 Chapter 5 My Saul, Yman Blythe bid the Lord, Etlin has carriage the cluds, on the wings of the wind making speed. The errand-runner he makes of the blasts, and loons of his aine, the blees aloe. SCOTCH SALMS If Philip Ostrander expected Miss Dobel to join his German class, he was doomed to what is not exactly correct to call a disappointment. Probably he did expect it. The other young ladies had all joined. Young ladies were apt to join any classes which he chanced to open without undue reluctance. He had been in the frequent way of this sort of thing, in the natural course of that griping struggle with ways and means which had brought the keen-eyed, poverty-ridden boy from an uncultivated New Hampshire home to one of the most brilliant positions which New England had then to offer. For it was now considered, as Avis heard from her father when she had been at home a little while, quite assured that Mr. Ostrander would ultimately take the geological chair through the probation of the assistant professorship. True, he was not a harmeth graduate—this the professor regretted keenly—but his shining talents burned the more conspicuously for this disadvantage, and that he had refused a position in his alma mater to compass those two years in Germany by which a promising young man expected, with some confidence, fifteen or twenty years ago, to become immediately distinguished had naturally recommended him to the harmeth perceptive faculty. Coy was right when she said that Mr. Ostrander was thought in harmeth to be remarkably versatile. At all events, a versatility which can be converted into a dollar an hour is not to be despised by a harmeth tutor, and Ostrander held the rudder of his yet unanchored craft with a very easy hand. In this matter of the German lessons, which, requiring but the slightest type of attention, left him space for a good deal of reverie, he was conscious of watching narrowly to see what Miss Dobel would do. During the afternoons which he spent in the sunny parlours of the harmeth ladies, with the prettiest girls in the city chirping gutterls at his feet, or in the evenings which he devoted to Barbara Allen's fine rendering of Schumann, he made no attempt to deny that the young artist occupied certain large, untraveled spaces upon the map of his fancy. It is more than possible, that if Avis had drifted into the German class, if there had been established between them that time-honoured relation of master and pupil, which, always fraught with the sweetest possible perils to man and woman, is more stimulating to the imagination of the pupil than of the master, if Avis too had sat and chirped at his feet. Well, what then? Possibly Ostrander assumed that then the delicate poem opened one day at Vespers in the Madeleine would hardly have been found worth the reading, and the radiant undiscovered country would have scarcely compelled the explorer over the threshold. Possibly too both nature and experience would have taken his brief had he been tried for this assumption. Ostrander at this period of his life protected himself against the ambuscades of his own temperament with that forethought which an unmarried man of thirty is clearly expected to have acquired. But he experienced a singular sense of relief and expectancy, when several weeks had passed, and Miss Dobel did not join the German class. That symbol of the Madeleine perhaps possessed the fine old classic instinct which every year he thought grew rare and rare among women. She must, it seemed, be absolutely sought. Impressing faculty business took him before the vacillating April days were quite over to Professor Dobel's house. He called at dusk, and Aunt Chloe invited him to tea. He hesitatingly refused, but when she said, Then come next Friday, Mr. Ostrander, it is a long time since we have had the pleasure, and I notice my brother is always in good spirits when you have been to see us. He accepted the invitation at once. He did not in the least attempt to wrestle with his motive in this innocent bit of scene-shifting, but allowed himself to be led blindfold by it. His wish to see that girl again had become imperative. Ostrander had the deepest respect for whatever he found really imperious in himself. With Friday the New England April weather had assumed one of the caprices which we tolerate so tenderly in any born coquette, and snow fell heavily. The day before had been as gentle as a baby's dream. Avis worked in the studio in the garden without a fire, and one of the college boys brought Ostrander a tuft of sexafrage from the pale green promise of the meadows. That morning the wind lay in the east sleepily enough, but by noon the air was blurred with the large irregular spring flakes, as if nature had taken a wayward fancy to fold herself in a Japanese screen. In the afternoon, when Ostrander had strolled out of town, and down the shore to see the surf, the drifts were already piling high. He tramped through them lightly enough in the rubber boots which are the chief end of man in New England, and with his soft silk cap drawn over his eyes, and his powerful figure bent a little with the first languid action of a wrestler upon it, yielded himself to the intoxication of the winter shore. Few greater passions passed more readily into the permanence and fidelity of love than the passion for the sea. Ostrander had an elemental kinship with it in himself which every year of his life had intensified. He sometimes wished that he was quite sure he cared as much for any human creature as he did for Harmouth Harbour. He struck off down the drifted beach toward the light. The wind was in his face. With the opaque air he could see rudely defined, like the values of a vast, unfinished sketch, the waves leap and slip and fall upon the glazed cliffs, and across the narrow reef from which the lighthouse shot sheer against the sky. He pushed on down, perhaps a mile, to find a shelter, and there, with the tide at his feet and the spray in his face, flung himself upon the freezing rocks, possessed with a kind of fierce but abundant joy. The light stood just across the bay where the harbour widened to the sea. It might have been a dozen rods or so from where Ostrander sat. The reef, traversable at low tide, ran from it to a gorge within the cliff. The well-defined metallic tints common to the New England coast, the greens and reds and umbers, the colours of rust, of bronze, of ruins, covered the reef. The gorge was a vein of deep purple lava, which to Ostrander's educated eye told the story of a terrible organic divorce. The wave that tore its heart out at his feet was throbbing green, but beyond that the inrolling tide, the chalky outline of the light, the harbour mouth, the narrowing horizon, the low sky, all the world lay gray beneath the footsteps of the dizzy snow. The wind was rising from the sullenness of a blow to the anger of a gale, and the crash of the breakers which he could see had a shrill, petulant sound set to the boom of those unseen across the bay. Was it the lawlessness of all this, or the law of it, that thrilled Ostrander? Was it the passion, or the purpose, which commanded him? Was the eternal drama of unrest an outlet, or an inlet to his nature, an excitement, or a sedative? It were hard to say. The young man asked himself the question, but found a shrug of his fine shoulders the most intelligent answer at his command. Or perhaps we must admit that there was as much rumitism as philosophy in that shrug. It certainly was growing very cold, and darkening fast. Ostrander had been somewhat sheltered by the cliff at whose feet he sat, so much so that he was quite unaware of the extent to which the wind had risen. A man does not sit very long upon an ice-covered rock, but a few moments will suffice to let loose the prisoned temper of an April gale. When he turned to get back to the beach, he found the wind racing through the lavagorge at the rate of perhaps eighty miles an