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Title: The other Miller girl

Author: Joslyn Gray

Illustrator: Beryl Boughton

Release date: June 6, 2024 [eBook #73780]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Chas. Scribners Sons, 1920

Credits: D A Alexander, 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 THE OTHER MILLER GIRL ***





_BY JOSLYN GRAY_

  THE OTHER MILLER GIRL
  BOUNCING BET
  THE JANUARY GIRL
  ROSEMARY GREENAWAY
  RUSTY MILLER
  ELSIE MARLEY, HONEY
  KATHLEEN’S PROBATION

_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_




THE OTHER MILLER GIRL




[Illustration: “I am so sorry ... but we don’t have company, you know.”

                                                             [_Page 53_]




  THE
  OTHER MILLER GIRL

  BY
  JOSLYN GRAY

  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  1922




  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  Printed in the United States of America

  [Illustration]




  TO
  FLORENCE TEMPLETON GRAY
  JANUARY 31, 1922
  IN MEMORY OF TODDIE
  AND THE DAYS BEFORE THE BIRTHDAY
  ON WHICH SHE WAS BANISHED




ILLUSTRATIONS


  “I am so sorry--but we don’t have company, you know”    _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE
  “Please, may I come in? I want to--tell you something”              26

  Anna took pride and pleasure in ironing the frills and
    laces of his little frocks                                       124

  The echoes of the thundering knocks had hardly died
    away ... when Alice Lorraine appeared                            216




THE OTHER MILLER GIRL




CHAPTER I


On a pleasant Saturday afternoon of the latter part of the September
following the awarding of the Wadsworth prize, Mr. Langley received
three distinct shocks. The first was occasioned by hearing Miss
Penny referred to as an old lady, and the second, which was almost
simultaneous, by learning that Anna Miller was commonly known as the
‘other Miller girl.’ The third, which was more subtle, was also more
personal and might have wrought real havoc but for the slip of a
yellow-haired girl who was characterised thus negatively. Her discovery
of this third shock to Mr. Langley and the action she took led to such
consequences that if it were the fashion now-a-days to invoke the
muse, this history must needs begin by bidding the goddess sing of the
uncommon sense of the other Miller girl.

The church at Farleigh was a really beautiful building. It was only
an old-fashioned New England meeting-house, but its proportions
were perfect for its style and its pillared portico was almost as
appropriate to its structure and environment as the chaste marble
columns of Greece to their more artistic and romantic setting. It stood
on an height truncated by natural forces to form a plateau and was
surrounded by broad lawns shaded by great English elms and a single
oak-tree.

The greensward was as rich and velvety as if the season had been
midsummer and the foliage of the trees as luxuriant and almost as
bright, on this Saturday afternoon of the third week of September
when the minister sauntered slowly up the broad walk leading to the
porch. For the summer had been wet: more than one week had disproved
the old saying that there will always be one fair day in the six to
dry the parson’s shirt. It had been favourable for grass and trees and
uncultivated vegetation but too rainy for crops. The September sunshine
was, however, making amends; and as he glanced at the picturesque
regularity of the fenced and walled fields of a farm across the river,
Mr. Langley said to himself that the harvest would be bountiful after
all if the frosts held off a bare fortnight.

The choir had been rehearsing for the morrow and the women members
were lingering in the porch to chat. The minister had just noticed
that Miss Garland, a member who had been away on a visit in the West
for three months or more, had returned, when he heard her ask who was
staying with old Miss Penny this winter. It gave him a start to hear
Miss Penny called old, though she hadn’t been a young woman when he had
come to the two villages straight from theological school, and if he
had stopped to reckon the years he must have realised that she was well
beyond three score and ten. But he did not stop, for Miss Harriman’s
reply gave him another start.

“The other Miller girl,” she said in her high, strong voice which
fortunately lost its nasal twang when she sang. “Rusty has gone to
college, you know, even though she didn’t get the Wadsworth prize. But
this girl goes to the academy and it seems to me that Miss Penny ought
to have more help than she can give her outside of school hours, for
she has rheumatism so bad now that she’s almost a cripple.”

Glancing up, the speaker saw that the minister was upon them and
smilingly apprised him of the obvious fact that Miss Garland had got
back. He shook hands with Miss Garland and with the other three,
questioned the former about her summer and declared that he should
call upon her next week for a fuller account. Then he turned to Miss
Merriman.

“What was that I overheard you saying, Miss Merriman?” he asked with
his slow smile. “Did I hear you speak of _the other_ Miller girl? And
does that mean Anna?”

“Yes, Mr. Langley, Anna Miller. But that is what everybody in the South
Hollow, and for that matter, in Farleigh, too, I guess, calls her. But
she was away so long that people forgot there was such a person--such
as knew of the family at all--and anyhow, she seems so different from
Rusty. Of course she’s pretty,--she looks for all the world like a
doll,--and everybody says she’s good-natured to a fault. And there’s
something droll about her. And yet----”

The expression of Mr. Langley’s face made her pause.

“Do you know, Miss Merriman,” he said whimsically but at the same time
rather wistfully, “at this moment it seems to me that to be supremely
good-natured and somewhat droll is a triumph in itself.”

He smiled and sighed.

“Nevertheless, life in the two villages will seem different without
Rusty,” he owned. “It will be quieter, but doubtless far less exciting.”

He went into the church to fetch a book, then overtook Miss Garland and
walked with her as far as the post office. And as they went, he asked
her why she thought of Miss Penny as old; and they occupied the time
recollecting dates and computing the passing of the years. And both
felt older at parting, and one of them strangely depressed.

Just as Miss Penny had long realised that people called her an old lady
so Anna Miller was quite aware that she was known as the ‘other Miller
girl.’ But the younger resented the fact as little as the older. Anna
adored her sister, looked up to her in many ways, and never dreamed of
disputing or questioning her title as virtual head of the family. The
girl knew, too, that she was pretty and in doll-fashion, though she
didn’t herself consider doll-fashion bad. If the question had come up,
she would have acknowledged promptly, too, that she was good-humored,
and she couldn’t help realising that people thought her droll.
Nevertheless, vain as she undoubtedly was, Anna Miller did not attach
undue weight to any of these qualities, and otherwise would have been
likely to rate her own powers lower than anyone else would have done.
Enjoying life thoroughly, and perhaps more consciously than is usual at
her years, she was quite content to be the ‘other Miller girl’ and to
endeavor to stop any portion she might of the gap left in hearts and
households by Rusty’s absence.

But the girl was herself quite unconscious and others quite unaware of
her most valuable characteristic. Young as she was, Anna Miller had one
quality seldom gained before middle age, and rare even then,--a truly
humourous outlook upon the world. The girl viewed life and her fellow
human beings almost in the detached manner of a philosopher, yet warmly
and sympathetically withal. She enjoyed oddities and idiosyncrasies
which annoyed or vexed others and made allowance for larger faults with
a singularly mature tolerance. She was one of the few who habitually
demand less than they are willing to proffer,--simply and naturally and
quite without any sense of superiority.

Experience had made Anna Miller prematurely middle-aged in her grasp
of reality,--experience acting upon that endowment of good nature
which everyone granted her. Running away as a child from the dreary,
shiftless household that had been her home, for five years the girl
had supported herself in the great city to which she had fled, to the
extent of keeping soul and body together, successively as errand girl
to a dressmaker, as bundle and cash-girl, and finally as sales-girl in
a department store. But all the while something within her--perhaps
the adventurous instinct that had hurtled her forth--had responded to
the clarion which is within the din of every struggle. She had known
the extremes of heat and cold, of loneliness and hunger, but she had
made light of them. She had clung to her shred of vanity, masquerading
on an empty stomach, and cheering long hours in her cramped, dreary
hall-bedroom arranging her tangle of pale yellow hair in various
fashions before her tiny cracked mirror, trying on scraps of finery,
and coquetting with the reflection which was always picturesque no
matter how absurdly arrayed. She had ‘bluffed’ her way through the
lean, meagre years, her shockingly slangy expression being a veritable
gospel of cheer to her fellow clerks and lodgers, and the snatches of
ugly popular songs on her lips, real melody which echoed in her own
heart as well as in theirs. And she had ‘won out’ triumphantly with her
natural sweetness of disposition not only unimpaired but strengthened
and enriched, with a keenness of mind which is one of the ends of
education, and with that curiously mature and humourous outlook instead
of the bitterness which might have been expected.

On the day following that on which Mr. Langley had first heard her
referred to as the other Miller girl, Anna was in her usual place in
Miss Penny’s pew at the opening of the Sunday morning service. She
was rather preoccupied by her new suit. Rusty had had to have a new
one when she went to college, and she had insisted upon Anna’s having
one at the same time. Rusty’s was brown, the peculiar russet shade
that matched her hair exactly and was peculiarly Rusty’s, loose in the
jacket, and plain. Anna’s was green, more elaborate than Rusty’s and
not in nearly so good taste, as Anna knew well. But it was exceedingly
smart and very becoming and the girl was, as she declared, ‘crazy over
it.’ Clever with her fingers, she had made a green velvet hat to match
the suit, a three-cornered affair which did not fall far short of being
utterly absurd, but which, set jauntily upon her riotous yellow hair,
certainly made her little doll-face bewitching.

Anna had a very sweet voice and had been asked to join the choir,
and during the anthem, she fixed her long-lashed blue eyes seriously
upon the women members, studying, not their voices nor their manner
of using their vocal organs, but their attitude and demeanour. As she
saw herself in fancy standing behind the low railing in her new green
suit and ‘nifty’ hat, she wondered if it wouldn’t be an exceedingly
pleasant change for the congregation to have a younger person to gaze
upon and one who had more regard for the current fashions. And dear me!
Every blooming member of the present choir had hair of the same colour,
something between brown and drab. Anna said to herself that when she
should stand up among them to sing, if her long yellow braid with the
curl at the end did not of its own accord flop over her shoulder, she
would flop it,--it stood out so picturesquely against the green. Here
in the pew, of course, it was just as well to let it hang down her
back, for Miss Penny sat very near the pulpit.

So near, indeed, that she was directly in front of Mr. Langley,--which
reflection induced another that when she should sit with the choir,
Mr. Langley couldn’t see her at all. That seemed a pity, and yet--Anna
wondered if he saw her now,--saw her, that is, not as a soul but as
a young girl in a new suit, with yellow hair shining like pale gold
against it. He might possibly notice the latter, for his beloved little
Ella May, who had died before the Millers had come to Farleigh, had had
long golden curls.

Suddenly the girl recalled her roving gaze. Mr. Langley was preaching,
and Anna hadn’t even heard the text! It was right down mean, she
said to herself, when anyone worked as hard as he did to write such
beautiful sermons for people not to listen to every single word. He
didn’t write absolutely new sermons, indeed, he had so many on hand
after preaching here for years and years and years; but they were new
to the greater part of the congregation and practically so to all of
them, for he worked over them, added new matter and quoted from new
poems whose authors had been at school or in their cradles when the
sermons were first composed. Moreover they were quite fresh to Anna.

Though her mental equipment was haphazard, Anna Miller had a certain
power of concentration. To-day, however, she had no sooner fixed her
eyes resolutely upon the minister than her thoughts began to wander
again. For it came to the girl suddenly and startlingly that Mr.
Langley was changed--yes, greatly changed. He looked tired, but it was
worse than that: he looked as if he had lost something. There seemed no
longer to be any _springiness_ about him. He was like a jack-in-the-box
that has been so mishandled that when you open the lid he doesn’t jump
out at you but only flaps feebly. Mr. Langley was too young to have his
springs go flat. He had only a few grey hairs. He was tall and slim and
straight and graceful and really much handsomer than that floor-walker
at Martin and Mason’s that had been so stuck on himself.

Glancing hurriedly back over his life as she knew it by hearsay, Anna
felt it to have been unusually placid and untroubled. Of course it had
been a terrible grief to him losing his little girl, that golden-haired
little Ella May who had gone about through the two villages scattering
sunshine. But that had happened years ago and he had seemed happy and
young until now. Then it came to her that this was, perhaps, Ella May’s
birthday. Perhaps he had it all to go through again every year as the
day came round?

Early in the afternoon, Anna appeared suddenly in the parlour, which
was seldom used excepting on Sunday, briskly polishing a goblet with a
cross-barred dish towel.

“O Miss Penny, tell me, when did Ella May die?” she asked. “Was it the
twenty-second day of September?”

“O no, Anna, she died on the twenty-eighth day of December,” Miss Penny
returned promptly and in some surprise. And although the storms of more
than a score of winters had yellowed the tiny marble lamb upon the
little grave in the cemetery on the hillside where the minister’s baby
had been laid, probably every adult person in the parish could have
given the date as readily.

Anna returned to the kitchen. Passing the mirror, she paused and gazed
at her own image. She shook her head ruefully. Even with her festive
blouse and smart skirt covered by her checked gingham overall, she was
a picture, and after all, her hair looked as pale golden against this
dull ground. Hastily gathering an handful of wet silver, she returned
to the parlour.

“She had golden curls, didn’t she, Miss Penny--little Ella May?” she
asked.

“Long, golden ringlets and deep blue eyes,” asseverated Miss Penny in
the tone she used only in speaking of the dead.

“Well, was her birthday in September?”

“Why Anna Miller! She was born on Christmas-day--O my dear child, it
must have been twenty-five years ago this next Christmas day, for I
was fifty myself at the time and I am seventy-five now. That was the
year I had my plum-coloured moreen--you remember the under side of the
cushion in grandma’s old chair up in Reuben’s room? Sarah Pettingill
made it, and I wore it to the Christmas tree for the first time and
word came while we were there that Mr. Langley had the finest gift in
the world--a little daughter. Some of the ladies wanted him to call her
Christmas and he said he’d like to have her named Carol, but she was
called for his wife after all. Her maiden name was May.”

Mrs. Langley was so little a personality in the mind of the girl that
it seemed incongruous in her to have had a maiden name. As she would
have asked a careless question in regard to her, however, she looked up
to see Miss Penny’s face drawn with dismay.

“Dear me, I know I am old, but I didn’t think I was losing my memory,”
Miss Penny cried. “It comes to me all of a sudden that I wore that
plum-coloured dress to the child’s funeral. I remember distinctly my
mother’s telling me that plum-colour was next door to purple and that
purple was light mourning and quite suitable for a young person’s
funeral.”

“But you could have worn it to both,” declared Anna. “You keep your
clothes so well that it probably looked new for the funeral.”

“But Anna, my aunt Penny died the February after that dress was made
and mother and I coloured it black for the funeral. And she died
twenty-five years ago the tenth of February.”

“Then it couldn’t be the Christmas that Ella May was born that you had
it, but the one before her death. I’m glad it wasn’t, for I don’t like
her to be so old.”

“But if the little thing wasn’t born that year, I’m sure I don’t know
when she _was_ born,” remarked Miss Penny plaintively.

“We’ll have to find out,” said Anna cheerfully. “Anyhow, I’m glad it
wasn’t the twenty-second of September. I got to thinking of it at
church and it sort of--got on my nerves.”

Returning to her work, she couldn’t get Mr. Langley and the mysterious,
lamentable alteration in him off her mind. Ella May might have nothing
to do with it--and then again she might. In any event, the first thing
to be done was to learn the age of the child at the time of her death.
She was just wondering whether she had time to go over to the cemetery
that afternoon, when Miss Penny called her. Going into the parlour, she
found Mrs. Phelps, their next-door neighbour.

“O Anna, what do you think?” cried Miss Penny in great excitement.
“Mrs. Phelps says that Ella May Langley was only three days old when
she died. She can prove it!”




CHAPTER II


Anna Miller gasped. But she recovered herself immediately.

“Well then, you were right about the plum-coloured moreen, Miss Penny.
It served for the christening and the funeral just like the baked
meats in _Hamlet_ that coldly furnished forth the wedding-feast,”
she commented. “Only--this is what gets me. How about those golden
ringlets?”

“Dear me, dear me! I cannot understand!” cried Miss Penny in dismay.
“Even now I seem to see that little thing as plain as day, toddling
along beside Mr. Langley, in her fine white dress with the lace frill
at the neck pressed down by those lovely long curls. I suppose I
dreamed it.”

“The fact is, Miss Penny, most everybody in the church feels just about
so,” remarked her neighbour.

She turned to Anna. “As I said to Miss Penny, the reason I am so sure
about it all is because the marble lamb on their lot in the cemetery
on Ella May’s grave was the last thing my cousin Alfred ever did. Mrs.
Langley was so particular that it should be copied from life from a
lamb that was just three days old same as the baby was when she passed
away that Albert had to wait until spring to do it. He went off on a
farm up in the hills beyond Marsden and stayed over two nights to make
his sketches. He took to his bed that spring and never did another
stroke of marble work. Mrs. Langley was more than satisfied with the
monument and had it photographed and framed. The last I heard--which
wasn’t very lately--the photograph stood on the marble-topped stand in
her room close to her bed.”

Anna’s eyes grew round. It seemed strange to hear Mrs. Phelps speak of
Mrs. Langley as a person. Until to-day she had been hardly so much as
a dim vision, a mere word, this woman who had been an invalid for more
years than Anna had lived. She seemed far less a person than Ella May.
And now to think of her--or to try to stretch her mind to think of her
as Ella May’s mother and Mr. Langley’s wife gave the girl an uncanny
feeling. And she couldn’t mention her in the present tense.

“What was she like, Mrs. Phelps?” she asked in an hushed manner.

“Mrs. Langley? O Anna, don’t ask me!” protested Mrs. Phelps. “She was
pretty with soft dark eyes and fine brown hair the last time I saw her,
but that was twenty-odd years ago.”

“My goodness! Hasn’t anyone seen her since?” asked Anna.

“It has been years and years, I don’t know just how many, since the
last outsider saw her. She had neuralagy in her face and headache.
The last I knew she had had one headache for ten years. I don’t know
whether that one is still going on or whether she had begun on another.”

“I wonder if Mr. Langley sees her?” Anna asked.

“I believe he goes in once a day--he used to. But Bell Adams that keeps
house for him takes care of Mrs. Langley and I guess she’s the only one
that ever really sees her.”

Anna betook herself to the porch. Understanding had come to her. Poor
Mr. Langley! He, too, had played with the vision of the golden-haired
little daughter; all these years he had kept himself young with the
image of his little girl in his heart. Most likely he hadn’t thought
of her as of any particular age--just a darling little girl. But now,
since last Sunday,--since Wednesday, indeed, some idiot had reminded
him that she would have been a grown-up young lady at this time.
Anna could fairly see him shrinking, cowering before the appalling
fact. Then he had taken a great leap headlong to overtake a daughter
twenty-five years old!

What a pity! What a calamity, indeed! How would he ever get through
the remainder of his life with his poor heart all flattened out and
his vision forever shattered? But no one could bring the baby back nor
could anyone halt or turn back the revolving years. Everything moved
relentlessly on towards old age excepting that little marble lamb that
would remain just three days old to the end of time.

But the marble lamb recalled Mrs. Langley, and suddenly Anna seemed to
see a ray of light. Mrs. Langley had been dead to the minister almost
as long as the baby, and yet she wasn’t hopelessly dead. Suppose she
were to be restored to him? There must have been something very dear
about one who had insisted upon the little symbolic image’s being
copied from a baby lamb just three days old, and if she still kept the
photograph beside her in her loneliness and pain, she must herself be
a lovely creature with the added saintliness of the years of patient
suffering. If she could be restored to Mr. Langley, a sweet girl-wife,
would not the weight of years that had suddenly pounced down upon him
take instant flight? One was always hearing of people who had been
bed-ridden for years getting well, and Mrs. Langley wasn’t so bad as
bed-ridden. ‘Neuralagy’ and sleeplessness and headache and the like
were what ailed her, and youth saw no reason why these should not be
speedily banished. Quite likely it might have been put through long
since had anyone taken the matter in hand.

Anna grinned as she said to herself she would now be Charley
on-the-spot. Mr. Langley had been goodness itself to Rusty and their
father--to all the family, indeed. He was putting Rusty through
college. Her mother and the boys worshipped him; and Anna herself
really owed him most of all. For she had deserted her family for five
years, coming back to find a quite different and to her ideal home, a
changed father and mother and a wonderful sister--and all through Mr.
Langley. In any case, Anna said to herself she would have wanted to do
what she was going to do (she didn’t know how or even exactly _what_
as yet); but as it was, she simply _had_ to do it.

That evening when she and Miss Penny were having their tea, Miss Penny
asked her how she happened to be thinking of Ella May that day.

“I noticed that Mr. Langley looked sort of sad this morning at church,
and I was trying to scare up a reason,” Anna returned.

“Sad!” cried Miss Penny in real distress. “O Anna!”

“Well, tired, perhaps,” the girl amended.

“Do you suppose, Anna, that it can be because of his lifting me
in and out of the phaeton every Sunday?” Miss Penny asked almost
tragically. “If I thought it was that, I wouldn’t go to meeting at
all--though I should miss it--I don’t know how I should get along
without it. And then he might be hurt. Or--I suppose I could get that
Luke Thompson--not his brother, you know--to help me. He isn’t very
bright, and yet--I hardly know whether I could offer him money. And yet
how could I ask him unless I did? And I should have to explain to Mr.
Langley--but so I should if I stayed at home. Only----”

“I could lift you myself. I could run three times round the house
with you in my arms,” Anna assured her. “It’s nothing at all to Mr.
Langley. He’s got muscle to burn. I didn’t mean that. I meant--I
don’t know exactly, but I believe he’s tired at heart after all these
years of well-doing. I’ll tell you what his expression this morning
makes me think of--pa’s Aunt Marthy he’s always telling of who was
taken with her last sickness in the dead of winter and had a terrible
hankering for dandelion greens. She said she knew she’d get well if
she could have just one mess of ’em--and the snow three feet deep on
the ground. And when it came to the end and they asked her if she had
any last wishes, she said: ‘Thank you kindly, I could relish a mess of
dandelions.’ And while she was waiting for them, she died.”

“We’re all more or less like that, wanting something or other beyond
our reach,” commented Miss Penny with a smile and a sigh, “But I
shouldn’t think it of Mr. Langley.”

“Do you know, Miss Penny, I believe I’ll run in to see Mrs. Langley
some day soon,” Anna remarked.

Miss Penny looked as if she believed Anna had suddenly gone mad.

“She might take to me where she didn’t to other people--some do, you
know,” the girl went on coolly. “And some people like just to look
at me--on account of my hair, I dare say, for otherwise I’m not much
to look at. It’s a yard long, you know, if I pull it out perfectly
straight.”

“Anna, dear, there are moments when I almost think you are vain,” said
Miss Penny smiling. “But listen to me, child. Reuben stayed at the
parsonage for weeks after his father passed away, and Mrs. Langley
would never see him even once. And he was the sweetest little fellow!
Mr. Langley would have liked to keep him, but of course he couldn’t
under the circumstances. And so--you know how it all came about that
he came here, don’t you, Anna?”

“I have heard it many a time. It’s one of pa’s favourite yarn. But it’s
a good story and worth repeating just the same,” Anna returned.

The girl’s last waking thought was of standing by the invalid’s couch
bathing her aching brow with cologne-water. But in the course of
the following week she learned that Mrs. Langley had acquired the
reputation of being extremely formidable. Big Bell, as Bell Adams,
the tall, large-boned, hard-featured but good-natured housekeeper was
called, cherished considerable affection for her mistress but gave Anna
no encouragement whatever. When she hinted that it might be well for
her to see someone, Bell was horrified and aghast. It was as much as
ever, she declared, that Mrs. Langley would see her own husband for two
minutes a day.

Admitting that visiting Mrs. Langley would be no _cinch_, the girl was
nevertheless undaunted. It wasn’t natural for her to live in that way.
If she weren’t lonely, she ought to be; if she were not wretched, it
was because there were no extremes in her life--only one dead level
of headache and _neuralagy_. And constantly Anna came back to the
realisation that there was something to appeal to in a woman who had
thought of having the three days old lamb carved and who had cherished
the picture of it all these years.

Finally she decided to see the image itself and receive, it might be,
some inspiration or suggestion for making a beginning. She learned
the location of the minister’s lot and set off secretly early Saturday
afternoon.

The cemetery, which overlooked the whole valley of the river, was a
retired, lonely place, hedged in by evergreen, yet not without beauty.
Anna had been vaguely perplexed and anxious, but the serenity of the
place soothed her, and she made straight for the minister’s lot with a
subdued eagerness of expectation that was almost adventurous.

Suddenly she saw it from a distance, the tiny baby lamb with its feet
folded neatly beneath it. So little and quaint and homely it was, that
the girl stilled a cry, a little motherly murmur of pity, as if the
tiny creature were alive and had been left here lonely through all the
long years. And running, she dropped down on her knees beside it to
fondle it.

Then she shrank back and caught her breath sharply, almost in a sob. It
was as if, believing it to be alive, she had found it dead. One side of
the marble was sadly discoloured. It was so blackened indeed as to be
quite defaced and ugly, to have lost all its symbolism and significance
and to have become an hideous caricature. Suddenly the other Miller
girl, who seldom shed tears, covered her face and wept.




CHAPTER III


Mr. Langley was nearer fifty than forty, though only by a little. He
was, in a way, ‘settled’ in his habits. He liked and affected, on all
days save the Sabbath, old clothes and old shoes, though both were
always scrupulously neat, and his shabbiness was never otherwise than
picturesque and attractive. Though he went about constantly among
his people, he led a lonely, pensive life in the big, empty, shabby
parsonage, almost as little aware, it would seem, of the existence of
his invalid wife as were his parishioners who practically thought of
him as a bachelor. And truly, since his wife had taken to her room
upwards of twenty years ago, and shut herself out from everyone, he had
been almost as literally widowed as if she, too, lay in the enclosure
marked by the little marble lamb in the cemetery on the hillside.

For all that, Russell Langley had still somehow kept intact through
all the years the heart of youth--almost of boyhood. Not that his
parishioners were aware of it, except indirectly. Most of them regarded
their beloved pastor and bore themselves towards him as if he had
something like three score years to his credit--or debit. The boys
and girls, it is true, the children and even the babies found him
singularly companionable,--but so did the very oldest. The greybeards
of the congregation and those who were contemporaries of Russell
Langley’s grandparents talked to him as they would have talked to the
latter had they been living and had their lines been cast in Farleigh
instead of in Albany, New York. His youthful appearance impressed
them only in the sense that he was a fine figure in the pulpit and a
graceful presiding officer in the town hall whenever the services of
such an one were required. His tall, slim, indolently erect figure was
attributed to the fact that he had played base-ball at college, and the
lack of lines in his face to freedom from family cares. For, when all
is said, an invalid wife whom a clergyman sees no more frequently than
an invalid parishioner and with whom he holds no conversation whatever
is scarcely to be classed among family cares.

It was only the other Miller girl who recognised the elusive quality
that made up a large part of the charm which everyone felt in the
man. Likewise when this quality had taken flight, temporarily or
irretrievably, it was Anna Miller who guessed the secret of its
loss. Everyone knew that the minister had never forgotten his little
daughter who had died. Ella May’s name was constantly upon his lips.
But Anna said to herself that the light of enthusiasm in his eye and
the buoyancy of his step had been largely due to the thought of a child
toddling or tripping along beside him.

Then suddenly he had lost her, had lost his child-companion and with
her the spirit of youth. Someone must have said to him--some _idiot_,
some _gump_, some _galoot_, the girl reflected indignantly--that
Ella May would have been--was it possible that she would have been
twenty-five if she had lived? Twenty-five! Poor Mr. Langley! He
couldn’t tote a person of twenty-five around with him leading her by
the hand. It must have been a terrible shock to him to reach out for
the golden-haired child and see a tall young lady with her hair put up
and a college education! No wonder that he had grown old overnight,
that his youth had fallen from him as if it had been something
material, a mantle of slippery silk that had dropped from his shoulders
at the loosing of a clasp.

Ah! but he should have it back. He should recapture it, the Reverend
Russell Langley should, before it was beyond recall. He would renew
his youth in the companionship of his youthful wife. Mrs. Langley
was nearly forty-five, but she wouldn’t look over thirty at the
most--probably not over twenty-five. And twenty-five in a wife is quite
another thing than in a daughter. It was work and care and fuss and
bother that made people grow old, and she hadn’t done a thing or had a
care for nearly twenty-five years. Mrs. Langley had, as it were, lain
upon rose leaves, gazed at the little pictured lamb (that was, alas!
so much fairer than the marble image) and thought of all sorts of
sweet and lovely things. She had suffered pain, of course, but that is
refining and would only add a pensive, perhaps mournful charm to her
flower-like beauty.

A week from the day of her visit to the minister’s lot in the cemetery,
Mr. Langley passed the Miller house, bound for a conference at the
academy, and the other Miller girl set forth for Farleigh, of which
village the South Hollow was one end. As she drew near the parsonage,
she saw a blue haze of smoke coming from the chimney of the summer
kitchen. That meant that Big Bell was at work in that remote part of
the house, and Anna’s feet flew.

As she came to a lane which extended a few rods from the avenue which
was the main street of the village to a pine grove which was originally
the western boundary of a large farm, she glanced up absently. The
one house in the lane had been vacant during the summer, but within a
few weeks a mother and daughter, a rather mysterious pair, had moved
into it. Now she saw a young girl, who was dark and looked handsome in
an haughty fashion, on the steps. Anna waved her hand in a friendly
way. The girl inclined her small head proudly, rose and went into the
cottage.

“I do believe she’s mad because I haven’t been in to see her,” Anna
said to herself in dismay. “She’s about my age and I’m the one who
would naturally do it. Of course, they wouldn’t let Mr. Langley in, but
I’m different. Nobody would mind a little thing like me.”

She was tempted to run up the lane and tap at the door. But this
afternoon was pledged to Mr. Langley and his girl-wife, and Anna
regretfully left the lane behind her.

She opened the parsonage gate softly. If she could elude Bell the way
was clear, for the front door stood open, and of course the screen door
wouldn’t be fastened. Creeping up the walk, she tried it gently. It did
not yield. Peeping in, she could just make out that it was hooked.

As she stood irresolute, she noticed a loose place where the wire
netting was tacked to the wooden frame of door. It was too late for
June-bugs, but the season was still like summer and if there were any
chance, moth millers would fly in by the score as soon as the lamps
were lighted and commit suicide in their harrowing way. Poor things! It
seemed wicked to entice them to destruction.

But there was no other way. Boldly the girl poked her finger through
the aperture, tearing the netting ruthlessly until she could reach the
hook and raise it. Then, withdrawing her scratched and bleeding hand,
she opened the door softly and stole in, only to be immediately seized
and oppressed by a sensation of guilt and even of fright. Pausing only
a moment, however, she made her way noiselessly down the passage to the
door of the room she knew to be that of the minister’s wife. It was
ajar and she knocked timidly.

Absolute silence save for the loud ticking of the clock and the yet
louder beating of her heart. Screwing her courage, Anna knocked again.

“Bell?” called out a strange, hoarse voice that accorded ill with the
vision of the girl-wife.

“No’m. It’s me--Anna. It’s the other Miller girl--Rusty’s sister, you
know,” murmured Anna faintly. “Please may I come in? I want to--tell
you something.”

Without waiting for an answer, she pushed the door wide and entered a
large, bare, gloomy looking chamber, darkened and musty-smelling though
one window was open a few inches. For a minute she stood motionless,
unable to make out anything clearly in the dimness. Then, as suddenly
as if a blind had been raised or a match struck she saw the dark figure
of the minister’s wife dimly silhouetted against the dun background.

Mrs. Langley--if indeed it were Mrs. Langley?--had raised herself from
the cushions of a padded arm chair and was staring at the intruder in
mingled amazement and horror. And the girl, her heart in her mouth,
stood as if transfixed and stared back. It was as if she had heard a
tremendous explosion or witnessed a silent one (as one does in a dream)
and found herself standing in the midst of a mass of wreckage--which
might have been the shattered fragments of the bottle of cologne-water
with which she had in fancy bathed the white brow of the pale, romantic
invalid she had pictured.

[Illustration: “Please, may I come in? I want to--tell you something.”]

This woman’s figure, outlined against the lowered blind, was that of
a witch, the shoulders being curved almost in an hump and the emaciated
profile resembling the terrible nutcracker contour commonly associated
with the broomstick. Her dark hair, streaked with yellowish grey, was
strained back from her yellow face into a tight little wad on the back
of her head. Her lips were colourless, her cheeks appallingly hollow.
Her sunken eyes, set in deep, greenish cavities, burned fiercely
beneath her frowning brow. She looked as old and ugly as a sybil and to
Anna as wicked.

