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The village inn was not a bit as I had pictured it to them. The verandah sagged wearily like the knees of an ancient. In my memory, it used to be a bower of flowered baskets. The baskets were hanging there, but they had a bereaved look, with only a few hopeless sprigs, that were not trying very hard to grow, peering over the edges. Perhaps I had been thinking of the flowers in late July, and it was now only June.

One of the men hailed a whittler, perched on a stone wall overlooking an arid garden.

“Is there another hotel in the town?”

“Yes sir,” slowly, “but it’s closed.”

“Well that point is settled satisfactorily,” said Thompson.

“What did we come here for, anyway?” growled Fischer, at the wheel.

“Don’t you know?” shrilled Enid Fischer, who always talked for every listener that might be loitering in the offing. “This is the village where Timothy was born. The return of the native.”

“It has many beauty spots,” I told Fischer, whose air of superiority when speaking of any village annoyed me. He was born in Montreal.

Mrs. Bob came to my rescue. Why condemn the town after one glance at an old verandah? It was doubtless young and beautiful when I lived here—how many years ago? More than thirty-five, nearer forty. You see, things do alter in forty years.

Whatever Mrs. Bob suggested swayed the party. “What a sister-in-law you have, Timothy,” said Fischer, and if that was a graceful submission, then his was a graceful submission.

But the stooped, senile shoulders of the verandah were an index of character. The screen door opened like a mouth—it was little more than a frame with the last remnants of broken wiring—and we got the stale breath of the hotel. Half a century of cigar smoke reeked in the hangings and the wood-work. A stout man in shirt sleeves pushed the register at us. No, we were not going to stay overnight; we only wanted dinner or supper—whatever meal might be coming next. The stout man did not hide his disappointment. He had none of the arts of self-advertisement. Plaintively he asked us what he would do nowadays but for the boarders, with the transients always hurrying away after a single meal to reach the next town.

“Stick to the simple things,” said Mrs. Bob in the dining-room. She had noted that no one remained beyond a single meal.

Her counsel was unnecessary. The cook believed in simplicity for a midweek evening meal. Fresh vegetables? The dining-room girl was all contempt for citified ignorance. Not so early in June. Except there were green onions and radishes. Would we like them? Enid Fischer issued a treble veto. Radishes perhaps for Fischer, but no onions, unless he would sleep in the garage. But the mischief had been done. There was little enough to tempt one in this Godforsaken hole, and having heard of green onions he fancied them.

Again, Mrs. Bob to the rescue. I have often wondered why she travelled so much with the endlessly bickering Fischers. She suggested a meal that satisfied everybody. She thought of things that the dining-room girl had not mentioned, and they were discovered in the kitchen. Mrs. Bob was a magnet, and all cooks were steel. This time the cook happened to be the proprietor’s wife, and she arrived in the dining-room for consultation. She came with resentment in every rigid line of her, and departed one of us. The boarders who had not already partaken and crept away, filled if not satisfied, fared better that night because of Mrs. Bob.

She mapped out the evening before the Fischers could advance two violently opposed suggestions. They would have a rubber of bridge until moonrise, and then start for the next town. “That will give Timothy time to poke round a bit,” she explained.

“It’s a funny idea,” observed Fischer, “coming back now to the scenes of one’s childhood.”

“I think it is beautiful,” murmured Mrs. Thompson, who never failed to admire the accepted thing.

“Then why didn’t Bob come too?”

“You can never get Bob to come away when the boys are available,” Bob’s wife replied. “What an evening it is for golf. I know they are playing.”

“He is a wonderful father, is Bob,” said Thompson, who would like to have been a wonderful father to the children who were just pert acquaintances of his, but never could make the time to get started.

“Bob has always had a way with boys,” I added. I was looking back a good many years.

“Wouldn’t Mrs. Bob be a wonderful mother too, if she only stayed home long enough to learn her job?” Mrs. Fischer’s high-pitched jests jarred me. I detested her narrow nervous shoulders and her little bobbed head.

“When the children were young, she gave them all her time—”

But Mrs. Bob stopped me.

“You came here to sentimentalize, Timmy,” she said, “but you haven’t much time. Go out and be sentimental till moonrise. That will be about as much of a debauch as is good for you.”

I took my cane and hobbled away, with the shrillness of Enid Fischer floating after me until I turned the corner.

Village streets do not alter greatly, even in two generations. If they do change, it is only to become something very like what they were before. A few trees were missing to make way for pavement. Small smeary windows contained just enough helter skelter articles to indicate the character of the shops. The drug-store was a disappointment. I made sure that the two big bottles of coloured water would still be there, even if they were the last pair in the Province. But they had gone. It cheered me to find, a couple of doors farther on, that barber poles survived.

The little stone building on the central corner of the town, once occupied by my father’s private banking house, was among the missing. In its place stood a red brick chartered bank, prosperous and money-proud. The humble stores kow-towed to its lordly presence. I stood on the steps to survey Front Street. It was flattened out, I thought. The buildings never looked so squatty on either side of the sweep of dusty road as I remembered them.

I crossed to the square behind the Town Hall. Half of it was gone, occupied by houses. Evidently, they did not hold market-days any more. The pens that skirted the fence were broken beyond repair, what remained of them, and I have never seen such a crop of thistles and burdocks as filled the centre of the field.

The school buildings slept heavily. I should have liked to see the children who occupied the desks that I used as a boy, but classes had been dismissed these three hours, so I wandered round and peered through the windows. There is nothing more deserted than a deserted school-room. In the twilight I made out chalk-marks on the black-boards. They used the same formulae that sent me out into the world with the simple faith that two and two always made four—at least in arithmetic. I gathered that the arrangement had not altered since my boyhood; the Public School occupied the square main building, with the Collegiate in the rambling wing. I took a drink at the old iron pump, from the half rusted ladle. No meddling public health officer had investigated the ancient school pump.

Back again I turned to the River Road, where the best homes used to stand. Victoria Avenue we called it when I was a boy. Loyalty found spontaneous expression in those days, and did not have to be fostered by organizations, any more than it was thought necessary to promote cheerfulness and optimism by means of international societies. The expansive tops of maples and elms pushed one another, advancing and retreating in the breeze, and because of them darkness fell a little earlier on the River Road. Already a few windows blinked with lights. New houses had been built where I remembered lawns and gardens, but I could find the old ones at intervals, even when repainted and altered. There was the cottage, still screened behind roses, where Aunt Henrietta Glint buried herself, away from the sound of gossiping tongues. That stone house once held the busy Miss Belle Reynolds. The only change was the asphalt drive where the dog-cart used to make its smart appearance on a gravel road. I wondered if the tennis courts were now in use. The red brick house with the verandahs round three sides—that had been my home. And the rough-cast building was where Judge Newman lived with his endless procession of homely daughters. But no, some one had altered it. Where were the towers and filigrees that gave it such an air of arrogance in my memory? The lilac bushes remained, gigantic hedges above the high fences. The night was sweet with lilacs.

I asked a passer-by, “Is that Judge Newman’s old home?”

He collected his wits. If I had enquired “Is that the Parliament Buildings?” he could not have looked more surprised.

“No. That’s Reeve Wilson’s house,” he replied, and shuffled on.

Of course that gaping clod would not know. He was little more than twenty; perhaps his family were new-comers; possibly he had never heard of Judge Newman and his nine jolly daughters and his pitiful imbecile son, so long awaited.

The road turned at right angles across a bridge, but not the shaky structure of forty years ago. It had been replaced by a neat cement affair, in keeping with the county motor road that climbed the hill opposite and left the village behind.

I made my way down the sidewalk under the elms until I could stand and look into the river. It was lazy and gurgled. It alone was still the same. I could see the picnic grove on the far bank, rounding the bend. But I regretted the bridge more than any of the other improvements—of course they were signs of progress—in the village. I had wanted to stand against the wooden rail and listen to the water while the stars came out. Mrs. Bob was right. Like most men whose lives have been made abnormal by ill-health, I love to sentimentalize.

And the bridge that was gone saw so much in the old days. My mother, a frightened fugitive with a baby in her arms, crossed it one wine-like October day in the seventies, to seek refuge in the stone cottage on the hill beyond. It was still there. A light twinkled through the shrubbery. On such June nights as this one, my mother’s life blossomed again, as she and my father sauntered down from the village and planned together for the days to come in the Loftus homestead, which his parents intended to vacate for something smaller. They must have paused and listened to the prattle of the water, that never had anything different to say in half a century. On the bridge, poor half-crazed Cousin Clara waited and watched with ebbing hope; and Aunt Henrietta’s last determined sally, from the room in which she had been a self-condemned recluse for a decade, terminated there. They passed this way and were gone, all of them.

And I, who had been too young in the days long ago to grasp the meaning of the things that were happening round me, stood where they had stood, and my memory gave them a brief spell of life again. A drama may act itself out in the home of a boy of twelve, and he will only touch its edge. Years passed by before I knew about all the events of the last summer that we spent in the village. I picked up the incidents one by one, and even those in which I took part I saw in a new light. How could a child know that he was witnessing the passing of a social order?

The moon came up full and tranquil beyond the grove. Down at the hotel there would be impatience. Painfully I pulled myself up the incline from the bridge and made my way along the River Road towards Front Street.

I.

The Northwest Rebellion of 1885 passed over the villages of Ontario like one of those local earthquakes about which you read in the morning paper. A paragraph on the front page informs you that, according to the records at the Observatory, your home has been shaken under your feet, and you cannot contradict the statement that the tremors occurred, but you never actually felt them. In much the same way, the troubles in Western Canada seemed more a thing of the newspaper and of the conversation than a physical reality. Few families had been directly affected by the uprising, and the feeling of imminent peril soon passed. Nevertheless the topic roused superheated discussion in every home. Confederation had trembled, so the politicians said. People believed in the tremble by an exertion of that faith that removes mountains, and were violently swayed in unison with the party to which, on account of birth or ancient prejudice, their vote and voice belonged.

You must bear in mind that politics, even politicians, were taken seriously in those days. Men and women were restricted in fitting subjects for mixed conversation. The majority of the things that their children talk about had not been heard of, and some of the favourite subjects of this new generation, subjects regarding which no age since Adam has been entirely ignorant, were still never mentioned because of a taboo that no one had, as yet, begun to flout. But politics! Politics possessed an element of religion and an element of sport. I suppose that was why the affairs of the groups of men who fought for the right to govern the young country assumed an undue importance.

Good-natured tolerance was not a virtue. No one in our village could think of Louis Riel and his hapless escapade as anything else but an issue; nor was it possible to mention the handling of the case in Ottawa without anger. Many of our friends threw up their hands in horror when mentioning a certain Mr. Laurier, who was reputed to have said that, had he been on the banks of the Red River, he too would have shouldered a rifle. . . . Some substituted the word musket because it had a more romantic sound. What was Canada coming to when such a man could continue to sit in Parliament? But beneath the horror there lurked an undertone of satisfaction. Observers had predicted a great future for this young Mr. Laurier. Well, he was done for now. He could not climb very high with such a speech to be quoted against him. That settled the handsome and eloquent young man for good and all.

Others were equally vehement in their denunciations of Sir John A. Macdonald. They blamed him for the way the rebellion started, and also for the way it ended. They hugged themselves to think that this political error was bound to be his last. The trouble was expected to develop into a cyclone and blow him into oblivion, but it didn’t. He weathered the next election, which forced the prophets to move the date of his final downfall forward four years. The old wizard—how did he do it? The love of those who loved him was only equalled by the hate of those who hated him.

I heard these matters harrowed and raked over, day after day, but Louis Riel was never as real to me as Geordie Palfrayman, nor did it dawn upon my imagination that the Rebellion had made as much actual commotion as one of our fair-days.

On the second Tuesday of each month the farmers from the surrounding township took possession of the village streets and the square behind the Town Hall. Early in the morning the drovers began to come in, and their shouts, mingled with the yapping of dogs, wakened the households along the main roads. It was the late arrivals who made the most trouble. They had to wait their turn, guarding their animals in the side streets, and squabbling with citizens who objected to having such unconventional things as cows wandering on their unfenced squares of grass.

The school children were never quite certain of the purpose of the fair-days or market-days. With the rest, I knew that men called dealers came to the village, and could be seen haggling earnestly with the farmers. The whole performance was supposed to be good for business, even on those days when muttering and bad-tempered drovers, perhaps a little drunk, took their herds back in the evening over the home roads along which they had brought them in the morning. Front Street, especially in the neighbourhood of Maguire’s Hotel, stayed noisily awake until late that night—later than any other day in the month.

Most of the farmers in our township pinned their faith to cattle, but it was largely a matter of tradition. The man amongst them who was best known for his riches had made his money out of his herds—and foreclosed mortgages. Everybody who desired to imitate him could not have mortgages to foreclose, but they could keep cows. In the second township west of us they were equally devoted to pigs. Out of swine had come the wealth of their member of parliament.

My father and his friends nursed a version of that story and used to tell it with glee. The M.P. had inherited his money from his father, who was a humble man in appearance and in social graces, but a marvellous breeder of pigs. He never bothered to take more than one young animal, be it sow or hog, in his waggon when starting for the city, a day’s journey; by the time he reached his destination, he frequently had as many as four. When the weather was settled, he made a trip as far as Hamilton, which required a night and part of two days. There he reached the market with sometimes a dozen squealers in his cart. Naturally many of them were quite young and still easy to lift. Only once did the old man fail to complete his prosperous outing. That time he reached home badly battered and refused to tell anybody what had happened to the two pigs that had been seen in his waggon when he stopped for a drink before leaving Petersville. The legendary quality of this piece of county history did not shrink as the years rolled by. Even at the hundredth telling my father’s friends laughed uproariously. Others, of a different political stripe, grew indignant and talked of libel laws.

II.

The whole town caught the excitement of fair-day. In the month of May, it was usual for the boys to remain after school to practice lacrosse under the direction of the principal, but nobody thought of staying a minute beyond four o’clock when the drovers were in town. Perhaps Geordie Palfrayman was already drunk in front of Maguire’s bar; perhaps he was already making his last fight against the husky townsmen who landed him every month in the lock-up—the black hole we called it—to sleep off the profit on his month’s slavery. There was a story that Palfrayman once drew a revolver and smashed a window in his effort to become a murderer. Probably it was not true. No one claimed actually to have seen the deed. But the boys loitered in the offing. It might happen again, and if it had not happened before, Palfrayman was still capable of an attempt to give substance to that shadow of a daring undertaking.

I had never seen Palfrayman in his most characteristic and interesting condition, as Front Street near the market square was forbidden territory for Harper and me on fair-days. Bob had passed the age when a boy goes out of his way for such problematic excitements; the High School students never bothered. It was part of the breakfast ritual in our home that my mother, on the second Tuesday of each month, reminded my father to tell the boys to come home directly after school was dismissed. Somehow I always felt that my father did not care greatly whether we did or not, but he backed up my mother’s ideas in such matters.

Harper answered “Yes” without hesitation, and then about five o’clock sought out mother to tell her a circumstantial story about being kept in. But I never possessed the daring of Harper. If I hesitated on my way from school, it was in front of the Malton House, the best of the four local hotels,—to become in the days of its decay “The Village Inn.” Nothing desperate could happen at the Malton House, I felt sure. They would not serve Geordie Palfrayman with even his first drink of the day at its well-polished bar. But on that May afternoon, I paused and looked, not entirely without hope of something sensational, at the hanging baskets, not yet planted with new green.

As I stood there, a man I had never before seen in the village crossed the road towards me. He was not a dealer. The dealers were usually burly men, with rough clothes, and only a few of them frequented the Malton House. The boys at the school would without a moment’s hesitation have called this new comer a dude. Our own fathers might dress up smartly on occasions. All of them had a special suit for Sunday, and those who lived on Victoria Avenue could provide clothes for even more exclusive functions. But the clothing of a dude had a subtle quality that invited contempt in our town. It was a question of natty cut, of ties, of creases and of soft colouring.

As a rule, a boy fought shy of dudes, but I realized in a moment that I could not avoid being addressed by this one.

He paused across my path with, “Say youngster, do you know your way about in this town?”

“Yes, sir.” I could make that admission to even such a rank outsider.

“Can you tell me where Harper Loftus lives?” he went on.

Of course I could. “He is my father,” I volunteered.

“Then I guessed right,” he said with a gleam of a smile.

It was not compromising to be friendly with a man who wanted my father, and I continued with assurance, “He is at his office, the bank up the next street. Father is never home at this time of day.”

To which he replied, “I have been there. It is all locked up.”

“Business hours aren’t after half past three,” I explained, a trifle flustered.

But he was more interested now in looking me over than in my information, “And what is your name?” he enquired.

“I’m Timothy Loftus.”

“Not Harper?” He seemed surprised.

“My little brother is Harper. He’s going on ten.”

“And you?”

“I’m going on twelve.”

“And how did you come to be Timothy?”

There was something odd in his interest. His tone suggested that he was making fun of me, but I felt shy about refusing to answer a fair question.

“My father had a relation called Timothy. He was a Bishop or something, so mother wanted me called Timothy.”

“A bishop!” He smiled again. “Your mother would like that.”

Of course mother did. She often mentioned it when religious matters were under discussion. But it did strike me to wonder how the stranger knew what my mother would like.

At this point Bob joined us, though I had not seen him coming. Talking with unknown men was another item on the long list of prohibitions in our young lives, and Bob never liked to see me toying with trouble.

He ignored the man and spoke abruptly as big brothers do.

“What does he want with you, Tim?”

It made me feel quite safe to be able to say, “He was only asking where father lives.”

The dude pulled his curly brown beard, the peak of dudishness, and enquired, “Who are you?”

“I’m his brother,” Bob replied shortly.

I could see no reason for rudeness to this man who was willing to be friendly, so I added, “Not Robert Loftus. He’s Robert Herndon.”

The man inspected him more curiously than he had looked me over.

“You are the young hunchback’s half-brother,” he said.

“Shut your mouth. Tim’s all right.”

Evidently Bob disliked the man. He wore that glowering look that always angered my father. Bob’s hair was a brown terrier’s shock that never accepted the dictates of any brush. It fringed the oblong of his forehead, and he had a slow contemplative way of gazing up from under it that made older people feel the boy’s will was a stubborn one. Now he placed his hand on my shoulder, the miscalling of which had angered him, and we began to move away.

The dude stopped us with a sort of apology.

“Hold on a moment,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong in being shaped differently from other people. Sometimes it is an advantage. Mary, Queen of Scots, would have been terribly ashamed of a second head, but how it would have confounded her enemies. No law in England permits double decapitation.”

Neither of us knew what he meant, but it was unusual enough to make us turn back.

“I don’t mind,” I murmured to Bob.

The man seemed to think that he had made a friend of Bob, for he said, “You can run on home now, Timothy. I want to see your father, and Robert will show me how to get in when the bank’s locked.”

“He does not like to be disturbed after hours,” hesitated Bob.

I came forward again. “I’ll go with you. That’ll be better.”

The dude was wearing his quizzical look.

“Why will it be better?”

That was something that I could not explain to a man who did not know us. Indeed I had no explanation. I only knew that it was lamentably easy for Bob to displease my father. There was a severity when he broke a family rule that Harper and I never experienced. I did realize that some misunderstandings could have been smoothed out if Bob had not remained so set and silent. Look at what Harper accomplished by means of volubility! But that was not Bob’s way. On the days when discipline was asserting itself in our home with Bob as the chief victim, my mother went to her room without a word and I was left with an agonized and helpless feeling that somehow it was all wrong. But things were as they were, and if I could only keep the two human beings I admired most from meeting and clashing I felt that a day had not been wasted.

The man laughed.

“I see, Harper Loftus prefers his own flesh and blood. A poor thing, but my own.”

I could feel Bob’s antipathy growing. “You had better come on home with me, Tim,” he said.

The stranger was not easily ruffled. “Timothy is safe enough with me, you old sheep dog.” He had noted Bob’s hair.

It was not often that I asserted my will against Bob’s advice, but here was an adventure that I had started and desired to finish. I felt instinctively that some sort of combustion would be the result of bringing this airy dude and my father face to face. But I merely suggested to Bob that it might be business, and that it would not do to turn the man away.

The three of us made our way up Front Street together, and Bob’s presence dampened all attempts at conversation.

There was a small enclosed garden behind the bank where a few flowers, that were supposed to thrive without any sun or much air, grew up skinny and leafless like under-nourished children. The stranger hoisted me to the top of the high wall. I knew that the door in the back office was always unlocked at this time of day, sometimes open when the smoke grew too thick. Four men were seated inside at cards when I dropped into the yard. I could hear my father’s voice counting, “High, low, jack, game and left pedro. You have the right, Reynolds.” Just before tea-time, they often gathered for a smoke and a game of cards, and pedro was the popular compromise between the players who disliked the long-drawn subtleties of whist and those who disdained the banalities of euchre.

“Look at your boy, Loftus,” exclaimed Reynolds as I entered. “God damn me, if I didn’t think you were an eagle swooping over the wall, Timothy.”

Gregory Reynolds, the lawyer, was known in the village for his hot temper and his hotter language, which he occasionally moderated for little girls but not always for women. Twenty years later he would have seized upon “strenuous” as the very word that he had always wanted to apply to life. As it was, he contented himself with going to the Northwest as a volunteer against Louis Riel. “To break the rebellion,” his wife told people with coy pride.

“To break the hellish monotony,” Gregory Reynolds corrected her.

“There is a Mr. George Lytton out in front of the bank who wants to see you,” I said a little nervously. That was the exact message that I had been instructed to deliver.

My father hardened all over. I feared that look, although it had never been directed at me. It always meant that my father was about to crush something or somebody that he hated. He was not a big man, but his lithe and muscular build indicated power. The suggestion of vigorous youth was heightened by the absence of the beard and moustache then fashionable among his men friends. My mother contended that a beard gave a man dignity and authority, but could not persuade him even to wear a moustache—“A lodging place for yesterday’s lost meals,” he called it, to provoke her icy disapproval of all vulgarity.

“I’ll put you out of the side door, Timothy,” he said to me, and to his friends, “If you’ll get yourselves a whiskey, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

So I missed seeing the meeting after all.

No one was present when my father and George Lytton came face to face. The clerk who had been lingering over his books was told to scamper home to his garden, with the reminder that he would not get many more perfect evenings for seeding. He departed, and my father admitted George Lytton into the semi-darkness of the bank. The shutters were up for the night.

There was no suggestion of friendliness. My father said quite simply, “I am not going to shake hands with you, Lytton.”

To which his visitor replied, “I am not holding mine out. You will remember that retort of Theodore Hook’s after a snub that did not worry him—”

But my father interrupted, “What are you here for?”

Lytton did not continue his quotation. “I was in town and thought you would like to know.”

“You were told to keep out of this village, were you not?”

Beneath the chill directness of the questions, the other man’s flamboyance subsided.

“Caroline gave me orders to that effect many years ago. In fact, I wrote her that I was coming, and she told me to stay away.”

“You have been writing to her.” There was a gleam of something like blood or fire in the orb of my father’s eye.

“Only once. I did not want to take her unawares. We might meet on the street you know.”

“But you have not said why you came here.”

“It is a free country. Besides, you are not the only person who would not expect to find me in a wayside ditch like this one.”

My father thought he recognized a symptom.

“You are in some scrape. You want money.”

“You are wrong this time,” replied Lytton, “I have plenty for the present.”

My father moved towards the door. “Now that I know that you are in town and that you have plenty of money, I’ll not detain you.”

“Then it is going to be arm’s length,” said Lytton. My father’s terseness put him at a disadvantage.

“When I gave you the money to start in British Columbia, there was a promise that all relationships would be wiped out. You are not welcome here.”

The other man pulled his beard and laughed, “I could guess that much after the first ten words. Anyway, Harper, I have told nothing about myself at the hotel. I do keep a promise occasionally, you see. It will reassure you to know that I am sober most of the time lately.”

My father paused a little to soften the curt dismissal. He asked, “How did you pick up the boy?”

“It was purely by chance. A good-looking youngster. Too bad about his shoulder.”

That sympathetic reference to my deformity, although quite as formal as a “How d’ye do,” was about the only thing that would have won my father.

“We hope that he will strengthen as he grows older,” he said, “but perhaps he won’t.”

Lytton, encouraged, followed it up. “And I saw Robert too. He is an ugly little devil and rude. How old is he now?”

“Nearly sixteen.” Then not willing to have Bob summed up so unfavourably, “Robert is a difficult lad. You know the strain, George. But he also has the other qualities, if they are matured properly.”

But George Lytton did not wish to seize upon the opening that this touch of intimacy seemed to offer. Rather, it enabled him to try a sally that he knew would provoke that ugly glint in the eye which he liked to rouse, and yet half feared.

“He looks like his pretty papa,” he said. “Now don’t he? Or have you noticed it?”

My father pulled the door open, and his guest did not misunderstand him. As he passed out, he received the sharp order, “Keep away from Caroline. I won’t have her distressed.”

It had been a short interview after all. As I loitered in the forbidden vicinity of the market square, watching with delighted eagerness the chaotic goings and comings around Maguire’s, I saw Mr. Lytton making his way back to the Malton House. I thought that he looked amused.

I.

Sharp at fifteen minutes after the ringing of the noonhour bell, all the families in Victoria Avenue sat down to dinner. The time that it took the children to get home from school controlled that arrangement, and the gongs could be heard sounding from house after house like the scale of a tuneless piano. Evening dinner was an unheard-of meal, something belonging to an outside, unnatural civilization, where they were also known to eat melons for breakfast instead of keeping them to be a midday dessert. Even when a hostess offered elaborate entertainment at six o’clock, with hot meat, salad, Spanish cream and perhaps hot asparagus dripping in white sauce, she called it tea. Only at dinner were the formidable steel knives used. At tea-time, you struggled with blunt silver affairs, though the antagonist might be a tough beefsteak. It would have been a subtle breach of usage to bring forth dinner knives so close to sundown.

So seldom was the routine of the dinner hour broken that I should have remembered the June day when Mr. Drury, the principal of the High School, came to see my father during the noon recess, even though troubled stirrings of my conscience had not made his arrival seem ominous. In all that summer, nothing marked my memory as deeply as the thoughts that I had nursed and hated in secret during the month preceding that day.

My father said grace, all of us standing, with Liza, the housekeeper, a God-conscious soul, always anxious to be in the vicinity of anything resembling a hymn or a prayer, bending reverently beside the dining-room door. She followed him flatly with an evangelical “Amen,” and disappeared into the kitchen, where she stimulated her desire for heaven with fearsome revival songs until summoned by the tinkle of a little bell to produce the dessert.

From my chair I could look along the east verandah to the gate, and when I saw the schoolmaster hesitating on the sidewalk beyond, as though fearing to be a breaker of tradition, I felt myself trembling with a nervousness that might have been guilt. Yet I had done nothing except make the discovery that life has its dark hidden places. I kept silent and waited, and the open French windows, for June had come in with grilling heat, permitted the sound of his steps to reach us the moment he mounted the verandah.

“A visitor at this hour,” said my mother, “How excessively annoying.”

But the placid face, that never permitted the most untoward happening to ruffle it, expressed no annoyance.

“Perhaps it is a tramp,” suggested my father, who had just finished carving. When he laid down the knife and fork, it was the signal that we boys could touch our plates.

“No,” I told them. “It is the schoolmaster.”

“Which?”

“Mr. Drury.”

At the mention of the High School principal, my mother looked anxiously at Bob. So did I, feeling that he knew as well as I did the purpose of the visit. But he went on eating without the least sign of concern.

My father gathered up his napkin in his hand and placed it beside his plate.

“I’ll let him in,” he said. “He probably wants me.”

And he went out into the hall.

I wondered what Bob was thinking as he enjoyed his dinner in his usual healthy way. I could only gulp my food, for I felt sure that I knew what Mr. Drury was telling my father, in the library beyond, with trembling lip and tears brimming the china blue eyes, which bulged so uncomfortably when he pleaded with or scolded a pupil. He was an earnest guide to youth, who longed to feel that no one could study within the hearing of his voice without becoming a model of rectitude. He took the boys and girls in separate classes and talked to them about temperance—temperance in all things. He dared not be more explicit than that. It was not permitted. So he skirted and palavered round forbidden subjects, and trusted that he had made himself clear by the insinuating phrase, temperance—temperance in all things. Surely anyone who was sufficiently besmirched to need his guidance would grasp his meaning.

Having learned by accident of things that were happening right under his nose, he had come to my father as chairman of the school board. Mr. Drury never shirked his duty, even when he knew that he was stirring up trouble that would bring undeserved blame upon his own head. He was aware that our village, like every other community under the sun, contained plenty of parents who invariably sought a scapegoat outside the family for the sins of their offspring. In the present instance he seemed certain to be the unanimous choice. Fair minded men like Harper Loftus might understand that he had little chance to offset the influence of careless and doting mothers working in combination with ignorant and coarse fathers. But even the sympathetic trustees did not realize how keenly he felt about the characters of his pupils. He talked a lot during each term in hope that some of his admonitions might stick, and he prayed earnestly in private over the boys who went out of school at last with no sign whatever of becoming anything resembling a plaster saint. But who would give him any credit, now that it became his duty to point out gross signs of failure on which they could place a finger? Certainly not the practical citizens who attend indignation meetings.

Every father experiences the hour that Mr. Drury brought to my father that day, the hour when he knows as a certainty a thing that he has refused to think about or suspect in connection with his sons. And if he feels that the world has split asunder, it is because he forgets—perhaps he never knew—that his own father once feared frantically about his opening eyes, lest they might see too much.

A family—a thrifty family that did not care to pay the twelve dollars per month asked by a farmer’s daughter entering service—had brought Myrtle Kormann to the village early the previous winter. She was a girl from some sort of an institution that existed for the apparent purpose of circulating imported undesirables as maid servants. Myrtle’s black eyes were bold and her lips loose and slobbery, and all she knew of life was to go adventuring where she could gratify her strongest instinct. Early in April she began to hover outside the fence close to the field where the bigger boys from the High School played, and she was eager to chat with those who responded.

Soon the stories seeped through to the boys in the Public School, and there was excitement in the groups that whispered about Myrtle Kormann. For most of us it was a revelation. We listened with dry lips and popping eyes while one loutish fellow, a collector of knowledge furnished round Maguire’s livery stable, swept back and plucked away our innocence.

These new fevers that raced through my imagination had ruined many days for me. It was something from which I could not get away. Even when I knelt alone to say my prayers at night, my thoughts refused to come under control. They should have been reaching up after blessings for all those who had been listed by my mother when she gave shape to my youthful petitions, but I found them grovelling round Myrtle Kormann and the boys with their heads together under the elms.

My idea of temptation—and such thoughts came under the heading of temptation, of that I felt sure—had been shaped by Cousin Clara Glint, who gave her Sunday School class her original conceptions of such things when other subjects ran out. Cousin Clara Glint preferred to tell us the story of her amethyst bracelet, given to her great-grandmother in England by a wicked French Count, who wished to receive in return a promise that the lady would leave her lawful husband and elope. But her great-grandmother, being a moral lady—more moral than was necessary in the eighteenth century—took the amethyst but scorned the proposal. Every article that Cousin Clara wore was the centre of a romance, except those that had obviously been secured at McPherson’s General Store. When she had exhausted her scraps of family history, she described graphically how the devils and angels made their suggestions to us, the angels whispering the right thing to do into the right ear—with a sense of the fitness of things—and the devils urging the opposite course in the left. And when one shouted the other down, then we weakly followed the victor.

The battle of the fiends and the angels raged about me as I knelt, and when even the device of holding my left ear firmly with my thumb failed to purify my prayers, I leapt into bed in a panic, wondering how long I should continue to be the centre of such noisome bickering in the spiritual world.

After fifteen minutes of waiting, my father came to the door and said, “Robert, I want to speak to you.”

Another eternity of suspense.

I couldn’t eat any more, but watched the gravy on my father’s plate grow cold and greasy.

My mother tinkled her bell. To Liza, who appeared promptly, she said, “I think you had better remove the meat. Mr. Loftus can get a hot piece when he comes, but the boys will have to eat dessert to be in time for school.”

Fresh strawberries, the first of the year, and Bob, who liked them better than any other fruit, shut in behind that forbidding door.

“Bob likes strawberries,” I suggested, “and he hardly finished his meat.”

My mother, who was not eating, piled more on the over-flowing saucer, while Harper, with crammed mouth, muttered an “Oh” of disappointment. With two members of the family absent, he had seen possibilities of much more than his share.

Then the front door slammed, and my father came into the room with Bob. At such times strangers would have thought my mother unconcerned, but she fluttered when she rose to meet them.

“Is anything wrong?” she asked, as she motioned Bob to his fruit.

“Nothing that you would care to hear about.” An answer that closed the door with finality on much of the information that my mother sought.

“It is not Bob. Bob has not been getting into trouble,” she said.

My father was seating himself. He was stern and white, but he tried to smile at her when he replied, “I am thankful to say it is not Robert.”

Bob was standing at his place, his eyes pleased by the waiting strawberries.

“I feared that Mr. Drury had some serious complaint to make.” My mother was speaking quite like herself now. “It is strange that he should have chosen such an inconvenient hour for nothing at all.”

“There was something in which we feared Robert might be mixed up, but it is all right. He has given us his word—and I trust I can—” He looked at Bob, and there was that sudden burning of hard suspicion which I always sensed as detestable and unfair.

Bob was still standing. I saw his hand tremble, and he put down the spoon that he had picked up to feel the berries. My mother drooped into her chair again.

“Oh, Bob,” she said.

Harper, who responded at once to the slightest sign of emotion, began to weep loudly.

Why did my father say things like that of Bob? Because Bob said yes or no to straight charges, and having made his denial fell doggedly silent. No one could hope to persuade him to add anything of gossip or of tale-bearing. But what he said might always be completely accepted. I knew that, and everybody else should know it also. He was not like Harper. Harper almost never told the truth. He lied his way cheerfully through life, and had grown to take pleasure in the untruths for their own sake, not merely because they helped him to avoid unpleasantness. But no one challenged Harper’s veracity in public.

The sound of childish woe brought Liza as surely as my mother’s bell. But she found nothing to account for the treble grief. Mother was standing at the window, and her casual “You can clear away, Liza” was as usual. Father had gone back to his library.

II.

Fresh impetus was given to Harper’s howl a few minutes later when they called him to get ready for school. What about Bob and Timothy—didn’t they have to go? The principals of the two schools, aided by members of the board would be holding an investigation that afternoon, and the big boys who were not concerned did not need to be there. A holiday, for no reason at all—that’s how it looked to Harper. His sense of injury required loud protests, which got him nothing.

After the school-bell had finished ringing, Bob found me on the verandah.

“There is no use hanging round here,” he said. “Come on, Tim, for a swim.”

Bob was the only person with whom I went swimming. When I removed my clothes from my unusual body with other boys around, I felt it a lamentable revealment. Some stared, and others were equally embarrassing in the efforts not to stare. It was better to deny myself a swim than to face that ordeal. As I grew older, Bob noticed that I did not join the crowds at the old dam, and he suggested that he knew a place that the two of us could visit alone. We went there regularly in the hot weather.

The river made a big sweep round the picnic grove, and in the shallows along the shore, the small boys and girls of the village did their first paddling, neck-deep in water. The boys wore trunks, and the girls flopped about in old print dresses, that puffed up like balloons when they went in and clung like wisps of rag when they came out. When the boys graduated from the shallows at the grove, they discarded the trunks and joined the swarm at the swimming hole outside the village. A pioneer had selected that point to build a dam and erect a mill, but when the community definitely located south of the site, a convenient fire destroyed the mill, of which nothing remained but a few charred pieces of wall. Those portions of the dam that had survived the spring freshets accumulated a sufficiently large pool to hold the entire male population without undue congestion.

When the girls graduated from the shallows, they were not so fortunate. Before they had reached their teens the daughters of the village gave up bathing in public. If they were lucky enough to have friends who lived on the lakes, or if they ever took one of those indefinite long-distance holidays known as going to the sea-side, they might try to swim again, enveloped in modest bathing suits that disguised their lines as completely as a thunder-cloud obliterates the graces of the moon. But no woman or maid beyond the age of twelve had ever plunged, except by accident, in the river.

Our cove, as we called the spot discovered by Bob, was remote from the town, more than a mile beyond the swimming hole. Sweat dripped down our necks as we plodded along the treeless side roads, and passing near the dam we could hear the laughter of hot-weather truants and delivery boys who were not supposed to be off work. Twenty minutes later we were stripped and in our cove. Water has never been quite the same to me as it used to feel in that river on a scorching summer day. It was not like getting into water. Your body was suddenly immersed in caressing, cool, liquid cleanness.

Self-consciousness may have made me shun the popular swimming hole, but Bob had no similar reason for suggesting so often the hot trudge to the cove, away from the friends of his own age. Mr. Lytton made reference to his shock head when describing him as “an ugly little devil.” His body was a thing of almost perfect proportions. I noticed it then on account of its contrast to my own, but since that time I have trifled in many of the art schools of the world without seeing a model that might so well have been the youthful David. His height came to him later, so that he had no ungainly shanks or lanky arms to give him the angles of a hobbledehoy.

Bob did not say much—he seldom did—until after the luxury of the first thorough chilling. Then we sought a sunny stretch of bank. He lay stretched on his back with his hands over his eyes.

“Put on your woollies, Tim,” he suggested, “Don’t run any risks. We’ll dip again later.”

I pulled on my underclothes, a concession to my health.

Bob was sitting up when I rose to light through my shirt. He held his hard brown ankles in his hands, and looked at me oddly.

“What do you know about all that at the school?”

I could see that it made him uncomfortable to put the question. He had an instinctive feeling against invading another person’s life.

It is not easy to be candid when you are uncertain of the point at which you may encounter disapproval. Frankness has to be unfolded bit by bit, so long as truth does not suffer. I stumbled along until my remarks were sufficiently jumbled; then stopped and waited.

A strong branch of a maple stuck out straight where Bob was able to reach it by jumping from the bank. He liked to swing on it, pull himself up, skin the cat and do other athletic capers that my weak arms could never hope to imitate. He took a short turn of exercise, nerving himself for his part in the dialogue.

When he came to earth, he summed up the matter, “Keep away from that sort of thing, Tim. Our kind shouldn’t get mixed up in nasty rotten stuff.”

He flopped out flat in the sun again, thinking a while. Bob had never talked that way to me before, and the sound of him, giving words of advice, surprised both of us. At last he came back with a second attempt.

“I don’t mean that we’re any better than the other fellows. They’re all right in lots of ways, in games and all. But we were lucky enough to be born gentlemen. We’ve got to start early to keep decent.”

That sentiment in its utterance struck his own ears as rank snobbery. So he took another swing on the bough to get rid of the echoes. He stood looking at me when he dropped from the tree, perhaps expecting a word that might help.

“Do you see what I’m getting at?” he invited.

I said, “Yes,” without meaning anything.

Bob went on, “Look at him, how he stands in the town. Do you ever hear people talk about him?” By the pronoun he indicated father.

“I’ve heard them say we’re stuck up,” I ventured.

“Not that,” with a shade of impatience. “He has lived here all his life, and yet everybody respects him.”

