Title: Forgive Us Our Trespasses (1937)
Author: Lloyd C. Douglas
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Language:  English
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FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES

by

Lloyd C. Douglas

1937

CHAPTER

CHAPTER I

The new-laid harvest straw beneath the faded red carpet rustled crisply under Martha's shapeless felt slippers as she padded across the living-room to the cluttered mantel.

With the quizzical grimace of long-neglected astigmatism she adjusted the steel-bowed spectacles that had been her mother's, had of a notion peddler for two dozen eggs and a pound of butter.

The wooden-wheeled clock--a noisy but amazingly accurate and exquisitely ornamented product of old Ferd's, while laid up one winter with a broken leg that had kept him two months sober--clacked irascibly at Martha that another blistering August morning was nearly five hours old. High time, indeed, that the day's work began. Not much wonder the Millers were poor.

Dragging her slipper-heels to the door of the spare bedroom which, in spite of her continued protests, Susan and Greta had insisted on occupying of late, Martha vigorously rattled the latch.

Glumly appeased by assurances from within, she returned to the dingy kitchen and peered into the kettle to see if there was enough water to prime the parching pump under the pear tree.

Then, kettle in hand, she plodded to the foot of the narrow stairs, and petulantly called:

"Julia!"

* * * * *

Outstretched on velvet moss so soft and deep it yielded to every curve of her supple young body, Julia knew that if she stirred, the least bit, she would never be able to recapture the complete satisfaction of this luxurious languor.

Doubtless it was too much to expect that an experience so strangely sweet could be quite real. Sooner or later, something or somebody would invade her peace. A tall giraffe would saunter up and thrust his long nose into the top of the banana tree. Giraffes ate bananas, didn't they? . . . Or a big man with a blue coat and shiny buttons would order her off. . . . Or there would be a peremptory summons from afar to come at once!

Julia's unbuckled consciousness was already troubled by the persistent echo of a distant call. It had seemed to come from the depths of this tropical forest--a faint but urgent cry for help. The voice had sounded tired, plaintive, persecuted--just like Martha's.

But what would Martha be doing away out here in . . . in Tasmania? Julia now readily identified her location by recalling a picture in The Pictorial Atlas, her omnivorous memory obliging her with phrases from the adjacent descriptive text: "Mountains heavily forested . . . magnificent scenery . . . peaks of crystalline rock showing pink and blue . . . frequent showers . . . luxuriant vegetation." If this wasn't Tasmania, it was someplace else too far off for Martha to find. Martha never went anywhere, not even to Ligonier on Saturdays. She always saw them off, standing there under the big maple, mopping her tanned forehead with the corner of her brown apron.

"Wish you was a-goin' along, Mat," Hiram would drawl, conscious that he only, by virtue of his clumsy championship of her dour eccentricities, could nickname her without rebuke.

"No," Martha would reply, sacrificially, "somebody's got to stay on th' place--what with them young turkeys and all."

Whoever was calling, Julia had an uneasy sense of guilt over her failure to respond. Whether required to go or not, she at least should have the courtesy to answer. Of course, if it did actually turn out to be Martha--a most improbable event--she would have to obey. One always came when Martha called. Sometimes one came scowling and grumbling, but one always came.

Martha had an uncanny instinct for knowing when one must on no account be disturbed. Had one reached the most exciting episode in a story, Martha needed a few dry chips immediately to revive an expiring fire. Let the sunset be at that phase where vermilion was beginning to be laced with purple, Martha's accusing voice inquired from the kitchen door whether one expected to gather the eggs, or must she go out later and do it herself in the dark and all? . . . But this couldn't be Martha!

In just a moment, now, Julia would reply to the entreaty. She would draw a deep breath--though deep breaths were rather disconcerting, lately, for they seemed to make her plump round breasts so much more mature than she was, herself--and try to exhale "Coming!" so effortlessly as not to disturb this delightful lethargy. She would wait until the cry sounded a little more distinctly, and then she would answer, "Yes, Martha . . . Coming!"

Evidently someone else had gone to the rescue, for everything was blissfully quiet again. That was good. So nice not to be bothered. Julia sighed contentedly as a big drop of warm dew dripped from the tip of a sheltering fern-frond and rolled slowly down her cheek.

She opened one eye cautiously--a mere tiny slit--to make sure the tall, slim, slanting date-palm was still there. It was; plainly visible through the vertical bars of her long black lashes.

Was this the one in the Elementary Geography or the Child's Natural History? No--it couldn't be; for the date-palm in the Geography had a grey monkey in the top, and the one in the Natural History was being climbed by a brown boy with arms as long as his legs, and sharp heels, scampering up out of the tiresome paragraph that read: "The Malay is of pigmy stature, averaging 148-149 cm., with black skin and short woolly hair." . . . No--this date-palm must be the one in the magic-lantern lecture, last winter, over at Hinebaugh's Schoolhouse.

As for the dripping rubber trees, with the waxy leaves that shaded her like hands folded above her eyes, Julia could locate them certainly. They were from the little conservatory at Fort Wayne . . . out in Spring Fountain Park . . . the day she didn't go to the show. And here they were in this immense conservatory--for this really was a conservatory. Julia smiled over her silly mistake. She had fancied herself out in the open . . . in Tasmania, maybe; and all the time she had been lying here on the moss in this conservatory, exactly like the one in Spring Fountain Park--only twenty times bigger!

But there was no mistaking those moist rubber trees. She had sat under them for a whole hour on a sticky green iron bench, that day last summer, when their family--all but Martha, what with the plums and all--had gone to Barnum and Bailey's circus; only she hadn't seen the show. She had indignantly left them standing there giggling foolishly on the crowded courthouse steps, craning their necks to follow the last of the little elephants at the tail of the pompous parade--the little elephants whose bulbous, bobbing, nodding heads seemed to be saying, "Yes, yes--we're coming.". . . (Yes, Martha . . . Coming!)

Hiram and Elmer had been so noisy and silly, and had attracted so much unpleasant comment, that she had suddenly rebelled against the further humiliation of going out to the show-grounds with them.

"Aw--come on!" Elmer had shouted, against the deafening shrieks of the steam calliope. "Don't be a sissy!"

"S'matter with yuh?" growled Hiram. "'Shamed o' yer folks?"

Greta was laughing uproariously over Susan's comment, "Wouldn't it kill yuh, Gret? . . . Father a-scoldin' the boys fer drinkin' so much, and him just able to stand up."

Julia had been very sorry for her father that day, swaying unsteadily in the broiling sun as he morosely watched the clanking, jingling, garish, pungent parade--his tanned face screwed up into tight little wrinkles, his shaggy grey hair curled in tight little ringlets on his temples, his blue eyes, deep-set, swimming with vertigo. She couldn't bear to see him ridiculed. He belonged to her.

"Please, Greta!"

Greta had grinned, and cracked her chewing-gum.

Julia had been strongly impulsed to slip her arm through her father's, and make off with him; to offer him a hand exactly like his, only smaller and not so brown; to smile into his eyes with eyes exactly like them, only younger and not so weary; to take him along with her--anywhere to be away from these unfeeling people who were not related to either of them except by the mere unfortunate accident that they all happened to belong to the same family. At that very moment, however, he had turned on her reproachfully, stifled a hiccough that hinted at impending nausea, and muttered, "You'd better let yourself go and have some fun once."

"Fun?"

"Yes: their kind o' fun. It won't do you no good to be haughty. You might as well cave in--an' like it! I done it! So kin you! I even larnt to talk like 'em. If you don't want to be lonesome all yer life, you'd better--"

That quite settled it! . . . Promising to meet them at the Pennsylvania Station at seven-fifteen (they had left old Florrie and the dilapidated surrey at Larwill and had come the rest of the way by rail), Julia had slipped through the sweaty crowd, her cheeks aflame.

Three blocks away she took the street-car--No. 52, a policeman had told her--an almost empty little green street-car that banged its bell furiously at the now demobilizing throng, demanding it to drag its roly-poly, waddling wife and gawky children and their yellow balloons and pink popcorn balls off the rails; had ground dizzily around sharp corners, and lost its few passengers--all but Julia--finally reaching almost open country, where it took the bit between its teeth, tucked its chin against its neck, and galloped over a rusty, hummocky track, the trolley-wheel singing a painfully shrill note, until it brought up with a jerk at the shabby station-shed in Spring Fountain Park.

The grass was seared and badly trampled, and the dahlias were dusty and frowsy in their prim round beds. A black-lettered board pointed an index-finger toward "The Conservatory."

Julia had had the steamy, sweaty, stuffy, little greenhouse all to herself, that afternoon. Everybody else had gone to the circus. She had sat there on the sticky iron bench, hoping it wouldn't come off on her new pink gingham, dreamily transporting herself to the equatorial regions where all this rank, lush, stifled vegetation belonged, finding a strange kinship with it. She sympathized with these cramped, dwarfed, imprisoned rubber trees, and the gigantic ferns with dejected, drooping arms and wings.

And now, to Julia's annoyance, the cry for help was repeated. It came from just outside the conservatory door, this time. Would she, or would she not, come immediately?

The huge dome of the conservatory lifted and disappeared. It was exactly like the glass cover that protected the plate of soggy doughnuts from the flies on the high counter in Ruggles's Restaurant and Pool Hall at Cromwell. . . . Martha had taken the conservatory by the handle, and lifted it off. One could hear what she was saying now, ever so distinctly. Would she come, this instant, and help get breakfast for Susan and Greta, who, as she very well knew, had promised to be ready at half-past five to go with the other huckleberry-pickers to Wadham's marsh? And wasn't it little enough for her to do, seeing she had begged off from the berryin' to study her algebry, or whatever it was, so she would be prepared for that there County Institute, week after next, which everybody knew she hadn't any right to waste their money on--even if it was her'n, a-teachin' silly paintin' lessons to women as ought to been a-keepin' their children's buttons on--what with them so hard-up and all? And didn't she have any natural feelin's of--"

"Yes, Martha. I'm coming!"

Julia sat up, drenched with perspiration, stretched, inhaled an unsatisfactory draught of sultry, humid air, and gazed out through the east window at a chrome yellow sun that already threatened to break an August record. Next Thursday's Ligonier Weekly Banner would probably say, in big black headlines, "HOTTEST DAY FOR TEN YEARS! . . . Highest Temperature Since 1885 Recorded on August the--"

August the whath? . . . August the tenth? Her birthday! Would anyone else remember?

She reached out a long, slender hand for her stockings, dangling over the back of a chair, and tugged them on. After all, shouldn't she be glad she had a good excuse not to go into Wadham's snake-infested huckleberry marsh and have her arms and legs scratched with briars and nettles while she fought deer-flies with an exasperation close to tears, and shuddered with loathing at the sight of enormous caterpillars, and wiped the slimy cobwebs out of her eyes with sun-blistered, juice-smeared wrists? . . . Blessings on the pesky algebra!

"J-u-l-i-a!"

"Yes, Martha. I'm coming!"

* * * * *

Her entrance into the grim little dining-room was effected with much difficulty. She could have wished that her first appearance before her household, as an adult in good and regular standing, might have been somewhat more impressive.

Circumstances had decreed that Julia must bump her way crabwise through the obstinate swinging-door from the smoky kitchen with a precariously poised platter of bacon in one hand and the big battered coffee-pot in the other, while the family, glancing up from its first round of fried mush and sorghum molasses--with which munitions Martha had preceded her--wondered, not without warrantable anxiety, whether she would make port with all her cargo.

It was not to be expected that her lazy and surly brothers, much less absent-minded old Ferd--whose fork trembled in a long, slim hand that had been obviously intended for more esteemed employment than shingling barns and blowing stumps--would spring to her rescue. That would have been "a-puttin' on style," an affectation held in snarling contempt by Hiram and Elmer. Indeed, their sentiment on this subject was commonly shared by the entire male species, so far as she had been able to observe.

As for Greta, who, at twenty-two, had already well developed an impish talent for the enjoyment of other people's discomfiture; and as for Susan, whose twenty-seven virginal years and one hundred and sixty-seven pounds gave such alarming promise of unarrestable progress in both dimensions that she was frankly envious of her willowy young sister, Julia's predicament was clearly no concern of theirs.

Martha, seated with her angular back to the door, which now capitulated with a savage swish and a sullen bang, cleared a place at her elbow for the brown-stained coffee-pot, and dutifully remarked that this was Julia's eighteenth birthday.

While still in her teens, Martha had accidentally lost an upper canine. Morbidly self-conscious, her misfortune had worried her grievously; but there had been no necessity for replacing the missing tooth. By skilful practice, Martha had been able to conceal this disfigurement with the corner of her lip, a technique which had produced a meticulousness of articulation oddly inconsistent with the slovenly elisions and shockingly bad syntax demanded by her righteous passion to avoid "a-puttin' on airs."