It was she who first recovered sufficiently to speak.

“Who are you and WHAT are you doing in my room?” she demanded in a
voice that made the girl say to herself ‘Hark from the tomb!’ and gain
thereby a bit of audacity.

“I’m the other Miller girl, Rusty’s sister,” she faltered. “I just
thought--I’d come----”

But she could not go on.

“Are you mad? Are you stark, staring crazy?” challenged the old woman
whom Anna couldn’t believe to be the minister’s wife. As she spoke,
large gaps on either side of her front teeth explained the unnatural
hollows in her cheeks.

“N-no, I guess not. I’m only--sort of _fresh_,” the girl gasped.

“Did Bell let you in?”--still more fiercely.

“O no, I let myself in,” Anna returned, and as the fierce dark eyes
bored into her she seemed forced to confess the whole enormity of her
action as if she had been a naughty child. “I poked my finger in and
made a hole in the screen, but I don’t believe it’ll matter--it’s so
late,--the season, I mean.”

“If you are not crazy, what do you mean by breaking into people’s
houses and disturbing the sick?” demanded the old woman. “Don’t you
know that I haven’t seen anyone except the doctor for twenty-three
years?”

“Twenty-three--that’s _skidoo_,” murmured Anna under her breath and
caught another bit of spirit. Withdrawing her gaze, not without
difficulty, from the face before her, she glanced about her, half
fearfully, half boldly. A marble-topped table next the chair in which
the invalid huddled was covered with bottles, apothecaries’ boxes
and medicine glasses. In their midst, a photograph in a velvet frame
stood upright by means of a support at the back. As the girl’s eye
encountered this, on a sudden she knew it was the little lamb, and her
fear took wings. Quite bold now, she went straight up to Mrs. Langley,
held out her hand--which was ignored--and smiled ingratiatingly.

“The little marble lamb up in the cemetery,” she murmured softly, “I
went to see it. I thought you would like to know--that is, I thought
you would want to know that it’s all turned black and yellow and
mildewed, and----”

“What!” the woman almost shrieked.

“The little lamb--the cunning little marble lamb on Ella May’s grave
with its little legs tucked under it like a baby kitten,--it’s all
black and--slimy!”

Mrs. Langley fell back among the cushions.

“My baby! My baby!” she cried, and the genuine pain in the harsh voice
awaked the girl’s pity. “Has no one looked after it? O, I might have
known! I might have known!”

As she looked beseechingly at Anna, she seemed to see her for the first
time.

“Sit down, little girl,” she said, and her voice though not pleasant
was less harsh.

Pity contending with shrinking, Anna fetched a chair and seated herself
beside the table bearing the bottles and the photograph. As she fixed
her eyes on the latter, the woman in the chair gazed at her. She had
had no glimpse of youth, of young life, for more than twenty years,
and it might not have been strange if this slip of a girl with her
long-lashed demure blue eyes, her charming, peaked little face and her
riotous yellow hair that almost seemed to light up the dark chamber,
had appeared a supernatural visitant. She made an apparent effort to
collect herself, to marshal forces that had been dormant for so many
years as almost to have become non-existent.

“It was--good of you to tell me,” she croaked. “Is it--ruined?”

“O no, indeed, one side of it is as good as ever, or nearly. A marble
man could mend it up slick, I’m sure. But Mrs. Phelps’ cousin Alfred
isn’t Charley-on-the-spot any longer because he cashed in right after
he made it.”

The invalid grasped only the first sentence. “I should hate to have
it--scraped,” she said in a low voice.

“I get you. So should I,” the girl responded eagerly. “Of course you
know that it isn’t alive, but you can’t help feeling all the time just
as if it were--those darling little sticks of legs tucked in under so
naturally and all that. I shouldn’t want it scraped, either. Promise
not to let on if I tell you something?”

The invalid looked as if she would have smiled if she hadn’t long since
forgotten how.

“I promise,” she said in a voice which indicated the weary while since
she had relaxed her terrible grimness.

“Well, when I saw it, so little and cunning and helpless, and then
saw--what had happened to it, out there all alone, I just cried. I
couldn’t help it, honestly.”

As she looked at the girl, tears came to the invalid’s eyes. The hand
which held her pocket handkerchief to them was like a yellow claw, but
they were less sharp when she removed it.

“O, don’t you feel badly about it, please, please,” Anna begged. “I’ll
tell you what--I’ll clean it all up slick. I can use sand soap and all
sorts of lightning cleaners. I’ll get someone to put me wise about
cleaning marble without letting on what it’s for.”

“O, if you only would!” cried the invalid looking and speaking more
like Red-Riding-Hood’s wolf than like the girl-wife Anna had dreamed of
restoring to her husband (who might be this woman’s son or grandson).

“I hope--I didn’t frighten you?”

“I was a bit fazed, but I shouldn’t be again,” Anna admitted as she
rose. Then she caught her breath sharply at the thought of there being
an _again_. And after all, why should there be? Though she couldn’t
help being sorry for her, there was nothing she could do with that sort
of person. Surely she couldn’t wish that sort of wife upon poor Mr.
Langley!

“And you will tell me how you get along?” the other asked.

“Come here, you mean?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Langley responded so promptly that Anna couldn’t
help feeling how elated she must have been if the invalid had been the
invalid of her fancy. She felt a bit indignant as she asked herself
why, with absolutely nothing to do for twenty years and no real
illness, this woman couldn’t at least have kept her figure and her
complexion. “How soon can you do it, little girl?” Mrs. Langley added.

“Not before next Saturday, for I’m in school--the academy. So you see
I’m not what you’d call a little girl. Well--so long.”

She held out her hand. The hand of the invalid was cold and clammy,
besides being like a claw, and as she let herself out, on a sudden Anna
shivered. The yellow face with its cavernous eyes, the sunken mouth,
the gaping teeth, the claw-like grasp of her hand,--the girl made
a wild dash to get away from it all only to ran violently into Mr.
Langley, who was coming slowly up the walk with bent head.

Apologising in profound distress, as if it had been his fault, he asked
Anna if she had been looking for him, that being the sole reason that
anyone but the doctor ever came to the parsonage.

“No, sir,” faltered the girl oppressed by a sudden and awful sense of
guilt towards him, “I came to see--your wife.”

“What’s that, Anna?” he demanded looking at her as if he doubted her
sanity or his own sense of hearing.

“I’ve been--visiting with your wife,” the girl said and laughed
hysterically.

With a startled face, he pushed by her into the house. And only then
Anna realised the whole force of the situation, the ugly, naked fact.
She--that terrible old woman who was really an old hag, was Mr.
Langley’s wife!

She began to run, wildly, blindly, pursued by the terrible vision. She
did not see the girl who lived in the lane come forth into the avenue
on an errand, and ran directly into her arms.




CHAPTER IV


Reuben Cartwright’s father had built the house in the lane at Farleigh,
and one who had known Dick Cartwright well would have said the cottage
was like him. There was something odd and unusual about it which
gave it a peculiar charm without making it startling or bizarre; and
something of his whimsicality seemed to have crept into the arrangement
of nooks and corners and cupboards and bookcases. Oddest of all was
the living-room, which was disproportionately large and contained a
good-sized platform, raised three feet or more above the floor, which
was to have held the pipe organ which the years were to have brought.
But the years, instead of bringing the pipe organ, fame and other
desiderata, material and otherwise, had taken away from Dick Cartwright
his greatest blessing, his wife and sweet-heart whose presence and
companionship had been the necessary conditions of fulfilling and
enjoying his dreams. And after her death, the quaint cottage with the
platform for the organ and the odd bits of furniture he had made and
carved were only a mockery to Dick Cartwright. He had his little boy,
it is true, who was very like his mother, and he had Mr. Langley as
an intimate friend; but he could not forget Jessie and he took to
drink to ease the torture remembrance was. Whereupon he forgot not
only Jessie but their child and his duty as well. He lost his place as
organist at Farleigh church and as book-keeper at one of the banks at
Wenham. And when presently, three years after the death of his wife, he
disappeared, it was found that he had lost his house also and all his
possessions.

When news of his death in a railway wreck near Chicago came to Mr.
Langley, who had meanwhile sheltered Reuben, he made enquiries and
found that the cottage had been mortgaged to its full value. The
bank at Wenham which held the mortgage offered the cottage for sale,
then, when no purchaser appeared, for rent. Soon after, an elderly
couple whose married daughter lived in the South Hollow took it and
occupied it for six years until early in the preceding summer when
their daughter had been widowed and they had gone to live with her. The
cottage stood idle all summer but early in September a new family moved
in, a mother and daughter, the first strangers to come to the village
for years. No one knew whence they came nor who they were. They moved
in so quietly that scarcely anyone knew the house was occupied until
they saw smoke coming from the squat, picturesque chimney.

No one had seen the mother; but the daughter, who had answered the door
or gone out on errands, was said to be as handsome as she was haughty.
They responded to no friendly overtures, refusing entrance even to Mr.
Langley, and seemed to feel themselves superior to the place and the
people and to the cottage where they lived which was, indeed, a simple
dwelling when compared with the simplest summer homes of the wealthy.
For they were said to have been enormously wealthy and suddenly to have
found themselves penniless at the death of the husband and father who
had gambled or speculated until he had come to his last farthing. It
was understood that they were relatives or connections of the president
of the bank at Wenham, who had offered them the shelter of the cottage
in the lane.

Anna Miller attributed their desire for seclusion to grief over the
death of the husband and father rather than to pride. She couldn’t
help fearing what had evidently occurred to none other that he might
have died by his own hand, and she felt that such a shock might well
leave them too sore and sick at heart to wish to see any human being.
Nevertheless she said to herself, with an assurance that was made up
of humility and warm-heartedness as well as of vanity, that she would
somehow effect an entrance where others failed.

When she ran straight into the strange girl’s arms on the day she was
fleeing from the parsonage and the spectre she had elicited, the one
shock counteracted the other. Controlling her hysterical shuddering,
she murmured an earnest apology.

“Dear me! I might have knocked you down, butting into you that way.
You are sure I didn’t hurt you?”

“Not at all,” the girl repeated quietly, and Anna liked her voice as
much as her dark, pretty face. “But what was it?” she asked. “Was
someone or something chasing you?”

Anna smiled rather wanly as she moved back to get the support of the
stone wall which fenced the lane. “Not exactly, unless it was a ghost,”
she said in her usual droll way. “Sit down here, won’t you, and I’ll
tell you about it.”

“I mustn’t stop,” the girl said nervously. “I only thought--you needed
help.”

“So I do, the worst way. Honest, I’m like a rag. My knees shake and----”

The stranger sat down on the wall beside her and put her arm about
her shelteringly. Anna leaned against her gratefully and closed her
eyes for a few moments. The older girl gazed at her wonderingly. An
hungry, almost a starved look came into the dark eyes and the arm which
supported Anna clasped her almost fiercely.

Anna opened her eyes and smiled without moving.

“You’ll think I’m a perfect baby,” she declared, “but truly I have had
a queer sort of shock.”

She sat erect and slipped down, then seated herself again. “I’m too
wobbly to walk just yet. I’ll wait a bit until I feel better or see a
waggon. I wish you felt like waiting with me?”

The other girl’s brow puckered in a slight frown. Anna introduced
herself.

“I am Anna Miller. I have wanted awfully to get acquainted with you,
though truly I didn’t mean to break in the way I did.”

The dark girl smiled vaguely and rose slowly from the wall. Anna sprang
up also.

“You mind--waiting alone?” the stranger asked hesitatingly.

“I’m not afraid, only I don’t seem to feel like facing my thoughts at
this moment. I guess I’ll hike along if you’re leaving me.”

As she breathed a deep sigh, the dark girl looked at her in troubled
fashion.

“Come up to our cottage and have a cup of tea first,” she asked in a
constrained manner. Anna said afterwards to Miss Penny that if she had
talked Latin she would have used the form of interrogation that expects
the answer no.

“I’d like to, first rate, if it wouldn’t be too much bother for you,”
she said frankly. And when the other assured her that it would be no
trouble, she put her hand on her arm and they went up the lane together.

The outer door led straight into the living-room. As they entered, a
tall, handsome, dark-eyed woman with a proud, forbidding countenance
rose from a chair and confronted them.

“Mother, this is Miss Miller,” the girl said deprecatingly. “She
doesn’t feel well--she’s faint and I want to make her a cup of tea.”

“Not Miss Miller,--Anna, please. No one calls me anything else,” the
girl asked in her sweet young voice. But the woman, who bowed stiffly
without extending her hand, asked Miss Miller stiffly to be seated.
Anna dropped limply into a chair. The other girl went out of the room.

“I--I didn’t catch your name,” murmured Anna.

“Lorraine,” said the woman coldly and yet with a certain fierce warmth.

“Somehow that name sounds very familiar to me,” Anna observed, only to
perceive by the woman’s face that she had made an extremely mal àpropos
remark. “I suppose it’s the city--or province in France I am thinking
of,” she added lamely.

“Quite likely,” returned Mrs. Lorraine frigidly, and taking up a piece
of embroidery began sternly to set fine stitches in it. Anna glanced at
her timidly.

“How pretty your fancy-work is,” she remarked, politely deprecatory.
She told Miss Penny afterwards that she wondered the stuff weren’t all
eyelet-holes, for Mrs. Lorraine’s eyes, black as they were, reminded
her of burning coals. And she declared that hereafter she would believe
in the tamarisk or basilisk or whatever the bird was whose gaze turned
one to stone.

“It could hardly be called fancy-work,” Mrs. Lorraine rejoined, and her
voice was the more cutting in that it was naturally good and had the
modulations of one who has lived among educated people in society. “I
make my living and that of my daughter--or try to--doing this work.”

Anna felt she should have run from this house also had not the daughter
appeared at this moment with a tray containing a cup of tea and a plate
of biscuit. She took it gratefully and in her nervousness scalded her
throat so that tears came to her eyes. It would have been easy to burst
into tears, and the girl resolutely studied the pattern of the napkin.
So doing, she noticed that it was of the finest damask she had ever
seen but was apparently old for it was darned and patched. Somehow,
she had never heard of patching napkins. But she felt Mrs. Lorraine’s
piercing eyes upon her and transferred her attention to the silver
spoon which was also old, very thin and exceedingly fine.

“They were my grandmother’s, and I kept the dozen. They were too thin
and worn to be worth anything,” Mrs. Lorraine declared in the manner of
challenge. And Anna felt that she could endure no longer. Gulping down
the tea, she rose to her feet.

“I must be going,” she said and turning to the daughter thanked her for
the refreshment.

“I feel so much better,” she said. “I----”

Pausing, she gazed wistfully at the girl who seemed sweeter and gentler
in contrast with her mother’s haughtiness, and to whom Anna’s heart
went out warmly. It seemed as if she couldn’t leave her without pledge
of another meeting. But when she asked if she might call for her on the
morrow to go to church, Mrs. Lorraine said that she and her daughter
did not go out.

“Just the same, I am sure there were tears in that sweet girl’s eyes,”
Anna told Miss Penny that evening. “She is all ready to be friendly,
but what can she do with that terrible old woman. And yet--I’m sorry
for her, too, poor thing!”

“I suppose she doesn’t like to appear out after being so rich, though
they must have some of their fine clothes left,” returned Miss Penny.
“But it may be their carriage, you know, though for that matter I don’t
know why even people with a coachman and footmen should care to drive
to church when it’s only across the way--that is, it’s cross-wise from
the parsonage and there’s only one house between the parsonage and the
lane, and Reuben’s father didn’t have to start until the last minute,
though he was always there, of course, to begin to play before the
opening of service. And there’s no barn for the carriage and where
would they put the coachman?”

“They could make a nice little coop for him by putting hinges on the
floor of the pipe organ platform and making a lid of it,” remarked Anna
lightly. She had decided on the way home that she would not mention
her visit to the parsonage to anyone. She would fulfill her promise,
clean the little marble lamb and then forget all about it and about
Mrs. Langley and go back to thinking of Mr. Langley as if he were a
bachelor. She would make no further ill-advised efforts to bring back
his youthfulness; she would be thankful if she hadn’t added ten years
to his age. If he didn’t appear to-morrow in the pulpit with snow-white
hair she would thank her lucky stars and never meddle with his affairs
again.

“I forgot there’s a shop on the place,--it went with the old house
that was torn down,” Miss Penny remarked and went on to try to fit
the coachman and at least one footman in there, though she could not
recollect whether there was a second story or loft or not. And Anna
listened absently and thought of Mrs. Langley.

Fortunately the third Saturday was also fair. Anna set out early with a
basket that might have been intended for autumn wild flowers but really
contained cloths, a cake of sand soap, a bottle of ammonia and a tiny
vial containing acid. As she followed the winding foot-path leading up
the hill, and all the while she was working on the stone with patient
skilful fingers, she seemed to hear over and over in her mind, she
seemed to scrub to the rhythm of the warning _Let sleeping dogs lie,
Let sleeping dogs lie_. Mr. Langley wouldn’t have thanked her for
arousing that old woman to life,--but fortunately she _hadn’t_ done any
such thing. It was only temporary--a flare-up of interest that would
die down as soon as she should be satisfied concerning the stone. She
would report her success--for she was succeeding--on her way home and
would thereafter leave her in the condition in which she had found her
and wherein she seemed perfectly content.

When she had done, the little image was so white and sweet and
appealing that Anna was loth to leave it. And when she bent to kiss the
meek little head in long farewell she couldn’t help thinking pityingly
of Mrs. Langley. Poor thing! Poor forlorn creature! If only someone
had gotten at her earlier before she had become a petrified mummy! It
was too late now, but Anna wished with all her heart she could see the
little lamb in its new freshness. She was sorry for her, more than
sorry. Nevertheless as she descended the hill the girl simply could
not face the thought of that darkened, musty room with the wild eyes
glaring through the dimness. She decided to write a note and took a
bypath which avoided the parsonage.

That night she wrote a note which her brother Frank delivered after
Sunday school next day:

  “DEAR MRS. LANGLEY, the little lamb is white as snow again, a perfect
  darling,--_fleckless_ as the books would say. I had to kiss its
  little head when I had finished, it was such a cutey. As I ought
  really to be studying up to my ears to keep up with the little
  cash-girls of the ABC class, I will send this note by my brother
  instead of disturbing you. I will keep my eye on the image from this
  time on.
                                                Yours faithfully,
                                                                  ANNA.”

As she finished the letter, Mrs. Phelps came in. Anna knew by her face
that she had some exciting or shocking bit of news to relate, and her
heart sank. Quite likely the report of her visit to the parsonage was
all over the place!

“Have you heard about the Lorraines?” she asked.

“The Lorraines?” repeated Anna.

“Yes, Anna. Do you happen to know where Mr. Lorraine is?” Mrs. Phelps
asked eagerly.

“In heaven I trust,” Anna murmured with charitable intent.

“Not at all and never will be unless he mends his ways. He’s behind
the bars. He is serving a sentence of ten years in prison for
embezzlement!” cried Mrs. Phelps almost triumphantly.




CHAPTER V


“O Anna,” cried her mother as soon as the girl had seated herself,
“have you heard about the people who have moved in where the Converses
moved out?”

“Why, Jenny, that’s the house where Reuben was born and brought
up,” observed Seth Miller. “It was before we knew Reuben or had any
suspicion there was such a person, and we get in the way of thinking
he always lived at Miss Penny’s; but I mistrust he had a good home and
indulgent parents until his ma died, and his pa, who was one of them
musical geniuses, took to drink.”

“Yes, ma, I heard about the Lorraines. Mrs. Phelps told Miss Penny last
night,” returned Anna who always spent Sunday afternoon at her own
home, which was diagonally across the way from Miss Penny’s. The girl
was pale to-day and leaned listlessly back in her chair in a way that
was foreign to her wonted lively self. Her mother had noticed in church
that Anna, who was always thin, had grown intensely so within the last
fortnight and had hastened to get the dinner dishes out of the way
before her daughter should rush in and take the task off her hands.

“It was all in the papers last spring,” said Miller. “They was
chock full of it for a spell, and the queer part of it was that
the denouncement of the hull thing came right at the same time Wat
Graham was arrested over at Wenham. If it hadn’t ’a been for Wat’s
brother-in-law, Mudge, going bail for him and helping settle with
the creditors, why Wat himself might ’a been in the cell next to Mr.
Lorraine.”

“Why, Pa Miller! Wat Graham’s in another class altogether,” protested
Anna.

“I know they called Lorraine an embezzler, but I supposed that was only
a polite name for thief,” her father rejoined. “Anyhow, it looked from
the papers and from what was said over to Spicer’s last night as if he
was a particularly mean kind of thief--sort of specialized on widders
and orphans, you might say.”

Anna uttered a little cry of protest. Mrs. Phelps had said that the
story was that Lorraine’s crookedness had involved thousands of small
investors who had lost their all through him. She had added that more
than one of those ruined thus had committed suicide. As Anna had lain
awake thinking of it, she had tried to convince herself that the latter
statement was false, and the rest exaggerated. She hadn’t succeeded,
but it was not until now that she realized that she had utterly failed.
Poor Miss Lorraine! And no wonder Mrs. Lorraine protected herself with
the bristles and spikes of a porcupine!

“Reuben will most likely feel cut up to have such people living in his
old house,” Mrs. Miller opined sadly.

“O ma, they can’t help it, and they aren’t that sort themselves at
all!” cried Anna.

“And my patience, Jenny, Reuben would be the last one in the world to
object to anybody because they was down; the quickest way to reach
Reuben’s heart is to be in trouble,” declared Seth Miller loyally. “He
started out as a little shaver by rescuing a poor, forlorn tramp cat,
and he’s been like a shepherd seeking for lost sheep ever since. By the
by, Anna, did I ever tell you that story--how Reuben clumb the highest
tree in the county and like as not in the state?”

“You certainly did, pa, the very day after I got back, and many’s the
time you have offered to tell it to me again,” retorted the girl. “Miss
Penny told me the same story the second time she laid eyes on me and
this very week she refreshed my memory with all the fine points of it.
But all the same, it’s a first rate yarn, and Reuben’s a brick.”

“That was the beginning of his going to Miss Penny’s,” Seth Miller went
on as if he could not leave the fascinating subject. Then suddenly he
opened his eyes wide to see Mr. Langley drive up to the gate.

As Mr. Langley stepped on the porch, Anna was seized with a sudden and
almost unaccountable sense of guilt. She felt as if she must make her
escape. But there was no stairway except that in the front passage,
and here was her mother beamingly ushering the minister in upon her.
But as she glanced up--even indeed, as she heard his step, the girl
was reassured. Somehow, it seemed as if Mr. Langley had recaptured
his springiness. He looked his old young self again, and as he took
her hand he smiled in a way that made her feel as if she had had a
benediction all to herself.

“O Anna, my dear child, Mrs. Langley wishes very much to see you,” he
said eagerly and with a certain largeness that would have been amusing
if it hadn’t been pathetic. For it seemed to indicate that he was the
bearer of a mandate from royalty.

“She expected you yesterday, it seems, and to-day she was so
disappointed to get a note instead of a call that I volunteered to come
up at once and fetch you.”

Thus far no one outside the parsonage had known of that audacious visit
of Anna’s. Seth Miller’s face wore an expression half-jaunty, half
proud. No man had such extraordinary daughters as he, and sometimes it
seemed as if Anna were quite as remarkable as Rusty. But Mrs. Miller
looked frightened.

Mr. Langley turned to her with his charming smile.

“What do you think, Mrs. Miller! This is the first time that Mrs.
Langley has felt any interest whatever in anyone or anything since we
lost our little Ella May,” he said in a sort of hushed wonderment. “You
will spare Anna for a little while, won’t you? I’ll bring her back
shortly safe and sound.”

When Anna returned to Miss Penny’s at tea time, she found her in a
state of almost wild excitement.

“O Anna, do sit down and tell me all about it,” she cried. “For the
first time in my life I was glad--no, I can’t say I was glad, but I
wasn’t really disappointed that Mr. Langley didn’t come in. Not that he
thinks it wrong, being Sunday, and anyhow I really am an old lady and
won’t be getting out to service many years more. But he had the Smith’s
horse, you know. It was nice of him to bring you home, but of course he
would. He thought you were here--that was why he stopped. And to think
of Mrs. Langley’s asking for you all of her own accord. Dear me, dear
me, what does she look like and did you have a nice time?”

“Not exactly what you would call slick,” replied Anna in her droll way
that cloaked her weariness even for herself. “There was nothing lively
enough about it to break the Sabbath. Our conversation was confined to
the subject of tombstones.”

“O Anna, my dear!” said Miss Penny in mild reproof as if it were
sacrilegious to speak lightly of such things.

Anna related briefly the occasion of her first visit and described the
restoration of the marble image in the cemetery.

“Bless its little heart!” cried Miss Penny who was as enthusiastic
as Anna in her love of animals. “It must be sweet. I wonder I never
thought of going to look at it on Memorial day. I used to go to the
cemetery regularly every year until I got so lame.”

“We’ll drive the pony up there some day. It’s not far to walk from the
gate,” Anna said.

She dropped into a rocking chair, let her yellow head fall wearily
back against the cushion and closed her eyes.

“I had to tell her of it over and over and over,” she said presently,
raising her lashes pensively.

“Anna, you are very tired!” cried Miss Penny.

“Only a wee bit and it isn’t exactly _tired_, then,” declared the
girl. “But you know how it is when you go into a painty room or pass
by that awful-smelling tannery place beyond Wenham? You don’t draw a
long breath all the while and yet you don’t realise that you’re holding
your breath. Well, there’s something about Mrs. Langley and her room
that makes you feel as if you were sitting on the edge of your chair
waiting until you can get out where you see sunshine and people that
talk and smile. Her eyes, you know, like coals of fire in the Bible,
and great hollows in her cheeks and a voice that seems to come from a
cave or a tomb. The blinds are drawn down almost to the window sills
and there are medicine bottles to burn. There’s air enough, I suppose,
but not the kind that’s sweetened by sunshine. It seems musty and makes
you feel as if there were spiders in all the dark corners--huge black
spiders with bodies big as this and crooked legs!”

“O Anna!”

“Sure thing! And what do you think? She wants me to come to see her
every Saturday,--every blooming Saturday afternoon, Miss Penny.”

“Anna dear, I wouldn’t do it. You really must not,” said Miss Penny
gravely. “It would be too great a strain upon you.”

Anna threw herself on the hassock at Miss Penny’s feet leaning her head
upon the knee that was not lame.

“Really, Miss Penny, I am glad to go again and every Saturday,” she
said softly. “Mr. Langley almost had tears in his eyes when he spoke of
it. I didn’t dare look at him again to make sure, because after I had
come out of that creepy place it wouldn’t have taken much to set me to
crying.”

“I understand,” murmured Miss Penny stroking the girl’s yellow hair.
“And to tell the truth, Anna, I almost envy you in being able to do
something for Mr. Langley. Ever since he came to be our preacher, I
have longed to do something for him to express my appreciation and
affection for him, but it always seems impossible. It has always been
the other way--his doing for me. And the best things in my life have
come to me through him, Reuben and Rusty and now you, Anna.”

“Miss Penny,” said Anna quickly, “you know he visits her every day. Do
you suppose he kisses her?”

“Dear me, Anna! what a question! I’m sure I have no idea. I suppose he
does.”

“But how can he! But you haven’t seen her as she is now, and you never
could imagine how she looks. He certainly seems to think a heap of
her all the same, and as he can see as well as I can in the dark, he
can’t help seeing that she looks old enough to be his great aunt. Well,
I’m sorry for her but I wouldn’t be related to her for a gold mine.
However, I can stand it once a week all right.”

In the following days, they recurred to the matter frequently. A dozen
times, Miss Penny suggested suddenly a new topic of conversation that
had popped into her head as appropriate for Anna to introduce as an
alternative to that of tombstones; but each one being only more utterly
absurd than the foregoing, Anna would laugh until she cried, Miss Penny
joining her merrily. None the less, when she returned late Saturday
afternoon, she announced that she had gotten away from the little lamb,
though not perhaps very far.

The girl had proposed one subject after another, receiving no response.
And it had presently been borne in upon her there could hardly be a
response in the nature of the case. Mrs. Langley was really living,
so far as she was alive at all, in another generation, so that trying
to converse with her was like shouting to someone miles behind one on
the highway and only visible because of curves in the course of it.
The years she had lived in retirement had counted for little more than
nothing. Her mind was twenty years younger than the village she dwelt
in.

“When I realised that, I tried to get back, and after a bit she was
glad to talk about Ella May,” Anna said to Miss Penny as she dried the
china after tea. “Only you would hardly know it _was_ Ella May. Mr.
Langley’s Ella May has been growing all these years until she went to
college with Rusty and jumped ahead and graduated and--O dear me! Hers
is still a teeny baby three days old. Now, Miss Penny, when those two
get to heaven one of them is going to have the surprise of their lives.”

“Why Anna,” murmured Miss Penny reproachfully.

“Meantime, things are at sixes and sevens with both of them. What
she needs is another baby, and what he needs is a full grown wife.
Both of ’em need it frightfully. But how in the world is it ever
going to be brought about, and who is to do it? I may think I am
Charley-on-the-spot for ordinary cases, but a sticker like this stumps
me flat. It would take someone a heap smarter than me to haul her over
all the years she has missed and bring her up to date. And while that’s
being done to her mind, her face, her looks ought to be stretched the
other way until she looks somewhere near as young as her husband.”

The girl sighed. “It’s like the North-west Passage. It ought to be
done, and I suppose it could be, but not by yours truly. And the worst
is, she refuses to see anybody else. She hardly pays any more attention
to Mr. Langley than she did before--just sends him orders about me
through Big Bell. O Miss Penny, did you ever hear the proverb ‘Let
sleeping dogs lie’?”




CHAPTER VI


Meantime the other Miller girl had made a second call at the house in
the lane which Reuben’s father had built. When her rat-a-tat at the
door sounded drearily as from an empty house, the girl said to herself
that it was too much. Most likely the ogress had slain her lovely
daughter and then fallen dead herself and their corpses lay stretched
upon the organ platform in the room which would never be a living-room
thereafter. But the lovely daughter came to the door. The cold, haughty
expression on her face changed to eagerness as she saw Anna and she
smiled sweetly and rather touchingly.

“O Miss Miller, I am so glad--to see you,” she said. But with the last
words enthusiasm had become dismay. She paled and looked appealingly at
Anna.

“Don’t call me Miss Miller, please. Nobody does. And--may I come in?”
asked Anna.

“I am so sorry, Miss--Anna, but mother--we don’t have company, you
know.”

“But I’m not company. And anyhow, I’ve got to come in this once for
I’ve got something for you,” Anna declared.

As the proud look returned to the older girl’s face and she started to
say something in regard to her mother, Anna drew forth from the covert
of her jacket a tiny ball of a maltese kitten with a white parting
between its baby blue eyes, a line of white waistcoat, and four white
paws, two of which had extra toes. Nothing could have been rounder or
silkier or more altogether appealing than this baby kitten with its
round, innocent eyes and its bit of pink tongue visible, and as Anna
held it out, the other girl took it ecstatically and held it close to
her face. Then she cried out impulsively to her mother and ran with it
to her. Anna followed her in, closing the door behind her.

Anna’s purpose had been deliberate. Still, it was almost unbelievable
to see Mrs. Lorraine’s grimness melt before that absurd mite of kitten.
As her daughter passed it over to her, she, too, hid her face against
its softness. Then she put it in her lap and gazed at it in a sort of
fascination, her daughter hanging over her and quite unnecessarily
calling attention to the little thing’s charms. As a matter of fact,
Mrs. Lorraine hadn’t handled--hadn’t even seen--a baby kitten of the
ordinary, harmless, necessary cat-kind since she had been a child in
a New England farmhouse and had worshipped the successive litters of
a three-coloured Tabby that had lived at one of the barns. They had
left the farm for the city before she was twelve; but though she had
had pets in the elegant home her parents had fallen heirs to and in
the magnificent residences of the millionaire she had married, they
had been the expensive, pedigreed sophisticated pets of the rich
and hadn’t appealed to her as Tabby and her kittens and the mongrel
shepherd dog of the farm had done. And not even the latter had so
appealed to her as this tiny plebeian offspring of a too prolific Tabby
mother who kept the tender-hearted Anna busy in finding homes for her
numerous kittens. Her sore heart could reach out to its innocence
without injury to her wounded pride.

