Deep channel
Date: 2022-11-17T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Villages -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Virginia -- Fiction

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Title: Deep channel

Author: Margaret Prescott Montague

Release date: November 17, 2022 [eBook #69369]
Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1923

Credits: hekula03, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEEP CHANNEL ***

DEEP CHANNEL

DEEP CHANNEL

BY
MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON

COPYRIGHT 1923 BY MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEEP CHANNEL

I

Where shall we pick up the thread of Julie Rose’s life? It runs, a hidden strand, back and back into the past, crossed and recrossed by the threads of other lives,—all weaving a pattern of humanity on an unseen loom,—deflected sometimes by the pull of natures stronger than her own, widened here and narrowed there by circumstance, winding itself for the most part along the muddy streets of Hart’s Run, to the shops on errands for her mother, to the schoolhouse, and on Sundays to the Methodist church; sometimes, more rarely, running out of the village by the main street, which so quickly turns itself into a rutty highway, up the sides of the surrounding mountains on excursions for chestnuts in the autumn, or for bloodroot and anemone blossoms in the spring.

Following the thread, one may see Julie Rose as a little girl—such a meagre, anxious, and correct little girl!—out on the streets in hood and little shawl in winter or in a checked wash-dress in summer, weaving her pattern of life through the village. An uncertain pattern, deflected as it is by the constant necessity for sudden crossings of the street to avoid encounters which frighten her, yet at the same time to give the impression that she changed her course for other reasons. Here she crosses, one might suppose, to speak to old Mrs. Brewster; in reality it is to escape a group of rough boys who would be sure to taunt her, or even give her hair a jerk, did she dare to pass them. There she recrosses, apparently to peep at a bed of zinnias but really to avoid a cow, which, blocking the sidewalk, might swoop its horns at her were she to face it. Always there is the fear and always the compulsion of concealment, for worse even than being afraid is to have one’s fear uncovered by the laughter of people. But though a little nervous pulse flutters in her neck, and her eyes darken constantly with apprehension, yet her whole face can light up amazingly whenever life is gracious to her: when some one gives her a red apple, for instance, or when her teacher is kind.

One sees her conscientiously hopping over the mud puddles on the way to school to avoid soiling her shoes and stockings, because that would worry her mother; yet one may also see that a paper doll, whose pink cheeks and blue eyes fill her with a maternal delight, is snuggled under her shawl. Alas! at this point, following her thread of life, one sees very distinctly the look in her eyes the day that Edward Black snatched that paper doll away from her, and there before the whole school at playtime wrenched its head off, and flung its decapitated body into a snow-bank. That was a gray winter day with dirty yellowed snow upon the ground and fresh flakes drifting down from a heavily close and sullen sky. Julie is paralyzed when that big bully snatches her doll, powerless to move or cry out; she can only stand and look, her eyes wide and stricken, her hands clutched together. Not so Henr’etta Wilkins, Julie’s deskmate. She flew at Edward Black, and slapped him full and stingingly upon the face with her competent hand. It was Henr’etta’s dramatic act which precipitated a general scuffle and free fight among the children. They fought back and forth through the snow and over the tattered remnants of the paper doll. Julie took no part in the conflict, but under its cover her tension of horror relaxed sufficiently for her to creep over and collect the torn bits that had been her doll. The other children knocked her about as she did so, and when she picked up the last bit, one of the big boys stepped square upon her hand. But Julie hardly noticed that. In a daze, she turned out of the school-yard and made for home, slipping and stumbling through the snow, the fragments of the doll pressed tight against her breast, and the forbidding sky hanging low upon her.

At home she could only hold out the torn pieces dumbly to her mother.

“What’s the matter, honey?” her mother cried, nervously. “Oh, what did they do to its doll baby?”

Then at last Julie could speak. “Edward Black did it!” she gasped. “He—he tore her head right off and flung it in the snow. I couldn’t stop him—I couldn’t do anything. I—couldn’t—” her voice squeaked out impotently in a flood of tears.

“Never mind! never mind! It shall have another doll baby,” her mother comforted her.

But a question struggled convulsively to the surface through Julie’s sobs. “What—what made Ed act so mean? I wasn’t doing a thing. I was—I was just standing there.”

“I don’t know,” her mother shook her head with a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. Folks do that way—I reckon it’s all you can expect in this world.”

“All you can expect in this world,” Julie repeated with a broken gasp.

Afterward her mother bathed her face and hands, tied up her bruised fingers, and giving her a cookie fresh and warm from the oven, made her go back to school, for “What’ll folks think if you stay home?” she said. “All the children will laugh at you.”

So Julie went back, the cookie, fragrant and comforting, in her hand, but a poignant disillusioned throb still in her heart, driven in so deep that it was beyond the relief of tears; and the two phrases her mother had used, “That’s all you can expect in this world,” and “What’ll folks think?” turned themselves over and over, burrowing down into her mind and intrenching themselves there. She took a little tentative nibble of the cookie to comfort herself. It was good, very good.

Good? What did that remind Julie of? Oh, yes! Last Sunday’s Golden Text: “Overcome evil with good.” Ed Black was certainly evil in Julie’s eyes—then ought she to do good to him? A sudden idea jumped in her mind, choking her and making her clutch her cookie fast. It was an awful idea. She could not possibly do it. It would be a dreadful thing to do. How all the children would laugh! But just because it was so awful, and would bring public opinion so down on her, a stern compulsion to do it seized her.

A tyrant within rose up and challenged her: “You don’t dare to do it,” the tyrant taunted. “All the children will laugh at you—you don’t dare—” “I do dare! I do!” Julie cried back at the tyrant, a cold perspiration breaking out.

The bell was ringing for the afternoon session when she reached the schoolhouse, and the children were flocking up the steps to the door. Edward Black, big and untidy, stood on the top step. His hair was tousled, his coat torn; his hands were chapped and grimy with dirt. Through the parti-colored surge of children Julie pressed up to him, and held out her cookie.

“What’s that?” he demanded, bringing his scornful eyes down upon her.

“A cookie,” Julie wavered. “It’s—it’s good.”

“A cookie?” He snatched it from her. “Well, if you ain’t the biggest little fool! Look a’ here!” he shouted. “Look what Julie Rose give me. A cookie! Haw! Haw! Haw!” He waved the gift for all to see, and his hoarse mirth ran down the line of children, in surprise, contemptuous laughter, and ejaculation. And only Julie’s shrinking and inadequate little body stood between her soul and the stabs of the other children’s derision. “Here—I don’t want anything from you!” Edward cried, and flung the cookie in her face. It struck her cheek and bounded from thence down to the dirty steps, where the oncoming children kicked at it, deriding it and trampling it into a pulp with the mud and snow on their shoes, while Edward Black went haw-hawing loudly into school.

“Julie! You are the biggest little idiot!” Henr’etta whispered, sharply, when they were seated at their desks, and the school was quieting down. “What in the name of common sense made you go and give your cookie to that hateful piece when he’d been so mean to you?”

“It—it was the text,” Julie stammered.

“The text? What text? Quit shaking so, Julie! What text?”

“Last Sunday’s,” Julie gasped.

Henr’etta considered a moment. “Oh, that!” she said. “Well, you cer’nly are a goody-goody.”

“I’m not! I’m not!” Julie panted. “It wasn’t that—I—I had to do it.”

“Why? Why did you have to? Quit shaking, I tell you!”

“I had to because I was scared to,” Julie confessed miserably.

But this was beyond Henr’etta’s comprehension. It was really beyond Julie’s own. She did not know that she was already beginning to feel herself caught in the terrifying net of her own fears, and had made a futile leap for freedom. She only knew that something had made her do a dreadful thing at which all the children had laughed, just as she had known they would.

“Oh here, don’t cry, Julie!” Henr’etta whispered hastily. “For the mercy sakes! Don’t go and cry now, right before the whole school. Here, look at the geography lesson—here, listen: ‘Principal rivers in West Virginia’—Oh, for goodness sake!”

For, despite the principal rivers, Julie had dropped her head upon the desk in front of her, bursting into a flood of tears; and again the eyes of all the school stabbed straight through her body, and down into her soul.

One may also see this fragile thread of life running back into Julie’s babyhood, mothered by her delicate and shrinking mother, and fathered by her big blustering father. Those were the days when Mr. Rose kept a small shop in the village, and when Julie’s earliest baby recollections were concerned with the many-colored things in the shop, and the mingled smell of raisins, tobacco, and peppermint candy, together with the dreadful tradition that a witch lived in the ginger-cake barrel, ready to snap out at a little girl who even so much as thought of helping herself in passing. That appeared to be the reason for their being called ginger-snaps.

But big and boastful as her father was, he was not a success at storekeeping, and by the time little Julie was five or six, her mother was taking table boarders “to help out.” She had been a school-teacher from one of the smaller cities in Virginia, and had trained herself to a rather prim mode of speech. Julie usually spoke as she did, but in moments of stress she was apt to break away to the mountain phraseology of her father’s people.

Julie’s father boasted largely of the things he meant to do in the business way, but always as the table boarders increased, the customers in the shop decreased, until finally, when Julie was ten or eleven, the shop was closed altogether, and her father had gone across the State line into West Virginia, to work in the lumber camps. There he made good money, for people said that Emmet Rose was a mighty fine hand in the woods; and he himself bragged that he could drop a tree within a foot of any spot he named. Thereafter, with the money coming regularly from the lumber camp, Mrs. Rose gave up most of the table boarders, and so had leisure to do fancy sewing, and to make pretty, sober little clothes for Julie. The stitches in them were exquisite and sincere, but she never dressed Julie in bright colors. “No, I don’t like bright colors,” she was wont to say.

“But why, mother? Why?” Julie questioned.

“They’re so gay—” her mother hesitated; “I—I don’t know, but someway I don’t think they’re respectful to the Lord.”

Thereafter Julie went in fear of a jealous surveillance from on high. God became somewhat confused in her child mind with a chicken hawk. “Grandmaw Rose,” who had a little farm on the top of Slatty Mountain, said she didn’t hold with white chickens: they was too easy a mark for the hawk. This seemed to accord with her mother’s fear of bright colors. Apparently, up there in the wide stretches of the deep sky that Julie had always liked, there lurked a terrifying Power that might pounce dreadfully at any moment. Evidently the safest way to get through life was to slip by as unnoticed as possible, clad, if one were a chicken, in speckled gray feathers that faded easily from sight in the grass; or; if one were a little girl, ordering one’s self in the same humble and unobtrusive manner.

Julie felt worried about her father, there was so little of the discreet coloration about him. His necktie, when he wore one, could be seen half a mile, an easy mark for hawk or deity. His friends described him as a great big two-fisted Jim-bruiser of a man. He was boastful and loud, and would come roaring down the river with the log drives in spring, boisterous, gay, and apparently unafraid. During the summer months, when he was in Hart’s Run, their reserved little house rocked with his Homeric laughter, accompanying great stories of “Tony Beaver” who lives up “Eel River,”—where all the impossible things of the West Virginia lumber camps happen,—who is blood brother to “Paul Bunyan” of the Northern woods and who owns a yoke of oxen so big it takes a crow a week to wing the distance between the horns of one of them. But just because of his recklessness and daring laughter, Julie adored her father. Those were good days on the whole—her mother and herself snug and well provided for in the village, building up a gentle home-life, with the lumber-jack’s big personality off in the woods to roof it over securely.

But when Julie was sixteen, this period came to an abrupt end on a day in the woods, when a tree which Emmet Rose was felling failed to drop on the spot he had named, but fell instead upon him. They brought him home, out of the woods, to Hart’s Run—a painful journey—by way of tram cars and rough frozen roads with ice and skifts of snow in the ruts, with Sam Fletcher, who drove, feeling in his own body every dreadful jolt of the wagon; for, as he confided to his intimates, if there was one thing he did naturally despise, it was haulin’ a crippled hand out of the woods.

Julie and her mother were dazed by the shock. Their scared faces fell into a mould of horror that did not lighten or relax when they spoke or even when they tried to smile. Their little hands shook, but they went on and did things efficiently and bravely. Emmet Rose watched them sadly out of his big face that was gaunt and curiously stretched with pain to a wider apprehension. Once when her mother was out of the room, he put out his uninjured hand to Julie and spoke darkly.

“It’s got me. I allus knew it would.”

Julie’s heart jumped violently. “What’s got you, pappy, honey?” she questioned, putting her hand in his.

“Life,” he answered. “It’s got me down at last. I allus knew it would. It gits every feller in the end. I stood up aginst it an’ fought it like a two-fisted man, but it’s got me, an’ now I’ll jist have to lay down on you women-folks. Don’t tell mammy—she’s scary enough anyhow.”

This admission was the climax of terror to Julie. She had always sheltered in her father’s loud confidence. To have him broken in body was frightful enough; to see his broken spirit laid bare, to know that always that sinister dread had lurked in the back of his mind, and that all his big bluster was just a cloak for it, seemed to take the roof from over her head, leaving her uncovered in a bleak world. Her heart beat so fearfully that the thin material of her blouse fluttered up and down. Nevertheless, she put her other hand, cold as it was, steadfastly over her father’s. “Never mind, pappy, honey!” she said. “Never mind. We’ll manage someway.”

He looked dimly at her white face with the big eyes, and felt the tremor of her fingers.

“Poor Julie,” he said. “Poor little Julie. I kind of hate to have life git a-hold of you.”

But after all Emmet Rose did not have to “lay down” long on his women-folks. A broken rib had pierced one lung, pneumonia set in, and five days after they brought him out of the woods his great body was stiff and tenantless, and Julie and her mother, two terrified little people, were left alone. Yet, for all their fear, with a dogged pertinacity they rebuilt their lives and struggled on, like a chess-player, who having lost his best piece still fights on with what the game has left to him.

Later on, when death swooped again and her mother was gone, Julie, frightened and alone, nevertheless rebuilt her life once more, and went on spinning her web of existence, supported by dressmaking and millinery which she had established in her father’s old shop, and protected from being quite alone by Aunt Sadie Johnson who rented one half of the house, and who was not Julie’s aunt at all, but was so old a friend of her mother’s that Julie had always called her so.

This is the thread of Julie Rose’s life, running on narrow and timorous lines back into the past to her birth in Hart’s Run, and forward into the future, at the command of existence; and all along its pathway of the past and future one may see her small figure faring forth, as she weaves her strand in the pattern of humanity. All of it is of interest and of value in that pattern, but for the sake of winding some of the thread into a ball of narrative, one must pick it up definitely at one point and break off at another; therefore, to begin, let us pick it up on a June night in the summer of 1918, the year that Julie was thirty-two.

II

It was a soft and gracious evening early in the month. The dusk, drenched by dew, which brought out the fragrance of locust blossoms, of peonies, roses, and cut grass in the dooryards up and down the street, fell over Hart’s Run in breath after breath of oncoming darkness, obliterating the sordid aspect of the village—except where the electric lights glaringly defied it—so that the cheap lines of the new garage were gathered into obscurity, the telegraph poles disappeared, and looking up one saw the wide, tumbled outline of mountains, with a remote young moon sailing the sky.

Some of the night’s fragrance drifted in through Julie’s back door, but she was unconscious of its appeal, having gone into her shop to see if everything was in order and safely locked up, before she started out for the week-night prayer-meeting.

She had already seen to everything once, but she returned nervously this second time just to be quite sure that all was safe. Snapping on the light, she stood a moment, and looked all about the neat little place; then she stepped across and tried the handle of the door. She was just turning away, when a sudden rasping noise jumped her heart into her throat, and stiffened all the nerves at the back of her neck. She stood transfixed, frozen with terror. She was all alone in her part of the house. What could the noise be? A snake? Once, as a little girl, she had almost stepped on a rattlesnake, and ever since any sudden rasping sound threw her into an agony of fear. Again the sound broke forth, constricting her with renewed terror. But now she realized that it came from the old disused fireplace, and she knew distressfully well what it was; though her fear left her, revulsion and discomfort took its place. It was the chimney swallows. Their nest had come down and the young birds were in the fireplace. Julie crept over, and pulling forward the board screen which she had covered with wall paper, peered into the hearth. There was only one, a naked little fledgling with blind eyes and gaping mouth. The sight of it nauseated Julie, and yet filled her with unhappy compassion.

“Poor little thing! Poor little thing!” she shuddered. “What in the world am I going to do with you?”

“Julie! Aw, Julie!” a strident voice called all at once from the back door, making Julie jump again.

It was Mrs. Dolly Anderson, Julie knew. She had stopped on her way to prayer-meeting. Julie wished she had not come until she had decided what to do about the chimney-swallow.

“Julie! Where are you?” the rasping voice persisted. Mrs. Anderson was coming in through the back way, and was already in the kitchen. Julie hastily replaced the screen, and met her at the shop door.

“There you are, dearie,” the visitor proclaimed. “I been bawling my head off for you. I come by to go with you to prayer meetin’—but you look’s white as a sheet. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I’m all right,” Julie said, nervously.

“Something’s scared you,” the other stated, her stalwart figure settling firmly back upon her heels, as she surveyed Julie with a relentless stare. “I never knowed any person to get scared as easy as you do, Julie. What’s happened now? I’ll bet a hopper-grass jumped at you! Or,” with sudden elephantine playfulness, “I caught you up to something you hadn’t ought to do. Now then!” she admonished, shaking a stubby and roguish finger, and pouncing inexorably upon Julie’s self-conscious look. “Tell its mammy what it’s been doin’.—Oh, for the mercy sake! What’s that?”

The young swallow had broken out stridently once more.

“It’s a chimney-swallow,” Julie confessed. “I was just trying to think what to do with it.”

“Where is it—over in the fireplace?” Mrs. Anderson, with a tread that made the boards complain under her, went over and pulled the screen away, with large competent hands. “Ugh! How I despise little naked birds!” she ejaculated. “Here, where’s the cat?”

“Oh, I don’t want the cat to get it.”

“Yes, you do. There ain’t a thing else to do. Here, kitty! Puss, puss, puss!”

“But I tell you I don’t want—”

“Yes you do, too, Julie. Here, kitty, kitty! You got to do it, Julie! There ain’t another thing to do with ’em. Pus-sie! Puss, puss!”

Julie’s big black cat came running in on soft eager feet.

“Here, pussie!” Mrs. Anderson called.

“No, don’t! Please don’t!” Julie begged. “Scat! scat out of here, Blackie!”

But as the cat paused in the doorway, looking uncertainly from one to the other, half crouched, with green eyes glinting and tail lashing, Mrs. Anderson dragged it forward by the scruff of the neck, and in an instant the combination was effected. There was a pounce, a last shriek of supreme agony from the fledgling, and with a growl the cat ran out of the room, the bird in its mouth.

Julie leaned against the counter, swallowing convulsively.

“Julie! for mercy sake! you know that was the onliest thing to do. When they come down the chimney like that, you just have to give ’em to the cat. There ain’t another thing to do.”

“I—I might have tried to raise it,” Julie said, weakly.

“No, you could not,” Mrs. Anderson retorted. “You don’t know what to feed it; an’ even s’posing you did, you ain’t got time to waste pokin’ fishin’ worms down a nasty little naked bird’s throat—specially now in the war when our boys needs every single thing we can do for ’em.”

“I know, but—”

“Well, but what?”

“It sounded so awful when the cat got it!”

“Julie! I never did see any person take things as hard as you do. I reckon it’s because you’re so thin. Just look at your arms!” Mrs. Anderson took one of Julie’s hands, and pushed the loose sleeve up above her elbow. “Looks about the size of a toothpick to me. If you were fleshier, things wouldn’t get to you so quick. Look at me, now,” she commanded, drawing up her frank proportions. “Things have to go through about six inches of grease ’fore they can reach me. But you—why you’re pretty near as naked to the world as that nasty little chimney-swallow. You can’t go through life like that. Oh, it’s all right for a real young girl, but you must be over thirty; it’s time you was featherin’ up, dearie.”

Julie snapped off the light in silence, and they passed out of the shop.

“Well, I will say one thing for you, you always look s’ nice,” Mrs. Anderson approved her, as they emerged from Julie’s side door and set out together along the village street. “I never seen you when you didn’t look like you’d stepped right out of a bandbox. That’s a mighty cute little collar you got on, dearie,” she continued, fingering the delicate ruffles at Julie’s neck. Julie was constantly at the mercy of other women’s hands. Her smallness stirred their maternal instincts; they were apt to stroke her and patronize her. “I declare, you don’t seem like nothing but a doll baby to me,” her companion pursued, her large damp hand giving Julie’s shoulder a final pat. “It beats me why you never married, Julie.—Oh my Lord!” she broke off abruptly, clapping her hand to her mouth.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” Julie cried, in alarm.

Mrs. Anderson performed some violent mouth-gymnastics behind her palm. “It’s my teeth,” she explained, spasmodically, at last. “I can’t seem to get used to this new set, an’ seems like they’re always a-bitin’ at my tongue. I have to watch ’em all the time. An’ I’m mightily afraid they’ll drop out in company some day.” She withdrew her hand at length, and they started on again. “But as I say,” she continued, “I don’t see why in the name of goodness you never married.”

“I never wanted to marry,” Julie said hastily, an uncomfortable restraint falling upon her.

“Oh yes, that’s just what every old maid says, if you’ll excuse me,” Mrs. Anderson retorted.

“No—but it’s true; I mean it,” Julie protested. “I—I always just hated the idea of getting married. It scares me to think of it.”

They were passing under an electric light, and Mrs. Anderson looked down at her curiously. “Well, now, ain’t that funny? I just believe that’s so,” she stated. “An’ it ain’t for want of chances, neither. There was Sam Dodson—he courted you, didn’t he?”

Julie was silent, but in the street light Mrs. Anderson could see the nervous self-consciousness of her face.

“Oh, all right, don’t tell, then,” she continued. “But everybody knows he did, an’ Pinckney Wayland, too—and wasn’t there a drummer feller from Cincinnati? Why, Julie, you’ve had a heap of chances. Most people would brag about ’em. Scary as you are, I’d think you’d want to be married an’ have a man ’round to look after you—There! there, now!” She stopped again, dramatically.

“What is it? Your teeth?” Julie inquired, with concern.

“No, but I got an idea. It’s come to me all of a sudden. I just believe I’ll make a match between you and the new preacher. Now I think that’d be real suitable. He’s about the right age for you, an’ maybe marrying a widower like that wouldn’t scare you s’ much.”

Julie quickened her pace nervously, walking with averted eyes.

“Widowers, now,” Mrs. Anderson pursued, “They’re broke to double harness already—they ain’t so hard to drive as a colt.”

She suddenly collapsed in mirth. “’Magine you drivin’ a colt husband, Julie!” she giggled. “Don’t walk so fast, dearie; you put me all out er breath. Well, anyhow, I think widowers are real nice. I ain’t got one thing against ’em. I just believe I’ll make the match between you and Brother Seabrook. You like his looks all right, don’t you?”

Julie had fallen into a frozen silence. But her companion was inexorable.

“Don’t you, dearie? Don’t you like his looks?” she persisted.

“I—I haven’t thought anything about how he looks,” Julie stumbled, unhappily.

“I b’lieve he’d like you, too,” Mrs. Anderson went on. “Big men like him are mighty apt to take to little scary women like you. An’ you’d make him a real good wife, Julie. I will say for you, you’re ’bout the best cook in town. You get that from your mother; she always set the prettiest table—you recollect, Julie?”

Again Julie was silent. The remembrance of her mother informed all her life, but it was not possible for her to speak of it to Mrs. Anderson.

“Well, of course Brother Seabrook would rather have you keepin’ his house an’ raisin’ his children for him than that soured-faced old aunt he’s got now. An’ you wouldn’t give him a speck er trouble; you wouldn’t kick over the traces, would you? ’Magine you kickin’ over anything, Julie!” Again Mrs. Anderson was convulsed with mirth, but this time she was interrupted. “Oh, mercy! Them old teeth!” she cried, clapping her hand to her mouth. “My! But they certainly did take a spiteful nip at my tongue that time. Yes, sir,” she continued, “I’m certainly goin’ to make that match if I live. I’ll commence right this evenin’ by bringin’ you to his notice. I’ll tip him off to call on you to pray.”

“Oh, no!” Julie burst out. “Oh, please, Mrs. Anderson—please don’t do anything like that! You know I never do lead in prayer. I can’t do it. I never could. Brother Mead knew I couldn’t—and old Brother Johnston, too—mother told them privately, and they never called on me. I’ll do anything to help the church—anything I can. But I can’t lead in prayer, Mrs. Anderson; you know I can’t! I never could.”

“Well, now, it’s time you learned. You been a member in the Methodist church too long not to be able to pray, Julie. Why, what’ll folks think if it gets about you can’t pray? Why, prayer’s just the very foundation of the church. What’s the matter?”

Julie had stopped. “I’m not going to prayer-meeting this evening,” she faltered. “I’ve got to go back. I—I don’t feel so very well.”

Mrs. Anderson laid firm hands upon her. “That’s perfect nonsense,” she cried. “You got to go. Why, this is Brother Seabrook’s first prayer-meeting. Everybody’ll think it’s awful funny if you ain’t there to welcome him.”

“I’m not going,” Julie protested, trying to twist herself free of the large hand on her wrist. “I—I—Oh, you know I can’t lead in prayer! If he calls on me, I’ll not be able to say one word—an’ everybody’ll laugh.”

“Julie! You a Methodist an’ can’t pray?”

“I’ll die if he calls on me,” Julie cried, on the verge of tears.

“Oh, no, you won’t. Folks don’t die that easy. What’s the matter with you, anyhow, Julie?” Mrs. Anderson interrupted herself suddenly. “Why, now I come to recollect, I heard you pray once, an’ it was just grand. It was the time we had that big revivalist here—remember? Why, you was just wonderful that night.”

“I know—I remember,” Julie returned hurriedly. “But that was different. I was just carried away that night. Something got hold of me—it sort of swept me out of myself. I—I wasn’t there that night. It was his preaching, I reckon. It seemed to set me free.” She broke off, a sudden bravery brought momentarily to her face by the remembrance. “But—but that was different,” she hurried on. “I couldn’t do it now. Please let me go.”

But the other was inexorable.

“You’ve prayed once an’ you can pray again,” she persisted. “An’ it would be awful for you not to be there for Brother Seabrook’s first prayer-meeting. If you struggle now, Julie, it’ll look like I was draggin’ you to church, an’ what’ll folks think of that?”

Julie knew, all through her sensitive being, just how it would look, and so perforce she yielded.

Fortunately, however, they were late, so that when they entered the Sunday-School room, where the week-night services were held, all the front benches were occupied and they were forced to slip into obscure seats, near the door. Hidden away by a broad back in front of her, Julie drew a breath of relief. The agitated beating of her heart began to subside, and during the singing of the first hymn she even dared to peep forth between the other worshipers, letting her eyes rove over the familiar congregation, the plaster walls ornamented by texts, the red runner of carpet in the aisle, and at last up to the front where Brother Seabrook stood by the reading-table, his hymn book stretched away from his farsighted eyes. He was a tall man, and big in proportion. Breathlessly, overpoweringly big he seemed to Julie. A personality that made her feel stifled. His hair was dark, and although flecked with gray, still persisted in a tendency to curl. He had a trick of smoothing it down fiercely from time to time. He smoothed it now as he gave himself to the loud worship of song, his body swaying slightly on his wide-planted legs, and his eyes, as round and dark and almost as expressionless as shoe buttons, alternately dropped to pick up a line of hymn and then raised to sweep over his flock. Peeping forth at him, Julie heard again in her mind Mrs. Anderson’s bold voice as she planned the match between Brother Seabrook and herself, and at the remembrance she blushed. She felt the blush not only in her face but all down into her very being. His eyes terrified her. Once, as she watched him, they came full upon hers, roving down between the channel of the people in front. She looked hastily away, but she knew he had seen her, had marked where she was sitting; and the blush burned through her more violently than ever.

The hymn came to an end, and with a final smooth to his hair Brother Seabrook spread his handkerchief on the floor, and dropped one knee upon it in prayer.

“Seems like he needn’t to be so scary about trustin’ both knees to our floor,” Mrs. Anderson whispered resentfully to Julie, as they bent forward.

Brother Seabrook’s petition was an impassioned plea that his flock might be instructed in prayer—all of them, even the least in their midst—and here Mrs. Anderson dug her elbow into Julie’s ribs. Another hymn followed, and as the congregation sang through “Take it to the Lord in prayer,” Julie tried to fortify herself with the thought that surely none of the women members would be called on at this very first prayer-meeting. But when the hymn died away, Brother Seabrook shattered this forlorn hope by booming out, “Sister Humphries, will you offer a prayer?” Obediently, old Miss Mary Humphries, up at the front, bowed her broad back to the burden. It was more than Julie could face. He was calling on the women, and he had fixed his eyes upon her. It was terrifying to leave. It was impossible to stay. She went. Mrs. Anderson’s face was buried in her hands. She never knew when Julie slipped from her side. None of the worshipers saw her go. She was so far back that a stride or two brought her to the door. It was half open, and she passed through it to freedom and safety, without a sound.

III

As Julie came forth from the Sunday-School room, breathless and trembling, she paused a moment upon the steps, and there the deep serenity of the night received her. She drew a long breath. Her heart still pounded violently, but she had escaped: she was delivered. Inside, Sister Humphries continued to pray, Brother Seabrook speeding the petition upon its way with ejaculations of “Lord, grant it!” “Amen! Amen!” Outside, the sweep of a starlighted sky covered the world. Julie lingered upon the steps, her tense nerves relaxing gradually, as the safety and reassurance outside wrapped her about. From some near garden the fragrance of roses was borne to her by an idle breeze—a little breeze which, having rendered this service, blew away thereafter into the hills. The mountains were there, the stars, the night.

On a sudden impulse she dropped down upon the top step. It half frightened her to do so, because it would “look so funny” if anybody should see her. But the church was a little distance back from the street, and there appeared to be no passers-by. She clasped her hands lightly around her knees, and leaned against a pillar. She had a feeling of daring and adventure, and yet of utter security. She was tired after her agitation, and the peace of the night received her, like the safety of a deep harbor after a tumultuous sea.

In the church they sang another hymn, and then Brother Seabrook fell upon his sermon. His text was, “The truth shall make you free.” Julie could hear every word, and yet she was completely detached. She sat there sheltered from view, a very still little woman, with the congregation just at her back, Brother Seabrook’s discourse pouring out through the half-open door, and the night all about her, as though she were an invisible soul swung between two worlds. Sometimes she listened to the sermon, sometimes she merely let the stream of it flow by her without bestirring her mind to detain the flotsam and jetsam of ideas.

The wraith of a cloud sailed very softly through the sky, trailing behind it a long wisp of vapor. It passed across the stars and was gone. It was immensely tranquilizing. What did all the little hot things of the world matter? Julie had half a mind to go back again into church now and dare whatever might happen. But at the thought her heart stirred and fluttered again. So she did not move, but continued to sit there in the oasis of peace to which she had come. Her eyes were fixed upon the infinite depth of the sky, piercing deeper and deeper into it, until at last it seemed to her as though she were up there above the hills, just below the pattern of stars.

Suddenly, however, she was jerked violently to earth. Her name was being spoken. She froze into a listening terror. Brother Seabrook’s sermon had come to an end, and his voice resounded through the open door: “I will ask Sister Julie Rose to offer the closing prayer,” it said.