“Father’s pretty important round these parts,” I contributed with a touch of pride.

“It’s more than that. Can’t you understand?” Bob had seated himself close beside me. “He has never been mixed up in putrid things. They always know that he will do what is right. They all say so. He hates lies too. I think it is because he sets his idea of being a gentleman pretty high.”

That finished the only glimpse Bob ever gave me in those days of the thoughts that were taking shape behind his contemplative eyes. He tried immediately to run away from it all. He helped me to pull off my shirt again, so that we could take another plunge, and we tore at it as though the river would be dry before we could reach it. Our talk drifted to the usual things, and when the late afternoon began to cool off, we dressed ourselves and lolled about on the grass.

You may wonder if boys brought up in Canada ever did try to express a conception of what it meant to be a gentleman. By the time we were walking home together, I felt a little uncertain myself whether Bob had said such things.

III.

At the table that evening, not a ripple remained of the excitement that had rocked the midday meal. Mother, in one of her teagowns, rich uncomfortable garments, smelling of soft perfumes, served the fruit and tinkled the bell with that graceful languor that had never ceased to win admiration from my father. Harper talked excitedly and incessantly about Tommie doing this and Jackie saying that. For some reason, the motto, “Little boys should be seen and not heard,” vigorously enforced in earlier years for Bob and me, had ceased to be applied to the self-expression of my younger brother. When we were without guests, the table at meal-times was his forum.

He finished his tea and excused himself. If our elders gave us permission to depart, we were supposed to leave the room quietly. But Harper’s rush started before the door was closed, and back through the hallway came a whoop.

“Full of life,” said my father, and mother smiled.

He turned to me, “And you have used the afternoon to get a good tan.”

“We were up at the cove until five o’clock,” I told him.

“It was rather a long walk for you on a hot day.”

They were all more anxious about my health than I felt myself.

“At the cove.” It was always easy to tell when mother had a question of propriety to take up. She spoke to Bob. “I think you are a big boy, Robert, to go swimming in those public places. It is not quite nice. Miss Belle Reynolds was telling me that she saw you last Saturday swinging from the branch of a tree into the water——” a pause, “entirely unclothed.”

“Stark naked,” corrected my father. It amused him to supply words that my mother had dodged, always, of course, expressions that a lady did not care to use.

Bob blushed.

“I didn’t see her,” he said. “We always stay in the water when people come along.”

“Come Carol,” my father objected, “it was only Belle Reynolds.”

He voiced the general feeling regarding Miss Belle Reynolds with her peering eyes and her reporting tongue. Until Gregory Reynolds brought home his timid and incongruous bride, the product of a military town in the older part of the Province, Miss Belle had ruled social and domestic affairs in her brother’s house. Then she began a cautious campaign to learn whether the arrival of the bride meant the end of her domination. What Mrs. Gregory arranged, she rearranged; if Mrs. Gregory’s preferences ran in one direction, Miss Belle set herself to see that things did not happen quite that way. One day, Gregory, who had taken for granted that the new mistress of his home would naturally have all the rights of a mistress, ran into some of the petty annoyances that his wife was trying to overlook. Gregory seized the occasion to declare his mind. He spoke with violence, and an amazing entanglement of powers celestial and powers terrestrial, of eternity and damnation and female dogs.

The bride of four months, who, up to that time, had only sampled Gregory’s vocabulary, thought that the end of happiness was upon her. She fled along the street to our home to seek refuge with my mother. Miss Belle stood her ground. She had wanted to find out who was head of the house, and now she knew. After that she enlarged her borders. Things might or might not be right in her brother’s home, but Mrs. Gregory was never molested. She had to ask her sister-in-law to take charge of the tennis parties, always her favourite social activity. Miss Belle grew steadily more interested in knowing who, among her neighbours, had done the things they ought not to have done.

“There was nothing to take her along that old broken road anyway, except curiosity. It could be no pleasure driving her dog-cart there,” my father observed. “When Miss Belle goes out seeking causes of offence, she should be thankful to persons who provide them.”

“Miss Belle Reynolds is a lady,” said my mother, “She has a right to have her sensibilities considered.”

“Tut, tut, Carol,” our champion went on, smiling assurance at us, “The boys have done nothing deliberately offensive.” Then his voice took a teasing note. “If Miss Belle had cared to notice, Robert’s beauties are of a kind that do not show above the level of his collar. Why Robert, it never struck me before that you resemble the lady in The Mikado that your mother and I saw in Toronto last Winter. She had plenty of hidden loveliness, a left elbow, or a knee or something that people went miles to see.”

My mother’s face wore the glazed mask which meant that the conversation had passed beyond the borderline of good taste.

“There is no use encouraging vulgarity,” she murmured.

“We’ll get the score after tea and see the exact words,” father suggested.

Bob looked unblinkingly at his food. For some reason, there seemed to be no common ground where he and his stepfather could meet for jesting.

My mother always raised side issues to stop an undesirable drift of ideas. Now she said, “Is the weather quite warm enough yet for Timothy to be in the water?”

“We won’t get much more intense heat than we had to-day. But can you swim at all, my boy?” father asked.

“I’m doing pretty good,” I told him. We had a restricting precept never to boast.

“Oh, Timothy,” reprovingly, from my mother.

I ignored the remonstrance, the meaning of which I knew perfectly well. When I used the words that suited my mother’s ear, the fellows at the school said I was putting on agony; and when I spoke the language that the fellows found acceptable, my mother cringed, like a musician who hears an unintentionally discordant note. It made conversation awkward for me at home and abroad.

But no one else appeared to have noticed the incident.

“Oh yes, sir, you would be quite surprised how well he does,” came Bob, eager with information, as I had hoped.

I.

After tea Judge Newman came over to discuss the happenings of the day. The cool breeze from the north, that made the swimmers hurry into their clothes late in the afternoon, developed into a gale about sundown, and the hot spell passed so completely that it required an effort of imagination to realize that the verandahs had been pleasant spots to sit and cool off just twenty-four hours earlier. My father retired to his library with the judge, as was the custom when male called on male. Nobody took a pipe into the parlour, which was entirely a feminine room, but at the end of an evening in the library, the smoke billowed in front of you when you opened the door and the four walls of books were dimmed by the haze.

A blue decanter of whiskey stood on the centre table with a stone jug of water. That was a man’s companion to be sipped at intervals of conversation and smoking. Matches flared occasionally in the thickening fog, and the talk ran on monotonously.

Everything had been settled satisfactorily. Myrtle Kormann was to disappear forever from the village, the next step in her career being a stay in a reformatory. “Poor child,” said my father, “I’m afraid that it only means an interlude. Then she will go to a city and be a menace to society for ten years or more. There doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done for these unfortunate creatures who are just naturally bad.”

They did not take such a despairing view of boys who had erred. Several brawny fathers, as shocked and surprised as though they had just arrived from the garden of Eden, listened to garbled confessions and undertook to trounce sons whose stories made a bad impression upon the trustees. It must have been a dismal evening in many households. Principal Drury was to select the offenders and others who were old enough to offend, and keep them after school for several earnest but whining talks on temperance—temperance in all things. Thus was the innocence of the village school to be restored.

Judge Newman did not feel at all certain about the efficacy of the thrashings. He had doubts about corporal punishment, and decidedly he did not favour the rod for half-grown men.

“It is your idea, Newman,” said my father, “that boys are always either too young or too old to whip. Solomon did not limit the interval for carrying out his advice about the rod.”

The judge sprawled in his chair, sitting, as always, about the middle of his back with his legs trailing across the floor.

“That may have been wisdom in Asia Minor,” he said, “but I’m speaking of young Canadians in the enlightened year of 1887.”

“Come now,” exclaimed my father, “you have been catching new fangled notions. Of course one must use discretion with sensitive or delicate children. We never punish Timothy, who is both. But the average healthy lad needs breaking in, like a thoroughbred horse. Perhaps he is balky; perhaps he is a liar; perhaps he is hard—it reduces such qualities, smooths them out.”

“Don’t be too sure,” the judge objected. “How do you know what you are accomplishing?”

My father was firmly convinced that boys did not give the same amount of thought to questions of right and wrong as their sisters did. There were certain fundamentals of conduct that they had to be taught forcibly so that they would not learn them too late. Experienced men knew that this was inadvisable and that that was immoral. “But you will admit, Newman,” he would say, “that we did not think out seriously the reasons behind morality until we were brought up against the sober side of life by marriage and other cares.” While boys were at the thoughtless stage they had to be given sharp reminders of the things that their elders, in their experience, regarded with disapproval. Fear did not make them behave themselves, and no father wanted to humiliate his son. But Solomon’s rod marked the danger spots in life until a future citizen had mind enough to recognize them for himself. Men like my father were not savage for the love of it.

He always turned to his personal experience when he clashed with the judge on this subject. “I was one of the healthy kind, and my dear old father believed in discipline. All his hopes centred in me, for he had no other boys, but never a week passed without the strap being in evidence, and when I got older it was a trusty cane.”

“Not a pleasant memory,” came the laconic comment.

“You are wrong, judge, not an unpleasant memory. There was a private school here for boys of the well-to-do families, kept by the Reverend McAinsh, a learned old Scotch divine. We were more exclusive in those days. We ran the gauntlet every day to get past the public school, and the youngsters had many a fight. Well do I remember, as a small boy, slipping down to the kitchen to rub flour on the blood smears that disfigured the front of my linen suit. My nose used to bleed so easily. But it never saved me from detection and the usual penalty for fighting.”

My father’s laugh was hearty, and Judge Newman joined, but without conviction.

“Remember that I was raised in your generation, Loftus. There were six boys in our home, and the rod was not spared. The only good that it ever accomplished that I could see was as a relief to my dear old father’s temper.”

“But the whole six boys turned out fine men.” Surely that was unanswerable.

“Why not give a little of the credit to my mother’s prayers. She was almost excessively pious,” suggested the judge.

Arguments with Judge Newman on the subject of bringing up boys never got anywhere. How could he know, with his nine daughters and the half-witted baby son who was wheeled in a carriage up and down Victoria Avenue when the weather permitted? Disappointments had made him sentimental, so they turned to politics, where they could agree entirely. They revelled in party plans, although the judge said many times, “Remember, Loftus, that I am out of the game now, except when I am talking to you.” Rumour said that he had almost refused the appointment of County Judge because it meant giving up his political recreations.

Affairs in the riding were causing much concern that summer. Dr. Moreland, the federal member, had met with an accident that threatened to prove fatal. Unfortunately the happening invited more censure than sympathy over the tea-tables. Why should a well-to-do member mount the driver’s seat of a waiting cab shortly before midnight and run off with the vehicle; why should his reckless use of the whip cause even the world-weary cab horses to make a bolt for it; and how did it happen that they galloped straight into the plate glass window of the largest store in Ottawa?

“Moreland is a fool,” declared Judge Newman. “He can never carry this constituency again with all that talk in the meeting houses on the side lines. His majority last winter was less than normal, only thirty-seven. Now he has confirmed the things that they were saying against him.”

“Ottawa is no school for saints,” assented my father, “but Moreland ought to know the difference between a party and a debauch.”

“Anyway he is done for politically in a county like ours, even if he does recover.”

My father shook his head. “If he does not recover, it will mean a by-election, and I am sure that Sir John doesn’t want any more of them just now than he can help.”

“It’s thoroughly unfortunate any way you look at it.”

Judge Newman leaned forward, lighted his pipe and puffed it impressively before he said, “If there has to be a by-election, Loftus, you are the logical candidate. Of course I am out of things and will have no voice in the matter, but anybody in the party will tell you the same.”

It was my father’s dearest ambition, and pleasure lightened his face at the suggestion, but he replied, “After Moreland’s escapade, we have got to consider the meeting house people on the side lines. Gossip swings their votes, and we must hold them.”

“What is your idea?”

“How about Henry Munn? He is one of them and has all the money needed for an election. They will not fear that Ottawa may demoralize him.”

“You are a stronger man than Munn, Loftus. You have your own record in the county and that of your father before you. They will not confuse you with Moreland.”

“Poor fellow, what an end. And we used to think he would reach the cabinet.”

“In order to have a weakness when you are in Canadian politics, you must be a Sir John A.” Judge Newman rounded it off.

They smoked in silence for a time and thought of Ottawa.

II.

In the parlour my mother sat alone with her books. She liked to have the room dim in the evenings, and her special chair stood so that she got the benefit of her favourite lamp, that made the room golden with its yellow silk shade. She read the current fiction that pleased her, a new novel by William Black or by Besant and Rice. Edna Lyall was her latest discovery, and she was catching up to all the English-woman’s published books as fast as possible, though Donovan with its flawless perfection of a hero, as he became in due time, remained her favourite. Of the genteel romances written by the poets, she never tired—Lucille, Lalla Rookh and Enoch Arden. She could not agree with those persons who thought Tennyson’s poem subversive to public morals because Enoch crept away and left his wife living, quite unintentionally, in sin; the man who wrote In Memoriam would not deliberately encourage or excuse bigamy. The poetic classics, in handsome gift volumes, lay constantly on her table, to be handy when she was in the mood for them. She liked to read beloved passages aloud, even when there was no one to listen. Of course she could have recited them with little prompting, but she preferred to sit up very straight with the small volume spread on her hand.

To my mother such a passage was very dramatic and beautiful. If no woman called in the course of the evening, my mother did not expect the men to disturb her. But shortly after nine o’clock, she was joined by Mrs. Newman, who had intended to remain at home to recover from the heat of the day, until the sudden drop in the temperature stimulated her to seek companionship. Her arrival signalled the men to let their pipes burn out and to swallow the last mouthful of whiskey.

They found the affair of Dr. Moreland being analyzed in the parlour from a feminine angle. My mother had her theory that it could be traced to Dr. Moreland’s unfortunate marriage. In his youth he had selected as his wife the pretty daughter of a hotel-keeper. Such a choice could not do a man any good. It might be taken to indicate his low instincts, though his father was full cousin to Sir Egbert Whitty-Moreland and possessed a hyphen himself until he came to Canada.

Mrs. Newman perched well forward on her chair, her heelless boots flat on the floor, her knees wide apart. She panted when she spoke, but more from a sort of chronic eagerness than for lack of breath. She refused to accept my mother’s diagnosis.

“Mrs. Moreland is a real nice woman,” she said. “Stylish too. I’m sure she can hold her own with lady this and lady that at Ottawa.”

The men arrived at that moment, and Mrs. Newman appealed to them. She counted on drawing my father into the argument on her side. The judge merely rubbed his aquiline nose and pulled his side-whiskers.

The expected support was forthcoming.

“We are too small a country to keep the classes apart,” her new ally said. “They are bound to mix, for young folks will marry. If they cannot find mates of their own kind, they go elsewhere. So the whole social system is levelling out. And a good thing too.”

“It is because young men are so scarce that I want you to keep your Bob for one of my girls,” Mrs. Newman put in.

“Certainly, Mrs. Newman. I am training him carefully so that he will give perfect satisfaction when you get him.”

“And when they present me with my first grandchild, I am going to kiss the father and the grandfather too, out of gratitude.”

“I’ll not forget, Mrs. Newman. I’ll be there.”

Father and Mrs. Newman always cracked their little joke together, but mother sat with fixed, expressionless eyes. Mrs. Newman’s unveiled habit of invariably associating marriages and births—like a newspaper—was something quite outside her conception of conversational refinement.

The judge chuckled.

“Mother is always sowing seeds to harvest kisses,” he said.

My father turned the subject back again. “Class collapses very quickly on this new soil. There has been a big change since my boyhood.”

“If we have no pride,” suggested my mother.

“Look at the Gilkinsons,” he continued. “The old colonel was as thoroughbred as they are made. Where is his family now? All gone to the dogs, except poor old Miss Susanna. And she lives on as best she can in her little cottage.”

“At least she refused to lower her standards.” This was an argument in which my mother would never yield.

“I don’t know about that. I think it was the family interference that marred her life. There was young Fischer. She might have married him and been comfortable.”

“A Dutch farmer!”

“German,” corrected Mrs. Newman, “his father was. He was a steady fellow and well-to-do. A bit brutal perhaps, but he educated his children well. Miss Susanna’s old beau has climbed up, they say, in Montreal. His eldest son is now attending McGill. They’ll amount to something—you mark my word.”

My father turned to the judge. “Do you remember, Newman, when Miss Gilkinson nursed Bob through the typhoid fever five years ago—or was it six? He dragged over to see her the day he was sickening, and she undressed him and popped him into bed. Nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand would have packed him home, but not Miss Susanna. She was ready to fight us if we tried to take him away.”

“That is not strange,” explained my mother. “Remember how long she helped to look after him when he was a baby.”

“Besides everybody likes Bob,” contributed Mrs. Newman. “I do myself, and Mrs. Glint has permitted no other child in her room for as long as I can remember.”

It was just the opening that my father wanted to make his point.

“You are quite wrong, both of you. It’s thwarted maternity, if there ever was such a thing. Susanna Gilkinson was true to her class, but she would have been happier with Fischer, though he was as brutal in his way as his father, provided he had made her a mother.”

My mother moved hurriedly from her chair as though to extinguish a dangerous blaze. “You do get hold of the strangest ideas, Harper,” she said.

Thwarted maternity mentioned in connection with a family friend who was a lady and a spinster—Harper Loftus had no sense of proper reticence.

When Judge Newman and his wife had gone, my father sat meditating, and feasting on the frail beauty of his wife as she read.

“Carol,” he remarked at last, “I have been thinking that it was hardly tactful to talk to Mrs. Newman of class distinctions and people marrying beneath them.”

“You need not worry about that,” she told him. “They have been married for so long that Mrs. Newman is quite one of us. Everybody takes her for granted.”

No secrecy buried the story of Mrs. Newman’s girlhood. She was the youngest daughter of the father of thirteen girls, a small farmer living in a remote part of the county. He stood as best he could the jibes of his friends whose sturdy sons helped them in the fields. Daughters could not plough or wrestle with the heavy work, and one girl would be able to attend the cow and the chickens as well as thirteen. The eldest reached the age of thirty before any of them married. Then one spring the disappointed parent fell ill and had to be removed to the city for an operation, which kept him in the hospital for months. The hired man departed about the same time, taking, without permission, the carriage horse. And the girls had the farm on their hands.

Four of them were out at service, but they hastened home to assist their younger sisters. The thirteen determined that the farm would not lie fallow for a year. They knew of only one thing that they could handle, potatoes, so they planted potatoes. On every piece of cultivated soil, potato hills rose like warts; and the neighbours went back and forth among their farms telling the story with much mirth.

But weather and soil conditions can play strange tricks. There was a failure of the potato crop that year, all over the Province seemingly, except on the farm where the thirteen girls hoed and hilled and fought the grubs. Fortunately for them the persistent bugs, which would have made their task unbearable, had not at that time invaded Canada. The senseless and disgusting little creatures arrived later, after Upper Canada became Ontario—though I am not suggesting that they were one of the problems created by the formation of a new nation. It does not seem possible that there could be a small fortune in a single yield of potatoes, but in that case there was, so said the tradition still lingering in the county. The following winter, money was forthcoming from somewhere to send the youngest girl to the city to attend high school. Her sisters admired her smartness and felt that she could become nothing less than a school teacher. We knew her as Mrs. Judge Newman.

Mrs. Newman did not try to forget her last summer on the farm—the bags of clean vegetables that they carted to the barn and the faces of the dumb-founded men of the neighbourhood. The judge did his part also in preserving the story. When they had been out to spend the evening with a friend, it was not an unusual thing to hasten the departure of his wife, who liked to linger and chatter, with “Come on, my dear. Come on. We must get home to our potato growers.”

I.

The sprawling cottage where Aunt Henrietta Glint lived with her three daughters was said to have been the first house built on Victoria Avenue. It looked its age. Virginia Creeper covered it like a gay garment on a squatty old crone. So sturdy was the vine that the gnarled roots of it might have been called a trunk. It smothered the chimney pots and hung in festoons from the eaves. Every spring my father tried to have it cut back because it was bound to make the house damp and rot the frame walls, and every fall it flamed a triumphant red, still untouched by the knife.

A long trellis, on either side of the centre walk, screened the front of the cottage. We always spoke of it as the rose lattice. It had been intended for roses, but that haughty flower did not like the climate of our county. After several years of coaxing, the bushes might reach maturity and display a profuse beauty for one summer, but the next spring, following a severe winter of thaws and zero spells, only dead branches remained. So it happened that clematis had inherited more than half the trellis, all the spots left vacant by the deceased Seven Sisters, and in their season the purple stars glinted and twinkled as the wind tried them first this way and then that.

The large centre room, which you reached through a porch, built generously to hold if necessary a wood box, was literally a living room. In it the meals were served; the girls were expected to use it when spending an evening at home; and all visitors were entertained there. Aunt Henrietta had arranged that concentration. It enabled her to control events from her darkened bedroom, with its door half ajar. Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen were supposed to run the house. Their mother constantly reminded them that they had no other task in life, and furtively and fearfully they tried to obey her.

Sometimes on a Wednesday, when the summer weather was sufficiently cool, a fish-man came from the neighbouring town. His cart, loaded with ice and saw-dust, trailed tearfully through the streets, and a blaring tin horn summoned those who cared to have a change from meat diet.

Cousin Sadie stood on the lawn and listened with delight. She had thought the weather cool enough to bring her favourite dinner to town, and the fish horn was music to her ears.

“Do you think we could have fish to-day?” she asked Kathleen, running into the porch.

“What did mamma say?” in the same undertone from Kathleen.

“She has not told me anything,” replied Sadie.

“What are you two whispering about?” boomed Aunt Henrietta’s voice from her room.

“It is the fish-man,” Kathleen told her. “Sadie is talking about fish for dinner.”

“We won’t have fish for dinner,” announced her mother with decision.

But Sadie was skipping across the lawn to the gate. She had only time to intercept the dripping cart with the offensive odor. In a moment she returned with a salmon trout, fresh and bloody-gilled, resting almost lovingly on a piece of newspaper.

“Look mamma,” she said, and Kathleen opened the slats of the shutters to give the necessary light.

“I don’t want to see,” Aunt Henrietta cried, “Take the stinking thing back to its owner.”

Sadie fled to tell the fish-man, who was waiting for his money, that she had changed her mind, and he departed muttering about women not knowing what they wanted.

“Sadie is a bigger fool than you are,” Aunt Henrietta told Kathleen. “As though anybody, ever yet, was induced to eat fish by smelling it.”

“Yes, mamma,” from Kathleen.

“Go tell Sadie we’ll have sweet-breads to-day, if they are to be had.”

Kathleen and Sadie consulted again in the kitchen, and Sadie put on her hat to go to the shops.

“You would like sweet-breads, mamma?” she asked at the bedroom door.

“Aren’t you supposed to be running the house?” complained Aunt Henrietta. “Why are you forever bothering me with the details that you should settle for yourself?”

Sadie had a way of sticking up her head to invite Aunt Henrietta’s brickbats. She only said, “Good-bye, mamma. I’ll not be long.”

In her bedroom at the back of the house, Kathleen was wrestling with a desire for self-assertion. Shortly after breakfast, one of Judge Newman’s tow-headed potato growers had arrived at the front door with both hands full of lily-of-the-valley, enough to deck a wedding. How Kathleen longed for the companionship of a fragrant little bouquet on her bureau. She loved touches of beauty, and when she placed the white bells on the lamp-stand beside the looking glass, they were beautiful.

Next to the night air, Aunt Henrietta Glint regarded flowers in a bedroom as the most dangerous of the gifts of God. Kathleen felt so guilty after enjoying the flowers for five minutes that she had to close her eyes. What would mamma say if she saw them there? Kathleen could imagine her banging the floor with her cane and ordering the defilement from the sanctuary. True, mamma had not been in Kathleen’s room for years. But mamma would not like it.

Kathleen sighed and took the lilies-of-the-valley back to the parent bunch. She kissed them as she made the restoration.

Aunt Henrietta heard her foot-steps. “Kathleen,” she enquired, “are the beds made?”

II.

It was so many years since Aunt Henrietta Glint had left her darkened bedroom that she was only a voice to the younger generation of the village. Sometimes people told of the days when her bulky form, flounced in heavy silks, was a familiar sight on Victoria Avenue and Front Street. She was an awe-inspiring personage, and no one dared to address her unless she had beckoned them to approach inside the circle of her exclusiveness. She spoke to very few, and liked to think her fellow-citizens were duly impressed.

When her only son began to attend college, Aunt Henrietta appeared to swell a little larger than before, and the lustre of her silks was intensified. On Sunday morning, she sailed majestically from her cottage to the Church of the Holy Trinity, with Newton trotting obediently beneath her shadow. Talking with friends, she trumpeted the news that she had decided to have her son study for the ministry, and he glanced sideways out of his red-rimmed eyes to see how the information was taken, grinning sheepishly. Aunt Henrietta’s contralto voice gave one final roll at the door of the church. The choir all looked when she marched down the centre aisle, and Newton sidled into the pew beside her.

Friends who heard that Newton Glint was to be a clergyman got together to smile over it. The wives, a trifle shocked, thought that something should be done about it, but the husbands said tolerantly, “Oh well, there will be no harm in the long run if he settles down after he is ordained and married.”

There was nothing that a youth could desire to make life comfortable that Newton did not receive from his mother. He never had to ask for anything, for she thought only of giving him more than he could want, but he had learned early that he must never say no to her yes, or yes to her no. He made his complaint to Sadie and Kathleen, and urged them to give what help they could. Cousin Sadie, not much less adoring than her mother, dared to suggest that brother had an idea, of course a splendid, manly idea, of his own, but for her trouble she learned once more what a hopeless, double-dyed, superlative, hyper-fool she was.

Newton thought of one other indirect method of struggling against his destiny. He spent an evening with the old rector, and next day the nervous little man called on Aunt Henrietta. His voice trembled as it did at every burial service, but he took firm hold of his moral courage. Was it wise to force a young man whose tastes lay in the direction of more profane—rather, more secular pursuits, to enter a sacred calling? A tendency—a slight tendency but known to everybody—to drink and to do other—well at least to drink, might not be considered becoming in a priest of the church.

Aunt Henrietta ordered her spiritual adviser off her property. She never wanted to see his impudent, hypocritical face in her home again. But the church was as much hers as it was his. She seemed larger than ever to the fidgetty parson, as she sat in her place, very straight and stiff, and stared at him until he bungled even the Lord’s Prayer.

At last came the Trinity Sunday when Newton Glint was to be ordained. No bride ever planned her white satin more carefully than Aunt Henrietta designed the gray silk that she intended to wear on that great day. Twice she made the journey to Toronto to have the dress fitted, and one dismal Thursday in June she went to the city again to make certain that everything was in readiness.

Aunt Henrietta expected to return the following week, with a black-suited, pot-hatted son to drag limply through the streets, as an Indian might wave a scalp, to indicate the triumphant end of a campaign. She came home on Monday and locked herself in her room. No one saw the gray silk dress, and few people ever set eyes again on Aunt Henrietta Glint, and then only in the dimness of a room with closed shutters. If the common people among the villagers snickered over her humiliation, she never saw them at it.

Newton Glint disappeared completely from the circle that had seen him alternately bullied and pampered for more than twenty years. Two days before he was to have been ordained, he bolted, and was swallowed up completely in the great spaces of wickedness and chaos that were known in the village as “the States,” where, so ’twas said, nobody observed Sunday and everybody was more or less divorced. Letters in his hand-writing passed through the post-office from time to time in the years that followed, from Mexico, from California, from New York, from Minnesota, and at the apex of his abandon from that young but unspeakable city, Chicago. Then Cousin Sadie or Cousin Kathleen consulted my father about generous money orders, and there was much clacking of tongues when the post mistress gave currency to the report that an envelope had departed addressed to “Newton Glint, Esq.”

Only once in my boyhood did Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen take me into Aunt Henrietta’s room. She had expressed a desire to see her first grandnephew. The incident was brief, an affair of emphasis, hurry and confusion. The heavy slats of the shutters clattered open. I became conscious of a mountain of shadow in the rocking-chair, but before it could resolve into angles and features, a loud voice shouted, “Remove that ghastly child from the room.”

Sadie and Kathleen fled with me as though detected in a crime.

After that, Bob was the one young person admitted to her presence—not that I envied him. He had to go to see her regularly. She demanded it. Often he sat for over an hour after school in the artificial twilight, answering her questions about his studies, his masters and the changes in the village.

One day she startled him with a question, asked with unusual intensity.

“Robert, would you like to be a preacher?”

“I think I’d rather be a doctor, Aunt Henrietta.”

“Pooh, pooh. Doctors are all quacks, getting rich by selling drugs to silly people.”

“Yes, Aunt Henrietta.”

The old woman pondered a few minutes, and then made an offer.

“I know that preachers are not paid very much. They are not worth it. But if you become a parson, I’ll leave you enough money to make it worth your while?”

“No thank you, Aunt Henrietta,” said Bob, “I don’t want to be a preacher.”

“Then get out of my sight, you nasty, ungrateful boy,” she screamed at him. “I never want to set eyes on you again.”

Bob stayed away for nearly six weeks, and then she sent for him. She made him sit where she could see him well, barred by the light through the shutter slats, and while he listened in silence, she scolded at him.

“Boys are thoughtless and selfish creatures,” she said. “I’m a lonely old woman, and have few pleasures, shut in here with three fools of daughters, and you know I count on your visits. Where have you been these weeks, enjoying yourself and forgetting all about me?”

But there was nothing about the well-knit Bob, with his direct gaze, to suggest the flabby-limbed and sly-eyed Newton.

III.

Cousin Clara Glint made her first appearance for the day at the dinner hour. The smell of sweet-breads stirred her appetite, so she tossed away the Ouida novel that she was reading, and dressed herself.

All her friends conceded Clara Glint the most beautiful figure in the village. One more jerk of her laces and her willowy waist would have snapped like the stem of a wineglass. When Cousin Clara was dressed for a party, it seemed incredible that such a mass of flounces could hang from so small a waist. She had costumes for every occasion. To-day she was to be present at one of Miss Belle Reynolds’ tennis parties, and she arrived at the dinner table in the appropriate gown. Her skirt swept the ground,—no woman would have dreamed of deliberately displaying her ankles, even to be athletic. And she had a saucy turban to match.

“It is quite dashing, is it not?” she asked Sadie and Kathleen, who agreed that it was quite dashing.

Playing tennis in Cousin Clara’s costume would have been like a performance in a combination straightjacket and racing sack. Truth to tell, Cousin Clara seldom went on the courts. She carried her racquet as she would carry a fan in a ball-room, but if a man invited her to be his partner, she had either twisted her ankle or suffered a slight touch of the sun. She played her best tennis in January, when elderly callers heard the story of how she had saved a critical game by the deadly accuracy of a return that she had made from a seemingly impossible angle.

Clara picked up her racquet and prepared to depart as soon as she had finished her meal, but Sadie headed her off by asking if she had made her bed. Clara twisted her face up in one of those playful grimaces that were never entirely smoothed out when she was in company. She frolicked round the table to kiss Sadie.

“You are going to make it for me, you old dear,” she gushed, “I’m late now.”

Sadie was not so certain. Clara cajoled her way along with her sisters, but occasionally they resisted.

“I have made it every day for a week,” said Sadie.

“But I’ll get all hot and tired,” complained Clara, “And you know that it does not become me to have my face red.”

Sadie did not try to argue the point. If she began to bandy words, she inevitably ended by giving in.

“Mamma,” Clara called, “don’t you think Sadie is mean? She won’t make my bed for me, and I am going to a tennis party.”

“Why do you always try to make yourself unpleasant, Sadie?” Aunt Henrietta shouted back. “Stop tormenting the child. You know that you are going to make her bed.”

“I’m going to do it mamma,” said Kathleen.

Cousin Clara dashed into her mother’s room for a quick kiss, and then she rushed off, pausing at the door to screw up her nose pertly at Kathleen.

“You are an old dear,” she bubbled.

Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen spent the afternoon behind the rose lattice—it was as good as a summer house. Sadie had her crochet work. She was making dogged headway with a quilt that would eventually add another layer to the bed in the forbidding spare room, which had not been used since Newton’s departure. Kathleen wept again over the pathos of In Silk Attire. Twenty readings had not made the sadness less poignant to her. Kathleen considered William Black a very great novelist indeed. She had bought his books from year to year, beginning with Love or Marriage, and following along to those best sellers of the eighties A Princess of Thule and Madcap Violet. They had a shelf to themselves in her room. But best of all, she liked the unfortunate heroine who died so bravely with such gay words on her lips. Sometimes she closed the book and sat for a long time thinking how pathetic and genteel it would be if she could remember to say when her time came to die, “Merrily, merrily shall I sleep now.” But no one was likely to be present at her passing who would be worth the effort to impress. Anyway, mamma would not like it. Mamma did not approve of displays of emotion by such inevitable spinsters as Sadie and Kathleen.

At tea-time, Clara returned in one of her most playful moods. Cousin Clara’s happiness had outward and visible signs like the happiness of a kitten. She grimaced more than ever, did cute baby tricks with her food and pretended that she could not talk plain.

Her sisters guessed the reason and were all agog.

“Whom did you meet at the party, Clara?” asked Sadie, knowing that some such query was expected.

“Oh, girls, I met the most perfect gentleman I have ever known,” she told them.

“What is his name?” breathlessly.

“Mr. Lytton. He is not like anybody you have ever seen. He is so elegant.”

She described his brown beard, as curly as that of a poet.

“Is he a poet?” exclaimed Sadie, who had wanted all her life to know a celebrity.

“Oh no,” replied Clara. “He is a gentleman every inch. You can see it when he moves. Blood will tell.”

Sadie requested credentials. Just who was he? Where did he come from? Clara told them that Miss Belle Reynolds had discovered him. Miss Belle invariably annexed the interesting new-comers first. She found them in the course of her investigations into the affairs of the village, and you could trust her not to make social errors.

“And Kathleen would admire him,” said Clara, “He is so classic in his conversation. I am sure you never met anyone, Kathleen, who was quite so classic.”

The two sisters were delighted in Clara’s delight, and the infection spread to the next room.

“Tell me,” boomed Aunt Henrietta. “Come Clara.”

“Yes, mamma, I’m coming.” Clara was anxious to tell her impression of the elegant gentleman as often as she could find some one to listen.

“It is your turn to wash the dishes,” whispered Sadie.

“But mamma wants me,” answered Clara, not in a whisper.

“Is that you, Sadie, trying to keep her?” demanded Aunt Henrietta.

“She hasn’t washed a dish for two weeks,” explained Cousin Sadie weakly.

“The child’s tired,” said their mother, “playing tennis all afternoon in the hot sun while you two have sat round and done nothing. It won’t hurt either of you to do the tea-dishes.”

Sadie looked grieved and as near to being rebellious as it was possible for her to feel, but Kathleen answered, “Yes, mamma.”

Aunt Henrietta Glint lay still in the gloom, while Clara told her of the elegance of Mr. Lytton and all about the fascination of a man whose sayings were so classic.

From the bed came a single interruption, “Lytton, Lytton, and he isn’t staying at your Cousin Harper’s. Well, I suppose the name is a common one. If you were not so young, I could tell you something of a Lytton family that I used to know, but you’ll learn the evils of the world soon enough.”

Cousin Clara chattered on, “He singled me out for more attention than anyone, and when I brought him raspberry vinegar, he called me Hebe. Oh, but the girls were jealous, mamma. They didn’t like it a bit, me keeping him all the time.”

“And I suppose you think it is your romance at last,” Aunt Henrietta remarked when the story reached its end.

Cousin Clara affected terror and scampered from the room. A minute later she stuck her head round the door and said in a hollow whisper, “Who knows?”

Then she screwed up her face, and pushed out her tongue, ever so little.

I.

Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen were not forced to spend all their days listening to the “come here” and “go there” of their mother. It was possible to leave Aunt Henrietta alone any time when she happened to be in the humour, for she did not claim to be ill. No doctor ever attended her. Even when she had slight ailments, she refused to see Dr. McDougald, fearing that he might be one of the herd who had snickered at her. She offered no defence for her course of action, nor did she attempt to explain it, but she remained in her darkened room. On one occasion my father tried to reason with her about the folly of being a hermit, and because it was Harper Loftus, she did not order him to leave her house and never return. It was hardly a triumphant demonstration of my father’s reputed influence over the self-willed woman that his mother’s brother had introduced into the family.

Her piano was the companion with which she spent most of her time. She could not quarrel with it. Once the instrument stood in the centre room, but the timorous fumbling of Sadie and Kathleen when playing their slender repertoires used to anger their mother.

“What are you afraid of, Kathleen? Don’t stroke the keys; hit them,” she would shout.

And the “I will, mamma” reflected the spirit of the solo performance.

In a fit of exasperation, Aunt Henrietta announced her intention to take the piano away from them. Sadie brought several men from the village, as the instrument would not readily pass through a door. They were almost willing to do the work for nothing in order to get a peep into the cell of the mysterious Mrs. Glint. It was surprising how soon Aunt Henrietta came to be considered mysterious.

At any hour of the day for many years, you could hear Aunt Henrietta clattering gay compositions on the discordant bass and the toneless treble of the old piano. She thundered with tremendous force and with the loud pedal down, and it never worried her that the tinny instrument had not been tuned for a decade. She preferred to play when the girls were out. They annoyed her with the repeated assurance of how much they loved to listen. If you stood at the garden gate and heard the din of Tam O’Shanter riding madly with the witches in hot pursuit, you could conclude that Sadie and Kathleen were visiting my mother.

Sadie and Kathleen took tea at our home once a week. They would not have thought of missing. They enjoyed literary discussions, and spent many hours going over with my mother the reading that they had done in the six intervening days. Novels were divided into two great classes, those that were nice and those that were not quite nice. Kathleen condemned all sordid books, by which she meant stories of families who were too poor to employ governesses or tutors. But Sadie had a liking for heroines who were daring, provided the author described nothing more unconventional than, say, an appearance at church without gloves. He could only hint at the bolder escapades.

The Illustrated London News and The Graphic were their delight. The English weeklies usually arrived on Friday, and three heads would bend over them, mother’s dark curls in the centre and the faded auburn of Sadie and Kathleen on either side, in eager search for pictures of the royal family. In 1887, the crowds of royalty elbowed one another in the pictorial weeklies, as Queen Victoria was celebrating her Jubilee with many festivities. Every number came as a greater treat than the preceding one to Sadie and Kathleen.

Regarding marriages and births in the royal families, they were more reliable than official records. They could tell you offhand anything you might want to know about the men and women who married the daughters and sons of their sovereign. They approved of all except the husband selected for dear Princess Alice. They were inclined to feel grieved, just a tiny bit grieved, with the queen for having made such a match.

“Patching her German cousin’s trousers,” suggested my father, overhearing the subject under discussion.

Mother, Cousin Sadie, and Cousin Kathleen raised a trio of protest at that bald way of putting it.

II.

Father brought the English weeklies directly to my mother so that she could have the pleasure of opening them.

“Aren’t we lucky to be here?” chirruped ecstatic Kathleen. It was seldom otherwise, but the previous week the papers had been delayed until Saturday.

