A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Miss Bishop (1933)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich
eBook No.:  0500431h.html
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          May 2005
Date most recently updated: May 2005

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MISS BISHOP

by

Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954

1933

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream. In 1856 the dream became an incorporated reality. Ten years later a rambling village with a long muddy Main Street and a thousand souls welcomed back its Civil War boys. And by 1876 it was sprawling over a large area with the cocksure air of a new midwestern town fully expecting to become a huge metropolis. If all the high hopes of those pioneer town councilors had been fulfilled, the midwest to-day would be one grand interlocking of city streets. As it is, hundreds of little towns grew to their full size of two or five or ten thousand, paused in their growth, and admitted that none of them by taking Chamber-of-Commerce thought could add one cubit to its stature.

So Oak River, attaining the full strength of its corporeal self some years ago, has now settled down into a town of ten thousand, quite like a big boy who realizes that the days of his physical growth are over, and proceeds to look a bit to the development of his mind and his manners.

The chief source of the big boy's pride is the school,--Midwestern College. It stands at the edge of town in a lovely rolling campus, sweet-smelling in the springtime from its newly cropped blue-grass and white clover, colorful in the autumn from the scarlet and russet and gold of its massive trees,--a dozen or more pompous buildings arranged in stately formation, a campanile lifting its clock faces high to the four winds, a huge stadium proudly gloating over its place in the athletic sun. Concrete driveways and sidewalks curve through the green of elms and maples, and young people walk or drive over them continually,--a part of that great concourse of Youth forever crossing the campuses of the world.

Until last summer, an ancient brick building known as Old Central Hall stood in the very middle of the group of fine modern structures, like a frowzy old woman, wrinkled and gray, surrounded by well-groomed matrons. A few mild-spoken people referred to the building as quaint, the frank ones called it ugly--but whenever there was talk of removing it, a host of sentimental alumni arose en masse and exclaimed: "What! Tear down Old Central?" And as the college board consisted one hundred per cent of alumni, Old Central continued to sit complacently on, year after year, in the center of the quadrangle, almost humanly impudent in attitude toward the rest of the buildings.

To several thousand people it was so familiar, so much a vital part of their lives, that when, last spring, a regretful board guiltily sounded the death knell, many more alumni than usual arrived on the campus at Commencement time, quite like children called home to see a mother on her deathbed.

Those who had not seen her for several years found her worn and cracked and disgracefully shabby, with her belfry half removed and extra pillars placed in the dismantled auditorium for safety's sake. But, even so, there were two or three present who recalled that like any other aged soul who has outlived her usefulness, she had once been as strong and bright and gay as a bride. That had been in 1876, when Oak River itself was still young.

On the sixth of September of that year, so important to the thirty-two young people entering the new hall for the first time, the building rose like a squatty lighthouse on a freshwater lake, for it stood in the center of forty acres of coarse prairie grass bent to the earth with the moisture of a three-day drenching rain.

It was still raining dismally at eight o'clock on that Wednesday morning--a low monotonous drizzle that turned the new campus into a sea--a Red Sea, for that matter, as the brick dust around the newly erected building made of the soggy ground a rust-colored mud. Wheelbarrows leaned tipsily against the new walls. Mortar boxes held miniature chalky pools. The approach to the big doors, unpainted as yet, was up an incline with wooden cleats nailed on it, upon which the girls in their flowing ruffled skirts tottered so perilously that their long thin hoops quivered up and down in rhythmic sympathy.

Inside, a few potential students stood about in the hall, which was almost too dark for any one of them to get an enlightening look at his neighbor. The newly plastered walls were scarcely dry, so that the atmosphere here was seemingly as moist as that without.

Chris Jensen, a young Dane, just starting out on his janitor duties, stood solemnly at the doorway with a broom, and after the entrance of each young neophyte, brushed out puddles of muddy water with the air of having swept a part of the River of Sorrows out of the infernal regions.

The first comers all watched him soberly. No one said anything. Everyone was cold, the huge coils of pipes around the rooms having as yet no intimate relation to any heating plant. All was as merry as a burial service.

Then a young girl opened the door and blew in on a gust of rain-filled wind. An expansive smile from a wide cheerful mouth greeted the assembled mourners as she gave one sweeping glance toward them all.

Chris Jensen, with broom poised for her entrance, grinned cheerfully back, his pale eyes lighting with responsive mirth.

"Velcome to school," he said in Danish accent and lowered the threatening weapon. It was the first word he had uttered during the whole moist morning.

With the girl's coming some new element entered the room, as though a bright pigment had suddenly been used on a sepia picture.

She was not pretty. One could scarcely say what it was that set her apart from the others,--humor, vitality, capability, or some unknown characteristic which combined them all. It was as though she said: "Well, here I am. Let's begin."

Removing shining rubbers and a dripping brown cape with a plaid hood at the back, she placed them in the hallway that gave forth a strong rubbery odor, and came up to the other students.

She had on a long plaid dress, brown and red, over narrow hoops, with ruffles curving from the bottom of her skirt up to the back of her waist, and a tight-fitting basque brave with rows of brass buttons marching, soldier-like, four abreast, across the front. Her hair was piled high in the intricate coiffure of the day and drawn back into curls.

She gave one look at the funereal expressions of the assembled embryonic collegians. One girl, highly overdressed in a green velveteen suit, was shedding copious tears into the expensive lace of a large handkerchief.

"What are we waiting for?" the newcomer said with some asperity. "Let's go on in."

Like sheep, the whole group, under the new bell-wether's leadership, tagged meekly after her into the assembly room--a room so huge that the wildest optimism of the most progressive of Oak River's citizenry could scarcely conceive a day when it would be filled with youth.

A young instructor sat at a desk just inside the door, two others were consulting by a window. Everything about the young man at the desk was thin. He had a thin body, a high thin forehead, a long thin nose, a thin mustache of recent raising straggling over a thin-lipped mouth. A blank book, very large and very white, was open in front of him over which he held a pen poised for action.

He appeared so timid in the face of the situation that when he managed to emit, "Will some one please start the enrollment?" the girl looked about her inquiringly and then marched sturdily up to the sacrificial altar as it were.

"Your name?"

He looked so embarrassed that the merry eyes of the girl half closed in crinkling humor and she stifled silent laughter.

"Ella Bishop," she said demurely.

He wrote it with great flourishes, his hand making many dizzy elliptical journeys before it settled down to an elaborate "E" with a curving tail as long as some prehistoric baboon's.

When he had finished the lengthy and intricate procedure, he paused and asked shyly:

"Your age?"

"Sixteen."

As this was executed in the less spectacular figures, it did not consume quite so much time.

"Residence?"

"Oak River, now . . ." And in further explanation, "We just moved in from the farm--my mother and I--and settled here."

"I see. On what street, please?"

"Adams Street--half way between Tenth and Eleventh."

He looked up as though at a startling piece of news. "Why . . . why . . . that's right across the street from me." And flushed to his thin forehead.

The green velveteen girl, who had been weeping continuously, suddenly tittered, a bit hysterically.

By this time the timid one had been joined by another instructor, evidently for monetary reasons, so that immediately there was a flutter of pockets and bags,--one big-boned German boy extracting gold coin with difficulty from the lining of his homemade coat, while a freckled girl of apparent Scotch lineage turned abruptly to the wall and deftly removed a roll of bills from some unknown source in the region of her left lung.

When the last name had been entered by Professor Samuel Peters' agile pen with much shading of downward strokes and many extra corkscrew appendages, the president called the students to order in the church-pew seats of the huge assembly room, in which immensity the little company seemed lost.

The faculty consisted of four instructors besides President Corcoran. They were Professor Loren Wick, mathematics, brown-whiskered and paunchy, with a vague suggestion of his last lunch somewhere on his vest,--Professor Byron Carter, grammar and literature, small and nervous, with gray goatee, eyeglasses and a black cord,--Miss Emmaline Patton, geography and history, a solid appearing woman, both as to physique and mentality,--as though an opinion once formed became a necessary amendment to the laws of the Medes and the Persians,--and the thin, embarrassed Samuel Peters, he of the coquettish pen, who was to teach spelling and the intricacies of the Spencerian method of writing.

These now with President Corcoran, who was to teach a mysterious subject called Mental and Moral Philosophy, filed up on the rostrum and sat down in a solemn row. Evidently the transmission of knowledge was to be a melancholy procedure. The girl, Ella Bishop, felt her heart pounding tumultuously with the formality of the occasion. The green velveteen girl mopped seeping moisture diligently.

A new reed organ with many carved cupids and gingerbread brackets stood at one side of the rostrum. President Corcoran, a short plump man whose kindly face was two-thirds hidden behind a duck-blind of beard, indicating the musical instrument, asked if any one could play, whereupon the green velveteen girl, having foreseen the possibility of this very prominence (and hence the velveteen) dried her eyes and volunteered with some alacrity.

Shortly, the assembled students were singing "Shall We Gather at the River?" and any one glancing out of the high Gothic windows with prairie adaptations, where the rain splashed and ran dismally down, could have answered honestly, "No doubt we shall."

There was prayer, in which the president informed the Lord of the current events of the morning, including the exact number of matriculations, and then, suddenly, abandoning statistics, asked fervently for divine love and light and guidance in the lives of these young people, which latter part of the petition seemed somehow to reach immediately the place for which it was intended.

When he had finished, there was an announcement or two, a reading of many and stringent rules with penalties attached thereto for nonconformity, and another song of such dry characteristics as might counteract the moisture of the first one:

". . . In deserts wild
Thou spreadest a table for thy child."

Then classes--and Midwestern College was fairly launched.

CHAPTER II

The girl, Ella Bishop, entered whole-heartedly into this first convocation of the new college,--as indeed she would have entered into anything, an auction sale or an Irish wake. Morning classes for her followed one another in rather sketchy fashion. With a surreptitious flourish of many cold chicken legs, lunch at noon was consummated in a room politely termed the physical science laboratory, but whose apparatus consisted largely of a wobbly tellurian, a lung-tester, and a homemade air-pump which gave forth human-like sounds of torture. One group sat in the recitation seats, one on the edge of a long table, and a few girls under Ella's efficient management gathered in a friendly arrangement of chairs in a far corner. The instinct to run to cliques settles itself in the breast of every female child at birth.

Afternoon saw Ella in Miss Patton's class reciting a little vaguely concerning the inhabitants of South America, and in Professor Peters' class watching with fascinated wonder as he executed a marvelous blackboard sketch of a fish never known to any sea, with the modest assurance that they too could be in time as proficient as he--although once it did briefly occur to Ella to question what specific importance could be attached to the resultant accomplishment.

The close of day saw her at home in the modest wing-and-ell house "on Adams between Tenth and Eleventh," where her widowed mother was attempting to settle the furnishings.

She removed her wet things and slipped into another dress which strangely enough was made of the same plaid goods as the one she had worn to school. A mystified onlooker could not have known that Ella's father, before his death, had taken over two bolts of cloth from a merchant at Maynard in payment for a horse--and that for several years now Ella's wardrobe had consisted entirely of red-and-brown plaid trimmed with blue serge, or blue serge trimmed with red-and-brown plaid.

"Shall I wear the pork and beans to-day, Mother, or the beans and pork?" she sometimes asked facetiously.

At which joking her mother's expression would become hurt and she would answer: "Oh, Ella . . . you shouldn't make fun . . . Father . . . the cloth . . . like that. . . ."

Mrs. Bishop seldom finished her sentences. She was so uncertain about everything, so possessed by a sense of helplessness since her husband's death, that at sixteen Ella had assumed management of the household and become the dictator of all plans.

Just now she accomplished more in the first half-hour of her brisk labor in the unsettled home than the mother had done in the whole day. She whisked things into place with marvelous dexterity, chattering all the time of the greatest event of her life,--her first day at the new college.

