Kitabı oku: «The House of Armour», sayfa 8

The gravely watchful dog that had walked into the room behind his mistress, and lay curled on the floor beside her, saw nothing hostile in the man’s attitude, and beyond keeping an observing eye upon him took no measures to make him retreat.

Not so sensible was the woman behind the door. For some reason or other she was highly displeased with the proceeding of the young man. Springing upon him as silently and as stealthily as a wild beast of the cat tribe would have done, she hissed in his ear, “Not for you to look at, Camaro; back! back!” and she motioned him to his seat.

He had reached the obstinate stage of drunkenness, and though a little fear of her shone out of his black and beady eyes, he shrugged his shoulders carelessly, and said in Italian, “Presently, presently, my lady.”

“Not presently, but now,” said the woman in pure and correct English, and having taken enough of the fiery liquor to be thoroughly quarrelsome, she threw herself upon him, dragged him to a corner where, when Stargarde turned around, she was quietly and persistently beating him with a stick of wood that she had caught from beside the stove.

Her husband sat stupidly watching her from the table, his hand going more and more frequently to the jug; and her victim, making not the slightest effort to withstand her, lay taking his beating as a submissive child might resign itself to deserved punishment from a parent.

“Stop, stop!” exclaimed Stargarde, hurrying to her side. “That’s enough, Zeb’s mother”—and throwing her cloak back over her shoulders she laid her hand on the woman’s club.

“He insulted you,” exclaimed the woman in maudlin fury, “I shall punish him.”

Stargarde towered above her, strong and firm and beautiful, and would not release her. “Who are you?” she said in surprise. “You speak Italian and French, and now good English; I thought you were Zeb’s mother.”

“So I be,” said the woman sulkily, relapsing into inelegant language, and pulling her hair over her eyes so that Stargarde could not see her features distinctly. “Here, give me that stick,” and seeing that Stargarde would not obey her, she began beating the man with her fists.

“Oh, this is dreadful,” gasped Stargarde, holding her back and gazing around the room, half choked by the heat, which was bringing out and developing a dozen different odors, each fouler than the last. “How can I leave Zeb here? Give me the child, won’t you?” she said pleadingly to the woman.

“No, no,” and a stream of foreign ejaculations and asseverations poured from the woman’s lips, in which the man at the table, comprehending dully what was said, hastened to add his quota.

Stargarde turned to look at him, and found that he was fondling tenderly a little monkey that had crept to his bosom. She remembered hearing Zeb say that her father loved his monkey and would feed it if they all had to go hungry.

“Sweet, Pedro, thou art beautiful,” he murmured, and Stargarde seeing that he cared nothing for the friend whom his wife was so unmercifully beating, knew that she must not relax in her protection of the unfortunate one, or there might be broken bones, and possibly loss of life before morning.

“You were kind to want to protect me,” she said, catching the woman’s wrists in her hands and holding them firmly; “but you should not beat the man. He would not have hurt me. I am never afraid of drunken people. See, I will take him away from you,” and sliding her hand under the little man’s shirt collar she slipped him swiftly over the floor to the doorway. Strong and muscular, and a trained athlete though she was a woman, she did easily in cool blood what the other woman had only been able to do in her rage.

Zeb’s mother precipitating herself upon her, hindered her from opening the door, till Zeb sprang from the bed and addressed her unreasoning parent in an eager jargon, in which Stargarde knew she plainly told her of the evil consequences which would arise from the indulgence of her wrath.

The woman, not too far gone to be amenable to reason, came so quickly to her daughter’s view of the matter that she even gave the now insensible man several helping kicks to assist Stargarde in dragging him out into the hall. Stargarde going ahead, slid him down the few steps to the next landing, where she laid his head on a bed of snow, and bound her handkerchief around an ugly cut on his wrist.

Before she finished, the woman exclaimed at the cold wind sweeping through the hall, and went into the room; but Zeb remained, watching and shivering, though she had on all the clothes she had worn through the day.

“Zeb,” exclaimed Stargarde passionately, looking up at her, “how can I leave you here? I shall not sleep to-night for thinking of you.”

The child shrugged her shoulders, but said nothing.

“Will you not come with me, darling?” said Stargarde. “I think your mother would give you up.”

“Yer’ll marry that–” Zeb scorned to bestow a name upon him; “then where’ll I find myself?”

