could pay you for doing it, my boy. But I may tell you I do not think you are doing a wrong thing. In war, and in love, men have to do things sometimes that look black but are white.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, unbuttoning his rough woollen coat and putting the note in an inside pocket with clumsy, careful fingers.

“I would do more nor this for Miss Gail,” he said looking up.

“I know you would,” the man replied with his dazzling smile. “Thank you, Wallie. I will not forget this.”

So Gail got the first of a number of small notes brought by Wallie to Phyllis and carried by Phyllis to her, and her answers of a few written words, were taken back to him.

In the last note he had written, “I go to New York to-morrow to sing there the next night, but I will return here immediately afterwards. Then something must be done. I will try to see your father again. Have patience, darling.”

She held the note against her face, and a strange fear ran through her, an intangible, unspoken fear. As the mariner of old set his course by a star, she knew she must now look to Benedict to guide her through this sea of trouble.

The O’Sullivan household was not running on an even keel as it usually did. There was a brooding silence over it. The light laughter and banter at the table was gone. Indeed O’Sullivan for the last week had ordered all meals served in the dining-room of the farmhouse and not in the so-called kitchen, that was seldom a kitchen.

Shannon was often away with his dog and his gun. Old Mrs. O’Sullivan was not inclined to come downstairs often. She was more feeble than last year, they said one to another. Kathleen was always with her father at meal-times—a bit too white and quiet—and Bob generally came in.

Nils Olsen had left the farm without ado, and Tom Grey also, their weeks of notice having expired.

Two new men filled their places, both Irishmen and young, and they sat below the salt cellar at the long black table that was temporarily deserted.

Wallie came less and less often to sit beside them, making a pretence of helping Phyllis and keeping as much as he could out of sight. His meals were now movable feasts taken where and when he could get them, and his chief object in life was to avoid O’Sullivan, which he had learned to do with dexterity.

In a way he enjoyed carrying the notes that he knew would have been forbidden. He deeply resented the locking up of his adored little mistress, and at such times as he could not escape seeing the old farmer, looked at him with glowering eyes, and sullen heavy mouth.

“The O’Sullivan he has all on us under his thumb,” he muttered at such times. “Ay, an’ he have a strong thumb, too, I warrant, but ’tain’t fair, anyone should ha’ power to lock anyone up, only police.”

Also he was puzzled and upset at the going of Olsen and Grey, and not inclined to be friendly with the new men. But he prided himself on sharing a secret with Phyllis, of whom he stood a little in awe, and though he was no winged mercury, brought the written messages with much despatch.

Phyllis sometimes wrote a word or so to him.

“Be careful,” she would write, “and be like me—dumb,” or “Say nothing, Wallie.” These words he would read carefully, and then violently nod his head in agreement.

Olsen had patted him on the back and given him a remembrance when he left. The boy had come as near to loving the Norwegian as he had ever come to loving any man, and he hated to see him go.

“Keep a stiff upper lip, Walter,” Olsen had said, “and do all you can to help Miss Kathleen and Miss Gail, and yes, Phyllis too. If you find you cannot be happy here you may come to my farm in Kent. I have bought a little tobacco farm. Here is my address.”

Then he had looked into the boy’s eyes steadily. “And another thing,” he said. “I want you to write to me and tell me what goes on in this house. I’m not asking you to, Walter, I’m telling you to. Do you understand? If anything happens you think I should know, telegraph.”

“What could happen, Nils?” the boy had asked blankly.

“Death happens sometimes,” the man had answered. “But I’m not trying to frighten you,” he smiled. “Really I know of nothing likely to happen. The old farm looks beautiful, prosperous, and peaceful too. Only I have the feeling perhaps it is not peaceful. Well, no more blues. Good-bye and write to me.”

The boy’s rough hand had been held a moment, and Olsen’s other hand had fumbled his hair in what might have been a caress. Then he had gone.

Walter had gazed after him. “It’s Miss Kathleen he’s thinking of,” he said absently, with that sudden insight with which the very young sometimes astonish us. Then as he gazed after the tall vanishing figure, his round eyes swam in tears.

Of the people in the O’Sullivan farmhouse, only two were really unhappy. Old Mrs. O’Sullivan was happy and dreamed away the time. A lovely haze had fallen over the past to her, blotting out all the pain and tragedy and loss, and leaving what was only sweet to remember. And there had been tragedy. Of the three babies born to her before her son, Marcus, two had been dead at birth, no doctor having been able to reach her for many hours. The third child was killed by a fall from a carriage when a horse they were driving ran away. Her only daughter had married young and gone to Montreal. There she had died at the birth of her son, Robert. His father, a business man, Robert Kelly, had died a few years later, and so young Bob, her grandson, had come to the farm to her. But it was her most beloved son, Brien, that she thought of oftenest. He was the last of her children, and they could not make a farmer of him though they tried, for he was all for the sea. Well he had gone to the sea over twenty years ago, and had been lost almost as soon as he sailed, in a storm that sunk his ship off the coast of Ireland.

He had been more than twenty years younger than her son, Marcus, and young and beautiful to look at when he went away. His hair had been the auburn hair that had been not unusual in her own family over the Scottish border. Even yet sometimes she dreamt of him going down in the sea, and awoke in wild terror.

Marcus, whom she adored now all the rest had vanished, had always been different. Harder. He had had the hardest work of any. He would not marry until certain things had been accomplished, and so he was not young when he took a wife.

But it seemed his only son would never settle down to the life of a farmer. He talked only of the gold fields to the north. The old lady knew many things with a strange wisdom. She saw that this farm with its beautiful fields and its many black walnut-trees planted seventy-five years before, would pass into the keeping of Robert Kelly, and out of the hands of Shannon O’Sullivan, because Bob loved the land and the traditions of his grandfather, and Shannon was a merry, foot-loose gentleman who thought and dreamed of the gold brought up from the new wonder mines, and not at all of the golden wheat grown on top of the good earth.

Old Mrs. O’Sullivan rocked and thought hazily of these things and was happy.

But Marcus O’Sullivan tossed uneasily on his bed. The plans he had made for his children were not working out. Shannon would never make a farmer. Kathleen was absent-minded, uninterested in the affairs of the farm, and of late quite unlike her usual tranquil, lovely self. Something had come to her, something had taken possession of her.

“Still waters,” he said to himself in the dark, “no man could tell how deep they run.” Not one of the rich farmers’ sons pleased her fancy, and other desirable men who had come to the farm she had treated with sweet indifference. Probably she would not marry, he thought, or else would hang on the bough till her summers were over, and all that rare beauty of hers lost. God knew; he couldn’t fathom her.

But this mad affair of Gail’s kept him awake, filling him with surging wrath. It completely scattered his plans for her. Kathleen he might not wed to anyone of his choice, but Gail he had determined should settle down nearby in the ordinary tried and tested way. As he lay sleepless, a deep unhappiness wrapped him around.

But Kathleen alone in her room was happy. She knew now that Nils Olsen loved her, for he had said, in a few words what his eyes had told her a thousand times. But this they both knew was not the time for her to leave home. She could not desert either the old frail woman, or her turbulent, unhappy father just now. They understood each other and defied life to harm them.

Bob Kelly was happy in his own fashion, revelling in the sun and wind and the scent of the earth and being pleasantly and lightly in love from time to time, but keeping free from entanglements. He had fancied himself heart-broken over Gail’s refusal to marry him, but that was six months back and now not even a really troublesome memory.

Shannon slept peacefully and though he did not analyse his feelings would have counted himself a happy man. Give him good hunting and fishing, a dog at his heels, and a girl somewhere in town waiting to see him, although his heart might not be greatly involved, he asked little more, particularly with the north country waiting and his plans made to sink a shaft on land he had bought and marked his own. The old farm was his father’s hobby, not his, and to-morrow he would be going north again.

Phyllis, in her little room next to Mrs. O’Sullivan, lay awake and listened to the sounds in the house that were at night so sharply defined. It was many a moon since she had known what happiness could be, but she rarely thought of this, living from hour to hour in her own way, and though a part of life around her, being strangely detached from it.

So the days wore on, and now the Hunter’s moon was waning and the leaves were thick upon the ground. By the time Hallowe’en came all would be down, and the first snow would fly.

Marcus O’Sullivan was troubled by many thoughts one day near the end of the month, while resting in his little office-room. His chair was near the window and looking out his eyes rested on the great black walnut-trees his father had planted. Fifteen of them stood within his range of vision, and he loved every one.

The land he owned and all upon it was so infinitely precious to him he could not comprehend the ease with which this younger generation contemplated leaving it.

A sense of futility haunted him in a vague, unnamed way. There was something so stable about a home of many years. The fact that his father and mother had come here long ago, and that he had been born in the little log house where now old Uncle Gideon and Aunt Pansy lived, and that this house had known other births and deaths of the family, meant much to him.

But to this generation it meant nothing, and little or nothing that it was their own birth-place. Some instinct appeared to be fading out of the race. New things, not old, tied the different lands and people together nowadays. There was so much flitting here and there, and such terrific speed. He himself was not so very old a man; his mother still lived, and yet they looked upon him as of the past, a back number, a drag upon the rapid wheels. O no! No one said so, or admitted the thought, but in an intangible way it was in their minds.

Someone had said, “I fear life’s changes, not death’s changelessness.”

Yes, it was true. He feared life’s changes. To own a hundred or two hundred acres of land in his father’s day, seemed riches. Now in the Western provinces men owned a thousand or more and were not content. Though he had added and added to his holdings, he was not a great landowner. His day was over, he said to himself, and unless Robert Kelly desired to remain, before he was cold in his grave “For Sale” signs would be up on this farm, known as “Tullamore.” His family did not agree with him nor with his actions, though maintaining a well-bred silence.