She could give the names of practically all the other thirty-one students. The big-boned German boy was George Schroeder. He had been a farmhand and could scarcely speak English. The small weazened-face boy who was so sharp at mathematics that Professor Wick had spoken about it was Albert Fonda, a Bohemian boy. He had told Professor Wick he wanted to study astronomy, and that nice Professor Wick had said he and Albert would have a class if there was no one in it but they two. The Scotch girl was Janet McLaughlin and she had made them all laugh by saying that she thought the day would come when cooking and sewing would be taught in schools. Imagine that,--things you could learn at home. The girl in the velveteen dress was Irene Van Ness, the banker's daughter, and she had cried because she didn't want to go to this school, but her father was one of the founders of it and had made her go. Irene was half-way engaged to Chester Peters, brother of the penmanship teacher, who went east to school,--the brother, she meant, not The Fish,--though how any one could be half-way engaged was more than she could understand.

Indeed, half-way measures were so unknown to Ella Bishop, that carried away by her own entertainment she was now imitating the instructors, describing her fellow students, impersonating Irene playing the organ so vividly that her mother laughed quite heartily before suddenly remembering there had been a bereavement in the family the past year.

The wing-and-ell house into which the two were moving sat behind a brown picket-fence not far back from the street. Two doors at right angles on the small porch opened into a dining-room and a parlor; the porch itself was covered with a rank growth of trumpet-vine. Inside, there were sale carpets tacked firmly over fresh oat straw, the one in the parlor was dark brown liberally sprinkled with the octagon-shaped figures to be found in any complete geometry, the one in the dining-room of red with specks of yellow on it looking like so many little pieces of egg yolk dropped from the table. The parlor contained an organ, a set of horsehair furniture of a perilous slipperiness, a whatnot, and in the exact center of the room a walnut table upon which Ella had arranged a red plush album, a stereoscope with its basket of views, and a plaster cast of the boy who is never quite able to locate the thorn in his foot. A plain house but striving to be in the mode of the day.

As Ella went now to the parlor door to shake out the crocheted tidies that belonged on the backs of the horsehair pieces, she glimpsed a young man walking slowly past the house in the rain and gazing intently at it. At the noise of the opening door he turned his head away suddenly and started walking faster down the street. "There he goes," she told her mother, "the young man whose pen is mightier than his swordfish." And laughed cheerfully at her own wit.

She watched from the shadow of the doorway and saw him cross the street, turn into the large yard with the two cast-iron deer, and go up the steps of the big red-brick house with the cupola on one corner.

"That's Judge Peters' house," Mrs. Bishop said, "the woman next door . . . was telling . . . The other son . . . She said . . . medicine or law . . . or something. . . ." Poor Mrs. Bishop, slipping through life, always half-informed, never sure of any statement.

"Yes, that's what I told you, Mother. Don't you remember? That fits in with what Irene Van Ness said--that she is half-way engaged to Chester Peters who is away at school and is coming home in a few years to go in his father's law office. This writing teacher's name is Sam, and Irene Van Ness says you never saw two brothers so different."

Ella's first day at school had been one containing many and varied bits of information. Keen, alert, the young girl was interested in every human with whom she came in contact.

On Thursday the rain had ceased, so that the short walk to school was a thing of delight. The college building sat so far back in the prairie pasture that at least half of Ella's journey was through the grass of the potential campus. It lay to the west of Oak River, near a winding prairie road running its muddy length at the south of the pasture and beyond. Oak Creek was to the north, a wandering gypsy of a stream, that after many vagaries of meandering, joined the river.

All of the keen senses of the girl were alive to the loveliness of the day and the joy of living. To her sight came the wide spaces of the prairie whose billowy expanse was broken only by clumps of trees which indicated the farmhouse of some early settler, and by the far horizon where the sky met the prairie like a blue-china bowl turned over a jade-colored plate. To her ears came the drone of Oak River's sawmill, the distant whirring of a prairie grouse, and the soft sad wail of mourning doves. To her nose the pungent odor of prairie grass and prairie loam after their drenching rain, and from the direction of the creek-bed the faint fragrance of matured wild crab-apples and hawthorn.

Plodding along through the flush grass she could see many of the new associates ahead of her wending their way up to this new Delphian oracle--this Greek temple with lightning-rods--the big-boned George Schroeder and the weazened little Albert Fonda and the Scotch Janet McLaughlin. A two-seated open carriage with prancing bays and jangling harness and swaying fly-nets came across the uneven ground and drew up beside her. An old colored man in a high silk hat was driving; Irene Van Ness was in the back seat.

"Come, get in," Irene called pleasantly. And Ella picked up her long ruffled plaid skirt and clutching it with her books, climbed up on the high seat beside her. Irene had on a blue silk dress with white pearl buttons and a flowing cape to match.

As the carriage bounced over the ground they passed a cow grazing near the building and when it snatched a greedy mouthful of the damp luscious prairie grass, Ella said: "That's Professor Wick's cow--and see how much like him she looks."

It set Irene to laughing--the cow gazing placidly at them over a great mouthful of grass, for all the world like Professor Wick looking calmly over his bushy whiskers.

Men were building the new wooden steps today, but placed the board with the cleats over the open framework for the two girls. Chris Jensen stood at the top and caught each one by the hand as she went teetering and giggling up the incline.

The day was something of a repetition of the first, without any of its depressing effects. Professor Wick conducted a class in experiments in which the human-voiced air-pump was the leading character, Professor Carter made an heroic attempt to initiate the novices into the mysteries of Chaucer, Miss Patton, coolly rearranging the year's outline to suit herself, moved deliberately out of South America into the British Isles, and young Sam Peters added a flourish of fins to his aquatic vertebrate. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

CHAPTER III

Ella Bishop, healthy, country-bred, alive to every fresh sensation, enjoyed her studies in the new college immensely, but to say that they were the least of her pleasures, is to admit that it was not that she loved her classes less, but that she loved her classmates more. Peculiarly a lover of human contacts, she brought to every day's work an exuberance of spirits, a zest for living, a natural friendliness toward every one in the little school, from President Corcoran to Chris Jensen.

Toward the new neighbors she felt also the same healthy curiosity and friendly spirit. On Friday morning of that first week Sam Peters caught up with her as she was leaving home and carried her books up the long straggling street and across the coarse prairie grass to school. For his shyness she had only sympathy, and when he confided to her that he was not particularly pleased with teaching but that his father had wanted him to try it, her heart quite ached for the unhappy appearing fellow.

On Saturday for the first time she saw Judge Peters leave the big brick house with the cupola on one corner like a stiff hat over one eye.

And to see Judge Peters leave the house and start down to his law office was almost like seeing an ocean liner leave dock. Swinging a cane without change of beat, he walked with a long slow gait as rhythmic as four-four time in music. He was tall, pompous, solemn. Black side-whiskers formed the frame for his face, a wide black cord connected his glasses with some strategic spot on his coat, black gloves added their share to the ensemble, a bit of red geranium in his buttonhole completed the work of art.

By October, when the Indian summer days had come, the judge and his wife, in the neighborly fashion of an early day, came one evening to call.

Mrs. Bishop had been making apple butter a little messily and inefficiently in the back yard all day. She had stirred the concoction in the iron kettle hanging by a chain over the fire, using a big wooden paddle, until, as she said, she was too tired to think. Having burned the last batch, she had left it in the kettle until Ella could come home to clean up the disagreeable mixture.

So when Judge and Mrs. Peters arrived, she was completely upset at the unexpected coming of so much grandeur. She fluttered about, removing her apron, pushing chairs a few inches from their original positions, picking at imaginary threads on the floor. Even at sixteen Ella was far more poised than her frail mother, undaunted by the pompous entrance of the Judge with his meek little wife in tow. Mrs. Peters wore a Paisley shawl and a black velvet bonnet with pansies outlining the rim and satin ties under her patient looking face.

"We came to pay our respects to the newcomers in our fair city," the Judge announced with pompous formality.

The little wife nodded meek assent--and Ella saw then how like his mother was the shy penmanship teacher.

The entire call was made in the manner for which the judge set the pace. So clothed was he in formal phrases, it seemed to Ella that he said everything the hardest and longest way. To remark that the weather was mild was really all he meant when he said that there had been a noticeable lack of inclemency in the activity of the elements.

Once he turned to Ella with exclusive attention: "You have no doubt made the acquaintance, at least in the capacity of student to instructor, of my elder son, Samuel?"

"Yes," Ella said, "oh yes, sir." Mercy, she thought, he is making me feel frightened, too. No wonder his little wife is cowed.

"You have no doubt heard ere this that I have a younger son, also." And before Ella had a chance to reply, he went on proudly: "A younger son, Chester, studying law at Winside--a bright scholarly lad--I may even go so far as to say brilliant. He will make of the law a thing of truth and beauty and justice."

"That's certainly nice, sir." One was not required to say much in his presence. He needed only an audience for his own bombastic speech.

"Chester and Sam are very different," he stated with no apparent loathness in comparing the two openly. Ella was sure she saw the little wife flush and draw back as though struck. "Chester has none of Sam's backwardness and timidity,--has much that Sam lacks."

And she felt an embarrassment for the mother she could scarcely control when he added:

"Sam is his mother,--Chester very like me. I am very proud of Chester. He will make a great lawyer,--yes, indeed,--a brilliant lawyer."

Ella was to remember that proudly reiterated statement years hence.

"I am very happy to hope, also, that Chester will some day bestow his hand and heart upon the daughter of my banker friend, thus uniting the old families of Peters and Van Ness."

So that was it, thought Ella--perhaps Irene's "half-way" engagement to Chester was merely an understanding between the families.

"I wouldn't like that," she thought. "When I'm engaged I want the man to love me for myself, and not for any other reason." Then she looked around the simple little parlor with the sale carpet and the cheap curtains, the horsehair furniture and the home-crocheted tidies and laughed to herself, "I guess he'll like me for just myself, all right."

After the call the man's egotism so lingered in her mind and the bald comparison of the two sons made such an impression upon her, that in the weeks to come she found herself forming a dislike of the younger Chester even before she had seen him,--feeling a relative compassion for the shy young instructor so earnestly teaching the swinging arm movements of his Spencerian writing.

A half dozen times that October he walked home from the college with her, so timidly, so self-effacingly, that in spite of laughing silently at his unattractive shyness, she felt a renewal of sympathy for him.

Her mother asked her about it: "This Sam Peters, Ella . . . do you . . . how do you . . . ? You see, he seems . . ."

"My word, Mother," she could always translate her mother's halting thoughts, "you don't think I especially like him, do you, just because of walking along the same way home?"

Her mother's eyes filled. "I don't suppose . . . I won't be staying with you . . . long, Ella. I'd like . . . if you could get settled . . ."

Ella ran to the frail little woman and clasped sturdy arms around her. "You're going to stay with me a long time, Mother. And I don't have to get settled yet for years and years."

Mrs. Bishop wiped her filling eyes with the corner of her apron. "Just so . . . you won't . . . an old maid . . . I wouldn't like . . ."

Ella threw back her head and laughed her hearty laughter. "Don't you worry. I won't be an old maid." Suddenly her voice dropped to a husky sweetness. "I have too many dreams for that, Mother. I think sometimes it is as though I am weaving at a loom with a spindle of hopes and dreams. And no matter, Mother, how lovely the pattern--no matter how many gorgeous colors I use,--always the center of it is . . . you know, . . . just a little house in a garden and red firelight and . . . the man I love . . . and children . . . and happiness. For me, Mother, that's the end of all dreaming."

CHAPTER IV

All that fall life in the young college was a never-ending journey of adventure for Ella Bishop. Full of vigor, her keen mind grasping for every advantage of her new surroundings, each morning with eager anticipation she donned either the blue-trimmed-with-plaid or the plaid-trimmed-with-blue and ventured forth upon the search for her own particular Holy Grail. But school life to this girl from the country was not only an avenue of approach to knowledge, but to that larger experience,--contacts with her fellow humans. She never lost interest in the most insignificant of her classmates,--held open house for them all in the chambers of her heart. "There isn't one of them but has some likable qualities," she told her mother.

"You're like your father, Ella," Mrs. Bishop would say with moist eyes. "I declare--he seemed . . . his friends . . . he knew every one . . . and then, to think . . ."

"Friends!" Ella always disregarded her mother's depressed attitude. "Do you know, Mother, I'd rather have friends than any amount of money."

