Kitabı oku: «Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905», sayfa 14

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

“No,” he said, quietly; “you’re not mine to kiss.”

She bent her right arm back with a quick movement behind his head, and drew his lips down to her face.

“Ah! if it were only a question of possession,” she sighed, as she pressed them to her own.

She turned on the stairs and looked back at him.

“You don’t resent it?” she inquired.

“Why should I?”

“Oh, because you’re not mine to kiss, I suppose.”

“Ah! that’s your affair,” he smiled.

At the hall door she suggested that, being bound for Waterloo, he might accompany her.

“I’m afraid of you,” he said.

“You needn’t be,” she murmured. “I’m done.”

In the end she waited while he packed a bag, and they drove together under the withered planes through the park to her hotel. But she declined to alight.

“You promised to be good,” he reminded her.

“I’m good – good as gold – I wouldn’t touch you for the world, but I’m going to see you off. Jim, do let me! I’ll come straight back and eat no end of dinner; I will, really! But I must say good-by to you there!”

“Why?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand; it’s a presentiment.”

“Presentiments are all stuff.”

“Yes, I know; so are women; but one has them both in – hansoms. Jim!”

“All right; but only to the station, not inside!”

She assented, and they parted, finally, with a feminine complexity of farewell, under the glass-roofed entry; South arriving on the platform to discover that the nine-fifteen had been advanced ten minutes since the first of the month, and that, thanks to Rosamond’s presentiments, he had lost the last train to Veyne St. Mary’s by a few seconds.

V

Vexed as he was with the woman who had barred the way, he was almost minded, driving back, to acquaint her with his failure.

The inclination was perverse and not in his sanest manner; but her presence had overpowered him that night as an inhaled narcotic; something diffusive in her strong, warm beauty, filling his room, had numbed him as he breathed it.

But his senses came again in the night air, and he kept on, after crossing the river, by the abbey, and his homeward way.

He had left his key behind him, and learned, on entering, that a gentleman awaited him above.

“Who?” he inquired, and was told Lord Veynes.

“Said as ’e couldn’t afford to miss you, sir; so ’e’d wait, and take ’is chance.”

South always faced trouble, but he went more slowly upstairs. The door of his room was ajar, the lamp had been relit upon the table, and soused in its shaded dome of light was the figure of a man, stretched along the big chair before the fire. Veynes did not respond to his host’s hail of welcome; his eyes were staring into the shadowy mirror; and his face reflected there was like a ghostlight on the glass.

Knowing something of his visitor’s moods, South took no notice of his silence, but, drawing a chair beside him, brought his hand down on the other’s fingers with an exclamation of abusive kindliness.

One speaks of words frozen on the lips, but those seemed frozen in the air, ringing with an awful icy vibration in the silent room, as South started back, dumb with horror, for the hand upon which his had fallen was damp with the grip of death.

* * * * *

Of the days which followed, South could never give a complete account. A stranger to sorrow, almost, indeed, to every ruinous emotion, the scenes he witnessed seemed to alter the spacing of the hours so that no two were of a length.

The noise and crush of daily life were suddenly muted, as though death had closed a door and shut them out; and within, behind the bolted silence of despair, were tears, sad talk, mourning darkness, and the melancholy business of the dead, haunted, as with pale marsh lights, by the pitiful inquisition in the dead eyes which he had closed.

His consolation, in that dreary time, was that he bore half the burden of its grief.

The earl knew nothing of his son’s death but what the doctors could tell him, for Lady Veynes, with a curious, but to her a natural, discretion had kept the motive of her movements a secret even from her maid.

So the two chief agents in the tragedy carried the weight of it between them, and alone heard the inquest verdict of “an overstrained heart,” with the desolate knowledge of all it meant – South with dry eyes, so dry that their color seemed faded, and hers so wet that they seemed mixed with their tears.

He had feared once, only once, that she would forget the righteous necessities of her secret, and admit another, with cruel penitence, to its miserable pale.

It was on her first entry to the room where the body was lying, the earl sitting by it, his face almost as gray and sharp as that of the dead. One of his hands was on his son’s, the other crept presently to Rosamond’s golden hair. She had dropped on her knees beside the bed, her eyes buried in the coverlet, her arms flung out across it, moaning an inarticulate torrent of useless tenderness, and penitence, and despair. Her head was shaken by its sorrow like a yellow leaf, but the old man’s grief ran silently, as a stream that dries upon its stones.