This keeping Gail imprisoned, for it amounted to that, only demonstrated to the others his weakness, not his strength. No doubt they were amused, while resenting it. He could not change her mind, more than he could alter the colour of her hair. With his work-gnarled fingers he tapped irritably on the arm of his chair.

The house was very quiet, and as he sat in his own room by the window thought possessed him, and his memory travelled back over the way he had come.

He stared out at the walnut-trees now towering in their full strength, their leafless branches etched like lace against the sky. Valuable trees. From Grand Rapids the furniture men had come to bargain with him for one, or all. They told him to set his own price on them, but he had laughed at their offer. Dearer to him than the golden boughs of Paradise were these black-walnuts. In spring the birds came back to them, crested wrens, robins, bluebirds, and finches; and orioles built their “little grey castles in the air” and hung them from the dipping branches. Squirrels flashed through them all the year round, taking the nuts as by lawful right.

“I’d not even sell the rails of some of my fences that are good split walnut cut when I was a boy,” he finished, and the lumber dealers had gone off disgruntled.

“He has enough walnut on that farm to buy ten farms,” one said, “but it will not be cut till he dies Then we’ll see!”.

“Queer old bird,” said the other. “Hipped on everything that is his because it’s his.”

But that was an almost forgotten incident. O’Sullivan stared at the trees, scarcely seeing them to-day, for his mind was travelling back over such an old trail.

He had not slept well these last few weeks, and lately he had been steeped in memories. They rose unbidden like the ghosts in Macbeth.

Vaguely he had fought against these moods of remembrance, yet at every pause in his busy day they settled over him intangible as a mist. He could not struggle out of the clinging meshes of old days, and old hours, in which time had not been reckoned in moments.

To-day he was overcome by them again. Certain long past happenings had been so stamped into his mind that they could light up into vivid pictures at an unexpected word.

A troublesomely good memory had old Marcus O’Sullivan for some things he wished to forget, and though they belonged to this or that far day that seemed as dead as the days of the Pharaohs, like Banquo’s ghost, they would not down.

In the hall, now, the tall clock struck four. His mother would be knitting or dozing. Gail was in her room. Kathleen was riding to town. Shannon had gone north. Bob was about the farm. The old house was desperately quiet; too quiet. Suddenly his thoughts raced back to a period of his life that was as clear to him,—as clear in detail,—as yesterday. The time before Gail was born, and just after.

That year, before her birth, his father had died, and his mother had been grief-stricken. She wanted to get away from the place of his suffering and death, and pleaded with them to let her take little Kathleen, who was four years old, and go to her old home in Ireland for a visit. She longed to escape her grief in any way possible, and she had sisters living there still. Shannon was a strong boy of seven. He went to school then in the village, riding his pony. His wife was not well that year, yet would not see a doctor.

She had come from a home of many young people and he often thought she found the farm lonely, particularly as she was many years younger than himself. That year she complained of violent headaches and sleeplessness, and at times what were almost hallucinations, at least obsessions. As she would not listen to reason and see a doctor, O’Sullivan refused to worry, and concluded as she was young this condition would pass.

A month or two went by, and as Margaret O’Sullivan still occasionally spoke of having severe headaches, the man was glad when she decided to get a maid to help Aunt Pansy, who alone did the housework. The coloured couple, Uncle Gideon and Aunt Pansy, with their two half-grown boys, had wandered out to that part of the country one harvest time a few years before, and never gone away, as O’Sullivan had let them live in the log house and hired them both. They were still there, though their sons were working in town.

Now it was agreed they needed another maid, but good servants thereabout were hard to find. Then they heard of a young girl, a fisherman’s daughter in the little fishing village of Penhale, an Irish settlement on the lake below the town. So they drove over together to Penhale, and brought back the girl, who was Phyllis.

She was about eighteen and very pretty, with the transparent rose-white skin, blue-grey eyes, and soft wavy black hair of the Irish; and she was not dumb. But having been only in the fishing village or at school at the separate school, and not knowing many townspeople, she was shy and quiet.

With a quick adaptability she fell into the ways of the house and learned the ways of cooking they liked. Aunt Pansy taught her secrets of the old Virginia school of cooking also. Everywhere she had a light and dainty touch. There was a gaiety about her and a soft gentleness that tied the children to her easily. She grew very fond of Shannon, and little Kathleen—who when the summer came in was going to visit Ireland with her grandmother—trotted about with her all day.

It was April then and the scent of ploughed earth on the air. Pussy-willows were silvery-grey along the riverbanks. Crocuses were up in the garden and lavender and pink wind-flowers in the bush; for spring was early that year.

Margaret O’Sullivan realized that in this young daughter of an Irish-Canadian fisherman she had found a treasure not easily obtained for any money. She rang true, and gave of her best. With strange tact she never jarred her mistress, whose nerves for some obscure reason were perpetually out of tune.

When Phyllis was near her she seemed better, and they both were busy making the little dresses Kathleen would need when she sailed with her grandmother in June. Her father and mother had hesitated to let her go, but she was not a strong child and the sea air would do her good. Though sad and grieving, old Mrs. O’Sullivan was very alert and capable of taking care of the child while her mother was ill, and they finally decided to let her go.

Brien O’Sullivan, the younger brother of Marcus, was home then, and though there were twenty years between them they were great friends. He was the very idol of his mother, and adored by Marcus in his quiet way, and no more charming and companionable fellow could have been imagined. But where Marcus was sober and grave he was gay and irresponsible, and he had no love at all for farming, but always talked of going to sea.

While Marcus was a black Irishman, of blue eyes, dark hair and swarthy skin, Brien was of colouring from over the border, his mother’s home, and had a thatch of brilliant auburn, and golden brown eyes. He always had a powdering of freckles, and the whitest teeth in the world. There was no question about his good looks. His father always said he was a throw-back to some red-headed Dane, a sea-roving fellow, who generations before had married into the Irish family, but his mother traced his colouring to an ancient Scot.

And he was different from his brother in that there was no real work in him. He was a good shot and in every way at home on the little river and lake. Also there was no dance far or near where he was not seen. On stormy winter nights anxious hours were lived through at the farmhouse if he had not come home. But sometime before morning he would blow in, kiss his mother heartily and laugh at their anxiety, though the silver might have dropped below zero, and he a bit overcome with good rye. Greatly indulged was young Brien on a farm that did not deal in indulgences.

Marcus, now master of the farm, had grown more rigid and dour since the day of his father’s death. He had married late and now, as all his life, hard work was his portion. To his mother he showed an unfailing courtesy, and he made allowance for his brother’s easy-going ways, but with his wife, except in times of illness, and even with his children, he was often exacting and domineering.

These spring days Brien went in and out of the house at his pleasure, fixing a paddle or an oar, going over his fishing tackle, or cleaning a gun and putting it up. No one saw him behind a plough or in any part of the farm where work was going on. Often he rode to town to return when it suited him, and sometimes he read through a rainy day. Marcus had the farm, but a small legacy had come to Brien from his father. He was now out of control of any, and at last decided on going to sea for at least one voyage.

He had written to a sea-captain, a friend of his father’s, and made arrangements to sail with him at his convenience, which he wrote would be late in the summer. If the sea proved to be what his fancy painted it, then he said he would put his mind to work and in time become a master mariner.

It sounded like a fairy tale to Marcus, and his mother was against his plans. But they knew what they said would have little effect, and that in the most delightful and sweetest way he would do exactly as he liked. Marcus had kept a sullen silence, and his mother, after much weeping, said perhaps the sea was calling him, and she would not hold him.

She would be in Ireland with little Kathleen when he left the farm in late August, but Brien promised that before he sailed on his long first voyage he would run up from Liverpool to see her in the Green Isle, and with that she had to be content. Not that she ever would be content again, she thought, looking at his radiant young face. Grief-stricken she might be, with the loss of her husband and her son going to sea, but she was level-headed and could take care of Kathleen and herself, and her duty was to see the few left to her in the old land. So in June she went.

Like a moving picture the scenes of that period in his life passed before O’Sullivan’s eyes as he sat by his window and looked out on his walnut-trees.

After his mother had gone he remembered things had seemed different on the farm. They missed Kathleen, who was a perpetually happy child, and they missed old Mrs. O’Sullivan.

When Margaret missed the child she complained bitterly of her absence, and often violently regretting she had let her go, but her father missed her all the time in silence. He was a man concentrated on what was his own. He longed for the child, he missed his mother, and the death of his father was still an aching grief. And Brien would soon be away. The world seemed unstable beneath his feet, a world of unremitting ghastly change. A world of robbery, where time took from us what we loved, beginning with our youth. He worked harder and grew more dour. And his wife resented his grave stillness. Both realized that in spirit they were far apart. That they had always been apart—and except for the two children their marriage had been a mistake. Little Shannon played with children from the next farm, but seldom followed his father as boys on farms often do, and Brien went about whistling, for he was blithely heading for what he desired. He sailed the lake oftener that summer, and spent many hours with the fishermen at Penhale. He was always welcome in any of the little cottages, and often sat on the doorsteps smoking his cigarettes, while beside him sat some old Irishwoman, it might be a great-grandmother, who had not changed the fashion of many petticoats and a little red shawl over her shoulders for anything modern, and who wore a white frilled cap, and she kept him company smoking her short clay pipe.

O’Sullivan had seen him so, on times when he drove over for a fresh whitefish. And well as Brien knew Penhale, he knew the town by the lake better. All the young folk of every set knew him, and no dance was over before he drifted in. Many secret tears were shed as the word went round he was going off to sea in August, and if he came back it wouldn’t be to stay.

It had become intensely quiet in the little room, he could even hear the ticking of his own watch, and still the pictures of vanished things rose and faded in O’Sullivan’s mind, dissolving one into the other as pictures on a screen. Once or twice he shook his great gaunt shoulders impatiently, as though trying to throw off some invisible weight, but he could not escape the spell that haunted him that afternoon, and he thought on.