"Yes; your little sister," reiterated Martha, her choice of a pronoun indicating the maternal relationship she sustained to the family, "is came of age."

Brief, bucolic felicitations from the boys were mumbled through the mush, to which old Ferd--so stung with remorse over having no gift for her that he did not even raise his eyes--added solemnly that Martha could always be depended on to remember the days.

Depositing her awkward burdens, Julia stiffened to a martial stance, brought her full red lips to a determined pucker, tossed her curly head airily, and swept the breakfast-table with a look of pretended challenge, as if to say that she was quite grown up now and they must all have a care how they treated her.

A moment later she was repentantly reflecting that previous experiences might have warned her against indulging in this bit of playful pantomime. Julia's sporadic efforts to dramatize some situation for the amusement of her family had been uniformly unsuccessful. It would have been very pleasant, she often thought, to belong to a household quick to interpret and enjoy a little good-natured clowning. It was not that their stodginess and lack of sparkle evoked her contempt: she was too naïve to be contemptuous. Indeed, she had never known--except in Little Women, long since read to rags and learned by heart--any such family as the rollicking, bantering, make-believe crew that constituted her ideal home.

On one's birthday, however, it might reasonably be hoped that the family would waive its habitual taciturnity, and humour a whim; so, quite recklessly overplaying her premeditated skit, Julia glared at her brothers and sisters with a mock severity signifying her newly acquired dignity. But they had already returned to their bacon and mush; and, noting that no one of them--not even her father--showed signs of sharing her mood, she doffed her archness, rubbed a damp wisp of blue-black hair from her low forehead with the back of a shapely wrist--astonishingly like old Ferd's, only daintier--and slipped into her accustomed place on the end of the pine bench beside Susan.

"Reckon you'll be too cocky to live with, now yer old enough t' be yer own boss," observed Hiram, who, on second thought, had decided not to leave Julia under the impression that he, at least, was too thick-witted to have taken note of her brief charade.

Equally unwilling to be considered incapable of clever deduction, Greta remarked to her plate that Julia would probably be leaving home, one of these days, to go on the stage.

Old Ferd hitched about in his chair, and for a moment Julia thought he was going to offer a comment.

"Julia's always been a-playin' she was somethin' else besides what she is," said Susan.

"Well--she ain't harmed no one by a-doin' that," growled Ferd. "She come by it honestly enough. When I was her age, or thereabouts--"

"More coffee, paw?" inquired Martha, loudly, as if he were deaf.

"It's sure a-goin' to be a scorcher, Gret," observed Susan,--fanning her goitre with the bib of her apron, and peering through the open doorway toward the road.

"There goes old Len Bausermann with his pick 'n' shovel," reported Elmer, following his plump sister's eyes to the highway.

"He'll be a-diggin' Granny Hartsock's grave today," explained Hiram, without turning to look.

"A saint," murmured Martha, unctuously, "if they ever was one."

"Who--Len?" chaffed Elmer. "That consarned old chicken-thief?"

Susan and Greta laughed immoderately. Martha, easily offended when her piety was ridiculed, drew down the corners of her mouth, and pouted. Elmer explored a defective wisdom-tooth with a pointed quill, and grinned.

Old Ferd knew they didn't care to hear his story--none of them but Julia. He could always be sure of an attentive listener in Julia, though sometimes she asked too many questions.

The family's rude indifference occasioned him no surprise. He had been on the defensive for so long in a home to which he contributed almost nothing, his small earnings claimed by Jake Heffel, that he had no right to be indignant over such discourtesies. He poured the thin coffee into his saucer with a shaky hand, crumbled bread into it, and sprinkled the dish with brown sugar, intent upon his occupation. Julia, toying absently with her food, studied his deep-lined, mobile face, confident that she was following his reminiscences as closely as if he had been given encouragement to recite them.

He was, she knew, skipping hurriedly over the Dresden part of it; the part that most interested her; the part that really mattered. She had never been able to construct a very clear picture of his boyhood home. The blurry impression she had of it was an accumulated synthesis of chance remarks accidentally dropped, and laconic answers to her importunate queries in the rare moments when he seemed willing to talk about his youth.

He would be out in his tiny shop under the big maple, standing at his home-made lathe, turning wooden pins for the mending of Squire Craig's harrow-teeth. The fine hickory shavings would come writhing and screaming from the point of his blue-hot chisel. He would pretend not to notice her, sitting on the old tool-chest, intently watching him.

"Let me treadle it, father. I like to."

The huge oak balance-wheel overhead would lumber to a creaking stop.

"Mind you don't get yer foot caught under it, now!"

Julia would snuggle it between his arms and stand so close, her back to his breast, pumping the broad pedal that made the patched belt go snapping and crackling on the great wooden fly-wheel, threatening to bring it down on their heads; her father's warm, hairy forearm, tense on the chisel, moist with sweat and powdered with fine sawdust, brushing her cheek, almost as if he caressed her.

Panting with exertion, she would look up over her shoulder, and smile, when he signalled her to stop.

"You're more like her every day, Julia!" he would murmur, as the machinery idled to a standstill.

"Because my hair dips down to a point here in the middle?"

"That--and the deep dimple in your chin."

"And she had the same kind of eyes that we have."

"Exactly; that's where we got 'em."

"The others don't have them, father. . . . Funny--isn't it?"

Thus drawn together in these brief intimacies, there would be some talk about her Grandmother Mueller--Ferd had changed his name to Miller, when coming to Indiana, because the people invariably mispronounced it; or was that the exact reason, Julia often wondered, when she had grown up--Grandmother Mueller who always seemed to be a mere slip of a girl, stooping over the flower-beds in the garden that was so--

"How big was it, father--honestly: big as our potato-patch?"

He would chuckle derisively.

"Our potato-patch! Huh! Six--eight--ten times as big!"

Then there would be some vigorous prodding of memory for more information about the house. It was a great, rambling, stone house with tall, broad chimneys and many gables. Yes--his own room had a gable, and there was a window-seat with a rose-coloured velvet cushion. Wrens nested in a little box under the eaves, and when it stormed, the branch of an elm swept the diamond-shaped panes of the mullioned window.

"And was there honestly a fountain in the middle of a big pool, father?"

"Yes--and lily-pads."

"And really goldfish, like you said?"

"Yes, daughter--but don't you think you'd better go and help Martha now?"

"And you would feed them in the mornings--and they always knew when you were coming, and swam close to the edge to meet you?"

Of late Julia was becoming painfully aware of their lost heritage. Her day-dreams were bounded by the high stone wall, made warm and friendly by the tall hollyhocks his mother loved. On summer afternoons she fancied herself sitting in the rose-arbour, hard-by the large, half-timbered workshop and studio where distinguished guests were so often entertained to tea.

"Tea!--in a shop!" she had exclaimed, the first time he had told her about it.

"But it wasn't a little shop like this here, Julia. Seems to me like it had five or six big rooms. I disremember, exactly. The people came to see the carvings; almost every afternoon, somebody. And there would be exhibitions, couple o' times a year. Lots o' people came then, from long distances, Paris and London."

"Would they talk to you, father?"

"I was just a young feller."

"Going to school?"

"No--I had a tutor. . . . But I was always a-hangin' around the shop, and I can't remember when I wasn't a-playin' with chisels, and a-makin' things. . . . Once I heard a Count--I disremember his name--a-tellin' somebody that Mueller on a rood screen made it worth more 'n' its weight in gold."

And there was a river.

Julia felt almost certain, as she sat watching her father's slow motions with his spoon, oblivious of the dull prattle of his family's table-talk, that he was dreaming of that river. You went through a thick oaken door set in the garden wall. The door had heavy wrought-iron hinges, and was always locked o' nights with a key that must have weighed all of a pound. You went through the door, and there was the river. The banks were rounded and grassy, and a long row of tall poplars grew on our side, "their leaves always a-flutterin' whether there was any wind or not." He disremembered the name of the river, but "one of the swans was called 'William Tell.'" There were boats, too; a couple o' canoes and a dory and a punt with a red and blue canopy--

"How much did Lafe Shock git fer his gol-danged shoats?" Elmer was inquiring of Hiram.

"Four cents, I heared," rumbled Hiram, puffing at his sputtering pipe. "'Bout enough to pay fer th' corn he'd chucked into 'em."

"Corn--hell!" scoffed Elmer. "Them shoats never seen a grain o' corn. All they ever et was swill!"

"Lot o' good the Shock swill woulda done' em," sneered Greta.

"They was so gol-danged poor," expatiated Elmer, "that I bet Lafe had to soak 'em afore they'd hold slop."

--and a punt with a red and blue canopy; and, sometimes, in the evening, his mother sat in the punt, with her guitar, and sang ballads to him, very sweetly. No--his father never joined them. No--he disremembered what the songs were.

Now Julia was at sea with her father, standing beside him as he stoked his way, with blistered hands, on a slow boat; she was landing with him, bewilderedly, at Castle Garden. Much had happened since the swans and the ballads in the evening; but it was quite impossible to recover intervening events. His father had whipped him savagely when he was sixteen. He wouldn't tell her why; but it had something to do with his mother. She had cried desperately, and that night he ran away. The tutor had helped him get away. The tutor had gone away, too, that same night.

Judging by the confident tightening of his lips, Julia knew he was in New York now, apprenticed to Lamb's Studios. Four years of that passed in a few seconds. Now he was hard at work on the big walnut eagle--his first important assignment--that was to be poised on a lectern for Saint John's in Philadelphia. Lamb's had taken him in on the strength of the Mueller tradition, and had given him every possible encouragement, undisguisedly rejoicing in his budding talent. Every day he was improving his skill; every night he was poring over his new books, determined to perfect his English.

Then came the war. Julia saw the clouds gathering on the seamed old face. It was all over now. He had gone back to Lamb's in a faded uniform topped by the absurd little cap with the stiff visor that he still wore, rather rakishly, on Decoration Day--a day Julia dreaded, for he always marched unsteadily, and joked a good deal, when he should have been silent and dignified.

Now he had returned to the Lamb Studios, stubbly, fuddled, and pungent, after a fortnight's spree. All was forgiven. Soldiers would be soldiers. Lamb's were disappointed, but hopeful. Why, Mr. Joseph Lamb, himself!--(Ferd had been too proud of that recognition to keep it a secret, even if its implications were not to his own credit)--Mr. Joseph Lamb, himself, had pleaded with him to straighten up, and be a man. Surely, nobody could have asked for a better friend, Ferd often remarked, than "Mr. Joseph," who, it was said, had given up his plans to enter the ministry because he thought he could do more for religion by adding something to its beauty. "Mr. Joseph Lamb was a great artist!" Ferd would say. "Yes sir!"

No--it wasn't the fault of Lamb's Studios if he had drunk himself practically into the gutter at a time when a returned soldier's dissipation was easily pardoned, but not so easily capitalized in a profession demanding the utmost steadiness of eye and hand. Ferd was so proud of his erstwhile craftsmanship and its stern exactions that he was willing to admit his own inability to meet its requirements, shamelessly confessing the cause of his failure, as if his very drunkenness, at twenty-four, was to be talked about in tones of respect, seeing it had been important enough to collide successfully with an esteemed art.

So--that chapter was finished, then, and her father had ceased being an artist. Julia recognized the exact moment when he "took to the road" en route to Pennsylvania in quest of a distant cousin who owned "a bit of a truck-farm." Oddly enough, no exigency of poverty had ever induced him to part with the books he had bought in the golden days when he was so brilliantly succeeding at Lamb's. He had stored them in New York; had kept himself sober long enough to save the money required for their transportation to his new home; for, now, he had a home. He had married the plump, shy, awkward, yellow-haired daughter of an improvident neighbour who indifferently operated a small sawmill, "mortgaged, by Golly, down to the last cleat in the old pulley-belt."

Julia knew how it always amused him to repeat that phrase. He smiled, now, and glanced up furtively to make sure the family's attention was occupied. She dodged his eyes and took no further risks with them until she was sure he was in "pardnership" with his unthrifty father-in-law, who, hearing rumours of advantages to be had by moving to Northern Indiana, "where everybody was a-makin' big money loggin' and gettin' out railroad ties," had suggested the immediate migration of his populous, penniless tribe.

Ferd grinned again, rather wryly. Julia was not quite sure where we were in the story, now. Perhaps he was thinking about something he had never told her--something not very pleasant, perhaps; something not much to our credit, she feared.

He had taken along to Indiana their simple, mostly homemade, household gear, the precious books--English classics--which were to become a veritable Godsend to Julia!--and his only military trophy, his little brown jug. Occasionally, of a late Saturday night in Heffel's Saloon in Cromwell, when Ferd and his cronies had passed from the bragging stage to the distinctly maudlin, nose-trumpeting phase of bland confessions and remorses over their respective might-have-beens, he would pull himself together long enough to make a pathetic joke of his own disaster.