Snatched back from the sky, Julie’s clasped hands flew spasmodically up against her breast. Very stiffly she turned and peered over her shoulder. It seemed to her that Brother Seabrook’s eyes must be staring straight at her, but she was still alone, still safely hidden from the congregation.

“Sister, will you please lead us?” the voice insisted. A pause followed, then the voice came again—“I thought I saw Sister Rose. Is she not among us?” it demanded.

Very stiffly and silently Julie arose, and tiptoeing down the steps, fled away in a panic toward the safety of her own home. Hastening desperately through the streets, in a few breathless moments she reached the haven of her own back door. With hands that shook, she inserted her key, and whisking inside, slammed the door and locked it.

Safe within the shelter of her own home, her own roof to cover her and her door fast locked against the outside world, she leaned against the wall and panted. “Oh, you fool! You awful little fool!” she cried in passionate self-contempt. “But—but I reckon I oughtn’t to say ‘fool,’” she faltered.

After a moment, she moved over and turned on the light, and then snapped it off again and stood uncertainly in the dark. She was dreadfully afraid some members of the congregation might stop to question her about her strange disappearance; but if her house was in darkness, they would conclude that she had gone to bed.

This was a vain hope, however. She had not been home very long, sitting cowering in the dark, when a sudden knock came, and a voice cried, “Julie—Aw, Julie!”

Julie waited a hesitant moment, but the voice came again and the knock insisted. It was Mrs. Sam Wicket. When she called, people had to answer and doors had to open. With fingers that were still tremulous, Julie turned the key. Three faces peered in at her, sharp with inquiry, in the flare of electricity that Julie turned on again. Mrs. Wicket had in tow her old aunt, Mrs. Stover, and Miss Mary Humphries also. It was a delegation of inquiry.

“Well,” Mrs. Wicket announced. “I didn’t b’lieve you’d gone to bed this early.”

“Walk in,” Julie said, with dutiful hospitality, which was superfluous, for, headed by Mrs. Wicket, the three were already trooping through to the sitting-room.

“Here, I can’t see a thing. Where’s that hateful button? There, now!” Mrs. Wicket flooded the neat little room with light. “Now, then, Julie, we stopped by to see what was the matter with you,” she announced. She was a thin woman, with dark and snappy eyes, very precise in her brown dress, to which there was not a superfluous ruffle, as there was not an extra ounce of flesh on her spare body. “No’m, thank you, I always prefer a stiff-backed chair; you take the rocker yourself,” she interpolated to Miss Mary Humphries.

Miss Mary sat down in the patent plush rocker,—one that Julie’s father had bought in the old days,—and her square figure firmly established there and her hands clasped upon her Gospel Hymn book, she stared at Julie. “What made you slip away like that, Julie?” she demanded.

“Was you feelin’ bad, honey?” old Mrs. Stover asked. She was a tired old woman whose eighty years found it hard to keep up with her niece’s forty-five energetic ones, but she was afraid to be left alone and so was forced to trail feebly in the other’s wake. She gasped now as she sank upon the sofa, her mouth open and tremulous, although she tried every now and again to shut it. But uncertain and dim as her eyes were, they were the only ones that held any comfort for Julie. “Was you sick?” she repeated.

But Mrs. Wicket, who never paid any attention to what her aunt said, cut her short and demanded again, “What made you slip out of church like that, Julie?”

“I—I felt kind of funny,” Julie parried, her cheeks turning red.

“Mrs. Anderson said you stole out like that because you were afraid Brother Seabrook would call on you to pray,” Miss Humphries announced heavily.

“Mrs. Anderson’s right hot with you, Julie, for givin’ her the slip like that,” Mrs. Wicket stated.

Julie said nothing. She sat with tightly folded hands on her knees and forced herself to look straight at first one inquisitor and then the other, with what might appear to be an air of composure, although the eyes seemed to bore into her soul, and to meet them squarely caused her almost a physical discomfort.

“Were you afraid he was going to call on you to pray, Julie?” Mrs. Wicket repeated all over again.

“Well—well, he did,—” Julie blundered—and knew at once that she was lost. “That is—I—I was afraid he might,” she added, frightened into the truth.

Mrs. Wicket’s eyes snapped wide open. “Why, Julie,” she cried. “Why, how on earth did you know he called on you?”

But Miss Mary Humphries had been caught by the second part of Julie’s statement.

“Why, Julie, are you really afraid to pray in public?” she demanded. “Why! I think that’s just awful.” Her blue eyes stared at Julie out of her wide heavy face.

“But what I want to know is, how on earth you knew Brother Seabrook called on you,” Mrs. Wicket pursued. “Mrs. Anderson said you left before the sermon.”

Miss Mary, however, was not to be thrown off her line of inquiry. “But, Julie! Not to be able to pray!” she expostulated. “Why, I can’t recollect when I couldn’t pray in public.”

“But how did Julie know she was called on?” Mrs. Wicket demanded. “It wasn’t till after the sermon.”

“In my family,” Miss Mary went on, heavily, “my father raised us up to pray an’ give in experience whenever called on, and—”

“How did you know, Julie?”

“And,” Miss Mary drove straight on, not permitting Mrs. Wicket’s excited interruption to throw her off the track, “and none of us ever did think anything of leading in prayer.”

“Well, now, that’s just it,” old Mrs. Stover suddenly came to the surface long enough to remark. “Maybe if you’d’ve thought more of it, it wouldn’t’ve come so easy to you. Some folks prays easy, an’ some don’t. Julie, you look real tired. If I was you, I’d go right to bed, an’ I’ll be over in the mornin’ to see how you air.”

“Oh, thank you,” Julie said, catching gratefully at the one remark that she dared to answer. “But I’ll not be here in the morning. I’m going to Red River.”

This announcement served as an unexpected reprieve.

“Oh, you going to Red River?” “You goin’ there in the morning?” Mrs. Wicket and Miss Mary exclaimed together, deflected from their other lines of thought.

“Yes, to do some shopping,” Julie nodded. And now she relaxed a little inside herself, aware that the bait of Red River, which was the county town and a shopping centre, would distract the others for at least a little while.

“Well, then, I certainly would be obliged if you’d do a little errand for me,” Mrs. Wicket said.

“An’ I’ll get you to attend to a little business of mine, too,” Miss Mary added.

“I’ll be real glad to do it,” Julie said, eagerly.

Mrs. Wicket and Miss Mary proceeded at once to give her minute directions for the carrying out of their desires, and Julie listened, assenting and suggesting with the nervous ingratiation of a little dog, which, having escaped a whipping, hopes to reinstate itself once more in society.

Having laid their shopping burdens on Julie’s shoulders, the visitors rose at last to go.

“Now, Julie,” Miss Mary charged, “don’t you go and let that smart clerk in at Randal’s persuade you into buying any of that cheap piece of goods. It ain’t the shade I want, and if they ain’t got anything better, I’ll have to send off for it myself.”

“And remember to see Mr. Winter himself in at Winter and White’s,” Mrs. Wicket admonished her.

They were outside in the garden now, starting down the little pathway. Julie called a good-bye, and shut her door hastily. A window was open, however, and halfway down the path she heard Mrs. Wicket exclaim, “Why, there now! We never did find out how Julie knew Brother Seabrook called on her.”

“It’s awful, her being afraid to pray,” Miss Mary rejoined. “I ought to go back an’ speak to her about it.”

Here Julie snapped out the light.

“There!” she heard old Mrs. Stover announce. “She’s goin’ to bed, like I told her to!”

“Well, it certainly was mighty funny, but I’ll find out all about it to-morrow,” Mrs. Wicket said, as their heels clicked away down the cement walk; and Julie knew that her having sat upon the church steps would yet have to be faced and explained.

“Oh, I am such an idiot!” she broke out. And now the nervous tears rushed forth, and she went about her preparations for bed, shaking convulsively, wiping them away, and raging at herself. “You idiot! You idiot!” she stormed. Even after the light was out and she was stretched in bed, the devils of self-hatred continued to tear through her. She tossed unhappily from one side to the other, going over and over the whole miserable evening. Why had she run away? Why hadn’t she stayed and faced it out? Oh, but she couldn’t pray—she just couldn’t! Well then, if she had to go, why hadn’t she come straight home, instead of lingering there on the steps? Of course that was a strange thing to do. Of course people would think it funny if they knew. And they would know. Mrs. Wicket would be sure to find it out, and sure to tell. Julie writhed all through her thin body.

“Oh, you little fool!” she gasped. “What business is it of Mrs. Wicket’s what you do? Why can’t you stand up to her and make her mind her own affairs! Everybody comes an’ bosses you. Mrs. Anderson gave the little bird to the cat, and Mrs. Wicket and Miss Mary poking into all you do, an’ you takin’ everything from ’em just because you’re scared to look ’em in the face. Oh, you fool—you fool!—But I mustn’t go on saying ‘fool’!” she wept.

Her shyness, her reserve, and morbid self-consciousness wrapped themselves about her, as intangible as spider webs, but as difficult to break as forged iron. As the night wore on, her having sat upon the church steps assumed an enormity out of all proportion to the fact. She knew that this was an obsession, but all alone in the depths of her self-distrust and sleeplessness, she could not break free from it.

“Oh, what a fool I am to take things so hard!” she panted. “Now everybody’ll know I’m afraid to pray in public. There won’t be one person that goes to the Methodist church that won’t know it. Oh, you silly idiot! Oh, how I hate you!” In a culminating burst of rage, she turned over and set her teeth violently into her thin arm.

The hours writhed away at last, and just before dawn she fell asleep, but, even then she was not delivered. In her dreams she herself became horribly confused with the little chimney-swallow, and Mrs. Anderson, in the shape of Blackie the cat, pounced upon her.

There was another cat also—this one with two heads; one head had the snapping eyes of Mrs. Wicket, and the other the broad and stupid face of Miss Mary Humphries. They gazed on her, and she heard them making a dreadful play on words.

“She can’t pray,” said the Miss Mary Humphries’ head.

“If she can’t pray, she’s my prey,” said the Mrs. Anderson cat, and opened her mouth. Julie saw the jaws, she saw the teeth, she saw the red tongue curled back. In a moment everything else disappeared. In all the world there was nothing but herself that was a little naked bird, and that gaping mouth descending upon her. Closer and closer it came, the tongue curled back, the white teeth in rows. It closed upon her, and she shrieked, only she did not shriek in her own woman’s voice but rather in that last agony that the fledgling emitted when Blackie pounced.

With a violent start, she awoke. It was early daylight and she was in her own bed; but the dream was still upon her, and for a moment she could not shake it off. It seemed as though somewhere in her sleep she had doffed her humanity and for a moment had entered into and known the agony of the captured bird, as though that agony were a real thing, detached and tangible, left alive to blow about through the world and fasten darkly upon any wayfarers of sleep. On the edge of waking, Julie found the tears in her eyes. “Poor little bird! Poor little thing!” she cried pitifully.

Then she came to herself. The mystery of sleep withdrew, she slipped back into her own personality, and knew that it was time for her to get ready for her day in Red River.

IV

When Julie reached the station to take her train for Red River, she found herself the only passenger from Hart’s Run. A couple of traveling men, strangers to her, were walking up and down the platform in the fresh morning air, pulling at their cigars, evidently content and well-breakfasted by the hospitality of the Monroe House in the village. The station master was also there. He was Edward Black, the same bully who had torn Julie’s doll to pieces so long ago. He had grown into a stout and flabby man, with small eyes set in so large an expanse of face that one inevitably thought of his cheeks as jowls. He greeted her with “Mornin’, Julie, goin’ away on Number Twelve?”

“Just to Red River for the day,” she answered. “I hope Twelve’s on time.”

“Hope’s cheap,” Edward retorted. It was his custom not to give away information in regard to the trains too easily. He liked to keep the superior knowledge that his post gave him for the gratification of his own vanity.

Julie would have liked to slip away unnoticed into the station, but she also wanted very much to know whether or not the train was on time, for if it were hours late—as it sometimes was—she would not be able to do much shopping in Red River, and so would put off her trip until the next day. Therefore she mustered courage to put the question direct, although she had a painfully acute inner remembrance of how very forlorn her face had looked in the mirror that morning.

“Is—is Twelve on time?” she asked.

“Is—is Twelve on time,” he mimicked, and turned to wink at the near-by drummers. But it was a wink misplaced. One of the men, who had been teetering gayly up and down on the precarious footing of the iron track, in sheer exuberance of health and the fine morning, turned a sudden flaming red, and removed the cigar abruptly from his mouth.

“The lady’s asked you if the train’s on time. You’re here to tell her!” he blazed.

In sulky surprise, Edward Black attempted to turn away as though called by important business elsewhere, but the drummer came a stride nearer, and curled his fists.

“Tell her!” he commanded.

“Yes, it’s on time,” Edward answered and made a sullen escape.

The drummer turned to Julie, and swept off his hat. “Lady, your train’s on time,” he announced.

“Oh—oh, thank you!” Julie faltered, and retreated into the station in an agony of embarrassment.

As she fled, she heard the drummer comment to his friend, “Oh, Lord, how I do hate that kind of a fat bully! I hope to heavens if I ever get to France all the Germans’ll look just like him. If they do, I’ll not have any trouble at all stickin’ bayonets into ’em.”

Julie knew that the words were perfectly audible to Edward Black and that he would not fail to pay her back for them. She still had her ticket to buy, and when he opened the ticket window she approached in apprehension. They were alone in the station.

“Say, Julie, I got a joke on you,” he jeered. “Say, I know how you go to prayer meetin’.”

The color rushed into Julie’s face.

“Say,” he pursued, watching her from under the drooped lids of his pig eyes, “What was you doin’ sittin’ out on the church steps last night, when everybody else was inside?”

So Edward Black, of all people, had seen her!

“Nothing—it wasn’t anything,” she stumbled, knowing that her voice sounded frightened, and that her cheeks were blazing.

“Oh, yes, it was nothin’! Nothin’ be dogged! Folks don’t turn red like that over nothin’. Well, I’m goin’ to tell people how Julie Rose goes to prayer-meeting!”

But here Number Twelve whistled down the line—a clear burst of sound, cutting joyously through the air. Edward Black had to supply Julie with her ticket, and so she was delivered.

It was on her way back from Red River that Julie first saw Timothy Bixby.

The shopping trips to Red River were always occasions of discomfort to Julie. It was unnerving to her to be shaken out of her accustomed rut of Hart’s Run. Out in the unfamiliar streets of the larger town, she always felt strange and dreadfully conspicuous. Henr’etta Crossman, who had been Henr’etta Wilkinson, Julie’s schoolmate in Hart’s Run, and with whom Julie generally took dinner when she came to Red River, was apt to call jovial attention to Julie’s unhappy self-consciousness. “Come right in to its momma,” she would greet Julie, enfolding her against her large bosom. “Nothing didn’t bite you comin’ up street, did it!”

A day in Red River spent in Henr’etta’s society left Julie limp, crushed by the other’s exuberant self-confidence, with all the delicate antennæ of her personality brushed aside, as a butterfly’s wing is brushed by a too rough touch.

The day in question was no exception. Indeed, after her wretched night, Julie was more than ever drained of all vitality when she boarded the afternoon train for Hart’s Run, squeezing herself and her bundles down into a seat beside a fat woman with a bulging suit-case. “Henr’etta certainly is kind,” she told herself wearily, “but someway, being with her always makes me feel mighty small, she’s so big and sure of herself. And Red River, too, it always makes me feel like I was out naked in the world. Why,” she thought suddenly, “that’s just what Mrs. Anderson said. She said I was pretty nigh as naked as that little bird, and it’s just the truth!”

Halfway down, all the seats on one side of the car were given over to a detachment of men in khaki. They laughed and joked uproariously and burst occasionally into war songs—“We won’t be back ’til it’s over, over there,” and “Keep the home fires burning.” Men in khaki were new and strange phenomena in Julie’s part of the world, and she looked at them curiously. But she was so weary that even they could not engage her interest for long, and closing her eyes, she let herself relax. She could feel the big warm body of the woman beside her heave up and down with each breath. The train was stuffy and hot, filled with disheveled people and fretful children, and over all hung the smell of smoke and cinders and peeled oranges; presently with closed eyes she went almost to sleep in the weary atmosphere. The gray roar of the train pulsed in her ears, making a swaying background of sound before which fantastic thoughts on the verge of dreams spread themselves out. Suddenly, however, against that curtain of sound a woman’s sharp voice detached itself from the other noises and hung for a moment before Julie’s consciousness, as distinct as words on a motion-picture screen.

“Yes, it is in there,” the voice said. “It is, too! I put it there myself just a while back!”

Julie opened her eyes, and looking in the direction of the voice saw Timothy Bixby for the first time. He was one seat ahead of her across the aisle so that she had a clear view of him, a meagre little man, fumbling anxiously through the contents of a suit-case, while a woman in the same seat, her head against a pillow, watched him angrily. It was the woman’s voice that had aroused Julie.

“It is there, too!” she repeated. “Oh, why in the name of common sense can’t you ever find anything? Here—get out of the way!”

She shoved the man aside, and stooping an instant, fished in the suit-case, bringing to light a collapsible drinking-cup.

“There! I told you it was there right along,” she announced, flouncing back into her seat. “Now for mercy sake get me that water, so’s I can take a tablet—my head’s just about to split open.”

The little man took the cup in submissive silence and went forward to the water cooler. Julie watched him go down the aisle. He had sandy hair, and meek, rather drooping shoulders. His progress was zigzag, as he clutched the back of first one seat and then another, tossed from side to side by the speed of the train, which on a down grade now was making up lost time. When, after filling the cup, he turned about, she had a good view of him. He was about thirty years old, with a small spare frame, deprecatory movements, and an anxious frown between his blue eyes. He seemed to be trying desperately hard to cope with life, with a kind of worried patience. But life was against him. Halfway down the car, a small peripatetic child got in his way, and a lurch from the train made him spill the water over its frock.

“Aw—oh!” he cried, a little ejaculation of dismay, and turned helplessly and unhappily to the mother.

“I certainly am sorry, marm,” he apologized, while he fumbled for his handkerchief to wipe the child’s frock. The mother paid no attention whatever to him, but snatching her child to her, removed the small spill of water as though her offspring had been marked by it for life. He repeated, “I’m mighty sorry,” and continued to stand helplessly by, but the woman would not give him even a glance of comfort or forgiveness, so after another uncertain moment he went back for fresh water. As he turned after refilling the cup and again came down the aisle, he was forced to meet the eyes of all the passengers. The small disaster had called momentary attention to him, marking him as it were with an exclamation point, and everybody was staring. The soldiers seized upon him as a butt for their wit.

“Now then, George, steady! Whoa—up! Steady!”

“Mind how you carry yer licker, son!”

“Atta boy!”

He advanced with averted eyes, apparently intent upon the cup, but Julie could see the flush of painful color in his face. The soldiers saw it too and jeered with renewed “Atta boy’s.” Julie knew exactly how he felt. All at once, she knew it so hard, so violently, that suddenly she seemed flowing out of herself to him with a sharp projection of sympathy. He felt her eyes upon him, and just as he reached his seat, looked up with a startled expression. There was a momentary rush of contact between them, close, astonishing, almost suffocating to Julie. An instant they were held in each other’s glance. Then he turned away, and handed the cup to his companion. The woman accepted it ungraciously, and putting a white tablet into her mouth, gulped it down with a swallow of water.

“I never did see anybody as awkward as you,” she said. “Spilling water all over that child! Now for gracious sake, keep still an’ let me be quiet a spell, and see ’f this tablet won’t help my headache some.”

He said nothing, but readjusted her pillow for her, restored the drinking-cup to the bag, and pushed the latter well over to his side to make more room for her, although he was himself uncomfortably squeezed, doing it all with that air of worried endeavor, as though Fate had presented him with a portion of life bigger than he could manage. He had also, Julie observed, a detached manner, a little as though his whole self were not present. It was this aloofness that made her comment inwardly, “Well, he certainly is good to that hateful sister of his.” True, the woman did not look like his sister, but she could not be his wife; surely, she thought, he would have had something different, a fuller, more alive personality, to offer to his mate.

After the suit-case was closed, he looked around again at Julie, but she averted her eyes now, staring away out of the window, and would not let herself glance again at him until the train was nearing Hart’s Run, when she straightened up, and began to gather her bundles together. Then she looked across the aisle, and saw that he and his companion were also making preparations to leave the train. Their suit-case was strapped; the woman had tidied herself up and put on her hat, presenting now an appearance completely in accord with the prevailing style; and when the conductor put his head into the train and shouted “Hart’s Run, Hart’s Run,” they rose and moved out into the aisle. Julie was just behind them as they approached the door. “Well, here we are,” the man said, and both he and his companion stooped down to peer through the windows at Hart’s Run, evidently seeing it for the first time.

“Well, ain’t it the awfulest little hole!” the woman ejaculated.

“Oh, maybe it won’t be so bad,” he offered.

By now they had all three moved out to the platform, waiting for the train to come to a standstill, as the dingy little station slid to meet them.

“Maybe! maybe!” she snorted. “I’m about sick of maybe’s! You’ve been maybe-ing all your life. I just bet before you were born somebody said, ‘Maybe it’ll be a boy,’ an’ that’s just what you are—a kind of a maybe man.” She ended with a burst of laughter, pleased by her own wit.

He made no retort, but Julie, who was standing close beside him now, saw him wince, saw his lips twitch, and his hands tighten spasmodically on the suit-case. For a moment he looked wildly about like a trapped animal seeking escape. As he did so his eyes came full upon Julie’s face. There was such a look of desperation, of trapped and impotent despair in them, that a surge of rage leaped within, sweeping her beyond all the small proprieties, so that she found herself whispering breathlessly behind the woman’s back, “Oh, don’t mind, don’t mind so! I understand—I understand!”

He stared at her a startled, incredulous moment, the color coming up in his face in flood after flood.

The train jerked to a standstill. They were flung together unsteadily for an instant, and then descended the steps.

Julie did not linger. She did not look again at the little man, but stepping past him and his companion, walked quickly along the station platform. Her arms were full of bundles, but she was hardly conscious of them, nor of her feet moving over the boards; the gust of her rage blew her along with a sense of speed and lightness, almost as though she were flying. It was glorious. It lifted her above herself. It set her free. At that moment she was released from all the small constrictions of her life, she was beyond fear of anything, or of any person. Walking thus down the platform she encountered Edward Black. He blocked her way with his great hectoring swagger.

“Oh, I know somep’n, I know somep’n,” he sang.

Julie stopped. She was so angry that her eyes glittered, and a flame seemed to dart out of her white face.

“What do you know?” she demanded.

Edward was surprised and disconcerted. This was not the frightened response he expected from his victim. “Oh, well, never mind,” he muttered, and started to turn away, but Julie stepped quickly after him.

“What do you know?” she repeated furiously.

Again he backed away a step or two. It seemed to him that this enraged little woman might fly at his throat.

“Aw, I was just foolin’, Julie,” he said weakly.

“You saw me sitting out on the church steps last night,” Julie stated clearly and concisely. “Now, what of it?”

“Nothing, Julie, nothing,” he repeated, still retreating sheepishly before her, and uneasily aware that they were attracting attention from the small group of station loafers. But Julie was swept above herself. What people thought, or what they said was a thing beneath her feet now. She did not even hear one of the loafers call out, “That’s right. Miss Julie! Don’t take any foolishness off’n Ed! You got him on the run now. Keep it up!”

“I sat out on the steps because I wanted to,” she continued fiercely. “And what I do is no concern of yours, nor of anybody else’s.”

Edward Black fell away without another word, and Julie continued her progress, still blown along by the gust of her rage. Presently she met Bessie Randolph, who was the wife of Silas Randolph, the president of the bank, a very important person in Hart’s Run.

“See that couple there,” Mrs. Randolph said, joining Julie and pointing out the small man and his companion, who had been met by Wilson McLane, editor of the Hart’s Run News. “The man must be the new printer for the News. Mr. McLane told me he was expecting him by this train. That must be his wife with him.”

“No, it’s his sister,” Julie corrected positively. She was not in the habit of contradicting.

“Oh, then you’re acquainted with them?” the other challenged.

“I never saw them before, but I noticed them on the train, and I know she’s his sister.”

“Well, they don’t either of them look like much,” Mrs. Randolph said with a careless dismissal. “Come on Julie, I’ll ride you home; my car’s right here.”

“I thank you,” Julie responded. “But I reckon I’ll walk.”

Mrs. Randolph stared at her. People did not often so lightly refuse her condescension.

“You better ride with all those bundles,” she urged.

“No—no thank you. I want the walk,” Julie answered. “And besides, I don’t like automobiles. It scares me to ride in them.”

For years Julie had been afraid of motors and for years she had tried to conceal the fact. This was the first time that she had ever dared to acknowledge it, much less to refuse an invitation from the elegant Mrs. Randolph. But now she gave a little indifferent bow of refusal, and went upon her way, still blown along by the gust of her anger, as she saw again in remembrance the incident on the train platform.

“That hateful woman!” she stormed to herself, the sneer on the woman’s face when she had called her companion a “maybe man” still sharp before her mental vision. “The hateful piece!” She found she was repeating over and over: “I know. I understand. I know. Oh, don’t take it so hard! I know how hateful folks are!—He’s as unfeathered as I am,” she whispered to herself. “Things get at him just like they do me, an’ he don’t know any better how to stand up against them. I understand. I know how it is.—Well, anyhow,” she exulted, “I settled that hateful Ed Black for once! Always picking on me. Tore my paper doll up. Tramped on my cookie. Thought he could keep on bullyin’ me forever, but I settled him all right!” The careful speech her mother had trained her to had slipped now, and she was reverting to the mountain phraseology.

“Julie! Oh, Julie, wait just a minute—I want to ask you about that crêpe waist of mine.” It was one of Julie’s customers calling to her from a porch. People were in the habit of stopping Julie as she passed along the street, no matter in how much haste she might be, to have her advice about old and decrepit clothes. Although she resented this, Julie usually meekly responded—but not this time.

“Bring your waist into the shop in the morning, and I’ll attend to it,” she called back, continuing upon her way.

She reached home, and unlocking her door, went into her bedroom, then depositing her bundles, removed her hat before the mirror. The face that looked at her was flushed and alive and recreated. It was not at all the haunted and forlorn little countenance that the glass had given back in the morning. Julie lingered a moment, staring at herself and wondering. She was interrupted by Mrs. Sam Wicket who entered after a preliminary knock.

“You back, Julie?” she said. And after Julie had stated that she was back, “Did you speak to Winter and White’s about the stove?” she inquired.

“I did,” Julie returned, “and they’ll write to you about it.”

“Humph! Writin’ ain’t much good. Well, did you do that other little errand for me? I ain’t got a second to stop; my light bread’s ready to come out of the oven right this minute.”

Julie fished out her especial package from the pile on the bed, and handed it over to her.

“Well, I certainly do thank you for all your trouble,” Mrs. Wicket said, and was just turning away, when she paused, struck by a further thought. “Oh, there!” she exclaimed. “What I wanted to ask you last night was, how you knew Brother Seabrook called on you to pray?”

“I was sitting just outside on the steps and heard him,” Julie returned simply, looking straight at her.

“You—you was sitting on the steps?”

“Yes,” Julie proceeded. “I slipped out because I was afraid to be called on, and after I got outside it was all so sweet and still, I just sat down there for a little bit, till I heard him ask me to lead, an’ then I came home.”

“Well!” Mrs. Wicket ejaculated. She was speechless a moment. Then she burst out. “Well, I think that was the funniest thing!”

“Maybe it was,” Julie interrupted her, “but anyhow I did it.”

“But Julie! Sitting outside on the church steps ’cause you’re afraid to pray?”

“Did you say your bread was in the oven?” Julie inquired.

“Yes, my bread-rolls; yes, that’s right. I got to go.” Mrs. Wicket turned away. “But I do think that’s mighty funny, Julie,” she called back as she went down the walk.

Julie shut her door and sat down in a chair. Suddenly she was extraordinarily limp and exhausted. Her anger with its glorious exaltation had evaporated, leaving her face to face with the appalling things to which it had swept her.

“Why, I told her—I just told her everything right out!” she whispered. “She’ll tell everybody; they’ll all be talking about it now. An’ I was short to Mrs. Silas Randolph, of all people! And look how I answered Kitty Jeffers about her waist. They won’t either of ’em like it. They’ll all be talking about me.” Then her relaxed mind gave back to her—what she had not noticed at the time—the words of encouragement the loafer at the station had cried to her: “That’s right, Julie; don’t take any foolishness off’n Ed! You got him goin’ now!” Why—how awful! Right out there on the station platform! How awful for her to have laid herself open to such conspicuousness! She shuddered, all her nerves tightening once more with self-consciousness, and her cheeks burning. “Oh, what a fool you are! Oh, how they’ll talk about you! They won’t any of ’em understand!” Glancing up, she saw her face again in the mirror, and now it was the same white and anxious reflection that had looked out at her in the morning. Something in its impotent appeal brought back the look of unprotected despair in the face of the little man on the train. “Oh, I understand, I do understand,” she burst out passionately. “Don’t look that way, don’t take it so hard! Folks don’t understand, but I do!” And she hardly knew whether her words were addressed to his tragedy or to her own.

V

It was two days afterward that Julie saw Mr. Bixby again. She knew his name now. The Hart’s Run News had announced that Mr. Timothy Bixby, an expert printer and typesetter, had accepted the position left vacant by the departure of Hobson Jones, who had left for Camp Lee to answer his call to the colors. The News added further, “We are glad to welcome Mr. and Mrs. Bixby to our midst.”

So that woman was his wife after all.

Their next meeting occurred when Mr. Bixby made his way to Julie’s little shop, sent by his wife to match some pink yarn for a sweater she was knitting. It was just like her, Julie thought, to be knitting a sweater for herself when all the rest of the women were at work on khaki wool for the soldiers. And like her, too, to send her husband, because she was ashamed to ask for it herself. Julie had time to think of these things because she was busy at the hat counter with a customer, and so had to let Maida Watkins, who sometimes helped her out in the shop, wait on Mr. Bixby.

“Pink wool?” Maida demanded sharply, her cold young eyes piercing him, and her teeth snapping together on her chewing-gum. Maida had been expressing superiority, leisure, and indifference, as she stood behind the counter, ruminating slowly upon her gum, the while she patted her blond hair from time to time, or examined her polished nails; but when Mr. Bixby entered, and holding out the sample made his timid request, she shot “Pink wool” at him, and clenched her teeth so tight on her gum that the muscles stood out on either side of her jaws. The color swept up uncomfortably to his eyes, making his face look blurred and helpless.

“Yes, marm, if you please, marm: to match this sample if you got it,” he stammered.

“No, we ain’t got it,” Maida returned, not even deigning to glance at the wisp of yarn he proffered. “It’s only pro-Germans would keep pink wool these days,” she informed him. After which she returned to her haughty mastication, staring away out of the window over his head.

It was here that Julie abruptly laid down the hat she had been displaying and swept forward. She was animated by the same rage that had assailed her before. As she passed Maida she glared at her. “Show Miss Jenkins that sport hat,” she commanded; and Maida with a startled and indignant toss of her blond puffs melted away to the obscurity of the hat counter.

Julie reached the open door just as Mr. Bixby was starting out of it.

“I’m mighty sorry I haven’t got what you want, Mr. Bixby,” she said. “I hope you’ll call again.”

At her words he turned, and there was a sudden leap of surprise, of recognition, and of release in his eyes. For an instant they stood and looked at one another, the storm-tossed personalities of each finding a harbor and refuge in the being of the other. He spoke first. “I—I didn’t know,” he stumbled. “Is this your shop?”