“It is a love, isn’t it?” remarked Anna presently, partly to call
attention to herself and partly because she couldn’t help it. For she
was herself ‘crazy over’ the kitten, as she put it. And joining the
little group, she pointed out its double paws and the white tip of its
tail which were the only details the daughter hadn’t exclaimed over.

“I started out right after school to find a home for it. There were
three of them but the grocer at the Hollow took the yellow twins--I
suppose he’ll call ’em the Gold-Dust Twins. It looks as if I needn’t go
further. Are you willing to take him in, Mrs. Lorraine?”

“I don’t know that we ought to,” returned Mrs. Lorraine, trying to
speak stiffly. But somehow, even the thought that perhaps it would be
wrong for the family of a criminal to indulge themselves even so little
was ineffectual to stiffen her with that soft little ball in her lap.

“Mother!” cried the girl beseechingly.

“You will need a cat, you know. Every household does,” said Anna
sagely. “This one will make a fine one, too. All of Tabby’s kittens
do. Never a one has failed to give satisfaction in the households in
which I have placed them. Ma’s never had any mice in our house since
I brought the mother-cat home. I found her on a lonely road a mile or
more from any house. Just think, someone had abandoned her. It must
have been someone in Wenham that came over to drop poor Tabby, for
before there wasn’t a three-coloured cat in all Farleigh.”

“We had a tortoise-shell cat on the farm when I was a little girl,”
remarked Mrs. Lorraine quietly with a gentler look in her eyes than
Anna would have believed possible. “Alice, perhaps the kitten would
like some milk,” she added.

Alice fetched a saucer and put it on the hearth. Mrs. Lorraine placed
the kitten beside it as gently as if it had been a fragile egg shell
and the three hung over it eagerly. The kitten put his nose in so far
that he spluttered amusingly and once he dipped a paw in; but it was
too light to overturn the dish and he drank enough to prove himself of
sufficient age to be taken from his mother.

“Now he’d like a nap,” remarked Anna, picking him up. She wanted to
give him to Alice (sweet name, Alice Lorraine!) who hadn’t had a chance
at him at all; but she put him into Mrs. Lorraine’s lap and he curled
into a yet rounder ball and was asleep at once.

“Speaking of tramp cats,” Anna remarked, though as a matter of fact the
subject hadn’t come up, “you probably know that Reuben Cartright once
lived in this house?”

“Reuben Cartright--is he a musician?” asked Mrs. Lorraine.

“Dear me, no. His father was a musician, though he wasn’t noted. He was
organist at the church for a long time. He built this house, though not
with his own hands. Did you ever wonder what that platform was for?”

“I thought this was a very old house and that perhaps that was a
trundle bed,” said Alice. Anna laughed and Mrs. Lorraine had to smile.

“Mr. Cartright had the floor raised so that when he got rich he could
have a pipe organ put in,” Anna explained. “I believe the clothes-press
in the chamber above is right over the platform and the same size and
they say he planned to tear out the floor of that so that the space
would go way up to the roof. But it never came to that. His wife died
and he took to booze and that was the last of him as well as of the
pipe organ.”

“Is the son musical?” asked Mrs. Lorraine, speaking softly as if the
sleeping kitten were a baby.

“Yes’m, in a way, though he’s never had much chance. He has beautiful
hands, slim with long fingers, and his father gave him lessons up to
the time Reuben was nine and his mother died. Since then Reuben has
never had time for music. He has worked his own way, and besides--as pa
says, ever since he rescued that tramp cat from the pine tree in the
common at the Hollow, he’s been on the look out for that sort of extra
jobs. It’s a sort of private joke between me and myself, the story of
that rescue is, though I shouldn’t dare let Miss Penny know it, or pa
or Rusty, my sister. I was away from home five years--ran away to seek
my fortune and never caught up to it--and this happened in my absence.
Pa told me the story the day after I got home and then Miss Penny.
Ma told me, too, and no end of other people offered to. And to this
day, pa or Miss Penny will ask me whether I happened to hear this or
that particular and even if I say yes are likely to go on as if they
suspected I didn’t get it straight or whole. But I will say it’s a good
story and will bear repeating.”

“O Anna, won’t you please tell it to us!” cried Alice, and her mother
looked acquiescent and perhaps eager.

Anna complied. The tale had, indeed, been told many a time before in
Farleigh to the end of the Hollow; but though no narrator had ever
before employed such a jargon of slang as the other Miller girl used,
perhaps none had ever told it better nor more sympathetically. The
telling of it amused and interested Alice Lorraine, who was already
more drawn towards Anna Miller than she had been to any girl she had
known before, but it affected her mother more powerfully. Henrietta
Lorraine (‘Hetty’ was the little girl of the farm) had been for years
a cold, proud woman, a slave, unconsciously, to her husband’s vast
possessions. During the past six months, following the disgrace of her
husband and his commitment to prison, her pride had become a sort of
fierce arrogance, while her sense of injury, her bitterness towards
all the world had shut her within bars hard as iron. But now as she
sat quiet, the tension of months relaxed, with the kitten in her arms,
and listened to the tale the odd, droll, charmingly pretty, appealing
young girl rattled off so flippantly, something began to melt within
her. Nor was it merely the icy crust that had protected her crushed
feelings of late. As the kindly folk of the story rose compellingly
before her, called forth by the wand of humourous sympathy of the
yellow-haired fairy, and she saw not only Reuben Cartwright and the
forlorn cat, but Miss Penny and Mr. Langley, the fat pony and the fat
janitor who later was nearly to burn the grammar school building to
the ground,--as she saw all this and more, the woman she had been for
years was so moved that she felt almost like the woman she might and
should have been. Alice got only the story Anna told. Her mother, who
had been a country child herself and whose natural sympathy was with
country folk and ways, got a broader view and a deeper vision. She felt
something genuine and fine and sincere and worth while in this bit of
village life,--something that was attainable to others. And it came to
her that possibly Alice’s life and even her own weren’t irretrievably
ruined and wrecked. In any event, terrible as had been the storm which
had overwhelmed them, in the restful atmosphere of this place to which
they had been forced to crawl for refuge, they could at least draw long
breaths of relief, and Alice might later find more than refuge and
relief.

At the end of the story, Anna rose hastily. “I must hike or Miss Penny
will be limping round to get tea,” she said. “Poor dear! She doesn’t
drive the fat pony herself now-a-days and can’t get out of the phaeton
alone for she has rheumatism; but she is as crazy about kittens as I am
and will be as pleased to hear that this mite has a home.”

Holding out her hand a bit timidly, the girl was surprised to have Mrs.
Lorraine press it warmly.

“We are very grateful to you, Anna Miller, not only for the kitten but
for other things, for changing the current of our thoughts,” she said.

The following Sunday, Alice Lorraine appeared at church with Miss Penny
and Anna. Her suit was not new but it was more elegant than anything
worn in Farleigh. Alice was extremely pretty and had the look of one
who has, so to speak, always lain on rose leaves, and Anna felt proud
to walk up the aisle with such a distinguished-looking girl. Miss Penny
begged her to go home with them after service but Alice wouldn’t leave
her mother. She walked down to the Hollow the next afternoon, however.

She couldn’t stay for tea, but Anna gave her a piece of cake and a cup
of chocolate. As Anna walked part way home with her, she spoke of the
cake.

“I wish I could cook,” she said. “I know nothing whatever about it,
and mother knows only what she learned before she was twelve, and
cook-books are such queer things to follow. I don’t mind eating tinned
things, but it’s hard on mother, though she never says anything. And
besides,--O Anna, you wouldn’t believe it, but I hardly know my mother.
At home after I was through with nurses and governesses, she went her
way and I mine as everyone seems to do in the city. And now--I care for
her more than I ever dreamed, but I don’t seem to be able to show it or
to take care of her.”

Anna talked it over with Miss Penny that night and on Saturday morning
Alice came over and watched Anna make bread, cake and cookies. Miss
Penny was in the kitchen the greater part of the time and Alice took to
the odd, inconsecutive, warm-hearted little lady as warmly as others
had always done, so that on a second Saturday they were like three
girls together. Alice began to frequent the house at all hours. And
Miss Penny, who was one of the best housewives in the two villages
and who had taught Rusty and Anna and through them their mother, gave
the girl the best of instruction in cooking and all sorts of domestic
matters, besides amusing and entertaining her with other stories than
the tale of Reuben and the tramp cat which she gravely related to Alice
the first time the two were alone together.

“O Miss Penny, the days fly by as they never did before and I wake so
happy every morning that I am ashamed of myself!” Alice cried one
afternoon as she waited for Anna to come from the academy.

“Ashamed, Alice?”

The girl paled. “Yes, Miss Penny, because of my father. You know about
him?”

“Yes, dear, I know. At first I was sorry that people in the village
should know, but now I really think it best. After all, newcomers are
discussed just so much, and--of course there aren’t many newcomers
now-a-days--not that there ever were many. Anna’s family were the last
to move into Farleigh before you and your mother. That was when Freddy
was a baby--Freddy, you know isn’t the one who looks after my pony.
That’s Frank. He does very well, but of course Reuben taught him, and
Rusty’s brother--and of course, Anna’s--couldn’t help doing well. But I
felt as if I ought to sell both the cows. It’s a pity for Seth Miller
with all his work to have to keep the milking in mind. There’s only
the one cow--Mr. Mudge is keeping the other--and Seth thinks the world
of Reuben and knows Reuben would feel terribly to have the other cow
disposed of--I don’t mean killed of course, though that is the way they
speak of killing poor cats and kittens. And that reminds me, Alice. How
is yours?”

As Alice would have replied, a peculiar knock sounded on the door.
Alice asked if she should answer it. But Miss Penny, whose face had
lighted up, said that it was Mr. Langley, and that he would let himself
in.

“He raps in a peculiar way--it’s really a bar of music. He and Reuben’s
father always used it. He--O Mr. Langley, how good you are!”

“Good to myself, yes indeed. I am really self-indulgent when I come in
here, Miss Penny.”

“I appeal to you, Miss Lorraine,” he said as he shook hands with the
girl. “Do you consider it an act of goodness or the gratification of a
desire for refreshment to come to see Miss Penny?”

“It’s a case of receiving wholly on my part,” asserted Alice with a shy
smile for Miss Penny.

“I interrupted a conversation. Pray go on with it and allow me to
listen,” he begged.

“Dear me, Mr. Langley, I am ashamed to say that for the moment I can’t
recollect what we were discussing,” said Miss Penny in dismay.

Alice smiled, but wanly. “I was telling Miss Penny that I am really
too happy, Mr. Langley,” she said. “I am happier than I have ever been
before. As far back as I can remember, the days were always long, I got
tired of everything and was bored the greater part of the time. I cared
for nothing but my music, and I never enjoyed that as I do going about
with Anna and listening to Miss Penny and learning to make bread and
doughnuts. And--there’s poor mother at home thinking of--my father. And
I-I have to _make_ myself think of him.”

“But my dear Miss Lorraine, you are doing this in large part for your
mother. You are sitting at the feet of Miss Penny in order to learn how
to make one of the most attractive cottages ever built into a real
home for her. And while you are broadening your life with these new
influences which seem more congenial than those you have known before,
no doubt you are enriching your mother’s life as well? You tell her of
all that takes place, I dare say?”

“Everything. And she is interested and forgets--for a little. And Anna
goes in and--mother loves Anna already.”

He turned smilingly to Miss Penny. “Anna is more like you, Miss Penny,
after all, than any other of your foster children,” he said and then
went on talking to Alice.

As he rose to take leave, he told Alice he hoped her mother might meet
Miss Penny before long. At the door, he kept her a minute.

“Don’t feel guilty when you forget your father and don’t force yourself
to think of him, Miss Lorraine,” he said earnestly. “Open your whole
heart to the new life and help your mother in her much harder task of
reconciling herself to a new future. Write your father, and if he gets
the impression he should from your letters, he will conclude that your
life isn’t going to be spoiled and--why, that will surely make a great
difference to him.”

There was a blur before the girl’s eyes so that she couldn’t see the
minister’s figure at the gate. Instead of returning to the sitting-room
she stole upstairs for a few minutes of silence in Anna’s large, pretty
chamber where she was always free to go.

Entering the room, she started at sight of a figure on the bed. As she
saw that it was Anna and that her face was buried in the pillow, her
heart grew cold. What had happened. Or hadn’t anything happened? Was it
that, all the while the girl was devoted to other interests than her
own, some secret sorrow was eating at her heart?




CHAPTER VII


Early the following afternoon Anna Miller made her way to the parsonage.

She announced the fact immediately that she couldn’t stay long to-day.
For already the clever girl had, as she put it, ‘sized up’ the lady
of the parsonage and knew better than to wait until later and then
‘spring’ the unwelcome fact upon her.

“O Anna, with all the long week, counting Sunday, and with a long
forenoon on Saturday, it seems as if you might spare me Saturday
afternoon,” protested the invalid.

“I can usually, Mrs. Langley, but you see I am going away Monday
morning early and there’s my packing and ever so many things to
attend to besides going over home, as I always do on Saturday, to
see if ma’s clothes and pa’s ties and shirts and the boys’ are in
Sunday-go-to-meeting shape,” Anna explained.

She waited for Mrs. Langley to ask where she was going or to evince
some interest in her journey. Not that she was the sort of person to
crave such attention. But the more she saw of Mrs. Langley, the more
she realized how self-centered her life had made her. In a certain
sense, it wasn’t her fault. But for the sake of Mr. Langley, his wife
must somehow be induced to think of other folk or other concerns than
herself, her dead baby, and the baby’s tombstone. And in that the only
person she really had anything to do with was Anna it would have been
encouraging to have her show some faint interest in her comings and
goings when they did not lead to the parsonage, or the cemetery on
yonder hillside.

But Mrs. Langley’s only concern was for her precious Saturday.

“But you will surely be back before the end of the week, Anna?” she
asked.

“I suppose I shall,” said Anna soberly. “But I may not be able to come
here for a fortnight. I shall have a lot of studying to do to make up
my work at school.”

“Isn’t Mr. Langley on the school committee?” demanded his wife.

Wondering at her acquaintance with even so little of current history,
Anna told her that he was chairman.

“Very well. Then he can arrange so that you needn’t make up the time
and you can come here just the same.”

“O Mrs. Langley, I don’t think he could or would do that, and anyhow I
wouldn’t have him,” Anna protested. “For after all, I’m really crazy
about school. I believe I like it all the better for knowing the world
a bit. As a matter of fact, you know, I could give Mr. Phillips points.
And I couldn’t _not_ make up certain things. For example, there’s the
Peloponnesian War. The plague began yesterday and,--O dear, like as
not when I get back I shall find the whole bunch stark dead. And then
there are those poor Helvetians all packed up and ready to hike with
their babies and cattle and pups and duds and all,--and those blooming
Roman soldiers ready to drive ’em straight back. I’ve simply _got_ to
see what happened to them. They had pluck--and yet, I can’t for the
life of me understand how they had the heart to burn down their houses
and their fields of grain. I dare say it showed their faith in God, but
they might have wanted to show their grandchildren years afterwards
where they had lived.”

“I don’t remember ever hearing about them. Are they in the Bible,
Anna?” Mrs. Langley asked, and before Anna could answer, bade her tell
their tale.

Surprised and delighted, the girl complied. Not at all a scholar, Anna
Miller nevertheless gleaned all sorts of riches from text books that
are desert wastes to the majority of young folk. And now, relating the
history of the Helvetians so far as she had followed it, in the graphic
account Julius Caesar gives of the unhappy impulse towards migration of
these people pent up in an inland island, she made it as interesting as
a fairy tale to a child. Mrs. Langley listened spell-bound. And though
Anna was disappointed to have her hark back to her usual subject, even
the momentary interest in something foreign to it counted for something.

“It must have been hardest of all for them to leave their graveyards
behind them,” she murmured, “for mothers to leave their babies’ graves.”

“And widows their husbands’,” Anna added. “And yet, Mrs. Langley,
there’s worse than that. Now my friend that I am going back to the city
to see lost her husband in the summer and now she’s sick herself, and
there’s her baby. If she should--well, it must be no end harder for one
to think of dying and leaving one’s baby alone in the world than to
move away from somewhere and leave the grave of a baby whose soul is
all safe.”

“Your friend must be older than you, Anna,” Mrs. Langley observed
irrelevantly.

“Two years, but we were the best of friends. She was at the ribbons
with me at Mason and Martin’s and Joe was at the soda fountain. He was
the nicest boy--and the thinnest! My goodness! Matches would seem as
big as the pillars of the Squire Bennet place at Wenham compared with
his legs. He and Bessy were married and went to housekeeping in two
rooms and were happy as kings. Joe was sick after a while and Bessy
came back to work beside me. Then the baby came and Joe went back to
work before he was able. He looked so bum they wouldn’t have him at the
soda fountain but put him in the stock-room where his poor phiz, that
looked for all the world like an interrogation point, wouldn’t queer
the whole concern. It must have been awfully hard for him there, but he
stuck it out until last August when he died. And now poor Bessy thinks
she’s dying and wants to see me.”

“I hate to have you go,” said the invalid with some warmth, and even
thought to ask who was going with her.

“O, I’m going by my lone. I’m good for it. But I think I will put up my
hair so as to look more responsible.”

“O Anna, don’t do that. I wouldn’t have you do that for the world!”
cried Mrs. Langley. “I like it just as it is. You see it is just the
colour my baby’s would have been and I was in hopes hers would be
curly, too. I should never have braided hers, though.”

Anna forgot that she ought to be on her way home and pulled her braid
over her shoulder and looked at it admiringly.

“I wish you would undo it and let me see it all spread out,” Mrs.
Langley said almost eagerly. And Anna was more than ready to gratify
her curiosity.

Untying the bow at the end of the long, heavy, wavy plait, she loosed
the strands and spread out the silky yellow mass until it enveloped
her like a golden mantle. Mrs. Langley leaned towards her, gazing on
the splendour in fascination, reaching out presently to stroke it with
her lean witch’s fingers. And whenever Anna made a move to gather it
in she uttered a cry of protest. And the vain girl yielded and forgot
everything except to wish that there were a mirror in the room.

But when the clock struck five, she started, quite aghast. Seizing her
hat and jacket, she said an hasty farewell and fled, the cloud of her
hair all about her.

As she went, people rushed to their windows to see the girl’s wonderful
hair, gazing spell-bound until she was out of sight. Afterwards, when
they got their breath, some said the other Miller girl had assurance to
flaunt her single charm thus boldly. But no one so took the matter to
heart as the Reverend Russell Langley, who met her as he returned from
a call at the Hollow.

Anna hadn’t time even to pause, and Mr. Langley thought she was ashamed
to do so. He took it for granted that the girl had set out from home
with this almost immodest splendour of yellow tresses all about her
simply to display it, and he felt bewildered and ashamed and grieved.
He shook his head sadly. He had known that Anna was vain--everyone knew
it. But her vanity had always seemed innocent and harmless, a part
of her droll charm. The girl had seemed too unselfish, too eagerly
active in behalf of others, to have leisure or desire for deliberate
advertising of her own beauty. She was, he had to acknowledge now,
quite different from Rusty. He began to understand why people referred
to her as the other Miller girl.

Reaching home, he found, after much searching, a sermon on humility
he had preached fifteen years before. Putting aside the sermon he had
ready for the morrow, he began to revise this. Revision turned out to
mean re-writing practically the whole discourse, and it was midnight
before he rose from his desk. The new sermon was less severe and
dogmatic than the one of the man of thirty which it replaced, but its
tone was wholesome and effective. And though the preached hoped that
Anna Miller would not realise that her vanity had been the occasion of
it, he trusted that she would nevertheless take the precepts to heart.

As it was, Anna listened gravely, as she almost invariably did, to
every word of the sermon. But she did not forget to flop her yellow
braid over her shoulder and as the choir rose to sing, and her sweet,
true voice rang out, the girl was not unaware that she was conspicuous
for that as well as for her personal appearance.

But she had forgotten all that when she went in to see Mrs. Lorraine
that afternoon to thank her for allowing Alice to make it possible
for her to go to her friend. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Lorraine had
been shocked when Alice came home Friday evening and told her of the
offer she had made to take Anna’s place at Miss Penny’s while she was
away. She declared that Alice should not do it. The bitterness which
had seemed to disappear had come back, and Alice had been greatly
disturbed. Mrs. Lorraine had finally yielded grudgingly, but she felt
hurt and injured and there had been a perceptible coolness between
mother and daughter since. They had never been close together, but of
late they had been nearer to one another than ever before. The more
Alice associated with Anna and Miss Penny, the more yearningly her
heart went out towards her mother, and this coldness that was almost
estrangement hurt her keenly.

She was grateful that Anna did not feel any want of cordiality in
her mother. Mrs. Lorraine received her thanks quietly and when
Anna explained the situation listened intently and questioned her
sympathetically. And she asked, almost impulsively, if Anna wasn’t
tired out.

“It’s just that I seem pulled so many ways at once, Mrs. Lorraine,”
Anna said. “Really, I ought not to be at Miss Penny’s. With Rusty at
college, I ought to be at home. Ma and pa need a daughter there the
worst way. I get over all I can, but they’re so glad to see me and so
sorry to have me go just across the street that it breaks my heart. But
someone has to be with Miss Penny. She was goodness itself to Rusty and
to the whole family, and I love her as if she were my favorite aunt
of all and just love to be with her. And now there’s Mrs. Langley.
She’s queer. Dick’s hatband had nothing on her when it comes to being
odd. And yet I take to her and would enjoy sort of mothering her if it
didn’t take me away from Miss Penny and my own family. And then again,
there’s Mr. Langley.”

On a sudden, tears filled the girl’s eyes. But she smiled through them.

“It’s rum to be so popular, isn’t it Alice?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you
think I was Brother Atlas or Father Time? The fact is, I’m only the
other Miller girl trying to pretend I’m Charley-on-the-spot.”

Mrs. Lorraine bent and kissed her. “You are a dear, absurd, unselfish
child!” she cried warmly. “And if ever there’s anything Alice or I can
do to help you out in any way, you must come straight to us. Mustn’t
she, Alice?”

“Yes, indeed,” agreed Alice with shining eyes, and coming to her mother
kissed her shyly.

Both girls would have thought that Mrs. Lorraine had unbent as far as
possible. But she was to go yet further. On the afternoon of the first
day Alice spent with her, Miss Penny had Frank Miller drive her over to
Farleigh with the fat pony. She returned with Mrs. Lorraine, whom she
had persuaded to visit her as long as Alice stayed. Mrs. Lorraine was
as much surprised as her daughter, but somehow, there was no resisting
Miss Penny.

She expected to spend the greater part of her time in her chamber,
but she did no such thing though she was left free. The housework was
inconsiderable. Alice, who took to it strangely, loved to help Miss
Penny, who wasn’t willing to relinquish the whole. But Mrs. Lorraine
found herself wishing to be near the centre of things in the kitchen or
living-room and drifted thither before the first forenoon was over. It
seemed to her that the very thing her sore heart and worn nerves had
craved was to bask in the homely warmth of this simple, cosy household.
For the first day she sat in an arm chair with Silvertoes, who had
been included in the invitation, in her lap. But on the second, she
felt, after another wonderful night, so much alive that she wished
to be active. She said to Miss Penny that she should like to learn
to cook--to complete an education in domestic matters begun in her
childhood and interrupted by the receipt of a large inheritance which
drove her family off the farm. Wherefore, at Miss Penny’s suggestion,
Alice was sent off nutting, and the two women had a long, happy morning
together.

An inborn taste for the domestic and a really good foundation made Mrs.
Lorraine a still readier pupil than her daughter had been. Miss Penny’s
surprise at her skill drew forth a longer account of Mrs. Lorraine’s
early life. Miss Penny spoke of her own girlhood and other forgotten
details came back to her guest. And when Alice returned at noon of the
second day, she could scarcely credit what she saw and felt. Her mother
and Miss Penny appeared to be warm friends.

Anna had already taught Alice to love the out-of-doors, and though it
was less pleasant alone, she took advantage of her opportunity and
remained out all that she could, believing that her mother and Miss
Penny’s friendship would progress the more rapidly in her absence. Mr.
Langley called one day, and Mrs. Lorraine saw him and liked him. She
told her daughter what he had said of Richard Cartwright, the man who
had built their cottage, and expressed apprehension that he might find
a bare-looking place when he should call. Whereupon it came to Alice
that she might do something to make it look more attractive before they
returned to it.

She went over next day. As she sauntered towards Farleigh, she thought
of the man who had died before he had attained his heart’s desire. She
did not think of him as Reuben’s father except to wish that everyone
wouldn’t dwell so constantly upon the son as never to drop any hint to
gratify her hungry, rather mournful curiosity concerning the father.

He and Mr. Langley had been intimate friends, so that Mr. Langley
would be able to tell one all about him. Alice was pleased to reflect
that since her mother had met and liked Mr. Langley there was no bar
against her becoming more friendly with him. She wondered how long
she must wait before she should feel free to question him concerning
Richard Cartwright. The girl sighed as it came to her that he, too,
would most likely insist upon talking about Reuben instead. She would
probably hear the famous tale of the cat in the primeval pine tree
again and other less familiar incidents connected with the model youth;
but surely after he had exhausted the list--and she would be patience
itself--he would be ready to speak of the older and more interesting
Cartwright.

The outline of the cottage was charmingly picturesque. As Alice turned
into the lane to-day it struck her afresh and more strongly than ever.
As a matter of fact, it was the first time she had approached it
when her heart had not been burdened with the sense of her mother’s
unhappiness. Relieved of that burden, dimly aware, indeed, of her
mother’s very pleasant preoccupation and quite forgetting her father,
who had always been a stranger to her, Alice saw with new eyes and sped
on with a light step and a sense of well-being that she had never known
before.

The little porch with settees built in invited the comer to pause to
contemplate the outlook. Alice had never before had leisure to heed
or even to feel the invitation, but to-day she accepted gratefully.
Throwing herself down, she gazed happily out through a break in the
wall of foliage bordering the lane to the distant hills. But very
shortly, content changed to vague melancholy which became poignant.
The lilac and blue of those lovely folded hills convinced her that
Dick Cartwright had had even that in mind when he planned this cottage
and this porch. And he must have sat here where she was sitting now
on many a day at sunset and in the early dusk and under the evening
stars thinking of the organ, which must have seemed to come nearer and
nearer, and dreaming out melodies to play thereon.

The girl clasped her hands. How terribly sad his fate had been! He had
lost everything and died and been forgotten. Perhaps if he had had
the organ to comfort him, he wouldn’t have felt the death of his wife
so desperately, and wouldn’t have taken to drink and met his death.
If only someone had given it to him! There were so many people in the
world to whom the cost of a pipe organ would have meant little or
nothing. Why, once her own father could have given away any number of
them easier than she and her mother could dispense coppers to-day. She
could have done it herself.

Well, there was nothing to do now except to make some atonement for
the cruel fate that had come upon Richard Cartwright. It wasn’t her
fault, but it might have been, and the least she could do would be to
make whatever amends might be possible now. Being the daughter of a
convict, she would of course never marry, and she would devote her life
to the memory of this genius who had died betimes. She would fulfil her
duty to her mother but all her leisure thought and time and money (she
would earn some in a manner to be determined later) would go towards
reviving his memory and keeping it green. She would build the organ
just as he had planned and then--why not turn the cottage into a sort
of museum--the Richard Cartwright Memorial? Or perhaps better than a
museum, it might be a kind of musical centre where famous organists
would give concerts in his memory to the people of the countryside who
hadn’t appreciated him in life and where poor young men might come to
practise and improvise.

Immensely cheered, Alice took the keys from the pocket of her jacket
to enter the cottage and see if the whole lower floor could be made
into one apartment. But in her eagerness, she put the wrong key in the
lock. The second key, marked _Shop_ opened a small separate building
hidden in the shrubbery in the rear. There was a shop at Miss Penny’s
too, and she had said every house had had one in her girlhood, and this
one, which did not match the cottage, evidently belonged to an earlier
dwelling. It occurred suddenly to Alice that she might find something
there belonging to Dick Cartwright, some memorials to be put behind
glass in a cabinet near the organ.

The sun had dropped below the horizon, but the girl felt she could
make an hurried survey before dusk--indeed, she must. She ran quickly
through the thicket to the door of the shop and succeeded in turning
the key in the rusty lock. She stole softly in, awe rather than dread
hushing her steps.

The first view was disappointing. The place was piled full of old
boxes and crates and stacks of yellowed newspapers. But in the corner
she caught glimpses of odd chairs and stands and bits of furniture
which might prove of interest if one could ever get at them. A narrow
stairway with ladder-like ascent told her what a more observant person
would have implied from the window in the gable above the door--that
there was a second storey.

Catching her skirts in her hand, Alice climbed up. Her spirits rose
the moment her head cleared the railing above. She stepped directly
into a little chamber which had not been converted into a store room or
dumping ground and stood still to gaze about. It must have been left as
it was when Dick Cartwright went away.

There was a long carpenter’s bench with an iron contrivance fastened
at the end on one long side, and a smaller table opposite containing
rusty tins with a swinging shelf above holding buckets that had once
contained paint. A stand and a rocking chair stood near the window at
the further end and a dark bench or couch was drawn into the shadow
of the rafters. A secretary with drawers below the writing shelf and
shelves above with glass doors stood near the other window which looked
towards the house. A chair stood before it--how many years had it stood
there?--and careless of dust, Alice seated herself in it.

The glass doors were open. A few old, mildewed books stood on the
shelves. They might form a nucleus of the memorial library, but
Alice Lorraine sighed. For the nonce she had forgotten that Dick
Cartwright was dead. Half mechanically she pulled out one of the little
drawers below. A pile of letters met her view. The uppermost bore a
superscription. Either dusk or faded ink made it very faint, but the
girl read it--Mr. Richard Cartwright, Farleigh. They seemed to her the
saddest words she had ever read.

Forgetting everything else, the girl sat by the desk while the shadows
in the corners increased, encroaching more and more upon her island
of twilight. Then on a sudden, strange, nameless terror seized upon
her. She felt as she had once or twice felt in the night upon awaking
without apparent cause from sound sleep. Her hair seemed to rise from
her head and cold drops stood out on her brow and lips.

There was someone else in the room! For some seconds the girl sat
motionless, fearing to stir, to draw breath. Then she turned her head
ever so slightly and cautiously to see how near she was to the stair.
Two steps would bring her thither. She gazed as in fascination upon the
space for some moments, then slowly, breathlessly turned her head in
the opposite direction.

Nothing met her gaze and she grew bolder--or at least less fearful.
Turning about in the chair, though noiselessly, she surveyed the room.
There was nothing to be seen. She peered in every direction. The
corners were dark but not suspiciously so. It seemed as if there were
something odd about the look of the couch, but she could reach the
stairway, rush down and be out of the door before anyone or anything
could reach her thence. She rose softly to her feet.

For a little she stood still. Then she tiptoed quietly towards the dark
bench or couch beneath the rafters, peering before her all the while.
Suddenly she paused.

Her horror-stricken eyes made out the outlines of a dark figure on the
couch, an human being, a man who looked to her frightened gaze of giant
size. His eyes were closed. He was asleep--or dead?

Alice Lorraine stood still trying to think. If the man were asleep, he
was a drunken tramp and she must flee. If he were dead--O, so much more
must she fly! Not for the world would she be alone with a dead man, a
corpse. She must----

On a sudden the figure moved. The man’s eyes opened wide.




CHAPTER VIII


Before the man on the old couch realized the actuality of the situation
and sprang to his feet, his bewildered, incredulous eyes took in
perforce the vision of a tall, graceful young girl with dark bands of
hair wound about her small head and dark brows and eyes conspicuous in
the dusk because of the pallor of her face. But pale as she was, and
weak and faint and confused, Alice Lorraine’s fear took flight almost
immediately. The first movement of the unknown man startled only to
reassure her. He sprang to his feet, but only to shrink back into the
corner as if to allow her to fly if she would.

He waited a moment for that before he spoke. In the inconsiderable
interval, Alice, shaken as she was, saw the man so clearly that she
could have given a fairly accurate description of him if she had never
seen him thereafter. She saw that he was tall, thin and gaunt, but
that his face, worn as it was, was almost the face of a boy. That must
have been because of his eyes, which were deep set and wide apart, not
large nor dark of colour but at once shy, kind and appealing. As he
started to speak, it came to the girl that he was the very image of the
man upon whom her thoughts had been dwelling from the moment of her
leaving the Hollow, except that he was thinner, more worn, older (save
for his eyes) and much more shabby. But gaunt as the man was, he was no
ghost.

