Alice Adams

“Good heavens, mama; you’re worse than Walter: I just barely know the man! DON’T be so absurd!”

“Yes, I’m always ‘absurd,’ ” Mrs. Adams moaned. “All I can do is cry, while your father sits upstairs, and his horn of plenty–-“

But Alice interrupted with a peal of desperate laughter. “Oh, that ‘horn of plenty!’ Do come down to earth, mama. How can you call a GLUE factory, that doesn’t exist except in your mind, a ‘horn of plenty’? Do let’s be a little rational!”

“It COULD be a horn of plenty,” the tearful Mrs, Adams insisted. “It could! You don’t understand a thing about it.”

“Well, I’m willing,” Alice said, with tired skepticism. “Make me understand, then. Where’d you ever get the idea?”

Mrs. Adams withdrew her hands from the water, dried them on a towel, and then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Your father could make a fortune if he wanted to,” she said, quietly. “At least, I don’t say a fortune, but anyhow a great deal more than he does make.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that before, mama, and you think he could make it out of a glue factory. What I’m asking is: How?”

“How? Why, by making glue and selling it. Don’t you know how bad most glue is when you try to mend anything? A good glue is one of the rarest things there is; and it would just sell itself, once it got started. Well, your father knows how to make as good a glue as there is in the world.”

Alice was not interested. “What of it? I suppose probably anybody could make it if they wanted to.”

“I SAID you didn’t know anything about it. Nobody else could make it. Your father knows a formula for making it.”

“What of that?”

“It’s a secret formula. It isn’t even down on paper. It’s worth any amount of money.”

“‘Any amount?’” Alice said, remaining incredulous. “Why hasn’t papa sold it then?”

“Just because he’s too stubborn to do anything with it at all!”

“How did papa get it?”

“He got it before you were born, just after we were married. I didn’t think much about it then: it wasn’t till you were growing up and I saw how much we needed money that I–-“

“Yes, but how did papa get it?” Alice began to feel a little more curious about this possible buried treasure. “Did he invent it?”

“Partly,” Mrs. Adams said, looking somewhat preoccupied. “He and another man invented it.”

“Then maybe the other man–-“

“He’s dead.”

“Then his family–-“

“I don’t think he left any family,” Mrs. Adams said. “Anyhow, it belongs to your father. At least it belongs to him as much as it does to any one else. He’s got an absolutely perfect right to do anything he wants to with it, and it would make us all comfortable if he’d do what I want him to—and he KNOWS it would, too!”

Alice shook her head pityingly. “Poor mama!” she said. “Of course he knows it wouldn’t do anything of the kind, or else he’d have done it long ago.”

“He would, you say?” her mother cried. “That only shows how little you know him!”

“Poor mama!” Alice said again, soothingly. “If papa were like what you say he is, he’d be—why, he’d be crazy!”

Mrs. Adams agreed with a vehemence near passion. “You’re right about him for once: that’s just what he is! He sits up there in his stubbornness and lets us slave here in the kitchen when if he wanted to—if he’d so much as lift his little finger–-“

“Oh, come, now!” Alice laughed. “You can’t build even a glue factory with just one little finger.”

Mrs. Adams seemed about to reply that finding fault with a figure of speech was beside the point; but a ringing of the front door bell forestalled the retort. “Now, who do you suppose that is?” she wondered aloud, then her face brightened. “Ah—did Mr. Russell ask if he could–-“

“No, he wouldn’t be coming this evening,” Alice said. “Probably it’s the great J. A. Lamb: he usually stops for a minute on Thursdays to ask how papa’s getting along. I’ll go.”

She tossed her apron off, and as she went through the house her expression was thoughtful. She was thinking vaguely about the glue factory and wondering if there might be “something in it” after all. If her mother was right about the rich possibilities of Adams’s secret—but that was as far as Alice’s speculations upon the matter went at this time: they were checked, partly by the thought that her father probably hadn’t enough money for such an enterprise, and partly by the fact that she had arrived at the front door.

CHAPTER XII

The fine old gentleman revealed when she opened the door was probably the last great merchant in America to wear the chin beard. White as white frost, it was trimmed short with exquisite precision, while his upper lip and the lower expanses of his cheeks were clean and rosy from fresh shaving. With this trim white chin beard, the white waistcoat, the white tie, the suit of fine gray cloth, the broad and brilliantly polished black shoes, and the wide-brimmed gray felt hat, here was a man who had found his style in the seventies of the last century, and thenceforth kept it. Files of old magazines of that period might show him, in woodcut, as, “Type of Boston Merchant”; Nast might have drawn him as an honest statesman. He was eighty, hale and sturdy, not aged; and his quick blue eyes, still unflecked, and as brisk as a boy’s, saw everything.

“Well, well, well!” he said, heartily. “You haven’t lost any of your good looks since last week, I see, Miss Alice, so I guess I’m to take it you haven’t been worrying over your daddy. The young feller’s getting along all right, is he?”

“He’s much better; he’s sitting up, Mr. Lamb. Won’t you come in?”

“Well, I don’t know but I might.” He turned to call toward twin disks of light at the curb, “Be out in a minute, Billy”; and the silhouette of a chauffeur standing beside a car could be seen to salute in response, as the old gentleman stepped into the hall. “You don’t suppose your daddy’s receiving callers yet, is he?”

“He’s a good deal stronger than he was when you were here last week, but I’m afraid he’s not very presentable, though.”

“‘Presentable?’” The old man echoed her jovially. “Pshaw! I’ve seen lots of sick folks. I know what they look like and how they love to kind of nest in among a pile of old blankets and wrappers. Don’t you worry about THAT, Miss Alice, if you think he’d like to see me.”

“Of course he would—if–-” Alice hesitated; then said quickly,” Of course he’d love to see you and he’s quite able to, if you care to come up.”

She ran up the stairs ahead of him, and had time to snatch the crocheted wrap from her father’s shoulders. Swathed as usual, he was sitting beside a table, reading the evening paper; but when his employer appeared in the doorway he half rose as if to come forward in greeting.

“Sit still!” the old gentleman shouted. “What do you mean? Don’t you know you’re weak as a cat? D’you think a man can be sick as long as you have and NOT be weak as a cat? What you trying to do the polite with ME for?”

Adams gratefully protracted the handshake that accompanied these inquiries. “This is certainly mighty fine of you, Mr. Lamb,” he said. “I guess Alice has told you how much our whole family appreciate your coming here so regularly to see how this old bag o’ bones was getting along. Haven’t you, Alice?”

“Yes, papa,” she said; and turned to go out, but Lamb checked her.

“Stay right here, Miss Alice; I’m not even going to sit down. I know how it upsets sick folks when people outside the family come in for the first time.”

“You don’t upset me,” Adams said. “I’ll feel a lot better for getting a glimpse of you, Mr. Lamb.”

The visitor’s laugh was husky, but hearty and reassuring, like his voice in speaking. “That’s the way all my boys blarney me, Miss Alice,” he said. “They think I’ll make the work lighter on ‘em if they can get me kind of flattered up. You just tell your daddy it’s no use; he doesn’t get on MY soft side, pretending he likes to see me even when he’s sick.”

“Oh, I’m not so sick any more,” Adams said. “I expect to be back in my place ten days from now at the longest.”

“Well, now, don’t hurry it, Virgil; don’t hurry it. You take your time; take your time.”

This brought to Adams’s lips a feeble smile not lacking in a kind of vanity, as feeble. “Why?” he asked. “I suppose you think my department runs itself down there, do you?”

His employer’s response was another husky laugh. “Well, well, well!” he cried, and patted Adams’s shoulder with a strong pink hand. “Listen to this young feller, Miss Alice, will you! He thinks we can’t get along without him a minute! Yes, sir, this daddy of yours believes the whole works ‘ll just take and run down if he isn’t there to keep ‘em wound up. I always suspected he thought a good deal of himself, and now I know he does!”

Adams looked troubled. “Well, I don’t like to feel that my salary’s going on with me not earning it.”

“Listen to him, Miss Alice! Wouldn’t you think, now, he’d let me be the one to worry about that? Why, on my word. if your daddy had his way, I wouldn’t be anywhere. He’d take all my worrying and everything else off my shoulders and shove me right out of Lamb and Company! He would!”

“It seems to me I’ve been soldiering on you a pretty long while, Mr. Lamb,” the convalescent said, querulously. “I don’t feel right about it; but I’ll be back in ten days. You’ll see.”

The old man took his hand in parting. “All right; we’ll see, Virgil. Of course we do need you, seriously speaking; but we don’t need you so bad we’ll let you come down there before you’re fully fit and able.” He went to the door. “You hear, Miss Alice? That’s what I wanted to make the old feller understand, and what I want you to kind of enforce on him. The old place is there waiting for him, and it’d wait ten years if it took him that long to get good and well. You see that he remembers it, Miss Alice!”

She went down the stairs with him, and he continued to impress this upon her until he had gone out of the front door. And even after that, the husky voice called back from the darkness, as he went to his car, “Don’t forget, Miss Alice; let him take his own time. We always want him, but we want him to get good and well first. Good-night, good-night, young lady!”

When she closed the door her mother came from the farther end of the “living-room,” where there was no light; and Alice turned to her.

“I can’t help liking that old man, mama,” she said. “He always sounds so—well, so solid and honest and friendly! I do like him.”

But Mrs. Adams failed in sympathy upon this point. “He didn’t say anything about raising your father’s salary, did he?” she asked, dryly.

“No.”

“No. I thought not.”

She would have said more, but Alice, indisposed to listen, began to whistle, ran up the stairs, and went to sit with her father. She found him bright-eyed with the excitement a first caller brings into a slow convalescence: his cheeks showed actual hints of colour; and he was smiling tremulously as he filled and lit his pipe. She brought the crocheted scarf and put it about his shoulders again, then took a chair near him.

“I believe seeing Mr. Lamb did do you good. papa,” she said. “I sort of thought it might, and that’s why I let him come up. You really look a little like your old self again.”

Adams exhaled a breathy “Ha!” with the smoke from his pipe as he waved the match to extinguish it. “That’s fine,” he said. “The smoke I had before dinner didn’t taste the way it used to, and I kind of wondered if I’d lost my liking for tobacco, but this one seems to be all right. You bet it did me good to see J. A. Lamb! He’s the biggest man that’s ever lived in this town or ever will live here; and you can take all the Governors and Senators or anything they’ve raised here, and put ‘em in a pot with him, and they won’t come out one-two-three alongside o’ him!

And to think as big a man as that, with all his interests and everything he’s got on his mind—to think he’d never let anything prevent him from coming here once every week to ask how I was getting along, and then walk right upstairs and kind of CALL on me, as it were well, it makes me sort of feel as if I wasn’t so much of a nobody, so to speak, as your mother seems to like to make out sometimes.”

“How foolish, papa! Of COURSE you’re not ‘a nobody.’”

Adams chuckled faintly upon his pipe-stem, what vanity he had seeming to be further stimulated by his daughter’s applause. “I guess there aren’t a whole lot of people in this town that could claim J. A. showed that much interest in ‘em,” he said. “Of course I don’t set up to believe it’s all because of merit, or anything like that. He’d do the same for anybody else that’d been with the company as long as I have, but still it IS something to be with the company that long and have him show he appreciates it.”

“Yes, indeed, it is, papa.”

“Yes, sir,” Adams said, reflectively. “Yes, sir, I guess that’s so. And besides, it all goes to show the kind of a man he is. Simon pure, that’s what that man is, Alice. Simon pure! There’s never been anybody work for him that didn’t respect him more than they did any other man in the world, I guess. And when you work for him you know he respects you, too. Right from the start you get the feeling that J. A. puts absolute confidence in you; and that’s mighty stimulating: it makes you want to show him he hasn’t misplaced it. There’s great big moral values to the way a man like him gets you to feeling about your relations with the business: it ain’t all just dollars and cents—not by any means!”

He was silent for a time, then returned with increasing enthusiasm to this theme, and Alice was glad to see so much renewal of life in him; he had not spoken with a like cheerful vigour since before his illness. The visit of his idolized great man had indeed been good for him, putting new spirit into him; and liveliness of the body followed that of the spirit. His improvement carried over the night: he slept well and awoke late, declaring that he was “pretty near a well man and ready for business right now.” Moreover, having slept again in the afternoon, he dressed and went down to dinner, leaning but lightly on Alice, who conducted him.

“My! but you and your mother have been at it with your scrubbing and dusting!” he said, as they came through the “living-room.” “I don’t know I ever did see the house so spick and span before!” His glance fell upon a few carnations in a vase, and he chuckled admiringly. “Flowers, too! So THAT’S what you coaxed that dollar and a half out o ‘me for, this morning!”

Other embellishments brought forth his comment when he had taken his old seat at the head of the small dinner-table. “Why, I declare, Alice!” he exclaimed. “I been so busy looking at all the spick-and-spanishness after the house-cleaning, and the flowers out in the parlour—‘living-room’ I suppose you want me to call it, if I just GOT to be fashionable— I been so busy studying over all this so-and-so, I declare I never noticed YOU till this minute! My, but you ARE all dressed up! What’s goin’ on? What’s it about: you so all dressed up, and flowers in the parlour and everything?”

“Don’t you see, papa? It’s in honour of your coming downstairs again, of course.”

“Oh, so that’s it,” he said. “I never would ‘a’ thought of that, I guess.”

But Walter looked sidelong at his father, and gave forth his sly and knowing laugh. “Neither would I!” he said.

Adams lifted his eyebrows jocosely. “You’re jealous, are you, sonny? You don’t want the old man to think our young lady’d make so much fuss over him, do you?”

“Go on thinkin’ it’s over you,” Walter retorted, amused. “Go on and think it. It’ll do you good.”

“Of course I’ll think it,” Adams said. “It isn’t anybody’s birthday. Certainly the decorations are on account of me coming downstairs. Didn’t you hear Alice say so?”

“Sure, I heard her say so.”

“Well, then–-“

Walter interrupted him with a little music. Looking shrewdly at Alice, he sang:

“I was walkin’ out on Monday with my sweet thing. She’s my neat thing, My sweet thing: I’ll go round on Tuesday night to see her. Oh, how we’ll spoon–-“

“Walter!” his mother cried. “WHERE do you learn such vulgar songs?” However, she seemed not greatly displeased with him, and laughed as she spoke.

“So that’s it, Alice!” said Adams. “Playing the hypocrite with your old man, are you? It’s some new beau, is it?”

“I only wish it were,” she said, calmly. “No. It’s just what I said: it’s all for you. dear.”

“Don’t let her con you,” Walter advised his father. “She’s got expectations. You hang around downstairs a while after dinner and you’ll see.”

But the prophecy failed, though Adams went to his own room without waiting to test it. No one came.

Alice stayed in the “living-room” until half-past nine, when she went slowly upstairs. Her mother, almost tearful, met her at the top, and whispered, “You mustn’t mind, dearie.”

“Mustn’t mind what?” Alice asked, and then, as she went on her way, laughed scornfully. “What utter nonsense!” she said.

Next day she cut the stems of the rather scant show of carnations and refreshed them with new water. At dinner, her father, still in high spirits, observed that she had again “dressed up” in honour of his second descent of the stairs; and Walter repeated his fragment of objectionable song; but these jocularities were rendered pointless by the eventless evening that followed; and in the morning the carnations began to appear tarnished and flaccid.

Alice gave them a long look, then threw them away; and neither Walter nor her father was inspired to any rallying by her plain costume for that evening. Mrs. Adams was visibly depressed.

When Alice finished helping her mother with the dishes, she went outdoors and sat upon the steps of the little front veranda. The night, gentle with warm air from the south, surrounded her pleasantly, and the perpetual smoke was thinner. Now that the furnaces of dwelling-houses were no longer fired, life in that city had begun to be less like life in a railway tunnel; people were aware of summer in the air, and in the thickened foliage of the shade-trees, and in the sky. Stars were unveiled by the passing of the denser smoke fogs, and to-night they could be seen clearly; they looked warm and near. Other girls sat upon verandas and stoops in Alice’s street, cheerful as young fishermen along the banks of a stream.

Alice could hear them from time to time; thin sopranos persistent in laughter that fell dismally upon her ears. She had set no lines or nets herself, and what she had of “expectations,” as Walter called them, were vanished. For Alice was experienced; and one of the conclusions she drew from her experience was that when a man says, “I’d take you for anything you wanted me to,” he may mean it or, he may not; but, if he does, he will not postpone the first opportunity to say something more. Little affairs, once begun, must be warmed quickly; for if they cool they are dead.

But Alice was not thinking of Arthur Russell. When she tossed away the carnations she likewise tossed away her thoughts of that young man. She had been like a boy who sees upon the street, some distance before him, a bit of something round and glittering, a possible dime. He hopes it is a dime, and, until he comes near enough to make sure, he plays that it is a dime. In his mind he has an adventure with it: he buys something delightful. If he picks it up, discovering only some tin-foil which has happened upon a round shape, he feels a sinking. A dulness falls upon him.

So Alice was dull with the loss of an adventure; and when the laughter of other girls reached her, intermittently, she had not sprightliness enough left in her to be envious of their gaiety. Besides, these neighbours were ineligible even for her envy, being of another caste; they could never know a dance at the Palmers’, except remotely, through a newspaper. Their laughter was for the encouragement of snappy young men of the stores and offices downtown, clerks, bookkeepers, what not—some of them probably graduates of Frincke’s Business College.

Then, as she recalled that dark portal, with its dusty stairway mounting between close walls to disappear in the upper shadows, her mind drew back as from a doorway to Purgatory. Nevertheless, it was a picture often in her reverie; and sometimes it came suddenly, without sequence, into the midst of her other thoughts, as if it leaped up among them from a lower darkness; and when it arrived it wanted to stay. So a traveller, still roaming the world afar, sometimes broods without apparent reason upon his family burial lot: “I wonder if I shall end there.”

The foreboding passed abruptly, with a jerk of her breath, as the street-lamp revealed a tall and easy figure approaching from the north, swinging a stick in time to its stride. She had given Russell up —and he came.

“What luck for me!” he exclaimed. “To find you alone!”

Alice gave him her hand for an instant, not otherwise moving. “I’m glad it happened so,” she said. “Let’s stay out here, shall we? Do you think it’s too provincial to sit on a girl’s front steps with her?”

“‘Provincial?’ Why, it’s the very best of our institutions,” he returned, taking his place beside her. “At least, I think so to-night.”

“Thanks! Is that practice for other nights somewhere else?”

“No,” he laughed. “The practicing all led up to this. Did I come too soon?”

“No,” she replied, gravely. “Just in time!”

“I’m glad to be so accurate; I’ve spent two evenings wanting to come, Miss Adams, instead of doing what I was doing.”

“What was that?”

“Dinners. Large and long dinners. Your fellow-citizens are immensely hospitable to a newcomer.”

“Oh, no,” Alice said. “We don’t do it for everybody. Didn’t you find yourself charmed?”

“One was a men’s dinner,” he explained. “Mr. Palmer seemed to think I ought to be shown to the principal business men.”

“What was the other dinner?”

“My cousin Mildred gave it.”

“Oh, DID she!” Alice said, sharply, but she recovered herself in the same instant, and laughed. “She wanted to show you to the principal business women, I suppose.”

“I don’t know. At all events, I shouldn’t give myself out to be so much feted by your ‘fellow-citizens,’ after all, seeing these were both done by my relatives, the Palmers. However, there are others to follow, I’m afraid. I was wondering—I hoped maybe you’d be coming to some of them. Aren’t you?”

“I rather doubt it,” Alice said, slowly. “Mildred’s dance was almost the only evening I’ve gone out since my father’s illness began. He seemed better that day; so I went. He was better the other day when he wanted those cigars. He’s very much up and down.” She paused. “I’d almost forgotten that Mildred is your cousin.”

“Not a very near one,” he explained. “Mr. Palmer’s father was my great-uncle.”

