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A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the

It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky shed a rain of silver sunshine on the

roofs of the village, and on the pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the round

white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and down the grassy road

that takes the name of street when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the open, and

lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England villages. The clump of weeping willows about

the duck pond, and the Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only roadside shadow

between lawyer Royall's house and the point where, at the other end of the village, the road rises above the

The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook the doleful fringes of the Hatchard spruces, caught the

straw hat of a young man just passing under them, and spun it clean across the road into the duckpond.

As he ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall's doorstep noticed that he was a stranger, that he wore city

clothes, and that he was laughing with all his teeth, as the young and careless laugh at such mishaps.

Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking that sometimes came over her when she saw people with

holiday faces made her draw back into the house and pretend to look for the key that she knew she had

already put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirror with a gilt eagle over it hung on the passage wall, and

she looked critically at her reflection, wished for the thousandth time that she had blue eyes like Annabel

Balch, the girl who sometimes came from Springfield to spend a week with old Miss Hatchard, straightened

the sunburnt hat over her small swarthy face, and turned out again into the sunshine.

The young man had passed through the Hatchard gate, and she had the street to herself. North Dormer is at all

times an empty place, and at three o'clock on a June afternoon its few ablebodied men are off in the fields or

The girl walked along, swinging her key on a finger, and looking about her with the heightened attention

produced by the presence of a stranger in a familiar place. What, she wondered, did North Dormer look like

to people from other parts of the world? She herself had lived there since the age of five, and had long

supposed it to be a place of some importance. But about a year before, Mr. Miles, the new Episcopal

clergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every other Sundaywhen the roads were not ploughed up by

hauling to hold a service in the North Dormer church, had proposed, in a fit of missionary zeal, to take the

young people down to Nettleton to hear an illustrated lecture on the Holy Land; and the dozen girls and boys

who represented the future of North Dormer had been piled into a farmwaggon, driven over the hills to

In the course of that incredible day Charity Royall had, for the first and only time, experienced railway

travel, looked into shops with plateglass fronts, tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened to a

gentleman saying unintelligible things before pictures that she would have enjoyed looking at if his

explanations had not prevented her from understanding them. This initiation had shown her that North

Dormer was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for information that her position as custodian of the

village library had previously failed to excite. For a month or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedly

into the dusty volumes of the Hatchard Memorial Library; then the impression of Nettleton began to fade, and

she found it easier to take North Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading.

The sight of the stranger once more revived memories of Nettleton, and North Dormer shrank to its real size.

As she looked up and down it, from lawyer Royall's faded red house at one end to the white church at the

other, she pitilessly took its measure. There it lay, a weatherbeaten sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned

of men, left apart by railway, trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern communities.

It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no "business block"; only a church that was opened every other

Sunday if the state of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been bought for twenty

years, and where the old ones mouldered undisturbed on the damp shelves. Yet Charity Royall had always

been told that she ought to consider it a privilege that her lot had been cast in North Dormer. She knew that,

compared to the place she had come from, North Dormer represented all the blessings of the most refined

civilization. Everyone in the village had told her so ever since she had been brought there as a child. Even old

Miss Hatchard had said to her, on a terrible occasion in her life: "My child, you must never cease to

She had been "brought down from the Mountain"; from the scarred cliff that lifted its sullen wall above the

lesser slopes of Eagle Range, making a perpetual background of gloom to the lonely valley. The Mountain

was a good fifteen miles away, but it rose so abruptly from the lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its

shadow over North Dormer. And it was like a great magnet drawing the clouds and scattering them in storm

across the valley. If ever, in the purest summer sky, there trailed a thread of vapour over North Dormer, it

drifted to the Mountain as a ship drifts to a whirlpool, and was caught among the rocks, torn up and

Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but she knew it was a bad place, and a shame to have come

from, and that, whatever befell her in North Dormer, she ought, as Miss Hatchard had once reminded her, to

remember that she had been brought down from there, and hold her tongue and be thankful. She looked up at

the Mountain, thinking of these things, and tried as usual to be thankful. But the sight of the young man

turning in at Miss Hatchard's gate had brought back the vision of the glittering streets of Nettleton, and she

felt ashamed of her old sunhat, and sick of North Dormer, and jealously aware of Annabel Balch of

Springfield, opening her blue eyes somewhere far off on glories greater than the glories of Nettleton.

Half way down the street she stopped at a weakhinged gate. Passing through it, she walked down a brick

path to a queer little brick temple with white wooden columns supporting a pediment on which was inscribed

Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great uncle; though she would undoubtedly have reversed

the phrase, and put forward, as her only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his greatniece. For

Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the

marble tablet in the interior of the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked literary

gifts, written a series of papers called "The Recluse of Eagle Range," enjoyed the acquaintance of

Washington Irving and FitzGreene Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy.

Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a link piously commemorated by the

erection of the monument where Charity Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk

under a freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt any deader in his grave than

Entering her prisonhouse with a listless step she took off her hat, hung it on a plaster bust of Minerva,

opened the shutters, leaned out to see if there were any eggs in the swallow's nest above one of the windows,

and finally, seating herself behind the desk, drew out a roll of cotton lace and a steel crochet hook. She was

not an expert workwoman, and it had taken her many weeks to make the halfyard of narrow lace which she

kept wound about the buckram back of a disintegrated copy of "The Lamplighter." But there was no other

way of getting any lace to trim her summer blouse, and since Ally Hawes, the poorest girl in the village, had

shown herself in church with enviable transparencies about the shoulders, Charity's hook had travelled faster.

She unrolled the lace, dug the hook into a loop, and bent to the task with furrowed brows.

Suddenly the door opened, and before she had raised her eyes she knew that the young man she had seen

Without taking any notice of her he began to move slowly about the long vaultlike room, his hands behind

his back, his shortsighted eyes peering up and down the rows of rusty bindings. At length he reached the

"Have you a cardcatalogue?" he asked in a pleasant abrupt voice; and the oddness of the question caused her

"Why, you know" He broke off, and she became conscious that he was looking at her for the first time,

having apparently, on his entrance, included her in his general shortsighted survey as part of the furniture of

The fact that, in discovering her, he lost the thread of his remark, did not escape her attention, and she looked

"No, I don't suppose you do know," he corrected himself. "In fact, it would be almost a pity"

She thought she detected a slight condescension in his tone, and asked sharply: "Why?"

"Because it's so much pleasanter, in a small library like this, to poke about by one's selfwith the help of the

He added the last phrase so respectfully that she was mollified, and rejoined with a sigh: "I'm afraid I can't

"Why?" he questioned in his turn; and she replied that there weren't many books anyhow, and that she'd

"Are they? That's a pity, for I see there are some good ones." He seemed to have lost interest in their

conversation, and strolled away again, apparently forgetting her. His indifference nettled her, and she picked

up her work, resolved not to offer him the least assistance. Apparently he did not need it, for he spent a long

time with his back to her, lifting down, one after another, the tall cobwebby volumes from a distant shelf.

"Oh, I say!" he exclaimed; and looking up she saw that he had drawn out his handkerchief and was carefully

wiping the edges of the book in his hand. The action struck her as an unwarranted criticism on her care of the

He turned around and looked at her with reviving interest. "Ahthen you're not the librarian?"

"Of course I am; but I can't dust all these books. Besides, nobody ever looks at them, now Miss Hatchard's

"No, I suppose not." He laid down the book he had been wiping, and stood considering her in silence. She

wondered if Miss Hatchard had sent him round to pry into the way the library was looked after, and the

suspicion increased her resentment. "I saw you going into her house just now, didn't I?" she asked, with the

New England avoidance of the proper name. She was determined to find out why he was poking about among

"Miss Hatchard's house? Yesshe's my cousin and I'm staying there," the young man answered; adding, as

if to disarm a visible distrust: "My name is Harney Lucius Harney. She may have spoken of me."

"Oh, well" said Miss Hatchard's cousin with a laugh; and after another pause, during which it occurred

to Charity that her answer had not been encouraging, he remarked: "You don't seem strong on architecture."

Her bewilderment was complete: the more she wished to appear to understand him the more unintelligible his

remarks became. He reminded her of the gentleman who had "explained" the pictures at Nettleton, and the

"I mean, I can't see that you have any books on the old houses about here. I suppose, for that matter, this part

of the country hasn't been much explored. They all go on doing Plymouth and Salem. So stupid. My cousin's

house, now, is remarkable. This place must have had a pastit must have been more of a place once." He

stopped short, with the blush of a shy man who overhears himself, and fears he has been voluble. "I'm an

She stared. "Old houses? Everything's old in North Dormer, isn't it? The folks are, anyhow."

"Haven't you any kind of a history of the place? I think there was one written about 1840: a book or pamphlet

about its first settlement," he presently said from the farther end of the room.

She pressed her crochet hook against her lip and pondered. There was such a work, she knew: "North Dormer

and the Early Townships of Eagle County." She had a special grudge against it because it was a limp weakly

book that was always either falling off the shelf or slipping back and disappearing if one squeezed it in

between sustaining volumes. She remembered, the last time she had picked it up, wondering how anyone

could have taken the trouble to write a book about North Dormer and its neighbours: Dormer, Hamblin,

Creston and Creston River. She knew them all, mere lost clusters of houses in the folds of the desolate ridges:

Dormer, where North Dormer went for its apples; Creston River, where there used to be a papermill, and its

grey walls stood decaying by the stream; and Hamblin, where the first snow always fell. Such were their titles

She got up and began to move about vaguely before the shelves. But she had no idea where she had last put

the book, and something told her that it was going to play her its usual trick and remain invisible. It was not

"I guess it's somewhere," she said, to prove her zeal; but she spoke without conviction, and felt that her words

"Oh, well" he said again. She knew he was going, and wished more than ever to find the book.

"It will be for next time," he added; and picking up the volume he had laid on the desk he handed it to her.

The hours of the Hatchard Memorial librarian were from three to five; and Charity Royall's sense of duty

But she had never perceived that any practical advantage thereby accrued either to North Dormer or to

herself; and she had no scruple in decreeing, when it suited her, that the library should close an hour earlier.

A few minutes after Mr. Harney's departure she formed this decision, put away her lace, fastened the shutters,

The street upon which she emerged was still empty: and after glancing up and down it she began to walk

toward her house. But instead of entering she passed on, turned into a fieldpath and mounted to a pasture on

the hillside. She let down the bars of the gate, followed a trail along the crumbling wall of the pasture, and

walked on till she reached a knoll where a clump of larches shook out their fresh tassels to the wind. There

She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and

colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her

palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and

She often climbed up the hill and lay there alone for the mere pleasure of feeling the wind and of rubbing her

cheeks in the grass. Generally at such times she did not think of anything, but lay immersed in an inarticulate

wellbeing. Today the sense of wellbeing was intensified by her joy at escaping from the library. She liked

well enough to have a friend drop in and talk to her when she was on duty, but she hated to be bothered about

books. How could she remember where they were, when they were so seldom asked for? Orma Fry

occasionally took out a novel, and her brother Ben was fond of what he called "jography," and of books

relating to trade and bookkeeping; but no one else asked for anything except, at intervals, "Uncle Tom's

Cabin," or "Opening of a Chestnut Burr," or Longfellow. She had these under her hand, and could have found

them in the dark; but unexpected demands came so rarely that they exasperated her like an injustice....

She had liked the young man's looks, and his short sighted eyes, and his odd way of speaking, that was

abrupt yet soft, just as his hands were sunburnt and sinewy, yet with smooth nails like a woman's. His hair

was sunburntlooking too, or rather the colour of bracken after frost; his eyes grey, with the appealing look

of the shortsighted, his smile shy yet confident, as if he knew lots of things she had never dreamed of, and yet

wouldn't for the world have had her feel his superiority. But she did feel it, and liked the feeling; for it was

new to her. Poor and ignorant as she was, and knew herself to behumblest of the humble even in North

Dormer, where to come from the Mountain was the worst disgraceyet in her narrow world she had always

ruled. It was partly, of course, owing to the fact that lawyer Royall was "the biggest man in North Dormer";

so much too big for it, in fact, that outsiders, who didn't know, always wondered how it held him. In spite of

everythingand in spite even of Miss Hatchardlawyer Royall ruled in North Dormer; and Charity ruled in

lawyer Royall's house. She had never put it to herself in those terms; but she knew her power, knew what it

was made of, and hated it. Confusedly, the young man in the library had made her feel for the first time what

She sat up, brushed the bits of grass from her hair, and looked down on the house where she held sway. It

stood just below her, cheerless and untended, its faded red front divided from the road by a "yard" with a path

bordered by gooseberry bushes, a stone well overgrown with traveller's joy, and a sickly Crimson Rambler

tied to a fanshaped support, which Mr. Royall had once brought up from Hepburn to please her. Behind the

house a bit of uneven ground with clotheslines strung across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the

wall a patch of corn and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining wilderness of rock and

Charity could not recall her first sight of the house. She had been told that she was ill of a fever when she was

brought down from the Mountain; and she could only remember waking one day in a cot at the foot of Mrs.

Royall's bed, and opening her eyes on the cold neatness of the room that was afterward to be hers.

Mrs. Royall died seven or eight years later; and by that time Charity had taken the measure of most things

about her. She knew that Mrs. Royall was sad and timid and weak; she knew that lawyer Royall was harsh

and violent, and still weaker. She knew that she had been christened Charity (in the white church at the other

end of the village) to commemorate Mr. Royall's disinterestedness in "bringing her down," and to keep alive

in her a becoming sense of her dependence; she knew that Mr. Royall was her guardian, but that he had not

legally adopted her, though everybody spoke of her as Charity Royall; and she knew why he had come back

to live at North Dormer, instead of practising at Nettleton, where he had begun his legal career.

After Mrs. Royall's death there was some talk of sending her to a boardingschool. Miss Hatchard suggested

it, and had a long conference with Mr. Royall, who, in pursuance of her plan, departed one day for Starkfield

to visit the institution she recommended. He came back the next night with a black face; worse, Charity

observed, than she had ever seen him; and by that time she had had some experience.

When she asked him how soon she was to start he answered shortly, "You ain't going," and shut himself up in

the room he called his office; and the next day the lady who kept the school at Starkfield wrote that "under

the circumstances" she was afraid she could not make room just then for another pupil.

Charity was disappointed; but she understood. It wasn't the temptations of Starkfield that had been Mr.

Royall's undoing; it was the thought of losing her. He was a dreadfully "lonesome" man; she had made that

out because she was so "lonesome" herself. He and she, face to face in that sad house, had sounded the depths

of isolation; and though she felt no particular affection for him, and not the slightest gratitude, she pitied him

because she was conscious that he was superior to the people about him, and that she was the only being

between him and solitude. Therefore, when Miss Hatchard sent for her a day or two later, to talk of a school

at Nettleton, and to say that this time a friend of hers would "make the necessary arrangements," Charity cut

Miss Hatchard reasoned with her kindly, but to no purpose; she simply repeated: "I guess Mr. Royall's too

Miss Hatchard blinked perplexedly behind her eye glasses. Her long frail face was full of puzzled wrinkles,

and she leant forward, resting her hands on the arms of her mahogany armchair, with the evident desire to say

She looked about the pale walls of her sittingroom, seeking counsel of ancestral daguerreotypes and didactic

"The fact is, it's not onlynot only because of the advantages. There are other reasons. You're too young to

"Oh, no, I ain't," said Charity harshly; and Miss Hatchard blushed to the roots of her blonde cap. But she must

have felt a vague relief at having her explanation cut short, for she concluded, again invoking the

daguerreotypes: "Of course I shall always do what I can for you; and in case....in case....you know you can

Lawyer Royall was waiting for Charity in the porch when she returned from this visit. He had shaved, and

brushed his black coat, and looked a magnificent monument of a man; at such moments she really admired

"I'd rather not," she said, swinging past him on her way to her room. It was the following week that he

brought her up the Crimson Rambler and its fan from Hepburn. He had never given her anything before.

The next outstanding incident of her life had happened two years later, when she was seventeen. Lawyer

Royall, who hated to go to Nettleton, had been called there in connection with a case. He still exercised his

profession, though litigation languished in North Dormer and its outlying hamlets; and for once he had had an

opportunity that he could not afford to refuse. He spent three days in Nettleton, won his case, and came back

in high goodhumour. It was a rare mood with him, and manifested itself on this occasion by his talking

impressively at the suppertable of the "rousing welcome" his old friends had given him. He wound up

confidentially: "I was a damn fool ever to leave Nettleton. It was Mrs. Royall that made me do it."

Charity immediately perceived that something bitter had happened to him, and that he was trying to talk

down the recollection. She went up to bed early, leaving him seated in moody thought, his elbows propped on

the worn oilcloth of the supper table. On the way up she had extracted from his overcoat pocket the key of the

She was awakened by a rattling at her door and jumped out of bed. She heard Mr. Royall's voice, low and

peremptory, and opened the door, fearing an accident. No other thought had occurred to her; but when she

saw him in the doorway, a ray from the autumn moon falling on his discomposed face, she understood.

For a moment they looked at each other in silence; then, as he put his foot across the threshold, she stretched

"You go right back from here," she said, in a shrill voice that startled her; "you ain't going to have that key

"Charity, let me in. I don't want the key. I'm a lonesome man," he began, in the deep voice that sometimes

Her heart gave a startled plunge, but she continued to hold him back contemptuously. "Well, I guess you

She was not frightened, she simply felt a deep disgust; and perhaps he divined it or read it in her face, for

after staring at her a moment he drew back and turned slowly away from the door. With her ear to her

keyhole she heard him feel his way down the dark stairs, and toward the kitchen; and she listened for the

crash of the cupboard panel, but instead she heard him, after an interval, unlock the door of the house, and his

heavy steps came to her through the silence as he walked down the path. She crept to the window and saw his

bent figure striding up the road in the moonlight. Then a belated sense of fear came to her with the

A day or two later poor Eudora Skeff, who for twenty years had been the custodian of the Hatchard library,

died suddenly of pneumonia; and the day after the funeral Charity went to see Miss Hatchard, and asked to be

appointed librarian. The request seemed to surprise Miss Hatchard: she evidently questioned the new

"To get away?" Miss Hatchard's puzzled wrinkles deepened, and there was a distressful pause. "You want to

Miss Hatchard clasped her nervous hands about the arms of her chair. Her eyes invoked the faded

countenances on the wall, and after a faint cough of indecision she brought out: "The...the housework's too

Charity's heart grew cold. She understood that Miss Hatchard had no help to give her and that she would have

to fight her way out of her difficulty alone. A deeper sense of isolation overcame her; she felt incalculably

old. "She's got to be talked to like a baby," she thought, with a feeling of compassion for Miss Hatchard's

long immaturity. "Yes, that's it," she said aloud. "The housework's too hard for me: I've been coughing a

She noted the immediate effect of this suggestion. Miss Hatchard paled at the memory of poor Eudora's

taking off, and promised to do what she could. But of course there were people she must consult: the

clergyman, the selectmen of North Dormer, and a distant Hatchard relative at Springfield. "If you'd only gone

to school!" she sighed. She followed Charity to the door, and there, in the security of the threshold, said with

a glance of evasive appeal: "I know Mr. Royall is...trying at times; but his wife bore with him; and you must

always remember, Charity, that it was Mr. Royall who brought you down from the Mountain." Charity went

home and opened the door of Mr. Royall's "office." He was sitting there by the stove reading Daniel

Webster's speeches. They had met at meals during the five days that had elapsed since he had come to her

door, and she had walked at his side at Eudora's funeral; but they had not spoken a word to each other.

He glanced up in surprise as she entered, and she noticed that he was unshaved, and that he looked unusually

old; but as she had always thought of him as an old man the change in his appearance did not move her. She

told him she had been to see Miss Hatchard, and with what object. She saw that he was astonished; but he

"I told her the housework was too hard for me, and I wanted to earn the money to pay for a hired girl. But I

ain't going to pay for her: you've got to. I want to have some money of my own."

Mr. Royall's bushy black eyebrows were drawn together in a frown, and he sat drumming with inkstained

Her contempt flashed out. "Do you suppose anybody'd stay at North Dormer if they could help it? You

"Anywhere where I can earn my living. I'll try here first, and if I can't do it here I'll go somewhere else. I'll go

up the Mountain if I have to." She paused on this threat, and saw that it had taken effect. "I want you should

get Miss Hatchard and the selectmen to take me at the library: and I want a woman here in the house with

Mr. Royall had grown exceedingly pale. When she ended he stood up ponderously, leaning against the desk;

"See here," he said at length as though utterance were difficult, "there's something I've been wanting to say to

The girl still stared at him without moving. "I want you to marry me," he repeated, clearing his throat. "The

minister'll be up here next Sunday and we can fix it up then. Or I'll drive you down to Hepburn to the Justice,

and get it done there. I'll do whatever you say." His eyes fell under the merciless stare she continued to fix on

him, and he shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. As he stood there before her, unwieldy,

shabby, disordered, the purple veins distorting the hands he pressed against the desk, and his long orator's jaw

trembling with the effort of his avowal, he seemed like a hideous parody of the fatherly old man she had

"Marry you? Me?" she burst out with a scornful laugh. "Was that what you came to ask me the other night?

What's come over you, I wonder? How long is it since you've looked at yourself in the glass?" She

straightened herself, insolently conscious of her youth and strength. "I suppose you think it would be cheaper

to marry me than to keep a hired girl. Everybody knows you're the closest man in Eagle County; but I guess

Mr. Royall did not move while she spoke. His face was ashcoloured and his black eyebrows quivered as

though the blaze of her scorn had blinded him. When she ceased he held up his hand.

"That'll dothat'll about do," he said. He turned to the door and took his hat from the hatpeg. On the

threshold he paused. "People ain't been fair to me from the first they ain't been fair to me," he said. Then

A few days later North Dormer learned with surprise that Charity had been appointed librarian of the

Hatchard Memorial at a salary of eight dollars a month, and that old Verena Marsh, from the Creston

It was not in the room known at the red house as Mr. Royall's "office" that he received his infrequent clients.

Professional dignity and masculine independence made it necessary that he should have a real office, under a

different roof; and his standing as the only lawyer of North Dormer required that the roof should be the same

It was his habit to walk to this office twice a day, morning and afternoon. It was on the ground floor of the

building, with a separate entrance, and a weathered nameplate on the door. Before going in he stepped in to

the postoffice for his mailusually an empty ceremonysaid a word or two to the townclerk, who sat

across the passage in idle state, and then went over to the store on the opposite corner, where Carrick Fry, the

storekeeper, always kept a chair for him, and where he was sure to find one or two selectmen leaning on the

long counter, in an atmosphere of rope, leather, tar and coffeebeans. Mr. Royall, though monosyllabic at

home, was not averse, in certain moods, to imparting his views to his fellowtownsmen; perhaps, also, he

was unwilling that his rare clients should surprise him sitting, clerkless and unoccupied, in his dusty office.

At any rate, his hours there were not much longer or more regular than Charity's at the library; the rest of the

time he spent either at the store or in driving about the country on business connected with the insurance

companies that he represented, or in sitting at home reading Bancroft's History of the United States and the

Since the day when Charity had told him that she wished to succeed to Eudora Skeff's post their relations had

undefinably but definitely changed. Lawyer Royall had kept his word. He had obtained the place for her at

the cost of considerable maneuvering, as she guessed from the number of rival candidates, and from the

acerbity with which two of them, Orma Fry and the eldest Targatt girl, treated her for nearly a year afterward.

And he had engaged Verena Marsh to come up from Creston and do the cooking. Verena was a poor old

widow, doddering and shiftless: Charity suspected that she came for her keep. Mr. Royall was too close a

man to give a dollar a day to a smart girl when he could get a deaf pauper for nothing. But at any rate, Verena

was there, in the attic just over Charity, and the fact that she was deaf did not greatly trouble the young girl.

Charity knew that what had happened on that hateful night would not happen again. She understood that,

profoundly as she had despised Mr. Royall ever since, he despised himself still more profoundly. If she had

asked for a woman in the house it was far less for her own defense than for his humiliation. She needed no

one to defend her: his humbled pride was her surest protection. He had never spoken a word of excuse or

extenuation; the incident was as if it had never been. Yet its consequences were latent in every word that he

and she exchanged, in every glance they instinctively turned from each other. Nothing now would ever shake

On the night of her meeting with Miss Hatchard's cousin Charity lay in bed, her bare arms clasped under her

rough head, and continued to think of him. She supposed that he meant to spend some time in North Dormer.

He had said he was looking up the old houses in the neighbourhood; and though she was not very clear as to

his purpose, or as to why anyone should look for old houses, when they lay in wait for one on every roadside,

she understood that he needed the help of books, and resolved to hunt up the next day the volume she had

Never had her ignorance of life and literature so weighed on her as in reliving the short scene of her

discomfiture. "It's no use trying to be anything in this place," she muttered to her pillow; and she shrivelled at

the vision of vague metropolises, shining superNettletons, where girls in better clothes than Belle Balch's

talked fluently of architecture to young men with hands like Lucius Harney's. Then she remembered his

sudden pause when he had come close to the desk and had his first look at her. The sight had made him forget

what he was going to say; she recalled the change in his face, and jumping up she ran over the bare boards to

her washstand, found the matches, lit a candle, and lifted it to the square of lookingglass on the

whitewashed wall. Her small face, usually so darkly pale, glowed like a rose in the faint orb of light, and

under her rumpled hair her eyes seemed deeper and larger than by day. Perhaps after all it was a mistake to

wish they were blue. A clumsy band and button fastened her unbleached nightgown about the throat. She

undid it, freed her thin shoulders, and saw herself a bride in lownecked satin, walking down an aisle with

Lucius Harney. He would kiss her as they left the church....She put down the candle and covered her face

with her hands as if to imprison the kiss. At that moment she heard Mr. Royall's step as he came up the stairs

to bed, and a fierce revulsion of feeling swept over her. Until then she had merely despised him; now deep

The next day, when Mr. Royall came back to dinner, they faced each other in silence as usual. Verena's

presence at the table was an excuse for their not talking, though her deafness would have permitted the freest

interchange of confidences. But when the meal was over, and Mr. Royall rose from the table, he looked back

"I want to speak to you a minute," he said; and she followed him across the passage, wondering.

He seated himself in his black horsehair armchair, and she leaned against the window, indifferently. She

"See here," he said, "why ain't you at the library the days you're supposed to be there?"

The question, breaking in on her mood of blissful abstraction, deprived her of speech, and she stared at him

"There's been some complaints made, it appears. Miss Hatchard sent for me this morning"

Charity's smouldering resentment broke into a blaze. "I know! Orma Fry, and that toad of a Targatt girl and

Ben Fry, like as not. He's going round with her. The low down sneaksI always knew they'd try to have

"Yesterday?" she laughed at her happy recollection. "At what time wasn't I there yesterday, I'd like to know?"

Charity was silent. She had been so steeped in the dreamy remembrance of young Harney's visit that she had

"Miss Hatchard? Why, she ain't ever been near the place since she's been lame. She couldn't get up the steps

"She can be helped up, I guess. She was yesterday, anyhow, by the young fellow that's staying with her. He

found you there, I understand, earlier in the afternoon; and he went back and told Miss Hatchard the books

were in bad shape and needed attending to. She got excited, and had herself wheeled straight round; and

when she got there the place was locked. So she sent for me, and told me about that, and about the other

complaints. She claims you've neglected things, and that she's going to get a trained librarian."