“My present plan is to live always in the Pavilion,” said Stargarde firmly; “and Zeb, I want you with me.”

Zeb relented a little. “I’ll see yer to-morrer,” she observed at length. “I’m tired o’ this kind o’ thing,” pointing contemptuously at the prostrate man.

“And Zeb,” continued Stargarde, as the girl showed signs of leaving her, “do open a window in there; the air is stifling.”

Zeb chuckled. “So I does, every night. In an hour them,” with a jerk of her finger over her shoulder, “will be sound off. Then I jumps up and opens both winders, ’cause I likes fresh air. Goodnight to ye,” and with a farewell glance at Stargarde she slammed the crazy door behind her and went into the room.

CHAPTER XV
A LOST MOTHER

Stargarde, lifting up her eyes and seeing that she was alone, hurried down the steps to the next floor, to a room belonging to a boys’ club.

“Password,” muttered a sepulchral voice when she tapped lightly on the door panels.

“Good boys,” she returned with a laugh. It was not the password. “Death to the traitor,” was the signal for the night; but they knew her voice, and a boy opened the door and slipped out.

“How do you do, Mike?” she said cheerfully; “can’t you let me in?” He hesitated and she went on, “I want to see how your club room looks. Don’t you want a new stove, and some chairs and pictures? I know where you could get some, if you do.”

The boy’s pale face brightened. “Hold on,” he ejaculated; “I’ll tell ’em.”

He insinuated himself back into the room through the very narrowest possible space; there was a sound of shuffling of furniture, and quickly moving feet, then he told her she might enter. The atmosphere of the room was thick with smoke; they could not clear that away, though a window had been hastily opened, and the pure, cold air streamed in through the dusky atmosphere.

Boys’ heads shone out of the cloud—not big boys, but half-grown ones, boys who drove small coal carts about the city—all noticeable by their universal blackness of hair and whiteness of faces recently washed. There was a good fire in the stove; poor people will go hungry before they will go cold, she knew that. Of books, games, anything to amuse the lads, she saw nothing. A few empty boxes for seats were set about the stove. On one of them a forgotten knave of clubs lay on his back ruefully staring in the direction his fellows had gone, marked by a suspicious bulge in the pocket of one of the oldest lads present.

“Good-evening, Harry, Jim, Joe, Will,” said Stargarde, nodding gayly, and mentioning all of the boys in the room by name. “What about the act respecting the use of tobacco by minors?” and she began to quote in a lugubrious tone of voice, “‘Any person who either directly or indirectly sells or gives or furnishes to a minor under eighteen years of age, cigarettes, cigars, or tobacco in any form, shall in summary conviction thereof be subject to a penalty of not less than ten dollars.’” She broke off there, for the boys were all smiling at her.

“Aren’t you glad I’m not a policeman?” she said. “Come now, boys, let us make a bargain. Pipes in the fire, and I’ll furnish the room. I was just speaking to Mike about it.”

The president, a lad rather more respectably dressed than the others, stepped forward. “Will you give us your terms in writing?” he said.

Stargarde smiled. “Too much red-tapeism,” laying her hand on his shoulder. “You all hear, boys; I’ll make this the nicest boys’ club in Halifax if you’ll throw away your tobacco, pipes, cigars, etc.”

“For how long?” asked the president cautiously.

“Say for a year. Then if you’re not healthier, happier boys, I’ll be greatly mistaken. Try it for a year, and if you are worse off without tobacco than with it, go back to it by all means.”

“A year isn’t long,” he replied, turning to his associates. “What is the opinion of the club?”

“Hurrah for Miss Turner!” said a lad, pressing forward enthusiastically.

“Make me an honorary member, Mike,” said Stargarde so quickly in the ear of the boy who let her in that he thought it was his own suggestion, and immediately proposed her. There was a show of hands, and the thing was done.

Stargarde thanked them, promised a supply of books and papers, then said earnestly: “There’s a little matter I wish to mention, boys. In the hall out here lies a man with some bruises that want attending to. Can some of you look after him for a few days? Keep him here and come to me for whatever you want, and take good care of him, for he’s a friend of mine.”

She had scarcely finished when two lads were detailed for duty and were stealing up the steps. Her friends were pretty well known, and when she had one in trouble, others of her friends were always willing to assist her.