“Still, of course you are related.”

“Yes; that distantly.”

Alice said placidly, “It’s quite an advantage.”

He agreed. “Yes. It is.”

“No,” she said, in the same placid tone. “I mean for Mildred.”

“I don’t see–-“

She laughed. “No. You wouldn’t. I mean it’s an advantage over the rest of us who might like to compete for some of your time; and the worst of it is we can’t accuse her of being unfair about it. We can’t prove she showed any trickiness in having you for a cousin. Whatever else she might plan to do with you, she didn’t plan that. So the rest of us must just bear it!”

“The ‘rest of you!’ ” he laughed. “It’s going to mean a great deal of suffering!”

Alice resumed her placid tone. “You’re staying at the Palmers’, aren’t you?”

“No, not now. I’ve taken an apartment. I’m going to live here; I’m permanent. Didn’t I tell you?”

“I think I’d heard somewhere that you were,” she said. “Do you think you’ll like living here?”

“How can one tell?”

“If I were in your place I think I should be able to tell, Mr. Russell.”

“How?”

“Why, good gracious!” she cried. “Haven’t you got the most perfect creature in town for your—your cousin? SHE expects to make you like living here, doesn’t she? How could you keep from liking it, even if you tried not to, under the circumstances?”

“Well, you see, there’s such a lot of circumstances,” he explained; “I’m not sure I’ll like getting back into a business again. I suppose most of the men of my age in the country have been going through the same experience: the War left us with a considerable restlessness of spirit.”

“You were in the War?” she asked, quickly, and as quickly answered herself, “Of course you were!’

“I was a left-over; they only let me out about four months ago,” he said. “It’s quite a shake-up trying to settle down again.”

“You were in France, then?”

“Oh, yes; but I didn’t get up to the front much— only two or three times, and then just for a day or so. I was in the transportation service.”

“You were an officer, of course.”

“Yes,” he said. “They let me play I was a major.”

“I guessed a major,” she said. “You’d always be pretty grand, of course.”

Russell was amused. “Well, you see,” he informed her, “as it happened, we had at least several other majors in our army. Why would I always be something ‘pretty grand?’”

“You’re related to the Palmers. Don’t you notice they always affect the pretty grand?”

“Then you think I’m only one of their affectations, I take it.”

“Yes, you seem to be the most successful one they’ve got!” Alice said, lightly. “You certainly do belong to them.” And she laughed as if at something hidden from him. “Don’t you?”

“But you’ve just excused me for that,” he protested. “You said nobody could be blamed for my being their third cousin. What a contradictory girl you are!”

Alice shook her head. “Let’s keep away from the kind of girl I am.”

“No,” he said. “That’s just what I came here to talk about.”

She shook her head again. “Let’s keep first to the kind of man you are. I’m glad you were in the War.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She was quiet a moment, for she was thinking that here she spoke the truth: his service put about him a little glamour that helped to please her with him. She had been pleased with him during their walk; pleased with him on his own account; and now that pleasure was growing keener. She looked at him, and though the light in which she saw him was little more than starlight, she saw that he was looking steadily at her with a kindly and smiling seriousness. All at once it seemed to her that the night air was sweeter to breathe, as if a distant fragrance of new blossoms had been blown to her. She smiled back to him, and said, “Well, what kind of man are you?”

“I don’t know; I’ve often wondered,” he replied. “What kind of girl are you?”

“Don’t you remember? I told you the other day. I’m just me!”

“But who is that?”

“You forget everything;” said Alice. “You told me what kind of a girl I am. You seemed to think you’d taken quite a fancy to me from the very first.”

“So I did,” he agreed, heartily.

“But how quickly you forgot it!”

“Oh, no. I only want YOU to say what kind of a girl you are.”

She mocked him. “‘I don’t know; I’ve often wondered!’ What kind of a girl does Mildred tell you I am? What has she said about me since she told you I was ‘a Miss Adams?’”

“I don’t know; I haven’t asked her.”

“Then DON’T ask her,” Alice said, quickly.

“Why?”

“Because she’s such a perfect creature and I’m such an imperfect one. Perfect creatures have the most perfect way of ruining the imperfect ones.”

“But then they wouldn’t be perfect. Not if they–-“

“Oh, yes, they remain perfectly perfect,” she assured him. “That’s because they never go into details. They’re not so vulgar as to come right out and TELL that you’ve been in jail for stealing chickens. They just look absent-minded and say in a low voice, ‘Oh, very; but I scarcely think you’d like her particularly’; and then begin to talk of something else right away.”

His smile had disappeared. “Yes,” he said, somewhat ruefully. “That does sound like Mildred. You certainly do seem to know her! Do you know everybody as well as that?”

“Not myself,” Alice said. “I don’t know myself at all. I got to wondering about that—about who I was—the other day after you walked home with me.”

He uttered an exclamation, and added, explaining it, “You do give a man a chance to be fatuous, though! As if it were walking home with me that made you wonder about yourself!”

“It was,” Alice informed him, coolly. “I was wondering what I wanted to make you think of me, in case I should ever happen to see you again.”

This audacity appeared to take his breath. “By George!” he cried.

“You mustn’t be astonished,” she said. “What I decided then was that I would probably never dare to be just myself with you—not if I cared to have you want to see me again—and yet here I am, just being myself after all!”

“You ARE the cheeriest series of shocks,” Russell exclaimed, whereupon Alice added to the series.

“Tell me: Is it a good policy for me to follow with you?” she asked, and he found the mockery in her voice delightful. “Would you advise me to offer you shocks as a sort of vacation from suavity?”

“Suavity” was yet another sketch of Mildred; a recognizable one, or it would not have been humorous. In Alice’s hands, so dexterous in this work, her statuesque friend was becoming as ridiculous as a fine figure of wax left to the mercies of a satirist.

But the lively young sculptress knew better than to overdo: what she did must appear to spring all from mirth; so she laughed as if unwillingly, and said, “I MUSTN’T laugh at Mildred! In the first place, she’s your—your cousin. And in the second place, she’s not meant to be funny; it isn’t right to laugh at really splendid people who take themselves seriously. In the third place, you won’t come again if I do.”

“Don’t be sure of that,” Russell said, “whatever you do.”

“‘Whatever I do?’ ” she echoed. “That sounds as if you thought I COULD be terrific! Be careful; there’s one thing I could do that would keep you away.”

“What’s that?”

“I could tell you not to come,” she said. “I wonder if I ought to.”

“Why do you wonder if you ‘ought to?’”

“Don’t you guess?”

“No.”

“Then let’s both be mysteries to each other,” she suggested. “I mystify you because I wonder, and you mystify me because you don’t guess why I wonder. We’ll let it go at that, shall we?”

“Very well; so long as it’s certain that you DON’T tell me not to come again.”

“I’ll not tell you that—yet,” she said. “In fact–-” She paused, reflecting, with her head to one side. “In fact, I won’t tell you not to come, probably, until I see that’s what you want me to tell you. I’ll let you out easily—and I’ll be sure to see it. Even before you do, perhaps.”

“That arrangement suits me,” Russell returned, and his voice held no trace of jocularity: he had become serious. “It suits me better if you’re enough in earnest to mean that I can come—oh, not whenever I want to; I don’t expect so much!—but if you mean that I can see you pretty often.”

“Of course I’m in earnest,” she said. “But before I say you can come ‘pretty often,’ I’d like to know how much of my time you’d need if you did come ‘whenever you want to’; and of course you wouldn’t dare make any answer to that question except one. Wouldn’t you let me have Thursdays out?”

“No, no,” he protested. “I want to know. Will you let me come pretty often?”

“Lean toward me a little,” Alice said. “I want you to understand.” And as he obediently bent his head near hers, she inclined toward him as if to whisper; then, in a half-shout, she cried,

“YES!”

He clapped his hands. “By George!” he said. “What a girl you are!”

“Why?”

“Well, for the first reason, because you have such gaieties as that one. I should think your father would actually like being ill, just to be in the house with you all the time.”

“You mean by that,” Alice inquired, “I keep my family cheerful with my amusing little ways?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“There were only boys in your family, weren’t there, Mr. Russell?”

“I was an only child, unfortunately.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see you hadn’t any sisters.”

For a moment he puzzled over her meaning, then saw it, and was more delighted with her than ever. “I can answer a question of yours, now, that I couldn’t a while ago.”

“Yes, I know,” she returned, quietly.

“But how could you know?”

“It’s the question I asked you about whether you were going to like living here,” she said. “You’re about to tell me that now you know you WILL like it.”

“More telepathy!” he exclaimed. “Yes, that was it, precisely. I suppose the same thing’s been said to you so many times that you–-“

“No, it hasn’t,” Alice said, a little confused for the moment. “Not at all. I meant–-” She paused, then asked in a gentle voice, “Would you really like to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I was only afraid you didn’t mean it.”

“See here,” he said. “I did mean it. I told you it was being pretty difficult for me to settle down to things again. Well, it’s more difficult than you know, but I think I can pull through in fair spirits if I can see a girl like you ‘pretty often.’”

“All right,” she said, in a businesslike tone. “I’ve told you that you can if you want to.”

“I do want to,” he assured her. “I do, indeed!”

“How often is ‘pretty often,’ Mr. Russell?”

“Would you walk with me sometimes? To-morrow?”

“Sometimes. Not to-morrow. The day after.”

“That’s splendid!” he said. “You’ll walk with me day after to-morrow, and the night after that I’ll see you at Miss Lamb’s dance, won’t I?”

But this fell rather chillingly upon Alice. “Miss Lamb’s dance? Which Miss Lamb?” she asked.

“I don’t know—it’s the one that’s just coming out of mourning.”

“Oh, Henrietta—yes. Is her dance so soon? I’d forgotten.”

“You’ll be there, won’t you?” he asked. “Please say you’re going.”

Alice did not respond at once, and he urged her again: “Please do promise you’ll be there.”

“No, I can’t promise anything,” she said, slowly. “You see, for one thing, papa might not be well enough.”

“But if he is?” said Russell. “If he is you’ll surely come, won’t you? Or, perhaps–-” He hesitated, then went on quickly, “I don’t know the rules in this place yet, and different places have different rules; but do you have to have a chaperone, or don’t girls just go to dances with the men sometimes? If they do, would you—would you let me take you?”

Alice was startled. “Good gracious!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Don’t you think your relatives–- Aren’t you expected to go with Mildred—and Mrs. Palmer?”

“Not necessarily. It doesn’t matter what I might be expected to do,” he said. “Will you go with me?”

“I–- No; I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t. I’m not going.”

“But why?”

“Papa’s not really any better,” Alice said, huskily. “I’m too worried about him to go to a dance.” Her voice sounded emotional, genuinely enough; there was something almost like a sob in it. “Let’s talk of other things, please.”

He acquiesced gently; but Mrs. Adams, who had been listening to the conversation at the open window, just overhead, did not hear him. She had correctly interpreted the sob in Alice’s voice, and, trembling with sudden anger, she rose from her knees, and went fiercely to her husband’s room.

CHAPTER XIII

He had not undressed, and he sat beside the table, smoking his pipe and reading his newspaper. Upon his forehead the lines in that old pattern, the historical map of his troubles, had grown a little vaguer lately; relaxed by the complacency of a man who not only finds his health restored, but sees the days before him promising once more a familiar routine that he has always liked to follow.

As his wife came in, closing the door behind her, he looked up cheerfully, “Well, mother,” he said, “what’s the news downstairs?”

“That’s what I came to tell you,” she informed him, grimly.

Adams lowered his newspaper to his knee and peered over his spectacles at her. She had remained by the door, standing, and the great greenish shadow of the small lamp-shade upon his table revealed her but dubiously. “Isn’t everything all right?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Don’t worry: I’m going to tell you,” she said, her grimness not relaxed. “There’s matter enough, Virgil Adams. Matter enough to make me sick of being alive!”

With that, the markings on his brows began to emerge again in all their sharpness; the old pattern reappeared. “Oh, my, my!” he lamented. “I thought maybe we were all going to settle down to a little peace for a while. What’s it about now?”

“It’s about Alice. Did you think it was about ME or anything for MYSELF?”

Like some ready old machine, always in order, his irritability responded immediately and automatically to her emotion. “How in thunder could I think what it’s about, or who it’s for? SAY it, and get it over!”

“Oh, I’ll ‘say’ it,” she promised, ominously. “What I’ve come to ask you is, How much longer do you expect me to put up with that old man and his doings?”

“Whose doings? What old man?”

She came at him, fiercely accusing. “You know well enough what old man, Virgil Adams! That old man who was here the other night.”

“Mr. Lamb?”

“Yes; ‘Mister Lamb!’ ” She mocked his voice. “What other old man would I be likely to mean except J. A. Lamb?”

“What’s he been doing now?” her husband inquired, satirically. “Where’d you get something new against him since the last time you–-“

“Just this!” she cried. “The other night when that man was here, if I’d known how he was going to make my child suffer, I’d never have let him set his foot in my house.”

Adams leaned back in his chair as though her absurdity had eased his mind. “Oh, I see,” he said. “You’ve just gone plain crazy. That’s the only explanation of such talk, and it suits the case.”

“Hasn’t that man made us all suffer every day of our lives?” she demanded. “I’d like to know why it is that my life and my children’s lives have to be sacrificed to him?”

“How are they ‘sacrificed’ to him?”

“Because you keep on working for him! Because you keep on letting him hand out whatever miserable little pittance he chooses to give you; that’s why! It’s as if he were some horrible old Juggernaut and I had to see my children’s own father throwing them under the wheels to keep him satisfied.”

“I won’t hear any more such stuff!” Lifting his paper, Adams affected to read.

“You’d better listen to me,” she admonished him. “You might be sorry you didn’t, in case he ever tried to set foot in my house again! I might tell him to his face what I think of him.”

At this, Adams slapped the newspaper down upon his knee. “Oh, the devil! What’s it matter what you think of him?”

“It had better matter to you!” she cried. “Do you suppose I’m going to submit forever to him and his family and what they’re doing to my child?”

“What are he and his family doing to ‘your child?’”

Mrs. Adams came out with it. “That snippy little Henrietta Lamb has always snubbed Alice every time she’s ever had the chance. She’s followed the lead of the other girls; they’ve always all of ‘em been jealous of Alice because she dared to try and be happy, and because she’s showier and better-looking than they are, even though you do give her only about thirty-five cents a year to do it on! They’ve all done everything on earth they could to drive the young men away from her and belittle her to ‘em; and this mean little Henrietta Lamb’s been the worst of the whole crowd to Alice, every time she could see a chance.”

“What for?“Adams asked, incredulously. “Why should she or anybody else pick on Alice?”

“‘Why?’ ‘What for?’” his wife repeated with a greater vehemence. “Do YOU ask me such a thing as that? Do you really want to know?”

“Yes; I’d want to know—I would if I believed it.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” she said in a cold fury. “It’s on account of you, Virgil, and nothing else in the world.”

He hooted at her. “Oh, yes! These girls don’t like ME, so they pick on Alice.”

“Quit your palavering and evading,” she said. “A crowd of girls like that, when they get a pretty girl like Alice among them, they act just like wild beasts. They’ll tear her to pieces, or else they’ll chase her and run her out, because they know if she had half a chance she’d outshine ‘em. They can’t do that to a girl like Mildred Palmer because she’s got money and family to back her. Now you listen to me, Virgil Adams: the way the world is now, money IS family. Alice would have just as much ‘family’ as any of ‘em every single bit—if you hadn’t fallen behind in the race.”

“How did I–-“

“Yes, you did!” she cried. “Twenty-five years ago when we were starting and this town was smaller, you and I could have gone with any of ‘em if we’d tried hard enough. Look at the people we knew then that do hold their heads up alongside of anybody in this town! WHY can they? Because the men of those families made money and gave their children everything that makes life worth living! Why can’t we hold our heads up? Because those men passed you in the race. They went up the ladder, and you—you’re still a clerk down at that old hole!”

“You leave that out, please,” he said. “I thought you were going to tell me something Henrietta Lamb had done to our Alice.”

“You BET I’m going to tell you,” she assured him, vehemently. “But first I’m telling WHY she does it. It’s because you’ve never given Alice any backing nor any background, and they all know they can do anything they like to her with perfect impunity.

If she had the hundredth part of what THEY have to fall back on she’d have made ‘em sing a mighty different song long ago!”

“How would she?”

“Oh, my heavens, but you’re slow!” Mrs. Adams moaned. “Look here! You remember how practically all the nicest boys in this town used to come here a few years ago. Why, they were all crazy over her; and the girls HAD to be nice to her then. Look at the difference now! There’ll be a whole month go by and not a young man come to call on her, let alone send her candy or flowers, or ever think of TAKING her any place and yet she’s prettier and brighter than she was when they used to come. It isn’t the child’s fault she couldn’t hold ‘em, is it? Poor thing, SHE tried hard enough! I suppose you’d say it was her fault, though.”

“No; I wouldn’t.”

“Then whose fault is it?”

“Oh, mine, mine,” he said, wearily. “I drove the young men away, of course.”

“You might as well have driven ‘em, Virgil. It amounts to just the same thing.”

“How does it?”

“Because as they got older a good many of ‘em began to think more about money; that’s one thing. Money’s at the bottom of it all, for that matter. Look at these country clubs and all such things: the other girls’ families belong and we don’t, and Alice don’t; and she can’t go unless somebody takes her, and nobody does any more. Look at the other girls’ houses, and then look at our house, so shabby and old-fashioned she’d be pretty near ashamed to ask anybody to come in and sit down nowadays! Look at her clothes—oh, yes; you think you shelled out a lot for that little coat of hers and the hat and skirt she got last March; but it’s nothing. Some of these girls nowadays spend more than your whole salary on their clothes. And what jewellery has she got? A plated watch and two or three little pins and rings of the kind people’s maids wouldn’t wear now. Good Lord, Virgil Adams, wake up! Don’t sit there and tell me you don’t know things like this mean SUFFERING for the child!”

He had begun to rub his hands wretchedly back and forth over his bony knees, as if in that way he somewhat alleviated the tedium caused by her racking voice. “Oh, my, my!” he muttered. “OH, my, my!”

“Yes, I should think you WOULD say ‘Oh, my, my!’ ” she took him up, loudly. “That doesn’t help things much! If you ever wanted to DO anything about it, the poor child might see some gleam of hope in her life. You don’t CARE for her, that’s the trouble; you don’t care a single thing about her.”

“I don’t?”

“No; you don’t. Why, even with your miserable little salary you could have given her more than you have. You’re the closest man I ever knew: it’s like pulling teeth to get a dollar out of you for her, now and then, and yet you hide some away, every month or so, in some wretched little investment or other. You–-“

“Look here, now,” he interrupted, angrily. “You look here! If I didn’t put a little by whenever I could, in a bond or something, where would you be if anything happened to me? The insurance doctors never passed me; YOU know that. Haven’t we got to have SOMETHING to fall back on?”

“Yes, we have!” she cried. “We ought to have something to go on with right now, too, when we need it. Do you suppose these snippets would treat Alice the way they do if she could afford to ENTERTAIN? They leave her out of their dinners and dances simply because they know she can’t give any dinners and dances to leave them out of! They know she can’t get EVEN, and that’s the whole story! That’s why Henrietta Lamb’s done this thing to her now.”

Adams had gone back to his rubbing of his knees. “Oh, my, my!” he said. “WHAT thing?”

She told him. “Your dear, grand, old Mister Lamb’s Henrietta has sent out invitations for a large party—a LARGE one. Everybody that is anybody in this town is asked, you can be sure. There’s a very fine young man, a Mr. Russell, has just come to town, and he’s interested in Alice, and he’s asked her to go to this dance with him. Well, Alice can’t accept. She can’t go with him, though she’d give anything in the world to do it. Do you understand? The reason she can’t is because Henrietta Lamb hasn’t invited her. Do you want to know why Henrietta hasn’t invited her? It’s because she knows Alice can’t get even, and because she thinks Alice ought to be snubbed like this on account of only being the daughter of one of her grandfather’s clerks. I HOPE you understand!”