Her mother managed a wan smile. "I guess . . . your wish, Ella . . . you'll get it . . . with Father gone . . . leastways, there'll never . . . there's no money now . . ."

So with an exuberance of spirits Ella went happily to school each morning through the lovely Indian summer of the midwest's October, with a few wild flowers still colorful in the prairie grass,--through the chilling rains of November when the mud-puddles on the way held white rims of ice,--and through the heavy December snows which sent the young Danish janitor out with a horse to break a path that the girls with their flowing skirts might get through the field.

At Christmas time Chester Peters came home, and Ella admitted with something akin to regret the superiority of the younger brother's charm. There were several social events of the community to which she was invited,--a masquerade party in the town hall, a more select one on New Year's Eve at Irene Van Ness's big home on Main Street, and a bob-sled ride to the town of Maynard, including an oyster supper while there. Chester Peters was Irene Van Ness's escort, although Ella told herself with reluctance that Chester did not appear to be a very ardent lover inasmuch as he paid far more attention to a holiday guest from away than to Irene. It was true that Irene was not pretty,--she was sallow and scrawny, and attempted to cover these discrepancies with a continual change of fine clothes. Poor Irene, with all her nice things she never appeared very attractive. No wonder she was merely "half-engaged" to Chester.

Ella went to the party at Irene's with Samuel Peters. And while he did not attract her in the least, in all honesty bored her, with her usual effervescent spirits she managed to have a grand time in spite of his rather depressing presence.

The big snows of winter melted, huge chunks slipping off the college roof so that every dash up the wide new wooden steps was a gamble with the back of one's neck the object in peril. Spring came on, a gorgeous creature, with the prairie campus turning to lush green as though a lovely new dress had been made for her, with wild roses trimming the green of the gown, with wild hawthorn buds for her hair, wild crab-apple blossoms to perfume her, and prairie larks to sing for her. Chris Jensen set out young elms and maples in two curving lines toward the door of the building, a huge half-ellipse of little switches a few yards apart, around each of which he placed a small barrel for protection. George Schroeder and Albert Fonda worked with him after school hours in order to help pay their tuition. When the three had finished, the tiny trees looked almost ludicrous, mere twigs hidden by a half-hundred pickle-kegs on the broad expanse of the prairie campus.

Spring turned to summer with the meadow-lark's voice stilled in the torrid heat and the prairie grass curing for the hay barn. All vacation Chris Jensen hauled water to the tiny trees, so that President Corcoran said to him: "Chris, when future generations sit under the great branches of towering elms and maples, they ought to think of you."

"Vell, py golly," Chris beamed with the praise, "I'll be den as old as Met'uselah, an' ve'll all be pickin' dill pickles off de trees."

The summer ended and school began.

While life for Ella the first year had been largely one of adjustment to the new conditions and getting acquainted, the second year proved to be one of greater growth with several constructive plans taking shape. For no sooner had a young men's debating society been formed, than Ella was champing at the bit. In her belief, no masculine student could tread paths over which his feminine colleagues might not go, and so largely through Ella's efforts in which she found her Man Friday in one Mary Crombie, the Minerva Society came into being.

They met once a week in the small room on the third floor into which President Corcoran allowed them to move,--and it was not noticeably surprising to any one that Ella was made the first president.

With Ella, six others composed the personnel of the charter membership--Irene Van Ness and Janet McLaughlin, the Scotch girl, homely and lovable, and Mary Crombie, frank and efficient--one Mina Gordon, little and lithe and gypsy-like, Emily Teasdale, the college beauty, and Evelyn Hobbs, soft-spoken and shyly humorous.

For several months the seven charter members composed the society in its entirety, but with the growth of self-assurance in speaking, in perpetrating their essays and original poems upon each other, came a desire for new worlds to conquer, and the exclusive bars were let down to admit six more Daughters of Wisdom.

Lusty debates were indulged in, which settled so far as they were able, the burning questions of Equal Suffrage, national party accomplishments, and the brighter effulgence of Rome or Athens.

On Friday afternoons when the secret business meetings were over and the doors opened to the proletariat, the small room on third which was the rendezvous for Minerva's handmaidens became the mecca for those outside the pale. Other girls arrived to listen to the pearls that dropped from the lips of the chosen few. Sometimes a group of the young men came also and caused much confusion as to the bringing in of extra chairs, and the fluttering of feminine pulses,--feminine pulses being as they were of a far more fluttery type in the late seventies than those of recent years.

Ella Bishop was in her element at these meetings. Whether she had the management of the entire program or the mere duty of slipping one-half of the black calico curtain across the rather shaky rod to meet its other half, she performed her task with deep fervor. Whether in the chair as president, handling with dictatorial power the noisy wooden potato-masher she had brought from home to serve as a gavel, or sitting humbly in the cold outside the door as sentinel, like some little Rhoda at the gate, she put all her energy into the duty. Her rival in managerial capacity was Mary Crombie whose high-powered energies took the form of a deep belligerency toward anything masculine. That woman would one day vote,--that woman would sometime hold office,--would compete with man,--this was her battle cry. The girls agreed with her in most instances, but the Friday afternoon on which she declared with widely sweeping arm gestures that some day a woman would sit in the cabinet at Washington, they all burst out into high girlish laughter at the absurdity.

A library was formed that year, and while it consisted in its entirety of Pilgrim's Progress, the plays of one William Shakespeare, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Swiss Family Robinson, Plutarch's Lives, Fox's Book of Martyrs, and the highly romantic and therefore thoroughly dog-eared Barriers Burned Away--it was indeed the nucleus of what eventually became a library of many thousand volumes.

The students were for the most part serious, studious, almost over-zealous. President Corcoran threw himself heart and soul into the building of a great college. If at times he became discouraged, if the worn-out apparatus of the laboratories, the half-furnished classrooms, or the small number of students worried him, he did not show it, but placed the whole of his energies with those few students and the people who had so enthusiastically founded the school.

In that second year there descended upon the authorities the terrible knowledge that young men and young women of the college were paying romantic attention to each other. When the worthy board found out this crime of the ages, they straightway made a ruling which was printed and passed out to all forty-six students. The ruling set forth: "While it is expected that the ladies and gentlemen of this institution shall treat each other with the polite and courteous civilities, there is a condition which transcends the proprieties of refined society. Anything like selection is strictly forbidden. Private walks and rides at any time are now allowed. Students of the two sexes by special permission of the president can meet privately, for the transaction of business and for that purpose only."

Be it said to President Corcoran's credit, that he labored faithfully with the board for several hours, attempting to explain that world-old human philosophy, that the apple which is strictly forbidden, becomes straightway the one fruit every Adam and Eve desires. But the committee on rules and regulations was adamant, and for two years the ruling stood on the college books, until that most potent of all weapons, ridicule, caused it to become obsolete.

At the end of the second year Sam Peters was dropped from the list of instructors. In spite of his marvelous dexterity with a pen, Sam and his exotic-looking fish and the elaborately constructed hand with its protruding index finger which he could draw so skillfully were not considered of enough importance as aids in mounting the ladder of success to warrant their continuance.

Judge Peters and President Corcoran thereafter avoided each other assiduously, due, it was rumored, to Judge Peters having turned the full weight of his extensive vocabulary upon the president, using in addition to the words found in his dictionary, a choice selection of those that were not.

Poor Sam's life under the withering criticism of his father was far less comfortable than before. He went to work soon in a grocery store where he kept the books with his fine Spencerian penmanship, somewhat embellished with intricate figures of hands whose long protruding index fingers pointed to the various commodities, but as he had to wait on trade in addition to the bookkeeping, and as trade in the seventies and eighties bought much salted mackerel and kippered herring, he rather lost his desire to do the fish.

At the first increase in his bookkeeping wages, he dressed in his best, crossed the street, and with almost as much formality as his father might have employed, asked Ella to do him the honor to marry him.

"Oh, no, Sam, I couldn't. I couldn't think of it."

"There's somebody else you like?" Sam's pale blue eyes blinked at the hurt.

"Yes," said Ella, and added hastily: "Oh, no,--I don't mean that, Sam. I wasn't even thinking of what I was saying when I said 'Yes.' I meant, I hope there will be some one some day that I can care for. I have an ideal in my mind. I can almost see him." She grew so enthusiastic that even Sam, as obtuse as he was, realized there was no hope for him. "I can see how tall he is . . . and broad-shouldered . . . and even though I can never see his face--in my fancy, you know--some way I just feel that I'll know him right away when I first see him."

"Then . . . he doesn't . . ." Sam swallowed with difficulty. "He doesn't look like me?"

"Oh, no." And at the sight of the flush on his thin drawn face she held out her hand to him. "I'm so sorry. You know . . . how it is. If you can't,--you just can't."

"I suppose not."

"But I'll be your friend, Sam . . . for all my life."

"I'm afraid friendship . . . doesn't mean very much, Ella."

"Oh, yes, it does, Sam--truly it does. Friendship is a wonderful thing--a perfectly wonderful thing. Let's make a promise. No matter what girl you marry,--and no matter what man I marry,--let's promise to be friends all our lives. Will you?"

Sam lifted his thin hurt face. "If you say so, Ella."

"I do say so." She spoke happily as though the whole question were settled with satisfaction to them both. "It's a promise. We'll always be friends. When I'm an old lady and you're an old man--isn't that funny to think about, Sam?--we'll be friends." It sounded as though she were bestowing an honor upon him,--that a young priestess was anointing him.

It was a persuasive way she had with people, even at eighteen--the art of getting them to see a thing from her viewpoint, to believe it was their own decision.

So Sam went away, stepping almost jauntily--taking Ella's promise of undying friendship. Poor Sam Peters, carrying away a friendship--who had come for love.

CHAPTER V

By Ella's third year a teachers' course and a music course were launched--and she straightway began studying didactics. To clerk in a store, do housework, or teach school were the only three avenues open for any girl, and her mind's selection was immediate. To teach--well, at least until her Lochinvar came riding by, she admitted to that innermost recess of her heart where dwelt her real self. To have a home of her own--children--nothing could ever take the place of that. But she could not look at the lovely picture hanging there so sacredly in her heart and place therein any young man she knew now. The only one who had ever offered himself was Sam Peters--and Sam was unthinkable.

The college boys were all good young chaps. She admired their energy and their sincerity, but to her fastidious mind there was no one outstanding among them--George Schroeder with his big head of rough hair, his foreign accent and his constant praise of anything Germanic--little Albert Fonda with his obsession for the study of the moon and the stars--or any of the others.

So the last two years were spent in a frame of mind as fancy-free as were the first two. Those last ones saw the faculty enlarged by the additional courses--Professor Cunningham for the didactics--Miss Susie McAlister for the music--the former friendly and humorous--the latter so devoted to the goddess Euterpe that she lived in a world apart, breathed the atmosphere of the upper strata.

Newcomers entered the young college, knowledge was disseminated, minds expanded, the Minerva Society waxed strong in numbers and oratory, the prairie grass was cut, the elms and maples looked superciliously down on their pickle-kegs from a height of five feet. Growth was in the air.

One might ride in state now to the very door of Central Hall in a public vehicle termed "the hack,"--but always with the precautionary measure of placing a newspaper or one's shawl on the seat so the red of the plush cushions would not identify itself too intimately with one's clothes.

The spring of 1880 came on and the first class was to graduate. Ella sent applications to the Oak River board, to Maynard, to Maple City, to every place she thought there might be a chance for a teaching position.

Janet McLaughlin was elected at Maynard, Mary Crombie at Maple City. Mina Gordon and Evelyn Hobbs and Emily Teasdale were all to be married. Irene Van Ness was to stay at home in anticipation of Chester Peters' sudden desire to become wholly and completely engaged. And still Ella had not secured a position.

The time for final examinations was in the offing. For harried days and sleepless nights, Ella and the eleven others comprising the first graduating class crammed for the fray. No dates for execution could have contained any greater element of dread than the June third, fourth and fifth marked with warning crosses in twelve almanacs. Ella grew wan-eyed, lost appetite and weight, and always among her worries was the realization that she had not yet been hired for fall work. Her one great wish had been to get a school near enough so that she could live at home with her always-frail mother. Sometimes in the night she awoke in a cold perspiration with the appalling thought that it looked as though she might not get any school at all. She would lie awake with tense nerves and think: "But I must . . . I have to get a school. . . . Mother has put me through the college . . . she hasn't enough to live on. . . ." All of which was not highly conducive to a healthy physical condition or calm mentality for the figurative Ides of March on which the examinations were to be held.