hour, and the snow seething under his feet before the first oncoming of the heavy breeze swept tide. He stopped to pull up his coat-collar, as he would now have the storm at his back. As he did so, the fog-bell began to toll from the light, and he turned instinctively at the sound. At that moment he saw a figure between himself and the lighthouse, moving slowly shorewards along the reef. It was the figure of a woman. It was the figure of a lady, slight and delicately dressed. It was not so dark, but that he could see that she moved with great difficulty. The reef was jagged as a saw, and glare with a thin, blue, cruel ice. It ran at an angle to the northward, and took the whole sweep of the Easterly gale. Ostrander, as he watched her, felt the blood tingle about his heart. He believed that there was but one lady in Harmouth who would have taken a walk to the lighthouse on such a day. Did Miss Dobble know that not one woman in one hundred could get across that reef in a blow like this? The light-keeper must have been mad to let her start. It seemed that the light-keeper himself was coming to that late and useful conclusion. Dimly through the snow, Ostrander saw the flash of the lantern with which she had accompanied her to the reef's edge. There was still much sickly light in the air, and the lantern shone pale and ghastly. The man gesticulated violently, and seemed to be shouting unheard words. Ostrander remembered suddenly how shallow the rocks grew in sloping to the little island. The rising tide had probably cut between the keeper and the lady, and by this time distinctly severed them. Ostrander hesitated no longer, but ran swiftly out upon the reef. She was making her way valiantly enough, perhaps without any more than a vague and not unpleasant consciousness of possible peril. The gale took the heavy drapery of her skirts and long waterproof cloak in a cruel fashion, winding them about and about her limbs. She looked very tall in the waning light, and there was a certain grandeur in her motions. She stood out against the ice-covered rock like a creature sprung from it, sculptured primeval, born of the storm. As Ostrander ran along the reef, he saw her stop or stagger, hesitate, then stoop slowly and take to her hands and knees. She rose again in a moment and stood cowering a little, afraid or unable to stretch her full height to the force of the gale, which seemed to Ostrander something satanic now that he was in the teeth of it upon that reef. Could a blind insensate force of nature, so many feet of atmospheric pressure to the square inch, obedient to a powerful and on the whole kindly disposed creator, set the whole weight of its brute organism to work with this devilish intelligence, to beat a delicate woman, blow by blow, to death? There seemed something so profoundly revolting to Ostrander's manhood in this idea, just then, that it did not occur to him that he was not the only man in the world who had ever experienced his first genuine defiance of fate in some stress of peril, sprung upon the woman whom he would have given—what would Ostrander have given to save her? It seemed to him at that moment that he would have given his young life, for as he crept along the reef, now swiftly that he might reach her, and then slowly that he might not startle her, she threw up her arms and fell. He came leaping from rock to rock and would possibly have plunged into the water, but through the dust he heard her voice. She said, I have not fallen into the water. Can you get over to that great purple rock? She spoke so quietly that he was completely reassured about her until he crawled over under the pounding of the gale and dashing the snow out of his eyes looked down. She had slipped from the edge of the reef and hung at full length along the slope of a large boulder. The slope was perhaps twenty feet long and very gradual. It was covered with ice. The spray froze in his face as he looked over. The water was breaking across her feet. She clung with both hands to the polished edge of the boulder. There was blood upon the ice where she had clutched and beaten it away. But perhaps the fact which came most distinctly to Ostrander's consciousness was that the tips of her fingers were absolutely without colour. The first thing which he did was to tear off his fur gloves and leaning over the reef stretched both his warm hands upon hers. The water sucked between the reef and the boulder in a narrow, inky stream. You are right, she said, they were getting frostbitten. There. Now I can hold myself easily as long as I must. Mr. Ostrander, do you not find it very slippery upon the reef? Not in the least, said Ostrander grimly, grinding his heel into the ice. Can you brace yourself sufficiently to put one foot against the boulder? I should hope so. Only one foot, please, and only one hand. Do not try to get upon the boulder and do not step between the boulder and the reef. Do you understand? Miss Dobel, give me one hand now, slowly. Raise your fingers one at a time and put them into mine. Do you understand that you are not to come upon the boulder? If you do not give me your hand immediately, I cannot possibly answer for what I shall do. Promise me that if I slip you will let go. I promise nothing. Give me your hand. Promise that you will not let me drag you after me. I promise anything. For God's sake, give me this instant the fingers of your right hand." She gave them to him with that, obediently enough. She lifted them one by one from the ice. One by one he slipped his own under them. Sled the palm of his hand slowly under the palm of hers. So cautiously, but with the full prehensile force of her own supple touch to help him, reached and grasped her wrist. Avis had firmer fingers than most women, but they were as supple as wives. Now the other. They managed it with the other more nervously, for the water was now dashing freely in their faces. Now I am quite firm upon the reef. I shall draw you easily up. Do you trust me perfectly that I know what I am about? Perfectly. Do you remember that in case of an accident only one must slip? I remember. Very well. Are you ready? Quite ready. It seemed to Avis but a moment's work, and they sat crouched and panting side by side upon the broad surface of the reef. She could not possibly have said how she came there. Her most definite thought was a perfectly new conception of the power of the human hand. Ostrander's controlled, intelligent grasp challenged the blind mood of the gale. It was iron and velvet. It was fury and pity, as if the soul of the storm had assumed the sense of a man. As soon as might be, for the tide was rising fast, they made their way across the reef, and sat down for a moment's breath upon the shore. Neither had yet spoken. Ostrander had not indeed released the grip which he had of Miss Dobel's hand. Avis was the first to break the silence which had fallen upon them. She said, I am afraid I have killed the bird. I beg your pardon, said Ostrander, staring. I went over to the light to see about the birds that are brought by the storm, said Avis exactly as if nothing had happened. The keeper gave me a little blue jay that he had picked up under the lighthouse. He thought it might live, and I wrapped it in my cloak pocket. Ah, see! No, it is alive. Give it to me, said Ostrander, adopting the young lady's tone very quietly. You are too much chilled to keep it. And now are you able to get on a little? The tide is becoming really troublesome, and the walk is longer than I wish it were. He took the bird, and unvastening his coat, wrapped it in his breast. Avis, looking up through the dusk, thought how tenderly the little act was done. The poor thing flutters against my heart, said Ostrander in his exquisitely modulated tones. He had one of those voices into which all the tenderness of the nature flows readily, like the meadows which are the first to receive the freshet of the river. And then Ostrander was