Aunt Pansy was often about the house that summer he remembered, singing her old southern spirituals in her low velvety voice, with their endless repetition of never-wearying words. She was a soothing presence, Aunt Pansy.

And Phyllis—Phyllis seemed always before his eyes when he came in from the fields. He found himself looking for her constantly. She went about with a little smile on her lips as one in a dream; and she was very beautiful, he thought. Often then she did not seem to notice at first when spoken to, and then with a little start would answer while her colour rose. He had not realized her beauty when they brought her in April from Penhale. Her hair shone bronze as the glistening leaves of a beech tree. The lashes of her eyes threw shadows on her rose-white face, and her mouth was curved and lovely. He watched her that summer as she moved about the dark room and served his wife, little Shannon and himself at their meals, and Brien.

He remembered now how he had wondered that anything so fair could come from a fisherman’s cabin—anything so like fine porcelain tinted and bronzed into beauty. She had looked then like something that might be easily broken—little hands and feet, small round wrists and ankles. But that was his mistake. She had not been made of perishable stuff, but something quite different.

By the window O’Sullivan stirred uneasily. O, well he remembered how one day coming into the dark room and seeing her suddenly, he had realized that he desired her as he had never desired anything in his life. He went out again into the sunlight a little mad, he thought, and after a while found himself in the bush, tramping over the shadow-dappled ground, walking, walking.

It was late at night when he went back to the house, and his wife plied him with irritable questions as to where he had been, to which he only answered that he had been in the woods, and she had watched him after that as a woman will who has suspicion of she does not quite know what—just vague suspicions, with no foundations. Because he was the same outwardly as he had ever been, only a bit greyer and exacting with all about him from that time on.

August came in, he remembered, hot and sultry, with the sudden sound of cicadas in the trees about the house and the rare light of a firefly now and then at night in the garden. No summer had been so stamped on his mind. From the time of apple-blossoms the country had been a riot of bloom. Never had there been such clusters on the rambling rosebushes, and in the fields and meadows never such a wealth of clover and grain. As August went by and it neared the day when Brien would leave for his ship, a sense of deep loneliness had settled over him, he remembered. He spoke seldom, and did not often let his eyes stray to Phyllis. Of what burned within him there was no sign.

Against his will he had noticed that the girl went about her tasks, as quite apart from them. Entirely capable, but away in spirit from what she did. She was as one bemused, he thought. Indoors and out she wrecked his soul—tortured him. He would have gone away had it been possible, or sent her back to Penhale had there been any excuse for that. Something evil was behind it all, he said often to himself. Something that made one believe in the old theories of witchcraft. That he, Marcus O’Sullivan should be obsessed with the thought of a serving maid from the fishing village infuriated him. He scorned himself. Yet looking out at the great trees this late afternoon, the old desperate sensation swept over him for a moment again, and he knew that there had been hours in that far-off summer when he would have taken the girl and left the place never to return. That she would have gone he did not question, though he had given her no hint of what he felt.

The last day of August came, when Brien went gaily away, and with many promises to come home at the earliest chance. And as part of that unsettled summer his going was set with dark foreboding to Marcus.

September went and October came in mellow and golden, he remembered. Margaret seemed better, but was still given to nervous outbreaks, and sudden headaches. O’Sullivan paid less attention to her complaints, and often hardly heard the querulous voice that followed him.

He had fought himself and was no longer the fool of an impossibly mad infatuation. He had at last relegated the little girl from the fishing village to her proper place of servant in his house. He no longer found himself furtively regarding her young loveliness, and despised himself for ever having done so. Pride dominated him again, pride of race and fine breeding. He had brought his young nephew, Robert Kelly—who was now without father or mother—home to the farm.

The old man, looking unseeingly out of the window, remembered how joyously Shannon had met his cousin. They were both eight that October, and it was in late October that both had been stricken with diphtheria. Neither was very seriously ill and both made a good recovery. His wife would have no nurse, but nursed them with intense devotion, following the doctor’s orders. But the strain left her worn beyond belief.

It was at this time, when the children were about again, that Phyllis was taken ill with the infection. She was not more seriously ill than the little boys had been, and when they sent to town for their doctor, he telephoned he would be delayed a few hours, but would be there as soon as possible, bringing the precious anti-toxin. O’Sullivan told his wife it would be best to have Phyllis taken to the town hospital, but she insisted nothing be done until the doctor came, that she knew exactly what to do until then.

Going to Phyllis, where she lay prostrated in bed, Mrs. O’Sullivan started to make her ready for the doctor’s visit, sponging her face and hands, laying out fresh sheets and pillow cases, and insisting on helping her put on a new pretty nightdress. The girl refused help gently but decidedly. She could bathe herself, she said. She was not too ill to do everything. The woman was equally determined to help her, and Phyllis grew more desperate.

It was then Margaret O’Sullivan made her discovery. With the last vestige of colour ebbing from her face, she stood straight and tall beside the girl’s bed. She had told her husband later of the scene, and now it rose again before his old eyes.

“You wicked one!” she had said in a tense whisper, “you wicked, wicked one. Tell me who the child belongs to that you are going to have?”

The girl had buried her face in the pillow, and was silent.

Margaret O’Sullivan became an avenging fury as she looked down at her.

“Tell me!” she commanded, her eyes blazing insanely. “Is this my husband’s child? Tell me! Tell me!”

“No! No!” Phyllis answered hoarsely, “not his.”

“I do not believe you,” the woman said in a shrill half-whisper. “He does not know, but I have watched him. I have seen him looking at you with his burning eyes! I have seen what was in them. It spoke louder than words. It is his child! It is! It is!”

“No,” the girl cried hoarsely. “No. You must believe me.”

“You will tell me the truth,” Margaret O’Sullivan whispered in that same ominous voice. “You will tell me the truth or I will kill you.”

“I have told you the truth,” she answered sobbing. “It is not his.”

With sudden rage at the answer Margaret caught the girl’s swollen throat in her two hands, and crushed the breath from her quivering body. Harder and harder the fingers pressed into the soft white flesh, until suddenly strength left them and with a gesture of loathing she flung the half-conscious girl away from her across the bed.

Then she went swiftly out to the field where O’Sullivan was working. Her rage had spent itself, and what was left was a sickening dislike of him.

“That girl we brought from Penhale last April,” she began as she came near, “is vile. She will have a child before many months are past. I discovered it in getting her ready for the doctor.”

The woman spoke quietly, as though she held the words in leash. There was a deadly quietness about her. Marcus O’Sullivan remembered it, as he gazed out now at his great trees.

“The child is yours, Marcus,” she went on. “Yours. You need not deny it. I have seen you look at her. No man looks at a woman that way—unless——” she broke off.

He had drawn himself to his full height and stood there bare-headed, a righteous indignation rising within him.

“Did she say it was mine?” he asked.

“No, she denied it. But she lied, Marcus.”

“You accused her of this?” he had questioned.

“I did, and I do now. I accuse you both. I tried to choke the truth out of her, but could not.”

“What did you do?” the man asked, his face darkening.

“I told you,” she said.

“God in Heaven!” he cried, “I don’t know what you have done! But she spoke the truth, the child is not mine. Come with me to the house! Come, hasten!” he called back, striding on.

“Whose child is it then?” she said, catching up to him. “Whose?”

“How should I know?” he returned harshly. “Come! Come up to her room with me!”

The girl was conscious now and breathing strangely. Deep purple marks of fingers showed on her throat.

Looking up at Marcus O’Sullivan, she tried to speak, but no words came. Desperately she tried again, but could not make him understand any sound she made. A pencil and book lay on the table near and she wrote on the fly-leaf, “I cannot stay here. I must go home.”

“No,” he had answered, “it would not be safe for you or them, this is diphtheria.”

A desperate fear came in her eyes. “I cannot stay,” she wrote.

“You must until the doctor sees you,” he said, pity sweeping over him.

Again she tried to speak and failed, then turned her face to the wall.

That long past afternoon waned and yet the doctor did not come. In the country it was sometimes long before a doctor came.

Margaret O’Sullivan did not go near her. The man did the little he could. He wondered how they could explain that purple marked throat.

“What to do?” he had said, pacing the kitchen floor, “whatever to do?”

Night fell, a dark, starless night. Ten struck, eleven. Then the doctor came up the driveway in his noisy carriage. He and O’Sullivan went up to the girl’s room, though the farmer had made no explanations. He bided his time, and it was well, for in the room the bed was empty and Phyllis had gone. Where, no one could tell.

The doctor said she might have fallen into a mild delirium and wandered away when left momentarily alone. Though knowing nothing, O’Sullivan thought she might have tried to go home. That she had dressed herself in a simple gown and coat was plain, for these clothes were gone and her hat and shoes, and some of her underwear.

The farmer concluded she had known what she was doing. His wife looked on and said little or nothing.

They sent to Penhale, and by morning wild anxiety and fear was in the hearts of the Irish coast people. They joined the search for the girl with terrible energy. She was not at the town hospital nor in any house she could have reached. Aunt Pansy went on with her work, doing double duty, and old Uncle Gideon and his sons joined the search. Aunt Pansy wept as she worked, for she loved Phyllis.

The October day was closing in and still Marcus sat reviewing that strange haunting year. The clock in the hall struck five. He did not move or light his pipe. He only waited there, remembering.

He remembered how every place they could think of had been searched, and no trace of Phyllis found. Then one after another slowly admitted that she might be in the river. The swimming pool was deep and shaded by trees. Few went there when the cool days came.

After that no one knew rest until the pool had been dragged, and the reaches of the river as far as she could have gone. All had been done that could be done, the town police said. The conclusion was that the girl had wandered down the highway and been taken in a passing farmer’s wagon to some little station, and that she had finally reached the next city and might be there in a hospital. O’Sullivan did not believe she would give her own name or theirs to any.