And then,--the miracle happened. President Corcoran called her to his office and asked her how she would like to teach English Grammar in the college. The school was growing,--they were rearranging classes--

Ella thought she could not believe what she was hearing. She was dreaming,--would waken in her bedroom and laugh at the wild fancy. But no, President Corcoran was saying: "I have watched you for four years, Miss Ella. You have done good work in grammar. You have a keen mind, an open heart, an enviable disposition, and that something which seems to me the very soul of the teaching profession--a keen interest in your fellow man."

No one knighted by a king's touch ever felt so honored.

There was the formality of the written application, the waiting of a few days for the decision already made in board meeting,--and Ella Bishop was to stay on at her youthful Alma Mater and teach. To earn a salary, even though modest, support her mother, live at home,--the whole world took on brilliant roseate lights.

"What have I ever done to have so much good luck?" she said over and over to her mother.

"You're like your father, Ella. He . . . there was something . . . he was always . . ." Mrs. Bishop groped, moist-eyed, for the explanation. "You go into things . . . just the way. . . ."

The examinations ended with no fatalities. Commencement was a reality, and under the bright glow of the knowledge of the new position, a thing of happiness and joy. Happiness and joy to Ella Bishop is meant, for to the towns-people, friends and relatives of the twelve graduates the merry-making had its difficult moments. On Sunday, President Corcoran gave a tedious, if earnest, Baccalaureate address,--on Monday, class-day exercises were held. On Tuesday, four of the twelve members of the class delivered orations, each of forty-five minutes' duration,--on Wednesday, four more held the rostrum for another three hours,--on Thursday, the last group spoke for three more hours to a wilted, perspiring, dog-tired audience of the faithful. George Schroeder, not yet over his German accent, gave a glowing tribute to his beloved Goethe. Albert Fonda spoke on "The Course of the Stars." Mary Crombie presented the case of Woman's Rights so forcibly that she half ripped out a sleeve of her navy blue silk dress. Ella gave all she had ever known or would ever know about "Our American Authors." Irene Van Ness, whose father had written her oration, presented a profound dissertation on "The Financial System of Our Country." "Across the Alps Lies Italy," "Heaven Is Not Reached by a Single Bound" and "Black the Heel of Your Boot" were conspicuous by their presence.

The long-drawn-out exercises were in the auditorium. The girls wore trailing silk dresses with camel-like humps in the rear over wire bustles. Long gold watch chains entwined their necks, coming to rest somewhere in the region of their padded bosoms. The windows were open to the stifling summer air, the June-bugs, and the sound of stamping horses tied to hitch-racks. The odor that penetrated to the farthermost corner of the huge room was a combination of June roses and livery barn. Palm leaf fans whacked vigorously against buttons and lodge emblems. There were instrumental and vocal numbers,--solos, duets, trios, quartets, and choruses. There were invocations and benedictions, presentations and acceptances. Never did it take so long to go through the birth pangs of graduation.

Twelve tables in the hallway, representing each graduate, were laden with bouquets of home-grown flowers, gold watches, pearl-handled opera glasses, plush albums, and many duplicates of cushioned and padded "Poems of Keats,"--or "Burns" or "Shelley."

Chris Jensen, resplendent in a new suit of purplish hue which gave his red face the appearance of being about to suffer apoplexy, guarded the treasures.

The sixth evening the Alumni banquet was held in the auditorium cleared of a portion of its pews, but luckily for the long-suffering public, the attendance was limited to graduates and faculty and faculty wives. The whole procedure had consumed as many days as the fundamentalists' conception of the genesis of the world. Small wonder that the entire community rested the seventh day and called it holy.

At this first Alumni banquet less than two dozen sat down to the tables. President Corcoran referred in his talk to the possible day when two hundred graduates would sup together. It did not seem possible to contemplate.

Ella felt that it was one of the happiest events in her life. Examinations passed, the nightmare moments of her oration behind her--nothing now but the friendly intercourse with those closest to her in school, and the warm glow of the knowledge that she had won the cream of the teaching positions. Life was all before her. She was young,--gloriously young,--only twenty. She could do with her life as she wished.

Happy Ella,--not to know yet for a little while that life is to do as it wishes to you.

CHAPTER VI

Ella could scarcely wait to begin her work. Sometimes in the summer she would go over to school, tramping through the campus grass to where Chris was mowing, and get the key to the building.

"May I take the key to Central hall?" she would ask when he had put down his scythe and come swinging across the newly-cut grass to meet her.

"Say . . . vy you alvays call her Cendral Hall," Chris asked once, "ven dey ain't but von anyvay?"

"Don't you see, Chris? Look around. Here, stand over here,--can't you see a lot more buildings there,--one over here and one there,--a calisthenics building there,--and a huge library,--and a science building,--and maybe a teachers' training one?"

But even though Chris, open-mouthed, looked and looked, he could not see a calisthenics building, nor a huge library, nor a teachers' training building,--nothing but a plain three-story one with a few straggling ivy vines clinging desperately to the hot bricks in the prairie sun. Only those who have dreams in their minds and courage in their hearts when they are young see such mirage-like things on familiar horizons.

Her classroom was to be on the second floor at the front, with a tiny inner room opening from it. "My office," she said under her breath many times a day to get the thrill which the words gave her. The potential office was a little room in the tower over which the bell hung. To hear the resounding clang of that brass-throated messenger directly over her was to feel its vibration in every nerve of her being. It was more than the mere ringing of a bell,--it was a call to knowledge,--a summons to life itself. Already pigeons had begun to nest in the tower and when the bell rang, they flew violently out like so many frightened loafers. Sometimes they tapped the swinging thing themselves in their turbulent activity.

There were windows on three sides of the little tower room. From them she could see the town to the east, four thousand people now--that was what the college had done for Oak River--the rolling campus to the south--well, anyway, the short prairie grass sloped down an incline--and farm land to the west as far as the eye could see, some of it cultivated, much of it still rough prairie land with no sign of road or fence, and with horses and cattle, herded in little bunches, grazing on its vast unbroken expanse.

Surprisingly, the September morning on which Chris rang the bell for opening classes was almost a replica of the rainy one on which Ella first entered four years before. Remembering the dismal reception to those half-frightened newcomers, she stationed herself near the big doors and greeted every freshman as though he were an honored guest arriving for a social event. President Corcoran, coming through the hall, smiled behind the ambush of his whiskers. "Whatever that girl does, she does," he said to Professor Cunningham in passing.

All fall, Ella Bishop taught grammar classes as though she had invented adjectives and was personally responsible for subordinate clauses. Papers she carted home in sheaves. Notebooks she perused so thoroughly that not an insignificant "for him and I" or an infinitesimal "has came" dared lift its head without fear of her sturdy blue pencil. Still so young, she made no effort to disengage herself from student activities. She was adviser for the now-flourishing Minerva Society. She helped start a tiny college paper called the Weekly Clarion. She was secretary of the modest little Faculty Family Club. "She's just about an ideal connection between faculty and students," President Corcoran told his wife. "Young enough to get the students' viewpoints, with a nice older dignity when necessary."

Sometimes a little daring crowd of students would plan to slip away in a hayrack or a bob-sled to Maynard to dance, and hearing it, Ella would try to think of some new entertainment to counteract the scheme.

Altogether life was full for her and very, very interesting, swinging along at a lively tempo for the times. The town was growing. Mr. Van Ness built a three-story bank building, renting out the upper floors to the Masons and the Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias. Every day Judge Peters walked pompously down Adams and Main Streets in four-four time, his gold-headed cane swinging out the rhythm. Sam slipped quietly down to the grocery store at daylight. Chester wrote home glowing accounts of his own activities over which Irene hung with tremulous hopes. Mrs. Bishop attempted to keep house, but the results were so confused and messy that Ella put her young shoulder to the wheel and did much of it over when she came at night.

The graduating class,--Class of 1880, the members always reminded their friends, as though there had been a dozen others,--had started a round-robin letter. Ella and Irene Van Ness were the only ones living in Oak River, so the package made trips to ten other localities before its return to the city of its birth. Mina Gordon and Emily Teasdale and Evelyn Hobbs all had new names now and were almost maudlin in their wishes that every one else in the class could be as happy as they. Mary Crombie and Janet McLaughlin were enjoying their teaching, the former having started a little Woman's Suffrage organization which she hoped would expand and sweep the country. George Schroeder was teaching and anticipating saving enough money to go to Heidelberg to school. Albert Fonda's report for the most part read like a treatise on astronomy,--Albert having hitched his wagon to all the stars.

On a Friday night in November, Chris came into Ella's room with a noisy depositing of mops, pail and brooms. She sighed and prepared to gather up her work to leave. That Chris,--he seemed to haunt her this week with his jangling paraphernalia.

He kept eyeing her furtively, she imagined, with a large show of cleaning activity but not much progress. Was it possible that the big bungling fellow had something on his mind?

"Why does every one always pick on me to unload their troubles?" she was saying to herself, half in exasperation, when he began:

"Miss Bis'op, I got news for you." His fat face was red, his pale blue eyes winking nervously.

"Yes, Chris?"

"I be gettin' marriet next veek."

"Well, Chris--congratulations. I didn't know you had a girl here."

"Oh, s'e not nobody here. S'e come by Ellis Island to-day. Next veek s'e get here to Oak Riffer--den ve get marriet. I rent a leetle house across from school over der by Smit's."

"Well, that's fine. I'm sure she's a nice girl, too, Chris."

"Oh, s'e nice all right. I not see her, now, come six year. S'e vait 'til I safe money and send for passage. S'e healt'y and goot vorker. S'e he'p me safe money."

Dear, dear, thought Ella--how unromantic.

"What's her name, Chris?"

"Hannah Christine Maria Jensen."

"Jensen?"

"Yah."

"The same as yours? Is she any relation to you now?"

"No-o." He threw back his head and laughed long and mirthfully. "Denmark, s'e full of Jensens."

Ella was interested, as indeed she always was in her fellow man. She could not quite seem to keep a hand out of the affairs of every one around her.

"Where will you be married?"

"I don' know. By the Lutheran preacher's house, mebbe."

Suddenly, Ella had an inspiration,--one of those enthusiasms with which she was eternally possessed. "Chris, would you like to be married at my mother's house? Wouldn't you like to have your--your Hannah Christine Maria come right to our house from the train . . . and have the ceremony in my mother's parlor . . . and then a little supper with us afterward?"

The blond giant's eyes shone,--his fat face grew redder with emotion. "Py golly, Miss Bis'op, I like it fine an' I t'ank you."

Now that she was launched on this new interest, she went into it, as always, with heart and soul. Several times she went to the little cottage at Chris's plea for advice. She took over a half-dozen potted geraniums--sent eggs and bread and fried-cakes for the first breakfast--would have taken the dresser scarf or curtains from her own room if necessary.

When the girl arrived, she proved to be apple-cheeked and buxom--her flesh hard and solid, her pale blue eyes and pale yellow hair contrasting oddly with the flushed red of her face. So in the parlor of Ella's home, Miss Hannah Christine Maria Jensen became Mrs. Hannah Christine Maria Jensen, after which the newlyweds and the Lutheran minister and his wife sat down with Ella and her mother to what the Oak River paper later termed "a bounteous repast."

When they were leaving for the cottage, Chris said, "To my dyin' day I'll nefer forget dis kindness."

He talked to the girl a moment in Danish and turned to Ella: "S'e say s'e tink s'e can mebbe come vork sometime to s'ow you her respeck."

It touched Ella. It was always to touch her a little,--Chris and Hannah Jensen's dog-like faithfulness to her all the years of her life.

It was not an astonishing piece of news to any one to hear in the spring that Ella had been elected for another year at a five-dollar-per-month increase in salary.

"I'm afraid . . . Ella, . . . you'll be an old maid," her mother said plaintively, "that way . . . teaching . . . kind of . . . seems like . . ."