That was the one occasion when South had distrusted the charity and shrewdness of her discretion; after that his doubts were at rest. She was everything a woman could be who would not sink her duties in sorrow, and South often wondered what the earl would have done without her.

He had beside ample reason for surprise. Her delicate little performance as a woman of affairs for the benefit of the lawyers, her equally fine and far more difficult personation before the family as lady paramount, were revelations of an ability he had been indisposed to admit.

He called it mummery to himself, but there was a dreary earnestness and effort in it which gave his slight the lie. He would not see the whiteness of her face, or the sorrow in her clouded eyes; and for a curious reason, because her grief left him, and it seemed with deliberate intention, in the cold.

She bore it with a certain stiffness of control as a burden she was too proud to share, yet which bent her into measured steps.

But South, who felt himself almost an accessory to her fate, could better have endured complaint; he would sooner have been hated, so he told himself.

So, since that memorable morning when she had flung a crumb of toast across the table at the gravity on his face, gray as it was with its news, and, afterward, in anguish and self-contempt, laid her sobbing head among the breakfast things, South had doubted everything about her but her charm.

Yet her sorrow proved, as he was finally to discover, exceedingly sincere; it outlasted even his demands upon it; but it lived, as all her clouds, in a windy sky; and broke, and blew over.

Ere that, however, or the lightening of her widow’s crape, a fresh link was welded from her life, which gave the sad earl a joy in his old age, and a despot to Veynes Court.

South used to run down, sometimes, on the summer evenings, to watch Lady Veynes, the earl and his grandson playing like three children in the dappled sunlight on the lawn.

Or, at least, if there were other reasons for his appearance, he was not on thinking terms with them.

Lady Veynes was. She thought, moreover, that his visits were far too few.

THE RIVALS

 
STRANGE when you passed me with him in the crowd,
That twixt us two the selfsame thought should be:
“So this was she!” your long glance spake aloud;
And I, to my own heart, “So this is she!”
 

Theodosia Garrison.

CONVERSATIONS WITH EGERIA
The Feminine Temperament
By MRS. WILSON WOODROW

IT is delightful to talk to a bishop,” smiled Egeria; “it immediately becomes a serious duty to be frivolous.”

“And why, pray?” The bishop looked slightly bewildered.

“To afford you the pleasures of contrast. To convince you from the start that one woman does not seek priestly counsel, nor intend to bore you with the vagaries of her soul.”

The bishop smiled benignly, deprecatingly and yet comprehendingly. He even shook his head in paternal and playful admonition.

“Oh, I know us,” Egeria assured him. “A woman, if she is young, is always either occupied with her heart or her soul. When the one absorbs her the other doesn’t. When she’s in love she forgets all about her soul. When she’s out of love she turns to it again. Then she yearns for incense, altar lights and a pale, young priest, who is willing to devote time and prayer to assuaging her spiritual doubts. She doesn’t care in the least to be spiritually directed by any well-fed, commonplace parson with a fat wife and a pack of rosy children. No, no, a wistful young ascetic, with hollows under his eyes – wan and worn with fasting and vigils. She is perfectly aware that he has ultimately not the ghost of a show; but she is entirely willing that he shall have a run for his money. In fact, she hopes that the struggle may be keen and prolonged. To play a game fish which is putting up the fight of its life is infinitely more exciting than to languidly reel in the line and secure a victim which has not made the least resistance.”

The bishop smiled tolerantly, tapping his finger tips together. “Doubtless correct, doubtless correct. Your astuteness and intellectual acumen have always elicited my admiration.”

A sparkle of annoyance brightened Egeria’s eyes.

“Checkmate,” she murmured, with a little bow of deference.

The bishop raised his brows innocently.

“Oh, you know,” continued Egeria, resentfully, “that there is one compliment a woman never forgives, and that is a tribute to her intellect at the expense of her power of attraction. If the lure the serpent taught her is vain, then is her destiny barren, her desire unfulfilled.”

“You deserved it,” laughed the bishop; “but, dear lady, have you ever paused to consider what a debt of gratitude the world owes us? When I listen to the outpourings of overcharged feminine hearts, and read the diaries, confessions and novels of innumerable women, I am forced to the conclusion that the church thoroughly understood one of the first needs of a woman’s heart when it established the confessional. Then man, with his restless, protesting conscience, did his best to estrange you from the consolation, and, in consequence, some eccentric, undisciplined creature now and again voices to the world the disorganized, hysterical feminine emotions which should have been discreetly sobbed into the ecclesiastical ear, decently entombed in the silence of the confessional.”