Charity had not moved while he spoke. She stood with her head thrown back against the windowframe, her

arms hanging against her sides, and her hands so tightly clenched that she felt, without knowing what hurt

Of all Mr. Royall had said she had retained only the phrase: "He told Miss Hatchard the books were in bad

shape." What did she care for the other charges against her? Malice or truth, she despised them as she

despised her detractors. But that the stranger to whom she had felt herself so mysteriously drawn should have

betrayed her! That at the very moment when she had fled up the hillside to think of him more deliciously he

should have been hastening home to denounce her shortcomings! She remembered how, in the darkness of

her room, she had covered her face to press his imagined kiss closer; and her heart raged against him for the

"Why, out of their old library: straight out, and never set foot in it again. They needn't think I'm going to wait

"CharityCharity Royall, you listen" he began, getting heavily out of his chair; but she waved him

Upstairs she took the library key from the place where she always hid it under her pincushionwho said she

wasn't careful?put on her hat, and swept down again and out into the street. If Mr. Royall heard her go he

made no motion to detain her: his sudden rages probably made him understand the uselessness of reasoning

She reached the brick temple, unlocked the door and entered into the glacial twilight. "I'm glad I'll never have

to sit in this old vault again when other folks are out in the sun!" she said aloud as the familiar chill took her.

She looked with abhorrence at the long dingy rows of books, the sheepnosed Minerva on her black pedestal,

and the mildfaced young man in a high stock whose effigy pined above her desk. She meant to take out of

the drawer her roll of lace and the library register, and go straight to Miss Hatchard to announce her

resignation. But suddenly a great desolation overcame her, and she sat down and laid her face against the

desk. Her heart was ravaged by life's cruelest discovery: the first creature who had come toward her out of the

wilderness had brought her anguish instead of joy. She did not cry; tears came hard to her, and the storms of

her heart spent themselves inwardly. But as she sat there in her dumb woe she felt her life to be too desolate,

"What have I ever done to it, that it should hurt me so?" she groaned, and pressed her fists against her lids,

"I won'tI won't go there looking like a horror!" she muttered, springing up and pushing back her hair as if

it stifled her. She opened the drawer, dragged out the register, and turned toward the door. As she did so it

He stopped and lifted his hat with a shy smile. "I beg your pardon," he said. "I thought there was no one

Charity stood before him, barring his way. "You can't come in. The library ain't open to the public

"Miss Hatchard's got no right to give her key to other folks, any more'n I have. I'm the librarian and I know

"I suppose you came to see what more you could say to set her against me? But you needn't trouble: it's my

library today, but it won't be this time tomorrow. I'm on the way now to take her back the key and the

Young Harney's face grew grave, but without betraying the consciousness of guilt she had looked for.

"I don't understand," he said. "There must be some mistake. Why should I say things against you to Miss

The apparent evasiveness of the reply caused Charity's indignation to overflow. "I don't know why you

should. I could understand Orma Fry's doing it, because she's always wanted to get me out of here ever since

the first day. I can't see why, when she's got her own home, and her father to work for her; nor Ida Targatt,

neither, when she got a legacy from her stepbrother on'y last year. But anyway we all live in the same place,

and when it's a place like North Dormer it's enough to make people hate each other just to have to walk down

the same street every day. But you don't live here, and you don't know anything about any of us, so what did

you have to meddle for? Do you suppose the other girls'd have kept the books any better'n I did? Why, Orma

Fry don't hardly know a book from a flat iron! And what if I don't always sit round here doing nothing till it

strikes five up at the church? Who cares if the library's open or shut? Do you suppose anybody ever comes

here for books? What they'd like to come for is to meet the fellows they're going with if I'd let 'em. But I

wouldn't let Bill Sollas from over the hill hang round here waiting for the youngest Targatt girl, because I

She stopped with a choking in her throat. Tremors of rage were running through her, and she steadied herself

What he saw seemed to affect him deeply, for he grew red under his sunburn, and stammered out: "But, Miss

His distress inflamed her anger, and she regained her voice to fling back: "If I was you I'd have the nerve to

The taunt seemed to restore his presence of mind. "I hope I should if I knew; but I don't. Apparently

something disagreeable has happened, for which you think I'm to blame. But I don't know what it is, because

"I don't know where you've been this morning, but I know you were here in this library yesterday; and it was

you that went home and told your cousin the books were in bad shape, and brought her round to see how I'd

Young Harney looked sincerely concerned. "Was that what you were told? I don't wonder you're angry. The

books are in bad shape, and as some are interesting it's a pity. I told Miss Hatchard they were suffering from

dampness and lack of air; and I brought her here to show her how easily the place could be ventilated. I also

told her you ought to have some one to help you do the dusting and airing. If you were given a wrong version

of what I said I'm sorry; but I'm so fond of old books that I'd rather see them made into a bonfire than left to

Charity felt her sobs rising and tried to stifle them in words. "I don't care what you say you told her. All I

know is she thinks it's all my fault, and I'm going to lose my job, and I wanted it more'n anyone in the village,

because I haven't got anybody belonging to me, the way other folks have. All I wanted was to put aside

money enough to get away from here sometime. D'you suppose if it hadn't been for that I'd have kept on

Of this appeal her hearer took up only the last question. "It is an old vault; but need it be? That's the point.

And it's my putting the question to my cousin that seems to have been the cause of the trouble." His glance

explored the melancholy penumbra of the long narrow room, resting on the blotched walls, the discoloured

rows of books, and the stern rosewood desk surmounted by the portrait of the young Honorius. "Of course it's

a bad job to do anything with a building jammed against a hill like this ridiculous mausoleum: you couldn't

get a good draught through it without blowing a hole in the mountain. But it can be ventilated after a fashion,

and the sun can be let in: I'll show you how if you like...." The architect's passion for improvement had

already made him lose sight of her grievance, and he lifted his stick instructively toward the cornice. But her

silence seemed to tell him that she took no interest in the ventilation of the library, and turning back to her

abruptly he held out both hands. "Look hereyou don't mean what you said? You don't really think I'd do

A new note in his voice disarmed her: no one had ever spoken to her in that tone.

"Oh, what DID you do it for then?" she wailed. He had her hands in his, and she was feeling the smooth

He pressed her hands lightly and let them go. "Why, to make things pleasanter for you here; and better for the

books. I'm sorry if my cousin twisted around what I said. She's excitable, and she lives on trifles: I ought to

have remembered that. Don't punish me by letting her think you take her seriously."

It was wonderful to hear him speak of Miss Hatchard as if she were a querulous baby: in spite of his shyness

he had the air of power that the experience of cities probably gave. It was the fact of having lived in Nettleton

that made lawyer Royall, in spite of his infirmities, the strongest man in North Dormer; and Charity was sure

She felt that if she kept up her denunciatory tone he would secretly class her with Miss Hatchard; and the

"It don't matter to Miss Hatchard how I take her. Mr. Royall says she's going to get a trained librarian; and I'd

"Naturally you would. But I'm sure she doesn't mean to send you away. At any rate, won't you give me the

chance to find out first and let you know? It will be time enough to resign if I'm mistaken."

Her pride flamed into her cheeks at the suggestion of his intervening. "I don't want anybody should coax her

He coloured too. "I give you my word I won't do that. Only wait till tomorrow, will you?" He looked straight

into her eyes with his shy grey glance. "You can trust me, you knowyou really can."

All the old frozen woes seemed to melt in her, and she murmured awkwardly, looking away from him: "Oh,

There had never been such a June in Eagle County. Usually it was a month of moods, with abrupt alternations

of belated frost and midsummer heat; this year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate beauty. Every

morning a breeze blew steadily from the hills. Toward noon it built up great canopies of white cloud that

threw a cool shadow over fields and woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again, and the western

On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge above a sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth and

the warm currents of the grass running through her. Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branch laid its

frail white flowers and bluegreen leaves against the sky. Just beyond, a tuft of sweetfern uncurled between

the beaded shoots of the grass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of sunshine. This

was all she saw; but she felt, above her and about her, the strong growth of the beeches clothing the ridge, the

rounding of pale green cones on countless sprucebranches, the push of myriads of sweetfern fronds in the

cracks of the stony slope below the wood, and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags in the

pasture beyond. All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to her on

mingled currents of fragrance. Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalation to the

pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pinesap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle

perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earthsmell that was like the breath of some huge

Charity had lain there a long time, passive and sun warmed as the slope on which she lay, when there came

between her eyes and the dancing butterfly the sight of a man's foot in a large worn boot covered with red

"Oh, don't!" she exclaimed, raising herself on her elbow and stretching out a warning hand.

"Don't stamp on those bramble flowers, you dolt!" she retorted, springing to her knees. The foot paused and

then descended clumsily on the frail branch, and raising her eyes she saw above her the bewildered face of a

slouching man with a thin sunburnt beard, and white arms showing through his ragged shirt.

"Don't you ever SEE anything, Liff Hyatt?" she assailed him, as he stood before her with the look of a man

"Down from where?" she questioned, stooping to gather up the petals his foot had scattered.

He jerked his thumb toward the heights. "Been cutting down trees for Dan Targatt."

Charity sank back on her heels and looked at him musingly. She was not in the least afraid of poor Liff Hyatt,

though he "came from the Mountain," and some of the girls ran when they saw him. Among the more

reasonable he passed for a harmless creature, a sort of link between the mountain and civilized folk, who

occasionally came down and did a little wood cutting for a farmer when hands were short. Besides, she knew

the Mountain people would never hurt her: Liff himself had told her so once when she was a little girl, and

had met him one day at the edge of lawyer Royall's pasture. "They won't any of 'em touch you up there, f'ever

you was to come up....But I don't s'pose you will," he had added philosophically, looking at her new shoes,

Charity had, in truth, never felt any desire to visit her birthplace. She did not care to have it known that she

was of the Mountain, and was shy of being seen in talk with Liff Hyatt. But today she was not sorry to have

him appear. A great many things had happened to her since the day when young Lucius Harney had entered

the doors of the Hatchard Memorial, but none, perhaps, so unforeseen as the fact of her suddenly finding it a

convenience to be on good terms with Liff Hyatt. She continued to look up curiously at his freckled weather

beaten face, with feverish hollows below the cheekbones and the pale yellow eyes of a harmless animal. "I

"Is there any folks living in the brown house by the swamp, up under Porcupine?" she presently asked in an

Liff Hyatt, for a while, considered her with surprise; then he scratched his head and shifted his weight from

"There's always the same folks in the brown house," he said with his vague grin.

Charity still held him with resolute eyes. "See here, I want to go there some day and take a gentleman with

She did not offer to explain this statement. It was too far beyond Liff Hyatt's limitations for the attempt to be

worth making. "He wants to see the brown house, and go all over it," she pursued.

Liff was still running his fingers perplexedly through his shock of strawcolored hair. "Is it a fellow from the

"Yes. He draws pictures of things. He's down there now drawing the Bonner house." She pointed to a

"Yes. You won't understandand it don't matter. All I say is: he's going to the Hyatts' in a day or two."

Liff looked more and more perplexed. "Bash is ugly sometimes in the afternoons."

She threw her head back, her eyes full on Hyatt's. "I'm coming too: you tell him."

"They won't none of them trouble you, the Hyatts won't. What d'you want a take a stranger with you though?"

He looked away at the blue mountains on the horizon; then his gaze dropped to the chimneytop below the

He shifted his weight again, crossed his arms, and continued to survey the distant landscape. "Well, so long,"

he said at last, inconclusively; and turning away he shambled up the hillside. From the ledge above her, he

paused to call down: "I wouldn't go there a Sunday"; then he clambered on till the trees closed in on him.

She lay on the warm ridge, thinking of many things that the woodsman's appearance had stirred up in her.

She knew nothing of her early life, and had never felt any curiosity about it: only a sullen reluctance to

explore the corner of her memory where certain blurred images lingered. But all that had happened to her

within the last few weeks had stirred her to the sleeping depths. She had become absorbingly interesting to

herself, and everything that had to do with her past was illuminated by this sudden curiosity.

She hated more than ever the fact of coming from the Mountain; but it was no longer indifferent to her.

Everything that in any way affected her was alive and vivid: even the hateful things had grown interesting

"I wonder if Liff Hyatt knows who my mother was?" she mused; and it filled her with a tremor of surprise to

think that some woman who was once young and slight, with quick motions of the blood like hers, had

carried her in her breast, and watched her sleeping. She had always thought of her mother as so long dead as

to be no more than a nameless pinch of earth; but now it occurred to her that the onceyoung woman might

be alive, and wrinkled and elflocked like the woman she had sometimes seen in the door of the brown house

The thought brought him back to the central point in her mind, and she strayed away from the conjectures

roused by Liff Hyatt's presence. Speculations concerning the past could not hold her long when the present

was so rich, the future so rosy, and when Lucius Harney, a stone's throw away, was bending over his

sketchbook, frowning, calculating, measuring, and then throwing his head back with the sudden smile that

She scrambled to her feet, but as she did so she saw him coming up the pasture and dropped down on the

grass to wait. When he was drawing and measuring one of "his houses," as she called them, she often strayed

away by herself into the woods or up the hillside. It was partly from shyness that she did so: from a sense of

inadequacy that came to her most painfully when her companion, absorbed in his job, forgot her ignorance

and her inability to follow his least allusion, and plunged into a monologue on art and life. To avoid the

awkwardness of listening with a blank face, and also to escape the surprised stare of the inhabitants of the

houses before which he would abruptly pull up their horse and open his sketchbook, she slipped away to

some spot from which, without being seen, she could watch him at work, or at least look down on the house

he was drawing. She had not been displeased, at first, to have it known to North Dormer and the

neighborhood that she was driving Miss Hatchard's cousin about the country in the buggy he had hired of

lawyer Royall. She had always kept to herself, contemptuously aloof from village lovemaking, without

exactly knowing whether her fierce pride was due to the sense of her tainted origin, or whether she was

reserving herself for a more brilliant fate. Sometimes she envied the other girls their sentimental

preoccupations, their long hours of inarticulate philandering with one of the few youths who still lingered in

the village; but when she pictured herself curling her hair or putting a new ribbon on her hat for Ben Fry or

Now she knew the meaning of her disdains and reluctances. She had learned what she was worth when

Lucius Harney, looking at her for the first time, had lost the thread of his speech, and leaned reddening on the

edge of her desk. But another kind of shyness had been born in her: a terror of exposing to vulgar perils the

sacred treasure of her happiness. She was not sorry to have the neighbors suspect her of "going with" a young

man from the city; but she did not want it known to all the countryside how many hours of the long June days

she spent with him. What she most feared was that the inevitable comments should reach Mr. Royall. Charity

was instinctively aware that few things concerning her escaped the eyes of the silent man under whose roof

she lived; and in spite of the latitude which North Dormer accorded to courting couples she had always felt

that, on the day when she showed too open a preference, Mr. Royall might, as she phrased it, make her "pay

for it." How, she did not know; and her fear was the greater because it was undefinable. If she had been

accepting the attentions of one of the village youths she would have been less apprehensive: Mr. Royall could

not prevent her marrying when she chose to. But everybody knew that "going with a city fellow" was a

different and less straightforward affair: almost every village could show a victim of the perilous venture.

And her dread of Mr. Royall's intervention gave a sharpened joy to the hours she spent with young Harney,

As he approached she rose to her knees, stretching her arms above her head with the indolent gesture that was

"What house? Oh, yes; that ramshackle place near the swamp, with the gipsylooking people hanging about.

It's curious that a house with traces of real architecture should have been built in such a place. But the people

He threw himself down beside her. "Will they?" he rejoined with a smile. "Well, I should like to see what's

left inside the house. And I should like to have a talk with the people. Who was it who was telling me the

Charity shot a sideward look at him. It was the first time he had spoken of the Mountain except as a feature of

the landscape. What else did he know about it, and about her relation to it? Her heart began to beat with the

fierce impulse of resistance which she instinctively opposed to every imagined slight.

Her tone of defiance seemed to escape him. He lay breastdown on the grass, breaking off sprigs of thyme

and pressing them against his lips. Far off, above the folds of the nearer hills, the Mountain thrust itself up

Her heartbeats slackened and she turned again to examine his profile. It was innocent of all unfriendly

"Why, it must be rather a curious place. There's a queer colony up there, you know: sort of outlaws, a little

independent kingdom. Of course you've heard them spoken of; but I'm told they have nothing to do with the

people in the valleysrather look down on them, in fact. I suppose they're rough customers; but they must

She did not quite know what he meant by having a good deal of character; but his tone was expressive of

admiration, and deepened her dawning curiosity. It struck her now as strange that she knew so little about the

Mountain. She had never asked, and no one had ever offered to enlighten her. North Dormer took the

Mountain for granted, and implied its disparagement by an intonation rather than by explicit criticism.

"It's queer, you know," he continued, "that, just over there, on top of that hill, there should be a handful of

The words thrilled her. They seemed the clue to her own revolts and defiances, and she longed to have him

"Nobody seems to know exactly how long. Down at Creston they told me that the first colonists are supposed

to have been men who worked on the railway that was built forty or fifty years ago between Springfield and

Nettleton. Some of them took to drink, or got into trouble with the police, and went off disappeared into

the woods. A year or two later there was a report that they were living up on the Mountain. Then I suppose

others joined themand children were born. Now they say there are over a hundred people up there. They

seem to be quite outside the jurisdiction of the valleys. No school, no churchand no sheriff ever goes up to

She flushed at the suggestion, and turned her face to his. "You never heard, I supposeI come from there.

"You?" He raised himself on his elbow, looking at her with sudden interest. "You're from the Mountain?

Her happy blood bathed her to the forehead. He was praising herand praising her because she came from

"Come," he said, "let's be off." He stood up and shook the grass from his loose grey clothes. "What a good

That evening after supper Charity sat alone in the kitchen and listened to Mr. Royall and young Harney

She had remained indoors after the table had been cleared and old Verena had hobbled up to bed. The kitchen

window was open, and Charity seated herself near it, her idle hands on her knee. The evening was cool and

still. Beyond the black hills an amber west passed into pale green, and then to a deep blue in which a great

star hung. The soft hoot of a little owl came through the dusk, and between its calls the men's voices rose and

Mr. Royall's was full of a sonorous satisfaction. It was a long time since he had had anyone of Lucius

Harney's quality to talk to: Charity divined that the young man symbolized all his ruined and unforgotten

past. When Miss Hatchard had been called to Springfield by the illness of a widowed sister, and young

Harney, by that time seriously embarked on his task of drawing and measuring all the old houses between

Nettleton and the New Hampshire border, had suggested the possibility of boarding at the red house in his

cousin's absence, Charity had trembled lest Mr. Royall should refuse. There had been no question of lodging

the young man: there was no room for him. But it appeared that he could still live at Miss Hatchard's if Mr.

Royall would let him take his meals at the red house; and after a day's deliberation Mr. Royall consented.

Charity suspected him of being glad of the chance to make a little money. He had the reputation of being an

avaricious man; but she was beginning to think he was probably poorer than people knew. His practice had

become little more than a vague legend, revived only at lengthening intervals by a summons to Hepburn or

Nettleton; and he appeared to depend for his living mainly on the scant produce of his farm, and on the

commissions received from the few insurance agencies that he represented in the neighbourhood. At any rate,

he had been prompt in accepting Harney's offer to hire the buggy at a dollar and a half a day; and his

satisfaction with the bargain had manifested itself, unexpectedly enough, at the end of the first week, by his

tossing a tendollar bill into Charity's lap as she sat one day retrimming her old hat.

"Herego get yourself a Sunday bonnet that'll make all the other girls mad," he said, looking at her with a

sheepish twinkle in his deepset eyes; and she immediately guessed that the unwonted presentthe only gift

But the young man's coming had brought Mr. Royall other than pecuniary benefit. It gave him, for the first

time in years, a man's companionship. Charity had only a dim understanding of her guardian's needs; but she

knew he felt himself above the people among whom he lived, and she saw that Lucius Harney thought him

so. She was surprised to find how well he seemed to talk now that he had a listener who understood him; and

Their conversation was mostly about politics, and beyond her range; but tonight it had a peculiar interest for

her, for they had begun to speak of the Mountain. She drew back a little, lest they should see she was in

"The Mountain? The Mountain?" she heard Mr. Royall say. "Why, the Mountain's a blotthat's what it is,

sir, a blot. That scum up there ought to have been run in long agoand would have, if the people down here

hadn't been clean scared of them. The Mountain belongs to this township, and it's North Dormer's fault if

there's a gang of thieves and outlaws living over there, in sight of us, defying the laws of their country. Why,

there ain't a sheriff or a taxcollector or a coroner'd durst go up there. When they hear of trouble on the

Mountain the selectmen look the other way, and pass an appropriation to beautify the town pump. The only

man that ever goes up is the minister, and he goes because they send down and get him whenever there's any

of them dies. They think a lot of Christian burial on the Mountainbut I never heard of their having the

minister up to marry them. And they never trouble the Justice of the Peace either. They just herd together like

He went on, explaining in somewhat technical language how the little colony of squatters had contrived to

keep the law at bay, and Charity, with burning eagerness, awaited young Harney's comment; but the young

"Yes, I have," said Mr. Royall with a contemptuous laugh. "The wiseacres down here told me I'd be done for

before I got back; but nobody lifted a finger to hurt me. And I'd just had one of their gang sent up for seven

"Yes, sir: right after it. The fellow came down to Nettleton and ran amuck, the way they sometimes do. After

they've done a woodcutting job they come down and blow the money in; and this man ended up with

manslaughter. I got him convicted, though they were scared of the Mountain even at Nettleton; and then a

queer thing happened. The fellow sent for me to go and see him in gaol. I went, and this is what he says: 'The

fool that defended me is a chickenlivered son of aand all the rest of it,' he says. 'I've got a job to be done

for me up on the Mountain, and you're the only man I seen in court that looks as if he'd do it.' He told me he

had a child up thereor thought he had a little girl; and he wanted her brought down and reared like a

Christian. I was sorry for the fellow, so I went up and got the child." He paused, and Charity listened with a

throbbing heart. "That's the only time I ever went up the Mountain," he concluded.

There was a moment's silence; then Harney spoke. "And the childhad she no mother?"

"Oh, yes: there was a mother. But she was glad enough to have her go. She'd have given her to anybody.

They ain't half human up there. I guess the mother's dead by now, with the life she was leading. Anyhow, I've

"My God, how ghastly," Harney murmured; and Charity, choking with humiliation, sprang to her feet and ran

upstairs. She knew at last: knew that she was the child of a drunken convict and of a mother who wasn't "half

human," and was glad to have her go; and she had heard this history of her origin related to the one being in

whose eyes she longed to appear superior to the people about her! She had noticed that Mr. Royall had not

named her, had even avoided any allusion that might identify her with the child he had brought down from

the Mountain; and she knew it was out of regard for her that he had kept silent. But of what use was his

discretion, since only that afternoon, misled by Harney's interest in the outlaw colony, she had boasted to

him of coming from the Mountain? Now every word that had been spoken showed her how such an origin

During his ten days' sojourn at North Dormer Lucius Harney had not spoken a word of love to her. He had

intervened in her behalf with his cousin, and had convinced Miss Hatchard of her merits as a librarian; but

that was a simple act of justice, since it was by his own fault that those merits had been questioned. He had

asked her to drive him about the country when he hired lawyer Royall's buggy to go on his sketching

expeditions; but that too was natural enough, since he was unfamiliar with the region. Lastly, when his cousin

was called to Springfield, he had begged Mr. Royall to receive him as a boarder; but where else in North

Dormer could he have boarded? Not with Carrick Fry, whose wife was paralysed, and whose large family

crowded his table to overflowing; not with the Targatts, who lived a mile up the road, nor with poor old

Mrs. Hawes, who, since her eldest daughter had deserted her, barely had the strength to cook her own meals

while Ally picked up her living as a seamstress. Mr. Royall's was the only house where the young man could

have been offered a decent hospitality. There had been nothing, therefore, in the outward course of events to

raise in Charity's breast the hopes with which it trembled. But beneath the visible incidents resulting from

Lucius Harney's arrival there ran an undercurrent as mysterious and potent as the influence that makes the

The business on which Harney had come was authentic; Charity had seen the letter from a New York

publisher commissioning him to make a study of the eighteenth century houses in the less familiar districts of

New England. But incomprehensible as the whole affair was to her, and hard as she found it to understand

why he paused enchanted before certain neglected and paintless houses, while others, refurbished and

"improved" by the local builder, did not arrest a glance, she could not but suspect that Eagle County was less

rich in architecture than he averred, and that the duration of his stay (which he had fixed at a month) was not

unconnected with the look in his eyes when he had first paused before her in the library. Everything that had

followed seemed to have grown out of that look: his way of speaking to her, his quickness in catching her

meaning, his evident eagerness to prolong their excursions and to seize on every chance of being with her.

The signs of his liking were manifest enough; but it was hard to guess how much they meant, because his

manner was so different from anything North Dormer had ever shown her. He was at once simpler and more

deferential than any one she had known; and sometimes it was just when he was simplest that she most felt

the distance between them. Education and opportunity had divided them by a width that no effort of hers

could bridge, and even when his youth and his admiration brought him nearest, some chance word, some

Never had it yawned so wide as when she fled up to her room carrying with her the echo of Mr. Royall's tale.

Her first confused thought was the prayer that she might never see young Harney again. It was too bitter to

picture him as the detached impartial listener to such a story. "I wish he'd go away: I wish he'd go tomorrow,

and never come back!" she moaned to her pillow; and far into the night she lay there, in the disordered dress

she had forgotten to take off, her whole soul a tossing misery on which her hopes and dreams spun about like

Of all this tumult only a vague heartsoreness was left when she opened her eyes the next morning. Her first

thought was of the weather, for Harney had asked her to take him to the brown house under Porcupine, and

then around by Hamblin; and as the trip was a long one they were to start at nine. The sun rose without a

cloud, and earlier than usual she was in the kitchen, making cheese sandwiches, decanting buttermilk into a

bottle, wrapping up slices of apple pie, and accusing Verena of having given away a basket she needed,

which had always hung on a hook in the passage. When she came out into the porch, in her pink calico,

which had run a little in the washing, but was still bright enough to set off her dark tints, she had such a

triumphant sense of being a part of the sunlight and the morning that the last trace of her misery vanished.

What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins, and

Mr. Royall was in the porch too. He had said nothing at breakfast, but when she came out in her pink dress,

the basket in her hand, he looked at her with surprise. "Where you going to?" he asked.

She made no answer, and he sat tilted back in his chair, drumming on the rail of the porch. It was the first

time he had ever spoken of the young man in that tone, and Charity felt a faint chill of apprehension. After a

moment he stood up and walked away toward the bit of ground behind the house, where the hired man was

The air was cool and clear, with the autumnal sparkle that a north wind brings to the hills in early summer,

and the night had been so still that the dew hung on everything, not as a lingering moisture, but in separate

beads that glittered like diamonds on the ferns and grasses. It was a long drive to the foot of Porcupine: first

across the valley, with blue hills bounding the open slopes; then down into the beech woods, following the

course of the Creston, a brown brook leaping over velvet ledges; then out again onto the farmlands about

Creston Lake, and gradually up the ridges of the Eagle Range. At last they reached the yoke of the hills, and

before them opened another valley, green and wild, and beyond it more blue heights eddying away to the sky

Harney tied the horse to a treestump, and they unpacked their basket under an aged walnut with a riven

trunk out of which bumblebees darted. The sun had grown hot, and behind them was the noonday murmur of

the forest. Summer insects danced on the air, and a flock of white butterflies fanned the mobile tips of the

crimson fireweed. In the valley below not a house was visible; it seemed as if Charity Royall and young

Charity's spirits flagged and disquieting thoughts stole back on her. Young Harney had grown silent, and as

he lay beside her, his arms under his head, his eyes on the network of leaves above him, she wondered if he

were musing on what Mr. Royall had told him, and if it had really debased her in his thoughts. She wished he

had not asked her to take him that day to the brown house; she did not want him to see the people she came

from while the story of her birth was fresh in his mind. More than once she had been on the point of

suggesting that they should follow the ridge and drive straight to Hamblin, where there was a little deserted

house he wanted to see; but shyness and pride held her back. "He'd better know what kind of folks I belong

to," she said to herself, with a somewhat forced defiance; for in reality it was shame that kept her silent.