"I can think of lots worse things, Mother," Ella laughed. "Marrying a worthless man, for instance, and having to take in washing or be a dressmaker. I wonder if the day will ever come when a married woman can do anything more than those two things?"

But Ella knew she would not be an old maid. Something told her so--some singing voice down in the innermost recesses of her heart. As well as she liked her teaching,--to have a husband and home and children,--these were better. These were the things for which her healthy young body and warm heart were intended. She knew.

CHAPTER VII

In that second year of Ella's teaching, Chester Peters, having finished his school work, was at home and in the law office with his father. Judge Peters took occasion to tell any one who would listen what a brilliant chap Chester was and how he would make of the law a thing of truth and beauty. He never said much about Sam, eggs and flour and salt mackerel evidently not conforming to his ideas of either beauty or truth. Irene Van Ness had a new fur coat, sealskin with mink trimming, a long row of dangling tails around the shoulders and hips, and a mink cap to match. People thought surely Chester would marry her now that he was settling down, and Irene fully shared the desire.

Ella felt sorry for her, could not conceive of a half-hearted romance like that,--was soon to know more about one.

It was a cold Friday night in November. It had snowed all day and now the whiteness of the drifts lay over college and campus, town and prairie. There was a concert in the college auditorium given by the new glee club,--the Euterpeans, they modestly called themselves,--the proceeds to go to the library fund. But at the supper hour, Ella had given up going. "To have a sore throat any night is bad enough," she said irritably to her mother, "but to have it on Friday night with a concert on is a disgrace. This is the first thing I've ever missed."

But she would not listen to her mother's timid statement about giving up the concert too. "The Peterses will come for you as they expected, so you go just the same. I'll help you get ready."

Mrs. Bishop was only in her forties, but to have been forty-six in the eighties was to have been an old woman. She wore a heavy black wool dress, a thick black cape with jet-bead passementerie trimming, a black velvet bonnet with a flat crêpe bow on top and wide crêpe ties under her chin.

Judge and Mrs. Peters came for her, the high-stepping blacks tossing their manes and jangling their sleigh-bells vigorously the few moments they were forced to stand at the horse-block.

After they had gone, Ella took some medicine, gargled with salt and water, rubbed goose-grease and turpentine on her throat and pinned a wide piece of red flannel around that offended part of her anatomy.

For a little while she read in her bedroom by the warmth of the sheet-iron drum, then deciding childishly to make some maple candy, she descended to the kitchen. When she had carried the pan of melted maple sugar back upstairs, she opened her bedroom window to get a plate of snow upon which to drop spoonsful of the hot concoction. It was a favorite confection of the times--these hardened balls of maple candy. The cold wind blew in and the carbon street lights flickered. There was no snow within reaching distance and so while Reason told her that she was doing a foolish thing, Desire caused her to throw a crocheted shawl around her shoulders and step out onto the roof.

As she turned to go in, the window slipped down with a noisy crashing sound. She was at the glass in a moment attempting to raise it, but it would not budge.

At first she worked frantically at the sash, and then when she realized the seriousness of the situation, with more dogged deliberation.

The cold was penetrating and she drew the shawl tightly about her and tied it in a knot in order to work with the stubborn window. When it still would not yield, she thought of summoning some near neighbor. But there were no lights at either house.

She walked gingerly to the very edge of the slippery roof and considered jumping. "Yes, and break my ankles," she thought, "and then faint away from the pain and be covered with snow when Mother comes home. She'd think I was the woodpile." She grinned nervously and shivered.

So this was the way they all felt, was it--Babes in the Woods--Princes in the Tower--and she on the kitchen roof?

Something clammy lighted on her nose. It was beginning to snow again. She let out a lusty and prolonged "Hoo-hoo-oo." No answer came from any source on the deserted street but a mocking echo. She began to shiver again and a cough strangled in her throat.

She hurried back to the window and beat with her fists but the glass would not yield. If she had only left on her sturdy shoes instead of wearing the soft woolen homemade slippers, she could have sent one flying through the pane.

But even as she grew desperate with genuine fright she could hear some one coming up the street, crunching along over the snow-packed sidewalk. As he passed under the carbon street-lamp she could see that he carried a valise.

"Hoo-hoo," she called loudly, "will you please stop a moment?"

The man slowed immediately, and when she called again, he came across the street and then through the snowdrifts of the yard, stepping along with high striding walk. "What is it?" he asked. "What's wanted?"

Ella could not recognize him in the semidarkness, and decided that he was a visiting stranger, but in her desperation would have accosted President Arthur himself.

"I'm terribly sorry to bother you--and highly ashamed of my predicament--but I'm trapped out here on the roof for doing such a silly thing as stepping out here to get a pan of snow. The window slipped down behind me. I've tried to break the glass--I thought glass was supposed to be fragile--and I'm certainly not a weakling--but I can't even crack it."

The young chap laughed and put down on the steps the valise he had been holding all the time. By the faint glimmer of the street-lamp he looked big and substantial.

"Where can I get a ladder?"

"There's one in the barn, just inside the door on the wall to your right."

He strode off to the barn and Ella could see the flare of a match against the darkness and hear Polly snort and rise to her feet. When he returned, he was holding the ladder balanced across his shoulder. With no word he placed it in a snowdrift by the kitchen wall and held it firmly.

"Come on," he called. "But be careful."

When she was half-way down, one of the slimsy cloth slippers dropped.

"See here," he said suddenly, "you can't walk in this deep snow. I'm going to carry you around to that porch."

"Oh, no--thank you. I'll manage." She felt shy, ashamed of her loose, flapping wrapper now that she was part way down and near the strange young man. "Besides, I have goose-grease and turpentine on my throat,--and it's smelly. . . ."

At that he threw back his head and laughed good-naturedly, and for answer picked her off the ladder with no comment and rounded the corner of the kitchen where he set her on her feet in the porch between the cistern-pump and a washtub. For that short distance, she had not been able to see his face distinctly. There had been only time for a fleeting impression of his big cold overcoat and his muscular strength,--and a certain queer sense of liking his personality. She wondered vaguely with swift questioning if it were true--that one radiated personality like that--so that another could tell--even about a stranger--and in the dark--

"Thank you so much for your trouble."

"It was a good thing I happened along or you might have had a sorry time. Even yet, you'd better go take a sweat," he advised solemnly.

"And quinine and white pine and tar and molasses and onions and sulphur." Her voice cracked a little. And they both laughed.

"Now that the rescue is accomplished, can you tell me hurriedly where Judge Peters lives?"

Ella pointed out the big brick house where the iron deer stood on frozen guard in the snowdrifts.

"I see. Chet has been my roommate--and I'm here to go in the law office with him and his father."

"Oh, how nice," Ella said almost before she realized. Nice for whom, Ella? It gave her a warm friendly feeling toward the young man.

"Well," he held out his hand, "Delbert Thompson is the name of the gallant fireman."

"Ella Bishop," she gave him her own cold one, responding cordially: "I teach in the college here--Midwestern."

"You?" He was incredulous. "I thought you were a little girl--with your hair in a thick braid down your back that way."

"No." And she sang slightly:

"The heavenward jog
Of the pedagogue
Is the only life for me."

They both laughed--it seemed very easy to laugh with the pleasant young man--and then he was gone, crunching along the snow paths with his valise. And Ella went into the house quite distinctly aglow with a peculiar new sensation.

When Mrs. Bishop came, Ella told her all about the funny experience, and Mrs. Bishop was terribly upset,--the exposure to the cold and the trusting of her girl to the clutches of an utter stranger that way. But try as she might in her little fluttered and frightened way, she could not seem to arouse her daughter to the enormity of the danger in which she had been. Indeed, when that daughter was dropping to sleep later, all swathed up in a fat pork poultice after a mustard foot bath, she was thinking she wished she could have seen the young man's face. "I could see how tall he was . . . and his broad shoulders," she thought, "but try as I would, I couldn't quite see his face." And then, suddenly, the familiarity of the words were so startling that all drowsiness left her. For a long time she lay staring into the darkness of the night, thinking of the rest of the prophecy she had made to Sam: "But some way I feel sure, Sam, that I will know him right away when I first see him."

When finally she was dropping off, she dreamed of weaving a tapestry on the kitchen roof, but she was so cold that she must weave in the center of the picture a great deal of red firelight--and--a little cottage--and children--

CHAPTER VIII

There was now a freshly painted sign over the door of an office next to the new Bank of Oak River which said "Peters, Peters and Thompson." And the strange and wholly informal meeting of Ella and the firm's new young partner had taken upon itself a bright and shining halo of romance. And life had begun to hold new experiences.

Inherently honest, Ella grew cunning and sly with her own self that month,--would not admit that she was dressing for the new young lawyer,--that she was attending every gathering of college and town in the hope of seeing his big broad shoulders and ready smile. She grew sensitive to his entrance into a room, knew through some peculiar psychic information without turning her head that he had arrived. Gradually she grew to feel that he was looking for her, too.

So immediately mutual was this attraction that by the holiday time he was her exclusive escort to all the social events of the community. In January people were teasing her. Even her students could bring the tell-tale color to her cheeks by an innocently uttered innuendo. Chester Peters seemed to have breathed a bit of the highly charged atmosphere also, for he was more attentive to Irene than he had ever been,--and Irene was glowing these days, her sallow face lighted by the first real hope of the culmination of her long liking for Chester. Chester Peters and Irene Van Ness--Delbert Thompson and Ella Bishop--it was a common sight to see the four tramping laughingly in single-file through paths shoveled in the deep snow or riding in Judge Peters' two-seated sleigh with the jet-colored high-stepping horses that matched the Judge's black side-whiskers. Sam did not figure in the gayety--went quietly to the grocery store where he kept the books in his flowing Spencerian hand, and handled the eggs that the farmers' wives brought in for trade. There seemed no great change in Sam's courteous attitude toward Ella,--except that his eyes now were not only wistful, but tragic. Sensing his shy longing for her, Ella sometimes felt a hearty impatience toward him. Why should the loveliest thing that had ever come into her life have a shadow cast upon it by the moon-calf attitude of Sam Peters?

By February, Ella was formally engaged to Delbert Thompson. It was one of those things she could scarcely believe true. It seemed all too sudden--too beautiful a thing to come to definite words so soon. Just a few months before and she had never seen him, save in her own girlish dreams. She had loved the courting, the imagining the possibility of what might come, the holding to her heart the delicate unfolding flower of romance. And now this February evening Delbert had her in his arms, was lavishing warm kisses on her cool lips, and she was saying, "Delbert--it's too soon. It has all happened too quickly."

At that he was throwing back his head and laughing his boyish ready laugh. "It's not too soon, Ella--nothing's too soon. We'll be married right away this spring."

"Oh, not this spring, Delbert. I should teach one more year . . . to get ready . . . and save money . . . and maybe know you better," she added, a bit shyly.

"You're a cool little piece, aren't you, Ella?" He held her off and asked anxiously for the dozenth time, "You do love me, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, yes, Delbert. I do love you . . . so much. But . . . wait a little . . . I must be so sure . . . it's such a big thing . . . to understand just what this love is."

"It's this." Delbert laughed and crushed her to him until she nearly cried out in the strength of the embrace.

But Ella knew better--Ella Bishop knew her love was something more than that--something more deeply beautiful,--something infinitely more delicate.

So in a whirlwind of courtship it was settled. Ella was to resign and they were to be married in June as soon as school was out.

When Irene Van Ness heard it, she cried a little. It did not seem quite understandable to her,--she had gone with Chet Peters ever since their High School days. The whole town knew she was Chet's girl,--no one else paid any attention to her. But he had never once mentioned marriage. She bought goods for two whole new outfits and took them to Mrs. Finch, the best dressmaker in town.

All spring Ella lived in the rarefied atmosphere of her romance. But instead of detracting from her work, it merely accentuated her fidelity to it. Every class brought her nearer to the end of her teaching and so she told herself she must give her best to that teaching while she could. This roseate happiness which was hers bubbled over into thoughtfulness for others, a warm kindness toward her students, an energy which sought to make the most of every opportunity to be helpful.