“Oh, my, my!” he said. “OH, my, my!”

“That’s your sweet old employer,” his wife cried, tauntingly. “That’s your dear, kind, grand old Mister Lamb! Alice has been left out of a good many smaller things, like big dinners and little dances, but this is just the same as serving her notice that she’s out of everything! And it’s all done by your dear, grand old–-“

“Look here!” Adams exclaimed. “I don’t want to hear any more of that! You can’t hold him responsible for everything his grandchildren do, I guess! He probably doesn’t know a thing about it. You don’t suppose he’s troubling HIS head over–-“

But she burst out at him passionately. “Suppose you trouble YOUR head about it! You’d better, Virgil Adams! You’d better, unless you want to see your child just dry up into a miserable old maid!

She’s still young and she has a chance for happiness, if she had a father that didn’t bring a millstone to hang around her neck, instead of what he ought to give her! You just wait till you die and God asks you what you had in your breast instead of a heart!”

“Oh, my, my!” he groaned. “What’s my heart got to do with it?”

“Nothing! You haven’t got one or you’d give her what she needed.

Am I asking anything you CAN’T do? You know better; you know I’m not!”

At this he sat suddenly rigid, his troubled hands ceasing to rub his knees; and he looked at her fixedly. “Now, tell me,” he said, slowly. “Just what ARE you asking?”

“You know!” she sobbed.

“You mean you’ve broken your word never to speak of THAT to me again?”

“What do I care for my word?” she cried, and, sinking to the floor at his feet, rocked herself back and forth there. “Do you suppose I’ll let my ‘word’ keep me from struggling for a little happiness for my children? It won’t, I tell you; it won’t! I’ll struggle for that till I die! I will, till I die till I die!”

He rubbed his head now instead of his knees, and, shaking all over, he got up and began with uncertain steps to pace the floor.

“Hell, hell, hell!” he said. “I’ve got to go through THAT again!”

“Yes, you have!” she sobbed. “Till I die.”

“Yes; that’s what you been after all the time I was getting well.”

“Yes, I have, and I’ll keep on till I die!”

“A fine wife for a man,” he said. “Beggin’ a man to be a dirty dog!”

“No! To be a MAN—and I’ll keep on till I die!”

Adams again fell back upon his last solace: he walked, half staggering, up and down the room, swearing in a rhythmic repetition.

His wife had repetitions of her own, and she kept at them in a voice that rose to a higher and higher pitch, like the sound of an old well-pump. “Till I die! Till I die! Till I DIE!”

She ended in a scream; and Alice, coming up the stairs, thanked heaven that Russell had gone. She ran to her father’s door and went in.

Adams looked at her, and gesticulated shakily at the convulsive figure on the floor. “Can you get her out of here?”

Alice helped Mrs. Adams to her feet; and the stricken woman threw her arms passionately about her daughter.

“Get her out!” Adams said, harshly; then cried, “Wait!”

Alice, moving toward the door, halted, and looked at him blankly, over her mother’s shoulder. “What is it, papa?”

He stretched out his arm and pointed at her. “She says—she says you have a mean life, Alice.”

“No, papa.”

Mrs. Adams turned in her daughter’s arms. “Do you hear her lie? Couldn’t you be as brave as she is, Virgil?”

“Are you lying, Alice?” he asked. “Do you have a mean time?”

“No, papa.”

He came toward her. “Look at me!” he said. “Things like this dance now—is that so hard to bear?”

Alice tried to say, “No, papa,” again, but she couldn’t. Suddenly and in spite of herself she began to cry.

“Do you hear her?” his wife sobbed. “Now do you–-“

He waved at them fiercely. “Get out of here!” he said. “Both of you! Get out of here!”

As they went, he dropped in his chair and bent far forward, so that his haggard face was concealed from them. Then, as Alice closed the door, he began to rub his knees again, muttering, “Oh, my, my! OH, my, my!”

CHAPTER XIV

There shone a jovial sun overhead on the appointed “day after to-morrow”; a day not cool yet of a temperature friendly to walkers; and the air, powdered with sunshine, had so much life in it that it seemed to sparkle. To Arthur Russell this was a day like a gay companion who pleased him well; but the gay companion at his side pleased him even better. She looked her prettiest, chattered her wittiest, smiled her wistfulest, and delighted him with all together.

“You look so happy it’s easy to see your father’s taken a good turn,” he told her.

“Yes; he has this afternoon, at least,” she said. “I might have other reasons for looking cheerful, though.”

“For instance?”

“Exactly!” she said, giving him a sweet look just enough mocked by her laughter. “For instance!”

“Well, go on,” he begged.

“Isn’t it expected?” she asked.

“Of you, you mean?”

“No,” she returned. “For you, I mean!”

In this style, which uses a word for any meaning that quick look and colourful gesture care to endow it with, she was an expert; and she carried it merrily on, leaving him at liberty (one of the great values of the style) to choose as he would how much or how little she meant. He was content to supply mere cues, for although he had little coquetry of his own, he had lately begun to find that the only interesting moments in his life were those during which Alice Adams coquetted with him. Happily, these obliging moments extended themselves to cover all the time he spent with her. However serious she might seem, whatever appeared to be her topic, all was thou-and-I.

He planned for more of it, seeing otherwise a dull evening ahead; and reverted, afterwhile, to a forbidden subject. “About that dance at Miss Lamb’s —since your father’s so much better–-“

She flushed a little. “Now, now!” she chided him. “We agreed not to say any more about that.”

“Yes, but since he IS better–-“

Alice shook her head. “He won’t be better to-morrow. He always has a bad day after a good one especially after such a good one as this is.”

“But if this time it should be different,” Russell persisted; “wouldn’t you be willing to come if he’s better by to-morrow evening? Why not wait and decide at the last minute?”

She waved her hands airily. “What a pother!” she cried. “What does it matter whether poor little Alice Adams goes to a dance or not?”

“Well, I thought I’d made it clear that it looks fairly bleak to me if you don’t go.”

“Oh, yes!” she jeered.

“It’s the simple truth,” he insisted. “I don’t care a great deal about dances these days; and if you aren’t going to be there–-“

“You could stay away,” she suggested. “You wouldn’t!”

“Unfortunately, I can’t. I’m afraid I’m supposed to be the excuse. Miss Lamb, in her capacity as a friend of my relatives–-“

“Oh, she’s giving it for YOU! I see! On Mildred’s account you mean?”

At that his face showed an increase of colour. “I suppose just on account of my being a cousin of Mildred’s and of–-“

“Of course! You’ll have a beautiful time, too. Henrietta’ll see that you have somebody to dance with besides Miss Dowling, poor man!”

“But what I want somebody to see is that I dance with you! And perhaps your father–-“

“Wait!” she said, frowning as if she debated whether or not to tell him something of import; then, seeming to decide affirmatively, she asked: “Would you really like to know the truth about it?”

“If it isn’t too unflattering.”

“It hasn’t anything to do with you at all,” she said. “Of course I’d like to go with you and to dance with you—though you don’t seem to realize that you wouldn’t be permitted much time with me.”

“Oh, yes, I–-“

“Never mind!” she laughed. “Of course you wouldn’t. But even if papa should be better to-morrow, I doubt if I’d go. In fact, I know I wouldn’t. There’s another reason besides papa.”

“Is there?”

“Yes. The truth is, I don’t get on with Henrietta Lamb. As a matter of fact, I dislike her, and of course that means she dislikes me. I should never think of asking her to anything I gave, and I really wonder she asks me to things SHE gives.” This was a new inspiration; and Alice, beginning to see her way out of a perplexity, wished that she had thought of it earlier: she should have told him from the first that she and Henrietta had a feud, and consequently exchanged no invitations. Moreover, there was another thing to beset her with little anxieties: she might better not have told him from the first, as she had indeed told him by intimation, that she was the pampered daughter of an indulgent father, presumably able to indulge her; for now she must elaborately keep to the part. Veracity is usually simple; and its opposite, to be successful, should be as simple; but practitioners of the opposite are most often impulsive, like Alice; and, like her, they become enmeshed in elaborations.

“It wouldn’t be very nice for me to go to her house,” Alice went on, “when I wouldn’t want her in mine. I’ve never admired her. I’ve always thought she was lacking in some things most people are supposed to be equipped with—for instance, a certain feeling about the death of a father who was always pretty decent to his daughter. Henrietta’s father died just, eleven months and twenty-seven days before your cousin’s dance, but she couldn’t stick out those few last days and make it a year; she was there.”

Alice stopped, then laughed ruefully, exclaiming, “But this is dreadful of me!”

“Is it?”

“Blackguarding her to you when she’s giving a big party for you! Just the way Henrietta would blackguard me to you—heaven knows what she WOULDN’T say if she talked about me to you! It would be fair, of course, but—well, I’d rather she didn’t!” And with that, Alice let her pretty hand, in its white glove, rest upon his arm for a moment; and he looked down at it, not unmoved to see it there. “I want to be unfair about just this,” she said, letting a troubled laughter tremble through her appealing voice as she spoke. “I won’t take advantage of her with anybody, except just— you! I’d a little rather you didn’t hear anybody blackguard me, and, if you don’t mind—could you promise not to give Henrietta the chance?”

It was charmingly done, with a humorous, faint pathos altogether genuine; and Russell found himself suddenly wanting to shout at her, “Oh, you DEAR!” Nothing else seemed adequate; but he controlled the impulse in favour of something more conservative.

“Imagine any one speaking unkindly of you—not praising you!”

“Who HAS praised me to you?” she asked, quickly.

“I haven’t talked about you with any one; but if I did, I know they’d–-“

“No, no!” she cried, and went on, again accompanying her words with little tremulous runs of laughter. “You don’t understand this town yet. You’ll be surprised when you do; we’re different.

We talk about one another fearfully! Haven’t I just proved it, the way I’ve been going for Henrietta? Of course I didn’t say anything really very terrible about her, but that’s only because I don’t follow that practice the way most of the others do. They don’t stop with the worst of the truth they can find: they make UP things—yes, they really do! And, oh, I’d RATHER they didn’t make up things about me—to you!”

“What difference would it make if they did?” he inquired, cheerfully. “I’d know they weren’t true.”

“Even if you did know that, they’d make a difference,” she said. “Oh, yes, they would! It’s too bad, but we don’t like anything quite so well that’s had specks on it, even if we’ve wiped the specks off;—it’s just that much spoiled, and some things are all spoiled the instant they’re the least bit spoiled. What a man thinks about a girl, for instance. Do you want to have what you think about me spoiled, Mr. Russell?”

“Oh, but that’s already far beyond reach,” he said, lightly.

“But it can’t be!” she protested.

“Why not?”

“Because it never can be. Men don’t change their minds about one another often: they make it quite an event when they do, and talk about it as if something important had happened. But a girl only has to go downtown with a shoe-string unfastened, and every man who sees her will change his mind about her. Don’t you know that’s true?”

“Not of myself, I think.”

“There!” she cried. “That’s precisely what every man in the world would say!”

“So you wouldn’t trust me?”

“Well—I’ll be awfully worried if you give ‘em a chance to tell you that I’m too lazy to tie my shoe-strings!”

He laughed delightedly. “Is that what they do say?” he asked.

“Just about! Whatever they hope will get results.” She shook her head wisely. “Oh, yes; we do that here!”

“But I don’t mind loose shoe-strings,” he said. “Not if they’re yours.”

“They’ll find out what you do mind.”

“But suppose,” he said, looking at her whimsically; “suppose I wouldn’t mind anything—so long as it’s yours?”

She courtesied. “Oh, pretty enough! But a girl who’s talked about has a weakness that’s often a fatal one.”

“What is it?”

“It’s this: when she’s talked about she isn’t THERE. That’s how they kill her.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“Don’t you see? If Henrietta—or Mildred—or any of ‘em—or some of their mothers—oh, we ALL do it! Well, if any of ‘em told you I didn’t tie my shoe-strings, and if I were there, so that you could see me, you’d know it wasn’t true. Even if I were sitting so that you couldn’t see my feet, and couldn’t tell whether the strings were tied or not just then, still you could look at me, and see that I wasn’t the sort of girl to neglect my shoe-strings. But that isn’t the way it happens: they’ll get at you when I’m nowhere around and can’t remind you of the sort of girl I really am.”

“But you don’t do that,” he complained. “You don’t remind me you don’t even tell me—the sort of girl you really are! I’d like to know.”

“Let’s be serious then,” she said, and looked serious enough herself. “Would you honestly like to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, you must be careful.”

“‘Careful?’” The word amused him.

“I mean careful not to get me mixed up,” she said. “Careful not to mix up the girl you might hear somebody talking about with the me I honestly try to make you see. If you do get those two mixed up—well, the whole show’ll be spoiled!”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because it’s–-” She checked herself, having begun to speak too impulsively; and she was disturbed, realizing in what tricky stuff she dealt. What had been on her lips to say was, “Because it’s happened before!” She changed to, “Because it’s so easy to spoil anything—easiest of all to spoil anything that’s pleasant.”

“That might depend.”

“No; it’s so. And if you care at all about—about knowing a girl who’d like someone to know her–-“

“Just ‘someone?’ That’s disappointing.”

“Well—you,” she said.

“Tell me how ‘careful’ you want me to be, then!”

“Well, don’t you think it would be nice if you didn’t give anybody the chance to talk about me the way—the way I’ve just been talking about Henrietta Lamb?”

With that they laughed together, and he said, “You may be cutting me off from a great deal of information, you know.”

“Yes,” Alice admitted. “Somebody might begin to praise me to you, too; so it’s dangerous to ask you to change the subject if I ever happen to be mentioned. But after all–-” She paused.

“‘After all’ isn’t the end of a thought, is it?”

“Sometimes it is of a girl’s thought; I suppose men are neater about their thoughts, and always finish ‘em. It isn’t the end of the thought I had then, though.”

“What is the end of it?”

She looked at him impulsively. “Oh, it’s foolish,” she said, and she laughed as laughs one who proposes something probably impossible. “But, WOULDN’T it be pleasant if two people could ever just keep themselves TO themselves, so far as they two were concerned? I mean, if they could just manage to be friends without people talking about it, or talking to THEM about it?”

“I suppose that might be rather difficult,” he said, more amused than impressed by her idea.

“I don’t know: it might be done,” she returned, hopefully. “Especially in a town of this size; it’s grown so it’s quite a huge place these days. People can keep themselves to themselves in a big place better, you know. For instance, nobody knows that you and I are taking a walk together today.”

“How absurd, when here we are on exhibition!”

“No; we aren’t.”

“We aren’t?”

“Not a bit of it!” she laughed. “We were the other day, when you walked home with me, but anybody could tell that had just happened by chance, on account of your overtaking me; people can always see things like that. But we’re not on exhibition now. Look where I’ve led you!”

Amused and a little bewildered, he looked up and down the street, which was one of gaunt-faced apartment-houses, old, sooty, frame boarding-houses, small groceries and drug-stores, laundries and one-room plumbers’ shops, with the sign of a clairvoyant here and there.

“You see?” she said. “I’ve been leading you without your knowing it. Of course that’s because you’re new to the town, and you give yourself up to the guidance of an old citizen.”

“I’m not so sure, Miss Adams. It might mean that I don’t care where I follow so long as I follow you.”

“Very well,” she said. “I’d like you to keep on following me at least long enough for me to show you that there’s something nicer ahead of us than this dingy street.”

“Is that figurative?” he asked.

“Might be!” she returned, gaily. “There’s a pretty little park at the end, but it’s very proletarian, and nobody you and I know will be more likely to see us there than on this street.”

“What an imagination you have!” he exclaimed. “You turn our proper little walk into a Parisian adventure.”

She looked at him in what seemed to be a momentary grave puzzlement. “Perhaps you feel that a Parisian adventure mightn’t please your—your relatives?”

“Why, no,” he returned. “You seem to think of them oftener than I do.”

This appeared to amuse Alice, or at least to please her, for she laughed. “Then I can afford to quit thinking of them, I suppose.

It’s only that I used to be quite a friend of Mildred’s—but there! we needn’t to go into that. I’ve never been a friend of Henrietta Lamb’s, though, and I almost wish she weren’t taking such pains to be a friend of yours.”

“Oh, but she’s not. It’s all on account of–-“

“On Mildred’s account,” Alice finished this for him, coolly. “Yes, of course.”

“It’s on account of the two families,” he was at pains to explain, a little awkwardly. “It’s because I’m a relative of the Palmers, and the Palmers and the Lambs seem to be old family friends.”

“Something the Adamses certainly are not,” Alice said. “Not with either of ‘em; particularly not with the Lambs!” And here, scarce aware of what impelled her, she returned to her former elaborations and colourings. “You see, the differences between Henrietta and me aren’t entirely personal: I couldn’t go to her house even if I liked her. The Lambs and Adamses don’t get on with each other, and we’ve just about come to the breaking-point as it happens.”

“I hope it’s nothing to bother you.”

“Why? A lot of things bother me.”

“I’m sorry they do,” he said, and seemed simply to mean it.

She nodded gratefully. “That’s nice of you, Mr. Russell. It helps. The break between the Adamses and the Lambs is a pretty bothersome thing. It’s been coming on a long time.” She sighed deeply, and the sigh was half genuine; this half being for her father, but the other half probably belonged to her instinctive rendering of Juliet Capulet, daughter to a warring house. “I hate it all so!” she added.

“Of course you must.”

“I suppose most quarrels between families are on account of business,” she said. “That’s why they’re so sordid. Certainly the Lambs seem a sordid lot to me, though of course I’m biased.” And with that she began to sketch a history of the commercial antagonism that had risen between the Adamses and the Lambs.

The sketching was spontaneous and dramatic. Mathematics had no part in it; nor was there accurate definition of Mr. Adams’s relation to the institution of Lamb and Company. The point was clouded, in fact; though that might easily be set down to the general haziness of young ladies confronted with the mysteries of trade or commerce. Mr. Adams either had been a vague sort of junior member of the firm, it appeared, or else he should have been made some such thing; at all events, he was an old mainstay of the business; and he, as much as any Lamb, had helped to build up the prosperity of the company. But at last, tired of providing so much intelligence and energy for which other people took profit greater than his own, he had decided to leave the company and found a business entirely for himself. The Lambs were going to be enraged when they learned what was afoot.

Such was the impression, a little misted, wrought by Alice’s quick narrative. But there was dolorous fact behind it: Adams had succumbed.

His wife, grave and nervous, rather than triumphant, in success, had told their daughter that the great J. A. would be furious and possibly vindictive. Adams was afraid of him, she said.

“But what for, mama?” Alice asked, since this seemed a turn of affairs out of reason. “What in the world has Mr. Lamb to do with papa’s leaving the company to set up for himself? What right has he to be angry about it? If he’s such a friend as he claims to be, I should think he’d be glad—that is, if the glue factory turns out well. What will he be angry for?”

Mrs. Adams gave Alice an uneasy glance, hesitated, and then explained that a resignation from Lamb’s had always been looked upon, especially by “that old man,” as treachery. You were supposed to die in the service, she said bitterly, and her daughter, a little mystified, accepted this explanation. Adams had not spoken to her of his surrender; he seemed not inclined to speak to her at all, or to any one.

Alice was not serious too long, and she began to laugh as she came to the end of her decorative sketch. “After all, the whole thing is perfectly ridiculous,” she said. “In fact, it’s FUNNY! That’s on account of what papa’s going to throw over the Lamb business FOR! To save your life you couldn’t imagine what he’s going to do!”

“I won’t try, then,” Russell assented.