She nodded. “Yes, I live here.”

But now she knew that Maida was turning to ask her something about the hat she held, and she hastily snatched up the momentarily dropped mantle of conventionality.

“I’m mighty sorry we haven’t any pink wool, Mr. Bixby,” she repeated, although she was aware that Maida was regarding her with outraged contempt.

He replied with a sudden surprising twist of whimsicality, an unexpected twinkle in his blue eyes.

“Oh, well,” he appealed, “ain’t it just like me to ask for pink wool a war year? Ain’t it just the ornary kind of thing I would do?”

He spoke as though she knew him quite well, and would understand perfectly all the small disasters to which he was prone.

“Oh, well,” she said, still offering consolation, “Of course, a man couldn’t be expected to know how hard it is to get any kind of wool these days. Why, the Red Cross Committee has even sent over to Winter’s Gap to see if they can’t get some homespun. Winter’s Gap is in the back part of the county away from the railroad, where some of the old folks still spin,” she explained.

“Is that so?” he said with interest. People were not usually interested in Julie’s small remarks. “Well, I reckon I must be going,” he added, conscious now of Maida’s severe eyes upon them. He made an uncertain gesture toward his hat and turned away. As he raised his arm, Julie caught sight of a rip in his sleeve.

“I don’t see why in the name of goodness that woman can’t keep him mended up!” her thoughts ejaculated angrily.

VI

The following Sunday after service, Julie was formally presented to Mr. and Mrs. Bixby.

She had gone to church in an agony of apprehension. Would Brother Seabrook call on her again to pray? Or did he know now that she was afraid? And did everybody else know? The thought made her feel like an outcast, yet she was so terrified that she would have liked to go to Brother Seabrook before church and beg him not to call upon her. She pictured herself doing it; she even made up in her mind the words with which to clothe her request; but in the end she could not bring herself to do it. Instead, she went late and slipped into a back pew. He did not call upon her, but all through the service she suffered an agony of dread, and when it was over, and she rose with the rest to leave, she felt as though every eye was fixed on her in contempt.

Outside the church she encountered a little group of people who were being introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Bixby. Mrs. Sam Wicket had taken upon herself the responsibility of presenting the strangers to the congregation.

“Miss Rose, make you acquainted with Mis’ Bixby,” she said, catching Julie by the arm as she came down the steps, and holding her firmly before the other, as though she might otherwise escape.

“Miss Rose, pleased to meet you,” the newcomer said; and Julie found herself looking up into the face of Elizabeth Bixby, while their hands touched for a moment.

Dressed for her first public appearance in Hart’s Run, Mrs. Bixby was at once more amiable and more overpowering than the cross and disheveled woman whom Julie had seen on the train. An exotic perfume new to the village hung about her. Her green silk dress shimmered in the sun, her feet were squeezed into high-heeled pumps with flashing buckles, while from her ears big green hoops depended, accentuating the breadth and bold commonness of her face, and shaking and gleaming as she turned her head from side to side. She was much taller than Julie, so that she had to look down at her.

“I recollect seeing you on the train, the day we got here,” she announced.

“And that’s Mr. Bixby,” Mrs. Wicket added—rather as an afterthought.

Julie turned and looked into Timothy Bixby’s face as their hands came together for the first time. His was cold from shyness, and Julie knew that hers must feel the same way. Neither of them spoke.

“You must excuse my husband,” Mrs. Bixby said with elaborate jocularity. “The cat got his tongue when he was real little, an’ he’s been dumb ever since.”

The unhappy color suffused Mr. Bixby’s face, and letting go of Julie’s hand, his glance sought the ground in confusion. Then suddenly he raised his eyes and gazed straight at her. She saw his spirit, desperate and impotent, like a caged wild animal, looking out at her. The sight shook her once more with that familiar suffocating anger.

“Oh, well,” she retorted boldly, “what people say isn’t really anything. It’s what they are that matters. I’m not much of a hand for talking myself. Maybe the same cat got my tongue.—Excuse me; I’ve got to go back and speak to Brother Seabrook a minute,” she added suddenly.

Julie reëntered the church and went hastily along the red-carpeted aisle, and with every determined spring of her foot she said to herself, “It’s got to stop—it’s just got to stop right now. Folks have got to let us alone.”

Quickly and decisively she came straight up to Brother Seabrook and paused in front of him. He was busy putting some papers together, and everybody else had left the church. “Brother Seabrook,” she said clearly, “I just came back to ask you—to tell you—you mustn’t call on me to pray.”

Brother Seabrook looked down at her in surprise, his brows over his shoe-button eyes going up protestingly. “Why, my sister, what is this?” he cried. “Not call on you to pray?”

“No, I can’t do it. I never could. My mother always explained to every new minister that I couldn’t. But she’s dead now, so I’ve got to tell you myself.”

Her big gray eyes fringed by dark lashes looked straight up at him. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. Her breath came quickly, making the ruffles about her neck stir up and down. She was all of thirty-two, but Brother Seabrook was nearing fifty, and was a widower. They were alone in the church.

He took her hand and held it in both of his large palms.

“My sister, my little sister,” he said, “you must pray—all of my flock must pray. Couldn’t you say one little prayer for me?”

Julie jerked her hand free.

“If I can’t do it for the Lord, I’m not likely to be able to do it for you,” she retorted, and went lightly away down the church aisle and out into the street, leaving him to turn a dusky red and swallow convulsively.

“There! That’s settled,” Julie said to herself, drawing a deep breath and aware of an enormous content and elation. Her feet moved over the ground with the flying swiftness that had borne her up the church aisle. She was conscious of a beautiful elasticity and freedom, as though a binding cord that had been twisted tighter and tighter to constriction had suddenly snapped, giving her relief and air and release into a beneficent world. It seemed to her she had never seen a day so exquisite. The sun bent over her in floods of golden calm. The mountains that encircled Hart’s Run, the blue sky and white drifting June clouds were in themselves climaxes of ecstasy, and yet they were more also, veilings of something hidden, enormous, and completely satisfying. She stood still in the street a minute and gazed up to the amazing blue of the sky, with the big puffs of silver clouds riding it. “Oh, my Lord, how beautiful that sky is!” she whispered. “And it’s always there,” she thought in astonishment; for it was as though she were seeing it for the first time. “Why,” she thought suddenly, “Why, it doesn’t make any difference whether I pray or don’t pray in public. I don’t know why I ever worried about it or about what folks would think. Oh, ain’t the sky beautiful!” she reiterated.

She was a little behind the rest of the congregation, and as she made her way homeward, small knots of people were all in front of her, going slowly along. Julie was conscious of a very warm and friendly outpouring toward them, but she was in no hurry to overtake any one. For the moment she wanted to be alone, isolated in that enormous sense of freedom, which only the sky was big enough to encompass.

As she approached her own house, she saw that Mr. and Mrs. Bixby were standing there in conversation with Mrs. Wicket. She quickened her pace, feeling her ankles supple and swift at each step, and came up to them in a little gust of eagerness.

“Look at the sky,” she cried, waving her hand toward it.

They all stopped talking and turned their faces up, tipping back on their heels, and shading their eyes.

“What is it? What do you see, Julie?” Mrs. Wicket demanded.

“It’s so beautiful!” Julie cried. “So blue—and those big white clouds!”

“Well, for mercy sake, is that all!” the other ejaculated. “Why, I thought it must be a flying machine.”

“But it’s so beautiful!” Julie persisted, trying to draw them into her elation.

“I don’t care for that kind of a sky,” Mrs. Bixby said languidly. “It’s mighty apt to bring a storm, and thunder always makes me s’ nervous.”

Julie felt crushed, as though the sky were a hat which she had offered for sale, but which both ladies had repudiated.

Mr. Bixby essayed a timid assent. “It is beautiful,” he said, cocking his head on one side to spy upward. “I don’t believe I ever saw it so blue.”

“I never saw how beautiful it is,” Julie said turning to him involuntarily. “I’ve—I’ve—why it’s like I’d just seen it for the first time.”

He looked at her curiously, and started to speak, but Mrs. Wicket interrupted.

“Aw, Julie,” she said, “you’re so funny! But what I want to know is, what you went back to speak to Brother Seabrook about.”

“I went back to tell him he mustn’t call on me to pray,” Julie replied simply.

“You did? Well, I never!” Mrs. Wicket cried. “For mercy sake, Julie! What’d he say?”

“He didn’t say much. But he won’t ever call on me again.”

“Can’t you pray, Miss Rose?” Elizabeth Bixby demanded.

“No. That is, sometimes I can. I did once. But just to think of it now makes me feel scared.”

“Well, I never did hear of a person telling a preacher a thing like that,” Elizabeth commented heavily. “That certainly is new to me. Hart’s Run’s a funny little place, all right!”

“That ain’t Hart’s Run,” Mrs. Wicket cried ruffling up in defense of her native town, “that’s just Julie’s scariness. I don’t reckon there’s another person in town would have had to tell Brother Seabrook such a thing.”

“Oh, do look at the sky,” Julie pleaded, still obsessed with the idea that if they could only realize the enormous serene beauty overhead, they would understand how little it mattered whether she was afraid to pray or not.

“Oh, for goodness sake, leave the sky alone!” Mrs. Wicket cried. “We ain’t got anything to do with the sky. What I want to know is how in the world you expect to be happy in heaven if you can’t pray. Why, I just know heaven’s made up of prayer and praise.”

Here Mr. Bixby cut in unexpectedly with the snatch of an old negro spiritual:—

He’ben! He’ben!

E’vy’body talk about He’ben ain’t goin’ there!

he sang.

“Tim!” his wife flared up. “Now you’ll apologize right this minute to Mrs. Wicket for that piece of impertinence,” she commanded.

The color drove into his face up to his eyes; he hesitated. But Mrs. Wicket, who had completely missed the significance of the words, said politely, “Aw, that’s all right. Mis’ Bixby. I don’t object to singin’ on Sunday s’long as it’s hymn tunes.”

At this point Aunt Sadie Johnson came out on the little stoop in front of her door and created a diversion.

“Julie,” she said, “did you know Mr. and Mrs. Bixby was looking at my upstairs rooms?”

Julie did not know it, and was surprised.

“Well, now, this is a real nice part of town for you all to locate in, it’s so central,” Mrs. Wicket said.

“I’m only considering them,” Elizabeth answered condescendingly. “They ain’t really just what I want, but they seem to be about as good as anything I can find in this place, so I reckon they’ll just have to do.”

Julie saw Aunt Sadie flush. The words were an insult to both of them, for though the rooms were Mrs. Johnson’s to rent if she pleased, they were in Julie’s house. Mr. Bixby looked unhappy and apologetic, but incapable of finding any way of relieving the situation. Julie’s exaltation had all evaporated. She was back again in the dreadful constriction of her small self. She had forced a door open for a moment, and looked forth into a wider world roofed by an amazing sky, but only Mr. Bixby would look at it.

Now the door was banged shut again.

“Well, I must go in and lay off my things,” she said, turning away abruptly.

Mrs. Bixby resented Julie’s not having expressed any interest over the possibility of having her for a tenant, and shot a taunt at her as she left.

“Oh, how can you bear to leave that beautiful sky, Miss Rose?” she cried.

Julie’s momentary flare of spirit was gone. She could find no power to retort, and turned away in silence. As she entered her door, she heard Mrs. Bixby comment to Mrs. Wicket, “Well, she certainly does seem to be a funny little thing.”

“If that woman takes those rooms, if she’s right up there over my head all the time, I’ll—I’ll choke to death!” Julie cried to herself. “She just stifles me so I can’t breathe! She stifles him, too.”

VII

All that Sunday Julie was haunted by the thought of Mr. and Mrs. Bixby’s taking Aunt Sadie’s furnished rooms upstairs. They would all be at very close quarters if they did. Julie kept the store and her three neat little rooms at the back. The other half of the house she rented to Aunt Sadie, who in turn rented out the upstairs floor as a small furnished apartment. Two doors, one upstairs and one down, connected the establishments. The one downstairs opened from Julie’s small hall straight into Aunt Sadie’s sitting-room. The other was at the top of Julie’s flight of stairs and gave on the rooms above. Neither of these doors had ever been locked. Julie and Aunt Sadie were in the habit of running unceremoniously in and out of one another’s quarters by way of the downstairs door, and even the upstairs one Julie had always left unfastened, in case the tenants above desired to come down through her hall and so out to the side street.

Julie was seized that afternoon with a panic over that door.

She was in her sitting-room, seated by the window with her church paper in her lap. The wind blew fitfully in, bringing her the scent of roses from her little plot. She wanted to go out and work around the bushes, but she did not think that was right on Sunday; so after drifting discreetly about the garden, inspecting each plant and little clump of blossoms, she had retired indoors, and settled herself with the Sunday Record, which she subscribed to dutifully, and which she usually held in her lap on Sabbath afternoons, but which she rarely read.

She was half asleep over it now, when suddenly the thought of that unlocked door at the head of her stairs leaped in her mind, startling her broad awake.

“Oh, my soul! That door’s unlocked,” she thought. She felt all at once exposed, as though some one—Elizabeth Bixby, for instance—might run unexpectedly in on her when she was undressed.

“I got to lock it,” she breathed. “I got to lock it ’fore that woman moves in. She’ll be runnin’ down on me every minute if I don’t.”

She ran up the stairs and slammed the door shut; but when her hand felt for the key, there was none in the lock. She jerked the door open and looked on the other side; it was not there either. “My soul! The key’s lost,” she cried in despair. “I got to find a key. I got to lock that door ’fore she gets here.” She hurried downstairs, and found a box of odd keys; returning with them she began trying one after another, haste and anxiety growing upon her, and her hand so unsteady that the keys made a small chattering against the lock. At any moment she felt the stillness of the rooms might dissolve and Elizabeth Bixby’s crushing personality be upon her. Indeed, now she heard some one coming up the outside stairway. Breathlessly she peeped forth through the vista of rooms, and waited. But it was only Aunt Sadie’s familiar gray head that came into view. She pushed upon the door, and caught sight of Julie.

“My lands! Is that you, Julie? Well, I thought I heard somebody up here,” she cried.

“Has that woman taken the rooms?” Julie demanded.

“Yes, they plan to move in, in the mornin’. Now what’s scared you, Julie?”

“I—I can’t find a key to this door,” Julie said weakly.

“Well, what of that? It ain’t never been locked.”

“I won’t have that Mrs. Bixby running down on me every minute,” Julie cried hysterically. “She’ll be in and out of the store all the time; I know she will. But I won’t have her running down into my home place!”

“Well,” Aunt Sadie said in her large and placid way, “I wouldn’t take it as hard as all that, but I believe you’re about right. I’m not so struck on the woman, myself. She’s a right airy piece. I hated to let her have the rooms after the way she turned up her nose at ’em. But I did want the money for the rent, and there really ain’t any other place I know of in town for them to go to, and I felt sorry for that little man. He’s a kind of pitiful little feller. It looks like he tries so hard, an’ she just snaps him off every time.”

“I can’t get a key to fit,” Julie said, going on desperately with her attempt to lock the door.

“Here, let’s see how this’ll do,” Aunt Sadie offered, taking a key out of the closet door of the room they were in, and trying it in the lock. “There now,” she said triumphantly as the key slipped into place, “Now you go on out your side, and I’ll lock the door, and put the key back in the closet here. When she comes she’ll find the door fastened an’ never think to try to unlock it.”

Julie withdrew reluctantly. Outside she waited until she heard the key scrape in the lock. Then she tried the door, and being assured that it was really secure, she went down the steps to her own demesne, with a feeling of relief and safety.

VIII

The Bixbys moved into Aunt Sadie’s rooms the next day. The little apartment was already furnished, so there was not a great deal of moving to do: merely the carrying in of a couple of trunks, a phonograph, and a suit-case. The windows and doors were all open, and Julie down in her little shop could hear much of what went on overhead. She heard Elizabeth calling out sharp directions to Mr. Bixby as he staggered up the stairway under one of the trunks. Then he was sent off to buy a broom and some extra cooking-utensils. He came back presently, laden with all sorts of angular bundles; but he had evidently forgotten something, for his wife’s voice was raised in complaint. Julie could not often hear the exact words, and she almost never heard his answers. She gathered that often he did not reply at all, for every now and then Elizabeth would burst out, “Answer me!”

But at last they settled down and had dinner, after which Mr. Bixby went off to the office of the Hart’s Run News; Elizabeth did some ostentatious sweeping, and then the creaking tread of her footsteps subsided.

“She’s taking a rest now,” Julie told herself. “She’ll get up after a little bit, and then she’ll dress herself and come down here.”

It was curious how the whole morning, during all her accustomed duties in the shop, Julie had been aware of all that took place upstairs. The Bixbys’ activities ran in a disturbing undercurrent through all she did. She was right in supposing that Elizabeth would come down to the shop after she had had her nap. At about four o’clock Julie heard her get up, and after moving about for some time, she started down her outside stairs. Certain boards creaked in the floor above. And over her head the heavy footsteps had gone back and forth, punctuated every now and then by a cringing squeak.

“I must get those boards fixed,” Julie told herself. “I’ll go crazy if that keeps up. I don’t know why I never noticed them when the Edwardses were up there.”

Realizing the impending encounter, Julie had made what defense she could. She had carried out to her back rooms the two extra chairs she usually kept in the shop, so that there was nowhere for a visitor to sit down, and was herself safely tucked in behind her counter, sewing, when Elizabeth entered.

For her first visit the newcomer had made an elaborate toilet, consisting of a pink summer dress, white shoes, pink silk stockings, a string of white beads around her neck, and her face frankly made-up. She was rested and refreshed by her nap, and was handsome in a large self-confident way.

She entered the shop with assurance, preceded by a wave of perfume.

“Well, Miss Rose, here’s your new neighbor,” she announced. “I’ve got my rooms fixed at last, an’ it took some straightening, let me tell you! I suppose Mis’ Johnson thought she had everything clean, but poor old soul, I reckon she can’t see so very good. An’ now I’ve come to visit with you a spell.

“Well,” she went on, sweeping her bold dark eyes condescendingly around the shop, “you got a right nice place here. I wouldn’t have looked for anything so nice in such a rotten little town.”

Julie had gotten up as though to serve her, and stood waiting behind the counter, but Elizabeth waved a protesting hand. “Oh don’t mind me. I’ll just look about and make myself at home, and if I find anything I like I’ll let you know. That’s a right pretty hat—that red one. What’s the price of it?—Oh well,” she continued, after Julie had told her, “I’ll wait a while. You’ll have to put it down ’fore the season’s over. People ain’t payin’ much for hats a war year like this. It ain’t patriotic. Besides it ain’t a style that would suit everybody. But it looks good on me, don’t it? Red’s one of my best colors.”

She put on the hat, and preened herself before Julie’s mirror. In her pink dress, crowned by the red hat, she made a garish flash of color, given back in duplicate from the mirror. Her overpowering personality dominated the place. Julie had been working all day and was tired. Glancing across, she saw her own sober little figure with its pale face mirrored beside Elizabeth’s pink and red. For a moment she contemplated the two figures side by side in sharp contrast, then she stooped to her sewing once more. Elizabeth saw the reflections and laughed. “We look kind of funny together, don’t we,” she said complacently. Then she moved to get a better view of herself, and Julie’s reflection was blotted out by her dominant pink.

“You ain’t got your mirror in a very good light,” she informed Julie. “If I was you, I’d hang it over on that side; and I’d get a better one. This don’t make people look their best, an’ what you want in a shop like this is a glass that’ll just make people look better’n they ever looked in their lives before, so they’ll think, ‘My, ain’t that hat becomin’!’ An’ then they’ll buy the hat, an’ never know it was the mirror all the time. That’s the way to sell hats, dearie! Oh, I could show you a heap about running your shop.”

Julie said nothing, but went steadily on with her sewing, her needle weaving deftly in and out of the soft blue material she was at work on; but Elizabeth was too completely wrapped up in her own atmosphere to be aware of the other’s unresponsiveness.

“I always did know about hats,” she went on. “It seems like it’s a kind of a gift with me. I can always tell what kind of a hat a person ought to wear. Now you—you ought to wear something kind of startling to bring you into view. If you don’t have it, you’re the kind of mousey little woman that slips by without any one’s payin’ any attention. I looked at you on Sunday, and I says, ‘That little woman kind of needs something to bring her out. Now what is it?’ I says, sort of turning you over in my mind, like you taste cake-batter to see what it needs. And all at once it came to me: ‘It’s a hat,’ I says, ‘a cerise turban: that would do the trick.’ If folks didn’t notice a thing else about you, they’d see that turban. You ain’t got just the color I had in mind,” she went on, surveying the hat counter, “but,” taking up a green turban, “this is kind of the shape I mean. Now if you had a piece of cerise silk you could fix this right over for yourself. Lemme see how it looks on you.”

But Julie shrunk hastily away. “No, no thank you,” she said with that quick breathlessness that was a nervous trick with her. “No, I never wear cerise, and I don’t care for that shape on myself.”

“Oh, all right then,” Elizabeth retorted, laying down the hat in a pique. “You can suit yourself. I was just trying to show you how you could attract a little attention. But you’re just like my husband; he sort of wants to slink through the world without anybody noticing him. I tell him a person would think he was a submarine, he’s so anxious to have that ‘low visibility’ the papers are always talking about these days. I declare, I’d like to put a cerise turban on him—a red hat like what the Popes wear in the Catholic Church. Maybe he couldn’t get by without folks seein’ that! ‘Look a’ here, Tim,’ I’m always sayin’ to him, ‘What’s the matter with you? It ain’t going to kill you if folks sees you. Come out into the open,’ I says. ‘You can’t hide behind my skirts all the time.’ But the more I talk at him, the more he goes in the ground an’ pulls the hole in after him. I declare, I think it’ll be a right good thing if the draft does take him.”

“The draft?” Julie looked up quickly.

“Mm—h’m,” Elizabeth nodded. “He’s liable to be called any time now. He just took this little job here while he was waiting. That’s why I didn’t bring any of my furniture with me. I got a nice house and a lot of elegant furniture in Lynchburg where we was, an’ we’ll go back there after the war. The paper he worked on there’s just suspended for a while. The editor an’ owner’s both gone to the front. Well, you don’t catch me stayin’ on here if Tim’s drafted. I’ll go on back to my own home. I got plenty of friends there. But say—he’ll make a great soldier, won’t he? I always tell him Tim’s short for timid with him. You can laugh if you want. I know just how funny he always strikes folks.”

“I—I don’t want to laugh,” Julie protested. “I—oh, I think the war’s awful!” she burst out. “I don’t want to laugh over any one’s going.”

“Oh, well,” Elizabeth said carelessly. “I wouldn’t be s’prised if the war didn’t make a man out of him—the drill an’ all would be fine. But I tell him he’d better mind out, or he’ll be the goat of the whole camp.”

Finding no chair to sit in, Elizabeth had been drifting about the shop, inspecting one showcase after another; now she came to rest at the counter behind which Julie was seated, and leaning nonchalantly against it, she did what was to Julie an amazing thing. She opened a gilt vanity-bag which she had been swinging, and taking from it a cigarette case, selected one and proceeded to light it with a knowing air. Julie knew, of course, that women did smoke cigarettes somewhere, but she had never seen them do it, much less light one in her discreet little shop. She was used to seeing the mountain women out in the country smoke pipes; indeed, her own grandmother on her father’s side had smoked and chewed as well. “But that’s different,” she told herself now. Her grandmother’s corncob pipe before a stone hearth seemed wholly in keeping with the old woman’s kerchief-covered head, her spinning wheel, her loom, and patchwork quilts. Not so Elizabeth’s insolent cigarette. That appeared to Julie an affront to her mother’s spirit, which always seemed to her still hovering dimly in the background of the little shop. She and her mother, living their gentle reserved lives there together, had made up the atmosphere, the soul, of the little establishment, pouring into it all the timid modesty, gentle propriety, and sincerity of their own hearts. They had neither of them had a brave or robust attitude toward life, but they had nevertheless woven a pattern that was adorned with a thousand tendernesses toward one another, with exquisite bits of understanding consideration, with gentle courtesies and kindnesses toward their neighbors, and with a careful honesty in all their dealings. Timid as they were, they yet had wrought an unseen mesh of life that had a delicate beauty all its own. And now to Julie, all that past that her mother and she had woven together was outraged by Elizabeth’s cigarette.

“I’ve got to stop her! She shan’t smoke here in my shop. What would mother say?” she thought breathlessly to herself, trying to control the tremor that ran through her hands, so that she might set even stitches in her work. “I’ve got to stop her! It’s my shop. She’s got no business to smoke here. Why, I wouldn’t let my best friend smoke here!” But though she protested these things to herself, Julie could not whip her courage up to bringing them forth in spoken words, and Elizabeth continued to puff out long blue columns of smoke, watching them with satisfaction, while with an affected gesture, she flecked her ashes here and there over the clean floor. She was in truth a little disappointed that her cigarette had provoked no comment. She had expected Julie at least to look startled, and was prepared to defend herself with condescending patronage. Julie’s silence was disconcerting, for Elizabeth possessed none of the spiritual antennæ with which to sense another’s atmosphere if unexpressed by word or gesture. She strolled back to the mirror, and under cover of patting her hair into place peeped at Julie’s reflection to see if she was being watched from behind her back. But Julie, whose weakness it was to have antennæ far too sensitive to another’s atmosphere, knew what Elizabeth expected, and kept her eyes resolutely upon the threading of her needle. It was a little defiant clash between the two women, of which Julie was fully aware, but which Elizabeth realized only from her own standpoint.

At this moment Aunt Sadie Johnson bustled into the shop, and having none of Julie’s delicate hesitancy, exploded the hidden situation with a startled exclamation.

“Julie,” she began, “I just ran in to see if that white ruchin’ I got you to order for me—Well, for the mercy sake!” she broke off, suddenly catching sight of Elizabeth. “Well, my lands!” she continued, staring frankly, and unafraid of drawing upon herself the full fire of the cigarette.

It was some such violent attention as this that Elizabeth had hoped for.

“What’s the matter?” she inquired in her most superior manner. “Oh,” feigning surprise, “my cigarette? Why surely, Mrs. Johnson, I’m not the first woman you’ve seen smoke.”

“That you ain’t!” Aunt Sadie retorted promptly. “I’ve seen a plenty of ’em do it.”

Elizabeth was somewhat dashed, but she rallied as best she could. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad Hart’s Run ain’t such a back number as not to know that all the smart women smoke nowadays.”

“Smart?” Aunt Sadie cried, and went off into billows of large mirth. “Well, you may call ’em smart, but I dunno’s they look so stylish to me. There’s old Betty Willets from off Rocky Ridge. She drives her old wagon an’ broken-down horse into town, to collect the swill from folks’ backyards to take up to her hog. She’s one of our smart smokers. An’ they all smoke up Spitzer’s Holler—an’ chew too—they’re ’bout the lowest-down lot of folks we have ’round here. Oh, no, you ain’t the first I’ve seen smoke, not by a long sight. But it does look like a pity for a right young woman like you to be smoking and chewin’—it’ll just ruin your teeth.”

“Chew?” cried Elizabeth wildly. “You don’t think I chew tobacco, do you?”

“Oh, don’t tell me!” Aunt Sadie returned. “I never saw a woman yet who smoked, that she didn’t chew on the sly an’ dip snuff, too. Oh, I’d be the last person in the world to say there was any real harm in it,” she went on tolerantly, “with so many of our old folks still doin’ it; it’s only that I always did think chewin’ an’ spittin’—”

“I don’t chew!” Elizabeth cried furiously. “Of course I don’t! Who ever heard of such a thing? Well, I’m going,” she announced, flouncing to the door. “An’ I’ll say this, Miss Rose,” she added, “I don’t think you’re any too polite either to strangers. In all the time I’ve been here, you’ve hardly said two words, and you haven’t so much as asked me to take a chair.” Angry tears leaped in her eyes, and she flung herself away out of the shop and up her own stairs.

“Well, the poor thing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “I made her mad all right! I reckon it was a sin, but I just couldn’t stand her airing ’round here with that cigarette, an’ showings off to us moss-backs. What’d you let her smoke in here for, Julie? You know your mother wouldn’t have liked it.”

“I didn’t know how to stop her,” Julie confessed helplessly.

“Well, I stopped her all right!” Aunt Sadie returned, shaken again by large laughter. “But ain’t the world funny, Julie? Here we’ve all come to look down on smokin’, and feel sort of ashamed of the old women that still do it, when along comes all the young smart Alecks, an’ says it’s the thing to do, an’ if you don’t do it, it just shows you’re right from the backwoods. Now ain’t that funny? If you just live long enough in the world, you’ll see everything turned upside down! But I feel kind of sorry for poor Mis’ Bixby,” she added tolerantly.

“Sorry for her?” Julie’s eyes opened in astonishment.

“Yes,” the other nodded her large gray head. “Don’t you think it’s kind of pitiful to see a grown person putting so much confidence in fine clothes, and thinking she’s so grand showing off with a cigarette? When you’ve been up against real life like I have, that kind of cheap person seems right pitiful.”

“She just stifles me,” Julie said. “She’s so—so big an’ satisfied with herself.”

“Oh, I don’t know’s she’s so satisfied with herself. She wants you to think she is, an’ that’s why she tries to show off so.”

“Well, all the same she does stifle me,” Julie repeated.

“I reckon she does,” Aunt Sadie conceded, surveying Julie’s shrinking make-up with her shrewd and kindly eyes. “She stifles you, honey, an’ I b’lieve she’s just about choked that poor little husband of hers to death.”

“I don’t see why in the world he ever married her,” Julie said.

“Who? That little Bixby? I’ll bet he never married her—she married him.”

“I b’lieve that’s true!” Julie cried with conviction. “Yes, I just b’lieve that’s so.” Aunt Sadie’s statement seemed to her an illuminating discovery. Of course that was it. None of his real self had gone into the union; that accounted for his detached air, which had made her suppose at first that they were brother and sister.

“Of course it’s so,” Mrs. Johnson reaffirmed. “You’re so innocent, Julie, you still think the man does all the courtin’; but I’ll bet poor Bixby did mighty little. I wouldn’t wonder if she married him out of spite. I’ll bet there was another she wanted an’ couldn’t get, so she turned ’round an’ snapped up that little feller, just to show people she could get a man if she wanted one.”

“Well, anyway he isn’t all there,” Julie said absently, still pursuing her own line of thought.

Aunt Sadie was startled. “Why, what on earth do you mean? Why, Julie, you don’t think he’s wanting, do you? He’s right nervous an’ scary lookin’, I know, but I wouldn’t for a minute say he was feeble-minded.”

“No, no, of course I don’t mean that!” Julie protested.

“Well, I shouldn’t think you would. Why, he’s real smart in his trade. I heard Mr. McLane bragging about him in the post office this morning. He said they never did have such a good printer on the News before. Said he seemed to understand high-class printing better’n anybody he’d ever known. No, whatever he is, he certainly ain’t feeble-minded.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” Julie reiterated. “Of course I didn’t mean that. I just meant she didn’t get the whole of him. She doesn’t own all of him.”

“Well, maybe so. I’m sure I hope so—the poor little feller,” Aunt Sadie returned.

IX

The Bixbys settled themselves down in Mrs. Johnson’s rooms over Julie Rose’s little shop, and thereafter the lives of these two new people were constantly crossing the thread of Julie’s life, all of them together weaving that unseen pattern in the garment of existence.