“You must hurry up and tell me,” said my father, “has Mrs. John Broon come up to to’on.”

That innocent couplet was supposed in the eighties to contain a ribald insinuation. My father made the joke at least once a month to rouse the bird-like indignation of his cousins. Both Sadie and Kathleen regarded it as treason. They were surprised at Harper for using words that were only fit “for frequenters of bar-rooms”—that was Sadie’s suggestion, but Kathleen said “for radicals.”

“I hope you won’t make that unseemly jest in front of the boys,” my mother added.

This week’s papers were better than ever—a full page picture of the two sons of the Prince of Wales.

“The dear Duke of Clarence.”

“Isn’t he refined?”

“Oh, Sadie, the flower of true royalty.”

“But poor young man. You can see that he is delicate.”

“Isn’t it sad that he should look so sickly?”

“Let me see,” said my father who had lingered a little, “what was it they used to do to Dukes of Clarence when they did not amount to much? Didn’t they drown them in a butt of malmsey wine?”

That was too much. How could any loyal subject say such things?

“We shall sit perfectly quiet and not say another word until you leave the room,” said Cousin Kathleen.

“If I did not know that you were just being humorous, Harper, I’d never forgive you,” said Cousin Sadie.

And father, chuckling to himself, went off to his library.

The coming of Cousin Clara interrupted the rapturous reminiscences in which Sadie and Kathleen always indulged after seeing a picture of anyone related to the Prince of Wales. During their one visit to England as young girls, they had met that stately and aloof beauty, the Princess of Wales, driving along an unfrequented road. Kathleen, all panic, curtseyed dizzily, but Sadie was able to call aloud, “May God bless the Princess of Wales.” She loved to tell how she felt and how she thought of the right words to say, much as a mighty hunter might recount his sensations the day he had the presence of mind to select the right gun and kill an onrushing tiger.

“It was not just a condescending bow she gave us,” claimed Sadie. “It was more like the intimate smile of a friend.”

“Every inch a lady,” said Kathleen.

“And every inch a queen,” said Sadie.

A few words were sufficient to indicate to Clara the point they had reached in the routine of their conversation. At the tamest of times, her sisters’ memories bored her, and she had other things these days to interest her.

“I just ran in to let you know that mamma said she didn’t mind my coming away,” Clara interrupted.

“You haven’t left mamma all alone.” Obviously, she had, but Sadie and Kathleen duetted just the same.

“She told me to,” replied Clara. “There are a few persons going down to Miss Belle Reynolds’ for pedro. But she is playing the piano, and you need not hurry home.”

Clara departed with a scamper to look into my father’s room before continuing on her way to the card party.

“Clara has been spending a good deal of time recently with Miss Belle Reynolds,” remarked my mother.

In her heart, she did not entirely approve of Miss Belle. According to my mother’s views, the constant manipulation of ill-natured gossip was not wellbred.

“There is another attraction.”

Sadie gave the information in the way that some persons tell of an engagement.

“I assumed that,” answered my mother.

Kathleen looked after her younger sister and sighed.

“I wish for Clara’s sake that the romance she talks about would come. She would make a nice husband so happy.”

“I do not understand it,” added Sadie. “She does attract the men, but when everything seems to be going so nicely, they always shy off.”

“I shouldn’t use that word,” corrected Kathleen. “It doesn’t sound quite nice, Sadie.”

“Anyway,” said Sadie, “nothing ever comes of it.”

Both of them were really anxious about Cousin Clara. They regarded her as a creature of almost perfect feminine charm, quite like a heroine in a novel.

“She is so vivacious,” said Kathleen.

“She is so roguish,” said Sadie.

III.

Cousin Clara preferred to be vivacious and roguish for my father’s benefit rather than to perform beneath my mother’s unsmiling gaze. She slipped through the door of his library and clapped both hands over his eyes. Then, in a voice that disguised nothing, she threatened him with a kiss unless he could guess her name.

“The Queen of Sheba,” ventured my father, and much mirth rained down on him from the kisser.

Clara perched on the library table. It permitted certain graces that could not be displayed on an ordinary chair. She said she would like to stay all evening and wake him up; he ought not to mope there in his smoke, all alone like an old fossil.

My father had arranged a section of his book-cases with pigeon holes for his private papers. It could hardly be called a place of safe-keeping, as he had a trustful way of leaving the key in the lock from one month’s end to another. Cousin Clara opened the door, and then transferred father’s glasses from his eyes to her own. Pursing her lips and trembling her hands like a dodderer, she peered into the compartments.

“You want some money to-day,” she piped in her best acting voice. “Now let me see what I have to show you. Would seven thousand dollars in gold interest you? No. Then perhaps you prefer to have eleven thousand dollars in bills, nice new crispy ones, marked down to ten thousand. . . Now Cousin Harper, what do you think of that? Wouldn’t I make a good banker? Don’t you want me for a clerk?”

“You are in high spirits tonight, Clara,” said my father. Her antics always amused him.

“Don’t you think my gown is elegant,” she asked him, jumping down and turning to display it.

He took out his pipe and laughed at the familiar symptoms.

“Ha, ha, Clara, I smell romance.”

Cousin Clara offered no denial. She leaned over the table to make faces at him.

“You’re a cynic,” she said. “And I won’t kiss you good-night.”

There was a great rustling and pattering as she continued on her way.

IV.

As Cousin Clara expected, her sisters did not feel that they could stay much longer, now that mamma was alone. They knew that Aunt Henrietta might urge Clara to go and enjoy herself, and yet be stridently disapproving one hour later over their tardy return. My mother thought it unfair that their one evening should be curtailed, while Clara got out whenever she liked. She said so in her mild way, but only persuaded them to linger by asking their assistance in their greatest annual pleasure, the preparation of the invitations for the Dominion Day Dance.

The Dominion Day Dance was the nearest thing to an institution that existed in the village. My grandfather gave the first of them to celebrate Confederation, and from 1867 onward, July 1st had been a day of great excitement in the Loftus home. When my father took over the house after his marriage, he took over the Dominion Day Dance as part of the inheritance. I believe that the people in the village looked upon July 1st as the day when Harper Loftus gave a dance, rather than the day that the Dominion came into existence.

In twenty years, the Dominion Day Dance had lost a good deal of its early exclusiveness. Sometimes my mother went to father’s pigeon holes and consulted long lists of guests who had attended in the early seventies—the sons and daughters of all the retired English army officers who could be found scattered through the two counties; names that meant something in the history of Toronto; the leading Presbyterian and Church of England clergymen and other persons connected with polite professions; and once a British Admiral and his wife who journeyed up from some place in the vicinity of Kingston.

Now the dance was becoming more local, and my mother found an increasing tinge of commonness in the lists. It worried her to feel that she had yielded too much to my father in this matter. You could hardly ask your nicest friends from Toronto if they were going to meet the young village schoolmaster, who might be seen almost any evening playing lacrosse with the town toughs in a shamelessly undressed fashion. Mother accepted the schoolmaster in the first place because good-looking bachelors were not easy to find, and he did seem popular with even the most fastidious girls. The younger generation was getting loose about such things. Samuel Mason, who owned the village flour and oat-meal mills, was also included with his wife, nice people to be sure, but not the sort that grandfather Loftus introduced into his home. My father insisted upon Mason. His father and his grandfather had owned the mills before him, and he and his wife were ambitious to deserve recognition. They read a great deal, and took an intelligent interest in politics and church affairs—three things that recommended them to my father.

So the borders of the Dominion Day Dance were enlarged. My mother foretold the day when the mob, encouraged by my father’s easy tolerance, would trample down the hedges completely. This year the names of the editor of the village paper and his wife were being included.

Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen comforted my mother by exclaiming at the news. What a concession, merely because he happened to be the first local editor to favor, in secret, my father’s view in politics. In his paper he was desperately neutral. Cousin Sadie knew his wife by sight, a very ordinary woman, but perhaps she would not accept, as she belonged to a sect—a name applied to any religious communion that could not afford to support a church in the village.

My mother stubbornly refused to admit the truth of her husband’s contention, “There were many things that we transplanted from the Old World which have refused to grow here as they used to grow. What we call our social arrangements in Canada must alter and adapt themselves to our own conditions. What is the use of shutting our eyes and denying the changes that are going on.”

My father sauntered into the parlor to defend himself good-humouredly. He knew of some other people who were to be invited next year, two of them storekeepers, but he had not yet mentioned it.

“If you go into parliament, I suppose you will want me to receive every Tom, Dick and Harry,” lamented my mother.

Sadie and Kathleen followed up with an excited duet, “Is Harper going into Parliament?”

“Oh no,” replied my father, “Carol says ‘if’ I go into Parliament I’ll be entertaining every Tom, Dick and Harry. She means, of course, that if I do as she desires and enter the British House of Lords, I will not have to entertain every Tom, Dick and Harry. That would be much nicer.”

My mother kept silent to cover her slip. It would be bad taste to speculate about such things with anybody but Judge and Mrs. Newman, and poor Dr. Moreland not yet dead. He clung to life tenaciously for a man whose career was wrecked beyond recovery. It hardly seemed worth the effort. Still, his successor could not be discussed. One must preserve the decencies.

As Sadie and Kathleen hastened back to their mother along the dark path under the trees, and it was dark on the village streets when there was no moon, they told one another in whispers how sad was the change that they could see coming gradually over Cousin Harper.

“He stands up for common radical ideas,” said Cousin Kathleen.

“He is almost a socialist,” said Cousin Sadie.

I.

As soon as darkness fell, a rocket trailed its thin cord of fire into the sky from beyond the orchard behind the house. It signalled the village that the fireworks were about to begin. They were an addition that my father had made to the Dominion Day Dance, a little garish, so my mother thought, but now expected by the townsfolk as well as the guests. When Bob was a small boy, a few rockets and crackers finished the day for him, and he disappeared from the scene before the dancers arrived. Out of a child’s good-night entertainment grew the fireworks’ display. Every year a larger and more widely assorted box arrived during the last week of June, and the boys at the school were as eager about its coming as about the commencement of the holidays. My father could not have discontinued this event if he had wanted to, which he didn’t.

There was an open space remote from the house that made an excellent field for such a performance, and, outside the fence, crowds of people, by no means all children, gathered at dusk in readiness. At about nine o’clock, my father appeared with Judge Newman, Gregory Reynolds and Dr. McDougald as his helpers, all of them wearing long driving coats for protection. Bob took an active part now in the creation of these fountains of sparks, but he worried about no covering for his plain navy blue suit. The fireworks served to hasten the guests, and they sauntered down through the orchard to watch from among the trees the rain of stars and golden balls.

Gregory Reynolds said quite candidly that the fireworks were the best part of the Dominion Day Dance. I think that the others agreed with him, but were less out-spoken. He always sent up the first rocket, to the accompaniment of much muttering, not entirely under his breath. You could hear references to God and other supernatural beings, but it was neither a prayer nor a dedication. A few burns on his hands, the result of his haste to do his share and more than his share, increased the vehemence of his blasphemies during the next half hour,—and yet he revelled in it.

“Hell isn’t going to look so bad when we all begin popping off,” he once said to my mother.

Her glazed eyes almost refused to recognize his presence.

“I do not know what you mean, Mr. Reynolds,” she replied.

Dr. McDougald returned as nearly as possible to his boyhood, whenever an opportunity offered. His short bandy legs ran to and fro between the boxes that contained the fireworks and the centre of operations. He yelled “Up she goes” for as many rockets as he could work it in, and exhausted the remainder of his excess energy in whoops. The children beyond the railings thought Dr. McDougald as well worth seeing as the pin-wheels.

Bob kept an eye on the eager small boys among the watchers. At intervals he would beckon some deplorable youngster to jump the fence, and then provide for him a roman candle or some other piece that was interesting. With his bare feet set as firmly as his lips, the urchin circled the candle with deadly earnestness amidst a shower of harmless sparks, and every moment or so, plop, a fiery ball went shooting up, to melt into the darkness it had disturbed. When the candle dropped to its last sputter, Bob bundled the fortunate performer over the fence again to his pals, who surrounded him with admiration, not unmixed with envy.

“Say, Johnny, did you shoot off a roman candle?”

And Johnny replied that he had, proudly, as though some magic in his touch accounted for the glory he had shown them.

The village boys had noted that Bob seldom beckoned the affluent. I am convinced that there were more bare feet and unbrushed heads to be seen in the audience at the Dominion Day Dance than on any other occasion in the community. Sons of prim parents, who made their male offspring go booted and stockinged even in their own back yards, turned up that night treading charily on the stones. Fortunately for their tender soles it was still too early in the summer for the grass to have formed much stubble.

I remember seeing one offender dragged away to the accompaniment of slaps and “Why, Wilfred, what have you done with your shoes and stockings?”

And Wilfred’s desire to discard anything that might hamper his feet was not a sign of keen business instinct, his father being the shoe-maker.

When the last pin-wheel had refused to wheel and the last rocket had discharged its heavenly cataract, the groups in the gloom outside the grounds drifted away, and the guests moved back towards the house where the dancing commenced immediately. For Harper and me, Dominion Day was over. To us, the dance was a noise of music and much distant laughter, heard through the drowsiness of approaching sleep.

II.

When the guests reached the upper garden, they found it full of new blooms. Dozens of Chinese lanterns hung their luminous bells on the trees. In the orchard, they were grouped in bouquets above the benches, patches of light and color. But in front of the house they were everywhere. Shrubs became burning bushes that did not speak.

On one side of the verandah, the side away from whatever breeze happened to be blowing that day, strings of lanterns illuminated the long tables that supplied refreshment for the dancers, and dancing on a July night in Ontario—often with the air lying superheated and dead—created a great demand for iced liquid. Bowls of punch and lemonade, in which the ladles clinked between the glass and the melting ice, and raspberry vinegar, with spring water to dilute to your taste, crowded the board. The men knew that they must travel farther, to the book-walled library, for a whiskey or a glass of ale. No one touched the port wine decanters, which added color without attracting patrons.

My father frequently expressed a wish that some sort of fruit was available for the refreshment tables, but he could get nothing except oranges at that time of year. They made a fine showing in large piles on towering dishes, but they were too complicated and treacherous a fruit for dancers to tamper with. The first year that some enterprising fruit dealer brought bananas to Toronto, such a long way from the tropical home of their origin, father introduced them into the village at the Dominion Day Dance. But this fruit, with its tough red skin and its mealy flesh, was more praised for its appearance than for its flavor. The general pronouncement was that bananas tasted foreign, and by some they were described as woolly. They could not be compared to our own luscious Ontario snow apple, picked after the first frost.

“Probably they are an acquired taste,” my father said afterwards to my mother. “I have read so much about them that I must say they are a trifle disappointing.”

It was not long before the banana ceased to be considered an exotic. In fact the bright yellow brothers became common so quickly that you would no more have thought of offering them as part of a social occasion than you would have served fried potatoes in the supper room.

In the parlor—everybody used that nearly obsolete word until the end of the century—the grand piano was backed into the bay window, and the pianist from Toronto sat ready, when the fireworks were finished, to commence the first set of lancers. Nobody went on to the floor in that dance who did not know the lancers well enough to go through every movement without a word of prompting. Five sets filled the accommodation, and as soon as they were in position, the pianist began his vivacious strumming, tiddily dee, ump tum, ump tum, ump tum, tiddily dee, and the dance was under way.

You might have regarded the opening lancers at the Dominion Day Ball as a ceremony rather than a dance. So early in the evening the laughter was subdued, and the twenty partners performed the figures with the regularity of clock-work. The women of the eighties did not prepare for dancing as their granddaughters strip for their syncopated athletics. Mrs. Bob still has one of my mother’s party gowns packed away among the family relics. Those dresses were indeed designed to disguise the human frame, with their flounces and panniers and the armour-like array of whale bones to build up a waist and a bust. And yet how deftly the women manipulated the trailing skirts as they swept back and forth, chained and bowed and balanced through the complications of the lancers. Just a little of the grace and dignity of the minuet lingered, a suggestion of the days when it was the ideal for men to be gallant and ladies fair.

With the lancers over the fun began. More sets of lancers were danced later in the evening, but none required such formalities. Partners got into them who just scrambled through. Square dances were much in vogue, the Six Nations and the eight hand reel, which was surely a Canadian version of the Virginian reel.

Why they called the Six Nations a dance, I cannot say. It was more like a drill that the couples walked through, keeping time to A Life on the Ocean Wave. Never in all history has there been such a chaste dance. The partners had no occasion to embrace; they seldom did more than touch hands, except that arms were crossed for “the figure eight,” in which it climaxed. The eight hand reel permitted a little more life. Swinging with locked arms through the grand chain, the young men liked to make the wisps of girls leap from their feet; it seemed to be a test of a woman’s popularity with the opposite sex—her bulk permitting, of course. The yelps and squeals of Cousin Clara in the eight hand reel indicated the intrepid manner in which she had to swing.

But the younger dancers preferred the schottische and the polka, also the languorous waltz, still regarded with head-shaking, probably on account of its languors. You could hardly think with suspicion of the jogging and kicking of the schottische or the gliding and dashing of the polka.

Most of the dancers who had passed beyond their thirties stood back when the pianist started the music of a round dance. If the elders ventured, it was a lark. Dr. McDougald appeared on the floor with Mrs. Newman, but he had not secured her partnership by an invitation to dance—rather it was a challenge. They went at it bravely, and other couples paused to watch. One, two, three and a kick; one, two, three and a kick,—Mrs. Newman with her short fat legs conserved her energy grimly, but the doctor’s bandied trousers kicked with abandon. Neither cried quits first—that had been the suggestion in the challenge—, for the doctor shot out a leg at last with so much energy that he lost his balance, and if Mrs. Newman had not been built four-square to the winds, they would have ended in complete collapse.

Rounds of applause greeted the feat, and those who had not witnessed it joined anyway. All Mrs. Newman’s bottled laughter poured forth. She made limp motions to the doctor when he offered to guide her to a resting place. Her mirth bent her double, and there she had to stand until she could come straight again.

Fortunately my mother was not in the room. She felt at such times that Mrs. Newman might be a little more restrained in her merry-making, a little more like the wife of a judge and the mother of ten children. My mother was wrestling with the problem that my father had forced upon her, the problem of making the editor’s wife feel herself to be part of the gayety. The poor creature, a trifle uncertain about the wantonness of the dance, could do nothing, apparently, except make everybody that my mother introduced to her wish for immediate escape. So Caroline Loftus, gracious, kindly, forgetting none of the cherished rules set herself as hostess, hovered in the offing until the guest with a tactful inspiration assured her, “Oh, Mrs. Loftus, I love sitting on your beautiful verandahs and looking at your lovely garden.”

The encore demands upon Dr. McDougald and Mrs. Newman were so insistent that they fled at last to the orchard, where the heroine of the performance could work off the last wheezy raids of her laughter.

“Do you know, Mrs. Newman,” said the doctor, “that there is nothing in the year I regret missing so much as the Dominion Day Dance? Wrecked engagements are a doctor’s greatest hardship.”

She laughed again.

“Are you reproaching me?” she asked, “Are you trying to remind me that my little Patria came on Dominion Day?”

“Oh, I have never forgiven you that, madam,” the little doctor declared. “I was sure of my dance until just about tea-time. There was no earthly reason why Patria could not have waited a couple of days longer. Then she would have escaped her name.”

“Oh fie, doctor,” Mrs. Newman shook a chubby finger at him. “What selfishness! Why she might have waited three days by mistake, and then my Patria would have been born with the tendencies of a traitor.”

And the doctor roared loudly at this new aspect of the case, and gave it as his opinion that Mrs. Newman beat the Dutch.

III.

The editor of The Weekly Enterprise did not share his wife’s uncertainty regarding his right to enjoy the frivolities of the night. He could not dance, but he was willing to master the rudiments of the art if several hours of diligent trying would accomplish anything. Naturally he fell into the hands of Cousin Clara Glint. Any man, sufficiently young and not too unattractive, who wished to learn the polka or the schottische, could turn to Cousin Clara. Her services were completely at his disposal.

When the pianist was resting between dances, Cousin Clara carried off her pupil to some quiet corner of the hall or to an unfrequented spot on the side verandah. She supplied her own accompaniment for the performance, in the form of short verses that kept time to the steps.

For the schottische:—

“Now Mr. Weaver, the straight steps and the kick are easy enough. It is the turn. Try it with me, for you must learn to guide your partner. My aunt Sally Ann’s. . . . Oh, no, no, no. Start right, and we’ll do the turn when we come to it.”

The polka fitted more nearly to what little aptitude Editor Weaver possessed.

“Oh, you do this one naturally. I see that. Two long glides, and then one, two, three—so.”

Her rhyme for the polka was almost an anecdote:—

If her pupil got tangled up in himself, Cousin Clara made faces at him, wry contortions and little snoots. But when he began to conquer his tendency to reduce everything to a walk—and for a man who had never danced, he was not impossibly awkward—she clapped her hands silently, while she assured him in baby talk that “The gweat big mannikin will be able some day to dance with the fairies on a dew dwop.”

The grandfather’s clock in the hall, chiming eleven, stopped Mr. Weaver’s course of instruction.

Cousin Clara clasped her hands.

“Oh dear,” she cried, “I didn’t know it was so late. But there you are, quite perfect. And there is Miss Newman all alone. I introduced you to her. I’m sure she will give you the next polka.”

The editor looked pensively after the scurrying white gown. How pleasant these young ladies who devoted all their existence to making themselves attractive could be, so playful and soft and feminine that they quite fluttered your pulses to be near them. The odor of perfume about Miss Clara Glint made her pleasant to hold in a dance. Mrs. Weaver never smelt of anything except cheap soap. He was not disloyal to Mrs. Weaver, an estimable woman who had given him seven children without a murmur, and had laboured fifteen hours a day for the twelve years of their married life to produce a spotless house and a God-fearing family.

Still, Mrs. Weaver could be dampening. She had been distinctly dampening when he handed her excitedly my mother’s neatly written invitation to the Dominion Day Dance.

“We must pray over this,” said Mrs. Weaver, “to find whether it is of God or of the devil.”

Now she was sitting on the verandah in the star-light, with the scent of syringa in her nostrils, glad that her doubts had been swept away. Poor soul, would they have revived again if she could have known her husband’s thoughts in the presence of the white arms and dancing feet of Cousin Clara Glint?

IV.

Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen always departed shortly before midnight. Every year they missed the serving of supper in the dining-room, where several of the village girls ran in and out from the kitchen, in cap and apron. Liza refused to wear any such badge of servitude.

Sadie and Kathleen sought out my mother with as much formality as though their early departure had never happened before.

“We should love to stay longer, Caroline,” they said, “but mamma is alone.”

And the two faded Cinderellas tore themselves regretfully away from the dance at which they had not danced, and the gayety in which they had not been so very gay. They knew that Aunt Henrietta would be waiting, not through nervousness but because she wanted to hear about the guests and the clothes and the routine of the evening.

“Come,” she would trumpet when the door opened, to let them know that they had kept her. But she refused to share their enthusiasms. She gave them the same verdict every year.

“Those dances are not what they used to be in your uncle’s time. He would not tolerate Harper’s changes. I fear that there is a vulgar streak in Harper somewhere.”

My mother was pausing a moment in her endless round as hostess when Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen arrived with the enveloped heads of departing guests.

“I’ll walk with you to the gate,” she said. She drew in the sweetness of the garden. “We have never had such a perfect night.”

She led them round by a side path to make the stroll longer, and told them she was glad, after all, that Mrs. Weaver had been invited. She seemed so grateful for the enjoyment, and was quite pathetic. The new-comers whom my mother resented were the forceful ones, determined to show themselves at home in new surroundings and to be on a familiar footing with the best of the company.

“The snow-balls are fading,” remarked my mother, turning aside to inspect a bush that looked forlorn in the artificial light. Some one had moved a bench into the shadow behind it, and as the three women approached, Sadie and Kathleen became aware that their sister was there with a man they had not seen before.

Cousin Clara and her companion had overheard the approaching chatter and were standing. Clara was flustered. She had not expected to have her plans thus precipitated.

“Cousin Caroline,” she exclaimed, “I have taken the greatest liberty. I have invited a special guest of my own. He seemed so anxious to come.”

My mother looked beyond Cousin Clara and became rigid.

Cousin Kathleen and Cousin Sadie looked and admired. This splendid creature with the brown curling beard and the immaculate clothes was all Clara had claimed.

“I knew you would not mind,” Clara rattled on. “You would have invited him yourself if you had known him. Mr. Lytton, I want to present you to my cousin, our hostess, Mrs. Loftus.”

Mr. Lytton laughed a polite ripple of a laugh, evidently amused rather than embarrassed.

“Let me see,” he said, “What did Charles Lamb call Mary in public? Did he call her Mary or Miss Lamb?”

Clara glanced at her sisters. Had they heard that? It was quite a pointless speech so far as she could see, but oh so classic.

My mother’s voice was very small but quite emotionless when she replied, “George and I hardly need an introduction.”

She held out her hand.

“And I am to have the freedom of the city,” he murmured as he took it.

My mother said no more.

George Lytton bent over the hand that he held and kissed it. Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen were thrilled. Never before in all their lives had they seen a man kiss a woman’s hand. The days of chivalry had blossomed again before their eyes. So would a cavalier greet a lady. Such things were really done then by romantic gentlemen, after all. I can imagine my father’s contempt of a salutation of that kind in an honest Canadian garden.

“May I take him in?” asked Cousin Clara.

“Of course,” deadly, from my mother.

Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen sped home in silence under the maples. It was the most wonderful incident that they had ever witnessed, just like play-acting.

Oh, what a night to remember!

V.

In the pale grey of dawning, my father and mother sat on the verandah after the last guest had gone.

“How could he dare such a thing?” said my mother. Her face was a little drawn.

“There was no harm done,” remarked my father.

“But the boldness of it.”

“I am quite satisfied with the way things turned out. If he wanted to create some sort of sensation, it fell very flat. People looked upon him as another guest, and just took for granted that we had invited him.”

They watched the slow breaking of the day for fifteen minutes in silence.

My father leaned forward gently, “You must not worry, Caroline. After all, George was never noted for niceness of feeling.”

My mother’s fingers were working nervously.

“He practically told Clara,” she said. “Do you think we ought to warn her?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It looks to me,” explained my father, “as though he is amusing himself by trying to force us to declare war. That’s why he came to the dance.”

“But Clara should know what sort of man he is.”

My father thought a while before he spoke. He lighted his pipe and drew long whiffs of smoke.

“Clara will be all right,” he observed at length. “There is no end that he can serve by cultivating her . . . Besides, you know what poor little Clara is with the men. She doesn’t learn, and she is treating George the same as the others. She kept him on the leash all evening. But her pretty tricks soon begin to pall. Inside of a month, if he stays that long, he will be running like a white-head at the sight of her.”

      *      *      *      

Behind the shadow cast by the rose lattice, Cousin Clara Glint said good-night and good-morning to Mr. George Lytton.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you knew Cousin Caroline?” she enquired, “Then I could have asked her to send you a regular invitation.”

He was laughing.

“You saw how pleased she was to renew an old acquaintanceship?” he said.

“Cousin Caroline is always formal and dignified,” Clara told him.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said as he left her. “You remember how young Montague ventured into the house of the fearsome Capulets to see his heart’s delight.”

There were tears of happiness in Cousin Clara’s eyes as she slipped into the silent house. To have inspired a man to utter such a speech!

I.

“Do you want to know something?” said young Harper, “Dudie Lytton is sparking Cousin Clara.”

We were at dinner about a week after the Dominion Day Dance, when my small brother looked up suddenly from his plate, and tossed us this piece of information picked up among his chums. The new comer had been dubbed “Dudie” from the start. As soon as the juvenile jury from the Public School set eyes on him, they convicted him of wearing clothes that could not possibly be approved by any of them. He was sentenced instinctively and unanimously to be Dudie as long as he remained in the village.

Harper must have been delighted by the reception given his scrap of news. My father leaned back in his chair and laughed until Liza came in from the kitchen to peep, lest she might be missing something that would provide a smile in her sallow existence.

Mother looked across the table with that “I told you so. And now it’s too late” expression that wives telegraph to their husbands when they feel that events have justified one of their standard grievances. It was the manner, not the matter, of Harper’s communication that had disturbed her. But the rebuke fell harmless, blunted by my father’s mirth. She knew that for some reason, which she was certain that she would never understand, the vernacular delighted him.

When they were left together after dessert, my mother said, “It is the public school that is to blame.”

“For what?” he asked, assuming an innocence that would not deceive her, and he knew it.

“That speech, of course. You know perfectly well what I mean. Harper picks up low ways of expressing himself only too readily.”

Harper senior smiled good-naturedly.

“You should learn to appreciate him, Carol. Why, when I was his age I could not have told a long story so tersely and graphically to save my life.”

“You are just trying to put me off,” she objected, “but you know I am right. You did have advantages yourself that we are not giving our boys. First, Dr. McAinsh’s school, then Upper Canada College and finally Trinity.”

“My dear Carol,” replied my father, rising to leave for the bank, “I have promised that Harper will go to Upper Canada when he is fifteen. Till then I think he is learning things at our own village school which will be of value to him all his life.”

My mother sighed. She knew an adamant decision when she saw one.

After dinner, I walked as far as Front Street with Bob. During the summer holidays he spent six weeks in the bank, and his assistance enabled my father to give each of the regular clerks a week’s holiday. Gregory Reynolds voiced the opinion of other business men in the town when he declared, over a game of pedro, that it was a dangerous precedent to make holidays a matter of course. If a clerk had worked without a change for years and years until broken in health and dormant in ambition, then it was only humane to permit him to take a rest, with his salary to keep him from worrying. Ordinarily, holidays only upset a man. Reynolds urged that in his own affluent existence, no one had paid him for his vacations. These objections were made while dealing, and doubtless noted. Afterwards the clerks went on their brief outings just the same.

As we sauntered along in the dry, breezeless heat, Bob remarked, “I wonder what that fellow Lytton wants.”

Both of us had noticed that he followed us about. One evening he appeared at our swimming hole, but on the wrong side of the river. He hailed us, and sat down to watch our performance in the water. Immediately Bob suggested that we should get out and dress behind the bushes. He had not moved away when we departed.

“He seems nice,” I ventured.

Events had made me revise, in part, my original estimate of Dudie Lytton, which was largely due to Bob’s bristling attitude. One afternoon he entered a candy store where I was balancing the selections on which to spend five cents, and his generosity increased my purchases tenfold. Besides, Bob had mentioned to me that he was a guest at the Dominion Day Dance.

“Perhaps he is, for all I know,” said Bob, “but he stopped me last night when I was coming from the Mechanics’ Institute, and asked me to go to his room at the hotel this afternoon when I left the bank.”

The Mechanics’ Institute was not a meeting centre for mechanics, nor was it a place that seemed fitted by the severe description of an institute. In the eighties, the local board of trustees had not yet thought to call an institution where citizens borrowed books to be read, by a name so simple and appropriate as public library.

“Are you going?” I asked.

“He said it was important,” Bob answered. “There is something about him that makes me think he is a sneak. He told me not to tell anyone.”

“But you have told me.”

“Oh, I didn’t make any promise,” Bob assured me. “I didn’t even say a word.”

II.

George Lytton opened the door of his room to admit young Robert Herndon.

“Come on in, my young cockalorum,” he said. “I was just beginning to think this was one time silence did not give consent, and that you were not coming to see me after all.”

Bob stepped inside, twitching his cap nervously in his hands. The one easy chair that the room contained was pointed out to him. He sat down charily, and waited. He had not said a word beyond the first greeting.

The older man stood eyeing him deliberately from head to foot, until he blushed and fidgetted as boys of Bob’s age will under such an inspection.

Finally George Lytton remarked, “You are not a very talky youth. You do not get that trait from your mother’s people. The Lyttons frequently had too much to say. But let’s see if I can put a little sparkle into this dour world.”

He crossed to the corner, and returned with a bottle of ale. It looked refreshing as it frothed over the tops of the light, narrow tumblers.

“Thank you sir,” said Bob.

“So you can speak.” Then after a pause, “Of course, I knew that Harper Loftus was not the sort of pietist to deprive his boys of the good things so lavishly showered upon unworthy mankind by a good God—and the brewers. Not even the son of Mortimer Herndon.”

Bob was puzzled. Why was it that this man talked of nothing but family matters? As he sat there quizzically pulling his curly brown beard, he seemed to be constantly worming his way into intimacies that were none of his business.

“Of course, you cannot answer that,” he went on. “I feel sure that you have been instructed never to discuss family affairs with strangers. And that is right and as it should be.”

They finished the ale in silence. The unswerving gaze of the boy opposite him made the man move uncomfortably. He got up and went to the horse-hair sofa.

“You asked me to come here,” Bob said at last.

“Of course, Robert, that’s just the point,” Lytton replied. “Do you know who I am?”

“I think you are some relative.”

“Indeed, what makes you think that?”

“Your name.”

“Then you know that your mother was once Caroline Lytton.”

“Oh yes.”

“Can you tell me anything about her brothers and sisters?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. But I’m sure father will give you any information you want.”

“What makes you think he’d know, if he has never told you?”

Bob weighed his reply for a moment.

“There is a large blue envelope among father’s papers marked ‘The Lytton Estate.’ He told me once that it contained all about mother’s family.”

George Lytton caught up one word in the boy’s speech.

“Your father, you say.”

“My stepfather.”

“Yes, your stepfather. Your father would not have neglected to tell you about your uncle George.”

Which happened to be untrue. No one ever despised George Lytton more heartily than Mortimer Herndon, though he never took the trouble to say so.

Bob got up and placed his glass on the table. Then he asked directly, “Are you my uncle?”

Lytton was quizzical again. Evidently he did not know how best to handle the situation. “Well now, think of that,” he murmured. “What touching things these family reunions are.”

Bob had no gift for retorting to raillery, so he stooped to pick his cap from the floor.

“I think I had better go, Mr. Lytton,” he said.

“Oh no, Robert, you must sit down. We are only beginning to know one another.”

Bob sat again, uneasily.

“So you had never heard any report of your uncle George, either good or bad? You didn’t even know you had an uncle George? That is pleasant. How about your father? Your stepfather couldn’t very well ignore the existence of Mortimer Herndon.”

Bob had come to the conclusion that he was staying too long. Listening to some of these things smacked of disloyalty.

“May I go now?” he asked.

“Would you like another glass of ale?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“There isn’t any,” said George Lytton laughing. Then he moved across the room and patted Bob’s shoulder. “I was your father’s closest friend, some years ago,” he went on. “I want you to know that whatever faults Mortimer Herndon may have had, he was a man’s man. He took everything he wanted out of life, and never snivelled. He was not Harper Loftus’s kind. Remember that.”

Lytton would have drawn his nephew to the sofa where he could talk closely and confidentially, but the shoulders were rigid and resisting, so he pulled up another chair.

“You are a disconcerting little devil,” he continued. “Your manner makes me think of your father. You are like him, Robert, a god’s body and an ugly head, but the sort of ugliness that sends women crazy. He could take any woman he wanted from me, who was supposed to be handsome and somewhat of a wit.”

Bob was unaccustomed to men who talked like that. He felt that he did not want his uncle so close to him, and yet could not push him away.

“Why did you want to talk to me and to tell me all these things?” he asked.

Lytton replied earnestly, “I had a notion, Robert, that I should like to protect Mortimer Herndon’s memory against the things that your stepfather might say against it.”

“But he never says things to me against anybody. What made you think he would?”

The smiling friendliness of the host had become a little thin.

“You are nearly sixteen, aren’t you? You should be commencing to see life for yourself,” he said. “You must know by now that your stepfather is as hard and dry as dust. We have got to be fair to him, I suppose, Robert, but these small towns breed hypocrites. Harper Loftus has gone to church every Sunday all his life, but I miss my guess if he believes a thing the parson tells him. That’s the way of it. He has to be respected for the good of his business. Your father was not that sort of narrow man. If you haven’t begun to understand Harper Loftus, it’s about time you started studying him.”

He waited, but there was no comment.

“I do not suppose he ever told the people of this village that when he married your mother he took over everything that belonged to her family. He is a good business man, I must admit. He has kept my existence dark for all these years, so that you did not even know you had an uncle George. Just think those matters over.”

He permitted his suggestions to sink in, and then added, “Look here, Robert, if you want to find out the truth for yourself, why don’t you look over the contents of that blue envelope you mentioned just now. It may contain some interesting revelations of your stepfather’s methods. Then you will have more to go by than what I have told you.”

Bob pushed his chair back so that he could get to his feet, quite clear of this new-found uncle. He spoke quickly, but clearly.

“I believe that every word you have said to me is a lie,” he declared, and walked out of the room.

Lytton had risen too, but the speed of the boy’s movements left him alone before he could reply.

So he finished the conversation with a remark for his own benefit.

“Harper Loftus has succeeded in making a prig out of Mortimer Herndon’s son.”

He caught up his hat and followed his nephew down the stairs. At the door, Miss Belle Reynolds’ dog-cart was standing. She had called for Lytton, to take him home as her guest, and when he saw her, he turned aside from his intention to overtake Bob.

As he climbed in beside her, he enquired, “What do you think of young Herndon?” pointing after the retreating figure.

“My brother likes him, says he’s got plenty of grit, or something of the sort that Gregory admires,” replied Miss Belle. “But I don’t. He’s always been a horrid, sullen boy. You can’t get a word out of him. He doesn’t even answer a direct question.”

“Isn’t that funny!” remarked Lytton. He was growing tired of Miss Belle Reynolds, having exhausted all her bitter gossip, and he spoke with more than a touch of sarcasm, “Did he ever manage to get away without telling you something that you wanted to know? You would hardly believe how chatty I find him. I was just about to inform you that he is the sort of boy who tells one everything he knows.”

III.

About half past five next afternoon, Bob and I were returning from a swim. On account of the heat, the bank clerks were permitted to leave every day as soon as my father could close things up. “Get cool as best you can,” he told them. “It’s too sultry for anybody to work properly.”

As we reached the road that led under the willows to the bridge, Bob stopped.

“You can hoof along home, Tim,” he said, “I am going across to see Miss Gilkinson.”

“Will you stay to tea?” I enquired.

“I’ll stay if I’m asked,” he replied with a smile. It was a formula that we had all learned as little shavers, meaning that we must not intimate a willingness to remain. The invitation had to come without prompting. But Bob knew his status in the home of Miss Susanna Gilkinson.

The stone cottage, in which Miss Susanna Gilkinson lived all by herself, stood at the top of the slope beyond the bridge, the white walls gleaming through masses of shrubbery. I cannot remember when Miss Susanna did not look unbelievably old. Her lithe body moved with the alertness of youth, but I am convinced that there never has been a face so wrinkled. Her features appeared to be crowded together for protection in the centre so as not to be overwhelmed by the maze of wrinkles. This gnarled countenance was crowned with coils of glossy black hair.

Miss Gilkinson was boiling the kettle over a few bits of broken board, when Bob knocked at the open door. On such a hot evening, she had concluded that the inevitable cup of tea and a few dry cookies would be sufficient for her meal, but she changed her arrangements at the sight of the most welcome visitor that ever entered her house.