A great anger now brooded in him that this girl they had taken into their house should have brought such undesirable notoriety upon them. Neither he nor his wife spoke of her to each other after she disappeared, though she had not left their thoughts. A dreadful silence lay between them. He knew she still thought he had brought the girl to this pass, and was filled with contempt for them both. He himself had no doubt in his own mind as to the father of the unborn child, but he said nothing, for this was past words. The children, Shannon and Bob, went to school and played and seemed happily indifferent to all else.

In early winter a change came to his wife, he remembered. She had been a tall, dark, handsome woman, moving with grace and dignity. Now she became gaunt, angular and hollow-eyed, her movements erratic and uncertain. She looked as though tormented by some inward grief or question. Neither of them spoke of the vanished girl, and the people from Penhale ceased to trouble them with questions.

Short letters came from Brien and old Mrs. O’Sullivan, to whom they wrote little news. Marcus was glad his mother and Kathleen were away as things were, though they would be home in late winter.

Christmas and the New Year passed and the children had toys and holidays. January went and they entered February. Sitting there by the window the old farmer went over those months—the haunted months of his life.

Margaret O’Sullivan wandered about the house silent and ghostlike. She denied herself to all callers at the farm, and spoke only to the old coloured woman and the little boys.

One day she went into the pantry when Aunt Pansy was mixing a cake.

“Sing for me, won’t you, Aunt Pansy?” she said, “one of the plantation hymns. Sing ‘Steal Away to Jesus’.”

“Why, yes, Honey, Miss Margaret, sure I’ll sing dat song fer yu. An’ would yu like ‘Tentin’ on de ole Camp Groun’?”

“I’d love it—but ‘Steal Away’ first.”

So Aunt Pansy sang, and the woman sat down in a little rocking-chair in the dark kitchen and listened to the low, caressing voice.

“Sweet!” she said, when it stopped. “So sweet, Aunt Pansy, it hurts. No, no more now. I could not bear any more.”

“All right, Honey, Miss Margaret. Songs do sort ’a hurt one’s heart, sometimes. Go upstairs an’ see can’t yu res’ a mite. I’ll tak keer ob eberything.”

“Thank you, Aunt Pansy. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

The old woman shook her gay turbaned head.

“Lucky day fer us, Gideon an’ me, when we come trampeasin’ down dis road. We nebber had no home to call our own till we got into that ole log cabin.”

“I’m glad you’re there,” she answered gently. “Glad anyone’s been happy on this farm.”

She stopped abruptly and hurried through the kitchen and upstairs where she met her husband, who had come in to get ready for the noon-day dinner.

Going up to him, she stopped, hesitated a moment, then touched his arm.

“If not you, Marcus,” she questioned, “then who was it that brought that girl to such grief?”

“I don’t know, Margaret,” he said in a low voice.

“Would you tell me if you did know?” she asked.

“I can’t answer that question either.”

Colour flamed in her faded face.

“I am tortured by it all!” she cried. “I don’t know what to believe. But one thing is certain, I sent her to her death. I must have been mad, Marcus.”

“No,” he said quietly, taking her hand, “only distracted for the moment; not knowing right from wrong.”

“I sent her to her death,” she repeated.

“We do not know she is dead. Let us not think of it.”

She threw out her hands protestingly and went into her own room.

And over this the old man went agonizingly in memory. He remembered what Pansy had told him of her singing the “Steal Away.” “Steal away”—and sitting by the window he brushed his hand across his eyes.

That night of twenty years ago, the night of February the fifteenth, there was a great snowstorm, he remembered. O, how he remembered!

In the middle of that night he had heard a stable or garage door banging in the wind. He got up, put on heavy clothes and started to go out. The door was open between his wife’s room and his own, and looking in he noticed she was asleep with the small night lamp lit by her bed. “So,” he thought, “she went to sleep with fear. The light gave her comfort of some kind.” Going downstairs, softly he took a lantern and made his way through piled snow to the stables. He kept but one hired man, and nothing could waken him. He looked after things himself. Finding the swinging door he closed it and then made a round of the stables seeing all was right. It took him longer than he thought, but at last, head down against the wind, he returned to the house. Carefully he blew the lantern out, hung it and went upstairs. The hall clock struck two as he entered his room. Glancing again through the open door he saw that Margaret was still asleep, so she had not been frightened by his absence, as he feared. But she had been up, for she had put on a blue kimono.

Suddenly, by the little flame of the night lamp he fancied he saw something queerly rigid and unnatural in her position. With strange haste he crossed to the bed and gazed down. She lay slightly arched backward and was dead. There was no shadow of doubt but that she was dead. Even now a sense of the same horror he had felt then stirred in the old man, as he thought. He remembered the little note held in her stiffening hand. Again he seemed to read it.

That was all. He still stared down at her. It was a swift poison, and she had been dead only a few moments. No doctor could help now, and there was no need to call one until he thought some way out of this, made some plan. They should not know she had killed herself. There should be no inquest if he could help it, no scandal. Already they were being looked at askance by some, because of the disappearance of the Penhale girl.

He remembered how he had straightened the arched body, shut her staring eyes, folded the clenched hands, burnt the note. A cold sweat broke out on him sitting there.

“She must have been quite mad—crazy—crazy—mad,” he had said over and over that night. But was she? Saying it he had not been sure. He had at last pulled the sheet up, covered her from sight and sat heavily down to think.

What could he do? What could he do? Any doctor could easily find out how she had died. Sudden deaths must be explained some way, investigated. There must be a death certificate—a doctor must truthfully sign it. At the least suspicion a coroner would be called—a jury. He would be put to the torture of questions. He, The O’Sullivan of Tullamore farm. Poison would be found in the—poison would be found. He—he might be accused of murder. The country would ring with it. This after the girl’s vanishing. He was in a coil; caught as a lion in a net.

He remembered no sense of loss had hurt him, no feeling of grief. Just panic—and a wild seeking for some way out. Then as he sat there long ago, he presently quieted down. His heart, that had been pounding, went back to regular beating. His icy body grew warm. No plan had come to him, no plausible story to tell, but he knew it would. There should be no inquest, no gossip and no suspicions. She should be buried in the time honoured way, not as a suicide. This tragedy should leave his name untouched by scandal. When his mind cleared he would know what to do. So he sat planning and discarding one plan after another, thinking—desperately thinking in a sort of agony. He remembered.

And then there had been a quick knocking at the front door of his house, an insistent quick knocking. Someone he thought might have lost their way in the storm. The hall clock struck three.

He shut the bedroom doors and taking the night light went downstairs.

“Who is it?” he said at the hall door.

“It’s me, Massa O’Sullivan!” said Aunt Pansy’s voice, “jes’ Pansy. Let me in fo de Lawd’s sake! I needs help right bad.”

O’Sullivan swung the door open and she came in. She was a heavy woman, and now bundled in Uncle Gideon’s greatcoat and snow covered, looked huge.

“What’s wrong, Pansy,” said the man, “is Uncle Gideon ill?”

“No, sir. No, sir, not him. It’s Phyllis, dat fisherman’s little gal. She’s has been pretty near daid dis night. I wants help wif her now.”

“Phyllis!” O’Sullivan exclaimed. “How is it she is with you?”

“Ah, Massa O’Sullivan, dat pore sweet lamb she come to Pansy and ole Gideon when she run away from you all wif de sore throat dat night. I do’ no how come she lef’ your house, but she shore come along in de dark to de log cabin an’ Aunt Pansy. She could only make queer sounds, not talk good, but I got to understand she meant ‘Hide me! Hide me, Aunt Pansy! Don’ let dem know where I is, hide me!’ I ax no questions but kep’ her hid. She been along wid ole Gideon and me dis las’ few months. I let on I didn’t know whar she was, for she come to me fer protection, Massa O’Sullivan, an’ de Lawd Hisself hunted for de one los’ lamb an’ carried it home in He’s arms. Seems lak she was dat little los’ lamb, Massa O’Sullivan. But I got ’a hurry back. I come to get you all to send for a doctor man. Seems lak she ought to hab a doctor now. I’m a bit skeered bout her.”

In the dim light of the hall she leaned towards O’Sullivan, and dropped her voice.

“I wants you to send right now fer a doctor, and get de sponsibility off Gideon and me. Dat chile hab a little baby born an hour ago, Massa O’Sullivan.”

“So!” he said hoarsely. “On this night! It’s born then?”

“Yes, sir, it’s borned at las’. Mighty long hours we put in, but she went wild if I said I’d leave her and come here for help, and dat ole man o’ mine he couldn’t go far as de fence in dis storm. I don did de best I could. She wouldn’t let me leave her an’ go.”

“Yes, Pansy,” he said, “You did—you did.”

He remembered, as though it were yesterday, what he had said to the old shaken coloured woman, and what he had done. The pictures rose and passed in his mind. Twilight was blotting out the walnut-trees. Someone knocked at his door—Kathleen.

“Will you come to supper, father?” she said.

“I am resting,” he answered, “I will have something by and by.”

“You are not ill?” she asked anxiously.

“No, no, just resting.”

The light steps died away, and again the pictures in his mind rose and dissolved into others. He remembered how the old negro woman looked, the snow melting on the man’s greatcoat she wore. He remembered her soft words.

So that was it! The girl had been safe, and near, while Margaret had thought her dead. Margaret! Dead herself upstairs! Something must be done, quickly done. There was no time to lose. Desperately, blindly he sought for some way out, and then in a flash saw it—saw plainly what he could do.

But he must take Pansy into his confidence. Without her help he could not succeed. Her faithfulness would be all he needed—her silence, her agreement to his plan. No one but Aunt Pansy must know of the tragedy of this night, no one. There was just one thing to be done before morning broke. His voice shook as he spoke.

“Pansy,” he said, “a dreadful thing has happened in this house to-night.”

“Lordy! Lordy!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands.