"I am teaching under the assumption that every young person in my classes has to learn from me all the English grammar he will ever know," she explained laughingly to Delbert. "By pretending that what I can't teach them now in the few remaining months they will never know, I hustle and make the most of my time."

"You're a bundle of energy," Delbert would say proudly, "so different from most of the girls with their kittenish ways and their silly little talk."

"I thought men were supposed to like that kittenish kind," Ella would suggest a bit jealously,--for the very feminine reason of getting him to disagree.

"Oh, they may be all right to flirt around with,--but for a wife, who wants a coquette?"

Delbert was to move into the Bishop home. It was a feature of the marriage which gave him some chagrin.

"It doesn't seem quite the thing to do, Ella. It ought not be that way," he would sometimes protest.

But Ella, practical as always, would laugh his humiliation away. "We bought the house after Father died and it's all paid for. I'm an only child . . . Mother has to live with us anyway--no matter where we would go. So what difference does it make?"

The last of March she spent her spring vacation doing the work of two women, for her salary, not any too large, had by necessity to stretch over many things. So, up on a sturdy stepladder, she papered the bedrooms with dainty flowered wallpaper. She washed and ironed the curtains, scrubbed and painted and cleaned.

"If it would only stay so until June." She surveyed her handiwork with the guilty acknowledgement that her mother was not much of a housekeeper. "I wish I could afford a hired girl just to stand guard and keep it nice."

April came in, soft and gentle, with the martins coming and the pussywillows over on the campus creek bursting into gray fuzziness--with time flying on such golden wings that Ella must even begin to think of her dresses now. Dresses in the eighties being, as they were, massive architectural works of pleats, flounces, panels, panniers, bustles and trains, she intended to have but two--a white silk one for the ceremony and a navy blue silk. "But no plaid," she grimaced.

"Do you think I should be so extravagant as to have a white silk one made, though, Mother?" She always went through the routine of asking her mother's advice although she knew the decision would have to be her own.

But almost to her amazement, her mother said definitely: "Yes . . . oh, yes. I had . . . the pale blue one, you know. Your father thought . . . He said I was so pretty . . . It's just one time . . . When you're old . . . you live it all over."

Each of these days was filled with happy tasks. Students must be helped tirelessly over the rough places, the house kept in order, her mother assisted, some plain sewing done at home, all her plans for the little June wedding perfected. Sometimes Ella stopped a moment to analyze herself. "What is there about me that is so different from other girls?" she would think. "When I stop to think about it, no one ever does anything for me. I always see to everything myself. Wouldn't it be nice sometimes to have some one else,--Mother, for instance,--take some responsibility? Even Delbert . . ." She felt a momentary disloyalty at the unspoken thought--"Oh, well," she laughed it off. "I'm just one of those people who get about and do things myself, I guess."

On the third of April, she started home at five o'clock. The campus grass, now in its sixth spring, was beginning to look almost like a lawn, the old prairie coarseness of the first two or three years having given place after continuous mowing and the sowing of blue-grass and clover to a fairly pleasing green sloping sward. The hard maples and the elms, planted in their curving horse-show formation up toward the building, were actually beginning to seem like real trees, although the barrel-staves around their bases for protection from wild rabbits still detracted not a little from their looks.

As she went down the long wooden sidewalk, she could see Chris in the distance burning leaves. Wild geese flew north, robins dipped low in front of her, sap on the sunny side of a soft maple was dripping clammily on the ground. All the signs of springtime had come,--her springtime. There was so much to do,--so many places to go, Irene was having a party in a few days, she and Delbert were driving to Maynard soon where he had business for the Judge,--he had said it would be a regular honeymoon trip with Judge Peters' team and shining new buggy. She was going to look at material for the white dress and compare it with the silk she could get here. Life was so full,--so joyous. How could there be unhappiness in the world?

"There just isn't any," she said to herself with a gay little laugh.

But there was unhappiness in the world. She found it out the moment she entered the house, and saw her mother sitting idly, a letter in her lap, tears on her cheeks.

"Mother, darling," she was at her side and down on her knees in a moment, "what's wrong?"

"My only brother is gone, Ella." And the tears overflowed again. "My Eddie--my little brother. One more sorrow for me, Ella." Then she added as casually as though it were not of great import, "And his daughter,--his little Amy . . . she wants to come . . . here with us, you know, Ella . . . and live awhile."

With a cold feeling that life had played her a trick at the very time she wanted life to be most gracious to her, Ella picked up the letter.

It was true. Cousin Amy Saunders, eighteen now, wanted to come out from Ohio and stay with her Aunt and Cousin Ella.

I've nowhere to go, and I don't know what to do. Could you let me come a little while, just until I can get over my sorrow for dear Papa? And, Auntie, I haven't a cent. I don't want to be a trouble to any one but . . .

Ella finished in a daze of mind, conscious that she was deeply annoyed at that which seemed like an intrusion just now. Silently she put the little pink note back in its little pink envelope, and almost without volition raised it to her nose. A faint odor clung to it. For a moment she forgot the import of the message in the whimsical desire to place that elusive fragrance, so strangely familiar. Something in the woods. May-apples--that was it--mandrakes--the cloying fragrance of the waxy-white blossoms of the May-apple.

CHAPTER IX

Mrs. Bishop kept wiping her eyes and sighing. When Ella had stared at the little pink and fragrant epistle for a long moment, her mother asked helplessly: "Oh, Ella, what . . . do you . . . what shall we do?"

"Do?" Ella was suddenly all briskness and decision. "There's just one thing to do. Send her some money and tell her to come on."

"Oh, Ella . . . with you going to get married. You're such . . . you're a good girl. First, you have me . . . on your hands . . . your newly married life . . . and now little Amy."

Ella's eyes wavered away from her mother's. "I was just thinking, Mother, now that it's turned out this way--Amy coming--maybe you and she could live here together. Delbert and I could get rooms--down town, in the building above Judge Peters' office. She'd look after you, you know, and I would be so close to come if I were needed."

That old childish look of fright came into her mother's moist eyes. "To leave Mamma, Ella? To leave me behind . . . when . . . I might . . . at best I may have only a year or two more . . ."

It moved Ella as it always did. Impatient she might feel, but one sight of that little delicate figure shrinking into its shroud of fear, and Ella was always on her knees, her strong young arms around it.

"Don't think about it any more, Mother. I'll manage you both somehow."

When she told Delbert about Amy's coming, he was not overly enthusiastic.

"Not that I should be the one to object, Ella dear,--your own house--and I just moving in. I can't quite swallow my pride yet about that. Some day, don't you forget, I'm going to be the one to furnish you with a new home. It will have colored fan-shaped lights over all the doors and windows,--and a black marble fireplace and this new walnut grill-work between all the rooms."

It pleased Ella. She loved that ambitious side of him,--those plans he always made for their future. It would be nice to have some one upon whom to lean. In all her twenty-two years she had never known the time when she could shift responsibility,--do anything but stand erect on her own two feet.

He caught her to him now, his flushed face against her own cool one, his kisses hot on her lips. "To think I'm to live with you . . . in the same house . . . the same room . . ."

"Delbert!" She drew back, a little shy as always. Never yet had she felt entirely responsive to those warm impulsive caresses. Just now he chided her for it. "You're an iceberg, Ella. You don't love me."

"Oh, yes, yes, Delbert,--I do! How I love you. You don't know! But . . . give me . . . time. Let me. . . ." She could not finish.

How could she tell him that love was such a fine thing, so exquisite, that she wanted to hold it in her heart awhile as one gloats over a pearl--or glories in the beauty of a rose--before wearing it? Sometimes--she wondered vaguely--if Delbert could quite understand that love was something infinitely more lovely, something far more delicate than the mere physical. Then in sheer anger at her disloyalty she would put the thought from her.

There was just time to get the third bedroom upstairs ready for the young cousin before her arrival. Mrs. Bishop's room was on the first floor, and there had never been any reason to furnish the third one upstairs which had been used as a storeroom.

But now Ella went back to the cleaning with only a few nights after school and one Saturday left in which to finish. She put the hat-boxes and her father's army equipment down in the cellar, papered and painted and hung up fresh curtains, and took her own best bedroom chair into the cousin's room.

As she worked, her interest in preparing for the guest overcame her resentment at that which had seemed at first like intrusion. "Poor little thing," she thought,--"left an orphan,--my own little cousin Amy . . . and I not willing to share a roof with her."

Irene's charade party was to be on Friday night, and it was just possible that Amy would get to Oak River in time to attend it, Ella thought, and decided it would be a nice way to initiate her into local society.

It turned out that it happened just that way. Amy was getting in on the four o'clock train from the east on Friday. Ella left school early. Delbert came and hitched up Polly and they were at the station long before the steam whistle sounded down the road. The train was a half-hour late--there had been cows on the track and the trainmen had been compelled to get out and extricate one from a trestle, the conductor said when he swung down from the coach. He appeared to show quite a solicitous attitude toward the girl as she came down the car steps. Evidently they had become rather good friends on the ride out.

Amy was lovely, Ella admitted that to herself. She was small-boned, softly rounded, the delicate pink of her flesh the texture of a baby's. Her wide eyes, too, were child-like in their blue candor. She wore a little gray dolman trimmed with baby blue, and a little stiff gray hat with blue cornflowers on it. It gave her the appearance of a soft little turtle dove, with a blue ruff. And she was fragrant with the scent of her letter--something that reminded Ella vaguely of the cloying sweetness of waxy-white mayflowers.

Also she was a helpless sort of little thing, Ella could see. She was not sure of anything,--her baggage, her checks, her way about. Delbert looked after everything for her and she thanked him so prettily that he flushed with pleasure.

"She makes me think of a kitten," he told Ella afterward, "a fluffy little kitten."

What was it Delbert had once said about kittens? Oh, yes, she remembered,--they were all right to flirt with--She put the thought quickly from her mind.

After supper, Delbert came for the girls and the three walked through the soft April night to the charade party at Irene Van Ness's home. The big house was bright from top to bottom,--hanging lamps with glass pendants and side lamps in brackets on the walls gave forth their limit of light. The heavy walnut furniture, the dark chenille portières, the thick-flowered Brussels carpet, and the Nottingham lace curtains, all looked rich in the night lights. Silver gleamed on the sideboard, and one caught whiffs of chicken and oysters when the kitchen door swung back. It was rumored that Mr. Van Ness had even ordered Sam Peters to send to Florida for a box of oranges.

Irene had on a new rich plum-colored satin--square cut in the front, from which her neck rose scrawnily, her dull complexion challenged by the purplish shade of the dress.

When Ella came downstairs with Amy, she was plainly aware of the admiring whispers that went around. Amy did look lovely--"bewitching" Chester Peters said before every one, so that Irene flushed a little. She wore pink silk, her plump form squeezed into the hour-glass shape which was the mode of the day, the low-cut front revealing the milky whiteness of her flesh. Her hair was a high mass of yellow curls through which a black ribbon was drawn, the one touch of mourning for her recent loss. Her wide blue eyes stared at the new-found friends with babyish candor. She had the merest suggestion of an impediment in her speech which certain of the young bloods there seemed to find quite entrancing, as they formed a little circle around her almost immediately.

At the end of the evening of charades and singing around the piano, a few dancing games, and the consumption of much rich food, there was no little rivalry over seeing Amy home. Chet Peters high-handedly won her promise, but when he was waiting at the foot of the stairs for her, Delbert tried to put him off with a curt: "No, you don't. I brought her and I'll see to her myself." Chet, however, won his point and carried Amy off into the warm spring moonlight.

When they left, Ella could see that Irene was making an ineffectual attempt to keep back the tears.

In the days that followed, the whole crowd knew that Chet Peters was quite mad about Amy Saunders. It worried Ella to the depths, to a great measure spoiled the days which should have been so happy. Irene was her best friend and was now too hurt to come to see her. It all made an upsetting state of affairs.

"Oh, why did she have to come just now?" Ella sometimes said to her mother.

But her mother was vague, uncertain what to say, could only look to Ella for decisions on the subject.