Suddenly she lifted her hand and pointed to the sky. "There's a storm coming up."

He followed her glance and smiled. "Is it that scrap of cloud among the pines that frightens you?"

"Oh, I don't believe half the bad things you all say of the Mountain! But anyhow, we'll get down to the brown

He was not far wrong, for only a few isolated drops had fallen when they turned into the road under the

shaggy flank of Porcupine, and came upon the brown house. It stood alone beside a swamp bordered with

alder thickets and tall bulrushes. Not another dwelling was in sight, and it was hard to guess what motive

could have actuated the early settler who had made his home in so unfriendly a spot.

Charity had picked up enough of her companion's erudition to understand what had attracted him to the

house. She noticed the fanshaped tracery of the broken light above the door, the flutings of the paintless

pilasters at the corners, and the round window set in the gable; and she knew that, for reasons that still

escaped her, these were things to be admired and recorded. Still, they had seen other houses far more

"typical" (the word was Harney's); and as he threw the reins on the horse's neck he said with a slight shiver of

Against the restless alders turning their white lining to the storm the house looked singularly desolate. The

paint was almost gone from the clapboards, the windowpanes were broken and patched with rags, and the

garden was a poisonous tangle of nettles, burdocks and tall swampweeds over which big bluebottles

At the sound of wheels a child with a towhead and pale eyes like Liff Hyatt's peered over the fence and then

slipped away behind an outhouse. Harney jumped down and helped Charity out; and as he did so the rain

broke on them. It came slantwise, on a furious gale, laying shrubs and young trees flat, tearing off their

leaves like an autumn storm, turning the road into a river, and making hissing pools of every hollow. Thunder

rolled incessantly through the roar of the rain, and a strange glitter of light ran along the ground under the

"Lucky we're here after all," Harney laughed. He fastened the horse under a halfroofless shed, and wrapping

Charity in his coat ran with her to the house. The boy had not reappeared, and as there was no response to

There were three people in the kitchen to which the door admitted them. An old woman with a handkerchief

over her head was sitting by the window. She held a sicklylooking kitten on her knees, and whenever it

jumped down and tried to limp away she stooped and lifted it back without any change of her aged,

unnoticing face. Another woman, the unkempt creature that Charity had once noticed in driving by, stood

leaning against the windowframe and stared at them; and near the stove an unshaved man in a tattered shirt

The place was bare and miserable and the air heavy with the smell of dirt and stale tobacco. Charity's heart

sank. Old derided tales of the Mountain people came back to her, and the woman's stare was so disconcerting,

and the face of the sleeping man so sodden and bestial, that her disgust was tinged with a vague dread. She

was not afraid for herself; she knew the Hyatts would not be likely to trouble her; but she was not sure how

Lucius Harney would certainly have laughed at her fears. He glanced about the room, uttered a general "How

are you?" to which no one responded, and then asked the younger woman if they might take shelter till the

The colour rose in Charity's face. "I'm Charity Royall," she said, as if asserting her right to the name in the

The woman did not seem to notice. "You kin stay," she merely said; then she turned away and stooped over a

Harney and Charity sat down on a bench made of a board resting on two starch boxes. They faced a door

hanging on a broken hinge, and through the crack they saw the eyes of the towheaded boy and of a pale

little girl with a scar across her cheek. Charity smiled, and signed to the children to come in; but as soon as

they saw they were discovered they slipped away on bare feet. It occurred to her that they were afraid of

rousing the sleeping man; and probably the woman shared their fear, for she moved about as noiselessly and

The rain continued to beat against the house, and in one or two places it sent a stream through the patched

panes and ran into pools on the floor. Every now and then the kitten mewed and struggled down, and the old

woman stooped and caught it, holding it tight in her bony hands; and once or twice the man on the barrel half

woke, changed his position and dozed again, his head falling forward on his hairy breast. As the minutes

passed, and the rain still streamed against the windows, a loathing of the place and the people came over

Charity. The sight of the weakminded old woman, of the cowed children, and the ragged man sleeping off

his liquor, made the setting of her own life seem a vision of peace and plenty. She thought of the kitchen at

Mr. Royall's, with its scrubbed floor and dresser full of china, and the peculiar smell of yeast and coffee and

softsoap that she had always hated, but that now seemed the very symbol of household order. She saw Mr.

Royall's room, with the highbacked horsehair chair, the faded rag carpet, the row of books on a shelf, the

engraving of "The Surrender of Burgoyne" over the stove, and the mat with a brown and white spaniel on a

mossgreen border. And then her mind travelled to Miss Hatchard's house, where all was freshness, purity

and fragrance, and compared to which the red house had always seemed so poor and plain.

"This is where I belongthis is where I belong," she kept repeating to herself; but the words had no meaning

for her. Every instinct and habit made her a stranger among these poor swamppeople living like vermin in

their lair. With all her soul she wished she had not yielded to Harney's curiosity, and brought him there.

The rain had drenched her, and she began to shiver under the thin folds of her dress. The younger woman

must have noticed it, for she went out of the room and came back with a broken teacup which she offered to

Charity. It was half full of whiskey, and Charity shook her head; but Harney took the cup and put his lips to

it. When he had set it down Charity saw him feel in his pocket and draw out a dollar; he hesitated a moment,

and then put it back, and she guessed that he did not wish her to see him offering money to people she had

The sleeping man stirred, lifted his head and opened his eyes. They rested vacantly for a moment on Charity

and Harney, and then closed again, and his head drooped; but a look of anxiety came into the woman's face.

She glanced out of the window and then came up to Harney. "I guess you better go along now," she said. The

young man understood and got to his feet. "Thank you," he said, holding out his hand. She seemed not to

The rain was still coming down, but they hardly noticed it: the pure air was like balm in their faces. The

clouds were rising and breaking, and between their edges the light streamed down from remote blue hollows.

Harney untied the horse, and they drove off through the diminishing rain, which was already beaded with

For a while Charity was silent, and her companion did not speak. She looked timidly at his profile: it was

graver than usual, as though he too were oppressed by what they had seen. Then she broke out abruptly:

"Those people back there are the kind of folks I come from. They may be my relations, for all I know." She

She laughed ironically. "To better themselves! It's worse up on the Mountain. Bash Hyatt married the

daughter of the farmer that used to own the brown house. That was him by the stove, I suppose."

Harney seemed to find nothing to say and she went on: "I saw you take out a dollar to give to that poor

He reddened, and leaned forward to flick a swampfly from the horse's neck. "I wasn't sure"

"Was it because you knew they were my folks, and thought I'd be ashamed to see you give them money?"

He turned to her with eyes full of reproach. "Oh, Charity" It was the first time he had ever called her by

"I ain'tI ain't ashamed. They're my people, and I ain't ashamed of them," she sobbed.

"My dear..." he murmured, putting his arm about her; and she leaned against him and wept out her pain.

It was too late to go around to Hamblin, and all the stars were out in a clear sky when they reached the North

SINCE her reinstatement in Miss Hatchard's favour Charity had not dared to curtail by a moment her hours of

attendance at the library. She even made a point of arriving before the time, and showed a laudable

indignation when the youngest Targatt girl, who had been engaged to help in the cleaning and rearranging of

the books, came trailing in late and neglected her task to peer through the window at the Sollas boy.

Nevertheless, "library days" seemed more than ever irksome to Charity after her vivid hours of liberty; and

she would have found it hard to set a good example to her subordinate if Lucius Harney had not been

commissioned, before Miss Hatchard's departure, to examine with the local carpenter the best means of

He was careful to prosecute this inquiry on the days when the library was open to the public; and Charity was

therefore sure of spending part of the afternoon in his company. The Targatt girl's presence, and the risk of

being interrupted by some passerby suddenly smitten with a thirst for letters, restricted their intercourse to

the exchange of commonplaces; but there was a fascination to Charity in the contrast between these public

The day after their drive to the brown house was "library day," and she sat at her desk working at the revised

catalogue, while the Targatt girl, one eye on the window, chanted out the titles of a pile of books. Charity's

thoughts were far away, in the dismal house by the swamp, and under the twilight sky during the long drive

home, when Lucius Harney had consoled her with endearing words. That day, for the first time since he had

been boarding with them, he had failed to appear as usual at the midday meal. No message had come to

explain his absence, and Mr. Royall, who was more than usually taciturn, had betrayed no surprise, and made

no comment. In itself this indifference was not particularly significant, for Mr. Royall, in common with most

of his fellowcitizens, had a way of accepting events passively, as if he had long since come to the

conclusion that no one who lived in North Dormer could hope to modify them. But to Charity, in the reaction

from her mood of passionate exaltation, there was something disquieting in his silence. It was almost as if

Lucius Harney had never had a part in their lives: Mr. Royall's imperturbable indifference seemed to relegate

As she sat at work, she tried to shake off her disappointment at Harney's nonappearing. Some trifling

incident had probably kept him from joining them at midday; but she was sure he must be eager to see her

again, and that he would not want to wait till they met at supper, between Mr. Royall and Verena. She was

wondering what his first words would be, and trying to devise a way of getting rid of the Targatt girl before

he came, when she heard steps outside, and he walked up the path with Mr. Miles.

The clergyman from Hepburn seldom came to North Dormer except when he drove over to officiate at the

old white church which, by an unusual chance, happened to belong to the Episcopal communion. He was a

brisk affable man, eager to make the most of the fact that a little nucleus of "churchpeople" had survived in

the sectarian wilderness, and resolved to undermine the influence of the gingerbreadcoloured Baptist

chapel at the other end of the village; but he was kept busy by parochial work at Hepburn, where there were

papermills and saloons, and it was not often that he could spare time for North Dormer.

Charity, who went to the white church (like all the best people in North Dormer), admired Mr. Miles, and had

even, during the memorable trip to Nettleton, imagined herself married to a man who had such a straight nose

and such a beautiful way of speaking, and who lived in a brownstone rectory covered with Virginia creeper.

It had been a shock to discover that the privilege was already enjoyed by a lady with crimped hair and a large

baby; but the arrival of Lucius Harney had long since banished Mr. Miles from Charity's dreams, and as he

walked up the path at Harney's side she saw him as he really was: a fat middleaged man with a baldness

showing under his clerical hat, and spectacles on his Grecian nose. She wondered what had called him to

North Dormer on a weekday, and felt a little hurt that Harney should have brought him to the library.

It presently appeared that his presence there was due to Miss Hatchard. He had been spending a few days at

Springfield, to fill a friend's pulpit, and had been consulted by Miss Hatchard as to young Harney's plan for

ventilating the "Memorial." To lay hands on the Hatchard ark was a grave matter, and Miss Hatchard, always

full of scruples about her scruples (it was Harney's phrase), wished to have Mr. Miles's opinion before

"I couldn't," Mr. Miles explained, "quite make out from your cousin what changes you wanted to make, and

as the other trustees did not understand either I thought I had better drive over and take a lookthough I'm

sure," he added, turning his friendly spectacles on the young man, "that no one could be more

"I hope a little fresh air won't desecrate it," Harney laughingly rejoined; and they walked to the other end of

Mr. Miles had greeted the two girls with his usual friendliness, but Charity saw that he was occupied with

other things, and she presently became aware, by the scraps of conversation drifting over to her, that he was

still under the charm of his visit to Springfield, which appeared to have been full of agreeable incidents.

"Ah, the Coopersons...yes, you know them, of course," she heard. "That's a fine old house! And Ned

Cooperson has collected some really remarkable impressionist pictures...." The names he cited were unknown

to Charity. "Yes; yes; the Schaefer quartette played at Lyric Hall on Saturday evening; and on Monday I had

the privilege of hearing them again at the Towers. Beautifully done...Bach and Beethoven...a lawnparty

first...I saw Miss Balch several times, by the way...looking extremely handsome...."

Charity dropped her pencil and forgot to listen to the Targatt girl's singsong. Why had Mr. Miles suddenly

"Oh, really?" she heard Harney rejoin; and, raising his stick, he pursued: "You see, my plan is to move these

shelves away, and open a round window in this wall, on the axis of the one under the pediment."

"I suppose she'll be coming up here later to stay with Miss Hatchard?" Mr. Miles went on, following on his

train of thought; then, spinning about and tilting his head back: "Yes, yes, I seeI understand: that will give

a draught without materially altering the look of things. I can see no objection."

The discussion went on for some minutes, and gradually the two men moved back toward the desk. Mr. Miles

stopped again and looked thoughtfully at Charity. "Aren't you a little pale, my dear? Not overworking? Mr.

Harney tells me you and Mamie are giving the library a thorough overhauling." He was always careful to

remember his parishioners' Christian names, and at the right moment he bent his benignant spectacles on the

Then he turned to Charity. "Don't take things hard, my dear; don't take things hard. Come down and see Mrs.

Miles and me some day at Hepburn," he said, pressing her hand and waving a farewell to Mamie Targatt. He

Charity thought she detected a look of constraint in Harney's eyes. She fancied he did not want to be alone

with her; and with a sudden pang she wondered if he repented the tender things he had said to her the night

before. His words had been more fraternal than lover like; but she had lost their exact sense in the caressing

warmth of his voice. He had made her feel that the fact of her being a waif from the Mountain was only

another reason for holding her close and soothing her with consolatory murmurs; and when the drive was

over, and she got out of the buggy, tired, cold, and aching with emotion, she stepped as if the ground were a

Why, then, had his manner suddenly changed, and why did he leave the library with Mr. Miles? Her restless

imagination fastened on the name of Annabel Balch: from the moment it had been mentioned she fancied that

Harney's expression had altered. Annabel Balch at a gardenparty at Springfield, looking "extremely

handsome"...perhaps Mr. Miles had seen her there at the very moment when Charity and Harney were sitting

in the Hyatts' hovel, between a drunkard and a halfwitted old woman! Charity did not know exactly what a

gardenparty was, but her glimpse of the floweredged lawns of Nettleton helped her to visualize the scene,

and envious recollections of the "old things" which Miss Balch avowedly "wore out" when she came to North

Dormer made it only too easy to picture her in her splendour. Charity understood what associations the name

must have called up, and felt the uselessness of struggling against the unseen influences in Harney's life.

When she came down from her room for supper he was not there; and while she waited in the porch she

recalled the tone in which Mr. Royall had commented the day before on their early start. Mr. Royall sat at her

side, his chair tilted back, his broad black boots with sideelastics resting against the lower bar of the

railings. His rumpled grey hair stood up above his forehead like the crest of an angry bird, and the

leatherbrown of his veined cheeks was blotched with red. Charity knew that those red spots were the signs

Suddenly he said: "Where's supper? Has Verena Marsh slipped up again on her sodabiscuits?"

Charity threw a startled glance at him. "I presume she's waiting for Mr. Harney."

"Mr. Harney, is she? She'd better dish up, then. He ain't coming." He stood up, walked to the door, and called

out, in the pitch necessary to penetrate the old woman's tympanum: "Get along with the supper, Verena."

Charity was trembling with apprehension. Something had happenedshe was sure of it nowand Mr.

Royall knew what it was. But not for the world would she have gratified him by showing her anxiety. She

took her usual place, and he seated himself opposite, and poured out a strong cup of tea before passing her the

teapot. Verena brought some scrambled eggs, and he piled his plate with them. "Ain't you going to take

The tone with which Mr. Royall had said "He's not coming" seemed to her full of an ominous satisfaction.

She saw that he had suddenly begun to hate Lucius Harney, and guessed herself to be the cause of this change

of feeling. But she had no means of finding out whether some act of hostility on his part had made the young

man stay away, or whether he simply wished to avoid seeing her again after their drive back from the brown

house. She ate her supper with a studied show of indifference, but she knew that Mr. Royall was watching her

After supper she went up to her room. She heard Mr. Royall cross the passage, and presently the sounds

below her window showed that he had returned to the porch. She seated herself on her bed and began to

struggle against the desire to go down and ask him what had happened. "I'd rather die than do it," she

muttered to herself. With a word he could have relieved her uncertainty: but never would she gratify him by

She rose and leaned out of the window. The twilight had deepened into night, and she watched the frail curve

of the young moon dropping to the edge of the hills. Through the darkness she saw one or two figures

moving down the road; but the evening was too cold for loitering, and presently the strollers disappeared.

Lamps were beginning to show here and there in the windows. A bar of light brought out the whiteness of a

clump of lilies in the Hawes's yard: and farther down the street Carrick Fry's Rochester lamp cast its bold

For a long time she continued to lean in the window. But a fever of unrest consumed her, and finally she went

downstairs, took her hat from its hook, and swung out of the house. Mr. Royall sat in the porch, Verena

beside him, her old hands crossed on her patched skirt. As Charity went down the steps Mr. Royall called

after her: "Where you going?" She could easily have answered: "To Orma's," or "Down to the Targatts'"; and

either answer might have been true, for she had no purpose. But she swept on in silence, determined not to

At the gate she paused and looked up and down the road. The darkness drew her, and she thought of climbing

the hill and plunging into the depths of the larchwood above the pasture. Then she glanced irresolutely

along the street, and as she did so a gleam appeared through the spruces at Miss Hatchard's gate. Lucius

Harney was there, thenhe had not gone down to Hepburn with Mr. Miles, as she had at first imagined. But

where had he taken his evening meal, and what had caused him to stay away from Mr. Royall's? The light

was positive proof of his presence, for Miss Hatchard's servants were away on a holiday, and her farmer's

wife came only in the mornings, to make the young man's bed and prepare his coffee. Beside that lamp he

was doubtless sitting at this moment. To know the truth Charity had only to walk half the length of the

village, and knock at the lighted window. She hesitated a minute or two longer, and then turned toward Miss

She walked quickly, straining her eyes to detect anyone who might be coming along the street; and before

reaching the Frys' she crossed over to avoid the light from their window. Whenever she was unhappy she felt

herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her. But the street was

empty, and she passed unnoticed through the gate and up the path to the house. Its white front glimmered

indistinctly through the trees, showing only one oblong of light on the lower floor. She had supposed that the

lamp was in Miss Hatchard's sittingroom; but she now saw that it shone through a window at the farther

corner of the house. She did not know the room to which this window belonged, and she paused under the

trees, checked by a sense of strangeness. Then she moved on, treading softly on the short grass, and keeping

so close to the house that whoever was in the room, even if roused by her approach, would not be able to see

The window opened on a narrow verandah with a trellised arch. She leaned close to the trellis, and parting the

sprays of clematis that covered it looked into a corner of the room. She saw the foot of a mahogany bed, an

engraving on the wall, a washstand on which a towel had been tossed, and one end of the greencovered

table which held the lamp. Half of the lampshade projected into her field of vision, and just under it two

smooth sunburnt hands, one holding a pencil and the other a ruler, were moving to and fro over a drawing

Her heart jumped and then stood still. He was there, a few feet away; and while her soul was tossing on seas

of woe he had been quietly sitting at his drawing board. The sight of those two hands, moving with their

usual skill and precision, woke her out of her dream. Her eyes were opened to the disproportion between

what she had felt and the cause of her agitation; and she was turning away from the window when one hand

Charity had often noticed Harney's loving care of his drawings, and the neatness and method with which he

carried on and concluded each task. The impatient sweeping aside of the drawingboard seemed to reveal a

new mood. The gesture suggested sudden discouragement, or distaste for his work and she wondered if he too

were agitated by secret perplexities. Her impulse of flight was checked; she stepped up on the verandah and

Harney had put his elbows on the table and was resting his chin on his locked hands. He had taken off his

coat and waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt; she saw the vigorous lines of his young

throat, and the root of the muscles where they joined the chest. He sat staring straight ahead of him, a look of

weariness and selfdisgust on his face: it was almost as if he had been gazing at a distorted reflection of his

own features. For a moment Charity looked at him with a kind of terror, as if he had been a stranger under

familiar lineaments; then she glanced past him and saw on the floor an open portmanteau half full of clothes.

She understood that he was preparing to leave, and that he had probably decided to go without seeing her.

She saw that the decision, from whatever cause it was taken, had disturbed him deeply; and she immediately

concluded that his change of plan was due to some surreptitious interference of Mr. Royall's. All her old

resentments and rebellions flamed up, confusedly mingled with the yearning roused by Harney's nearness.

Only a few hours earlier she had felt secure in his comprehending pity; now she was flung back on herself,

Harney was still unaware of her presence. He sat without moving, moodily staring before him at the same

spot in the wallpaper. He had not even had the energy to finish his packing, and his clothes and papers lay

on the floor about the portmanteau. Presently he unlocked his clasped hands and stood up; and Charity,

drawing back hastily, sank down on the step of the verandah. The night was so dark that there was not much

chance of his seeing her unless he opened the window and before that she would have time to slip away and

be lost in the shadow of the trees. He stood for a minute or two looking around the room with the same

expression of selfdisgust, as if he hated himself and everything about him; then he sat down again at the

table, drew a few more strokes, and threw his pencil aside. Finally he walked across the floor, kicking the

portmanteau out of his way, and lay down on the bed, folding his arms under his head, and staring up

morosely at the ceiling. Just so, Charity had seen him at her side on the grass or the pineneedles, his eyes

fixed on the sky, and pleasure flashing over his face like the flickers of sun the branches shed on it. But now

the face was so changed that she hardly knew it; and grief at his grief gathered in her throat, rose to her eyes

She continued to crouch on the steps, holding her breath and stiffening herself into complete immobility. One

motion of her hand, one tap on the pane, and she could picture the sudden change in his face. In every pulse

of her rigid body she was aware of the welcome his eyes and lips would give her; but something kept her

from moving. It was not the fear of any sanction, human or heavenly; she had never in her life been afraid. It

was simply that she had suddenly understood what would happen if she went in. It was the thing that did

happen between young men and girls, and that North Dormer ignored in public and snickered over on the sly.

It was what Miss Hatchard was still ignorant of, but every girl of Charity's class knew about before she left

school. It was what had happened to Ally Hawes's sister Julia, and had ended in her going to Nettleton, and in

It did not, of course, always end so sensationally; nor, perhaps, on the whole, so untragically. Charity had

always suspected that the shunned Julia's fate might have its compensations. There were others, worse

endings that the village knew of, mean, miserable, unconfessed; other lives that went on drearily, without

visible change, in the same cramped setting of hypocrisy. But these were not the reasons that held her back.

Since the day before, she had known exactly what she would feel if Harney should take her in his arms: the

melting of palm into palm and mouth on mouth, and the long flame burning her from head to foot. But mixed

with this feeling was another: the wondering pride in his liking for her, the startled softness that his sympathy

had put into her heart. Sometimes, when her youth flushed up in her, she had imagined yielding like other

girls to furtive caresses in the twilight; but she could not so cheapen herself to Harney. She did not know why

he was going; but since he was going she felt she must do nothing to deface the image of her that he carried

away. If he wanted her he must seek her: he must not be surprised into taking her as girls like Julia Hawes

No sound came from the sleeping village, and in the deep darkness of the garden she heard now and then a

secret rustle of branches, as though some nightbird brushed them. Once a footfall passed the gate, and she

shrank back into her corner; but the steps died away and left a profounder quiet. Her eyes were still on

Harney's tormented face: she felt she could not move till he moved. But she was beginning to grow numb

from her constrained position, and at times her thoughts were so indistinct that she seemed to be held there

A long time passed in this strange vigil. Harney still lay on the bed, motionless and with fixed eyes, as though

following his vision to its bitter end. At last he stirred and changed his attitude slightly, and Charity's heart

began to tremble. But he only flung out his arms and sank back into his former position. With a deep sigh he

tossed the hair from his forehead; then his whole body relaxed, his head turned sideways on the pillow, and

she saw that he had fallen asleep. The sweet expression came back to his lips, and the haggardness faded

SHE had lost the sense of time, and did not know how late it was till she came out into the street and saw that

As she passed from under the black pall of the Norway spruces she fancied she saw two figures in the shade

about the duckpond. She drew back and watched; but nothing moved, and she had stared so long into the

lamplit room that the darkness confused her, and she thought she must have been mistaken.

She walked on, wondering whether Mr. Royall was still in the porch. In her exalted mood she did not greatly

care whether he was waiting for her or not: she seemed to be floating high over life, on a great cloud of

misery beneath which everyday realities had dwindled to mere specks in space. But the porch was empty,

Mr. Royall's hat hung on its peg in the passage, and the kitchen lamp had been left to light her to bed. She

The morning hours of the next day dragged by without incident. Charity had imagined that, in some way or

other, she would learn whether Harney had already left; but Verena's deafness prevented her being a source

Mr. Royall went out early, and did not return till Verena had set the table for the midday meal. When he came

in he went straight to the kitchen and shouted to the old woman: "Ready for dinner" then he turned into

the diningroom, where Charity was already seated. Harney's plate was in its usual place, but Mr. Royall

offered no explanation of his absence, and Charity asked none. The feverish exaltation of the night before had

dropped, and she said to herself that he had gone away, indifferently, almost callously, and that now her life

would lapse again into the narrow rut out of which he had lifted it. For a moment she was inclined to sneer at

She sat at table till the meal was over, lest Mr. Royall should remark on her leaving; but when he stood up

she rose also, without waiting to help Verena. She had her foot on the stairs when he called to her to come

She was sure from his tone that in a moment she would learn what every nerve in her ached to know; but as

Mr. Royall stood in the middle of the office, his thick eyebrows beetling, his lower jaw trembling a little. At

first she thought he had been drinking; then she saw that he was sober, but stirred by a deep and stern

emotion totally unlike his usual transient angers. And suddenly she understood that, until then, she had never

really noticed him or thought about him. Except on the occasion of his one offense he had been to her merely

the person who is always there, the unquestioned central fact of life, as inevitable but as uninteresting as

North Dormer itself, or any of the other conditions fate had laid on her. Even then she had regarded him only

in relation to herself, and had never speculated as to his own feelings, beyond instinctively concluding that he

would not trouble her again in the same way. But now she began to wonder what he was really like.

He had grasped the back of his chair with both hands, and stood looking hard at her. At length he said:

Instantly she felt that something had happened, and that he held her in his hand.

"Where is Mr. Harney? Why hasn't he come back? Have you sent him away?" she broke out, without

The change in Mr. Royall frightened her. All the blood seemed to leave his veins and against his swarthy

"Didn't he have time to answer some of those questions last night? You was with him long enough!" he said.

Charity stood speechless. The taunt was so unrelated to what had been happening in her soul that she hardly

"Then it was you that put the lie into their mouths.Oh, how I've always hated you!" she cried.

She had expected a retort in kind, and it startled her to hear her exclamation sounding on through silence.

"Yes, I know," Mr. Royall said slowly. "But that ain't going to help us much now."

"If they're lies, they're not my lies: my Bible oath on that, Charity. I didn't know where you were: I wasn't out

She made no answer and he went on: "Is it a lie that you were seen coming out of Miss Hatchard's nigh onto

She straightened herself with a laugh, all her reckless insolence recovered. "I didn't look to see what time it

"You lost girl...you...you...Oh, my God, why did you tell me?" he broke out, dropping into his chair, his head

Charity's selfpossession had returned with the sense of her danger. "Do you suppose I'd take the trouble to

lie to YOU? Who are you, anyhow, to ask me where I go to when I go out at night?"

Mr. Royall lifted his head and looked at her. His face had grown quiet and almost gentle, as she remembered

"Don't let's go on like this, Charity. It can't do any good to either of us. You were seen going into that fellow's

house...you were seen coming out of it....I've watched this thing coming, and I've tried to stop it. As God sees

He looked at her in surprise. "Didn't he tell you so? I thought he understood." He spoke slowly, with difficult

pauses, "I didn't name you to him: I'd have cut my hand off sooner. I just told him I couldn't spare the horse

any longer; and that the cooking was getting too heavy for Verena. I guess he's the kind that's heard the same

thing before. Anyhow, he took it quietly enough. He said his job here was about done, anyhow; and there

didn't another word pass between us....If he told you otherwise he told you an untruth."