When the boys found that the man was a foreigner and unknown to them, they were filled with an important sense of mystery. A course of blood-and-thunder novel reading had prepared them for just such an event as this, and for some days they took turns in guarding the unfortunate man, who had received even a worse pounding than Stargarde had imagined, nursing him secretly, and feasting him on the daintiest morsels that the Pavilion restaurant afforded.

“Oh, how good the poor are to each other; how good they are!” murmured Stargarde, as she languidly descended from the club room and rejoined her patient lover. “Yes, I am tired, Brian,” she said wearily, as she slipped her hand through his arm; “tired, but not with bodily fatigue. I am tired of the temptations to sin. It seems as if the Evil One is perpetually casting a net about our feet. No one is exempt. But the poor! oh, the poor! it is hardest for them. How can they be good when they are ground down by the perpetual struggle for bread in miserable surroundings, and worse than that, worse than that,” and her voice sank to a low wail, “the temptation that is always before them—nay, forced upon them—to drink deep and forget their misery.”

They were passing the old Clock Tower, situated on the Citadel Hill. Camperdown looked up at its impenetrable face. “Sin and misery have been in the world ever since it began,” he said hopelessly; “always will be till it ends.”

“Ah, but what a grand thing to put a stop to a little of the sin and iniquity!” exclaimed the woman, turning up to the stars her bright and eager face. “That is one’s only consolation.”

“I wish you would not walk along the street with your face turned up in that way,” was Camperdown’s unexpected and jealous reply. They had just passed two soldiers who stared curiously at the beautiful woman on his arm, and just as he spoke a girl standing in a near doorway with an apron flung over her head made a saucy remark with regard to Stargarde to a broad-shouldered workman standing by her.

“Hist,” said the man angrily; “you’re new here, or you’d know who that is,” and he took off his cap as Stargarde passed by. “There’s hands as’ll be raised to slap your mouth, woman as you be,” he continued half apologetically to the girl as the two people went by, “if you dares to pass a word agin her. She’s the poor man’s friend. She’s always with ’em, sick an’ dyin’ and dead. She put my old mother in a handsome coffin–” and he broke off abruptly.

Camperdown and Stargarde were walking slowly so that they heard every word that had been said. “Brian,” she said passionately, “do you hear that? and can you still want me to live only for pleasure and society? Oh, how dare you? how can you? Shame to you, Brian!” and the very stars seemed to have got tangled in the glitter and radiance and unearthly beauty of the eyes that she turned upon him.

He looked at her, growled something in a low, happy voice that she could not hear, then said dryly, “Hadn’t you better give me my pocketbook?”

She stopped short. “How stupid I am; pray forgive me. Here it is,” and she handed it to him. “How did you know that I had it?”

“By your face,” he said shortly.

“I wonder who Zeb’s mother is?” said Stargarde, as they walked slowly on. “She talks like a lady at times. I must find out. There’s a mystery about them that I can’t fathom. They’ve been dwellers in big cities. They’re not like our poor people, Brian. I wonder; I wonder–” and still wondering she arrived at her own doorway.

“You’re crying!” exclaimed Camperdown, when he put out his hand to say good-bye to her. “What’s the matter?”

“I am thinking about my mother,” she replied in a low, distressed voice. “Is it not strange, Brian, that I hear nothing of her? From the day that I heard I had a mother till now, I have searched for her. Yet I can hear nothing from her; neither can any one that I employ.”

Her voice failed, and with a heavy sob she dropped her head on her breast.

Camperdown looked at her in obvious distress. She so seldom gave way; he could see that she was suffering extremely. “Don’t cry, Stargarde; don’t cry,” he said uneasily. “It will all come out right. We may find her yet.”

“I am a coward,” said the woman, suddenly lifting her moist, beautiful eyes to his face; “but sometimes I can’t help it, Brian; it overcomes me. I never sit by a sick-bed, I never kneel by a dying person without thinking of her. Where is she? Is there some one to care for her? Perhaps she is cold and hungry and ill. Her body may be suffering, and her soul too, her immortal soul. Oh, that is what distresses me. She was not doing right—we know that.”

“There is one thing I know,” he said decidedly, “and that is that you’ll do no work to-morrow if you spend the night in fretting over what can’t be helped. Come, take some of your own medicine. The Lord knows what is best for you; go on with what you have to do and wait his time.”

She brightened perceptibly. “Thank you, Brian, for reminding me. Good-night, my dear brother, always kind and good to me,” and pressing gently the hand that still held her own, she gave him a farewell smile and went slowly into her rooms.