There was a faint wrinkle of displeasure in Egeria’s brow. “Admitted, admitted” – hastily – “and thank you kindly, dear bishop, for your little criticism of us. It makes it quite possible for me to discuss the clergy if I wish. Now I can ask, without being impertinent, a question which has long puzzled me. Why is it that you prelates and the princes of the church are almost invariably tolerant, delightfully broad-minded and free from bias, while the rank and file are so frequently strenuous and discomposing? For instance, last summer I was thrown, through force of circumstances, with a sallow-faced, stoop-shouldered preacher, who always spoke of himself as ‘a minister of the gospel.’ Whenever his dyspepsia was especially severe he informed his parishioners that he had girded on his armor and was prepared to rebuke evil in high places, and that he would be recalcitrant to his trust if he did not lift up his voice to condemn civic rottenness and social degeneracy. His wife was ‘an estimable lady,’ with the figure of a suburbanite who only wears stays in the evening, and a pronounced taste for the clinging perfume of moth balls. No children having blessed their union, they decided to adopt some definite aim in life. They were talking it over once when I was present.

“‘There are the sick and the poor; I am sure there are plenty of them,’ suggested the lady.

“Her husband looked at her scornfully, and coldly remarked that that field was full of reapers.

“‘Oh, you mean to stand up openly in the pulpit and rebuke the rich men who make their money in queer ways!’ she exclaimed, excitedly.

“‘And offend half my wealthy parishioners by branding them as thieves on insufficient evidence?’ he thundered. ‘Are you insane?’

“Finally, however, being a shrewd creature, he solved the problem and incidentally won for himself a great deal of gratuitous advertising. They organized a society for the suppression of bridge – aware that the public loves sensational details regarding women of position; the insidious cocktail – the public delights to know that the social leaders look too often upon the wine when it’s red; ostracising divorcées – women thus having the sanction of Heaven for attacking their own sex. Oh, it was a holy crusade in a teapot, and made him quite famous; and, bishop, what do you think was the motto of the organization?”

The bishop shook his head. Mild curiosity was in his eyes; but the shake of his head was distinctly reproving.

“The watchword chosen,” chuckled Egeria, “was, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ Now, bishop, tell me, please, what makes the difference between his type of man and yours?”

A humorous twinkle shone in the bishop’s eye, then he leaned forward and whispered one word in Egeria’s ear: “Money.”

She laughed, and then returned to her muttons. “But, really, quite under the rose, do you not become fearfully bored sometimes by the various manifestations of the feminine temperament?”

“It may be a trifle self-conscious, a little inclined to regard itself pathologically,” admitted the bishop, with caution.

“It is frequently yellow,” said Egeria. decisively. “Why don’t you clergymen and novelists occasionally tell us the truth?”

“We must fill our churches and sell our books, I suppose,” returned the bishop, half whimsically, half regretfully. “What would you say, Lady Egeria, if we put you in orders, and disregarding St. Paul’s advice, let you occupy the pulpit? Would you thunder denunciations at poor, defenseless women?”

“I’d have a fine time,” cried Egeria her eyes alight. “I would do what you sermonizers and novel writers haven’t the courage to do – just tell them the truth about themselves. Chide them for their frivolities and extravagances and vanities? Not I. They don’t care a straw for that. No, no, I should have a new evangel and a new text. It should be: ‘Play the game gamely, and don’t whine if you lose.’ Now, bishop, confess that you never meet a strange woman that you do not observe a speculative gleam in her eye which long experience has taught you to interpret as: ‘How soon can I tell him my troubles?’”

“Poor ladies! You have so many,” sighed the bishop, sympathetically.

“Of course we have, we multiply them by three. To sedulously observe all tragic and harrowing anniversaries is a part of our religion. ‘It’s just five years ago to-day since Edwin left me for another,’ she says, mournfully, and then, shrouding herself in gloom, lives over each poignant, past moment. If anyone ask the cause of her dejected demeanor, she murmurs, in a sad, sweet voice: ‘It is an anniversary. Would you like to hear of my grief?’

“But what does a man do? He says: ‘Jove! It’s just a year ago to-morrow since Jemima was run down by an automobile. I must keep myself well amused or it may be a depressing occasion.’