"Yep"--Ferd would say, grinning drunkenly through his tears--"that was my only military trophy--that there little brown jug."

He glanced up now, out of the tail of his eye, and found Julia regarding him with rapt interest. A bit disconcerted by this intense scrutiny (sometimes Julia's penetrating knowledge of his moods and meditations annoyed him, just a little), he pushed back his chair, and muttered, partly to himself, partly to her:

"Yep--that's the way it goes."

He gnawed off a large bite of Horseshoe chewing-tobacco from the plug he had rummaged from the depth of his overall-pocket, and, without a backward glance, strolled out through the doorway toward his shop.

Perhaps he would continue his reminiscences while he worked on the Snell baby's pine coffin; but he had already covered everything in his story that had any interest for Julia. Except for such minor episodes as the births of his five children, and the death of Minnie, six years ago, his history was an unpunctuated monotony of trivial jobs--building corncribs, replacing timbers in the forebay at Austin's gristmill, planing and hanging Squire Craig's screen-doors every April, and stowing them in the loft of the woodhouse every November--a chronicle as sterile of novelty as the legendary minstrel's redundant report that now another locust came and carried away another grain of corn.

Julia wondered, sometimes, whether her father ever missed her mother. It was obvious that he did not grieve for her. Minnie's biological contribution to Julia's character was no more in evidence than the influence of a hen on a golden pheasant's egg. Julia was all Ferd's.

Minnie had been an ignorant, whining, colourless, unimaginative creature, her quite astounding bulk disproving the adage that stout people are invariably optimistic. Save for the fact that she had been an economical housekeeper (as she had plenty of reason to be), and was thought to put up the best green-tomato pickles in the Oak Grove neighbourhood, nothing important was remembered of her; not even by her own kin.

A litter of empty, overturned, glass fruit-jars on her grave in the Baptist Cemetery which, on the anniversaries of her death, the melancholy Martha stuffed with garden flowers, ironically testified to Minnie's previous relation to other natural objects in a world where she had dully foozled a chance to present society with a rehabilitated wood-carver of exceptional virtuosity, and had contented herself with the excellence of her piccalilli.

* * * * *

A clatter of wheels and harness drew Greta to the door.

"Fer Gosh sakes, Sue, if Bob ain't came with the hay-ladders on! Jolt the very stuffin' out of yuh!" She turned to the abstracted Julia. "You'd better come, too, Miss Stuck-up! Here's that Schrofe boy what's so crazy about yuh. . . . Hoo-hoo, Bob! We'll be out in a jiffy!"

"Mebby you better go, Julia," advised Martha, maternally.

Julia demurred. It was little enough time she had to review her algebra, even if she studied every minute.

Old Ferd, returning for a tin of water to cool his grindstone, arrived in time to take a hand in the argument.

"Give her a chance, Martha. I'd like to see one of us do somethin' to make our name a little more important than it's been."

Martha picked up a double handful of dishes with a decisiveness of manner that promised an impressive exit, to be followed presently by a great clatter of pots and pans off stage.

"Well--all I got t' say is--"

But the threatened tantrum was played to a thinning house, Ferd had found his tin cup, and was off with it. Susan and Greta were on the way to the wagon. The boys slouched toward the barn. Julia carried her plate to the kitchen, where Martha was sniffing ostentatiously, and vanished with a promise to make the beds, her sister's plaintive whine trailing her all the way upstairs. "'Pears like nobody in this house cares what I think about anything. Just a hired girl . . . without any pay."

* * * * *

Standing before the severely plain but expertly crafted walnut desk that her father had given her, last Christmas, Julia unlocked a drawer and re-read the precious document it contained.

The desk had become a symbol of the considerable difference between herself and her brothers and sisters. A source of anxiety and embarrassment at first, the desk had come to be a refuge and an inspiration.

On Christmas morning, having presented each member of the family with a fine, large orange, Ferd had made a mysterious trip through the snow to his shop, returning shortly with the desk. Julia's exclamations of delight had intensified the sullen silence. At supper, that evening, Greta's smouldering indignation blazed forth in an irascible comment to which Ferd quietly replied:

"She's the only one in this family that would have any use fer a desk. If any o' the rest o' yuh ever needs one, mebby I'll 'tend to it."

This sarcastic explanation of the gift did little to conciliate them. So much constraint was traceable to the episode that Martha told Julia she had better take her new desk upstairs and keep it out of sight. Susan added that she, for one, would never darken the door of Julia's room while it was there.

But, however painful the situation, at the outset, it developed for Julia a privacy she had never enjoyed before. By common consent, the family left her to herself, implying, a dozen times a day, that she considered the rest of them inferior, twisting her every remark into allusions to their ignorance.

"What shall I do, father?" she inquired one day, in the shop. "They're always trying to act as if they're not as smart as I am."

Ferd grinned, and blew the sawdust off his chisel-handle.

"They don't have t' put on, very much, t' play that."

"But it makes me so miserable!"

"Well--don't cry. . . . That's what yuh get fer a-bein' smart. Smart people's always miserable. Old man Solomon said that--er somethin' about like it."

"Was he miserable?" asked Julia, with a tearful little smile.

"Gosh, yes! He was the smartest man that ever lived!" Ferd sat down on the tool-chest, laid a dusty hand on her knee, and grinned mysteriously. "Julia, are yuh sure you've found all the drawers in that there little desk? One of 'em ain't got no handle."

Her eyes brightened.

"No," she whispered, excitedly, "I haven't found it. Will you show me?"

He had found it for her the next time the family was out of the house--a narrow drawer set in the centre of a row of six open pigeon-holes and faced by a little pilaster carved to imitate a longitudinal section of a Corinthian column.

"That there's it," pointed Ferd, hugely enjoying Julia's flutter of excitement. "No--it don't come out that way," he said, when she had unsuccessfully grappled with the ornament which defied the best efforts of her finger-tips. "Nobody could ever get it out a-doin' that."

"Do show me, father!"

He had proceeded then in leisurely fashion, immensely relishing her suspense, to demonstrate the strange magic of the secret drawer.

"Now, if you ever want to put anythin' out of sight, Julia," commented Ferd, with a comradely wink, "you'll know how to do it; and it'll take a heap o' tinkerin' with this here desk fer anybody else but you to find out how that drawer opens."

Julia was ecstatic.

Her close inspection of the desk had led to another discovery: Ferd had carved the name "Mueller" on the bevelled edge of the little receptacle for ink-bottles and pens.

"I'm so glad you did that, father. That makes the desk still more valuable, doesn't it?"

Ferd flushed with pride.

"It's the only time, Julia, since I cut the name under the wing of an eagle that holds the Bible in a big church in Philadelphia. It's the way my father cut his name--and his father--and his father's father. . . . It's a good name, daughter."

Standing now before the desk, Julia withdrew a document--much too long to fit into the secret drawer--bearing the impressive seal of the Great State of Indiana and signed with an affected flourish by the Noble County Superintendent of Public Instruction, authorizing her to teach an ungraded school for the term of One Year. Beside it, in the long envelope, was the covering letter containing a pressing suggestion that the recipient plan to attend a five-day Institute to be held in Albion, the county seat, in late August, chiefly for the benefit of inexperienced teachers.

"Please, God," whispered Julia, wistfully but shyly, for they were not very well acquainted, "let me have a school!"

Nobody in the Miller family exhibited any piety but Martha, who was presumed to have enough for all. Martha's conversation was sprinkled with scriptural allusions, her stock of texts featuring the punitive phrases promising the ultimate rebuke of the proud, the "froward" (whoever they were), and the stiff of neck. Julia, gifted in parody, occasionally employed these solemn exhortations herself, with ex tempore improvisations and amendments which amused her, and sometimes frightened her, too; for, she reflected, if there really was a hell, surely the fabricator of any such flippancies was reserving a warm berth.

When Martha, in her thin, flat voice, carolled from the kitchen, "I'm washed in the blood of the Lamb," Julia invariably shuddered, swallowed hard, and muttered, "Ugh!--how nasty!"

"Please let me have the Schrofe School," wheedled Julia, clutching her precious credentials tightly in one hand and with the other pressing her eyes hard to make sure they were closed firmly enough to satisfy the requirements of Deity, who was sure to be suspicious of her sincerity, "so I won't have to come home except on Sundays. But--any school will do. Please, dear God, let me hear from one of them pretty soon. It would be so nice to have word on my birthday. Please!"

Somewhat startled by the inflection of this final word of entreaty, which hinted at an intimacy with the Almighty which, she was aware, impertinently presumed upon a very sketchy relationship, Julia added, humbly "--Unless, of course, it should not be in accordance with Thy Holy Will."

* * * * *

"What have yuh got yer Sunday hat 'n' dress on fer?" inquired Martha, when, a half-hour later, Julia passed through the kitchen, book and slate in hand, pausing to remark that she was going down by the creek where it was cooler.

"I thought I might walk over to Oak Grove, when I am tired studying, and see if there is any mail--about a school, you know."

"Mighty sight o' studyin' you'll get done with that on yer mind. Better to a-gone berryin', like I told yuh. Anyways, all the schools are a-took by now. 'Pears to me like--"

Without waiting for the rest of it, Julia walked out of the kitchen, quickened her steps immediately she was out of sight over the slope behind the barn, tossed her algebra and slate into the grass at the foot of the big willow that overhung the stream, climbed to the highway, and set out at a swinging stride toward the village two miles to the west--two miles by the road, but subject to considerable discount if one cut across Squire Craig's stubble-field, just beyond the Baptist Church, and took the path through the woods along the widening river, pent by the Austin milldam.

There were two high fences and a padlocked gate to climb, and occasionally the Squire's ill-tempered ram contested the audacity of trespassers, but Julia was impatient to peer into the tiny pane of dirty glass--No. 8--in the Post Office which occupied a few square feet in the front end of Baber's General Store.

Halfway across the stubble-field, Julia's steps became shorter and less confident.

Seated, with his back to her, on the top rail of the fence that bounded the woods, was a young stranger, fashionably dressed, his shoulders slumped as if he were lost in serious thought; in trouble, perhaps.

Julia reflected that if he were to straighten himself out to full length he would be very tall.

The stranger's perch must be quite uncomfortable. Julia surmised that he would not remain there long. If she dallied, he might proceed, unconscious of her approach. She stopped, toying with the idea of retracing her steps, but the sun beat pitilessly upon the dazzling yellow field, and the cool maples promised a relief irresistible. Her heart quickened as her pace slowed. She pulled off her dowdy hat, made of cheap lace over a wire frame, and patted the damp curls at her hot temples.

Now the young stranger had turned, and, over his shoulder, was regarding her arrival with frank interest. He stepped down from the fence, on the grove side, consulted his watch, and smiled. It was almost as if he had been waiting for her, thought Julia; as if they had arranged to meet, and she was late. Had he decided to play, she wondered, that they were keeping an engagement? Could it be possible that there was anyone in the world like that? It would be such fun.

Would he not think her a bit stupid if she stared stonily into his friendly eyes, pretending to be offended, pretending to be haughty? Was it not one's duty to be cordial to strangers? Even Martha, prude that she was, believed that one might be "entertaining angels unawares."

Julia had never seen that sort of a smile on a boy's face. It signified nothing but a proffer of friendliness from one young human being to another. It left out of consideration the negligible fact that they were not of the same sex. How different from the awkward, crooked grin of the typical gum-chewing youngster who manœuvred to one's side at a boisterous barn-dance and paid one a clumsy compliment while turning to wink at some equally boorish bystander, as if to say, "I'm a-tryin' to see how fer I c'n git with her!"--as if their relationship implied that she was willing it should be rated an obscenity. She had often been half-ashamed she was a girl.

Julia was within a few yards of the fence, now, making no pretence of indifference to the presence of the tall, athletic chap who awaited her, watch still in hand.

His smile was so disarming that her red lips parted in an honest recognition of the first of its kind she had ever seen worn by a contemporary male. Her ingenuous response to it was quite free of self-consciousness or embarrassment. Toward this handsome, urbane, self-possessed boy--clearly not of her world at all, so far as outward appearances went--she sensed a strange kinship which, she believed, it would have been unworthy of her to deny either to herself or to him.

It was what she had been longing for, all her life, wasn't it? Hadn't she dreamed of an acquaintance with some congenial spirit in whose company she might be . . . herself? Why dissemble? She owed something to that dream.

"It's much cooler over here," he said, offering her both hands, when, having lightly climbed to the top of the fence, she sat facing him, fanning her flushed cheeks with her crumpled, frumpy hat.

"I know," said Julia.

She took his hands without hesitation or coyness, and joined him.

"But we must keep an eye out for my Uncle Jasper's pet sheep, Otto the Seventh," he said, as they fell into step on the path. "Otto has a vile disposition, and the run of this grove."