really sorry for the bird. Avis made no reply. She took his arm in silence, and in silence they passed through the lava gorge, and out upon the drifted beach. There she stopped and looked back. The fog bell was tolling steadily, and under the gray sheen of the snow the grayer mist stole in. I have always wondered exactly what made this gorge, she said, quite as if she and Ostrander had only come out on a little geological expedition. What was torn out of the heart of the rock? Nothing was torn out, said Ostrander. The two sides of that gorge are thrust apart by flood or fire. They were originally of one flesh. It was a perfect primeval marriage. The heart of the rock was simply broken. Avis stood for a moment in the purple shadow of the cleft, into which the water was now bounding high. A certain awe fell upon them both as Ostrander spoke. Instinctively they glanced from rent side to rent side of the divorced cliff, and then into one another's faces. Stirred by the strain of peril and a thrill of safety, Avis's excited imagination took vivid hold of the story of the rock. It seemed to hers that they stood there in the wake of an awful organic tragedy, differing from human tragedy only in being symbolic of it, as if through the deep, dumb suffering of nature, the deeper because the dumber. All little human pains went seething shallowly, as the tide came seething through the gorge. In some form or other, the motherhood of earth had forecast all types of anguish under which her children groaned—had also thrilled, perhaps, beneath all forms of joy. Suppose the bridal gladness or the widowed pathos of a rock. Suppose the sentient nature of a thing adapted to its reticence. What a story, then, in sea or shore, in forest, hills and sky, in wind and fire, in all things whose mighty lips were sealed. Suppose she herself, gone mute as the mutist of them, cognizant of their secret, joined to their brotherhood, redashing on the tide across the lava gorge. As they turned away, she leaned rather heavily upon his arm and tremulously said, I suppose, Mr. Ostrander, if it had not been for you— Oh, no, no! interrupted Ostrander quickly. The lightkeeper would have got out the boats. I have only saved you a pretty cold bath. Pray let us not talk of that. But indeed, he added, abruptly changing his tone, I begin to understand why the people in the novels are always saving each other's lives. It is just another instance of the absolute naturalness of much that we are all used to call unnatural in fiction. And why? asked Avus, without the least apparent awkwardness. Because nothing equates to people like the unconventionalities of danger. It seems to me—pray pardon me—as if I had known you for a long time. This made no reply, and they struck out upon the drifting shore. They seemed to have been taken up now and driven by the gale behind them, as if they had been scooped into the hollow of a mighty hand. And nothing isolates, continued Ostrander, like the interchange of emotions which any such experience involves. See now, added the young man, looking about the desolate shore, how lonely we seem! It would be easy to think that there was no other life than ours in all this world. He turned as he spoke, and would have stood to face the wind, but the mighty hand which had gathered them swept them imperiously on, as if it conceived them to have been bent upon some terrible errand of its own. Perhaps Ostrander too had received quite his share of the excitement of that April afternoon. He was, in some sense, rather a guarded man in his habit of speech among women, sufficiently cautious not to involve himself in those little ambiguous sallies of the lip to which young ladies attach an importance which a man reserves for affairs. He caught himself in thinking that he did not know another woman in the world to whom he could have made that speech without a savage and humiliating fear of misinterpretation. With a little of the madness of any rarely-tasted license he plunged on. How like you it was in the midst of all that to tell me to get upon the purple rock! How do you know it was like me? laughed Avis as they struggled through the snow. I think I have always known what would be like you, said the young man in a lower voice, since I saw you in the Madeline. There is a certain shade of expression peculiar to a man's face which every woman knows, but few understand. It falls as far short of the flash of over-mastering feeling on the one hand as it does of self-possession on the other. It's where is it once constrained to admire and predetermined not to love, and precisely insofar as he is unconscious even of that predetermination does this delicate play of the features take on the appearance of the strongest emotion. It was not so dark but that Avis, looking up through the storm, saw that sensitive expression dart across Ostrander's face. Then the lines about his mouth subsided, his eye cleared, he lifted his head, and it was gone. She need not be a vain woman, only an inexperienced one, who reads in such a facial change a tenderness which it by no means bespeaks. Avis, being neither the one nor the other, suffered nothing more than a slight feeling of surprise. I suppose, he added, after a few minutes' profound attention to the problem, given darkness, a lady and a snow-drift four feet high, how to flounder through the latter with that grace which it will be a pleasure to reflect upon to-morrow, I suppose you now went home and thought what a rude American you had seen. I was glad when I saw you come to the Chaucer Club. I have always felt that I owed you an apology for that stare. He said this with a manner of one who is conscious of having said an uncommon thing, and hastens to wrench out of it a commonplace significance. Not in the least, said Avis with composure. I owe the making of a very satisfactory little sketch to you. I put you into sepia, on a neutral grey. Couture took a great fancy to that sepia. If I have been in any sense the cloak across which your royal feet have stepped upon the muddy road to glory, or the royal road to glory, or—my metaphor has gone mad and I give it up—set us stranded with the carelessness which conceals rather than expresses meaning. At all events I am glad you made the sketch. We are getting along bravely. Are you very cold? Not much. Only my hand which I bruised. Thank you. No, I should be very unhappy to take your glove. How is my bird, Mr. Ostrander? I forgot the bird. He sought for it very gently with his free hand, and said, It lives. It is quite warm. But it does not stir. Why? said Avis, as they drew inside of her father's house. Why should we disturb my father by telling him about that slip upon the rock? Why indeed? You are very wise and right. We will not talk of it. I have been away from him so many years, said Avis, in the almost timid way she had when her gentlest feeling was aroused, that now I am come back. I find I like to spare him all possible pain, even a little one like this. And now, Mr. Ostrander, how is my bird? The light from the hall fell full upon his face when they stopped without the door. The snow lay lightly on his beard and bright hair. He looked like a young Scandinavian god. He slipped his hand very tenderly under his shaggy coat as he stood there looking down at her. I hope all is well with the poor thing, he said. But the bird upon his heart lay dead. Avis was in no possible sense what we call a woman of moods. Her mouth and eyes were too harmonious, and her chin too broadly cut. Yet she had as many phases as the moon. So, as unconscious at the lack of originality in his fancy as most excited young creatures to whom all earth's dull old figures are sublimated by the moment's fever, Ostrander thought, when she came down to supper that night, gone by some ten minutes magic out of her wet wrappings into a wonderful warmth and delicacy. Even the scent of her dress, as she swept past him, a fine French perfume, but