“It takes all the romance out of ME,” she laughed. “You’ll never go for a Parisian walk with me again, after I tell you what I’ll be heiress to.” They had come to the entrance of the little park; and, as Alice had said, it was a pretty place, especially on a day so radiant. Trees of the oldest forest stood there, hale and serene over the trim, bright grass; and the proletarians had not come from their factories at this hour; only a few mothers and their babies were to be seen, here and there, in the shade. “I think I’ll postpone telling you about it till we get nearly home again,” Alice said, as they began to saunter down one of the gravelled paths. “There’s a bench beside a spring farther on; we can sit there and talk about a lot of things—things not so sticky as my dowry’s going to be.”

“‘Sticky?’” he echoed. “What in the world–-” She laughed despairingly.

“A glue factory!”

Then he laughed, too, as much from friendliness as from amusement; and she remembered to tell him that the project of a glue factory was still “an Adams secret.” It would be known soon, however, she added; and the whole Lamb connection would probably begin saying all sorts of things, heaven knew what!

Thus Alice built her walls of flimsy, working always gaily, or with at least the air of gaiety; and even as she rattled on, there was somewhere in her mind a constant little wonder. Everything she said seemed to be necessary to support something else she had said. How had it happened? She found herself telling him that since her father had decided on making so great a change in his ways, she and her mother hoped at last to persuade him to give up that “foolish little house” he had been so obstinate about; and she checked herself abruptly on this declivity just as she was about to slide into a remark concerning her own preference for a “country place.” Discretion caught her in time; and something else, in company with discretion, caught her, for she stopped short in her talk and blushed.

They had taken possession of the bench beside the spring, by this time; and Russell, his elbow on the back of the bench and his chin on his hand, the better to look at her, had no guess at the cause of the blush, but was content to find it lovely. At his first sight of Alice she had seemed pretty in the particular way of being pretty that he happened to like best; and, with every moment he spent with her, this prettiness appeared to increase. He felt that he could not look at her enough: his gaze followed the fluttering of the graceful hands in almost continual gesture as she talked; then lifted happily to the vivacious face again. She charmed him.

After her abrupt pause, she sighed, then looked at him with her eyebrows lifted in a comedy appeal. “You haven’t said you wouldn’t give Henrietta the chance,” she said, in the softest voice that can still have a little laugh running in it.

He was puzzled. “Give Henrietta the chance?”

“YOU know! You’ll let me keep on being unfair, won’t you? Not give the other girls a chance to get even?”

He promised, heartily.

CHAPTER XV

Alice had said that no one who knew either Russell or herself would be likely to see them in the park or upon the dingy street; but although they returned by that same ungenteel thoroughfare they were seen by a person who knew them both. Also, with some surprise on the part of Russell, and something more poignant than surprise for Alice, they saw this person.

All of the dingy street was ugly, but the greater part of it appeared to be honest. The two pedestrians came upon a block or two, however, where it offered suggestions of a less upright character, like a steady enough workingman with a naughty book sticking out of his pocket. Three or four dim shops, a single story in height, exhibited foul signboards, yet fair enough so far as the wording went; one proclaiming a tobacconist, one a junk-dealer, one a dispenser of “soft drinks and cigars.” The most credulous would have doubted these signboards; for the craft of the modern tradesman is exerted to lure indoors the passing glance, since if the glance is pleased the feet may follow; but this alleged tobacconist and his neighbours had long been fond of dust on their windows, evidently, and shades were pulled far down on the glass of their doors. Thus the public eye, small of pupil in the light of the open street, was intentionally not invited to the dusky interiors. Something different from mere lack of enterprise was apparent; and the signboards might have been omitted; they were pains thrown away, since it was plain to the world that the business parts of these shops were the brighter back rooms implied by the dark front rooms; and that the commerce there was in perilous new liquors and in dice and rough girls.

Nothing could have been more innocent than the serenity with which these wicked little places revealed themselves for what they were; and, bound by this final tie of guilelessness, they stood together in a row which ended with a companionable barbershop, much like them. Beyond was a series of soot-harried frame two-story houses, once part of a cheerful neighbourhood when the town was middle-aged and settled, and not old and growing. These houses, all carrying the label. “Rooms,” had the worried look of vacancy that houses have when they are too full of everybody without being anybody’s home; and there was, too, a surreptitious air about them, as if, like the false little shops, they advertised something by concealing it.

One of them—the one next to the barbershop— had across its front an ample, jig-sawed veranda, where aforetime, no doubt, the father of a family had fanned himself with a palm-leaf fan on Sunday afternoons, watching the surreys go by, and where his daughter listened to mandolins and badinage on starlit evenings; but, although youth still held the veranda, both the youth and the veranda were in decay. The four or five young men who lounged there this afternoon were of a type known to shady pool-parlours. Hats found no favour with them; all of them wore caps; and their tight clothes, apparently from a common source, showed a vivacious fancy for oblique pockets, false belts, and Easter-egg colourings. Another thing common to the group was the expression of eye and mouth; and Alice, in the midst of her other thoughts, had a distasteful thought about this.

The veranda was within a dozen feet of the sidewalk, and as she and her escort came nearer, she took note of the young men, her face hardening a little, even before she suspected there might be a resemblance between them and any one she knew. Then she observed that each of these loungers wore not for the occasion, but as of habit, a look of furtively amused contempt; the mouth smiled to one side as if not to dislodge a cigarette, while the eyes kept languidly superior. All at once Alice was reminded of Walter; and the slight frown caused by this idea had just begun to darken her forehead when Walter himself stepped out of the open door of the house and appeared upon the veranda. Upon his head was a new straw hat, and in his hand was a Malacca stick with an ivory top, for Alice had finally decided against it for herself and had given it to him. His mood was lively: he twirled the stick through his fingers like a drum-major’s baton, and whistled loudly.

Moreover, he was indeed accompanied. With him was a thin girl who had made a violent black-and-white poster of herself: black dress, black flimsy boa, black stockings, white slippers, great black hat down upon the black eyes; and beneath the hat a curve of cheek and chin made white as whitewash, and in strong bilateral motion with gum.

The loungers on the veranda were familiars of the pair; hailed them with cacklings; and one began to sing, in a voice all tin:

“Then my skirt, Sal, and me did go Right straight to the moving-pitcher show. OH, you bashful vamp!”

The girl laughed airily. “God, but you guys are wise!” she said.

“Come on, Wallie.”

Walter stared at his sister; then grinned faintly, and nodded at Russell as the latter lifted his hat in salutation. Alice uttered an incoherent syllable of exclamation, and, as she began to walk faster, she bit her lip hard, not in order to look wistful, this time, but to help her keep tears of anger from her eyes.

Russell laughed cheerfully. “Your brother certainly seems to have found the place for ‘colour’ today,” he said. “That girl’s talk must be full of it.”

But Alice had forgotten the colour she herself had used in accounting for Walter’s peculiarities, and she did not understand. “What?” she said, huskily.

“Don’t you remember telling me about him? How he was going to write, probably, and would go anywhere to pick up types and get them to talk?”

She kept her eyes ahead, and said sharply, “I think his literary tastes scarcely cover this case!”

“Don’t be too sure. He didn’t look at all disconcerted. He didn’t seem to mind your seeing him.”

“That’s all the worse, isn’t it?”

“Why, no,” her friend said, genially. “It means he didn’t consider that he was engaged in anything out of the way. You can’t expect to understand everything boys do at his age; they do all sorts of queer things, and outgrow them. Your brother evidently has a taste for queer people, and very likely he’s been at least half sincere when he’s made you believe he had a literary motive behind it. We all go through–-“

“Thanks, Mr. Russell,” she interrupted. “Let’s don’t say any more.”

He looked at her flushed face and enlarged eyes; and he liked her all the better for her indignation: this was how good sisters ought to feel, he thought, failing to understand that most of what she felt was not about Walter. He ventured only a word more. “Try not to mind it so much; it really doesn’t amount to anything.”

She shook her head, and they went on in silence; she did not look at him again until they stopped before her own house. Then she gave him only one glimpse of her eyes before she looked down. “It’s spoiled, isn’t it?” she said, in a low voice.

“What’s ‘spoiled?’”

“Our walk—well, everything. Somehow it always—is.”

“‘Always is’ what?” he asked.

“Spoiled,” she said.

He laughed at that; but without looking at him she suddenly offered him her hand, and, as he took it, he felt a hurried, violent pressure upon his fingers, as if she meant to thank him almost passionately for being kind. She was gone before he could speak to her again.

In her room, with the door locked, she did not go to her mirror, but to her bed, flinging herself face down, not caring how far the pillows put her hat awry. Sheer grief had followed her anger; grief for the calamitous end of her bright afternoon, grief for the “end of everything,” as she thought then. Nevertheless, she gradually grew more composed, and, when her mother tapped on the door presently, let her in. Mrs. Adams looked at her with quick apprehension.

“Oh, poor child! Wasn’t he–-“

Alice told her. “You see how it—how it made me look, mama,” she quavered, having concluded her narrative. “I’d tried to cover up Walter’s awfulness at the dance with that story about his being ‘literary,’ but no story was big enough to cover this up—and oh!

it must make him think I tell stories about other things!”

“No, no, no!” Mrs. Adams protested. “Don’t you see? At the worst, all HE could think is that Walter told stories to you about why he likes to be with such dreadful people, and you believed them. That’s all HE’D think; don’t you see?”

Alice’s wet eyes began to show a little hopefulness. “You honestly think it might be that way, mama?”

“Why, from what you’ve told me he said, I KNOW it’s that way. Didn’t he say he wanted to come again?”

“N-no,” Alice said, uncertainly. “But I think he will. At least I begin to think so now. He–-” She stopped.

“From all you tell me, he seems to be a very desirable young man,” Mrs. Adams said, primly.

Her daughter was silent for several moments; then new tears gathered upon her downcast lashes. “He’s just—dear!” she faltered.

Mrs. Adams nodded. “He’s told you he isn’t engaged, hasn’t he?”

“No. But I know he isn’t. Maybe when he first came here he was near it, but I know he’s not.”

“I guess Mildred Palmer would LIKE him to be, all right!” Mrs. Adams was frank enough to say, rather triumphantly; and Alice, with a lowered head, murmured:

“Anybody—would.”

The words were all but inaudible.

“Don’t you worry,” her mother said, and patted her on the shoulder. “Everything will come out all right; don’t you fear, Alice. Can’t you see that beside any other girl in town you’re just a perfect QUEEN? Do you think any young man that wasn’t prejudiced, or something, would need more than just one look to–-“

But Alice moved away from the caressing hand. “Never mind, mama.

I wonder he looks at me at all. And if he does again, after seeing my brother with those horrible people–-“

“Now, now!” Mrs. Adams interrupted, expostulating mournfully. “I’m sure Walter’s a GOOD boy–-“

“You are?” Alice cried, with a sudden vigour. “You ARE?”

“I’m sure he’s GOOD, yes—and if he isn’t, it’s not his fault. It’s mine.”

“What nonsense!”

“No, it’s true,” Mrs. Adams lamented. “I tried to bring him up to be good, God knows; and when he was little he was the best boy I ever saw. When he came from Sunday-school he’d always run to me and we’d go over the lesson together; and he let me come in his room at night to hear his prayers almost until he was sixteen. Most boys won’t do that with their mothers—not nearly that long. I tried so hard to bring him up right—but if anything’s gone wrong it’s my fault.”

“How could it be? You’ve just said–-“

“It’s because I didn’t make your father this—this new step earlier. Then Walter might have had all the advantages that other–-“

“Oh, mama, PLEASE!” Alice begged her. “Let’s don’t go over all that again. Isn’t it more important to think what’s to be done about him? Is he going to be allowed to go on disgracing us as he does?”

Mrs. Adams sighed profoundly. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed, unhappily. “Your father’s so upset about—about this new step he’s taking—I don’t feel as if we ought to–-“

“No, no!” Alice cried. “Papa mustn’t be distressed with this, on top of everything else. But SOMETHING’S got to be done about Walter.”

“What can be?” her mother asked, helplessly. “What can be?”

Alice admitted that she didn’t know.

At dinner, an hour later, Walter’s habitually veiled glance lifted, now and then, to touch her furtively;—he was waiting, as he would have said, for her to “spring it”; and he had prepared a brief and sincere defense to the effect that he made his own living, and would like to inquire whose business it was to offer intrusive comment upon his private conduct. But she said nothing, while his father and mother were as silent as she. Walter concluded that there was to be no attack, but changed his mind when his father, who ate only a little, and broodingly at that, rose to leave the table and spoke to him.

“Walter,” he said, “when you’ve finished I wish you’d come up to my room. I got something I want to say to you.”

Walter shot a hard look at his apathetic sister, then turned to his father. “Make it to-morrow,” he said. “This is Satad’y night and I got a date.”

“No,” Adams said, frowning. “You come up before you go out. It’s important.”

“All right; I’ve had all I want to eat,” Walter returned. “I got a few minutes. Make it quick.”

He followed his father upstairs, and when they were in the room together Adams shut the door, sat down, and began to rub his knees.

“Rheumatism?” the boy inquired, slyly. “That what you want to talk to me about?”

“No.” But Adams did not go on; he seemed to be in difficulties for words, and Walter decided to help him.

“Hop ahead and spring it,” he said. “Get it off your mind: I’ll tell the world I should worry! You aren’t goin’ to bother ME any, so why bother yourself? Alice hopped home and told you she saw me playin’ around with some pretty gay-lookin’ berries and you–-“

“Alice?” his father said, obviously surprised. “It’s nothing about Alice.”

“Didn’t she tell you–-“

“I haven’t talked with her all day.”

“Oh, I see,” Walter said. “She told mother and mother told you.”

“No, neither of ‘em have told me anything. What was there to tell?”

Walter laughed. “Oh, it’s nothin’,” he said. “I was just startin’ out to buy a girl friend o’ mine a rhinestone buckle I lost to her on a bet, this afternoon, and Alice came along with that big Russell fish; and I thought she looked sore. She expects me to like the kind she likes, and I don’t like ‘em. I thought she’d prob’ly got you all stirred up about it.”

“No, no,” his father said, peevishly. “I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t care to know anything about it. I want to talk to you about something important.”

Then, as he was again silent, Walter said, “Well, TALK about it; I’m listening.”

“It’s this,” Adams began, heavily. “It’s about me going into this glue business. Your mother’s told you, hasn’t she?”

“She said you were goin’ to leave the old place downtown and start a glue factory. That’s all I know about it; I got my own affairs to ‘tend to.”

“Well, this is your affair,” his father said, frowning. “You can’t stay with Lamb and Company.”

Walter looked a little startled. “What you mean, I can’t? Why not?”

“You’ve got to help me,” Adams explained slowly; and he frowned more deeply, as if the interview were growing increasingly laborious for him. “It’s going to be a big pull to get this business on its feet.”

“Yes!” Walter exclaimed with a sharp skepticism. “I should say it was!” He stared at his father incredulously. “Look here; aren’t you just a little bit sudden, the way you’re goin’ about things? You’ve let mother shove you a little too fast, haven’t you? Do you know anything about what it means to set up a new business these days?”

“Yes, I know all about it,” Adams said. “About this business, I do.”

“How do you?”

“Because I made a long study of it. I’m not afraid of going about it the wrong way; but it’s a hard job and you’ll have to put in all whatever sense and strength you’ve got.”

Walter began to breathe quickly, and his lips were agitated; then he set them obstinately. “Oh; I will,” he said.

“Yes, you will,” Adams returned, not noticing that his son’s inflection was satiric. “It’s going to take every bit of energy in your body, and all the energy I got left in mine, and every cent of the little I’ve saved, besides something I’ll have to raise on this house. I’m going right at it, now I’ve got to; and you’ll have to quit Lamb’s by the end of next week.”

“Oh, I will?” Walter’s voice grew louder, and there was a shrillness in it. “I got to quit Lamb’s the end of next week, have I?” He stepped forward, angrily. “Listen!” he said. “I’m not walkin’ out o’ Lamb’s, see? I’m not quittin’ down there: I stay with ‘em, see?”

Adams looked up at him, astonished. “You’ll leave there next Saturday,” he said. “I’ve got to have you.”

“You don’t anything o’ the kind,” Walter told him, sharply. “Do you expect to pay me anything?”

“I’d pay you about what you been getting down there.”

“Then pay somebody else; I don’t know anything about glue. You get somebody else.”

“No. You’ve got to–”

Walter cut him off with the utmost vehemence. “Don’t tell me what I got to do! I know what I got to do better’n you, I guess!

I stay at Lamb’s, see?”

Adams rose angrily. “You’ll do what I tell you. You can’t stay down there.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because I won’t let you.”

“Listen! Keep on not lettin’ me: I’ll be there just the same.”

At that his father broke into a sour laughter. “THEY won’t let you, Walter! They won’t have you down there after they find out I’m going.”

“Why won’t they? You don’t think they’re goin’ to be all shot to pieces over losin’ YOU, do you?”

“I tell you they won’t let you stay,” his father insisted, loudly.

“Why, what do they care whether you go or not?”

“They’ll care enough to fire YOU, my boy!”

“Look here, then; show me why.”

“They’ll do it!”

“Yes,” Walter jeered; “you keep sayin’ they will, but when I ask you to show me why, you keep sayin’ they will! That makes little headway with ME, I can tell you!”

Adams groaned, and, rubbing his head, began to pace the floor. Walter’s refusal was something he had not anticipated; and he felt the weakness of his own attempt to meet it: he seemed powerless to do anything but utter angry words, which, as Walter said, made little headway. “Oh, my, my!” he muttered, “OH, my, my!”

Walter, usually sallow, had grown pale: he watched his father narrowly, and now took a sudden resolution. “Look here,” he said. “When you say Lamb’s is likely to fire me because you’re goin’ to quit, you talk like the people that have to be locked up. I don’t know where you get such things in your head; Lamb and Company won’t know you’re gone. Listen: I can stay there long as I want to. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do: make it worth my while and I’ll hook up with your old glue factory, after all.”

Adams stopped his pacing abruptly, and stared at him. “‘Make it worth your while?’ What you mean?”

“I got a good use for three hundred dollars right now,” Walter said. “Let me have it and I’ll quit Lamb’s to work for you. Don’t let me have it and I SWEAR I won’t!”

“Are you crazy?”

“Is everybody crazy that needs three hundred dollars?”

“Yes,” Adams said. “They are if they ask ME for it, when I got to stretch every cent I can lay my hands on to make it look like a dollar!”

“You won’t do it?”

Adams burst out at him. “You little fool! If I had three hundred dollars to throw away, besides the pay I expected to give you, haven’t you got sense enough to see I could hire a man worth three hundred dollars more to me than you’d be? It’s a FINE time to ask me for three hundred dollars, isn’t it! What FOR? Rhinestone buckles to throw around on your ‘girl friends?’ Shame on you! Ask me to BRIBE you to help yourself and your own family!”

“I’ll give you a last chance,” Walter said. “Either you do what I want, or I won’t do what you want. Don’t ask me again after this, because–-“

Adams interrupted him fiercely. “‘Ask you again!’ Don’t worry about that, my boy! All I ask you is to get out o’ my room.”

“Look here,” Walter said, quietly; and his lopsided smile distorted his livid cheek. “Look here: I expect YOU wouldn’t give me three hundred dollars to save my life, would you?”

“You make me sick,” Adams said, in his bitterness. “Get out of here.”

Walter went out, whistling; and Adams drooped into his old chair again as the door closed. “OH, my, my!” he groaned. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy! The way of the transgressor–-“

CHAPTER XVI

He meant his own transgression and his own way; for Walter’s stubborn refusal appeared to Adams just then as one of the inexplicable but righteous besettings he must encounter in following that way. “Oh, Lordy, Lord!” he groaned, and then, as resentment moved him—“That dang boy! Dang idiot” Yet he knew himself for a greater idiot because he had not been able to tell Walter the truth. He could not bring himself to do it, nor even to state his case in its best terms; and that was because he felt that even in its best terms the case was a bad one.