And Amy? Sometimes she went with him as coolly as any woman of the world and sometimes she clung to Delbert and Ella as though she were a child and afraid of Chet's ardent wooing. Ella could not read the girl clearly. Was she too young and innocent to know her own mind? Did she honestly dislike Chester? Or was she assuming a virtue when she had it not?

"I like him," she said one day to them both, her blue eyes wide and soft and child-like. And added with engaging candor, "But I like Delbert better." And to Ella, with a half-sad little smile: "You're the one I envy."

She said it so prettily that Delbert flushed with pleasure.

Ella scarcely knew what to say. Among all the girls of her acquaintance in her four school years,--among all the girls in the classes of her two teaching years,--she had not known one quite like Amy. She was so sweet, so guileless,--and yet,--This time, instead of vague Mrs. Bishop, it was Ella, herself, who could not finish a sentence.

CHAPTER X

On the Saturday that Delbert was to drive to Maynard on business and to which Ella had looked forward, Amy remarked with her usual beguiling candor that it was such a lovely day she wished she could go too. There seemed nothing to do but to take her. One could scarcely conceive of leaving the young guest behind to sit in the house on such a spring day.

So the trip that was to have been almost a wedding journey became a rather different sort of thing. Ella felt cross as they started, chiding herself for having a beastly disposition, but on the long drive with the Judge's horses keeping up a steady swing, the scent of the spring day in the air, and Amy and Delbert gay and talkative, her unquenchable spirits rose too, and she felt such a magnanimity toward all mankind that her momentary disappointment was forgotten.

When they were ready to make the return trip, Amy placed herself in the middle of the seat. "I'm the littl'st," she said with her faint suggestion of a lisp. "I want to sit between you so I won't fall out."

Ella felt provoked at the absurd childishness, but Delbert laughed.

The horses were not so fresh as in the morning and the drive seemed longer. Amy quieted and fell asleep as they jogged along.

"She's like a baby instead of a young lady, isn't she?" he said to Ella--and with his finger tips touched the creamy whiteness of the curve under her chin. At which Amy sighed and moved in her sleep so that her head fell over against his shoulder.

At home Ella sprang as nimbly to the ground as her long skirts would allow, but Amy, rousing from her nap and yawning, made such hard work of it that Delbert helped her down carefully. As she put her foot on the carriage step, she slipped and would have fallen if he had not caught her. For a long moment she lay smiling in his arms until he set her hurriedly on the horse-block.

The first of May, Ella bought the goods for her dresses--twenty yards of lovely silk with nosegays of flowers strewn over its snow whiteness and sixteen yards of wide stiff blue silk and four dozen wooden buttons to be covered with the same material. She opened the packages on the bed in her room and could scarcely take her eyes from the beauty of the white one, the little bouquets of pale pink rosebuds and baby-blue forget-me-nots standing out in silken relief against the shimmering background.

Amy came in to see them, and went into such ecstasies over the white silk--her enjoyment of its loveliness so genuine--that Ella told herself she would forever forget all the impatience with her she had ever felt. The girl was merely immature--her joy lay in the material world almost entirely. As for the future, she would let that take care of itself for a time. Amy would not want to stay with them forever,--she would marry,--Chet, perhaps, as he was apparently infatuated with her. At any rate she was the type that married young. Never again would she let the actions of the girl displease her--now that she was assured of their naturalness.

In the late afternoon Ella took the package of silk to the little weather-beaten house where the dressmaker lived.

The woman was quite excited over the news that she could have the honor of making them. "I've heard of you, Miss Bishop, and saw you, and my neighbor girl here next door has went to you, and she says you're the best teacher she ever seen in her life. She says you make the students talk right. Well, gracious, I says to her, it's the Lord that gives you your talkin'--what can a mere teacher do about it? But I guess I got to admit maybe the Lord 'n you is in cahoots."

But it did not take Ella long to realize that maltreating the king's English had very little to do with the woman's natural knack for dressmaking. She brought out a lovely pale blue silk,--"for Irene Van Ness,"--glowing with pride at the name of her customer. "She has always went with that Chester Peters 'n while I wouldn't want any girl of mine to tie up with him--I guess there's plenty about him--there's them that must have their own ideas. But they say she's eatin' her heart out over jealousy of some girl here visitin'. The rich has their troubles the same as us dressmakers, I guess."

Ella said she must get right at the planning for it was growing late. So the woman brought out her "Colored Plates of Ladies of Fashion" and was immediately lost to the world of gossip.

In the days that followed, Ella made many trips to the little weather-beaten house in the far end of town. Having a dress made in the eighties was having a monument built.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the last of May she felt almost too tired to stand through the long ordeal of the fitting. School all day, doing her portion of the housework when home, then the fitting,--and still the day was not over, for she and Amy were going up the river with Delbert after supper.

"I wonder if the time will ever come that one can walk into a store and buy a dress all made," she said to the woman down on her knees.

The dressmaker shifted two or three pins with the muscles of her mouth. "Good land, no. The' ain't no two sets o' hips 'n busts 'n shoulders in the world alike. No--that's one thing ain't never goin' to be invented by nobody. 'Til the end o' the world folks has got to have dresses made for ev'ry separate one."

When Ella arrived home, Delbert was there, and also there was word awaiting her to come to President Corcoran's office at seven-thirty to a hastily called meeting of the faculty over some Commencement difficulty.

"That settles going up the river," she said.

"Oh, no," Amy pouted, "I want to go."

Ella ignored it and turned to Delbert. "You know, Delbert, I wouldn't want any one to hold a single criticism against my work if I could help it. No one can say that I've not done my duty right up to the last."

"Of course not, Ella. It's right, too."

Amy's big china-blue eyes filled with tears. "I'm so disappointed. This beautiful evening--there's going to be a moon. I've counted all day on going. You see, Ella, you and Delbert are out all day." Her soft lips quivered, "But when I'm just here with Auntie, I look forward to little things like this."

"Where's Chester?" Ella was a little tart in tone.

Delbert answered that Chester was with his father who was having two men in the office for business--farmers who had made the date with him. Then he added: "I could take her, Ella--if she's so disappointed. We could walk over to school with you first and then go back down to the river."

Ella thought of her own self at Amy's age--she was nearly nineteen--remembered her self-reliance and self-discipline, and felt a disgust for her cousin's childishness and an annoyance at Delbert's succumbing to the soft little wiles of the girl.

She shrugged a lithe shoulder. "Oh, of course--she ought to be taken," she admitted dryly, and went for her own wraps.

Amy recovered her spirits then, chattered gayly all the way to Central Hall, left Ella with, "You're not mad are you, Ella?" Tired as she was, it took all of Ella's self-control to maintain her poise.

"How long do you think you'll be in the meeting, Ella?" Delbert was wanting to know.

"I haven't the least idea." To save herself she could not help an acidity creeping into her tones.

"I'll probably be waiting here in the hall for you."

"You needn't bother."

She went in to the office, thoroughly annoyed at her own annoyance. "Sometimes I think I'm my own worst enemy," she said to herself.

The meeting lasted late, involving as it did a necessary change of plans and their attendant preparations for Commencement. During the entire time Ella held herself to the line of duty, schooling herself in the concentration of her part in it.

When she came out, she looked about. But there was no one in the hall.

She walked across the campus with Professor Cunningham and Miss McAlister, scorning the idea that they accompany her on down Adams Street to her home, went into the house where the lamp was still burning for her and on up the enclosed stairway to her own room. There she undressed, got into her long white cambric nightgown with its embroidered yoke, and brushed her thick dark hair. When she was ready for bed, she took her lamp with its red flannel in the kerosene bowl and tiptoed down the length of the hall to Amy's room. Cautiously pushing back the door and holding her hand in front of the light in order not to disturb the sleeping girl, she looked in. Amy was not there.

A cold icy hand clutched Ella's heart and strangled her breathing. The gray deep river--a leaky flat-bottomed boat--or an upset canoe--or a fall from a rocky ledge--or--or--

She felt, rather than saw, her way back into her room, blew out the light to have the sheltering darkness, sat stiffly on the edge of the bed to stare into the enfolding blackness.

After a long time she heard the far sound of the outside door, the closer creak of the stair one, and the softly padded tiptoeing of the girl down the hall.

Ella lay back on her pillow. But for an hour or more she continued to stare into the engulfing darkness.

CHAPTER XI

Morning and sunshine and the sweet May odors from the yard brought to Ella clearer vision and a mind swept of all doubts. Why should humans--decent souls who despised the perfidious--ever be besieged by disturbing and disloyal questions? It was not worthy of her,--was not trustful of the love which had been given her. As she dressed she made a little prayer to the God of Lovers,--and the humble request was: "Keep us both from unworthy thoughts."

She left the house cheerfully, before Amy had come down. All day long at school she was busy and contented. In the late afternoon at home she found Amy demure and gentle, slipping quietly about the house doing a simple task or two. Some May-apple blossoms drooped limply over the side of a vase,--mute reminder of the river trip.

"That's one flower should stay in its natural woodsy habitat," Ella said gayly. "Never pull a mandrake."

She did not notice that Amy's wide blue eyes looked up, startled and fearful.

Delbert did not come in the evening. Sometimes he had extra work and stayed at the office. Neither was there any word from him, for the telephone was but a new toy being tried out by a handful of people in the east.

Chester drove up in the new buggy with the prancing blacks, but when Amy saw him, she said hurriedly to Mrs. Bishop: "Tell him I have a headache"--and ran up the enclosed stairway.

Friday morning Ella went as usual to school, her active mind placing all the day's tasks in neat pigeon-holes: classes, a test on diagramming, see Professor Wick about Clarence Caldwell, meet with Miss McAlister and Professor Cunningham on a committee, go to Mrs. Finch's for a fitting, ask Irene about some music for the Alumni--the third banquet, now, with thirty-three graduates eligible to attend.

A busy morning--and then in the afternoon just before the one o'clock class was called, Chris Jensen came to Ella's recitation room, tiptoeing with noisy boots--squeak--squeak--all the way down the length of it. He grinned as he handed her a sealed note.

"Iss dis somet'ing you can use?"

"Thank you, Chris."

"Pleased to do t'ings for you, Miss Bis'op."

The note was in Delbert's handwriting so that Ella slipped into her little office to open it alone. Sometimes he sent her these little messages by Chris,--about nothing at all.

She tore into the envelope with its Peters, Peters and Thompson in one corner.

But this,--this was different. Ella's heart pounded strangely at the queer letter and the same icy hand of Wednesday evening clutched at her throat.

DEAR ELLA:

Something has happened. I must see you this evening,--and talk with you.

DELBERT.          

What--oh what had happened? Something that night. Why must Delbert talk with her? About something of that night. Why had he sent a note at all? He could come any time he wished. It was preparing her. For what? For something about that night.

Like the tom-toms of the jungle it beat its monotonous refrain: Something that night.

The one o'clock bell rang directly over her head with loud clamorous insistence, and the pigeons flew out in noisy response, their wings brushing the windows. The bell! The bell meant service to others. Oh, no, not now,--not this afternoon when something had happened. The bell meant obligations. No, no,--nothing was important but that something had happened,--something vital,--something more serious than classes, --something to do with the things of the heart. The bell meant duty. Duty! One's duty had to be performed, no matter under what stress. Go on in there like a soldier. But something has happened, I tell you. Stop whimpering. Go!

Head up, Ella stepped into her classroom.

All afternoon she could hear the pigeons coo and their wings beat against the bell. And then to her tormented mind they were no longer softly cooing pigeons but great black bats that, like her thoughts, would not stay away. They swirled about her head, harassing and torturing her--the bats and the thoughts. They flew about her in all their ugliness, through the work of the three periods.

"The definition, please, for a transitive verb."

Something has happened.

"Name the principal parts . . ."

I must see you this evening.

"What type of clause do we prefer there?"

Something has happened.

CHAPTER XII

Ella taught all her classes. She walked down to Mrs. Finch's and stood through a tedious and loquacious fitting. She found her mother not feeling well and put cold packs on her head.

When the bell rings, the Ella Bishops of the world answer the summons.

But she could eat no supper. She sat at the table and made futile little stabs at her plate, nibbling a saleratus biscuit, so her mother would not notice and worry.