“I beg your pardon. I must have frightened you,” he murmured in a
gentle, deprecatory voice which would have been exactly the right sort
of voice for the dead musician and which would of itself have reassured
Alice had the dusk been so deep as to veil the kindliness of his
countenance.

“I was--startled,” the girl gasped. “I didn’t know--I never dreamed----”

“Of course you didn’t. It was unpardonable in me,” he declared.
“But I believed the house yonder was unoccupied. There was no one
there all yesterday and no light at night. I could see that there
had been someone living there, but I supposed whoever it was had
gone--_vamoused_ as we say in the West. I wouldn’t however,--at least
I hope I wouldn’t have tried to enter that in any case. But I know
this old shop as a boy and I couldn’t resist making an attempt to get
in here. Then--I got to thinking of old times and--I have walked many
miles during the last week--I threw myself down on the old lounge and
fell asleep.”

He raised his eyes almost ingenuously to her, for the moment a shy boy.

“I hate to think what a sad shock it must have been to you coming upon
me so,” he said contritely. “You look ready to drop. Won’t you sit
down? The chair over yonder by the stair railing is all right for I
dusted it with my pocket handkerchief.”

“Thank you,” the girl faltered, “but----”

He understood. “Naturally you would like to get out of here right away?
May I help you down? The stairway is steep and narrow and it is dark
below. But perhaps you would rather go alone?”

The girl’s heart throbbed strangely.

“I should like to get out into the air,” she said. “I can get down all
right, but----”

“May I come after and--explain myself?” he asked. “I want you to
understand and to feel safe from further shocks of the sort.”

She murmured a confused affirmative and started to feel her way down.

“Do you mind my shining a light?” he asked. “I have an electric
flash-light in my pocket, but please don’t think me a professional
burglar for all that.”

Alice tried to laugh, though she was still shaken. He lighted her down
and out, took her key, locked the door and handed it back to her.

“You live in the house?” he asked.

Alice explained that she lived there with her mother but that they
were visiting in the part of the village called South Hollow. She knew
that she shouldn’t be saying this to a stranger whom she had found in
the upper storey of the shop; but for herself she felt that there are
strangers and strangers.

“I know the Hollow,” he said. “I lived about here as a boy. Are you
going back now?”

Alice replies that she ought to be, but that she felt as if she
must sit down for a little first and would go up to the porch. He
accompanied her thither and asked if he might wait. And when she gave
the desired permission, he suggested that she get herself a wrap from
the house. As she complied with the suggestion, the girl seemed to
feel her mother’s horror. He unlocked the door for her and waited on
the walk below. When she came out and dropped down upon one settee, he
seated himself opposite.

“I want to apologise for my thoughtlessness which might have had
serious consequences,” he said quietly. “And I give you my word that
I will not come near the place again so that you needn’t feel nervous
about coming in at any time. And--neither need your mother. I suppose
you will tell her?”

“No, I don’t think I will,” said the girl slowly. “It would frighten
her unnecessarily and what’s the use?”

“None if you feel so,” he said. “I confess that I shall be very glad if
you do not, though I wouldn’t stand in the way of your doing so if you
feel it right. As a matter of fact, I don’t want anyone to know I am
about here--or that anyone is about who is not here ordinarily.”

“I won’t mention it,” she said.

“You are very good,” he returned simply.

For a little there was silence between them. Then he spoke.

“I really want to stay about for a little,” he began deprecatingly. “I
have only just come, and--perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I promise to
keep away from here? I have been away a long time. All sorts of things
have happened to me in the interval and also, I dare say, to the people
in Farleigh I used to know. I am living and working in the Middle West.
I saved up money to take a vacation and come East and look around. I
don’t want people to see me but I want to try to see some of those I
used to think a lot of. You will believe me, won’t you, when I say that
I have no other purpose in mind?”

“Of course I will,” the girl cried warmly.

“Thank you. It might well look queer to you for me to be skulking
about, but I simply cannot let anyone know anything about me, and yet
I long above all things to find out about old friends--who is alive
and--and all that. I thought it would be simple, for it is a very long
time and I have changed so that I felt I was safe. But I came upon a
drummer in New York who had known me only slightly and he recognised
me. That took away my nerve. I couldn’t bluff now. So there’s nothing
to do but to spy around nights. I can only see who’s here and who----”

“If you don’t see them you won’t think they’re dead?” protested the
girl.

“The ones I care for would be dead if they weren’t here,” he said
quietly.

He said this so exactly as Dick Cartwright would have said it, that it
came to Alice Lorraine that it was not unlikely that he was a relative
of the dead man. He looked enough like him--or like the image in
Alice’s mind which people who had known him had furnished material
for--to be his brother. He wasn’t old enough to be his father nor young
enough to be his son. Suppose it was really Dick Cartwright that the
stranger had gone through so much to come and look up? How terribly sad
to find him dead! But if that should be the case, it would, perhaps,
be the kindest thing to tell him at once. As she felt for words to
introduce the subject, it came to the girl that he would feel somewhat
comforted to hear of her idea of a memorial.

“I wonder,” she began almost eagerly, then started again quietly. “The
man that built this house--the shop was built years earlier, they tell
me--he was--I wonder if he was here in your day? His name was Richard
Cartwright.”

“O yes, I knew Cartwright,” he returned not at all enthusiastically.

“You may not have heard--that he is dead?” she said softly.

“I understood he was. He came to a bad end, I believe?”

“A sad end,” she amended with a trace of indignation. “He was killed in
a railway accident.”

“But he was himself a wreck long before that, I believe,” he remarked.
“However, you, being a stranger, would not have heard I suppose. If you
hadn’t come to live in his house, you would never have heard of him at
all and then only because it is a crazy-built house.”

“It’s a charming house,” the girl declared.

“It is attractive to look at,” he agreed, peering through the dusk.
“But--he is pretty well forgotten by this time, I dare say?”

“Well, if he is, it isn’t fair! It isn’t fair at all!” she cried.

He had nothing to say.

“Mr. Langley, the minister, whom everybody looks up to, thought ever
so much of Mr. Cartwright. I don’t believe he has forgotten him,” she
asserted.

“Mr. Langley! You know Mr. Langley!” he exclaimed. “O tell me of him,
please.”

“I have only seen him to speak to him once. But he is--O very
impressive--I mean you take to him and feel he’s wonderful just as
those who have always known him do.”

“How does he look? But I shall see him. I must. I’ll see him to-night.
Does--but I ought not to let you stay here longer. It’s dark already.
My name is John Converse. May I ask to whom I am indebted for this
kindness?”

“I am Alice Lorraine,” she said, rising reluctantly.

He asked if he might walk to the Hollow with her. The girl hesitated,
wondering if it were safe for him.

“I am sorry I am so shabby, Miss Lorraine,” he said. “I have decent
clothes over at Marsden Bridge where I am staying--I didn’t dare risk
Wenham--but I am less likely to be recognized in these.”

They set out at once. But they had gone only a few rods beyond the lane
when the sound of light footsteps came clearly to them in the absolute
stillness of the damp autumn evening.

“That’s Mr. Langley,” he said quietly. “I’ll have to leave you. He’s
the one person I dare not meet even in black night.”

“O wait!” begged Alice in agonised whisper, panic stricken at the
thought that she would never see him again. But at that moment a dark
figure appeared in sight. Alice pressed the keys into the stranger’s
hand. “To-morrow at four. I’ll come to the shop,” she whispered. John
Converse disappeared into the bushes by the roadside.

It was barely a minute before Mr. Langley had stopped and was calling
her by name.

“Why Miss Lorraine, is it indeed you?” he cried, surprised to see the
girl out alone after dark. He bade her come back as far as the Smiths’
with him that he might get their horse and drive her back to Miss
Penny’s, giving her no opportunity to refuse.

They were hardly in the carriage when Alice turned to the minister.

“Mr. Langley, I heard lately of a man returning to his birthplace
after years of absence longing to find out all about the friends of
his boyhood and to see them if he could do it secretly. How would you
account for such a thing?”

Though Mr. Langley was quite accustomed to being bombarded with odd
questions, sometimes hypothetical, sometimes otherwise, he hesitated
now. He could not say to this girl whose father was in prison that
the obvious solution of her problem was that the man had committed a
crime and was a fugitive from justice or was ashamed of his record. But
before the pause became awkward an happy suggestion came to his mind.

“Well, it might be another case of Enoch Arden,” he said. “This man
might have been missing for so long that he had been taken for dead.
That used to be very common in sea-faring places and among sea-faring
people. His wife or sweet-heart may have married another. Or I can
imagine a man being unwilling to make himself known when relatives have
come into possession of his more material property.”

Alice’s heart leaped. She remembered Enoch Arden only vaguely, but
enough to feel a thrill at her heart at the thought of re-reading it in
her bed that night. There was a copy of Tennyson’s complete poems in
the book-case of the room she occupied--which was Reuben’s old room.

The Smiths’ horse was a fine, strong creature which did not get
sufficient exercise, but he didn’t fancy starting out just at supper
time any more than Miss Penny’s fat pony, and he showed his reluctance
plainly. It came to Alice that this was her chance to find out more of
Richard Cartwright. She had said she would seize her first opportunity.
Besides, Mr. Converse had spoken slightingly of him. It wouldn’t be bad
to have Mr. Langley’s own word as to his respect and admiration for the
dead genius.

“O Mr. Langley, I have--well living in the cottage where he lived
I suppose it is natural for me to wonder about Mr. Cartwright,” she
observed. “But--no one seems to have anything to say about him. Of
course, he can’t be forgotten?”

“His son has rather overshadowed Cartwright’s memory,” Mr. Langley
remarked quietly.

“One certainly hears enough of _him_,” the girl remarked.

“O Miss Lorraine, I hope you and your mother aren’t getting the
impression that Reuben is anything of a prig,” he protested, “for he
isn’t. He is--well, he is four-square, that boy is, Miss Lorraine, and
I am happy to think that you will see him and judge for yourself in the
Christmas holidays.”

“I shall be pleased, I’m sure,” she murmured conventionally. “But I
can’t help being more interested in the father,--being so musical and
wanting a pipe organ in his house and dying before it ever came to him.
You knew him well, Mr. Langley?”

“Yes, I knew--and loved the man well,” he said sadly. “He was a
charming fellow, the best of companions and friends.”

“And he played--well?”

“To me he seemed almost a genius,” he replied, and Alice heard herself
repeating it triumphantly to John Converse.

“And yet--people have forgotten him already!” she exclaimed. “One would
think--O Mr. Langley, has there ever been any idea of a memorial for
him here in Farleigh?”

“O no, nothing of the kind,” he said in some surprise.

“But don’t you think there should be?” she cried.

“In his case, I think it is better as it is,” he said.

Alice’s heart sank. O dear, how terribly strict Mr. Langley was!

“You mean because he drank?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t mean that,” he said slowly. “I believe his taking to
drink as he did shows weakness, but I cannot judge Dick Cartwright too
severely for that. His artistic temperament made him different. Grief
was truly more terrible to him and temptation stronger than to less
gifted mortals. And when he went away and deserted his little son he
was hardly a responsible person.”

Alice was silent until lights twinkling in the Hollow reminded her that
she had only a few minutes. “But surely, Mr. Langley, you wouldn’t have
him forgotten?” she asked.

Mr. Langley realised that Alice Lorraine was a girl of some force.
She was apparently intent upon obtaining justice to Dick Cartwright’s
memory--which must not be.

“It’s this way, Miss Lorraine,--for I am going to tell you something
in strict confidence. It is for the best that Richard Cartwright be
forgotten save in the minds of a few friends. He died in a railway
wreck, it is true, but he was not an innocent victim. I myself thought
him to have been at first. I wrote to a friend in Chicago hoping he
might secure details which might be of comfort to Cartwright’s friends
and later to Reuben. But I regretted my action. My friend learned that
Cartwright had turned ruffian and desperado. He was a member of a gang
that killed the mail clerk and the engineer and thus wrecked the train.”

He sighed. He didn’t say that if Cartwright had not been killed he
would to-day be serving life sentence in prison with others of the gang
who had escaped. But he felt compelled to add: “I dislike to believe
it and do not, but one of the men said that Cartwright fired the shot
that killed the mail clerk. So I do not wish any attempt to revive the
remembrance of Reuben’s father.”

“Of course not,” cried Alice. “I understand, and--thank you, Mr.
Langley. I am sorry to have awakened sad memories for you.”

The house was in darkness but Alice did not mind that. Relieved at the
absence of Miss Penny and her mother she rushed upstairs and removing
her wraps threw herself on the bed, her thoughts a wild chaos. She did
not know how long she had been there when she heard her name called
from below.

Going down, she found Anna’s brother Frank who had lighted the lamp.

“I guess you were scared about your mother and Miss Penny,” the boy
said sympathetically, gazing at her white face. “They thought you’d
be, but they clean forgot. They’re over to our house. Anna’s come home
and--something terrible’s happened to her!”




CHAPTER IX


On the afternoon following Alice Lorraine’s strange adventure, Mr.
Langley sat at his study window gazing out over the pickets of the
paling towards the bushes and scrub trees which marked the line of
the river, but which, being mainly oaks, still hid the stream itself
from view. He was ready for Sunday even to the point of having tidied
his desk so that it looked unfamiliar. He was conscious--vaguely
conscious--of working better and more easily of late--with more spirit.
It might be that it was only a sort of rebound after the period of
depression into which he had fallen when someone had reminded him of
the fact that Ella May, whom he had always thought of as a little
girl, would now have been a woman grown, older than her mother had
been at her birth, and he had lost the child-companion of his thoughts
and wanderings. Even so, something must have happened from without
himself to pull him out of that slough. That something was, of course,
connected with his wife’s new interest in life--at least in so much of
life as was represented by the other Miller girl.

It was probably recollection of Anna that made him think at first
glance that the figure coming along the avenue at a distance beyond
the lane was Anna, but, looking again, he saw that it was someone
else--one of the grammar school children, he fancied, though he
couldn’t seem to place her. He didn’t try long, for as his eyes dwelt
upon that particular spot, something disconcerting came suddenly to
him. Last evening as he had walked slowly homewards just before full
darkness, he had looked up at this point to see approaching him the
figures of a man and woman or youth and maiden whom one glance showed
to be intensely interested in one another or in a common subject and
who seemed to be strangers to him. Then he had utterly forgotten them.
For he had been arrested by a loud chattering in a tree at the roadside
and had gone to see why a squirrel should be awake at that time of day.
Then, walking on, he had met Alice Lorraine. She was alone, but--the
minister shook his head. It seemed now to him that the figure of the
girl he had seen walking with the strange man was Alice Lorraine.

And yet--it couldn’t be. The man and woman weren’t figments of his
imagination, he was sure of that. They must, however, have turned back
at that point for some reason. And quite likely he had stood looking
for and calling to the squirrel longer than he had realised and Alice
had come along meantime.

The click of his gate recalled his thoughts sharply. On a sudden the
man sat erect and stared--almost glared at the strange yet familiar
figure he saw coming slowly up the flagged walk. For an instant he
could not believe it--could not credit the evidence of his eyes. Then
he recollected the preceding Saturday and--O, that sermon of Sunday!
And he groaned within his heart. Had that child been so affected as
to sacrifice her vanity thus? It was worse than absurd. It was cruel,
monstrous!

He went to the door to let her in.

“Anna, take off your hat,” he bade her, his voice stern through
repressed feeling.

Obeying silently, Anna Miller stood before him with downcast eyes. She
looked like a boy,--a handsome lad of perhaps a dozen years. Her long
yellow hair had been shorn. Parted at one side, the thick, short unruly
locks curled about her peaked face and pipe-stem neck, emphasizing the
childish delicacy of her features, the long curling eyelashes and the
sweet curve of her mouth. Later Mr. Langley realised this, and the fact
that though Anna looked younger, she had somehow quite lost whatever it
was in expression or countenance that likened her to a doll. He, who
had never acknowledged that likeness while it existed, became aware of
it after it had been displaced by something else. But at the moment the
loss seemed irreparable and entire; the hard ugly fact seemed quite
without extenuation.

With an effort the girl raised her eyes and smiled.

“I wonder if Mrs. Langley wants to see me?” she asked.

“She always wants to see you, Anna,” he returned half absently,
frowning unconsciously. But as she made a move to go in, he arrested
her.

“Why have you done this foolish thing, tell me, child!” he demanded
reproachfully.

“Because--well--” Anna choked--“Honestly, Mr. Langley, I _can’t_
tell you now,” she faltered. “Ma cried and Miss Penny and even Mrs.
Lorraine, and Pa took to the wood-pile. It’s only--a sort of a joke.”

“A poor sort of joke, it seems to me,” he remarked and betook himself
to his study.

Mrs. Langley cried, too. But whereas one would have deprecated Anna’s
mother’s tears and Miss Penny’s, it was probably good for Mrs. Langley
to forget herself for the moment and be really moved by something
beyond her immediate narrow horizon. It was, perhaps, fortunate for her
that after all those arid, selfish years she had tears of sympathy to
weep.

Anna found her looking better. Since the girl had begun to visit her,
Mrs. Langley had slept at night and suffered less and less pain during
the day. This afternoon she wore an old-fashioned lace fichu over her
ugly Mother Hubbard gown which so relieved the sharpness of her face
and the yellow tone of her skin, that Anna had no hesitation in kissing
her when she saw that it was expected of her.

But as she stood before her, suddenly Mrs. Langley raised both hands
and cried out.

“Anna Miller! Your lovely hair!” she exclaimed incredulously, “you’ve
had it all cut off!” And covering her face with her hands she began to
weep.

Anna, who had had a hard week and a difficult home-coming, was startled
and distressed. She stood quite still with tightly clasped hands. It
might kill an invalid to cry like that. If they knew, they would never
let her in again. What if Big Bell should come in now--or Mr. Langley?
How angry he would be! Anna hadn’t supposed he had it in him until she
had heard his voice to-day. He was probably thinking then that it would
be a shock to his wife, and that she was a hateful thing not to have
thought of it.

Poor Mrs. Langley! Her shoulders were shaking. Anna went closer and put
her arm about her gently.

“Don’t cry. Don’t feel badly about me, Mrs. Langley,” she begged
softly. “It’ll grow out again. I’m awfully sorry, but honest and true,
I couldn’t help it.”

Mrs. Langley uncovered her face.

“Couldn’t help it?” she repeated wonderingly, adding with more spirit
than she had ever exhibited before since Anna had known her. “Do you
mean that someone cut it off by force and stole it? O, Anna, if they
did that, I’ll have Mr. Langley put them in prison right away!”

Anna couldn’t help laughing. But she said to herself it wasn’t bad for
Mrs. Langley to believe her husband was Charley-on-the-spot, whether he
really was or not.

“Well, no’m, not just that,” she said, “but----”

“But what?” demanded the invalid rather sharply.

“I haven’t told anyone yet,” replied Anna softly. “I just let them
think that I--just did it, you know, and that I like it better. I
thought they wouldn’t mind so much as if they really knew. But I’ll
tell you if you want me to.”

Mrs. Langley gazed at the girl wonderingly. Anna was pale and there
were bluish shadows under her eyes which looked very big and rather
wistful to-day. Already Mrs. Langley began to feel that if she could
but forget that shimmering mass of gold about her shoulders of a week
since, she might like her even better as she was now. The short locks
curled so gracefully and stood out so picturesquely about her little
face and slender throat that her head was like a bright, loose-petalled
flower upon its stem.

“Do tell me about it, Anna, if you’re not too tired,” she said
wistfully, endeavoring rather vainly to soften her harsh voice. “No,
don’t sit there, poor child. You shall have this soft rocking chair for
your sharp little bones.” And before Anna realised what she was doing,
she had risen and forced the girl into her own padded rocker.

Of course Anna would not keep it, but she drew another close. She
rather shrank from making the explanation; but she said to herself
sagely that it might do Mrs. Langley good to hear it, and it might
forward a certain scheme she had in mind--a wonderful plan that was to
crown all her endeavors and make everyone happy. Apparently it hadn’t
hurt her to cry, for she had hopped out of that rocking chair and
whisked her into it as nimbly and neatly as any strong person could
have done. _She should worry!_

“Well, Mrs. Langley, you see I found my friend Bessy very bad off,”
she began. “It was all very sad because Joe her husband wasn’t long
dead, and there was the baby, little Joe, Junior, and her chum Hazel
sticking by her through everything and supposing she had lost her job,
though they took her back again. I slept with Hazel Monday night and
woke up towards morning and found her crying. It seemed that Bessy had
enough laid up to bury her; but she’d been sick so long that Hazel had
just had to break into it, what with medicine and the baby’s milk, and
of course she had to have something to eat herself or she couldn’t have
done for Bessy. And here it was almost gone, and Bessy didn’t know it
had been touched, and was feeling so secure about it. You might not
think anyone would mind, Mrs. Langley, but there’s something frightful
in the idea of being buried by charity.”

“I suppose so,” Mrs. Langley assented absently.

“Charity down there doesn’t mean what it does with us, you see,--public
charity isn’t like the charity of the Bible, you know.”

Mrs. Langley nodded impatiently.

“Well, I managed to get Hazel chirked up so that she went to sleep,
and I lay staring at the smoky ceiling and wondering what to do. Then
suddenly I had a hunch. And the very first thing in the morning I went
down to Mason and Martin’s and talked with a woman in the hair goods
I used to know that had first put me wise about such things. She gave
me a tip and the people she sent me to offered me sixty-five dollars
for my hair--the braid was almost a yard long and about as thick at
one end as at the other, you know. Then I went back and told Hazel I
could get sixty-five dollars for her at any moment. She thought it was
a diamond ring or family jewels I could put in soak, which wouldn’t
of course mean much at a time like that, and she cheered right up.
And Bessy seemed to feel a change and to be really better, and we
all talked about old times in the store and laughed a lot. But that
was Bessy’s last day. She died in the night. In the morning I went
down--and got the money.”

Unconsciously the girl drew a deep sigh even as she forced a little
plaintive smile. Mrs. Langley sighed yet more deeply. She wasn’t
sufficiently practical to ask any of the obvious questions or to
suggest the alternatives with which others were to confront and
confound the girl even though they were quite futile now that the deed
was done.

“It was good of you, Anna,--it was a beautiful thing to do,” she
acknowledged, “only I am afraid you will be sorry.”

“I should worry. It will be good for me, and a lot less strain on the
looking glasses,” the girl owned, shrugging her shoulders. “And anyhow,
Mrs. Langley, I never could be sorry, after seeing real things like
I saw there: Bessy only barely two years older than I and Hazel just
my age, and--O, I’m so thankful it was so long and not thin and that
I had sense to think of it in time. Honest and true, I don’t believe
I could ever be happy again or sleep nights if we had had to call
in--outsiders. But you never could understand that without being right
there.”

Mrs. Langley sighed again.

“Of course I shall sort of miss it,” Anna rattled on. “I used to brush
it at night, have it all over me, you know, and Rusty would tease me.
And I simply loved the feel of that fat braid flopping about. But it’s
just as well, for I sha’n’t have so much time now.”

“You look--O, Anna, at this moment you look just as my baby would
have looked when she began to run about!” cried Mrs. Langley almost
enthusiastically. “But please don’t put on your hat now. You have only
just come.”

“I really must. Ma thought I ought not to come at all, but I felt as if
I must get it over--about my hair, you know.”

“Then you’re staying at home,” remarked Mrs. Langley with her
occasional acuteness as to the present moment. “When do you go back to
Miss Penny?”

The girl hesitated. “Not for some little time, Mrs. Langley.”

It would have seemed that Mrs. Langley _must_ have asked the desired
question. But the invalid was thinking of herself.

“O Anna, how very nice! You won’t be nearly so busy, then, and can get
over here oftener. I wish you would come regularly in the middle of the
week, too. Can you?” she asked promptly.

Anna sighed. “The fact is, I’m going to be a heap busier--that’s why
I’m staying at home,” she returned obscurely. “But Mrs. Langley, some
of the ladies would just love to drop in to see you.”

“Anna Miller, I don’t know what you are thinking of,” Mrs. Langley
complained feebly, falling back in her chair. “I have been an invalid
since my baby died. I couldn’t endure seeing anyone.”

“You see me.”

“That’s very different. Besides, you took an interest in my baby’s
grace. No one else did that. Even the baby’s father----”

“O Mrs. Langley,” Anna interrupted quickly, “Mr. Langley doesn’t--he’s
a real true-blue Christian, you know. He doesn’t think of Ella May as
dead, and so----”

“Never mind that. But I wish that if you aren’t going back to Miss
Penny’s you’d come right here and stay all the time.”

Anna could scarcely restrain a groan. “I’m needed at home,” she said
briefly and drew her jacket together. But after all, the real business
of her call hadn’t been touched upon.

“You knew that there was a baby, too--little Joe, Junior?” she asked.

Mrs. Langley assented without interest.

“He was left pretty much alone, poor little lamb, wasn’t he?”

“I suppose the girl Hazel would look after him?”

Anna’s eyes flashed. “She makes seven dollars and a half a week--that’s
every penny she has to live on. Even if she could work with him on her
hands, she couldn’t buy his milk with what was left each week.”

“O, I see. I suppose she will put him in an orphan asylum?”

“Orphan asylum nothing!” cried Anna and waited a minute. Then as Mrs.
Langley did not speak she said casually: “I brought him home with me.”

Mrs. Langley sat up straight. “Anna Miller!” she exclaimed.

“There was nothing else to do and anyhow I wanted to. The little beggar
needs fresh air and sunshine and--Farleigh.”

“You don’t mean that you’re going to keep him?” Mrs. Langley protested.

Anna’s heart sank. She had truly decided to bring the baby home because
there had seemed no alternative. But no sooner was she out of the
sadness and confusion and settled in the train than she had realised
the fitness, the inevitability of her action. She was bringing the
baby straight to Mrs. Langley. A baby was exactly what Mrs. Langley
needed and wanted and what Mr. Langley would enjoy most of anything.
If she had chosen, she would probably have had a girl, but she wasn’t
sure that that wouldn’t have been a mistake. And though Anna, who was
wild over all young creatures, was attached to little Joe already, she
decided to hand him over to Mrs. Langley as soon as the transfer could
be affected. But even before she had come to the parsonage to-day, she
had realised that it wasn’t altogether the simple matter it would seem
to be and that it wasn’t to be accomplished without finesse. Still she
had expected one visit to finish the negotiations,--and she had nearly
missed mentioning it at all!

“I hardly know,” she faltered. “That is, I’m going to keep him
of course until I find a good home for him. I’d like to keep him
always only--ma wasn’t so tremendously pleased to have him added to
her family, and of course I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking him to
Miss Penny’s though she would have taken him in forever if I had
said the word. However, I own that it was something of a surprise
to ma--springing the baby on her at the same time she saw my
Sampson-Delilah hair-cut. But heaps of people would give their heads to
get a nice baby ready-made just at the cunning age, or nearly, and with
the worst of his teething over.”

She waited anxiously. Mrs. Langley only stared at her.

“People that haven’t any children or people that have lost
children,--lost them when they were babies, ought to jump at such a
chance,” she went on, longing to have Mrs. Langley ask some question,
however reluctantly, concerning the child. But the invalid held up a
protesting hand.

“Anna! I would never have believed that you would speak in that
unfeeling way about--the loss of a baby!” she cried.

“I didn’t mean to,” said Anna quickly. “I just wanted--perhaps Mr.
Langley might know of some good home where they would take in the
little fellow. Would you mind telling him about little Joe and asking
him?”

“Mind! Of course I would mind, Anna Miller! I--I never could get
through it!”

“Then I suppose I shall have to see him myself,” remarked Anna
tentatively.

“Anna, Mr. Langley is an overworked man,” said his wife rather
surprisingly. “He has a great deal to do as chairman of the school
committee, besides all his church business. Don’t go to him with any
such thing as that. And--O Anna, don’t say anything more about it to
me. Don’t mention the matter at all when you come next Saturday--or
Wednesday, if you can come on Wednesday. I’m all upset.”




CHAPTER X


In the confusion and excitement which prevailed at the two houses in
the South Hollow in which this narrative is concerned, Alice Lorraine’s
secret perturbation either remained unnoticed or was attributed to the
cause which affected them all. But very shortly Mrs. Lorraine, who had
come out of her shell almost unbelievably in her week of companionship
with Miss Penny, so that now in the crisis she was a very tower of
strength not only to Miss Penny but to the Miller household as well,
began to be greatly troubled by her daughter’s demeanour. She had
rejoiced at the manner in which the girl had bloomed under Anna’s
influence, and had been amazed not only at her capacity for learning
and power of adaptability but at the generous warmth and sweetness
of her nature. She had believed that a real transformation had taken
place. Wherefore she was the more disappointed to discover that, at a
moment of crisis, Alice really wasn’t the useful, helpful, sympathetic,
understanding girl she had seemed. Anna’s arrival, shorn of her
wonderful hair and accompanied by the strange, unattractive, almost
uncanny baby, had upset Miss Penny’s household and all but devastated
the Millers’. And Alice, who might have cheered the former immensely
and have been of great service in restoring equanimity to the other,
seemed completely unstrung by the excitement and a subject rather than
a source of aid.

On Saturday morning, when she caught sight of Alice, who supposed
herself alone, wringing her hands as she stood by a window of the
living-room looking north, Mrs. Lorraine sighed and said to herself,
in Anna’s expressive phrase, that it seemed to be ‘up to’ her. And
summoning all her powers, some of which had been awakened of late and
others which had lain dormant almost all her life, Henrietta Lorraine
started in good earnest to bring some sort of order out of chaos.

She began with Miss Penny. It did not take long to reconcile that
philosophical and optimistic little lady to the loss of the yard of
silken tresses; and after a bit Mrs. Lorraine convinced her that Anna
would soon pick up again now that she was at home, would regain at
least as many pounds as she seemed to have lost, and would lose the
hurt, mournful look that close association with death in such sad
circumstances had left in her merry eyes. Moreover, the care of the
baby need not fall wholly upon her. There were plenty of people about
to help.

“The fact is, Mrs. Lorraine, Anna knows of people that will take the
child,” Miss Penny owned. “That’s the queer part of it--she wanted a
baby for these very people. Of course, she wouldn’t have had--but after
this afternoon--it’s Saturday, you know--I can probably tell you all
about it. And--O Mrs. Lorraine, I hope you won’t feel that you must
leave me right away. I have enjoyed having you here so much. And it
is such a relief to have an older person to talk to now all this has
happened. Dear me! it’s almost like having Reuben back--and I have only
known you a week.”

Mrs. Lorraine smiled. “We will stay as long as you are alone, Miss
Penny,” she assured her. “There is nothing to call us back after all to
that bare little cottage.”

“Then--O Mrs. Lorraine, why not spend the winter with me?” Miss Penny
cried eagerly. “It would make me so happy. You could have a separate
sitting-room, if you liked and--O, you would be here Christmas to see
Reuben! And Anna ought to be at home while Rusty’s away, anyhow. It is
so hard on her mother lending her to me. I feel troubled about it all
the time--and yet, I cannot get on alone. And of course I would pay
Alice just as I do Anna so that it needn’t make any difference and you
can do your embroidery as well here as--O Mrs. Lorraine, we could get
back my other cow and make butter! We both love to do it and I am sure
you could make more money in that way and--O don’t say no! Dear me! I
wish Mr. Langley would come in!”

“I won’t say no, and I will think it over. And we will stay on anyhow
until Anna gets rested, and so we may as well get the cow back in the
shed and begin making butter,” returned Mrs. Lorraine quietly though
not without secret excitement.

At dinner, Alice could not eat and her mother was distressed.
Afterwards she persuaded Miss Penny to lie down and then told Alice to
go to her room to rest. Not long afterwards the girl appeared in the
living-room in her prettiest suit with a jaunty little hat over her
dark plaits. Mrs. Lorraine looked up in some surprise.

“You are going out, Alice?”

“Yes, mother, I want--I am going for a walk. I think--I will walk down
to the cottage and bring back--some things.”

“But I can’t go with you and I don’t like your going into that empty
house alone.”

“O it’s perfectly safe. They say it’s safe everywhere about Farleigh,”
murmured Alice uneasily.

“Alice, you must not do it,” declared Mrs. Lorraine with new
decision--for it was wise and kind and _motherly_.

“Very well, I won’t go in,” said Alice in an odd voice.