one which she could not associate with any pretty Parisian whom he had ever met, added to this impression. Yet once she had become a housed, sheltered, hearth-loving creature. The soul of the storm lingered only upon her hair and eyes. There was a certain native daintiness about Avis, distinct from the inevitable elegance of a young lady recently returned from Paris, and hardly to be expected of the artistic temperament. She had her mother to thank for that, on Chloe said. It was still well remembered in Hormath that the professor's wife wore colours that no reading club would have thought of combining, and laces of a very unintellectual character. Ostrander did not recollect, having seen any other woman in such a dress as Miss Doblemore that evening. It was of white French flannel, very fine and soft, somewhat loosely worn, and unornimented. She was standing by her father's open fire when he came back from his room at the college, and was ushered by Aunt Chloe into the study. Her eyes only moved to meet him. She looked slender and shining as a Doric column. Ah! said the professor, I am more than glad to see you here. I do not recall, Mr. Ostrander, whether you have been in my study before. So? Then you will have seen my engraving of Sir William. Avus, be good enough to turn on the gas a little. The only copy from that plate, sir, to be found in this country, I believe. Ostrander was hastening to say that there was, he fancied, or was it fancy, a remarkable likeness, when Avus interrupted him by saying, within a relevance which surprised the professor and a girl of Avus's really coherent mind, that Aunt Chloe had sprained her wrist, had tried to lift her great ivy-jar. Aunt Chloe tended her flowers as if they were all orphans, and loved that ivy like her own soul. I have never thought myself lacking in the commoner forms of humanity, observed Avus, her eyes electric with merriment, but I certainly could not sit up nights with a sick ivy. It was a German ivy, said Aunt Chloe plaintively, and I thought it would freeze. I can't sleep warm if I know my plants are cold. Did you never notice, Mr. Ostrander, how in our buttolin, for instance, will shiver? It will shiver like a thoroughbred spaniel at a draft of air. But the ivy was heavy. And Avus, I think you must pour the tea, if you please, my dear." Ostrander was not sorry to see Avus pour the tea, but he recommended an Arnica bandage to Aunt Chloe with much graceful sympathy, discussing the continental pronunciation with the professor, meanwhile. Ostrander had no deeply preconceived repulsions to women with careers, holding it to the first duty of an educated man to cultivate a tolerance of opinion, especially in matters in which opinion most unconsciously cooled into prejudice. But he had, without doubt, his preconceived ideals. Among these he found that he had never placed a young woman in a white French evening dress, pouring tea at a cultivated table, with a singularly pretty arm. After tea, for the simple habits of the Christian family were not often disturbed for a quiet guest, and especially not for any pet of the professors like this young man, Avus went to her accustomed seat upon a low cricket at her father's feet, and sitting in the full firelight with a bent head, read the Psalm for evening prayers. A beautiful womanliness was upon her. She seemed to be wrapped in it, like a niad in a silver shell. Ostrander yielded himself to the domestic spirit of the evening with the rare relief which a homeless and restless man alone can know. He sat with his hand above his eyes, and listened to her reverent young voice. After prayers, the professor monopolized the conversation to the exclusion of the ladies, a harmeth habit of which his wife had nearly succeeded in breaking him. But Aunt Chloe supposed that was the way in all literary families, and a lady could always take her work while gentlemen talked. Ostrander did not object to this form of parlor etiquette, however, just then. He would have been quite satisfied if he need not have exchanged another word of the stable that evening. It suited his mood to steal a look at her now and then in silence. Even to watch her almost reduced his thought of her to garelessness. In the beautiful scholastic sense which wise men give to our common phrase, he had become conscious of her. He was made aware of the variations in her voice, her attitude, her glance, as he was made aware of the fluctuations of his own breath. He felt her presence in the room as he felt Aunt Chloe's rose hyacinth in the atmosphere. Was the repressed excitement of a shared and unspoken experience upon her as upon himself? She spoke but little, and wandered about the room. When Aunt Chloe, from over her knitting, recommended some light crochet work, which she was sure Mr. Ostrander would excuse. How superb she was in that white wool, as if she had wrapped herself in a snow-cloud, as if the very soul of the storm, gone mad as a lover to enfold her, turned warm as the June to win her, had followed her in from death and the freezing sea. She was standing with her face bent, and buried in the hyacinth, when Aunt Chloe presently called her. Avis, Mr. Ostrander wants to get a portrait done for a birthday present to his mother. Mr. Ostrander, then, is a devoted son, said Avis, lifting her face. So I was telling him, and we have so few. Good sons have gone out of fashion, like Hollyhawks. I hope you'll be able to give him the sittings, Avis. The studio will be soon quite comfortable with the May sun. How is it, Avis? said the Professor, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and stopping in his walk across the room to look at her. Can you gratify Mr. Ostrander, my dear, do you think? It was when Ostrander was wading back to his rooms, beating his way through the damp and heavy drifts with the good temper of a man who was past an exhilarating evening, that he saw, turning the sharp corner upon the college green, a slight figure struggling before him in the snow. It staggered with the helplessness of a creature encumbered by heavy swathing of the limbs, as only a woman mummied in her skirts can stagger. The poor soul was slightly dressed, and carried a little bag such as is carried by agents or female peddlers, a sight much less common fifteen years ago than now. As Ostrander approached, she tripped, and fell heavily across the snow, bruising her head, he thought, against a lamp-post as she fell, inwardly wondering of how many more damsels in distress he was elected to be the night errant before that storm was over, with a lurking smile upon his lips, but instant pity in his eyes, he sprang, and lifted the young woman to her feet. As she turned to thank him, the light from the street lamp fell full upon her face and his. They looked steadily at one another before she spoke. CHAPTER VI The clearest skies are those that farthest off appear, to birds of strongest wing. The dearest loves are those that no man can come near with his best following. R.K. Weeks. The subtle footsteps of the spring stole on. The Chaucer Club adjourned till the months with the R should reinstate the oyster suppers. The German lessons, since now a yachting party offered its own peculiar type of culture, and a little wider variety in those forms of stimulus which no intelligent young lady is ashamed to admit receiving from the masculine mind, the German lessons flagged. The deepening sun upon the picture of Sir William wandered through the open window by which the Professor had wheeled his study-chair. Aunt Chloe's geraniums were promoted to the garden, and Aunt Chloe's soul to the seventh heaven of tender garden cares, and hopes and fears, which those only know whose nature burgeons with the green things growing and with these alone. And in the studio Couture's pet pupil sat painting the very successful portrait of her first American sitter. Her great master, if he might have strolled through the old-fashioned