"Yes," said Julia, "I know."

He ventured a sidelong glance, as if to inquire whether his new friend had exhausted her conversational possibilities, and met an enigmatic smile.

"Had I kept you waiting long?" she asked, with an earnestness that puzzled him.

He turned about and faced her so soberly that Julia repented her whimsical audacity. Did nobody in the world know how to take a little joke? Was she the only one, after all, who had any instinct for impromptu drama? She took a step forward. He detained her with a light touch on her arm.

"Yes," he said, rather huskily, "I have been waiting a long time . . . for you."

"Don't spoil it," said Julia, entreatingly. "We were only playing, weren't we?"

CHAPTER II

For the first time in the history of the Schrofe School it was being taught without benefit of whips and dunce-caps.

The innovation caused some stir. Discipline had been much less savage in recent years under a succession of female teachers, but the present policy of complete disarmament was viewed with anxiety.

"Fer the girl's own sake," agreed the younger mothers, whose support of her had been swiftly won by the affectionate interest bestowed on their little tots, "them bigger boys oughta be kept in hand. They'll run her out afore Thanksgivin'."

Ham Ditzler, who had put in six exciting winters behind that desk, more than a decade earlier, and now divided his time between odd jobs of plasterin', paperin', paintin', an' butcherin', in the employ of his erstwhile pupils--("danged degradin' work")--offered to bet (amount of wager unspecified) that the Miller girl would never finish out her term, a prediction which came true, though not for lack of firmness in her schoolroom.

Abner Schrofe, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, when joined in his barn by the four other members, one rainy Sunday forenoon in early October, silently shucked corn during their recital of the public's apprehension based on criticisms offered by the veteran pedagogue.

Upon the conclusion of their remarks, Chairman Schrofe listed heavily to starboard and deftly poured a considerable quantity of tobacco-juice down a convenient rat-hole, thus setting himself at liberty to express the opinion--conciliatorily phrased in terms consonant with the dignity of his office--that Ham Ditzler was nothin' but a damned old sore-head.

Encountering no opposition to this statement, not even from Zeke Trumbull, Ham's son-in-law, with whom he made his home, Abner further deposed that there was more brains in Julia Miller's little finger than Ham Ditzler had in his hull body, adding that he would respectfully entertain a motion a-sayin' it to be th' sense of this here board, duly and properly assembled, that Miss Miller's services was "sadisfactory."

Hez Brumbaugh said he would so move, and suggested that the Chairman inform Miss Miller of their action.

Jake Waters, who since last spring had owed Abner the final Eight Dollars on a Guernsey heifer, 'lowed that Ham Ditzler--after all's said and done, and a-takin' him by and large--was purty much of a gol-darned old blatherskike whose idears wasn't wuth hell-room.

At Zeke's suggestion, this was taken by consent. He modestly demurred, however, when delegated to convey this sentiment to his father-in-law, feeling that it would have "more weight" coming from someone else. The decorum of the board being slightly disturbed by this remark, it grinningly adjourned to the hog-pen to inspect the new "Poland-Chiny" sow that Abner had purchased at the recent Whitley County Fair.

"Please, Mr. Schrofe," pleaded Julia, next morning, after Abner, delightedly to have an official errand at the schoolhouse, had told her he was on his way to settle Mr. Ditzler's hash, "leave him to me. Don't hurt him. I'll think of some way to accomplish the same thing without humiliating him."

Ham, already silenced by a hint from Zeke to the effect that if he knowed which side his bread was buttered on he would let up on the Miller girl, bewilderedly accepted her invitation to make a little talk to the school on the afternoon of Columbus Day, on which occasion he astounded himself and the assembled mothers by confessing the difficulty that an old-timer has in a-keepin' up with th' march o' progress.

An able craftsman of home-made philosophy, Ham spent many meditative hours evolving what he thought was a brand-new theory for the achievement of this here thing they calls success, chattering so volubly about his discovery that it became a community joke.

His convictions on this subject were never better expressed than on the late afternoon of an eventful day in May when, riding home from a service at the Oak Grove Baptist Church in company with Zeke and Lola and their swollen-eyed little daughter Goldie, Ham observed:

"It all goes fer t' show that this here thing they calls success is the fruit of self-confydence.

"If yuh know yer bigger 'n' yer job, and c'n drop the dang thing whenever yuh like and do somethin' better, the people yer a-workin' fer seems t' know it without yer a-tellin' 'em. They take orders as if they was a-spoke by Jehovah, so long as they know yuh know there's sumethin' in prospec' fer yuh a dang sight more important than a-foolin' away yer time with the likes o' them!

"If a teacher, f'rinstance, thinks he's got about all that's a-comin' to him, and has to mind his p's and q's er the Board'll set on him, he just natcherly has t' whale hell outa the brats to make 'em behave.

"If he c'n get along without rules er whips er threatenin's, it's because th' scholars knows that he don't have t' care a tinker's damn whether he keeps his job er not, seein' he c'n leave 'em, if they don't like it, and do somethin' better. . . . And I bet that's the secret o' success in all th' walks o' life, in ev'ry day an' generation."

Ham leaned far out of the open surrey, where he shared the back seat with Goldie, and improved his impaired articulation by relieving himself of a large quid of tobacco, wiped his stubbly lips with the back of a brown hand, and continued:

"You take this here parson, over in Wayne, what's been a-sayin' lately that th' story about Jonah ain't so, d'yuh reckon they'd let him stay there and be as honest as that if they didn't know the hull town knows as how he's had an invite to a big church in Chicago? Not by a dang sight! They just grin when he goes after the Old Testyment fer a-sayin' that th' Lord God drownded all them heathens fer spite . . . 'cause they know that if they holler he'll tell 'em t' take their danged ol' church b' th' bell-clapper, 'n' go t' hell!"

"Sh!--Pap!" admonished Lola, without turning. "What kinda talk . . . right afore little Goldie, too!"

"Well--I wisht I'd a-heared some talk like that when I was about her size," muttered Ham, remorsefully. "Mebby I'd amounted to somethin'."

"I wonder," inquired Zeke, "why didn't this here smart preacher in Wayne take that there bigger job in Chi?"

Ham was fidgety with eagerness to explain.

"Now yer a-gettin' to it! That just goes fer t' show how smart this feller is! If he went to Chicago, where mebby he'd be exac'ly the size of his job, er mebby a little smaller, he wouldn't be able t' tell 'em where t' get off at. He likes a-bein' where he c'n tell 'em, if they object t' his preachin', that they c'n take their danged ol' church b' th' bell-clapper, 'n'--"

"Pap--that'll do now!" snapped Lola, adding, growlingly, "Can't we never talk about nothin' else but things as riles Pap and makes him swear, right afore little Goldie?"

"All the same," finished Ham, doggedly reverting to his original proposition, "if Julia Miller hadn't 'lowed, all th' time she was a-teachin', that she was a-goin' away purty soon t' be a rich man's wife, I bet she'd a-had t' larn them sassy young rake-hells all over th' schoolhouse, five times a day!"

Little Goldie wept noisily.

"Shet up, Pap!" commanded Lola. "Hain't yuh got no proper feelin's at all?"

* * * * *

Sometimes, during those early autumn days, Julia's happiness almost suffocated her. As often, it terrified her. Was Martha's grim and hateful philosophy correct? Did people always have to pay the piper? Was this ecstasy the sort of thing you inevitably had to settle for with interest compounded?

Sudden waves of black depression briefly but increasingly inundated her dream-world. Was she living in a fool's paradise? Would the clock presently strike twelve, and send the prancing horses scampering back to rejoin their fellow-mice? Nonsense! She must pull out of this! How silly! Was ever anyone more fortunate than she?

She became very sensitive on the subject of her happiness, eager to keep her radiant spirits within bounds so that Fate would at least give her credit for all the humility and gratitude she would muster. Diligently occupied with the unaccustomed task of disciplining her emotions, sternly warning them to keep their distance from her eyes, her lips, her voice, her hands and feet, Julia was unaware of the outward effect of these suppressions.

"Julia has growed up, almost overnight," muttered old Ferd.

"Who'd a-thought that Julia Miller would age so fast?" remarked Mrs. Abner Schrofe. "She's a woman!"

The effect of Julia's self-discipline in the cause of propitiating Nemesis was an unconscious exhibition of that magnetic and covetable type of personal poise not to be had cheaper than at the price of a stoical imprisonment of kinetic energy bruising its fists against the bars and pleading for its right to shout and dance and sing.

Eager to offer any forfeit to fend off the Day of Judgment, Julia had decided to room and board at home, involving a daily tramp of nearly six miles. It was a very real sacrifice, in anticipation; for, in looking forward to her new work, its most alluring promise had been the escape it offered from an irksome home environment.

School had been in progress barely a week, however, before Julia began to doubt the efficacy of her splendid sacrifice. The atmosphere at home had improved. The boys were shaving now, every other day, in honour of the young school-mistress who appeared at their breakfast-table trimly clad for her day's work. Susan and Greta crimped their hair, starched their aprons, and conceded the boarder a right to the exclusive use of her own trinkets. Her father's gratitude for the money she had engaged to pay touched her. Martha's awkward tenderness and solicitude slightly embarrassed her. What a difference a little money made in the general line-up of human relations! Julia smiled, with new understanding, over the story that had gone the rounds about Widow Mercer, who lived near Bippus, ten miles east.

Mr. Mercer, an enthusiastic Maccabee, had left her Two Thousand Dollars in fraternal insurance. There were four sons, all concerned that this large fortune should not be dissipated. They suggested that their mother divide the money among them, and spend her time living in their homes as an honoured guest.

"No," she had replied, quietly. "'Pears to me like an elderly lady with Two Thousand Dollars would be a much more interestin' guest than an old woman with nothin'."

It made all the difference in the world, money did!

One day you were "Julia? . . . Julia! . . . Julia!! Come here, this instant, like I told yuh, and peel these potatoes!"

One short week later you were "Julia, you just let Susan peel them potatoes, and you go set down till supper's ready."

Nor was this refreshing change at home Julia's chief ground for satisfaction. She was grateful for the opportunity to be alone, two hours daily, with her enchanting memories and high expectations. The vigorous walk quickened her imagination. Fully a third of the trip to school was taken through tall timber on a picturesque wagon-road that negligently waived the right o' way to close-meshed clumps of flaming sumac, and an occasional obdurate oak--a narrow ribbon of a road, carpeted with freshly fallen leaves, frost-sensitized to autumnal rays filtered through the livelier half of the prism, and crisp under her nimble feet.

On the return journey, Julia was always the school-teacher, it being part of her discipline to restrict her thoughts to her professional obligations.

On the early morning trip, however, she was all Zandy's! Her capacity increased for the vivid recovery of her deliriously happy experiences with him. To the very minutia of detail, Julia reconstructed every tone, posture, and gesture associated with those dreamy, unreal afternoons under the shade of the river-willows behind the Baptist Cemetery, not more than a dozen yards from her mother's grave, and the few almost painfully rapturous hours that had transfigured dull and dusty little Albion into the City Delectable!

The first half-mile of the out-bound trip, which brought her to the Baptist Church, where she turned to the left on the busy Larwill Pike, was invariably taken, at that early hour, without encountering any traffic, either on foot or wheel.

Except for the shrill scream of some excited water-bird on the river, and the lonesome clangor of a cow-bell registering the impatience of horns entangled in a wild grapevine down in the glen, there would be no sound but the rhythmic crunch of frosty gravel under her competent heels.

Julia's precious recollections proceeded in orderly sequence. Sometimes--let her do her utmost to concentrate on the opening chapter of the almost incredible story--her memory would insist on turning whole handfuls of pages; but, tugging herself free of the culminating episodes that mattered most, she would pursue events chronologically. She always wanted to be through with the early part of the story before she reached the busier mile of pike, for the full enjoyment of their first encounter demanded a few merry roulades of bantering laughter--her own: Zandy had been so serious. And, besides, she liked to be in the thick of the dark woods when she arrived at the Albion part of it! . . . Dear, dear Zandy! How tender! How precious!

Julia's reminiscences always began at the fence where they had met on the morning of her birthday. Now they were ambling slowly through the grove. They had left the path, and were wandering toward the river. She was still en route to the Post Office, but they were off the path.

"You have a first name, too?" (I have told him mine.)

"Alexander."

"Quite long and dignified." (I think I must not do that, any more. He doesn't like teasing. He is so serious.)

"So was my grandfather. It was his name. Everyone calls me Zandy. My sister began it when she was a little tot, and I was a baby."

"Do they call you Zandy at Dartmouth, too?"

"Mmm." (Zandy says "Mmm" when he means yes; not "Umm-humm," the way our people do. Martha thinks it queer when I say "Mmm.") "College students are not very formal. Even the profs have nicknames."

"Do they know it?"