Her mother looked at her. “You are restless, dear. You are more upset,
now, over Anna’s escapade even than Miss Penny at her age. You feel
as if you wanted to get away from everything for a little and I don’t
blame you. But--we can’t do that any more, dear, you and I. That is
what we have always done, though it isn’t your fault. And anyhow we
have to make up now. Let me tell you what to do. Miss Penny says Anna
feels obliged to go over to the parsonage this afternoon. Suppose you
go over to the Millers’ and stay until she comes back? You can help
take care of the baby. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I’ll go right over,” said Alice, and would have started but her mother
arrested her.

“Hadn’t you better change your suit, Alice? To-morrow is Sunday, and if
you get it creased there’d be no chance to press it to-night.”

Already Alice had expended considerable nervous energy on the subject
of her dress. At one moment, she had felt as if she should don her
poorest gown out of consideration for the shabbiness of the stranger.
Again, that had seemed a shabby thing to do and she had decided to wear
her most attractive things to accord, not with the stranger’s garb but
with his manner and bearing. Then she would think of the dusty shop and
waver. She might never have any more new clothes and perhaps it was
foolish to risk spoiling a really handsome suit for the sake of making
a good appearance before a stranger whom she didn’t know whether she
liked and whom she would probably never see after to-day.

Then she said that she knew that she liked him. And besides, she had to
have excitement after having had that beautiful, romantic image of Dick
Cartwright so cruelly shattered before her eyes. She didn’t know how
she should bear that if it wasn’t for looking forward to seeing John
Converse. And she _would_ see him again after to-day. She would have
to--for she meant to help him in his quest. And to-day she was to be
as nice as she knew how to be and as interested in helping him plan,
and she would also look as well as it was in her power to look, so that
altogether it would seem pleasant to him or not boresome to see her
again.

She said now to her mother that she would be careful not to muss her
skirt, and Mrs. Lorraine did not protest further. But she breathed a
sigh of relief as she saw her at the Miller’s gate. She felt that Alice
would be all right after an hour with the baby. For though he wasn’t a
very attractive baby, he appealed to Mrs. Lorraine. He was quiet, he
didn’t cry nor fuss, and he was a baby-creature.

But he wasn’t to have a chance that day. For not long after, the two
girls left the house together. Alice had explained that her mother sent
her over to help but that she had planned to go to the cottage to get
the keys she had left there the day before. Anna declared that the baby
was asleep and that there was nothing to do, and begged her to come
along and tell her on the way of what had happened during her absence.

“I can’t get a sane, sensible word out of anyone. Braids of yellow hair
and orphan babies are the only subjects people will mention to-day,”
she added drolly and yet a bit plaintively. “And I’m fed up with the
matter of yellow hair, and if I am going to talk about babies, it’s
with people that appreciate their fine points better than anyone I have
seen thus far.”

As they parted at the lane, Alice begged Anna not to say anything about
her having come to the cottage. Anna assented without question and
went on to the parsonage.

Alice Lorraine stole softly up the lane. There was no one in sight and
no sound. She was earlier than the hour she had named and she went
round the house and sat down on the step of the kitchen porch. After a
little she stole part way down the overgrown path to the shop and back
again. The shop looked as empty as the house,--nay, emptier. The girl
was convinced that there was no one there. And her heart grew cold at
the thought that four o’clock might come and yet bring no one.

Suppose he shouldn’t come? John Converse had the key not only to the
shop but to the house. Suppose he had been--well, the sort of person
her mother, for example, might guess him to be upon hearing the story?
He wasn’t, but--something might have happened. He might be ill at the
hotel at Marsden Bridge or--any number of things might have happened to
prevent his coming. And he had the keys! Suppose her mother should want
to get into the cottage to-morrow?

The girl rose and ran swiftly but quietly to the shop. Her heart was in
her mouth as she knocked softly on the door, so softly that the sound
wouldn’t have been heard from the porch she had just left. The door
opened and the stranger held it wide for her.

Another stranger to-day! And it wasn’t only the dear light that made
the difference. John Converse might have been another person from the
man of yesterday. He was dressed well,--almost elegantly. Certainly
his suit, though it had a sack coat, was of fine material and good
make and he wore a silk shirt and jaunty tie as if he were used to
such informal elegance; and all the accessories were in keeping down
to his neat shoes. He was not less thin nor pale--his face was almost
cadaverous in the stronger light. But his eyes were merry and full of
life, his rather large, thin-lipped mouth puckered with amusement at
her wonderment, and there was a boyish eagerness about him that was
flattering and very grateful to the girl’s perturbed spirit.

They shook hands gravely.

“It is more than good of you to come,” he said.

Alice Lorraine gave a little cry.

“Why, what have you done!” she exclaimed and looked about her as if
frightened.

“Won’t you sit down and take in the magnificence at your ease?” he
asked with a whimsical charm which seemed native to him. And Alice
dropped into the large and comfortable wooden chair he indicated which
was not only free from dust but had apparently been scrubbed clean.

Likewise the whole place. The room had been cleared of rubbish and
transformed by the magic of strong, eager hands and soap and water to
a quaintly attractive sitting-room. The bareness added to its apparent
size. Odd bits of hand-made furniture were disposed gracefully about
and every natural comeliness made the most of. Even the stairway added
something to the general attractiveness. A bit of old rug lay before
it and another at the door. The windows had a strip of dark cloth above
for a blind and a white curtain over the lower sash. A small sheet-iron
stove, still rusty, but clean, warmed the place and held a tiny kettle
in which the water was boiling. A stand in the corner was covered by a
white tea cloth, apparently just out of the shop, and held a tea pot
and two cups, which were also new and gaudily pretty, and a plate of
sweet biscuit.

“O Mr. Converse, you are a wizard surely!” cried the girl. “I really
believe that you could turn yourself into whatever you wished. You
could be an old gypsy woman or a fat man with bright-red hair and could
walk the streets of Farleigh by day.”

He laughed. “It was soap and water and elbow grease that did this. I am
afraid they wouldn’t presto-change me so easily.”

Then suddenly he paled. “Nevertheless, I have seen the time when soap
and water might have worked wonders with me,” he declared bitterly.
Alice looked at him in consternation.

“Pardon me. It was awfully good of you to come,” he said in another
tone. “I hoped you would, and I believed you would unless you were
prevented. And really----”

“You will stay right here now that you have made it so comfortable,
won’t you?” Alice asked eagerly.

“O, I didn’t do it for that. I wanted to have a decent place for you to
come to,” he said, boyishly ingenuous. Despite his gaunt face, which
was also lined, and his grey hair, he was really youthful as he spoke.

“What a lot of work for a person you never saw but once,” she said.
“I felt last night--when we saw Mr. Langley, you know--that we hadn’t
settled anything--I mean, I thought I might help you--tell you about
people or find out about those I don’t know--but----”

She paused. “I’m talking for all the world like Miss Penny,” she owned.
“What I mean to say is that I am glad I did manage to arrange to see
you to-day and that I was able to get away. And I am glad you have done
this because it will make it comfortable for you. You can stay here as
long as you choose--make it your headquarters.” And she went on to say
that she and her mother were to remain at the Hollow for some time.

“You will stay, won’t you?” she begged.

“It would be perfectly bully if I could,” he cried eagerly. “I
could--well, reconnoiter from here in grand style.”

But as he referred to his purpose in this region, the boyish look fled
and he looked sad and perhaps old. And Alice remembered Enoch Arden and
her heart ached for him.

But he was a boy again as he made the tea, served her, and sat down
with his own cup. Alice, too, was a younger girl than she would have
been if she had never known Anna Miller. They dallied happily over
the ceremony and afterwards went to the top of the stair so that Alice
might see the change in the upper chamber, which was as wonderful as
that below. The upper room, indeed, with its tent roof, beams, rafters
and brick chimney, its window at either end and its built-in benches
was more attractive than the lower. Alice rather hoped John Converse
would suggest their sitting there, but he did not, and they returned
to their chairs in the lower apartment to begin finally upon the real
business of the afternoon.

“I don’t really know how to start out,” Alice remarked. “The people I
know best are Miss Penny and the Miller family.”

“In my day there were no Millers in Farleigh--except the moth
millers,--dusty-millers, we used to call them. I remember Miss Penny,
however,--a little old maid who always came to church. She drove a fat
pony. I suppose that is dead long ago?”

“I’m learning to drive him. I feed him sugar every day,” said Alice.
“But I am wasting time. Suppose you ask me questions.”

“Well, suppose you tell me a bit more about that Cartwright fellow you
mentioned yesterday.”

Alice paled. She didn’t want to think of Dick Cartwright now.

“I was all wrong,” she said in a low, pained voice. “He wasn’t good. He
was--O, a dreadful man.”

“Why Miss Lorraine! what do you mean?” he asked. And she thought he had
noticed her secret pain.

“I can’t tell you what he did. Mr. Langley told me in confidence and I
really ought not to say anything,” she returned sadly. “Mr. Langley’s
the only one who--well, he’s very anxious that this Richard Cartwright
should be forgotten.”

“But I thought--didn’t you tell me yesterday that Mr. Langley was this
man’s friend?”

“O yes. But this is on account of the son, Reuben. He’s a fine boy,
everyone says, and he’s in college. Mr. Langley doesn’t want him to
know how bad his father was. And he doesn’t want people to be thinking
and talking of him for fear--well, he says it is best that he be
forgotten.”

“I told you I knew Mr. Langley once. I should have thought of him as
being faithful to the end of things,” he said bitterly.

“He was faithful to the end of things,” the girl rejoined warmly.
“He----”

“Nonsense. There’s no such thing to-day as faithfulness,” he declared
bitterly.

Afterwards, as she lay in her bed at night--Alice remembered Enoch
Arden and wondered if he had learned of his wife’s unfaith and that had
made him so bitter. At this moment, however, the girl was too wrought
up to think of aught but the matter under discussion.

“There is, too. There is--ever so much!” she cried hotly.

“Not at all. One faces this way--a tiny breath of wind, and round goes
the weather-cock!”

“I should think--” the girl began indignantly. She didn’t pause
because she didn’t exactly know what it was she should think but
because he was looking at her with a strange, half-hurt, half-angry
look in his eyes.

“Even you, Miss Lorraine,--pardon me, but aren’t you really an example?
Wasn’t it only yesterday that you were saying that it wasn’t fair
that this man who had loved music and planned higher things than his
weakness could fulfill should be utterly forgotten because he ran amuck
when his head was turned by grief? And to-day--apparently you can’t
think badly enough of him!”

The girl’s heart throbbed wildly. A flaming colour came to her cheeks
giving her real beauty.

“Well, you yourself!” she cried hotly. “You--you said nasty things
yesterday about Dick Cartwright and now, to-day, one would think he was
your best----”

Suddenly she stopped. She was aware of a disturbance from without.
Someone was calling her name and banging on the door of the cottage.
Now she realised that it had been going on some time and she had been
vaguely aware of it. She sprang to her feet, her face horror-stricken.
Her mother had come for her!




CHAPTER XI


Anna reached home worn and fatigued on that Saturday afternoon only to
learn that Alice Lorraine was still absent. Without the knowledge of
anyone, she slipped out and returned to the lane. It was she whom Alice
heard pounding on the kitchen door.

Recognizing Anna, Alice clasped her in a hysterical embrace.

“I thought it was--mother!” she sobbed.

“Good heavens! is her mother such an ogre as all that!” Anna said to
herself. Aloud she said lightly: “What, with my bobbed hair? I like
that. No, Alice my child, your mother is waiting for you to join her
at supper, and we must hike. Don’t cry any more and they won’t know.
They’ll think it’s from running--for we’d better run.”

Something in her brave, tired voice went to Alice’s heart. She kissed
her warmly.

“I’ll run, Anna dear, but you take your time,” she bade her. But Anna
stood firm. And though they did not run, they walked fast and were not
long in reaching the Hollow. Just before they came to Miss Penny’s,
Alice spoke with effort.

“Anna, I want awfully to get down to the cottage to-morrow. Do you
suppose I can?”

“It won’t be so easy, being Sunday. Could you possibly wait until
Monday?” Anna asked in troubled tone.

“O Anna, not possibly!” cried the other girl vehemently, remembering
her parting with John Converse. For they had been interrupted in the
midst of what was virtually a quarrel. Alice felt as if she could not
possibly let a day go by without seeing him and straightening it out.
Besides, if he didn’t see her to-morrow he might feel that she was
offended, or that it had been her mother and she had forbidden her to
come near again.

“All right. We’ll fix it somehow,” Anna assured her, and asked Alice if
she wished her to go in with her.

“O Anna, if you would!” cried Alice, throwing her arm about her and
embracing her warmly.

Thereafter for many days Anna Miller had an additional burden upon her
shoulders--the burden of Alice Lorraine’s mystery. The change in Alice
which was inexplicable to Anna but which seemed painfully obvious, she
tried to keep from the knowledge of others as she endeavored to cover
up her secret visits to the cottage she and her mother had occupied.
She did this cheerfully and willingly, but her heart was heavy. For
Alice did not seem happy at all. She seemed nervous and apprehensive,
so that Anna feared the secret she was helping her to conceal was
anything but a pleasant one.

But for this, Anna would have been serene. For Mrs. Langley’s
unexpected behaviour in respect to the baby troubled her less and
less as the days passed. She still expected to hand the child over to
the household at the parsonage on some fine day, but she was ready
to wait. Indeed, but for the fact that the care of little Joe during
school hours fell upon her mother, she would have been glad to wait
indefinitely.

And as it was, the girl had never been so happy with anyone or anything
as she was with this forlorn baby orphan. No one shared her enthusiasm
in any considerable measure. Alice Lorraine went into ecstasies over
little Joe by fits and starts and then forgot all about him. Mrs.
Lorraine was becoming attached to him, and Anna’s father and the boys
took kindly to him. But Mrs. Miller disapproved thoroughly of the whole
affair,--the only instance of her disapproval Anna had known since her
return home. And she remained unresigned to her part of minding little
Joe when Anna was at school, though he slept a good part of the time
and for the rest was, she had to own, as little trouble as a child
could be. She even confessed, when pressed, that he was hardly more
bother than a kitten.

This was not exaggeration. Joe, Junior, occasioned little trouble. On
the other hand, he paid as little in the coin of babyhood for such
trouble as he gave as could any human being at his interesting age.
Not only was he not irresistible but he was quite negligible, unless,
indeed, he aroused vague irritation in the mind of the beholder because
of his utter want of attractiveness. He was thin and scrawny and
sallow; his head was too big for his emaciated little body, and his
pale-coloured eyes too big for his mite of an old man’s face. His feet
and hands were ugly claws, his legs mere sticks--one would as quickly
have looked for dimples in the living skeleton of the circus. He had a
mere wisp of tow-coloured hair and never showed the teeth he possessed.
He never smiled, never, indeed, looked other than woe-begone. Though
he never cried out and seldom whined or whimpered, he always seemed to
want sadly something that was never by any chance what was proffered
him.

But he clung to Anna, and though he was never other than mournful
even with her, he was passively content. And Anna adored him. It was
no task for her to hurry home from school to relieve her mother--she
could scarcely wait to get at the baby after any absence. He slept in
an old cradle (salvaged from Miss Penny’s garret) by the side of her
bed, and the girl was ready to get up at any hour of the night for milk
or water, and sang to him by the hour in her sweet young voice. She
spent nearly all the money she had saved in a year in the purchase of
a wardrobe for the baby, who was the best-dressed child of his age, or
perhaps of any age, in the two villages. She took pride and pleasure in
ironing the frills and laces of his little frocks and petticoats and
in keeping him immaculately tidy,--the latter being easy, as the baby
never played, and if he was placed on the floor never moved from the
spot. She brushed the scanty hair on top of his head, longing for the
time when there should be enough to make a curl.

But one day as she did this, it came to the girl that when that time
should come, in all likelihood Joe, Junior, wouldn’t be with her. Her
heart sank. And it was borne in upon her that if she was to give the
baby away, it must happen very soon. A little later, and it would be
utterly impossible. Even now, she wouldn’t have been able even to
contemplate the idea if it had been anyone but Mr. Langley who was to
benefit thereby.

Mr. Langley had been in to see little Joe and had taken to him more
warmly than anyone else had done, unless one counted Alice in one mood.
He had held the baby all the while he stayed and hadn’t seemed to know
how to get away. He hadn’t seemed to feel any want in him; he had
admired him apparently as much as Anna herself. He needed him more than
she did, of course, but O, he didn’t _want_ him more!

He didn’t know that he wanted him, for he did not dream that there was
any chance of having him. Mrs. Langley kept it dark--trust her!--and
Anna didn’t feel like saying anything until she was ready to receive
the child. Miss Penny was the only other person who knew, and she,
though she couldn’t keep a secret of her own, was quite safe with that
of another. But he should know as soon as it was prudent, and that,
Anna decided, must be very soon. She said to herself it was up to her
to make what Caesar calls a forced march.

[Illustration: Anna took pride and pleasure in ironing the frills and
laces of his little frocks.]

Already she had talked to Mrs. Langley of the baby for half an hour at
a time, and had repeated her request to be allowed to bring him to the
parsonage. Mrs. Langley always declared that it would break her heart
to see him but Anna felt that one glimpse of him would settle the whole
matter. Wherefore on the next Saturday she announced that she meant to
bring Joe, Junior, with her that day-week.

For an instant the invalid’s eyes brightened. Then she sighed deeply.

“O no, Anna, I couldn’t bear the sight of a baby. It would break my
heart,” she declared. And her emotion was unfeigned.

“But it isn’t the same, Mrs. Langley, Joe, Junior, being a boy,” Anna
protested. “If he made you think of anyone it wouldn’t be Ella May, it
would be of that little lamb.”

“O, is his hair curly?” asked the invalid eagerly.

“Well, no, not yet,” Anna admitted regretfully. “But he has such a
sober, meek little face, young, and yet sort of sedate and oldish, too,
you know, that he makes me think of the little lamb.”

“Dear me, you are like a pretty lamb yourself, Anna, with your fuzzy
yellow hair. I believe I really like you better with it cut so,”
declared Mrs. Langley with sudden enthusiasm.

“You’d better take a good look at it then, for it will be longer before
you see it again,” Anna suggested mischievously. “I shan’t be hiking
down to the parsonage for some time, you see. I can’t come any more
unless you let me bring Joe, Junior.”

Mrs. Langley clasped her thin hands. “O Anna, don’t speak so even in
fun,” she begged. “Of course you will come next Saturday--or sooner if
you have a chance. Only please don’t mention that baby to me again. It
stirs me all up.”

“I won’t,” the girl assented meekly, adding: “for I sha’n’t be here to
mention him or anything else. Honest and true, I can’t come any more
without him. Whenever I am not in school, my place is with that blessed
little monkey, Mrs. Langley. It’s mighty good of ma to mind him as much
as she does since she doesn’t take to him, but I don’t mean to put it
over with her unless I have to. And now it’s cold weather, the boys
want to skate Saturday afternoons--and before long there’ll be sliding.”

“There’s that Alice Lorraine. How about her?” demanded Mrs. Langley.

Anna opened her eyes very wide. Extremely vague in general, unaware
apparently of the existence of anyone outside her own four walls,
sometimes, when her own interests were concerned, the woman was
uncannily acute.

“O Mrs. Langley, I wouldn’t go off and leave that precious child with
Alice Lorraine. She’s dear, but she’s absent-minded and I should be on
pins and needles all the while for fear he was being drowned or scalded
or kidnapped,” she declared.

“There’s that neighbor of Miss Penny’s, Mrs. Phelps,” Mrs. Langley
persisted.

“For the love of Mike!” cried the girl in utter amazement. “Why, I
should as soon think of asking the Lord Mayor of London to run over
every Saturday afternoon.”

“Well, there must be someone who lives near,” Mrs. Langley murmured
with unusual meekness.

“There isn’t, and anyhow, I wouldn’t trust Junior with ’em!” cried
Anna. And suddenly she lost her temper,--something that was extremely
rare with the other Miller girl. “I simply can’t come again without the
baby and what’s more I won’t, so there! That’s all there is to it. Cash
down or no goods delivered!”

And she flung herself from the place like a small whirlwind.

She had passed the lane, when she recollected Alice Lorraine and
paused. She had agreed to meet her at the lane as near five as
possible, and strolling back she seated herself on the stone wall to
consider. On other occasions she had either just made the hour or had
been late, and she felt a certain hesitation about hanging around the
place for a matter of twenty minutes. She said to herself sadly that
it was just as if she suspected Alice of meeting someone there, though
she knew--she hoped with all her heart she knew--that Alice wouldn’t do
such a thing. But O, what was her secret? What was she doing, haunting
the lane and the cottage almost daily?

As she was pondering sadly, she heard a step, and looked up to see Mr.
Langley. Her heart sank. She supposed he would reproach her for leaving
Mrs. Langley so rudely. But apparently he knew nothing about it.

“O Anna, I wanted to speak to you and tried to get home before you
should leave,” he said. “Do you mind coming back to my study for a few
minutes?”

“What now?” the girl said to herself. But he was all kindness as he
led her back through the gate, helped her off with her jacket and
established her in the most comfortable chair in his study.

“I want to speak to you in regard to Miss Lorraine. You know her well,
I think, Anna?” he began at once.

“Why yes, Mr. Langley,” she faltered.

“And you like her? You--believe in her?”

“Of course.”

“I am glad to hear that. I like the girl so far as I know her and I
believe in her. But things look a bit odd and I want to talk a little
with you. People in the village are talking about Miss Lorraine.
Someone said to me that at least two persons have seen her walking at
dusk with a strange man.”

“O Mr. Langley, I don’t believe that. There must be some mistake!”
cried Anna.

“I hope so and think so. And yet, do you know, I thought myself I saw
her walking one night with a stranger. The other person disappeared and
she was alone when I met her. But I couldn’t shake off the impression.”

Anna stared at him helplessly.

“There’s still more,” he went on reluctantly. “There is, I fear, no
doubt but that there is a strange man hanging about the village--the
Farleigh end. More than two or three persons have declared they saw a
man peering in their windows. They connect this man with Miss Lorraine.
They say it is the same man she walks with, and--dear me, her father
being in prison, it is so easy for people to lose their common sense
and originate all sorts of rumors.”

“But Mr. Langley, surely you don’t believe that--about a man looking
into people’s windows?” Anna demanded.

“I don’t know what to think. The truth is, that before I heard any
rumors--it was last Sunday evening--I felt that there was someone
looking in at me through yonder window. I have always left the blind
up--until this week.”

“I feel stunned, Mr. Langley,” said Anna mournfully.

“Poor child! No wonder! I hated to bother you with this, but dear me--I
seem to be following the lead of others and bringing my burdens to lay
upon your youthful shoulders. However--we cannot let this go on. I am
convinced that there is a mistake and that Miss Lorraine can explain.
Shall I speak to her or would you rather, Anna?”

Anna considered. “Perhaps I’d better,” she said. “But--I guess I won’t
do anything until after to-morrow. I’d better think it over first.”

Mr. Langley begged to drive her home, but recollecting her promise to
Alice she made an excuse. And there was Alice waiting for her at the
lane.

To-night Alice was in high spirits. First she asked about the baby in a
pathetically perfunctory way, then she put a careless query in regard
to Reuben. Anna’s heart grew cold. What did it mean? Why was she asking
so many questions of late, particularly about Reuben?

Reaching Miss Penny’s she went in with Alice, understanding clearly
now that Alice wished her mother to think they had been together all
afternoon. Mrs. Lorraine looked up with troubled face.

“O Alice, I didn’t know you were going out this afternoon,” she said.
“We looked everywhere for you. I wanted you to go over to Wenham to the
bank to see Mr. Clarke. If we are to stay here until after Christmas, I
feel as if we ought to give up the cottage.”

Alice became very white. “We can’t give it up so suddenly,” she said
with a curious gasp. “You have to--give notice.”

“It’s different in our case,” said Mrs. Lorraine, paling herself. “But
never mind now. I will write a note and send it to-night. Miss Penny
says Mr. Phelps will take it.”

“Not to-night, mother,” the girl said quickly and with a certain
fierceness of determination. “Wait till--next Saturday perhaps. I
have--lost the key. I’ll go over to-morrow and see if I can find it.”




CHAPTER XII


When Anna Miller had a concrete problem to solve, it was her
habit--rather more unconscious, however, than deliberate--to put
herself in touch with the situation or the matter itself and trust to
her mother-wit for suggestions as to procedure. Wherefore, as soon as
Joe, Junior, fell asleep the following afternoon, she betook herself
over to Miss Penny’s to see Alice. She had no plan. She only wished to
spend an hour in Alice’s company, after which she might have something
to meditate upon.

She found Mrs. Lorraine just finishing the washing-up and was surprised
that Alice would have left it to her. Then she recollected the hour and
wondered why the work should have been delayed. As she enquired for
Alice with apparent unconcern, she saw that Mrs. Lorraine’s face was
flushed and that Miss Penny showed traces of excitement, and guessed
that something had happened directly after dinner. It wasn’t unlikely
that there had been a discussion between Alice and her mother and that
Alice had flown.

“Alice is up in her chamber lying down, Anna dear,” Miss Penny informed
her. “She may be asleep, but you are so quiet you may steal up to see
if you like.”

Anna gazed enquiringly at Mrs. Lorraine, who begged her to sit down.

“Have you noticed anything strange about Alice lately, Anna?” she asked
in a troubled voice.

“Why Mrs. Lorraine, now you speak of it--Alice does seem--nervous,” the
girl admitted.

“She does. Decidedly. I cannot understand it. She gets wrought up
over such trifles. You saw how it was last night about giving up the
cottage? And to-day she wanted to rush off the minute dinner was over
to look for the key she lost. She seemed all used up over it. I told
her Mr. Clarke very likely had others, and that anyhow it wasn’t such a
serious matter as she made it to lose a key in a quiet community like
this, but she was too excited to be reasonable. Finally, I persuaded
her to go up and lie down and put this off until to-morrow, but I feel
worn out myself from the struggle.”

“You don’t think the work she does here is tiring her?” asked Miss
Penny anxiously.

“She did more at the cottage, and besides of late she hardly does
anything,” said Mrs. Lorraine.

“Alice is high-strung and goes into things too intensely,” remarked
Miss Penny. “She took to going off for long walks when you were away,
Anna, and I think she overdid. I don’t think she went so far as going
to the cemetery as you did; but she seems to have become interested in
old-time things and people--antiquities and relics--not relicts,--and
yet, I don’t know--there’s Enoch Arden, you know.”

“Enoch Arden!” cried Anna aghast.

Miss Penny smiled. “My dear, my head is all right,--as good, that is
to say, as it ever was. I was simply--but naturally you didn’t see
the point. One night some time ago--it was, O, a month ago, I should
say, though it might not have been, Alice read Enoch Arden aloud
to her mother and me. We all talked about it afterwards but Alice
couldn’t seem to get through. She kept questioning me. She wanted to
find out whether it could be true--here, for instance, right here in
this village. She started me to thinking of the different widows, you
know, and whether any husbands had left Farleigh and never come back.
Reuben’s father wasn’t exactly a husband, you know, though he went away
and never returned. But he was a widower. And his wife even if she had
been alive would never have married again. And if she had, it wouldn’t
have been Enoch Arden, for he was killed in a wreck--that’s more
certain than being lost at sea.”

“But--Enoch Arden?” asked Anna still perplexed.

“That’s just it. That’s why it took so long to get through--if we ever
got through? Alice would get me started and then I would be reminded of
something else and lose the point. There are so many different stories
connected with everyone, you see. And yet, I don’t know that anyone
in Farleigh ever had so many stories that could be told at his age as
Reuben has.”

Anna put the kitten tenderly down on the hearth.

“You’re not going upstairs, Anna?” asked Mrs. Lorraine.

“I think I’ll run straight home and see my baby,” returned Anna, who
knew well that Alice Lorraine was not in her room or in the Hollow at
all. And she acted upon her words.

She sighed as she climbed the stair at home to her own chamber. The
problem of Alice seemed too big for the like of her. But she sighed yet
more deeply when Freddy came up to say that Mr. Langley was down in the
sitting-room. Had something happened? she asked herself in terror; or
was it only that he had come to ask her if she had spoken to Alice? But
no, he had given her until to-morrow. Looking over the baby to see that
he was immaculate, she picked him up and went down, not even stopping
to glance at the mirror, though she had been lying on her bed.

“Anna looks almost as much a child as the baby himself,” Mr. Langley
remarked to Mrs. Miller, rising as the girl entered with little Joe on
her arm, his starched frock standing out over his frilled petticoats,
his mournful, colourless face against her rosy one, the wisp of hair on
top of his head contrasting oddly with her thick yellow mop of short
locks.

“She’s just wearing herself out with that child, Anna is,” remarked her
mother rather fretfully.

“Let me have him, pray Anna,” said the minister eagerly holding out his
arms. The baby went to him indifferently.

He was equally indifferent to the remainder of the company that filled
the room. Miss Penny and Mrs. Lorraine had come over to be in time for
him when he waked. All the Millers were there. The boys always hung
round when they felt sure the baby wouldn’t be left alone for them to
mind, and Seth Miller never liked to leave the house when the child was
awake. But one or many,--it was all a matter of indifference to little
Joe.

Anna was secretly relieved by the presence of Miss Penny and Mrs.
Lorraine. For the minute she saw Mr. Langley she knew his coming had
nothing to do with Alice. She recollected her visit at the parsonage
the day before and knew as well as if he had announced it that he had
come to bid her reconsider her decision. But he wouldn’t be likely to
ask her before the others and if he did, it would be easier for her to
refuse. But she sighed within her. She wasn’t sure. And fancy refusing
Mr. Langley anything before Miss Penny! And she couldn’t explain
afterwards even to Miss Penny that it was all for his ultimate good.
That would be quite too smug!

But he acted as if he had come merely for a social call. The baby
rested in his arms, quiet and sober, while they talked of indifferent
things though not indifferently. Mr. Langley and Mrs. Miller discussed
the concert at the church last month and Seth Miller declared that
his wife was full of music, and announced, to the surprise of all,
that he planned to get a piano-forte before very long for her and
the girls--Rusty would enjoy playing on it when she was home for her
holidays.

“O pa, can we play on it?” cried both the boys at once.

Seth Miller frowned. But before he could speak, Anna smiled on him.

“I guess they can, if I am in the room with them until they get used
to it and know how to handle it, can’t they, pa?” she asked. And he
assured her that of course they could.

Meantime one and another tried to relieve Mr. Langley of his burden,
though none was as disinterested as he seemed. The baby was sober--sad,
indeed, but he was very comfortable to hold. He never wriggled as many
babies do. And plain as he was, there was something appealing about
him. And besides, there was always the prospect of being the fortunate
one to win his first smile. But Mr. Langley refused all proffers. He
wouldn’t even give him up to Miss Penny.

“You may have him when I go, Miss Penny,” he said smiling, “but I want
him as long as I stay. You’re all near neighbours and can see little
Joe every day, but I seldom get a chance. But bless me, what’s the boy
up to now?”

Nothing very exciting, truly. A weak little hand was fumbling for Mr.
Langley’s watch guard, the baby gazing at the bright trinkets with
some interest. Of course the minister did the usual thing, drew out
his watch and held it to the child’s ear. Joe listened attentively and
apparently wished it to be held there indefinitely.

Mr. Langley had to return it to his pocket, however, when he rose to
take leave, and it was probably that which troubled the baby. But he
thought, as he would have put the child in Miss Penny’s arms, that
little Joe cried for him, and a certain satisfaction was apparent
beneath his concern.

The baby did not cry out. He did not make a sound. But two tears
spilled upon his thin cheeks and the maternal Anna seized him
anxiously. Burying his face in her shoulder, Joe, Junior, found instant
solace.

“I want to speak to you a moment, please, Anna,” Mr. Langley asked.
Anna’s heart sank but she went out into the passage with him. It was
cold there, so he wouldn’t keep her, and she hoped she could hold out.

“Mrs. Langley is feeling badly because you said you couldn’t come to
see her next Saturday,” he said very kindly. “If you are willing to
spend the time, I wonder if we can’t rearrange matters. Why can’t I
come over and mind the baby while you’re gone? He’s good with me, as
you see, and with the watch----”

He was like a boy in his eagerness. Anna paled.

“I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Langley, only really that wouldn’t help out.
You see ma would feel just the same. She’d love to have you come, of
course, but she wouldn’t feel as if it was polite to leave you and--you
see if she was right here all the while, there wouldn’t be any need of
your coming way over from the parsonage. Now would there?”

He smiled. “You remind me of what is called in logic a vicious
circle,” he said. But he became serious at once.