garden and into the snug summer-house which Avis had levied for her uses, would possibly have said with a keen glance from face to face, Très bien, you give Mademoiselle a long-haired student. She gives you Thor, Odin, Balder. Mademoiselle idealizes. Mademoiselle has a future. It seemed to Mademoiselle, meanwhile, that in strange senses, tingling as an unmastered science, and blinding as an unknown art, and solemn as an untraught world, her future, through the budding of that spring, advanced to meet her. She became electrically prescient of it. She throbbed to it as if perplexing magnetisms played upon the lenient May air. It was as if she held it in her young hand, as she held the violet bud that Ostrander brought her. He brought her only buds. I am so glad to be at work, she said, so gravely, greatly glad. She said this to herself. It was necessary to say something. She did not remember to have worked so excitedly before. She thrilled to her task as the violet thrilled to the sun. Never had she seemed to conceive or to construct, with her imagination so recipient and docile to her inspirations. Never had she seemed before to be in such harmony with the infinite growing and yearning of nature. She stood like the child of the desert, with her ear at the lips of the sphinx. The whole world had leapt into bloom to yield her the secrets of beauty. She spread the spring showers upon her palette, and dipped her brushes in the rainbow. As for her sitter, he served as well as another to pass the mood of the May weather. Better perhaps with that stimulating legendary type of beauty. She found much beauty, and more the better she knew it, in Philip Ostrander's face. She told him so one day, with a naïve tey which enchanted him. "'I rarely meet,' said the young artist, with beauty in men. I have known several beautiful women.' And other women, it seems, no beautiful men,' urged Ostrander, gracefully evasive of the compliment, though he felt to the bottom of his soul the utter absence of that which would have given it a distinct value to him. This young woman regarded the contour of a man's face precisely as a physician regards a hectic flush or a billious eyeball. It was the intricate strife of the artist with the woman in her which had been the bewitchment of that look surprised in the Madeleine. He rather hoped some sudden abashed consciousness would overtake her calm professional scrutiny. He had often wished so while the portrait had been in progress. Just now he would have been glad to see her blush, perhaps. But she went serenely on. "'I know, I know, but I never could understand it. When I was a girl, and the other girls talked about the handsome college boys, I was greatly puzzled. I did not know, but I was colour-blind about it, or that my eyes were made with different lenses. I am afraid I am not just like other women,' added Avis, simply, dipping her brush with deep absorption in the matter-rose. "'Thank heaven,' said Ostrander, in a low, delirious tone. Avis lifted her eyes with a startled change of expression, holding the tube of brilliant colour like an arrested thought upon the air. "'I did not understand you,' she said gravely. "'I said you were in danger of dropping the matter-rose. There! Allow me! Do not stir it will hitch the hem of your dress.' He stooped to pick it up, her dress, as he did so, falling with a faint electric touch against his hand. Raising his head suddenly, he surprised her eyes upon him. They were wide, grave, imperious. They made him think of a Juneau that he knew, and thought the grandest in the world. Was it the sensitiveness of a young man's wounded vanity that led him to fancy that her lips parted with something of the dumb and delicate scorn that the lips of that Ludovici Juneau, alone of all sculpture that he had ever seen, commanded? In truth Avis had come home with large segments of her nature not altogether occupied by young Scandinavian divinities, and it is doubtful if all the gods of Olympus would have appealed to her sensibilities on any sustained scale just then, other than as affording more or less fresh material for a charcoal, a memory, or a sienna. As the souls of the dead are said in the hideous fable to suck the heart's blood of the living, so without doubt a great purpose sprung too early upon a young life may dehumanize it, sometimes does. It is impossible to overestimate the effect of substituting an intellectual for an emotional passion in the absorbent phases of a woman's life which are covered by the decade from sixteen to twenty-six. Such an experience may prune the nature, as we are told that hardship does that of certain savage races, retarding their tenderer impulses. While the other girls talked of love and lovers, Avis sat and sketched their shy, expectant faces. Yet nothing could be more fatal to horticulture than to mistake the retarded for the stunted or the sterile growth. Avis's abundant being had suffered no depletion. She was alive to the nerves of her soul. She was still an unwon woman. She felt even glad sometimes that there were men in the world who loved her. She liked to think that they loved her because they could not help it. She wondered why it was that the swifter the retreat of her nature from them had been, the shore had been the advance of theirs. She was sorry about it when it happened, but she had no coquettish consciousness of having been in fault, and she thought very humbly of her power to mar the music of any other life. Men usually married, and it was pleasant to remember that she was not unlovely or unlovable. Sometimes when she sat before her easel, forecasting her fair future, she felt suddenly glad with the downright womanish thrill that she was so sure of the beauty and patience of her purpose, that she was not to live a solitary life because no other had been open to her. Perhaps the woman does not live for whom the kingdoms of earth and the glory of them could blunt the tooth of that one little poison thought. And Avis did not mean to marry. That was a matter of course. It was not necessary to talk about it. Young women were apt to say something of the sort, she believed, and she had never meant to marry, and she knew that she had never meant to. She acted upon this consciousness as reticently as she did upon the combinations of her palette, and as naturally as she did upon the reflex motion of her muscles. But the silent footsteps of the spring crept on. It was pleasant in the garden studio. The square little building with the gothic door and porch and long low windows stood within call of the house, yet was quite isolated by the budding trees, an island in a sea of leaves. It gave a sense of solitude to the fancy, which was rather heightened than lessened by the close presence of unseen life. When Aunt Chloe, who had the best intentions in the world in the matter of matronizing Avis through this portrait, trotted in and out in her short garden gown, it seemed somehow only to deepen their isolation. When she suddenly remembered that the lilies were to have been bedded this morning, or wondered if Jacobs had let the cows into the corn patch, or was afraid the newspaper over the wisteria had been blown away, or was sure Julia would get the dumplings underdone, or the professor get home from lecture before the study was dusted, and begging Mr. Ostrander to excuse her for a minute, vanished for an hour. Avis, looking gently after her, used to think of some odd, odd words. Then she departed into her own country by another way. Turning to Ostrander she would find his eyes upon her, but his lips said nothing. The robins came and peered at them with curious glance upon the window ledge, a ground sparrow who had built her nest just beneath the wooden doorstep, twittered in a tender monotone. The boughs of the budding apple trees hit the glass with slender fingertips, and reddened if one looked at them. The dumb sunlight crawled inch by inch like a creeping