CHAPTER XVI
THE COLONIAL COTTAGE

Stanton Armour was a man who dwelt apart from other men as far as his inner life was concerned. A large number of people saw him going daily to his office; a smaller number had business dealings with him; a select few had an occasional conversation with him in the privacy of his own house; and of the outer man those people could give a very good description.

Of the inner man they knew but little. Wrapped in an impenetrable, frozen reserve, it was impossible to tell what was going on in the hidden recesses of his mind, except at some occasional times when he exhibited a flicker of interest or annoyance at something that was transpiring about him.

His reputation was that of an honorable, upright man, yet he was a person to be respected and avoided rather than cultivated and admired.

There were a few people—discerning souls—who looked deeper than this and even felt pity for the man. They said that his state of frozen composure was unnatural, and that there was somewhere a reason for it; he had received some shock, he had a secret trouble, or had been disappointed in love, or had in some way lost faith in his fellow-men, or perhaps, it was hinted, his brain might be affected. It was a well-known fact that he had been a cheerful lad, a little sober in his ways, inasmuch as he had begged his father to take him from school and give him a seat in his office, yet still a lad happy and companionable in his tastes, and showing no sign of the prematurely grave and reserved man that he was so suddenly to become.

This change in him dated from the time that the firm suffered so heavily from the defalcations of the French bookkeeper, and most people believed that this was the true cause of Stanton Armour’s peculiarities. He had been very much attached to the Frenchman, and his sudden falling into crime had given him a terrible shock. And stepping into the disgraced man’s shoes as soon as he did, would have been an occurrence to sober a much more flighty lad than he had ever been. From the day of Étienne Delavigne’s departure, Stanton Armour in spite of his youth, had begun to take upon himself a strange interest and oversight of his father’s business, and in an incredibly short space of time was admitted to a partnership in the house.

As the years went by, though his father was still nominally head of the firm, he it was who managed all important transactions. Very quietly this went on, and only the devoted servants of the house saw the persistent pushing of the father out of the places of responsibility by his youthful, talented, and apparently intensely ambitious son.

Outsiders, when the fact became impressed upon them, supposed it was Colonel Armour’s good pleasure that his son should be master in place of himself, but such was not the case. The head of the house had been primarily a man of pleasure, but he also loved his business, and had thrown himself into it with a zeal and relish and a skill for making money that had made him the envy and despair of men less fortunate than himself. Then, after the lapse of years, he found himself quietly excluded from the excitements of business life. His son reigned while he was yet alive. He resented this at first, with a wickedness and fury and a sense of impotence that had at times made him feel like a madman, but in late years more wisdom had come to him, and for Stanton to mention a thing was to have his father’s ready acquiescence.

The members of the family and intimate friends of the house knew that there was no sympathy between father and son, and very little intercourse. They rarely spoke to each other, except in the presence of strangers. Stanton was master in the business and master at home. He occupied the seat of honor at the table, and his father was as a guest. Colonel Armour did not even sleep under his own roof, though this was his own doing, and of his usual place of sojourn we have to speak.

The grounds at the back of Pinewood sloped gradually down to that beautiful inlet of the sea—the Northwest Arm. Behind the house were on the one side, a flower garden, a tennis lawn, and a boat house; and on the other a semicircular stretch of pines, that began in front of the house, and with a growth of smaller evergreens formed a thick, wedge-shaped mass down to the water’s edge.

A few places there were where lanes had been cut among the trees and gravel walks formed. The broadest of the walks led to a handsome cottage, where dwelt Colonel Armour, at such times as he was neither away from home, nor up at the large house, his usual attendant being a Micmac Indian rejoicing in the name of Joe Christmas.

Joe would not sleep under the roof of a substantially built house. That would be too great a stretch of Indian devotion. The Micmacs do not take kindly to indoor life, and every night when his day’s work was done, Joe paddled himself in his small canoe across the Arm, where he had a solitary wigwam among the firs and spruces of a bit of woodland belonging to the Armours.

Valentine Armour made a constant jest of the Indian’s wildwood habits. “Plenty trees, Joe,” he would say, pointing to the pines about the house. “Build wigwam here.”

“No, no;” and Joe would shake his head, and show his tobacco-stained teeth in amusement. “Too near big house. Too much speakum.”