“I hate to seem to overpersuade you, but, Anna, if there’s any way in
the world you can manage it, I should be more than grateful to you,” he
said earnestly. “Already, I know, I am under tremendous obligation to
you. You have done more for Mrs. Langley--and for me--than I can ever
begin to thank you for. And yet I am asking further grace. But perhaps
if you could manage to keep up for a few weeks more, we can get along
afterwards.”

The girl’s eyes filled with tears. With all the hardship she had
known, she had never learned to be ungracious. She couldn’t explain
that she was holding out because only so, it seemed to her, could she
bring about the desired end, and that she was acting for his ultimate
good. She couldn’t tell him that she, a school girl, was treating a
grown woman, and the minister’s wife into the bargain, like a naughty,
stubborn child.

“Really and truly, Mr. Langley, I have thought and planned and tried to
do the best I can. But I can’t come to the parsonage any more unless I
can bring the baby with me,” she said in a low, desperate voice.

“Well, you know best, Anna,” he said in a tone whose kindness could not
cloak his intense disappointment. “I am very sorry, and if anything
happens that would enable you to change your mind, I am sure you will
let me know.”

Anna Miller flew to her room and wept. She who had endured with all
sweetness much that would have made another bitter, now wept almost
bitterly, while little Joe sat beside her on the bed in solemn silence.
But presently the girl felt a little hand on her head, uncovered her
face and smiled through her tears at the baby’s first attempt at a
caress. And he of his own accord cuddled down beside her on the pillow
with his cheek against hers.

“You darling love!” the girl cried. “But, O, it’s _my_ heart you’ll be
breaking instead of Mrs. Langley’s. Here I am with my frame-up to get
rid of you, hurting Mr. Langley and disciplining his wife, when if I
should make a get-away of it, it would simply kill me dead! And after
all, why should I? I have a mind, honey-sweet, to throw over the whole
thing, that ginger-coloured old woman with the peppery eyes and all,
and let Mr. Langley become a hoary old man as soon as he has a mind to,
and just devote myself to you. When are you going to talk, precious?
Can’t you say An-na?”

Joe, Junior, remained dumb.

“Well, I am mighty thankful you can’t--or won’t. For if you could--or
would--then I would never in the world let you go. And really, I _must_
put it through. You’d be far better off at the parsonage with the best
man in all the world for a daddy, and with a mother that wouldn’t be
half bad if she would once give in to your blessed charms--as she
is going to do. Besides, you’d belong there, and you don’t here. Ma
doesn’t want you round, and you feel it in your sensitive little heart
and that’s why you act so queer and offish. But it’ll all come out
right--for everybody but poor me. Cheer up, old sport!”




CHAPTER XIII


As Mr. Langley walked slowly back to Farleigh in the early dusk of the
cloudy November day, he reflected upon his visit, upon the beautiful
baby, upon what had carried him thither and upon Anna’s unaccountable
unwillingness to gratify his wife’s not unnatural desire. But he said
to himself it wasn’t really unaccountable--it only seemed so to him.
How serious the girl had looked as she stood with the baby in her arms,
its little face hidden on her shoulder--and how staunch and true! And
when all was said, she had simply refused to neglect her duty as she
saw it. Quite likely, too, she saw more clearly than he. Certainly
there was nothing selfish in her standpoint, while he, for his part,
could not so absolve himself. He hoped he had not urged her unduly.

Nevertheless, the situation was not normal. Anna’s mother was rightly
troubled. The girl was too young to shoulder the responsibility she had
taken upon herself. After the strain of those hard years in the city,
she ought to be free to devote herself to school and a school-girl’s
pleasures with only the normal home duties of such an one. Someone
ought to adopt the baby--someone in Farleigh so that Anna need not be
separated wholly from him. Someone--Mr. Langley stopped and put forth
considerable effort to dislodge a stone between the flags with his
walking stick. As he went on again, he said to himself that it would
be a simple matter to put through. If they knew there was a chance, it
seemed to him that people would simply flock to the Millers’ in crowds
to beg for that most engaging baby. How wise the little fellow had
looked as he listened to the watch!

Sighing vague, he hastened on as if he wished to escape something. But
with all his speed, he was unable to do so, and depression settled upon
him. He supposed that it was because he was drawing near the parsonage
and would have to disappoint his wife.

He went directly to her room, realising, even in his preoccupation,
that he owed the privilege to Anna. For only since she had entered
the wedge, had he fallen into the habit of seeking his wife at odd
moments. And though she rather tolerated than welcomed his visits,
he was grateful for even tolerance. For her long illness and silence
and desire for seclusion had estranged husband and wife almost as
effectually as bitter feeling might have done.

Mrs. Langley sat in her cushioned chair in the dark, gloomy room,
awaiting the word he was to bring. Her eyes were weak from headache and
want of sunshine and out-of-door air, and in winter she had her tea
very early to avoid lighting the heavily shaded lamp. Both Mr. Langley
and Bell Adams felt that, having admitted Anna Miller, if Mrs. Langley
would also let in the sunshine she might utterly banish neuralgia.
But neither ventured to make the suggestion. She had already had her
tea, and when he entered the room, her husband felt rather than saw her
eager questioning gaze.

“Anna still feels that she cannot get away without the baby, Ella
dear,” he said gently, seating himself on the edge of a chair, like
a poor relation in a fine drawing room. “And really, I see her
difficulty. As a matter of fact, the girl has added one member--a
complete stranger with no claim whatever--to a rather straitened
household and she doesn’t wish her mother to feel the burden unduly.
And certainly Mrs. Miller had a difficult time when her children were
small and----”

His wife broke in almost fiercely.

“Russell Langley! I tell you that I cannot get along without seeing
Anna at least every Saturday,” she cried.

He sighed as he pushed back a bit further on the chair, though not
enough to be comfortable.

“Well, Ella, why not let her bring him along--why not try it just for
once?” he asked quietly. “He’s really a beautiful child. (The minister
was quite sincere.) He sat on my lap all the while I was there, quiet
as a mouse, and the first I knew the little fellow was feeling for my
watch. I only wish you could have seen his face, dear, as I held it to
his ear. Do let Anna bring him on Saturday!”

“I couldn’t bear the shock of it,” she said dully as if repeating a
formula, then suddenly enquired: “Russell, where’s my watch?”

“In the top drawer of my desk. I wind it every night. Would you like
it, Ella?”

She assented rather sharply and he fetched it. Now he seated himself
comfortably and taking the key from his chain, wound the watch and set
it exactly by his own and put it on the stand with the medicine bottles
and the photograph of the lamb.

“She’s a stubborn girl, that Anna Miller,” his wife remarked.

“She means well,” he returned absently in conventional phrase, his mind
being otherwise engaged as he presently showed.

“I have it!” he exclaimed suddenly, holding his watch from him as if he
had discovered the clue to the mystery in it. “Anna can bring the baby
with her, but you needn’t see him--you needn’t realise that he’s in the
house at all; and you wouldn’t, he’s such a mouse. And I’ll mind him
while Anna visits you. He knows me--I think he rather takes to me, you
know, and I can carry him all over the house and show him everything.
I fancy the little chap might rather like the statuette on the parlour
clock and--O, the elves on the silver water-pitcher! And there’s my
crystal paper weight. And perhaps when I’m over in Wenham I will just
step into Wetherell’s and see what they have in the way of toys. Boys
generally----”

But Mrs. Langley made a sudden move.

“Russell Langley!” she cried. “If that baby comes to this house, he
shall come straight to my room. He can have my watch to play with. He
can’t hurt it, and if he bites the case, I don’t care.”

Seth Miller was one of the folk who adored Mr. Langley and he was aware
of the disappointed look upon his face as he left the house that Sunday
afternoon. He had unbounded confidence in his daughter; if she caused
the disappointment, it was because she couldn’t help it. But he felt as
if he should like to do something particularly nice for the minister to
make up for it.

As he pondered upon it, it came to him that he might be able to do
some bit of carpentry at the church as a surprise to Mr. Langley. But
he couldn’t think of anything that was necessary, and to discover any
possibility in the way of ornamentation he would have to go over to the
church. He had gone over early that morning to see to the fire, had
attended service, waiting until everyone was out after Sunday school
to lock the building, and he would have to go over early to unlock the
building and see that all was right for evening service. He might have
postponed this matter until that time, but it seemed to make it of more
consequence if he made a special journey, so he decided to go at once.

He was tired enough, however, not to wish to go upstairs for his keys.
He had an extra key to the little side door leading to the vestry which
he kept in the kitchen so that Anna could get it when he was away. She
had sung in the choir before the baby’s arrival and had let the others
in and out for rehearsals. But when he looked, the key was not in its
place.

Mrs. Miller and the boys had gone home with Miss Penny and Anna was in
her room, so he fetched his bunch of keys and went on, wondering that
Anna, who was exceedingly careful of such things, should have failed
to return the key to the nail where it belonged. As he approached the
church from the rear he was suddenly startled by a sound which was,
however, not startling in itself--a low, sweet strain of music which
seemed to come from the church and to be the voice of the well-known
organ.

Seth Miller’s heart beat violently. The organist came from Wenham and
did not play for evening service. Moreover, she played at Wenham in the
afternoon--she was in the church there at this very moment. No one else
but Mr. Langley had a key and he did not play the big organ. And--how
early the sun set. It was almost dark now. Miller did not believe in
ghosts, but--it would be dark inside.

The music ceased. As it died away, it came to him that Anna might be in
the church. Perhaps the baby had fallen asleep and she had run down for
a little change. He didn’t know that she could play the pipe organ, but
she was full of music like her mother. Moreover, he wasn’t sure as the
music he had heard had been correct music. He had something of an ear
himself, but the strain was low and he had been excited, and for all he
knew, it might have been the chromatic scale. Of course it was Anna,
and he hurried round to the door of which she had the key.

But it was fast. He had told Anna not to lock the door behind her at
choir rehearsal, but perhaps she felt that this was different. He
unlocked it and went in making a racket and calling her name lest she
be frightened.

She was not to be found, however. The audience room looked exactly
as it had when he had left it early in the afternoon except that now
twilight had fallen upon it. He went to the organ loft, but saw no
traces of anyone having been there. And he began to wonder if he had
been mistaken. Perhaps he hadn’t heard anything. But he knew he had.
Perhaps it had come from elsewhere? It had sounded like the organ, but
it was rather low and soft for that great organ. Still, where could it
have come from? Shaking his head, Seth Miller returned home, his errand
forgotten.

That evening as he was about to start for the church, he asked Anna
what she had done with the key to the vestry door.

“It’s there on the nail, Pa,” she said, pointing to the place where it
should have been--and where it was!

Too confounded for speech, he took it down, handled and put it back.
Then he went out without a word.

He decided to say nothing to Anna until next day. But the next day
brought wild excitement to the house in the form of an invitation for
Anna to bring little Joe to the parsonage on Saturday, and he forgot
the lesser in the greater.

The excitement was great, too, at Miss Penny’s, and Joe, Junior,
acquired a new importance. Anna consulted Mrs. Lorraine and Miss
Penny, and even Mrs. Miller showed an interest in the baby’s toilette
for the occasion. But no one guessed how painfully the girl made her
preparations, for she expected to return without the child. She sang as
she flew about, and laughed at the boys who were working hard in all
their spare time to teach the baby to talk before he should visit the
parsonage. Freddy began with _cat_ and _rat_, those being the words he
first learned to read. Frank, the older and wiser, experimented with
bow-wow, moo-moo and other onomatopoetic syllables, but with equal
unsuccess. The baby wouldn’t even say _O_.

On Saturday afternoon, Seth Miller himself drove them over to the
parsonage, Miss Penny having loaned her pony. Mr. Langley came to the
gate and proudly and rather spectacularly bore the baby into the house
as if it were a royal infant. He removed his little bonnet and cloak
with surprising deftness, admiring the swan’s down border of the hood
as if it were ermine. Big Bell stood at the end of the passage with
a wistful expression on her homely face and Anna tiptoed past Mrs.
Langley’s door to let her see the baby first.

But the emotion displayed by the giantess gave the girl pause. On
the threshold of Mrs. Langley’s room she was seized with sudden
apprehension. Suppose it should be too much for the invalid! Her
reiterated phrase as to its breaking her heart to see the baby
acquired a warning significance. On a sudden Anna wished with all her
heart that she hadn’t insisted. Suppose the shock were too much for
Mrs. Langley!

“We’re here,” she said faintly, ready to back out across the threshold
at a word.

“Come up near,” Mrs. Langley bade her more hoarsely than usual and not
at all reassuringly. She obeyed tremblingly.

Taking the customary chair, she settled the baby comfortably and fixed
her eyes upon his wisp of hair. If she hadn’t heard her heart beating
wildly she wouldn’t have believed that she breathed at all.

For a few moments Mrs. Langley peered at the child in silence. He was
beautifully dressed, but he wasn’t at all what she had expected from
Anna’s and her husband’s accounts. He wasn’t even what a baby would
naturally have been expected to be apart from pardonable exaggeration.
He wasn’t round nor rosy nor pretty; he looked like nothing so much as
a very ugly rubber doll dressed in fine raiment. Moreover, Ella Langley
had so dreaded the ordeal that cold sweat stood upon her forehead in
beads.

None the less, as she gazed, her heart warmed. There was, somehow,
something appealing in his big, mournful eyes and plaintive little
white, pinched face and perhaps even in the very want of baby charms.
The woman hadn’t seen a child for years upon years and suddenly her
heart yearned towards this one overwhelmingly.

“O Anna, let me take him in my arms,” she entreated in a voice Anna
had never heard before. Surprised and delighted, and without for the
moment considering the significance of it, the girl rose quickly to put
the baby into the outstretched arms.

But for the first time Joe, Junior, who went mournfully wherever he was
placed, indifferent to all but Anna, resisted--resisted convulsively.
Springing back with a strength he had not seemed to possess, he clung
to Anna with a grasp that was painful in its intensity. Then as Mrs.
Langley’s hand fell gently upon his shoulder, he uttered a piercing
cry--such a shriek as had never before echoed within the parsonage
walls. His arms tight about Anna’s neck, clutching like a frightened
wild animal, Joe, Junior, continued to shriek and without pause.

Never before since Anna had known him had the baby uttered a sound
above a mere whimper. The girl’s blood congealed for terror. As
he continued to scream in a manner that seemed to stop her heart
and paralyze her muscles, she stood motionless for a few seconds.
Recovering herself, she fled wildly from the room.

She never knew when the baby stopped screaming. Snatching his wraps, in
some manner she got him into them, and careless of her own, rushed out
of the house and through the gate, flying along the village street in
the direction of the Hollow and home. And before the minister, who was
in the garret, happily occupied in searching for toys or something that
might take the place of toys, had located the strange sound or realised
what it meant, Anna Miller and Joe, Junior, were out of sight.




CHAPTER XIV


Mr. Langley, Mrs. Lorraine and Seth Miller had been severally perturbed
at about the same period over a matter which might or might not have
had a common occasion. But the excitement of the following week
centering about little Joe quite drove other affairs from the minds of
the first and last mentioned and caused even Mrs. Lorraine’s anxiety
over her daughter to be relieved because of the constant demand upon
her attention and sympathies. She enquired for the lost key early in
the week, and Alice quietly gave it into her hands. As she took it, it
seemed as if she remembered another, and that the two were on a ring or
tag; but she forebore to question. Neither did she bring up the matter
of giving up the cottage. After all, they had made no definite decision
and might as well keep the house until after Christmas. She wasn’t
sure, if Alice remained in this strange and difficult condition, that
they ought to remain longer with Miss Penny. But she said nothing of
this nor of anything to Alice, hoping that the girl would come to her.
But Alice, though she was less nervous and was not out so late, kept
her own counsel and her habit of solitary rambles.

But one night when they sat at tea, Miss Penny suddenly turned to
Alice and asked if she had found the key. Alice assented, changing the
subject so quickly that her mother was vexed.

“That reminds me, Alice, I thought there were two keys when they were
given to us,” she said.

“I believe there were. The other is down there. You don’t want both,
mother?”

“O, were they duplicates, Alice?” her mother asked, for she had thought
they might have opened different doors.

“One was for a shed or something,” returned Alice carelessly, and
turning to Miss Penny made a lame remark about the shape of the cream
jug which she had admired before.

“I’ll tell you--one must have been the key to the shop!” cried Miss
Penny. “You see there was a shop with the old house that was torn
down--nearly every house had them once. This one is a tidy little
place, or was. Reuben’s father used to work there a great deal--I don’t
know whether it was over his music--of course there was no instrument,
but when you think of Wagner--or whoever it was that couldn’t hear a
sound--though I am not sure that his wife--Reuben’s mother--didn’t have
an old melodeon besides the organ they had in the cottage--not the pipe
organ. They never got that. But he made things, too. He made tables and
chairs and--what-nots, I rather think--though he hadn’t a great deal of
time for he worked over to Wenham besides playing the church organ.
Such hands as that man had--and Reuben’s are just like them.”

“Dear me, I shouldn’t have said there was a separate building on the
place,” remarked Mrs. Lorraine, “should you, Alice?”

“No mother, I shouldn’t have,” said the girl.

“There’s such a tangle of brush and I believe the land drops just
there, which I suppose helps hide it,” Mrs. Lorraine went on. “I’d
rather like to see that shop. I believe I’ll go down some afternoon and
look it over. Perhaps I can go this week. O Miss Penny, how would you
feel about going with me?”

“I would--why, Alice!”

Mrs. Lorraine, seeing that her daughter was very pale and looked as if
she were about to faint, rose and went to her. “Are you ill, Alice?”
she cried anxiously, holding a goblet of water to her lips.

“No, no, mother. It’s nothing. Please sit down again. I had a--sort of
pain, that’s all,” the girl declared.

She wouldn’t lie down and even made a pretence of eating her supper.
Her colour came back and as she seemed all right next day her mother
was not troubled. Indeed, as the week passed, she felt less anxious
than she had for some time, for Alice seemed more like her old self
again. She hardly went out at all except to the Millers’ or with Anna.
And on Sunday, to her mother’s surprise and delight, she remained in
all afternoon.

A storm had been imminent all day and snow began to fall just as the
first bell rang for evening service. Ten minutes after the second bell
had ceased ringing, Alice stole down the back stairs in tam o’ shanter
and ulster and would have slipped out but that her mother saw her and
stopped her at the door.

“Alice, you’re not going out?” she said, though the girl’s purpose was
evident.

“I am going to Farleigh to drop this letter in the post office, mother.”

“But, my dear child, it isn’t open on Sunday.”

“There’s a place on the outside where you can drop letters in,”
declared the girl.

“What a pity you didn’t send it by Mr. Miller! Don’t you know, Alice,
that he always goes down for evening service?”

“I didn’t want to send it by him.”

“Indeed, is it a very important letter, Alice?”

“It’s a letter to father!” cried the girl.

Mrs. Lorraine paled. “I am glad you wrote your father, dear, and--it’s
all right if you wish to post it yourself. Wait a minute and I will go
with you.”

“O mother, you mustn’t leave Miss Penny!” Alice declared; then, as
steps sounded at that moment on the porch: “O, someone’s coming. Let me
get away.” And she slipped quickly out.

Not long afterwards Seth Miller arrived with his lantern which he
turned down to a proper height and left in the porch. Miller was
earning a good income as janitor of the schools in the South Hollow,
including, of course, the academy, and as sexton of the church,
besides having all the carpentry he could do during the school
vacation. He had moved his family into a warm, comfortable house
and was the head or at least the source of supply of a comfortable,
well-dressed, happy household. Despite his anxiety, he could not but
feel himself to be a substantial citizen and freeholder as he went
forth over the new-fallen snow to consult with his neighbours.

Miss Penny asked anxiously for the baby. He replied that little Joe
was prime but that Anna had felt wretchedly all day and was really ill
to-night. While her mother was getting her to bed he had come over to
see if they had any suggestions.

“The worst of it is, we can’t consult Mr. Langley,” said Miss Penny
in her fluttered way. “He always knows just what to do, but--there’s
his wife, you see. What I mean is--of course, I am as pleased as
anyone--and that alone wouldn’t hurt Anna--nor perhaps the other
alone--I am not sure--but racing home to little Joe--and all her
school work--and standing all day when she was clerking in the city.
And as you say, Seth, it was unfortunate, his crying the first time.
But we mustn’t blame the little fellow. Anna says she looks like Red
Riding-Hood’s grandmother--no, I believe it was like the wolf dressed
up in the grandmother’s night gown, though I don’t suppose he’s heard
that story or would understand it if he had.”

“No’m, you’re right. Not yet, Miss Penny,” Miller assured her politely.

“What does Anna’s mother think?” asked Mrs. Lorraine.

“Jenny lays it all to the baby, mostly. She never took to him as the
rest of us do, Mrs. Lorraine, and she frets more ’n I ever knew her
to over Anna’s having the care of him. And all the time, you know, he
ain’t much trouble.”

“We might take him over here for a while, Mrs. Lorraine?” Miss Penny
suggested.

“You’d only shift the trouble, Miss Penny,” Miller declared. “Anna’d
come along, too, and you’d be all wore out with the excitement and
Jenny would be all the more worried. She thinks, too, Anna hadn’t ought
to go to Mrs. Langley’s so often.”

“After all, why should she go at all?” demanded Mrs. Lorraine with
sudden spirit. “Why don’t you put your foot down, Mr. Miller, that she
sha’n’t go there except in vacation?”

Seth Miller was flattered by the implication of her demand. But he knew
as well as any that he wasn’t one to set his foot down in any firm way
in his own family.

“I guess I couldn’t hardly do that, Mrs. Lorraine, for Anna might take
it to heart,” he said. “And you see we was without our daughter for
five years.”

“And consider what it means to Mr. Langley to have her go!” cried Miss
Penny. “O Mrs. Lorraine, if you could know what store we set by that
man--though I suppose you begin to guess by now. But you may not know
how we all long to do something for him--to show our appreciation--or
perhaps to satisfy our own hearts--and it’s so difficult--it’s next to
impossible. And she his wife, you know. If she should come out among
people, he would be the happiest man alive.”

“I fear she never will, Miss Penny,” Mrs. Lorraine returned doubtfully.
“She has been shut in too long. People like that grow selfish and
exacting. She will never be willing to make the effort it would require
to receive other people so long as she can have Anna, who just suits
her. She’ll cling to her and I fear will devour her youth.”

The phrase impressed Seth Miller deeply. He repeated it more than
once as he walked across with his lantern, sighing deeply with each
repetition, though he had really been cheered by the promise the ladies
had given him to consider the problem carefully.

He was amazed to find Anna, wrapped in a woollen dressing-gown, sitting
by the kitchen stove with her mother and the boys. She had regained her
colour and seemed herself again. As she shook back her short yellow
locks, her father thought she looked like a posy swayed by the wind.

“O pa, what do you think! Here’s a note from Mrs. Langley!” she cried.
“I thought she’d be so mad after yesterday that she’d never want to
see me again, but here she is begging to see me soon because she has
something special to speak about. Mr. Langley will come for me and
bring me back, she says, if I’ll come some night after school. Here it
is--sort of funny writing, isn’t it?”

As it never occurred to the other Miller girl to wait until she was
stronger, she hurried over to the parsonage Monday afternoon. And her
heart leaped with generous emotion when Mrs. Langley’s first question
was for the baby.

“Joe’s right as rain, bless his heart, Mrs. Langley,” she returned
cheerfully. “Pa says it did him good to expand his lungs. You
understand how it was, didn’t you?”

Mrs. Langley evaded the question by asking another: “Who’s with him
now?”

“Ma’s right there and the boys are minding him. You see,--I--I wanted
to bring him with me so badly that I’m afraid I didn’t try as I might
have to get him taken care of. And anyhow the boys are getting better.
What do you suppose? They took the pennies they have been saving
for Christmas and sent over to Wenham by Walter Phelps and got him
a perfectly scrumptious linen picture book with an animal for every
blooming letter of the alphabet. They’re perfectly dotty over teaching
him to talk. Freddy thinks it will be easier now that he knows how to
cry!”

“O, the baby isn’t afraid of them?”

“O no, the baby isn’t afraid of anybody,” returned Anna before she had
time to reflect. Then she flushed. “I mean he isn’t afraid of anyone
he’s used to. Of course he’s used to them.”

“Then he’d get used to me?” Mrs. Langley half-asserted, half-questioned.
Anna’s heart sank.

“I guess Joe, Junior’d better not go so far from home again until he’s
older,” she said gently. “I ought to have known better. But I can come
just the same. The boys have already offered to mind him Saturday.”

“But I want to see _him_ again,” Mrs. Langley insisted. And Anna felt
as if she were standing on her head, to have Mrs. Langley begging to
see the baby and to be trying to hold her off.

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Langley, when he’s a wee bit older,” she temporized,
but the other broke in impatiently. “Anna Miller! it’s just because
he’s a baby that I want to see him. When he’s older, I sha’n’t care.”

Anna sighed.

“He’ll get used to me,” Mrs. Langley urged. “I understand that he lets
Mr. Langley hold him?”

“O, any child would go to Mr. Langley, he’s so good and so----”

“So _what_?” demanded the minister’s wife, so fiercely that Anna
faltered the word she had meant to swallow: _handsome_.

“Anna Miller! Do you mean to tell me that I--that I frightened that
baby by my looks?” cried the invalid yet more fiercely.

“You don’t happen to look like anyone he’s happened to see so far,
nor--dress like ’em,” Anna murmured deprecatingly.

“You’d hardly expect him ever to see anyone who had suffered as I have
all these years and lost everyone they ever cared for!”

“There’s Mr. Langley,” Anna reminded her.

“Of course. But he isn’t like one’s own child. Anna, will you go out
and send Bell in to me. Then please wait until she comes for you.”

Too sore and shocked to protest, Anna complied silently. She guessed
that Mrs. Langley was about to consult a mirror. If she hadn’t seen
herself since--since the little lamb had been placed in the cemetery,
she would--but Anna’s imagination refused to compass the situation. She
waited with mingled dread and terror for--she knew not what.




CHAPTER XV


Big Bell’s voice was actually soft as she bade Anna return to her
mistress, and the girl stole fearfully in. However, nothing dire had
happened. Except that she was strangely subdued, Mrs. Langley was her
usual self. But Anna’s heart ached sadly.

She chattered lightly about the snow-fall and the interrupted skating.
Mrs. Langley, who hadn’t listened, presently broke in.

“Anna, what can I do to make--so that the baby won’t be afraid of me?”
she asked at once meekly and fiercely so that Anna shuddered. There was
no answer to that riddle, but she plucked up a bit of spirit.

“It was partly the dark--the half dark, I mean. Junior’s used to one
thing or t’other. There’s no twilight in our house any more than there
was where he came from,” she said, rather talking against time than
making a suggestion. But the other took it as such.

“It would hurt my eyes, but I could have the blinds raised. Would he be
all right then?”

Anna couldn’t say that he would. She looked at Mrs. Langley pleadingly.

“You think he would still be afraid of me?”

“Why, he might be afraid of--the memory of you,” the girl said
reluctantly. “If you looked like--the lady he saw in the dark room
that made him cry, he might, I suppose----”

But the girl stopped short. No, he mightn’t. Not for all the world
would she subject that baby to the danger of a second fright.

“You think I ought to wear something light and pretty?” Mrs. Langley
asked almost humbly.

“It would be nice if you should,” Anna returned in noncommittal
fashion. “But if you did, you would have to fix your hair in some other
way. Having it drawn back so tight wouldn’t go with a nifty dress.
Perhaps you could have it a bit looser about your face?”

Anna didn’t know what possessed her. She had almost said _phiz_. And
something within her added that _mug_ wouldn’t be bad. As she thought
of a dainty, light gown and soft hair about that ugly yellow face, she
had an hysterical impulse to laugh or to burst into tears.

“Perhaps he’d like it frizzed?” suggested Mrs. Langley. And then Anna
laughed out naturally.

“O Mrs. Langley, one would think Joe, Junior, was royalty!” she
exclaimed. And then she wanted to cry. _Frizzes_ about that face!

“You’re not well enough anyhow to bother about curl papers. Soft and
loose would be just as well,” she murmured with a deepening sense of
guilt. She had grown so used to Mrs. Langley that she had forgotten her
ugliness until Saturday had impressed it forcibly upon her. She said
to herself it was wicked to talk against time as she was. Could that
harsh-looking hair ever look smooth? And anyhow, she knew she would
never venture to bring the baby hither again.

Mrs. Langley was staring at her. “I suppose he likes your hair, Anna?”
she asked with something like craving in her voice.

“Rather. He’s stuck on anything yellow. He clutches at the sunshine and
he reached for Mr. Langley’s watch.”

“If I will have Bell put the blinds up as far as they will go, will you
bring him again on Saturday afternoon, Anna?” Mrs. Langley asked almost
eagerly, and added, “You’ll have to come early to catch the sunshine,
for there isn’t any after the middle of the afternoon.”

“O but Mrs. Langley, you could never stand the strong sunlight all at
once. Your poor eyes! You must let it in little by little!” protested
the girl.

Mrs. Langley looked hard at her. “Anna Miller! You have made up your
mind you won’t bring him,” she declared.

“I don’t want him to cry again. Neither do you; so it’s partly for your
sake,” Anna declared.

“But you said he wouldn’t cry if I did all that?”

Anna remained silent.

“You did say so?”

“Not exactly that. I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid that even after
all that it wouldn’t go.”

“What do you mean?”

“I really can’t tell. I’m not sure that I know. But I will come myself
just the same.”

Mrs. Langley sat almost erect. When it had happened, Anna did not know,
but she noticed now for the first time that the hump was gone. “I don’t
want you without him,” she cried, “and I want to know the truth. Why
should he be afraid of me after I had done all that?”

“Because--O, if everything else was all right, he would be afraid
of--your teeth!” the girl cried desperately. “They’re so--far
apart--there’s a gap on each side. He hasn’t many, himself, but they’re
close up and anyhow he doesn’t know what he looks like. When I hold him
up to the mirror, what do you think he does. He looks right at me!” And
the girl laughed nervously.

It was all she could do to restrain her tears. It seemed to her as if
she could not endure it for another minute. But when Mrs. Langley spoke
she forgot herself in the great wave of pity that flooded her heart.

“Well, I suppose if it’s that, there’s no help for it, and I may as
well give up,” the woman said in an old, weary voice. “You feel quite
sure, Anna?”

“You could have some put in?” Anna suggested colourlessly. Then as she
went on, her voice showed the confidence she gained. “You’d be a lot
more comfortable, too. The dentist would come over from Wenham, you
know. He came way over to the Hollow to draw a tooth for Miss Penny.”

For a few moments there was silence. The room was dark now. Anna moved,
and Mrs. Langley spoke fretfully.

“And you would have me go through all that for a baby, Anna Miller?”

“Never. Never in the world. Only--you might do it for other reasons.
Mr. Langley might like it,” Anna suggested timidly.

His wife was apparently surprised, perhaps startled. As she hadn’t
thought of Mr. Langley’s being handsome until Anna recalled it to her
mind, so it would not have occurred to her that her personal appearance
could be of moment to him.

“Why don’t you surprise him?” the girl suggested eagerly. “Pretend you
want a tooth pulled or--why need he know about it at all until it’s
done? He’s out so much it would be dead easy.”

“The excitement would kill me,” remarked Mrs. Langley.

“Then I shouldn’t think about it,” said Anna quite as decidedly. “After
all, lots of women look older than their husbands. Ma doesn’t, but Mrs.
Mudge does and Mrs. Graham--Mabel’s mother--and--no end of others.”

Mrs. Langley had nothing to say but her silence seemed eloquent--
fiercely eloquent to Anna, and she took leave hastily, promising to
drop in again on Saturday. As she hurried home, she said to herself it
was just as if she had sat in a dentist’s chair all afternoon and ached
all over now.

That night as she lay in bed, she said to herself that that was the
end of everything. And she feared that she was more relieved than
disappointed. It would be cruelly hard to part with the baby and her
heart leaped at the thought of keeping him always. And she owned to her
innermost heart that she should be glad of a rest from going to the
parsonage. She would have more time for Joe, Junior, and for Alice.
She and Alice could enjoy him together, and--dear me, she had quite
forgotten those absurd rumours about Alice! She must do something at
once.

She was sincerely sorry so far as Mr. Langley was concerned. But she
had done her level best. She would have given him the baby though it
had half killed her, but she had failed to ‘put it over’. She must
always be sorry for that part of it, for most likely he would grow old
with a vengeance now and she would be obliged to sit by and watch him
going headlong down hill. Well, and she was sorry for Mrs. Langley,
too. Somehow, she seemed to have a certain affection for her--a queer,
maternal sort of affection as if a downy yellow chick wanted to mother
and brood an ugly old hen. If only someone had taken her earlier!