Elizabeth Bixby and her landlady fell into an indifferent intimacy. Aunt Sadie was a sociable person well up in her sixties. The immediate pressure of life was over for her, except when some one of her children, all of whom were married, needed her in an emergency. The years had drifted her into a rather pleasant backwater where she had leisure to look about her and to enjoy what small diversions Hart’s Run had to offer. Her gray eyes, set in a broad, weather-beaten face, were shrewd but tolerant. She viewed human nature clearly, but not unkindly.

“You got to take people like you find ’em,” she was apt to state. Of Elizabeth Bixby she said, “Oh, well, the poor thing, maybe I’d’ve put a little more sweetening in, if I’d had the makin’ of her; but I didn’t mix her batter, so it’s no concern of mine. I’m kind of sorry for her, she craves so to have people notice her, an’ wants her own way so bad; but she’s right good company, too, when everything’s going to suit her.” Thus she explained their intimacy, and together they went almost nightly to the moving pictures.

Elizabeth was lonesome, and had a good deal of spare time to kill. Some of it she killed in Aunt Sadie’s society. The rest she made away with by lying in bed late,—Mr. Bixby always got his own breakfast,—by fitful housekeeping, by gossip and cheap fiction, and by much attention to her clothes. And all that she did went by to the blare of popular songs ground out on her gramophone, for, as she told Aunt Sadie, “If there’s one thing I hate more’n another it’s nothin’ doin’. I got to have some kind of stir goin’ on all the time, if it’s nothin’ more’n the gramophone.”

Her uncertain and slovenly habits were the very antithesis of Julie’s well-ordered and conscientious ones. At a certain early hour Julie arose; at another certain hour she had her breakfast; and by another her rooms were tidied and her shop open for the day. After the Bixbys moved in, she became accustomed to hearing Mr. Bixby every morning at a regular time getting his own breakfast; his habits, when they did not depend on Elizabeth, were as methodical as her own. His breakfast varied in time not more than five minutes from morning to morning, but his dinner, which Elizabeth prepared, swung backward and forward across the face of the clock.

As Julie finished her own breakfast and started her house-cleaning for the day, she was used now to hearing Mr. Bixby’s tiptoe footsteps creeping about overhead. The footsteps were so timid, so stealthy, that she guessed he went in terror of an outburst of irritability from Elizabeth if he awakened her. He was not always successful in keeping quiet. One morning there was a sudden clatter and crash of tinware, and immediately on the heels of it, a flood of abuse from his wife.

When Mr. Bixby came down the outside stairs that morning Julie was sweeping her front steps. He paused after they had exchanged their customary shy good morning.

“I was mighty sorry I made all that racket right over your head just now,” he apologized awkwardly.

“Oh, that was all right,” she assured him quickly. “A person can’t help pans falling down sometimes.”

“It was the pie plates,” he confided. “Seems like they just stand there on edge watching their chance to jump down on a feller, and they ain’t never satisfied to let one of the bunch go alone, but all of ’em got to rattle down together.” There was in his eyes now that rueful twinkle which she had seen before. He offered it tentatively to her, a deprecatory, whimsical comment on his own inaptitude.

It was like a shy animal peeping forth from its hole, ready to whisk away at the first unsympathetic gesture.

Julie smiled. “Yes, I know,” she said, although she really had no whimsical twist like that in her own make-up. When pie plates fell for her, they fell, and there was no alleviating mirth about their descent.

He still lingered, looking at her wistfully, relaxing his nerves in her sympathetic atmosphere.

The street was almost empty. The little gardens up and down it made joyful bits of color, and the fresh morning air danced through the shimmering trees, and twinkled its feet over the sparkling grass. Here and there, spread on the small lawns, or depending from the garden fences or from the branch of a shrub, spider webs showed their lace, an ephemeral loveliness which would presently disappear as the day advanced. For a time life seemed to turn a kindly side to them both, and in the friendliness of each other’s presence, their real personalities—which were usually as invisible as the gossamer webs upon the grass—came forth in shy intercourse.

“I’m mightily afraid I’ll disturb you in the mornings, stepping around right over your head like that,” he confided.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she reassured him. “I’m always up and through my breakfast before you commence, and I think it’s nice to hear other folks stirring around and getting ready for the day, too.”

“Well, I made stir enough this morning, didn’t I?” He laughed. Then he was emboldened to a further confession. “I scared myself so bad I didn’t have the nerve to go on and get my breakfast.”

“Why! You haven’t had anything to eat?” she exclaimed.

He flushed. “Oh, it’s all right. I’ll get me some coffee over at the Monroe House. I didn’t want to disturb my wife again. She’s mighty apt to have one of her bad headaches in the morning,” he said, unconsciously revealing the real reason for his abandoning any further attempt at breakfast.

“I got some fresh coffee right on my stove this minute, an’ some hot biscuits still in the oven. I’d be mighty glad to give you a bite,” she offered impulsively.

At that, a quick embarrassed flush mounted to his forehead. “I’m much obliged,” he answered stiffly, “but I wouldn’t trouble you.”

His embarrassment communicated itself to her, entrapping them both in their frozen self-consciousness and destroying the little moment of friendly spontaneity.

“I must be going,” he said.

“Well,” she answered awkwardly, “I’m sorry you won’t try my coffee.”

For a moment more they lingered uncertainly, their real selves staring forth wistfully through the formality that their conventional selves were hastily assuming, like friendly children being dragged apart by stiff grown-ups. Then she began to sweep again, and he, with a constrained gesture toward his hat, went on his way.

X

Later in that month of June, Aunt Sadie Johnson gave a supper party. She said it did look like she ought to do something for Mr. Seabrook: which was merely a thin excuse, as she was a Presbyterian herself and therefore owed no hospitality to the new Methodist minister. She was, however, obsessed with the idea of finding a husband for Julie, although she was not as frank about it as Mrs. Dolly Anderson. With this in view, she had meant to ask only Julie and Brother Seabrook, but Elizabeth Bixby got wind of the small festivity and saw to it that she was included.

“She invited herself: she didn’t get no bid from me,” Aunt Sadie told Julie. “Oh, well, the poor thing, I reckon she’s lonesome, so we might as well have her; an’ anyhow we’ll give that poor little Bixby man a good feed for once in his life—good, that is, as Mr. Hoover’ll allow. We’ll have waffles anyhow. I reckon we can use that much flour this once, seein’ ’s I’ve eat almost nothing but corn bread all summer. I’ll get you to come in early an’ make ’em, Julie; you make the best waffles in town.”

Julie had no desire to meet Brother Seabrook so intimately and so soon again after her encounter with him in the church, but she could not screw her courage up to explain the matter even to Aunt Sadie. She blushed all over at the very thought of it now, merely in her own mind. So there was no escape for her. Accordingly, on the night of the supper she dressed early and went through to her hostess’s part of the house, to help set the table and to beat up the waffles.

“My, Julie! You look mighty nice in that little sprigged dress,” Aunt Sadie hailed her. “That little touch of blue just suits you. It helps to bring out the color of your eyes. I’ll bet your preacher takes notice.”

“Oh, no, he won’t!” Julie hastily replied. “That is,” she stammered, flushing, “I hope he won’t.”

“Oh, Julie, you’re so young,” Aunt Sadie told her tolerantly. “I don’t know what it is about you—you ain’t really young no more, an’ you don’t exactly look young; but someway you just seem to make every one think of you as nothin’ but a child.”

It was a rather disjointed supper party. Julie had to vibrate constantly between kitchen and dining-room, serving the waffles, and Mrs. Johnson was forever jumping up to hand somebody something. Her idea of entertainment was to see that her guests were well fed, over-fed,—stuffed, in fact,—and conversation was left to struggle along as best it could. Little hopeful fragments of talk were started, but constantly shattered by the necessity for serving a fresh batch of waffles, or by her starting up to get out a glass of some new kind of preserve. Brother Seabrook tried bravely to converse with his hostess, but it was no easy matter. “Yes, yes,” she responded absently to some promising remark, “Now do have one of Julie’s hot waffles, Mr. Seabrook, they’re right fresh from the iron”; or, in sudden accusation, “Why, Mr. Seabrook, you haven’t one thing on your plate!” Valiantly as the poor man struggled to see the surface of his plate, he never saw it, for always as he politely got through one mountain of food, another avalanche descended upon it. He ate manfully, however, replying as best he might to Elizabeth’s insistent talk, and trying from time to time to drag Mr. Bixby into the stream of conversation, as a small boy, not too happy in the swimming-hole, tries to urge other tentative little boys upon the bank to “come on in.” But this Elizabeth always circumvented. Whenever her husband essayed a plunge into the talk, encouraged thereto by Brother Seabrook or in a moment of his own unaided daring, she immediately chased him into silence with some sharp retort. So for the most part he ate his supper without a word. He ate it, too, as though he were very hungry. Unfortunately he told his hostess that it was just about the best supper he ever did eat. He said it in an aside, but Elizabeth overheard and paused just long enough in something she was telling Brother Seabrook to pounce upon him with, “Now that’s a pretty thing to say, ain’t it! Like your own wife kep’ you half starved!”

After that Mr. Bixby fell out of the conversation altogether, only raising his eyes from his plate to glance from time to time at Julie as she came and went with her waffles. In her neat sprigged dress she looked soft and gentle. Her face was a little flushed; one dark strand of hair fell over her forehead, and when she turned to go back to the kitchen, he could see that there were two little ringlets that made curls at the nape of her neck.

Waffle-making was an art with Julie. In the practice of it she even forgot her usual feeling of constraint and breathlessness toward Elizabeth, and served her as eagerly as the rest. In her unconscious delight in doing a thing she loved to do and could do well, she created a content and serenity that drew Mr. Bixby’s eyes continually toward her, and also made the Reverend Mr. Seabrook, who appeared to harbor no malice for that brief episode in the church, rather absent to Elizabeth’s stream of talk. Elizabeth had come to the party intent on making an impression, but much as her elaborate talk and dashing costume thrust her into the foreground, she felt herself constantly in danger of being swept away into the background every time that Julie entered with fresh waffles.

It was the summer of 1918, and naturally most of the fitful conversation turned upon the war, although Elizabeth said flatly that she was just sick to death of the hateful business; and Aunt Sadie answered Brother Seabrook’s scraps of war news with, “Yes, yes—have some preserves?” The reverend gentleman, however, was patriotic, and would not be deflected from the subject.

“Well,” Elizabeth said, at last, making the best of it, “my husband’s liable to get his draft call most any time now. It’ll be right hard on me, but if the country needs him, I’ll have to give him, I reckon. Everybody’s got to do their bit.”

She patted her hair and sighed, basking in her own nobility.

Though Aunt Sadie tolerated Elizabeth, she was apt to flash out at her every now and again.

“You give him?” she snorted. “Humph! that sounds mighty grand, but believe me if Uncle Sam wants him, he’ll take him all right, without any giving on your part.”

Elizabeth’s eyes glittered angrily. She did not quite dare to cross swords with the older woman, so she turned upon her husband.

“Well, he’ll make a great soldier, won’t he!” she jeered.

“Why, I wouldn’t hardly think he was up to the standard height,” Brother Seabrook said, running his eye appraisingly over Mr. Bixby.

“Oh, it ain’t always the biggest men makes the best soldiers,” Mrs. Johnson protested.

They all fixed their scrutinizing eyes upon the little man, but none of them spoke directly to him, unconsciously following the impersonal attitude that Elizabeth had adopted.

Julie was standing in the background, having just returned from the kitchen. She had paused involuntarily when she heard Elizabeth’s remark about Mr. Bixby’s being drafted, and her eyes went quickly to his face. She saw his lips give that faint nervous twitch, and his face stiffen. Then when they all turned their impersonal scrutiny upon him, as though they were inspecting some curious specimen, she saw the unhappy crimson flush up to his eyes.

“What’s the matter with us?” Julie thought violently, unconsciously classing herself with him. “Why can’t folks see us? We’re there just like anybody else, but they always act like they didn’t see us. Someway we stand outside of people’s minds, an’ have to wait for them to open an’ let us in. And they never do.”

Suddenly familiar words flashed upon her with such vividness as to leave her giddy. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” She was aware of so enormous an extension of understanding that the whole of it was beyond her grasp, making her feel for an instant as though she reeled into a larger world. She knew that it was just Mr. Bixby sitting there, silent and embarrassed, shut away from life by the impersonal eyes upon him; and yet in that moment of insight it seemed to her that the great essence of humanity was there looking forth from the caged bars of the little man’s face, waiting patiently, terribly, for an invitation to enter. “I got to let him in—I got to get the door open someway an’ let him in!” she thought fiercely. She moved forward quickly, holding out her plate of waffles. “Have a fresh waffle, Mr. Bixby,” she urged. “These are nice and crisp. I’d like for you to try one.”

It was all perfectly simple and natural, and yet the slight emphasis she laid upon the personal pronoun seemed to open the door for him that he might emerge into the life of a real human being, set free from the negative limbo to which the others had driven him.

He looked up quickly and gladly into her face, with that look of release and freedom, and the breaking of a constricting cord which she had read in his expression before.

“I thank you, I thank you, Miss Julie,” he said gratefully. It was the first time he had dared the intimacy of her Christian name. He helped himself, and, fortified by her creative touch, held the waffle suspended upon his fork for a moment’s approving contemplation.

“My!” he said, with the air of a connoisseur, “That’s about the finest thing in the way of waffle-flesh I ever did see. I’d recommend you to try one of this batch, Brother Seabrook,” he urged.

“Well, I thought I was about done, but if you advise it, Brother Bixby—” Brother Seabrook hesitated.

“I don’t just advise you to take one, I prescribe it for your health,” Mr. Bixby returned; at which every one laughed except Elizabeth, who was furious over his being allowed any personality.

But for the other two Julie had opened the door and let him in, so that he emerged into their consciousness as some one to be taken into account. Brother Seabrook fell into talk with him about the war, and as to the possibility of his draft call, ignoring Elizabeth’s ruffled attempts to draw the conversation back to herself. The supper came to an end presently, and to Elizabeth’s chagrin, Mrs. Johnson accepted her perfunctory offer to help with the dishes.

“Yes,” she said, “you stay with me, Mis’ Bixby, an’ we’ll let Julie go out to the porch an’ entertain the men-folks for a spell. She needs a rest an’ cool-off ’fore we go to the show.”

“Well, you picked a poor hand to help you,” Elizabeth said tartly. “If there’s one thing I do despise, it’s dirty dishes. Here, Tim!” she cried to her husband; and then, realizing that if she called him back that would leave Brother Seabrook in a tête-à-tête with Julie, she said, “Oh, well, go on then”; for she suspected in the minister an interest in Julie which she resented. Her manœuvres were all so obvious and usually so futile, that Julie, informed by that wider understanding, felt a sudden pity for her.

“I’ll stay and help you with the dishes,” she offered.

But this Aunt Sadie would not allow. “No, you go on now, Julie; you’ve done your bit. You go out on the porch an’ cool off,” she ordered.

While the table was being cleared, Julie and the two men sat together in the dusk of the side porch. Julie did not talk much. She did not want to. She was slightly tired, and was content to listen to the other two. She liked to hear Mr. Bixby. It was amazing how much he found to say when the stifling incubus of Elizabeth was withdrawn. For a time the talk was still about the war, but presently it drifted away to other topics, and as that was left behind, Julie was conscious that there appeared in his voice a note of relief and picking up of interest. He talked more quickly and easily, describing the matter of printing. His father, it appeared, had been a printer before him. He had learned the trade from him. He said, “I like it.” He said that over frequently in variations. “Somehow I like it. I like a good bit of printing,” and “I liked it from the first, when I was just a kid.” He made what he said interesting: so much so that Brother Seabrook was glad to listen and said, “Well, well, is that so?” frequently. Neither of the men spoke especially to Julie, yet she knew that they were both aware of her presence, and stimulated by it.

She liked sitting there in the dusk, making the background for their conversation. She had a curious sense that something out of herself flowed forth and made a successful medium for their talk. She knew that if she had not been there Mr. Bixby could never have spoken so well and so easily about his trade. Without the touch of her sympathy, together with the mantle of the dusk, he could never have let so much of himself appear; he would not have been interesting, and Brother Seabrook would have seized the conversation and borne it away in his own large declamatory tones.

It was not long, however, before this little friendly interim was broken. The other two reappeared, and Aunt Sadie hurried them all off to the moving-picture theatre. There Elizabeth managed to secure the seat next to Brother Seabrook, a manœuvre which Aunt Sadie was not quick enough to frustrate. She would not, however, permit her guest of honor to be snatched completely from her, and so squeezed herself down firmly beside them, leaving Julie and Mr. Bixby to find seats together elsewhere.

The entertainment was preceded by a patriotic rally on behalf of one of the Liberty Loans, and as Judge Dean—the main speaker of the evening, who had come from Red River to address the Hart’s Run people—was just beginning his speech, they hastily obliterated themselves in back seats. They listened dutifully through the speech, and to the subscribing for bonds which followed, although they took no part in it, as Julie had already bought two bonds, and Mr. Bixby whispered that he too was carrying about all he could manage.

After the drive for the Loan was over, the lights were lowered, and the moving pictures began; and as always in those summer days of 1918, soldiers went marching by upon the screen. Soldiers drilling at Camp Lee; running up the flag—for a moment Old Glory waved and rippled in the wind before them, and the crowd went wild with applause; soldiers on a transport; American soldiers marching through Paris. At the sight of them and at the sound of the continuous applause, Julie felt the man beside her stiffen. “I’m liable to get my call any time now,” he whispered suddenly in the dimness.

It was only what his wife had said at supper, but now it was different. Then it had been an almost impersonal statement. Now his low voice made it alive and real, an approaching event upon which a human being’s whole life was hung.

“You heard ’em speak of it at table?” he questioned.

“Yes,” she nodded faintly.

The light from the screen glimmered upon his face, and he looked and looked at the men slipping by before him. Suddenly for Julie there seemed to be nothing in the house save those marching figures, and his white face watching them. She fixed her eyes upon them also and a twist of horror shot through her. “Look at those men,” she thought. “Look at all of them—those are all real men—they aren’t just pictures, they’re real. Every soldier there is—or was—a real person. Oh, my Lord!” she thought suddenly, “I wonder what they’re up against now.”

At last the war pictures flashed out and a play began. Mr. Bixby drew a deep breath and Julie felt him relax. He turned to her. “I—I was mightily obliged to you,” he ventured, speaking softly.

Julie knew what he meant, but she wondered if he was aware of what she had done.

“What for?” she questioned.

“Why, you know.” He seemed surprised that she should ask. “At supper, for helping me out. I mean for sort of bringing me into things. After what you did, they saw I was there. But—you know,” he broke off.

“Yes, I know,” she answered.

“You’ve known right from the first,” he said, daring to speak in the half obscuring dark. “When you’re there, I always know you understand. She—I mean—” he cut himself off; “some people seem to sort of strangle me. I don’t know how it is, but someway, I just can’t get to the surface with them.”

“Can’t get to the surface?” she asked quickly.

“Yes. I mean, to get into the world at all. It was like I wasn’t all in; they seem to slam a door in my face, an’ squeeze me out. I’m only half alive with them. They go right along as though I wasn’t there. I don’t know what it is.” He paused uncertainly, as though trying to blaze a pathway of words through a maze of difficult and heretofore unexpressed thoughts. “I reckon it’s my fault someway—I don’t know—or maybe it’s because I’m insignificant-looking an’ small—though I’m really only a little bit below average height—but folks go along an’ don’t even seem to see me.”

“I know: I understand,” she breathed.

“Yes,” he whispered sharply, “you do know. That’s just it. You’ve understood right from the first! There was never anybody else who ever did.”

“It’s—it’s the same with me,” she confessed, a thrill of emotion in her voice. “That’s why I understand. Some folks just choke me—an’ I—someway, I don’t know how to stand up against them.”

“Ain’t that funny?” He spoke wonderingly. “Ain’t it funny? I thought I was the only one in the world that way.”

“I know. I thought that, too.”

They spoke slowly, little pauses between each sentence, as they felt their way on this dim pathway out toward each other.

When suddenly the play came to an end, the theatre lights flashed up, and they heard Elizabeth’s loud confident laugh, they were startled and astray, as though they had come back into a strange world.

XI

That was a strained summer in Hart’s Run, an uneasy, nervous war-summer, throwing the village people out of all their accustomed ways, as they gave themselves to the business of war. Speakers were sent to them for the various “drives,” from Red River and even occasionally from Washington as well. Judge Dean spoke to them in his soft slow voice—oratory strangely different and much more impressive than the flamboyant outbursts of the ordinary campaign-days. “Strictly speaking,” he said softly, “your country has no business at the present time but the business of killing Huns; and strictly speaking, you have no business but the business of killing Huns.”

What an amazing business for Hart’s Run! What had Hart’s Run, up to 1914, ever known about Huns? The nervous, high-strung days went by with Red Cross work, patriotic rallies, the conservation of food, and the tense reading of headlines. Long troop-trains went through Hart’s Run by night and by day, and every now and again a little handful of village men, and men from the surrounding country, left for Camp Lee.

The business of killing Huns—an amazing business indeed for Julie Rose! What did she know about Huns? She subscribed to the Liberty Loans, she worked for the Red Cross, she saved food conscientiously, and she listened to what others read out of the papers; but in truth the war did not touch her very acutely. She did all her duty, and more. She felt some of the horror of the war; but for the most part she looked on as an outsider. So it always was with her. She had always been an outsider—not quite in touch with the rest of the world. People were constantly crowding her shy sensitive nature to one side. As a child she had never been “in it” in the games at school, and now as a grown person she was not in it with her country in this terrible game. Perhaps because of this aloofness, which her timid nature had thrust upon her, she did not now feel much of the intense patriotism that ran through the country. That great uplifting thrill of close interest and contact with other human beings that came to many at that time was denied to Julie. She did all that was required of her; but she was untouched by any rewarding flame of consecration.

“It certainly is awful,” she said from time to time. But the awfulness of the war had been going on since 1914, and the first edge of it was gone. Yet sometimes the horror stuck its head out abruptly in their very midst. It did for Julie on the day that she read in the Hart’s Run News of the death of John Webster in France. “One of our Stag County young men,” the News announced, “whose parents, Mr. and Mrs. Otley Webster, are prominent citizens of Red River.” Why, yes; Julie knew the Websters. She had met them once at Henr’etta’s, and Henr’etta was always talking about Effie Webster—about her clothes, her car, how stylish she was, and about her set of new china. Henr’etta had told Julie about that china the last time she was in Red River. And now Effie Webster’s boy was dead in France. Julie shivered, and thought what awful deaths men had to die. She was rather accustomed to violent death in the lumber camps, in the mining-fields west of Hart’s Run, and on the railroads. Hadn’t her own father been killed by a falling tree? Julie recalled his death with a quiver—that stretched look of suffering, which had so widened and whitened his face. She was thinking of these things a week or so after the supper party, sitting under the light in her back room, knitting on a sweater, when Aunt Sadie came in to her from the other side of the house.

“Come on, Julie, let’s go to the picture show this evening,” she suggested.

“I can’t,” Julie returned. “I’ve got to get on with this Red Cross sweater.”

“Well,” the other sighed, “I reckon I oughtn’t to tempt you away from your duty, with our men givin’ their lives over there. Ain’t it awful about that Mrs. Webster’s boy!”

“Awful,” Julie assented.

“It’s the third one of our Stag County young men to go. That boy from Whifen that was killed early in the war, an’ that young feller that was in the Marines, and now Mrs. Webster’s son. They said when they got the word his mother just fell right over on the floor, an’ was dead for five hours. He was her only boy, and the baby child; an’ now him dead ’way off there—one of our men dead over in France—ain’t it awful?”

“Yes, awful,” Julie repeated, hurrying nervously on with her knitting.

“Well—and did you hear about the Chapin boy?” Aunt Sadie continued.

“No. What about him? What Chapin boy?” Julie asked, startled.

“Why, you know those Chapins that live out on the Easter Road, ’bout five miles from town? It’s a little log-house, sits back from the road in a right pretty yard.”

“Oh, yes, I know. What about the boy?” Julie questioned.

“Well, they had to send him back from camp. They couldn’t do one thing with him. He just cried all the time.”

“Cried all the time?”

“Um—’m.” Mrs. Johnson firmed her lips to a straight line, and nodded her head up and down heavily. “Yes, they couldn’t do one thing with him.”

“But—but what was the matter with him?” Julie persisted.

“I don’t know. He just cried all the time. Lost his nerve, I reckon. They sent him back home. They said he wasn’t no good to them. His father feels terrible; says he always was a nervous kind of a boy, an’ his mother humored him along till she just ruined him.”

“Oh, the poor boy!” Julie cried.

“Well my Lord, Julie! Just s’pose all our men were like that; what would Uncle Sam do?”

“Oh, of course, I know. Only—how awful it was for him!”

“Well, I’m mighty glad he ain’t my son,” Aunt Sadie retorted. “It’ll be a thing people’ll throw up against him all his life. Folks won’t forget it in a hurry. Well,”—she dragged her large figure up out of the plush rocker,—“If you won’t go with me to the picture show, I reckon I’ll just have to go ask Mis’ Bixby; she’s better’n no company.”

She went, and after a little Julie heard her and Elizabeth Bixby setting forth. Julie sat on alone, knitting under the light, her mind filled with distressful thoughts about the Chapin boy, who found camp so awful and the prospect of death in France so overpowering, that he could do nothing but cry. “How dreadful!” Julie thought. “What was the matter with him? What made him go to pieces like that? Other men stood up against it; what was the matter with the Chapin boy? Oh, the poor boy! The poor thing! How frightful to give way like that, with all the camp to see!”

As far as she could remember, she had never talked to the Chapin boy and had not seen him very often. She recalled him as a thin gangling youth, with a prominent Adam’s apple and shallow, frightened blue eyes. And now he was at home again with a disgrace like that. “Oh, the poor boy!” she thought again, horrified at the spiritual collapse that would make one’s pride and reserve go down and leave one exposed before the whole world. “It’s just what I might do if I were a man—just the way I might have acted. Oh, I’m glad I’m not a man!” she told herself.

Suddenly in the stillness she heard a sharp sound in the hall. It startled her so that her hands on the knitting-needles jumped together. “Oh, what is that?” she thought. She listened rigidly a minute, and heard a creaking on the stairway. With an effort, she wrenched herself up, and stepping to the door pressed the electric button. As the light flashed up in the hall, she saw Mr. Bixby’s white face looking down at her from the stairway.

“Oh, I scared you,” he said confusedly. “Don’t be scared; it’s just me. I didn’t go to frighten you.”

Julie looked up at him. “You?” she cried uncertainly. “Oh, it’s you!”

They stared at each other a moment, and then she turned back into her sitting-room. “Well,” she said, relieved, “I’m glad it’s you. I was scared. I didn’t know what to think.”

He came down the stairs, still apologizing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t go to frighten you. I was upstairs all alone—my wife’s gone to the show with Mis’ Johnson—and I got to wondering where that door went to, an’ then, just out of curiosity, I hunted round till I found a closet-key that fitted it. But I’m mighty sorry I give you a start.”

He had come into the little sitting-room now and was leaning over the back of the red-plush rocker, looking down at her. She had returned to her knitting under the light. “Oh, it’s all right; it isn’t anything. I just get scared so easy,” she told him, still with a little tremor in her voice.

“Yes,” he said, “I know. Some of us do.”

He still lingered, leaning on his arms over the back of the chair and watching her knit.

“Making a sweater?” he asked.

“Yes, for the Red Cross.” She spread it out for him to see.

“Well, the feller that gets it’ll be lucky,” he said. Still he did not go; and in a moment he spoke again, feeling his way uncertainly. “Speaking about being scared—I mean, you said you got scared easy?”

“Yes, I do,” she answered, to help him out as he hesitated. “I’m awful timid; sudden noises always make me jump.”

“Yes, I know. And I was thinking how it was with that boy.”

“What boy?” she asked.

“The feller they had to send back from camp. Chapin, I think was the name. You heard about him?”

He waited, looking down at her.

Suddenly Julie comprehended a strained anxiety in his tone, and her heart began to beat quickly.

“Yes, I heard,” she said, and kept her eyes down on her knitting now, not to look too closely at him.

“They said he just cried”—he swallowed nervously—“all the time in camp. They said they couldn’t do a thing with him.”

“I know; I heard.” Julie knit faster.

“They said everybody’d laugh at him from now on,” he continued.

Julie raised her eyes and looked straight up at him. “I never will,” she promised.

He drew a free breath. He seemed to have been waiting for her to say this. “I didn’t b’lieve you would,” he said.

“I never will,” she answered faithfully again, as though making a solemn compact with him.

She saw his hands that clutched the back of the chair tremble slightly, and a faint hot moisture broke out upon his forehead. Then he stooped closer to her, daring all.

“She said—my wife said—that was just what I’d do in camp.”

“You wouldn’t,” she cried sharply. “You wouldn’t! I know you wouldn’t.”

“But—but I might,” he faltered, moistening his lips. “It’s—it’s just what I might do.”

“You would not!” Julie repeated violently, clutching her knitting so tight that one of the bone needles snapped in two.

“She said I would,” he persisted. “And then she went off to the show. I was all alone. I got to studyin’ about it. I thought—I thought—”

“I know,” she interjected quickly. “I know, I understand how it is.”

He moistened his lips once more, and tried again. “And—and I thought maybe she was right,” he got out at last.

“She is not right. She isn’t!”

“And everybody’s laughin’ at the Chapin boy—”

“I’ll never laugh at him.”

“An’ I thought—” He swallowed again. “I thought, ‘Maybe it’ll be you they’ll all be laughin’ at next week.’” He paused a moment. “And—and now you know it all,” he ended.

“I understand.” Julie’s eyes were suddenly full of tears, so that his strained face, gazing hungrily down at her, was blurred through them. “I know. I was sitting here thinking that, too. I was thinking, if I was a man maybe that was just what I’d do. Maybe I wouldn’t stand up against things any better than that Chapin boy.”

“You? You thought that?”

“Yes,” she nodded back at him.

“Then you know,” he said, with a breath of relief. “I didn’t want any one to laugh at him,” he went on. “Don’t laugh,” he pleaded, as though now he were defending the Chapin boy to that cold outside world that had laughed. “Maybe he just couldn’t help it, the poor feller! Life’s mighty big for some folks—too big—bigger than a lot of us knows how to stand up against. You don’t know how hard he tried; folks don’t know how hard a person tries; but you understand, Miss Rose?” He suddenly broke off, his eyes coming back to her face. “You understand, Miss Julie?”

“Yes, I understand,” she answered faithfully. “An’ I know about life being so big.”

“It’s too big for some folks,” he said. “Well, I must go.” He drew himself erect, and started toward the door; then he turned back. “Miss Rose—Miss Julie,” he said, “I want to tell you—I didn’t tell you the truth—I don’t have to tell you anything but what’s the truth. I opened that door and found you on purpose. Of course I knew where it went. I was sitting there all alone after what she said. And then someway I had to see if you were laughin’ like all the rest. Now you know—I don’t have to tell you anything but what’s the truth.” He went then. And presently Julie heard the door at the top of the steps shut and locked, and the key withdrawn from the inside.

Not long afterward Elizabeth Bixby and Aunt Sadie returned, and presently upstairs Julie heard Elizabeth’s high voice taunting her husband. The walls were thin, and certain words came vividly down to her. “Oh, yes you would, too! You’d be just like him!”