Of all his regrets the greatest was that in a moment of vanity and tenderness, twenty-five years ago, he had told his young wife a business secret. He had wanted to show how important her husband was becoming, and how much the head of the universe, J. A. Lamb, trusted to his integrity and ability. The great man had an idea: he thought of “branching out a little,” he told Adams confidentially, and there were possibilities of profit in glue.

What he wanted was a liquid glue to be put into little bottles and sold cheaply. “The kind of thing that sells itself,” he said; “the kind of thing that pays its own small way as it goes along, until it has profits enough to begin advertising it right.

Everybody has to use glue, and if I make mine convenient and cheap, everybody’ll buy mine. But it’s got to be glue that’ll STICK; it’s got to be the best; and if we find how to make it we’ve got, to keep it a big secret, of course, or anybody can steal it from us. There was a man here last month; he knew a formula he wanted to sell me, ‘sight unseen’; but he was in such a hurry I got suspicious, and I found he’d managed to steal it, working for the big packers in their glue-works. We’ve got to find a better glue than that, anyhow. I’m going to set you and Campbell at it. You’re a practical, wide-awake young feller, and Campbell’s a mighty good chemist; I guess you two boys ought to make something happen.”

His guess was shrewd enough. Working in a shed a little way outside the town, where their cheery employer visited them sometimes to study their malodorous stews, the two young men found what Lamb had set them to find. But Campbell was thoughtful over the discovery. “Look here,” he said. “Why ain’t this just about yours and mine? After all, it may be Lamb’s money that’s paid for the stuff we’ve used, but it hasn’t cost much.”

“But he pays US,” Adams remonstrated, horrified by his companion’s idea. “He paid us to do it. It belongs absolutely to him.”

“Oh, I know he THINKS it does,” Campbell admitted, plaintively. “I suppose we’ve got to let him take it. It’s not patentable, and he’ll have to do pretty well by us when he starts his factory, because he’s got to depend on us to run the making of the stuff so that the workmen can’t get onto the process. You better ask him the same salary I do, and mine’s going to be high.

But the high salary, thus pleasantly imagined, was never paid. Campbell died of typhoid fever, that summer, leaving Adams and his employer the only possessors of the formula, an unwritten one; and Adams, pleased to think himself more important to the great man than ever, told his wife that there could be little doubt of his being put in sole charge of the prospective glue-works. Unfortunately, the enterprise remained prospective.

Its projector had already become “inveigled into another side-line,” as he told Adams. One of his sons had persuaded him to take up a “cough-lozenge,” to be called the “Jalamb Balm Trochee”; and the lozenge did well enough to amuse Mr. Lamb and occupy his spare time, which was really about all he had asked of the glue project. He had “all the MONEY anybody ought to want,” he said, when Adams urged him; and he could “start up this little glue side-line” at any time; the formula was safe in their two heads.

At intervals Adams would seek opportunity to speak of “the little glue side-line” to his patron, and to suggest that the years were passing; but Lamb, petting other hobbies, had lost interest. “Oh, I’ll start it up some day, maybe. If I don’t, I may turn it over to my heirs: it’s always an asset, worth something or other, of course. We’ll probably take it up some day, though, you and I.”

The sun persistently declined to rise on that day, and, as time went on, Adams saw that his rather timid urgings bored his employer, and he ceased to bring up the subject. Lamb apparently forgot all about glue, but Adams discovered that unfortunately there was someone else who remembered it.

“It’s really YOURS,” she argued, that painful day when for the first time she suggested his using his knowledge for the benefit of himself and his family. “Mr. Campbell might have had a right to part of it, but he died and didn’t leave any kin, so it belongs to you.”

“Suppose J. A. Lamb hired me to saw some wood,” Adams said. “Would the sticks belong to me?”

“He hasn’t got any right to take your invention and bury it,” she protested. “What good is it doing him if he doesn’t DO anything with it? What good is it doing ANYBODY? None in the world! And what harm would it do him if you went ahead and did this for yourself and for your children? None in the world! And what could he do to you if he WAS old pig enough to get angry with you for doing it? He couldn’t do a single thing, and you’ve admitted he couldn’t, yourself. So what’s your reason for depriving your children and your wife of the benefits you know you could give ‘em?”

“Nothing but decency,” he answered; and she had her reply ready for that. It seemed to him that, strive as he would, he could not reach her mind with even the plainest language; while everything that she said to him, with such vehemence, sounded like so much obstinate gibberish. Over and over he pressed her with the same illustration, on the point of ownership, though he thought he was varying it.

“Suppose he hired me to build him a house: would that be MY house?”

“He didn’t hire you to build him a house. You and Campbell invented–-“

“Look here: suppose you give a cook a soup-bone and some vegetables, and pay her to make you a soup: has she got a right to take and sell it? You know better!”

“I know ONE thing: if that old man tried to keep your own invention from you he’s no better than a robber!”

They never found any point of contact in all their passionate discussions of this ethical question; and the question was no more settled between them, now that Adams had succumbed, than it had ever been. But at least the wrangling about it was over: they were grave together, almost silent, and an uneasiness prevailed with her as much as with him.

He had already been out of the house, to walk about the small green yard; and on Monday afternoon he sent for a taxicab and went downtown, but kept a long way from the “wholesale section,” where stood the formidable old oblong pile of Lamb and Company. He arranged for the sale of the bonds he had laid away, and for placing a mortgage upon his house; and on his way home, after five o’clock, he went to see an old friend, a man whose term of service with Lamb and Company was even a little longer than his own.

This veteran, returned from the day’s work, was sitting in front of the apartment house where he lived, but when the cab stopped at the curb he rose and came forward, offering a jocular greeting. “Well, well, Virgil Adams! I always thought you had a sporty streak in you. Travel in your own hired private automobile nowadays, do you? Pamperin’ yourself because you’re still layin’ off sick, I expect.”

“Oh, I’m well enough again, Charley Lohr,” Adams said, as he got out and shook hands. Then, telling the driver to wait, he took his friend’s arm, walked to the bench with him, and sat down. “I been practically well for some time,” he said. “I’m fixin’ to get into harness again.”

“Bein’ sick has certainly produced a change of heart in you,” his friend laughed. “You’re the last man I ever expected to see blowin’ yourself—or anybody else to a taxicab! For that matter, I never heard of you bein’ in ANY kind of a cab, ‘less’n it might be when you been pall-bearer for somebody. What’s come over you?”

“Well, I got to turn over a new leaf, and that’s a fact,” Adams said. “I got a lot to do, and the only way to accomplish it, it’s got to be done soon, or I won’t have anything to live on while I’m doing it.”

“What you talkin’ about? What you got to do except to get strong enough to come back to the old place?”

“Well–-” Adams paused, then coughed, and said slowly, “Fact is, Charley Lohr, I been thinking likely I wouldn’t come back.”

“What! What you talkin’ about?”

“No,” said Adams. “I been thinking I might likely kind of branch out on my own account.”

“Well, I’ll be doggoned!” Old Charley Lohr was amazed; he ruffled up his gray moustache with thumb and forefinger, leaving his mouth open beneath, like a dark cave under a tangled wintry thicket. “Why, that’s the doggonedest thing I ever heard!” he said. “I already am the oldest inhabitant down there, but if you go, there won’t be anybody else of the old generation at all. What on earth you thinkin’ of goin’ into?”

“Well,” said Adams, “I rather you didn’t mention it till I get started of course anybody’ll know what it is by then—but I HAVE been kind of planning to put a liquid glue on the market.”

His friend, still ruffling the gray moustache upward, stared at him in frowning perplexity. “Glue?” he said. “GLUE!”

“Yes. I been sort of milling over the idea of taking up something like that.”

“Handlin’ it for some firm, you mean?”

“No. Making it. Sort of a glue-works likely.”

Lohr continued to frown. “Let me think,” he said. “Didn’t the ole man have some such idea once, himself?”

Adams leaned forward, rubbing his knees; and he coughed again before he spoke. “Well, yes. Fact is, he did. That is to say, a mighty long while ago he did.”

“I remember,” said Lohr. “He never said anything about it that I know of; but seems to me I recollect we had sort of a rumour around the place how you and that man—le’s see, wasn’t his name Campbell, that died of typhoid fever? Yes, that was it, Campbell. Didn’t the ole man have you and Campbell workin’ sort of private on some glue proposition or other?”

“Yes, he did.” Adams nodded. “I found out a good deal about glue then, too.”

“Been workin’ on it since, I suppose?”

“Yes. Kept it in my mind and studied out new things about it.”

Lohr looked serious. “Well, but see here,” he said. “I hope it ain’t anything the ole man’ll think might infringe on whatever he had you doin’ for HIM. You know how he is: broad-minded, liberal, free-handed man as walks this earth, and if he thought he owed you a cent he’d sell his right hand for a pork-chop to pay it, if that was the only way; but if he got the idea anybody was tryin’ to get the better of him, he’d sell BOTH his hands, if he had to, to keep ‘em from doin’ it. Yes, at eighty, he would! Not that I mean I think you might be tryin’ to get the better of him, Virg. You’re a mighty close ole codger, but such a thing ain’t in you. What I mean: I hope there ain’t any chance for the ole man to THINK you might be–-“

“Oh, no,” Adams interrupted. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe he’ll ever think about it at all, and if he did he wouldn’t have any real right to feel offended at me: the process I’m going to use is one I expect to change and improve a lot different from the one Campbell and I worked on for him.”

“Well, that’s good,” said Lohr. “Of course you know what you’re up to: you’re old enough, God knows!” He laughed ruefully. “My, but it will seem funny to me—down there with you gone! I expect you and I both been gettin’ to be pretty much dead-wood in the place, the way the young fellows look at it, and the only one that’d miss either of us would be the other one! Have you told the ole man yet?”

“Well–-” Adams spoke laboriously. “No. No, I haven’t. I thought—well, that’s what I wanted to see you about.”

“What can I do?”

“I thought I’d write him a letter and get you to hand it to him for me.”

“My soul!” his friend exclaimed. “Why on earth don’t you just go down there and tell him?”

Adams became pitiably embarrassed. He stammered, coughed, stammered again, wrinkling his face so deeply he seemed about to weep; but finally he contrived to utter an apologetic laugh. “I ought to do that, of course; but in some way or other I just don’t seem to be able to—to manage it.”

“Why in the world not?” the mystified Lohr inquired.

“I could hardly tell you—‘less’n it is to say that when you been with one boss all your life it’s so— so kind of embarrassing—to quit him, I just can’t make up my mind to go and speak to him about it. No; I got it in my head a letter’s the only satisfactory way to do it, and I thought I’d ask you to hand it to him,”

“Well, of course I don’t mind doin’ that for you,” Lohr said, mildly. “But why in the world don’t you just mail it to him?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Adams returned. “You know, like that, it’d have to go through a clerk and that secretary of his, and I don’t know who all. There’s a couple of kind of delicate points I want to put in it: for instance, I want to explain to him how much improvement and so on I’m going to introduce on the old process I helped to work out with Campbell when we were working for him, so’t he’ll understand it’s a different article and no infringement at all. Then there’s another thing: you see all during while I was sick he had my salary paid to me it amounts to considerable, I was on my back so long. Under the circumstances, because I’m quitting, I don’t feel as if I ought to accept it, and so I’ll have a check for him in the letter to cover it, and I want to be sure he knows it, and gets it personally. If it had to go through a lot of other people, the way it would if I put it in the mail, why, you can’t tell. So what I thought: if you’d hand it to him for me, and maybe if he happened to read it right then, or anything, it might be you’d notice whatever he’d happen to say about it—and you could tell me afterward.”

“All right,” Lohr said. “Certainly if you’d rather do it that way, I’ll hand it to him and tell you what he says; that is, if he says anything and I hear him. Got it written?”

“No; I’ll send it around to you last of the week.” Adams moved toward his taxicab. “Don’t say anything to anybody about it, Charley, especially till after that.”

“All right.”

“And, Charley, I’ll be mighty obliged to you,” Adams said, and came back to shake hands in farewell. “There’s one thing more you might do—if you’d ever happen to feel like it.” He kept his eyes rather vaguely fixed on a point above his friend’s head as he spoke, and his voice was not well controlled. “I been—I been down there a good many years and I may not ‘a’ been so much use lately as I was at first, but I always tried to do my best for the old firm. If anything turned out so’s they DID kind of take offense with me, down there, why, just say a good word for me—if you’d happen to feel like it, maybe.”

Old Charley Lohr assured him that he would speak a good word if opportunity became available; then, after the cab had driven away, he went up to his small apartment on the third floor and muttered ruminatively until his wife inquired what he was talking to himself about.

“Ole Virg Adams,” he told her. “He’s out again after his long spell of sickness, and the way it looks to me he’d better stayed in bed.”

“You mean he still looks too bad to be out?”

“Oh, I expect he’s gettin’ his HEALTH back,” Lohr said, frowning.

“Then what’s the matter with him? You mean he’s lost his mind?”

“My goodness, but women do jump at conclusions!” he exclaimed.

“Well,” said Mrs. Lohr, “what other conclusion did you leave me to jump at?”

Her husband explained with a little heat: “People can have a sickness that AFFECTS their mind, can’t they? Their mind can get some affected without bein’ LOST, can’t it?”

“Then you mean the poor man’s mind does seem affected?”

“Why, no; I’d scarcely go as far as that,” Lohr said, inconsistently, and declined to be more definite.

Adams devoted the latter part of that evening to the composition of his letter—a disquieting task not completed when, at eleven o’clock, he heard his daughter coming up the stairs. She was singing to herself in a low, sweet voice, and Adams paused to listen incredulously, with his pen lifted and his mouth open, as if he heard the strangest sound in the world. Then he set down the pen upon a blotter, went to his door, and opened it, looking out at her as she came.

“Well, dearie, you seem to be feeling pretty good,” he said. “What you been doing?”

“Just sitting out on the front steps, papa.”

“All alone, I suppose.”

“No. Mr. Russell called.”

“Oh, he did?” Adams pretended to be surprised. “What all could you and he find to talk about till this hour o’ the night?”

She laughed gaily. “You don’t know me, papa!”

“How’s that?”

“You’ve never found out that I always do all the talking.”

“Didn’t you let him get a word in all evening?”

“Oh, yes; every now and then.”

Adams took her hand and petted it. “Well, what did he say?”

Alice gave him a radiant look and kissed him. “Not what you think!” she laughed; then slapped his cheek with saucy affection, pirouetted across the narrow hall and into her own room, and curtsied to him as she closed her door.

Adams went back to his writing with a lighter heart; for since Alice was born she had been to him the apple of his eye, his own phrase in thinking of her; and what he was doing now was for her.

He smiled as he picked up his pen to begin a new draft of the painful letter; but presently he looked puzzled. After all, she could be happy just as things were, it seemed. Then why had he taken what his wife called “this new step,” which he had so long resisted?

He could only sigh and wonder. “Life works out pretty peculiarly,” he thought; for he couldn’t go back now, though the reason he couldn’t was not clearly apparent. He had to go ahead.

CHAPTER XVII

He was out in his taxicab again the next morning, and by noon he had secured what he wanted.

It was curiously significant that he worked so quickly. All the years during which his wife had pressed him toward his present shift he had sworn to himself, as well as to her, that he would never yield; and yet when he did yield he had no plans to make, because he found them already prepared and worked out in detail in his mind; as if he had long contemplated the “step” he believed himself incapable of taking.

Sometimes he had thought of improving his income by exchanging his little collection of bonds for a “small rental property,” if he could find “a good buy”; and he had spent many of his spare hours rambling over the enormously spreading city and its purlieus, looking for the ideal “buy.” It remained unattainable, so far as he was concerned; but he found other things.

Not twice a crow’s mile from his own house there was a dismal and slummish quarter, a decayed “industrial district” of earlier days. Most of the industries were small; some of them died, perishing of bankruptcy or fire; and a few had moved, leaving their shells. Of the relics, the best was a brick building which had been the largest and most important factory in the quarter: it had been injured by a long vacancy almost as serious as a fire, in effect, and Adams had often guessed at the sum needed to put it in repair.

When he passed it, he would look at it with an interest which he supposed detached and idly speculative. “That’d be just the thing,” he thought. “If a fellow had money enough, and took a notion to set up some new business on a big scale, this would be a pretty good place—to make glue, for instance, if that wasn’t out of the question, of course. It would take a lot of money, though; a great deal too much for me to expect to handle—even if I’d ever dream of doing such a thing.”

Opposite the dismantled factory was a muddy, open lot of two acres or so, and near the middle of the lot, a long brick shed stood in a desolate abandonment, not happily decorated by old coatings of theatrical and medicinal advertisements. But the brick shed had two wooden ells, and, though both shed and ells were of a single story, here was empty space enough for a modest enterprise—“space enough for almost anything, to start with,” Adams thought, as he walked through the low buildings, one day, when he was prospecting in that section. “Yes, I suppose I COULD swing this,” he thought. “If the process belonged to me, say, instead of being out of the question because it isn’t my property—or if I was the kind of man to do such a thing anyhow, here would be something I could probably get hold of pretty cheap. They’d want a lot of money for a lease on that big building over the way—but this, why, I should think it’d be practically nothing at all.”

Then, by chance, meeting an agent he knew, he made inquiries—merely to satisfy a casual curiosity, he thought—and he found matters much as he had supposed, except that the owners of the big building did not wish to let, but to sell it, and this at a price so exorbitant that Adams laughed. But the long brick shed in the great muddy lot was for sale or to let, or “pretty near to be given away,” he learned, if anybody would take it.

Adams took it now, though without seeing that he had been destined to take it, and that some dreary wizard in the back of his head had foreseen all along that he would take it, and planned to be ready. He drove in his taxicab to look the place over again, then downtown to arrange for a lease; and came home to lunch with his wife and daughter. Things were “moving,” he told them.

He boasted a little of having acted so decisively, and said that since the dang thing had to be done, it was “going to be done RIGHT!” He was almost cheerful, in a feverish way, and when the cab came for him again, soon after lunch, he explained that he intended not only to get things done right, but also to “get ‘em done quick!” Alice, following him to the front door, looked at him anxiously and asked if she couldn’t help. He laughed at her grimly.

“Then let me go along with you in the cab,” she begged. “You don’t look able to start in so hard, papa, just when you’re barely beginning to get your strength back. Do let me go with you and see if I can’t help—or at least take care of you if you should get to feeling badly.”

He declined, but upon pressure let her put a tiny bottle of spirits of ammonia in his pocket, and promised to make use of it if he “felt faint or anything.” Then he was off again; and the next morning had men at work in his sheds, though the wages he had to pay frightened him.

He directed the workmen in every detail, hurrying them by example and exhortations, and receiving, in consequence, several declarations of independence, as well as one resignation, which took effect immediately. “Yous capitalusts seem to think a man’s got nothin’ to do but break his back p’doosin’ wealth fer yous to squander,” the resigning person loudly complained. “You look out: the toiler’s day is a-comin’, and it ain’t so fur off, neither!” But the capitalist was already out of hearing, gone to find a man to take this orator’s place.

By the end of the week, Adams felt that he had moved satisfactorily forward in his preparations for the simple equipment he needed; but he hated the pause of Sunday. He didn’t WANT any rest, he told Alice impatiently, when she suggested that the idle day might be good for him.

Late that afternoon he walked over to the apartment house where old Charley Lohr lived, and gave his friend the letter he wanted the head of Lamb and Company to receive “personally.” “I’ll take it as a mighty great favour in you to hand it to him personally, Charley,” he said, in parting. “And you won’t forget, in case he says anything about it—and remember if you ever do get a chance to put in a good word for me later, you know–-“

Old Charley promised to remember, and, when Mrs. Lohr came out of the “kitchenette,” after the door closed, he said thoughtfully, “Just skin and bones.”

“You mean Mr. Adams is?” Mrs. Lohr inquired.