“Will you promise if I tell you the truth to keep it to yourself? Never to tell it to anyone?”

“Yas, sir,” she answered. “Gideon an’ me owes you a lot. I promise never to tell anything you say. You’s a heap wiser ’n me, Massa O’Sullivan.”

“You can help me out of a frightful difficulty then, Aunt Pansy. Something unbelievable has happened. My wife has poisoned herself. She is dead.”

Pansy gave a soft cry.

“Yes,” he went on, “she took poison about an hour ago. I went out to the stable to close a door that was banging in the wind, and she took it then. If something isn’t done, there will be an inquest—horrible gossip. I may be accused of killing her! Now listen to me, Pansy.”

“Yas, sir, O—Lord—yas, sir! Hab mercy, Lord!”

“Keep quiet,” the man had ordered, “absolutely quiet and listen.”

“Yas, sir, yas, sir!”

“This girl Phyllis has a baby born to-night, you say?”

“Dat’s true. An hour ago if I knows de right time. Maybe ’twas more. Gideon he’s awatchin’ her now. I got to hurry back. But I won’t take no mo’ sponsibility. Dere’s got to be a doctor sent for. I wants you to telefoam—please, sir.”

“We will both hurry,” he had answered. “I’ll hitch up a horse and take the double buggy over.”

“Don’t do dat!” she had protested, “I could run back faster’n you could get out de buggy. You jes’ sen’ for de doctor.”

“No,” he had told her, “I will drive you home. Then I will wrap the girl and her baby in blankets and bring them back here with you. I need your help.”

The woman gasped.

“Seems lak you couldn’t move her, sir, Massa O’Sullivan. You couldn’t do dat, please, Massa Sullivan!”

“O yes I can,” he said. “They move women to hospitals every day and night in every sort of desperate condition. I can take her as carefully as any ambulance. I will bring hot water bottles, and blankets—blankets. You can hold her. Don’t be so frightened. Even Esquimo infants survive,” he said, his spirits rising.

“Is you mind fixed to do dis?” she asked tremblingly.

“It is,” he had said. “We will put her to bed in the farmhouse, and you will stay and take care of her. I will bring the Bible, Pansy, and you will lay your hand on it and swear never to speak of this, or of what I told you to-night.”

From the bookcase he brought a little Bible.

“Lay your hand on the book, Pansy.”

She put her brown hand on the black cover.

“I swear, Massa O’Sullivan, I won’t ever tell,” she said, her voice trembling.

“All right. I trust you. I shall bring you here with Phyllis even if she dies on the road. But she will not die. And now, listen again. I am going to say the baby belongs to my wife, that it was born during the storm. That the telephone was out of order—it often is—that the roads were full of snowdrifts, almost impassible, and they are. I will say my wife died shortly after the birth of the child, from exhaustion or heart failure, I thought. Do you understand?”

“Yas, Sir! Mercy Lord!”

“The girl shall be kept on in a room apart, on the top floor. She will nurse the baby, and keep it alive though it would be better dead. But I do not propose to be a murderer, Pansy.”

“No, sir, Massa O’Sullivan. Praise God!”

“To-morrow when the doctor gets here through the drifts he will only find a dead woman and a new-born baby. He will have no need to examine her. The baby is proof of what I say. Then there will be a funeral, and that is all. Now I’ll bring the horse and double buggy around. You just wait here.”

Aunt Pansy looked up into the set and determined face, and knew she need make no protest. All his fear and uncertainty had gone. He was in command again.

“I won’t say no word at all, Massa O’Sullivan, an’ I’ll warn dat nigger Gideon to keep wat he knows silent as de grave. De Lawd knows we bof’ll keep silent, Massa O’Sullivan.”

“You had better, Aunt Pansy,” he returned briefly.

“Well den, go git de horse an’ buggy. I gotta travel.”

He remembered how he had driven through the snow the little way to the log house among the trees, and there found Phyllis and her baby.

The girl had rallied and her condition did not alarm him.

The child, a girl, was very fair, and there were rings of red-gold hair clinging to its small head. The face, as the faces of very young infants often are, was stamped with a strong resemblance.

“Brien,” the man had said looking down. “It belongs to Brien, Phyllis.”

She raised her eyes to his, wide and frightened, and nodded assent.

“I am taking you over to the farm,” he went on, “and at once. This child is the child of my brother, you admit. It has the look of him. I need no other proof. But henceforth it belongs to me and to my wife. We will take it. Never as long as you live say anything to the contrary. If you do, much worse will befall you, Phyllis. Do you understand? I have reasons for this action of mine.”

Again she nodded, fear stamped on her face.

“Dat sweet lamb won’t say nothin’, Massa O’Sullivan,” Aunt Pansy had put in, “’cause she ain’t said nothin’ since de night she first come. ’Pears like her throat was hurt someway more dan jes’ sore. I reckon she dumb now.”

“Dumb?” he exclaimed incredulously. “I guess not, Aunt Pansy. I never saw a dumb woman who could hear. We’ll give her a little whisky. Here is my flask.”

She shook her head but drank what they gave her.

“Fill the hot water bottles,” he ordered. “There are two I brought in.”

Pansy filled them.

“Now,” he said, “wrap her and the baby in the blankets and then go out and climb into the buggy.”

“Lord have mercy!” she prayed, but did as he told her.

Marcus O’Sullivan remembered how he carried the girl and the child in her arms, rolled in the blankets on to the buggy and placed them beside Aunt Pansy.

Then they drove slowly through the snow to the farmhouse doors.

“Reckon dat man means what he says, Phyllis honey,” the old black woman groaned, “but Aunt Pansy goin’ to stop right with yu. ’Tain’t been no worse dan ridin’ to a hospital. De worse all ober fer you, dat’s de truf.”

In the carriage the girl lifted her haunted eyes to the dark face, then shook her head and pressed the baby closer.

“I know what yu means, chile, but it’s goin’ to work out all right. Jes’ you do nothin’. He’ll go it all, his own way.”

A little later the girl was in the warm upper bedroom, safe, and seemingly unharmed, and the baby had been taken over by Marcus O’Sullivan as his daughter.

Then when he had put up the horse and buggy he returned home and telephoned to the doctor in town. He told of the slightly premature, so unexpected birth, of the terrible shock of his wife’s sudden death afterwards, apparently from a heart seizure.

He told of his many futile attempts to reach him by the telephone, which might have been affected by the storm, and he ended by saying he had been alone except for his old coloured servant, and a hired man, who was ill. That was true. The hired man was ill with acute indigestion, and could not have been sent to town that night.

The doctor who knew them all was old, and glad he had not been called out in the dreadful storm. He wondered Margaret O’Sullivan had not consulted him lately as things were. Perhaps she intended to come in to the hospital. Anyway she was a strange, withdrawn sort of woman, and he had examined her once, and told her her heart was irregular. They did die sometimes, these women. He said he would be over in the morning and see the baby and sign the death certificate, and he expressed the greatest sympathy and understanding. He asked if he should send a nurse from the hospital for the baby, but O’Sullivan said his coloured woman was capable, and would take care of it. It looked like a perfectly normal baby, though small.

In the morning the doctor got there through the drifts of snow. He viewed the still form of Margaret O’Sullivan, and saw and examined the baby, which he pronounced normal.

Looking up from the tiny face he said unexpectedly, “There is one of those strong family likenesses here. This baby looks like Brien. Do you not see it?”

“Most babies look alike to me,” he remembered he had answered.

“That is just a stock phrase,” the old doctor had returned.

He made out the death certificate without hesitation, having himself some time before pronounced her heart not perfectly right.

“Women with uncertain hearts should not have children,” he had averred, as he signed the paper.

“That is true,” O’Sullivan agreed.

With many shakings of his head he had taken a glass of whisky and asked some detailed questions of O’Sullivan. He remembered how strained his answers had been, how shaky his hand. Undoubtedly he showed the effects of the night’s ordeal.

The doctor said there would be no object in his examining the woman—it would be sacrilegious under the circumstances. So he had gone away, to appear as family physician at the funeral.

After the funeral—to which the whole countryside came—O’Sullivan had resolutely put thought aside.

He remembered how he had told Phyllis, while she was still recovering, the conditions under which she could remain. No one knew she was the mother of an illegitimate child but Uncle Gideon and Aunt Pansy. No one would know unless she told. And the child here was his, so the doctor would say, so Aunt Pansy and Uncle Gideon would say. They were afraid not to. But she could stop in the farmhouse, nurse and take care of the baby, and later become his housekeeper and cook. Until he gave her leave to be seen below, she was to be in seclusion above stairs. In perfect seclusion. Aunt Pansy would follow his orders to the letter, he knew well.

He would write to advise his mother not to sail for home until April, as the winter was severe. By that time the baby could be weaned, and she about her work downstairs. They would give the report to the gossips that she returned of her own accord from a town far beyond. No other explanations should be given at all. So there would be nothing for them to work on.

The girl saw that in the set hard face which left her no alternative. She bowed her head in acceptance of his terms. She would be near her baby, and it would be safe here. Here she had known the short golden spring days of love. The alternative would be to go away—not back to Penhale where she would be plied with questions—never to Penhale. And now she could not speak. Something that dreadful night had happened to her throat. Margaret O’Sullivan’s hands——She shuddered.

Yes, she would stay, and accept everything, even the mystery of his wife’s death. For she knew mystery surrounded it. But she would ask nothing, and keep her thoughts to herself. All that mattered was that she would be near her baby.

Marcus O’Sullivan remembered the girl’s face as she had agreed to stay at his terms.

Still he sat by his window, while the twilight deepened, his face drawn and white, the silver cap of his hair almost luminous.

He felt very tired. Not for years had he so communed with his soul. The clock in the hall struck seven, as he rose and switched on the light. Supper would be over. They would think he was just over-tired, and they never questioned him.