Joe’s connection with Colonel Armour arose from the fact that he had been his guide in many a hunting excursion in years gone by, and had found the colonel so indulgent a master that at last he had formed the habit of following him home in the late autumn, and establishing himself near him till the hunting season came around again.

He was a good cook, and he would occasionally condescend to perform household tasks, an unusual favor from a Micmac. He also had charge of the boat house, and at times, by a great stretch of courtesy, would render some slight assistance to the gardener or coachman.

He was an easy-going, pleasure-loving Indian, rather tall of stature, with olive skin, the dark, searching eyes of his race, and thick, black hair reaching to the back of his neck, and there cut squarely across. At a distance there was a ridiculous resemblance to his master about him, owing to his habit of arraying himself in Colonel Armour’s cast-off garments. In common with other Micmacs of the present day, he despised the skins and blankets of his forefathers and aped the fashions of the white man.

None of the house servants ever liked him. He was “creepy and crawly in his ways,” they said, and though nothing could be proved against the good-natured, mild-spoken Christmas, certain it was that he knew quite well of the race prejudice that existed against him, and any man-servant or maid-servant who carried matters with too high a hand invariably departed with suspicious haste from the service of the Armours. They received a fright, or had an illness, or suddenly made up their minds that they would leave without formulating any complaint—in short they always went, and the Indian if remonstrated with at all, only shook his head, and ventured a long-drawn “Ah—h,” of surprise, that he should be so misunderstood.

He professed not to mind the cold weather, but in reality he hated it, and during the winter days he spent most of his time in the cheerful kitchen at the cottage, where before a blazing fire on the old-fashioned hearth, he made and mended flies, fishing rods, bows and arrows, and inspected and polished the various instruments of steel designed to create havoc among beasts, birds, and fishes during the next hunting season.

A few days before Christmas, while Joe was squatting before his fire, Dr. Camperdown was driving leisurely out to Pinewood.

There had been during the preceding day a heavy fall of snow. Arriving inside the lodge gates, Dr. Camperdown heard a sound of merry laughter and shouting before him.

A number of young people in red, white, or blue blanket costumes were careering over the snow before him; and ejaculating, “A snowshoeing party! Flora always has something going on,” he gave Polypharmacy an encouraging “Hie on,” and made haste to join them.

As he caught up with the last stragglers of the party, he was inwardly pleased to see Vivienne among them.

“Had a good tramp?” he asked, after responding to her gay greeting.

“Delightful!” she exclaimed, her cheeks a blaze of color. “We’ve been across the Arm and to Dutch Village, and now we’re coming in to have afternoon tea—and I haven’t had a tumble yet,” and as she spoke she gave a coquettish push to the toque on the back of her head, and looked at him over her shoulder.

“But you’re just going to have one,” he said, “take care.”

It was too late—she had pushed the front of her long snowshoe too far into a drift, and down she went, with an exclamation of surprise, and sending up a cloud of white, powdery flakes above her.

Captain Macartney, who was her escort, made haste to assist her to her feet, and she got up laughing and choking, her mouth full of snow, her black hair looking as if it had been powdered.

“We’re all too lively,” she cried, beating her mittens together; “our tramp hasn’t taken enough out of us—just hear them shouting over there, and see me run,” she vociferated, frolicking off on her snowshoes with a gayety and wildness that made her companion hurry after her, dragging his larger appendages along more heavily, giving an occasional hop to facilitate his progress, and crying warningly, “’Ware snowdrifts, Miss Delavigne. You’ll be down again.”

Down again she was, and up again before he got to her, and with some other members of the merry party sliding down a steep snowbank before the house. Then they joined a group below them busily engaged in arranging a set of lancers before the drawing-room windows.

“Dance my children, dance,” called Flora approvingly, and in a lower key to Valentine Armour, “Unfasten my thongs quick, Val. I wish to go in and see if the maids have everything ready.”

The young man went down on one knee, and bent his head over her snowshoes. He was in a costume of white, bordered by delicate pink and blue stripes. A picture of young, manly beauty he was, his black eyes sparkling, his cheeks glowing, the white-tasseled cap pulled down over the closely cropped hair, that would have been in waving curls all over his head had he allowed it to grow.

Judy, from a window above, was watching the progress of the dance. The couples stood opposite each other, then floundering and plunging through the snow, essayed to form figures more or less involved.