“Who’d you think I meant?” he returned. “One o’ these partridges in the wall-paper?”

“Did he look so badly?”

“Looked kind of distracted to me,” her husband replied. “These little thin fellers can stand a heap sometimes, though. He’ll be over here again Monday.”

“Did he say he would?”

“No,” said Lohr. “But he will. You’ll see. He’ll be over to find out what the big boss says when I give him this letter. Expect I’d be kind of anxious, myself, if I was him.”

“Why would you? What’s Mr. Adams doing to be so anxious about?”

Lohr’s expression became one of reserve, the look of a man who has found that when he speaks his inner thoughts his wife jumps too far to conclusions. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “Of course any man starting up a new business is bound to be pretty nervous a while. He’ll be over here to-morrow evening, all right; you’ll see.”

The prediction was fulfilled: Adams arrived just after Mrs. Lohr had removed the dinner dishes to her “kitchenette”; but Lohr had little information to give his caller.

“He didn’t say a word, Virgil; nary a word. I took it into his office and handed it to him, and he just sat and read it; that’s all. I kind of stood around as long as I could, but he was sittin’ at his desk with his side to me, and he never turned around full toward me, as it were, so I couldn’t hardly even tell anything. All I know: he just read it.”

“Well, but see here,” Adams began, nervously. “Well–-“

“Well what, Virg?”

“Well, but what did he say when he DID speak?”

“He didn’t speak. Not so long I was in there, anyhow. He just sat there and read it. Read kind of slow. Then, when he came to the end, he turned back and started to read it all over again. By that time there was three or four other men standin’ around in the office waitin’ to speak to him, and I had to go.”

Adams sighed, and stared at the floor, irresolute. “Well, I’ll be getting along back home then, I guess, Charley. So you’re sure you couldn’t tell anything what he might have thought about it, then?”

“Not a thing in the world. I’ve told you all I know, Virg.”

“I guess so, I guess so,” Adams said, mournfully. “I feel mighty obliged to you, Charley Lohr; mighty obliged. Good-night to you.” And he departed, sighing in perplexity.

On his way home, preoccupied with many thoughts, he walked so slowly that once or twice he stopped and stood motionless for a few moments, without being aware of it; and when he reached the juncture of the sidewalk with the short brick path that led to his own front door, he stopped again, and stood for more than a minute. “Ah, I wish I knew,” he whispered, plaintively. “I do wish I knew what he thought about it.”

He was roused by a laugh that came lightly from the little veranda near by. “Papa!” Alice called gaily. “What are you standing there muttering to yourself about?”

“Oh, are you there, dearie?” he said, and came up the path. A tall figure rose from a chair on the veranda.

“Papa, this is Mr. Russell.”

The two men shook hands, Adams saying, “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” as they looked at each other in the faint light diffused through the opaque glass in the upper part of the door. Adams’s impression was of a strong and tall young man, fashionable but gentle; and Russell’s was of a dried, little old business man with a grizzled moustache, worried bright eyes, shapeless dark clothes, and a homely manner.

“Nice evening,” Adams said further, as their hands parted. “Nice time o’ year it is, but we don’t always have as good weather as this; that’s the trouble of it. Well–-” He went to the door. “Well—I bid you good evening,” he said, and retired within the house.

Alice laughed. “He’s the old-fashionedest man in town, I suppose and frightfully impressed with you, I could see!”

“What nonsense!” said Russell. “How could anybody be impressed with me?”

“Why not? Because you’re quiet? Good gracious! Don’t you know that you’re the most impressive sort? We chatterers spend all our time playing to you quiet people.”

“Yes; we’re only the audience.”

“‘Only!’” she echoed. “Why, we live for you, and we can’t live without you.”

“I wish you couldn’t,” said Russell. “That would be a new experience for both of us, wouldn’t it?”

“It might be a rather bleak one for me,” she answered, lightly. “I’m afraid I’ll miss these summer evenings with you when they’re over. I’ll miss them enough, thanks!”

“Do they have to be over some time?” he asked.

“Oh, everything’s over some time, isn’t it?”

Russell laughed at her. “Don’t let’s look so far ahead as that,” he said. “We don’t need to be already thinking of the cemetery, do we?”

“I didn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Our summer evenings will be over before then, Mr. Russell.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Good heavens!” she said. “THERE’S laconic eloquence: almost a proposal in a single word! Never mind, I shan’t hold you to it. But to answer you: well, I’m always looking ahead, and somehow I usually see about how things are coming out.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose most of us do; at least it seems as if we did, because we so seldom feel surprised by the way they do come out. But maybe that’s only because life isn’t like a play in a theatre, and most things come about so gradually we get used to them.”

“No, I’m sure I can see quite a long way ahead,” she insisted, gravely. “And it doesn’t seem to me as if our summer evenings could last very long. Something’ll interfere—somebody will, I mean—they’ll SAY something–-“

“What if they do?”

She moved her shoulders in a little apprehensive shiver. “It’ll change you,” she said. “I’m just sure something spiteful’s going to happen to me. You’ll feel differently about—things.”

“Now, isn’t that an idea!” he exclaimed.

“It will,” she insisted. “I know something spiteful’s going to happen!”

“You seem possessed by a notion not a bit flattering to me,” he remarked.

“Oh, but isn’t it? That’s just what it is! Why isn’t it?”

“Because it implies that I’m made of such soft material the slightest breeze will mess me all up. I’m not so like that as I evidently appear; and if it’s true that we’re afraid other people will do the things we’d be most likely to do ourselves, it seems to me that I ought to be the one to be afraid. I ought to be afraid that somebody may say something about me to you that will make you believe I’m a professional forger.”

“No. We both know they won’t,” she said. “We both know you’re the sort of person everybody in the world says nice things about.” She lifted her hand to silence him as he laughed at this. “Oh, of course you are! I think perhaps you’re a little flirtatious—most quiet men have that one sly way with ‘em—oh, yes, they do! But you happen to be the kind of man everybody loves to praise. And if you weren’t, I shouldn’t hear anything terrible about you. I told you I was unpopular: I don’t see anybody at all any more. The only man except you who’s been to see me in a month is that fearful little fat Frank Dowling, and I sent word to HIM I wasn’t home. Nobody’d tell me of your wickedness, you see.”

“Then let me break some news to you,” Russell said. “Nobody would tell me of yours, either. Nobody’s even mentioned you to me.”

She burlesqued a cry of anguish. “That IS obscurity! I suppose I’m too apt to forget that they say the population’s about half a million nowadays. There ARE other people to talk about, you feel, then?”

“None that I want to,” he said. “But I should think the size of the place might relieve your mind of what seems to insist on burdening it. Besides, I’d rather you thought me a better man than you do.”

“What kind of a man do I think you are?”

“The kind affected by what’s said about people instead of by what they do themselves.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not,” he said. “If you want our summer evenings to be over you’ll have to drive me away yourself.”

“Nobody else could?”

“No.”

She was silent, leaning forward, with her elbows on her knees and her clasped hands against her lips. Then, not moving, she said softly:

“Well—I won’t!”

She was silent again, and he said nothing, but looked at her, seeming to be content with looking. Her attitude was one only a graceful person should assume, but she was graceful; and, in the wan light, which made a prettily shaped mist of her, she had beauty. Perhaps it was beauty of the hour, and of the love scene almost made into form by what they had both just said, but she had it; and though beauty of the hour passes, he who sees it will long remember it and the hour when it came.

“What are you thinking of?” he asked.

She leaned back in her chair and did not answer at once. Then she said:

“I don’t know; I doubt if I was thinking of anything. It seems to me I wasn’t. I think I was just being sort of sadly happy just then.”

“Were you? Was it ‘sadly,’ too?”

“Don’t you know?” she said. “It seems to me that only little children can be just happily happy. I think when we get older our happiest moments are like the one I had just then: it’s as if we heard strains of minor music running through them—oh, so sweet, but oh, so sad!”

“But what makes it sad for YOU?”

“I don’t know,” she said, in a lighter tone. “Perhaps it’s a kind of useless foreboding I seem to have pretty often. It may be that—or it may be poor papa.”

“You ARE a funny, delightful girl, though!” Russell laughed. “When your father’s so well again that he goes out walking in the evenings!”

“He does too much walking,” Alice said. “Too much altogether, over at his new plant. But there isn’t any stopping him.” She laughed and shook her head. “When a man gets an ambition to be a multi-millionaire his family don’t appear to have much weight with him. He’ll walk all he wants to, in spite of them.”

“I suppose so,” Russell said, absently; then he leaned forward. “I wish I could understand better why you were ‘sadly’ happy.”

Meanwhile, as Alice shed what further light she could on this point, the man ambitious to be a “multi-millionaire” was indeed walking too much for his own good. He had gone to bed, hoping to sleep well and rise early for a long day’s work, but he could not rest, and now, in his nightgown and slippers, he was pacing the floor of his room.

“I wish I DID know,” he thought, over and over. “I DO wish I knew how he feels about it.”

CHAPTER XVIII

That was a thought almost continuously in his mind, even when he was hardest at work; and, as the days went on and he could not free himself, he became querulous about it. “I guess I’m the biggest dang fool alive,” he told his wife as they sat together one evening. “I got plenty else to bother me, without worrying my head off about what HE thinks. I can’t help what he thinks; it’s too late for that. So why should I keep pestering myself about it?”

“It’ll wear off, Virgil,” Mrs. Adams said, reassuringly. She was gentle and sympathetic with him, and for the first time in many years he would come to sit with her and talk, when he had finished his day’s work. He had told her, evading her eye, “Oh, I don’t blame you. You didn’t get after me to do this on your own account; you couldn’t help it.”

“Yes; but it don’t wear off,” he complained. “This afternoon I was showing the men how I wanted my vats to go, and I caught my fool self standing there saying to my fool self, ‘It’s funny I don’t hear how he feels about it from SOMEbody.’ I was saying it aloud, almost—and it IS funny I don’t hear anything!”

“Well, you see what it means, don’t you, Virgil? It only means he hasn’t said anything to anybody about it. Don’t you think you’re getting kind of morbid over it?”

“Maybe, maybe,” he muttered.

“Why, yes,” she said, briskly. “You don’t realize what a little bit of a thing all this is to him. It’s been a long, long while since the last time you even mentioned glue to him, and he’s probably forgotten everything about it.”

“You’re off your base; it isn’t like him to forget things,” Adams returned, peevishly. “He may seem to forget ‘em, but he don’t.”

“But he’s not thinking about this, or you’d have heard from him before now.”

Her husband shook his head. “Ah, that’s just it!” he said. “Why HAVEN’T I heard from him?”

“It’s all your morbidness, Virgil. Look at Walter: if Mr. Lamb held this up against you, would he still let Walter stay there? Wouldn’t he have discharged Walter if he felt angry with you?”

“That dang boy!” Adams said. “If he WANTED to come with me now, I wouldn’t hardly let him, What do you suppose makes him so bull-headed?”

“But hasn’t he a right to choose for himself?” she asked. “I suppose he feels he ought to stick to what he thinks is sure pay.

As soon as he sees that you’re going to succeed with the glue-works he’ll want to be with you quick enough.”

“Well, he better get a little sense in his head,” Adams returned, crossly. “He wanted me to pay him a three-hundred-dollar bonus in advance, when anybody with a grain of common sense knows I need every penny I can lay my hands on!”

“Never mind,” she said. “He’ll come around later and be glad of the chance.”

“He’ll have to beg for it then! I won’t ask him again.”

“Oh, Walter will come out all right; you needn’t worry. And don’t you see that Mr. Lamb’s not discharging him means there’s no hard feeling against you, Virgil?”

“I can’t make it out at all,” he said, frowning. “The only thing I can THINK it means is that J. A. Lamb is so fair-minded—and of course he IS one of the fair-mindedest men alive I suppose that’s the reason he hasn’t fired Walter. He may know,” Adams concluded, morosely—“he may know that’s just another thing to make me feel all the meaner: keeping my boy there on a salary after I’ve done him an injury.”

“Now, now!” she said, trying to comfort him. “You couldn’t do anybody an injury to save your life, and everybody knows it.”

“Well, anybody ought to know I wouldn’t WANT to do an injury, but this world isn’t built so’t we can do just what we want.” He paused, reflecting. “Of course there may be one explanation of why Walter’s still there: J. A. maybe hasn’t noticed that he IS there. There’s so many I expect he hardly knows him by sight.”

“Well, just do quit thinking about it,” she urged him. “It only bothers you without doing any good. Don’t you know that?”

“Don’t I, though!” he laughed, feebly. “I know it better’n anybody! How funny that is: when you know thinking about a thing only pesters you without helping anything at all, and yet you keep right on pestering yourself with it!”

“But WHY?” she said. “What’s the use when you know you haven’t done anything wrong, Virgil? You said yourself you were going to improve the process so much it would be different from the old one, and you’d REALLY have a right to it.”

Adams had persuaded himself of this when he yielded; he had found it necessary to persuade himself of it—though there was a part of him, of course, that remained unpersuaded; and this discomfiting part of him was what made his present trouble. “Yes, I know,” he said. “That’s true, but I can’t quite seem to get away from the fact that the principle of the process is a good deal the same—well, it’s more’n that; it’s just about the same as the one he hired Campbell and me to work out for him. Truth is, nobody could tell the difference, and I don’t know as there IS any difference except in these improvements I’m making. Of course, the improvements do give me pretty near a perfect right to it, as a person might say; and that’s one of the things I thought of putting in my letter to him; but I was afraid he’d just think I was trying to make up excuses, so I left it out. I kind of worried all the time I was writing that letter, because if he thought I WAS just making up excuses, why, it might set him just so much more against me.”

Ever since Mrs. Adams had found that she was to have her way, the depths of her eyes had been troubled by a continuous uneasiness; and, although she knew it was there, and sometimes veiled it by keeping the revealing eyes averted from her husband and children, she could not always cover it under that assumption of absent-mindedness. The uneasy look became vivid, and her voice was slightly tremulous now, as she said, “But what if he SHOULD be against you—although I don’t believe he is, of course—you told me he couldn’t DO anything to you, Virgil.”

“No,” he said, slowly. “I can’t see how he could do anything. It was just a secret, not a patent; the thing ain’t patentable. I’ve tried to think what he could do—supposing he was to want to—but I can’t figure out anything at all that would be any harm to me. There isn’t any way in the world it could be made a question of law. Only thing he could do’d be to TELL people his side of it, and set ‘em against me. I been kind of waiting for that to happen, all along.”

She looked somewhat relieved. “So did I expect it,” she said. “I was dreading it most on Alice’s account: it might have—well, young men are so easily influenced and all. But so far as the business is concerned, what if Mr. Lamb did talk? That wouldn’t amount to much. It wouldn’t affect the business; not to hurt. And, besides, he isn’t even doing that.”

“No; anyhow not yet, it seems.” And Adams sighed again, wistfully. “But I WOULD give a good deal to know what he thinks!”

Before his surrender he had always supposed that if he did such an unthinkable thing as to seize upon the glue process for himself, what he would feel must be an overpowering shame. But shame is the rarest thing in the world: what he felt was this unremittent curiosity about his old employer’s thoughts. It was an obsession, yet he did not want to hear what Lamb “thought” from Lamb himself, for Adams had a second obsession, and this was his dread of meeting the old man face to face. Such an encounter could happen only by chance and unexpectedly; since Adams would have avoided any deliberate meeting, so long as his legs had strength to carry him, even if Lamb came to the house to see him.

But people do meet unexpectedly; and when Adams had to be downtown he kept away from the “wholesale district.” One day he did see Lamb, as the latter went by in his car, impassive, going home to lunch; and Adams, in the crowd at a corner, knew that the old man had not seen him. Nevertheless, in a street car, on the way back to his sheds, an hour later, he was still subject to little shivering seizures of horror.

He worked unceasingly, seeming to keep at it even in his sleep, for he always woke in the midst of a planning and estimating that must have been going on in his mind before consciousness of himself returned. Moreover, the work, thus urged, went rapidly, in spite of the high wages he had to pay his labourers for their short hours. “It eats money,” he complained, and, in fact, by the time his vats and boilers were in place it had eaten almost all he could supply; but in addition to his equipment he now owned a stock of “raw material,” raw indeed; and when operations should be a little further along he was confident his banker would be willing to “carry” him.

Six weeks from the day he had obtained his lease he began his glue-making. The terrible smells came out of the sheds and went writhing like snakes all through that quarter of the town. A smiling man, strolling and breathing the air with satisfaction, would turn a corner and smile no more, but hurry. However, coloured people had almost all the dwellings of this old section to themselves; and although even they were troubled, there was recompense for them. Being philosophic about what appeared to them as in the order of nature, they sought neither escape nor redress, and soon learned to bear what the wind brought them. They even made use of it to enrich those figures of speech with which the native impulses of coloured people decorate their communications: they flavoured metaphor, simile, and invective with it; and thus may be said to have enjoyed it. But the man who produced it took a hot bath as soon as he reached his home the evening of that first day when his manufacturing began. Then he put on fresh clothes; but after dinner he seemed to be haunted, and asked his wife if she “noticed anything.”

She laughed and inquired what he meant.

“Seems to me as if that glue-works smell hadn’t quit hanging to me,” he explained. “Don’t you notice it?”

“No! What an idea!”

He laughed, too, but uneasily; and told her he was sure “the dang glue smell” was somehow sticking to him. Later, he went outdoors and walked up and down the small yard in the dusk; but now and then he stood still, with his head lifted, and sniffed the air suspiciously. “Can YOU smell it?” he called to Alice, who sat upon the veranda, prettily dressed and waiting in a reverie.

“Smell what, papa?”

“That dang glue-works.”

She did the same thing her mother had done: laughed, and said, “No! How foolish! Why, papa, it’s over two miles from here!”

“You don’t get it at all?” he insisted.

“The idea! The air is lovely to-night, papa.”

The air did not seem lovely to him, for he was positive that he detected the taint. He wondered how far it carried, and if J. A. Lamb would smell it, too, out on his own lawn a mile to the north; and if he did, would he guess what it was? Then Adams laughed at himself for such nonsense; but could not rid his nostrils of their disgust. To him the whole town seemed to smell of his glue-works.

Nevertheless, the glue was making, and his sheds were busy. “Guess we’re stirrin’ up this ole neighbourhood with more than the smell,” his foreman remarked one morning.

“How’s that?” Adams inquired.

“That great big, enormous ole dead butterine factory across the street from our lot,” the man said. “Nothin’ like settin’ an example to bring real estate to life. That place is full o’ carpenters startin’ in to make a regular buildin’ of it again. Guess you ought to have the credit of it, because you was the first man in ten years to see any possibilities in this neighbourhood.”

Adams was pleased, and, going out to see for himself, heard a great hammering and sawing from within the building; while carpenters were just emerging gingerly upon the dangerous roof. He walked out over the dried mud of his deep lot, crossed the street, and spoke genially to a workman who was removing the broken glass of a window on the ground floor.

“Here! What’s all this howdy-do over here?”

“Goin’ to fix her all up, I guess,” the workman said. “Big job it is, too.”

“Sh’ think it would be.”

“Yes, sir; a pretty big job—a pretty big job. Got men at it on all four floors and on the roof. They’re doin’ it RIGHT.”

“Who’s doing it?”

“Lord! I d’ know. Some o’ these here big manufacturing corporations, I guess.”

“What’s it going to be?”

“They tell ME,” the workman answered—“they tell ME she’s goin’ to be a butterine factory again. Anyways, I hope she won’t be anything to smell like that glue-works you got over there not while I’m workin’ around her, anyways!”

“That smell’s all right,” Adams said. “You soon get used to it.”

“You do?” The man appeared incredulous. “Listen! I was over in France: it’s a good thing them Dutchmen never thought of it; we’d of had to quit!”