“That woman’s a devil. She’s just a devil!” Julie whispered to herself.

XII

That was the first time Mr. Bixby unlocked the door and came down the stairway to Julie, but it was not the last. Almost every evening Elizabeth and Aunt Sadie went out to the moving pictures, and there was no one in the house except Mr. Bixby upstairs and Julie in her sitting-room below. Two or three nights after his first appearance he came again. This time he offered a small excuse. “Could I trouble you to lend me a pair of big shears?” he asked awkwardly. But after she found a pair and put them in his hands, he stood and looked at them uncertainly as though he did not know what to do with them, then suddenly he flushed and laid the scissors back on the centre table.

“I wasn’t tellin’ you the truth,” he confessed abruptly. “I don’t need your scissors. That wasn’t anything but just an excuse. But, someway I can’t lie to you.”

Julie looked straight up at him. “You don’t have to,” she said simply. “You don’t ever have to tell me anything but what’s the truth.”

With the words she came as it were into a place of peace. All the whirling haste and nervous anxiety of her existence, all its terrors and subterfuges, fell away, and left her still and secure.

She saw the tension of his face relax also.

“That’s so,” he said with quick relief. “That certainly is so, Miss Julie. You’re one person I don’t have to try to fool.”

He seated himself in the plush rocker easily and naturally. “All my life,” he went on, “I’ve been pretendin’ things. Puttin’ up a front an’ tryin’ to fool people into thinkin’ I’m something I ain’t.”

“I know. I always do it, too,” she answered. “I reckon it’s mighty foolish of us.” She looked at him out of her wide gray eyes which were kindled now with the light of discovery.

His face broke all at once into laughter. It was a whimsical trick of his nature to experience a certain rueful mirth over his own futilities. “Yes,” he assented, “it is foolish! But anyhow we don’t have to do it with one another, do we,” he said, restating the fact. “I’m kind of lonesome to-night, that was why I come down—I didn’t really want the shears.”

“I know. I understand,” she answered again.

“My wife likes the movies. She goes to ’em ’most every night, but I don’t care nothin’ about ’em. I don’t see what people finds in them.”

“I don’t either,” she confessed.

Thereafter they fell into easy and simple conversation. Indeed, why should he not sit and talk a little while to her? He told her of the small happenings of his day at the News office and of the big and terrible news of the world. He did not hasten to cover up any silence with the clatter of talk. He spoke when he felt like it, sitting in the plush rocker and watching her sew, and she replied—or was silent—as she pleased. He stayed for a half-hour or so and then he rose.

“Well, I reckon it’s time for me to tell you good-night,” he said, and slipped away up the stairs without further comment.

After that he came again and again. The house would be still,—as it never was when Elizabeth’s noisy personality was at home,—Julie would be sewing by her light, when she would hear the key turn in the lock and his foot upon the stair. Once or twice he said, “I was kind of lonesome; maybe you’ll let me sit here a spell,” but later he came without even that preamble, simply saying, “Well, Miss Julie, here I am,” and dropping into the plush rocker as though it were his place that was waiting for him. At first his talk was only general news of the day, but as their intimacy deepened they began to unfold themselves to each other more and more. With all the rest of humanity they continually had to pretend, dressing themselves in a garment of life that was altogether too big for them. With others they were always on the defensive, always erecting hasty barriers of reserve and shyness behind which their sensitive personalities might retreat, but with each other they were free; there they could be spontaneous and completely true. Their real selves came forth and played about naturally and easily in this intercourse of friendly comprehension. The key words of their intimacy came to be, “I know, I understand,” spoken by her, or “Yes, that’s the way it’s always been with me, too,” spoken by him. If there fell a momentary constraint or embarrassment between them, these words were all that were necessary to set them free again. And in the finding of one another’s understanding they found themselves, and a whole new world as well. This world emerged from under all the difficulties and timidities of life as she had known it; from under the strangled inhibitions from which he suffered. It was for them a world that was large and beneficent, where they were big people who were unafraid. It was difficult to put into words what they experienced, but sometimes they groped about to find expression for it.

“Ain’t it strange?” he said. “When I open that door and come down the steps, it’s more than just a door opening. It’s—it’s something in myself. I open the door, and I see you sitting there under the light, and—someway—I find myself when I find you. It’s like when I was a kid and used to be scared in the dark. We lived in the country then, and sometimes they’d send me down to the stable on errands after nightfall. Coming back, the dark’ud all close in on me. I’d be so scared, I’d seem to be getting smaller and smaller an’ bein’ smothered. I’d run an’ stumble over things. An’ then all at once, I’d see the light from the kitchen, and folks moving about inside, and everything’d be all right. The dark would kind of draw off. I’d open all up inside, like I’d been set free. An’ that’s the way it is when I come down the steps an’ see you sitting here. It’s like I’d come home. I’m a bigger person down here in this sitting-room than I am anywhere else. I mean to say,” he hesitated, turning the thought over, “there’s more of me here than anywhere else.”

“But it’s there all the time: I mean, what you really are is there, no matter where you are,” she interrupted.

“Maybe so, but it don’t come out other places. You’ve got the key, Miss Julie. I’ve got the key to the door, but you’ve got the key to what I am.”

But for the most part they did not attempt to phrase it, accepting it simply and easily. They had been cramped and terrified, constricted into their smaller selves, by other people and by their own constrained natures, and now this wider existence trembled into view: an existence set free from fear, where they might be themselves and be happy; and they seized upon it with avidity.

They almost never spoke of Elizabeth. Julie never did, and he but rarely. “My wife’s gone out with Mrs. Johnson. She’s crazy about the movies,” he sometimes said. Once he said, “I offered to go with her, but she said I wasn’t good enough company. She’d rather have anybody’s company but mine.”

“Well, if she leaves him every night like that, of course he’s lonesome,” Julie thought sharply to herself.

They did not meet thus a great number of times—not more than six or seven, all told. They wondered over the miracle of their friendship and they rejoiced in the new life that it brought to them, yet they spoke no word of love to each other. But there fell at last an evening when the summer night had come down over Hart’s Run; when children in pretty, clean frocks called to one another through the dusk; when lovers would have walked the street, if it had not been a war year, with most of the young men gone; when the whole village was relaxed and at ease; and when Julie, sitting sewing by her light, heard the key scrape in the lock, the creak of footsteps on the stairs, and in a moment looking up saw Mr. Bixby before her, but with a face so strange and pinched that she cried out, “What is it? What’s happened?”

He sat down in the rocker and looked at her for a dumb moment. Then he spoke.

“It’s come; my draft call’s come. I got to go.”

“You got to go?” she whispered.

“I just got it from the post office. I got to go in the mornin’. She’s out—my wife’s out. I ain’t told her yet. I came to you, Miss Julie.”

“You—you got to go in the morning,” she repeated blankly. Her work had fallen in her lap, and the delicate folds were crumpled between her clutched hands.

He nodded. “I got to go. They drafted me.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Julie swallowed spasmodically once or twice, looking around the little room where their imprisoned personalities had come together in the last weeks. Where they had found one another, and in that finding had discovered their hidden selves. Where their souls had ventured forth and found a whole new world impinging marvelously upon their constricted everyday existence, and where the timid and reserved room had taken on life from their life.

“You’re going away?” she faltered again, knowing that this world was falling to pieces. She felt herself beginning to tremble all over.

“I got to go, honey,” he said, and stretched out his hand open to her across the table. It was the first time he had used a term of endearment—the first time he had stretched his hand to her. She put her own swiftly into his. The two hands, small and thin, locked together there upon the table. She did not look at him, she looked down at their clasped hands in the light—hands that had miraculously found each other out of all the tumult and terrors of life. Through the tears that were beginning to burn into her eyes the hands looked dim and uncertain. The trembling of her body ran down her arm into her fingers, and communicated itself to his. A tremor shivered through their hands as they clung together.

“I—I got to go, ain’t I, little honey?”

There was a question in his tone now, and she looked up swiftly into his face, the tears arrested and hanging upon her lashes. In his eyes looking hungrily at her she read hesitation and dread. She forgot herself in the realization of what was before him.

“You’re afraid,” she said abruptly.

His face flared darkly red, and he put his disengaged hand up before his eyes. But in a moment he took it down and looked straight at her.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “Look at me, honey, I don’t mind your knowin’ it. I want for you to know. I want you to know just all I am. You’re the only person in all the world I could ever speak about it to, but I want you to know just the onery little feller I am. You’re my mother, an’ my sister—you’re what I am. I can’t keep nothing back from you. I want to lay my heart right out for you to see.”

“I know—I understand,” she whispered. She accepted his fear simply and uncritically.

His hand tightened upon hers desperately. “I’m just a coward, honey, just yeller. I’m afraid of the other fellers; they’ll guy the life out of me. I’ll be everybody’s goat, I know it. She said I would, an’ it’s so. Maybe—maybe I can’t stand up to it any better than that Chapin boy. An’ I’m afraid of goin’ over an’ of gettin’ killed. I want for you to know it all—all I am! But—but it ain’t the first time I’ve stood up and made myself do things I was scared of. I’ve got to go. Oh, Lord! Maybe I’ll pull through all right!”

“Why do you have to go?” Julie cried suddenly, violently. Then like the breaking of a dam her words gushed out, tossing aside the mincing phraseology of her mother’s training, and reverting to the tongue of her mountain people. “What’s the world ever give you that you got to stand up now an’ maybe be killed for it? What’s folks ever done for you or for me that we got to please ’em now? Did they ever do anything for you? They never done one thing for me! My mother an’ my father was good to me—but they’re dead. An’ what’s other folks ever done for us? Ain’t they always crowded us out into the cold an’ slammed the door in our faces? They never let us in to life. They never even knowed we was there. Or if they took notice of us, it was just to knock us out er the road, er maybe stamp on us, or wrench us ’round the way they wanted us to go.”

“That’s God’s truth,” he said slowly.

“Ain’t it always been so?” she rushed on. “Did they ever let you be a real person? Wasn’t they always slappin’ you out into the cold? Even when you was a child, did the other children ever let you in, an’ play with you like they did one another? They never did me.”

“They never did me either,” he answered. “I was the outsider. They always picked on me.”

“They tore my paper doll to pieces when I wasn’t doin’ one thing to anybody, an’ all of ’em tramped it into the snow! Oh my God! It’s been that way with both of us, always. All our lives we was pinched an’ strangled, an’ thrown aside. They didn’t let us do any more’n just cling to the edges of life. An’ then we found one another.” She was crying now, and her words were cut in two by her gasping breath. “We found one another—we found one another, an’ then we found life! But now they open the door and say, ‘Come on in.’ Now they got a use for you. Now they’ll let you stand up an’ git killed for ’em. They never opened the door to let you into life, but they’ve opened it up wide for you for death! No,” she cried wildly, “you don’t owe folks nothin’! They never give us life—we’ve found life for ourselves together! An’ now, just as we found it, they’d snatch hit away! You don’t have to go!

“You don’t have to go, do you?” she repeated.

He looked at her, dazzled by the flaming passion of her face. “We—we could go away an’ hide somewheres together,” he ventured, uncertainly.

She stared back at him.

“What would they do to you if they caught you?” she demanded.

“I dunno.” He shook his head. “But—if we went—it would—you know it would break your life all to pieces. If anything was to happen to me, you couldn’t come back here.”

“I never had no life to break, ’til you came into it,” she cried. “I never knew what life was. You’ve set me free! You’ve made me all I am. We’ve made each other! Our life together—our love—it’s just all there is! Oh God! Oh God!” she cried, “Ain’t we got a right to it?”

He bowed his head down upon their hands on the table.

“My honey! My love! My little honey!” he cried.

XIII

The next morning Timothy Bixby left on the early train going east.

Aunt Sadie came in and told Julie about it.

“Well,” she announced, “Little Bixby’s gone. He got his draft call last night, an’ he left on Number Three this morning. He’ll go to Camp Lee like all the men from this section. I saw him when he left. Mis’ Bixby wasn’t up. I declare, if he didn’t have to get his own breakfast this very last morning! I told him he ought to go in and bid you good-bye, but he said he was late. He really had a plenty time; he was just makin’ up an excuse, ’cause he’s so bashful. I reckon you’ll just have to excuse him, Julie. It seems funny to me that they’d want a little scary feller like him.”

“He’s not really so small,” Julie returned sharply. “He’s up to standard height.”

“I know he is, but someway a person always thinks of him as sort of undersized. But I came in, Julie, to tell you something else. I’m goin’ over to stay with Betty this afternoon.”

Betty was Mrs. Johnson’s daughter, who was married and living some twenty miles away in the country.

“She’s sick, an’ the baby’s ailin’, an’ she can’t get any help over there. I got a card in the morning’s mail asking me please to come, so I’m going over there this evenin’. I wouldn’t be s’prised if I was away for a couple of months. An’ Mis’ Bixby’s leavin’—”

“When does she go?” Julie demanded.

“She’s leavin’ on the night train. She’s going back to her home in Lynchburg for a spell, and later maybe she’ll go to be near Camp Lee. She says she’ll not go ’til they kind of get Mr. Bixby licked into shape. She says she’ll be so ashamed of him at first. I think she’s layin’ off to have a right good time. Ain’t that just like the woman? But you’re goin’ to be all alone ’til I come back, Julie. You better see to gettin’ somebody to stay with you.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” Julie evaded.

So the life that had informed Julie’s small establishment for the last few weeks fell suddenly all to pieces. Mr. Bixby had gone. Aunt Sadie left with her son-in-law in the afternoon, and Elizabeth took the night train. She came in before she went to say good-bye to Julie. She was dressed elaborately for her journey, and was in high spirits.

“My! But I’m glad to be out of this rotten little town,” she announced. “There ain’t anything I can do for Tim,” she went on, “so I might just as well fly ’round an’ enjoy myself.”

Here the car came which she had ordered to take her to the station, and in the expansiveness of leave-taking she attempted to kiss Julie, but Julie started back involuntarily.

“What’s the matter? Did you think I was goin’ to bite you?” Elizabeth demanded.

“No, no—I—”

“Oh, all right. Goodness knows I don’t want to kiss a person that don’t want to kiss me. Well, I’m gone.”

She went; and the next day Julie went also. She went in the early morning when most of the people of the village were still asleep—when lacy mists hung over the mountains, and all the flowers in her little garden were drenched with summer dew. She went out of her side door, locking it after her. In her garden she lingered a moment to pluck a little nosegay of sweet peas and to touch the wet faces of the other flowers with a caressing finger; then she went swiftly. She went with no compunctions. “Ain’t I got a right to life?” she asked herself fiercely. “Goodness knows we don’t owe folks anything. They never did anything for us!” But though she went unhesitatingly she could not bring herself to turn for a last look at the garden with its row of sweet peas and nasturtiums, nor at the shop staring into the street with its blank shuttered windows. Not for anything would she have looked back at that side door. Somehow, as she went up the street to the station, she visualized her mother’s figure standing there following her with her eyes, as she had stood so often in life. Julie knew she was not there; she knew she just imagined this vision; yet not for worlds would she have turned to glance back. With her eyes set steadily forward up the street, the picture of her mother standing there in the doorway looking after her hung persistently in the back of her mind. Her mother had worn very neat white aprons; they used to stand out distinctly against the black of her dress when she stood in the doorway, and sometimes the wind would flutter them a little. She had a way of putting her hand up to shade her eyes as she looked and looked after Julie. There was one point in the street where Julie had been in the habit of turning to wave to her mother, and her mother used to wave the hand that had been shading her eyes, and with that final gesture turn back into the house. But Julie did not pause or turn at this point to-day. Whispering defiantly, “Ain’t I got a right to my life?” she went steadily on.

So the remembered vision of her mother did not turn away, but continued to stand there in the door, watching her go, with the hand still shading the eyes.

XIV

At the Hart’s Run station Julie bought a ticket to Washington, but when the train reached Gordonsville she slipped out of it unnoticed and, buying another ticket, crossed the tracks and boarded the Richmond train which was waiting there. At the station in Richmond, Timothy Bixby met her.

Thus, as easily almost as changing from one garment to another, Julie Rose slipped out of all her established life. With that sudden violent outcry, “What’s folks ever done for you or for me, that we got to please ’em now!” she had burst open a door, through which she and Timothy passed defiantly, finding themselves in a world where life turned round and looked at them with apparent beneficence. In the happiness of their companionship they drew long breaths of freedom; and, relaxing into the recreating power of their love, they found themselves and a confidence they had never known, so that for the first time they faced their fellow beings without fear.

His concern was all for her. When he met her that first afternoon at the Richmond station, he insisted that she was tired and must have supper at once before he took her to their rooms. Accordingly, they had their first meal together in the station restaurant, a meal that in spite of the city heat and the coming and going of hurried people, was to Julie the most wonderful she had ever eaten. Afterward they boarded a westbound street-car.

“I’m afraid you’re going to find the city mighty hot after the mountains,” he said anxiously.

She did not answer, but she turned and looked at him, and words were not necessary. What did heat or material discomfort matter to her then?

The city was hot, tired, and flat after long weeks of summer; disheveled and overgrown with extra population also, as were most cities near any of the big training-camps, in that war year of 1918.

“The rooms ain’t much, honey,” he apologized, as the car ground its way west with jerks of stops and starts. “An’ they ain’t in a swell part of town; but they’re the best I could do, an’—an’ I got something to show you.”

The rooms were in a part of the city made up almost entirely of blocks of small frame houses, sheltering Richmond’s poorer inhabitants, who spilled out of their front doors on to the little porches and into the streets: the men in shirt sleeves, the women sometimes tidied for the afternoons, sometimes still in the depression of wrappers that had been worn through all the heat of the day.

“You see it ain’t much—pretty hot, an’ cheap out this way,” he apologized again as they got off the car and started along the street.

She looked up at him as she had looked before. “Oh, Tim!” she cried; and suddenly she laughed—a ripple of shy wild ecstasy. “Oh, Tim, honey! How could anything like that matter now?”

Looking at her, he caught the flaming happiness of her face, and laughed too. “I know, I know,” he whispered. “An’ anyhow, I have got something fine to show you,” he added.

Though the streets were for the most part lined with small wooden houses, there was an occasional more pretentious one of brick, and sometimes a larger frame dwelling. It was in one of these last, a double, three-storied house which accommodated several families and one or two single lodgers, that Mr. Bixby had found an abode for them—a sitting-room, a kitchen, and at the back a bedroom. The rooms were close and the furniture was cheap and ugly, but what did that matter? The porch outside was clothed with a cottage vine, a strip of zinnias and cosmos marched in the tiny front-yard, and at the back was another attempt at a flower bed.

“Oh, Tim! Oh, Tim!” she cried. She stood in the middle of the small domain and turned slowly about. “Oh, Tim! It’s ours!” The rooms ceased thereat to be mere rooms; with that rush of emotion her heart opened to them, they entered, and the place became her home.

But he would not let her linger there now. Depositing her bags, he urged her out again. “Come on,” he cried. “I got to show you ’fore it’s too late.”

He turned into a street running south, which after a few minutes’ walk came to an end in a small bit of parkway where were a row of benches and a stone balustrade. “There now! Look!” he cried. It was his triumph.

All the cheap sordidness of the city ended abruptly here. Beyond was space—a deep drop to the stretches of the James River below. Overhead was the infinite breadth and height of the sky, and far across the river, whose tawny waters were tufted by little islands, were green stretches of open country.

He drew her down to a bench. “This is the jumping-off place,” he told her. “I thought you could come here an’ kind of stretch and breathe when things got too close on you back there in the streets.”

It was amazing. The mean streets reached almost to them, fenced off by just that little edge of open ground, yet all one had to do was to turn the back upon them to enter another world, a place of space and freedom, of green islands, clean air, the smell of the water, and the yellow flow of it. Here, too, they found the secret places of their own souls. The twilight and then the dark came slowly down. They sat together upon the bench, their eyes rested by the open stretches before them, their hands close clasped, their bodies touching, and their soft, half-whispered words feeling out toward one another, as they brought to light all the past tragedies of their lives, all their sorrowful timidities. Here was one at last to whom everything might be told, who would listen, who would perfectly understand. They paused often to say in whispered wonder, “Why, I never told that to anyone before!”

He told her there in halting phrases about his marriage. His disjointed words only touched upon the high places, like a child skipping across a brook on the stepping-stones. All the difficult everyday intercourse with his wife that had followed their union was a dark flood he did not dip into. What he did tell was enough for her to understand.

“We lived in the same town together,” he said. “I’d known her always, off an’ on. She was mighty handsome—big and full of life. Everybody thought she was going to marry Warwick Preston. But I reckon they quarreled or something. Anyhow, him and Ethel Dow ran off and got married. She—Elizabeth—lived a few doors down the street from me. We met one evening—she was mighty fine an’ big-lookin’. She asked me to come an’ see her, an’ I went several evenin’s. One night she cried, an’ said how lonesome she was. I was lonesome, too—”

“I understand,” Julie cried hastily, and he went no further with his explanation. They turned away from the unhappy past to the miracle of the present.

“We’re free! We’re free!” she exulted. “None of the little old fears can hold us any more. We’ve found ourselves, honey! We’ve found one another.”

“It was you unlocked the door an’ set me free,” he burst out. “You’re my sister an’ my mother! You’re all I am. Oh, my little honey! My love!”

“I’m your sister an’ your mother—I’m the one that would die for you!” she cried in answer.

After that they needed no more words. Silence fell, and the dusk that had faded now into dark, wrapped them close about. They sat thus for a long time, but at last it was late, and rising they made their way hand in hand like happy children back to the three little rooms that were now their home.

XV

In the lodging-house in their new life together Julie and Mr. Bixby passed as Mr. and Mrs. Freeman. It was Julie who named them.

“An’ that’s the truth; we are free. It isn’t any lie,” she pleaded.

“It’s God’s truth,” he affirmed solemnly.

They kept their own first names, for they both clung tenaciously to the truth whenever it was possible. Indeed, they did not practise many subterfuges nor make any very great effort at concealment. In this big strange life of a city where neither of them had ever been before, it did not seem likely that he would be traced, or that a country so grimly occupied with war and great undertakings would pause long enough in all the mad confusion to note that one inconspicuous man had failed to appear at the place assigned to him. They were not worried either about finances. They each had a small stock of ready money, and Julie had a couple of Liberty Bonds which could be sold in case he found any trouble in getting work. They had agreed that he must leave his bonds for Elizabeth, although, as she had a small income of her own, she was independent of his support. He found a position almost at once in a printing establishment where war had left them short of men, and where they welcomed his expert services. Julie planned to seek work also later on, but for the present he entreated her not to.

“No, take time just to be alive a while,” he begged. “Why, we’re almost as new as Adam an’ Eve; all I want you to do is just to help me name the animals.”

“Name the animals!” she laughed, as no human being had ever laughed before at his small whimsicalities.

They were both released into a gayety and laughter of life that heretofore had passed them by. Youth flowed back into Julie’s face, and with it her lost prettiness—or perhaps a fresh prettiness which even her youth had never known. Ordinarily the strangeness of their new surroundings, with the inevitable publicity of the lodging-house, would have terrified them both. But not now. As certain animals put their young in the centre of the flock, and then in companionship face the enemy boldly, so together they pooled their confessed weaknesses and fears, and thus were able to turn an assured front to the rest of the world. Their passion had released them. Heretofore they seemed to themselves to be clinging merely to the edges of life, but now they were at its flaming centre. Nay more, they were life itself; and from the heart of it they looked forth at the rest of the world with a fearless joy. Like children who make a tent out of a couple of chairs roofed by an old shawl and, creeping under it, find an enchanted world of their own, no matter what tragedies may be facing the grown-up people around them, so under the grim roof of a world’s war these two discovered a miraculous existence. After their long years of repression, in this sudden release they were intoxicated with the rapture of existence. For Julie the days flowed by in ecstasy, from early morning when she arose and prepared his breakfast, on through all the happy day as she attended to her small home tasks, and so to the fall of evening which brought him home again—every moment was a golden joy keyed to a hidden rhythm. Other people also became a delight to her. With that one defiant and releasing cry of hers, she had defied people, and found freedom; but now that she was free, she no longer held any grudge against them. Indeed, one of the keenest delights in her new existence was a fearless and easy intercourse with the rest of the world. Her happiness and vividness of life was such that it could not be contained within their own two personalities, but must flow forth in a warm friendliness to all the people with whom she came in contact—to the children in the street, the clerks in the shops and at market, and to the other lodgers in the house. With these last she found herself on friendly terms almost at once.

They were ordinary enough people, but to Julie they seemed different from any she had ever known. There was Mrs. Watkins, who had the rooms across the hall from Julie on the first floor. She was a frail and tired little woman, wilted by the heat, and burdened with the care of four small children. She generally managed to get herself into a tidy dress late in the afternoon, but most of the day she went about in a wrapper, her hair in curl-papers, and her constant complaint, “My Lord, ain’t it hot!” To help her with her sewing for the children was a delight to Julie. She did it so eagerly and so well, that even Mrs. Watkins’ fretful discouragement was pierced by gratitude.

“My, but you’re kind! Why, you couldn’t be kinder to me if you was my own sister,” she burst out one day, as Julie held up a completed dress with pretty summer ruffles. “I never did think I’d get that dress finished for poor little Nell. Looks like the heat always drags me down so—but you! Why, you ain’t been at it no time, an’ now it’s all done. Nell!” she called out of the window into the hot street, “Nelly! run here a second; momma’s got something to show you, dearie.”

The little girl entered the cluttered bed-sitting-room, a languid and pale little creature of eight years, but when Julie held up the little frock before her, her eyes lighted with joy.

“Oh, momma!” she breathed, turning to her mother. “Oh, it’s done, ain’t it!”

She seized the dress, and holding it up under her chin, danced away to look at herself in the faded mirror.

“Oh, momma! Let me wear it this evening,” she pleaded, turning about from side to side, preening before the glass.

“You better take time to thank Mis’ Freeman, ’stead er primpin’ like that,” her mother admonished her. “She’s the one finished it for you, she’s your friend.”

“Thank you, thank you, marm,” the child said, turning toward Julie. The words were constrained and inadequate, spoken in obedience to her mother’s command; but as she stood there with the pink folds of the frock caught close to her and her pinched face flushed with happiness, she was a little point of color and joy that lighted up the discouraged room and made her mother’s eyes linger upon her fondly a moment, then turn for sympathetic understanding to Julie.

“Look what else I got,” Julie said, and took a small package from her workbasket. The child unwrapped it shyly and a bright pink ribbon shimmered into view.

“For my hair—to match the dress,” she breathed, and fell dumb with happiness.

“My, but you’re kind!” Mrs. Watkins exclaimed again.

“Oh, it ain’t anything,” Julie deprecated. “I love to see children in pretty clothes, an’ I like to sew. I used to do dressmaking up in the country where I lived.” With the words, suddenly the sight of her little shop in Hart’s Run staring with blank shuttered windows out upon the street, with its nasturtiums and sweet peas in the side yard, rose up in her mind and hung there a moment before it dissolved. It gave Julie a sharp stab of unexpected wistfulness.

“I had a little shop once—a millinery shop, where I did sewing, too,” she confided. Somehow she felt she must speak of her home. It had come to her as a shy child comes to its mother’s knee, and she must give it some touch of recognition. “It was a shop in the front, and I had my living rooms in behind, and a little garden on the side with sweet peas and nasturtiums in it,” she went on, offering the inner vision propitiation.

“My! That must’ve been nice,” the other said. “You’d like that. My Lord! Ain’t it hot! I wish’t I was in the country right this minute.” She mopped her face with a dingy handkerchief. “What was the name of the place?”

“Oh, it’s just a little town up in the mountains,” Julie evaded. “You wouldn’t ever have heard of it.”

“What’s its name?” Mrs. Watkins persisted. “Maybe I have. I had a brother used to be in the lumber business up in the western part of the state.”

“Its name—its name—” Julie hesitated. She found it extraordinarily difficult to lie, and yet to speak the truth would be utter recklessness. All the time the little shop which had been her home seemed to hang there in her mind expectant, waiting to see whether she would own or deny it.

“Its name’s Red River,” she said at last, with an effort. Instantly the picture of the shop broke and swirled away. “Oh, no, it isn’t! No, it isn’t!” she corrected herself breathlessly, and completely reckless now. “It’s Hart’s Run. Red River’s the county town. But it’s Hart’s Run—Hart’s Run,” she cried, “where my home was.”

Then, terrified by what she had done, her heart began to flutter violently up and down and she looked wildly about for some means of changing the conversation. As she did so she caught sight through the window of a strange old woman going down the porch steps, and passing uncertainly out into the street.

“Oh, Mrs. Watkins,” Julie whispered, “look quick. Who is that old woman?”

Mrs. Watkins peeped out. “That? Oh, that’s the poor old soul lives all by herself up on the third floor. She’s mighty peculiar. It’s Miss Fogg.”

“I’ve seen her several times, an’ meant to ask about her. What’s the matter with her? She looks—she looks dreadful,” Julie cried, glad to elaborate the subject, and hoping that the name she had spoken would be overlooked.

“Well, she’s mighty peculiar,” Mrs. Watkins repeated. “I reckon she must be cracked.”

“But she looks so strange, so—so awful,” Julie persisted.

“Well, she’s really lookin’ better than usual right now. She has spells when she don’t come out of her room for days together, when she don’t even pretend to fix herself up. You think she’s awful looking now; but you just ought to see her then. She just stays shut up in that room and don’t see a soul except her canary bird, if you could call that a soul—just for days. I don’t know what in the world she does with herself—just sits an’ mopes, I reckon.”

“But don’t people go in to see her, to see what’s the trouble?”

“Oh, she don’t thank you to: she’s mighty peculiar, I tell you. An’ proud—who-ee! It’s enough to kill you with laughing, but that old rag-bag that looks like she hadn’t washed herself for a week—she thinks herself better’n anybody in this house. Wouldn’t that kill you? That’s because she used to go out sewing for some of the grand people here in town. That’s her trade—dressmaking.”

“Oh, well, then she and I ought to get along,” Julie cried eagerly. “I’ll go to see her. I hate to have any one look so awful.”

“She won’t thank you an’ she won’t see you; she’ll just slam the door in your face. She seems like she’s mighty suspicious of every one. She won’t have a thing to do with anybody, I tell you.”

“I’m going to see her just the same,” Julie persisted. “It’s awful—the look in her face, I mean. It’s like she hadn’t a friend in the world.”

“She won’t let anybody be friends with her, she’s so proud an’ touchy, an’ so peculiar.” Mrs. Watkins hastened to defend the neighborliness of the house. “People ain’t going to put up with it. Some of the ladies she sewed for used to come to see her and bring her things, but she’s so stand-offish even with them that they’ve about quit comin’.”

“What does she live on?” Julie inquired.

“Oh, she ain’t poor. She’s got some private means of her own. No, ma’am, she ain’t poor.”

“There’s something dreadful the matter with her,” Julie said distressfully. “I met her one day on the porch and looked straight into her eyes, and I never saw anything so—so awful looking.”

“Well, there was a doctor once came to see her; one of the ladies she used to sew for had him to come; an’ he said she was mighty bad off; said she had some sort of melancholia, an’ it wasn’t really safe to have her goin’ ’round loose; said she was liable to do something terrible.”

“What? What would she do?” Julie’s eyes widened with apprehension.

“I dunno.” The other shook her head. “Maybe kill herself, or something.”