She disappeared into the back garden for a few minutes, and returned with her hands full of the yellowish green of fresh lettuce. “The heat is toughening it,” she observed, “but I have some cold lamb here that will make a tasty salad.”

She touched his shoulders as she crossed behind his chair.

“Not much of a tea for such a big lad as you are getting to be.”

Miss Susanna dropped through the trap door into the cellar, emerging with a small red jar in her hand.

“Wild strawberry jam,” she informed him. “I have eleven more jars, and you must take tea with me eleven more times next winter. Let me know ahead when you are coming after it turns cool, so that I can make you a tart.”

She wiped the bottle with a dish cloth, and gave the top a determined twist.

“Wild strawberries are not as plentiful as they used to be,” Miss Susanna remarked.

She did not mention the hours that she had spent in the hot June mornings gathering enough of these tiny red berries to make twelve jars of jam. Down in the broken bad lands beyond the river the vines grew. It required a long walk to reach the spots where they were to be found in quantities. With aching back and tired joints, she pursued the luscious fruit into the corners where they had hidden among the old tree roots or under the protecting shade of great boulders. It was a rest to find an occasional bed in the fallow open spaces. The reward for all this labor was to be Bob’s smile of appreciation when she produced them.

He gave her one of these smiles now.

If the combination of one of nature’s inventions and the skill of a cook ever produced anything more delicious than wild strawberry jam, no sample of it has, as yet, reached Canada,—at least not to my knowledge.

Tea over, Bob wiped the dishes while Miss Gilkinson washed them. That attention meant a good deal more in the eighties than now, for dish-washing was considered a purely feminine accomplishment, and the men who helped their women folk clear away were as peculiar as the women who wanted to vote.

Bob’s visit to Miss Susanna was for a specific purpose, but he had a boyish diffidence about launching into a serious conversation. They sat for a long time in the gloaming in the front room, chatting about ordinary comings and goings. She held the boy’s brown fist in one of her thin hands and stroked it with the other, as she might a kitten. Bob’s peculiar stubbornness became a nerveless patience when he endured the attentions of the old ladies who made their affection for him so apparent, Miss Susanna Gilkinson with her hand-stroking and Aunt Henrietta Glint, nagging at him and all mankind in her darkened room.

It grew moonlight as they sat drinking in a whiff or two of the breeze, that tried dejectedly to spring up after sundown.

At last Bob spoke, so sharply and suddenly that it startled her. He had been wondering how best to get under way.

“Miss Gilkinson,” he said, “my mother came here with me when I was just a baby, didn’t she?”

“Yes, Robbie,” she replied. “And it doesn’t seem long enough ago to have you the big fellow you are now.”

“How old was I?”

“A few months, that was all,” Miss Gilkinson told him.

“And mother lived with you until she married Mr. Loftus?”

“Why, yes, Robbie, to be sure. But you have known all that for a long time, surely.”

“I never thought much of it before,” he said, “not until last night. Miss Gilkinson, did you ever see my father?”

The old lady hesitated. “Just once, Robbie.”

“What was he like?”

She thought for a few moments and then asked, “Why do you want to know?”

“I have been wondering.”

“Well, he was something like you may look when you are a man, Robbie,” she told him. “I only saw him, a few days apart, for a short time. He had a forceful way with him.”

“And he was shot while hunting?” enquired Bob.

“Yes, the following Winter.”

Bob had heard these facts before, but he wanted to have them definitely restated as a preface to his main questions. It was difficult to put his queries into words, because he did not want to sound, even to himself, as though he credited a single statement made by George Lytton,—except, of course, the unimportant item of relationship.

“Did you know anybody else in my mother’s family? Had she a brother?”

“Oh, I cannot say about that,” Miss Gilkinson replied. “Your mother was very unhappy when she came here. We never talked about things that distressed her.”

“Had she plenty of money? Was she wealthy?”

“Why, no, Robbie, what a question! She was very, very poor.” Miss Gilkinson paused, uncertain how much she should tell. “She owed everything to your grandmother, old Mrs. Loftus, I mean.”

“That’s all I wanted to know for sure,” said Bob. “You do not mind my asking you?”

“No, dear boy,” she replied. “But why didn’t you go to your stepfather? He would tell you anything you want to know.”

“I couldn’t. It is hard for me to talk to him.” Bob said these things in a matter-of-fact way, feeling that Miss Gilkinson would understand. “Besides, there was a man saying things to me about him yesterday.”

“What sort of things?”

“Lies. I knew all the time they were lies.”

Miss Susanna got up and lighted a small lamp. She placed it on the table, so that she could look Bob in the face. Then she sat down beside him again.

“Robbie,” she said, “If someone told you anything reflecting on the honor of your stepfather, you shouldn’t have needed to come to me.”

“I know that.” He was ashamed now. “I can see how square he tries to act all the time, to everybody.”

“Do you remember when I had you here sick, Robbie?” Of course he remembered, but he knew how she loved to recall details of those weeks, when she was a mother standing between death and her child. “Do you remember one night when you were nearly well? It was too dark for me to read to you, so I talked. You remember what I said?”

“I’ve not forgotten,” he answered.

“What I told you then I think more strongly than ever. Harper Loftus is a gentleman of the old school. They are getting to be rare, Robbie. When I was young I knew so many of them, old Mr. Loftus, Dr. Morphy and my own dear father, Colonel Gilkinson—and others too that you have never heard about. They were men who loved honor, who believed in being fair-minded, and gentle with the weak, and true. Now they are dying out, and the world is much poorer for that.”

He looked at her quite frankly. “I think I have understood those things about him because of what you said that night.”

“When I pray,” she told him, softly, for she hated cant, and to talk about one’s prayers sounded like cant, “I always pray for you, Robbie, that when you are a man grown, you will be such another as Harper Loftus.”

Miss Susanna Gilkinson was one of those independent creatures who do not feel the need of prayer every day and always, but when she prayed, driven by desperate loneliness to seek a confident somewhere, somehow, it was the agonized hopes and yearnings, which she could never make articulate, that rushed and tumbled through her mind, as she sat in her rocker in the silent house, with her hands clasped over her closed eyes.

IV.

Even if Miss Susanna Gilkinson had felt so inclined, there was not much more that she could have told Bob about the coming of my mother to the village. The narrowness of the horizon visible from Miss Susanna’s cottage had never inflamed her curiosity, or made her eager to pry into matters that were not explained to her spontaneously.

One tranquil September when the Dominion was only a few years old, my grandmother, Mrs. Harper Loftus, paid Miss Gilkinson a visit and told her of the existence of Mrs. Mortimer Herndon.

“You will doubtless regard the proposal that I am going to make to you as preposterous,” said my grandmother, a chubby woman, and formal, “but I hope, Susanna, that you will consider it carefully, even though at first you are inclined to resent it.”

Miss Susanna had never been given to showing resentment, and assured Mrs. Loftus that she intended to remain quite calm, no matter what she should hear.

My grandmother broke it gently that she wished Miss Susanna to take a lodger. She was apologetic when she came to the point. One did not ask persons who were genteel to take lodgers, but my grandmother hastened to add that the case was most exceptional.

Sitting primly, her hands, in the fingerless silk gloves, clasped politely, she related the circumstances.

“Mrs. Herndon is a mere girl, and her story is a sad one. Her mother was my dearest girlhood friend, but she died when Caroline was still a mere baby. I had not seen much of my God-daughter—I forgot to say that she is my God-daughter,—until she appealed to me several months ago. I believe from all accounts that she has married a very wicked man, well-born, my dear Susanna, a most distinguished family, but no credit to his name, I sadly fear.”

“Is the poor girl divorced?” asked Miss Gilkinson.

My grandmother raised a gloved hand at such a question. In her social register, divorcees and harlots were classed together, with a little more indulgence for the harlots, who had not been so wilfully perverse as to attempt to improve their position by asking for legal recognition.

“But she is leaving home,” she explained. “It is quite impossible that she should cleave to him. I think that even our dear Lord would see that.”

My grandmother feared at times that Miss Susanna Gilkinson had leanings to unconventionality. Still, that attitude was useful, otherwise she could not have approached her about the lodger.

The room that Mrs. Herndon would occupy was prepared, and Miss Gilkinson awaited further word from my grandmother. Then, three weeks later, my mother arrived unheralded. Miss Susanna found her standing, frightened and uncertain, on the bridge across the river. Her brown hair was cut short and curled lightly on her head, and her face was pale from recent illness. She carried a sleeping baby, rolled in a white shawl, and she gazed, a trifle apprehensively, at the agile middle-aged woman who approached her.

“Can you tell me if I am anywhere near Miss Gilkinson’s house?” she enquired.

“You must be Mrs. Herndon,” said Miss Susanna.

She took home with her the frail girl mother and the vigorous baby boy.

“I could not stand it another day,” was Mrs. Herndon’s only explanation of her premature arrival. Miss Susanna asked for nothing more. She took complete charge of the infant, and told the mother not to worry but to get strong.

My grandmother came as soon as notified, and arranged details of board and similar things in whispered consultations at the gate, where her generosity could not be overheard. To her God-daughter, she frequently observed “You are among friends, my dear,” and “We must trust that we have done the right thing, Caroline.”

Mrs. Herndon was too unhappy to pay much attention. She seldom wept, but even her baby failed to interest her. Miss Gilkinson did not mind that, and the bellowing, kicking, troublesome Robbie became her toy.

One night Caroline Herndon cried out in terror in her sleep, and when Miss Susanna had lighted the lamp, the younger woman clung to her and asked for a promise never to let her go back to her husband.

“No woman has to live with a man she hates,” Miss Gilkinson reassured her.

Then Mrs. Herndon shed tears unreservedly.

“I am not sure that I do hate him,” she said. “Now that I am safe from that terrible house, I think of him night and day. I remember how I used to long for his coming before we were married. Somehow it is the same again. I can’t explain it. That’s why I am so miserable.”

But she said no more, and Miss Gilkinson never asked questions.

When Mortimer Herndon found his wife at last, it was Miss Gilkinson who faced him at the door. He told her brusquely, hardly conscious of her presence, as he would speak to a servant, that he had come for Mrs. Herndon. She felt him to be a man not easily gain-sayed, but she blocked his path without flinching, one hand firmly on the doorknob and the other on the frame of the door. Then he saw that there was more than a wrinkled spinster,—there was a will in his path. He told her shortly that his wife was coming away with him and that he did not intend to tolerate any interference.

“Your wife, poor young thing, is broken in body and spirit,” said Miss Susanna. She was not surprised now that the girl feared her own weakness in the presence of Mortimer Herndon.

“All she needs is a little zest in living. She’ll be all right when she gets away from that child,” he replied.

“What are you going to do with your boy?” she asked him.

“I suppose we can leave it here for a few years. We shall pay you well,” he suggested. “And now kindly call Mrs. Herndon.”

After that last proposal, Miss Gilkinson’s tendency to relent in favor of Herndon dried up. It was as the champion of Robbie that she fought the battle. She stood beside the quivering girl and supplied her with the strength to resist a power that was more than physical. My grand-parents, whose disapproval was the sort of thing that Mortimer Herndon had fed upon delightedly all his life, might be overridden, but not this grim watch-dog who regarded him as an unnatural father.

A week later, Mortimer Herndon said good-bye to his wife for the last time, with Miss Gilkinson standing guard. Such complete defeat was something to which he was unaccustomed. He looked at her sullenly, but with a feeling akin to admiration for her spirit. Then he turned and walked away without a word when she asked, “Don’t you want even to look at your baby?”

Miss Susanna often re-lived those days in her memory. She knew that if she had been Caroline Herndon, he would not have gone away alone. For him and his, life could not be the tepid thing that she had found it. He might be as wicked as they said, but God had ordained that a little wickedness would be a becoming though uncomfortable thing in a man, like a woman’s head of glorious hair. She did not blame the girl. Caroline Herndon’s ideas were so romantic and finely spun that turbulent realities could only horrify and overwhelm her. Miss Susanna’s fibre was stronger. It was possible for a man to resemble Mortimer Herndon and yet not be an unnatural father. That was how near his most unflinching opponent came to being his ally.

In November, news reached them of his death in a hunting camp. They told the widow that it was an accident. Others may have suspected, but in the village, only my father, grandfather and Miss Susanna knew that Mortimer Herndon had deliberately killed himself.

The three years that followed were the happiest that Miss Gilkinson had ever known. At least half of the mothering of Robbie was hers. To think of delicacies that the small boy welcomed; to bathe that beautiful little body and struggle with the unmanageable mop of hair; to laugh at his stubborn fights for his own way; and to shower kisses on his sleeping face in his cot,—such things were unsullied delights. To my mother, her son brought hours of anxiety. She could not cope with his dogged determination to do the thing that he wanted. In all their battles, there was only one victor, and Robert marched sturdily upon his self-willed way.

After one of these struggles, Harper Loftus found the vanquished mother in tears. He looked after the business arrangements that his mother had made with Miss Gilkinson, and he discovered that the visits required to settle affairs grew steadily more numerous.

“I cannot do a thing with him,” the young mother exclaimed, trying to laugh. “I dread to think of what it will mean when he grows older.”

“The boy will get more sense,” suggested Harper Loftus.

“It isn’t that,” she said. “Doesn’t he remind you of some one? He doesn’t seem to care for anything so long as he gets what he wants. What if the other traits develop too!”

“A little discipline is all a lad like that requires.” The tone was masculine and reassuring. “Those faults can be weeded out if they are taken in time.”

“That’s just it,” she said. “I am not strong enough physically or morally. It will take a man’s hand to master Robert.”

“My hand is a man’s hand,” he said, leaning close to her.

They looked at one another, their eyes saying everything necessary, and laughed.

“You must not tell anybody that I practically proposed,” she whispered, finger on lip, as they stood on the bridge in the star-light that night gazing down at the silly chattering water. They had been discussing with my grand-parents the plans for an early marriage. The old people were more excited than the lovers. One of their greatest anxieties was that their only son should marry early and suitably to carry on the name and traditions. In that pride of family they were like their Old Country ancestors. But they could make no headway with the young man; when the subject was urged, he jested about it in a modern way that shocked them, and once even hinted that he felt no inclination to marry any of the girls he happened to know, least of all the eager Belle Reynolds. “I am afraid, father, that I am bad insurance for the name of Harper Loftus,” he suggested. “You should have taken out another policy.” Now their dread that he might remain a bachelor was banished, and all was well.

Miss Gilkinson greedily treasured the remaining weeks of Robbie. My father had shouldered the task of teaching Caroline Herndon’s son that a boy cannot go through life gratifying his own desires, regardless of the wishes and rights of those about him. It is to be feared that Miss Susanna’s pampering hand fortified Robbie to make the early battles bitter ones.

In the meantime the air of summer breathed first of blossoms and then of mellow fruit, and the light came back to the eyes of Caroline Herndon, her brown hair grew more lustrous and her youthful beauty burst into its full blooming.

I.

The heat of July proved too much for Dr. Moreland, M.P. Word came that he had rallied from the shock and the resulting delirium tremens, or nervous breakdown as the newspapers discreetly described it, and that his broken bones would not curtail his liberty for long. Gossip waxed, waned and died to a whisper, and the danger and trouble of a by-election seemed definitely past. Then one afternoon, he collapsed and passed away suddenly, when the thermometers in Ottawa were registering 95 in the shade.

His remains were taken back to his home town for burial, and the constituency buzzed again. His enemies were just as angry because the Toronto papers toned down the truth of the regrettable accident as his friends would have been if they had toned it up. Outside his own riding, his death did not seem any more exciting than the passing of an ordinary member of parliament, who had voted right all his days and never embarrassed his party.

Meanwhile the friends of the late Dr. Moreland watched anxiously for some improvement in the weather. You went through the formalities of a funeral in the eighties without any reprieve, whether the sun blazed or the rain drenched.

Judge Newman dropped over after tea to discuss arrangements with my father—the setting of the sun did not make the air any cooler, but imagination helped a little in the hours of darkness. They were to be pall bearers, and intended to drive over to the neighboring town early in the morning, so as to have a little time to stretch their legs before the ceremonies began, shortly after midday.

The two men enjoyed their smoke on the verandah while their wives sat in the stuffy parlor together.

“The only thing to be said for this weather,” remarked the judge, “is that it keeps business slack, and I suppose you can get away more easily, Loftus.”

“It would be all right anyway,” replied my father. “My clerks are very competent.”

“How is Robert getting along?”

My father looked pleased. He sat up and knocked the ashes from his pipe on the verandah rail before replying.

“He is going to be an excellent clerk, Newman. He is careful and alert.”

“And you are going to make a banker of him?”

“Yes, I intend to give the lad a real chance in life. When he finishes at the High School, I’ll see him through until he is well established in some bank.”

Banking was one of the favorite topics for argument of these two cronies. Now Judge Newman thought he saw an opportunity to score.

“But haven’t you been saying that the days of the private bank are numbered?” he asked. “Why put Robert into a dying profession?”

“That makes no difference, Newman. The chartered banks are spreading everywhere, and I’ll see that Robert gets a good start in one of them.”

They smoked in silence for a few moments, looking at one another in an amused way, as men do when preparing to launch into a discussion where they can disagree without becoming heated.

“You think that I am inconsistent,” said my father. “Well, I feel sure that seventy-five years from now there will not be a private bank left in Ontario.”

“You are a safe prophet,” laughed the judge. “Neither of us will be here seventy-five years from now to say ‘I told you so.’ ”

“I suppose you noticed,” said my father, “that Bentley closed his doors last week.”

Judge Newman dismissed that instance.

“He was a gambler, trying to promote a flax industry in a county where any fool might have known it would never succeed. That’s not banking. You are a business man, Loftus.”

“Just the same, I have been thinking of letting a chartered bank come in here in my place. Better to do it now while I am a comparatively young man to start into something else. In my old age I might be squeezed out and left in poverty.”

The judge feared the loss of my father’s companionship as he would have dreaded the obliteration of his pet habit. The death of Dr. Moreland furnished him with a new suggestion.

“But you cannot go away from here if you are to represent the riding.”

My father had been preparing to go in, so he dodged the issue.

“We’d better wait until we see about that. In the meantime, let us join the ladies.”

Judge Newman’s lanky figure towered up out of the verandah chair, and they moved indoors.

My mother was making lemonade at the side table while she chatted to Mrs. Newman. Bob had been sent to dig ice from the saw-dust bin in the outhouse, and arrived just as the men did, with the stone jug full of it, cracked and washed.

“Not much room for lemon juice, mother,” he said.

My mother took it with her gentle “Thank you, dear.” And Bob continued on his way to his room.

“Why the boiling water?” asked the judge, noting the kettle.

“It’s a new wrinkle for making lemonade that Carol found in some book,” explained my father.

“Just you wait and you will see,” added my mother. “Mrs. Newman is entirely skeptical.”

“She says that if you pour the boiling water into a jug filled with ice and lemon juice, it will be the coldest iced lemonade in a few minutes that you have ever tasted.” Mrs. Newman repeated my mother’s recipe as well as she could for laughing.

“The proof of the pudding will be the eating,” my mother remarked. “Wait and see.”

“I say that nothing can be colder than cold,” chuckled Mrs. Newman.

“You had better not be too positive. Carol is a genius in her way,” suggested my father. “You might argue that no one can make lemonade that is sourer than sour. But Carol does.”

In spite of the heat, Mrs. Newman had to rock herself in enjoyment of that comparison.

My mother paid no attention to the baiting. She poured the hot water into the jug and sat back waiting. Mrs. Newman turned for her usual crack with my father.

“I hope that you are not abusing my boy Bob, now that you have started to dry him out sufficiently to make him into a banker,” she said.

Like her husband, Mrs. Newman never missed an opportunity to intimate that she considered my father’s ideas of discipline old-fashioned and severe.

“When a mother has nine daughters to market she must not be too particular,” retorted my father. “You cannot hope for nine sons-in-law who are all up to your specifications.”

“Robert is doing so well,” my mother put in. “We are both greatly pleased.”

“By the way, Loftus, what are you going to do with Timothy?” the judge asked. “He is such a delicate lad.”

“He is a sensitive boy too,” my father replied. “That makes him quite a problem. His own idea—I don’t know where he got it—is to be a painter.”

Mrs. Newman’s laugh belched heartily. A painter suggested to her Mickey McGowan, the whitewash man, in his smeared overalls.

My mother’s manner stiffened slightly. She cherished in secret the idea of having an artist in the family, something a little different from all the men she had known. Artists were romantic, and not funny as Mrs. Newman appeared to think.

“I’ll show you some of his drawings,” she said. “He has a good deal of natural talent.”

And Mrs. Newman realized that she had seen a joke where none was intended—an error of judgment that she not infrequently made.

Her husband shook his head.

“You are not serious,” he said. “That does not seem to be much of a way of making a living.”

“The boy is quite set on it,” my father told him. “I don’t know where he got the notion, but that’s the reason I feel we shouldn’t discourage him. As for myself, I know a pretty picture when I see one, but I couldn’t even draw a straight line without a ruler.”

Judge Newman looked round critically at our pictures. My mother had wanted paintings for her parlor, so her husband pleased her shortly after their marriage by ordering fifteen oils from a travelling dealer. They were what Liza proudly described as “hand painted” to distinguish them from the engravings, colored and plain, that decorated the majority of homes in the village. All of them were landscapes, done at sunrise or sunset or in the autumn—it did not much matter which so long as dashes of red could be introduced to brighten the general effect. They were very nice pictures indeed; they looked quite like what they were intended to be, almost as natural as photographs. Also they had the poetry of yellow foliage and red clouds, which photographs can never give you. Hundreds of such paintings brightened the parlors of the Province, unsigned, but they might all have been the work of one man, so strong was the family likeness.

“How much would one of them bring?” asked the judge. He covered his walls with large engravings, the larger the better, The Monarch of the Glen, The Horse Fair, Dignity and Impudence and the inevitable Fathers of Confederation.

“About fifteen dollars, as I remember,” my father answered.

“I suppose a well trained painter could do three or four a day,” calculated the judge. “That would not be so bad, provided he could sell them when they were finished.”

Having discovered that the subject was a serious one, Mrs. Newman now attempted to mollify my mother by treating it as such, though she knew quite well that musicians and painters had to live in foreign countries in order to amount to anything. Or who ever heard of authors of any account in Canada? Her memory heaved up a scrap of information buried since she had ceased to teach school. Wasn’t there poor Mr. Richardson, a second Fenimore Cooper, once upon a time? And he starved to death or something. But Mrs. Newman had a suggestion which she felt to be an inspiration.

“Why not make a parson out of Tim?” she said. “That would please Mrs. Glint. Then he could paint on week-days as much as he liked. Between them both he would live as comfortably as most.”

My mother never could see eye to eye with the practical Newmans when it came to the arts. Literature, music and painting—she spoke of them only a little less reverently than she said “The Church.” To her, the attitude of Mrs. Newman was among the minor blasphemies. The judge knew instinctively that such subjects should be avoided, so he put down his empty lemonade glass with a word of appreciation for its coldness.

“Come on, my dear,” he added, “I have to make an early start tomorrow. Let us get home to our potato growers.”

II.

The hot spell had reached that point when the nights were worse than the days. In the late afternoon, a flaming breeze blew against you like the breath from an oven door, but at least there was life in the air. The movement went down with the sun. At night the atmosphere became something that had died, and the dead body, hot and clammy, lay on you and smothered you. Only just before daybreak came a slight dampness that was a substitute for coolness.

Dr. Moreland had done many things in his later years to strain the loyalty of his friends. The last and greatest test of all was his funeral. “Hell is pretty close to the surface to welcome him,” suggested Gregory Reynolds, but he put on his heavy blacks and turned out too.

Night had not slept under the heavy sky, and the tiny voices of dawn, that stir sharply in the departing darkness, were listless. The face of the lamp by which my father dressed looked wan, as though its duties had been a weariness. The sun was rising like an inflamed harvest moon in the eastern mist when the two crow-like figures, oozing perspiration, drove away in Judge Newman’s sulky.

“I hope you will not be ill,” said my mother, at the gate to see them depart. Her placid beauty seemed to be the only cool thing left on the earth.

But the papers of all the towns in the constituency bore testimony the following week that “the most impressive cortège ever witnessed in the county” followed “our illustrious son” to “his last resting place.” Nothing was omitted from the expected routine. Enough baked meats to have fed all the voters who ever marked a ballot for the dead man were spread on the dining-room table in the Moreland home. It was a custom that survived from a generation that set apart an entire day to show proper respect for the departed, when friends drove long distances to be present, ravenous with journeying.

The black suits were not regarded as a sufficient expression of woe. The undertaker supplied flowing streamers to be tied round the hat, hanging dismally behind, and another band to circle the arm. Over the shoulder and fastened with a cockade at the hip, the men of prominence in the ceremonies wore rolls of black cloth. As Mrs. Moreland spared no expense, fine French merino was provided for those who mourned her husband. It is recorded that daughters of prominent Tories were appearing in all parts of the county for at least five years in dresses made from material secured at the burial of the late member. The undertaker had black gloves also for those who desired them. Every man was wrapped up sufficiently to face a blizzard.

The pall bearers did not attend the funeral in the capacity of honored guests, who carried the coffin only a few yards and who differed in no other respect from their fellow mourners. They were symbols of the friendship that sticks closer than a brother to the very end. With the paraphernalia of grief draped about them, they ploughed through the dust inches deep, from the house to the cemetery, three on either side of the hearse, while their boots and trouser-legs turned gradually from black to grey. The blistering sun cracked the earth about their feet in the shadeless grave-yard, but they stood solemnly while the pastor, himself so dizzy as scarcely to be able to speak clearly, talked appropriately of dust to dust.

So Dr. Moreland, who might have been Dr. Whitty-Moreland but for some streak in him that disliked ostentation, drew about him for the last time the men who had so often cheered his words and shouted at the mention of his name. Some of them whispered with regret of the career that might have been his, but others were more knowing and gave voice to doubts that they claimed to have entertained from the beginning. Now the only thing that really mattered was the choice of his successor.

Noses were erect to sniff scandal too. Who was the woe-stricken woman, faded and timid and middle-aged, who arrived from Ottawa to attend the funeral, and stayed at the hotel? She was the only woman, except the sight-seers, who followed to the grave-side, a brazen act in itself. And nobody could ascertain her identity, which made things worse.

This brave woman might have told them that hers was a tribute to a noble friendship. As the impoverished widow of the closest chum of Dr. Moreland’s college days, she had experienced a generosity that made the years ahead of her look dark indeed. People were not informed of these things. They did not learn later that this widow became the companion of Mrs. Moreland, when she went abroad to live. Dr. Moreland’s good deeds were buried as deep as his body. In the stories of the funeral that rattled over the teacups in remote households throughout the county during the months that followed, the woman from Ottawa grew into a creature of golden hair and cosmetics, who flaunted tainted jewelry in the presence of tragedy.

Just after sundown, Judge Newman dropped my father at the door.

“Do you want something to eat?” my mother asked, as he came up.

“No thank you,” he replied, and his voice was not as weary as she had feared it would be. “I only want to get off every garment I decently can.”

“And I’ll find you something cooling to drink.”

In the gathering darkness, they talked over the events of the day.

“Carol,” said my father, “it will take you nearly a week of hard brushing to get the dust out of my clothes. But do not start work on them until it turns cool.”

“You seem cheerful in spite of your terrible day,” she suggested, surprised.

“It had its redeeming features,” he told her, “Sir John A. being there. I forgot to tell you that I talked to him for nearly ten minutes.”

III.

When was it, I have often wondered, that the worship of political heroes ceased to be common in Canada. In the eighties men still felt strongly about the party to which they belonged, and still more strongly about the party to which they did not belong. If you were a Grit, you regarded the Tories as the defenders of social privilege, and accused them of being selfish and debauched. If you were a Tory, you spoke of the Grits as cranks and hypocrites, whose loyalty to the Crown it was even possible to doubt. In small communities, Tories and Grits had to mix socially, but there could hardly be much intimacy among them. How was it possible for a host to place himself on easy terms with a guest, any mention of whose politics had to be avoided as carefully as one would avoid reference to a murderer in the presence of his brothers? The man who first said, “I don’t care which side I vote for. It doesn’t make any difference, because one crowd is as bad as the other” had not yet been born. I believe they would have lynched him, socially if not physically. A laughing tolerance of everything connected with the selection of the men to run the country was unthinkable, a sign of degenerate citizenship.

They had the lusty hatreds that give zest to politics, and I fear that nobody ever campaigned heartily and effectively for any party with only devotion and idealism as his stimulus. When you feel your gall pouring out its bitterness at the mention of the men against whom you have voted, then you begin to develop an unreasoning adoration of your own leaders.

In the eighties, a man’s political leanings were regarded as part of his character. You had to know the party he favored in order to make up your mind whether it was safe to trust him. My father could not have understood that man, found everywhere to-day, who votes, if he takes the notion, for one outfit of party leaders but expresses himself as utterly contemptuous of all politicians.

The presence of Sir John A. MacDonald—ten minutes of his conversation—was sufficient to take the curse off a day that would otherwise have been a nightmare of discomfort. He was as real a hero to my father as Prince Rupert must have been to the Cavaliers. In these days, nobody would treasure the memory of entertainment offered to a politician as we remembered the one visit, overnight, of Sir John A. to our home.

Nothing of moment happened on that occasion. After tea, the men retired to the library, all eyes centred with male adoration for male upon the gaunt figure picking his ungainly way to a chair, a strange bird scuffling round and settling. They smoked and talked for many hours, much as Judge Newman and my father would pass an evening or so every week, except that the blue decanter had to be replenished several times—as a rule one filling lasted for a number of entertainments.

If anybody uttered a word of unusual wit or wisdom, it was smothered in the smoke. The one saying of the Premier that remained in the history of our home did not have its origin in the intimate discussion that filled the hours between tea and bedtime.

In the morning, the station platform was crowded with men and women who wanted to get a glimpse of Sir John A. before he departed. He seemed familiar with everyone. A squire leaving his native village could not have been more at home in the crowd. Children, from Tory homes, were rushed forward to shake hands with him, in order that they might boast of it in the years to come. Village wits shouted remarks, hoping to provoke a retort worth remembering.

Geordie Palfreyman arrived on the station platform just before train time. He was unusually sober for Geordie at a public function, but then it was only nine-thirty in the morning. He claimed attention, and Sir John shook hands with him with all the cordiality of an old friend.

Geordie did look upon himself as an old friend and not an ordinary admirer. He asked with a wink, “Do you remember that night, Sir John?”

It was a baffling question, and Sir John fished a little, banteringly. He did not enquire directly what night and where, but he left an opening for more particulars.

Geordie was shrewd. He twigged the artifice.

“I don’t believe you remember me,” he said, and then a little reproachfully, “And I remembered your face, Sir John, though I was drunk and you were sober at the bonfire after the meeting.”

My father came to the rescue, cheerily, “Oh yes, Palfreyman,” he said, “but you must bear in mind that Sir John possesses that rare type of beauty which once seen is never forgotten.”

Sir John A. saw an opportunity to sidestep skilfully the reproach of having forgotten a face.

“Yes, Palfreyman,” he retorted, “and by the same token our friend Loftus may be numbered among the immortals.”

I.

Four times a year, Aunt Henrietta’s funds, as her daughters called them, returned a dividend. Her money was handled by trustees who lived in Toronto. She had accumulated cash in the village bank too, and at intervals my father consulted her regarding expenditures and investments. These interviews were always difficult to get started, and still more difficult to get stopped. Aunt Henrietta invariably refused at first to listen to a word about business. She was too old to be bothered and she paid her banker to arrange things for her, so why should she have her nerves upset?

Having consented to look into the one matter that required her attention, she continued to ask questions about other things, items here and items there, many of them long since cleared away. Aunt Henrietta never admitted having forgotten anything. If she took into her head to enquire about an investment that was not there, she smelt an irregularity. My father itemized and she stormed. She might have known that everything would be at sixes and sevens if she trusted anybody instead of doing things herself.

She had her own way of getting round her forgetfulness without accusing her nephew of defalcations.

“I know you forget, Harper,” she shouted, “I tell you I did not instruct you to sell that. It must have been Sadie. No, I don’t want to see any papers. I know it was Sadie. They keep me locked in my dark room and go about doing things behind my back. Don’t you say another word,” thumping with her cane, “I tell you it must have been Sadie. No. I won’t look at any signatures on paper. I am not going to be bothered this way. Listen to me, Harper, will you? I would not have thought of doing such a thing.”

Then, possibly, a new scent crossed the trail, and Aunt Henrietta was off in full cry, raging, questioning and refusing to wait for an answer in her anxiety to contradict every statement point blank. But she invariably became plaintive before my father departed.

“I don’t know what I should do without you, Harper,” she said. “You are the only person I can trust to keep me informed accurately about my affairs.” And then a moment later, “Why do you come here bothering me with business matters? I know I shall not sleep a wink tonight.”

At the door, Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen, all a-flutter, made something like an apology.

“You must not mind what mamma says, Harper. I hope you are not offended.”

To which he replied, “You needn’t worry, girls. When Aunt Henrietta gets fussed, she is inclined to be just a tiny bit unreasonable at times. But if we got excited enough for you to notice, forget about it.”

“You know she thinks more of you than anyone,” went on Sadie, accompanying him to the gate.

My father sometimes remarked after one of these business consultations.

“I am well pleased, Carol, that the bulk of Aunt Henrietta’s money is handled in Toronto.”

And that was a good deal for him to say.

Once the Toronto trustee paid a visit to the village. After he had been ordered to take his thieving face out of the cottage, he threatened to resign, but as an old friend of the late Horace Glint, he yielded at last to the persuasion of my father, who admitted frankly that he dreaded to have so much responsibility on his hands. “It is much better,” he said, “for the trustee to live in another town, so that he need never see Mrs. Glint. Let us co-operate, and things will be easier for both of us.”

Accordingly, it was arranged that one of Aunt Henrietta’s daughters should go to Toronto every three months, to sign the necessary papers and receive the quarterly income.

Sadie, Kathleen and Clara were supposed to take turns, each one having a short trip at least once a year. Aunt Henrietta still told people that the girls had an even share of outing. She did not seem to notice that Cousin Clara had practically monopolized the duties of messenger. Sometimes Cousin Sadie or Cousin Kathleen would have to miss her turn because Aunt Henrietta had decided that she could not spare either of them in that particular week. Sometimes Cousin Clara urged a special claim. She had noticed by the paper that a certain actor was to be in the city in the “most wonderful play in the world,” and she would “simply die” if she didn’t see it.

Aunt Henrietta always stamped on any selfish attempt to thwart Clara. On one occasion, Cousin Sadie protested, “But I should greatly like to see that play myself. I have been reading about it in the newspapers, and I haven’t seen one of the great actors from England for years and years.”

But Aunt Henrietta had squelched her, “What is the use of you seeing a play. You are too great a fool to take it in.”

Cousin Kathleen had weakened her right to make the trip by disgracing herself. Her mother frequently complained that it was a waste of money to send Kathleen to the city; she came home as dumb as an oyster, with nothing whatever to tell. The next time, Kathleen returned with an excited story of how she had dined with the Hodges—evening dinner no less. She met Stella Hodges on the street, and received an informal invitation, but it turned out to be a most impressive meal, six courses.

“Not Sandy Hodges’ family,” shrieked my aunt from the other room, “Sandy Hodges who used to keep the harness shop here when you were children.”

Kathleen hastened to explain that Alexander Hodges had made a great success of something or other in the city, and was very wealthy.

“What do I care about that?” shouted back her mother. “They are low people.”

“They live in Pembroke Street,” said Kathleen on the defensive. “And only the very nicest people live there.”

“Don’t answer me back, miss,” commanded her mother. “If you haven’t the sense to behave yourself in Toronto so as not to disgrace the name of Glint, I’ll have to refuse to let you go at all.”

“Let’s hear about the dinner,” suggested Clara. “What did you have for the six courses, Kathleen?”

“Not another word,” yelled her mother. “Mere vulgar ostentation, to show you what a lot of money they have.”

“I’ve had dinner at the Queen’s with Stella,” giggled Clara when the three sisters were together in the kitchen. “But I had more sense than to tell mamma. I think Stella Hodges is a sweet girl, and so smart.”

After that when Kathleen hinted that it was her turn to visit Toronto, she was promptly reminded of her improper behavior with that Hodges creature, and warned not to speak to such people on familiar terms again.

But the midsummer trip belonged to Cousin Clara. If they had been adhering faithfully to the schedule, she would have gone in July. True she visited Toronto for the funds in January and again in April, but on both occasions she had found it necessary to argue for the privilege, or at least to appeal to Aunt Henrietta, but neither Cousin Sadie or Cousin Kathleen disputed July with her.

Just in time for Clara’s outing, nature set to work with determination and washed itself clean of the heat. All Friday night, thunderstorms chased back and forth across the village, passing and repassing with shifting winds. On Saturday, everything steamed. Exhausted men and women in clammy clothes told one another that the dry heat was better than this. The sky disappeared behind a grey veil. Horses refused to work in the humidity.

Saturday night, clouds, black as though they contained all the water drawn from the earth during the torrid spell, came up from the northwest, spreading with a deliberation that meant business. The rain swept down in torrents, riding on a gale. Corn fields and hollyhocks went flat, and trees, after reaching frantically for remote branches, let them go; the struggle to hold to their roots was exhausting enough. All night it poured, while the earth drank its fill. Sunday was a day of driving clouds, out of the north; Monday brought a sky of brilliant transparent blue, and an air so soft that the days of too much heat seemed like something that could not have happened in such a pleasant land.

“Aren’t I lucky?” exclaimed Cousin Clara, standing in the hall awaiting the bus.

“You will be back Wednesday night or Thursday at the latest,” boomed Aunt Henrietta, issuing these instructions for the tenth time.

“Yes, mamma,” was the dutiful reply, also for the tenth time.

Old Jonas backed and thumped, yelled “Whoa,” “Gee,” “Geddap,” then bumped again, until the bus was placed squarely against the carriage platform, so that Cousin Clara could step easily into the vehicle. Driving in the bus with Old Jonas was a harrowing experience. He had so much consideration for their comfort in landing that those who knew him best dreaded to reach their destination. He jolted and jarred his passengers to the point of sea-sickness in order to place his bus so that they could alight without effort. In vain, nervous ladies called, “I can get out quite easily now, Mr. Jonas.” In his own sphere, Old Jonas refused to stop short of perfection. Then he got down smilingly to open the door, and was grieved when a man or woman tottered out with no word of appreciation.

Clara kissed Sadie and Kathleen for the last time, and tripped gaily into the bus.

“The roads are pretty rough,” remarked a sea-green old lady with her bonnet over one ear. “I wish that I had walked to the station.”

“I don’t mind,” replied Cousin Clara Glint. “I love any sort of travelling.”

And they rocked away down Victoria Avenue at an angle that made the sea-green lady wonder if two of the wheels were in the ditch.

II.

Late Friday afternoon, Sadie arrived at our house to tell my mother that she and Kathleen would not be able to pay their weekly visit. They could not leave Aunt Henrietta alone.

“We are quite worried,” said Sadie. “Clara should have been home last night, but she has sent no word. We cannot think what is detaining her.”