Not yet had he quite come from the past. His head felt confused, his limbs trembly. It was a feature of age to be reminiscent, he thought irritably. Then his mind slipped back again.

“I remember,” he said half-aloud, “how mother wondered when she got home at there being a baby in the house; how she wept for Margaret. I remember her tiresome questions about Phyllis and the loss of her voice. The doctor told her it was a form of paralysis following diphtheria, so she was satisfied.”

And other memories still lashed over him. There was the cable, the cable from Lloyd’s with the list of those lost on the ship sunk by a mine in the Irish Sea, and Brien’s name was among them. That was in the following September. Then, as it seemed, his mother had all at once become a very old woman; and Phyllis grew more and more transparent and white. No letter had come to her, as far as he knew. She had been only an incident in the gay life of his young brother. The light love of a spring day. Though perhaps for her it had been all the ecstasy she would ever know or care to know.

With a swift flare of anger he remembered how her young beauty of so rare and delicate a type had kindled his own blood. He had nothing left of that now but a vast contempt of himself. He loathed himself for having given her a thought—she, a fisherman’s daughter, a kitchen wench, of common breed and low, licentious tendencies.

Well, she had paid for all that. He would let it lie. No doubt it was she who had waylaid his brother, and tried to trap him into marriage.

He had been obsessed by the past to-day. But never again! There should be no more retrospect.

Now the girl who had seemed to bring so much trouble to the farm that bygone year, was only the wraith of a woman, the grey shell of a soul. But in the child that was hers there was the same tendency.

She, too, was eager to throw herself into a man’s arms—a man she scarcely knew. She followed in the same footsteps. It was by reason of Phyllis, Brien had left—to get away from her. So he had met his death. She had some witchlike quality. He had felt it himself, and it was of the devil. In other days she would have been burnt. A trembling ran through his limbs. He held to the back of a chair a moment before leaving the room.

He would never again, he said to himself, go back into the past, never again. With an effort he threw back his shoulders, and went down to the long room. Straight and forbidding he took his seat at the head of the empty table, and rang for his belated supper.

That night O’Sullivan slept heavily, but woke up at morning haunted as by an evil dream. But he had not been dreaming. He slowly realized it was the thoughts of yesterday that still disturbed him.

To slip so deeply into the past was perilous, he knew. A sign of old age, this harking back. It was a danger signal, too. If he gave way to it he would soon live in the past, as his mother did now.

He swore softly as he dressed and went down to breakfast.

They each greeted him pleasantly enough and he nodded to them in return.

Kathleen looked white, he thought, but she smiled at him.

“We missed you at supper, Dad. Too bad you were tired out. Were you taking a nap?”

“No,” he said grimly. “No. Just thinking.”

“You remember what Cæsar said of Cassius, ‘He thinks too much, such men are dangerous’,” she ended with a little soft laugh, that held no merriment.

“Ah!” he returned, “I do not know Shakespeare as well as you do, Kitty.”

“O, I don’t know him well. Only some lines refuse to be forgotten. One does not learn them, Dad. Hearing them once it seems natural to know them; like knowing the colours, or certain tunes.”

“You are poetical, Kit,” he answered briefly.

“This table looks empty,” Bob remarked, immediately regretting the words.

Shannon, who had come in during the night, smiled broadly. “The old salt cellar does not know what it is there for, Dad. Its mission in life, to mark the masses from the classes, seems ended.”

“I told Phyllis yesterday to seat the new men in the summer kitchen till I knew them better, and we would return here. But it makes too much work to have both tables. If they are all right, I’ll have them in.”

That seemed to end it.

“Whatever took off Olsen?” Shannon asked, “and Grey? I was away when they went.”

“O, he had ideas about raising tobacco in Kent,” Bob explained. “He’ll get on.”

“No one doubted that,” Shannon replied. “And old Tom Grey, what got him? It’s annoying to have two raw recruits.”

“I dismissed him,” O’Sullivan said.

“O! Did you, sir? Well, I suppose you had a reason.”

“Certainly,” he assented. “I hope I have a good reason behind all my actions, Shannon.”

“Of course, sir. But on the other hand——”

“On the other hand——” echoed O’Sullivan.

“I have nothing more to say,” his son said abruptly, and stopped.

“Finish what you began,” his father insisted.

Shannon shrugged. “I intended to say, on the other hand you could not always expect us to agree with your reasons. I beg your pardon, sir, but you would have it, you know.”

“Ay, I would have it! I would rather my children told me outright they thought I was wrong, than slander me behind my back!”

“O, we never do that, Father!” Kathleen broke in, “Only——”

“Only what?” he said ominously.

She looked up bravely. “We all think it is very hard for Gail to be kept so long upstairs a—a sort of prisoner. We cannot think she deserves such punishment.”

She saw in Shannon’s eyes and Bob’s that they were glad she had spoken. That braced her.

Phyllis, serving at the table, seemed oblivious to what was said, but she fluttered a little, Kathleen thought, without realizing she thought it, like a grey moth who comes too near a flame.

“I am keeping Gail in her room until she gives me her promise not to see this Basque singer. She heard what I told you all at this table—to have nothing to do with those gypsies—and disobeyed me. I am saving her from herself. Until she promises not to see him or he goes away she shall be kept in the house.”

“O, father!” Kathleen said bitterly, “don’t you see you cannot change Gail that way? What have you against this man? I heard about him in town. He is a far greater continental singer than you know. He is famous. I have heard.”

“I want no opera singers in my family!” O’Sullivan answered violently. “Loose livers all of them! What do we really know of him? He may have a wife abroad, or be a divorced man.”

“Your imagination is running away with you, Dad!” Kathleen said lightly. “It may be dangerous to—to interfere with things of this kind—with love’s young dream,” she ended with an uncertain little laugh.

“I hardly wonder Gail was attracted by him,” Shannon remarked, lighting a cigarette. “At least he is different from anyone she has seen.”

“Ay!” O’Sullivan commented grimly, “I warrant he is. Very different from any upright Canadian boy about here. He is almost twice her age, and a foreign libertine, I’ll be bound.”

“It’s useless to argue, Dad. But it hurts us all to have Gail,” she hesitated, “imprisoned. It would be better perhaps if Benedict went away.”

“Better!” he exclaimed. “Undeniably it would, and better if he had never come. But I’ll take care of this business, and I’ll not be made a fool over it.”

Rising he left the room, as did the others.

“He is my father, and a mighty good one,” Shannon remarked to Bob on the porch, “but a greater egotist never existed. I fear he will come a cropper this time. He has made what might have been a summer flirtation a very serious affair.”

“I don’t think it was a summer flirtation,” Bob said casually, “and I don’t believe for a moment this man Benedict is going to pass out of the picture. He came to your father with his request to marry her as any honourable man would.”

“Well, that certainly looks serious enough,” Shannon laughed. “I have always thought Gail had a great deal of beauty—a dangerous type of beauty. They say she is the image of Uncle Brien. You remember him? He used to simply fascinate me as a kid! Something about him, you know. The modern film idol in person. It’s strange Dad should be so rigid and uncompromising and his brother such a wild, light-hearted chap, as I hear he was—such a lovable chap. Grandmother cannot speak of him yet without tears.”

So, whistling to their dogs, they took their guns and went out to where the quail ran in the corn stubble.

Another week went round, when O’Sullivan, while driving down to the village, met Benedict riding his grey horse.

The man touched his hat and gave a pleasant greeting to the old farmer, who only glowered back. No words were exchanged, but from an indefinite expression on Benedict’s face O’Sullivan realized he did not intend to be stampeded.

He had heard the Basques were now in comfort on a better farm than Hennessy’s, nearer town and a French settlement.

Strangely he had lost any desire to buy the Hennessy place. Anyway, now his pride would not let him buy it. If Shannon was going so often up to the mines, why have more land. Things were at a deadlock.

It seemed absurd to keep Gail in her room week after week. It reflected on his sense and judgment. It showed he had no ability to control his household but by force.

In the way such news travels, it had filtered through to the community that Gail was being held in the house. The minister’s wife had first discovered it. One garbled story after another was going around. Visitors called at the house who had not called for months. Gossip seethed. It became a torture for Kathleen to ride anywhere, she met so many questioning glances. Old friends frankly asked her what was wrong, and it took all her tact to answer them.

So at last she kept to the garden, still filled with the glamour of October, and she told Wallie, who answered the door, to say she was not at home. To Kathleen, who was not given to little white lies, this was difficult, though to Wallie it was enjoyable.

When at last O’Sullivan realized gossip had been set afloat, fury, silent but terrible, burned within him. He saw he had been baffled and frustrated at every turn, and made to look like the tyrant father of an ancient novel.

But to liberate Gail was akin to letting a bird out of its cage. Nothing was more certain than that she would meet Benedict. He was still here for that purpose, not a whit less determined than himself. Probably the two would be married, eloping in the old-time fashion, and he, the irate father, would be left to make the best of it, the laughing stock of the county.

“Let them talk,” he muttered, driving on. He would keep her close for a while yet. Time was the great test in these affairs. Eventually the man would have to go. Nothing was more exacting than art. It dominated, or it failed. Even now he was playing dangerously with his career. O’Sullivan smiled at the thought, a hard smile.

A scent of dead leaves burning, was on the wind. Veils of gauzy violet floated over the far hills. It had been a good year except that Shannon would not stay steadily on the farm. Yes, eventually it would be Bob who took it over. His mother would go—he himself would go. Kathleen to perhaps her own home somewhere. And Gail—Gail should marry Bob. But there was little chance of that.

He had not felt so strong since yesternoon. ‘Damn all harking back to dead days.’ What is over, is over. He drove in, gave his horse and buggy over to his man, and as he crossed to the house saw Wallie going towards the kitchen porch.

Looking up the boy saw him suddenly, and as suddenly swerved and turned to go back the way he had come. It was a queer, half-afraid, involuntary movement.