“Seriously, bishop, if I were you, I’d have a phonograph in my study, and the moment a woman set foot within the door it should begin that good old hymn: ‘Go bury thy sorrow, the world hath its share.’”

“But what can the poor things do,” asked the bishop, “if they may not turn to their clergyman for consolation and comfort?”

“Twang on Emerson’s iron string: ‘Trust thyself.’ Why always twine about a pole, like a limp pea vine, and flop on the ground the minute the upholding stick is withdrawn? Imagine the emotions of the pole, if it were sentient! At first it would say: ‘Delicate, dainty pea vine, lean on me, the clasp of your myriad tendrils fills me with rapture. How sweet is your adorable dependence!’ But in time: ‘Oh! stifling, smothering pea vine, I am suffocated by your deadening passivity. Would I could tear myself free from your throbbing tendrils.’”

“You evidently believe in the dead burying their dead,” said the bishop, meditatively.

“No sounder philosophy was ever enjoined on a living world. Let the dead – dead pasts, dead lives, dead loves, dead memories – bury their dead. Ah, bishop, the great art of life is the art of forgetting.”

“You, Madame Egeria, are inclined to philosophize.”

“Sir, do not remind me of it! When we offer sacrifices at the altar of laughter, you may look for gray hairs and crows’ feet. Tears and passion belong to youth: that season of fleeting and exquisite joys, of tragic and fugitive griefs, of tempestuous and restless longings. Youth, with the passionate voice of Maurice de Guerin, cries eternally: ‘The road of the wayfarer is a joyous one. Ah, who shall set me adrift upon the waters of the Nile?’”

“And in maturity we learn to fold our hands and stop our ears and take refuge in the commonplace.” The bishop’s tone was tinged with bitterness.

“Ah, no, no!” Egeria was vehement. “We learn that the Nile, with its dream-haunted shores, flows by our door; that wherever a patch of sunlight falls is beauty, wherever a morning-glory blows is art.”

The bishop fell in with her mood. “That is it. Maturity is nothing if it is not expansion.

 
“’Tis life of which our nerves are scant.
’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,
More life and fuller life.”
 

He loved to quote.

“Yes,” exclaimed Egeria, “‘more life, fuller life, more work, more play, more experience, more of the dreams that scale the stars, more of the splendid, inexorable life of earth. But” – looking at him doubtfully – “we are getting horribly didactic and prosy, and we are a thousand miles away from the feminine temperament.”

“Is there anything left of it?” inquired the bishop, mildly.

Egeria ignored him. “You have only expressed yourself guardedly, while I have talked and talked,” she complained.

“I shall be equally fluent.” The twinkle shone again in his eye. “But my opinion is given in confidence. I throw myself on your discretion.”

“Assuredly,” murmured Egeria.

“Very well, then” – lowering his voice – “I am like the old Englishman who said: ‘I have always found a most horrid, romantic perverseness in your sex. To do and to love what you should not is meat, drink and vesture to you all.’ And I also know that —

 
“Every day her dainty hands make life’s soiled temple clean,
And there’s a wake of glory where her spirit pure hath been.
At midnight through the shadow-land her living face doth gleam,
The dying kiss her shadow, and the dead smile in their dream.”
 

IN THE GARDEN

 
THE lily lifts her bridal whiteness up,
And leans a list’ning to th’ impassioned rose,
The dewdrop answer trembles in her cup,
Shines on her silver lip and overflows.
They lean and love for all the world to see,
But thou, my love, thou leanest no more to me!
 
 
Oh, mocking-bird, that bosomed in the height
Of yon magnolia, warblest all alone
Thy liquid litany of heart-delight,
While the pure moon steps slowly tow’rd her throne.
Lo! Thou hast lured all joy to soar with thee,
And thou, my love, thou sing’st no more to me.
 
 
Oh, one white star in all the blue abyss!
Oh, trembling star that lookest on my pain!
So shook my soul beneath his parting kiss,
So waits my heart, alone and all in vain.
Oh, Night, sweet Night, I bare my grief to thee —
Oh, world, far off, give back my love to me!
 

Margaret Houston.

ELLEN BERWICK
BY ANNE O’HAGAN

BEFORE I went away from Agonquitt I was not, even by the most egotistic stretch of my imagination, a very important or an overwhelmingly popular person in the community. The girls from the village did not swarm out to the farm to see me; they did not hang upon my words with reverent attention. Even during the two years when I was at college, my holidays were not periods of public rejoicing; my clothes were not copied or my style of hairdressing regarded with imitative admiration.