“The weather has been so delightful,” suggested my mother. “Clara is doubtless enjoying herself. It will be quite bearable even in the city.”

Like all people who live in villages, no matter how baked and comfortless they may be, my mother had the notion that any city in a torrid spell must be at least thirty degrees hotter. That thought cheered residents of Victoria Avenue, gasping in their stuffy rooms, during a stagnant night in the breezeless river valley.

“She should have sent word anyway,” declared Sadie. “It has made dear mamma so difficult to-day.”

Dear mamma had indeed been difficult. When it became a certainty that Cousin Clara was not on the morning train, Aunt Henrietta ordered her bedroom door shut and remained unheard for two hours.

Then Kathleen knocked and timidly announced that dinner was ready. She had her mother’s tray, a little cold chicken with potato salad, a pot of tea with rolls, and some late raspberries that had revived miraculously in the rain that followed the hot spell.

“What’s that?” demanded Aunt Henrietta.

Kathleen told her.

“What a meal for chilly weather like this,” exclaimed the old woman in the bed. “I don’t want cold chicken and I hate potato salad, except on a hot day. Why didn’t you have the sense to do something appetizing, a veal cutlet and fried potatoes.”

“You asked for chicken on Tuesday, and we have had such trouble getting one at this time of the year,” Sadie reminded her.

“This is not Tuesday; this is Friday, and Clara should be home by now. Why wasn’t I asked what I wanted to-day? Why are you girls so secretive?” shouted Aunt Henrietta.

“We didn’t like to disturb you.”

“It should not be necessary to disturb me. But when there are two fools running the house, I am prepared to be disturbed.” She lay down again and pulled up the bed-clothes. “Take that stuff away, and get me something warm and eatable.”

Sadie had to put on her hat and hasten to the butcher store, while Kathleen peeled potatoes to fry. An hour later, Aunt Henrietta got her cutlet and potatoes, but by that time she could not enjoy them because, so she said, the undue delay had given her a headache.

“Do you think it is a good joke to starve me, just because I am lying here helpless?” she bayed at them, as they were making a fidgetty arrangement of the napkin on her tray.

“Anyway, Caroline,” Sadie told my mother, “I do not think it is kind or thoughtful for Clara to stay away without sending word. It always upsets mamma.”

III.

Gregory Reynolds was an outcast on his own tennis courts. His friends looked upon tennis as a game of long rallies, in which points were scored when somebody cleverly put the ball into a remote corner where his opponent could not reach it, or when a player carelessly made a mistake in his stroke. The gallery applauded an apparently endless exchange of nicely lobbed balls, as an audience might applaud a juggler who had kept a collection of spheres tossing in the air to the point of exhaustion. But Gregory Reynolds went into tennis to win or to lose. His method on the courts was to play the whole game, and if he did not win it for himself, he lost it for himself. He smashed every ball that he touched. No one ever saw him serve an easy bouncer—his last ounce of strength went into both the first and the second. If he produced a double fault, he grinned—his substitute for a smile—and accepted the penalty. If either one happened to be good, he scored, for it seldom came back. His games contained no pretty rallies. On days when he happened to be accurate and lucky, he took his points, fifteen, thirty, forty, game, from the man beyond the net, who looked on weakly while it happened. At other times he banged and crashed the game away to an equally impotent opponent. Usually it was the former.

Everybody agreed that Gregory Reynolds’ method was miserably bad form. It was not tennis at all. Belle told him what her guests said, and he talked of bloodless livers and the comparative safety of a louse in the presence of the men who frequented his sister’s tennis parties.

They took their revenge by telling one another that Gregory Reynolds played his games like a Yankee, to win at all costs.

In the eighties, Canadians were not as intimate with their cousins across the boundary line as they have since become. They were probably a little more of one blood than they are now, but they talked less about it. Goodwill towards men who made the mistake of living under a different flag still remained a foolish song, chanted by unworldly beings once upon a time, in the middle of the night, in Palestine—a pretty phrase but not in the least practical.

The typical faults of the United States and England were taken for granted among the citizens of the Dominion. No Ontario boy ever doubted for a moment that there was truth behind the assertion that a display of bad sportsmanship made him resemble a Yankee—a comprehensive word covering an entire nation. Dishonest tricks in business were supposed to complete the likeness. These notions were accepted as truisms, just as naturally as millions of people in the year 1919 believed that God’s special gift to the Germans was a brutal nature which nothing in this world or the next could neutralize. When a Canadian acquaintance turned out to be a bad sport or a sharper, it kept our pride in our social tone unsullied to be able to cast him off spiritually by saying, “He has always been a regular Yankee.”

The complaints against the English were quite as bitter in their way. The British were complacent, dunder-headed people who did not appreciate Canada, and of course one hates to be unappreciated. England was a doting parent who insisted upon sending lavish hampers to the prodigal son, frequently at the expense of the faithful offspring. The Mother Land showed an unfailing willingness to sacrifice Canada’s interests in order to be pleasant to her eldest son, now master in his own house, but nevertheless a prodigal. “Kowtowing to the Yankees,” was the phrase that Canadians used to describe England’s attitude to Uncle Sam. Could you imagine a greater cause of complaint? Over many a dinner table the exasperating details were bandied about—the Ashburton Treaty gave away what belonged to Canada; and worse and worse, how completely the wrongs done to Canadians during the Fenian Raids had been ignored. The list tapered off into lesser items still fastened to the memory by their sting. In the whole history of the world, was loyalty ever before treated so shabbily? So they railed at the callous aloofness of the English.

Insularity. Certainly, they had heard the word, and it meant the same then as it does to-day. Insularity is the term used to describe the attitude of other nations that do not know our national perfections as well as we feel they should. But what possible connection could there be between insularity and the verdict that Gregory Reynolds played tennis like a Yankee?

Those players who preferred form to points dodged playing with Gregory Reynolds. He did not whine about being sent to Coventry, but he went out and made the discovery that Bob was a boy after his own heart, who did everything that he could, on his own side of the net, to win the game and found no fault with his opponent’s method.

On Saturday afternoon, Gregory Reynolds called at the bank to take Bob home for a game of tennis. At first, my father refused to let him go. Work had accumulated during the hot spell and was now being overtaken.

“So long as Robert is working here,” he explained, “I do not think that he should be given special privileges that I do not allow the other clerks.”

“Then let all the clerks go,” suggested Reynolds. “It’s nearly four o’clock. I guess I’ll have to wait round until he’s ready.”

So he seated himself and lighted his pipe, pattered impatiently with his heel, got up and walked about, sat down and pattered again, until my father admitted that the boys had slaved sufficiently for one week.

“Take Robert and go to your tennis,” he said.

Gregory Reynolds grinned.

“You had better drop in on your way home,” he suggested. “Belle will give you a welcome.”

When my father arrived at the courts, the players had deserted two of the nets to watch Bob battle with the bad form. The boy had no chance to win, but he fought every inch of the way. Not a ball crashed into his territory that he did not attempt to go after, content to get it back in hopes that Mr. Reynolds would smash a point against himself. The spectators resorted to bad etiquette to punish Reynolds for his bad form. If the firm young arm managed to pick up a scudding ball and drop it just over the net, they applauded; and applauded again, with more emphasis, if the man tried a volley that ended in disaster. Organized disapproval did not abash Gregory Reynolds. He grinned appreciatively at the grim steadiness of his youthful opponent.

As my father joined the gallery, the pace setter ended what had been almost a rally by sending a glancing bullet of a ball to the outer edge of the court.

“Get that one if you can, you God damned little bulldog,” said Gregory Reynolds.

Miss Belle beckoned the newest arrival among her guests to join her under the large umbrella that shaded the refreshments.

“This match appears to be quite a feature,” observed my father. “Robert plays a courageous game of tennis.”

“It suits Gregory,” Miss Belle replied. “But it is not tennis.”

They stood together and surveyed the party.

“I hear that you have made quite a conquest of Mr. Lytton,” he remarked teasingly, “but I don’t see him with your guests this afternoon.”

“He left town on Tuesday,” replied Miss Belle, quite casually. She refused to appear interested in a man who had not given her the courtesy of a good-bye.

“Indeed,” observed my father, more alert for news than he would have wanted her to suspect. “Will he be back?”

“I think he was more likely to confide his intentions to Robert than to me,” Miss Belle said, nodding in the direction of the players.

“Why to Robert?” almost sharply.

“They were such pals. Surely you knew that Robert was in the habit of visiting Mr. Lytton in his room.”

“Of course, of course,” he answered, sorry to have given her the satisfaction of such a query. He turned about and began to talk of the improved green of the garden after a week of rain and cool nights.

Nevertheless the stray scrap of gossip had lodged in his mind. He could think of nothing else when he and Bob were returning home together after the game. Harper and I liked to walk with father. We could chatter incessantly without the constant corrections of grammar and manners that mother felt to be her parental duty, and his interruptions in the form of laconic quizzes did not bother us in the least. But with Bob he was different. They strode along together, the boy accommodating himself to the man’s long swinging step, and the remarks exchanged were few and mostly formal.

My father asked, “How did you do in the tennis to-day, Robert?”

And Bob replied, “I won three games in the first set, sir, but after that Mr. Reynolds got stronger. In the last two sets he only let me have one game, although we were deuce quite often.”

“I like the plucky game you play, Robert. I felt quite proud of your showing.”

“Thank you, sir.”

They were nearing the gate of our home when my father said, “I understand that you have been talking with Mr. Lytton. I suppose, Robert, that you know he is your uncle.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your mother and I, for excellent reasons, which I shall tell you when you are a little older, have had nothing to do with him for a great many years.”

“I gathered that, sir.”

Father paused in his walk to make the importance of his next remark clear.

“I hope that you have not been spending too much of your time with him.”

Bob answered briefly from behind his wall of reserve.

“I have only talked to him once sir, and then not for any longer than I could help,” he said.

IV.

When Cousin Clara did not return by Sunday, Aunt Henrietta Glint became more difficult than her daughters had ever known her. It was all the fault of Sadie and Kathleen. If they were not so selfish, if they did not continually make things uncomfortable for their younger sister, she would not be so anxious to remain away from home. They ought to remember that she was different from a pair of old maids, and needed a little diversion. When they were as young as Clara, they did not have an elder sister thwarting them all the time.

Sadie and Kathleen held consultations in the kitchen, out of hearing of mamma. Ought they to write to Clara or to the trustee? Of course, they knew now that she had stayed over Sunday to attend service at St. James Cathedral. That was the one reason that would occur to Sadie or Kathleen for remaining in Toronto over Sunday. Beautiful St. James, with the dear canon’s immense voice filling the whole building, a little like mamma, and yet so different. It would be foolish to alarm the trustee, merely because Clara had a natural desire to worship in the cathedral. They went back within reach of Aunt Henrietta’s thunders and waited patiently, certain of the arrival of their sister on the Monday morning train.

On Wednesday, Kathleen urged Sadie to consult Cousin Harper. He would be able to tell them what was best to do.

“You can drop into the bank on the way to the butcher’s,” she said. “It is nearly an hour since I heard the train. Evidently, Clara is not coming home this morning.”

But it happened that Cousin Clara had returned to the village on the train which Kathleen heard whistling, sharp on time as it swept round the maple sugar bush approaching the station. Twenty minutes later, the bus rocked down Victoria Avenue. When it failed to stop at their gate, Sadie and Kathleen looked at one another and sighed, but said nothing for fear that Aunt Henrietta might hear them.

As Sadie turned off Victoria Avenue to climb the hill that took her to Front Street, she ran into Clara, standing by her valise under the shade of a large mountain ash. Unusual things had happened so frequently during the week that Sadie scarcely felt surprised. It seemed quite natural to find her sister waiting under that tree, although it was the first time in her life that Cousin Clara had walked from the station and carried her valise. Furthermore, there was no reason why she should have taken so long about it on a cool day.

Sadie stood still and stared, without even a greeting.

Clara ran forward with playful grimaces and kissed her sister.

“I was waiting for you,” she said. “I knew you would be going to shop.”

“But why here?” asked Sadie. “Mamma has been so anxious.”

Clara put her hands before her face, pretending to be terribly frightened and shy, though her laughing lips could be seen. She peered between her fingers.

“Because I have lost the money.”

Sadie took in the significance of this statement slowly. She believed from past experience that people only lost small coins, not large sums.

“What money?”

“The money I got in Toronto, of course,” her sister replied.

“However did you do that?” exclaimed Sadie.

“I don’t know,” said Clara. “My bag must have come open or something, I just lost it.”

Sadie’s mind was galloping, or rather moving at a rate as near a gallop as Sadie’s mind ever travelled.

“How much was it?”

“Five hundred dollars, I think,” Clara told her.

Sadie stood aghast.

“Whatever will mamma say?”

Clara gave her a loud kiss, surely an ill-bred thing to do in such a public place.

“I want you and Kathleen to tell mamma.”

“Oh, Clara, how could you be so careless?”

And Cousin Sadie sat down on Clara’s valise right in the middle of the sidewalk, which was quite as ill-bred as kissing in public.

Sadie had never before been called upon to face such a crisis single-handed, but she rose to the occasion as though subterfuge were her daily exercise.

After thinking for a few moments, with her face buried in her hands, she looked up and said, “We must not bother mamma. Kathleen and I have quite a good deal of money of our own in the bank. Now you go right home and tell them about your visit until I come. I’ll get the five hundred dollars from Cousin Harper.”

“Oh, you love,” cried Clara. “I hoped you would do that.”

As soon as Sadie had regained her feet, Clara picked up her valise as though it weighed nothing, and started along Victoria Avenue.

When Sadie sat down opposite my father in his office, she hardly knew how to explain the crime that she wished to commit. Only after Clara tripped happily on her way did Sadie realize the enormity of her suggestion. Not once before in her whole life, regardless of consequences, had she deliberately deceived mamma. How angry mamma would be if she knew what Sadie was about! Then the thought came to her that if mamma knew, she could not be angry because, knowing, she would not be deceived. Sadie’s brain, which usually dealt only in simple matters of good manners and conduct, was chaotic. All she felt sure of was that the member of the Glint family who had done something to make them feel ashamed was Sadie the deceiver, not Clara, who had merely been unfortunate in losing the money.

It relieved her to find that Cousin Harper did not refuse to be a party to her criminal proceedings. He was kindness itself in refraining from any mention of deceit. How she loved him for being so understanding and considerate. He could be chivalrous, though he so often shocked her by showing tendencies to the modern commonness to be seen everywhere.

He only remarked, “Clara would lose her head if it was not fastened on.”

As he was tying the bills in an envelope for her, he added, “It seems to me that you and Kathleen are unnecessarily generous.”

“But mamma! What would mamma say?” twittered Sadie.

“I should have let her say her say to Clara,” my father replied.

Sadie and Kathleen had seldom seen Clara in such spirits. She handed over the five hundred dollars to Aunt Henrietta as soon as her sister arrived home. That ended the little matter of the lost money without comment or explanation. Then she felt quite free to rush into mamma’s room and smother her with bursts of enthusiasm and delighted antics. She could not remember ever having enjoyed a trip to Toronto so much, not even in the winter when she attended the theatre. She made her mother guess where she had been staying instead of coming home when expected. No, no, no, all the guesses were wrong.

“Go on and tell me, child,” cried Aunt Henrietta Glint. “How am I to know?”

“With the Hodges,” said Clara.

Sadie and Kathleen gazed at one another in roundeyed horror. One meal with the Hodges had almost vulgarized Kathleen for life. How would a week beneath the roof affect Clara?

Aunt Henrietta paused. “Those people,” she said, and then with interest, “Do they live in Pembroke Street?”

“Oh yes, mamma,” replied Clara. “And they sent to the hotel for me. They have their own Victoria and coachman.”

“They have done very well in the city, apparently,” observed her mother. “I noticed last January that Alexander Hodges’ name was on the list of New Year’s callers at Government House.”

“They go with the best,” Clara assured her. “They serve six courses at dinner.”

Kathleen remembered that her impressions of the Hodges had been similar to Clara’s, but when she tried to describe them as an excuse for her misconduct, they had only caused her mother to shout, “Ostentation. To think that a daughter of mine should be taken in by vulgar ostentation.” But Clara had a way with her. Not even mamma could resist her gayety and girlish happiness. Sadie and Kathleen thought how pleasant it must be to radiate joy like their sister.

In the evening, they walked together, as they often did, up and down the path in front of the house. Their whispers were interrupted by Clara, who rushed down upon them, embracing both about the waist.

“I love you,” she said excitedly, but in an undertone, “for helping me with the lost money. I am going to tell you a secret, the greatest, greatest secret you have ever heard.”

Sadie and Kathleen were filled with gasping delight. They seldom heard a secret of any account, and then it was usually a widely shared one.

“And you must not tell a soul, not even mamma, until it is all over,” she told them.

“What is it?” they urged her.

“I am going to be married.”

She paused to get the full effect of their surprise. It was not entirely a surprise. Any great secret had to do with romance, and there could be no romance without a wedding ring.

“But you can’t marry without letting mamma know,” exclaimed Sadie. And Kathleen whispered to herself, “Oh, this is too romantic!”

“Not a soul must know in the village except we three,” emphasized Clara squeezing them.

“Who is it?” asked Sadie.

Clara was embodied mystery. She had promised not to tell, just yet. She was making an exception in mentioning it to them, but they had been so sweet to her.

They hugged themselves in sympathetic tremors, and Sadie ventured, “Is it Sam?”

“Sam? Who is Sam?” Clara enquired.

“Why, Sam Hodges,” replied Kathleen. “Don’t you think he is dashing?”

“Oh, Stella’s brother,” said Clara. “Yes, I remember that Stella has a brother. No, you are wrong.”

It was odd, thought Sadie that night, lying in bed awaiting sleep, that Clara should have forgotten the existence of Stella’s brother Sam. Such a strange lapse of memory after being a week in a house. Wasn’t romance wonderful, blinding a girl to the presence of every man in the world except the one?

I.

The by-election to fill the vacant constituency would be held in October. That much was taken for granted. An earlier date might clash with busy days on the farms, but after the harvest was safe the farmers would enjoy a day off to go a-voting. Under the surface, the political tides began to run strongly immediately after Dr. Moreland’s funeral. It was a close riding at the best of times, fifty votes one way or the other usually told the tale, so party committees got together and discussed the best ways of making sure of those fifty votes. It would be a disfiguring black eye for Sir John A. if he lost one seat in the house so soon after the general elections, but his friends were determined that nothing of the sort should happen—no matter what it cost. Even the most conscientious party men were frank about the unseemly cost of elections.

My father attended a meeting at Petersville, the home of the late member. Hopeful politicians, several of them with the lurking feeling that they possessed the qualities that make ideal dark horses, aided by a cabinet minister from Ottawa, spread out the situation and looked it over. The end of Dr. Moreland’s career was lamentable. It had left an unpleasant taste in the mouths of certain voters. A few loyal friends, mostly from outside the riding, praised him for his openhanded life; no shadow of hypocrisy fell across the livid path he blazed in his last years. Still, the fact that his majority fell so low when he last went to the poll indicated that gossip as an influence in politics could not be ignored. There were tender consciences, swift to condemn the private sins of public men, on the side lines in our county.

Judge Newman arrived the next evening to hear an account of the gathering, at which so many of his old friends were present. He reminded himself at intervals that he was out of politics, for the dignity of the law had to be preserved. Only in the house of his closest friend would he put aside his wig and gown to talk of the fanatics and the scoundrels, meaning anyone whose political views differed from his, who used to feel the lash of his tongue from many a platform in the hustings before he went on the bench.

“Of course, you are the only man to shoulder the task,” he said, puffing slowly at his pipe while he sprawled lazily over chair and floor.

“There is one other possibility,” said my father.

“Henry Munn.”

“Pooh, pooh,” exclaimed the judge. “The party has never sent a man of that type to the house, not from this riding anyway.”

“Do you know him?”

Judge Newman did not.

“I was most favorably impressed,” went on my father. “And there is an important point to consider. We can count on all the stalwarts for him. He is sure to get their votes anyway. We have to consider the waverers. They hold the balance of power. Munn knows them all and can get their votes for himself.”

“The very reason that you are our man, Loftus, is because of the standing of your family in the county,” declared the judge leaning forward and speaking emphatically. “Everybody respects the name of Loftus. If we have to depend on the puritans whose votes are swayed by gossip, we want you.”

“What’s this, what’s this, Newman?” laughed my father. “Surely it isn’t our county judge whom I hear talking with so much heat of us and ours. I have heard it rumored that you are out of politics.”

Newman leaned back and chuckled. He crowded the tobacco slowly into the bowl of his pipe; drew a couple of times to make sure that it was not too solid; then he remarked deliberately,—

“The nomination is yours.”

To which my father replied, “I want you to meet Henry Munn, just socially of course.”

Henry Munn had made himself well-to-do by hard work on his rich farm, coupled with thrift. He was a burly man with a head like an enormous pumpkin. Out of the round face, with the round red cheeks, looked two round blue eyes, healthy and wide-awake. No suit of clothes was ever made that would give lines to Munn’s hulking frame. His tailor, not a skilful man under the best of conditions, was content to cover Munn’s nakedness with garments that draped a little like a tweed tent.

Henry Munn was a widower, and his widowed sister, herself childless, looked after his home and his strapping, God-fearing children. All the male Munns feared God intensely, but feared nothing else. Munn believed that his submission to the will of his God accounted for all his prosperity. He attributed his exuberant good health to the fact that he had lived his life according to the laws of God,—his own particular set of morals and rules of diet being the laws of God. He had never put even a sip of the demon rum to his lips, and only knew the taste of tobacco because he could not help swallowing a little of the smoke that other men breathed into the atmosphere. As often as he could get away, he took a cart filled with children to the Methodist Churches and meeting houses that were within driving distance of his farm. If the travelling preacher failed to arrive, Henry Munn was quite capable of delivering a strong Gospel message to the gathering. Many preferred him to the weedy visitors. In that way he had developed into one of the county orators. A little uncertain at times about the meaning and arrangement of words, he rode majestically over such puny things as the laws of English grammar because he had something to say and could, in his own way, make his ideas clear.

“He is the sort of man who gives one a feeling of confidence in our rural districts,” said my father to my mother, when proposing the tea party. “He is so alive.”

“I have heard you say, yourself, that there used to be more gentlemen among the farmers than you will find to-day,” remarked my mother.

“They may have been gentlemen, but they were not farmers,” replied my father. “When I was a boy there were plenty of retired English army officers, and even retired naval men, trying to run farms in the county. They thought, poor fellows, that any fool could farm. That’s why they lost all their money at it.”

“Colonel Gilkinson was one of them?”

“Yes, but that is not the point. We must have Henry Munn and his sister to tea to meet Newman and his wife.”

My mother never attempted to alter her husband’s purpose in matters of this sort. Before I can remember she had learned to recognize at once the things that he intended to do.

“Yes, dear,” was all that she said.

Perhaps inwardly she made the wry face, by which more combative wives register their protest against the inevitable.

II.

Henry Munn’s sister did not accompany him to the tea party. Poor woman, she was not accustomed to visiting, except in a limited circle of friends whose domestic habits resembled her own. The polite note, requesting the pleasure of her company with her brother at tea with Mr. and Mrs. Harper Loftus, contained the information that it would be quite informal, but she quaked when she read it. Nobody had ever referred to her company as a pleasure, and something about the conventional insincerity of it awed her. And how could a party be informal at which a judge and his wife were to be present?

A week of intense nervousness acting upon a stomach that was none too good at the best of times produced indigestion and a sick headache. When the day arrived, Mrs. Waters was glad to be able to insist that Henry should go alone. She could honestly say she was unable to take the long drive to the village, with her stomach constantly hinting that it was about to assert its biliousness.

Mr. Munn asked for my mother as soon as he arrived at the house, so that he could make profuse apologies. He feared his hostess might guess the truth, that his sister did not want to come, and that made him halt and stumble as though a sick headache were unbelievable.

Henry Munn did not pretend to be a ladies’ man, but he was soon at his ease sauntering in the garden with my father and Judge Newman, to fill the short interval while they were awaiting the ringing of the tea gong. He was not the sort of man to indulge in polite compliments, when called upon for an opinion on subjects in which he could count himself as expert, and he dropped a number of useful hints regarding the mistakes made here and there by the cheerful and easy-going Peter, who was valuable as a gardener more for his faithfulness than for his skill as a horticulturalist.

In the dining-room where the two ladies awaited the three men, Henry Munn felt more than ever that it was the wrong thing for Keziah to have done to fail her hostess without previous warning. He wondered if Mrs. Loftus and Mrs. Newman had been discussing Keziah’s bad manners, so he returned to his apologies in order, if possible, to justify his sister. He explained the extreme weakness of Keziah’s stomach, with an account of the various tonics that had failed, from time to time, to strengthen it. It was in such situations that my mother showed her gift of graceful tact. If one of her own friends had admitted in her company the possession of such an indelicate organ as a stomach, my mother would have lapsed into a state of coma, and remained silent, like a fixed rebuke, until the subject was changed. To Henry Munn she showed only interest, and spoke with tender solicitude of stomachs, especially rebellious and weak ones. She even mentioned the repulsive word.

It took Henry Munn several minutes to fit his fullblown personality, which had expanded, like one of his own mangel-worzels in the earth with no unnatural hot-house limitations, into the atmosphere of one of my mother’s tea parties. First he placed his hands upon the table, and then, realizing with a start how large and naked they looked, he tried them beneath the cloth on his knees. He hoped that attitude did not look as awkward as it felt.

Liza arrived with the chicken broth, which served to remind Mrs. Newman that they had been particularly unfortunate with their hatchings in the spring. She appealed to Mr. Munn regarding the relative values of the breed of chickens that she preferred and those that the judge favored. Before they had reached the dessert, Henry Munn was beginning to wish that Keziah had come along to see how respectfully these pleasant people listened to his opinions.

He had a good deal to say about the need of more scientific farming. It was one of his favorite topics, and he seized this opportunity to expound it. Too many men who tried to make a living on the land were ignorant and stupid. He did not know whether farming should be described as a trade or a profession, but it might be taught as systematically as other trades and professions. That was the only way in which to make sure of universal success in agriculture.

His host and Judge Newman were not convinced that such undertakings would be practical. Henry Munn reminded them that the Model Farm had passed the experimental stage and was attracting students from other countries. More colleges of that sort, for the Model Farm was really the only college that did not lure farmers away from the land, were needed, and he had every confidence that they would come in the course of a generation or so.

The judge, to save himself from being overwhelmed, rallied his wife on the potato growing incident.

Henry Munn picked up the story to enforce his point.

“You admit that what you done that year was just luck,” he said. “Don’t you ma’am? Well, that is what I say. There is too much counting on luck in farming as we do it now. There ain’t no reason why it should not be taught as completely as law, if I may take the liberty.”

“I hope they will teach it better than law,” exclaimed Mrs. Newman. “If you could hear lawyers arguing, you would have some idea just how higgledy piggledy the law is. They never can agree on the rights and wrongs of a single legal question.”

“I stand corrected, ma’am,” replied Mr. Munn. “They’d have to teach farmers to know their job better than that.”

And the judge protested that he was not going to have his wife giving away the weaknesses of his profession in public.

Henry Munn startled himself by shaking the chandelier with his bellow of a laugh. He was getting along famously with good-natured Mrs. Newman.

No whiskey and water appeared after the dessert, not even a little harmless wine. But Henry Munn wondered, as he passed his cup back for the third time with explanations that talking was thirsty work, how such delicious coffee was made. It differed in both flavor and texture from Keziah’s muddy beverage, served as a treat at breakfast on Sundays.

It was nine o’clock and the lamps had been lighted before they rose from the table. Henry Munn thought that this habit of lingering in conversation after a meal was pleasing, and more restful than Keziah’s method of piling the dishes right under his nose and rushing them away. She would have said, “Talk, talk, talk. What’s the sense of all this aimless talk, when there is work to be done?” Something in the big man delighted in aimless talk, talk, talk, but his sister enforced even that form of temperance. My father suggested a little music, for my mother could play the piano quite prettily for such occasions, but Henry Munn reminded them that he had a long drive ahead of him.

The by-election was mentioned only once in the course of the evening. As Munn shook hands before leaving, he said, “I seen a number of my neighbours at church last Sunday morning. I think you can count on them, though they would never have voted again for Dr. Moreland.”

The springs of his buggy sagged as he climbed in, a tribute perhaps to Liza’s cooking, and the horse clumped away into the darkness.

My father knew without enquiring that Judge Newman had been favorably impressed. They sat together for some time smoking and pondering, and at last the judge remarked, “He is quite an interesting fellow, Loftus. You are right about him. He has strength.”

There was another silence. The tea party had been too successful to require comment. When the judge spoke again, he changed the subject.

“That fellow Lytton appears to have left the town for good,” he said. “I suppose you are not sorry to hear it.”

My father turned suddenly in his seat. “I assume from that remark that you know Lytton is my brother-in-law.”

“So Miss Belle Reynolds told my wife,” replied the judge. “I thought you would want to know about the whisperings. That’s all. I am not prying into your private affairs, Loftus.”

“Thank you, Newman. But I want you to know that I believe I was perfectly justified in closing my doors to George Lytton.”

“I felt certain of that,” the judge assured him.

III.

My mother’s feelings regarding Henry Munn were more complex than those of Judge and Mrs. Newman. Her verdict, based on his table manners and his version of the Queen’s English, would have been that he was a terrible man, but she could not deny that he possessed what my father described as a certain rugged charm. In her heart, she felt it was an impertinence that he should be considered a rival candidate to Harper Loftus.

“We ought not to have men in parliament who are not gentlemen,” she declared. “It lowers the dignity of the institution.”

“He has a bright mind,” replied my father. “I have never come across a man with more schemes. Most of them are not workable, I fear, but they indicate that he has been trying to think out ways to improve our farming. Did you hear his suggestions for making Canadian cattle the finest in the world?”

Henry Munn had emphatically expressed the conviction that inferior breeding stock should be wiped out by law. He explained his theory that the government could import pure-bred bulls and distribute them throughout the farming districts. Then the men with cattle would have no excuse for keeping the sort of scrub animal that might be found in every county. He had a vision of the settled districts in Ontario filled with magnificent stock. “An aristocracy that would be of some value to us,” suggested Mrs. Newman. The other men feared the undertaking was too big to be feasible.

“Of course I heard, Harper,” my mother answered with set face. “It was the first time that bulls have been mentioned at our dinner table, and the boys there too.”

“Tush, my dear, Robert is no longer a child, and the other boys were paying no attention. They asked to be excused just about that time.”

“And Mrs. Newman seemed really interested,” went on my mother. “She does like the most extraordinary conversations.”

And when the discussion was finished, my mother was still unconvinced about the advisability of permitting unpolished citizens like Henry Munn to sit in parliament at Ottawa. It seemed to her like radicalism in disguise.

“You say he possesses ideas,” she said, “Well, I am unable to see why a man cannot have ideas and be wellbred at the same time.”

“That last remark is more profound than you may think,” laughed my father, and permitted the subject to drop there.

Does the snobbery of Mrs. Harper Loftus living in a quiet Ontario village in the eighteen-eighties strike you as something foolish and only worthy of contempt? True, she used no social test except the ancient and worn-out one of birth. But do not plume yourself that the vaunted democracy of this century has destroyed the brotherhood, let alone the sisterhood of snobs. Take a cross section of any community in any age, and you will find it as strongly permeated with snobbery as was our village. Let it be remembered that Mrs. Harper Loftus believed as steadfastly in the obligations of birth and breeding as in their privileges. Can you say as much for the snobbery of to-day? The snobbery that bases its claims to superiority upon wealth piled up by an acquisitive and not too scrupulous talent; upon mental nimbleness that is bored by mediocrity; upon authority obtained by manipulated pull; or upon the ridiculous distinction that comes from having worn some sort of a uniform with its corresponding title.

I.

After Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen had nibbled delightedly for several days at the outer edge of their secret—Cousin Clara’s secret so generously shared with them—, they began to worry. They wondered why their sister received no letter from her lover—they rejoiced in that word, for in their dictionary it possessed no sinister meaning. Sadie carried the key to the post-office box, and believed she would be the lucky one to see all Clara’s letters first. She planned to rush home, when they came, and to present them to her blushing sister, giggling knowingly the while to show her appreciation of the situation. But Sadie looked in vain for addresses in an unfamiliar manly hand, and she could not help noticing that Clara showed no added interest in the mail.

Sadie found herself doubting that she had heard aright.

One evening she drew Kathleen outside the kitchen door and asked her, “Do you think that we could have misunderstood Clara? Didn’t she say that she was going to be married?”

“Undoubtedly she did,” was the reply. “But I wonder why she has never mentioned it again.”

“Of course, I did not really doubt it,” said Sadie. “Clara is so subdued and different, like some one awaiting her nuptials.”

The change in Cousin Clara came slowly. They had seldom seen her so playful as during the first ten days after her return. Aunt Henrietta declared that the house became a different place when she was in it. Neither of her sisters had the heart to press Clara to lift her hand to do any work. She chirruped from room to room like a bird, and she made things more pleasant for Sadie and Kathleen because their mother, sharing her joyousness, allowed herself to be a little less difficult than usual.

Miss Belle Reynolds sent invitations to tennis parties, but Clara refused them. She told her sisters that she was much happier at home with them. For a while that seemed to be true. Then she stayed at home, but not so happily.

After tea she became restless. Her sisters thought it was merely to avoid the dish-washing that she said every evening, “I think I’ll run down to the Mechanics’ Institute and change my book.”

But Sadie discovered that she was not going to the Mechanics’ Institute at all. Sadie did not mean to spy upon Clara’s movements—to have suspected her sister and to have sneaked around to make discoveries about her would have been unpardonable conduct in a lady. It happened quite by accident. Clara had told them that she was going to the Mechanics’ Institute, and a moment later her sister discovered that she had forgotten her book. Sadie rushed to the gate with the volume in her hand to call after her, but there was not a soul in sight along Victoria Avenue. What speed. Sadie gazed along the lifeless street in amazement, but not even a dog was to be seen between the gate and the turning that led up to Front Street. As she moved to go back to the house, she looked in the other direction and saw Clara disappearing round the corner towards the bridge.

Cousin Sadie felt much disturbed at having discovered something that Clara evidently did not want her to know. Embarrassment made her seek to fasten her attention on something different from what she had seen. She glanced instinctively at the title of the volume she was carrying. Under Two Flags by Ouida. Why, Clara had told her the day after returning from Toronto that she was returning Under Two Flags to the Mechanics’ Institute, and here it was still. Even being engaged should not make her sister so mysterious. Was she creeping away every evening in the gloaming to visit the bridge or the grove beyond the river? Did it mean that she had a local lover? If so, who could it be?

Sadie consulted with Kathleen. Ought they to tell Cousin Harper that Clara had found her romance, and that they felt troubled about her? Cousin Harper was always so helpful, but they could not betray a confidence. After a fortnight of hesitation, they felt practically certain that Clara’s happiness was no longer spontaneous. They suggested to one another that they might only imagine the change. The weather was depressing—a cool, cloudy August, melancholy in the late afternoon. It was enough to affect their sister’s spirits. They showed the effects of it themselves, they feared. So did mamma.

“I find myself almost wishing,” said Sadie at last, “that Clara had not told us her secret.”

“I cannot understand her,” agreed Kathleen. “I cannot understand her at all.”

II.

Dull August evenings caused people to take to winter entertainment prematurely. In the cold weather, we had music after tea at least once a week, but my mother seldom thought of suggesting such a thing before October. She knew that Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen would be very glad to take out their songs, which had been put away since April. Besides, it was not easy to entertain the Misses Glint and Mrs. Newman at the same time. The judge’s wife took no interest whatever in the royal family, outside of the half dozen members that everybody knew. To her, Queen Victoria was a permanent person, who had always been on the throne and always would be, which was fortunate when you considered the things that were said about the Prince of Wales. So far as Mrs. Newman could make out, Queen Victoria was the only thoroughly respectable monarch that the world had ever known, from King David down. Wasn’t it a good thing for the Empire that she had come to stay, in view of the millions of subjects that she possessed to follow her good or bad example? But why all the to-do about the others, and most of them such homely bodies?

Mrs. Newman enjoyed a musical evening. She brought along her knitting and worked industriously, for she had many pairs of stockings to complete before December, with an occasional word of approval, “It is very nice, Miss Glint, very nice indeed.”

My mother was at the piano. She did not sing herself, but both Sadie and Kathleen found her precise and delicate accompaniments exactly to their liking. The voices of Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen were thin pipes out of flat chests. Being almost entirely toneless, they were described by their friends as drawing-room singers, and nobody thought of asking them to sing at concerts or in the church choir. Though their efforts were little more than melodious breathing, Mrs. Newman often found tears in her eyes as she listened. She felt intensely sorry for the two Miss Glints, who had to seek their romance in the vicarious form of sentimental songs.

Harper Loftus liked to make fun of his cousins’ repertoires. He frequently urged them to try a number or two out of The Mikado or one of the other Gilbert and Sullivan operas, but they firmly refused.

“I am sure that you could learn to sing ‘On a Tree by the River,’ ” he said to Kathleen. “It is not in the least difficult.”

“That song may be acceptable in a theatre,” she replied. “But it is hardly suitable for a drawing-room, with the intimate association of ladies and gentlemen.”

He asked her why, and Kathleen explained with as much tact as possible, “It is the refrain. The ‘willow’ is quite nice, but I feel that Mr. Gilbert might have picked a more refined word to go with it.”

After that my father permitted the score of The Mikado, which he had been able to secure only after considerable trouble, to remain tucked away on the shelf.

“Now you needn’t commence to find fault with the songs,” Mrs. Newman warned the men, as they sauntered in from their smoke.

“That’s a cheery ditty that you have just been singing, Miss Sadie,” said the judge.

Cousin Sadie was indeed at her best in her coy rendering of her favorite, Five O’Clock in the Morning. As she folded away her music she said, “I like it because the sentiment is touching, even while the song is bright.”

“At least nobody dies in it,” added my father.

“Now Harper, don’t start your teasing.” My mother turned on the piano stool to shake a warning finger. “I don’t believe that you have a particle of romantic feeling in your being.”

My father appealed to Mrs. Newman.

“Tell me your candid opinion now,” he said. “Isn’t an evening with these songs just about as cheerful as an evening in a morgue? The death rate in them is simply appalling. Nellie Gray and Bell Brandon and Sweet Alice and all the rest of the ladies, not one of them survives. These composers ought to be indicted for wholesale murder.”

Mrs. Newman laughed. “You are a caution,” she exclaimed. “But sit down, do, and behave yourself.”

Kathleen Glint sang Douglas, Douglas, Tender and True. She regarded it as the most beautiful song in her repertoire, and tonight she moved herself close to tears, for she was thinking of Clara.

“If you do not think that is a lovely poem, Harper,” she said, folding up the music, “you must be utterly heartless.”

“Well then, Kathleen,” he replied, “I’ll challenge you to tell me what it is all about.”

The accompanist gave the answer. “It is quite plain, I should think. There was a misunderstanding between these two lovers, and Douglas died before they could be reconciled.”

“Yes,” corroborated Kathleen.