Charity listened in a cold trance of anger. It was nothing to her what the village said...but all this fingering of

"No....It's not that I care what any of you say...but you may as well know. Things ain't between us the way

you think...and the other people in this place. He was kind to me; he was my friend; and all of a sudden he

stopped coming, and I knew it was you that done it YOU!" All her unreconciled memory of the past

flamed out at him. "So I went there last night to find out what you'd said to him: that's all."

Mr. Royall drew a heavy breath. "But, thenif he wasn't there, what were you doing there all that time?

This pathetic abdication of all authority over her did not move her: she could feel only the outrage of his

"Can't you see that I don't care what anybody says? It's true I went there to see him; and he was in his room,

and I stood outside for ever so long and watched him; but I dursn't go in for fear he'd think I'd come after

him...." She felt her voice breaking, and gathered it up in a last defiance. "As long as I live I'll never forgive

Mr. Royall made no answer. He sat and pondered with sunken head, his veined hands clasped about the arms

of his chair. Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm. At length he

"Charity, you say you don't care; but you're the proudest girl I know, and the last to want people to talk

against you. You know there's always eyes watching you: you're handsomer and smarter than the rest, and

that's enough. But till lately you've never given them a chance. Now they've got it, and they're going to use it.

I believe what you say, but they won't....It was Mrs. Tom Fry seen you going in...and two or three of them

watched for you to come out again....You've been with the fellow all day long every day since he come

here...and I'm a lawyer, and I know how hard slander dies." He paused, but she stood motionless, without

giving him any sign of acquiescence or even of attention. "He's a pleasant fellow to talk toI liked having

him here myself. The young men up here ain't had his chances. But there's one thing as old as the hills and as

Charity did not speak. It seemed to her that nothing could exceed the bitterness of hearing such words from

Mr. Royall rose from his seat. "See here, Charity Royall: I had a shameful thought once, and you've made me

pay for it. Isn't that score pretty near wiped out?...There's a streak in me I ain't always master of; but I've

always acted straight to you but that once. And you've known I wouldyou've trusted me. For all your

sneers and your mockery you've always known I loved you the way a man loves a decent woman. I'm a good

many years older than you, but I'm head and shoulders above this place and everybody in it, and you know

that too. I slipped up once, but that's no reason for not starting again. If you'll come with me I'll do it. If you'll

marry me we'll leave here and settle in some big town, where there's men, and business, and things doing. It's

not too late for me to find an opening....I can see it by the way folks treat me when I go down to Hepburn or

Charity made no movement. Nothing in his appeal reached her heart, and she thought only of words to wound

and wither. But a growing lassitude restrained her. What did anything matter that he was saying? She saw the

"CharityCharitysay you'll do it," she heard him urge, all his lost years and wasted passion in his voice.

She moved toward the door as she spoke, and he stood up and placed himself between her and the threshold.

He seemed suddenly tall and strong, as though the extremity of his humiliation had given him new vigour.

"That's all, is it? It's not much." He leaned against the door, so towering and powerful that he seemed to fill

the narrow room. "Well, then look here....You're right: I've no claim on youwhy should you look at a

broken man like me? You want the other fellow...and I don't blame you. You picked out the best when you

seen it...well, that was always my way." He fixed his stern eyes on her, and she had the sense that the struggle

They stood and looked at each other for a long moment, eye to eye, with the terrible equality of courage that

"Do you want him tosay? I'll have him here in an hour if you do. I ain't been in the law thirty years for

nothing. He's hired Carrick Fry's team to take him to Hepburn, but he ain't going to start for another hour.

And I can put things to him so he won't be long deciding....He's soft: I could see that. I don't say you won't be

She heard him out in silence, too remote from all he was feeling and saying for any sally of scorn to relieve

her. As she listened, there flitted through her mind the vision of Liff Hyatt's muddy boot coming down on the

white brambleflowers. The same thing had happened now; something transient and exquisite had flowered

in her, and she had stood by and seen it trampled to earth. While the thought passed through her she was

aware of Mr. Royall, still leaning against the door, but crestfallen, diminished, as though her silence were the

He kept his place a moment longer, his hand on the doorknob. "Charity!" he pleaded. She made no answer,

and he turned the knob and went out. She heard him fumble with the latch of the front door, and saw him

walk down the steps. He passed out of the gate, and his figure, stooping and heavy, receded slowly up the

For a while she remained where he had left her. She was still trembling with the humiliation of his last words,

which rang so loud in her ears that it seemed as though they must echo through the village, proclaiming her a

creature to lend herself to such vile suggestions. Her shame weighed on her like a physical oppression: the

roof and walls seemed to be closing in on her, and she was seized by the impulse to get away, under the open

sky, where there would be room to breathe. She went to the front door, and as she did so Lucius Harney

He looked graver and less confident than usual, and for a moment or two neither of them spoke. Then he held

Her heart was beating so violently that she was afraid to speak, and stood looking at him with teardilated

eyes; then she became aware of what her silence must betray, and said quickly: "Yes: come in."

She led the way into the diningroom, and they sat down on opposite sides of the table, the cruetstand and

japanned breadbasket between them. Harney had laid his straw hat on the table, and as he sat there, in his

easylooking summer clothes, a brown tie knotted under his flannel collar, and his smooth brown hair

brushed back from his forehead, she pictured him, as she had seen him the night before, lying on his bed,

with the tossed locks falling into his eyes, and his bare throat rising out of his unbuttoned shirt. He had never

"I'm so sorry it's goodbye: I suppose you know I'm leaving," he began, abruptly and awkwardly; she

"I presume you found your work was over quicker than what you expected," she said.

"Well, yesthat is, no: there are plenty of things I should have liked to do. But my holiday's limited; and

now that Mr. Royall needs the horse for himself it's rather difficult to find means of getting about."

"There ain't any too many teams for hire around here," she acquiesced; and there was another silence.

"These days here have beenawfully pleasant: I wanted to thank you for making them so," he continued, his

She could not think of any reply, and he went on: "You've been wonderfully kind to me, and I wanted to tell

you....I wish I could think of you as happier, less lonely....Things are sure to change for you by and by...."

The answer seemed to break up the order of his prearranged consolations, and he sat looking at her

uncertainly. Then he said, with his sweet smile: "That's not true of you. It can't be."

The smile was like a knifethrust through her heart: everything in her began to tremble and break loose. She

She was aware of his taking her hand, and of feeling that his touch was lifeless.

"Goodbye." He turned away, and stopped on the threshold. "You'll say goodbye for me to Verena?"

She heard the closing of the outer door and the sound of his quick tread along the path. The latch of the gate

The next morning when she arose in the cold dawn and opened her shutters she saw a freckled boy standing

on the other side of the road and looking up at her. He was a boy from a farm three or four miles down the

Creston road, and she wondered what he was doing there at that hour, and why he looked so hard at her

window. When he saw her he crossed over and leaned against the gate unconcernedly. There was no one

stirring in the house, and she threw a shawl over her nightgown and ran down and let herself out. By the

time she reached the gate the boy was sauntering down the road, whistling carelessly; but she saw that a letter

had been thrust between the slats and the crossbar of the gate. She took it out and hastened back to her room.

I can't go away like this. I am staying for a few days at Creston River. Will you come down and meet me at

CHARITY sat before the mirror trying on a hat which Ally Hawes, with much secrecy, had trimmed for her.

It was of white straw, with a drooping brim and cherry coloured lining that made her face glow like the

She propped the square of lookingglass against Mr. Royall's black leather Bible, steadying it in front with a

white stone on which a view of the Brooklyn Bridge was painted; and she sat before her reflection, bending

the brim this way and that, while Ally Hawes's pale face looked over her shoulder like the ghost of wasted

Ally smiled and took back the hat. "I'll stitch the roses on right here, so's you can put it away at once."

Charity laughed, and ran her fingers through her rough dark hair. She knew that Harney liked to see its

reddish edges ruffled about her forehead and breaking into little rings at the nape. She sat down on her bed

Ally shook her head without looking up. "No, I always remember that awful time I went down with Juliato

"I can't help it. The house is on the corner of Wing Street and Lake Avenue. The trolley from the station goes

right by it, and the day the minister took us down to see those pictures I recognized it right off, and couldn't

seem to see anything else. There's a big black sign with gold letters all across the front 'Private

"Poor Julia!" Charity sighed from the height of her purity and her security. She had a friend whom she trusted

and who respected her. She was going with him to spend the next daythe Fourth of Julyat Nettleton.

Whose business was it but hers, and what was the harm? The pity of it was that girls like Julia did not know

how to choose, and to keep bad fellows at a distance....Charity slipped down from the bed, and stretched out

"Is it sewed? Let me try it on again." She put the hat on, and smiled at her image. The thought of Julia had

The next morning she was up before dawn, and saw the yellow sunrise broaden behind the hills, and the

Her plans had been made with great care. She had announced that she was going down to the Band of Hope

picnic at Hepburn, and as no one else from North Dormer intended to venture so far it was not likely that her

absence from the festivity would be reported. Besides, if it were she would not greatly care. She was

determined to assert her independence, and if she stooped to fib about the Hepburn picnic it was chiefly from

the secretive instinct that made her dread the profanation of her happiness. Whenever she was with Lucius

It was arranged that she should walk to a point of the Creston road where Harney was to pick her up and

drive her across the hills to Hepburn in time for the ninethirty train to Nettleton. Harney at first had been

rather lukewarm about the trip. He declared himself ready to take her to Nettleton, but urged her not to go on

the Fourth of July, on account of the crowds, the probable lateness of the trains, the difficulty of her getting

back before night; but her evident disappointment caused him to give way, and even to affect a faint

enthusiasm for the adventure. She understood why he was not more eager: he must have seen sights beside

which even a Fourth of July at Nettleton would seem tame. But she had never seen anything; and a great

longing possessed her to walk the streets of a big town on a holiday, clinging to his arm and jostled by idle

crowds in their best clothes. The only cloud on the prospect was the fact that the shops would be closed; but

She started out unnoticed in the early sunlight, slipping through the kitchen while Verena bent above the

stove. To avoid attracting notice, she carried her new hat carefully wrapped up, and had thrown a long grey

veil of Mrs. Royall's over the new white muslin dress which Ally's clever fingers had made for her. All of the

ten dollars Mr. Royall had given her, and a part of her own savings as well, had been spent on renewing her

wardrobe; and when Harney jumped out of the buggy to meet her she read her reward in his eyes.

The freckled boy who had brought her the note two weeks earlier was to wait with the buggy at Hepburn till

their return. He perched at Charity's feet, his legs dangling between the wheels, and they could not say much

because of his presence. But it did not greatly matter, for their past was now rich enough to have given them a

private language; and with the long day stretching before them like the blue distance beyond the hills there

When Charity, in response to Harney's message, had gone to meet him at the Creston pool her heart had been

so full of mortification and anger that his first words might easily have estranged her. But it happened that he

had found the right word, which was one of simple friendship. His tone had instantly justified her, and put her

guardian in the wrong. He had made no allusion to what had passed between Mr. Royall and himself, but had

simply let it appear that he had left because means of conveyance were hard to find at North Dormer, and

because Creston River was a more convenient centre. He told her that he had hired by the week the buggy of

the freckled boy's father, who served as liverystable keeper to one or two melancholy summer

boardinghouses on Creston Lake, and had discovered, within driving distance, a number of houses worthy

of his pencil; and he said that he could not, while he was in the neighbourhood, give up the pleasure of seeing

When they took leave of each other she promised to continue to be his guide; and during the fortnight which

followed they roamed the hills in happy comradeship. In most of the village friendships between youths and

maidens lack of conversation was made up for by tentative fondling; but Harney, except when he had tried to

comfort her in her trouble on their way back from the Hyatts', had never put his arm about her, or sought to

betray her into any sudden caress. It seemed to be enough for him to breathe her nearness like a flower's; and

since his pleasure at being with her, and his sense of her youth and her grace, perpetually shone in his eyes

and softened the inflection of his voice, his reserve did not suggest coldness, but the deference due to a girl of

The buggy was drawn by an old trotter who whirled them along so briskly that the pace created a little

breeze; but when they reached Hepburn the full heat of the airless morning descended on them. At the

railway station the platform was packed with a sweltering throng, and they took refuge in the waitingroom,

where there was another throng, already dejected by the heat and the long waiting for retarded trains. Pale

mothers were struggling with fretful babies, or trying to keep their older offspring from the fascination of the

track; girls and their "fellows" were giggling and shoving, and passing about candy in sticky bags, and older

men, collarless and perspiring, were shifting heavy children from one arm to the other, and keeping a haggard

At last the train rumbled in, and engulfed the waiting multitude. Harney swept Charity up on to the first car

and they captured a bench for two, and sat in happy isolation while the train swayed and roared along through

rich fields and languid treeclumps. The haze of the morning had become a sort of clear tremor over

everything, like the colourless vibration about a flame; and the opulent landscape seemed to droop under it.

But to Charity the heat was a stimulant: it enveloped the whole world in the same glow that burned at her

heart. Now and then a lurch of the train flung her against Harney, and through her thin muslin she felt the

touch of his sleeve. She steadied herself, their eyes met, and the flaming breath of the day seemed to enclose

The train roared into the Nettleton station, the descending mob caught them on its tide, and they were swept

out into a vague dusty square thronged with seedy "hacks" and long curtained omnibuses drawn by horses

with tasselled flynets over their withers, who stood swinging their depressed heads drearily from side to

A mob of 'bus and hack drivers were shouting "To the Eagle House," "To the Washington House," "This way

to the Lake," "Just starting for Greytop;" and through their yells came the popping of firecrackers, the

explosion of torpedoes, the banging of toyguns, and the crash of a firemen's band trying to play the Merry

The ramshackle wooden hotels about the square were all hung with flags and paper lanterns, and as Harney

and Charity turned into the main street, with its brick and granite business blocks crowding out the old low

storied shops, and its towering poles strung with innumerable wires that seemed to tremble and buzz in the

heat, they saw the double line of flags and lanterns tapering away gaily to the park at the other end of the

perspective. The noise and colour of this holiday vision seemed to transform Nettleton into a metropolis.

Charity could not believe that Springfield or even Boston had anything grander to show, and she wondered if,

at this very moment, Annabel Balch, on the arm of as brilliant a young man, were threading her way through

"Where shall we go first?" Harney asked; but as she turned her happy eyes on him he guessed the answer and

The street swarmed with their fellowtravellers, with other excursionists arriving from other directions, with

Nettleton's own population, and with the millhands trooping in from the factories on the Creston. The shops

were closed, but one would scarcely have noticed it, so numerous were the glass doors swinging open on

saloons, on restaurants, on drug stores gushing from every sodawater tap, on fruit and confectionery shops

stacked with strawberrycake, cocoanut drops, trays of glistening molasses candy, boxes of caramels and

chewinggum, baskets of sodden strawberries, and dangling branches of bananas. Outside of some of the

doors were trestles with bankedup oranges and apples, spotted pears and dusty raspberries; and the air

reeked with the smell of fruit and stale coffee, beer and sarsaparilla and fried potatoes.

Even the shops that were closed offered, through wide expanses of plateglass, hints of hidden riches. In

some, waves of silk and ribbon broke over shores of imitation moss from which ravishing hats rose like

tropical orchids. In others, the pink throats of gramophones opened their giant convolutions in a soundless

chorus; or bicycles shining in neat ranks seemed to await the signal of an invisible starter; or tiers of

fancygoods in leatherette and paste and celluloid dangled their insidious graces; and, in one vast bay that

seemed to project them into exciting contact with the public, wax ladies in daring dresses chatted elegantly,

or, with gestures intimate yet blameless, pointed to their pink corsets and transparent hosiery.

Presently Harney found that his watch had stopped, and turned in at a small jeweller's shop which chanced to

still be open. While the watch was being examined Charity leaned over the glass counter where, on a

background of dark blue velvet, pins, rings, and brooches glittered like the moon and stars. She had never

seen jewellry so near by, and she longed to lift the glass lid and plunge her hand among the shining treasures.

But already Harney's watch was repaired, and he laid his hand on her arm and drew her from her dream.

"Don't you think the blue pin's better?" he suggested, and immediately she saw that the lily of the valley was

mere trumpery compared to the small round stone, blue as a mountain lake, with little sparks of light all

He laughed, and they went out of the shop; but a few steps away he exclaimed: "Oh, by Jove, I forgot

something," and turned back and left her in the crowd. She stood staring down a row of pink gramophone

"You mustn't be afraid of looking at the blue pin any longer, because it belongs to you," he said; and she felt

a little box being pressed into her hand. Her heart gave a leap of joy, but it reached her lips only in a shy

stammer. She remembered other girls whom she had heard planning to extract presents from their fellows,

and was seized with a sudden dread lest Harney should have imagined that she had leaned over the pretty

A little farther down the street they turned in at a glass doorway opening on a shining hall with a mahogany

staircase, and brass cages in its corners. "We must have something to eat," Harney said; and the next moment

Charity found herself in a dressingroom all lookingglass and lustrous surfaces, where a party of

showylooking girls were dabbing on powder and straightening immense plumed hats. When they had gone

she took courage to bathe her hot face in one of the marble basins, and to straighten her own hatbrim, which

the parasols of the crowd had indented. The dresses in the shops had so impressed her that she scarcely dared

look at her reflection; but when she did so, the glow of her face under her cherrycoloured hat, and the curve

of her young shoulders through the transparent muslin, restored her courage; and when she had taken the blue

brooch from its box and pinned it on her bosom she walked toward the restaurant with her head high, as if she

Her spirit sank a little at the sight of the slim waisted waitresses in black, with bewitching mobcaps on

their haughty heads, who were moving disdainfully between the tables. "Not f'r another hour," one of them

"Oh, well, we can't stay sweltering here," he decided; "let's try somewhere else" and with a sense of relief

That "somewhere else" turned outafter more hot tramping, and several failuresto be, of all things, a little

openair place in a back street that called itself a French restaurant, and consisted in two or three rickety

tables under a scarletrunner, between a patch of zinnias and petunias and a big elm bending over from the

next yard. Here they lunched on queerly flavoured things, while Harney, leaning back in a crippled

rockingchair, smoked cigarettes between the courses and poured into Charity's glass a pale yellow wine

Charity did not think the wine as good as sarsaparilla, but she sipped a mouthful for the pleasure of doing

what he did, and of fancying herself alone with him in foreign countries. The illusion was increased by their

being served by a deepbosomed woman with smooth hair and a pleasant laugh, who talked to Harney in

unintelligible words, and seemed amazed and overjoyed at his answering her in kind. At the other tables other

people sat, millhands probably, homely but pleasant looking, who spoke the same shrill jargon, and looked

at Harney and Charity with friendly eyes; and between the tablelegs a poodle with bald patches and pink

Harney showed no inclination to move, for hot as their corner was, it was at least shaded and quiet; and, from

the main thoroughfares came the clanging of trolleys, the incessant popping of torpedoes, the jingle of

streetorgans, the bawling of megaphone men and the loud murmur of increasing crowds. He leaned back,

smoking his cigar, patting the dog, and stirring the coffee that steamed in their chipped cups. "It's the real

thing, you know," he explained; and Charity hastily revised her previous conception of the beverage.

They had made no plans for the rest of the day, and when Harney asked her what she wanted to do next she

was too bewildered by rich possibilities to find an answer. Finally she confessed that she longed to go to the

Lake, where she had not been taken on her former visit, and when he answered, "Oh, there's time for thatit

will be pleasanter later," she suggested seeing some pictures like the ones Mr. Miles had taken her to. She

thought Harney looked a little disconcerted; but he passed his fine handkerchief over his warm brow, said

Mr. Miles's pictures had been shown in an austere Y.M.C.A. hall, with white walls and an organ; but Harney

led Charity to a glittering placeeverything she saw seemed to glitterwhere they passed, between

immense pictures of yellowhaired beauties stabbing villains in evening dress, into a velvetcurtained

auditorium packed with spectators to the last limit of compression. After that, for a while, everything was

merged in her brain in swimming circles of heat and blinding alternations of light and darkness. All the world

has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of palms and minarets, charging cavalry regiments, roaring

lions, comic policemen and scowling murderers; and the crowd around her, the hundreds of hot sallow

candymunching faces, young, old, middleaged, but all kindled with the same contagious excitement,

Presently the thought of the cool trolleyrun to the Lake grew irresistible, and they struggled out of the

theatre. As they stood on the pavement, Harney pale with the heat, and even Charity a little confused by it, a

young man drove by in an electric runabout with a calico band bearing the words: "Ten dollars to take you

round the Lake." Before Charity knew what was happening, Harney had waved a hand, and they were

climbing in. "Say, for twennyfive I'll run you out to see the ballgame and back," the driver proposed with

an insinuating grin; but Charity said quickly: "Oh, I'd rather go rowing on the Lake." The street was so

thronged that progress was slow; but the glory of sitting in the little carriage while it wriggled its way

between laden omnibuses and trolleys made the moments seem too short. "Next turn is Lake Avenue," the

young man called out over his shoulder; and as they paused in the wake of a big omnibus groaning with

Knights of Pythias in cocked hats and swords, Charity looked up and saw on the corner a brick house with a

conspicuous black and gold sign across its front. "Dr. Merkle; Private Consultations at all hours. Lady

Attendants," she read; and suddenly she remembered Ally Hawes's words: "The house was at the corner of

Wing Street and Lake Avenue...there's a big black sign across the front...." Through all the heat and the

THE Lake at lasta sheet of shining metal brooded over by drooping trees. Charity and Harney had secured

a boat and, getting away from the wharves and the refreshmentbooths, they drifted idly along, hugging the

shadow of the shore. Where the sun struck the water its shafts flamed back blindingly at the heat veiled sky;

and the least shade was black by contrast. The Lake was so smooth that the reflection of the trees on its edge

seemed enamelled on a solid surface; but gradually, as the sun declined, the water grew transparent, and

Charity, leaning over, plunged her fascinated gaze into depths so clear that she saw the inverted treetops

They rounded a point at the farther end of the Lake, and entering an inlet pushed their bow against a

protruding treetrunk. A green veil of willows overhung them. Beyond the trees, wheatfields sparkled in the

sun; and all along the horizon the clear hills throbbed with light. Charity leaned back in the stern, and Harney

Ever since their meeting at the Creston pool he had been subject to these brooding silences, which were as

different as possible from the pauses when they ceased to speak because words were needless. At such times

his face wore the expression she had seen on it when she had looked in at him from the darkness and again

there came over her a sense of the mysterious distance between them; but usually his fits of abstraction were

She was still thinking of the ten dollars he had handed to the driver of the runabout. It had given them

twenty minutes of pleasure, and it seemed unimaginable that anyone should be able to buy amusement at that

rate. With ten dollars he might have bought her an engagement ring; she knew that Mrs. Tom Fry's, which

came from Springfield, and had a diamond in it, had cost only eight seventyfive. But she did not know why

the thought had occurred to her. Harney would never buy her an engagement ring: they were friends and

comrades, but no more. He had been perfectly fair to her: he had never said a word to mislead her. She

Boats were beginning to thicken on the Lake and the clang of incessantly arriving trolleys announced the

return of the crowds from the ballfield. The shadows lengthened across the pearlgrey water and two white

clouds near the sun were turning golden. On the opposite shore men were hammering hastily at a wooden

"Why, the fireworks. I suppose there'll be a big show." Harney looked at her and a smile crept into his moody

"Miss Hatchard always sends up lovely rockets on the Fourth," she answered doubtfully.

"Oh" his contempt was unbounded. "I mean a big performance like this, illuminated boats, and all the

"Rather. Didn't you notice that big raft we passed? It's wonderful to see the rockets completing their orbits

down under one's feet." She said nothing, and he put the oars into the rowlocks. "If we stay we'd better go and

"But how can we get back afterwards?" she ventured, feeling it would break her heart if she missed it.

He consulted a timetable, found a ten o'clock train and reassured her. "The moon rises so late that it will be

Twilight fell, and lights began to show along the shore. The trolleys roaring out from Nettleton became great

luminous serpents coiling in and out among the trees. The wooden eatinghouses at the Lake's edge danced

with lanterns, and the dusk echoed with laughter and shouts and the clumsy splashing of oars.

Harney and Charity had found a table in the corner of a balcony built over the Lake, and were patiently

awaiting an unattainable chowder. Close under them the water lapped the piles, agitated by the evolutions of

a little white steamboat trellised with coloured globes which was to run passengers up and down the Lake. It

Suddenly Charity heard a woman's laugh behind her. The sound was familiar, and she turned to look. A band

of showily dressed girls and dapper young men wearing badges of secret societies, with new straw hats tilted

far back on their squareclipped hair, had invaded the balcony and were loudly clamouring for a table. The

girl in the lead was the one who had laughed. She wore a large hat with a long white feather, and from under

"Say! if this ain't like Old Home Week," she remarked to the girl at her elbow; and giggles and glances

passed between them. Charity knew at once that the girl with the white feather was Julia Hawes. She had lost

her freshness, and the paint under her eyes made her face seem thinner; but her lips had the same lovely

curve, and the same cold mocking smile, as if there were some secret absurdity in the person she was looking

Charity flushed to the forehead and looked away. She felt herself humiliated by Julia's sneer, and vexed that

the mockery of such a creature should affect her. She trembled lest Harney should notice that the noisy troop

Presently there was a soft rush through the air and a shower of silver fell from the blue evening sky. In

another direction, pale Roman candles shot up singly through the trees, and a firehaired rocket swept the

horizon like a portent. Between these intermittent flashes the velvet curtains of the darkness were descending,

and in the intervals of eclipse the voices of the crowds seemed to sink to smothered murmurs.

Charity and Harney, dispossessed by newcomers, were at length obliged to give up their table and struggle

through the throng about the boatlandings. For a while there seemed no escape from the tide of late arrivals;

but finally Harney secured the last two places on the stand from which the more privileged were to see the

fireworks. The seats were at the end of a row, one above the other. Charity had taken off her hat to have an

uninterrupted view; and whenever she leaned back to follow the curve of some dishevelled rocket she could

After a while the scattered fireworks ceased. A longer interval of darkness followed, and then the whole night

broke into flower. From every point of the horizon, gold and silver arches sprang up and crossed each other,

skyorchards broke into blossom, shed their flaming petals and hung their branches with golden fruit; and all

the while the air was filled with a soft supernatural hum, as though great birds were building their nests in

Now and then there came a lull, and a wave of moonlight swept the Lake. In a flash it revealed hundreds of

boats, steeldark against lustrous ripples; then it withdrew as if with a furling of vast translucent wings.

Charity's heart throbbed with delight. It was as if all the latent beauty of things had been unveiled to her. She

could not imagine that the world held anything more wonderful; but near her she heard someone say, "You

wait till you see the set piece," and instantly her hopes took a fresh flight. At last, just as it was beginning to

seem as though the whole arch of the sky were one great lid pressed against her dazzled eyeballs, and

striking out of them continuous jets of jewelled light, the velvet darkness settled down again, and a murmur

"Nownow!" the same voice said excitedly; and Charity, grasping the hat on her knee, crushed it tight in the

For a moment the night seemed to grow more impenetrably black; then a great picture stood out against it

like a constellation. It was surmounted by a golden scroll bearing the inscription, "Washington crossing the

Delaware," and across a flood of motionless golden ripples the National Hero passed, erect, solemn and

gigantic, standing with folded arms in the stern of a slowly moving golden boat.

A long "Ohhh" burst from the spectators: the stand creaked and shook with their blissful trepidations.

"Ohhh," Charity gasped: she had forgotten where she was, had at last forgotten even Harney's nearness.