Amy cast furtive glances at the two occasionally, her long thick lashes sweeping her cheeks whenever she looked away. Mrs. Bishop made plaintive and tedious remarks about the dull pain in her head. It was a tense meal.

"I'll wash the dishes," Amy volunteered with feigned lightness.

"No, I'll do them myself." Ella wanted activity for her body to deaden the constant questioning of her mind.

When she heard Delbert open the picket-gate and come up the board walk, she slipped outside and met him under the rank growth of the trumpet-vine at the edge of the porch. He stood and stared at her with no word. By the rays from the dining-room lamp, she could see that he was haggard, his lips drawn taut.

"What is it?" The thing was now frightening her beyond endurance.

"Let's walk, Ella. I have to tell you something. Let's get away . . . from the house." He threw a nervous glance toward the lamplight beyond the screen door against which a Junebug was thumping noisily.

"No." She heard her own voice as though coming from far off and detected the terror in it. "Tell it now. Right here." She felt that she was choking, so that she put both hands across the beating pulse of her throat.

"It's . . . about Amy." His voice sounded desperate.

She knew it. Something had been trying to tell her so for days. And she had refused to listen. Now in the flash of a split second she knew that she had sensed the thing from the first.

"You love her." She found herself saying it for him. In her whole life to come no one would ever accuse Ella Bishop of sidestepping the truth. Some sturdy element inherited from her pioneer father gave her strength to shoulder the hard part of the interview. Even now, in the crisis of the tense moment, she had a swift understanding of herself, a sudden fleeting premonition that she was always to do that for other people--assume their burdens.

"I . . . I . . . am afraid so." He was breathing hard,--was suffering. "Come over here . . . where we can talk . . ." He put his hand on hers to draw her to a bench in the yard. Ella pulled it back as from a striking reptile.

"Let me explain, Ella." His voice sounded as though he had been running. "When I went up the river with her, I swear to you . . ."

"No . . . that's enough."

She turned away.

He called her desperately: "Ella . . . come back."

But she had gone, in one swift flash, back into the house--the screen door clicking sharply behind her. Up the stairs with running feet--up to the darkness of her room--up to face despair--up to the black midnight of--

But in front of her own bedroom door Amy met her, barring the way to that dark haven.

"Oh, Ella, whatever will you say to me?" She tried to put her hand on Ella's arm, but pulled it back at the sight of the older girl's wild face.

Suddenly she began to cry, little, superficial, cowardly tears. "Ella . . . I'm sorry. I never meant to."

Meant to.

Ella stared, white-faced, at the soft pink features contorted into a baby-like expression of fear until Amy cowered before her.

"What are you going to do about it?" the young girl looked out between trembling fingers.

Do! Do!

"Ella, you aren't . . . you don't think you can still marry him, do you?" Genuine fright was in the soft voice.

Ella glared at the human who could conceive the thought. The young girl misinterpreted the long icy silence,--all the unanswered questions,--for suddenly she took her hands from her face and said dryly, with a little jaunty twitch of her shoulder. "Well, you can't. He can't marry you now. I'll have you know that."

It was with fascinated horror that Ella gazed now at the girl. What? What? Oh, what?

She wet her moist lips, tried to make the words come. Her knees were water.

"You mean . . . ?"

"Well . . . he has to marry me . . . now."

"You . . . you little . . . animal," Ella said. And crumpled to the floor.

CHAPTER XIII

All night and a day Ella lay on the bed in her darkened room without removing her dress. All night and a day she crushed her face into the pillow and prayed to die. "Don't let me live. Please don't let me live," was her constant petition.

Her mother tiptoed to the door at intervals,--plead plaintively with her daughter to see her. But there is no sharing Gethesemane with another. When one crosses the brook of Cedron into the Garden, one goes alone.

Toward evening there was a different voice at the door,--Amy's childish one. "I'm going, Ella." And in a moment: "Ella, . . . let me see you a minute before I go, won't you?" And when there was no answer, "Ella, don't be mad. Please don't be mad."

Ella wrapped the pillow about her head and moaned into its feathery depths.

At dusk she heard a buggy drive up. Her ears sharpened by distress conveyed the fact to her that there was more movement in the house than there had been all day. A door slammed twice, there was a sound of a man's low voice--Delbert's--the dragging of a trunk or box, a high childish call of "Good-by, Auntie." And the world had come to an end for Ella Bishop.

Toward morning, she pulled the clothes from her exhausted body and got into her gown. For the first time, then, she felt that she wanted her mother. Like a little girl, bruised and hurt, she crept down the stairs, felt her way through the darkness of the rooms, into her mother's bedroom, and crawled into bed with her.

"Mamma--comfort me." It was the cry of a wounded thing.

But her mother's heart was pounding so furiously from the shock, and she said her head was splitting so terribly, that in a few minutes Ella got up and dressed again and gave her medicine and wrung out cold compresses for her. So after all, it was Ella who did the comforting.

Sunday passed with tragic nerve-racking slowness. Once she threw out some dead mandrake blossoms and scrubbed the vase vigorously, as though she would cleanse it from all past association with the cloying odor of the waxy flower. Like a haunted thing then her mind would again travel in sickly imaginings up the river where an empty boat was nosed into the wet sand, drag itself up the bank and creep into the nearby woods where the May-apples grew in shady cloistered places--She would moan aloud in the agony of her mental illness and dark despair.

On Monday morning she dragged herself to her classroom. Duty--obligations--service. These await every one who comes out of the Garden.

"Oh, Miss Bishop, have you been sick?" a freshman girl asked.

"Just a Sunday headache," she answered with studied composure.

All day she taught with painstaking thoroughness. Not all the world's heroines are listed in the archives.

"Another use of the participle should be kept in mind."

Where did they go last night?

"Analyze it orally, giving attention to the function of the participle."

She's a cunning little thing--like a kitten.

Not a student could have detected any letdown in the detailed instruction. Ella Bishop's heartbreak was her own.

She stayed until five, assisting a pretty young girl with an outline for an essay. The student was only four years younger than the teacher, but to Ella, noting the girl's spontaneous smile, there seemed all the difference between blooming youth and tragic old age.

When the work was finished, she put on her hat and walked down through the June sunshine, redolent with the odors of Commencement, across town to Mrs. Finch's weather-beaten house.

The little dressmaker greeted her with: "Well, well, here comes the bride." And before Ella could respond she added: "The blue one is all finished to the last stitch, but the one has to have another fitting, so I'm glad you've come."

Ella held herself together with studied effort. There would be a great deal of this to meet now, and she must face it with composure. "You won't need to finish it, Mrs. Finch. I'm not going to use it."

"Oh--you'll wear the blue instead? But I wouldn't, Miss Bishop . . ."

"You don't understand. I'm not getting married at all."

"Oh, Miss Bishop. You don't . . . ?" But something formidable in Ella's face made her stop abruptly.

"Sometimes one just changes one's mind," Ella said quietly.

Mrs. Finch was embarrassed. She hardly knew how to proceed. "You'll take the blue one with you then?"

"Yes," said Ella.

"And how . . . about . . . ?"

"The white? I'll take it too."

"Just the unfinished way . . . with the bottom not hemmed . . . and the sleeves not sewed in?"

"Yes."

She brought it out of an inner room--a shimmering mass of white with little bouquets of pale pink rosebuds and blue forget-me-nots in silken relief against the snowy background--a lovely white monument for the grave of a dead hope, with flowers for remembrance.

With much fumbling of paper and dropping of string the little dressmaker did up the two dresses, the blue one and the white one and the long mousquetaire sleeves of the white which had not been sewed in.

When Ella took the money out of her purse, the woman said sympathetically: "Just for the blue, Miss Bishop. I wouldn't like to . . . take anything for the other . . . unfinished that way and . . . not to be used just now."

"Thank you--but I pay my obligations," Ella said firmly. And left with the finished blue dress and the unfinished white one which was not to be used just then--or ever.

CHAPTER XIV

After supper Sam came across the street, stepping gingerly around through the young hollyhocks to the back door. When Ella met him at the entrance to the little porch, he stood in embarrassment, his thin throat with its prominent Adam's apple working convulsively.

"I know all about it, Ella."

"Please--Sam--don't talk of it."

"I won't, Ella--now or ever. But I have to tell you one or two things,--it's necessary. I thought if I came right now and got it over, I wouldn't have to bother you any more. Delbert severed his connections with father . . . and left town. You won't . . . won't have to be seeing him. And Chet's gone away."

"Gone . . . where?"

"St. Louis. Father owns a little property there. Chet went to transact some business in connection with it. He just didn't want to stay here longer. He was"--Sam looked up in embarrassment--"quite madly in love with Amy."

"Yes. And Irene?"

"He doesn't care anything for her."

"No--he doesn't. Poor Irene."

For a little while they stood at the back stoop, saying nothing--both in frozen misery.

Sam broke the stony silence then with: "I'd give anything in the world, Ella, to have you happy again."

"I know, Sam. And I'm grateful to you."

"That's one thing I came to say. If ever . . . if you need me, I'll always be there . . . right across the street."

"Thank you, Sam."

"You may seem pretty strong and self-reliant, Ella, but maybe there are times you'd need to . . . sort of lean on some one . . ."

It broke Ella. She, who had held her head high all day, suddenly burst into wild tears. Great wrenching sobs shook her,--and when she was spent with the rocking torture of them, Sam, with untold misery in his eyes, was saying: "That's good for you, Ella--a kind of outlet. God knows, I wish it was the last tear you'd ever have to shed in your life."

So Chester Peters had left town for awhile in the despondency of a weak and hopeless infatuation for Amy. The trail of wreckage left behind her coming was quite complete.

On Tuesday, Ella asked to see President Corcoran after school alone in his office. With no preliminaries she asked if her position had been filled, and when told that it had not been as yet, without evasive excuses she inquired whether or not she could retain it.

President Corcoran's bright black eyes looked at her quizzically through the steel-bowed glasses above the Spanish moss of his beard.

"But your other plans, Miss Ella? I ask only with kindest motives."

"I understand, President Corcoran. I've changed my mind. Am not . . . getting married . . ." If her voice faltered, it was only for a moment. "Probably I never shall."

"I see."

The president sat quietly looking out on the raw new campus with the barrel-staves around the bases of the young elms and maples.

"You are a fine young woman, Miss Ella," he said in a moment. "You would make the young man a splendid wife. If there is any uncertainty . . . yet . . . in your mind?" It was half question, half fatherly advice.

Ella, holding her lips together in a quivering line, shook her head.

"I see."

He waited another moment, thoughtfully, then reached to a pigeon-hole of his desk and withdrew a handful of letters,--apparently a dozen or fifteen,--and dropped them into the cavernous wastebasket at his side.

"Applications," he remarked casually, and held out his hand. "It will be all right with the board, I know."

Ella took the hand which pressed her own in paternal sympathy, but she could not trust herself to speak.

In a moment he asked: "You will devote your fine young energies to the students of this school?"

Something suddenly ran through her body and heart and mind with the thought--some feeling of emotion, which was too deep for analysis.

"It's a wonderful work," the steady voice went on. "It's something like carrying a torch to light the paths for all the boys and girls with whom you come in contact. In dollars and cents it does not pay much--perhaps it never will. For myself--I know I might be able to make more money another way. I have just this spring had that very question to settle. My brother-in-law has wanted me to go into a new manufacturing business with him for which the financial prospects seem extremely good. I have had my struggle with myself and made my decision. I shall teach,--even when the school grows and I need no longer conduct any classes, the contacts will be the same."

When Ella did not speak he went on. "There is no way in the world, Miss Ella, to hold to one's youth. Time passes so quickly. Today I'm forty. To-morrow I shall be sixty,--day after to-morrow, eighty. The only way I know to hold on to those fleeting years is to bind myself to youth. If in these swiftly moving years I can pass on a little of that living flame from the torch I carry . . . if I can help light the long steep paths for young people . . . the service I have rendered will be its own reward."

It touched Ella deeply. For days she had prayed for strength to take up her life--asked that something come into her mind and heart to help in blotting out the bitter thing she had experienced. This was it. Quite unexpectedly President Corcoran was helping make it possible to think of something else, to turn from the anguish that