But ever since I went to New York the attitude of my acquaintances has changed. At first I was touched and flattered by the interest which all my old companions took in me when I came home; gradually, however, it glimmered upon my consciousness that it was not myself, but the glamour of the great city, which drew them – as though the atmosphere of New York were a tangible thing, and shreds of it clung to me through the long journey down into this remote country. I think I was a little more touched, though not so flattered, when I learned this; there is something pathetic to the initiated in the eager wonderment and awe of the neophyte.

Sometimes the girls have asked my advice, confiding to me their yearnings to leave home, to make “careers” for themselves in the world. And when I try – as perhaps I too often do – to discourage them, they look at me reproachfully, mutely accusing me of a selfish refusal to share with them pleasures and glories. They talk of the theaters, the opera, books, pictures, the glittering press of life, as though a ticket to New York insured one these things. I talk of loneliness and discomfort, of the pinch of poverty. They speak of enlarged horizons; and I of the hall bedrooms which would bound the outlook of most of them. They glow with the thought of new friendships; and I dash their ardor with tales of isolation, of snubs in the effort to escape isolation, of tawdry relationships begun for the sake of mere companionship. But their eyes are always full of incredulity. And sometimes, remembering the delights which were no less a part of my life in the big city than the depression, remembering the wholesome joy of work, the natural pride of feeling oneself an integral part of the great onward-pressing stream of life; yes, and remembering the sweet and the bitter-sweet that came to me there, I wonder if my prohibitive wisdom is not a little hypocritical. Would I myself forego any of my New York experiences?

Sometimes it has seemed to me that my own adventures – or lack of adventures – set down as plainly and truthfully as I can recall them, might be of more illuminating, perhaps – perhaps – of more deterrent, effect than all my spoken generalizations. For though my existence had its peculiar features, rose to its individual climaxes, yet in the main it was typical – the duplicate in most essentials of that of thousands and thousands of young women, not greatly gifted, who come to New York to seek their fortunes.

I shall never forget how the whole thing came about. I was in the poultry yard, doctoring some of my chickens for the pip, when I heard a great puffing and chugging in the road. It was the Hennens’ automobile, and instead of dashing past the house, scattering terror before it, it snorted itself to a standstill before our old carriage block. I knew that mother’s annual ordeal was before her, and I half laughed as I went on forcing the broilers’ throats open.

Mother hated the yearly visitation of Mrs. Hennen with all the intensity of her very gentle, very proud nature. Thirty-five years before she and Letitia Bland had been the rival belles of the Agonquitt region, and the legend was that Letty Bland had taken to her bed for three days when mother’s engagement to father was made known, and that she went to visit relatives in Eastport at the time of the marriage. After a triumph like that, no wonder mother hated the magnificent summer descent upon her of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, widow of the oil-field king, mother of George Hennen, the banker, broker, yachtsman and what not; of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, owner of the feudal castle on the shore three miles from the village, whose splendors put to utter rout the modest opulence of all the rest of Agonquitt’s summer colony. I was always sorry for mother at the season of her recurrent Nemesis, and yet I was always amused at the thought of time’s revenges.

To-day, when I had finished doctoring the broilers, I strolled into the house and greeted the great lady. She was a kind, stout, motherly soul – very gorgeous in raiment, very imposing in a white pompadour; her good-natured, round face always looked forth half bewilderedly between the effort of her dressmaker and that of her hairdresser. This time her eyes were frankly wet as she took my hand and patted it.

“And so you’ve lost your dear father,” she said. “And you’ve come home from college – what a pity, my dear! And you’ve been down to Bangor and learned stenography – what a brave girl you are, your father’s own daughter – and you’re selling broilers to the hotel; why not to me, my child?”

Mother’s cheeks were pink with badly suppressed mortification, her eyes sparkled, her lips were on the quivering point.