Many falls, inextricable confusion, and much laughter ensued, then the attempt was given up. Unfastening their snowshoes they filed gayly into the house. Dr. Camperdown watched them out of sight, the smile on his face dying away, as his keen eyes caught sight of poor, mis-shapen little Judy, half-hidden behind the window curtains, her face convulsed with envy and annoyance. Such amusements were not for her. She never would be strong and well like other girls.

Dr. Camperdown’s gaze softened. Springing from his sleigh, he anchored Polypharmacy to a snowdrift, and casting off his huge raccoon coat, like an animal shedding its skin, he took a book from a pocket in it, and made his way to the drawing room.

Divans, ottomans, and arm-chairs were full of young people, chatting, laughing, and telling jokes over their tea and coffee, sandwiches and cake.

“I believe you young people laugh all the time,” he grumbled good-naturedly, coming to a halt in the middle of the room, and surveying them from under his eyebrows. “Girls especially—always giggling.”

“How old are you, dear doctor?” exclaimed a pretty girl of seventeen, looking saucily up into his face. “Is it a thousand or two thousand? I’m only twenty,” and she made an audacious face at her teacup.

“Silly girl,” and the man looked down kindly at her; “silly girl. Where is Judy Colonibel? She is the only sensible one in this party. Judy, Judy; where are you?”

“I don’t know where she has bestowed herself,” said Mrs. Colonibel complainingly. “She could be of assistance to me if she were here. Won’t you find her, Brian?”

Camperdown went out into the hall, and lifted up his voice. “Judy, I have a present for you.”

She appeared then—hobbling along over the carpet with childish eagerness.

"It is that rara avis, a Canadian novel," said Camperdown. “The glittering romance of the ‘Golden Dog.’ See the picture of him. Gnawing a man’s thigh bone. Looks as if he enjoyed it. Read the French, Judy.”

The girl bent her head over the book and read slowly:

 
“Je suis un chien qui ronge l’ os,
En le rongeant je prends mon repos.
Un temps viendra qui n’ est pas venu
Que je mordrai qui m’ aura mordu.”¹
 
 
“I am a dog that gnaws his bone,
And while he’s gnawing takes his rest;
In time not yet, but yet to come,
Who’s bitten me, I’ll bite with zest.”
 

“Hateful words,” said Dr. Camperdown, “and a hateful tragedy. When you go to Quebec, Judy, you’ll see the dog tablet there yet. But you needn’t go out of Halifax for Golden Dogs. Bitten ones there are here, plenty of them, gnawing bones and waiting a chance to bite back. You’ve got your own Golden Dog, you Armours,” he added under his breath.

Then surveying critically the young girl whose face was buried in the volume, “Body here, Judy—mind already back to time of Louis Quinze. Don’t read so steadily, you small bookworm. Remember your eyes. Better, aren’t they?”

“No; worse,” said the girl impatiently.

“Go and help your mother, won’t you? She needs you.”

“She can get on without me,” sullenly. “I have to do without her,” and pulling her hand from him, she made as though she would go upstairs. Suddenly she stopped, and eyed him curiously. She was struck by the intentness of his glance. “What are you thinking of?” she asked.

“Of a poor child—younger than you, called Zeb. When you’re disagreeable you look like her.”

She smiled disdainfully, and began to limp upstairs. “Judy,” he called after her, “where’s the colonel? He likes this sort of thing,” with a gesture in the direction of the drawing room.

“He’s not well,” said Judy with a meaning smile. “Mamma sent for him, but he’s dining early in the seclusion of the cottage. Good-bye, and thank you for the book,” and she took herself upstairs with such haste that he could not have recalled her had he wished to do so.

“Poor girl,” he muttered; “books her only comfort. Glad Flora isn’t my mother,” and with this sage reflection, he rammed his fur cap over his ears, turned up his coat collar, and opening a door at the back of the hall, crossed a veranda, went down a flight of steps, and struck into a path cut through the drifted snow, and leading down to the cottage.

It was very quiet under the pines. There was only a faint breath of wind, ruffling occasionally a few flakes of snow from the feathery armfuls held out by the flat, extended branches of the evergreens. Everything was pure and spotless. The white path that he followed was almost untrodden. The stars blinked down through fleecy clouds on an earth that for once was clean and without stain.

The lights from the cottage streamed out through the windows and lay in colored bands on the banks of snow. Dr. Camperdown paused an instant in the shadows of the trees as some one approached one of the windows and propped open a variegated square of glass.