The picture vanished and darkness came down. In the obscurity she felt her head clasped by two hands: her

face was drawn backward, and Harney's lips were pressed on hers. With sudden vehemence he wound his

arms about her, holding her head against his breast while she gave him back his kisses. An unknown Harney

had revealed himself, a Harney who dominated her and yet over whom she felt herself possessed of a new

But the crowd was beginning to move, and he had to release her. "Come," he said in a confused voice. He

scrambled over the side of the stand, and holding up his arm caught her as she sprang to the ground. He

passed his arm about her waist, steadying her against the descending rush of people; and she clung to him,

speechless, exultant, as if all the crowding and confusion about them were a mere vain stirring of the air.

"Come," he repeated, "we must try to make the trolley." He drew her along, and she followed, still in her

dream. They walked as if they were one, so isolated in ecstasy that the people jostling them on every side

seemed impalpable. But when they reached the terminus the illuminated trolley was already clanging on its

way, its platforms black with passengers. The cars waiting behind it were as thickly packed; and the throng

about the terminus was so dense that it seemed hopeless to struggle for a place.

"Last trip up the Lake," a megaphone bellowed from the wharf; and the lights of the little steamboat came

They pushed their way back to the edge of the water just as the gangplank lowered from the white side of

the boat. The electric light at the end of the wharf flashed full on the descending passengers, and among them

Charity caught sight of Julia Hawes, her white feather askew, and the face under it flushed with coarse

laughter. As she stepped from the gangplank she stopped short, her darkringed eyes darting malice.

"Hullo, Charity Royall!" she called out; and then, looking back over her shoulder: "Didn't I tell you it was a

A snigger ran through the group; and then, towering above them, and steadying himself by the handrail in a

desperate effort at erectness, Mr. Royall stepped stiffly ashore. Like the young men of the party, he wore a

secret society emblem in the buttonhole of his black frockcoat. His head was covered by a new Panama hat,

and his narrow black tie, half undone, dangled down on his rumpled shirtfront. His face, a livid brown, with

red blotches of anger and lips sunken in like an old man's, was a lamentable ruin in the searching glare.

He was just behind Julia Hawes, and had one hand on her arm; but as he left the gangplank he freed himself,

and moved a step or two away from his companions. He had seen Charity at once, and his glance passed

slowly from her to Harney, whose arm was still about her. He stood staring at them, and trying to master the

senile quiver of his lips; then he drew himself up with the tremulous majesty of drunkenness, and stretched

There was a scream of tipsy laughter from the party, and Charity involuntarily put her hands to her head. She

remembered that her hat had fallen from her lap when she jumped up to leave the stand; and suddenly she had

a vision of herself, hatless, dishevelled, with a man's arm about her, confronting that drunken crew, headed by

her guardian's pitiable figure. The picture filled her with shame. She had known since childhood about Mr.

Royall's "habits": had seen him, as she went up to bed, sitting morosely in his office, a bottle at his elbow; or

coming home, heavy and quarrelsome, from his business expeditions to Hepburn or Springfield; but the idea

of his associating himself publicly with a band of disreputable girls and barroom loafers was new and

"Oh" she said in a gasp of misery; and releasing herself from Harney's arm she went straight up to Mr.

"You come home with meyou come right home with me," she said in a low stern voice, as if she had not

heard his apostrophe; and one of the girls called out: "Say, how many fellers does she want?"

There was another laugh, followed by a pause of curiosity, during which Mr. Royall continued to glare at

Charity. At length his twitching lips parted. "I said, 'Youdamnwhore!'" he repeated with precision,

Laughs and jeers were beginning to spring up from the circle of people beyond their group; and a voice called

out from the gangway: "Now, then, step lively thereall ABOARD!" The pressure of approaching and

departing passengers forced the actors in the rapid scene apart, and pushed them back into the throng. Charity

found herself clinging to Harney's arm and sobbing desperately. Mr. Royall had disappeared, and in the

AT two o'clock in the morning the freckled boy from Creston stopped his sleepy horse at the door of the red

house, and Charity got out. Harney had taken leave of her at Creston River, charging the boy to drive her

home. Her mind was still in a fog of misery, and she did not remember very clearly what had happened, or

what they said to each other, during the interminable interval since their departure from Nettleton; but the

secretive instinct of the animal in pain was so strong in her that she had a sense of relief when Harney got out

The full moon hung over North Dormer, whitening the mist that filled the hollows between the hills and

floated transparently above the fields. Charity stood a moment at the gate, looking out into the waning night.

She watched the boy drive off, his horse's head wagging heavily to and fro; then she went around to the

kitchen door and felt under the mat for the key. She found it, unlocked the door and went in. The kitchen was

dark, but she discovered a box of matches, lit a candle and went upstairs. Mr. Royall's door, opposite hers,

stood open on his unlit room; evidently he had not come back. She went into her room, bolted her door and

began slowly to untie the ribbon about her waist, and to take off her dress. Under the bed she saw the paper

She lay for a long time sleepless on her bed, staring up at the moonlight on the low ceiling; dawn was in the

She dressed and went down to the kitchen. Verena was there alone: she glanced at Charity tranquilly, with

her old deaflooking eyes. There was no sign of Mr. Royall about the house and the hours passed without his

reappearing. Charity had gone up to her room, and sat there listlessly, her hands on her lap. Puffs of sultry air

fanned her dimity window curtains and flies buzzed stiflingly against the bluish panes.

At one o'clock Verena hobbled up to see if she were not coming down to dinner; but she shook her head, and

The sun turned and left her room, and Charity seated herself in the window, gazing down the village street

through the halfopened shutters. Not a thought was in her mind; it was just a dark whirlpool of crowding

images; and she watched the people passing along the street, Dan Targatt's team hauling a load of pine

trunks down to Hepburn, the sexton's old white horse grazing on the bank across the way, as if she looked at

She was roused from her apathy by seeing Ally Hawes come out of the Frys' gate and walk slowly toward the

red house with her uneven limping step. At the sight Charity recovered her severed contact with reality. She

divined that Ally was coming to hear about her day: no one else was in the secret of the trip to Nettleton, and

At the thought of having to see her, of having to meet her eyes and answer or evade her questions, the whole

horror of the previous night's adventure rushed back upon Charity. What had been a feverish nightmare

became a cold and unescapable fact. Poor Ally, at that moment, represented North Dormer, with all its mean

curiosities, its furtive malice, its sham unconsciousness of evil. Charity knew that, although all relations with

Julia were supposed to be severed, the tenderhearted Ally still secretly communicated with her; and no

doubt Julia would exult in the chance of retailing the scandal of the wharf. The story, exaggerated and

Ally's dragging pace had not carried her far from the Frys' gate when she was stopped by old Mrs. Sollas,

who was a great talker, and spoke very slowly because she had never been able to get used to her new teeth

from Hepburn. Still, even this respite would not last long; in another ten minutes Ally would be at the door,

and Charity would hear her greeting Verena in the kitchen, and then calling up from the foot of the stairs.

Suddenly it became clear that flight, and instant flight, was the only thing conceivable. The longing to escape,

to get away from familiar faces, from places where she was known, had always been strong in her in

moments of distress. She had a childish belief in the miraculous power of strange scenes and new faces to

transform her life and wipe out bitter memories. But such impulses were mere fleeting whims compared to

the cold resolve which now possessed her. She felt she could not remain an hour longer under the roof of the

man who had publicly dishonoured her, and face to face with the people who would presently be gloating

Her passing pity for Mr. Royall had been swallowed up in loathing: everything in her recoiled from the

disgraceful spectacle of the drunken old man apostrophizing her in the presence of a band of loafers and

streetwalkers. Suddenly, vividly, she relived again the horrible moment when he had tried to force himself

into her room, and what she had before supposed to be a mad aberration now appeared to her as a vulgar

While these thoughts were hurrying through her she had dragged out her old canvas schoolbag, and was

thrusting into it a few articles of clothing and the little packet of letters she had received from Harney. From

under her pincushion she took the library key, and laid it in full view; then she felt at the back of a drawer for

the blue brooch that Harney had given her. She would not have dared to wear it openly at North Dormer, but

now she fastened it on her bosom as if it were a talisman to protect her in her flight. These preparations had

taken but a few minutes, and when they were finished Ally Hawes was still at the Frys' corner talking to old

She had said to herself, as she always said in moments of revolt: "I'll go to the MountainI'll go back to my

own folks." She had never really meant it before; but now, as she considered her case, no other course

seemed open. She had never learned any trade that would have given her independence in a strange place,

and she knew no one in the big towns of the valley, where she might have hoped to find employment. Miss

Hatchard was still away; but even had she been at North Dormer she was the last person to whom Charity

would have turned, since one of the motives urging her to flight was the wish not to see Lucius Harney.

Travelling back from Nettleton, in the crowded brightlylit train, all exchange of confidence between them

had been impossible; but during their drive from Hepburn to Creston River she had gathered from Harney's

snatches of consolatory talkagain hampered by the freckled boy's presencethat he intended to see her the

next day. At the moment she had found a vague comfort in the assurance; but in the desolate lucidity of the

hours that followed she had come to see the impossibility of meeting him again. Her dream of comradeship

was over; and the scene on the wharfvile and disgraceful as it had beenhad after all shed the light of

truth on her minute of madness. It was as if her guardian's words had stripped her bare in the face of the

grinning crowd and proclaimed to the world the secret admonitions of her conscience.

She did not think these things out clearly; she simply followed the blind propulsion of her wretchedness. She

did not want, ever again, to see anyone she had known; above all, she did not want to see Harney....

She climbed the hillpath behind the house and struck through the woods by a shortcut leading to the

Creston road. A leadcoloured sky hung heavily over the fields, and in the forest the motionless air was

stifling; but she pushed on, impatient to reach the road which was the shortest way to the Mountain.

To do so, she had to follow the Creston road for a mile or two, and go within half a mile of the village; and

she walked quickly, fearing to meet Harney. But there was no sign of him, and she had almost reached the

branch road when she saw the flanks of a large white tent projecting through the trees by the roadside. She

supposed that it sheltered a travelling circus which had come there for the Fourth; but as she drew nearer she

saw, over the foldedback flap, a large sign bearing the inscription, "Gospel Tent." The interior seemed to be

empty; but a young man in a black alpaca coat, his lank hair parted over a round white face, stepped from

"Sister, your Saviour knows everything. Won't you come in and lay your guilt before Him?" he asked

Charity started back and flushed. For a moment she thought the evangelist must have heard a report of the

"I on'y wish't I had any to lay!" she retorted, with one of her fierce flashes of selfderision; and the young

But she had jerked her arm out of his hold, and was running up the branch road, trembling with the fear of

meeting a familiar face. Presently she was out of sight of the village, and climbing into the heart of the forest.

She could not hope to do the fifteen miles to the Mountain that afternoon; but she knew of a place halfway

to Hamblin where she could sleep, and where no one would think of looking for her. It was a little deserted

house on a slope in one of the lonely rifts of the hills. She had seen it once, years before, when she had gone

on a nutting expedition to the grove of walnuts below it. The party had taken refuge in the house from a

sudden mountain storm, and she remembered that Ben Sollas, who liked frightening girls, had told them that

She was growing faint and tired, for she had eaten nothing since morning, and was not used to walking so far.

Her head felt light and she sat down for a moment by the roadside. As she sat there she heard the click of a

bicyclebell, and started up to plunge back into the forest; but before she could move the bicycle had swept

around the curve of the road, and Harney, jumping off, was approaching her with outstretched arms.

She stared as if he were a vision, so startled by the unexpectedness of his being there that no words came to

"Where were you going? Had you forgotten that I was coming?" he continued, trying to draw her to him; but

"I was going awayI don't want to see youI want you should leave me alone," she broke out wildly.

He looked at her and his face grew grave, as though the shadow of a premonition brushed it.

He stood glancing doubtfully up and down the lonely forest road that stretched away into sunflecked

As she spoke she became aware of a change in his face. He was no longer listening to her, he was only

looking at her, with the passionate absorbed expression she had seen in his eyes after they had kissed on the

stand at Nettleton. He was the new Harney again, the Harney abruptly revealed in that embrace, who seemed

so penetrated with the joy of her presence that he was utterly careless of what she was thinking or feeling.

He caught her hands with a laugh. "How do you suppose I found you?" he said gaily. He drew out the little

"You dropped them, you imprudent young persondropped them in the middle of the road, not far from

here; and the young man who is running the Gospel tent picked them up just as I was riding by." He drew

back, holding her at arm's length, and scrutinizing her troubled face with the minute searching gaze of his

"Did you really think you could run away from me? You see you weren't meant to," he said; and before she

could answer he had kissed her again, not vehemently, but tenderly, almost fraternally, as if he had guessed

her confused pain, and wanted her to know he understood it. He wound his fingers through hers.

He spoke with a boy's gaiety, carelessly and confidently, as if nothing had happened that could shame or

embarrass them; and for a moment, in the sudden relief of her release from lonely pain, she felt herself

yielding to his mood. But he had turned, and was drawing her back along the road by which she had come.

They looked at each other a moment in silence; then he answered gently: "Very well: let's go the other way,

She remained motionless, gazing silently at the ground, and he went on: "Isn't there a house up here

somewhere a little abandoned houseyou meant to show me some day?" Still she made no answer, and

he continued, in the same tone of tender reassurance: "Let us go there now and sit down and talk quietly." He

took one of the hands that hung by her side and pressed his lips to the palm. "Do you suppose I'm going to let

The little old houseits wooden walls sunbleached to a ghostly graystood in an orchard above the road.

The garden palings had fallen, but the broken gate dangled between its posts, and the path to the house was

marked by rosebushes run wild and hanging their small pale blossoms above the crowding grasses. Slender

pilasters and an intricate fanlight framed the opening where the door had hung; and the door itself lay

Inside, also, wind and weather had blanched everything to the same wan silvery tint; the house was as dry and

pure as the interior of a longempty shell. But it must have been exceptionally well built, for the little rooms

had kept something of their human aspect: the wooden mantels with their neat classic ornaments were in

Harney had found an old bench at the back door and dragged it into the house. Charity sat on it, leaning her

head against the wall in a state of drowsy lassitude. He had guessed that she was hungry and thirsty, and had

brought her some tablets of chocolate from his bicyclebag, and filled his drinkingcup from a spring in the

orchard; and now he sat at her feet, smoking a cigarette, and looking up at her without speaking. Outside, the

afternoon shadows were lengthening across the grass, and through the empty windowframe that faced her

she saw the Mountain thrusting its dark mass against a sultry sunset. It was time to go.

She stood up, and he sprang to his feet also, and passed his arm through hers with an air of authority. "Now,

She looked at him and shook her head. "I ain't ever going back. You don't know."

"What don't I know?" She was silent, and he continued: "What happened on the wharf was horribleit's

natural you should feel as you do. But it doesn't make any real difference: you can't be hurt by such things.

You must try to forget. And you must try to understand that men...men sometimes..."

He coloured a little at the retort, as though it had touched him in a way she did not suspect.

"Well, then...you must know one has to make allowances....He'd been drinking...."

"I know all that, too. I've seen him so before. But he wouldn't have dared speak to me that way if he hadn't..."

"Hadn't wanted me to be like those other girls...." She lowered her voice and looked away from him. "So's 't

Harney stared at her. For a moment he did not seem to seize her meaning; then his face grew dark. "The

damned hound! The villainous low hound!" His wrath blazed up, crimsoning him to the temples. "I never

dreamedgood God, it's too vile," he broke off, as if his thoughts recoiled from the discovery.

There was a long interval of silence, during which she imagined that he was searching her face for more light

"I know the way you must feel about me," she broke out, "...telling you such things...."

But once more, as she spoke, she became aware that he was no longer listening. He came close and caught

her to him as if he were snatching her from some imminent peril: his impetuous eyes were in hers, and she

"Kiss me againlike last night," he said, pushing her hair back as if to draw her whole face up into his kiss.

ONE afternoon toward the end of August a group of girls sat in a room at Miss Hatchard's in a gay confusion

of flags, turkeyred, blue and white paper muslin, harvest sheaves and illuminated scrolls.

North Dormer was preparing for its Old Home Week. That form of sentimental decentralization was still in

its early stages, and, precedents being few, and the desire to set an example contagious, the matter had

become a subject of prolonged and passionate discussion under Miss Hatchard's roof. The incentive to the

celebration had come rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to

stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss

Hatchard's pale prim drawingroom was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton,

Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated

"All the old names...all the old names...." Miss Hatchard would be heard, tapping across the hall on her

crutches. "Targatt...Sollas...Fry: this is Miss Orma Fry sewing the stars on the drapery for the organloft.

Don't move, girls....and this is Miss Ally Hawes, our cleverest needlewoman...and Miss Charity Royall

making our garlands of evergreen....I like the idea of its all being homemade, don't you? We haven't had to

call in any foreign talent: my young cousin Lucius Harney, the architectyou know he's up here preparing a

book on Colonial houseshe's taken the whole thing in hand so cleverly; but you must come and see his

One of the first results of the Old Home Week agitation had, in fact, been the reappearance of Lucius Harney

in the village street. He had been vaguely spoken of as being not far off, but for some weeks past no one had

seen him at North Dormer, and there was a recent report of his having left Creston River, where he was said

to have been staying, and gone away from the neighbourhood for good. Soon after Miss Hatchard's return,

however, he came back to his old quarters in her house, and began to take a leading part in the planning of the

festivities. He threw himself into the idea with extraordinary goodhumour, and was so prodigal of sketches,

and so inexhaustible in devices, that he gave an immediate impetus to the rather languid movement, and

"Lucius has such a feeling for the past that he has roused us all to a sense of our privileges," Miss Hatchard

would say, lingering on the last word, which was a favourite one. And before leading her visitor back to the

drawingroom she would repeat, for the hundredth time, that she supposed he thought it very bold of little

North Dormer to start up and have a Home Week of its own, when so many bigger places hadn't thought of it

yet; but that, after all, Associations counted more than the size of the population, didn't they? And of course

North Dormer was so full of Associations...historic, literary (here a filial sigh for Honorius) and

ecclesiastical...he knew about the old pewter communion service imported from England in 1769, she

supposed? And it was so important, in a wealthy materialistic age, to set the example of reverting to the old

ideals, the family and the homestead, and so on. This peroration usually carried her halfway back across the

The day on which Charity Royall was weaving hemlock garlands for the procession was the last before the

celebration. When Miss Hatchard called upon the North Dormer maidenhood to collaborate in the festal

preparations Charity had at first held aloof; but it had been made clear to her that her nonappearance might

excite conjecture, and, reluctantly, she had joined the other workers. The girls, at first shy and embarrassed,

and puzzled as to the exact nature of the projected commemoration, had soon become interested in the

amusing details of their task, and excited by the notice they received. They would not for the world have

missed their afternoons at Miss Hatchard's, and, while they cut out and sewed and draped and pasted, their

tongues kept up such an accompaniment to the sewingmachine that Charity's silence sheltered itself

In spirit she was still almost unconscious of the pleasant stir about her. Since her return to the red house, on

the evening of the day when Harney had overtaken her on her way to the Mountain, she had lived at North

Dormer as if she were suspended in the void. She had come back there because Harney, after appearing to

agree to the impossibility of her doing so, had ended by persuading her that any other course would be

madness. She had nothing further to fear from Mr. Royall. Of this she had declared herself sure, though she

had failed to add, in his exoneration, that he had twice offered to make her his wife. Her hatred of him made

it impossible, at the moment, for her to say anything that might partly excuse him in Harney's eyes.

Harney, however, once satisfied of her security, had found plenty of reasons for urging her to return. The

first, and the most unanswerable, was that she had nowhere else to go. But the one on which he laid the

greatest stress was that flight would be equivalent to avowal. Ifas was almost inevitablerumours of the

scandalous scene at Nettleton should reach North Dormer, how else would her disappearance be interpreted?

Her guardian had publicly taken away her character, and she immediately vanished from his house. Seekers

after motives could hardly fail to draw an unkind conclusion. But if she came back at once, and was seen

leading her usual life, the incident was reduced to its true proportions, as the outbreak of a drunken old man

furious at being surprised in disreputable company. People would say that Mr. Royall had insulted his ward

to justify himself, and the sordid tale would fall into its place in the chronicle of his obscure debaucheries.

Charity saw the force of the argument; but if she acquiesced it was not so much because of that as because it

was Harney's wish. Since that evening in the deserted house she could imagine no reason for doing or not

doing anything except the fact that Harney wished or did not wish it. All her tossing contradictory impulses

were merged in a fatalistic acceptance of his will. It was not that she felt in him any ascendancy of

characterthere were moments already when she knew she was the strongerbut that all the rest of life had

become a mere cloudy rim about the central glory of their passion. Whenever she stopped thinking about that

for a moment she felt as she sometimes did after lying on the grass and staring up too long at the sky; her

Each time that Miss Hatchard, in the course of her periodical incursions into the workroom, dropped an

allusion to her young cousin, the architect, the effect was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland she was

wearing fell to her knees and she sat in a kind of trance. It was so manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard

should talk of Harney in that familiar possessive way, as if she had any claim on him, or knew anything about

him. She, Charity Royall, was the only being on earth who really knew him, knew him from the soles of his

feet to the rumpled crest of his hair, knew the shifting lights in his eyes, and the inflexions of his voice, and

the things he liked and disliked, and everything there was to know about him, as minutely and yet

unconsciously as a child knows the walls of the room it wakes up in every morning. It was this fact, which

nobody about her guessed, or would have understood, that made her life something apart and inviolable, as if

The room in which the girls sat was the one which had been Harney's bedroom. He had been sent upstairs, to

make room for the Home Week workers; but the furniture had not been moved, and as Charity sat there she

had perpetually before her the vision she had looked in on from the midnight garden. The table at which

Harney had sat was the one about which the girls were gathered; and her own seat was near the bed on which

she had seen him lying. Sometimes, when the others were not looking, she bent over as if to pick up

Toward sunset the girls disbanded. Their work was done, and the next morning at daylight the draperies and

garlands were to be nailed up, and the illuminated scrolls put in place in the Town Hall. The first guests were

to drive over from Hepburn in time for the midday banquet under a tent in Miss Hatchard's field; and after

that the ceremonies were to begin. Miss Hatchard, pale with fatigue and excitement, thanked her young

assistants, and stood in the porch, leaning on her crutches and waving a farewell as she watched them troop

Charity had slipped off among the first; but at the gate she heard Ally Hawes calling after her, and reluctantly

"Will you come over now and try on your dress?" Ally asked, looking at her with wistful admiration. "I want

Charity gazed at her with dazzled eyes. "Oh, it's lovely," she said, and hastened away without listening to

Ally's protest. She wanted her dress to be as pretty as the other girls'wanted it, in fact, to outshine the rest,

since she was to take part in the "exercises"but she had no time just then to fix her mind on such matters....

She sped up the street to the library, of which she had the key about her neck. From the passage at the back

she dragged forth a bicycle, and guided it to the edge of the street. She looked about to see if any of the girls

were approaching; but they had drifted away together toward the Town Hall, and she sprang into the saddle

and turned toward the Creston road. There was an almost continual descent to Creston, and with her feet

against the pedals she floated through the still evening air like one of the hawks she had often watched

slanting downward on motionless wings. Twenty minutes from the time when she had left Miss Hatchard's

door she was turning up the woodroad on which Harney had overtaken her on the day of her flight; and a

few minutes afterward she had jumped from her bicycle at the gate of the deserted house.

In the goldpowdered sunset it looked more than ever like some frail shell dried and washed by many

seasons; but at the back, whither Charity advanced, drawing her bicycle after her, there were signs of recent

habitation. A rough door made of boards hung in the kitchen doorway, and pushing it open she entered a

room furnished in primitive camping fashion. In the window was a table, also made of boards, with an

earthenware jar holding a big bunch of wild asters, two canvas chairs stood near by, and in one corner was a

The room was empty, and leaning her bicycle against the house Charity clambered up the slope and sat down

on a rock under an old appletree. The air was perfectly still, and from where she sat she would be able to

She was always glad when she got to the little house before Harney. She liked to have time to take in every

detail of its secret sweetnessthe shadows of the appletrees swaying on the grass, the old walnuts rounding

their domes below the road, the meadows sloping westward in the afternoon lightbefore his first kiss

blotted it all out. Everything unrelated to the hours spent in that tranquil place was as faint as the

remembrance of a dream. The only reality was the wondrous unfolding of her new self, the reaching out to

the light of all her contracted tendrils. She had lived all her life among people whose sensibilities seemed to

have withered for lack of use; and more wonderful, at first, than Harney's endearments were the words that

were a part of them. She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as

On the morrow of the day when she had shown him the way to the deserted house he had packed up and left

Creston River for Boston; but at the first station he had jumped on the train with a handbag and scrambled

up into the hills. For two golden rainless August weeks he had camped in the house, getting eggs and milk

from the solitary farm in the valley, where no one knew him, and doing his cooking over a spiritlamp. He

got up every day with the sun, took a plunge in a brown pool he knew of, and spent long hours lying in the

scented hemlockwoods above the house, or wandering along the yoke of the Eagle Ridge, far above the

misty blue valleys that swept away east and west between the endless hills. And in the afternoon Charity

With part of what was left of her savings she had hired a bicycle for a month, and every day after dinner, as

soon as her guardian started to his office, she hurried to the library, got out her bicycle, and flew down the

Creston road. She knew that Mr. Royall, like everyone else in North Dormer, was perfectly aware of her

acquisition: possibly he, as well as the rest of the village, knew what use she made of it. She did not care: she

felt him to be so powerless that if he had questioned her she would probably have told him the truth. But they

had never spoken to each other since the night on the wharf at Nettleton. He had returned to North Dormer

only on the third day after that encounter, arriving just as Charity and Verena were sitting down to supper. He

had drawn up his chair, taken his napkin from the sideboard drawer, pulled it out of its ring, and seated

himself as unconcernedly as if he had come in from his usual afternoon session at Carrick Fry's; and the long

habit of the household made it seem almost natural that Charity should not so much as raise her eyes when he

entered. She had simply let him understand that her silence was not accidental by leaving the table while he

was still eating, and going up without a word to shut herself into her room. After that he formed the habit of

talking loudly and genially to Verena whenever Charity was in the room; but otherwise there was no apparent

She did not think connectedly of these things while she sat waiting for Harney, but they remained in her mind

as a sullen background against which her short hours with him flamed out like forest fires. Nothing else

mattered, neither the good nor the bad, or what might have seemed so before she knew him. He had caught

her up and carried her away into a new world, from which, at stated hours, the ghost of her came back to

perform certain customary acts, but all so thinly and insubstantially that she sometimes wondered that the

Behind the swarthy Mountain the sun had gone down in waveless gold. From a pasture up the slope a tinkle

of cowbells sounded; a puff of smoke hung over the farm in the valley, trailed on the pure air and was gone.

For a few minutes, in the clear light that is all shadow, fields and woods were outlined with an unreal

precision; then the twilight blotted them out, and the little house turned gray and spectral under its wizened

Charity's heart contracted. The first fall of night after a day of radiance often gave her a sense of hidden

menace: it was like looking out over the world as it would be when love had gone from it. She wondered if

His bicyclebell sounded down the lane, and in a minute she was at the gate and his eyes were laughing in

hers. They walked back through the long grass, and pushed open the door behind the house. The room at first

seemed quite dark and they had to grope their way in hand in hand. Through the windowframe the sky

looked light by contrast, and above the black mass of asters in the earthen jar one white star glimmered like a

"There was such a lot to do at the last minute," Harney was explaining, "and I had to drive down to Creston to

He had his arms about her, and his kisses were in her hair and on her lips. Under his touch things deep down

in her struggled to the light and sprang up like flowers in sunshine. She twisted her fingers into his, and they

sat down side by side on the improvised couch. She hardly heard his excuses for being late: in his absence a

thousand doubts tormented her, but as soon as he appeared she ceased to wonder where he had come from,

what had delayed him, who had kept him from her. It seemed as if the places he had been in, and the people

he had been with, must cease to exist when he left them, just as her own life was suspended in his absence.