O’Sullivan stood stock still. “Now what did the boy mean by dodging like that?” a thought flashed into his mind. There was some reason for it—then he had something to hide!

With an extraordinary return to his old vigour and energy, he also turned and strode after the boy’s retreating form.

“Walter!” he called. “Stop I say! Come here.”

Walter halted for a fleeting undecided moment, then, his shoulders slumping and his feet heavy, went back to his master.

O’Sullivan held him with his eye as did the Ancient Mariner the wedding guest. Wallie quailed before it. Authority was in the old man’s bearing. For the moment he looked as tall and strong as in his young days. He seldom wore a hat except in the strong sun, and now his hair shone like a metal casque.

“Walter,” he said, “what are you hiding from me?”

Slowly the brick-red receded from the boy’s round face. He shuffled his feet and looked down.

“Do not keep me waiting,” the old man said ominously.

Walter hesitated no longer. He took from his pocket a note in a grey envelope and handed it to O’Sullivan. It bore no address.

“So!” he exclaimed. “So! Notes.”

Cupid has many messengers, and Wallie, he now realized, was as good as any.

For a moment he did not open the envelope.

“How long have you been bringing these messages from Mr. Benedict to Miss Gail?” he asked the boy, who was shaking as with a chill.

“Since—since Miss Gail has been locked in, sir,” he half whispered. “But I ain’t ever taken one right to her. No, sir. I carried them from Mr. Benedict to Phyllis, an’—an’ I guess she gave ’em to Miss Gail. Phyllis wrote on her slate that Miss Gail was unhappy an’ would I bring a note from Mr. Benedict. So I gave in. I’d do anything for Miss Gail, sir. Anything!” A little spirit crept into his voice.

Strangely enough the farmer’s hand was laid for a moment on Wallie’s rough head.

“All right, all right,” he said, “I’ll deal with you later, Walter, but I’ll not harm ye. Run on away. I will deliver the note myself.”

Like a rabbit released from a trap Wallie was gone.

The man walked around to his walnut-trees, and sat down on a bench beneath one of them. He glanced around but no one was in sight. Then he opened the note and read the few lines of it.

“I cannot endure this any longer, darling,” the words ran. “I have seen Phyllis and she will help you to escape to-night. Try to meet me in the little summer-house at ten. That is a safe hour. I have arranged for our marriage in town an hour later. I regret we must vex your father, but our lives are our own. Gabriel.”

He sat very still, a stifling anger rising in him. This was their simple plan to hoodwink him, and Phyllis was behind every move. Phyllis—grey and gentle—seeing everything, hearing everything, and eternally silent. This delighted her—this making him of no account under his own roof. This woman, whom he had sheltered from disgrace and the wrath of the narrow, virtuous Catholic fisherman, her father.

It was late afternoon and he pulled himself together and went up to the house. “What has to be said, had best be said now,” he thought.

The long kitchen was empty. The high old salt cellar gleaming on the dark table gave the room an unusual elegance.

The old man stood in the familiar place as uncertain what to do next. Phyllis might be in the buttery or summer kitchen; so he called.

She came out of the big pantry, wiping her little fluttering hands.

O’Sullivan went over and stood with his back to the glowing fire. Above the mantel were hung wide-spreading moose antlers, and on the wide black shelf a pair of brass cluster candlesticks with candles, always lit at supper time because Kathleen liked candle-light. Beside them, quite out of their places, lay a fishing-creel, some decoy ducks, and a gun Shannon had been cleaning. Shannon’s things were like that.

Furious as he was, these misplaced things gave the man an added irritation.

“Come here, Phyllis!” he said sharply.

The woman went over and stood quite still looking at him, though she recognized his mood.

O’Sullivan held out the grey note that was in his hand.

“What do you know about this?” he asked gravely.

Then as she lifted her slate to write an answer he dashed it from her hand.

“Never mind!” he exclaimed. “I want no damned hypocritical writing. This note is from the Basque—the gypsy—Benedict! O you know very well what is in it—but read it just the same!”

Her face did not change as she took the note and read. Then she handed it back.

“You know their plans,” he said with dangerous quiet. “You have seen him. You have promised to help them when the time comes. You have been the go-between—taking the notes from Benedict to my daughter. Walter does not count.”

The woman lifted one hand to her throat. A spasm of pain crossed her face and a blurred harsh sound—then one word came from her unsealed lips in a withering tone.

“Yours?” she said, “Yours?”

“My God!” the man exclaimed, “you are speaking, Phyllis! You have been fooling us—all these years!”

“No! No!” she repeated painfully, her hand on her quivering throat, “only now—I can speak—a little!”

“It alters nothing,” O’Sullivan asserted, “nothing at all, whether you can speak now or not. But you are better silent. You—you are back of this deception and disobedience! I tried to save the girl from disaster, and you prevent me to the full of your ability. What have you ever given her? It is I who have provided her with a home and a name—everything!”

His low-pitched voice, hot with anger, did not carry beyond the woman before him.

Her face had grown greyer and her hand was still at her throat.

“You have carried to Gail the last note she will get from this foreigner,” he went on. “I will meet him myself to-night and settle all this.”

His narrowed eyes held hers as by hypnotic power.

“But as you have interfered and defied me,” he went on, “there is a better way for me to deal with the girl. I will go to her now and tell her the truth she has never known. That she is not my daughter in reality. That she is the daughter of Brien O’Sullivan, my brother, and that you—you a Penhale fisherman’s girl, and a servant in my house—you are her mother. That she was not born in wedlock, and that her father deserted you and went to sea to be rid of the affair.”

Again pain contracted her face, and again with a wrenching effort her words came in the strange tones.

“You shall not!” she said. “You shall not! She must not know!”

“She shall know,” he reiterated. “Who are you to tell me what I must or must not do? When she knows she is without home or dower, except of illegitimacy, I warrant she will not go to this man Benedict who claims to be decently born and have an established place in the world. She has pride because the blood of the O’Sullivans is in her. She has the very face of Brien, and his nature, too, lovable, charming, credulous. But she is also deceptive, and that quality she inherits from you and your people.”

“They are honest people!” Phyllis cried in a sort of agony, “dear people, my own—people.”

“Yes! Then yes!” he answered frantically, trying to stop those broken syllables. “Don’t talk for God’s sake. I can’t stand it!” But his tone changing, “You do not change my purpose one whit. Before they come in for supper I will have told her who she is. That will stop these insane proceedings. I will tell her all.”

“You shall not!” she exclaimed, again catching at his arm, her face ghastly and set.

“O yes!” O’Sullivan repeated, “I will—and at once.”

With a movement too quick to be followed the woman reached up and took the newly-cleaned and loaded gun from the mantel-shelf, and before O’Sullivan realized her intention pulled the trigger.

The shot entered his left side and he threw up his arms and fell heavily before the hearth.

Phyllis stood with the gun in her hands, then it slipped to the floor as though her strength went with it.

Her eyes wide with horror were fixed on the great gaunt frame of O’Sullivan. She wavered as though blown by the wind.

The sound of the shot brought Walter running from the kitchen garden, with the two new hired men, who were going up to their room, at his heels.

O’Sullivan lay before the fireplace, unbelievably still, his eyes half-closed.

The men rushed to him, their faces blanched, and one knelt down by his side. Wallie hovered by the door, speechless with fear. But fear was in the air.

“He is not dead!” the kneeling man said. “Someone telephone for a doctor—any doctor—only hurry.”

“I’ll ring,” the other man answered leaving.

“He’s shot near the heart,” the man on the floor said quietly. “Who did this, Phyllis?”

She touched herself, and nodded.

“You?” he exclaimed incredulously, “not you?”

Phyllis nodded again, her face grey.

O’Sullivan opened his sunken eyes.

“She lies,” he said faintly. “She does not know what she is saying. She—is—bewildered with fright. I shot myself. An accident. I was lifting the gun from the mantel to put it—where it belongs, and the trigger caught in my sleeve. It was just as simple—as that.” His eyes closed again.

“Ride for the doctor, Wallie!” the man called to him. “Ride like the devil. We don’t want any delay, with this——”

Walter vanished.

“Water!” O’Sullivan whispered, “water!”

Phyllis brought a glass and held it to his lips, but he did not swallow.

She rose and stood still gazing at him. A pool of blood at his side widened every moment.

“Better not try to move him till the doctor comes,” the man nodded to her, “I can’t think of nothing we can do yet. Nothin’ at all.”

Phyllis brought a cushion and slipped it under his head, but he did not notice.

The other man stepped nearer. “I telephoned,” he told them, “the doctor’s coming fast as he kin. But we jest ought to do something! Shall I get Miss Kathleen?”

O’Sullivan shook his silver head. His lips moved. “No!—no—get no one.” They caught the words.

The clock in the hall struck six. Shannon was off somewhere, Bob in town.

The old farmer heard the clock strike and must have realized Kathleen would soon come downstairs. His mind was no longer quite clear, they realized, by the burning light in his eyes. He looked up at the strange men, and the woman.

“A quick death, this,” he said with his old grim smile, “and an easy one. Not so hard—Phyllis—as strychnine for instance—that arches the body up. To die alone in the night of strychnine—would be worse than this. This is a good way to make an ending. Careless of me to catch the trigger in my cuff. Shannon should have put the gun—in its rack. His creels, and decoy duck, and gun—all out of their places. But it doesn’t matter. Each goes—when—his time comes. It’s just one more tragedy. This is the house of sudden death. The little baby, long ago, when the horses ran away—killed,” he went on. “Margaret, in the night—Brien at sea—now The O’Sullivan.” His breath fluttered, stopped, went on, and again he spoke.

“About little Gail,” he looked at Phyllis. “It doesn’t matter any more. Let her have her own way, d’ye hear?”