"In time. They don't seem to care. We had a big Scot in Math, last year, with an enormous moustache. He discovered that he was 'The Walrus', and pared it down. When that didn't help, he shaved it off."

"And then he wasn't a walrus, any more?"

"Oh, yes, he was still a walrus. . . . I say, Julia, I'm going to like you, most awfully." (I knew, then, that it was true. Zandy was going to like me. He couldn't have said it, that way, and not mean it.)

"What is your sister's name?" (I think it better we should talk about his sister. I'm afraid my face is red, and my heart is just pounding!)

"Alison. . . . She's married."

"Does she live in Cincinnati, too?"

"She lives in a Pullman car. Her husband is Roland Forsythe."

"The famous tenor?"

"Mmm . . . and tanker."

"You mean he drinks?"

"Like a fish."

"Is that why your sister goes along?"

"Exactly--but Alison doesn't mind. She likes excitement. And she thinks Providence has appointed her to keep a great artist sober. She married him for that."

"And she can't?"

"Not much of the time."

"But how can he sing?"

"You don't have to be sober to sing? A good many people never do sing unless they're--"

"It doesn't always work that way. Some people get glum and mean."

"Roland doesn't. He's mean when he's sober. But it'll get him, some day. Leaky heart."

"How I hate it!" (I almost tell him why, for he's sure to find out.)

Now they had reached the gate at the farther side of the woods, and Julia had climbed it, leaving Zandy to wait her return from the Post Office. She had discouraged his going along, reluctant to amuse the loafers who would be sitting in front of Eph Mumaugh's blacksmith shop. . . . Now she was back.

"Look, Zandy!" (How natural it seemed to call him Zandy.) "I've got a school!--the Schrofe one!--the one I wanted!" (He takes the letter, and our hands touch.)

"Writes like a ten-year-old boy, doesn't he?"

"He probably never went to school much."

"I'll bet he can multiply bushels by dollars." (We are down at the river, again, sitting on the grass.)

"That's where I'm weak . . . figures. I think algebra's awful!" (I tell him all about having to go to Albion for the Institute.)

"I'll help you. It's easy. . . . Explain it to you in an hour."

"Will you, honestly?" (Zandy gives my hand a little pat. That was the first time.)

"This afternoon!"

"But I mustn't take your time. You'll be busy!"

"What would I be busy at? It'll save my life." (His father is sore at him because he's decided to be a writer, instead of making nails, and he's changed his course in college, and his father has sent him to the country, all summer, as a punishment, instead of taking him along to Europe, as he had promised.)

* * * * *

Most of the early part of the story would have been covered by the time Julia reached the woods. She had walked rapidly on the pike, and could afford to take the rest of the trip more leisurely.

Now they were sitting on the river-bank behind the Baptist Cemetery. It was Thursday, late afternoon. They had known each other three days. She was reclining against the bole of a maple, using the opened algebra to protect her back from the rough bark. Zandy had just finished reading her the Rubáiyát. What a wonderful voice he had! So tender! Her eyes were wet.

"Let me have it a minute. I want to see that verse about--"

She reached for the book.

He took her hand.

"Anybody would know at a glance, Julia, that you were meant for some kind of creative art."

"How would they?"

"Your thumb!"

"What's funny about my thumb?" she had asked, searching his deep-set grey-green eyes.

"Bends back so far. . . . Open your hand, dear. . . . Wide. . . . See?"

"Does yours? . . . Let me look . . . Why, the very idea! . . . Is that what makes you think you can write? . . . Our hands are very much alike, aren't they?"

A little shiver of excitement always came over Julia when she reached this part of the story.

"We're alike in more ways than that, precious!"

She had made a little effort to retrieve her hands. Zandy had taken both of them in one of his. When he kissed her, she did not resist. How everlastingly right it seemed! She had shared his kiss, a bit clumsily. They were both quite stampeded for a moment. She hoped he would kiss her again: perhaps she could do better. It was rather embarrassing to feel that one had been so awkward. She had done much better, the next time, maybe because it was not so hurried. . . . Zandy's kisses! They made your heart so big there wasn't room in your chest to breathe!

He had walked back with her, that day, until they could see the chimney of her house. When she stopped, meaning that he mustn't come any farther, he said, "What are you doing, tonight?"

* * * * *

It proved to be an eventful evening. Julia volunteered to accompany Martha to prayer-meeting. At the door of the church, however, she said, "I think I'll run over to the Post Office, first. . . . I've a letter that should be mailed to Albion, about my room, you know."

"I thought you had did that," said Martha. "You'll not be back afore meetin' is out!"

But Martha seemed relieved. Julia knew that her sister preferred not to have other members of the family present when she testified to the submissiveness of her burden-bearing. It reflected no credit on her home, where, it was implied, she took all the hard knocks with little to show for them but a chastened spirit.

"You'll not go through them dark woods, will yuh?" Martha cautioned. Julia promised.

Zandy was waiting for her, by the fence where she had first met him. He kissed her lips, her eyes, her hair. . . . They were made for each other, weren't they? . . . They would plan to spend their lives together. . . . Why not? . . . Didn't she love him? . . .

Someone was blowing out the malodorous kerosene lamps in the church when Julia returned across the stubble-field with Zandy, the shrill rendition of "God Be With You Till We Meet Again" warning them their tryst was over. They stopped in the darkness for a final embrace.

"It won't be long now, sweetheart."

"Oh, Zandy; I'm so happy!"

The little group on the church porch was separating, Martha's prim voice conspicuous above the others.

They walked home almost in silence, Martha mentally putting into rehearsal the testimony she meant to give, next time; Julia wondering what Martha would be saying if she knew that Zandy Craig was going along with her to Albion where they were to be married!

Late in the night, Julia, wide-awake but calm, wondered if she were playing the game squarely with everybody; with her father, with Martha, with Zandy's father, who made nails and was so gruff and domineering; with Zandy's mother, who already had a girl selected for him. . . . But, as Zandy had said, they had their own lives to live. Her father, her sister, his father, his mother--had they not been given a chance to live their lives, as they liked? . . . Maybe not. . . . It was all very confusing. Life was complicated.

"We will do what our hearts tell us is exactly right, darling," Zandy had said. "Nobody in the world has a right to keep us apart. We will keep it a secret, now, but, one of these days, when they see how happy we are, and how right it all was, they will be glad."

* * * * *

Old Ferd remarked at supper, one Saturday evening in early November, that he had met Abner Schrofe, that afternoon.

"Ab says," reported Ferd, proudly, "that Julia is the best teacher they ever had. I'm a-goin' to tell her when she comes down. It's no more 'n' right she should hear it . . . What's a-keepin' her?"

"She's been a-lyin' down most o' th' afternoon, paw," said Martha. "I'm afeard that long walk every day is a-pullin' Julia down, now it's come rainy. She hasn't looked good fer quite a spell."

"She was a-cryin' when I looked in to call her t' supper," said Greta. "Funny fer Julia to be a-cryin'."

"I'll go up," said Martha. "Here, Susan, dish them turnips."

Julia recognized her sister's step on the stairs, raised up on one elbow, dabbed at her eyes with a soggy little handkerchief, tucked a letter under her pillow.

"No--I'm quite all right, Martha. Working pretty hard, you know. Just . . . sort of unstrung. No--I don't believe I could eat a bite, not now. Maybe, after a while. Run along. It's nothing."

Martha clumped down the stairs, and the letter was unfolded again.

"What a misfortune, darling, if things are as you fear. If it had happened a little later--wouldn't we have been glad? Maybe it isn't that. Try not to worry.

"All one hears about now is the big game with the Chicago Athletic Club on Thanksgiving. Father and mother are coming East for it. How I wish you could be here! Big doings!

"If it's what you think, darling, can you go on, a little while, as if nothing had happened? How long? Maybe I can have a heart-to-heart with my father. But he's pretty hard, you know. Savage old thing, when disappointed. I'm afraid he'd take me out of college. That would set us back. If I can get through this year, the rest will be easy."

* * * * *

Julia had fainted at the Friday afternoon programme with which school closed for the Christmas holidays. The room was packed with visitors and stuffy with festal decorations. When the exercises were all but over, Julia crumpled in a pathetic heap on the floor. Young Jason Schrofe, whose attentions she had regarded so casually that he had quite lost hope, drove her home in his sleigh.

"That settles it," said old Ferd. "She's not a-goin' to tramp through them snowdrifts any more. . . . You must find a place to board, Julia, closer by th' school."

She smiled wanly and shook her head. She would be all right. No use wasting the money.

She had hoped that the cruel exertion might . . . somehow . . . solve the problem. In any event, the long walk daily helped to distract her mind. She might go mad, otherwise. . . . How long would it be until people noticed? . . . What would those all-knowing young mothers think of her fainting? . . . How much torture could she stand in these cruel stays?

"It fairly breaks my heart, darling," Zandy had written. "There you are, worrying your dear little head off; and here I am, starting home for the holidays, unable to bear even a wee bit of your trouble . . . and discomfort, too, I suppose. I don't know much about such things."

"The dear boy," thought Julia. "He doesn't know, of course. He probably thinks a woman just knows it's going to happen, on a certain day, and--when the time comes--it happens. And I don't know much more about it, except that I'm afraid I can't keep it a secret much longer . . . not even for Zandy's dear sake."

* * * * *

Zandy was in line for the Perkins Medal in oratory. On no account must that event be jeopardized. . . . Could Julia, he wondered, manage to carry on until the oratorical contest was over? February third, it was. How about it, Julia, darling?

Julia would certainly try. Zandy must not be disqualified for that medal. Perhaps his father would be that much more kind, if he won it. But, dear boy, let's arrange to tell them the very minute the contest is over! It's getting serious! Please!

It so happened that on the very night when Zandy was laboriously composing a letter which began, "My dear Father Miller (for I really want to call you Father Miller, because your Julia is my wife; though I'm afraid you will be annoyed, a little, that we haven't told you earlier about our wedding)"--Greta had whispered to Susan, and Susan, white-faced, had whispered to Martha, and Martha, trembling with fear and indignation, had entered Julia's room without knocking.

Julia was outstretched, her dark-circled eyes were closed, her hands lay supine, palms upward, on the counterpane. Martha looked at her for a long time before she spoke. She swallowed, noisily.

"You might as well make a clean breast of it," said Martha, hoarsely. Julia opened her eyes and smiled.

"In the drawer of my desk, Martha. Here's the key. That long paper. That's it. My marriage licence."

"So you run off and got married, did yuh?"

"Well--not exactly . . . run off. We were married during the County Institute."

"And you was in Albion, a-livin' with a man, while we thought you was a-goin' to that school that cost all o' Thirty Dollars!"

"He was my husband--and it was my money."

"Humph! He don't seem to set much store by yuh . . . a-leavin' yuh to face the music. What's his name?" Martha adjusted her steel-bowed spectacles, and stooped under the lamp. "Alexander Craig . . . who's that? You don't mean t' say it's that rich Craig's boy what was here last summer a-visitin' at the Squire's?"

Julia nodded.

"It's a heap the Craigs would do fer a Miller! You wait till your father hears o' this. He'll make that young rascal sweat! He'll have th' law on him!"

So--at long last, Julia had no further need to punish her desperately ill-treated body. Ungirded--physically, mentally--she felt that her worst troubles were behind her. They could say what they liked, they could do what they would--she had made her last agonizing trip to the schoolhouse. There was some comfort in that, at least.

Old Ferd was torn between grief and anger. He wanted to pour out his rage without delay. He would write to that lousy whelp and tell him, for once, what somebody should have told him long ago--that he was a low-lived coward, a dirty blackguard, and--and--if he ever darkened their door, except to bring the money to pay for Julia's sickness, he would be pitched out! . . . And he did write that, and more, pounded a stamp on the envelope with a fist that looked amazingly like Julia's, only not so white, and stalked, half-blind with hate, to the Post Office, where he was regarded with fresh interest, the loafers in corduroy coats and felt boots noting his state of mind and winking at one another out of the tails of their eyes. He was aware of it. Everybody knew, damn them! . . . There was a letter for Julia. She always got the mail, herself. . . . He would tear it up, and throw it in the river. The sleety gale sobered him, somewhat, on the way home. He did not destroy the letter.

* * * * *

"A couple of years from now, darling," wrote Zandy, a week later, "we will have forgotten all about this. At the moment, things do look pretty dark, don't they? I was all ready to come when I had the letter from your father. He is in a great temper; hardly to be blamed, of course; talked of shooting. Anyone else but your father, I would debate that subject with him. But all I could do for you now would be to stir up a tremendous row and probably make everything more difficult for you.

"I postponed writing to my father until last Saturday; couldn't think up just the right way to approach the matter. He is always so autocratic and hair-triggery. I did the best I could to make him see things. There is a wire from him this afternoon, hundred words, saying he is done with me. That, of course, only means he is very sore. He may come around all right. But not very soon. You have no idea how stubborn he can be.