“How did he die?” my father asked. “Did she kill him?”

“Of course not,” put in Sadie. “But it does not really matter.”

“I should think it did matter. The song would be much more interesting if we knew for certain that she smashed his head with a poker, as I suspect she did.”

“What a horrible idea,” exclaimed Sadie.

“She talks about her eyes being blinded,” he went on. “That sounds like an apology for a misdirected blow. Maybe she only intended to dislocate his shoulder. Also she wants him ‘in the old likeness that she knew.’ Doesn’t that suggest that something violent had happened to his profile?”

“Dear me,” observed the judge. “There is strong circumstantial evidence against the lady. But I think she had a perfectly justifiable motive. Doesn’t one verse tell us that no matter what scornful words she used to pain him, he smiled as sweet as the angels do? That sort of thing is terribly aggravating to a high spirited girl.”

“You two have no imagination, no imagination at all,” cried Kathleen. “I think the sentiment of the song is heart-breaking.”

My father suggested that if they wanted to hear about disappointed love and tragedy, they ought to invite Liza to sing one of her ballads.

I sometimes wonder where the songs that Liza sang, when not in the mood for revival hymns, came from and where they have gone to. They bore the same relation to the songs used by Kathleen and Sadie that Liza’s hymns bore to Hymns, Ancient and Modern. With Liza, both religion and drama had to be drenched in blood. She droned her ballads by the hour, and not even the most thrilling incidents in the narratives made her pause in her work. The one she favored most began,—

The story unfolded along similar lines for about thirty verses, and ended in a scene of carnage that would have made the last act of Hamlet seem pale in its murderous passions. Some of the little girls in the village knew the ballads, and frequently offered to sing them at school concerts, but never received encouragement from the teachers. Liza had an unusually large collection in her repertoire, and one monotonous tune did for the lot. My father found them a constant delight.

“Did you ever hear those ballads?” my mother asked Mrs. Newman. “I cannot understand a religious woman like Liza permitting herself to remember such vulgarities.”

“Ever hear them?” exclaimed Mrs. Newman. “Why, they were the only songs that I ever tried to sing.”

My father pressed her to contribute one to the programme, and she pretended to be on the point of complying, to the consternation, only half concealed, of the other women. Then she hesitated and explained, “Really, Mr. Loftus, you must give me an opportunity to rehearse. I am terrible out of practice.”

“In the meantime,” said my father, “we must be content with the minor blood-sheds of Sadie and Kathleen.”

Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen did not really resent the fun that my father poked at their songs. I had a notion as a boy that they basked in his banter. It was the most attention that they ever received from a member of the opposite sex, and I suppose that they were not without their longings for a little of the romance that they talked so much about.

It was now Sadie’s turn to perform, and she went through her pile of music for the most crape-laden of her lyrics, for Cousin Harper’s special benefit.

On the wall behind the piano there was a large mirror, in which my mother could watch what was happening in the room without altering her position at the keyboard. Attention centred in Sadie, and they were all laughing as she mocked, waving sheet after sheet, “This one is not doleful enough. That won’t do. It must be sad as sad can be.” Nobody noted my mother’s tensity. She rose suddenly to her feet, and, without turning, exclaimed in a voice that trembled with alarm, “There is somebody at the door.”

She was still speaking when everybody became conscious of the rattling of the handle of the French window. There came a blast of cold air; the blind flapped violently, and Cousin Clara rushed across the room to where my father was sitting.

“Cousin Harper,” she cried, “you must come at once. Mamma is very ill.”

Clara was colorless. Her face looked drawn, and she clasped and unclasped her tapering white fingers. Sadie and Kathleen were at her side in a moment.

“It’s not a stroke,” Sadie’s agitated voice ventured.

“No, no, no,” exclaimed Clara. “She has had a fit. I do not know what is wrong.”

My father turned quickly to my mother. “Has Robert gone to bed?” he asked. “Rouse him and send him for the doctor. I’ll go over right away with Sadie. Kathleen can bring Clara later. We cannot leave Aunt Henrietta alone.”

Clara made her next statement as though surprised that anybody needed to be told.

“She is not alone,” she said. “She is over at Miss Gilkinson’s house.”

Aunt Henrietta Glint across the river at Miss Susanna Gilkinson’s cottage! It could not be true. They gazed at Clara as though she had taken leave of her senses.

“My dear girl, what do you mean?” my father asked her. “How can Aunt Henrietta be any place but at home?”

“It is all my fault,” she gasped. “Mamma fainted on the bridge. Oh, I am so miserable.”

III.

Aunt Henrietta Glint sat in her room after Clara had removed her tea-tray, and watched the dimming of the thin slits of light between the slats of the shutters. She called and Clara answered slowly. To come heavily was not like Clara. Her mother had always liked the way her lightness of heart expressed itself in running when others would have walked. Also it was unlike Clara to be low spirited and tiresome. Aunt Henrietta told herself that if Sadie and Kathleen were not such characterless fools, they would have noticed it.

When Clara sat down on the side of the bed, with a suppressed sigh that suggested complete weariness, her mother said, “You had better retire for the night, child. I am sure that you are not well.”

It was an unheard-of thing for Aunt Henrietta to admit that anyone in the household might be suffering ill-health. When her daughters contracted sniffy colds in the spring and fall, she felt that they had done so merely to annoy her. They knew she did not like it.

But Clara was not seeking sympathy.

“Oh no, mamma. I am quite well indeed. I am going to the Mechanics’ Institute to change my book.”

“Go to bed when I tell you,” shouted her mother.

“But the book is overdue now,” Clara replied. “And a walk will do me good.”

The gayety with which Clara ran into the room a few minutes later, to deposit several playful pecks of kisses, was entirely forced. Aunt Henrietta could see that.

“I’ll not be gone long,” the usual good-bye with the usual grimace, but they were unhappy.

“Why can’t you obey me occasionally?” grumbled the old woman.

Night had begun to descend about the middle of the afternoon. The clouds constantly threatened a downpour, but the spits of rain at intervals did not leave a mark in the dust of the roadway, and by seven-thirty evening had become a muddy twilight.

Cousin Clara met no one on Victoria Avenue. She stopped at the top of the slope leading to the bridge. What was the use? He had promised to meet her at their old trysting spot, as she called it, in less than a week, and more than a month had gone by. He would not turn up on such a night. He hated discomfort so. But suppose he had come and she did not meet him. It looked desolate and lonely, with only the noise of the river. Cousin Clara cried a little, wiped her eyes, and hastened to the bridge.

No familiar figure stood by the railings. She was growing accustomed to that daily disappointment, but she paused and peered in both directions. There was the grove still. Maybe he was waiting by the bench, their bench, under the beeches beyond the picnic pavilion. She felt like an intruder in a grave-yard. Not a soul was to be seen in the grove; the chain swings clanked wearily against the supporting posts. Clara sat on the bench and had another little cry.

Something had happened to him. She thought of his romantic appearance and classic manners. Surely nature would not be so cruel as to place a blighting hand on such perfection. But he must have been taken ill. Nothing else could account for his continued silence. He would come as soon as possible. If not tonight, then perhaps tomorrow night. In the meantime, she did feel anxious.

The trees stirred dismally in the wind. She might as well go home. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she found him on the bridge as she walked back, thought Clara.

She stopped again and waited; something might happen at the last moment. Then it was that she saw an incredible thing on the slope leading to Victoria Avenue. If Aunt Henrietta’s cottage had moved across the bridge towards her in the gloom, Clara would have recognized it, but would have refused to believe her eyes. She felt the same way about Aunt Henrietta, whose bulk came slowly towards her with no sound but the stump, stump, stump of her cane.

Aunt Henrietta was the first to speak. “What are you doing here?” she thundered.

“I was just coming home,” faltered Clara.

“Who has been with you over there in the grove?” demanded her mother.

“No one,” Clara replied weakly. “I have been taking a little stroll by myself.”

“Don’t lie to me, you hussy,” shouted the old woman. “You lied to me when you said you were going to the Mechanics’ Institute. But I saw you turn along the street in this direction, and I knew you were up to no good. That’s why you have been mooning about the house lately. Who meets you here?”

“Oh mamma, mamma, you must not excite yourself,” cried Clara. “You will make yourself ill. Really I have seen no one.”

Aunt Henrietta’s unwonted effort was now commencing to tell upon her.

“Don’t come near me, you strumpet,” she said, and her daughter saw her sway against the side of the bridge. The rail bent beneath the dead weight of the old woman, and Aunt Henrietta was perilously near a plunge in the silly, chattering river. Then with a sound that resembled a sigh, she subsided in a heap on the planking.

The light in Miss Gilkinson’s cottage, gleaming and disappearing through the waving green, was the only promise of aid that Clara could see. She opened the door without knocking, and found Miss Susanna making a piratical journey through English society in company with Becky Sharp. At least once a year, Miss Gilkinson read Vanity Fair.

Aunt Henrietta was sitting up in a dazed condition when the two women approached her, in the swinging light of a lantern that threw contorting shadows in every direction. Miss Gilkinson had brought a flask of brandy.

“Drink this,” she said, “and then I shall be able to assist you as far as my house.”

The stimulant enabled Aunt Henrietta to climb to her feet again. She only half realized the things that were happening as they pulled her up the hill. Once she was conscious of a sharp voice saying, “Lean more on yourself, you big fat thing. We cannot carry you.” But it seemed like a dream and she did not retort. Aunt Henrietta had always despised Miss Susanna Gilkinson, despised her as an old maid, as she despised all those inferior women who had not shared with her the elevating experience of wifehood and motherhood. Miss Gilkinson, in turn, disliked Aunt Henrietta as a woman who had crushed four lives beneath her pulverizing maternity. But the need of the older woman made a truce between them.

Aunt Henrietta was almost submissive when Miss Gilkinson ordered her to bed.

“Get a carriage and I’ll go home,” she said, but without much vigor.

“You can’t do any more to-day,” replied Miss Gilkinson. “It will be soon enough for you to go home in the morning. In the meantime, Clara, you had better let Sadie and Kathleen know what has become of your mother.”

Aunt Henrietta said no more. She was glad to find herself in the easy chair in Miss Gilkinson’s spare room, and consented to sit still until a cup of strong tea could be prepared for her. When my father, Judge Newman, Dr. McDougald and Bob arrived, with Sadie, Kathleen and Clara as a tremulous rearguard, Miss Susanna met them at the door.

“You had better not disturb her,” she told them. “Come back for her in the morning with a Victoria.”

“Oughtn’t I to see her?” asked the doctor, not hopefully.

“You will only get abused for your pains,” replied Miss Gilkinson.

Sadie came forward with her voice quivering.

“But Clara said that mamma had a fit.”

“Nothing at all of the sort. The only fits that trouble Henrietta Glint are fits of bad temper.”

The door showed no signs of opening with a welcome for them, and the party, that had come to the aid of Miss Gilkinson, left a little foolishly. Clara’s mixture of tears and self-reproaches did not help them to understand how her mother happened to be in Miss Susanna’s cottage.

IV.

By morning Aunt Henrietta was herself again. After a good sleep, the stunned feeling had passed away. She remembered the circumstances under which she had followed Clara to the bridge, and the suspicions regarding her daughter’s behavior were complicated with the thought that the common people of the village might be snickering at the Glint family again. If it had not been for the unfortunate fainting fit, she might have discovered the man. There wasn’t time for him to get so very far away after they saw her coming. But how did Miss Gilkinson happen to arrive upon the scene? Was she in the conspiracy too?

Aunt Henrietta shouted peremptorily for Miss Gilkinson.

Miss Susanna came to the door of her bedroom, just long enough to say that she would attend to her guest when the breakfast was ready.

Mrs. Glint called after her that she had something more important than food to talk about. Her hostess would have to let her breakfast wait.

“It’s what you want to talk about that will have to wait,” replied Miss Gilkinson, and the kitchen door closed with decision.

By the time that the tray containing her breakfast was brought, Aunt Henrietta had fumed herself into a fine tantrum.

“You have wasted your time. I won’t eat it,” she announced as the door opened.

“Then I’ll take it right back to the kitchen and wash up.”

“Put it down,” yelled the old woman in the bed. “Why do you keep running away, Susanna, when I want to speak to you?”

Miss Gilkinson sat down in the easy chair.

“Now, what is it that you want, Henrietta?” she enquired.

“That jade Clara has been carrying on behind my back, and you know all about it. I want you to tell me.”

“If you cannot be civil,” said Miss Gilkinson, “I am not going to waste my time with you. They will be here with a cab shortly to take you home. When you are there you can get your own way by being as disagreeable as you know how, but not here.”

Much against her will, Aunt Henrietta moderated the loudness of her voice, and told how she had followed Clara the previous evening. Why should a girl sneak away to meet a lover in a place like the grove if they were honest? Did Susanna know anything about the affair? She didn’t.

My aunt was eating her breakfast now, having been forced to ask for it. Miss Gilkinson placed the tray on the washstand, and apparently forgot about it until Mrs. Glint urged her weakness and her hunger.

Her voice assumed a pleading note.

“Why do my children treat me so?” she exclaimed.

But she got no sympathy.

“Do you want to know the reason, Henrietta Glint?” said Miss Gilkinson. “It is because you are a nasty old woman.”

Aunt Henrietta’s voice was almost a scream when she started to order Miss Gilkinson out of the house. Her autocratic commands were habit, but before she had finished the sentence, she realized that she was like a queen on foreign soil,—her word was no longer law. Her abuse melted away to nothing.

Miss Susanna continued quite calmly, “If your children are queer, Henrietta, it is because of your own selfishness. If it pleases you to pamper them, you pamper them. If it pleases you to bully them, you bully them. You have never shown any sense about either. I don’t suppose that Clara has done anything wrong. But even if she has, you are not going to act like a virago in my house.”

It was a new experience for Mrs. Henrietta Glint. Nobody had ever dared to put her so completely in the wrong. She ate her breakfast, all of it, meekly, as though a cheep from her might bring another volley of calm but scathing truths. All she ventured was a deprecating protest as her tray was removed, “I am not a nasty old woman.”

By noon she was back in the semi-darkness of her own room. Clara had remained in bed with a headache, but Sadie and Kathleen stood by, expecting they knew not what. Mamma’s docility frightened them. Perhaps she was ill. They felt relieved when about tea-time, the boom began to acquire its wonted vigor. If mamma would only call one of them a fool, they could feel that all was well.

My father reported Aunt Henrietta’s ride home an uneventful affair. He had nerved himself to face it, and there was nothing to face.

“I should like to know what happened last night,” my mother remarked.

He answered, “I’d be more pleased to know what happened this morning at Miss Gilkinson’s. I cannot remember ever seeing Aunt Henrietta in any sort of a crisis when she was so completely subdued.”

I.

When George Lytton came to the village in May, I happened to be the first member of our family to whom he spoke. When he returned in September, he used me a second time to carry the news to my father.

School was open again for Harper and me. “Bob always has the luck,” said Harper, when he heard that the High School would remain closed until October. Mr. Drury resigned from his position, at the end of June. Week by week he found that more of the responsibility for the ugly interlude, that had made poor ignorant Myrtle Kormann’s name a by-word, was being loaded upon his shoulders. Wasn’t he paid a perfectly enormous salary, twelve hundred dollars a year, to fill the boys’ minds with knowledge and protect their morals from 9 a.m. until tea-time? If he had been doing his duty, his hulking pupils would still be as innocent as their baby brothers. My father and Judge Newman urged Mr. Drury to face out that sort of talk, but he could not guess what his critics might be saying by the end of another term, so he resigned. The trustees selected his successor in August, and two weeks later the new head master contracted typhoid fever and died. “We never have teachers who do that,” complained Harper, aggrieved. The time was so short that the reopening had to be postponed, awaiting the appointment of the new principal. That arrangement suited the farmers; they got another month’s work out of their sons.

Unless Bob met me at the school gate, I usually wandered aimlessly about the village for an hour or more.

“That lad seems to lack definite purpose,” Gregory Reynolds would say.

“I fear it’s his health,” was my father’s regular answer.

And so long as they did not urge me to hurry, I didn’t care how they explained me.

I had just finished ten satisfactory minutes gazing at nothing in the empty market square when Lytton hailed me. He was leaning out of a covered buggy and waving familiarly.

For no particular reason, except that Bob seldom found me hard to convert to his views of people, I now disliked Dudie Lytton. One day Bob said to me emphatically, “I’m glad he’s gone away. You couldn’t trust him. He’s slimy.” Now I looked at him with a feeling that he had recently stolen something, and the thought of his slime made me shiver. Still, there was a quality about him that made me curious. He differed so completely from all the men in the community.

When he beckoned, I went guiltily across the street to see what he wanted.

“Is your father in the bank?” he asked. “I cannot get anybody to answer the door.”

“I think he went home early to-day,” I replied. “He was going to do some work in the garden.”

“Can I boost you over the wall again, just to make sure?” he suggested.

“I am sure. He went home,” I repeated, and started on my way.

“Come back a minute, Tim,” he called after me. “I’ll give you a lift as far as your house. I want to see your father.”

I got into the buggy. Before he started the horse he gave me a quarter, which I took gingerly. It was no longer an indication of generosity; it somehow indicated that you could not trust him,—Bob said that sneaks often curried favor with gifts.

I tried to hand it back. “No thank you, sir. I guess I don’t want money,” I said. It made me feel foolish when he paid no attention, so I put the coin in my pocket and sat well into the corner of the hood.

“I see that you have been studying the art of making yourself agreeable with Professor Robert Herndon,” he remarked, shaking the rein to hurry his horse along. “I shouldn’t do that if I were you. Bad manners will never get you anywhere.”

Nothing more was said until we alighted at the house. As I stepped from the buggy with a sheepish, “Thank you, sir,” he gave a short laugh, and observed, “You haven’t been exhilarating company, Timothy, but you come of a clan that sticks together. The rank outsider must never be allowed to forget that he is a rank outsider. It’s a medieval code.”

That speech on the short-comings of my family conveyed no meaning to me. We walked in silence up the path, and I left him standing on the verandah while I called my father. Again I was ordered to be absent from the meeting of these two men. My father told me, apparently quite casually, to run upstairs and wash my hands for tea. I turned reluctantly into the house, with thoughts of loitering that I did not turn into action. In the eighties, there was a custom in family life that has, so far as one can notice, disappeared completely since that time,—children occasionally did what their parents told them, when they did not feel so inclined. The right of self-determination had not yet become a universal axiom.

When my father arrived on the verandah, George Lytton was more ill at ease than he wished to appear.

“You are surprised to see me,” he said.

“I understood that you had left town. But your movements neither interest nor surprise me.”

“I am trying Petersville now, and find it, on the whole, more friendly,” Lytton volunteered.

“Then we can assume that you have left the village for good.”

“But there is one matter that I must talk over with you.”

My father took hold of the knob of the front door, as though to keep it tight against intruders.

“You know perfectly well, Lytton, that I shall not ask you to enter my house,” he said. “You can see me tomorrow at the office.”

Lytton went down a couple of steps.

“Very well,” he remarked, “This matter was one in which I thought you would be interested. But if you cannot see me tonight I won’t be here tomorrow. I am driving directly back to Petersville.”

Harper Loftus relented because he had some questions that he wished to ask his brother-in-law. He was not curious about the purpose of Lytton’s visit, suspecting that he wanted something. But recent events had left a fear lurking in his mind, which this man could prove to be well founded or not.

“Are you going to have tea at the hotel?” he asked.

“I did not expect to enjoy your hospitality,” replied Lytton.

“Then I’ll be at the bank at seven-thirty. You can meet me there.”

Lytton laughed.

“You are a cool customer,” he said. “But I’ll do it.”

And they separated without another word.

It was seldom necessary for my father to visit the bank after dark in the summer, and he found his lamps in a woeful state of uncleanliness. Both chimneys were so darkened by smoke that the two lamps, when lighted, threw only a pale glow that did not half illuminate the room. It was dim enough for any sinister interview.

My father went to the front door when everything was in readiness, and found that George Lytton had just alighted from his buggy. It took but a moment to tie the horse to the hitching post, and, without uttering a word, they moved back together into the inner office. When two men, who dislike one another but who cannot express themselves in some form of brawling, are left together for an intimate conversation, studied deliberate movements make their best defence. A cigar was offered and lighted, and then my father spoke as a store-keeper might address an unwelcome customer with a large unpaid account.

“You want something with me,” he said. “We had better go right to the point.”

Lytton leaned back and took from his inside pocket a large blue envelope, which he placed upon the table.

“That is yours,” he remarked, “so I brought it back.”

My father picked it up, puzzled, though he recognized it even before he turned over to the side on which the words “The Lytton Estate” were written. He had thought of many possible lines of approach, but not this one.

“How did you get hold of that envelope?” he enquired shortly.

The reply evaded the question. “I have looked it over and find everything neatly settled, no loose ends at all.”

“What did you expect? You knew how badly things were involved.”

“I couldn’t help hoping that you had found a little surplus to pocket, on the side. But everything is most creditable to you.”

“Do you mean to say that you came to the village, and stayed here all summer in order to get hold of that information?”

George Lytton laughed. He never took that much trouble to gain any end, so it seemed funny to be suspected of elaborate plotting.

“I didn’t even know of the existence of that envelope until Robert told me about it,” he said. “Then I took into my head that it would be interesting to look it over, just to be sure of things.”

My father put the package into his pocket. “If you had come to me in a straight-forward manner, I should have been willing for you to examine all the papers dealing with the estate.”

“I quite realize that now, seeing that it cost you several thousand dollars out of your own pocket to straighten matters,” observed Lytton. “But if the balance had been on the other side, you would not have been so anxious to put the cards on the table.”

“A fishing expedition, eh?”

“Something like that. I was disappointed, but not greatly surprised. I have always suspected that you were an honest man, Loftus. Whatever your vice may be, it isn’t pilfering.”

“Now would you mind telling me how you got it, George? Did you steal it on the night of the Dominion Day dance.”

“No indeed. That was too pleasant an evening to spoil by sneak thieving. It was after that that my nephew told me all about the envelope.”

“How did he come to tell you? You hardly know the lad.”

“Blood is thicker than water, Loftus. I know him better than you think.”

“Can’t you be candid?”

“How much more candid do you want me?”

“I want to know that I can trust Robert. I don’t believe that he would do a treacherous thing like this.”

“After all, he had a personal interest in the matter, Loftus. I gather from him that you have kept his mother’s relations under cover. You talk about candor, but you have never been candid with your stepson. Can you blame him for investigating his family’s past?”

When he entered the room, Lytton had not intended to say these things about his nephew. But he saw that they made the other man flinch. If it hurt the self esteem of Harper Loftus to hear that his stepson was capable of a little guile, then the young prig’s reputation would have to suffer. Each man suspected the other of being too close to Bob.

“I am sorry that you asked the boy to do a thing like that,” was all my father said.

The interview appeared to have come to an end. The two men were standing now, formal again as when they first entered the room. Then my father remembered the subject about which he intended to speak to Lytton. He had been fitting together the puzzle of Cousin Clara’s recent behavior. The lost money did not account for the girl’s unhappiness and for the circumstances surrounding Aunt Henrietta’s trip to Miss Gilkinson’s cottage. There must be something more, and it was the sort of mystery in which he might expect to find his brother-in-law involved.

He faced the other man and asked directly, without a word of introduction, “Look here, Lytton, didn’t you see Miss Clara Glint in Toronto in July, the week that you left the village?”

Lytton hated questions that took him by the throat. He answered “No,” but he said it without the slightest suggestion of truth behind it.

Harper Loftus had more intuition in tackling his brother-in-law than in approaching his stepson. Perhaps the one fact accounted for the other. He followed with a second query, as to which he now felt certain enough to make it an assertion.

“You took five hundred dollars belonging to her. What have you done with it?”

The passage to the door being blocked by determined and sinewy shoulders, Lytton was calmly reasonable, avoiding the airiness with which he could always annoy his brother-in-law.

“I shouldn’t put it that way,” he said. “You quite misunderstand the situation.”

Harper Loftus remembered that the other man had said once long ago, after justice had taken its course with him, “It doesn’t do to trust to the good-will of friends and relations to save you, if you want to break a law. Better arrange so as to leave no trail.”

“I don’t want any hair-splitting,” he declared. “You got the money and it was not yours.”

“I didn’t really need it. But a man cannot throw away cash that has been literally forced on him.”

“You have imposed upon Miss Glint in some way because she is sentimental.”

“That girl knows what she is about, Loftus. She gets what she wants in her own way. My God, I earned that money. Apparently you do not know what Clara Glint is like when she waxes romantic.”

“What do you mean by that?” the ugly look was in my father’s eyes that Lytton had seen there once before, during the most painful interview, considered physically, that he had ever passed through with another human being. “Have you been acting like a blackguard with that girl?”

“As you may know,” replied Lytton, “it is not considered gentlemanly to kiss and tell. Perhaps you will not believe me when I say that I never intended any harm to Miss Glint. I don’t know what she may have told you, but it started innocently enough, so far as I was concerned. I offered to drive her out to see some friends in a village north of Toronto. As soon as we struck the country roads, she began imagining romance, and Saint Anthony could not have escaped her. We ended up for a day or so at a little inn in a place called—Something Hill. I was anxious enough to escape. That woman would drive any normal man crazy. I had to lie about urgent business to keep from getting deeper than I was prepared to go. That’s when she made me take the money, only as a loan. You have no idea what I went through, Loftus, but she knew what she was about every inch of the way.”

My father realized that the other man was afraid of physical mishaps, and that his version of the affair would be more complimentary to his manly fascinations if told to other listeners.

“If what you say is true, I know there is more that you haven’t told me,” he said. “Clara Glint is expecting you to come back.”

“Perhaps so.”

“I know my cousin well enough to be sure of it. She believes steadfastly that romance means marriage.”

“That sounds a trifle cynical.”

“This is no matter to be witty about. You must have promised to marry her, or Clara Glint would never have gone into the adventure.”

“She takes a great many things for granted.”

“It is a poor service to any girl to make a man like you marry her,” said my father. “But you are not going to humiliate Clara Glint, and then walk off and leave her to face the music.”

George Lytton did not fear legal pressure. The law would protect him, if the law came into the tangle at all. He had in reserve one sufficient reason why Harper Loftus could not tie him up, an unwilling husband for Clara Glint. Imagine being bound permanently to that compound of silliness and gush. Her chatter passed the time at a tennis party and was amusing enough during a walk on a summer evening. But as a steady diet! Heavenly Creator of foolish mortals, how could a woman keep so continuously on the edge of idiocy?

Harper Loftus was still in the dark, so Lytton only remarked, “I know it is useless to tell you that men are not always the seducers. You are too old-fashioned to admit it. You would hardly believe how many of us are victimized yearly by romantic simpletons.”

But my father, in common with men of his kind, still held to the belief that no unmarried woman of his class was capable of harboring what he would call an impure thought. But he was not going to argue the point with a fellow like Lytton. He spoke peremptorily. “You know as well as I do the only way in which you can protect a woman’s name after what you have done. I intend to see that you do the right thing.”

“Marry Clara Glint?”

“Yes.”

“But you see, I can’t do that.” The tone was clipped to make the statement emphatic. “I am married already.”

They had reached a dead end. George Lytton went on to tell about the marriage of which his sister had hitherto heard nothing. It gave him considerable satisfaction to note that he had scored, after apparently being badly on the defensive for several minutes. Hadn’t they been surprised at his silence for seven years? It was not due to his forgetfulness of family ties, but he was safely wedded in that interval to a young woman in Halifax. She came of a family of which even Caroline would have to approve; he was not so sure that his wife’s people would approve of Caroline. Mrs. Lytton’s mother did not think that any really patrician family could be found in Canada west of the city of Quebec. Even the loyalists who settled in Ontario differed socially from those who made their homes in the blue-nose country. The latter came from the best New England stock, but the former—well they were largely high adventurers and low Dutch from Pennsylvania, surely, odd devotees of British connection.

This interpretation of history might have impressed Cousin Clara as classic. My father interrupted it to ask, “If you are married, what are you doing back here in Ontario?”

Lytton only hinted at the explanation. His wife was capricious and had returned to her father’s home. He did not add that he had managed to get his hands on five thousand dollars that belonged to her in the eyes of the law, although in the eye of heaven, they two were one flesh, making four hands instead of two that had a right to enter her cash box. But his father-in-law being a stern man, George Lytton had thought it well to find a quiet place where he could hide, as it were, without crouching.

There was irony, which he did not realize, in the circumstances that had dropped Lytton into our village. He need not have wasted a summer in such uncongenial surroundings. The father of Mrs. George Lytton did not like to lose five thousand dollars, but he regarded it as heavy and safe insurance, insurance that his daughter’s husband would never dare to show his curly brown head and heart-breaking beard in Halifax again, and that the old man could bring up his four grandsons—he had no boys of his own—according to his strict Presbyterian rules of living.

“I suppose there is nothing more to discuss,” Lytton remarked.

Then something unexpected happened. From somewhere came a large bunch of boney knuckles, driven by terrific force. They landed on Lytton a little below the curly brown hair and a little above the silky beard, and as the second croquet ball gives way when roqueted, his head went backward against the cold surface of the safe door. Sitting in a heap on the floor, his wits were ragged as those of a man who is coming out of an anaesthetic. He had known that Harper Loftus possessed such knuckles,—he had suffered one previous experience of how they could bruise and disfigure a handsome face,—but he had counted upon the respectability of the Loftus family, inherited and cherished by generation after generation, to protect him from anything so unpleasant, while he was a guest in the office of the bank.

“You think that you have debauched my stepson and my cousin. You have behaved like the blackguard you have always been,” said my father. “Now you can get out.”

Lytton held one hand tightly above his eyes (he knew they would be black in the morning) as he obeyed.

“That was always your way of getting even,” he muttered, wiping the first thin trickle of blood from the end of his nose.

Half an hour later, the buggy was jogging along the road to Petersville. In it, George Lytton, feeling physically sore and mentally venomous, wondered what could be done by tossing atoms of fact and surmise to the scandal-mongers of these rural communities. How scandal-mongers loved to be able to smirch the glazed good name of a man like Harper Loftus.

II.

For an hour after the departure of George Lytton, Harper Loftus sat and pondered the two new difficulties that he had to face. A smouldering anger made it hard for him, at first, to see things clearly. In a fair fight he was a good loser. To know that an opponent had bettered him might cause him secret chagrin, but his attitude in victory or defeat looked the same to a casual observer. In this instance, he did not feel that an honorable foe was scoring in an open battle. Something had happened unexpectedly, in the dark, to affect two of the most vital things in his life. The wreckage of hopes, that were running high less than an hour ago, surrounded him. First, his failure with Robert Herndon. It was complete enough to upset his self-confidence, to make him doubt his ability to assert his will as something stronger than that of the boy. Did it mean that Robert was too perverse to learn how honorable men abhor certain things? Had his stepson taken advantage of the leniency of recent years, under the impression that it indicated weakness of purpose?

Cousin Clara’s escapade might touch his ambition to enter parliament. That thought flitted across his mind. He felt sorry for the girl, now that he knew why her bloom was fading. None of the Glints made the best of life, and Clara seemed to be involved in the worst mess of all, if things turned out as badly as they might.

But that was a problem to be faced later. First came Robert. The treachery of the lad had not resulted in any evil consequences, but it was treachery as treachery that Harper Loftus hated. Judge Newman’s comments on his theories of discipline stirred uneasily, but he silenced them as the cause of the trouble. It was time for action, the assertion of the code of the stronger.

Bob was sitting in the parlor looking over the weeklies when my father entered. There was no greeting, just a sharp “Go to your room, Robert. I want to talk with you.”

“Yes, sir.”

The boy departed, his eyes a little wondering.

My mother knew the signs, the hardness in the face usually so good-humored. It was a long time since she had seen her husband so calmly on fire.

“Robert has not done anything wrong at the bank,” she ventured.

He sat down beside her.

“I refuse to think that Robert is unconquerable,” he said. “In the bank I have been greatly pleased with him. Now I find that he has descended to a piece of calculated deceit that is unpardonable.”

Caroline Loftus was very white.

“I have brought so much trouble to you, and you have been so generous,” she whispered.

I heard my father pass my door on the way to Bob’s room. I had been undressed for a considerable time, but I liked to stand, in my night-gown, at the high bureau, reading under the lamp. Instinctively I knew that one of those clashes that I used to fear had again occurred. I slipped down the corridor after him as far as the closed door.

When his stepfather entered, Bob, still mystified, stood up to meet him.

“What is the matter, sir?” he asked.

“I have been talking with your uncle, George Lytton.”

“Yes sir.”

“Need I tell you what that means?”

Bob did not answer.

“He has told me about the papers of the Lytton estate.”

“Oh that, sir.” But the tone was puzzled.

“He is the sort of man to betray those who have done something for him. When will you learn to shun a cad, Robert? I had hoped that occasions like this were things of the past. But you should know that the two things I despise most in all the world are a sneak and a liar.”

And Bob only looked at him with a silent perplexity that resembled a mask of defiance.

Outside, I was experiencing the anguish of impotence. A few yards away from me were the two heroes of my boyhood,—the only two I have ever had, (the minds of to-day dwell too much upon the universal blemishes in human nature, even at its best, to permit the worshipping of heroes). I knew that somehow they never looked at one another with seeing eyes, and I did not understand how to be an interpreter.

There was terror too in this interval of discipline that I had never before known. The last time, Bob had been younger and acted as a child. Now I heard no sound to indicate his presence in the room.

Only blows.

My father found me crouching there when he came out. He stooped over me gently.

“You are shivering like a leaf,” he said. “Come to your room, Timothy, my boy. You will catch your death of cold.”

It was not cold that I felt then, but a new emotion, an extraordinary sweep of physical compassion for the man and the boy. But how could I, eleven years of age, speak of such things? He took me as far as my room.

The trembling ceased after I had hugged my knees in the corner of my sofa for a short time. I looked into the hall. No one was about, so I put out the lamp and crept back again to the little door at the end. It was dark when I entered, except for a pale splash of moonlight on the floor—the harvest moon had just risen.

On the bed, face downward, I could distinguish Bob, brooding there.

“Bob.”

“Oh, is that you, Tim?”

“Yes.”

I went close to him.

Bob moved over and said, “Come on in, Tim.”

He made room for me, and I slipped under the clothes beside him.

“Are you cold?” he asked, and reached more blanket over me.

We were silent for a time. What was there for two boys to say? He put his pillow beneath my head, resting himself flat on the mattress, and a little later I felt his hand for an interval on my shoulder. I tried to telegraph thoughts I could not speak, patting his arm with the ends of my fingers.

Bob spoke at last with an intensity that startled me.

“I hate him,” he said. After a pause, “And I think he hates me.”

“I wish you didn’t feel like that, nor him either,” I whispered back.

Maybe the words sounded stronger to him than he expected. About half an hour later he said, “Of course I am not his own son, and I suppose that makes a difference.”

It was a strange vigil that I kept without speaking until after the grandfather’s clock in the hall downstairs had struck three. Once about midnight I was dozing when Bob awakened me with a low sound. It was like a dry sob. But I must have been mistaken, for I remembered that he never did that sort of thing,—wept or showed his feelings.

But pity replaced sleep for three hours longer.

III.

In the library shadowed by the cliffs of wisdom to be found in English literature, my parents sat for many hours and discussed in their foolishness the problem of Robert’s character. There were no concealments between husband and wife. Caroline Loftus listened, with drawn lines about her mouth, to the sequel of the coming of her brother, chiefly as it affected her son.

“Miss Belle Reynolds told me more than a month ago about their friendship,” said my father, “but I did not pay much attention. I know Miss Belle’s petty malice, and she never misses a chance to disparage Robert, probably because Gregory calls him the finest lad in town. Gad, Carol, I’d like to know that Gregory was right.”

“If only one could think it was another of George’s lies.”

“Everything fits too exactly. I wish that Robert had told me the truth when I first asked him about his friendship for George.”

“Yet, you can always believe him about little things, Harper.”

“But one cannot refuse the evidence of one’s eyes.”

He took the blue envelope from his pocket, and replaced it in the pigeon hole where it belonged.

“What can we do with my boy?” cried my mother, her voice pinched with suffering. “Isn’t there any way to fight heredity?”

“It is a strange thing, Carol, to see a character repeat itself, without there being any model for the new one to copy. It is not the sullenness that I mind, his queer forbidding disposition. Sometimes I have thought it was lightening. But the deliberate wilfulness. I fear his determination to serve his own ends, without any thought of principle or of those he should love. When he wants to do a thing he has no scruples.”

“But he is a good boy in so many ways,” exclaimed my mother. “He asks for so little. My heart cries out to him, for I think he is lonely with his reserve.”

“Carol, I would give much to succeed in this task, the very first one that you ever set me to do. But it is such glimpses as I have had to-day of Robert’s character that make me feel powerless.”

Like protected women who prefer to find adventure vicariously in novels, Caroline Loftus became melodramatic when deeply moved.

“Can the dead hand of a father he never knew be as strong as that?” she said. “I cannot see how a just God would put anything into the world so horrible as the law of heredity.”

She was haunted by the popular conception of heredity, a mixture of the second commandment and the scientific thought of the nineteenth century, adulterated and watered down so that she could apply it to Mortimer Herndon and his son Robert. To her, heredity was something—a combination of weakness and vice—that got into a family and refused to be driven out.

“I will not think that way of it,” my father often tried to reassure her. “Deep-seated physical disease yields to vigorous treatment, and only becomes vital when overlooked or neglected; I believe it must be true also of inherited disease of the mind or heart.”

Spoken like a fool, spoken with all the airy self-confidence of blunderers who thought they knew all about the bringing up of children.

It is always easy for the perfect present to sit in judgment on the erring past, which was in its day, oddly enough, the perfect present. We can only shake our heads and wonder how our parents and grand-parents could have been so woefully ignorant regarding the relationship of the physical to the mental in the youthful male. They built too extensively and brutally on a single Scriptural epigram.

We are different to-day, completely modern and scientific in our handling of the young. We know that we are justified in purring over the revealed rightness of our methods, in which the goal is self-expression, stimulated by such precepts as “Be successful” and “Be optimistic” and “Learn to sell yourself.” What a pleasure it is to talk about the perfection that we have achieved, based on a thorough knowledge of child psychology. Then again, at other times, we lament over the manners and morals of the teen-age youths and maidens that we happen to know.

Sometimes a senseless query insists upon erecting a persistent interrogation mark in our brains. How did it happen that the maltreated sons of the eighties and the seventies and the sixties and all the years before managed to grow up into decent citizens, so that the world had not fallen into a state of advanced decay before the nineteen-twenties were reached to save it? We have to admit that a few of our fathers, funny old stick-in-the-muds, the product of a variety of vicious systems, were not such a bad set of fellows after all.

All of which would seem to indicate that bringing-up as a fine art has nothing to do with it.

I.

Next morning at breakfast my mother said, “Your bed was not slept in last night, Timothy. It gave me quite a turn when I went into your room this morning.”

I was heavy-eyed from lack of my usual amount of sleep, and even mild disapproval made me squirm. She added, anxiously, “You look done out. I’m afraid you don’t get your proper rest that way.”