child across the steps and in upon the floor. The air was full of the langurs of unseen buds. Car and faint upon the shore summoned the rapture of the hidden sea. He could understand, Ostrander thought, why it was given to the first man to woo the first woman in a garden. Out of all the untried moods of the new heavens and the new earth, the gloom of the forest, the strength of the hills, the stir of the moors or the glory of the sea, what could have taught that perfect primeval creature, the slow, sweet lesson of love's surrender, like the temper of one budding flower. E. p. it always fancied, was rather hard to win. And now the hurrying footsteps of the spring swept on. In the ripening grass the clover buds appeared, bursting into color impetuously like kisses that a child throws to the sky. In the pansy bed beside the summer house, Aunt Chloe's old-fashioned ladies' delights lifted their impressive faces and sat like philosophers in the sun, asking for ever a question to which no man could reply. The imperfectly defined scent of buds faded from an air gone drunk with yielding blossoms. One day, as Avis sat painting busily, there came a stir upon the apple-tree, as if a spirit had troubled the soul of it. A fine, almost inaudible sound, like a murmur of appeal or monstrance, crossed the boughs, and a shower of blossoms fell in upon her. Every petal is a perfumed shell, said Avis, drawing her breath. See how they drift to their places, drawn by the currents, compelled by the currents of an unseen tide! answered Ostrander. His voice had the tense resonance which precedes tremulousness. This means, he said, as he stooped to gather a leaf which had fallen from her hair, and was sinking with a reluctant motion to the floor. This means that May is past, and June has come to us. He said this in his penetrative undertone, that tone which may mean anything or nothing, but which in Ostrander gave one the impression that he spoke in a delicate spiritual cipher, to which it were a dullness amounting to grossness not to find the key. He thought, as he spoke, that a faint flush stirred across Avis's listening face, but if so it was transparent as the colour of the petal in his hand, and as swift to fade. I had been very slow about the portrait, returned Avis, hastening to speak. I worked more rapidly with a master. At the first plunge into a solitary struggle, a self-distrust which I can neither explain nor avoid, comes upon me now and then, like the cramp upon a swimmer. Yet I am quite sure I am doing better work. If we had multiplied the sittings a little, the picture would have been—should have been finished before the apple-blossoms fell. Pray, do not misunderstand me, urged Ostrander gently. How could you for one moment think? Mr. Ostrander—interrupted Avis with a sudden piercing candour in her eyes—I did not misunderstand you. Then tell me, pleaded Ostrander, caressing the apple-blossom which lay quivering across his hand like a thing that might fly. Tell me what I would have said. I am struck dumb to-day. I think you meant to say that there is a calendar for all kind thought that people acquire of one another, said Avis quietly. All friendliness is a progression. A friend is a marvel, a creation, a discovery, a growth like a year, and June will follow May. A friend—a friend—said the young man, bringing his hand slowly across his eyes. How often do you find the June in the soul of a friend? I am not sure, said Avis, laying down her brushes, that we either of us quite know what we are trying to say. Strictly since you ask me, I must think my life has been barren of that which, it seems to me, a friend would put into it. Of course, one is always giving and receiving a sort of service and tenderness. But I see many women find the closest sympathies and the deepest comfort. Perhaps I have been necessarily too much absorbed in my own affairs to cultivate that divine self-oblivion which is the first condition of friendship. She took up her brushes with a solitary look, but before Ostrander could answer, it had turned into an expression which deterred him from speech, like an outstretched hand. He had never seen her looked so seriously annoyed, nay, disturbed. He had heard women talk about friendship before. He had never seen one who did not mellow under the subject like a September afternoon. But Miss Doble froze before the sun-beam fell. In truth Avis was bitterly annoyed with herself. She recoiled from her little innocent impulse, as if it had held the compromising power of an imprudence, and felt the scathing hurt which a delicate nature receives from the reaction of all misplaced ardor. She had not reached the age—perhaps with those serious eyes of hers would be long in doing so—when we can catch only the ludicrous angle in the sight of a woman talking friendship with a man. But a friend—a friend—she had allowed this man a momentary privilege, sacred and mystical to her as her maidenly dim vision of the rites of plighted love. He had overtaken her upon the boundary of a country wholly as heaven and human as Eden. Avis Doble, in her nurtured, loved, and eventful, but as she truly said, most solitary life, had dreamed of the heart of a friend with more passion and more reserve than most women dedicate to the lover of their young ideal. But, like Frigga, the wife of Odin, who foreknew but never foretold the destinies of men, she had the silence of her inspirations. She had never told anybody that she felt solitary before. She had never chattered about sympathy or cackled about being imperfectly understood—an obstinate weakness in people which she hated as she did some of her tubes of paint, always telling on the colours of character, killing superior values by its terrible encroachment. All forms of self-pity, like Prussian blue, should be sparingly used. A friend—her friend—what was this that she had done? She felt a sudden sick emptiness of soul as if an artery had been opened there which no human power could ever bind. Her whole nature crouched as if it would spring upon this man who had severed it. She had returned to her painting quietly enough. Ander watched her between his half-closed guarded eyes. Beautiful leperous, he said, but he did not say it aloud. And now it was June in the garden studio. Coy was privileged one day to come in when Avis was working alone and criticise the picture. I suppose I must make a fish-horn of my fingers, said the young lady plaintively. I never knew an artist who didn't go about the world with one hand curled up at his eye like the tin fish-horns that we find in galleries to see the pictures through. I always used them devoutly, of course, but I never knew what they were there for. Yes, Avis, that is a likeness. His eyes are too big and his nose is too little and there's too much—what do you call it? Action? In the left mustache, but it is a very good likeness. How much you have improved! As Mrs. Hogarth says, it will be quite a step for Avis. I do not mean to paint portraits, said Avis, colouring slightly. Though couture said I probably must in America. But I have different plans. At least I have different hopes. Is the hair too lightly lighted, Coy? No. Coy uncurled her hand like a long spiral shell and bent her two keen, unaided eyes upon Avis. No. Your portrait is alive. Flattered, of course, that is the first duty of a portrait painter. I didn't know before that Mr. Ostrander had a mother. I wonder if she gave him his light hair. He looks like the people with the horrid Norse names in the poems Longfellow's taken to writing—Frigga and those. Wasn't Frigga a woman? suggested Avis. Oh, well, it's all the same. He has the antique Icelandic style. Mrs. Hogarth is much interested about it. Ah! said Avis. And Barbara! added Coy. But then Barbara is into the faculty. Avis made no reply. In fact, Avis, I may say that the greater part of harm at this familiar with the history and progress of this portrait. Oh! I suppose