He continued, now, to talk to her volubly and gaily, deploring his lateness, grumbling at the demands on his

time, and goodhumouredly mimicking Miss Hatchard's benevolent agitation. "She hurried off Miles to ask

Mr. Royall to speak at the Town Hall tomorrow: I didn't know till it was done." Charity was silent, and he

Charity made no answer: She did not care what part her guardian played in the morrow's ceremonies. Like all

the other figures peopling her meagre world he had grown nonexistent to her. She had even put off hating

"Tomorrow I shall only see you from far off," Harney continued. "But in the evening there'll be the dance in

Any other girl? Were there any others? She had forgotten even that peril, so enclosed did he and she seem in

He pushed the hair from her forehead, bending her face back, as his way was, and leaning over so that his

head loomed black between her eyes and the paleness of the sky, in which the white star floated...

Side by side they sped back along the dark woodroad to the village. A late moon was rising, full orbed and

fiery, turning the mountain ranges from fluid gray to a massive blackness, and making the upper sky so light

that the stars looked as faint as their own reflections in water. At the edge of the wood, half a mile from North

Dormer, Harney jumped from his bicycle, took Charity in his arms for a last kiss, and then waited while she

They were later than usual, and instead of taking the bicycle to the library she propped it against the back of

the woodshed and entered the kitchen of the red house. Verena sat there alone; when Charity came in she

looked at her with mild impenetrable eyes and then took a plate and a glass of milk from the shelf and set

them silently on the table. Charity nodded her thanks, and sitting down, fell hungrily upon her piece of pie

and emptied the glass. Her face burned with her quick flight through the night, and her eyes were dazzled by

the twinkle of the kitchen lamp. She felt like a nightbird suddenly caught and caged.

Charity took no notice. Her soul was still winging through the forest. She washed her plate and tumbler, and

then felt her way up the dark stairs. When she opened her door a wonder arrested her. Before going out she

had closed her shutters against the afternoon heat, but they had swung partly open, and a bar of moonlight,

crossing the room, rested on her bed and showed a dress of China silk laid out on it in virgin whiteness.

Charity had spent more than she could afford on the dress, which was to surpass those of all the other girls;

she had wanted to let North Dormer see that she was worthy of Harney's admiration. Above the dress, folded

on the pillow, was the white veil which the young women who took part in the exercises were to wear under a

wreath of asters; and beside the veil a pair of slim white satin shoes that Ally had produced from an old trunk

Charity stood gazing at all the outspread whiteness. It recalled a vision that had come to her in the night after

her first meeting with Harney. She no longer had such visions...warmer splendours had displaced them...but it

was stupid of Ally to have paraded all those white things on her bed, exactly as Hattie Targatt's wedding

dress from Springfield had been spread out for the neighbours to see when she married Tom Fry....

Charity took up the satin shoes and looked at them curiously. By day, no doubt, they would appear a little

worn, but in the moonlight they seemed carved of ivory. She sat down on the floor to try them on, and they

fitted her perfectly, though when she stood up she lurched a little on the high heels. She looked down at her

feet, which the graceful mould of the slippers had marvellously arched and narrowed. She had never seen

such shoes before, even in the shopwindows at Nettleton...never, except...yes, once, she had noticed a pair

A blush of mortification swept over her. Ally sometimes sewed for Miss Balch when that brilliant being

descended on North Dormer, and no doubt she picked up presents of castoff clothing: the treasures in the

mysterious trunk all came from the people she worked for; there could be no doubt that the white slippers

As she stood there, staring down moodily at her feet, she heard the triple clickclickclick of a bicycle bell

under her window. It was Harney's secret signal as he passed on his way home. She stumbled to the window

on her high heels, flung open the shutters and leaned out. He waved to her and sped by, his black shadow

dancing merrily ahead of him down the empty moonlit road; and she leaned there watching him till he

THE Town Hall was crowded and exceedingly hot. As Charity marched into it third in the white muslin file

headed by Orma Fry, she was conscious mainly of the brilliant effect of the wreathed columns framing the

greencarpeted stage toward which she was moving; and of the unfamiliar faces turning from the front rows

But it was all a bewildering blur of eyes and colours till she found herself standing at the back of the stage,

her great bunch of asters and goldenrod held well in front of her, and answering the nervous glance of

Lambert Sollas, the organist from Mr. Miles's church, who had come up from Nettleton to play the

harmonium and sat behind it, his conductor's eye running over the fluttered girls.

A moment later Mr. Miles, pink and twinkling, emerged from the background, as if buoyed up on his broad

white gown, and briskly dominated the bowed heads in the front rows. He prayed energetically and briefly

and then retired, and a fierce nod from Lambert Sollas warned the girls that they were to follow at once with

"Home, Sweet Home." It was a joy to Charity to sing: it seemed as though, for the first time, her secret

rapture might burst from her and flash its defiance at the world. All the glow in her blood, the breath of the

summer earth, the rustle of the forest, the fresh call of birds at sunrise, and the brooding midday languors,

seemed to pass into her untrained voice, lifted and led by the sustaining chorus.

And then suddenly the song was over, and after an uncertain pause, during which Miss Hatchard's pearl

grey gloves started a furtive signalling down the hall, Mr. Royall, emerging in turn, ascended the steps of the

stage and appeared behind the flowerwreathed desk. He passed close to Charity, and she noticed that his

gravely set face wore the look of majesty that used to awe and fascinate her childhood. His frockcoat had

been carefully brushed and ironed, and the ends of his narrow black tie were so nearly even that the tying

must have cost him a protracted struggle. His appearance struck her all the more because it was the first time

she had looked him full in the face since the night at Nettleton, and nothing in his grave and impressive

He stood a moment behind the desk, resting his finger tips against it, and bending slightly toward his

At first she paid no heed to what he was saying: only fragments of sentences, sonorous quotations, allusions

to illustrious men, including the obligatory tribute to Honorius Hatchard, drifted past her inattentive ears. She

was trying to discover Harney among the notable people in the front row; but he was nowhere near Miss

Hatchard, who, crowned by a pearlgrey hat that matched her gloves, sat just below the desk, supported by

Mrs. Miles and an importantlooking unknown lady. Charity was near one end of the stage, and from where

she sat the other end of the first row of seats was cut off by the screen of foliage masking the harmonium. The

effort to see Harney around the corner of the screen, or through its interstices, made her unconscious of

everything else; but the effort was unsuccessful, and gradually she found her attention arrested by her

She had never heard him speak in public before, but she was familiar with the rolling music of his voice when

he read aloud, or held forth to the selectmen about the stove at Carrick Fry's. Today his inflections were

richer and graver than she had ever known them: he spoke slowly, with pauses that seemed to invite his

hearers to silent participation in his thought; and Charity perceived a light of response in their faces.

He was nearing the end of his address..."Most of you," he said, "most of you who have returned here today, to

take contact with this little place for a brief hour, have come only on a pious pilgrimage, and will go back

presently to busy cities and lives full of larger duties. But that is not the only way of coming back to North

Dormer. Some of us, who went out from here in our youth...went out, like you, to busy cities and larger

duties...have come back in another waycome back for good. I am one of those, as many of you know...."

He paused, and there was a sense of suspense in the listening hall. "My history is without interest, but it has

its lesson: not so much for those of you who have already made your lives in other places, as for the young

men who are perhaps planning even now to leave these quiet hills and go down into the struggle. Things they

cannot foresee may send some of those young men back some day to the little township and the old

homestead: they may come back for good...." He looked about him, and repeated gravely: "For GOOD.

There's the point I want to make...North Dormer is a poor little place, almost lost in a mighty landscape:

perhaps, by this time, it might have been a bigger place, and more in scale with the landscape, if those who

had to come back had come with that feeling in their mindsthat they wanted to come back for GOOD...and

"Gentlemen, let us look at things as they are. Some of us have come back to our native town because we'd

failed to get on elsewhere. One way or other, things had gone wrong with us...what we'd dreamed of hadn't

come true. But the fact that we had failed elsewhere is no reason why we should fail here. Our very

experiments in larger places, even if they were unsuccessful, ought to have helped us to make North Dormer

a larger place...and you young men who are preparing even now to follow the call of ambition, and turn your

back on the old homeswell, let me say this to you, that if ever you do come back to them it's worth while to

come back to them for their good....And to do that, you must keep on loving them while you're away from

them; and even if you come back against your willand thinking it's all a bitter mistake of Fate or

Providenceyou must try to make the best of it, and to make the best of your old town; and after a while

well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you my recipe for what it's worth; after a while, I believe you'll be able to

say, as I can say today: 'I'm glad I'm here.' Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is

He stopped, and a murmur of emotion and surprise ran through the audience. It was not in the least what they

had expected, but it moved them more than what they had expected would have moved them. "Hear, hear!" a

voice cried out in the middle of the hall. An outburst of cheers caught up the cry, and as they subsided

Charity heard Mr. Miles saying to someone near him: "That was a MAN talking" He wiped his

Mr. Royall had stepped back from the desk, and taken his seat in the row of chairs in front of the harmonium.

A dapper whitehaired gentlemana distant Hatchardsucceeded him behind the goldenrod, and began to

say beautiful things about the old oaken bucket, patient whitehaired mothers, and where the boys used to go

Suddenly Mr. Royall pushed back his seat, and one of the maple branches in front of the harmonium

collapsed with a crash. It uncovered the end of the first row and in one of the seats Charity saw Harney, and

in the next a lady whose face was turned toward him, and almost hidden by the brim of her drooping hat.

Charity did not need to see the face. She knew at a glance the slim figure, the fair hair heaped up under the

hat brim, the long pale wrinkled gloves with bracelets slipping over them. At the fall of the branch Miss

Balch turned her head toward the stage, and in her pretty thinlipped smile there lingered the reflection of

Someone came forward to replace the fallen branch, and Miss Balch and Harney were once more hidden. But

to Charity the vision of their two faces had blotted out everything. In a flash they had shown her the bare

reality of her situation. Behind the frail screen of her lover's caresses was the whole inscrutable mystery of

his life: his relations with other peoplewith other womenhis opinions, his prejudices, his principles, the

net of influences and interests and ambitions in which every man's life is entangled. Of all these she knew

nothing, except what he had told her of his architectural aspirations. She had always dimly guessed him to be

in touch with important people, involved in complicated relationsbut she felt it all to be so far beyond her

understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts. In the

foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his

shortsighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her down into them; and, above all,

Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the unknown, and whispering to another girl things

that provoked the same smile of mischievous complicity he had so often called to her own lips. The feeling

possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too sure of his love. It was rather a terror of the unknown, of

all the mysterious attractions that must even now be dragging him away from her, and of her own

She had given him all she hadbut what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood

now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all

The heat had grown suffocatingshe felt it descend on her in smothering waves, and the faces in the

crowded hall began to dance like the pictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton. For an instant Mr. Royall's

countenance detached itself from the general blur. He had resumed his place in front of the harmonium, and

sat close to her, his eyes on her face; and his look seemed to pierce to the very centre of her confused

sensations....A feeling of physical sickness rushed over herand then deadly apprehension. The light of the

She forced herself to look away from her guardian, and became aware that the oratory of the Hatchard cousin

had ceased, and that Mr. Miles was again flapping his wings. Fragments of his peroration floated through her

bewildered brain...."A rich harvest of hallowed memories....A sanctified hour to which, in moments of trial,

your thoughts will prayerfully return....And now, O Lord, let us humbly and fervently give thanks for this

blessed day of reunion, here in the old home to which we have come back from so far. Preserve it to us, O

Lord, in times to come, in all its homely sweetnessin the kindliness and wisdom of its old people, in the

courage and industry of its young men, in the piety and purity of this group of innocent girls" He

flapped a white wing in their direction, and at the same moment Lambert Sollas, with his fierce nod, struck

the opening bars of "Auld Lang Syne."...Charity stared straight ahead of her and then, dropping her flowers,

NORTH DORMER'S celebration naturally included the villages attached to its township, and the festivities

were to radiate over the whole group, from Dormer and the two Crestons to Hamblin, the lonely hamlet on

the north slope of the Mountain where the first snow always fell. On the third day there were speeches and

ceremonies at Creston and Creston River; on the fourth the principal performers were to be driven in buck

It was on the fourth day that Charity returned for the first time to the little house. She had not seen Harney

alone since they had parted at the wood's edge the night before the celebrations began. In the interval she had

passed through many moods, but for the moment the terror which had seized her in the Town Hall had faded

to the edge of consciousness. She had fainted because the hall was stiflingly hot, and because the speakers

had gone on and on....Several other people had been affected by the heat, and had had to leave before the

exercises were over. There had been thunder in the air all the afternoon, and everyone said afterward that

At the dance that eveningwhere she had gone reluctantly, and only because she feared to stay away, she

had sprung back into instant reassurance. As soon as she entered she had seen Harney waiting for her, and he

had come up with kind gay eyes, and swept her off in a waltz. Her feet were full of music, and though her

only training had been with the village youths she had no difficulty in tuning her steps to his. As they circled

about the floor all her vain fears dropped from her, and she even forgot that she was probably dancing in

When the waltz was over Harney, with a last handclasp, left her to meet Miss Hatchard and Miss Balch,

who were just entering. Charity had a moment of anguish as Miss Balch appeared; but it did not last. The

triumphant fact of her own greater beauty, and of Harney's sense of it, swept her apprehensions aside. Miss

Balch, in an unbecoming dress, looked sallow and pinched, and Charity fancied there was a worried

expression in her palelashed eyes. She took a seat near Miss Hatchard and it was presently apparent that she

did not mean to dance. Charity did not dance often either. Harney explained to her that Miss Hatchard had

begged him to give each of the other girls a turn; but he went through the form of asking Charity's permission

each time he led one out, and that gave her a sense of secret triumph even completer than when she was

She was thinking of all this as she waited for him in the deserted house. The late afternoon was sultry, and

she had tossed aside her hat and stretched herself at full length on the Mexican blanket because it was cooler

indoors than under the trees. She lay with her arms folded beneath her head, gazing out at the shaggy

shoulder of the Mountain. The sky behind it was full of the splintered glories of the descending sun, and

before long she expected to hear Harney's bicyclebell in the lane. He had bicycled to Hamblin, instead of

driving there with his cousin and her friends, so that he might be able to make his escape earlier and stop on

the way back at the deserted house, which was on the road to Hamblin. They had smiled together at the joke

of hearing the crowded buckboards roll by on the return, while they lay close in their hiding above the road.

Nevertheless she had not wholly forgotten the vision of fear that had opened before her in the Town Hall. The

sense of lastingness was gone from her and every moment with Harney would now be ringed with doubt.

The Mountain was turning purple against a fiery sunset from which it seemed to be divided by a knifeedge

of quivering light; and above this wall of flame the whole sky was a pure pale green, like some cold mountain

lake in shadow. Charity lay gazing up at it, and watching for the first white star....

Her eyes were still fixed on the upper reaches of the sky when she became aware that a shadow had flitted

across the gloryflooded room: it must have been Harney passing the window against the sunset....She half

raised herself, and then dropped back on her folded arms. The combs had slipped from her hair, and it trailed

in a rough dark rope across her breast. She lay quite still, a sleepy smile on her lips, her indolent lids half

shut. There was a fumbling at the padlock and she called out: "Have you slipped the chain?" The door

She started up, sitting back against the cushions, and they looked at each other without speaking. Then Mr.

The last glare of the sunset was on her guardian's face, which looked ashcoloured in the yellow radiance.

She had become conscious of the hair hanging loose across her breast, and it seemed as though she could not

speak to him till she had set herself in order. She groped for her comb, and tried to fasten up the coil. Mr.

He had glanced away, and stood looking curiously about the illuminated room. Purple asters and red maple

leaves filled the jar on the table; on a shelf against the wall stood a lamp, the kettle, a little pile of cups and

His tone was quiet and controlled, and the fact disconcerted her. She had been ready to give him violence for

violence, but this calm acceptance of things as they were left her without a weapon.

"See here, Charityyou're always telling me I've got no rights over you. There might be two ways of

looking at thatbut I ain't going to argue it. All I know is I raised you as good as I could, and meant fairly

by you always except once, for a bad halfhour. There's no justice in weighing that halfhour against the rest,

and you know it. If you hadn't, you wouldn't have gone on living under my roof. Seems to me the fact of your

doing that gives me some sort of a right; the right to try and keep you out of trouble. I'm not asking you to

She listened in silence, and then gave a slight laugh. "Better wait till I'm in trouble," she said. He paused a

He turned away slowly, but as he did so the thing she had been waiting for happened; the door opened again

He stopped short with a face of astonishment, and then, quickly controlling himself, went up to Mr. Royall

"Have you come to see me, sir?" he said coolly, throwing his cap on the table with an air of proprietorship.

Mr. Royall again looked slowly about the room; then his eyes turned to the young man.

Harney laughed: "Wellas much as it's anybody's. I come here to sketch occasionally."

There was an immense and oppressive silence. Charity, quivering with anger, started forward, and then stood

silent, too humbled for speech. Harney's eyes had dropped under the old man's gaze; but he raised them

presently, and looking steadily at Mr. Royall, said: "Miss Royall is not a child. Isn't it rather absurd to talk of

her as if she were? I believe she considers herself free to come and go as she pleases, without any questions

from anyone." He paused and added: "I'm ready to answer any she wishes to ask me."

Mr. Royall turned to her. "Ask him when he's going to marry you, then" There was another silence, and

he laughed in his turna broken laugh, with a scraping sound in it. "You darsn't!" he shouted out with

sudden passion. He went close up to Charity, his right arm lifted, not in menace but in tragic exhortation.

"You darsn't, and you know itand you know why!" He swung back again upon the young man. "And you

know why you ain't asked her to marry you, and why you don't mean to. It's because you hadn't need to; nor

any other man either. I'm the only one that was fool enough not to know that; and I guess nobody'll repeat my

mistakenot in Eagle County, anyhow. They all know what she is, and what she came from. They all know

her mother was a woman of the town from Nettleton, that followed one of those Mountain fellows up to his

place and lived there with him like a heathen. I saw her there sixteen years ago, when I went to bring this

child down. I went to save her from the kind of life her mother was leadingbut I'd better have left her in the

kennel she came from...." He paused and stared darkly at the two young people, and out beyond them, at the

menacing Mountain with its rim of fire; then he sat down beside the table on which they had so often spread

their rustic supper, and covered his face with his hands. Harney leaned in the window, a frown on his face: he

was twirling between his fingers a small package that dangled from a loop of string....Charity heard Mr.

Royall draw a hard breath or two, and his shoulders shook a little. Presently he stood up and walked across

the room. He did not look again at the young people: they saw him feel his way to the door and fumble for

After he had gone there was a long silence. Charity waited for Harney to speak; but he seemed at first not to

find anything to say. At length he broke out irrelevantly: "I wonder how he found out?"

She made no answer and he tossed down the package he had been holding, and went up to her.

She waited to be caught into his arms, but he turned away from her irresolutely. The last glow was gone from

behind the Mountain. Everything in the room had turned grey and indistinct, and an autumnal dampness crept

up from the hollow below the orchard, laying its cold touch on their flushed faces. Harney walked the length

She sat down beside him, and he untied the string about the package and spread out a pile of sandwiches.

"I stole them from the lovefeast at Hamblin," he said with a laugh, pushing them over to her. She laughed

"Oh, wellit's too late to boil the water now." He said nothing more, and sitting opposite to each other they

went on silently eating the sandwiches. Darkness had descended in the little room, and Harney's face was a

dim blur to Charity. Suddenly he leaned across the table and laid his hand on hers.

"I shall have to go off for a whilea month or two, perhapsto arrange some things; and then I'll come

His voice seemed like a stranger's: nothing was left in it of the vibrations she knew. Her hand lay inertly

under his, and she left it there, and raised her head, trying to answer him. But the words died in her throat.

They sat motionless, in their attitude of confident endearment, as if some strange death had surprised them.

At length Harney sprang to his feet with a slight shiver. "God! it's dampwe couldn't have come here much

longer." He went to the shelf, took down a tin candlestick and lit the candle; then he propped an unhinged

shutter against the empty window frame and put the candle on the table. It threw a queer shadow on his

"But it's been good, though, hasn't it, Charity?...What's the matterwhy do you stand there staring at me?

Haven't the days here been good?" He went up to her and caught her to his breast. "And there'll be

He turned her head back, feeling for the curve of her throat below the ear, and kissing here there, and on the

hair and eyes and lips. She clung to him desperately, and as he drew her to his knees on the couch she felt as

Harney was to leave the next morning early. He asked Charity to say nothing of their plans till his return, and,

strangely even to herself, she was glad of the postponement. A leaden weight of shame hung on her,

benumbing every other sensation, and she bade him good bye with hardly a sign of emotion. His reiterated

promises to return seemed almost wounding. She had no doubt that he intended to come back; her doubts

Since the fanciful vision of the future that had flitted through her imagination at their first meeting she had

hardly ever thought of his marrying her. She had not had to put the thought from her mind; it had not been

there. If ever she looked ahead she felt instinctively that the gulf between them was too deep, and that the

bridge their passion had flung across it was as insubstantial as a rainbow. But she seldom looked ahead; each

day was so rich that it absorbed her....Now her first feeling was that everything would be different, and that

she herself would be a different being to Harney. Instead of remaining separate and absolute, she would be

compared with other people, and unknown things would be expected of her. She was too proud to be afraid,

Harney had not fixed any date for his return; he had said he would have to look about first, and settle things.

He had promised to write as soon as there was anything definite to say, and had left her his address, and

asked her to write also. But the address frightened her. It was in New York, at a club with a long name in

Fifth Avenue: it seemed to raise an insurmountable barrier between them. Once or twice, in the first days, she

got out a sheet of paper, and sat looking at it, and trying to think what to say; but she had the feeling that her

letter would never reach its destination. She had never written to anyone farther away than Hepburn.

Harney's first letter came after he had been gone about ten days. It was tender but grave, and bore no

resemblance to the gay little notes he had sent her by the freckled boy from Creston River. He spoke

positively of his intention of coming back, but named no date, and reminded Charity of their agreement that

their plans should not be divulged till he had had time to "settle things." When that would be he could not yet

She read the letter with a strange sense of its coming from immeasurable distances and having lost most of its

meaning on the way; and in reply she sent him a coloured postcard of Creston Falls, on which she wrote:

"With love from Charity." She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that

in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could

not help it. She could not forget that he had never spoken to her of marriage till Mr. Royall had forced the

word from his lips; though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had

lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.

She had not seen Mr. Royall on her return to the red house. The morning after her parting from Harney, when

she came down from her room, Verena told her that her guardian had gone off to Worcester and Portland. It

was the time of year when he usually reported to the insurance agencies he represented, and there was

nothing unusual in his departure except its suddenness. She thought little about him, except to be glad he was

She kept to herself for the first days, while North Dormer was recovering from its brief plunge into publicity,

and the subsiding agitation left her unnoticed. But the faithful Ally could not be long avoided. For the first

few days after the close of the Old Home Week festivities Charity escaped her by roaming the hills all day

when she was not at her post in the library; but after that a period of rain set in, and one pouring afternoon,

Ally, sure that she would find her friend indoors, came around to the red house with her sewing.

The two girls sat upstairs in Charity's room. Charity, her idle hands in her lap, was sunk in a kind of leaden

dream, through which she was only halfconscious of Ally, who sat opposite her in a low rushbottomed

chair, her work pinned to her knee, and her thin lips pursed up as she bent above it.

"It was my idea running a ribbon through the gauging," she said proudly, drawing back to contemplate the

blouse she was trimming. "It's for Miss Balch: she was awfully pleased." She paused and then added, with a

queer tremor in her piping voice: "I darsn't have told her I got the idea from one I saw on Julia."

Ally reddened, as if the allusion had escaped her unintentionally. "Oh, it was a long time ago I seen her with

Silence fell again, and Ally presently continued: "Miss Balch left me a whole lot of things to do over this

"Didn't you know? She went off the morning after they had the celebration at Hamblin. I seen her drive by

There was another silence, measured by the steady tick of the rain against the window, and, at intervals, by

Ally gave a meditative laugh. "Do you know what she told me before she went away? She told me she was

going to send for me to come over to Springfield and make some things for her wedding."

Charity again lifted her heavy lids and stared at Ally's pale pointed face, which moved to and fro above her

Ally let the blouse sink to her knee, and sat gazing at it. Her lips seemed suddenly dry, and she moistened

Ally did not answer. She bent above the blouse, and began picking out a basting thread with the point of the

"If all the people got married that folks say are going to you'd have your time full making wedding dresses,"

"That's so....I only know I seen her crying the night of the party because her dress didn't set right. That was

Charity stood absently gazing down at the lacy garment on Ally's knee. Abruptly she stooped and snatched it

"Well, I guess she won't dance in this either," she said with sudden violence; and grasping the blouse in her

"Oh, Charity" Ally cried, springing up. For a long interval the two girls faced each other across the

"Oh, what'll I say to her? What'll I do? It was real lace!" she wailed between her piping sobs.

Charity glared at her unrelentingly. "You'd oughtn't to have brought it here," she said, breathing quickly. "I

hate other people's clothesit's just as if they was there themselves." The two stared at each other again over

this avowal, till Charity brought out, in a gasp of anguish: "Oh, gogogoor I'll hate you too...."

The long storm was followed by a northwest gale, and when it was over, the hills took on their first umber

tints, the sky grew more densely blue, and the big white clouds lay against the hills like snowbanks. The

first crisp mapleleaves began to spin across Miss Hatchard's lawn, and the Virginia creeper on the Memorial

splashed the white porch with scarlet. It was a golden triumphant September. Day by day the flame of the

Virginia creeper spread to the hillsides in wider waves of carmine and crimson, the larches glowed like the

thin yellow halo about a fire, the maples blazed and smouldered, and the black hemlocks turned to indigo

The nights were cold, with a dry glitter of stars so high up that they seemed smaller and more vivid.

Sometimes, as Charity lay sleepless on her bed through the long hours, she felt as though she were bound to

those wheeling fires and swinging with them around the great black vault. At night she planned many

things...it was then she wrote to Harney. But the letters were never put on paper, for she did not know how to

express what she wanted to tell him. So she waited. Since her talk with Ally she had felt sure that Harney was

engaged to Annabel Balch, and that the process of "settling things" would involve the breaking of this tie.

Her first rage of jealousy over, she felt no fear on this score. She was still sure that Harney would come back,

and she was equally sure that, for the moment at least, it was she whom he loved and not Miss Balch. Yet the

girl, no less, remained a rival, since she represented all the things that Charity felt herself most incapable of

understanding or achieving. Annabel Balch was, if not the girl Harney ought to marry, at least the kind of girl

it would be natural for him to marry. Charity had never been able to picture herself as his wife; had never

been able to arrest the vision and follow it out in its daily consequences; but she could perfectly imagine

The more she thought of these things the more the sense of fatality weighed on her: she felt the uselessness of

struggling against the circumstances. She had never known how to adapt herself; she could only break and

tear and destroy. The scene with Ally had left her stricken with shame at her own childish savagery. What

would Harney have thought if he had witnessed it? But when she turned the incident over in her puzzled mind

she could not imagine what a civilized person would have done in her place. She felt herself too unequally

At length this feeling moved her to sudden action. She took a sheet of letter paper from Mr. Royall's office,

and sitting by the kitchen lamp, one night after Verena had gone to bed, began her first letter to Harney. It

I want you should marry Annabel Balch if you promised to. I think maybe you were afraid I'd feel too bad

She posted the letter early the next morning, and for a few days her heart felt strangely light. Then she began

One day as she sat alone in the library pondering these things the walls of books began to spin around her,

and the rosewood desk to rock under her elbows. The dizziness was followed by a wave of nausea like that

she had felt on the day of the exercises in the Town Hall. But the Town Hall had been crowded and stiflingly

hot, and the library was empty, and so chilly that she had kept on her jacket. Five minutes before she had felt

perfectly well; and now it seemed as if she were going to die. The bit of lace at which she still languidly

worked dropped from her fingers, and the steel crochet hook clattered to the floor. She pressed her temples

hard between her damp hands, steadying herself against the desk while the wave of sickness swept over her.