“It was all right,” my father put in. “Timothy slept with Robert. On a gorgeous day like this, he will soon feel as fit as a fiddle.”

Tempests passed quickly in our household and left no sign. My father’s manner to Bob at breakfast was exactly the same as on any ordinary day. He never appeared aggrieved or offended as some parents do for hours, even days, after a misunderstanding with their children.

He said genially, “Robert, would you run down to the bank like a good lad, and tell Mr. Green I have business that will keep me away from the office for part of the day?”

Bob replied, “Yes sir,” and followed me from the room when I started for school.

After Harper had closed the door behind us, my father observed in his quiet way, “I should never say anything to discourage the affection between those boys, Carol. His tenderness for Timothy may be the saving of Robert. I have felt sometimes that it will be the only hold on him we have at last.”

My mother got up and went round the table to kiss him.

“I did not sleep very well last night. Perhaps I am somewhat unstrung. I got thinking of Clara, too. What a curse I and mine have been to you and yours.”

He pulled her towards him.

“You must not think or say such things,” he commanded. “We cannot afford to be morbid, especially if we hope to set things right.”

And she could not have guessed, he was so briskly cheerful, that he had made a bitter decision in the long hours of the night to put aside deliberately, for the time being, the chance of achieving his fondest ambition.

II.

When my father arrived at the door of Judge Newman’s home, he met the sturdy housewife advancing towards him down the hall to the vicious accompaniment of a broom, with sufficient dust rising about her to suggest a domestic Elijah in a chariot of smoke. It did not worry her to be found in a morning wrapper with her head bundled in an enormous dust-cap. They employed no servants in the judge’s house. “Why should we, with enough home-grown maids to supply the township?” said Mrs. Newman, and at all times she acted as general to the forces at her command.

She stood the broom in the corner to take possession of the morning caller.

“You have never honoured us this way before,” she said. “You must come along with me to see our vegetable garden. You have promised me several times this summer. Now I’ll make you keep your word, for once.”

Behind the house the vegetables stood in brave array, ready for harvesting at any time, the red leaves of the beets, the tumbled pipes of the onions, the ferny carrots, and the potato tops, flopped and withered.

“Enough for the winter and to spare,” she said proudly. “And the girls did every speck of it. There is something in heredity after all.”

She laughed loudly.

My father enquired regarding varieties, but Mrs. Newman paid little attention to such distinctions. Potatoes were potatoes, and corn was corn. That suited her.

“The girls wanted some fancy stuff this spring from Toronto. Their father ordered it to please them, a marvellous new variety of green peas, ‘Six Weeks Wonder,’ they called it. At the end of six weeks we were all wondering why they did not come up.”

That joke at the expense of her potato growers and their father had served Mrs. Newman all summer. Her laughter fluttered the leaves above her head as much now as when she first thought of it, and my father joined, catching the contagion of her heartiness.

“Of course you did not come over to see me,” Mrs. Newman said as they strolled back to the house. “But I kidnapped you, and now I give you back your freedom, so that I can finish my sweeping.” More laughter.

Sprawled in his favorite chair with the Toronto papers of the previous day scattered about him, Judge Newman was keeping abreast of current history. He spent two hours every morning in the great world outside; for the remainder of his time he found enough interests about him to absorb all his attention.

The two men were such old friends that they did not exchange greetings when they met, just a smile or a grunt to indicate pleasure in the other’s company. If either of them had a subject to discuss, he turned to it in an intimate offhand way, as brothers living at home do—when the brothers are good friends and on speaking terms, which does not always happen.

My father sat down and went right to the heart of the matter.

“Henry Munn will have to be our candidate. Something has happened that will make it impossible for me to go through an election. So I cannot permit my name to come before the convention.”

The judge folded up the paper that he had been reading, with pronounced deliberation.

“Remember that I am out of politics, and must show no interest in the election. But I may say that the party will insist upon it, and the party will be right.”

“It is not a matter for jesting,” replied my father.

The judge became suddenly alert.

“What’s wrong, Loftus?” he asked. “Surely nothing has happened that we cannot straighten out.”

“It is in the strictest confidence, Newman. But when you hear what I am going to tell you, I think you’ll agree that I have made the only possible decision.”

The judge listened grimly to the details of the interview with George Lytton. My father glossed over the portion that affected Bob; he did not want to influence his friend’s good opinion of the boy. After all, the important thing was the story of Clara Glint’s infatuated escapade with his wife’s brother.

“You do not think,” said the judge, “that Clara is in trouble. The girl has always been flighty, but I never thought that she would go as far as this.”

“I hope we shall not have that complication to face,” replied my father. “I want to talk to Clara to-day, and then I’ll hear what did happen. He must have promised marriage. I feel sure of that.”

Judge Newman pondered a while, and then made a judicial decision.

“Clara will have to face it out as best she can. But I do not see that you need give up so much because of her.”

“I knew that you would take that view, Newman, but I have given the matter hours of thought. More and more I have realized that it makes my candidature impossible.”

“You are hyper-sensitive, Loftus.”

“No, I am not.”

“What this man and poor Clara have done cannot affect your honor.”

“You do not know what he is like, Newman. Remember that he is still living in Petersville. If I entered the field in the election, he would try his hand at injuring me. The story would soon be discreetly placed in circulation that my cousin and my brother-in-law had spent a week together without benefit of clergy.”

“No man would be such a scoundrel.”

“The trouble is that we are not dealing with anything so wholesome as a scoundrel. George Lytton is the most thorough-going cad that I have ever known.”

“Something could be done to shut his mouth.”

“What, for instance?”

“I don’t know, Loftus, but you must give me time to think.”

“I have made up my mind that poor little Clara’s good name is not going to be whispered and dragged up and down the side roads as an issue in the coming election campaign.”

Judge Newman seldom showed anger, but now he was walking up and down the room, remembering and trying out every piece of profanity that he had ever heard.

“It is abominable,” he said. “Give me permission to horse-whip that fellow.”

“I am glad that you agree with me for once that a little physical punishment might do good,” replied my father with a smile.

“It would relieve my feelings, Loftus. And that much I have always admitted for it.”

“I did not tell you that his eyes will probably be discolored this morning, and his head aching.” There was hard satisfaction in these words.

“Good,” laughed the judge. “I have been wondering why you didn’t.”

“It was foolish of me to do it. An incident of that sort might have made the story known.”

“We won’t submit so easily, Loftus. We’ll fight it out, and let the gossiping tongues be damned.”

“When you have thought it over for a day, you will see that we can take no chances of losing the seat.”

“But how can you be so cool about it, old friend? I know what it means to you.”

The judge mopped his brow. It was the hardest morning’s work that he had done in many a day.

“It is no use to bluster against the inevitable,” said my father.

“And what will you tell the party?”

“Business reasons. And that is not really an untruth. You know that I have been contemplating changes for a long time.”

Judge Newman thumped the table.

“The nomination is yours by all the rights of fair play.”

My father shook his head.

“I have not forgotten that the first consideration is that we must get a man who can carry the riding. After Dr. Moreland, we have got to put up a candidate whose private affairs will stand full investigation. Henry Munn is such a man. If I ran, the scandal, cleverly handled, might cost us the seat. The evangelical conscience is a strange thing.”

It is humiliating for a fervent believer in the ballot to have to admit it, but principles and high causes had just about as much to do with the winning of elections in the eighties as now. A little bit of scandal, festering in the corner post-offices, here and there throughout the countryside, had more effect upon a party’s fortunes in the rural districts than all the policies that were ever voiced by silver tongues.

Harper Loftus had made up his mind to retire from the field, and talking against the opposition of a friend only clarified his purpose. At parting they shook hands, and the grip was firm and prolonged. Ordinarily the shaking of hands is about the most meaningless thing under the sun. But when two men, so intimately associated that they do not usually exchange salutations, pause to clasp right hands, it conveys more than either one would ever dare to put into words.

Judge Newman only said, with an air of jocularity, “I’ll have another go at this, and I hope to convince you yet. I can’t help thinking that you are too quixotic. Under the same circumstances, I would not give up so much.”

And the other replied, “Oh yes, you would, Newman. I know you better than that.”

III.

Cousin Clara Glint had to be told that her furtive romance, now so sadly faded in her own eyes, was as dead as she feared. Nobody ever tried to discuss things seriously with Clara. Her conversations with men were like games of peek-aboo with a baby. Who would think of pulling down the fingers from a child’s face to tell it about the reality of perfidy and suffering?

After banking hours, my father called at the cottage of Aunt Henrietta Glint, who shouted at him, as soon as she heard his voice, that he had been neglecting her shamefully of late. She wanted him to come in some day to hear about the unpardonable rudeness of Miss Susanna Gilkinson. “She always had a wicked tongue,” yelled Aunt Henrietta, “and being an old maid has made her bitter. I’m sorry I stayed overnight in the house of such a woman, and put myself under any obligation to her.”

My father had only keyed himself for a certain amount of nervous strain in the course of the day, and he was not prepared to bear, with patience, one of Aunt Henrietta’s tantrums. Without going to the door he replied, “I am sorry to disagree with you. Miss Susanna Gilkinson is one of my best friends. There are few finer women in the country.”

“None of your impertinence, Harper,” retorted the voice from the room beyond. “Go home now and come back when you are in a better temper.”

He had no intention of staying, even for the bite of tea that Sadie and Kathleen flew about to press upon him, and he excused himself by explaining that he wanted to arrange with Clara to come over about eight o’clock. It was a rule in our house never to discuss unpleasant news or open a letter before a meal. A comfortable stomach supports the mind and the nervous system to an unbelievable degree in facing a shock or a crisis. It was not the usual flitting Clara who replied listlessly that she could accompany him at once. A cup of tea with some toast and jam, which she was finishing, had satisfied her appetite for the evening. There was a little pretence at her familiar playfulness when she said good-night to her mother, but it had none of the old spontaneity.

Poor Cousin Clara. Many tears shed when she should have been sleeping had left her face pinched and white. She no longer grimaced, or popped her head from concealment, or stuck out the tip of her tongue. In two months she had become a pathetic echo of the most dashing belle in the village.

Tea was ready when they arrived at our house, and mother told them as they entered the library that she would not wait unduly. Clara sat down opposite my father, limp and still. He did not have to find an opening for she said in a tiny voice, “You know about George and me.”

“Yes, Clara, a little, probably not all. I know that you gave him the five hundred dollars.”

“But he is coming back to marry me, Harper. That is the truth. He promised.”

He told her gently that she had probably seen the last of George Lytton, but she blazed out at him, on the defensive.

“He said you disliked him,” she declared. “I know he is Caroline’s brother. He said you would do anything you could to injure him.”

“Have you heard from him since you came home, or even since he got your money?”

“I gave him the money, Harper. He didn’t ask for it. He is too honorable. He said that his finances would not permit him to marry at once, so I made him take a loan. I know he is ill, or that something terrible has happened to him.”

“He is perfectly well.” My father almost smiled as he remembered that the bloom of Lytton’s health was now qualified by a pair of black eyes. “I had a long talk with him yesterday at the bank. He has gone away again.”

Her voice was almost nothing at all when she said, “If you are trying to break things off because you dislike George, I’ll never forgive you.”

In as few words as possible, he informed her that George Lytton was already married, and had a wife living in Halifax. Clara could not bring herself to accept the fact. All through the interview she cried a little, softly, to herself, but never hysterically. Even when she repeated, as she did many times, “But he has to marry me,” she spoke with a dull insistence, as though trying to convince herself.

Harper Loftus wished to sift the matter to the bottom, but there were questions that he dared not ask. At last he made a suggestion, “I think that you had better tell Caroline all about it. You could talk more freely to her. You may want the advice and help of another woman.”

Clara took the sloppy square of handkerchief from her eyes.

“I’d sooner talk to you,” she said.

“But if there are certain facts to face, Caroline can help us.”

The training of Clara’s life-time sounded in the next words, “Isn’t it terrible that I have become a creature that you can think of in that way?”

“Shall I call Caroline?”

“No, no, I am all right, except that I have been the sort of wicked woman that mother would drive out of the house. I cannot forgive George for telling you that. How could he?”

This glimpse of wren-like indignation pleased my father. It was a healthy sign. But a moment later Clara was defending George Lytton. Nothing had been planned. It just happened. She met him first in Toronto because she had promised to do something for him. He was grateful, and took her for walks and to a band concert. Then he offered to drive her out to see some friends who lived north of the city, but it was she who suggested that the beautiful weather should not be wasted while they paid calls.

“I do not know how it was, but all of a sudden we had made up our minds to elope. We thought it would be such fun and so romantic. We drove up the stage-coach road, past ever so many inns. I don’t think anybody could have been happier than we were. Then we stopped at a village where the inn was better than the others. I asked him what the clergyman would think of two strangers walking in like that, late in the afternoon, but George said he knew the parson. He went off to find his friend, and left me at the hotel. You see, if his friend had been at home, we should have been married right away. It seemed all right for us to stay when the clergyman was to be home in just a few days to marry us, but after we had waited, news came that he was ill. And George was worried, and in a hurry to get back to the city.”

As she listened to her own recital, Cousin Clara realized for the first time that they were the adventures of a fool. She had always revelled in novels about innocent girls who were deceived, but the villains did not resemble George Lytton. He was more like the classic fellows who married the heroines in the final act of the dramas that Clara favored. That had been her impression of the whole affair while she was living through it. During those delirious days she had felt like a beautiful actress in a play, acting, acting, acting for dear life with handsome George Lytton, for the benefit of an audience consisting entirely of herself. Another phase of the novels and the dramas rushed into her mind now. Did Cousin Harper regard her as a fallen woman? It struck her as a new thought that fallen women did not go out and fall for the sake of falling. Maybe they danced merrily along, as she had done, enjoying romance as it came, and then suddenly discovered themselves to be fallen women. Would she ask Cousin Harper about it? No, ladies and gentlemen could not discuss such things together, and he might think her unduly forward.

She realized that he was making practical suggestions about the future. “Only a few people need ever know. We shall tell Sadie and Kathleen.” She protested. “Yes, child, they must be told. They love you and will protect you.” At that she cried again. “You have been plucky so far, Clara. It will take some more courage. Just keep on going about as you have always done. No one need ever suspect.”

“Do you think I can face all the people who know me?”

“You will have to be very brave, but we will see you through.”

Clara caught both his hands and covered them with kisses. She could not get away entirely from the feeling that she was acting in a play.

“You have no idea how horrible I have been, Harper, and you are so good to me. I met him in Toronto to do something against you.”

“Don’t think about that. I dare say that George Lytton has plenty to say against me. We have always disliked one another.”

“I did more than listen to what he said about you. He wanted to see an envelope containing some things you had written about him. I took it from your desk for him before going to Toronto.”

He stood up with a sternness that startled her.

“Was it you, Clara, who took that envelope from my desk?”

His look made her pause, frightened.

“He said that he could do you no harm, and I was just teasing him. I told him he would have to meet me in Toronto to get it.”

“I never dreamed of such an explanation,” he said, almost to himself.

“Will he be able to injure you?”

She caught his arm in both her hands. She was more troubled over the ill turn she might have done him than over her own predicament. He pulled himself together. He could not explain to her.

“That is all right, Clara. You must not worry. He brought the envelope back.”

IV.

My father took Cousin Clara as far as the gate of her own home. Her spirits revived as they walked. There was no more uncertainty to oppress her. Her mind turned away from the dark future to fasten upon the past. She wanted her companion to know, and it surprised him when she exclaimed ecstatically, “I have been very wicked, Harper. But they were wonderful days, and I know he loved me, if he had not been married.”

“Poor Clara,” he thought to himself, striding homeward. “It is odd that she should feel that way about it, being Aunt Henrietta’s child. I doubt if the old woman puts her stamp on them as firmly as she thinks.” Then he hastened along. The wrong that he had done Robert must not remain unexplained for one second longer than he could help. Tea was over when he entered, and Harper had gone to bed after his usual vain protest against being first. Bob was not in the room, and I was kicking my legs nervously in a chair, unable to read.

“Where is Robert?” enquired my father, without even waiting for his kiss of greeting to his wife.

“I don’t know,” replied my mother, with anxious eyes, fearful of more trouble. “He has not come in yet.”

“Don’t you know where he is?”

“No Harper. That is the odd part of it. Robert seldom stays away without letting me know. I get so anxious.”

“Doesn’t Timothy know?”

“No. He says not.”

Then I made my dry throat do its duty, and I spoke.

“Yes, I do, mother. But I didn’t like to tell you while father was away. Bob has gone to Toronto. He went off by the afternoon train.”

I do not know now—probably I had no definite idea then, what effect I expected my news to have when I dared to impart it. There was no danger of a visitation of anger upon my head. I do not remember either parent ever speaking to me in a tone that suggested a threat, probably on account of my hunch back. But I was quite unprepared for their dismay. My mother clasped her hands tightly, her face bloodless as a shell, and looked at my father awaiting his leadership.

He gazed at her intently and said, “It is all my fault, Carol, all my fault.”

And she only replied, “No, Harper.”

My father questioned me closely, but there was not much that I could tell him. Bob had not been able to inform me what he intended to do, because he did not know himself. He did not want mother to worry, and promised to write to her as soon as he could get some work. Yes, he had money, his savings that he kept in the bank.

“What can we do?” my mother asked.

My father brought her a little brandy in a wine glass and she drank it.

“In a little while I’ll tell you something of what this means,” he said. “It was a sense of injustice that made Robert take the step. Nothing worse than that.”

“He wanted to be a doctor,” I burst out. “He didn’t like the bank, and only worked there to please you. I think he must have gone to Toronto to learn to be a doctor. But I don’t want him to go away and stay away. I want him to live here with us.”

“I hope he will be back with us very soon,” said my father, with a kindly hand resting on my shoulder. “Now Timothy, be a man. You must not upset your mother.”

And at that point I blubbered, as my voluntary contribution to the general agitation.

I.

Bob made his plans for going to Toronto quickly and without saying a word to anybody, as was his way. Only half an hour before train-time, he told me what he was doing. All his belongings that he required were packed in his black leather valise, and awaited him at the railroad station.

“Are you running away?” I asked, properly awed. In my most thumbed book, Frank Fairweather’s Fortunes, the hero ran away to join a circus and did not return until time had made him romantic and wealthy.

“No, silly,” he replied. Bob did not care about theatrical poses.

“Is it because you hate father?”

“Forget it, Tim. I shouldn’t have said that to you. He and I are different, somehow, so I am going to Toronto.”

“But you cannot go off this way to be a doctor,” I ventured.

“I couldn’t be a doctor if I stayed here. He wants to make me into a banker.”

It seemed foolish to talk as though father refused to listen to reasonable requests, but I could only suggest, “Why don’t you stay and tell him you want to be a doctor?”

“I can’t talk to him the way you do, Tim.”

“Oh yes you can. You never try.”

He took my arm and we walked along together.

“There is no use making an argument about it. I’ve thought it over a good many times. I am through here. I intend to find a place in the city, and go to work for myself.”

My wits never ran to nimbleness, and the full meaning of what I had just heard came to me slowly. Life without Bob had not seemed a possibility half an hour ago. Now I was with him for the last time, perhaps. I could see no turning back. Only a few words of his instructions leaked through to my understanding. He would write to mother as soon as he got work, and I must not let her bother her head about him. Also I needn’t yap about it to anybody else.

I stood on the station platform and watched him board his train. I felt benumbed, like a man in an accident.

One of the loiterers who watched every departure and arrival said to me, “So Bob has gone to the city for a trip with no one to look after him.”

And remembering not to yap about it, I said, “Yes.”

The loiterer leered offensively.

“Most fellows of his age want to get away without a nurse, to try for themselves the things that other chaps tell ’em.”

Another shuffling lout had joined us.

“I bet he’ll spend more money in the next two weeks than he could get rid of in a year in this burg.”

His grin was wise too.

“I guess I’ll be going,” I said, not wanting to snivel before these scoffers.

“Your turn will come,” one of them called after me, mistaking the cause of my emotion.

Their own adventures in the paths of sin were circumscribed by lack of money and initiative. That was why they could see only one motive for leaving the village.

II.

With seventy dollars in his pocket, Robert Herndon left his home that late afternoon to start life on his own. In the eighties, the people of Ontario considered Toronto as much of a city as they do to-day, and to go there was to plunge boldly into the sea of experience. Bob’s money seemed to him to be substantial backing. We boys managed to enjoy our childhood without handling many coins. Parents did not believe in giving their children cash in those days to squander or save. A ten cent piece was a generous present to hand to a boy, when I was one. Probably it was because some sense of proportion had to be preserved, and even well-to-do people felt instinctively that they should not toss a dollar bill to a youngster when that was all they paid a laborer for a day’s work. My father made himself unpopular with our neighbors when he gave our old gardener an extra fifty cents a day, thereby, I suppose, discouraging thrift. With seventy dollars for emergencies, Bob felt a stimulating affluence.

Bob was not an experienced traveller. He and I had been taken one summer to Niagara Falls, and another time we went to Ottawa during the session to see our country being governed, which did not turn out to be as exciting as a fair-day—at least so far as we could notice. Occasionally we paid short visits to Toronto, but always in the company of our elders. Still, he did not feel at all timid about the venture. According to the creed that everybody in the school held firmly, village boys were the right kind of boys, and what they knew or did was always best. But the city bucks! What helpless fellows they were, ill-favored sissies and all that. Once a year, the pupils in the highest form of the Collegiate debated, “Resolved: that country life is better than city life.” It was pitiful how little could be found to support the negative.

Bob left his valise in the checking room of the Toronto station. His plans were simple. Tonight he would get himself located in a comfortable boardinghouse, and tomorrow he would find a situation good enough to keep him for the present, until he became better acquainted with things.

Day was dimming into evening. On the streets running north and south, the shadows from the west-side buildings had folded across to darken the opposite sidewalks. The thoroughfare up which Bob took his way was old and dingy and had a touch of slum about it, but a short walk brought him to a group of hotels that marked the turning into the business section. He recognized one of them, the Rossin House. We had all stayed there over Sunday once, so as not to impose three children on the good-nature of friends. It looked familiar and friendly.

Once across King Street and away from the railroad section, Bob looked for improvement in the locality. It surprised him to find that the change was, if anything, for the worse. Children and junk littered the entrances to all the shops, and inside only disorder could be seen through the dirty windows. Small men behind large beards sat at the door-ways, or talked excitedly in little groups. Bob wondered why they were all so worked up. One narrow door had a sign over it that called to him to mount the broken staircase to find “Clean beds. Fifteen cents a night.” He knew there was one lie in that advertisement. He felt the flesh between his shoulders creeping as he thought about it.

He began to realize that this was not a street where a Canadian boy could find a night’s lodging. It seemed to be frequented entirely by foreigners. But they were interesting, as few people came to our village whose native tongue was not English. He felt a little disappointed in the appearance of the Jews. Immensity of whisker and nose did not make a good association with modern clothes. But could you imagine the flowing robes of Dore’s Bible Gallery in such surroundings? A Chinaman scuttled past him, with short finnicky steps like a dancer, his pig-tail only partly wrapped about his head, the tail of his shirt and his trouser-legs flapping. At least the Chinamen consented to remain Chinamen in Canada.

It was evident that he would have to try a side street. He looked along one of them. It was narrow and quieter, with no Jewish children tumbling down the front steps. When he turned into it, the houses, faded and uninviting, gave him a desolate feeling. In one porch a burly negro sat, straining his eyes to read a paper in the gathering dusk. He looked up and grinned at Bob, as though boys in their first long pants were a joke to him. Every house had its bay window, but there were no cards offering “Room and Board” outside the bedraggled curtains. Bob walked slowly, looking for them. Once a girl, sitting between two sickly fuschias, tapped on the window glass and beckoned, and from an open window another girl spoke to him. Her hoarse breathy voice startled the boy. He turned hurriedly and retraced his steps. Such things were quite true then. Well, yes, he had known they were true, but somehow he had thought them more remote.

He felt an agitating mixture of excitement and distaste. Cities were strange places. So shameless.

After that street with its windows like spiders’ eyes, the grubby Jewish children squabbling and rolling almost under his feet seemed less squalid. It was not so easy to find a boarding house after all. Perhaps he would have more success by daylight tomorrow. He could afford to stay at the Rossin House for one night, and in the morning everything would be brighter and more wholesome. It was not possible that he felt the beginnings of homesickness already, less than four hours away from the village.

A brilliant blue September sky started the next day with a feeling of exhilaration. After all it was not so bad being by one’s self, with nobody to consider. He went to breakfast, and thought what a chance it would be to try something that he had never tasted, but after a delay that made the waiter impatient, he ordered the meal that Liza would probably have been dishing to him at home. Bob paid his bill, and as the clerk who took his money looked approachable, he asked for information regarding boarding houses, adding a few words about his experience of the night before.

“Keep off Pearl Street and Adelaide Street,” the clerk advised him. “They are well named. You are just as likely as not to get into a joint.”

“How far is it to the streets where I can get a respectable place to board?”

“There are plenty of them not so far west. But if I were you I’d walk up Yonge Street a bit. The streets just east of Yonge are lousy with rooming houses, and they are handy to business.”

“It’s over that way?” said Bob, pointing vaguely east.

“Jump on a car, and you’ll be there in no time. Good luck, youngster.” And the clerk turned to another guest.

The cars, with the jogging horses and the constant clink-clank of the cracked bells, were interesting enough as novelties to look at, but Bob thought he would stretch his legs a little and inspect the glories of the shop windows. Surely nobody who did not arrive in a private Victoria would dare to enter these haughty stores, and just around the corner too from the dilapidated refuse-bin of a street that had given him the blues the night before. Where did the ordinary people go to buy things? He stopped opposite a newspaper office. He had read about its high tower, with a bird’s eye view to the city limits in every direction. There was something jolly about the shoutings of the newsies and the clump clump of the horses’ hoofs on the hard roads.

Bob followed the instructions of the hotel clerk. With so much to see, distances were nothing at all. He had walked up Yonge Street for several blocks before he began to realize he would never find anything but stores along the route he was following. The first street to the east seemed the logical one to try, but he found it disappointing. The brick and rough-cast houses cried more loudly for repairs than those he had looked at the night before. Never had he seen such women as were giving the steps their morning scrub. Maternity, recent or soon-to-be, appeared the prevalent condition of these homes. There was a shrill friendliness, back and forth, from stoop to stoop. It seemed immodest to pause in a district that was indulging in such an orgy of race propagation. Bob trudged on.

Toronto streets running north from the section of the city known as down-town, the condensed business centre, had a peculiar way of altering their social status without warning. You travelled for blocks in humble surroundings; then you passed a cross street and found yourself in a neighborhood that flaunted its new glory haughtily, like a social climber who had forgotten his lowly beginnings. The street that Bob had selected changed its character suddenly, in that way.

The row of mean houses came to an end, and he found himself on a square overlooking a park or some institution. The building had the dignity of age and was surrounded by venerable trees. Among the flower-beds were pieces of statuary, shoddy bits that gave the impression of having escaped from a cemetery to hide in a garden.

The homes that faced upon the square were starched and clean and up-standing, in keeping with their outlook, all except one group at the corner that had evidently slopped over from the block below. As the mouth of an idiot drops ajar and drools, so the doors of these characterless houses stood open and soiled babies dribbled constantly across the doorstep. And a dozen numbers farther on, Bob came to what he would have called a mansion, grim and aristocratic behind a stiff iron fence. Somewhere between the two, there ought to be a respectable boarding house.

Iron fences, less showy than the one in front of the big house with the conservatory, gave the neighborhood an air. Bob picked out a very red brick house—it had been painted a darker red than any brick ever blushed—and mounted the long flight of steps to the door. He pulled the bell-handle, and heard the responding jingle-jangle somewhere in the depths beyond. Immediately a little fat woman appeared at the door beneath him, leading to the basement. She was ready to shout alarming dismissals at a pedlar or a ragman, but as Bob was neither, she came up the steps, taking two sets of false teeth from her apron pocket as she mounted and jamming them into her mouth.

Bob saw a peculiar transformation take place as he watched. Without the teeth, the little eyes and round snout above the fallen lips suggested something not quite human—perhaps a pig. But supported on the dental foundation, the mouth gave an impression of good nature that inspired confidence.

While awaiting her, Bob took off his hat.

“I am looking for a room and board, ma’am,” he said.

“As a rule I don’t take men,” the woman replied. “But of course you are not a man. You are only a boy, and I like boys.”

She talked without ceasing while leading him inside. Her house was full with the exception of one room, and of course she wanted some one to use it. She owned the house and took boarders only during the winter, to eke out her income. She did not know what her husband, the late Dr. Ira Splaver—veterinary, but she never mentioned that qualifying word—would say if he knew how she had come down in the world. Anyway, her boarders were all genteel, no shop-girls; she accommodated only modelites.

“Do you know what modelites are?” she enquired.

Bob didn’t.

“They are young women who are studying to be school-teachers, all superior young ladies, as you would expect. That is why I cannot have young men in the house. So many of them, the young men I mean, not the modelites, cannot be trusted. But I can see that you have been well brought up. If I may ask, what are you doing in the city? You don’t belong here. I can tell that by the cut of ye.”

Bob told her that he intended to find a position.

The room that Mrs. Ira Splaver showed him was at the back of the hall, next to the large one that she reserved for herself. There was a parlor on the ground floor, and the kitchen and dining-room occupied the basement. All the upstairs was populated by modelites. Mrs. Splaver trusted no man in their midst. But the small room that looked down the steps to the basement was right under her eye. She felt that she might rent it to a boy like Bob without fear of a future scandal that would rob her of all the modelites. She pointed out that there could not be any more furniture than it contained, on account of the limited space. There were two narrow iron beds, one of them disguised as a sofa, a bureau and washstand that huddled in one corner, and a chair. Bob could have it with board for three dollars per week, and if by any chance he found some one to take the other bed, it would be fifty cents cheaper for each of them.

“It must be a nice boy, remember,” she added. “I can’t risk a masher with so many innocent young ladies in my keeping. This is no ordinary, vulgar boardinghouse that you have gotten into.”

Bob produced his roll of money and paid a week’s board in advance, though he had a slight dread that Mrs. Splaver intended to mother him. She thanked him and departed, dropping the crisp one dollar bills into her apron pocket as soon as the door closed behind her, and her two sets of teeth after them a moment later. She never gave them enough time in position to make themselves feel at home. Twenty times a day they were popped from mouth to pocket and back again.

Seated on the chintz-covered bed, or sofa for the time being, Bob made the acquaintance of the decorations, for the right to enjoy which he had just paid. Mostly they consisted of mottos, with two large pictures that faced one another on opposite walls. One was a lady in remarkably dry and flowing raiment, clinging to a cross, suspended on nothing in the midst of a storm-tossed sea that had apparently just engulfed the last of all mortals except her ladyship. The other was a highly colored hunting scene, that had once occupied a conspicuous place in the outhouse that Ira Splaver called his office.

III.

Finding employment was more difficult than locating a boarding house. In the banks, Bob received the information that new clerks had to be recommended and bonded, in addition to passing a special examination. The remainder of the day he spent among the warehouses of the business section, being told that his services were not wanted.

At dinner time, Mrs. Splaver, with her teeth in place, took him to the table to meet the modelites. He knew the introduction would be an ordeal, and it was a relief to find that the young ladies were equally ill at ease with him. But the land-lady was a perfect hostess—she filled all the gaps in the conversation. It would, perhaps, be more accurate to say that the occasional gaps in her monologue could be filled by a monosyllable from one of the boarders.

After the meal, Mrs. Splaver sat with her male lodger, thinking it wise, from previous experience, to provide a large dose of chat as an antidote to possible homesickness.

“How do you like the Square?” she asked. “It is the most beautiful down-town district.”

“Pretty well, ma’am, and—”

“Of course it isn’t what it used to be. When the doctor was alive, all my neighbors were gentlemen with their own carriage and pair. Now I am surrounded by boardinghouses, and naturally I feel it.”

“That must be a gentleman’s home just north of here,” ventured Bob, “In the winter that conservatory—”

“Gentleman! I should say not. Hotel people own that house, and no one who makes money directly or indirectly by the sale of ardent liquor was ever recognized as a gentleman by either Dr. Splaver or I.”

Mrs. Splaver did not realize that her native tongue frequently played her the meanest tricks when she thought she was handling it most impressively.

She reminded Bob many times that she knew he was a good boy, and that she expected him to remain a good boy for the sake of the reputation of her house, the preservation of which seemed to be linked in a mysterious manner with the memory of the late Dr. Ira Splaver.

Early the following Monday, Bob found something to do that brought him an even smaller income than he had feared. But he had resolved by that time to grab the first thing that offered. He was just starting down Yonge Street after his breakfast, when he saw a man placing in the window of a drug-store a card proclaiming the need of a smart boy to deliver parcels. Bob rushed in as the only applicant, and his first task was to remove the card from the window.

The druggist was a tall man with a long neck and a bald bullet head. Bob found later that his employer had a great many intimate friends among his customers, who called him Joe. Frequently they brought in weedy and sorry looking girls, who had consultations with Joe in his private office.

He made only one comment when engaging his new messenger boy.

“You’ll have to brush your hair.”

Those rebellious terrier locks! Bob had fought them daily for years but they remained unconquered still.

After a couple of days, he wondered why brushed hair should be necessary in his position. At eight o’clock each morning, he started his routine by sprinkling wet saw-dust on the floor and sweeping it up again. He dusted round for a while with a dirty rag, until Joe was satisfied that things looked sufficiently spotless. Then Bob went behind the scenes and did not reappear in the front shop, except when he passed out to deliver bottles and tiny boxes. In the afternoon, when the glare of the sun had crossed the street, he threw water up the outside of the windows and scraped it down with a sort of rubber hoe. Between times he washed bottles, an endless number of bottles, as though Joe was preparing for an epidemic or a siege.

The druggist had few words for him either of encouragement or fault-finding. Sometimes after a long message, he remarked laconically, “There are lots of interesting things to look at in Toronto, eh, Bob?” But repetition soon took the sting out of that. It was more a stock joke than a rebuke.

On Saturday afternoon, while Bob was hoeing the window, he saw the first familiar face since arriving in the city. Mr. Drury stopped and stared at him a moment before speaking, as though he could not be certain of the identity of his old pupil.

“Why, Robert,” he exclaimed at last, “whatever does this mean?”

“I wanted to start to work, sir, to support myself,” he replied.

Mr. Drury’s china blue eyes bulged with surprise.

“Surely your father would not want you to be doing work of this sort.”

“Oh, I am only doing it until I can find something better, sir.”

Mr. Drury moved along, but halted half a block away and returned to where the boy was working.

“The city is full of temptations to go wrong for a young fellow, if he has no good influences round him,” he said in his school-room voice of admonition. “I trust that you are careful in the selection of your associates, and that you will not forget to visit the House of God on the Sabbath.”

“Yes sir,” replied Bob in the uncomfortable way that youth always receives such onslaughts from the elders.

Mr. Drury shook hands and departed, with his mind filled with misgivings.

The words of counsel did not surprise Bob. They were like poor fussy old Drury. But why was it that since leaving the atmosphere of his home, everybody’s mind seemed to hover round one subject, like bluebottles round carrion? Hints, insinuation, warnings, invitations, but no one ever spoke straight out. He seemed to affect everybody with the same apprehension, even Joe, who told him jokes that left him astounded rather than amused. Was it for that reason his stepfather had been so down on him? Were they all sure of something about him that he occasionally feared about himself?

He had other things to think about besides temptation. His wage as a messenger boy was only a dollar fifty a week, half of what he required to pay his board. Of course he was on the look-out for a better position, but while he remained with Joe he would have to draw upon his slender capital each week to pay Mrs. Splaver. Other expenditures soon ate up extra dollars, ten cents on the plate at the Cathedral Sunday evening, a magazine or two and daily papers to keep him company in his room until bedtime. It was the only way to dodge the attentions of the widow of the late Dr. Ira Splaver, and the modelites. Once the first shyness had worn off, the young ladies showed a strong desire to make a pet of Mr. Herndon. They told one another that they thought him lovely, if a trifle youthful, and that they did not consider him ugly because he was so manly and cute. They felt sure that some mystery surrounded his presence in the city—you could see he was a gentleman, now couldn’t you, with half an eye?—and that made him all the more interesting and desirable. And Bob fled to sanctuary, as was his way all through life when pursued by fascinated females. Only the hard talking Mrs. Splaver could break into his room, to tell him family history and to keep on stimulating him to be a good boy.

Temptation. And a boy living on a dollar and a half a week in a house filled with modelites under the hawk-like eye of Mrs. Ira Splaver, class leader at Elm Street Methodist Church.

I.

Harper Loftus held the theory that any unpleasantness in a family was nobody’s business but their own. If you could keep your friends and neighbors from suspecting that something was wrong, so much the better. A gentleman did not make public complaint of fate’s bludgeoning, or fate’s pin-pricks for that matter. Repression was a law of life, unless a person was made of inferior clay. No one could have convinced him that it was a dangerous thing to sit on the lid of a desire, even to talk.

In our home, Bob’s departure was treated as a matter of course, and no signs of anxiety ruffled the surface. He had gone to Toronto. Liza and Harper and the various visitors to the house were told of it as naturally as though it had been part of a programme, and everybody took for granted that he would be home again before the new schoolmaster arrived. Gregory Reynolds observed that it was time to train the lad to be independent. Too many gentlemen’s sons grew up in grey flannel petticoats. Harper was the only person who made any complaint. He did not begrudge Bob an outing, but he saw every situation in relation to himself, and here he was back at his books again simply because it was not his luck to have a dead schoolmaster. If Providence saw fit to make fish of one and flesh of another, without any thought of the justice of the situation, then you could trust Harper to register his objection. Every morning he did so, with unavailing tears.

To me the attitude in the household seemed callous. In spite of my father’s re-assurance, I feared that Bob had gone for good. It was the first time that anything I prized had been lifted out of my life. I was learning one of the things that all sentimentalists regard as tragedy—that the pleasant circumstances and congenial groups of friends in which we find ourselves from time to time break up and alter, leaving the passive souls high and dry, while the adventurous spirits move on to new experiences. Would everything in all the days to come have to happen without Bob?

Of course, I couldn’t know that my father and mother were not as calm about Bob’s action as the surface suggested. They went over Cousin Clara’s story together. My mother was horrified. Nice women just did not do such things. They accepted wifehood or spinsterhood, whichever came, but never thought of any half-way course in either direction. Why should Clara be like that when Kathleen and Sadie were so content to be ladies? My father was chiefly concerned about the effect on his stepson.

“To him, it was just rank injustice,” he said. “I hate to think of what he must have felt about my unfairness.”

She put her arm through his, as they sat together on the sofa.

“I wish that you would not blame yourself.”

“How can I help it, until the matter can be straightened up?”

“But there didn’t seem to be any other explanation. How could you guess it was Clara, after George telling you it was Bob?”

“I am not digging up the excuses, Carol. But it has come into my mind that I’ve been too sure of myself. Perhaps I have not given Robert a square deal all along. It is not a comfortable thought.”

“You shouldered it all for me,” she whispered. “My family has been your curse.”

And with a mixture of impatience and tenderness, he forbade her ever to say that again.