so, said Avis, wearily. It is just so if a woman writes a poem or does anything less to be expected than making one, two, three, four cake. I must submit to that. I work so busily and so happily that I seldom think about it. I suppose the woman never lived who would not rather work in the shelter of a desert or a star. Very true, said Coy, with her most motherly air. And you know, Avis, you never even knew till you got home that Harmouth had engaged you in Florence to two sculptors and one artist. No, two artists and a sculptor, besides the Italian Count. You are wrong, it was a German baron, said Avis, in a tone of scientific precision. At all events, said Coy, with a swift glance from the portrait to Avis and back again to the portrait, it is a good subject. Mr. Rose says, they call him the beauty of the faculty, the bell of the faculty, I think he said, isn't that good? The antony of a college faculty! I should have soon looked for a Belvedere in the third tertiary strata. Now, there is my father. If it hadn't been for mother's kind interference, I suppose I might have looked like him. Everybody should have been proportionately intellectual. Brains and beauty, as some one was saying the other day at the critic and the creator, but I don't think that was Mr. Rose. Seemed to be born enemies. Oh, Coy! cried Avis, lighting. Shiller and Goethe and Burns, and see that print of Robertson behind you. Very likely, insisted Coy, indeed I know girls who are more in love with a photograph of Frederick Robertson today than they ever were with a live man. But all the same I stake my point and refer you to any good album of the poets or the clergy. As a rule a man can't cultivate his moustache and his talents impartially. There's apt to be something askew or deficient in handsome men. They don't do great things, I think, more than flowers do. Or women. So with a pretty ingenuity that she had, Coy worked out the chance barbs which had annoyed Avis. She knew. Avis never sat so still with just one vein throbbing in her temple, unless she were annoyed. And yet the June budded in the garden studio, and one day the portrait was done. Avis, feeling the inevitable strain which falls upon the portrait artist with the completion of a work, had slept lightly and little for several nights. The moment when the subject and the picture are first brought face to face, she thought no experience could ever make other than one of her fine, nervous trial to her. She had often heard artists speak of this, and some of them never outgrew it, as some great orators are found to never outgrow the sudden sick bounding of the heart and trembling of the muscles of the face which the first sight of an audience produces. The artist's public, narrowed for the moment into one pair of human eyes, acquires a kind of omnipotence, like that of the sliding wall in the old story of martyrdom, which towering higher as each day brings it nearer, creeps to crush the victim at the appointed hour. She once heard Alexander say that he could tell across the studio by the look of a man's back whether he liked his picture. She would have been sorry not to have Mr. Ostrander like the portrait, but more sorry, she thought, if it failed to please that lonely old mother in New Hampshire. Mr. Ostrander had said that he was not able to visit his mother as often as he would like, the state of his health requiring a different climate and the brief vacations which an overworked man cannot afford not to expend to the best physical advantage. He had said this so sadly that Avis felt very sorry for him. It did not occur to her till afterwards to be very sorry for the old lady. As the day drew on when she was to show him the picture, her repressed excitement deepened. She must have lost more sleep than she had supposed, so taut attention seemed to have been sprung upon her nerves. During the night she lay with wide eyes, seeing the souls of unwrought pictures, like disembodied spirits, sweep by vision upon vision, electro-typed upon the darkness which the substance of wine or opium fantasies, an experience which chanced to her only in her most fertile moods. When day broke a strange buoyancy overtook her. Her veins seemed filled with a fine fire, like an intoxication which she had seen follow the use of certain rare liqueurs among Parisian women. Juices expressed from subtle fruits, or the flowers of fruits, after which the lacrime Christi seemed gross. Ostrander came after tea to see the picture. Her father and Aunt Chloe had just been in, finding themselves sufficiently pleased with the work. But a faculty meeting, involving a pet quarrel with a theological chair, absorbed the professor. And Aunt Chloe had an oleander to water before the sun had set. The artist and the model were left alone. It was still quite light. The birds in unseen nests were singing themselves to sleep with a lessening, crooning cry as children do, one by one falling smothered in silence. The surf upon the beach had died, only a slight sob came from the harbour, like that of a creature in whom a great struggle had worn to a peaceful close. There was not wind enough to take the pollen from a lily. But the bees were awake, and hummed dizzily among the flowers. My picture must be the final cause of this evening, said Ostrander lightly, as they approached the easel, for he felt her strained nerves beneath her quiet manner, as sailors feel the prophecy of a storm upon a sleeping sea. Such a colouring will define its like a frame. Ah! There! Do not move it. The light is perfect. And so is the portrait. Miss Dobel, my mother, will be satisfied. You are very good to think so, said Avis, drawing her breath. But shall you be satisfied? More than satisfied, said Ostrander after a pause. He stood for a few moments silently looking at the picture, before he added in a lower tone. Much more. Do I really look like that? Out of the kind eyes of a friend. Why, turning suddenly so that his eyes swept her face and figure, are you so tired? You are worn out. I have wearied you. Pray do not stand. In truth Avis trembled heavily, and sank into the chair which he had brought. Did you mind me so much? murmured Ostrander with a daring rapture in his voice. I am ashamed, she cried impetuously, but it is a nervousness I have when a picture comes to an end. It is like the ending of a life. Her chants words fell with a sudden dreary significance upon them both, as they sat looking across the little room, which seemed to be absorbent of the intense evening light, and to throb like a topaz about them. Avis looked up at him with timid, candid eyes. It would be lonely in the studio to-morrow. He must know that. She had nothing to conceal from this man. Nothing. Nothing. She repeated the word to herself with a sharpening emphasis. But she rose with a swift motion, as if she discarded some encroaching thought, and going to the doorway stood there looking out across the garden. Ostrander followed her, and gently said, Do you see the bees on the wigalia? As he spoke, one circled away from the blush of the shrub, and hovered over her with a slow, intoxicated swing. You have flowers about you, he said. No. Yes, I had forgotten. It is the rose in my hair. She flung it away as she spoke with a startled jester. You did not listen, said Ostrander, to the bee. Have you forgotten the pretty thought about the growing of the grass and the budding of the flowers? That it is only because our eyes are not fine enough that we do not see a lily open or a clover bloom, and only because our ears are not delicate enough that we do not hear this sap circulate in a rose leaf or the heart throb in the insect that lights upon it. I have thought of that, said Avus in a low voice. Every day, sights that I never saw, and sounds that I never heard, it seems to me I have heard and seen this spring. Something ails the June. I have felt as if I had her heart beneath the microscope all the time. It is the