"So--meantime, I can't stay in school. My mind is too upset, anyway. I shall be out of funds, too. In fact, I'm out of funds now. The month's allowance is just due, and he isn't even going to send that. I've made up my mind to bum my way through to the Coast. This twenty is all the money I have but five dollars. You can depend on me to send you some more as soon as I have it. Don't be discouraged, dear. I intend to succeed. Success is more a gift than an achievement. Some people are born to succeed. I am one of them. You will share. Keep that in mind through these hard days. I shall soon send for you, and we will be happy together forever."

* * * * *

With confidence unshaken, for there was a peculiar contagion associated with Zandy's optimism that gave her courage, Julia watched the last of the snow disappear.

Everything was going to come out all right, as Zandy had predicted. He had started West to find work and make a little home. Then he would send for her . . . for them!

Every few days there came another postal card . . . from Detroit, Chicago, Davenport, Denver, Spokane. Zandy was on the way.

Presently the lilacs were opening, and the air was vibrant with the hum of all sorts of awakened winged things. Julia could hear the occasional scream of her father's chisel doing a shrill aria to the accompanying rumble of the big wooden fly-wheel.

"Poor old darling," she thought, tenderly. "He's worried about me, and trying to keep his hands busy . . . dear, shaky, old hands."

"What's father making, Martha?"

"Will yuh let on yer surprised when he gives it t' yuh?"

"Mmm--but maybe you'd better not tell me if it's a secret."

"A little cradle," whispered Martha. "Mind yuh don't let on."

Julia wept a few happy tears. Her father had forgiven her, then. That was ever so much better. It would come out all right, as Zandy had said.

When Doctor Engle came, next day, he was shortly after joined by Doctor Marshall, a specialist from Fort Wayne. Jason Schrofe had driven him up from Larwill.

Doctor Marshall had quiet blue eyes and wore a brown suit that fitted him. He did not talk much, and hardly asked any questions at all. Julia had great confidence in him and felt no shyness in his strong, competent hands.

The charge was twenty-five dollars, and when Julia had counted it out--after Doctor Engle had handed her the pocket-book from her desk--she was pleased to find that there was just enough; a twenty, a two, and three ones. Doctor Marshall looked at the money and the empty pocket-book, and said not to bother about paying it until she was well. He would send her a bill, some day.

"Thank you," said Julia, gratefully. "I'll pay you as soon as I'm up."

"That will be soon enough," said Doctor Marshall. Martha came and sat on the edge of the bed, after the doctors were gone, holding Julia's throbbing fingers. Martha had shown the doctors out, and Julia had heard them talking, downstairs, for a disturbingly long time. Martha's face, always an open book, was troubled. It twitched, as it did when she was worried.

"What is it, Martha? You talked to them. Do they think I'm very sick? They don't think I'm going to--they don't think maybe I'm not going to get well, do they?" Julia's words came slowly, and as from a considerable distance.

Martha pressed her bony knuckles hard against her cheek and swayed slowly back and forth.

"They're a-doin' everythin' they knows how, Julia. We must all put our trust in th' Lord 'n' His precious promises. . . . Can't yuh let yerself just rest on His Blessed Name?"

Julia turned her face away and stared hard at the white wall, her eyes wide, frightened.

"Would yuh like Brother Miner t' come over from Cromwell 'n' talk t' yuh, Julia? It might be quite comfortin'."

Julia shook her head, and there was a little convulsive shudder of her shoulders. Sighing audibly, Martha drew up the sheet over the quivering shoulders, laid the back of her rough hand against the hot neck, and quietly left the room.

A violent storm was rising in Julia's breast--a devastating tornado of rebellion. Why had Fate played this ghastly trick on her? What had she ever done to earn this dull tragedy? What chance had she had from the beginning? Why had Destiny set her down in this stupid house--her mother a whining fool, her father a shabby old drunkard, her brothers and sisters nothing but clods and dolts?

And that wasn't the worst of it! Fate had opened the door a little way and pointed toward liberty. Love--great love--had come! Why hadn't Fate left her to the tiresome little drudgeries that were the common lot of people badly born? Why this mocking glimpse of freedom?

In her broken-dyked passion, Julia's scorn swept over everything and everybody associated with her disaster. Her father! What right had this drunken old man and his slatternly wife to bring her into the world at all? And this smug, surly, ignorant, superstitious old sister--calmly inviting her, in this hour of break-up, to like it! . . . to put her trust in the Lord! Mighty little He cared! Nobody cared! Least of all--the Lord! If He saw it, at all, He probably grinned! Another good joke!--saith the Lord.

Martha was back now, seated again on the edge of the bed, wetting her thumb and leafing the thin pages of a book. Julia dully turned her eyes and recognized the cheap little Bible she had earned for faithful attendance at Sunday School when she was nine or ten. Martha was doubtless hunting for some more of those precious promises. What a dull, uninteresting old thing those precious promises had made of her!

Clearing her throat and settling her spectacles more firmly on her thin nose, Martha held up the Bible at an angle that would better the light on the fine print. "No, please, Martha," muttered Julia. "Not now--please!"

"I'll just leave it here, then," said Martha, regretfully. "Mebby it'll be a sort o' comfort just t' have it under yer pillow."

She was gone now, leaving Julia with the precious promises within easy reach. But the storm was by no means spent. With white-knuckled little fists and tightly clenched teeth, rigid lips wide apart, Julia stared up defiantly. In a moment she gave way to the passionate indignation that was all but driving her mad. The precious promises! Bah! . . . God--and the Bible--and prayer--and the angels--and miracles--and faith that would remove mountains! Bah! . . . She groped under the pillow, clutched the book, opened it in the middle, utterly blind with hot tears and crazed with desperate anger, and began to claw at the pages with her nails. She buried all her fingers in the book, and tore, and ripped, and crumpled, making snarling little mutterings deep in her throat.

"That! . . . and that! . . . for You!" she panted. (Rip!) "And that! . . . and this! . . . for Your . . . (Crunch!) . . . precious . . . promises! . . . Look! . . . if You can see . . . You cruel Thing . . . what I'm doing to your Holy Word! . . . Now! There! . . . send me to hell!"

Completely spent by her exertion, Julia lay as one dead under the litter of ragged, crumpled desecration, her shuddering sobs all but subsided; and, fatigued beyond endurance, drifted away from the shameful scene, and slept.

When she woke there was a dim light burning on the table. Her father was sitting on the low rocking-chair by the bed, elbows on knees, his fingers tangled in his shaggy grey hair. Remembering dully, she felt about on the counterpane. Nothing there. So it was only a bad dream, after all. That was good. Her fingers touched a rumpled scrap of paper. It was not a dream. She laid her hand on the torn paper and closed on it.

Roused by her stirring, Ferd glanced up, and their eyes met. Julia's were inquisitive.

Ferd shook his head, and smiled wanly.

"It's all right, Julia. I cleared it up. Nobody seen it. Guess you was a little out o' yer mind fer a spell."

"I'm dreadfully sorry, father," she murmured, penitently. "It was . . . an awful thing to do."

Old Ferd caressed the white hand nearest him. With the other, Julia absently rolled the fragment she had found into a tight little ball.

She fell to wondering whether there was anything still legible on the scrap; and, if so, whether it would be some frightful forecast of doom for sinners. Well--she deserved it, didn't she? She recalled her curiosity about the sentimental mottoes that came on thin, narrow, sticky strips of paper wrapped around cheap taffy at the County Fair. . . . Funny how people took stock in the silly fortunes told that way. . . . She remembered a discussion between Martha and Becky Slemmer, one day, over the "messages" they had had by tossing the Bible open at random and reading the first verse at the top of the page. . . . Martha had come by many a precious promise accidentally . . . poor Martha. . . . Becky had laughed over some of hers, and Martha had hush-hushed her, warningly. Becky said you couldn't make much out of it, anyway. One time, after a big quarrel with Zelma in which they had bit, scratched, and pulled hair, she had gone to the Bible for guidance, and the magic verse at the top of the column said, "She is loud and stubborn." Becky was sure, at first, that the Lord referred to her sister, but she wondered afterward. Martha said: "No--Becky. The Lord wouldn't send a message t' Zelma through you. He must 'a' meant somethin' personal."

"Shall I get yuh a cold drink, Julia?" Ferd was inquiring.

"Please, father . . . and turn up the light a little, won't you, before you go down?"

* * * * *

"You're ever so much better this morning," said Doctor Engle, cheerily.

Julia smiled contentedly, and nodded.

"You're overcoming this toxine, Julia."

"What's toxine, doctor?" she inquired, interestedly.

"Poison."

"Yes," said Julia, thoughtfully, "I have overcome it."

"Well--maybe not all of it yet," he cautioned, stroking his cheek, "but--"

Julia's dry lips puckered determinedly, and she nodded her head with an air of deep conviction.

"All of it," she said, firmly, "all the poison is gone."

That afternoon, to Martha's astonishment and disapproval, Julia demanded pen, ink, paper, and privacy. Protestingly, the weary and worried woman propped her sister up with pillows, and closed the door.

Summoning all her depleted energy, Julia wrote a long letter addressed to her unborn child. The writing was uneven and sprawling, and the lines sagged at the right end, more and more, until the last ones ran nearly off the pages in a pitiful little toboggan toward the corner.

Everything she knew about Dresden was in it; high pride for the things that were Dresden; high hopes for the heir to the Dresden tradition.

Everything she knew about Zandy was in it; poor, bewildered Zandy, so frightfully misunderstood, and showing up so badly when he really had it in his heart to do the right thing.

"I'm going to hide this letter, and hope that you find it, some day, in case anything happens to me. You'll not find it, perhaps, until you're big enough to want to take things to pieces and see how they were put together. I hope you won't find it even then. I hope you won't find it until you're old enough to have had a few harder bumps than just falling out of your cradle.

"I've discovered a secret. It's going to take me through what I have to face. If I live, it's going to make me over into something else than I've been. If I die, I'll die happy. I'm going to tell you what I've found. It's the only thing I have to leave you. If you'll take it, and make use of it, you may need no other fortune."

It was a difficult letter to write. The uncanny experience that had been hers, during the preceding eighteen hours, was not easy to explain. But Julia did the best she could, and with the last physical resource left from the fatigue of writing, she groped her way dizzily to the little walnut desk, with a great effort opened the secret drawer, deposited her letter, and returned to her bed, exhausted.

* * * * *

After her grinding agony was over, Julia slept, and woke, and slept, and dreamed.

In the late afternoon, she became slightly delirious. Martha caught fragments of it, and wept quietly. . . . Roses overhanging a trellis at the doorway of a little bungalow . . . Zandy being welcomed with outstretched arms that quickly fell inert from fatigue. . . . Then--there was a garden . . . a high, grey, stone wall . . . and in the wall there was a door . . . and beyond the door, a river. . . . Martha sobbed chokingly, and turned the iced towel on the hot forehead. . . . And on the river there was a punt . . . with a red and blue canopy . . . and the sound of a tender voice, singing . . . and a guitar.

When she awoke again, it was almost dark. It was apparent to the watchers that Julia was mildly curious about the presence of the whole family.

Doctor Engle was seated at the bedside with his fingers on her wrist. Her father stood stiffly beside him, his hands clenched. Martha slowly waved a palm-leaf fan, supporting her weary weight on outspread fingers laid against the head of the bed. Susan and Greta stood at the foot, staring wide-eyed. Hiram and Elmer were in the doorway.

Julia's eyes slowly travelled over the group, finally coming to rest on old Ferd whom she inspected with gravity. She attempted a little smile for him--a solicitous little smile that seemed to say, "What a lot of trouble I'm making you. So sorry." Ferd couldn't face the stiff little smile any longer; closed his eyes, walked to the window, wept.

Julia had kept her secret too long. Through hot, parched lips she asked Martha if she would please take care of the baby. Greta drew a sudden racking sob, and sank to the floor. Susan raised her up and tugged her out into the hall.

"His name," murmured Julia, valiantly battling with the oncoming fog, "is Alexander Ferdinand. . . . But--Martha--if that's too long a name . . . for such a little boy . . . you may call him Zandy."

* * * * *

It was late afternoon. They had just returned from the service at Oak Grove Baptist Church, and its sequel in the Cemetery. The long row of hitching-racks had been quite inadequate. Barely a third of the people had been able to enter the church.

Martha had whispered to the undertaker, and he had laid one of the sprays on their mother's grave, hard-by. Jason Schrofe, observing that his flowers had been chosen for this tribute, tarried, after the others had moved away, and replaced it.

Susan and Greta were busying themselves in the kitchen, sympathetically assisted by neighbours whose voices, restrained but endeavouring to be cheerful, drifted up the stairs where Martha, having laid her borrowed bonnet and veil on Julia's primly made, white-counterpaned bed, was stooping over the cradle.