II.

Even the sober routine of Sunday started off as usual, with Harper’s petulant objection after breakfast to going to church and Sunday School. He rebelled against them as he did against all the traditional duties of the family. It was all right for Timothy and Bob to go. They liked sitting still, and they liked standing up and singing. He hated singing, and he couldn’t sit still. He wouldn’t learn to be good at church, he just wouldn’t. With his eyes red and his mouth drooped in a heavy pout—his rebel heart did accept the code that boys must not weep in public places—, he marched with the rest of us down Victoria Avenue towards the Church of the Holy Trinity, just before the eleven o’clock bell rang.

On that Sunday, Cousin Clara Glint made her effort to be brave, and to face the village as though nothing had happened. She spent a long time preparing for church. Sadie and Kathleen waited anxiously for her appearance, for my mother had already drawn them into the circle of those who must protect Clara. At last she came forth from her room, completely restored, or so it seemed to their surprised eyes. Her waist was more wasp-like than it had ever been, and her figure more rigid with encasement. Perhaps the extra sashes were a trifle gaudy for divine worship. Kathleen and Sadie wondered about them, but said nothing. Clara had suddenly become a tragic heroine. To be dashing after what she had gone through was to be, oh so Spartan!

Cousin Clara took her old place in the choir, from which she had been absent all summer, but that was no cause for comment, as she only went to church in the cool weather. She plumped herself in the front pew, an orchid in a bed of pansies. Standing very straight, her voice was as conspicuous as her raiment. She sang so hard that the people craned to see who had come into their midst, and her shrill soprano made the disconcerted organist scratch back and forth uneasily on his bench. I saw my father put his book down and pick it up again many times. Her flaunted heroism made him nervous.

Dinner had only been over for about an hour when Cousin Sadie arrived, with startled eyes and trembling lips.

“Clara has locked herself in her room and will see no one,” she said. “I wish that you would come over, Cousin Harper.”

She chattered frantically about Clara’s strange mood as they walked back together to the cottage.

“She thinks we are all against her, and won’t listen to anything we say. I don’t know why. I really don’t. We have not said an unkind word.”

“You needn’t tell me that, Sadie,” he replied. “I am sure it is nothing that you or Kathleen have done.”

“Or mother either. Of course she does not know about Clara’s great sorrow. But Clara has always been mother’s favourite.”

Clara opened her door when she heard the voice of Cousin Harper. She still wore the gay costume which had been discussed that day at the dinner table of every family represented in the congregation of the Church of the Holy Trinity, but her face was utterly woe-begone.

“They want to get rid of me,” she whispered. “You are the only friend I have left in the world. Sadie and Kathleen are so refined. They think I am a bad woman. And mother called me a strumpet. You remember the night that she called me a strumpet. Oh, I am a most unhappy woman. But I am not going to sit at the table with people who despise me and wish I was dead. And I won’t let them come in here.”

Then she burst into tears, more like a child in her utter lack of self-restraint than like an adult.

It was nearly midnight before my father came home. He could not leave until Dr. McDougald had given Cousin Clara a strong sleeping powder. It was a nervous breakdown, the doctor said, and he feared that the patient would have to go away for a time among strangers, where such cases were understood.

Two days later, Clara was taken by my father for the first time to a Retreat, as they called it, kept by a nerve specialist in a neighboring city.

The village used to see her at intervals after that, when she came home gay and more dressy than ever. For as long as a year at a time, she would frolic and flirt with everybody, her hair a little darker and her cheeks a little redder than they used to be, for she was determined to be the youngest and most dashing of them all. She made a point of leading the fashions. What Clara Glint wore to-day, the other young women would wear tomorrow, in a less extreme form. Cousin Sadie and Cousin Kathleen were her slaves—was she not the victim of romance?—teased and bullied, but waiting lovingly for her slightest whim, always in fear of the inevitable day when she would declare that they had turned against her. Then she disappeared for a few months, and her friends said casually to one another, “Poor old Clara Glint has another turn.”

Her secret was well kept. It may have floated through the community in nebulous form, but no one made a point of giving it definite shape. Miss Belle Reynolds said as much as anybody when she remarked, “The idea of a girl breaking her heart over a silken beard, when he cleared out and wouldn’t even look at her.”

And that was very moderate for an Ontario village in the eighties, or indeed at any time.

III.

On Tuesday evening, my father returned home after leaving Clara in the Retreat. His first anxious question was regarding a letter from Bob. There had been no word.

“I know he is quite safe,” he assured my mother.

“Then why are you so worried?” she asked.

“Anyway, a little outing will not hurt him. You are fussing, Carol, because you think of Robert as a babe in the wood. That’s foolish.”

He walked about the garden alone after tea, puffing violently at his pipe, until my mother suggested the calming influence of a smoke with Judge Newman.

Before answering he went into the hall for his hat.

“I think I’ll see Miss Susanna Gilkinson,” he told her. “It is just possible that Robert might write to her, if things were not going well.”

Also he felt that Miss Susanna was the only person in the town with whom he could talk over Robert Herndon. He trusted her complete sanity.

Miss Gilkinson was making plum jam when he entered her house. On a large soup-plate, surrounded by hot wet clothes, the jars looked amber and luscious. She made her caller try a saucer of the preserves, and laughed as he gingerly tested the heat.

“I’ll wash up the things in the morning,” she said. “Let’s go into the sitting room, where it is not quite so hot. I can see you want to talk about something.”

She brought out a bottle of whiskey and jug of water, saying, “Now light your pipe. I like the smell of men about the place.”

He adjusted the filling in the half-burned bowl, and obliged her.

“What is the matter?” she asked. “I know it is something about Robbie. He went off to Toronto without telling me that he was going. I suppose, Harper, that that is why you have come to see me.”

Her directness did not disconcert him. He knew Miss Susanna’s uncompromising ways, and liked them. That was why he had come to her now. He told her without flinching the story of Bob’s departure. Her face wrinkled and puckered more and more as she listened.

When he stopped, she said “And now you can tell me why you have always been so strict with him. I want to know.”

So she heard for the first time the facts about Mortimer Herndon, of whom Robert Herndon was the son and the copy.

“That helps me to understand a little better,” she added. “I have always been afraid that something like this would happen.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I have watched you and Robbie and his mother.”

“We know how fond you have always been of the boy, Miss Susanna. That’s why I wanted to talk with you.”

She got up and pulled her rocking-chair close to him, so that, seated, their knees almost touched.

“I have known you all your life, Harper Loftus,” she began. “You are the only man left who reminds me of the crowd I knew when I was a girl. I like you and I respect you. Now I am going to talk very plainly to you.”

He smiled at her. “Go on,” he said. “You can’t offend me, old friend.”

“You have had that boy living with you for more than a dozen years, and you know absolutely nothing about him.”

“That’s true, I’m afraid. But why?”

“Just because he happens not to have been yourself all over again. Do you know how much Robbie admires you?”

“How could he? That’s what I fear, that I’ve completely antagonized him.”

“He has always thought your way of doing things was the right way, the manly way. What better beginning could you have than that? It is your own fault if he does not love you.”

He took out his pipe and laid it down. “I hope you do not think that I have not been trying to do my best for Robert. I intended to give him a position in the world.”

“What a way you talk,” she scoffed at him. “As if Robbie cared for a position in the world. I never saw you with him that you were not acting like a formal acquaintance. You were to blame. Children never break through the coldness of us grown-ups.”

“I did feel that at times.”

“Then why didn’t you do something about it? You were the man and he was the boy. Never in my life have I known anyone who responded to affection like Robbie.”

“He has always been reliable. I should have counted more on that.”

“Why will you talk of him so—two and two make four?” Then she spoke earnestly, “How could you look into those eyes and not know he was to be trusted, every inch? Robbie is not one of those people who like you to trust them so they can abuse your trust, if it will ever profit them.”

He exclaimed at the cynicism.

“Let’s not sit here and pretend,” she retorted. “You know perfectly well that most people are like that,—most people, but not Robbie.”

He sat a few moments in silence before he spoke again.

“His mother has never seemed to get close to him either.”

She replied, “Carol is not the sort of mother who could. She has been too fearful of him and too fearful for him.”

After considering her words, he agreed, “Perhaps you are right.”

“Now you listen to what I know of Robbie,” she commanded, “and don’t forget that I have been closer to him than most old maids manage to be with a boy right to the edge of manhood.” She described traits that she had seen gathering strength in Robbie’s character. She told anecdotes about him that she had treasured, and remarks that he had made about life. She enquired if he knew that Robbie wished to be a doctor. No. Finally she recounted at length how the boy had come to her about George Lytton. Whom should he have consulted if all had been right but his stepfather?

In pauses, my father commented, “He never talked to me like that.”

And each time she nailed him with, “It was your own fault, Harper Loftus.”

At the door as they parted, she held his hand and patted it re-assuringly.

“I’ll say this for your comfort,” Miss Susanna concluded, “you were so different that it was difficult for the two of you to come together in the first place, and that’s the hardest part. But if you had gone the right way about it, what a worshipping friend you would have found in that boy. There is nothing much left for us, Harper, as we grow old but the worship of some young folk here and there.”

IV.

The following Sunday, Mr. Drury drove over from Petersville, where he was now installed as head master of the High School, and tied up in front of our home, late in the afternoon. When my father joined him in the parlor, he started to be splutteringly apologetic, but that never surprised anybody—he was always apologetic with those persons whose social superiority he denied in the bosom of his family.

“I hope that I am not intruding in a matter that is none of my affair,” he said, “but I met Robert Herndon in the city yesterday, and feared that something might be wrong.”

My father thanked him, with the added assurance that he was not intruding. Robert had left home suddenly, as the result of a misunderstanding in which the boy was entirely free from blame. Mr. and Mrs. Loftus hoped that when matters could be cleared up, it would all be forgotten as though it had never happened.

“I thought Robert could not be working there with your knowledge,” chirped Mr. Drury. Appreciation always cheered him. “That’s why I didn’t mention it even to Mrs. Drury. You were very kind to me last June, and I don’t forget it.”

He produced a paper with the name and address of the drug-store where Bob was working.

“I went back again, but Robert was out. I could not wait as I had to catch the train. The proprietor told me he understood Robert was boarding on St. James Square.”

Harper Loftus expressed his gratitude for the trouble that Mr. Drury had taken. The schoolmaster hinted that haste might be advisable. His cousin had a stationery store in the same block, and according to him, the druggist’s reputation was none too good.

In excellent spirits, Mr. Drury drove away. As he clammily milked my father’s fingers, which was his way of shaking hands, he had said, “I didn’t tell you when I was in the village, because I thought it might sound insincere, as though I wanted to curry favour, but I have never taught a boy that I liked better than Robert. At first I thought him sullen. But I soon found that I could always rely on him. And all the boys liked him, though he usually went his own way.”

      *      *      *      

“It is strange, Carol,” said my father afterwards, “how different people come to us this way, and seem to rub in about Robert’s trustworthiness. You and I, who should have known him best, appear to be the only ones who failed to trust him as he deserved.”

“The others did not know what we knew,” she replied. “We were so afraid.”

“That is what Miss Susanna accused us of, being too fearful.”

“But there is a likeness, in face and manner and everything, a likeness that you and I have always seen.”

“Carol, when I find Robert I am going to tell him the whole story, as much of it as I can make plain to him. It is the only thing now to be done.”

With that purpose, my father took the train to Toronto on Monday afternoon.

The tangled story of two lives lay behind the misreading of Robert Herndon by his mother and his stepfather.

Both of my mother’s parents were proud of being members of old Toronto families. How there can be old families in a city that is as brash and unmellowed in its newness as Toronto, I cannot explain. But they gave a great deal of time to dividing the lists of persons to be encouraged from those to be snubbed. The task was by no means so simple as you might think. The currents of business did not always bring wealth to the right people. Indeed, it was distressing how often the right people lost their money, and had to be carried along, in spite of their shabbiness, so as to keep the armies of social rightness intact. On the other hand, many of the wrong people prospered. It seemed perverse, almost bad taste, for them to prosper so brazenly when they must have realized that they were the wrong people. After acquiring a certain amount of riches, they had to be tolerated and then encouraged judiciously, for fear that they might form a rival army and overwhelm the old families. It required a great deal of diplomacy to know when to snub and when to pet. Government allowances and real estate purchased when land in Toronto sold by the acre kept my great grand-parents in the forefront of the right people, and my grand-parents recognized the responsibility of their position.

Sudden squalls on Lake Ontario are no respecters of persons, and will drown the right people as quickly as the wrong people if they happen to take risks while boating. So it came about that Caroline Lytton, a baby of two years, and her handsome brother George, aged four, were found to be orphans, one July day when the lake, after a brief rampage, cast up its dead. That happened in the troubled years when the scattered British colonies in North America were trying to federate themselves into a Dominion.

Mrs. Lytton had one sister, a widow who lived with her mother. She claimed the right to adopt the babies. Her husband, Colonel Dean, had married late in life, when his gout and his kidneys and a threat of general physical collapse made it unwise for him to go on living in the way which he preferred, and, after a querulous decade of the wedded state, he died without having been the father of either a son or a daughter. Mrs. Dean’s grief over being both husbandless and childless at such an early age gave her, for a number of years, plenty of opportunity to pity herself. The death of her sister enabled her to claim dramatically that she, alone in all the world, could bring up George and Caroline as their mother would have wished. Her gesture fell a little flat, for no one tried to deprive her of the task. All the Lytton Relatives heaved a sigh of relief, and straightway forgot about the orphans.

Mrs. Dean talked a great deal about the code of a lady and the code of a gentleman, but according to her definitions the two were only remotely related. A lady and gentleman met on one common ground, and that was in snubbing their inferiors. Caroline was educated to be a lady. In other words, she got no education at all. A series of characterless governesses, all of whom thought a great deal about the better days they had seen, taught her to sing a little, to play the piano a little, to draw a little, and to talk bad French and stilted English. She learned the names of the kings of England, but was frequently told that Upper Canada had no history, which was perhaps not altogether untrue. Mrs. Dean saw to it that her niece was kept as remote from the actual life of the pioneer city as though she had been reared in a convent. Nature gave Caroline Lytton a delicate and refined beauty, and her aunt could not make that artificial.

A different process was used to turn a boy into a man of the world. George Lytton had tutors until they refused to put up with him, and then attended select boys’ schools where discerning masters detested him cordially. Mrs. Dean gave him to understand early in life that men of blood all sowed their wild oats. Genteel ladies pretended to be shocked, but knew all the time that a little high stepping distinguished the well born from the middle class. For herself she said, “I have always faced these matters without any pretence. I hate Puritanical hypocrisy.” The point was that his morals would never greatly matter so long as his manners were good,—they were the first consideration. Mrs. Dean liked George better than Caroline. She always preferred men to women.

If the aim of education is to create individuality, then Mrs. Dean’s method was triumphantly justified. Her wards were not like the majority of young people raised in the same community. They grew from childhood, each with two outstanding characteristics fully developed. Her niece’s were prudery and snobbery, and her nephew’s were vanity and self-indulgence.

When George Lytton blossomed forth as one of the beaux of the King Street promenade, he was counted as a handsome boy. He took his place with the young bloods who aired their graces, on a fine day, up and down the fashionable thoroughfare, though he formed no permanent friendships in his own circle. They all agreed that he did not wear well, but no one attempted to go deeper into an explanation of him.

He had a favorite jest that made other young men raise their eye-brows. Whenever he wished to indulge in some expensive pleasure that he could not afford, he would say, “For which deprivation I must thank my fool parents.”

His acquaintances concluded that the Lytton estate had been a small one. In reality, he was referring to a provision in his father’s will, under which all the money was tied up in the hands of a trustee until Caroline was twenty years of age, or until she married. Then George was to assume complete control of it. So long as Caroline remained a mere school girl, one road to a supply of ready cash seemed as remote as the other. But when his sister was sixteen, she dropped her skirts to the ground and put up her hair. Overnight she changed in appearance from a child to a woman. Then George conceived the idea of finding her a husband among the young men in his set, and instinctively he selected Mortimer Herndon. If Herndon would only take a fancy to Caroline, she was certain to be fascinated by him.

Mortimer Herndon was the only son of a widow who came to Toronto from England in the early fifties, with plenty of money and letters of introduction to the best people. Why she remained in Canada no one could make out, unless it was that she enjoyed the feeling of superiority which she experienced in the half-baked colonial society. She spent her time jeering at the crudeness that she saw everywhere she took the trouble to look, crudeness in art, crudeness in breeding, crudeness in mind, crudeness in manners, crudeness in ideas—everything that could be crude was crude. Most of all she laughed at the crudeness of the accent, so flat and ugly. It was not like the Yankee twang, oh no; it was not like anything that a God who loves sweet sounds would ever have made. But if Mrs. Herndon found native Torontonians who tried to cultivate an English intonation, they struck her as funnier still; she burlesqued them, between gusts of mirth, for the benefit of her son. In such surroundings, Mrs. Herndon felt herself a goddess, and a goddess steps on worms when she takes the notion. What right have worms to resent being hurt?

When people looked first at Mortimer Herndon, they thought him an ugly youth, with his large head and shock hair. But a moment later their attention would be attracted by the beauty of his frame and the virility of his movement. He was peculiarly magnetic. Mrs. Herndon made Mortimer her only equal. She began, when he was very young, to confide in him her low opinion of everybody whom they were meeting in the new country. She never permitted him to forget that Canadians were inferior beings, and, by inference, Mortimer came to the conclusion that he need not restrict himself to please any of them. He went about sullenly and silently getting his own way. He knew what pleased him, and nothing else mattered. If attempts were made to thwart him, he overrode them without a scruple, and he refused to discuss the rights and wrongs of a case with anyone.

At Upper Canada College, Harper Loftus first met Mortimer Herndon, but wherever there was discipline to encounter, young Herndon’s career did not last long. His mutinies seemed senseless to the other boys. He made a point of breaking every custom and defying every tradition of the school; because they existed and threatened to curb him, he hated them. He loomed as a nine days’ wonder among his fellow students, for the one reason that he was so different, and then he disappeared.

Mortimer Herndon only spoke to Harper Loftus when he found the alert junior in his path, but there was a quality, almost like magnificence, about him that impressed the imagination of the younger boy. There were no Mortimer Herndons in the families that Harper Loftus knew. He was eager to take his share of life and play the game according to the rules, as he found them. He accepted traditions and suffered the pressure of customs, irksome as many of them were, because he had an instinctive feeling for such things, which turned later into a sort of love that was largely loyalty. That was the spirit of Harper Loftus and his kind when the Province of Ontario was younger.

His affection for the college, where he passed without a whimper through all the experiences that a student was expected to undergo, ripened in after years. When visiting Toronto, he often took us to the Four Corners in order that we might become better acquainted with Education. The Four Corners were a local jest in those days; the angles of two cross streets were occupied by the College, Government House, a church and a bar-room,—Education, Legislation, Salvation and Damnation. A new generation has arisen to whom the significance of the Four Corners is unknown, and of the four only Salvation remains,—attach an allegory to that fact if you can, and if you are that sort of person.

The character of her son was a constant source of amusement to Mrs. Herndon. She liked the initiative that moved beneath his calm exterior. When he was only five years of age, they were dining together at a hotel, and Mrs. Herndon complained to the child of the length of time that the waiter had kept them waiting. When the soup arrived, the boy picked his plate up quietly and without warning, and dropped it on the floor. “We don’t want this stuff now,” he said.

When Mortimer was ten, they were visiting a wealthy friend who kept horses that the boy liked to ride. A trusted man servant had charge of the stables. One morning he told young Mortimer that he could not have the little mare. A quarter of an hour later, the animal came cantering down the drive to the main gate. The stable man met them, caught the bridle, and jerked the mare’s head around. “I told you I was going to take it,” said the boy, and with easy deliberation struck the servant twice across the face with his whip. The man was quick and muscular. In a moment, Mortimer was pinned under his left arm, and he applied the whip scientifically—he was the father of sons himself—at the ratio of ten blows for one. Mrs. Herndon demanded the dismissal of “this fellow,” but her hosts took a different view of the incident. In her own home, she had time to think over her son’s independence and enjoy thoroughly the spontaneity of it. Otherwise the affair rankled. She never went back to the house in which they had permitted her discomfiture, and, if she had only known, laughed heartily over it.

Even when Mortimer’s precocity began to be more costly, she still took pride in it, and gave him the encouragement of laughter. He was barely nineteen when she had to pay a disconcertingly large sum to a girl, who lived in a town on the St. Lawrence River, where the mother and son spent one summer. There was some suggestion of marriage, but Mortimer disposed of that. “She’s a handsome wench,” he said, “but she is a wench.” It ended in a settlement, and Mrs. Herndon had to write a lengthy letter to England about the “impossible young colonial” who had almost entrapped her boy.

As a young idler of means, who played at being a broker, Mortimer Herndon took a peculiar place in the society of Toronto just after Confederation. Something that was called the Byronic tradition still prevailed, into which he fitted. In the exclusive homes of Wellington Street, stories were told of the reckless orgies of the young man who refused to be controlled by any law, social or moral, and young women prayed their brothers to bring him home with them. They picked the passages from Byron that fitted him; surely this smileless devil was “pleasure’s palled victim.”

Finally his determination to go his own way clashed with his mother’s plans to do likewise. For a while he closed his mouth stubbornly and, without a word, did the thing he intended. When she told him that their supply of money was not unlimited, he merely suggested ways in which to curtail her expenditures. His next large demand upon her resulted in a violent quarrel—at least she was violent enough, but he did not seem to be listening, which made her more angry still. Mortimer Herndon did not alter his course one iota. At last, his mother took action suddenly. She left him and returned to England, with as little reason, apparently, as she possessed for coming to Canada in the first place.

The entire social structure of Toronto rustled and fluttered violently, when the news began to circulate that Mortimer Herndon had fallen in love with Mrs. Dean’s ward, the colorless child, Caroline Lytton, who had scarcely enough character to come out, like other girls in her station of life. Certain dowagers wondered if Mrs. Dean had taken leave of her senses. Then it was remembered that Mrs. Dean was a broadminded woman of the world, who tolerated a good deal. The late Colonel Dean—well, the less said about the performances of certain old cocks in the military circles the better. Mrs. Dean did feel slightly perturbed when stories reached her to the effect that Mortimer was not as circumspect in his behaviour as society expected a young man to be during the period of his engagement. There was a certain Mrs. Ryding—a widow and well connected, but oh dear, oh dear.

Mrs. Dean spoke to him quite tactfully about Mrs. Ryding.

Mortimer Herndon replied, “I thought more of my mother than of any living soul, but I would not give up my way of living to please her. If you think that I am going to make any alterations to flatter your fastidious niece, you are making a grave miscalculation.”

That little passage occurred between Mrs. Dean and Herndon,—there were no witnesses of her rebuff, so she said nothing more about it. No harm had been done. Anyway, a wise woman was never too exacting when dealing with men.

At the age of eighteen, Caroline Lytton knew less of the world and the flesh than a modern child, who attends the movies, knows at eight. She dreamed of Mortimer Herndon, and his image haunted her waking hours. This man, about whom everybody talked in whispers, loved her, simple child though she was. How did such wonderful things happen?

In the shocked months following her marriage, romance ceased to be a matter of rose pink to her. The brooding sultry passion, that had fascinated her, became a source of terror. He treated her prudish ignorance as an affectation, and tramped rough-shod on her sensibilities. She had only known one other man, her brother George, at all well; now she thought them all horrible.

There were intervals in which Mortimer neglected her entirely, for some other interest. She felt again his power over her when he returned suddenly, like a wooer, to take her to a play or for a drive. She loved the way he made such speeches as “Whatever you may hear about me, Caroline, you are the only woman I could have married. Remember that.” At such moments, she almost forgot her hours of anguish and apprehension.

Perhaps it was not unnatural that a time came at last when Caroline Loftus thought with dread of everything connected with her first marriage, and that a little of the shadow fell on Bob.

Once she left Mortimer Herndon and went back to Mrs. Dean, but she did not dare to tell her aunt that she intended to remain. Her baby was coming soon, and that gave her an excuse. Then gossip on Wellington Street swelled to the size of scandal. Mrs. Ryding was visiting at the Herndon home while Mrs. Herndon was staying with her aunt. Mrs. Dean insisted that Caroline must return to her husband at once. If she happened to be at home, there could be no harm in Mrs. Ryding remaining there.

Caroline Herndon had stood enough. If her aunt would not assist her, she must find support elsewhere, so she turned to her god-mother, Mrs. Harper Loftus. I believe that my grandmother became bad friends with Mrs. Dean over this issue. Mrs. Dean would not countenance the desertion of Mortimer Herndon by his wife. Women had to put up with many things in marriage, and the sooner they reconciled themselves to the fact that men were men the better for them. If she had been temperamental about the peccadilloes of the late Colonel Dean—marriage had not made him entirely domestic—, she would not now be able to revere his memory as the most sacred thing in her life.

Mrs. Harper Loftus thought that she might talk seriously to the young husband, soon to have the responsibilities of a father, and Mrs. Dean confided her experience as a deterrent.

My grandmother was not easily daunted. When she went to interview Mortimer Herndon, she had no idea what her next step would be if that move failed to improve the situation. Not knowing the woman with whom he was dealing, Herndon made a characteristic error of judgment. He told her that he loved his wife in his own way, and would make no promises to interfering females.

Nothing had ever happened to my grandmother so terrible as being called a female. The terse coarseness of the single word was more offensive than a volley of oaths. Any conscientious scruples she had felt about assisting a young wife to leave her husband fell silent. She hesitated no longer. It was at this point that she consulted Miss Susanna Gilkinson.

When Caroline Herndon left her husband, Mrs. Dean proceeded to wash her hands for good and all of her niece, an unwomanly woman. She had just completed the performance of the same type of ablution in connection with George Lytton. Once that young man got his hands on the Lytton estate, it did not last long. Herndon asked him casually just after the wedding if Caroline had no claims, and his brother-in-law replied that he was making some investments and would report at a later date. When George found himself short of money again, he began to suspect that his aunt had held back something for her own use. The more he needed ready cash, the more convinced he felt that she had done so. A simple way to straighten accounts was to forge her name to a cheque for a tidy sum. He expected her to find out what he had done, but felt sure that she would cover up the crime for the sake of the family name—an old name, remember. Mrs. Dean surprised him; she saw to it that he went to prison—the judge, when passing sentence, remarked on her venom. That was the one serious miscalculation of George Lytton’s career. He never again gambled on the humanity of his victims, and he never again went to jail.

Several years later, when Harper Loftus married the widow of Mortimer Herndon, Mrs. Dean sent for him. She made it plain that she did not wish to see her niece. She would never recover from the ingratitude of her wards, and the manner in which they had repaid her for giving them the best up-bringing that a boy and girl ever received. Caroline must not come to her house, but she desired to hand Caroline’s husband all the papers that remained in her hands in connection with the Lytton Estate. On examination, he found that he had to pay a number of debts to avoid any word of reproach being spoken against his wife’s family.

But Mrs. Dean had another reason for summoning Harper Loftus to Toronto. She wished to deliver to him, in her acidulous voice, a speech that she had prepared for his special benefit.

She said, “The man who entices a married woman away from her lawful husband, even when he marries her later on, can hope for no blessing from the hand of God in this world or the next.”

And Robert Herndon in his looks and in his manner was the son of Mortimer Herndon. Behind the wordless stubbornness, my father and mother thought that they detected the perverse self-will that in Mortimer Herndon had never been disciplined or broken.

I.

With its four rows of houses, St. James Square looked like a formidable undertaking for a door to door hunt, but my father felt that it should not take him long when he eliminated the private homes, most of which could be easily distinguished from those that took boarders. He was even more fortunate than he expected, and ten minutes after leaving Yonge Street was listening to the muffled jangle of Mrs. Ira Splaver’s door-bell.

He had the good luck to commence his search at the right corner of the square. The second house that he visited was owned by a lynx-eyed woman who kept a close watch upon the movements of the neighbourhood. She knew how many vacant rooms were worrying each of her rivals in business, but they all thought well of her, because she was so willing to pass on any enquirer whom she could not accommodate.

“There is a Mr. Herndon boarding at the dark red brick house four doors up, just next the cottage,” she told the man in search of information. “He has been there about two weeks.”

“Quite a swell looking gentleman,” she informed her boarders a minute later. “Mrs. Splaver says there is some mystery about young Mr. Herndon, and I wouldn’t be surprised. If ever I seen an eminent man, that man who came to the door asking for him was eminent. I’d certainly like to be in Mrs. Splaver’s shoes right this minute.”

Mrs. Splaver was getting every ounce of enjoyment out of being in her own shoes right then. She had a capacity for appreciating such moments. She also had the impression that the gentleman whose plain card read “Harper Loftus” was what her neighbour called eminent. She knew, from industrious reading of the papers, that he did not belong to the St. George Street set, and she had never heard of his name in Jarvis Street or Queen’s Park, but he was obviously someone in particular. It behooved her to introduce him, with as little delay as possible, to the memory of the late Dr. Ira Splaver, who would be turning in his grave if he knew that his widow was reduced to the keeping of boarders. Not that it was absolutely necessary. If she sold her house and took a few rooms, she could scrape along very nicely. But she was the sort of woman who liked to see a little of life. Though boarders might be tiring, they provided variety. Of course she took no ordinary young men and women who might reduce the tone of her establishment. Only genteel young persons were to be found under her roof.

Mrs. Splaver had him cornered in the gloom of her plush parlor. Young Mr. Herndon went for a short walk every evening after dinner; he was out now. She expected him back at any moment, and would be pleased to have her boarder’s friend wait. After which introduction, the ghost of Dr. Ira Splaver commenced to walk vigorously.

My father told her how pleased he was that Bob had been living in such a home.

Mrs. Splaver beamed. She had made an impression. Was she speaking to some relative of young Mr. Herndon?

His stepfather.

His stepfather! She repeated the word in a tone that suggested a general disapproval of stepfathers. But she did not tell some things she knew about the sufferings of children whose mother had married again. Instead, she trusted that her youthful boarder was not under any cloud.

No, he was not under any cloud. His stepfather hoped, however, to make some alterations in his plans for the future.

“If he goes I shall be sorry to lose him,” said Mrs. Splaver. “All my girls are so interested in him. Not my daughters, of course, but the girls who board here, and as nice a bunch of perfect ladies as I have ever had for the Model School term. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Loftus, that they are quite smitten with your stepson. They would make a pet of him, but he is such a shy boy. I always says that there is no more tantalizing combination in the eyes of any girl than a manly lad who is shy. Haven’t you noticed?”

My father was commencing to find Mrs. Splaver’s parlor, with its red plush and wool tidies and stuffed birds as a back-ground for her vivacious conversation, decidedly oppressive. He suggested that he might wait in Mr. Herndon’s room. She was quite willing, and led the way down the hall. He produced a match to light the gas, and when he turned round she was comfortably seated on the only chair, prepared to continue her monologue. She urged him to sit upon the sofa, but he remained standing, awkwardly, he felt, and looking a little foolish.

Thus Bob found them, my father listening, a trifle wilted, to an address on modelites, the danger of young men in the house when they were bad, and the pleasure of their company when they were good.

In the months that followed, Mrs. Ira Splaver maintained, many times and at considerable length, that there was something closely resembling a mystery about Bob’s presence in her house.

“I never saw two relatives so formal, except at a funeral,” she told the modelites. “I’m quite sure that Mr. Herndon was not any too pleased at finding his stepfather waiting for him. But there must have been good news of some sort for him, after all. They talked together in the room until nearly midnight, and I sat and sat in the parlor, waiting for the man to go. If he hadn’t been a gentleman, I should have told him that none of my boarders ever entertained after ten o’clock.”

It was not an easy meeting for Robert Herndon and Harper Loftus. They were conscious of Mrs. Splaver looking on, with the eagerness of a reporter. Even when the door closed behind her, they continued to face one another, nervous and constrained.

Bob spoke first, “I know that I should not have come away without telling you all, sir. It must have worried mother. I wrote to her yesterday, and she ought to have my letter by now.”

My father had already shaken Bob’s hand when he entered. He had intended to emphasize his first speech by a hand-clasp, but now as he uttered the words, standing in the narrow space, they sounded rehearsed and distant.

“Before we say anything else, Robert,” he said, “I want to apologize for being hasty and unjust in my treatment of you. I have found out that your uncle George lied when he told me you gave him information about my private affairs. I was unfair to you a fortnight ago, and I’m sorry.”

It was not a happy beginning. Whatever Bob felt inwardly, the apology froze him outwardly. He mumbled something, only half heard, like “It’s all right, sir.”

“No, it has never been quite all right between us, Robert. I should like if we could talk a while, and maybe clear up some things.”

Bob motioned towards the sofa.

“Won’t you sit down?”

He took a seat himself upon the bed. There was a difficult space between them.

My father remarked irrelevantly, “You have rather pokey quarters here, after your airy room at home.”

“She is very kind to us,” replied Bob, “but she talks an awful lot.”

“So I’ve discovered.”

They should have smiled at one another, comparing experiences of Mrs. Splaver, but they didn’t. They were, as always, matter-of-fact.

My father returned to the purpose of his visit.

“Your mother and I feel that you are now old enough to be taken more into our confidence. Perhaps we should have realized it sooner. If I had told you more about your uncle George, there could have been no misunderstanding. You probably wondered why he was not welcome at our house.”

He recounted a few episodes from the career of George Lytton, that had produced a complete breach between Harper Loftus and his brother-in-law.

“He is a man without a sense of honour. Wherever he goes he brings trouble to people. I have yet to hear of him displaying a fine impulse.”

“I never took any stock in that man,” Bob commented quietly. “I disliked him, sir, just as soon as I set eyes on him.”

It was not easy for my father to continue. The boy’s simple statement seemed to put him more than ever in the wrong. Bob sat still and listened, as though waiting for another point to be set up so that he might knock it down. It was the old situation again, except that the man did not feel he was being baffled by a resentful will making its own plans behind the silence. But had he waited so long that he could never hope to get through to the things that Miss Susanna Gilkinson found there?

Bob paved the way for the harder part of the talk.

“Was my father like George Lytton? No one has ever told me anything about him.”

“No Robert. Your father was not in the least like your Uncle George.”

“I look like him, don’t I?”

“Yes, he was like you.”

“He didn’t make my mother happy?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What happened? Why doesn’t anybody ever talk about him?”

“It is not easy for me to tell you, Robert. I did not know him well enough. But your mother was too sensitive, her mind was too delicate for a sudden disillusionment about men.”

That had always been the view held by Harper Loftus regarding the women of his own walk in life.

“But how do men and women come to be married when they are different like that?”

My father had not expected to have such questions asked him. It amazed him to find that his stepson had been groping in the dark and piecing things together. Boys grow up in secret behind the backs of their elders, who are startled when they discover what has happened.

“Your father used to fascinate people, Robert,” he explained. “But he had what some men still consider the aristocratic view; he recognized no authority.”

An incident or two drawn from the past served to illustrate his meaning. He did not wish to do more than indicate how Mortimer Herndon made a mess of living.

“And you think I am like him?” Bob enquired abruptly.

“You may have thought I was severe with you at times, Robert,” said my father. “But I wanted you to learn that a man cannot live properly unless he acknowledges discipline. Perhaps I was wrong in believing that I saw in you a trait that resented it.”

Bob sat and looked across the square of rag carpet, his eyes puzzled.

“I don’t know why, sir,” he answered. “I did try to be decent.”

They had come to an end, so it seemed. Now that the man really wanted the boy to be closer to him, he felt how far away he was. They were, as Miss Susanna had said, only on the footing of acquaintances.

Suddenly, my father stretched two hands across the chasm.

“Robert,” he said, “you want to be a doctor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You never told me that.”

“No, sir.”

“Will you let me see you through? I want to do it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Something trembled between them.

My father stood up. Like many self-contained men, there were seconds in his life when his emotions insisted upon making themselves seen. To be demonstrative was practically the same as being insincere, so when most moved he generally resorted to banter. His self-control was perfect in the presence of his greater joys and sorrows. But on rare occasions, a swift overwhelming impulse drove him to action a little outside his character.

Something in him yearned powerfully for the confidence of his stepson. Almost roughly, with his two hands, he pushed back the shaggy fringe and kissed Bob on the forehead.

“My boy,” he said, “I hope you will never know what it is to feel that you have only escaped by a hair’s breadth making an irretrievable mistake.”

When Bob looked up startled, he caught a glimpse of a man he had not known before, a man who was not all stern rectitude, but who had humour in his eyes; whose instinct was to protect and encourage those who had planted themselves in his affections. I think it was at that moment that there was a new beginning.

To Bob, that night remained as something sacred, not to be bandied about in conversation, even with his closest confidant. My father stayed with him for three hours, as though he feared that what he had found might be lost again. They talked about the past, intimately going over the matters that they had put so baldly a few minutes before. Each warmed to the discovery that the other was like him in personal attitudes and prejudices.

Also, they talked about the future. Bob did not want to return to the village. He would look foolish if he walked back meekly after running away so short a time ago.

My father made sport of his fears, as he would, under similar circumstances, with me or mother. It was a new attitude towards his stepson. Then he explained that all was well, because nobody knew of the runaway. Bob would return quite naturally from a holiday in Toronto.

“You must give Timothy a thought. The lad is lost without you. I wouldn’t dare face his disappointment if I had to tell him that you were not coming home.”

“Tim’s all right,” said Bob.

“Isn’t he?” said my father.

Before they parted for the night, my father suggested that they should take breakfast together at the Queen’s.

“You forget, sir, that I have to be at work by seven-thirty. There would not be time for me to go down to the hotel.”

“That’s so. We’ll have an evening or two in the city, you and I, for you must give your employer a chance to get another boy before you leave.”

“It is not much of a job for anybody,” with his slow smile.

“Oh well, your experience as a druggist will be very useful to you when you are a doctor, Bob,” observed my father.

And they both laughed, standing on the high steps overlooking the square, with right hands clasped in a sustained handshake that was more than good-night.

      *      *      *      

It was the following year that Harper Loftus, private banker, gave up his business, as a result of an arrangement with a chartered bank that took his place. “Better to step out than to be squeezed out,” he told Judge Newman, who loathed changes, especially when they robbed him of habits and cronies.

Almost immediately we moved to Toronto. My father’s explanation was that the city offered better educational opportunities for the boys, and he did not want them to leave home before it was necessary. A man lost his sons soon enough without having to give them up just as they were becoming companionable.

So we tore the leaf from our calendar prematurely, and left behind us the day before yesterday, when the older towns of Ontario were self-contained social entities, loosely connected with the world outside their walls. Maybe they were narrow and ingrown; maybe they imitated too many of the bad old habits of their ancestors in caste and customs; maybe their prejudices and principles were what we, who are their children and grandchildren, would call reactionary. They were petty, doubtless, but they were mellow. In many ways they were indefensible, but they were picturesque. They danced stiffly, but with dignity. Now they are gone, and who is so foolish as to grow lyric over the things that have passed because the new age out-grew them? We have been ironed out, and standardized, and knit more closely together, town to town, and so on. For what? We shall see.

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 Day Before Yesterday, by Fred Jacob]