Adams laughed, and went back to his sheds. “I guess my foreman was right,” he told his wife, that evening, with a little satisfaction. “As soon as one man shows enterprise enough to found an industry in a broken-down neighbourhood, somebody else is sure to follow. I kind of like the look of it: it’ll help make our place seem sort of more busy and prosperous when it comes to getting a loan from the bank—and I got to get one mighty soon, too. I did think some that if things go as well as there’s every reason to think they OUGHT to, I might want to spread out and maybe get hold of that old factory myself; but I hardly expected to be able to handle a proposition of that size before two or three years from now, and anyhow there’s room enough on the lot I got, if we need more buildings some day. Things are going about as fine as I could ask: I hired some girls to-day to do the bottling—coloured girls along about sixteen to twenty years old. Afterwhile, I expect to get a machine to put the stuff in the little bottles, when we begin to get good returns; but half a dozen of these coloured girls can do it all right now, by hand. We’re getting to have really quite a little plant over there: yes, sir, quite a regular little plant!”

He chuckled, and at this cheerful sound, of a kind his wife had almost forgotten he was capable of producing, she ventured to put her hand upon his arm. They had gone outdoors, after dinner, taking two chairs with them, and were sitting through the late twilight together, keeping well away from the “front porch,” which was not yet occupied, however Alice was in her room changing her dress.

“Well, honey,” Mrs. Adams said, taking confidence not only to put her hand upon his arm, but to revive this disused endearment;—“it’s grand to have you so optimistic. Maybe some time you’ll admit I was right, after all. Everything’s going so well, it seems a pity you didn’t take this—this step—long ago. Don’t you think maybe so, Virgil?”

“Well—if I was ever going to, I don’t know but I might as well of. I got to admit the proposition begins to look pretty good: I know the stuff’ll sell, and I can’t see a thing in the world to stop it. It does look good, and if—if–-” He paused.

“If what?” she said, suddenly anxious.

He laughed plaintively, as if confessing a superstition. “It’s funny—well, it’s mighty funny about that smell. I’ve got so used to it at the plant I never seem to notice it at all over there. It’s only when I get away. Honestly, can’t you notice–-?”

“Virgil!” She lifted her hand to strike his arm chidingly. “Do quit harping on that nonsense!”

“Oh, of course it don’t amount to anything,” he said. “A person can stand a good deal of just smell. It don’t WORRY me any.”

“I should think not especially as there isn’t any.”

“Well,” he said, “I feel pretty fair over the whole thing—a lot better’n I ever expected to, anyhow. I don’t know as there’s any reason I shouldn’t tell you so.”

She was deeply pleased with this acknowledgment, and her voice had tenderness in it as she responded: “There, honey! Didn’t I always say you’d be glad if you did it?”

Embarrassed, he coughed loudly, then filled his pipe and lit it. “Well,” he said, slowly, “it’s a puzzle. Yes, sir, it’s a puzzle.”

“What is?”

“Pretty much everything, I guess.”

As he spoke, a song came to them from a lighted window over their heads. Then the window darkened abruptly, but the song continued as Alice went down through the house to wait on the little veranda. “Mi chiamo Mimi,” she sang, and in her voice throbbed something almost startling in its sweetness. Her father and mother listened, not speaking until the song stopped with the click of the wire screen at the front door as Alice came out.

“My!” said her father. “How sweet she does sing! I don’t know as I ever heard her voice sound nicer than it did just then.”

“There’s something that makes it sound that way,” his wife told him.

“I suppose so,” he said, sighing. “I suppose so. You think–-“

“She’s just terribly in love with him!”

“I expect that’s the way it ought to be,” he said, then drew upon his pipe for reflection, and became murmurous with the symptoms of melancholy laughter. “It don’t make things less of a puzzle, though, does it?”

“In what way, Virgil?”

“Why, here,” he said—“here we go through all this muck and moil to help fix things nicer for her at home, and what’s it all amount to? Seems like she’s just gone ahead the way she’d ‘a’ gone anyhow; and now, I suppose, getting ready to up and leave us! Ain’t that a puzzle to you? It is to me.”

“Oh, but things haven’t gone that far yet.”

“Why, you just said–-“

She gave a little cry of protest. “Oh, they aren’t ENGAGED yet. Of course they WILL be; he’s just as much interested in her as she is in him, but–-“

“Well, what’s the trouble then?”

“You ARE a simple old fellow!” his wife exclaimed, and then rose from her chair. “That reminds me,” she said.

“What of?” he asked. “What’s my being simple remind you of?”

“Nothing!” she laughed. “It wasn’t you that reminded me. It was just something that’s been on my mind. I don’t believe he’s actually ever been inside our house!”

“Hasn’t he?”

“I actually don’t believe he ever has,” she said. “Of course we must–-” She paused, debating.

“We must what?”

“I guess I better talk to Alice about it right now,” she said. “He don’t usually come for about half an hour yet; I guess I’ve got time.” And with that she walked away, leaving him to his puzzles.

CHAPTER XIX

Alice was softly crooning to herself as her mother turned the corner of the house and approached through the dusk.

“Isn’t it the most BEAUTIFUL evening!” the daughter said. “WHY can’t summer last all year? Did you ever know a lovelier twilight than this, mama?”

Mrs. Adams laughed, and answered, “Not since I was your age, I expect.”

Alice was wistful at once. “Don’t they stay beautiful after my age?”

“Well, it’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it? Not ever?”

“You may have a different kind from mine,” the mother said, a little sadly. “I think you will, Alice. You deserve–-“

“No, I don’t. I don’t deserve anything, and I know it. But I’m getting a great deal these days— more than I ever dreamed COULD come to me. I’m— I’m pretty happy, mama!”

“Dearie!” Her mother would have kissed her, but Alice drew away.

“Oh, I don’t mean–-” She laughed nervously. “I wasn’t meaning to tell you I’m ENGAGED, mama. We’re not. I mean—oh! things seem pretty beautiful in spite of all I’ve done to spoil ‘em.”

“You?” Mrs. Adams cried, incredulously. “What have you done to spoil anything?”

“Little things,” Alice said. “A thousand little silly—oh, what’s the use? He’s so honestly what he is —just simple and good and intelligent—I feel a tricky mess beside him! I don’t see why he likes me; and sometimes I’m afraid he wouldn’t if he knew me.”

“He’d just worship you,” said the fond mother. “And the more he knew you, the more he’d worship you.”

Alice shook her head. “He’s not the worshiping kind. Not like that at all. He’s more–-“

But Mrs. Adams was not interested in this analysis, and she interrupted briskly, “Of course it’s time your father and I showed some interest in him. I was just saying I actually don’t believe he’s ever been inside the house.”

“No,” Alice said, musingly; “that’s true: I don’t believe he has.

Except when we’ve walked in the evening we’ve always sat out here, even those two times when it was drizzly. It’s so much nicer.”

“We’ll have to do SOMETHING or other, of course,” her mother said.

“What like?”

“I was thinking–-” Mrs. Adams paused. “Well, of course we could hardly put off asking him to dinner, or something, much longer.”

Alice was not enthusiastic; so far from it, indeed, that there was a melancholy alarm in her voice. “Oh, mama, must we? Do you think so?”

“Yes, I do. I really do.”

“Couldn’t we—well, couldn’t we wait?”

“It looks queer,” Mrs. Adams said. “It isn’t the thing at all for a young man to come as much as he does, and never more than just barely meet your father and mother. No. We ought to do something.”

“But a dinner!” Alice objected. “In the first place, there isn’t anybody I want to ask. There isn’t anybody I WOULD ask.”

“I didn’t mean trying to give a big dinner,” her mother explained. “I just mean having him to dinner. That mulatto woman, Malena Burns, goes out by the day, and she could bring a waitress. We can get some flowers for the table and some to put in the living-room. We might just as well go ahead and do it to-morrow as any other time; because your father’s in a fine mood, and I saw Malena this afternoon and told her I might want her soon. She said she didn’t have any engagements this week, and I can let her know to-night. Suppose when he comes you ask him for to-morrow, Alice. Everything’ll be very nice, I’m sure. Don’t worry about it.”

“Well—but–-” Alice was uncertain.

“But don’t you see, it looks so queer, not to do SOMETHING?” her mother urged. “It looks so kind of poverty-stricken. We really oughtn’t to wait any longer.”

Alice assented, though not with a good heart. “Very well, I’ll ask him, if you think we’ve got to.”

“That matter’s settled then,” Mrs. Adams said. “I’ll go telephone Malena, and then I’ll tell your father about it.”

But when she went back to her husband, she found him in an excited state of mind, and Walter standing before him in the darkness. Adams was almost shouting, so great was his vehemence.

“Hush, hush!” his wife implored, as she came near them. “They’ll hear you out on the front porch!”

“I don’t care who hears me,” Adams said, harshly, though he tempered his loudness. “Do you want to know what this boy’s asking me for? I thought he’d maybe come to tell me he’d got a little sense in his head at last, and a little decency about what’s due his family! I thought he was going to ask me to take him into my plant. No, ma’am; THAT’S not what he wants!”

“No, it isn’t,” Walter said. In the darkness his face could not be seen; he stood motionless, in what seemed an apathetic attitude; and he spoke quietly, “No,” he repeated. “That isn’t what I want.”

“You stay down at that place,” Adams went on, hotly, “instead of trying to be a little use to your family; and the only reason you’re ALLOWED to stay there is because Mr. Lamb’s never happened to notice you ARE still there! You just wait–-“

“You’re off,” Walter said, in the same quiet way. “He knows I’m there. He spoke to me yesterday: he asked me how I was getting along with my work.”

“He did?” Adams said, seeming not to believe him.

“Yes. He did.”

“What else did he say, Walter?” Mrs. Adams asked quickly.

“Nothin’. Just walked on.”

“I don’t believe he knew who you were,” Adams declared.

“Think not? He called me ‘Walter Adams.’”

At this Adams was silent; and Walter, after waiting a moment, said:

“Well, are you going to do anything about me? About what I told you I got to have?”

“What is it, Walter?” his mother asked, since Adams did not speak.

Walter cleared his throat, and replied in a tone as quiet as that he had used before, though with a slight huskiness, “I got to have three hundred and fifty dollars. You better get him to give it to me if you can.”

Adams found his voice. “Yes,” he said, bitterly. “That’s all he asks! He won’t do anything I ask HIM to, and in return he asks me for three hundred and fifty dollars! That’s all!”

“What in the world!” Mrs. Adams exclaimed. “What FOR, Walter?”

“I got to have it,” Walter said.

“But what FOR?”

His quiet huskiness did not alter. “I got to have it.”

“But can’t you tell us–-“

“I got to have it.”

“That’s all you can get out of him,” Adams said. “He seems to think it’ll bring him in three hundred and fifty dollars!”

A faint tremulousness became evident in the husky voice. “Haven’t you got it?”

“NO, I haven’t got it!” his father answered. “And I’ve got to go to a bank for more than my payroll next week. Do you think I’m a mint?”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Walter,” Mrs. Adams interposed, perplexed and distressed. “If your father had the money, of course he’d need every cent of it, especially just now, and, anyhow, you could scarcely expect him to give it to you, unless you told us what you want with it. But he hasn’t got it.”

“All right,” Walter said; and after standing a moment more, in silence, he added, impersonally, “I don’t see as you ever did anything much for me, anyhow either of you.”

Then, as if this were his valedictory, he turned his back upon them, walked away quickly, and was at once lost to their sight in the darkness.

“There’s a fine boy to’ve had the trouble of raising!” Adams grumbled. “Just crazy, that’s all.”

“What in the world do you suppose he wants all that money for?” his wife said, wonderingly. “I can’t imagine what he could DO with it. I wonder –-” She paused. “I wonder if he–-“

“If he what?” Adams prompted her irritably.

“If he COULD have bad—associates.”

“God knows!” said Adams. ”I don’t! It just looks to me like he had something in him I don’t understand. You can’t keep your eye on a boy all the time in a city this size, not a boy Walter’s age. You got a girl pretty much in the house, but a boy’ll follow his nature. I don’t know what to do with him!”

Mrs. Adams brightened a little. “He’ll come out all right,” she said. “I’m sure he will. I’m sure he’d never be anything really bad: and he’ll come around all right about the glue-works, too; you’ll see. Of course every young man wants money—it doesn’t prove he’s doing anything wrong just because he asks you for it.”

“No. All it proves to me is that he hasn’t got good sense asking me for three hundred and fifty dollars, when he knows as well as you do the position I’m in! If I wanted to, I couldn’t hardly let him have three hundred and fifty cents, let alone dollars!”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to let ME have that much— and maybe a little more,” she ventured, timidly; and she told him of her plans for the morrow. He objected vehemently.

“Oh, but Alice has probably asked him by this time,” Mrs. Adams said. “It really must be done, Virgil: you don’t want him to think she’s ashamed of us, do you?”

“Well, go ahead, but just let me stay away,” he begged. “Of course I expect to undergo a kind of talk with him, when he gets ready to say something to us about Alice, but I do hate to have to sit through a fashionable dinner.”

“Why, it isn’t going to bother you,” she said; “just one young man as a guest.”

“Yes, I know; but you want to have all this fancy cookin’; and I see well enough you’re going to get that old dress suit out of the cedar chest in the attic, and try to make me put it on me.”

“I do think you better, Virgil.”

“I hope the moths have got in it,” he said. “Last time I wore it was to the banquet, and it was pretty old then. Of course I didn’t mind wearing it to the banquet so much, because that was what you might call quite an occasion.” He spoke with some reminiscent complacency; “the banquet,” an affair now five years past, having provided the one time in his life when he had been so distinguished among his fellow-citizens as to receive an invitation to be present, with some seven hundred others, at the annual eating and speech-making of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. “Anyhow, as you say, I think it would look foolish of me to wear a dress suit for just one young man,” he went on protesting, feebly. “What’s the use of all so much howdy-do, anyway? You don’t expect him to believe we put on all that style every night, do you? Is that what you’re after?”

“Well, we want him to think we live nicely,” she admitted.

“So that’s it!” he said, querulously. “You want him to think that’s our regular gait, do you? Well, he’ll know better about me, no matter how you fix me up, because he saw me in my regular suit the evening she introduced me to him, and he could tell anyway I’m not one of these moving-picture sporting-men that’s always got a dress suit on. Besides, you and Alice certainly have some idea he’ll come AGAIN, haven’t you? If they get things settled between ‘em he’ll be around the house and to meals most any time, won’t he? You don’t hardly expect to put on style all the time, I guess. Well, he’ll see then that this kind of thing was all show-off, and bluff, won’t he? What about it?”

“Oh, well, by THAT time–-” She left the sentence unfinished, as if absently. “You could let us have a little money for to-morrow, couldn’t you, honey?”

“Oh, I reckon, I reckon,” he mumbled. “A girl like Alice is some comfort: she don’t come around acting as if she’d commit suicide if she didn’t get three hundred and fifty dollars in the next five minutes. I expect I can spare five or six dollars for your show-off if I got to.”

However, she finally obtained fifteen before his bedtime; and the next morning “went to market” after breakfast, leaving Alice to make the beds. Walter had not yet come downstairs. “You had better call him,” Mrs. Adams said, as she departed with a big basket on her arm. “I expect he’s pretty sleepy; he was out so late last night I didn’t hear him come in, though I kept awake till after midnight, listening for him. Tell him he’ll be late to work if he doesn’t hurry; and see that he drinks his coffee, even if he hasn’t time for anything else. And when Malena comes, get her started in the kitchen: show her where everything is.” She waved her hand, as she set out for a corner where the cars stopped. “Everything’ll be lovely. Don’t forget about Walter.”

Nevertheless, Alice forgot about Walter for a few minutes. She closed the door, went into the “living-room” absently, and stared vaguely at one of the old brown-plush rocking-chairs there. Upon her forehead were the little shadows of an apprehensive reverie, and her thoughts overlapped one another in a fretful jumble. “What will he think? These old chairs—they’re hideous. I’ll scrub those soot-streaks on the columns: it won’t do any good, though. That long crack in the column—nothing can help it. What will he think of papa? I hope mama won’t talk too much. When he thinks of Mildred’s house, or of Henrietta’s, or any of ‘em, beside this–- She said she’d buy plenty of roses; that ought to help some. Nothing could be done about these horrible chairs: can’t take ‘em up in the attic—a room’s got to have chairs! Might have rented some. No; if he ever comes again he’d see they weren’t here. ‘If he ever comes again’—oh, it won’t be THAT bad! But it won’t be what he expects. I’m responsible for what he expects: he expects just what the airs I’ve put on have made him expect. What did I want to pose so to him for—as if papa were a wealthy man and all that? What WILL he think? The photograph of the Colosseum’s a rather good thing, though. It helps some— as if we’d bought it in Rome perhaps. I hope he’ll think so; he believes I’ve been abroad, of course. The other night he said, ‘You remember the feeling you get in the Sainte-Chapelle’.—There’s another lie of mine, not saying I didn’t remember because I’d never been there. What makes me do it? Papa MUST wear his evening clothes. But Walter–-“

With that she recalled her mother’s admonition, and went upstairs to Walter’s door. She tapped upon it with her fingers.

“Time to get up, Walter. The rest of us had breakfast over half an hour ago, and it’s nearly eight o’clock. You’ll be late. Hurry down and I’ll have some coffee and toast ready for you.” There came no sound from within the room, so she rapped louder.

“Wake up, Walter!”

She called and rapped again, without getting any response, and then, finding that the door yielded to her, opened it and went in. Walter was not there.

He had been there, however; had slept upon the bed, though not inside the covers; and Alice supposed he must have come home so late that he had been too sleepy to take off his clothes. Near the foot of the bed was a shallow closet where he kept his “other suit” and his evening clothes; and the door stood open, showing a bare wall. Nothing whatever was in the closet, and Alice was rather surprised at this for a moment. “That’s queer,” she murmured; and then she decided that when he woke he found the clothes he had slept in “so mussy” he had put on his “other suit,” and had gone out before breakfast with the mussed clothes to have them pressed, taking his evening things with them. Satisfied with this explanation, and failing to observe that it did not account for the absence of shoes from the closet floor, she nodded absently, “Yes, that must be it”; and, when her mother returned, told her that Walter had probably breakfasted downtown. They did not delay over this; the coloured woman had arrived, and the basket’s disclosures were important.

“I stopped at Worlig’s on the way back,” said Mrs. Adams, flushed with hurry and excitement. “I bought a can of caviar there. I thought we’d have little sandwiches brought into the ‘living-room’ before dinner, the way you said they did when you went to that dinner at the–-“

“But I think that was to go with cocktails, mama, and of course we haven’t–-“

“No,” Mrs. Adams said. “Still, I think it would be nice. We can make them look very dainty, on a tray, and the waitress can bring them in. I thought we’d have the soup already on the table; and we can walk right out as soon as we have the sandwiches, so it won’t get cold. Then, after the soup, Malena says she can make sweetbread pates with mushrooms: and for the meat course we’ll have larded fillet. Malena’s really a fancy cook, you know, and she says she can do anything like that to perfection. We’ll have peas with the fillet, and potato balls and Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts are fashionable now, they told me at market. Then will come the chicken salad, and after that the ice-cream—she’s going to make an angel-food cake to go with it—and then coffee and crackers and a new kind of cheese I got at Worlig’s, he says is very fine.”

Alice was alarmed. “Don’t you think perhaps it’s too much, mama?”

“It’s better to have too much than too little,” her mother said, cheerfully. “We don’t want him to think we’re the kind that skimp. Lord knows we have to enough, though, most of the time! Get the flowers in water, child. I bought ‘em at market because they’re so much cheaper there, but they’ll keep fresh and nice. You fix ‘em any way you want. Hurry! It’s got to be a busy day.”