Old Ferd tiptoed into the room, and Martha glanced up.

"Look at them long fingers," she said. "Like her'n."

Ferd handed her a yellow envelope.

"One o' the Schrofe boys fetched this over from Cromwell."

Martha opened it, read it through, silently, her lips forming the words, and gave it back. Ferd stared hard at the message from Seattle.

COURAGE DARLING IT WILL NOT BE LONG NOW GOOD JOB ZANDY

He tossed the telegram on Julia's bed, and stumbled out of the room, whimpering like a punished child.

* * * * *

That night--as if the Millers had not already furnished enough sensation to satisfy the community--Ferd hanged himself from a rafter in the vacant stall next to Florrie.

Hiram had gone out to throw down some straw, and saw It, from the mow-ladder, slowly revolving. Martha, hearing a hoarse shout, ran from the kitchen and found her brother retching violently. It seemed a long time before they found a box high enough to stand on.

"I was a-feared o' this, all along," groaned Martha.

Greta kept screaming, hysterically, while she tugged at the rope of the dinner-bell that clanged ominously from its perch on the roof of the milkhouse.

The barnyard filled with neighbours carrying lanterns. Milt Mumaugh volunteered to drive to Albion for the coroner, and put his three-year-old roan mare to a gallop.

It was a warm night, but they felt chilly and built a fire to sit by while they waited. About midnight, the wives of the watchers served sandwiches, cake, and coffee.

Abner Schrofe and Doc Engle sat on the doorstep of old Ferd's shop, smoking and slapping mosquitoes.

"Baby a-goin' t' live, Doc?"

"Looks like it. . . . Poor little devil. . . . Maybe better off if it died. . . . Not much of a future for it, I'm afraid."

"Well--as fer that," drawled Abner, "yuh never c'n tell."

CHAPTER III

"And now, Ferdinand"--Reverend Miles Brumm pursed a public smile--"perhaps you had better mount your new pony, and see how he sits."

"Please, Uncle Miles, I don't want to."

Ferdinand's voice was barely audible, but to the congregation assembled in the parsonage barn-lot there was no mistaking the determined shake of his curly head.

Consternation prevailed in the audience, composed of half the children in Zanesdale, and what Mr. Brumm would have considered on Sunday morning as "a goodly company" of adults.

A medley of encouragement, ridicule, insufferable patronage, and downright contempt volleyed at the embarrassed boy.

"Aw, gwan! Ride him!" . . . "Don't be scairt of him, Ferdinand; he won't throw yuh!" . . . "He's yourn, hain't he? Git on 'im!" . . . "Shucks!--feared of a Shetland pony!" . . . "Yeah--tame as a kitten!"

Ferdinand hung his head, abstractedly crushed an ant with his bare toes, and was painfully conscious of the rapid beating of a bulging vein in his neck.

"Bet he cost a hundred dollars!" appraised Nathan Himes, who had joined the procession when it passed his drugstore.

"Hundred dollars!" scoffed Bill Trask, the station agent; "that there saddle 'n' bridle cost more 'n' a hundred dollars!"

"My land!" exclaimed Sophie Trask, proudly relaying her husband's versatility to the huddle of women by the big gate, "Mr. Trask says the saddle and bridle alone must 'a' cost more than a hundred dollars! What must the pony be worth?"

Nobody paid any attention to the comment except young Mrs. Himes (her as was one o' them Sheriff Effendorfer girls from over beyond Maples; so stuck up--all of 'em--their noses was out o' joint), who, behind her hand, remarked to Clara Sellars, the lately-from-Wayne peroxide-blonde milliner (less said the better), that the Trasks always knew so much, to which Miss Sellars replied, in a disgusted undertone, "Don't they give yuh a pain?"

Mr. Brumm, aware of the unanimous curiosity about the pony, to which his young nephew had now added spice by his reluctance to exhibit a natural interest in it, felt himself in an awkward situation. He had been unprepared for the episode that had plunged his family into the public eye. No chance had been given him to collect his thoughts or confer with Ferdinand in private.

It was the lad's tenth birthday. At breakfast he had received a large, inexpensive pocket-knife from his uncle, a sticky, acrid-smelling, red-and-green Child's Illustrated Bible from his aunt, and three lead-pencils in a slim pasteboard box from Angela. He had put down the apple he was munching, and had gone about, as the custom was, dutifully kissing the donors--Uncle Miles, first; for Uncle Miles was always served first with whatever happened to be in distribution; and then Aunt Martha, who moistened a finger and brushed back the unruly lock that dipped to a point in the centre; and then Angela, whom he tried to kiss on the cheek, for Angela's kisses were wet, and he had a disinclination toward them which he hoped she would realize, one of these days, without too much injury to her feelings.

At that mellow moment--for, however stiffly the family ties were habitually starched, there were festal occasions when something like spontaneous affection had its innings--there was a vigorous rap at the kitchen door. Straightening his frayed cravat, Mr. Brumm had answered the summons. A stranger's business-like voice was heard.

"Mr. Brumm? . . . How do you do, sir? . . . Very well, sir. . . . My name is Thompson. I'm from Chicago; that is, I'm from the Winnetka Stock Farm. Our people has had orders to deliver a pony here for Master Craig--"

Through the open door came the rumble of many voices. Angela wiped her shapely lips on her sleeve and hurried to the window. Ferdinand stared hard at Aunt Martha, listening intently.

"He lives with you, don't he? . . . It's a birthday gift from his father. . . . It's Mr. Craig's instructions from Seattle. . . . I've just got in with it, expressed from our place in Winnetka. . . . The pony's out here in your lot, delivered in good shape, as you'll see, and if you, or the young gentleman, will sign these papers, I can catch the nine-seventeen back to the city. . . . Right here you are, sir, on that line; and here, too, if you please. Thanks! . . . Quite a crowd we gathered up, coming through the village, eh? Guess it's the first time a pony ever came to this town on a passenger train."

Aunt Martha had taken off her brown apron and joined her husband at the back door, nervously smoothing her hair with both hands.

Ferdinand, blinking rapidly, and tapping his front teeth with a restless thumb, squeezed past his aunt, and ventured out upon the back porch, quite overawed by the gathering crowd.

Uncle Miles, with a pumped-up air of heartiness, as if he himself were being presented with a thoroughbred Shetland pony by his admiring fellow-townsmen, breezed forth to the barnyard, delightedly intoning, "Well--well--indeed! . . . A great surprise, I'm sure! . . . A pony! . . . Well--well!"

It was the crowd that remembered the pony was Ferdinand's.

"Heigh! Ferdinand! Come on out! Look what yuh got!"

"Must I, Aunt Martha?" asked Ferdinand, his face twitching.

"Of course, silly!" shouted Angela, clutching his hand and dragging him along.

"Fancy that great big boy having to be tugged out of the house to see a pony!" scoffed Clara Sellars.

"He's only a kid," explained Mrs. Himes. "Awful big for his age; tall as his half-sister, and she must be all of fourteen. I s'pose he's just shy of so many people."

Very much embarrassed, Ferdinand allowed himself to be propelled through the crowd. He drew a stiff, reluctant smile, reached out a slim hand, stroked the pony's velvet muzzle, and was generously rewarded for the tentative caress, the pony sniffing inquisitively at his pockets and licking his hands.

"Aw--look--ain't that cute?" The women cooed appreciatively, and beamed on Aunt Martha, who had joined them, murmuring apologies for her looks and all. They told her she looked quite all right, they were sure.

Miss Sellars, pretending interest in the half-finished sweater that Mrs. Himes was carrying under her arm, whispered, "Did yuh ever see such an old frump?"

"Awful pious, I guess."

"Can't people be pious without--"

"No," said Mrs. Himes, "Sh!--Listen!"

"Well--Ferdinand--" said Uncle Miles.

"No, Uncle Miles." His deep-set, grey-green eyes were perplexed, and his face was contorted as he gnawed his lips. He stepped back, and glanced about as if looking for a way of escape.

Mr. Brumm wiped his brow with a large handkerchief. It would hardly do to send these parishioners of his away with so great a mystery to discuss.

"Don't you like your pony?" he stammered, in a tone that affected to express the general surprise.

"Of course!" Ferdinand's voice was husky under the strain. "But I mustn't have it! I can't have it! You know why!" Hot tears sprang to his eyes, and he scurried through the speechless crowd, disappearing into the house.

"Ferdinand's a little nervous and excited," explained Mrs. Brumm, primly, but obviously shaken by the unfortunate event. "He wasn't expecting a pony, you know, and what with so many good friends coming along, and all--"

"That's it--that's it," said Mr. Brumm, who, upon Ferdinand's retreat, had moved toward his wife to learn what explanation she was offering for this strange conduct. "Ferdinand will be quite himself, presently."

"Yeah--I bet there's a skeleton in the Brumms' closet, all right, all right!" muttered Miss Sellars. "They're badly fussed--both of 'em!"

* * * * *

Ferdinand, face downward on his bed, could hear the children's excited shouts as they took turns riding the pony about the barn-lot. . . . It sounded now as if they had taken him out into the road. "Please let me next, Angela!" . . . "I said first, Angela!" . . . "These stirrups is too high!"

He heard his uncle's heavy footsteps on the stairs.

"Now, my boy, what's the trouble?" Uncle Miles was serious.

Ferdinand stifled a racking sob.

"You know I can't take anything from him! . . . Sure--I love the pony, and I want it awfully . . . but I wouldn't take anything from him--not if he gave me a million trillion dollars!"

"But you didn't have to show off like that before all our people! What do you suppose they'll think?"

"I don't care what they think," growled Ferdinand into the damp pillow. "It's none of their business, is it?"

"They'll make it their business to find out."

Uncle Miles sat down on the edge of the bed, Ferdinand moving over with a great effort to make him room.

"You are a strange child, Ferdinand, to feel this way about your father." Uncle Miles laid a hand on the twitching shoulder. "I hardly thought it possible for a child of your years to be capable of as much hatred as you--"

"But you hate him, don't you, Uncle Miles? Aunt Martha hates him!"

"Hate is an ugly word, Ferdinand. Neither your Aunt Martha nor I hate anybody in the whole wide world--not even your erring father. Whatever mistakes he may have made in letting your young mother suffer and be misunderstood and maligned . . . and die . . . it will do you no good to carry a grudge--especially now that he wants to be friendly."

At this, Ferdinand broke down completely, and cried piteously.

"He waited for ten years! . . . Not one word from him! . . . Even if you and Aunt Martha did hate him, I kept hoping he would write to me when I got big enough to read. . . . But I swore, last Christmas morning, I would hate him . . . forever!"

"On Christmas morning!" Uncle Miles was horrified. "What a day to choose for a pledge to everlasting hate!"

"Good as any," grumbled Ferdinand.

Uncle Miles took a turn or two up and down the room, tugging at his black burnsides.

"Well--if you're sure you don't want the pony"--Uncle Miles's tone was conciliatory--"we'll sell it. Perhaps that would be more prudent, anyway. You've shown pretty good judgment for a small boy. We can't afford a pony, and our people know it. You would only make the other children envious. It's out of keeping with everything else we have. . . . Suppose we sell the pony, and put the money in bank for your college education: how's that?"

"But--Uncle Miles!"--Ferdinand's voice rose shrilly. "That's all the same, isn't it? I don't want anything he's got! I won't have his ponies, or saddles, or colleges, or anything! He same as killed my mother! Aunt Martha said so! I'm going to write and tell him so! You see if I don't!"

"Now--now!" soothed Uncle Miles. "You wouldn't do that."

He patted Ferdinand on the head and walked slowly out of the room and down the hall to his study, where he slumped into the shabby morris chair by the window and meditatively twisted the burnsides into pencil-points.

Every three months since his marriage to Martha Miller, seven years ago, he had received a draft for two hundred and fifty dollars from his prosperous brother-in-law. It exceeded his salary.

Indeed, his decision to marry Martha Miller--which he tried later to tell himself was based on the fact that she, albeit unsightly and eccentric, was an excellent housekeeper, a paragon of piety, and singularly devoted to his motherless little Angela--had been hastened upon her confiding to him that the baby Ferdinand was something other than a liability.

"It's very sacrificial of you, Miss Miller," he had said, that April afternoon on his return to the Miller home for a brief glimpse of Angela, who, since the revival he had conducted at the Oak Grove Baptist Church in November, had been happily in Martha's care--"it's very fine of you to have assumed, so cheerfully, the burden of your unfortunate sister's child: very unselfish, indeed!"

Martha had smiled, cryptically.

"I must be honest with yuh, Brother Brumm. Of course, I would 'a' took care o' Julia's baby, like I promised, even if young Craig had disowned it. . . . But--he remembers."