Little by little it subsided, and after a few minutes she stood up, shaken and terrified, groped for her hat, and

stumbled out into the air. But the whole sunlit autumn whirled, reeled and roared around her as she dragged

As she approached the red house she saw a buggy standing at the door, and her heart gave a leap. But it was

only Mr. Royall who got out, his travellingbag in hand. He saw her coming, and waited in the porch. She

was conscious that he was looking at her intently, as if there was something strange in her appearance, and

she threw back her head with a desperate effort at ease. Their eyes met, and she said: "You back?" as if

nothing had happened, and he answered: "Yes, I'm back," and walked in ahead of her, pushing open the door

of his office. She climbed to her room, every step of the stairs holding her fast as if her feet were lined with

Two days later, she descended from the train at Nettleton, and walked out of the station into the dusty square.

The brief interval of cold weather was over, and the day was as soft, and almost as hot, as when she and

Harney had emerged on the same scene on the Fourth of July. In the square the same brokendown hacks and

carryalls stood drawn up in a despondent line, and the lank horses with flynets over their withers swayed

their heads drearily to and fro. She recognized the staring signs over the eatinghouses and billiard saloons,

and the long lines of wires on lofty poles tapering down the main street to the park at its other end. Taking the

way the wires pointed, she went on hastily, with bent head, till she reached a wide transverse street with a

brick building at the corner. She crossed this street and glanced furtively up at the front of the brick building;

then she returned, and entered a door opening on a flight of steep brassrimmed stairs. On the second landing

she rang a bell, and a mulatto girl with a bushy head and a frilled apron let her into a hall where a stuffed fox

on his hind legs proffered a brass cardtray to visitors. At the back of the hall was a glazed door marked:

"Office." After waiting a few minutes in a handsomely furnished room, with plush sofas surmounted by large

goldframed photographs of showy young women, Charity was shown into the office....

When she came out of the glazed door Dr. Merkle followed, and led her into another room, smaller, and still

more crowded with plush and gold frames. Dr. Merkle was a plump woman with small bright eyes, an

immense mass of black hair coming down low on her forehead, and unnaturally white and even teeth. She

wore a rich black dress, with gold chains and charms hanging from her bosom. Her hands were large and

smooth, and quick in all their movements; and she smelt of musk and carbolic acid.

She smiled on Charity with all her faultless teeth. "Sit down, my dear. Wouldn't you like a little drop of

something to pick you up?...No....Well, just lay back a minute then....There's nothing to be done just yet; but

in about a month, if you'll step round again...I could take you right into my own house for two or three days,

and there wouldn't be a mite of trouble. Mercy me! The next time you'll know better'n to fret like this...."

Charity gazed at her with widening eyes. This woman with the false hair, the false teeth, the false murderous

smilewhat was she offering her but immunity from some unthinkable crime? Charity, till then, had been

conscious only of a vague selfdisgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to

her the grave surprise of motherhood. She had come to this dreadful place because she knew of no other way

of making sure that she was not mistaken about her state; and the woman had taken her for a miserable

creature like Julia....The thought was so horrible that she sprang up, white and shaking, one of her great

Dr. Merkle, still smiling, also rose. "Why do you run off in such a hurry? You can stretch out right here on

my sofa...." She paused, and her smile grew more motherly. "Afterwardsif there's been any talk at home,

and you want to get away for a while...I have a lady friend in Boston who's looking for a companion...you're

Charity had reached the door. "I don't want to stay. I don't want to come back here," she stammered, her hand

on the knob; but with a swift movement, Dr. Merkle edged her from the threshold.

Charity looked helplessly at the doctor's tight lips and rigid face. Her last savings had gone in repaying Ally

for the cost of Miss Balch's ruined blouse, and she had had to borrow four dollars from her friend to pay for

her railway ticket and cover the doctor's fee. It had never occurred to her that medical advice could cost more

Dr. Merkle gave a short laugh which did not show her teeth, and inquired with concision if Charity supposed

she ran the establishment for her own amusement? She leaned her firm shoulders against the door as she

"You say you'll come round and settle later? I've heard that pretty often too. Give me your address, and if you

can't pay me I'll send the bill to your folks....What? I can't understand what you say....That don't suit you

either? My, you're pretty particular for a girl that ain't got enough to settle her own bills...." She paused, and

fixed her eyes on the brooch with a blue stone that Charity had pinned to her blouse.

"Ain't you ashamed to talk that way to a lady that's got to earn her living, when you go about with jewellery

like that on you?...It ain't in my line, and I do it only as a favour...but if you're a mind to leave that brooch as

a pledge, I don't say no....Yes, of course, you can get it back when you bring me my money...."

On the way home, she felt an immense and unexpected quietude. It had been horrible to have to leave

Harney's gift in the woman's hands, but even at that price the news she brought away had not been too dearly

bought. She sat with halfclosed eyes as the train rushed through the familiar landscape; and now the

memories of her former journey, instead of flying before her like dead leaves, seemed to be ripening in her

blood like sleeping grain. She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed

to have grown suddenly clear and simple. She no longer had any difficulty in picturing herself as Harney's

wife now that she was the mother of his child; and compared to her sovereign right Annabel Balch's claim

That evening, at the gate of the red house, she found Ally waiting in the dusk. "I was down at the post office

just as they were closing up, and Will Targatt said there was a letter for you, so I brought it."

Ally held out the letter, looking at Charity with piercing sympathy. Since the scene of the torn blouse there

Charity snatched the letter with a laugh. "Oh, thank yougoodnight," she called out over her shoulder as

she ran up the path. If she had lingered a moment she knew she would have had Ally at her heels.

She hurried upstairs and felt her way into her dark room. Her hands trembled as she groped for the matches

and lit her candle, and the flap of the envelope was so closely stuck that she had to find her scissors and slit it

I have your letter, and it touches me more than I can say. Won't you trust me, in return, to do my best? There

are things it is hard to explain, much less to justify; but your generosity makes everything easier. All I can do

now is to thank you from my soul for understanding. Your telling me that you wanted me to do right has

helped me beyond expression. If ever there is a hope of realizing what we dreamed of you will see me back

She read the letter with a rush; then she went over and over it, each time more slowly and painstakingly. It

was so beautifully expressed that she found it almost as difficult to understand as the gentleman's explanation

of the Bible pictures at Nettleton; but gradually she became aware that the gist of its meaning lay in the last

But then he wasn't even sure of that? She understood now that every word and every reticence was an avowal

of Annabel Balch's prior claim. It was true that he was engaged to her, and that he had not yet found a way of

As she read the letter over Charity understood what it must have cost him to write it. He was not trying to

evade an importunate claim; he was honestly and contritely struggling between opposing duties. She did not

even reproach him in her thoughts for having concealed from her that he was not free: she could not see

anything more reprehensible in his conduct than in her own. From the first she had needed him more than he

had wanted her, and the power that had swept them together had been as far beyond resistance as a great gale

loosening the leaves of the forest....Only, there stood between them, fixed and upright in the general

Face to face with his admission of the fact, she sat staring at the letter. A cold tremor ran over her, and the

hard sobs struggled up into her throat and shook her from head to foot. For a while she was caught and tossed

on great waves of anguish that left her hardly conscious of anything but the blind struggle against their

assaults. Then, little by little, she began to relive, with a dreadful poignancy, each separate stage of her poor

romance. Foolish things she had said came back to her, gay answers Harney had made, his first kiss in the

darkness between the fireworks, their choosing the blue brooch together, the way he had teased her about the

letters she had dropped in her flight from the evangelist. All these memories, and a thousand others, hummed

through her brain till his nearness grew so vivid that she felt his fingers in her hair, and his warm breath on

her cheek as he bent her head back like a flower. These things were hers; they had passed into her blood, and

become a part of her, they were building the child in her womb; it was impossible to tear asunder strands of

The conviction gradually strengthened her, and she began to form in her mind the first words of the letter she

meant to write to Harney. She wanted to write it at once, and with feverish hands she began to rummage in

her drawer for a sheet of letter paper. But there was none left; she must go downstairs to get it. She had a

superstitious feeling that the letter must be written on the instant, that setting down her secret in words would

bring her reassurance and safety; and taking up her candle she went down to Mr. Royall's office.

At that hour she was not likely to find him there: he had probably had his supper and walked over to Carrick

Fry's. She pushed open the door of the unlit room, and the light of her lifted candle fell on his figure, seated

in the darkness in his highbacked chair. His arms lay along the arms of the chair, and his head was bent a

little; but he lifted it quickly as Charity entered. She started back as their eyes met, remembering that her own

were red with weeping, and that her face was livid with the fatigue and emotion of her journey. But it was too

He had risen from his chair, and came toward her with outstretched hands. The gesture was so unexpected

that she let him take her hands in his and they stood thus, without speaking, till Mr. Royall said gravely:

She freed herself abruptly and fell back. "Me? No" She set down the candle on his desk. "I wanted some

letterpaper, that's all." His face contracted, and the bushy brows jutted forward over his eyes. Without

answering he opened the drawer of the desk, took out a sheet of paper and an envelope, and pushed them

She nodded, and he gave her the stamp. As he did so she felt that he was looking at her intently, and she

knew that the candle light flickering up on her white face must be distorting her swollen features and

exaggerating the dark rings about her eyes. She snatched up the paper, her reassurance dissolving under his

pitiless gaze, in which she seemed to read the grim perception of her state, and the ironic recollection of the

day when, in that very room, he had offered to compel Harney to marry her. His look seemed to say that he

knew she had taken the paper to write to her lover, who had left her as he had warned her she would be left.

She remembered the scorn with which she had turned from him that day, and knew, if he guessed the truth,

what a list of old scores it must settle. She turned and fled upstairs; but when she got back to her room all the

If she could have gone to Harney it would have been different; she would only have had to show herself to let

his memories speak for her. But she had no money left, and there was no one from whom she could have

borrowed enough for such a journey. There was nothing to do but to write, and await his reply. For a long

time she sat bent above the blank page; but she found nothing to say that really expressed what she was

Harney had written that she had made it easier for him, and she was glad it was so; she did not want to make

things hard. She knew she had it in her power to do that; she held his fate in her hands. All she had to do was

to tell him the truth; but that was the very fact that held her back....Her five minutes face to face with Mr.

Royall had stripped her of her last illusion, and brought her back to North Dormer's point of view. Distinctly

and pitilessly there rose before her the fate of the girl who was married "to make things right." She had seen

too many village love stories end in that way. Poor Rose Coles's miserable marriage was of the number; and

what good had come of it for her or for Halston Skeff? They had hated each other from the day the minister

married them; and whenever old Mrs. Skeff had a fancy to humiliate her daughterinlaw she had only to

say: "Who'd ever think the baby's only two? And for a seven months' child ain't it a wonder what a size he

is?" North Dormer had treasures of indulgence for brands in the burning, but only derision for those who

succeeded in getting snatched from it; and Charity had always understood Julia Hawes's refusal to be

Onlywas there no alternative but Julia's? Her soul recoiled from the vision of the whitefaced woman

among the plush sofas and gilt frames. In the established order of things as she knew them she saw no place

She sat in her chair without undressing till faint grey streaks began to divide the black slats of the shutters.

Then she stood up and pushed them open, letting in the light. The coming of a new day brought a sharper

consciousness of ineluctable reality, and with it a sense of the need of action. She looked at herself in the

glass, and saw her face, white in the autumn dawn, with pinched cheeks and darkringed eyes, and all the

marks of her state that she herself would never have noticed, but that Dr. Merkle's diagnosis had made plain

to her. She could not hope that those signs would escape the watchful village; even before her figure lost its

Leaning from her window she looked out on the dark and empty scene; the ashen houses with shuttered

windows, the grey road climbing the slope to the hemlock belt above the cemetery, and the heavy mass of the

Mountain black against a rainy sky. To the east a space of light was broadening above the forest; but over that

also the clouds hung. Slowly her gaze travelled across the fields to the rugged curve of the hills. She had

looked out so often on that lifeless circle, and wondered if anything could ever happen to anyone who was

Almost without conscious thought her decision had been reached; as her eyes had followed the circle of the

hills her mind had also travelled the old round. She supposed it was something in her blood that made the

Mountain the only answer to her questioning, the inevitable escape from all that hemmed her in and beset her.

At any rate it began to loom against the rainy dawn; and the longer she looked at it the more clearly she

THE rain held off, and an hour later, when she started, wild gleams of sunlight were blowing across the

After Harney's departure she had returned her bicycle to its owner at Creston, and she was not sure of being

able to walk all the way to the Mountain. The deserted house was on the road; but the idea of spending the

night there was unendurable, and she meant to try to push on to Hamblin, where she could sleep under a

wood shed if her strength should fail her. Her preparations had been made with quiet forethought. Before

starting she had forced herself to swallow a glass of milk and eat a piece of bread; and she had put in her

canvas satchel a little packet of the chocolate that Harney always carried in his bicycle bag. She wanted

above all to keep up her strength, and reach her destination without attracting notice....

Mile by mile she retraced the road over which she had so often flown to her lover. When she reached the turn

where the woodroad branched off from the Creston highway she remembered the Gospel tentlong since

folded up and transplantedand her start of involuntary terror when the fat evangelist had said: "Your

Saviour knows everything. Come and confess your guilt." There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only a

desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and begin life again among people to whom the

harsh code of the village was unknown. The impulse did not shape itself in thought: she only knew she must

save her baby, and hide herself with it somewhere where no one would ever come to trouble them.

She walked on and on, growing more heavyfooted as the day advanced. It seemed a cruel chance that

compelled her to retrace every step of the way to the deserted house; and when she came in sight of the

orchard, and the silvergray roof slanting crookedly through the laden branches, her strength failed her and

she sat down by the roadside. She sat there a long time, trying to gather the courage to start again, and walk

past the broken gate and the untrimmed rosebushes strung with scarlet hips. A few drops of rain were

falling, and she thought of the warm evenings when she and Harney had sat embraced in the shadowy room,

and the noise of summer showers on the roof had rustled through their kisses. At length she understood that if

she stayed any longer the rain might compel her to take shelter in the house overnight, and she got up and

walked on, averting her eyes as she came abreast of the white gate and the tangled garden.

The hours wore on, and she walked more and more slowly, pausing now and then to rest, and to eat a little

bread and an apple picked up from the roadside. Her body seemed to grow heavier with every yard of the

way, and she wondered how she would be able to carry her child later, if already he laid such a burden on

her....A fresh wind had sprung up, scattering the rain and blowing down keenly from the mountain. Presently

the clouds lowered again, and a few white darts struck her in the face: it was the first snow falling over

Hamblin. The roofs of the lonely village were only half a mile ahead, and she was resolved to push beyond it,

and try to reach the Mountain that night. She had no clear plan of action, except that, once in the settlement,

she meant to look for Liff Hyatt, and get him to take her to her mother. She herself had been born as her own

baby was going to be born; and whatever her mother's subsequent life had been, she could hardly help

remembering the past, and receiving a daughter who was facing the trouble she had known.

Suddenly the deadly faintness came over her once more and she sat down on the bank and leaned her head

against a treetrunk. The long road and the cloudy landscape vanished from her eyes, and for a time she

seemed to be circling about in some terrible wheeling darkness. Then that too faded.

She opened her eyes, and saw a buggy drawn up beside her, and a man who had jumped down from it and

was gazing at her with a puzzled face. Slowly consciousness came back, and she saw that the man was Liff

She was dimly aware that he was asking her something, and she looked at him in silence, trying to find

strength to speak. At length her voice stirred in her throat, and she said in a whisper: "I'm going up the

"Up the Mountain?" he repeated, drawing aside a little; and as he moved she saw behind him, in the buggy, a

heavily coated figure with a familiar pink face and gold spectacles on the bridge of a Grecian nose.

"Charity! What on earth are you doing here?" Mr. Miles exclaimed, throwing the reins on the horse's back

Then Mr. Miles said: "You look ill, my dear, and it's a long way. Do you think it's wise?"

A vague mirthless grin contracted Liff Hyatt's face, and Mr. Miles again spoke uncertainly. "You know,

Mr. Miles was examining her thoughtfully. She fancied she saw a change in his expression, and the blood

He laid his hand on her arm. "My child, your mother is dying. Liff Hyatt came down to fetch me....Get in and

He helped her up to the seat at his side, Liff Hyatt clambered in at the back, and they drove off toward

Hamblin. At first Charity had hardly grasped what Mr. Miles was saying; the physical relief of finding herself

seated in the buggy, and securely on her road to the Mountain, effaced the impression of his words. But as her

head cleared she began to understand. She knew the Mountain had but the most infrequent intercourse with

the valleys; she had often enough heard it said that no one ever went up there except the minister, when

someone was dying. And now it was her mother who was dying...and she would find herself as much alone

on the Mountain as anywhere else in the world. The sense of unescapable isolation was all she could feel for

the moment; then she began to wonder at the strangeness of its being Mr. Miles who had undertaken to

perform this grim errand. He did not seem in the least like the kind of man who would care to go up the

Mountain. But here he was at her side, guiding the horse with a firm hand, and bending on her the kindly

gleam of his spectacles, as if there were nothing unusual in their being together in such circumstances.

For a while she found it impossible to speak, and he seemed to understand this, and made no attempt to

question her. But presently she felt her tears rise and flow down over her drawn cheeks; and he must have

seen them too, for he laid his hand on hers, and said in a low voice: "Won't you tell me what is troubling

She shook her head, and he did not insist: but after a while he said, in the same low tone, so that they should

not be overheard: "Charity, what do you know of your childhood, before you came down to North Dormer?"

She controlled herself, and answered: "Nothing only what I heard Mr. Royall say one day. He said he brought

Mr. Miles was silent again, then he said: "I'm glad you're coming with me now. Perhaps we may find your

They had reached Hamblin, where the snowflurry had left white patches in the rough grass on the roadside,

and in the angles of the roofs facing north. It was a poor bleak village under the granite flank of the

Mountain, and as soon as they left it they began to climb. The road was steep and full of ruts, and the horse

settled down to a walk while they mounted and mounted, the world dropping away below them in great

Charity had often had visions of this ascent of the Mountain but she had not known it would reveal so wide a

country, and the sight of those strange lands reaching away on every side gave her a new sense of Harney's

remoteness. She knew he must be miles and miles beyond the last range of hills that seemed to be the

outmost verge of things, and she wondered how she had ever dreamed of going to New York to find him....

As the road mounted the country grew bleaker, and they drove across fields of faded mountain grass bleached

by long months beneath the snow. In the hollows a few white birches trembled, or a mountain ash lit its

scarlet clusters; but only a scant growth of pines darkened the granite ledges. The wind was blowing fiercely

across the open slopes; the horse faced it with bent head and straining flanks, and now and then the buggy

Mr. Miles had not spoken again; he seemed to understand that she wanted to be left alone. After a while the

track they were following forked, and he pulled up the horse, as if uncertain of the way. Liff Hyatt craned his

head around from the back, and shouted against the wind: "Left" and they turned into a stunted

A mile or two farther on they came out on a clearing where two or three low houses lay in stony fields,

crouching among the rocks as if to brace themselves against the wind. They were hardly more than sheds,

built of logs and rough boards, with tin stovepipes sticking out of their roofs. The sun was setting, and dusk

had already fallen on the lower world, but a yellow glare still lay on the lonely hillside and the crouching

houses. The next moment it faded and left the landscape in dark autumn twilight.

"Over there," Liff called out, stretching his long arm over Mr. Miles's shoulder. The clergyman turned to the

left, across a bit of bare ground overgrown with docks and nettles, and stopped before the most ruinous of the

sheds. A stovepipe reached its crooked arm out of one window, and the broken panes of the other were

In contrast to such a dwelling the brown house in the swamp might have stood for the home of plenty.

As the buggy drew up two or three mongrel dogs jumped out of the twilight with a great barking, and a young

man slouched to the door and stood there staring. In the twilight Charity saw that his face had the same

sodden look as Bash Hyatt's, the day she had seen him sleeping by the stove. He made no effort to silence the

dogs, but leaned in the door, as if roused from a drunken lethargy, while Mr. Miles got out of the buggy.

Mr. Miles turned to Charity. "Just hold the horse a minute, my dear: I'll go in first," he said, putting the reins

in her hands. She took them passively, and sat staring straight ahead of her at the darkening scene while Mr.

Miles and Liff Hyatt went up to the house. They stood a few minutes talking with the man in the door, and

then Mr. Miles came back. As he came close, Charity saw that his smooth pink face wore a frightened solemn

She got down and followed him while Liff led the horse away. As she approached the door she said to

herself: "This is where I was born...this is where I belong...." She had said it to herself often enough as she

looked across the sunlit valleys at the Mountain; but it had meant nothing then, and now it had become a

reality. Mr. Miles took her gently by the arm, and they entered what appeared to be the only room in the

house. It was so dark that she could just discern a group of a dozen people sitting or sprawling about a table

made of boards laid across two barrels. They looked up listlessly as Mr. Miles and Charity came in, and a

Mr. Miles paused and looked about him; then he turned to the young man who had met them at the door.

The young man, instead of answering, turned his head toward the group. "Where's the candle? I tole yer to

bring a candle," he said with sudden harshness to a girl who was lolling against the table. She did not answer,

Mr. Miles fumbled under his heavy wrappings and drew out a matchbox. He held a match to the candle, and

in a moment or two a faint circle of light fell on the pale aguish heads that started out of the shadow like the

"Mary's over there," someone said; and Mr. Miles, taking the bottle in his hand, passed behind the table.

Charity followed him, and they stood before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on

it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen across her squalid bed in a drunken

sleep, and to have been left lying where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung above

her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with

a ragged stocking rolled down about the ankle. The woman lay on her back, her eyes staring up unblinkingly

"She jus' dropped off," a woman said, over the shoulder of the others; and the young man added: "I jus' come

An elderly man with lank hair and a feeble grin pushed between them. "It was like this: I says to her on'y the

Someone pulled him back and sent him reeling against a bench along the wall, where he dropped down

There was a silence; then the young woman who had been lolling against the table suddenly parted the group,

and stood in front of Charity. She was healthier and robuster looking than the others, and her weather beaten

"Who's the girl? Who brought her here?" she said, fixing her eyes mistrustfully on the young man who had

"What? Her too?" the girl sneered; and the young man turned on her with an oath. "Shut your mouth, damn

you, or get out of here," he said; then he relapsed into his former apathy, and dropped down on the bench,

Mr. Miles had set the candle on the floor and taken off his heavy coat. He turned to Charity. "Come and help

He knelt down by the mattress, and pressed the lids over the dead woman's eyes. Charity, trembling and sick,

knelt beside him, and tried to compose her mother's body. She drew the stocking over the dreadful glistening

leg, and pulled the skirt down to the battered upturned boots. As she did so, she looked at her mother's face,

thin yet swollen, with lips parted in a frozen gasp above the broken teeth. There was no sign in it of anything

human: she lay there like a dead dog in a ditch Charity's hands grew cold as they touched her.

Mr. Miles drew the woman's arms across her breast and laid his coat over her. Then he covered her face with

his handkerchief, and placed the bottle with the candle in it at her head. Having done this he stood up.

There was a moment of bewildered silence; then the fierce girl spoke up. "You'd oughter brought it with you.

Mr. Miles, looking at the others, repeated: "Is it possible you have no coffin ready?"

"That's what I say: them that has it sleeps better," an old woman murmured. "But then she never had no

Mr. Miles turned away from them and moved a few steps apart. He had drawn a book from his pocket, and

after a pause he opened it and began to read, holding the book at arm's length and low down, so that the pages

caught the feeble light. Charity had remained on her knees by the mattress: now that her mother's face was

covered it was easier to stay near her, and avoid the sight of the living faces which too horribly showed by

"I am the Resurrection and the Life," Mr. Miles began; "he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet

shall he live....Though after my skin worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God...."

IN MY FLESH SHALL I SEE GOD! Charity thought of the gaping mouth and stony eyes under the

handkerchief, and of the glistening leg over which she had drawn the stocking....

There was a sudden muttering and a scuffle at the back of the group. "I brought the stove," said the elderly

man with lank hair, pushing his way between the others. "I wen' down to Creston'n bought it...n' I got a right

"Sit down, damn you!" shouted the tall youth who had been drowsing on the bench against the wall.

"For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who

"Well, it ARE his," a woman in the background interjected in a frightened whine.

The tall youth staggered to his feet. "If you don't hold your mouths I'll turn you all out o' here, the whole lot

of you," he cried with many oaths. "G'wan, minister...don't let 'em faze you...."

"Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the firstfruits of them that slept....Behold, I show you a

mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the

last trump....For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality. So when

this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and when this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall

be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in Victory...."

One by one the mighty words fell on Charity's bowed head, soothing the horror, subduing the tumult,

mastering her as they mastered the drinkdazed creatures at her back. Mr. Miles read to the last word, and

Liff Hyatt, who had come in while he was reading, nodded a "Yes," and pushed forward to the side of the

mattress. The young man on the bench who seemed to assert some sort of right of kinship with the dead

woman, got to his feet again, and the proprietor of the stove joined him. Between them they raised up the

mattress; but their movements were unsteady, and the coat slipped to the floor, revealing the poor body in its

helpless misery. Charity, picking up the coat, covered her mother once more. Liff had brought a lantern, and

the old woman who had already spoken took it up, and opened the door to let the little procession pass out.

The wind had dropped, and the night was very dark and bitterly cold. The old woman walked ahead, the

lantern shaking in her hand and spreading out before her a pale patch of dead grass and coarseleaved weeds

Mr. Miles took Charity by the arm, and side by side they walked behind the mattress. At length the old

woman with the lantern stopped, and Charity saw the light fall on the stooping shoulders of the bearers and

on a ridge of upheaved earth over which they were bending. Mr. Miles released her arm and approached the

hollow on the other side of the ridge; and while the men stooped down, lowering the mattress into the grave,

"Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery....He cometh up and is cut

down...he fleeth as it were a shadow....Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and merciful

"Easy there...is she down?" piped the claimant to the stove; and the young man called over his shoulder: "Lift

There was a pause, during which the light floated uncertainly over the open grave. Someone bent over and

pulled out Mr. Miles's coat("No, no leave the handkerchief," he interposed)and then Liff Hyatt,

"Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear

sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to

dust..." Liff's gaunt shoulders rose and bent in the lantern light as he dashed the clods of earth into the grave.

"Godit's froze a'ready," he muttered, spitting into his palm and passing his ragged shirt sleeve across his

"Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto His glorious body,

according to the mighty working, whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself..." The last spadeful

of earth fell on the vile body of Mary Hyatt, and Liff rested on his spade, his shoulder blades still heaving

"Lord, have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us..."

Mr. Miles took the lantern from the old woman's hand and swept its light across the circle of bleared faces.