She had bought three dozen little roses. Alice took them and began to arrange them in vases, keeping the stems separated as far as possible so that the clumps would look larger. She put half a dozen in each of three vases in the “living-room,” placing one vase on the table in the center of the room, and one at each end of the mantelpiece. Then she took the rest of the roses to the dining-room; but she postponed the arrangement of them until the table should be set, just before dinner. She was thoughtful; planning to dry the stems and lay them on the tablecloth like a vine of roses running in a delicate design, if she found that the dozen and a half she had left were enough for that. If they weren’t she would arrange them in a vase.

She looked a long time at the little roses in the basin of water, where she had put them; then she sighed, and went away to heavier tasks, while her mother worked in the kitchen with Malena. Alice dusted the “living-room” and the dining-room vigorously, though all the time with a look that grew more and more pensive; and having dusted everything, she wiped the furniture; rubbed it hard. After that, she washed the floors and the woodwork.

Emerging from the kitchen at noon, Mrs. Adams found her daughter on hands and knees, scrubbing the bases of the columns between the hall and the “living-room.”

“Now, dearie,” she said, “you mustn’t tire yourself out, and you’d better come and eat something. Your father said he’d get a bite downtown to-day— he was going down to the bank—and Walter eats downtown all the time lately, so I thought we wouldn’t bother to set the table for lunch. Come on and we’ll have something in the kitchen.”

“No,” Alice said, dully, as she went on with he work. “I don’t want anything.”

Her mother came closer to her. “Why, what’s the matter?” she asked, briskly. “You seem kind of pale, to me; and you don’t look—you don’t look HAPPY.”

“Well–-” Alice began, uncertainly, but said no more.

“See here!” Mrs. Adams exclaimed. “This is all just for you! You ought to be ENJOYING it. Why, it’s the first time we’ve—we’ve entertained in I don’t know how long! I guess it’s almost since we had that little party when you were eighteen. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“But, dearie, aren’t you looking FORWARD to this evening?”

The girl looked up, showing a pallid and solemn face. “Oh, yes, of course,” she said, and tried to smile. “Of course we had to do it—I do think it’ll be nice. Of course I’m looking forward to it.”

CHAPTER XX

She was indeed “looking forward” to that evening, but in a cloud of apprehension; and, although she could never have guessed it, this was the simultaneous condition of another person—none other than the guest for whose pleasure so much cooking and scrubbing seemed to be necessary. Moreover, Mr. Arthur Russell’s premonitions were no product of mere coincidence; neither had any magical sympathy produced them. His state of mind was rather the result of rougher undercurrents which had all the time been running beneath the surface of a romantic friendship.

Never shrewder than when she analyzed the gentlemen, Alice did not libel him when she said he was one of those quiet men who are a bit flirtatious, by which she meant that he was a bit “susceptible,” the same thing—and he had proved himself susceptible to Alice upon his first sight of her. “There!” he said to himself. “Who’s that?” And in the crowd of girls at his cousin’s dance, all strangers to him, she was the one he wanted to know.

Since then, his summer evenings with her had been as secluded as if, for three hours after the falling of dusk, they two had drawn apart from the world to some dear bower of their own. The little veranda was that glamorous nook, with a faint golden light falling through the glass of the closed door upon Alice, and darkness elsewhere, except for the one round globe of the street lamp at the corner. The people who passed along the sidewalk, now and then, were only shadows with voices, moving vaguely under the maple trees that loomed in obscure contours against the stars. So, as the two sat together, the back of the world was the wall and closed door behind them; and Russell, when he was away from Alice, always thought of her as sitting there before the closed door. A glamour was about her thus, and a spell upon him; but he had a formless anxiety never put into words: all the pictures of her in his mind stopped at the closed door.

He had another anxiety; and, for the greater part, this was of her own creating. She had too often asked him (no matter how gaily) what he heard about her, too often begged him not to hear anything. Then, hoping to forestall whatever he might hear, she had been at too great pains to account for it, to discredit and mock it; and, though he laughed at her for this, telling her truthfully he did not even hear her mentioned, the everlasting irony that deals with all such human forefendings prevailed.

Lately, he had half confessed to her what a nervousness she had produced. “You make me dread the day when I’ll hear somebody speaking of you. You’re getting me so upset about it that if I ever hear anybody so much as say the name ‘Alice Adams,’ I’ll run!” The confession was but half of one because he laughed; and she took it for an assurance of loyalty in the form of burlesque.

She misunderstood: he laughed, but his nervousness was genuine.

After any stroke of events, whether a happy one or a catastrophe, we see that the materials for it were a long time gathering, and the only marvel is that the stroke was not prophesied. What bore the air of fatal coincidence may remain fatal indeed, to this later view; but, with the haphazard aspect dispelled, there is left for scrutiny the same ancient hint from the Infinite to the effect that since events have never yet failed to be law-abiding, perhaps it were well for us to deduce that they will continue to be so until further notice.

… On the day that was to open the closed door in the background of his pictures of Alice, Russell lunched with his relatives. There were but the four people, Russell and Mildred and her mother and father, in the great, cool dining-room. Arched French windows, shaded by awnings, admitted a mellow light and looked out upon a green lawn ending in a long conservatory, which revealed through its glass panes a carnival of plants in luxuriant blossom. From his seat at the table, Russell glanced out at this pretty display, and informed his cousins that he was surprised. “You have such a glorious spread of flowers all over the house,” he said, “I didn’t suppose you’d have any left out yonder. In fact, I didn’t know there were so many splendid flowers in the world.”

Mrs. Palmer, large, calm, fair, like her daughter, responded with a mild reproach: “That’s because you haven’t been cousinly enough to get used to them, Arthur. You’ve almost taught us to forget what you look like.”

In defense Russell waved a hand toward her husband. “You see, he’s begun to keep me so hard at work–-“

But Mr. Palmer declined the responsibility. “Up to four or five in the afternoon, perhaps,” he said. “After that, the young gentleman is as much a stranger to me as he is to my family. I’ve been wondering who she could be.”

“When a man’s preoccupied there must be a lady then?” Russell inquired.

“That seems to be the view of your sex,” Mrs; Palmer suggested. “It was my husband who said it, not Mildred or I.”

Mildred smiled faintly. “Papa may be singular in his ideas; they may come entirely from his own experience, and have nothing to do with Arthur.”

“Thank you, Mildred,” her cousin said, bowing to her gratefully. “You seem to understand my character—and your father’s quite as well!”

However, Mildred remained grave in the face of this customary pleasantry, not because the old jest, worn round, like what preceded it, rolled in an old groove, but because of some preoccupation of her own. Her faint smile had disappeared, and, as her cousin’s glance met hers, she looked down; yet not before he had seen in her eyes the flicker of something like a question—a question both poignant and dismayed. He may have understood it; for his own smile vanished at once in favour of a reciprocal solemnity.

“You see, Arthur,” Mrs. Palmer said, “Mildred is always a good cousin. She and I stand by you, even if you do stay away from us for weeks and weeks.” Then, observing that he appeared to be so occupied with a bunch of iced grapes upon his plate that he had not heard her, she began to talk to her husband, asking him what was “going on downtown.”

Arthur continued to eat his grapes, but he ventured to look again at Mildred after a few moments. She, also, appeared to be occupied with a bunch of grapes though she ate none, and only pulled them from their stems. She sat straight, her features as composed and pure as those of a new marble saint in a cathedral niche; yet her downcast eyes seemed to conceal many thoughts; and her cousin, against his will, was more aware of what these thoughts might be than of the leisurely conversation between her father and mother. All at once, however, he heard something that startled him, and he listened—and here was the effect of all Alice’s forefendings; he listened from the first with a sinking heart.

Mr. Palmer, mildly amused by what he was telling his wife, had just spoken the words, “this Virgil Adams.” What he had said was, “this Virgil Adams —that’s the man’s name. Queer case.”

“Who told you?” Mrs. Palmer inquired, not much interested.

“Alfred Lamb,” her husband answered. “He was laughing about his father, at the club. You see the old gentleman takes a great pride in his judgment of men, and always boasted to his sons that he’d never in his life made a mistake in trusting the wrong man. Now Alfred and James Albert, Junior, think they have a great joke on him; and they’ve twitted him so much about it he’ll scarcely speak to them. From the first, Alfred says, the old chap’s only repartee was, ‘You wait and you’ll see!’ And they’ve asked him so often to show them what they’re going to see that he won’t say anything at all!”

“He’s a funny old fellow,” Mrs. Palmer observed. “But he’s so shrewd I can’t imagine his being deceived for such a long time. Twenty years, you said?”

“Yes, longer than that, I understand. It appears when this man—this Adams—was a young clerk, the old gentleman trusted him with one of his business secrets, a glue process that Mr. Lamb had spent some money to get hold of. The old chap thought this Adams was going to have quite a future with the Lamb concern, and of course never dreamed he was dishonest. Alfred says this Adams hasn’t been of any real use for years, and they should have let him go as dead wood, but the old gentleman wouldn’t hear of it, and insisted on his being kept on the payroll; so they just decided to look on it as a sort of pension. Well, one morning last March the man had an attack of some sort down there, and Mr.

Lamb got his own car out and went home with him, himself, and worried about him and went to see him no end, all the time he was ill.”

“He would,” Mrs. Palmer said, approvingly. “He’s a kind-hearted creature, that old man.”

Her husband laughed. “Alfred says he thinks his kind-heartedness is about cured! It seems that as soon as the man got well again he deliberately walked off with the old gentleman’s glue secret. Just calmly stole it! Alfred says he believes that if he had a stroke in the office now, himself, his father wouldn’t lift a finger to help him!”

Mrs. Palmer repeated the name to herself thoughtfully. “‘Adams’—‘Virgil Adams.’ You said his name was Virgil Adams?”

“Yes.”

She looked at her daughter. “Why, you know who that is, Mildred,” she said, casually. “It’s that Alice Adams’s father, isn’t it? Wasn’t his name Virgil Adams?”

“I think it is,” Mildred said.

Mrs. Palmer turned toward her husband. “You’ve seen this Alice Adams here. Mr. Lamb’s pet swindler must be her father.”

Mr. Palmer passed a smooth hand over his neat gray hair, which was not disturbed by this effort to stimulate recollection. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Of course—certainly. Quite a good-looking girl—one of Mildred’s friends. How queer!”

Mildred looked up, as if in a little alarm, but did not speak. Her mother set matters straight. “Fathers ARE amusing,” she said smilingly to Russell, who was looking at her, though how fixedly she did not notice; for she turned from him at once to enlighten her husband. “Every girl who meets Mildred, and tries to push the acquaintance by coming here until the poor child has to hide, isn’t a FRIEND of hers, my dear!”

Mildred’s eyes were downcast again, and a faint colour rose in her cheeks. “Oh, I shouldn’t put it quite that way about Alice Adams,” she said, in a low voice. “I saw something of her for a time. She’s not unattractive in a way.”

Mrs. Palmer settled the whole case of Alice carelessly. “A pushing sort of girl,” she said. “A very pushing little person.”

“I–-” Mildred began; and, after hesitating, concluded, “I rather dropped her.”

“Fortunate you’ve done so,” her father remarked, cheerfully. “Especially since various members of the Lamb connection are here frequently. They mightn’t think you’d show great tact in having her about the place.” He laughed, and turned to his cousin. “All this isn’t very interesting to poor Arthur. How terrible people are with a newcomer in a town; they talk as if he knew all about everybody!”

“But we don’t know anything about these queer people, ourselves,” said Mrs. Palmer. “We know something about the girl, of course—she used to be a bit too conspicuous, in fact! However, as you say, we might find a subject more interesting for Arthur.”

She smiled whimsically upon the young man. “Tell the truth,” she said. “Don’t you fairly detest going into business with that tyrant yonder?”

“What? Yes—I beg your pardon!” he stammered.

“You were right,” Mrs. Palmer said to her husband. “You’ve bored him so, talking about thievish clerks, he can’t even answer an honest question.”

But Russell was beginning to recover his outward composure. “Try me again,” he said. “I’m afraid I was thinking of something else.”

This was the best he found to say. There was a part of him that wanted to protest and deny, but he had not heat enough, in the chill that had come upon him. Here was the first “mention” of Alice, and with it the reason why it was the first: Mr. Palmer had difficulty in recalling her, and she happened to be spoken of, only because her father’s betrayal of a benefactor’s trust had been so peculiarly atrocious that, in the view of the benefactor’s family, it contained enough of the element of humour to warrant a mild laugh at a club. There was the deadliness of the story: its lack of malice, even of resentment. Deadlier still were Mrs. Palmer’s phrases: “a pushing sort of girl,” “a very pushing little person,” and “used to be a bit TOO conspicuous, in fact.” But she spoke placidly and by chance; being as obviously without unkindly motive as Mr. Palmer was when he related the cause of Alfred Lamb’s amusement. Her opinion of the obscure young lady momentarily her topic had been expressed, moreover, to her husband, and at her own table. She sat there, large, kind, serene—a protest might astonish but could not change her; and Russell, crumpling in his strained fingers the lace-edged little web of a napkin on his knee, found heart enough to grow red, but not enough to challenge her.

She noticed his colour, and attributed it to the embarrassment of a scrupulously gallant gentleman caught in a lapse of attention to a lady. “Don’t be disturbed,” she said, benevolently. “People aren’t expected to listen all the time to their relatives. A high colour’s very becoming to you, Arthur; but it really isn’t necessary between cousins. You can always be informal enough with us to listen only when you care to.”

His complexion continued to be ruddier than usual, however, throughout the meal, and was still somewhat tinted when Mrs. Palmer rose. “The man’s bringing you cigarettes here,” she said, nodding to the two gentlemen. “We’ll give you a chance to do the sordid kind of talking we know you really like. Afterwhile, Mildred will show you what’s in bloom in the hothouse, if you wish, Arthur.”

Mildred followed her, and, when they were alone in another of the spacious rooms, went to a window and looked out, while her mother seated herself near the center of the room in a gilt armchair, mellowed with old Aubusson tapestry. Mrs. Palmer looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s back, but did not speak to her until coffee had been brought for them.

“Thanks,” Mildred said, not turning, “I don’t care for any coffee, I believe.”

“No?” Mrs. Palmer said, gently. “I’m afraid our good-looking cousin won’t think you’re very talkative, Mildred. You spoke only about twice at lunch. I shouldn’t care for him to get the idea you’re piqued because he’s come here so little lately, should you?”

“No, I shouldn’t,” Mildred answered in a low voice, and with that she turned quickly, and came to sit near her mother. “But it’s what I am afraid of! Mama, did you notice how red he got?”

“You mean when he was caught not listening to a question of mine?

Yes; it’s very becoming to him.”

“Mama, I don’t think that was the reason. I don’t think it was because he wasn’t listening, I mean.”

“No?”

“I think his colour and his not listening came from the same reason,” Mildred said, and although she had come to sit near her mother, she did not look at her. “I think it happened because you and papa–-” She stopped.

“Yes?” Mrs. Palmer said, good-naturedly, to prompt her. “Your father and I did something embarrassing?”

“Mama, it was because of those things that came out about Alice Adams.”

“How could that bother Arthur? Does he know her?”

“Don’t you remember?” the daughter asked. “The day after my dance I mentioned how odd I thought it was in him—I was a little disappointed in him. I’d been seeing that he met everybody, of course, but she was the only girl HE asked to meet; and he did it as soon as he noticed her. I hadn’t meant to have him meet her—in fact, I was rather sorry I’d felt I had to ask her, because she oh, well, she’s the sort that ‘tries for the new man,’ if she has half a chance; and sometimes they seem quite fascinated —for a time, that is. I thought Arthur was above all that; or at the very least I gave him credit for being too sophisticated.”

“I see,” Mrs. Palmer said, thoughtfully. “I remember now that you spoke of it. You said it seemed a little peculiar, but of course it really wasn’t: a ‘new man’ has nothing to go by, except his own first impressions. You can’t blame poor Arthur—she’s quite a piquant looking little person. You think he’s seen something of her since then?”

Mildred nodded slowly. “I never dreamed such a thing till yesterday, and even then I rather doubted it—till he got so red, just now! I was surprised when he asked to meet her, but he just danced with her once and didn’t mention her afterward; I forgot all about it—in fact, I virtually forgot all about HER. I’d seen quite a little of her–-“

“Yes,” said Mrs. Palmer. “She did keep coming here!”

“But I’d just about decided that it really wouldn’t do,” Mildred went on. “She isn’t—well, I didn’t admire her.”

“No,” her mother assented, and evidently followed a direct connection of thought in a speech apparently irrelevant. “I understand the young Malone wants to marry Henrietta. I hope she won’t; he seems rather a gross type of person.”

“Oh, he’s just one,” Mildred said. “I don’t know that he and Alice Adams were ever engaged—she never told me so. She may not have been engaged to any of them; she was just enough among the other girls to get talked about—and one of the reasons I felt a little inclined to be nice to her was that they seemed to be rather edging her out of the circle. It wasn’t long before I saw they were right, though. I happened to mention I was going to give a dance and she pretended to take it as a matter of course that I meant to invite her brother—at least, I thought she pretended; she may have really believed it. At any rate, I had to send him a card; but I didn’t intend to be let in for that sort of thing again, of course. She’s what you said, ‘pushing’; though I’m awfully sorry you said it.”

“Why shouldn’t I have said it, my dear?”

“Of course I didn’t say ‘shouldn’t.’ ” Mildred explained, gravely. “I meant only that I’m sorry it happened.”

“Yes; but why?”

“Mama”—Mildred turned to her, leaning forward and speaking in a lowered voice—“Mama, at first the change was so little it seemed as if Arthur hardly knew it himself. He’d been lovely to me always, and he was still lovely to me but—oh, well, you’ve understood—after my dance it was more as if it was just his nature and his training to be lovely to me, as he would be to everyone a kind of politeness. He’d never said he CARED for me, but after that I could see he didn’t. It was clear—after that. I didn’t know what had happened; I couldn’t think of anything I’d done. Mama—it was Alice Adams.”

Mrs. Palmer set her little coffee-cup upon the table beside her, calmly following her own motion with her eyes, and not seeming to realize with what serious entreaty her daughter’s gaze was fixed upon her. Mildred repeated the last sentence of her revelation, and introduced a stress of insistence.

“Mama, it WAS Alice Adams!”

But Mrs. Palmer declined to be greatly impressed, so far as her appearance went, at least; and to emphasize her refusal, she smiled indulgently. “What makes you think so?”

“Henrietta told me yesterday.”

At this Mrs. Palmer permitted herself to laugh softly aloud. “Good heavens! Is Henrietta a soothsayer? Or is she Arthur’s particular confidante?”

“No. Ella Dowling told her.”

Mrs. Palmer’s laughter continued. “Now we have it!” she exclaimed. “It’s a game of gossip: Arthur tells Ella, Ella tells Henrietta, and Henrietta tells–-“

“Don’t laugh, please, mama,” Mildred begged. “Of course Arthur didn’t tell anybody. It’s roundabout enough, but it’s true. I know it! I hadn’t quite believed it, but I knew it was true when he got so red. He looked—oh, for a second or so he looked —stricken! He thought I didn’t notice it. Mama, he’s been to see her almost every evening lately. They take long walks together. That’s why he hasn’t been here.”

Of Mrs. Palmer’s laughter there was left only her indulgent smile, which she had not allowed to vanish. “Well, what of it?” she said.

“Mama!”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Palmer. “What of it?”

“But don’t you see?” Mildred’s well-tutored voice, though modulated and repressed even in her present emotion, nevertheless had a tendency to quaver. “It’s true. Frank Dowling was going to see her one evening and he saw Arthur sitting on the stoop with her, and didn’t go in. And Ella used to go to school with a girl who lives across the street from here. She told Ella–-“

“Oh, I understand,” Mrs. Palmer interrupted. “Suppose he does go there. My dear, I said, ‘What of it?’”

“I don’t see what you mean, mama. I’m so afraid he might think we knew about it, and that you and papa said those things about her and her father on that account—as if we abused them because he goes there instead of coming here.”