“How awful!” Julie gasped, appalled. “The poor, poor thing!”

That night after supper, as they sat in the little park overhanging the river, Julie confessed to Tim that she had told Mrs. Watkins she came from Hart’s Run.

“I don’t know how I ever came to do such a thing,” she said in a frightened voice; “I didn’t mean to speak of it; I tried not to. I tried my best to lie. An’ first I said ‘Red River,’ but right away I changed it to ‘Hart’s Run.’ I had to. It seemed like I’d almost slapped my home an’ all the days that were gone right in the face when I said ‘Red River.’ I oughtn’t to have said ‘Hart’s Run’—I know I oughtn’t to. Oh, do you reckon it’s done any harm? Do you think we ought to move away some place else?”

“No—no. It’s all right. I don’t expect she even noticed,” he comforted her. “It’s all right.”

She was leaning against him, and he felt a tremor of fear shiver through her.

“My little honey, it’s all right,” he whispered, his arm tightening round her. “It’s all right. I’m glad you said ‘Hart’s Run.’ I wouldn’t have had you not to. Don’t get scared.”

They were all alone on the lower terrace of the park. At their back rose a steep bank. In front was the sheer drop to the river, overhung by the wide soft spaces of the misty air. Their hands met in a tight clasp, and for a moment they were silent in the ecstasy of their complete trust in each other. But after a moment she spoke diffidently.

“Tim, I got a notion about our—our happiness.” They never spoke of it as love. “I want to tell you about it.” She had fallen into a little trick of saying eagerly, “I want to tell you,” or “I want to tell you all about it.” And always he answered, “Tell me, my little honey.”

Since her mother’s death there had never been any one who had really wanted to hear what she had to say, and even her mother had not wanted it, had not understood, in the complete way that he did. Now, because of his understanding, her thoughts poured themselves out in a manner that astonished her. His creative sympathy made ideals and fancies, which heretofore had been too deep or too elusive to be expressed, come forth fleshed in words.

“Tell me, my honey,” he said now.

“Well, our happiness, Tim—it’s so—so alive, that it seems like it was a real thing running through us, like the way sap runs up the trees in spring. Oh, honey, ’til you came I was as dead as a winter branch, an’ now it seems like I couldn’t hold all the happiness, all the life that’s mine. I got to pour it out for other folks.”

“What’s folks ever done for you, or for me, that you got to please ’em now?” he said unexpectedly.

She was startled, frightened by his quotation of her own words. “Oh, I don’t feel that way now,” she cried. “I don’t feel it now that we got each other, do you? Do you, Tim?” she questioned anxiously, trying to read his face in the dusk.

“No, I don’t now—now that we’re free,” he answered. “I know something,” he announced suddenly.

“What? What do you know?”

“Oh, honey! It wa’n’t really the other folks kep’ us down. It was our own selves, our scary selves that we couldn’t break free of.”

She stared out into the wide dusk in amazement. “That’s the truth,” she said at length, with deep conviction. “It’s just the truth. Nobody to blame but our own little selves,” she repeated. “Nobody to blame, not—Why, Tim, not even Elizabeth!”

“No, not even her,” he nodded back.

They were neither of them bitter people; and with this revelation all their resentment towards the rest of the world melted away, leaving their hearts clean-swept and trembling with reverence toward the great happiness and emancipation that was theirs.

“Oh, Tim, I got to try an’ help people,” she whispered, presently. “I’m so happy I got to pour some of it out for somebody. That’s why I got to try an’ help that poor old Miss Fogg.”

“Who’s Miss Fogg?” he questioned.

“She’s that poor thing lives up on the third floor all to herself,” she told him. “Sometimes she shuts herself in for days and days and won’t see a soul, Mrs. Watkins was telling me. She’s awful to look at, just awful. She’s—she’s—oh, Tim, she scares me! She’s what I might have grown into if you hadn’t come. I’ve got to help her! It seems like I owe it to our happiness to try an’ make her happy, to pour life back into her! Oh, honey, you don’t care if I take some of our happiness and give it away, do you?” she cried suddenly, twisting off whimsically.

“Take all you want of it.” He made a gay, large gesture of bestowal. “There’ll always be a plenty to go round.”

They broke into happy laughter together in the dusk.

“Come on,” he proposed, jumping up. “Let’s go get us some ice cream.”

So hand in hand, laughing softly together, they wandered away along the summer street.

There was just one incident that momentarily disturbed for Julie the sheer felicity of that evening. As they approached Broad Street they realized that the lifeless air, which was redolent of tobacco from the factories farther down-town, and permeated as well with the smell of the hot pavement, of fruit stands and grocery shops, or enlivened with occasional whiffs of perfumery from a passing woman, was being lifted and woven into rhythm by a band. At the sound children broke their play and began to run, and grown people also stepped off their porches and hastened toward the music. Julie and Tim ran with the rest of the crowd, reaching the corner just as a detachment of marching men swung by in rippling khaki lines. The crackle of clapping hands from the small crowd which had assembled followed the strains of the band and the stamp of the men’s feet, and, as the flag came swaying past, the people cheered and cheered. Tim did not applaud. He stood very drawn and still, his eyes fixed upon the marching men; and suddenly, as the cheers broke out for the flag, he gripped Julie’s hand so violently that a ring her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday cut sharply into her finger. She did not let herself wince, but she fixed her eyes upon his face. Once she twitched his hand, but he did not stir or turn from the soldiers. The detachment passed, the crowd began to disperse, and the band grew faint in the distance, but still he stood upon the curb, staring fixedly down the street. Julie gave his hand another little frightened pull, but he only tightened his grip so that the ring bit deeper into her flesh.

“Oh, Tim!” she gasped involuntarily at the pain. “Oh, honey!”

He started then and looked down at her as though coming back from far away. “My honey,” he muttered absently.

“Let’s go get our ice cream,” she pleaded.

“Ice cream?” He paused. “Why, yes—sure.”

He was awake now. The soldiers had disappeared down the street. His spirit was back once more with hers, and the terror that had swooped upon her lifted and blew away.

The rest of the evening was unalloyed happiness. His gayety overflowed almost boisterously. They had their ice cream, and then they went to a moving picture that made them laugh immoderately. After that, in sheer exuberance of life and joy they had more ice cream, and then at last, replete with happiness, they wandered home through the silent streets.

XVI

It was not, however, an easy matter to make friends with old Miss Fogg, as Julie discovered, in spite of her ardent longing to do so. The next morning, full of friendly desire, she went up the stairs to the bare third floor where the old woman had her room, and knocked upon her door. There was no answer. The empty hall was deserted and still save for the complaint of a few flies upon the dim unwashed window at one end, which gave what little light there was. Behind the closed door that faced her there was no sound. Julie waited there, the bearer of a cup of life that was brimful and eager to pour itself out in self-donation. A second time she knocked and waited, and finally a third time. Then at last she heard a noise within the room. The bed creaked, and footsteps came toward the door. The handle was turned and old Miss Fogg looked forth. In spite of herself Julie fell back a step or two. The old face staring out at her was so startling, so haggard, so defiant, and so horrible with despair, that she was speechless before it. For an instant the head was thrust out at her, its gray unbrushed hair, its withered neck set in torn nightgown-ruffles, looking like some grotesque despairing Jack-in-the-box. Then before Julie could muster a word, the face was withdrawn, the door banged shut, and the key twisted in the lock.

Julie turned and fled down to her own room, her heart pounding, and her knees rather weak beneath her. “But I will get in to her yet. I will, I will!” she told herself.

Later in the day she confessed her failure to Mrs. Watkins.

“Well, didn’t I tell you that was just the way it would be?” the other said, taking a gloomy satisfaction in the coming true of her prediction.

“But I will get in to help her yet,” Julie persisted. “She scares me; but I won’t let her shut herself up and suffer like that all alone. I can’t bear to think of it: it hurts me all through.”

“Well, she’s not the only one suffering these days,” Mrs. Watkins returned sombrely. “Look at the awful things happening in Europe: young men being killed, an’ children starving, an’ old folks driven out of their homes.” Mrs. Watkins was holding her youngest child, a little boy of two, in her arms and rocking as she spoke.

“I know,” Julie assented, “but that’s ’way off there across the ocean; Miss Fogg’s right here, right up over my head, suffering. The things that are happenin’ over there don’t seem so close.”

“Don’t it seem close when it’s our own men, our own boys, fightin’?” Mrs. Watkins challenged. “My Lord! my youngest brother’s over there right this minute! It don’t seem far away to me—nor to my mother.”

“I know, I know,” Julie answered hastily, breathlessly. “I know; but—”

“You’re lucky that your man don’t have to go. Why was it you said they turned him down?”

“It was—it was flat foot,” Julie said. She cleared her throat after she had said it, swallowing nervously, her eyes fixed upon her sewing.

“Well, if I was you, I’d be glad he had it,” Mrs. Watkins went on, rocking her child in her arms. “I seen you in the crowd last night watching the soldiers. You didn’t see me, but I was noticing Mr. Freeman, an’ the way he looked after them men made me think he wished he was with ’em.”

“Oh, no, he doesn’t!” Julie protested sharply.

“Well, he looked like he did, an’ if I was you I’d be glad he had that flat foot.”

Julie did not reply. She went on earnestly setting the gathers she was running, and scratching them into place with her needle, and did it without looking up.

“You’re lucky, an’ I’m lucky that my old man don’t have to go,” Mrs. Watkins continued. “But look at my little sister-in-law. There’s my brother had to leave her, an’ she lookin’ for her first baby any day, an’ no more’n a child herself. No, I’m sorry for Miss Fogg. She is a poor old derelict all right, but I don’t think of her first these days.”

“I’m going to see her again to-morrow,” Julie said. “I’m going to get in to see her yet. She’s got to let me in to help her.”

The next morning Julie went to market early, and purchased a little nosegay of summer flowers. She lingered some time in the cool shadow of the arcade where the flower stalls were. It was pleasant to come out of the dazzle of the street into the relief under the arches, where the colored women sold herbs and simple flowers, gathered from the fields or from their own small gardens outside the city. It was a place of lovely color, refreshing the eye and enlightening the heart. Here were pot marigolds, orange and yellow and straw color, all in a great basin together, with an old black woman in a blue checked apron bending her dark wrinkled face over them. There was a drift of white marguerites, and again crimson and pink zinnias in stiff bunches. Beyond them a big bunch of althea, goldenrod in yellow masses, and still farther on, with a streak of sunlight falling over them, a tub of cosmos, the pink and white blossoms feathered with the green of their foliage. The flowers were up on stalls or down upon the floor in tubs and buckets in long rainbows of color, with the dark faces of the Negro women beside them, and every now and then some added flash of pink or blue from the bright summer frock or parasol of a purchaser.

Julie wished that Tim were there to share the delight with her. She would have liked to stand and look across the flower stalls with him beside her. It was hard to know what to buy, but at last she chose a little bunch of blue nigella, “love-in-a-mist,” and made her way home.

Later in the morning she ventured upstairs again and, holding the flowers, which she had put into a glass of water, in one hand, she knocked upon Miss Fogg’s door with the other and waited as before, standing in the empty uncarpeted hall with her heart fluttering.

There was no response to her knock; yet Julie could hear the sound of some one stirring in the room. Again she knocked and again there was no answer; yet Julie was sure that Miss Fogg was within. She waited a moment more, and then turned the handle tentatively. To her surprise the door was unlocked, and greatly daring, she pushed it open and walked in. Her first impression was of the ill-smelling and wretchedly untidy room; the next of old Miss Fogg standing by the side of her bed, glaring at her with furious, sunken eyes. She had on a soiled and torn nightgown, her gray hair fell wildly upon her neck, and her feet were bare on the floor.

“Oh—oh please excuse me,” Julie faltered.

“An’ who might you be?” the old woman demanded in a cold fury.

“I’m—I’m Julie—Julie Freeman,” Julie said hastily, getting her words out as fast as possible before the storm broke. “I’m living here in the house. I brought you some flowers. I thought—”

“You thought!” the other screamed. “You thought nothin’! You wanted to come pushin’ an’ pryin’ in here, sticking your nose where you got no business, an’ nobody wants you, just so’s you could run out in the street an’ tell everybody how old Miss Fogg lives!”

“I didn’t, I didn’t!” Julie cried. “Of course I wouldn’t do such a thing.”

But in truth she was so painfully aware of the whole dreadful state of the room that she dropped her eyes perforce before the faded glare of the other’s, and found herself staring down at the bare old feet.

“Yes,” the old woman cried shrilly. “Look at my feet! Look at ’em good! Look at ’em, I tell you! An’ then run out an’ tell the world how you found old Miss Fogg in her dirty nightgown an’ her bare feet! Yes, look at ’em! Look at ’em, I tell you!”

The distracted old creature began a sudden fantastic dance of rage and mortification, standing first upon one foot, and then on the other, while the free leg kicked defiantly out at Julie, the nightgown falling back from the withered shin. “Yes, look at ’em,” she screamed. “Yes, they’re dirty. Oh, my Lord! Go on, tell everybody what you seen!”

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” Julie cried pitifully, “you know I didn’t come for that! I—I just wanted to bring you these flowers. I’m so sorry.” Her heart was jumping violently up and down; she wanted to turn and flee; but she forced herself to stay. “She’s crazy,” she thought. “She must be crazy. Oh, poor thing, poor thing! It was awful of me to push in like this, but now I am in, I’ve got to stay an’ help her.”

“Look, I brought you some flowers,” she repeated. “I came to make friends.”

“Friends!” the old woman shrieked at her. “Friends! Oh, my God!” But her rage and her wild dance had exhausted her, and she sank down now upon the edge of the tumbled, unmade bed, trembling and shaken. “Oh,” she moaned, “ain’t it a cruel thing that a person can’t be left alone—not one minute—sick an’ miserable like I am! But strangers got to come pushin’ an’ crowdin’ their way in here to stare at my dirt an’ my rags! Take your eyes off my feet!” she broke out violently, beginning once more to dance her feet up and down upon the floor, as though shaking something off. “Take ’em off, I tell you—I feel ’em—I feel ’em lookin’, burnin’ holes in my feet!”

With shaking hands she dragged at her nightgown, endeavoring to pull it down and cover her naked feet. But the material was old and rotten. It gave way under the violence of her hands, and a long tear was wrenched in it. For a moment old Miss Fogg stared at it, clutching the torn stuff and peering stupidly at her bare old knees exposed by the rent. Then she burst into impotent tears. “Look,” she wept. “Now just look what I done to my gown!” All the rage and defiance were gone. She was a despairing, helpless old woman weeping upon the edge of her bed, incapable any more of coping with the difficulties of life.

“Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!” she wept, her shoulders shaking convulsively beneath her straggling hair.

The tears leaped into Julie’s eyes. She came quickly and laid a tender hand on her shoulder.

“Never mind, never mind about your gown,” she comforted. “I’ll mend it for you.”

“It ain’t my gown,” the other wept. “It ain’t just my gown! It’s—O God Almighty! It’s everything!”

“I know! I know!” Julie cried poignantly. “You’re sick. I understand.”

“I’m crazy. I’m all in a kind of a daze.” The old woman wept convulsively. “O God, what’s the matter with me? I can’t seem to find myself.”

She looked up at Julie, her mouth tremulous and her old eyes filmed with despairing tears.

“I can’t find myself, I—I b’lieve I’m crazy,” she repeated desperately. “I can’t fix up no more. I ain’t got no heart left for nothing.” She turned her head dumbly from side to side. “I know everything’s dirty: it’s all in a mess. But I can’t fix up no more.”

“You’re tired.”

“Tired! I’m so tired I wish’t I was dead,” the other cried.

“I know; I understand,” Julie’s tender hand still caressed her. “But I’ve come to help you. I’m your friend. I’ll fix everything up for you, an’ then you won’t feel so bad. Look at the flowers I brought you.”

She held the gay, alluring little nosegay out. The old woman took her clinched hands down from her face, and stared dimly at it. Her cheeks were smudged with tears, and she swallowed convulsively, like a child when its storm of grief is past.

“See,” Julie went on, her compassionate voice soothing her. “See, honey, I got them in market for you this morning. Look how nice an’ fresh they are.”

The flowers with their blue blossoms peeping through the netted greenery, like faces looking through latticed windows, seemed a lodestone to draw the old creature’s attention away from her despair. She put out one trembling finger and touched them uncertainly, and although she did not speak, she let her gaze linger upon them.

“Where shall I set them?” Julie questioned, now for the first time daring to raise her eyes and look about the unhappy room. The whole place was in disorder. Dust lay everywhere; clothes were upon the floor and tumbled on chairs; the window was dim and smudged with dirt; a sick canary bird drooped in its cage, and a geranium plant was withered and dead in the window. The life had gone out of every small attempt at homemaking. The curtains, which had once been clean and festive, were soiled and torn now, and the white covers upon the bureau were crumpled. The spirit in the old woman which should have informed her dwelling place with life and cheer was as withered at its roots as the geranium in the window. There was just one thing which caught Julie’s eye amid all the squalor. That was the photograph of a young girl on the mantel shelf. Unlike the rest, it was dusted and cared for. The frame was bright and the glass clean. It appeared to stand as the last pinnacle of hope, over which the despair that had engulfed the rest of the room had not as yet surged.

“Where shall I put the flowers?” Julie questioned again, and the old woman raised her eyes and pointed to the picture. “There,” she commanded.

Julie stepped across and placed the nosegay before the picture. It was that of a young girl, dressed in a fashion of some fifteen years ago.

“What a pretty little girl,” she said. “Who is she?”

Old Miss Fogg stared at the picture through dim eyes. “My little baby child—all I got in the world,” she muttered at length and broke into fresh tears. “She’s all the kin I got in the world, but she’s married an’ gone, and I ain’t seen her for ten years,” she wept. “Oh, my baby, my honey! Why don’t you come see your old Tannie no more? O Sweetness, I want to see you so bad!”

“You haven’t seen her for ten years!” Julie exclaimed. Instantly she saw the thin old shoulders stiffen, and felt an unseen veil drawn. Miss Fogg looked up in quick defiance, a crafty challenge in her eyes.

“Who said she ain’t been to see me for ten years?” she demanded.

“Why you said—” Julie faltered.

“I ain’t said nothing!” the other stormed. “Folks tells lies. I don’t know what’s got into people. They ain’t got no idea about the truth no more. What business they got telling tales about my little honey, saying she ain’t coming to see me no more? They don’t know,” she spoke mysteriously, “but I’m expecting her most any day now. She’ll come to me soon, my baby’ll come soon to her old Tannie.” Her tone changed, she looked up at Julie, and spoke with a pathetic dignity, “I’m looking for a visit from my little niece,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was to come to-day.”

She made the statement defiantly, yet there lurked in her eyes an anguish of entreaty that implored Julie to confirm her.

“Why, yes, indeed!” Julie answered eagerly. “Why, yes, she’s liable to come almost any day now.”

“But she don’t come! She don’t come! Oh, my baby! My honey! I want to see you so bad!” Once more the old woman began to rock herself to and fro hopelessly.

“But she will come! She’ll come soon now,” Julie promised.

Old Miss Fogg gazed up into her face, her mouth hanging open and tremulous with eagerness, as she gathered encouragement from Julie’s assurance. Then her eyes wandered away over the room.

“But look!” she cried. “If she was to come, how’m I going to see her in this pigsty? I ought to fix up; but I ain’t got the heart—I ain’t even got the heart to wash my face,” she confessed looking at Julie piteously, the slow impotent tears gathering in her eyes.

“Never mind, never mind,” Julie comforted her quickly. “You don’t have to worry. I’ll fix it all up for you. You lie down now,” she coaxed. “Lie down and rest a while, an’ I’ll get things straight.”

To her surprise the old woman yielded, and let herself be helped back into bed, where exhausted by all her storms of emotion, she fell asleep almost immediately.

That was the beginning of Julie Rose’s friendship with old Miss Fogg. Thereafter, as the days went by, tenderly, persistently, baffled sometimes by the old woman’s outbreaks of rage and suspicion, or worse still by the terrible inertia of depression which constantly settled over her, Julie gradually won her way further and further with the other, and by the sheer indomitable persistency of her compassion managed to drag her back occasionally almost to the shore of normal life. At least her room and her person were clean and in order, and Julie saw to it that she had regular meals—dainty little lunches cooked by herself. Sometimes she was rewarded by an outburst of gratitude, that usually ended in tears. “You’re good!” the old woman would cry seizing Julie’s hand convulsively. “I don’t know what you want to be so good to a poor old wreck like me for.”

But sometimes she pushed her food away, and refused to eat. “What’s the use of eatin’?” she would weep. “Oh my Lord! What’s the use of anything in this world? Oh, I wish’t I was dead! But I ain’t even got ambition enough to die!”

Sometimes Julie coaxed her with flattery, into tidying herself up. “That black dress certainly is a handsome piece of goods, and that gray one, too,” she said.

“Why, of course I got handsome clothes,” Miss Fogg retorted with a proud jerk of her head. “Why, who do you take me for? I don’t belong with all the common trash that lives in this house. I’ve sewed for all the best people in town. I ain’t used to common people; I’m used to quality. But these folks here—they’re as common as pig-tracks. You don’t s’pose I’d run with them, do you? An’ I’ve always been used to keeping myself nice an’ elegant. I wasn’t one to lay around in wrappers all day. But now—Oh my Lord!”

“Look,” Julie hastily interposed, forestalling the rising tears. “Just see how nice you look with your hair fixed like I’ve done it to-day.”

She held a mirror up, and Miss Fogg peered blindly at herself for a moment in silence. But as she looked a dim satisfaction grew in her face.

“Why that looks real nice, don’t it?” she said, turning her head to one side with self-conscious shyness.

Indeed, with her indomitable persistency Julie had won out of this human ruin some of the mellowed grace of a more fortunate old age. With the creative power of her devotion she had gone forth into the dark waters engulfing the old woman, had struggled there, and dragged her back into life; and having won a precarious hold upon her affection, she poured forth the overflowing joy of her heart in her service.

Miss Fogg continued to stare at her reflection, her lip trembling slightly. It seemed as though the vision of her past self was given faintly back to her out of the mirror. She bent over and looked still closer. “Why,” she said slowly, “that’s me—that’s the way I used to be ’fore I lost my ambition.” She raised her eyes to Julie with a faltering surprise. “Why,” she cried, “Why you’ve give me back to myself.”

She patted the ruffles at her neck, and smoothed her hair with a fleeting return of vanity.

“I was always a great hand to keep myself fixed up nice,” she boasted. “An’ now you’ve put new life into me.”

Julie looked at her suddenly, her eyes wide and shining.

“That was what I came for,” she said solemnly. She took the old withered hand and pressed it against her own breast that was so warm and full of living happiness. “I came to bring you life,” she repeated. “I have so much—I’m so happy, so alive! I want you to share it.” She still pressed the withered hand against her breast with her warm and eager ones. “It’s all here in my heart, all the happiness and the life that any one in the world could need. It’s here for you. Don’t you feel it running out to you?”

It seemed to Julie in that moment of intense donation as though indeed something out of her very heart rushed forth for the other’s re-creation. Her eyes burning with an almost unearthly light, she gazed down at the old woman and wrung a flickering response even out of that half dead personality, so that she leaned her head against Julie’s breast. “If anybody could put life into my old carcass, it would be you,” she said. “You couldn’t be any sweeter to me if I was your own mother.”

“You are my mother!” Julie cried passionately. “My mother, an’ my sister, an’ my child!” With the words, something seemed to open within her and she was conscious of so tremendous an inrush of life and insight that she was half frightened and made giddy by the swirl of it.

She tried to tell Tim about it that night after supper. “I don’t know what it was,” she said, still half frightened, “but it was like something broke inside of me. I wasn’t just myself any more. An’ when I said that about her being my mother, it was true. An’ she was more than that even: she was my very self. It was like—like—” she hesitated; “like all my happiness and love had broke over and some of it flowed into her. It did flow into her, some of me did spill over into her. And just for a moment it was like the whole world was rushing through me. I was down at the heart of all the world. At the red-hot centre of us all. There wasn’t anybody so low I couldn’t understand ’em, or so high up my happiness couldn’t reach to them. We were all brothers an’ sisters together there. Just for a minute—just for a second, Tim, the whole world was running through me. My love—our love—had broken open the doors, an’ let in all the rest of the world. But it—it scares me,” she faltered, gripping his hand tight. “It’s like a channel had been plowed straight through me by a river in freshet, an’ it’ll never close up.”

“I know,” he returned, with the same awe. “I understand. I saw it, too.”

“You saw it, too?”

He nodded, looking at her strangely. “Yes, that time the soldiers went by, an’ I stood on the side of the street an’ let them pass; an’ another time too, when we were at the pictures, an’ there were American boys goin’ up to the front. There was one—”

But she would not let him finish. His look frightened her. It was aloof and far away as it had been when he watched the line of marching men go by. She caught his hand and began to talk very fast.

“Oh, Tim,” she begged, “think of Miss Fogg! She’s getting better: I know she is. She kissed my hand to-day an’ said I’d given her back life.”

“Julie—” he began again, but again she cut him short.

“Think what our love’s done,” she persisted. “It’s given life to her: it’s our love that’s done it.”

His expression was still aloof, and he struggled once more to speak. “Julie,” he began, but she would not have it.

“Oh, Tim—honey! Don’t!” she begged; and with a little sob she buried her face against his breast. He stooped and kissed her then, and said no more.

XVII

As the days drifted by, it seemed indeed as though Julie’s passion of loving service had worked a miracle in old Miss Fogg—that broken vessel which life had cast upon the midden of the world. Her canary bird, restored to life, sang in the window. The geranium was dead; but Julie bought another, so the effect of the room was gay, with white curtains blowing in the wind, the bird’s song, and the flower in the sunshine.

The room’s vigor and cleanliness inspired Miss Fogg to attempt mending her clothes and putting them in order.

“It would be a right funny thing,” she said, “if I couldn’t put my own old duds to rights, me that always did the fine sewin’ for all the swellest brides in town.”

Her fits of depression and indifference persisted but, sustained by Julie, she was more alive between the attacks, more able to look after herself.

One morning when Julie went up to her, she found the old woman, a fantastic gingham cap upon her head, busy turning out all her drawers, with a spasmodic energy.

“I got to get everything straight—all nice and clean,” she announced. “Wait,” she added. She tiptoed across to the door and closed it. “Sh-sh!” she whispered. “There ain’t a soul in this house a person can trust. They spy on me all the time. They peep at me over the transom an’ spy in at the keyhole. Ain’t it just awful what some folks will do?”

She stood close to Julie and spoke into her ear mysteriously. “Sh-sh! there’s one of ’em at the keyhole now.”

Julie went quickly over and threw wide the door. The hall was completely empty.

“There’s nobody there,” she said. “You just thought you heard somebody.”

“Hm!” the old woman retorted scornfully but still whispering. “So you think; but they don’t fool me. They’re quick enough to jump away when you open the door. I’ve quit doin’ that. I’m up to their tricks, an’ I got a way to fool ’em all right.”

Catching up an old spotted handkerchief, she hung it stealthily on the handle of the door. “There, that’ll fix ’em!” she triumphed. “If they want to peep, let ’em peep into that handkerchief. They’ll see all them red spots, an’ then they’ll run out in the street an’ say, ‘Old Miss Fogg’s done killed herself, an’ her blood’s all over the floor.’ That’d be funny, wouldn’t it?” She gave a sudden crazy laugh. “I kin kill myself all right, but it won’t be none er their business if I do. It won’t be their brains on the floor.”

A shiver ran through Julie.

The old woman sank down upon the edge of her bed and stared at the floor. “That’s what comes of livin’ with common people,” she moaned. “I ain’t used to common folks an’ I ain’t a-goin’ to start runnin’ with ’em now, me that’s sewed for all the best folks in town. I wouldn’t mix with this common lot, not to save their souls I wouldn’t; an’ my little baby child wouldn’t neither; she wouldn’t turn her hand over for er one of ’em.”

“Maybe your little niece will come soon,” Julie said catching at that one bright hope.

“Sh-sh!” the other commanded. Rising, she tiptoed over to the door again and, raising the handkerchief, bent her old back and peeped out through the keyhole. Then dropping it, she came back to Julie. “That was what I wanted to tell you,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was to come soon now—real soon. I had a dream last night—I’m mighty apt to have dreams when anything’s goin’ to happen—an’ the dream said she was comin’ soon. That’s why I got to get everything straight for her.”

“I’ll help you!” Julie cried eagerly. “We’ll get everything all nice before she comes.”

Julie fell to work at once. The old woman attempted a fitful assistance, but her burst of energy gave out before it had carried her far, and soon she retired to the easy chair by the window, watching Julie with dull eyes, or staring down at her lap and moaning, “Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord!” from time to time.

Julie was amazingly happy. So happy that she broke into little snatches of song as she moved about the room, dusting and cleaning it, and straightening the wild heap of garments in Miss Fogg’s drawers. So happy that the moaning old woman crumpled up in her chair did not seem repulsive to her, but rather, as always now, an outlet for the abounding joy that surged through her.

There was only one little rift the whole morning through. That was when Julie essayed to open a small drawer in Miss Fogg’s bureau. She had turned out and straightened all the others, but when she came to this one it refused to open. Thinking it merely stuck, she tugged upon the handles, but was stopped by a sudden cry, almost a scream, from the old woman. “Leave that drawer alone, leave it alone, I tell you!” she cried. Julie jumped round, startled.

Miss Fogg had sprung to her feet, and was glaring at her.

“Oh my Lord!” she cried, “Can’t you leave nothing be?”

“I’m sorry; I didn’t know it was locked,” Julie apologized hastily.

“My Lord! Can’t I have no place to myself no more?” the other stormed, sinking down again and running her trembling hands wildly through her hair.

“I’m so sorry,” Julie pleaded again. “See, I’m not touching it. I won’t touch it again.”

But it took her some time to soothe Miss Fogg and to win her confidence once more; and always afterward Julie was conscious of a certain uneasiness on the old woman’s part whenever she came near that especial drawer.

But on the whole it was a happy and beautiful morning for Julie, and even for Miss Fogg it held a faint return to life.

Julie tried again that night to tell Tim what Miss Fogg meant to her. It was a mystery that she could not quite explain to herself. She was constantly drawn back to interpret it to him.

“It’s like she was my child,” she said. “I’m giving her life. She’s mine. Everybody’s forgotten her. Life’s forgot her, an’ gone on by; but now I’ve come along, an’ brought some of it back to her. It’s like all the sufferings of the world had got a-hold of my heart, an I had to go down into hell to drag folks out. It isn’t just that poor old soul. She stands for all the rest: all of ’em that’s suffering. It’s something bigger almost than I can feel, but it’s got a-hold of me, an’ it’ll never let me go. Oh, my honey! my love!” she burst out, holding the lapels of his coat and staring up into his face. “You know what it is! It’s our love gone beyond itself—beyond just us, an’ out into all the world.” For a moment her eyes blazed up into his and her face was a white flame, then he put his hand over the wide gaze and turned her face against his breast pressing it there with both hands.

“Little honey, don’t!” he cried. “You’re mine. Don’t slip away to all the world.”

It made Julie happy when anyone in the house commented upon Miss Fogg’s improved condition. She was pleased when Mrs. Watkins said, “Well, you certainly are the miracle-worker! Who ever would have thought you could get that old soul to look so spruced up an’ reasonable. Why, she looks almost like real folks now.”