"Now kneel down, all of you," he commanded, in a voice of authority that Charity had never heard. She knelt

down at the edge of the grave, and the others, stiffly and hesitatingly, got to their knees beside her. Mr. Miles

knelt, too. "And now pray with meyou know this prayer," he said, and he began: "Our Father which art in

Heaven..." One or two of the women falteringly took the words up, and when he ended, the lankhaired man

flung himself on the neck of the tall youth. "It was this way," he said. "I tole her the night before, I says to

Mr. Miles had been getting into his coat again. He came up to Charity, who had remained passively kneeling

Mr. Miles lowered his voice. "But it's not possibleyou don't know what you are doing. You can't stay

She shook her head and rose from her knees. The group about the grave had scattered in the darkness, but the

old woman with the lantern stood waiting. Her mournful withered face was not unkind, and Charity went up

"Have you got a place where I can lie down for the night?" she asked. Liff came up, leading the buggy out of

the night. He looked from one to the other with his feeble smile. "She's my mother. She'll take you home," he

said; and he added, raising his voice to speak to the old woman: "It's the girl from lawyer Royall'sMary's

The woman nodded and raised her sad old eyes to Charity's. When Mr. Miles and Liff clambered into the

buggy she went ahead with the lantern to show them the track they were to follow; then she turned back, and

CHARITY lay on the floor on a mattress, as her dead mother's body had lain. The room in which she lay was

cold and dark and lowceilinged, and even poorer and barer than the scene of Mary Hyatt's earthly

pilgrimage. On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt's mother slept on a blanket, with two

childrenher grandchildren, she saidrolled up against her like sleeping puppies. They had their thin

Through the small square of glass in the opposite wall Charity saw a deep funnel of sky, so black, so remote,

so palpitating with frosty stars that her very soul seemed to be sucked into it. Up there somewhere, she

supposed, the God whom Mr. Miles had invoked was waiting for Mary Hyatt to appear. What a long flight it

Charity's bewildered brain laboured with the attempt to picture her mother's past, and to relate it in any way

to the designs of a just but merciful God; but it was impossible to imagine any link between them. She herself

felt as remote from the poor creature she had seen lowered into her hastily dug grave as if the height of the

heavens divided them. She had seen poverty and misfortune in her life; but in a community where poor thrifty

Mrs. Hawes and the industrious Ally represented the nearest approach to destitution there was nothing to

As she lay there, halfstunned by her tragic initiation, Charity vainly tried to think herself into the life about

her. But she could not even make out what relationship these people bore to each other, or to her dead

mother; they seemed to be herded together in a sort of passive promiscuity in which their common misery

was the strongest link. She tried to picture to herself what her life would have been if she had grown up on

the Mountain, running wild in rags, sleeping on the floor curled up against her mother, like the pale faced

children huddled against old Mrs. Hyatt, and turning into a fierce bewildered creature like the girl who had

apostrophized her in such strange words. She was frightened by the secret affinity she had felt with this girl,

and by the light it threw on her own beginnings. Then she remembered what Mr. Royall had said in telling

her story to Lucius Harney: "Yes, there was a mother; but she was glad to have the child go. She'd have given

Well! after all, was her mother so much to blame? Charity, since that day, had always thought of her as

destitute of all human feeling; now she seemed merely pitiful. What mother would not want to save her child

from such a life? Charity thought of the future of her own child, and tears welled into her aching eyes, and

ran down over her face. If she had been less exhausted, less burdened with his weight, she would have sprung

The grim hours of the night dragged themselves slowly by, and at last the sky paled and dawn threw a cold

blue beam into the room. She lay in her corner staring at the dirty floor, the clothesline hung with decaying

rags, the old woman huddled against the cold stove, and the light gradually spreading across the wintry

world, and bringing with it a new day in which she would have to live, to choose, to act, to make herself a

place among these peopleor to go back to the life she had left. A mortal lassitude weighed on her. There

were moments when she felt that all she asked was to go on lying there unnoticed; then her mind revolted at

the thought of becoming one of the miserable herd from which she sprang, and it seemed as though, to save

her child from such a fate, she would find strength to travel any distance, and bear any burden life might put

Vague thoughts of Nettleton flitted through her mind. She said to herself that she would find some quiet place

where she could bear her child, and give it to decent people to keep; and then she would go out like Julia

Hawes and earn its living and hers. She knew that girls of that kind sometimes made enough to have their

children nicely cared for; and every other consideration disappeared in the vision of her baby, cleaned and

combed and rosy, and hidden away somewhere where she could run in and kiss it, and bring it pretty things to

wear. Anything, anything was better than to add another life to the nest of misery on the Mountain....

The old woman and the children were still sleeping when Charity rose from her mattress. Her body was stiff

with cold and fatigue, and she moved slowly lest her heavy steps should rouse them. She was faint with

hunger, and had nothing left in her satchel; but on the table she saw the half of a stale loaf. No doubt it was to

serve as the breakfast of old Mrs. Hyatt and the children; but Charity did not care; she had her own baby to

think of. She broke off a piece of the bread and ate it greedily; then her glance fell on the thin faces of the

sleeping children, and filled with compunction she rummaged in her satchel for something with which to pay

for what she had taken. She found one of the pretty chemises that Ally had made for her, with a blue ribbon

run through its edging. It was one of the dainty things on which she had squandered her savings, and as she

looked at it the blood rushed to her forehead. She laid the chemise on the table, and stealing across the floor

The morning was icy cold and a pale sun was just rising above the eastern shoulder of the Mountain. The

houses scattered on the hillside lay cold and smokeless under the sunflecked clouds, and not a human being

was in sight. Charity paused on the threshold and tried to discover the road by which she had come the night

before. Across the field surrounding Mrs. Hyatt's shanty she saw the tumbledown house in which she

supposed the funeral service had taken place. The trail ran across the ground between the two houses and

disappeared in the pinewood on the flank of the Mountain; and a little way to the right, under a wind

beaten thorn, a mound of fresh earth made a dark spot on the fawncoloured stubble. Charity walked across

the field to the ground. As she approached it she heard a bird's note in the still air, and looking up she saw a

brown songsparrow perched in an upper branch of the thorn above the grave. She stood a minute listening to

his small solitary song; then she rejoined the trail and began to mount the hill to the pinewood.

Thus far she had been impelled by the blind instinct of flight; but each step seemed to bring her nearer to the

realities of which her feverish vigil had given only a shadowy image. Now that she walked again in a daylight

world, on the way back to familiar things, her imagination moved more soberly. On one point she was still

decided: she could not remain at North Dormer, and the sooner she got away from it the better. But

As she continued to climb the air grew keener, and when she passed from the shelter of the pines to the open

grassy roof of the Mountain the cold wind of the night before sprang out on her. She bent her shoulders and

struggled on against it for a while; but presently her breath failed, and she sat down under a ledge of rock

overhung by shivering birches. From where she sat she saw the trail wandering across the bleached grass in

the direction of Hamblin, and the granite wall of the Mountain falling away to infinite distances. On that side

of the ridge the valleys still lay in wintry shadow; but in the plain beyond the sun was touching village roofs

Charity felt herself a mere speck in the lonely circle of the sky. The events of the last two days seemed to

have divided her forever from her short dream of bliss. Even Harney's image had been blurred by that

crushing experience: she thought of him as so remote from her that he seemed hardly more than a memory. In

her fagged and floating mind only one sensation had the weight of reality; it was the bodily burden of her

child. But for it she would have felt as rootless as the whiffs of thistledown the wind blew past her. Her child

was like a load that held her down, and yet like a hand that pulled her to her feet. She said to herself that she

Her eyes turned back to the trail across the top of the Mountain, and in the distance she saw a buggy against

the sky. She knew its antique outline, and the gaunt build of the old horse pressing forward with lowered

head; and after a moment she recognized the heavy bulk of the man who held the reins. The buggy was

following the trail and making straight for the pinewood through which she had climbed; and she knew at

once that the driver was in search of her. Her first impulse was to crouch down under the ledge till he had

passed; but the instinct of concealment was overruled by the relief of feeling that someone was near her in the

Mr. Royall saw her, and touched the horse with the whip. A minute or two later he was abreast of Charity;

their eyes met, and without speaking he leaned over and helped her up into the buggy.

She tried to speak, to stammer out some explanation, but no words came to her; and as he drew the cover over

her knees he simply said: "The minister told me he'd left you up here, so I come up for you."

He turned the horse's head, and they began to jog back toward Hamblin. Charity sat speechless, staring

straight ahead of her, and Mr. Royall occasionally uttered a word of encouragement to the horse: "Get along

there, Dan....I gave him a rest at Hamblin; but I brought him along pretty quick, and it's a stiff pull up here

As he spoke it occurred to her for the first time that to reach the top of the Mountain so early he must have

left North Dormer at the coldest hour of the night, and have travelled steadily but for the halt at Hamblin; and

she felt a softness at her heart which no act of his had ever produced since he had brought her the Crimson

After an interval he began again: "It was a day just like this, only spitting snow, when I come up here for you

the first time." Then, as if fearing that she might take his remark as a reminder of past benefits, he added

"Ho, there, Dan, step out," he muttered, jerking the bridle. "We ain't home yet.You cold?" he asked

She shook her head, but he drew the cover higher up, and stooped to tuck it in about the ankles. She

continued to look straight ahead. Tears of weariness and weakness were dimming her eyes and beginning to

They drove in silence, following the long loops of the descent upon Hamblin, and Mr. Royall did not speak

again till they reached the outskirts of the village. Then he let the reins droop on the dashboard and drew out

"Charity," he said, "you look fair done up, and North Dormer's a goodish way off. I've figured out that we'd

do better to stop here long enough for you to get a mouthful of breakfast and then drive down to Creston and

Mr. Royall, without answering, let the horse jog on till they reached the door of the first house in the village.

"This is old Mrs. Hobart's place," he said. "She'll give us something hot to drink."

Charity, half unconsciously, found herself getting out of the buggy and following him in at the open door.

They entered a decent kitchen with a fire crackling in the stove. An old woman with a kindly face was setting

out cups and saucers on the table. She looked up and nodded as they came in, and Mr. Royall advanced to the

"Well, Mrs. Hobart, you got any breakfast for this young lady? You can see she's cold and hungry."

Mrs. Hobart smiled on Charity and took a tin coffeepot from the fire. "My, you do look pretty mean," she

Charity reddened, and sat down at the table. A feeling of complete passiveness had once more come over her,

and she was conscious only of the pleasant animal sensations of warmth and rest.

Mrs. Hobart put bread and milk on the table, and then went out of the house: Charity saw her leading the

horse away to the barn across the yard. She did not come back, and Mr. Royall and Charity sat alone at the

table with the smoking coffee between them. He poured out a cup for her, and put a piece of bread in the

As the warmth of the coffee flowed through her veins her thoughts cleared and she began to feel like a living

being again; but the return to life was so painful that the food choked in her throat and she sat staring down at

After a while Mr. Royall pushed back his chair. "Now, then," he said, "if you're a mind to go along" She

did not move, and he continued: "We can pick up the noon train for Nettleton if you say so."

The words sent the blood rushing to her face, and she raised her startled eyes to his. He was standing on the

other side of the table looking at her kindly and gravely; and suddenly she understood what he was going to

"You and me have spoke some hard things to each other in our time, Charity; and there's no good that I can

see in any more talking now. But I'll never feel any way but one about you; and if you say so we'll drive

down in time to catch that train, and go straight to the minister's house; and when you come back home you'll

His voice had the grave persuasive accent that had moved his hearers at the Home Week festival; she had a

sense of depths of mournful tolerance under that easy tone. Her whole body began to tremble with the dread

She herself did not know: she was not sure if she was rejecting what he offered, or already struggling against

the temptation of taking what she no longer had a right to. She stood up, shaking and bewildered, and began

"I know I ain't been fair to you always; but I want to be now....I want you to know...I want..." Her voice failed

Mr. Royall leaned against the wall. He was paler than usual, but his face was composed and kindly and her

"What's all this about wanting?" he said as she paused. "Do you know what you really want? I'll tell you. You

"Ain't it?" He looked at his watch. "Well, I'll tell you another thing. All I want is to know if you'll marry me.

If there was anything else, I'd tell you so; but there ain't. Come to my age, a man knows the things that matter

His tone was so strong and resolute that it was like a supporting arm about her. She felt her resistance

"Don't cry, Charity," he exclaimed in a shaken voice. She looked up, startled at his emotion, and their eyes

"See here," he said gently, "old Dan's come a long distance, and we've got to let him take it easy the rest of

He picked up the cloak that had slipped to her chair and laid it about her shoulders. She followed him out of

the house, and then walked across the yard to the shed, where the horse was tied. Mr. Royall unblanketed him

and led him out into the road. Charity got into the buggy and he drew the cover about her and shook out the

reins with a cluck. When they reached the end of the village he turned the horse's head toward Creston.

They began to jog down the winding road to the valley at old Dan's languid pace. Charity felt herself sinking

into deeper depths of weariness, and as they descended through the bare woods there were moments when

she lost the exact sense of things, and seemed to be sitting beside her lover with the leafy arch of summer

bending over them. But this illusion was faint and transitory. For the most part she had only a confused

sensation of slipping down a smooth irresistible current; and she abandoned herself to the feeling as a refuge

Mr. Royall seldom spoke, but his silent presence gave her, for the first time, a sense of peace and security.

She knew that where he was there would be warmth, rest, silence; and for the moment they were all she

In the train, during the short run from Creston to Nettleton, the warmth aroused her, and the consciousness of

being under strange eyes gave her a momentary energy. She sat upright, facing Mr. Royall, and stared out of

the window at the denuded country. Fortyeight hours earlier, when she had last traversed it, many of the

trees still held their leaves; but the high wind of the last two nights had stripped them, and the lines of the

landscape' were as finely pencilled as in December. A few days of autumn cold had wiped out all trace of the

rich fields and languid groves through which she had passed on the Fourth of July; and with the fading of the

landscape those fervid hours had faded, too. She could no longer believe that she was the being who had lived

them; she was someone to whom something irreparable and overwhelming had happened, but the traces of

When the train reached Nettleton and she walked out into the square at Mr. Royall's side the sense of

unreality grew more overpowering. The physical strain of the night and day had left no room in her mind for

new sensations and she followed Mr. Royall as passively as a tired child. As in a confused dream she

presently found herself sitting with him in a pleasant room, at a table with a red and white tablecloth on

which hot food and tea were placed. He filled her cup and plate and whenever she lifted her eyes from them

she found his resting on her with the same steady tranquil gaze that had reassured and strengthened her when

they had faced each other in old Mrs. Hobart's kitchen. As everything else in her consciousness grew more

and more confused and immaterial, became more and more like the universal shimmer that dissolves the

world to failing eyes, Mr. Royall's presence began to detach itself with rocky firmness from this elusive

background. She had always thought of himwhen she thought of him at all as of someone hateful and

obstructive, but whom she could outwit and dominate when she chose to make the effort. Only once, on the

day of the Old Home Week celebration, while the stray fragments of his address drifted across her troubled

mind, had she caught a glimpse of another being, a being so different from the dullwitted enemy with whom

she had supposed herself to be living that even through the burning mist of her own dreams he had stood out

with startling distinctness. For a moment, then, what he saidand something in his way of saying ithad

made her see why he had always struck her as such a lonely man. But the mist of her dreams had hidden him

It came back to her now, as they sat at the table, and gave her, through her own immeasurable desolation, a

sudden sense of their nearness to each other. But all these feelings were only brief streaks of light in the grey

blur of her physical weakness. Through it she was aware that Mr. Royall presently left her sitting by the table

in the warm room, and came back after an interval with a carriage from the stationa closed "hack" with

sunburnt blue silk blindsin which they drove together to a house covered with creepers and standing next

to a church with a carpet of turf before it. They got out at this house, and the carriage waited while they

walked up the path and entered a wainscoted hall and then a room full of books. In this room a clergyman

whom Charity had never seen received them pleasantly, and asked them to be seated for a few minutes while

Charity sat down obediently, and Mr. Royall, his hands behind his back, paced slowly up and down the room.

As he turned and faced Charity, she noticed that his lips were twitching a little; but the look in his eyes was

grave and calm. Once he paused before her and said timidly: "Your hair's got kinder loose with the wind,"

and she lifted her hands and tried to smooth back the locks that had escaped from her braid. There was a

lookingglass in a carved frame on the wall, but she was ashamed to look at herself in it, and she sat with her

hands folded on her knee till the clergyman returned. Then they went out again, along a sort of arcaded

passage, and into a low vaulted room with a cross on an altar, and rows of benches. The clergyman, who had

left them at the door, presently reappeared before the altar in a surplice, and a lady who was probably his

wife, and a man in a blue shirt who had been raking dead leaves on the lawn, came in and sat on one of the

The clergyman opened a book and signed to Charity and Mr. Royall to approach. Mr. Royall advanced a few

steps, and Charity followed him as she had followed him to the buggy when they went out of Mrs. Hobart's

kitchen; she had the feeling that if she ceased to keep close to him, and do what he told her to do, the world

The clergyman began to read, and on her dazed mind there rose the memory of Mr. Miles, standing the night

before in the desolate house of the Mountain, and reading out of the same book words that had the same

"I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all

hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment whereby ye may not be lawfully joined

Charity raised her eyes and met Mr. Royall's. They were still looking at her kindly and steadily. "I will!" she

heard him say a moment later, after another interval of words that she had failed to catch. She was so busy

trying to understand the gestures that the clergyman was signalling to her to make that she no longer heard

what was being said. After another interval the lady on the bench stood up, and taking her hand put it in Mr.

Royall's. It lay enclosed in his strong palm and she felt a ring that was too big for her being slipped on her

Late that afternoon Charity sat alone in a bedroom of the fashionable hotel where she and Harney had vainly

sought a table on the Fourth of July. She had never before been in so handsomely furnished a room. The

mirror above the dressingtable reflected the high headboard and fluted pillowslips of the double bed, and

a bedspread so spotlessly white that she had hesitated to lay her hat and jacket on it. The humming radiator

diffused an atmosphere of drowsy warmth, and through a halfopen door she saw the glitter of the nickel taps

For a while the long turmoil of the night and day had slipped away from her and she sat with closed eyes,

surrendering herself to the spell of warmth and silence. But presently this merciful apathy was succeeded by

the sudden acuteness of vision with which sick people sometimes wake out of a heavy sleep. As she opened

her eyes they rested on the picture that hung above the bed. It was a large engraving with a dazzling white

margin enclosed in a wide frame of bird'seye maple with an inner scroll of gold. The engraving represented

a young man in a boat on a lake overhung with trees. He was leaning over to gather waterlilies for the girl

in a light dress who lay among the cushions in the stern. The scene was full of a drowsy midsummer

radiance, and Charity averted her eyes from it and, rising from her chair, began to wander restlessly about the

It was on the fifth floor, and its broad window of plate glass looked over the roofs of the town. Beyond them

stretched a wooded landscape in which the last fires of sunset were picking out a steely gleam. Charity gazed

at the gleam with startled eyes. Even through the gathering twilight she recognized the contour of the soft

hills encircling it, and the way the meadows sloped to its edge. It was Nettleton Lake that she was looking at.

She stood a long time in the window staring out at the fading water. The sight of it had roused her for the first

time to a realization of what she had done. Even the feeling of the ring on her hand had not brought her this

sharp sense of the irretrievable. For an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the

lift of a broken wing. She heard the door open behind her, and Mr. Royall came in.

He had gone to the barber's to be shaved, and his shaggy grey hair had been trimmed and smoothed. He

moved strongly and quickly, squaring his shoulders and carrying his head high, as if he did not want to pass

"What are you doing in the dark?" he called out in a cheerful voice. Charity made no answer. He went up to

the window to draw the blind, and putting his finger on the wall flooded the room with a blaze of light from

the central chandelier. In this unfamiliar illumination husband and wife faced each other awkwardly for a

moment; then Mr. Royall said: "We'll step down and have some supper, if you say so."

The thought of food filled her with repugnance; but not daring to confess it she smoothed her hair and

An hour later, coming out of the glare of the dining room, she waited in the marblepanelled hall while Mr.

Royall, before the brass lattice of one of the corner counters, selected a cigar and bought an evening paper.

Men were lounging in rocking chairs under the blazing chandeliers, travellers coming and going, bells

ringing, porters shuffling by with luggage. Over Mr. Royall's shoulder, as he leaned against the counter, a girl

with her hair puffed high smirked and nodded at a dapper drummer who was getting his key at the desk

Charity stood among these crosscurrents of life as motionless and inert as if she had been one of the tables

screwed to the marble floor. All her soul was gathered up into one sick sense of coming doom, and she

watched Mr. Royall in fascinated terror while he pinched the cigars in successive boxes and unfolded his

Presently he turned and joined her. "You go right along up to bedI'm going to sit down here and have my

smoke," he said. He spoke as easily and naturally as if they had been an old couple, long used to each other's

ways, and her contracted heart gave a flutter of relief. She followed him to the lift, and he put her in and

She groped her way in through the darkness, forgetting where the electric button was, and not knowing how

to manipulate it. But a white autumn moon had risen, and the illuminated sky put a pale light in the room. By

it she undressed, and after folding up the ruffled pillowslips crept timidly under the spotless counterpane.

She had never felt such smooth sheets or such light warm blankets; but the softness of the bed did not soothe

her. She lay there trembling with a fear that ran through her veins like ice. "What have I done? Oh, what have

I done?" she whispered, shuddering to her pillow; and pressing her face against it to shut out the pale

landscape beyond the window she lay in the darkness straining her ears, and shaking at every footstep that

Suddenly she sat up and pressed her hands against her frightened heart. A faint sound had told her that

someone was in the room; but she must have slept in the interval, for she had heard no one enter. The moon

was setting beyond the opposite roofs, and in the darkness outlined against the grey square of the window,

she saw a figure seated in the rockingchair. The figure did not move: it was sunk deep in the chair, with

bowed head and folded arms, and she saw that it was Mr. Royall who sat there. He had not undressed, but had

taken the blanket from the foot of the bed and laid it across his knees. Trembling and holding her breath she

watched him, fearing that he had been roused by her movement; but he did not stir, and she concluded that he

As she continued to watch him ineffable relief stole slowly over her, relaxing her strained nerves and

exhausted body. He knew, then...he knew...it was because he knew that he had married her, and that he sat

there in the darkness to show her she was safe with him. A stir of something deeper than she had ever felt in

thinking of him flitted through her tired brain, and cautiously, noiselessly, she let her head sink on the

When she woke the room was full of morning light, and her first glance showed her that she was alone in it.

She got up and dressed, and as she was fastening her dress the door opened, and Mr. Royall came in. He

looked old and tired in the bright daylight, but his face wore the same expression of grave friendliness that

had reassured her on the Mountain. It was as if all the dark spirits had gone out of him.

They went downstairs to the diningroom for breakfast, and after breakfast he told her he had some insurance

business to attend to. "I guess while I'm doing it you'd better step out and buy yourself whatever you need."

He smiled, and added with an embarrassed laugh: "You know I always wanted you to beat all the other girls."

He drew something from his pocket, and pushed it across the table to her; and she saw that he had given her

two twentydollar bills. "If it ain't enough there's more where that come fromI want you to beat 'em all

She flushed and tried to stammer out her thanks, but he had pushed back his chair and was leading the way

out of the diningroom. In the hall he paused a minute to say that if it suited her they would take the three

o'clock train back to North Dormer; then he took his hat and coat from the rack and went out.

A few minutes later Charity went out, too. She had watched to see in what direction he was going, and she

took the opposite way and walked quickly down the main street to the brick building on the corner of Lake

Avenue. There she paused to look cautiously up and down the thoroughfare, and then climbed the

brassbound stairs to Dr. Merkle's door. The same bushyheaded mulatto girl admitted her, and after the

same interval of waiting in the red plush parlor she was once more summoned to Dr. Merkle's office. The

doctor received her without surprise, and led her into the inner plush sanctuary.

"I thought you'd be back, but you've come a mite too soon: I told you to be patient and not fret," she

Charity drew the money from her breast. "I've come to get my blue brooch," she said, flushing.

"Your brooch?" Dr. Merkle appeared not to remember. "My, yesI get so many things of that kind. Well,

my dear, you'll have to wait while I get it out of the safe. I don't leave valuables like that laying round like the

She disappeared for a moment, and returned with a bit of twistedup tissue paper from which she unwrapped

Charity, as she looked at it, felt a stir of warmth at her heart. She held out an eager hand.

"Have you got the change?" she asked a little breathlessly, laying one of the twentydollar bills on the table.

"Change? What'd I want to have change for? I only see two twenties there," Dr. Merkle answered brightly.

Charity paused, disconcerted. "I thought...you said it was five dollars a visit...."

"For YOU, as a favourI did. But how about the responsibility and the insurance? I don't s'pose you ever

thought of that? This pin's worth a hundred dollars easy. If it had got lost or stole, where'd I been when you

Charity remained silent, puzzled and halfconvinced by the argument, and Dr. Merkle promptly followed up

her advantage. "I didn't ask you for your brooch, my dear. I'd a good deal ruther folks paid me my regular

She paused, and Charity, seized with a desperate longing to escape, rose to her feet and held out one of the

"No, I won't take that, my dear; but I'll take it with its mate, and hand you over a signed receipt if you don't

Dr. Merkle looked up at her pleasantly from the plush sofa. "It seems you got married yesterday, up to the

'Piscopal church; I heard all about the wedding from the minister's choreman. It would be a pity, wouldn't it,

to let Mr. Royall know you had an account running here? I just put it to you as your own mother might."

Anger flamed up in Charity, and for an instant she thought of abandoning the brooch and letting Dr. Merkle

do her worst. But how could she leave her only treasure with that evil woman? She wanted it for her baby:

she meant it, in some mysterious way, to be a link between Harney's child and its unknown father. Trembling

and hating herself while she did it, she laid Mr. Royall's money on the table, and catching up the brooch fled

In the street she stood still, dazed by this last adventure. But the brooch lay in her bosom like a talisman, and

she felt a secret lightness of heart. It gave her strength, after a moment, to walk on slowly in the direction of

the post office, and go in through the swinging doors. At one of the windows she bought a sheet of

letterpaper, an envelope and a stamp; then she sat down at a table and dipped the rusty post office pen in

ink. She had come there possessed with a fear which had haunted her ever since she had felt Mr. Royall's ring

on her finger: the fear that Harney might, after all, free himself and come back to her. It was a possibility

which had never occurred to her during the dreadful hours after she had received his letter; only when the

decisive step she had taken made longing turn to apprehension did such a contingency seem conceivable. She

The last words were not in the least what she had meant to write; they had flowed from her pen irresistibly.

She had not had the strength to complete her sacrifice; but, after all, what did it matter? Now that there was

When she had put the letter in the box she went out into the busy sunlit street and began to walk to the hotel.

Behind the plateglass windows of the department stores she noticed the tempting display of dresses and

dressmaterials that had fired her imagination on the day when she and Harney had looked in at them

together. They reminded her of Mr. Royall's injunction to go out and buy all she needed. She looked down at

her shabby dress, and wondered what she should say when he saw her coming back emptyhanded. As she

drew near the hotel she saw him waiting on the doorstep, and her heart began to beat with apprehension.

He nodded and waved his hand at her approach, and they walked through the hall and went upstairs to collect

their possessions, so that Mr. Royall might give up the key of the room when they went down again for their

midday dinner. In the bedroom, while she was thrusting back into the satchel the few things she had brought

away with her, she suddenly felt that his eyes were on her and that he was going to speak. She stood still, her

halffolded nightgown in her hand, while the blood rushed up to her drawn cheeks.

"Well, did you rig yourself out handsomely? I haven't seen any bundles round," he said jocosely.

"That so?" He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and his eyebrows projected in a scowl. Then his face

grew friendly again. "Well, I wanted you to go back looking stylisher than any of them; but I guess you're

Their eyes met, and something rose in his that she had never seen there: a look that made her feel ashamed

"I guess you're good, too," she said, shyly and quickly. He smiled without answering, and they went out of

Late that evening, in the cold autumn moonlight, they drove up to the door of the red house.