"Indeed? . . . Does him credit, I must say. . . . Does he remember substantially, may I ask, Miss Martha?"

"Two hundred and fifty every quarter." Martha seemed satisfied with the effect of her announcement. "Reg'lar as the clock."

"A thousand dollars a year, Martha, for the keep of a baby?"

Martha nodded, smiled, folded her arms, rocked gently.

"I had a promise from Craig"--she leaned forward and lowered her voice confidentially--"shortly after our poor Julia passed away. He had wrote a-sayin' was there anything he could do, though at the minute he hadn't much to do with, he said, and I reckon that was true. . . . Give the devil his due, I always say--"

"I'm sure you would, Martha!"

He recalled Martha's prompt reaction to the note of tenderness in his voice. She had smiled appreciatively, puckered her lips self-deprecatingly, touched her hair, rather gingerly; for it was the first time she had done it up over a rat--not one of the larger rats, to be sure, such as the bulky Susan affected; a mere mouse, indeed, compared to Susan's--and was obviously not quite at ease with her greying foretop so heavily shadowing her eyes.

"But--and so--then--Oh, yes; then I wrote him as how poor Julia had gave me th' baby t' bring up, and that I meant t' do so, well as I could. If he ever wanted t' send me anything toward its keep, all well and good, I said, but the baby was mine. I told him as how it was Julia's last words, and it was, almost. I asked him t' promise he would never try t' take little Alexander away from me, or even write to him when he grew big enough t' understand; fer it might make him discontented and all . . . and he promised!"

"Alexander? I thought the child's name was Ferdinand."

"Well, you see Julia had wrote a letter, a couple o' days afore she died, and if the baby was a boy it was to be Alexander. So Craig always calls him Alexander. . . . We just couldn't; not after what he'd done, 'n' all. . . . Anyways, that's the baby's other name."

Mr. Brumm had proposed marriage to Martha, that evening, and had been accepted with a coyness he had hardly suspected her capable of in the face of her nun-like, ascetic piety.

On the day of their wedding in December--Mr. Brumm had just returned aglow over the quite brilliant success of his three weeks' revival at Partridge Crossing, Illinois--certain small items of business were under discussion. He and Martha were out walking in the snow on the highway, safe from the hostile curiosity of the family in whose opinion that slick feller Brumm was a-tryin' t' lay his miracle-workin' hands on th' baby's money, an indictment they had hinted at, in his presence, and freely discussed within easy earshot.

Martha had beamed over the prompt victory she had won in gaining his consent to look for a settled pastorate and discontinue his itinerant evangelistic career. Her solicitude over his endurance of cold beds, unwholesome food, and long journeys touched him, even if--as he suspected--there was another reason, quite as good, for her request. As the wife of a minister, Martha hoped to enjoy whatever refracted glory shone upon that office. There would be small comfort sitting at home, unrecognized, with the care of two small children--Angela was seven, Ferdinand three--while her crusading spouse spent blocks of weeks in distant parts.

With this triumph scored, Martha was prepared to be generous when Miles (it was becoming easier to call him Miles) suggested that he would deeply appreciate it if their future negotiations with Alexander Craig might be conducted by himself. It would be much more pleasant, all 'round, if he, as head of the household--and would not little Ferdinand be the same as his own son, now?--were entrusted with this business.

Pursuant to that agreement, Martha had promptly written to Seattle notifying her young brother-in-law of her marriage and stating that hereafter Mr. Brumm was to be considered custodian of the child's funds, adding that the arrangement would undoubtedly make Mr. Brumm even more interested in little Alexander. She hadn't said why.

Shortly before little Ferdinand was eight, Mr. Brumm had received a letter from Craig--they had always referred to him as Craig; not Mr. Craig, which would have denoted an unearned respect for him, or Alexander, which would have seemed more friendly than they felt--inquiring whether it would be considered a violation of his covenant if he wrote to his son on the occasion of his next birthday. The letter was typed on the expensively embossed stationery of The Puget Sound--Editorial Department.

Mr. Brumm, who enjoyed letting himself go, a bit, with a pen, had written a reply which, after many revisions, pleased him.

"We live very simply here, as becomes the family of a village clergyman, on small pay, ministering to a by no means well-to-do community composed of persons who for the most part make their own clothes and grow their own food. Your son's wants are few. As you are aware, we have thought it imprudent to inform him of your benefactions. Did he know that we are receiving generous amounts of money on his account, it would unquestionably alter his relation to our household, both in his mind and ours. It would make for constraint, and, perhaps, a breakdown of the discipline which every small boy, however tractable, requires."

There was a great deal more of it, running into all of four pages, redundantly cautioning Mr. Craig that any affectionate gesture toward his son, at this time, would make the child restless in his humble home, and reminding Mr. Craig of his promise to Mrs. Brumm "never to disturb the existing relationship while she lives."

Mr. Brumm had had no reply to that letter which, he felt, deserved adequate recognition, considering the amount of time and labour he had spent on its composition. The quarterly remittances continued to arrive unaccompanied by any personal message. On each occasion, Mr. Brumm receipted with a brief note, reporting on the boy's health and advancement in school, always optimistically. As for young Ferdinand's opinion of his father, they had tried to shape it properly by making the relationship seem as remote as possible. How else, indeed, were they to insure the child's contentment?

Reflecting on it now, in the light of this morning's dismaying episode, Mr. Brumm wondered if they had not slightly overdone their efforts to portray Craig as a selfish, cowardly scapegrace who had fled in terror from the gravest of obligations. He was aware that Martha had spared no ugly words in recounting for Ferdinand the pitiful details of a tragedy which had become an obsession in her cramped mind. Would this hot-headed boy actually write to his father, provoking an open breach, perhaps an investigation? It was a comfort to remember that Ferdinand did not know his father's address beyond the bare fact that he lived in Seattle. But was that a comfort? Mr. Brumm wondered if a letter addressed to Alexander Craig, Seattle, might not be delivered.

* * * * *

Meantime, while Mr. Brumm toyed absently with his beard, there was a dull rumble of conversation drifting in from Ferdinand's room, where Aunt Martha was endeavouring to set everything right. From the boy's protests, it was to be gathered that she was not meeting with much success.

"I was just a-sayin' to Ferdinand"--Aunt Martha rose from the low rocking-chair, and leaned against the foot of the bed as Uncle Miles strolled in--"that we mustn't have any more fuss now about this pony business. It's gone plenty far enough!"

"Well," said Uncle Miles casually, "we'll think it over and decide what's the best thing to do. Ferdinand's going to be reasonable, I feel sure."

His shoes squeaked as he went downstairs. Aunt Martha sighed audibly, and followed him. Ferdinand, fatigued by the emotional storm, yawned, stretched, slept.

After a brief conference in the kitchen, Uncle Miles harnessed the glossy bay mare to the jump-seat buggy, while Aunt Martha, in their downstairs bedroom, changed to her white lawn with the black spray.

"Angela," she called, "your father 'n' me are a-goin' to make a call on Sister Sprecker."

In deference to Ferdinand's distress, Angela had cheerfully consented that the pony should be stabled, and was sitting on one foot in the porch swing deeply absorbed in The Last Days of Pompeii, which, after many unsuccessful attempts, she was devouring with interest. The book was lowered to her lap for a moment. Odd--making a visit on Saturday afternoon. Father always reserved Saturday for study.

Aunt Martha did not explain that she herself was to be left with Sister Sprecker, who lived on the pike halfway to Bluffton, while Uncle Miles continued to town for the purpose of sending a telegram, which he could not prudently dispatch from Zanesdale, inquiring of the Winnetka Stock Farm whether they would buy back the pony and equipment. She tiptoed upstairs, and returned to the front screen-door, bonneted and black-mitted for her journey.

"Ferdinand's asleep, Angela. He's been so stirred up 'n' all. Get him a piece when he comes down. We mayn't be back much afore sundown. You peel th' potatoes, 'n' make a good fire about five o'clock."

Briefly disengaging herself from panic-stricken Pompeii, Angela mumbled acquiescence and hoped they would have a good time.

She was a flaxen-haired, large-eyed, precocious youngster whom her father regarded as a valuable asset in his profession. A great deal of attention had been paid to Angela when she was a mere tiny tot by the adoring widows and elderly maidens in whose indulgent care she had been lodged, in at least a score of small towns, while her father was pursuing his evangelistic ministry, previous to his second marriage.

Sometimes she sat beside him in the pulpit, an enraptured and undeniably touching picture of cherubic innocence. Not infrequently she was adverted to, with a tender gesture, when the preacher spoke feelingly of the uninquisitive faith to be found at its best in the heart of a child.

At eight, Angela had sung, "I'll Meet Mother Over There," in a sweet, unaffected, little voice that had utterly devastated with emotion the large crowd on the last night of Mr. Brumm's memorable revival at Unger, shortly after accepting their call.

More than a hundred souls were saved during that revival; and at least a score, already saved, experienced the second blessing. Little Angela herself had publicly professed a receipt of the second blessing, on that final night of the revival, somewhat to her parent's confusion; for this degree, while not explicitly restricted to an adult constituency, had not--at least within his own purview--been undertaken by anyone of Angela's immature years. There was nothing he could do about it, however; certainly not at the moment, seeing with what a spontaneous wave of hysterical exultation the child's bland announcement was accepted. In fact, it was Angela's second blessing that had brought the month's "big meetin'" to an almost painfully triumphant crescendo insuring her father's standing in the community for five successful years.

As was to be expected, Angela, thereafter, was looked to, on occasions when emotion ran high, for a tender song, a fervid testimony, a sugary little prayer--demands which she met so adequately that even she herself could not have failed to realize the value of her talent, had she been infinitely more reticent than she was. Everybody predicted a bright future for Angela. It went without debate that she could expect to be mightily used by the Lord. Aunt Martha occasionally hinted to her husband that it would be a pity if Angela's head should be turned by so much praise; but, observing that his smug smile left something unsaid on the subject of envy, she did not venture to press the matter.

No endeavour had been made to capitalize Ferdinand's piety which was of a much less showy type. He had displayed no prophetic gifts. At Christmas and on Children's Day he spoke short pieces and participated in dialogues, always without enthusiasm or promise of future distinction either as an apostle or platform orator. Privately he despised these exhibitions, and consented to be a party to them only when his loyalty to his uncle was challenged. Especially did he loathe the dialogues. Overtopping by a head all the other boys of his age, he appeared the dolt in a line-up of brighter juniors, albeit some of them might be older than he. It was a sore trial, indeed, when it came his turn to hold up a little white pasteboard card bearing the letter D, and recite, shamefacedly, amid the pardonable titters of the congregation:

"I am the Daisy that grows in the spring,
Sweetly adoring the love of our King."

Presently all these letters would spell

GODS LITTLE FLOWERS

and he could stumble awkwardly to his seat beside Aunt Martha, who, smiling benignly, would wet a finger and brush back the lock that had come all the way from Dresden.

Ferdinand accepted Angela's opulent faith at face value. It never occurred to him to be jealous of the marked attentions she received, wherever they went, sometimes in quite glaring contrast to the attitude people manifested toward him. He rejoiced in her well-deserved popularity. He liked Angela. The hazard of childish quarrels between them had been reduced to a minimum by the fact that no question of property rights ever arose. Until recently, Angela had contented herself at play with her dolls and dishes. Ferdinand, when not whittling sticks, amused himself with his small set of smeary rubber-type. They kept out of each other's way.

Of late, however, Angela had been taking more interest in Ferdinand. At first he had been flattered by these friendly attentions; though, on the whole, he rather liked her better when she left him to his own devices. Sometimes she came out to the bench, behind the woodhouse, and sat by him while he whittled toy furniture out of soft pine; sat very close, often hampering him.

Angela confided in him very freely now, as if he were her own age. One of these days she was going to be an evangelist. She could do it now if they would let her. Not only would she do a great deal of good, but she could earn some money. She could have nice clothes. "And I'll get you a really good printing outfit, too, Ferdinand. You want one very much, don't you?"

And when he said he certainly did--very much--she would kiss him, and say: "Never you mind. I'll get you one that you can print a little newspaper on. Wouldn't that be fun?"

* * * * *

Ferdinand was roused by Angela's voice down in the parlour, singing, "That Will Be Glory For Me," to her own accompaniment on the melodeon. He was debating whether he should not go down and ask Aunt Martha for a piece of pie, now that he had slept through dinner-time. It was almost three.

Suddenly the music stopped abruptly. Angela was calling from the foot of the stairs.

"Ferdinand!"

"Ye-es."

"You awake now?"

"Um-humm."

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"Lonesome?"

"No--but I'm hungry."

"Want me to bring you a piece of cake and a banana?"

"Well--if you want to."

She came presently and sat down beside him on the bed, licking sticky fingers.

"Don't you want any?" asked Ferdinand, his mouth full.

"I just had some. Did you know that fathe