Mrs. Watkins was rocking back and forth in a chair which creaked regularly as it struck a certain board in the floor, the while she fanned herself and the baby in her arms with a frayed palm-leaf fan, which she used also to emphasize her remarks.

“She is better, isn’t she?” Julie said, eager for more praise of her creation.

“She is that,” Mrs. Watkins assented cordially. “But it’s you that’s done it.” She pointed the fan at Julie. “You mark what I say, it’s you that’s put life into the old graveyard-deserter. She hasn’t got any real life of her own: she’s just what you’ve made of her. You’ve put life into her like a kid blowing up a toy balloon; but if you was to quit blowing at her she’d go flat again, or maybe bust.”

“I know,” Julie admitted uneasily. “That’s the reason I wish her niece would come to her.”

“Niece?” Mrs. Watkins swept a fly off the sleeping baby’s face and paused, staring at Julie. “Niece?” she snorted. “I’m mighty doubtful about any niece, myself.”

“Why, she’s got a photograph on her mantel of a girl that she says is her niece,” Julie cried.

“Well, maybe she is. I don’t know for certain,” Mrs. Watkins returned, still doubtfully. “I know the picture. Miss Fogg used to let me into her room sometimes before she got so cranky an’ suspicious. An’ I know she says it’s her niece, but if it is, believe me, she certainly don’t care one thing about her old aunt. Miss Fogg’s been in this house for all the eight years I’ve been here—for all she thinks we’re so common, she keeps a stayin’ with us—an’ I’ve never seen any niece in all that time; an’ she don’t ever seem to have no letters, or word of any kind from the niece—not even at Christmas—that I know of. My, ain’t it hot!” she interpolated, putting up one languid hand and plucking a wisp of hair back from her forehead. “I just b’lieve that photograph’s a picture of some girl she used to sew for, and she likes to b’lieve it’s kin to her, poor soul.”

“Oh! it must be her niece,” Julie cried, distressfully. “It would be awful if it weren’t. Why, she’s all poor old Miss Fogg has in the world—the last straw of life that she clings to. It would be awful if she didn’t have her!”

“Well, I hope in my heart she has got a niece,” Mrs. Watkins returned.

“She ought to be here,” Julie persisted. “She ought to come to Miss Fogg, in case I have to leave.”

“Why, you thinkin’ of goin’ away?”

“No—Oh, no. Not really,” Julie evaded hastily, with that little breathless catch in her voice which was characteristic of her under any stress. “No. But I might.”

“Well, it would be a sad day for everybody in this house if you was to leave,” Mrs. Watkins said heartily. “You’ve got something about you most people ain’t got. You’re so—so good.”

Julie looked up, her eyes wide and horrified.

“Oh—Oh, no! I’m not. Don’t say that,” she faltered blindly.

It was after her talk with Mrs. Watkins that Julie made a fresh attempt to get Miss Fogg to write to her niece. The old woman would never give her either the niece’s name or her address. That and the locked drawer in her bureau were the only things over which she evinced the secretive suspicion toward Julie that she showed toward every one else. When Julie tried again that afternoon to persuade her, she firmed her lips obstinately.

“I’ll write if I want, an’ I’ll not if I don’t,” she announced.

“Look,” Julie coaxed. “See, I’ve brought you in ink and paper and everything. See what nice paper this is.”

Miss Fogg took the paper and inspected it critically. “That’s right nice,” she admitted. “I wouldn’t write to her on any but the best paper; she thinks a heap of having things stylish.”

Julie drew up a table and spread the writing materials invitingly upon it.

“There now, just write her a few lines,” she begged.

The old woman looked at all the preparation dimly, but presently she really did pick up the pen, and squaring herself at the table made a few trembling strokes. “My baby child,” she scrawled, the line running slantingly down the paper. “My little baby,” she attempted again and then, staring at the words, she broke down in tears. “I can’t do it,” she wept. “I can’t. I can’t get beyond ‘My baby child.’ I just think of her like that. She don’t seem to me like a grown person, an’ it’s all I can think to say.”

“That’s plenty: that’s all she’ll need,” Julie comforted her. “I’ll write her a letter and tell her all about everything, and put in what you’ve written.”

“Well,” the old woman consented shakingly, “well, tell her—Oh, tell her please to come! Tell her not to be mad at me.” And then all at once the secret of the old woman’s heart burst forth. “She’s mad at me about something. She won’t come. I’ve written and written—of course I have. But she don’t even answer. She don’t send a word. She’s gone back on me.” She looked up at Julie, her old face all distorted and twitching. “Don’t tell—don’t you tell any of these onery folks—but she’s gone back on me. She don’t ever write nor nothin’. Not even Christmas time. I ain’t told on her. I’ve kep’ it all to myself, here in my breast—but it’s erbout killed me. All I’ve got in the world! All—” The words fell into sobs.

“But she will come now!” Julie promised with poignant sympathy. “She just doesn’t understand. But I’ll write so she’ll see she must come.”

“Well—you write,” the other agreed with a pathetic confidence in Julie. “Maybe she’ll come for you. Tell her—Oh, tell her her old Tannie is sick an’ wants her. ‘Tannie,’ that was what she always called me: it was as near as she could come to saying ‘Aunt Annie’ when she was little.”

Julie did write. She did not know the niece’s name, and was afraid to ask, dreading a return of that sly suspicious look that was always brought out on Miss Fogg’s face when she questioned her too closely about anything. So she began the letter “Madam,” and when she came to the signing of her own name, she hesitated. She had never yet brought herself to write, “Julie Freeman.” She had always managed in some way to avoid doing so. For all that she had said that the name was no lie, she could not make herself write it. But her own name she dared not put. So in the end she signed it, “From a Friend.”

She wrote urgently, and enclosed the sheet on which Miss Fogg’s trembling words, “My baby child,” went slanting down the paper. Then she sealed the envelope and stamped it.

“Now then,” she said with an assumption of confidence that she did not feel, “what’s her address?”

To her despair she was met by the old crafty look in Miss Fogg’s eyes.

“That’s all right—that’s all right,” the old woman said with dignity. “Just lay it there, an’ I’ll back it when I git ready.”

Julie was blank with disappointment, but it was useless to insist, so she left the letter sealed and stamped and ready for the address. She did not know it, but that night when all the house was quiet, old Miss Fogg slipped out and, going secretly down a side street, posted the letter which she had managed to address, after looking all about and up and down to be sure that no one was spying at her.

XVIII

The summer days slipped by. The intense city heat of mid-August burned itself up toward September.

Old Miss Fogg waited and waited, but there came no answer to the letter. Julie fought against the old woman’s despairing disappointment, buoying her up with the power of her own spirit. She had often the feeling that wide wings spread themselves, out of the sheer force of her devotion, and bore that broken and defeated bit of old age up into a sunny atmosphere. Then she would be rewarded for all her pains. A faint flush would run into the old cheeks, she would look at Julie out of clear eyes from which all the crafty despair was momentarily gone, and which were almost as serene as the eyes of a happy child. It was that look which was a reward for all Julie’s efforts. She was thinking of it, hoping for it one day as she came along the street late in the afternoon. She was to have a little party for Miss Fogg that evening. The old woman was coming down to have supper with Julie and Tim and perhaps, if they could coax her into it, to go to a moving picture afterward. For the occasion Julie had done up one of Miss Fogg’s white muslin waists for her, earlier in the afternoon. She had done it with especial care, and was proud of her handiwork. She took it upstairs, holding it daintily on a coat-hanger so as not to wrinkle its perishable freshness, and displayed it to the old woman. Miss Fogg had looked really pleased, and had promised to put it on.

Julie was bringing home now a number of small packages for the supper party. All the preparations filled her with an intensity of happiness. So much so that merely doing them was not enough; she must sit down a moment and think them all over. Accordingly, when she came to Monroe Park on her homeward way, she sat down for a moment on one of its benches. The park was shady, with the slanting green-gold light of late afternoon sifting through the trees. Silver showers from the fountain sprayed up and caught the sunlight, and groups of very small children, looking almost unearthly in that glamour of green and gold effulgence, ran and played upon the grass, or up and down the paths, their laughter a whimsical undercurrent beneath the grown-up noises of the city.

Julie let her eyes rest happily upon them, while through her mind there drifted one pleasant picture after another: Miss Fogg’s crisp shirt-waist, the pleased look on her old face when Julie had brought it to her; the purchasing of the materials for the party, all of which lay now in her market basket beside her; the little basket itself, which had been a gift from Tim, so neat and pretty with a gay pink pattern woven into it. Then going forward she visualized the supper-table spread with clean linen and set forth with her rosebud china, which also had been a gift from Tim. Julie was an artist in homemaking, and these small and happy things were the material of her art. Out of them she was to weave a little supper which was for her almost as much a creative act as is the composition of a symphony for a musician. In the ardent contemplation of her small creation, she overflowed with joy.

“Oh Lord, I’m so happy—so happy! I got to make a gift out of the happiness!”

She rose then and made her way home. Arrived there, she put her bundles carefully away in their little makeshift ice-box, which Tim had devised and which was really very successful, and then passed through into the front room to look forth and see if he might by any chance be coming. The shutters were drawn together to exclude the heat. Stooping, she peeped through them and, in the bright sunlight without, saw a figure coming up the walk, the sight of which made her suddenly fall down upon her knees beneath the window sill, crouching close against the wall.

It was Elizabeth Bixby; and she was entering the house now.

She came so close upon Julie’s entrance that it was impossible not to suppose she had seen her and was following. Julie crouched helplessly beneath the window. She wanted to run to the door and lock it fast, but she felt powerless to move. She cowered in a heap upon the floor, waiting for Elizabeth to enter and find her.

“I must get up. I must stand up on my feet,” she kept thinking. But still she did not rise. She felt utterly defenseless, utterly uncovered and at the other’s mercy.

If she could only have slipped across and locked the door, that would have given her an instant’s pause to gather herself together before Elizabeth’s entrance; but she could not move to do it.

“I’ll stand up. I’ll stand right up on my feet and meet her as soon as I hear her hand on the door,” she whispered to herself, every nerve in her body keyed for the expected sound.

But the sound did not come; a miracle happened; Elizabeth did not pause at Julie’s door. Julie heard her enter, heard her ask Mrs. Watkins some question, and then heard her feet beat a sharp patter along the passage and upstairs. Had she made a mistake? Been directed to the wrong room? Very slowly Julie relaxed and got upon her feet, her knees weak beneath her. She crept across and turned the key in the lock at last. Now there was a momentary barrier set between herself and that hand upon the door which she felt sure must come. Then she sat down in a chair and waited, her hands clinging tight together in her lap. She waited a very long time, an hour at least it seemed, and, except for an occasional shifting in her chair, a clasping and unclasping of her hands, or a faint dumb turning of her head from side to side, she did not stir. There was nothing she could do. She did not know where to find Tim, even if she had dared to slip out and search for him. He had told her he had some errands to do for the printer, and would probably be a little late. She did not know by which street he would return. There was nothing therefore to do but wait—wait for the footsteps to come down from upstairs, or for Tim’s to come up the cement walk outside. So she sat staring helplessly down at her clasped hands. She looked at them so long and steadfastly that they seemed at last to be detached from herself, not to be her hands any more, but to be separate personalities, small personalities—little people clinging very tight together there in the world of her lap, as though some disaster menaced. She felt dimly sorry for them.

At last she heard a door upstairs open—she was not sure which one it was—and then the steps that she knew were Elizabeth Bixby’s came down the stairs and down the hall. They would be at her door in an instant. The two little personalities in her lap, that were made of her hands, jumped desperately tight together. But again the feet did not pause, but pattered definitely past and out into the street. Julie leaped up and peered through the blinds. Perhaps she was mistaken: perhaps it was not Elizabeth after all. But it was. She saw her face distinctly as she went down the steps—and saw something else as well. Elizabeth had been crying—was still wiping her eyes rather blindly. How strange that was! What could have moved her to tears? The surprise of this stayed for a space the leap of relief over her departure; but in a moment it came, and Julie relaxed all over as though a warm beneficent tide flowed through her. Perhaps they were safe after all. Safe—

At this point there came an imperative knock and, when Julie forced herself to go over and open the door, she found Mrs. Watkins there eager with news.

“Well, you was right after all!” she announced. “The miracle’s happened. Miss Fogg’s niece’s been to see her—that was her just went down the steps.”

“That?” stammered Julie. “That—that lady that just went down the steps—Miss Fogg’s niece?”

Mrs. Watkins nodded. “M—h’m, that’s the wonderful niece. She asked me did Miss Fogg live here, and when she went away she told me she was her niece. She’s been upstairs with the old soul a right smart spell, an’ I heard her tell her when she left she’d be back to see her again in a couple of days. She said she was going to Camp Lee for a day or so. When she left I seen she’d been cryin’.”

“Yes,” Julie said, “I saw that, too.”

“I reckon it must of upset her to find the old lady so bad off. Soon as she’d gone I flew upstairs to see how the old soul was takin’ it. But she’s got her door locked, an’ wouldn’t answer or let on she was there when I called her name. Oh, I reckon I’m too common to hear about the grand niece! But you go up, dearie, an’ hear the news. She’s your baby—she’ll talk for you.”

“I—I can’t!” Julie gasped and put her hand to her head. “I feel so—Oh, I feel so bad,” she faltered.

“Why, you do look real white!” Mrs. Watkins exclaimed with concern. “What’s the matter? How do you feel bad?”

Julie sat weakly down in a chair. “I—feel—shaky,” she got out slowly, speaking with difficulty.

“You lie right down, an’ don’t do a thing for a spell. I’ll bet it’s the heat—you ain’t used to this city heat—an’ you seem to have a kind of a nervous chill, too.”

“I’m—I’m all right,” Julie got out, struggling to keep her teeth from chattering. “I reckon it is the heat. I—Oh don’t—don’t bother. I’ll just lie—down a little bit.”

She went unsteadily over, Mrs. Watkins piloting her, and lay down upon the sagging plush sofa, a sofa that had adjusted its spring to accommodate the weight, and probably the sorrows also, of many human beings before her.

“Yes—now, that’s right,” Mrs. Watkins said, giving her a pat as she settled a cushion for her. “What you want is to keep right still. Don’t stir now. Just lay still an’ think about nice things. Think about Miss Fogg’s niece bein’ here at last. Ain’t that a wonder? It ought to please you, after you worked so hard to get her here.”

Looking up at her from the sofa, Julie suddenly brought her hands tight together, and burst into a high startling scream of laughter.

“Why, so it was! It was all my doing!” she gasped, shaken by one shuddering gust of laughter after another.

“What on earth ails you? That ain’t as funny as all that,” Mrs. Watkins cried. “Hush, hush now! Hold on to yourself, Mis’ Freeman. Quit that! You’ll be in hysterics d’rectly.”

“No, no! It isn’t funny. I won’t laugh. I promise not to laugh,” Julie gasped, biting her lips hard together between sentences, and fighting to choke back the wild paroxysms. “I won’t laugh. And she was crying! I saw her crying! Oh—” The tension broke and she collapsed into a flood of tears.

“There now, that’s better.” Mrs. Watkins patted her shoulder. “Now you’ll be all right in a little bit.”

“I—I am all right,” Julie affirmed presently, pressing her hand against her shaking mouth. “Don’t mind me—don’t. I—I just get this way sometimes.”

“We all do, us poor women—specially in this heat,” the other answered. “You’ll be all right now the storm’s broke. Just lay right still. I’ll be back in a little bit, an’ see if the clouds ain’t all gone, an’ the rainbow come: maybe you’ll have found the pot of gold at the end of it by then.”

Mrs. Watkins went off, shutting the door after her, and Julie was alone. She did not cry or laugh any more. She was very tired—completely spent—and a little confused also, so that as she lay there with closed eyes, what Mrs. Watkins had said as she went out kept repeating itself through her mind. “The end of the rainbow! The end of the rainbow!”

XIX

Tim found Julie still limp upon the sofa when he came home. She opened her eyes and stared up at him. He knew at once that something was the matter, and came quickly and knelt down beside her, laying his hands on hers.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

“Elizabeth’s been here,” she answered, still lying helplessly on the sofa and looking at him.

“Elizabeth?”

She told him then all about it. “I fell down under the window—I couldn’t seem to stand up—but I would have stood up if she’d come in—I would have, Tim—but she didn’t come.”

“She didn’t come? Then she didn’t see you—she doesn’t know we’re here?”

“No: it wasn’t for us she came. She’s Miss Fogg’s niece—the one she’s always talked about. Oh, Tim, did you know? Did you know Elizabeth had an old aunt?”

He stared away out of the window a moment, searching his mind. “Yes, she did speak once or twice of an aunt—but not often. She hadn’t seen her for years. I never heard her right name. She called her by a baby name.”

“She called her ‘Tannie,’” Julie said. “It was short for ‘Aunt Annie.’”

“Yes, that was it,” he nodded.

They were silent, their eyes fixed upon each other’s face.

“Oh, Tim, I did it!” Julie broke out. “I brought her right here. It was me made Miss Fogg send the letter. I never rested ’til I got her to. I worked and worked at her ’til I got it sent. I did it.”

“Never mind, never mind, honey. You couldn’t know. How could you? It was my fault, not recollecting. But she didn’t see you?”

“No, she didn’t see me.”

“Then it’s all right. We’ll leave here right away.”

“Leave here?” Julie looked around the little room blankly.

“Why, yes, honey. We got to leave. She’ll be coming back again.”

“She won’t be back for a little bit,” Julie said.

“How’s that? How do you know she won’t be back?”

“Mrs. Watkins heard her say she was going away for a day or so.”

“Going away? Where’s she going? Did she hear where she was going?”

She was silent, looking at him.

“Did she hear where she was going?” he persisted.

“Camp Lee,” she answered at length.

“Camp Lee?”

She nodded.

He turned his head away, a sudden spasm constricting his mouth.

“Oh, my honey!” she broke out with a little sob, “I know—I understand how you feel.”

But this time he silenced her, turning her head against his shoulder and pressing it there. “There! It’s all right. It’s all right. There now.” He held her fast. And after a moment he said, “We’ll see about moving right away.”

“Oh, Tim, our home! Our little rooms where we’ve been so happy!”

“I know—I know! But we’ll find another place,” he comforted her.

She raised her head presently, and held him off. “But Tim, think of her being Miss Fogg’s niece! Oh, I hate that! Miss Fogg’s mine: she’s my child. I made her. Elizabeth’s never done one thing for the poor old woman; but I worked over her with all my heart. It’s true what Mrs. Watkins said about my blowing the breath of life into her. That’s what God did in the Bible for Adam. Oh, I oughtn’t to think such things—but that’s the way I felt—something right out of myself went into that old soul an’ gave her life. And all the time—all the time, she was her aunt!” She paused, but in a moment she spoke abruptly. “Tim, she was crying when she went down the steps. What could have made her cry?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Again they were silent, looking into one another’s faces questioningly. They were suddenly at sea in the wine-dark waters of life, swept from all their moorings, confused and uncertain, and they looked at each other in search of some fresh anchorage. The shadows were gathering in the room now; it was almost dark; and at length he rose and lighted the gas.

“There! Now what about a little bite to eat?”

It was an inspiration on his part. It brought her back to the reality of the moment, comforting and restoring her as nothing else could have done. In the simple preparations for the meal, their familiar happy life flowed back upon them as though, after all, it was to continue. They both clutched at it eagerly. It had seemed to be broken and gone; but now in the laying of the table, the setting forth of the knives and forks and dishes, here it was again, come back more alive, more poignant than ever, as though some worker in the ground who thought his mine exhausted had stumbled unexpectedly upon a vein of metal more pure than all the rest. It was soul-restoring for them both. He helped her, and she laughed a little with a shaken tender mirth at his way of doing things. Together they placed Julie’s best cups upon the table, the cups that he had given her, that had pink rosebuds flecked all over them, and which meant more to her and to him than any other cups could ever mean. The food, the daintily spread table, the knives and forks, the little cups particularly, seemed all to embody and make real their companionship, as though what was in their hearts, that vivid and beautiful essence of their life together, had poured itself forth materialized before their eyes in these familiar creatures, small and endearing. But when the meal was all prepared, and the table spread, Julie and Tim stood, hesitating.

“I can’t go up and get her: I can’t go now,” Julie faltered. He knew she meant Miss Fogg, for whom the party had been planned.

“Oh, well, maybe she’ll come down of herself,” he answered.

She brightened. “That’s so. Maybe she will. Let’s wait a little bit and see.”

They stood for a time with their hands on the backs of their chairs, and surveyed the dainty repast. But nothing happened.

“No, she won’t come by herself,” Julie said forlornly, at length. “I know she won’t.”

He caught the falling note in her voice, and his love hurried toward her with words of protective tenderness.

“Well, she’d come quick enough if she could just see how nice you’ve got everything fixed for her,” he cried. “Just give a person one look at this table, an’ I’ll bet you couldn’t drive ’em away from it with a stick.”

She looked up quickly and gratefully, a little laugh trembling on her lips, and about to reply, when a sudden faint noise at the door arrested her. Her nerves were on edge, and any noise now was startling.

“Oh, Tim!” she breathed faintly, and wavered toward him. He was beside her in a moment, his arm fast about her. So they faced the door and waited. The sound came again, and with a little catch of breath Julie whispered, “Look!” and pointed. A bit of white paper was creeping in under the door-sill. They stood and watched it with fixed eyes. It came in slowly, uncertainly, making a little scratching sound as it came. A long black hairpin was being used to push it in: they saw the sharp wire line of it dark against the white of the paper. Slowly, thoroughly it came creeping under the door. Then with a final poke the hairpin was withdrawn, and the paper lay there white upon the floor. A faint pause followed, and then footsteps creaked away down the hall.

Tim stooped quickly and snatched the paper up. It was a flimsy half sheet, and was folded into a note.

“What is it?” Julie faltered. Some words were scrawled on the outside. It took a little time to puzzle them out. “Don’t read till I say when,” they deciphered finally.

“Oh, it’s Miss Fogg!” Julie cried with an unsteady laugh of relief. “But what does she mean? How are we to know when she says ‘when’?”

As the question died on her lips she was answered by the sudden explosion of a pistol-shot. An instant of caught silence followed, and then doors were banged open and people began to run through the house. “Miss Fogg!” Julie screamed. She and Tim ran also, down the hall and up the stairs. When they reached the place, the room was crowded full of people. The locked drawer in her bureau was pulled open, and old Miss Fogg lay on the floor, a pistol beside her, slipped out of her dead hand.

The people were talking disjointedly, crowding in, and one was stooping down touching her. Their words came in confused ejaculation. “She’s dead—just as dead as a nit!” “My Lord! what a sight!” “She done it with that pistol.” “Don’t touch her. Don’t touch her, I say! She’s dead, all right.” “But she wa’n’t dead when I got here; she give a kind of a flop or two just as I got to the door.” “Well, she’s dead now. The poor crazy old soul!” “She’s killed herself all right!” “Don’t touch her, I say! Don’t! You got to let her lay like she is till the coroner comes.” “Mind! you’re gettin’ your hands all into it.” “My Lord! What a sight!”

Julie took one look at the figure on the floor, at the old face, at the gray hair that she had sometimes brushed, at the muslin waist she had pressed so carefully, all streaked now—and something crashed within her. She reeled against Tim. “Take me away—downstairs,” she panted.

He supported her down the narrow steps, and back into their own rooms. She sank on a chair.

“Read her letter,” she commanded.

He took the twist of paper and, unfolding it, puzzled over it for a time in silence. “It’s mighty hard to read; it’s written so funny; she’s left out a lot of words, and written some twice over, an’ all running down on the paper,” he hesitated.

“Read it, read it!” she cried. She was sitting bowed over, her elbows on her knees, her face hidden in her hands.

He read, picking the words out with difficulty.

“It commences, ‘Dear’—just that: she forgot to put the rest, I reckon. ‘Dear, I can’t stand no more. My niece, my baby—baby,’ (she’s got that twice over) ‘to see me to-day.’ (She’s left out something here) ‘trouble. She’s in awful trouble. Her husband’s left an’ gone with another woman. She’s all broke up by it. My baby she cried and cried.’”

He paused.

“Don’t leave out anything: read it all—all,” she breathed from behind her hands.

He went on again: “‘An’ now the law’s lookin’ for him. My poor little baby child! All I had. I can’t stand up against this trouble—disgrace. People talk, always peeking and spying at you, an’ talk. I ain’t got no more to live for now, an’ I don’t want to live—’”

He hesitated.

“All, Tim, all!” she cried out again.

“‘Don’t want to live if there’s bad people in the world like what took my baby’s husband. She was all I had to set my heart on. You understand. You been good—good to me.’ (She’s got ‘good’ written twice over, Julie.) ‘I take my pen in hand—these few lines. Don’t let any one be blamed. Nobody to blame but that woman. You been good to me. I thank you, an’ so no more at present from your poor old friend, Eliza Annie Fogg.’”

He dropped the paper, and turned to her. “Julie! Honey!” he cried. “Julie, don’t take it so hard! She was just a crazy old woman: anything would have made her do it!”

Julie raised her ghastly face, staring at him. “She was my child,” she said, “and I’ve killed her. Oh, you don’t know; but she was like my own child. She was in the dark, an’ sufferin’. I had so much happiness—I thought it would give her life. Instead—”

“Julie, she was crazy!” he pleaded.

Her eyes, though she still stared at him, were remote, fixed upon an inward picture.

“Tim,” she said. “It was all over the clean waist I pressed for her—all over it. I’ve killed her. And—and Elizabeth too, she was crying.”

“Elizabeth! Her tears—” he broke in violently, but she silenced him.

“No, don’t speak now; don’t. Let me alone. I’ve got to be by myself and think it all out alone. I’ve got to think.” She rose unsteadily.

She stood looking at him one moment more, dumbly, uncertainly, groping perhaps to find something for his consolation, but she found nothing, and in the end she evaded his outstretched arms, murmured blindly, “I got to be alone—I got to think it all out,” and passed from the kitchen and through to the dark of the sitting-room, where she shut the door fast behind her.

He sank down in a chair and sat on all alone in the room, where the lights were bright and the supper still waited upon the table in festive expectancy. Every now and then his eyes traveled around the room with its air of frozen gayety, but always they returned to the floor, and so he remained, his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands driven into his pockets, and his head bowed.

He sat there a long time until his legs grew stiff and went to sleep. Then he stirred uneasily, drawing them in, and looking again at the waiting meal.

“I reckon I better eat something; it’s gettin’ late,” he whispered to himself. He turned to the table and helped himself to some food tentatively, but as he did so he caught sight of Julie’s apron where it had fallen to the floor from its accustomed hook.

“Honey, your apron’s on the floor,” he said. He rose stiffly and going over picked up the checked gingham, but when he thought it was secure on the hook it fell down in soft folds against him, and he clutched it suddenly to his breast. “Honey! Julie! Don’t take it so hard!” he cried. After the apron was once more restored, he came back and looked at the table and knew that it was impossible to eat.

“I reckon I better clear things away,” he thought drearily.

He began moving very quietly and carefully about the room, doing everything as nearly as Julie would have done it as he could. He put all the food away in the ice-box, folded up the linen, and set the china in its place. But his hands were not very steady, and as he picked up one of the rosebud cups, a sudden noise upstairs made him start, and it fell out of his hands and crashed to the floor. “Aw—Oh! I’ve broken your cup,” he cried in dismay. He stooped, and gathering up all the pieces tried ineffectively to fit them together. “One of your best cups, honey, you thought so much of: I’ve broke it,” he confessed. Suddenly the edges he was trying to fit together blurred in a dazzled line and the tears rushed into his eyes. He laid the shattered pieces in a desolate pile on the table, and stumbling into a chair, buried his head in his arms beside them.

Later on, there was a knock at the door and the coroner came in to ask for evidence. Tim gave him the note Miss Fogg had written Julie, and the coroner, a rather sombre dark man with a sallow face and outstanding ears set wide as though to catch every note of horror that the world held, read it, holding it beneath the gas jet that made shining lights on his hair, pausing every now and again to say, “What do you make of that word?”

“Well,” he said when he had puzzled it all out, “it’s suicide all right, no question about that. Everybody in the house says the old soul was more’n half cracked, anyhow. I reckon she’s had that pistol loaded an’ handy for some time.”

“She had it in that drawer she always kep’ locked,” Tim told him. “Julie said there was one drawer she was always mighty oneasy about.”

“Is that so?” said the other.

“Yes, Julie said so.”

“Who’s she? Is that your wife?” the coroner demanded.

Tim hesitated. It seemed impossible even to say the little word, “Yes.” But the coroner, busy folding up Miss Fogg’s note, labeling it and tucking it away in his wallet, where no doubt it found itself in company with many another pitiful disaster, appeared not to notice his silence.

“I’ve heard ’bout your wife,” he said. “Everybody says she was mighty good to the old woman—seemed to put new life into her. Can I speak to her?”

“She’s feeling bad,” Tim hesitated. “She’s mightily upset. She ran upstairs with everybody, and saw the poor old soul layin’ on the floor.”

“Yes,” the coroner nodded, “right much of a mess, wa’n’t it? Liable to upset anybody not used to viewin’ all kinds of remains, like I am.”

“It was all over her clean waist,” Tim explained earnestly. “Julie just ironed that waist for her—just a little bit before.”

“I see,” said the coroner. “Perfectly natural she’s upset. Well, no need to disturb her if she’s feeling bad. This note gives plenty of evidence.”

He turned to go, but Tim detained him with an eager hand upon his arm.

“A crazy old woman like—like she was, would be mighty apt to commit suicide, wouldn’t she? It would take less to make her do it than it would for a person in good health?” he begged. “She’d do it easier than most folks, wouldn’t she?”

“Oh, yes, any little thing’d be liable to tip her over,” the other assented. “This trouble now, what she speaks of here in the letter—that other woman goin’ off with the niece’s husband—that was all she needed: that did the trick for her, poor old soul. Well,” he turned again to go, “no need to trouble your wife if she’s feelin’ bad. Tell her she ought to feel good to think she was able to do so much for the old lady.”

With that he went, and Tim turned and saw Julie standing in the open door with the dark of the sitting-room behind her, and knew that she had heard what the coroner said.

“Julie!” he cried.

But she put up her hands, motioning him away as before, and without a word turned back into the dark room, shutting the door between them.

Tim sat on alone in the kitchen. As the hours passed slowly away, he went on tiptoe several times to listen at the sitting-room door, and at last, late in the night, as there was no sound, he turned the handle and pushed the door open cautiously. But instantly she cried out in the dark, “No, Tim, no!”

So he shut the door again as softly as he had opened it, and after a moment’s hesitation, stretched himself out upon the floor in front of it. But after all, if she opened the door suddenly to come out, there was danger that she might stumble over him and get a fall; so he rose and at last went lonesomely into the bedroom and slipping off his shoes, flung himself, all dressed as he was, upon the bed.

XX

In the early morning following that long night Julie came softly into the bedroom and found Tim lying there asleep, all dressed as he had flung himself upon the bed. He opened his eyes as she entered.

“I—I broke one of your little cups last night, honey,” he said confusedly, “one of your best ones. I certainly am sorry.” He sat up in bed, staring at her in all the bleak tragedy of the gray dawn.

“I broke your little best cup, an’ I reckon I’ve broke your heart, too,” he said.

She put out her hands swiftly and drew his head passionately close against her breast, bowing her face down to it.