Phyllis stooped down and nodded her head, her face greyer than his own.

“Yes,” he said again, “it seems as though I have got hold of the answer to a riddle—it is—to everyone his own life—to everyone, Phyllis, his own life—in his own way.” There was a breathless pause, but his lips moved. “Tell Gail I said so—and tell the Basque gypsy.” He paused. “Damn all gypsies!” he exclaimed fervently, then went on in a different way—“Tell this Basque singer I—I liked his courage. He came honourably to me to ask for my daughter’s,” he raised his eyes to Phyllis—“my daughter’s hand in marriage. Whatever I have said before—I say this now. He is all right. To come to me took courage.” Again the grim smile crossed his ashy lips, and he tried to quote a line from the writer he loved. “You’re a better man,” he said, “A better man than I am—Gunga——”

His breath fluttered—stopped—and his silver head fell in a friendly, almost caressing way against his hired man’s arm. Outside on the porch the old setter lifted his head and gave a long quivering cry.

They waited as though frozen into stillness, the three of them—the servants in the house.

Then the kneeling man laid the silver head more straightly on the cushion, and got up stiffly.

“I reckon we better tell them, those upstairs I mean, now. He’s hit the long trail.”

Phyllis stooped down and with a soft, quick gesture straightened his tie. Her eyes were filled with pain, but not tears.

“We gotta leave everything,” the other man insisted. “There mustn’t be nothing touched, not even——” He pointed to the red pool fast drying. “The doctor will come along first, and then the coroner, and the jury, and there’ll be the inquest. It’s lucky we all three heard him say he caught the trigger on his sleeve cuff hisself. Otherwise they’d question the life out of you.”

“Yes, sure we all heard him,” the other assented. “Guns—they go off easy.”

“Sure,” he nodded. “You’d better fetch Miss Kathleen, Phyllis. God! I don’t want that task! Tell her he wouldn’t have her called before.”

The woman went away slowly, and in a little while Kathleen came back with her. With an agonized cry she ran to her father, and dropped beside him.

There was no question but he was gone.

“Why didn’t you call me!” she cried. “We heard a report upstairs and thought it came from the fields where the quail are running. How could it have happened? O father!”

“Well, lady,” one of the men returned gently, “we have his own word for it he shot himself accidental. He lifted this here gun from the mantel where Mr. Shannon left it to put it in the rack, an’ it went off—like they do. Guns is guns.”

“O how can we ever tell grandmother?” she said wildly. “How can we? How can we——?”

“Maybe y’ jest better not tell her,” one of the men volunteered. “What she don’t know she won’t grieve over.”

Kathleen rose slowly. “Perhaps,” she answered, “that is the best way.”

“I’d go upstairs,” the man went on, “if I was you. This won’t be no sight for a woman when the doctor—an’—an’ coroner comes.”

She did not seem to hear him.

“Phyllis,” she said, “tell me he didn’t suffer!”

Phyllis lifted her slate and wrote on it the words O’Sullivan had said. All he had said to the last word.

Kathleen read it and went slowly upstairs, her limbs trembling.

In so short a time everything had been changed at the farm known as “Tullamore.” The old aristocrat who had come of so long a line of Irishmen whose word in their own place had been law, would command no more. Each and every one belonging to him could henceforth follow their own way as much as fate allowed.

There was the passing of many feet through the house during the next two days. The ordeal of the inquest had to be endured, but it was soon over with, its verdict, “Death by accident.”

Following that it seemed that the whole countryside came to see their old neighbour once more. Though he had not been greatly beloved, no man stood higher in their esteem. His industry and its results had been the inspiration of many a young farmer, and integrity and generosity were virtues not denied to him. Now that he was laid so low they did not speak of his pride or love of dominance.

Shannon got home from wherever he had been for the funeral, and Bob was there as always. Both looked shaken and deeply subdued.

Kathleen told them what Phyllis had written on her slate. Those last words of his coming over ashy lips.

Gail was free, as they all were free. No old restraining hand would ever be laid on them again.

But in their hearts they grieved for him, for he had been their tower of strength, the source of all they needed of things material. They loved him, though not all his ways.

His mother had not been told of the tragedy. They just said he was away for a little while, and she gently accepted whatever they told her.

Lately she had slipped back to far away days, and presently she ceased to wonder that Marcus did not come home. She spoke of him and her son Brien as though they might return any moment.

The day of the funeral, when they were all gathered in the village church and the parson who had known Marcus O’Sullivan so long had preached the short sermon that service called for, Benedict hitched his grey horse outside and entering softly, took his seat in the last pew.

His riding clothes were black corduroy. With his dark bowed head he might easily have been taken for one of the mourners.

Gail had asked them to sing for that last hymn, ‘Jerusalem the Golden,’ and again the marvellous voice of Benedict rolled through the little stone church like the voice of an archangel. Many held their breath to listen, and some could not see the beloved words of Bernard of Cluny, being blind with tears.

When it was all over, and the country people driving away in the fading light, Benedict rode up beside the old B.C. where Kathleen and Gail in their sad black dresses were being driven home by Wallie.

“May I ride beside you?” he asked Kathleen leaning over from his horse to see her under the fringed canopy, and to smile at Gail.

The dark oval of his face was thinner, she thought, but his eyes more beautiful and luminous than ever before.

Kathleen gave him a little welcoming smile.

“Come home with us,” she said. “Do come home with us. I want to tell you something father said—before——” She stopped a moment. “It makes all the difference in the world to us, knowing what he said,” she ended.

“It will be happiness to go with you. I hoped you would ask me to.” He looked again at Gail. “There is something I also must say, for I must sail for England in three days—and Gail must go with me.”

“My brother is the head of the house now, but we have spoken of this and I know he will leave it to Gail.”

“And you?” Benedict asked, bending to see her under the fringed cover. “You, Gail? I cannot wait until we reach your home to know. You will come with me?”

“O, Gabriel,” she said, tears on her upcurled lashes, “you know I will. Isn’t it dreadful of him, Kit, to make me say it this way before everybody?” Then her tone changing, “Did you see Nils Olsen in church, Gabriel? Nils—who had gone away?”

“Ah, the Viking!” he smiled. “Yes! I saw him. He could not be overlooked, he is so towering a man. I know this Nils Olsen. He cured my horse of a poisoned leg. I have a great admiration for him.”

“So have I, Gabriel. I am very fond of him.”

“You are fond of him?” he questioned, swinging his horse around and trying to see her under the carriage cover.

“Well—perhaps not exactly fond—but Kitty is.”

“Ah!” he bowed, “but that is so different.”

Kathleen turned to Gail, her face that had been white, colouring. “Why will you speak of such things, darling, now—now—what does it matter?”

“It matters a great deal, Kathleen,” Benedict said looking down. “Now, or any time. Such men as this Olsen are rare. In my life I have seen but few like him.”

She did not reply, and Wallie, chunky in black, and subdued, clucked to the lively Cherry as she turned into the driveway and rolled the old B.C. up to the steps.

Benedict dismounted and helped Kathleen to alight, then turned to Gail.

“Come!” he entreated, “I will lift you down and then we can walk through the garden to that little summer-house.”

“There are no flowers now,” she said with a long sigh.

“There will always be flowers now,” he returned, taking her hand. “Come to the summer-house!”

The girl walked beside him, her black gown rustling against the dead leaves. Taking off her hat, her shining red hair blew about her head. Looking at her Benedict realized how more than beautiful she was. He touched a curl of the blowing hair.

“It is of the colour, my sweet, that men go mad about in my country and in Spain. So I told you one day.”

Her face, he thought, was pale, and she was smaller, slighter. Those prisoned weeks had taken their toll.

“Yes, but I do not care what the Basques or Spaniards think of its colour, if you like it, Gabriel,” she sighed again.

“I? O, I, too, go quite mad at sight of it!” he asserted, with his quick smile. “I will always, but I must not have you sigh that way.”

They reached the summer-house, with the leafless trumpet-vine swinging over it, and he caught her close to him.

“There is Phyllis ringing the tea bell,” she said.

“Ah, Phyllis,” he echoed. “She is a little grey saint, I think. All the colour has been bleached from her—by grief, or tears, of perhaps just life.”

“O no!” Gail shook her head. “She has always been like that—at least for so long. But I love her. And do you know, Gabriel, even with Kathleen here, and Shannon and Bob, I think she loves me best of all.”

He lifted her hands and kissed them.

“I, too, love you best of all. But do you not feel in the very air to-night a sadness? It is that makes you look so white. It broods over your old home there. The shadow of death does not yet seem to have lifted. We must go away from here quickly! Listen, darling, there is a little lyric I will say for you, for it says what I feel. Some great lover wrote it, but I do not think anyone knows who he was.”

She laid her bright head against his arm in its black corduroy sleeve, and he repeated the lovely—eternally lovely poem.

“Ah no! I cannot lose you, Gail. This is the only fear I have in my heart now. But it is the sadness of the October night, and your tears, and the lingering shadow of Death that has made me say to you these lines.”

“They are too beautiful, Gabriel, I cannot bear them to-night! Let us go up to the house for there will be lights now and the open fire. There is Phyllis at the door again ringing the little bell.”

“I will banish this sadness from your face to-morrow,” he said, “and take you away. There will always be so many things, so many things for me to show you, and so much music for you to hear Gail, for there will be music everywhere we go.

“And we will very soon be in old London that you will love, or on the boulevards of Paris, or we may go to Vienna a little while, but the places I know will give me a new wonder for you will be with me by sunlight, or moonlight or in the grey dawn.”

So he spoke the impassioned golden words, not as they speak them in the north, sparingly, perhaps, but as lovers of the warm south always speak, in a tide of words, unhindered and sweet.

The passing fear vanished from his mind as they went up to the old house, hand in hand, and Phyllis opened the door, and let them in.

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.

[The end of Below the Salt, by Virna Sheard]