The next day was a day of profound discomfort. But on Wednesday, a note
was brought to the Hollow from the parsonage asking Anna to come to see
Mrs. Langley on Saturday week at two o’clock and bring the baby with
her. Consternation seized upon her, and settled into despair. But she
felt constrained, and before night sent back word that they would come.

At first she was thankful for the ten days respite. Then she felt the
suspense would kill her. But very shortly she had no time to worry over
that or anything else except after she got into bed at night and then
she was too tired. For suddenly Alice Lorraine began to seek and claim
her companionship as she had never done before, and the girls became
practically inseparable.

Anna always enjoyed Alice, and with Alice and Joe together would have
been blissfully happy but for the lurking apprehension with regard
to the Saturday facing her. And when she forgot that, it was because
she recollected the mystery connected with Alice, who had ceased her
wandering and seemed to her mother and Miss Penny to be herself again.
But Anna knew better: she wasn’t at all the same girl she had been
before the day Anna had found her at the dark cottage in the lane. She
had moments of high spirits, but they did not last. She clung to Anna,
but she was still nervous and absent-minded. Anna was forced to guess
that the reason she no longer went back and forth between the Hollow
and the lane was because the person she met there or the occasion of
her going was no longer thereabout. But although Alice was not happy
nor at her ease, neither was she really unhappy as she must have been
had it--whatever it had been--been over and the parting final.

If the strange man she had walked with were her father, then Anna had
no fear. If he had escaped from prison and his daughter had helped him,
Anna was only too glad. She would have been glad to help him herself.
But if it weren’t--and how could it be? Why should Alice have exhibited
that uncanny interest in Reuben’s past if the man was her father? If he
wasn’t her father, if he were some younger man--Anna wouldn’t admit it
even to herself, but something kept trying to tell her that Alice acted
now just as a girl would who was planning to run away--to elope. Still,
that did not explain her interest in Reuben. Alice didn’t question
any more, it is true, but she was all eagerness whenever Reuben was
mentioned. But nothing could be more absurd, if one knew Reuben, than
to connect him in any way with the man with whom Alice had been seen or
with the occasion of her solitary rambles.

In the midst of this, happily for Anna, a counter-excitement arose. A
change came over Joe, Junior, which, slight as it might have seemed to
another, thrilled the heart of his foster-mother. On a sudden he began
to take an interest in the world about him and the passing scene. A
faint flicker of colour appeared upon his little old man’s face which
looked less mournful and forlorn. He held everything that was put
into his hands, examining it gravely from every angle, and evinced a
real interest in the animals in his gay picture book, viewing them as
seriously and intently as if he were making weighty deductions in
natural history or even biology, though his silence remained unbroken.

       *       *       *       *       *

The December day fixed for the visit at the parsonage dawned clear
and fine and remained unclouded up to sundown. Anna set out promptly
in order to catch the mid-day beams upon those western windows that
had shut out the sun for so many annual revolutions. The snow had
disappeared, save in patches facing the north, and the air was genial.
Joe, Junior, was almost rosy, looked calmly content and less serious
than his wont. Anna wore her Sunday suit of hunter’s green with the
coquettish little cocked hat perched on her short locks and looked like
a handsome young prince. Strange to say, however, she was quite unaware
of her appearance. She hadn’t glanced at a mirror except to put in her
brooch, and her face was very grave. None knew how the girl dreaded
the ordeal, but Mrs. Lorraine, who drove her over with the fat pony,
guessed something.

She exclaimed over the baby’s improvement, praised the green suit and
thought the little hat was even more becoming with bobbed hair. Anna
smiled absently but sighed almost immediately.

“Anna, you don’t feel like going this afternoon? Let me take you back
home and then go over to the parsonage and make your excuses?” Mrs.
Lorraine begged.

“O no, Mrs. Lorraine. I’m really wild to go--in a way,” Anna declared.
“I’m sure everything’s going to be all right to-day, only--I seem
to be pulled all ways at once. You see--well,--Freddy came to me
this morning in tears and said he heard ma advising pa not to buy a
piano-forte--not to put his money into it. She said with an extra mouth
to feed he’d better hold on to it.”

“Well, perhaps there isn’t any special hurry about the piano,” Mrs.
Lorraine returned, not venturing to express at this time the sympathy
she felt. And she endeavoured to distract Anna’s attention by speaking
of the butter she and Miss Penny had made that week, the market price
and the new mould. And Anna forgot her own perplexities and was quite
herself when they reached the parsonage.

It was Bell Adams who met her at the door to-day. The expression on
her face was such as to puzzle Anna and rather to frighten her. She
spoke in hoarse whispers and made strange grimaces, and suddenly
Anna’s heart failed her. But she had promised. Slipping off the baby’s
wraps hastily, she took him and hurried to the door of Mrs. Langley’s
room without stopping to remove her own jacket. She opened the door
desperately. Just within, she paused. She expected a change, but--what
had happened?




CHAPTER XVI


The blinds were raised high and the sun streamed in over so brilliant
a Brussels carpet that the carefully cherished one in Miss Penny’s
parlour would have seemed almost dingy beside it. And the dimness
having vanished, the room seemed to have expanded--to have thrust out
its boundary walls in all directions. Extra furniture had been moved
in--though not, probably, on that account--which imparted an hospitable
if rather grotesquely amusing air. There were chairs of all shapes
and sizes, tables and stands, hassocks, an extra what-not, an Indian
cabinet, and such an array of tidies, antimacassars, lambrequins, and
afghans as only a country parsonage can collect through various periods
and many years of ‘fancy-work.’ One of the larger of the extra tables
held the parlour clock, which was surmounted by a bronze statuette
representing a barefooted maiden with a pitcher, and the other, the
great silver water-pitcher with elves clambering over the handle which
had been the wedding gift from the church. The medicine bottles had
been cleared away and the stand that had held them was adorned only by
the framed photograph of little Ella May’s monument resting on a gay
mat of shaded red worsteds.

Nevertheless it was not this transformation which the other Miller girl
noticed first, nor was it considerable in comparison with the real
transformation. After a vague, momentary realisation of the sunshine
and the gorgeous purple and crimson roses of the border of the carpet,
the girl was lost in wonder as she stared incredulously at the figure
in the familiar yet strange arm chair.

Mrs. Langley--if it were, indeed, Mrs. Langley?--wore a gown of
warm grey shading into lilac with a lace fichu fastened by a large,
handsome cameo brooch. Her parted hair was brought back so loosely as
considerably to disguise the sharpness of her temples. Her eyes looked
softer and her skin less sallow even in the strong light; while, most
remarkable of all, the appalling hollows in her cheeks had disappeared,
taking with them almost all the grimness of the mouth. And when she
actually smiled, partly with her eyes yet also with her lips, Anna lost
her head. She forgot all the neat, deprecatory little speeches she had
prepared for every emergency save this overwhelming surprise.

“O Mrs. Langley! you look simply _swell_!” she cried, dropping into
a three-cornered chair that might have seemed perilously near. “And
here’s little Joe, Junior, come way across the city from the Hollow to
the Bowery to tell you he’s going to celebrate his first Christmas in
ten days.”

She held her breath. But the baby surveyed the scene calmly with that
new keenness of observation of his. Apparently nothing suggested to
him that it was the same wherein he had been so terrified a fortnight
since. He stared coolly at the lady in the flowered chair, the lotos
blossoms and birds of paradise of which hadn’t been visible in the
darkened room, scrutinizing her gravely but without either recognition
or disapproval.

None the less, it was only with a tremendous effort of will that Anna
rose and deliberately put the child into Mrs. Langley’s arms. For a
moment her heart stood still. But to-day there was no scream. Little
Joe did not even seek to come back to Anna. His gravity seemed, indeed,
rather to lift than to deepen. He cuddled down in the stranger’s arms
in a manner that implied an absent-minded desire to be comfortable
while he completed his survey. For he made haste to study the bright
colours of the worsted mat. Thence his gaze roved to the photograph in
the frame. He looked at it hard, glanced at the lady who held him then
turned to Anna.

“Baa-baa!” he exclaimed suddenly, very clearly and rather dramatically
and stretched out his little hand towards the picture.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Langley being summoned, had also to pause on the threshold.
He was almost overwhelmed by the transformation, for which he was
wholly unprepared. For Big Bell had helped her mistress carry through
everything without his knowledge. He hadn’t so much as had inkling
of the fact that the blinds had been raised every day a bit higher
and for progressively longer intervals leading up to this handsome
crisis. He felt absolutely dazed as he looked at his wife, as if he,
too, had been dwelling in semi-darkness the while. He hadn’t seen her
clearly for years upon years and one might have expected the strong
light now to be disillusioning rather than flattering. But not so.
Russell Langley could scarcely believe that the comely looking woman in
the gay, flowered chair with the child cherished in her arms was his
wife,--nor, indeed, that he was himself.

But somehow when his eyes wandered and fell upon the other Miller girl,
the sight of her steadied him. Anna was as real as she was true blue.
Wherefore everything was real, even that splotch of sunshine on the
purple and crimson carpet which had so enchanted his youthful masculine
fancy.

“What are you standing there for, Russell?” asked his wife in a voice
and with a manner that were singularly what they would have been had
husband and wife come through the twenty years hand-in-hand instead of
separately. “Come here and listen to this wonderful baby.”

He obeyed as one in a dream. But when he stood over her, as he bent and
kissed her, it cost him an effort not to try to take the child from her
into his own arms. Mrs. Langley pointed her lean finger towards the
lamb in the picture.

“What’s that, baby? What’s that, darling child?” she begged his royal
highness to declare.

“Baa-baa,” returned the child, and looking up to Anna almost smiled.
The girl dropped at his feet enraptured. Then she caught sight of the
giantess as she had endeavoured to peep in unseen and called her in.
Bell joined the group in an instant.

“O an’ the little angel he is, ma’am!” she exclaimed. “O to have him in
me arrums but the oncet. Would he come to the likes of me, Miss Anna?”

“Sure, Bell,” said Anna, though Mrs. Langley frowned upon the bold
request. But Big Bell held out her great strong arms, and, the baby
responding with unusual readiness, gathered him tenderly into them.
Mrs. Langley, who yielded him ungraciously, watched Bell suspiciously
as she marched about the room with him, showing him the colleen on
the parlour clock and the wee people on the silver water-pitcher.
But when Bell put a bright blue worsted mat with a fringe of tassels
on top of her head and cocked it at the baby, winking one eye, and
the baby actually and unmistakably smiled, Mrs. Langley smiled, too.
Nevertheless, she couldn’t endure it another second and demanded that
Joe, Junior, be returned to her at once.

Bell was bold enough to ask her if she felt she was strong enough,
and then gave him up reluctantly. “I’ve a way with ’em same’s ever,”
she declared defiantly. “I brought up my sister’s babies till her man
married again, and when I first went into service it was as a nurse.”
She would have gone on, but suddenly her feelings overcame her and she
turned and fled.

       *       *       *       *       *

On her way home, Anna prudently decided to say nothing of the marvel
of the baby’s talking until after he should have gone to sleep. After
that had happened she related the story dramatically to the assembled
family.

They were all greatly excited, but the boys were wild with anticipation
and could scarcely wait until morning. Though it was Sunday and dark,
they were up and dressed at six o’clock and had a long, weary wait
before the hero made his appearance. But the instant Joe, Junior,
finished his porridge, they fetched his picture book. It was already
open at L and Anna was as much delighted as they when he promptly said
Baa! to the lamb.

“Ask him something else, quick!” cried Freddy, as if there were not a
moment to lose.

“O Freddy, that’s no fair. He’s only a baby. You mustn’t expect too
much of him,” cautioned Anna.

“No, indeed, Fred Miller, don’t you dare turn that page,” added the
elder brother sternly. “You’ll get him mixed up and scared and then
he’ll never say baa again. Don’t you dare. We’ll practise him a while
on this now.”

Freddy snatched the book, opened it at random in his haste, and before
Frank could interfere demanded of the baby what _that_ might be. The
choice was unfortunate, _that_ being an hippopotamus with a gaping red
mouth.

“Moo moo!” cried the baby almost dramatically, and the boys shouted for
joy. Then alike unmindful of threats and warnings, they went through
the book, and the astonishing baby had an answer for every question.
He wasn’t always right, but he only appeared the more clever. He said
_bow-wow_ for the camel but he gave a really creditable roar for the
cinnamon bear.

In truth, Joe, Junior, seemed to have come into his own. Not only did
Anna and the boys hang over him spell-bound and Seth Miller seem glued
to the spot, but Mrs. Miller left her work not only patiently but
eagerly whenever the boys summoned her, and once she bent over the baby
and kissed him.

Not long after the others had gone to service, Mrs. Lorraine came in.
She made Anna lie down on the sofa and sat beside her.

“I understand the baby has begun to talk,” she observed.

“O Mrs. Lorraine! Already? Who told you?” asked the girl eagerly.

“Your father and mother and Frank each told me separately, and Frank
and Freddy together. And Miss Penny told me last evening. Mr. Langley
told someone and Mr. Phelps heard it at the post office.”

“I’m glad ma told you,” Anna remarked. “She’s beginning to take to him.
She kissed him this morning.”

Mrs. Lorraine sighed. Anna had been pale when she came in. Now her
cheeks were crimson and her eyes too bright. She was always thin, but
to-day her face looked pinched. Anna was second only to Alice herself
in Mrs. Lorraine’s heart.

“Anna, I wish you would find a home for that baby or let some of us,”
she said anxiously. “The responsibility is too much for you. Many
people would be glad to take him, I am sure.”

“Glad! my goodness, they’d jump at the chance!” rejoined Anna. “And
well they might. I did think that I would give him away, but I don’t
believe now that I could part with him. And it’s different now. The
boys are crazy over him and so is pa. And now that ma----”

Mrs. Lorraine perceived that she had taken the wrong tack. She must try
again.

“But Anna, having him keeps you from so many things. They really need
you in the choir, you know.”

“Alice might sing in the choir. Her voice is better than mine and she
knows heaps more about music.”

“Alice wouldn’t go in without you, and her voice really isn’t so sweet.
And your mother needs you, Anna. Like most mothers, she has been tied
at home for years, and it seems a pity that just as she begins to go
about she should lose your companionship. And your school-mates----”

As Anna sat up, suddenly she looked so distressed that Mrs. Lorraine’s
heart failed her. She had never been a very considerate woman--hadn’t
taken any thought to avoid hurting the feelings of others. But she must
have become more sensitive of late. Certainly it hurt her to hurt the
girl before her.

“You see, dear child, you are just the sort of person everyone wants
a share of, but little Joe quite monopolises you,” she went on more
gently. “You and Alice were reading _Retaliation_ the other day, you
know. Well, you’re like the line on Burke. You give up to Joe, Junior,
what was meant for mankind.”

Anna laughed, though ruefully. She rose and made a movement to smooth
her hair, then remembered that her braid was gone and shook her short
locks. Seating herself in a straight chair, she folded her hands over
her knee.

“One reason why I hate to give him up, Mrs. Lorraine, is because he’s
Bessy’s baby and Joe’s,” she began wistfully. “He’s the only part of
them and of that life that I’ve got left, you see. Not that I want ever
to go back to it. I love the Hollow and Farleigh and all the people,
and yet there’s something that makes me feel I don’t want to forget the
other altogether. Bessy wore a pompadour that made even me shiver and
she chewed gum, and Joe would have looked like a jumping-jack beside
Reuben, and yet Bessy and Joe were both true blue. Bessy got all run
down while Joe was sick going without things so that he could have milk
and eggs, and when he got back to work he went without lunches so that
she would think his pay was the same as it had been. And if Hazel or I
or any of their friends had had hard luck, they would have taken them
in and done everything for them the same as Hazel did for Bessy when
the time came.”

She looked entreatingly into Mrs. Lorraine’s dark eyes, which were
sympathetic but perplexed.

“You can’t understand how it is, unless you live right among them, but
if you once have, there’s something mighty precious in the memory of
that life that you wouldn’t lose hold of. If I didn’t want Joe, Junior,
myself, I should want him because he’s Bessy’s and Joe’s,” she said
earnestly.

The girl was very quiet all the rest of the day. She pondered sadly
over what Mrs. Lorraine had said and over what her words had further
implied. She had not realised that they had missed her, her mother
and the boys and Miss Penny and Alice--Alice most of all, perhaps,
though her mother didn’t dream that. Perhaps she could do things for
them that others couldn’t, while the baby would really be better off
with the Langleys. Mr. Langley and Bell Adams would be wonderful with
him and it began to look as if Mrs. Langley would make a creditable
mother. And Alice needed her; and Alice’s mother needed something in
Alice which perhaps only Anna could watch out for. And Alice had never
been really happy until she was twenty and Mrs. Lorraine not until she
was forty-five. And both had been so frightfully unhappy. And there
was that terrible black shadow of the prison hanging over them for ten
years to come.

Giving up Joe, Junior, was of course only what she had planned to do
in the first place. It was only what she had worked and struggled for
ever since she had returned with the baby. And even before that, she
had been longing to discover some means of repaying Mr. Langley for all
he had done for Rusty and her family in general and to comfort him for
losing his little Ella May after all the years. Yet now that she had it
within her power to give him something that would be like his heart’s
desire, she was grudging it. But O--that darling baby! And he loved her
as he cared for no one else.

On a sudden, Anna decided to go to evening service. She had kissed the
baby in his sleep and almost thought he smiled, and as she flew over
the frozen ground, her heart grew light again. Her own words came back
to her. “The baby loves me best.” They echoed in her heart and she
almost danced along to their melody. He loved her best and therefore
he belonged to her as he could belong to no other. For, after all,
there was nothing like love. Advantages and all sorts of material goods
couldn’t compete with it. She was going to keep Joe, Junior, always.




CHAPTER XVII


Anna Miller went forth exultantly, hugging the certainty to her heart
that Joe, Junior, loved her best and that she had, therefore, a right
to keep him to grow up in an household wherein everyone loved and
wanted him. But all her elation died out at the sight of Mr. Langley’s
face as it looked down from the pulpit. He looked as he had never
looked before, and the girl knew only too well that it was all because
of the baby’s visit to the parsonage yesterday. He looked weary--at
once wistfully and radiantly weary. He looked as if he had been through
floods and stood on mountain summits. He looked, poor dear, as if he
ought to have a darling, cuddling, prattling baby at the parsonage all
the time.

So the question was unsettled again and settled the other way, though
Anna lay awake for hours that night before she announced the painful
decision formally to herself. And even then she did not dare trust
herself until she had burned all her bridges behind her. She hastened
over to the parsonage late Monday afternoon.

At the door, Big Bell enquired eagerly though shyly for the blessed
baby. When Anna told her of his feats with the picture book, Bell
laughed and choked and got out of the way quickly to conceal her
tears. Anna’s eyes were moist as she entered Mrs. Langley’s room.

“O Mrs. Langley, what do you think now?” she cried, and proceeded to
relate the story of the pictures at greater length. And as she told it,
she and Mrs. Langley laughed and cried together in new intimacy.

“Why didn’t you bring him with you?” Mrs. Langley asked wistfully. And
the girl’s heart sank to feel how fatally easy it was to be to give
away the baby. She spoke very low in order to keep her voice steady.

“Because--O, Mrs. Langley, I don’t think we’ll keep little Joe. We all
love him--even ma, but we don’t really need him and--don’t you know
someone who would like a baby boy that talks?”

Mrs. Langley stared at the girl. The blinds were raised to-day, though
not so high, and she wore the pretty gown and becoming arrangement of
her hair. She looked even more attractive than she had on Saturday, for
she seemed used to the change. It was almost as if she had always let
in the sunshine and the rich rosy afterglow which prevailed now and had
never resembled Red-Riding-Hood’s wolf in her grandmother’s cap and
gown. And Anna jumped at the conclusion any young or immature person
might have made that the transformation within must be as complete and
thorough.

“Wouldn’t you like him yourself--you and Mr. Langley?” she asked
gently. “If so, I’ll give him to you as a Christmas present.”

Mrs. Langley only stared the more blankly. The idea was absolutely new
and strange to her mind and therefore startling. Never in all her life
before had she been so surprised, so astounded.

Then suddenly a sharp twinge of neuralgia, zigzagging up her face into
her head converted her confusion into a sort of blind rage. As it died
away, it left her with a sensation of faintness and sickness.

“I don’t know what you are thinking of, Anna Miller, to--to--upset me
so!” she cried querelously. “Of course we couldn’t have him here and I
an invalid! It would kill me--break my heart.”

As for Anna, she was quite confounded. Absolutely unprepared for the
refusal of the precious gift it had cost her so much to proffer, the
repetition of that hateful, meaningless phrase irritated her keenly.
But for Mr. Langley’s sake, she spoke with measure.

“But Mrs. Langley, I thought you were better--a heap better,” she
protested. “Tell me, does your head ache at this very minute?”

Mrs. Langley considered, or tried to do so. “I can’t tell,” she
snapped. “I think it must, but I am so wrought up I’m sure I can’t
tell. But I know this. As soon as you go, I shall find myself suffering
torture, and it’s likely to keep up all night.”

“I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to excite you,” murmured Anna meekly.
“But Joe, Junior, wouldn’t excite you, not a bit. And he wouldn’t be
any trouble even to a worse invalid than you were when you were at
your very sickest. He isn’t at all like other babies. Big Bell would
take all the care of him--she knows how to handle ’em and she’s crazy
about him already. And Mr. Langley would play with him--he’d love to,
too--and then whenever you wanted to see him and hear the little love
talk, why all you’d have to do would be to have him brought in--ask
Bell for him.”

“And like as not Bell would have an excuse all ready. I know Bell Adams
better than you do, Anna Miller! She’d keep him to herself all the time
and when I wanted him, she’d say he was having a nap. And he’d like
Mr. Langley better than he would me and he wouldn’t come to me from
him. And--O dear, O dear, why did you come here with your wild notions
stirring me up so that I sha’n’t get a wink of sleep all night!”

Anna looked desperately and forlornly at the big purple roses. A long
pause ensued which Mrs. Langley finally broke.

“Anna, I would like to have you bring the baby over here just as often
as you can,” she said in a conciliatory way. “Of course it wouldn’t be
wise for me to have him in the house all the time in my delicate state
of health, as you would know if you were older or had had experience
with illness. But I would dearly love to have you bring him over every
day besides all Saturday afternoons.”

Slow to anger as the girl was, she wasn’t proof against this. She
sprang to her feet.

“Not on your tintype!” she cried hotly. “That baby shall never come
to this house again unless he comes to stay--never! never! I’ve got
something else to do than tote him way over here every day, and if you
want to see him days you’ve got to shelter him nights. Not that the
darling has to go a begging for shelter, for I’m sure I don’t want to
give him away. But I’ll give you one more chance. Do you want him to
keep, or will you never look on his face again?”

Mrs. Langley began to remonstrate peevishly. Anna repeated her demand
fiercely.

“O Anna, I couldn’t think of doing that. It would break my heart,” Mrs.
Langley almost wailed. Anna turned at the door.

“Very well, then. It’s settled,” she cried, “and you shall never have
him, never! I wanted to keep him myself and now I will and there’ll
be no more fussing about it. I shall give up my life to him and never
marry. And, believe me, I shall never come near this house again!”

“I’m sure, I’m glad to hear that!” retorted Mrs. Langley. “Don’t
flatter yourself that it’s any favour to me your coming here and
ordering me round and stirring me all up in this fashion. I’ll thank
you to pull that curtain down and leave me alone.”

Anna yanked at the blind viciously and down it came, fixture and all,
with a sad crash. Startled out of her wrath, the girl was ashamed and
confused. She was sick at heart, too, with the significance of it, the
drawing down of the blind that had let in light for only a fortnight
out of twenty-odd years. But she fled precipitately, pausing only to
send Bell in to her mistress. And she believed herself to be leaving
the house forever.




CHAPTER XVIII


On the day following her second meeting with the stranger who called
himself John Converse, Alice Lorraine was in a sad state of mind when
she reached the lane. She _had_ to see the man again. She told herself
that ordinary civility as well as her own desire demanded that. Chance
had brought them together and put upon her the duty of aiding him so
far as possible in looking up old associations without making himself
known in the village of his birth and boyhood. She had somehow lost her
head and become involved in a warm dispute. That made it hard for her
to act to-day. But she told herself that she was not going back as the
girl who had been vehement over--nothing! She was simply going to meet
John Converse (for the last time, probably) in the odd little shop,
give him such information as she was able, and if he should wish, help
him plan his course of action. Then they would part in the polite way
of people who have become acquainted in the course of a long railway
journey and offered one another kindly civilities.

It would be simple enough, she told herself, if she could only remember
that he belonged to an older generation. He didn’t look young and he
couldn’t be, with a memory reaching back as far as his did. It was
only his sad eyes which could become so merry and the whimsical smile
that transformed his gaunt face that had made her feel as if he were a
companion of her own years.

As the girl stole around the cottage towards the path leading to the
shop, John Converse rose quickly from the step of the back porch and
joined her. He held out his hand eagerly and she put hers shyly into
it, her face expressing the relief she felt to find that he was not
resentful. She realised now that she had feared that if he were about
at all he would be stiff and cold.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said with a frank smile. “I have
had a nasty night, I can tell you. And now I want to explain to you
right away what must have seemed to you inexcusable behaviour. Shall we
sit down here?”

Alice thought of his safety. And she suggested that they might as well
go into the shop. As they entered, she noted that there was a fire and
the same preparations for tea he had made the day before.

He took her jacket, made her comfortable, prepared the tea and served
her. Alice, with a sense of relief that was like happiness, leaned
back in her chair and watched him admiringly. She had never known a
man to be so deft, and gazing at his hands she noticed that, though
the skin was hard and rough and they must have done the work of a
labourer, they were the long, sensitive, slender hands of the sculptor
or musician--probably the latter. And suddenly her lips puckered in an
involuntary smile.

“What pleases you, if I may ask?” he said wonderingly. He himself was
very serious,--sad, almost. There was no hint now of the whimsicality
that made him so young--nor of the youthful impulsiveness with which he
had met her to-day.

Alice looked into his eyes ingenuously. “I wouldn’t dare tell anyone
else of the thought that came to me and made me smile,” she declared.
“They would mob me, I am quite sure. You see everyone in this
village--or everyone I happen to know--is simply mad about Reuben
Cartwright. Honestly, I believe they consider him perfect--incapable
of doing anything that’s not exactly the right thing. And I have
heard so much raving about him that I believe I am catching the
madness, or whatever you call it. Just now as you were handling the
cups so skilfully it came suddenly to me that your hands were like
Reuben’s--and mind you, I never saw the boy!”

He did not smile. He only looked at her curiously. Then he sat down
opposite her.

“It wouldn’t be strange if they were alike,” he said quietly. “It’s
odd, but you have led up to the explanation I was about to make. I
feel, Miss Lorraine, that I owe it to you to tell you who I really
am. You trusted me without a shred of evidence of my integrity, and
you granted my wish for secrecy. I ought to have told you, anyhow.
But having lost my temper and made shockingly uncivil remarks to you,
I cannot do otherwise. The reason I fired up when you were ready to
believe ill--the worst--of Dick Cartwright is the same reason that
Reuben Cartwright’s hands and mine may look alike, though I trust his
aren’t so calloused and generally bunged up. I am Reuben Cartwright’s
father.”

It wasn’t, of course, the same shock to Alice Lorraine the announcement
would have been to one who had known Richard Cartwright or his son
Reuben. But the girl paled.

“But I thought he was dead--_you_, I mean,” she said so naively that he
smiled.

“I may be lean and lank, but I am a right husky ghost for all that,” he
said. Then he grew serious. “You were right in thinking so. I wanted
everyone to believe me dead, and now I feel the same, except for you.
It wasn’t only because I wouldn’t seem so rude if you understood that I
wanted you to know, Miss Lorraine; but you seemed to think I was such
a bad lot that I wanted you to know the truth. Not that I wasn’t a bad
lot, you know, only I wasn’t quite such a scoundrel as you apparently
think. Do you mind telling me just what impression Mr. Langley gave you
of me? I believe under the circumstances you have the right to speak
freely.”

Alice complied briefly. Cartwright wiped his brow more than once.

“I went through a lot for nothing, then,” he said almost bitterly.
“If I had given my real name, I could have gotten off; but I feared
the notoriety for Reuben and took the name of a man that was killed,
for the sake of giving him mine and having Reuben’s father die a
comparatively decent death instead of being a convict. I was on that
train but the only thing wrong about my being there was that I didn’t
pay my fare. I was a tramp at that time and another tramp and I were
riding the bumpers--he initiated me into the mysteries of the practise.
He was killed and in the confusion of the wreck I was arrested as one
of the gang that was responsible for it and for the deaths of the mail
clerk and engineer. They couldn’t prove anything, but circumstantial
evidence implicated me as an accessory. My one hope of clearing myself
would have been to establish my identity as Richard Cartwright,
which, as I said, I did not choose to do. Wherefore I landed in the
penitentiary.”

The girl gave a little involuntary, startled, deprecating cry. Richard
Cartwright faced her almost sternly with folded arms.

“You have been there--not ever since?” she protested. He told her that
he had served two years of a sentence of five when the confession of a
member of the gang who died of consumption had freed him.

“But why didn’t you come back here then?” she cried.

“If you could have seen me the day after I left the prison, you
wouldn’t ask,” he said bitterly. “I became a bum on the spot. I
deliberately took up the drink habit again and became a drunkard and a
tramp. I kept at it for three years--years that are almost a blank to
me now. Then something happened--I don’t know what it was--that set me
thinking of Reuben and Farleigh and Russell Langley and I decided to
stop long enough to put myself into shape to come East and see if they
were alive and how things were going on and all that. That was nearly
a year ago. I stopped drinking, went to work, earned and saved money
enough to clothe myself decently and to take this sight-seeing trip,
and--here I am.”

Again he wiped his damp brow with his pocket handkerchief and looked at
the girl--defiantly, bitterly, yet deprecatingly and wistfully.

“But why don’t you stay, now?” she cried. “And why don’t you see Mr.
Langley and Reuben? Though I know Reuben only by hearsay, I know enough
of him to know that he would be--_crazy_ to see you.”

She smiled tremulously. “He’s the faithful sort, if I’m not,” she said.

“O Miss Lorraine, don’t hit a fellow who’s down,” he begged.

“But you will--you will stay and--you will see them, Reuben and Mr.
Langley?”

“No, Miss Lorraine, I cannot stay. And I’ll see them, but I won’t
let them see me and I will remain dead to everyone but you just the
same. I will roam about dear old Farleigh and see the changes, and I
won’t hurry, but--I’ll go back presently. This is only a vacation,--a
sight-seeing trip on the part of John Converse.”

“Back to what?” asked the girl imperiously.

“Back to being a good, honest day-labourer, if you say so, Miss
Lorraine,” he assured her.

“Well, but I don’t say so,” she retorted. “I want you to be a musician.
I want you to have your old house back and to build----”

Her voice broke. He was silent a little. Then he reached forth his
hard, beautifully shaped hands.

“Look at those--_hoofs!_ On nearer view do they look like a
musician’s?” he asked.

“The hands do and you could easily soften the skin,” she declared.

“I learned cobbling in prison and did it for two years,” he remarked,
and the girl paled sensitively, and her eyes fell.

“And my job now is work in a shoe factory, and so it must be for----”

“So it must not! No such thing!” she interrupted.

He smiled at her fire, and she thought he was ready to be persuaded.
And for some little time, Alice Lorraine urged him to alter what she
found to be a bitterly fixed determination. But she was still shaken
and confused by the excitement and emotion she had undergone, and
presently she gave over for the moment, feeling that she could do
better by waiting until she should have pondered over the matter alone.
However, she secured his promise not to return to the West without
letting her know nor without seeing her. By that time it was late and
agreeing to meet him the next day, she took leave.

The next day Dick Cartwright told her that he had decided to remain
hereabouts for a fortnight if he was lucky enough to escape detection,
after which he would go to the town where Reuben was attending college,
preferring to see him there rather than in Farleigh at the Christmas
holidays. Then he would stop here and tell her about it on his way
West. He begged her earnestly not to try to dissuade him. His purpose
was fixed, and it only caused him intense pain to have her attempt to
alter it.