“Thank you ever so much, Mrs. Hennen,” I interposed, hastily, before mother could say anything, “but the Agonquitt House contracted for them all. Next year – ”

“But I must do something for you,” the dear, kind lady blundered on. “It’s all too sad; it’s too like your dear father’s own case. You’ve heard how he had to come back from college to take charge of the farm when his father had the stroke, and he – your father, I mean, dear, not your grandfather – had so wanted to be – ”

“Of course Ellen knows all about that,” interrupted mother, icily. “And I would have done anything to spare her the sacrifice” – her voice grew human again – “but – ”

“I’m sure she knows everything there is to know already” – Mrs. Hennen beamed, benignly. “And stenography! My, my! Doesn’t it make you feel ignorant, Marietta? And so you’re going to get a position in Bangor or Portland, your mother says, in the fall?”

I nodded. Mrs. Hennen looked at me with an air of silly, puzzled admiration. Suddenly she clapped her hands – the fingers were like little bleached sausages in the tight, white gloves.

“The very thing!” she cried. “You shall be George’s private secretary. His Miss O’Dowd is going to be married in October. The very thing! I’ll speak to him to-night.”

She puffed up, the kind lady, and kept saying, “Not a word, not a word; I won’t hear a word against it; not a word, Marietta, not one, Ellen, my dear.” And she panted off, leaving mother on the verge of tears, and me quivering with excitement.

“A favor from Letty Bland I will not endure!” mother proclaimed. “I will not endure her patronage.” Then she broke down entirely and sobbed: “Oh, I can’t stand in your way, my poor little girl, and I can’t bear to let you go so far from me.”

The end of the whole matter was that the close of September found me on the way to New York, warmly clad in the clothes over which mother had reddened her pretty eyes and pricked her pretty fingers, an emergency fund of a hundred and twenty-five dollars – those blessed broilers! – in a chamois bag between my excellent woolens and my stout muslins, a room in the Margaret Louisa Home engaged for me for any period up to a month. Our clergyman’s wife had recommended that refuge, and mother’s premonitions of battle, murder and sudden death for me grew a little less insistent when she had been finally convinced that I could go almost without change of cars from the safety of Agonquitt to that most evangelical of shelters.

Oh, the tremors, the breathlessness, the excitement, of that journey! Oh, the fairly dizzy rapture and pain of it! I had a vision of streets brilliant with lights, of a press of carriages, of shops, flowers, buildings; of unknown faces, each one the possibility of interest, the invitation to adventure, and I exulted. Then I saw the big, square house where I had been born, shabbily in need of paint; the lonely fields sloping away from it, the woods of yellow birch and pine, the lonely blue reaches of our Northern bays, and my mother sitting in her poor black frock alone by the fire in the early evening. Then I strangled sobs behind my clinched teeth.

My journey from Agonquitt had been broken by one night’s stay in Portland with our second cousins. Mother regarded a sleeping car as an unpermissible atrocity – and wider experience compels me to share her views – and I made the trip by daylight stages. No one had paid any particular attention to me; no adventure had paused by my chair in the car. Nothing happened until I emerged from the train into the murky, glittering evening at the Grand Central Station. Then for a few minutes I was really dazed.

I had spurned the assistance of porters, being forewarned of tips, and I carried my bag through the yard toward the street. There I gasped and nearly reeled. Never had I heard such a clamor, or seen such a whirl and tangle of lights, such recklessness of darting figures, such insistent greed of beckoning fingers and whips.

“Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The maddening din rang in my ears. “Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The arms, the eyes, all echoed the cry. “Keb, keb, keb, keb – ” Beyond the barricade of that shout there was tempest, turmoil, clatter; I turned and fled backward toward the train yard, which seemed to me calm and sane now, though a few minutes before it had been a smoking, roaring understudy for Purgatory. Never could I breast that tumultuous tide of madness without.

Another train was unloading. I was jostled by a great many persons who had evidently determined to reach the bedlam on the sidewalk in less than half a second. I dodged. I looked for a uniform which might remain stationary long enough for me to reach it. I saw one – baggage man, carriage starter, train announcer, I didn’t know or care what – I made a sidewise dash for him and collided violently with a dress-suit case, whose owner towered several feet above. He muttered an apology, I muttered an excuse, and then we both stopped, to the damming of the torrential haste behind us.

“Ellen Berwick!”

“Bob Mathews!”

Never had human face seemed to me so friendly as this one. Never had words sounded so honey-sweet as my name ejaculated by a voice which, if not lately familiar, was at least friendly and recognizable. The Agonquitt stamp was already the hall mark of worth, of excellence, in my mind. And Robert Mathews was Dr. Mathews’ son; no amount of Beaux-Arts-ing it, no amount of rising-young-architect-ing it, could alter that blessed fact.