“My love, my love!” she cried, stumbling and sobbing through the words. “You made all my heart—all my life—it was yours to break or do with like you pleased.”

For a time they clung together in tears. But at last he raised his head and, putting one of his hands on each of her arms, looked curiously into her eyes. The storm of her emotion was passed, and she was calm now. She seemed changed also from the small woman of the day before. Her spirit had withdrawn from the surface, and was gazing forth from deeper levels of life. The expression of her eyes was wiser, steadier; she even appeared physically larger, a stronger woman, than she had been before. What encounters of the spirit had she faced alone through all the dark of the night?

In the long gaze that passed between them they were confronted by a tremendous question. Each asked it silently of the other. Julie was the first to answer.

“Yes,” she nodded. “It’s come to an end, my honey. We got to part now—’fore I kill somebody else.”

“Julie, she was crazy!” he cried as before.

But she brushed his words aside. “All night I’ve seen the blood on her waist,” she said. “It mocked me. The two were right together: the clean waist I was so proud with myself for fixin’ for her, an’ the spots of her blood. They were like mouths laughing at me with the awfulest laughter—red words hollerin’ out across the world, ‘Look! Look! Look at the way Julie Rose gives life to folks!’ Tim, last night I went down deep—I was shoved down into the deepest places—I see it all different now—I’ve got to stand square with folks now.”

He nodded. “Yes, it’s come to that with both of us—Julie,” he burst out, “I ain’t where I ought to be! When the soldiers went by in the street, an’ that night when they showed the doughboys in France on the screen, you didn’t notice, I reckon—”

“I did. I did!” she broke in. “I’ve known all along how it was with you, but I wouldn’t let you speak. God forgive me! I kept you from it. I was scared.”

“Well,” he went on. “That night when they showed our boys goin’ up to the front, there was one little feller on the screen—a runty kind of a little feller like me—an’ as he went by he turned so’s you saw his full face. Julie, he looked straight at me; an’ something jumped in me an’ sez, ‘That’s your brother. Why ain’t you with him?’”

“I know, I know,” she cried poignantly. “Your brother! My sister! We thought when we found ourselves we was all, but now we’ve caught a sight of the other folks.”

“So I got to go now,” he ended. “I’ll give myself up—”

“Oh, honey! What will they do to you?”

“I dunno. But I can stand up to it. I can stand it now. You’ve made a man of me at last.”

“Oh, my God!” she cried. “I didn’t. I tempted you away. I don’t know what I’ve done to you. Without me you wouldn’t be in all this trouble.”

He faced her steadily. “Without you I’d never have found myself, an’ that’s God’s truth,” he said solemnly. “I’m your man, honey. You made me. I was afraid of every one, picked on by every one, an’ then you came along an’ set me free!”

“Our love!” she cried. “It was that set us both free so’s we found ourselves. But that ain’t all. Last night, Tim, I understood more. It seemed like I was shoved right down into the heart of life. I had a kind of a vision—maybe it was only a dream: I’d been asleep, I know. I stayed awake ’til real late, just sitting there in the dark an’ knowin’ what I’d done to her. It seemed like I’d go crazy; I couldn’t cry; I thought my mind was about to split. An’ then at last I did: I cried, an’ cried, though it didn’t do her no good. I kep’ thinkin’, ‘This don’t do her no good. My tears can’t help her any now.’ But they helped me. My head stopped feelin’ so tight after that. The awful splashes on her waist quit hollerin’ out, ‘Look! Look!,’ an’ at last I dropped off into a doze; an’ when I waked up things was different. It seemed like I’d shifted in deeper than I ever was before.”

She brushed a dark strand of hair back from her brow, then she dropped her hand to his and he held it fast, staring up into her face, whose look of wider apprehension seemed reflected on his own as well.

“It was like I’d been stretched,” she went on slowly, feeling for words, “stretched into knowing bigger things, an’ shoved deep down where you ain’t yourself alone, but where all the rest of the folks is, too, all kind of bound together—all brothers an’ sisters—an’ where nobody lives to theirselves, or dies to theirselves. An’—an’ now I got to stand straight with the world.”

He nodded, “I know. I understand.” It was the old familiar phrase which had linked them so close together. They were silent for a long moment, drinking understanding and courage from one another’s eyes in the communion of their spirits.

He spoke at last. “I’ll go ’round to the police this mornin’ an’ turn myself in. Or maybe it would be better to go straight to Camp Lee.”

Her clasp upon his hand tightened, but she spoke steadily. “I’ll go home to Hart’s Run.”

He started at that. “Oh, no, honey,” he protested, “you can’t do that. You can’t go back there now. You know how it is—how they’ll treat you. You can’t live there now.”

“I can live anywhere now,” she answered. “I’ve found myself now. All my life I’ve been scared of folks. You know how it was. But not now: I’m free of ’em all at last. I got to go back there. It’s my home. It’s where I belong, where I can be square with the world. Oh,” she cried, “what does it matter to me where I live, when you—when you—Oh, honey,” she broke down, “what will they do to you?”

“Never mind! Never mind! It’s all right now. I can stand it now,” he consoled her. “But how will you live at Hart’s Run? Will they—will folks buy from you now?”

She laughed a little at that. “Oh, they’ll buy, all right,” she reassured him. “Maybe they’ll put me out of the church; but I trim hats too well, an’ know too much about fixing clothes for ’em not to come to the store.”

They began after that to consider their plans, bravely and calmly making arrangements for a speedy departure. It was still very early, and together they fell to work packing up all their small belongings. There was not much to pack: only a few clothes, the rosebud cups, and some extra housekeeping utensils that they had had to buy. These all went easily into her suit-case and his trunk, which she was to take with her. When the packing was finished he went out, arranged to have the trunk sent for later, saw their landlord and settled for the rent, explaining his sudden departure by saying he had to answer his draft call.

When he returned, breakfast was ready. Julie had even made waffles for their last meal together.

He sat down and forced himself to eat to please her, but she could scarcely touch anything.

“You better try to eat a little bit,” he urged. “There now, have some of this plateful of waffles. I can’t eat ’em all, honey.”

She looked at him a moment, her face quivering. “I—I got something in my throat—seems like I can’t swaller past it,” she got out, snatching at that wisp of whimsicality to cover the nakedness of their tragedy.

But on the whole the breakfast was a brave, almost a gay, meal. They were both setting forth upon desperate paths of life and, knowing this, they were keyed up and excited by the adventure of it, and in themselves they knew as well a steady self-confidence that had never been theirs before.

They had agreed that for Tim to go to Camp Lee and give himself up there would be the best plan; but after all, they were too late. As they finished breakfast, they were startled by a sudden loud bang upon their door. Their hands flew together and clutched fast for one moment across the table, then he rose and threw the door wide.

Two men in plain clothes burst in.

“Here, what’s your name?” the foremost demanded, a big swaggering man with the face of a bully.

“Timothy Bixby,” Tim answered steadily.

“Oh, it is, is it?” the man cried, a trifle taken aback. “This is your mornin’ for tellin’ the truth, ain’t it? Well, Mr. Timothy Bixby, I arrest you in the name of the law. See this?” He turned back his coat lapel, and displayed a sheriff’s badge. “We’re the dog catchers, an’ we’ve come for you—you damned yeller cur!”

“I was just fixin’ to go to Camp Lee an’ give up,” Tim said.

“Oh yes, you were,” the other jeered. “A hell of a lot you were!”

“But he was! It’s the truth, he was!” Julie broke in. “He was just gettin’ ready to go right this mornin’.”

“Oh, yes, he was, I know mighty well he was!” the other repeated. “An’ I know all about you, too!”

“But it’s true. Honest it is! Honest!” Julie pleaded desperately, turning helplessly to the other man, her eyes wide and sincere.

“Never mind, never mind!” Tim cut in under his breath to her. “It don’t matter, so long as you know.”

“Oh, well now, Sam, maybe he was,” the second man interposed pacifically.

“Maybe nuthin’!” the sheriff cut him off. “He’s had a whole two months to git from Hart’s Run to Camp Lee, an’ you know traffic ain’t blocked as bad as all that. An’ if it hadn’t of been for his wife catchin’ a sight of him, he’d be hidin’ here still in this damned love-nest.”

So Elizabeth had seen, after all! Their eyes turned swiftly to one another at that.

“Now then, be in a hurry,” the sheriff commanded. “I ain’t got time to waste over you. Here—where’s your hat?”

Julie went quickly and brought Tim’s hat, pressing it into his hands. “My honey! My honey!” she breathed.

But the sheriff cut in between them. “Here, none er that,” he cried, jerking Tim away.

“Take me! Take me, too!” Julie cried. “It was all my doing!”

But she was brushed aside.

“Git out of the way! We ain’t got nuthin’ to do with you,” the sheriff said, pushing Tim toward the door. On the threshold, Tim paused and twisted around to cry back, “It’s all right, Julie, it’s all right.”

Then his captor thrust him savagely forth.

The other man, glancing back at Julie, paused an instant, caught by the anguish of her face. “Here, quick,” he whispered awkwardly, “ain’t you got a token—a keepsake for him? Maybe I’ll git a chanst to slip it to him.”

She looked wildly about the room. What should she send him? She started to take up the pieces of the broken cup, but her heart cried out, “No, no, not that!”

“Quick! Quick!” he urged her. “Your handkerchief?”

But her handkerchief was all sodden with the tears they had shed together. She shook her head dumbly. Hurried and confused, her mind was blank. Her gaze fell to the breakfast table. There was a pile of waffles still fresh and warm. To her dazed thought at that moment they were not food, they were symbols of her heart. With a hand that shook she caught up one and held it out mutely to the man.

“No, no,” he whispered sharply, “think what you’re doing, woman. A keepsake—a keepsake! Here—what about this?”

He picked up a picture postcard from the mantelpiece. It was a photograph of herself and Tim taken together.

“Yes, yes,” she nodded gratefully.

“I’ll slip it to him if I git the chanst,” he promised again.

“What will they do to him?” Julie breathed.

He shook his head. “I don’t know—I don’t know how bad he’s in.”

“Will I know what happens?” she questioned.

“You—you ain’t his wife, are you?” he asked uncertainly.

“No,” she answered, her wide eyes looking at him unfalteringly.

“The government only notifies the wife or next of kin,” he mumbled, as though repeating a formula.

“I’m goin’ back to Hart’s Run,” she told him simply. “If the law wants me, too, I’ll be there. My name’s Julie Rose.”

“Here, Jack, where in the hell are you?” the sheriff bawled from outside.

“Coming!” the lingerer cried, and went, slipping the postcard into his pocket.

Julie stumbled to the window and peered out. Tim was walking between the two men. As they came to the corner where he had always turned to wave a farewell to her, he paused now and half turning raised his hand, but the sheriff struck it angrily down and thrust him on around the corner out of sight.

Julie stood a long time, her head pressed hard against the window frame, her eyes fixed blankly on the street; but she knew that she must face it sometime, and at last she jerked herself round, and, straining back against the sill, let the empty desolation of the room rush over her.

XXI

Julie awoke the next morning in the dim and early light and sat up in her berth. She had slept so profoundly, swept down to such depths of unconsciousness, that for a moment on awakening she appeared to have drifted beyond all the moorings of her accustomed self, so that it took her a few moments of uncertain staring at the swaying green curtains of the berth and at the flickering light across the bedclothes, to realize that she was on the train. “I’m going home,” she told herself at last.

Yesterday, with all its complete shattering of her life in Richmond, its agony of parting in the morning, and its long hot sufferings of the ensuing day, was gone into the past, and this was to-morrow.

The man had come for her trunk soon after Tim had been arrested, and Julie had managed to slip away out of the house without having to face a parting and explanation with any of her friends there. She had spent most of the long, oppressive, and tragic day in the railway station, chiefly because she did not know where else to go. It was a strained and terrible time of waiting in heat, and confusion, and the weary sordid smells of humanity traveling in hot weather. Every now and again waves of hysteria swept over her, so that it was only by gripping her hands very tight, and by staring resolutely at the moving people before her, that she succeeded in keeping herself from breaking down altogether there in the public waiting-room. But finally the afternoon came, then twilight and supper; and then at last her train was made up, and she could get on and go to bed in the sleeping-car where she had been fortunate enough to secure a berth. She was so completely worn out by the sleeplessness of the night before and by all she had suffered, that—as soon as the train got under way and the intense city heat had lessened as it took the cool open stretches of the country night—the swaying of her berth, and the monotonous gray roar of the wheels, broken only by an occasional hollow moment running through the pattern of the gray roar as the train swept over a culvert, relaxed her all over, lulling her down and down through hazy thoughts, dreams, and at last into sleep and profound unconsciousness.

Now it was morning; she was awake again and, sitting up in her berth, looking at the light, she told herself, “I’m going home.” She realized that the air was cool and fresh, almost sharp. Putting up the curtain, she peeped out. The train was on an up-grade, pushing its way steadily along through deep cuts which occasionally closed into tunnels, or again running out into the open along the edges of hillsides, from the steep drop of which one looked down into hollows and little valleys filled with mists.

“We’ve struck the mountains, I’ve come home!” she breathed. She clasped her arms tight around her knees, and the long swell of a deep emotion laid hold upon her. Somewhere in the profound sleep of the night the tension of life had snapped, releasing her into something sure and steadfast. Big things—pity, truth, love, mountains, God, the sky, came shouldering boldly up through all the trivialities of life, and gathered her into an enormous peace. “I’ve broke through, I’ve broke through,” she whispered, “through into the big things. An’ he’s broke through, too! He’s safe, they can’t tetch him now—they can’t lay the weight of a finger on him now. He’s out in the deep channel. He’s safe in the Lord.”

All her prim acquired English fell from her, and she turned back to the phraseology of her mountain people. Her thoughts ran out in a medley of confused, disjointed sentences, such as she had been accustomed to hear in shouting revivals in her church: ejaculations, snatches of hymns, remembered terms of the lumber camps—an overflowing of the spirit that clothed itself in any words that came.

“We’ve broke through, we’ve broke through,” she whispered that, over and over. “O my Lord! We’ve broke through! Freedom—freedom! There ain’t nothin’ big enough to hold it. ‘Shout, you mourners, you shall be free’—free in the Lord! The deep channel! The deep channel! He’s safe now, like I am! We ain’t hung up in the shallers no more—the jam’s broke an’ we’re out in the deep channel of the river, traveling free in the peace of the Lord.”

An ecstasy of depths of peace and stillness engulfed her, a vision of the enormousness and profundity of life which was God, so that the tears ran down over her illumined face.

“O my Lord!” she whispered, over and over, “O my Lord, you’ve fetched us home! You’ve give us sight. We ain’t just ourselves no more. You’ve showed us a vision of the other folks—my sister, my brother! An’ now we’re free. There’s freedom in the world for the little scary folks if they go down deep enough. We are free!” she cried. “My love, my honey, my dear love, we’re safe at last! We’re traveling free in the vision of the Lord!”

She stared out of the window at the long stretches of mountains and valleys, with the sky above, and knew a deep kinship with them, as well. “Freedom,” she thought. “Nothin’ can’t hold it all. Nothin’ kin hold me. I kin stretch out all acrost the mountains, an’ lay down in the sky, an’ I’m deep-rooted in the everlastin’ hills. O my Lord, O my Lord!” The breathless ejaculations flowed away into complete silence, where only the tears running from her closed eyes could express the ecstasy of adoration that held her.

She still inhabited the same small and meagre body, but the spirit that flowed through her now was free of all the world, and with it came an enormous outstretching compassion, understanding, and tenderness for all suffering.

An hour later she stepped off the train at Hart’s Run. It was a morning in late September. An intense sparkling light fell over the world, driving the mists away from the parti-colored hills, and disclosing the immense dome of the blue sky.

Gathering up her hand luggage, Julie walked lightly along the familiar platform, her footsteps answering the rhythm of the words, “I’ve come home, I’ve come home.”

The first person to see her was Edward Black. He was pushing a truckload of trunks, and when he caught sight of her he stopped dead and half sat down upon the truck handles to gaze in stupefaction.

“Julie Rose! You back?” he cried.

She met his eyes steadily, gazing forth at him from that deep centre of herself. “Yes, Ed, I’m back. I’ve come home,” she answered.

His first astonishment gave place then to a mean and taunting look. He leered as she passed and said softly, “Well, I reckon you an’ Mis’ Bixby’s husband had a high old time together.”

But she went by untouched, the insult blowing past her as lightly as a summer wind. The great experience through which she had passed had been out in the deep channel of the spirit. How could Ed Black know anything about it? How could any words of his even touch it, much less hurt her? She looked full at him as she passed, and in that instant of detached scrutiny she was conscious of a sudden stab of pity. For a moment she knew the man for what he was—a poor mean nature, destined always to inhabit the murky backwaters of life, incapable of ever striking out into the clear depths of any great emotion—a crippled bit of humanity never again to be afraid of or bullied by, only to be sorry for. “Poor Ed,” she thought, as she went down the platform and turned along the main street. The morning air touched her face refreshingly, there were drifts of great white clouds in the sky, and the mountains—the mountains that she had been born and brought up in! “I’ve come home, I’ve come home!” she whispered again.

Coming up the street a little in advance of her, she presently perceived Brother Seabrook. He was pacing along abstractedly, his head bent over his newspaper, which he had just secured from the post office and which bore tall excited headlines about the war. A little distance away, conscious that some one was approaching, he glanced up, saw her, and stopped for one paralyzed instant. His hand went mechanically toward his hat, but he checked it and, thrusting it into his breast pocket, pretended to feel for something; then he faced abruptly round and hastened in the opposite direction, as though suddenly reminded of important business elsewhere.

A little farther on Julie saw Mrs. Silas Randolph’s colored girl come out in the street to cross to the meat market. Suddenly she also saw Julie, and stopped in her tracks as had the others. She, however, attempted no subterfuge for her astonishment, but stood frankly still in the middle of the street, staring with her mouth open. Julie spoke to her as she passed, but the girl did not respond; after one more thorough stare, she turned and ran back across the street, stumbling under the excitement and haste of her news, turning her head back every now and again over her shoulder to be sure of what she had seen.

Julie knew that she had raced back to tell her mistress of the return. She knew that the latter would not believe her, but would run to the window to peer out herself, and that, then catching unmistakable sight of Julie, she would go to the phone and ring up different intimates to impart the news to them, using cryptic sentences supposed to baffle any eavesdropper on the wire. Julie knew that even now Mrs. Randolph’s incredulous eyes were fixed upon her back as she continued along the street. She knew her village, she knew what she had done and what she would have to face, yet it could not break that high serenity in which she moved. There was, too, a great peace in the thought that here all was known. It was a part of her standing square with the world. There would not be here any sudden pistol-shot, or the vision of an old woman on the floor, brought to that end by what she had done.

As she went along the street, she heard a little frightened mewing, and looking down perceived a gray kitten backed against the palings of one of the garden fences. It was very small and helpless, and in its wide kitten-eyes was a passion of terror. It had been chased by dogs and boys and rolled in the dust, and one little paw was bleeding. Its agony, its baby helplessness, and soft hurt paw stabbed Julie with an infinite compassion.

She dropped her bag and stooped quickly down.

“Poor little kitsy—poor little kitsy,” she murmured tenderly. The little frightened creature squeezed itself harder than ever against the fence, spitting helplessly at Julie’s hand and trying to strike with its tiny paw. “Don’t be scared, kitsy—poor little kitsy, there ain’t anything to be scared of—nothing to be scared of any more,” Julie comforted it. She gathered the little trembling body up, pressing it close to her warm neck; and so, with the kitten held against her breast, she came at last to her own little shop. Suddenly, as she looked at it staring out upon the street with its shuttered blank eyes, something clutched her throat. For one sharp suffocating moment she almost saw her mother stand there, her apron blowing in the wind as of old.

“Mother! I’ve come home, I’ve come home,” she whispered breathlessly.

The side gate to her garden was broken and hanging upon one hinge. A cow had squeezed its way through, defiling the little cement walk, and trampling over and ravishing her flower beds, so that there were only a few broken chrysanthemums left. The house was completely deserted. Evidently Aunt Sadie was still away with her daughter.

Julie went up the walk and up the steps and, taking the key from her bag, unlocked the door and threw it open. The cold musty smell of the closed house rushed out to meet her, but she entered unhesitatingly. In the kitchen she set down her bag and the little kitten, and went about opening the windows and throwing shutters wide so that the sun and fresh air flooded in. As she looked out from the front window of her shop, she saw a woman walking down the middle of the street with a white mask over her mouth. Julie stared at her for a moment. “So the flu’s reached Hart’s Run,” she thought, and wondered how bad it was.

She had not had any breakfast, and she went out and bought some supplies at the grocery. A new clerk was there who did not know her.

“Where’s Picket Forster?” she asked.

“Over in France,” the new clerk returned briefly.

Julie went back with her purchases and got herself some breakfast, and was feeding the famished kitten, when the back door darkened and Mrs. Dolly Anderson’s large figure towered above her.

“Well,” she cried, her eyes snapping, “I never b’lieved ’em when they said you was back.”

“Yes, I’m back,” Julie returned simply.

The other continued to stand and stare. “Where you been all this time?” she demanded at length.

“In Richmond,” Julie answered.

“In Richmond? Well, there’s been a heap of talk goin’ the rounds about you, Julie.”

“I suppose there has,” Julie assented. She sat down and, taking the kitten which was fed and comforted now, upon her knee, began to stroke it softly. “Won’t you sit down?” she said politely.

“No, I’ll not sit down,” Mrs. Anderson returned heavily, and remained upon her feet.

“Julie,” she said at length, “did you—did you—” she hesitated.

“Did I go off with Mr. Bixby, you mean,” Julie answered steadily. “Yes, I did. We’ve been together in Richmond for the last two months.”

The other woman’s mouth dropped open. “An’ you dare to come back here to Hart’s Run an’ tell a tale like that?” she cried furiously.

“I don’t dare not to. I want folks to know the truth.”

“You want ’em to know?”

“Yes, I want to stand straight with the world.”

“You want ’em to know?” the other reiterated violently. “Well, upon my soul! I don’t believe you’ve got one shred of decency left.”

She glared at Julie, who made no retort but went on gently stroking the kitten, which was curled on her knee, comforted now, and blowing an occasional silver bubble as it purred.

“Quit foolin’ with that nasty little cat, an’ listen to me!” Mrs. Anderson stormed. “What I want to know is how you ever come to do such a thing—raised like you’ve been?”

Julie looked at her out of still eyes. How had she come to do it? How could she ever explain to Mrs. Anderson how it had happened? How could she explain the long repression of soul that had led her and Timothy Bixby to blow the lid off so violently at last? There were too many fine shades of meaning in it for her ever to make the other understand. In truth, she could hardly understand it herself. What had happened was down so deep in the elemental things of life that she could not put it into words.

“I don’t think I could possibly tell you why we did it,” she answered at length. “We cared for each other, but—but we parted as soon as we saw it was wrong—that what we did was hurting other folks.”

“You parted as soon as you knew it was wrong? You mean to say you didn’t know right from the first that it was wrong to go off with another woman’s husband—an’ him a draft dodger, too? Oh, you needn’t come back to Hart’s Run an’ tell a tale like that, an’ expect decent folks to go right along an’ treat you like nothing had happened. They won’t do it, I tell you!”

“I don’t expect them to,” Julie said.

“Well, it’s lucky you don’t. Folks won’t stand for any such carryings on. You’ll be put out of the church. Brother Seabrook’ll put you right out—I know he will. I don’t see to save me how you dared to come back.”

“Why, I had to come back here,” Julie cried. “It’s my home—it’s where I belong. Why, I’m rooted here.”

“Well, folks ain’t goin’ to have one thing to do with you, I tell you! I don’t know in my soul what I’m doin’ here right this minute! And other folks ain’t goin’ to have nothing to do with you.”

“No, I reckon not,” Julie answered, “but here’s where I belong just the same.” She looked away out of the window and rested her eyes on the sweep of autumn hills surrounding the village—she who had been for weeks in the city, and a flat country. “Maybe you’re right, an’ folks won’t have anything more to do with me—but—but—the mountains are here, an’ the sun’ll rise an’ set, an’ the snow come in the winter, an’ the sap run in spring. It’s where I belong.”

“Julie Rose! Upon my word I just b’lieve you’ve lost your mind!” the other broke in.

“I’ve found my soul,” Julie interposed beneath her breath.

“There you set, nursing that nasty cat, an’ not carin’ one thing what people think.”

“I care what God thinks.”

“Well—you better be thinking about your sin then,” Mrs. Anderson retorted.

“My sin,” Julie repeated, and suddenly she saw an inward picture of old Miss Fogg’s gray head upon the floor. “But—but God forgives sins!” she cried poignantly. “He does forgive them. ‘A broken and a contrite heart He will not despise’—the Bible says so!”

“That’s all right about the Bible,” Mrs. Anderson cried savagely. “But you ain’t livin’ in the Bible; you’re livin’ right here in Hart’s Run. An’ I tell you Hart’s Run folks ain’t goin’ to stand for this: they’ll put you out of the church—you see if they don’t.”

“Will they put the Bible out, too?” A voice spoke suddenly behind them.

Turning, they saw that Doctor Franklin had come in through the front shop and was standing looking at them. He was a country doctor, loose-limbed, gaunt, and gray, and old—a man born in Hart’s Run, who had ridden all the roads about it from the old horseback days down to Ford-car times—a man who knew intimately all the physical ills and many of the mental and spiritual ones as well, in a radius of thirty miles—old Doc’ Franklin—old Doc’ Franklin. When people were born he was there, and when they died he was there, gaunt and quiet and natural, very deeply rooted, patient, and unshaken, whether he watched at the gates of birth or at the gates of death.

They did not know how long he had been standing there.

“Well, but look a-here, Doctor,” Mrs. Anderson protested. “Here’s Julie Rose settin’ there foolin’ over that nasty little cat, an’ not caring one thing what folks thinks of her!”

The doctor put out one long finger, and gently rubbed the kitten’s little mouse-colored head. Fed and reassured, it looked up at him now out of the blue loveliness of kitten-eyes, purring happily back and forth, blowing out that occasional, impudent, and care-free bubble.

“Well, that’s sort of like me,” he said. “Other folks have time to calculate who can stay in the church, an’ who’s got to be put out—it’s all too mixed up for me to know. All I know is I’ve got some mighty sick patients up the Easter road, an’ I’ve got to dust out there an’ see ’em.”

Julie looked up into the weather-beaten old face above her. “Look at the kitten’s paw,” she begged. “Is it broken?”

He ran a thumb and forefinger lightly down the furry leg. “No, just a bruise,” he said. “No, little cat, you’re all right,” he added for the small patient’s benefit, giving another little tap on its head. “Julie, have you got any fly-netting? That’s what I stopped for when I saw your shop was open.”

“How’s the flu, doctor?” Mrs. Anderson interposed. “Any fresh cases?”

“Half a dozen, an’ not near enough people to nurse the sick ones,” he answered. “The Chapin family’s the worst. The father died last night and Mrs. Chapin and the boy are just as bad off as they can be—nobody in the house to help, an’ the neighbors not doin’ as much as they might on account of the boy’s record. Maybe I could get you to go out there and lend a hand for a day or so,” he said, looking at Mrs. Anderson.

“Not me,” she retorted promptly. “I’m scared to death of the flu—I’d run a mile from it—an’ more’n that, I wouldn’t turn my hand over for that boy after the way he disgraced the whole county in camp.”

Julie put the kitten down and stood up. “I’ll go with you right away, doctor,” she said. “I’ve got my things here in the suit-case, an’ I’ll get the fly-netting.”

He looked at her. “It’s hard work, Julie,” he said. “You’ve never been very stout, you know. Do you reckon you can stand it?”

“I can stand anything now,” she told him.

“Things are in right much of a mess out there,” he hesitated.

“Then that’s where I belong,” she answered.

XXII

The doctor took Julie in his old Ford car, along the Easter road out to the Chapins.

She sat beside him very relaxed and still, her hands lying loosely in her lap. Her eyes were rested and refreshed by the September scenery; by the tawny hills, black cloud-shadows blowing over them down into the hollows and racing up the ridges, turning their colors dark for a moment, and then giving them back to the sun; by the weathered rail-fences on either side, with red blackberry leaves, asters, and goldenrod snuggled against them; and by silver fluffs of milkweed pods that the sun had ripened and burst, and that now the wind was tossing to pieces to bear each little winged seed away on an adventure of life of its own.

The Easter road, white and dusty, led away in front of them, with the mountains towering up on either side and above, the endless sky bridging it over.

There was still that wide sense of immensity and peace upon Julie, of freedom, and of return, and the knowledge, also, that Tim had come into the same deep serenity.

“I’ve come home, I’ve come home”—the words went on saying themselves over in her mind.

Once, unconsciously, she spoke them half out-loud. “I’ve come home.”

The old doctor looked down at her. He did not seem surprised. “Home’s a good place to be,” he said.

“It’s where I belong,” she replied.

He nodded, “Yes,” again, his old brown hands on the wheel, turning it deftly to avoid a sudden hump, his eyes upon the road ahead. Old Doc’ Franklin, riding the roads of Stag County from horseback and saddlebag days down to gasolene and Ford cars. Old Doc’ Franklin, riding the roads of life down at the heart of the world; present in the great moments of existence, in the agony of birth, in the hour of death; sent for in haste and terror in the catastrophe of pain; forgotten in the times of health. Old Doc’ Franklin—you don’t fool him and you don’t shock him. Tolerant, elemental, undeceived, and faithful; familiar alike with the ravings of delirium tremens and with the prayers of dying saints; as uncritical of both as life itself, or the showers of God—old Doc’ Franklin. He hadn’t made the world—not he. Why should he judge or condemn? He helped people into life if they wished to come, and he helped them out again when they had to go; but how they behaved while here was none of his business. His job was to meet each need that the day presented, patient, forbearing, pitiful, mending where he could. Old Doc’ Franklin—gnarled, and weathered, and lined, like an apple tree on a bleak hillside; but sound and deep-rooted still.

Sitting beside him in his mud-splashed car, with the mountains on either side, the sky above, and the road before them, Julie was almost as simple, direct, and deep-rooted now as he was himself. Ahead, along the Easter road, the Chapin man was dead, the mother and the son desperately ill. Sorrow and disaster awaited them: suffering people and a distracted house. Here was something that they might do, work for them down at the heart of the world, work for them that was natural, sincere, and pitiful.

The doctor glanced down from time to time at Julie, looking at her clear quiet profile. Once he asked, “What became of little Bixby?”

She turned her still eyes upon him and answered simply, “They arrested him for not answering his draft call. He was just fixing to give himself up; they came before he could; but he’s all right.”

“All right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she nodded. “Things can’t get at him now like they used to. They can’t touch him now—he’s safe, he’s found himself, he’s out in the deep channel like I am.”

A little later, the doctor brought his car to a standstill before the Chapins’ dooryard. The log-house, small and weathered, looked peaceful enough on the outside, with the September sun flowing over it, a white chicken or two walking its grass, and little borders of late flowers running down to the gate; but inside human beings were at grips with death.

Old Doc’ Franklin, long and awkward and loose-jointed, a little tired-looking about the eyes, but still going, picked up his worn bag and swung himself out.

“Come on, Julie,” he said, “here’s our job.”

Was it the old doctor, or was it life itself, holding out a hand to Julie Rose, there at the end of the Easter road?

Printed by McGrath-Sherrill Press, Boston
Bound by Boston Bookbinding Co., Cambridge

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

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