Warm-hearted Alice agreed to desist temporarily at least and to
help make his days in Farleigh successful whether they were only
holidays or, as she continued secretly to hope, the beginning of a
second residence. She learned all she could about Reuben to relate to
his father when she met him, which was daily except when Alice was
prevented from getting away, which happened only twice. She told him
something more of Mr. Langley almost every time she saw him and learned
the history of every person he mentioned any desire to know about. She
helped him plan his nightly wanderings about the place, shared one of
them and listened eagerly to what he told her of his experiences. She
even managed to get him into the church one Sunday afternoon and to
coax him to play a few bars on the familiar organ, the sight of which
brought tears to his eyes. At moments when they were in good spirits
they called themselves a pair of conspirators and wondered at the
success which attended Dick Cartwright. For Alice assured him again and
again that no one dreamed of there being any stranger in the place.

The days flew over Alice Lorraine’s head, her only regret being that
she had no opportunity to plead with Dick Cartwright to reconsider his
resolve. At home, as was perhaps not unnatural, she appeared nervous
and was ready to be irritable as she had never been before. She was
careless of others and remiss in her duties. And yet she was not
utterly so. For a new feeling for her father had been aroused in her,
a pity and sympathy the girl could never have experienced otherwise.
She thought much of him and wrote him two long letters in the fortnight
that elapsed before Dick Cartwright left Farleigh to go in search of
Reuben.

On the night he was to leave, Alice, who was supposed to be in her room
whither she had withdrawn early, met him at a point in the South Hollow
which they had agreed upon. She entreated him to make himself known to
his son and let him help make the final decision, but Cartwright was
adamant.

“I couldn’t explain to Reuben without letting him know that I have been
in prison,” he finally explained reluctantly and quite as if that ended
the argument.

“Yes, but _innocently_!” she cried.

“That makes little difference. I would rather die than have Reuben know
he is the son of one who has been a prisoner,” he declared proudly.

Alice withdrew her arm from his. “You think it so terrible a stigma as
all that, Mr. Cartwright?” she demanded.

“I would rather die than have Reuben know it,” he repeated warmly.

“_My_ father is in prison now!” she cried. “And he--he is--he isn’t
innocent!”




CHAPTER XIX


“We’re goin’ to have a green Christmas, sure’s you’re born,” remarked
the usually stolid and reticent Bell Adams. “I only hope the rest of it
don’t follow. Dear me, if that delicate motherless baby should be took!”

“Bell Adams, I don’t know what you mean, talking like that to me,”
cried her mistress. “Just because I’ve forced myself to endure the
strong light and have changed a little outwardly, you treat me as if I
were as well and strong as anyone. You used to be so careful, Bell.”

That was quite true,--also that Bell had borne herself differently of
late. She had not, as a matter of fact, been the same woman since the
visit of Anna Miller and Joe, Junior, when she had held the baby in
her arms. And since she had in some manner come to understand that the
child had been offered to the household and refused by Mrs. Langley,
she had been so thoroughly indignant that she could scarcely speak to
her mistress. But silence being her usual role, it was only when her
anger had cooled into sulkiness that Mrs. Langley felt and resented the
strangeness of her demeanour.

“And why you should pick out that little innocent baby--” Mrs. Langley
went on in an aggrieved voice.

“I ain’t a-pickin’ of him out,” retorted Bell. “If anybody’s doin’ that
it’s the Lord, and if He’s marked him out for early death, why, there
you are. And anyways, the little mite hasn’t no real home, so to speak.
And he’s too bright to grow up. He ought to be tenderly cherished with
that bulgin’ forehead, and his speakin’ out so sudden and complete
wasn’t natural.”

Mrs. Langley was too affected to reply. Bell hastened back to the
kitchen, for it was the day before Christmas and she was deep in
preparation.

Ten minutes passed and a shadow fell across her table. Bell looked up
in amazement to see her mistress before her. Mrs. Langley had not left
her room for years, and Bell was really frightened.

“For the dear sake, Mis’ Langley, you out of your head?” she cried.

“No, Bell, but I felt upset. I wish you would come in and sit with me
for a little, but you must be quiet. I don’t want you to say a word.
You stirred me all up with your chatter about green Christmases.”

“But ma’am, I’m makin’ cranberry jell, and I must get this mince pie
into the oven for Mr. Langley’s Christmas dinner,” returned Bell.

She glanced at her mistress out of the tail of her eye, and, apparently
deciding that she could go further with impunity, added:

“It’s bad enough as it is, him a-eatin’ of it all alone.”

Mrs. Langley flushed. That woman was getting unbearable.

“If you pity Mr. Langley, I should like to know what you think of me,
Bell Adams?” she cried. “I must not only eat alone but I am forced to
remain alone all the time and to suffer constant pain.”

“Yes’m, I know,” Bell relented. “’Tis hard, dear knows. And yet, men
are different from we women, and sometimes I mistrust they suffer as
much from bein’ lonesome as we do from real pain. And then of course
he’s been as good as a widower all these years and----”

“Bell Adams----”

“O, ma’am, you ought not to be standin’ and in this hot kitchin and
like a summer day outside and the twenty-fourth day of December. Now
why don’t you go into the front room and set a spell and watch the
folks go by? They’s a lot of passin’ the day before Christmas, and
you can see way to the post office now that the leaves is off. Rusty
Miller’s home, they say, and you may see her. You’ll know her by her
red hair. Everybody mistrusted she’d come home from college with it
done up in a p’siky but it seems she ain’t.”

Mrs. Langley was tempted by her suggestion. It didn’t seem as if she
could go back to her room and think about green Christmases and that
over-bright baby and Mr. Langley’s having been like a widower all these
years. Wherefore, when Bell went before and led her to the at once
familiar and strange room, she followed and allowed herself to be
established comfortably in a big chair before the low window.

She had not been there ten minutes when she was secretly blaming
Bell for not having thought of this before. Indeed, if it had not
been for haunting thoughts of Anna and the baby, she would have been
quite comfortable. It occurred to her that Joe, Junior, would like to
be sitting on her lap looking out the window with her. There was a
Newfoundland dog--she wondered if he would know what it was and say
_bow-wow_?

As a matter of fact Joe, Junior, was saying _bow-wow_ to every dog he
saw that afternoon, thereby nearly convulsing Freddy Miller who walked
at his side. The boys wheeled him all the way from the Hollow to the
post office in his new perambulator.

Rusty had brought it home with her as a Christmas present for her
sister. After she had gone away in the early autumn, Rusty had begun
to feel as if she had been less than fair to Anna. She had been deeply
impressed by her sister’s devotion to the baby and by the sacrifice of
her beautiful hair. It was like Rusty to desire to make her atonement
concrete, and she had saved all her pocket money towards a Christmas
present for Anna, expecting to get something handsome in the way of
jewelry or other personal adornment. But when she had made secret
enquiries of the family, no one knew of anything that Anna really
wanted, except that Frank suspected she was saving her money for a
perambulator for Joe, Junior. Whereupon Rusty purchased an handsome
carriage that was convertible into a sleigh.

Anna had been overwhelmed with delight. The perambulator had been
placed in the parlour and covered by a sheet, that the baby should not
see it before Christmas day.

Against this, however, the boys had protested loudly. They declared
they wanted to be sure to use it before the runners should be put on,
and everyone said there was a storm due, and it would be too mean for
anything if they couldn’t try the wheels before April. The baby was
so little he wouldn’t know the difference, anyhow. But Anna would not
yield.

Reuben was to arrive at Wenham the day before Christmas, and Rusty was
to drive over to meet him with Miss Penny’s pony. It occurred to her
that morning to ask Anna to go with her.

Anna flushed to the roots of her dandelion hair, as Frank called it.
Then she remembered the baby and told Rusty she couldn’t leave him.

“Ma’s got baking to do, and I couldn’t have her bothered, Rusty.”

“But he’ll sit on the floor and not be the least trouble,” urged her
sister.

“I don’t like to risk anything now, Rusty,” Anna confessed. “Ma didn’t
take to him at first, and now she’s begun to, I don’t want any setback.
I want him to live with us always, you see.”

“O, Anna, you’ll never have any more fun then,” protested Rusty.

“Junior’s all the fun I want,” returned Anna rather shyly.

“Well, anyhow, the boys can mind him this afternoon?”

“They could, but I don’t believe they will. Frank’s mad with me because
I won’t let him use the perambulator.”

Rusty appealed to her mother.

“I’m afraid it’s no use, Rusty,” returned Mrs. Miller. “Frank’s a good
boy, but when he gets a contrary streak, he isn’t to be coaxed. And
I shouldn’t like to _make_ him mind the baby, for fear he might turn
against him, and it’s good for the boys to love him as they do now. But
I’ll look after him myself. He’s no trouble at all; he’s just company
for me.”

She sighed.

“I’m sorry I didn’t make more of him when he first came,” she owned.
“Anna won’t let me do anything for him except in school hours, and I
want her to get into the notion of leaving him to me and getting out
more herself. It was really for her sake that I sort of hardened my
heart against the baby in the first place,--I felt it was too much for
her.”

Rusty kissed her mother and said she would try to see what she could do
with Frank. She sought out her brother.

“Frank, you and Freddy’ll mind the baby while Anna goes to Wenham with
me to meet Reuben, won’t you?” she begged. “You know I’ve been away
so long you haven’t had a chance to do anything for me for weeks and
weeks.”

“Why Rusty Miller,” the boy exclaimed, “ain’t writing letters
anything,--with ink, too! It takes the whole evening, even if you begin
the minute the table cloth’s off.”

“Yes indeed, Frank, it’s a lot, and it’s a great comfort to get them,”
Rusty owned, “but answer me quick so that Anna can change her dress
before dinner. And I’ll tell Reuben how good you are.”

“Fred and me was going to the post office to see the Christmas mail
come in,” objected Frank. “Anna won’t let us haul Joe in our cart so
far as that on account of the bumps, but if you’ll let us take the
perambulator we’ll mind him dandy.”

Rusty argued with him but found that her mother was right, and
presently yielded.

“Well, do take it,” she said, “only wait until we’re out of the way.
I’ll tell Anna, but be sure she doesn’t know it to-morrow. Wipe the
wheels all off as soon as you get back.”

She and Anna went away directly after dinner in order to wander about
Wenham and see the Christmas decorations before time for Reuben’s
train. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Miller got the baby into his wraps and
put him into the perambulator. The child looked at the new equipage
with interest and approval and settled himself comfortably among the
cushions with an expression that was almost eager. Mrs. Miller kissed
him.

“Frank, don’t you feel a little ashamed when Anna’s so good to you to
be doing just what she doesn’t want you to?” she asked.

Frank looked rather sheepish.

But Joe, Junior, was almost smiling.

“Well, perhaps one day won’t make any great difference,” Mrs. Miller
admitted indulgently.

“Say _Go_, baby,” urged Frank, and the child complied instantly.

“Now don’t hurry,” cautioned their mother. “And Freddy, don’t dance up
and down that way. It’s long enough there and back if you just walk
without any capers. And besides, if you jump about too much that safety
pin will give and your stocking will be all down around your foot.”

Of course Freddy forgot the warning. Joe, Junior, repeating _Go, go_,
Freddy was in an ecstasy, and was hardly out of sight before his
stocking was trailing in the dust. The day being unseasonably warm he
rather liked it so, and didn’t mind the halting gait it induced. But
Frank objected to the latter, and drawing the stocking up over the
little boy’s trousers, fastened it securely if not elegantly with the
safety pin. Whereupon they rushed on and reached the post office an
hour before the mail was due.

After a little the elder brother went inside, cautioning the younger
not to wheel the carriage while he was gone. When Freddy grew tired of
waiting, he moved it, pushing it sidewise, and went in to tell Frank
that the sun was shining right into the baby’s eyes, and couldn’t he
just wheel him into the shade?

But when he entered, the post master was telling his brother how many
parcels had come on the stage a year ago on the twenty-fourth of
December, and what he calculated would have been their combined weight
in pounds. He put it to Frank how many ounces that would be, and Freddy
stood spell-bound while his brother computed it ‘in his head.’ Further
delay was occasioned by the fact that Frank got his answer according to
the avoirdupois scale and had to be reminded that he should have used
the Troy, and to multiply all over by sixteen, which was more difficult
than reckoning by the dozen.

When finally the matter was settled, the little boy put his request.

“Of course, silly,” returned Frank, and went on talking with the post
master. Presently Freddy returned.

“He ain’t there,” he said in a dazed way.

“What you givin’ us?” demanded his brother.

Freddy burst into tears. “He ain’t there, cross my neck, Frank. Nothin’
but a pillow,” he declared, “O, O, the bears must ’a eat him up!”

Frank rushed out. The perambulator was indeed empty. For an instant he
stared at it in amazement. Then he decided it was a trick of some of
the boys in Farleigh and tiptoed about peering into all possible and
impossible corners and hiding-places. But there was no one in sight.




CHAPTER XX


Seth Miller returned home shortly after the boys. Greatly alarmed, he
rushed over to Miss Penny’s and frightened her still more. But Mrs.
Lorraine spoke calmly and suggested that he get Walter Phelps to drive
him over to the post office, enquiring all the way, and if he did not
find the baby meantime, someone in the crowd collected for the mail
would be sure to have tidings of him.

The stage was late and they reached the post office just as it drove
up. Anna stepped out, white and anxious. She had learned the news at
Wenham just in time to catch the coach.

The girl did not lose an instant. She consulted the post master who had
enquired of everyone who had come in. He had no information to offer.
Her father had stopped at every house except the parsonage, Miss Penny
having cautioned him not to go there because of the invalid. Wherefore
Seth Miller supposed that they had better be working over Wenham way.

But Anna decided otherwise. Asking Walter to remain at the post office
for possible tidings, she had her father drive her to the parsonage.
Three minutes after she had let herself quietly in, she came running
out to the buggy.

“Mrs. Langley’s gone, too,” she said. “Dear me, isn’t it great luck
that Mr. Langley’s way at the further end of the Hollow? We met him,
and I suppose he’s talking school business with Mr. Phillips. He’d be
perfectly crazy, you know.”

She climbed into the buggy.

“Did you look in the garret?” her father enquired.

“I don’t know about that, but Bell went everywhere else,” Anna
returned. Her father stared at her for she seemed less anxious.

“Anna, someone may have kidnapped the two of ’em,” he said hoarsely.
“I don’t know as you have heard, but they do say there’s a strange man
around the village peering in windows at night and the like.”

Anna almost laughed. “They’d bring Mrs. Langley back when daylight
came,” she returned flippantly.

She directed her father to drive down the Wenham road, beyond the house
where they had lived when the boys were babies, to the bridge and to
watch from there, dropping her at a point she would indicate.

“Give me your bandana,” she ordered. “Now, Pa, if you see me waving it,
you come straight towards it as far as you can come with a horse and
wait. I’m going cross lots but you may see me later against the western
sky line.”

“O Anna, I don’t dare have you go off alone away from beaten tracks
with strange men and kidnappers about,” he protested. “Let me hitch the
horse and go with you.”

But Anna laughed, reassured him, and disappeared. Making a bit of
detour to avoid being seen, she headed for the cemetery. Anxious still,
she was nevertheless relieved, and once on the direct path, ran all
the way, leaping ditches, pushing through underbrush and taking the
steepest part of the bank as if it were a plain. When she reached the
top, she was hot and breathless. Throwing her jacket on top of the
wall, she vaulted it lightly and made for a point whence she could see
the Langley lot. Even while she caught her breath and wondered if she
should dare look, she heard a little familiar sound.

The girl stopped short. For a second she could not move. The complete
relief from suspense was so great that she had to choke back her tears.
For there they were, just where she hard hardly dared to think of them
as being, Mrs. Langley wrapped in a gay old-fashioned paisley shawl
with her head uncovered, sitting on the ground with Joe, Junior, in
her lap. The baby was fondling the little marble image and murmuring
baa-baa, the while Mrs. Langley looked on as if she were in Paradise.

As she stole towards the little group and stood before them, Anna was
unaware that tears were streaming down her cheeks. The baby saw her
first and smiled. “Baa-baa” he cried out stretching out his hands, and
Mrs. Langley looked up quickly. Her expression changed instantly from
beatitude to deep guilt.

“You said you would give him to me for a Christmas present, anyhow,
Anna,” she declared, half defiantly, half-entreatingly.

“Yes, but you didn’t--take him,” gasped Anna dropping down beside them.
She was hugging Joe, Junior, but she did not take him into her arms.

“I’m sorry I didn’t. I’ve been sorry ever since. But you took me so by
surprise. Of course I really wanted him when I could straighten out my
thoughts.”

“We have all been frightened nearly to death thinking the little fellow
was lost,” Anna remarked reproachfully.

“I didn’t think of that,” Mrs. Langley returned meekly, stroking the
baby’s little hand. “I saw him go by and I wanted to see him so badly
that I got my shawl and followed as far as the post office. He was all
alone and so near the road that a horse might have run over him if it
shied. Really, Anna, I was just meaning to stand by him until your
brothers came out; but he reached out his little hands and I had to
take him--he knew me, you see. For he said Baa-baa, and it seemed as if
he was asking me to bring him to see this little lamb; and as I wanted
to see it myself, I brought him up here.”

“Brought him up here!” exclaimed Anna suddenly realizing the magnitude
of the action. “How in this world did you ever do it?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure, but he didn’t seem heavy. He’s so still, I
suppose. I didn’t mean to stay at all, but it is so warm and pleasant;
and baby has been so happy that I forgot everything else.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, Seth Miller had driven out to the bridge and waited,
talking the while to the Phelps horse which, like most of the horses
in the village, was a great pet and like one of the family. Presently
he caught a flash of red among the pines on the hill, saw his daughter
waving to him, and drove on until he saw her waiting at the lower gate
of the cemetery with the baby and a strange, foreign-looking woman whom
he took to be a gypsy who had probably been carrying the baby away when
Anna caught her. Again and again that night at home he exclaimed over
his surprise to think that the old and faded woman with the piercing
black eyes who might have been a gypsy crone was none other than the
handsome Mr. Langley’s wife. And yet he granted she was pleasant-spoken
and the baby seemed to take to her amazingly and he only hoped she
wasn’t out of her head.

Anna got out with Mrs. Langley at the parsonage and asked her father
to bring the baby in. Seth Miller held the baby close, whispering to
him and lengthening the inconsiderable distance by crawling along, the
while Anna explained that she would have to go in for a little and
asked him to stop at Miss Penny’s with the news and have someone come
for her with the pony later.

“And pa, if you see Mr. Langley, send him home right away,” she added
eagerly. “Or--if you happen to hear where he is, do go get him and
bring him home.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Seth Miller did not meet Mr. Langley, however, nor could he learn
where he was except that he wasn’t in the Hollow. As a matter of fact
Mr. Langley was engaged in an affair of some moment.

He had left the parsonage early in the afternoon. Directly after
dinner, an informal, self-constituted committee of three men living
in the Farleigh end of the village had waited on the minister in his
study. Though not taken wholly by surprise, he had been shocked and
distressed by the nature of their errand, even while he could not but
feel, as he assured them, that they acted within their rights. He
would have persuaded them to wait until after Christmas, but he could
not insist upon it. And he was grateful to them for coming to him
and allowing him to forestall their action so that it should be less
shockingly abrupt to those who must suffer thereby.

Hastening from the parsonage, he met Rusty and Anna Miller in the
phaeton driving the fat pony. As he had already seen Rusty, he only
greeted them in passing. And realising at once that they were on their
way to Wenham to meet Reuben, he was thankful to have them out of the
way for a good measure of time. His business was with Alice Lorraine,
and the fewer people he saw besides the girl herself, the quicker might
he dispatch it.

Unhappily, he did not find Alice at home. He looked so concerned when
Miss Penny told him that the girl had gone away for the afternoon that
Mrs. Lorraine was startled.

“Is it something serious, Mr. Langley?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Lorraine, it is indeed. May I ask if it would be possible to
get your daughter within half an hour?”

Mrs. Lorraine feared not. Miss Penny made an excuse and went out. As
Mr. Langley resumed his chair, Mrs. Lorraine turned to him despairingly.

“I haven’t the slightest idea where Alice is, Mr. Langley. She left
the house an hour ago. Anna and Rusty Miller came over just as we were
finishing dinner, and when we looked for Alice she was not to be found.”

“May I ask if she went in the direction of Farleigh?”

“I hardly think she did, Mr. Langley. As a matter of fact, she
practically always starts out in that direction, but I do not think she
did to-day for if she had we should have seen her. Miss Penny and I
both happened to be where we saw everyone who passed over that way for
half an hour before we discovered she wasn’t in the house.”

“Then I shall have to trouble you, Mrs. Lorraine,” he said gravely. “I
am sorry. I would spare you if I could, but even if I had seen Miss
Lorraine first, you would have had to know presently. May I ask you, in
the first place, whether you have allowed anyone to occupy the cottage
in the lane since you and your daughter have been at Miss Penny’s?”

“O no, Mr. Langley,” she declared so decisively that he frowned
unconsciously. “We might as well have given it up, only Alice thought
we should keep it until after Christmas. I suppose----”

But she could not go on. His expression disconcerted her.

“And the little building in the rear that is called the shop?” he asked.

“We never used that, anyhow,--never even looked into it, though I
believe we have the key.”

He picked up his gloves and looked inside as if to determine the size.
Then he looked at her.

“Three men came to me this noon about a matter that has been troubling
the village for some little time and which now seems to them to be
approaching a crisis,” he began. “This is the situation, Mrs. Lorraine.
There has been a strange man around for--it must be upwards of three
weeks now. One person and another has caught sight of him at night,
and he seems to have looked into the windows of nearly every house in
Farleigh. It may be imagination in some cases, but before I had heard
anything about the stranger, I felt quite sure one night that there
was someone peering in at my study window, and I certainly saw someone
slink away from another window at the parsonage about a fortnight
since. Someone saw the figure of a man pass across the window in the
organ loft at the church one Sunday afternoon, and there have been
other similar things--not of great moment when taken separately but
which collectively seem to these men and others to constitute a menace
to public safety.”

“But Mr. Langley, what has that to do with my--with the cottage in the
lane?” she enquired with a sharp note of pain in her voice.

“They seem to think that the man has hidden there the while. Smoke has
been seen a number of times coming from the chimney of the little shop.
At first people explained it by saying that Miss Lorraine probably had
gone down to fetch something and had made a fire to take off the chill,
but lately one thing and another has led them to suspect that that
isn’t the right explanation.”

“I have heard of tramps occupying deserted houses,” she remarked.

He had nothing to say. She grew very white. “Did you ask for Alice
simply to spare me, Mr. Langley?” she asked.

“No, Mrs. Lorraine,” he replied reluctantly, “it was because I hoped
she might be able to throw some light upon the matter. It appears
almost certain that she knows something about this mystery in our
midst. She has been seen more or less about the lane, and--I don’t
credit the particular rumor people have patched up, but----”

“And what is that, Mr. Langley?” she broke in breathlessly.

“They think Alice’s father--that Mr. Lorraine is hereabout--that he
has been staying in the shop behind the cottage and that his daughter
carries him food and visits him daily.”

For a few seconds, Mrs. Lorraine was too dazed to speak. Alice’s
strange conduct seemed to accord with this tale, and yet--she rallied
her forces. It was impossible.

“Alice hears from her father. She had a letter only a day or two ago,”
she declared. But even as she spoke, she realised that that wasn’t
valid evidence. She knit her brows, then looked up. “But Mr. Langley,
if Mr. Lorraine had escaped, why wouldn’t it have been in the papers?”
she demanded. “You say this has been going on over three weeks,
and--Mr. Lorraine was--well-known.”

“I said something of the sort to these gentlemen,” he returned.
“They claimed that such an escape is often kept secret for a time
for strategical reasons. But irrespective of that, there is no doubt
that someone has been skulking about the village, and that your shop
building has been occupied and probably by that person. But for more
than a week everything was quiet. No smoke was seen and no one saw any
suspicious person and it was decided that the mysterious stranger had
departed. But night before last something happened to arouse suspicion
again. The men who came to me declare that the tramp or stranger came
back at that time and is still here. They say he is in your shop at
this moment. The building is being watched now, and they are only
awaiting my return to enter and arrest whomever they may find within.”

He rose. “You know nothing about it, Mrs. Lorraine, but there’s nothing
to do but to allow them to proceed?”

[Illustration: The echoes of the thundering knocks had hardly died away
... when Alice Lorraine appeared.]

“No. Mr. Langley, there isn’t,” she acknowledged, and asked him if
he was going thither. And when he said that he was she asked if she
might go along. He acquiesced. After she had spoken to Miss Penny, Mr.
Langley handed her into the carriage and they drove to the lane where
the minister gave the horse in charge to someone standing about. Going
straight to the shop, they found the three men Mr. Langley had seen and
the constable.

The latter pounded on the door preliminary to breaking it in. He waited
a few seconds. The echoes of the thundering knocks had hardly died away
when the door opened and Alice Lorraine appeared before the five men
and her mother.




CHAPTER XXI


Pushing by Alice Lorraine, deaf to her entreaties, the constable and
two of the men made their way into the shop and after an hasty glance
about the lower room hastened upstairs. Mr. Langley, after a brief
word to Mrs. Lorraine, followed. And despite his haste and excitement
and perturbation, he noticed the homelike appearance of the place he
recollected as a littered work shop.

But of the upper chamber he noted no detail. As his head rose above
the railing of the stair, he saw the men start back from the further
end of the place. Peering into the shadows, he saw the figure of a man
stretched upon an old couch. Approaching, he saw that he was burning
with fever and unconscious. The man, who was very tall, was not at
all the tramp in appearance, though he seemed to have slept in his
clothes. He was well dressed and a superficial view pronounced him of
refined presence. He was like a skeleton, however, and his purple face
cadaverous to the extreme.

Mr. Langley asked one of the men to go for the doctor, sending Mrs.
Lorraine up as he went. The constable said he would wait below. The
other man took a chair in the further end of the room as Mrs. Lorraine
joined Mr. Langley by the couch.

“Do you know this man?” he asked.

“I never saw him in my life,” she declared, and going to the stairs,
summoned Alice. The girl appeared, white as chalk.

“Alice, do you know this man,” demanded the mother sternly.

“I know him, certainly!” cried the girl defiantly. “He is--he is a
gentleman. He has done no one any harm. He came to Farleigh to look for
someone he knew once, and I told him he might stay here.”

“But if he is a gentleman, how came you here, Alice Lorraine?” cried
her mother.

“I haven’t been here long, and--how could he know it! Look at him, will
you!” the girl cried. But her mother continued to look sternly upon her.

“He went away,” the girl forced herself to explain. “He was coming
back before he went West where he lives now. He didn’t come and--I was
afraid something had--happened. I came down this afternoon to look once
more and found him--just so. O Mr. Langley, is he dying, do you think?”

“I shouldn’t judge so. I should say he was in the early stage of a
fever. He is terribly emaciated. He looks starved. The doctor will be
here shortly. Meantime let me see if I can loosen his clothing a bit.”

As he bent over the couch, Alice’s heart went out to him. He seemed so
gentle and tender though he had no idea the man was not a stranger and
probably believed him to be a tramp. As he put his arm beneath the
sick man’s shoulders to change his position, the latter opened his eyes
wide. Mr. Langley started but finished what he was about.

The doctor came up and Mrs. Lorraine and Alice went below. After some
little time Mr. Langley joined them.

“It is probably pneumonia, or will be within a few hours,” he
announced. “Dr. Porter will send for the ambulance and have him taken
to the hospital at Wenham where he will have the best of care.”

He turned to Alice with a kind look.

“O mother, couldn’t we take him into the cottage and take care of him?”
cried the girl beseechingly. “He is good and--O, so unfortunate, and--O
if you knew something I know, you couldn’t refuse. And--if Mr. Langley
knew--something else, he would beg you to.”

Mr. Langley looked at the girl with an odd expression on his face.

“The man’s eyes are exactly like those of a dear friend of mine who has
been dead these six years,” he said keeping his own eyes upon her the
while. “For a moment I forgot all and thought he was Dick Cartwright.”

Alice wrung her hands.

“Tell me, Alice Lorraine, who is the man above? Is it indeed Dick
Cartwright?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr. Langley, it is,” the girl owned with a great sense of relief.
“He didn’t die. It was another man, but he gave him his name because he
wished to be dead. He only came here to see you and Reuben. Then he
was going back again. I--happened upon him one day and--after that I
tried to help him. He is really----”

Mr. Langley was half way up the stair. Mrs. Lorraine stopped him. “Tell
the doctor we will take him into the cottage,” she bade him. “Alice and
I will go right over to get a bed ready.”

They got the bed ready and Mr. Langley and the doctor carried the sick
man over, undressed him and got him into it. The doctor secured a nurse
and Mr. Langley waited until she should come. Meanwhile Alice Lorraine
related to him and to her mother the whole story Dick Cartwright had
told her.

Mrs. Lorraine remained at the cottage, while Alice returned to Miss
Penny’s. When Mr. Langley took her over he told Miss Penny briefly who
the sick man was, and they discussed the situation as it concerned
Reuben, who was fortunately out of the house at that moment.

They decided to say nothing to him until after Christmas when Mr.
Langley would tell him the whole story. Reuben could then, if he
wished, stay at the cottage for the remainder of his holidays.

As a matter of fact, Reuben was to remain there considerably longer
than that. When it was time for him to return to college his father was
just out of danger and Reuben did not dream of leaving him. He did not,
indeed, return to college again until the following autumn. As soon as
Dick Cartwright was able to be about the house, Mrs. Lorraine returned
to Miss Penny’s, and Reuben and his father took the cottage as their
home. Reuben got a position in the bank at Wenham and went back and
forth to his work happily. His father kept house. As he grew stronger,
Mr. Langley persuaded him to practice on the church organ. In the late
spring, he was back again in his old position of organist at Farleigh
church, and in the summer he secured, with Mr. Langley’s help, the
position to teach music in the public schools at Wenham. This gave him
a sufficient income not only to live comfortably but to pay Reuben’s
expenses at college. Reuben, however, still preferred to work his way
through, so the money was saved towards the pipe organ.

       *       *       *       *       *

To return now to Mr. Langley and the day before Christmas--that
Christmas which was to be the happiest of his life.

He hadn’t realised that he was tired until he opened his own gate late
that afternoon. Then suddenly such a dead weight of fatigue dropped
down upon him that he felt as if he couldn’t crawl to his own door.
Certainly he could never attain the sanctuary of his study where he
could think over the events of the afternoon and realise the joy that
had come to him with the return of his friend as it were from the gates
of death.

Someone came to the door and peered eagerly up the street. It was Anna
Miller. Forgetting himself, Mr. Langley called to her and hurried up
the steps.

“O Anna, is anything wrong?” he asked anxiously, for he would have
thought of her as being somewhere with Rusty and Reuben.

“Wrong!” the girl echoed with ringing voice and beaming face. “O Mr.
Langley, everything is so beautifully right that it seemed as if you
would never, never come. O hurry, please.”

She led him, not as he expected, towards his wife’s door, but into the
front room across the passage from the study. It had been the parlour
but was seldom used now-a-days.

It looked exceedingly cheerful now, but so would the cellar have looked
to Mr. Langley had the potato-bin held the same group that he saw on
the brocaded sofa. Mrs. Langley, bright and alert with flushed cheeks
and not uncomely, despite Seth Miller’s opinion, sat thereon with Joe,
Junior, curled up beside her while Big Bell hung over them, trying now
to make herself inconspicuous and really appearing to be twice her
natural size.

As the minister paused on the threshold, his wife looked up and smiled.
She had actually learned since noon to smile. Or it may be that she had
recollected her old smile of twenty-odd years ago, for she looked to
Russell Langley at that moment like the bride of his youth, or rather
like little Ella May’s mother.

“Russell, what do you think! Anna has offered us this precious baby as
a Christmas gift!” she cried eagerly. “Shall we accept?”

He put Anna into the most comfortable chair in the room and moved it
close to the sofa. Then he seated himself the other side of the baby
whom he bent to kiss. And little Joe repeated what no doubt seemed to
him the pass-word for this household, “baa-baa!”

Mr. Langley turned eagerly to the girl.

“Do you mean it, Anna?” he asked with such a look in his eyes that Anna
could not answer. But she nodded, smiling through tears.

He took the baby into his arms and caressed it.

“I can’t--we can’t begin to tell Anna how happy we shall be nor how
grateful we are to her, can we Ella?” he said warmly.

“We’ll certainly jump at the chance,” Mrs. Langley rejoined, borrowing
Anna’s phraseology with such comical effect that they all laughed
merrily. And little Joe smiled confidently into Anna’s eyes.


THE END.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.





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