being at home, I think, and finding my father so well, and content to see me hard at work. And I am always excited when I am at work. No, said Ostrander in a changed voice. No, that is not it. I believe you are the only woman in the world who would not understand. You do not, will not, will not. Ah hush! For all that ails the June is, that we love each other. The young man had hardly uttered these words before he would have given a ransom to recall them. There is something appalling at times to the dullest fancy in the inexorable nature of human speech. The word that is leapt from the lips has gone, as the soul goes from the body. It has taken on the awful rebellion of a departed spirit. To recall it is like recalling the dead. A moment ago your friend was yours, to have and to hold, to kiss, to clasp. Now, whose is he? And what, and where? An instant past your thought was your slave, mute, subservient, safe. Now it defies you. Ostrander had felt himself blindly driven that evening toward some riot of expression, circling slowly to it as the bee circled to the flower in her abundant hair. He had struggled against this impulse stoutly. As long as his love was his secret, he felt himself to be in a certain mystical exalted sense the master of this beautiful defiant creature. He could love her. She could not help that. Deeper than all the moods that the subtle June night could ever strike, he knew now that he loved her. It was no riot. He was not the man to mistake a revolution for a riot. He knew the difference. He had been spurred into speech by an instinct, daring as all instincts are, and as full of danger. And his instinct had told him that this was a woman to be surprised, not wooed. He felt that, if he came suppliant to her, her whole being would have gathered itself like a queen and receded from him. He could not have dallyed with her, or pleaded with her, or sighed before her. That seemed to him an artificial process, adapted for the winning of other women, in whose tenderness there was usually an element of art. They might melt beneath it. It would be like the administration of Aether to the grand simplicity of her soul. The influence meant to subject her into a gentle dream would prove a powerful excitant. She would freeze under it, like ice mechanically formed at Midsummer. He could not think of her as a woman to whom a man would ever say, learn to love me, permit me to teach you, suffer me to be near you. He would, as naturally have said to a beautiful torrent, seek to love me, or beckoned to some sweet wild creature of the woods expecting it to fawn at his feet. The young man's nature had leaped to entrap her, as the hero in the old mythology crossed the ring of fire that surrounded the daughter of the gods. When he had made the plunge, he found indeed a woman sleeping, but it was a woman armed. Avis lifted her eyes slowly, like one struggling with a fugitive dream. He would have given years of his life at that moment to see her lip tremble, or her eyelash fall, or her commanding figure shrink. She did indeed change colour, but it was to take on the colour of white fire. And then the antique cast of her features came on. She looked like a great, dumb, protesting goddess whom some light hand had just dragged from the bosom of the earth to the glare of day. As they stood there, the humming of the bees in the Wigalia bush reverberated, and seemed to fill the world. One crawled out of the rose which she had cast away, and reeled against her foot. They stood just as his broken words had arrested them, fastened by each other's eyes. Suddenly in hers their dawned afar startled look. She began to turn her neck a little from side to side, like a deer stirred by the sound, but not as yet by the sight of the pursuit, and secretly preparing for flight. Then she thrust out both her hands. I deny it, said the woman. I assert it, said the man. They faced one another, flashing like dualists. You assume, she blazed, stammering and struggling with her words, you presume what no man. I presume to say that I love you, he urged, swiftly scintillating into a dazzling tenderness. I quite dare to say that I love you. I know what I am saying. I love you. Love you. At that moment his words seemed to her a kind of unendurable liberty, like a personal approach, as if he had touched her dress or hand. Her startled maidenhood felt a wild rebellion in just standing there and knowing that his eyes were on her. Her own had now fallen. She began to quiver and flush, but it was not with tenderness. She was caught between two fires. She could not have told just then for which cause she felt most repellent of him, that he loved her, or that he had told her she loved him. A kind of wide recoil from him, such as she had never known from any man, made either of these suppositions seem to her like usurpations, like infringements of some blind, sacred law, which she felt about her like the evening air, and would seek to understand at a calmer time. But it was not an instinct of repugnance that had spread in a moment. There, through the calm June afterglow, a sudden impassable distance between herself and this man—an antipathy would have been less complex, and so more tractable than this feeling. It was a rebound of dismay. It was at once blindly instinctive and rigidly measured, like that which one makes before a plunge. No man had ever spoken to her like this man. His words had the character of events. She felt as if she had in one moment put a great fact behind her, whose effect the whole of life could not undo. What was the weakness in her nature that had made this experience possible, and what the tumult there which made it memorable, stamped it upon her like the mold of a great sorrow or a wild joy? Her startled look had broadened now, and brightened like a light coming near and near to one through the undergrowth of a dense forest. There was even a kind of appeal in her voice, though it was with the ceremonious dignity that she said, I hope, Mr. Ostrander, that you may find yourself as much mistaken in your own feeling as you have been so extraordinarily in mine. It will undoubtedly be so. Nothing is easier than to overestimate the depth of a passing influence. I have overestimated nothing, persisted he doggedly, and I am mistaken in nothing. Ahush, let me speak, let me explain, you do not understand yourself or me. You recoil, you are angry with me. I was abrupt, I was uncouth, I was unreasonable, but before God I believe I was right. Turn to me one moment, let me see your eyes, let me beg of you to listen. I wonder, Mr. Ostrander," said Aunt Chloe, panting up across the pansy bed, if I might so greatly trouble you as to help me one moment with the grapevine. And Avus, I am sorry, but there are callers. I think it is Mr. Allen and his sister, and the grapevine will get a sprain if I leave it as it is. I thought, if they'll excuse the garden-gown, you would like to bring them out and get their criticism upon the picture. CHAPTER VII I accept the peril. I choose to walk high with sublime or dread rather than crawl in safety. GRAPH. Armgardt, I would with all my soul I knew the man so rare that he could make your life as woman's sweet to you, as artist's safe. George Elliot. He sought her the next day without preface or apology, and like a man demanded his hearing out. There was a perfectly new element in his manner to her that had almost the dignity of a claim or right, but to resent this seemed like resenting the sacred incoherencies of grief. Avus received him gently. He found her wandering in the fields about the shore. She could not work. She too had not slept and looked well nigh as worn as he. They did not sit down, but walked restlessly to and fro through the long impeding grass. He could not catch her eye, but the expression of her mouth when he began to speak disheartened him. He had never seen her put her lips together so. This felt that a battle was impending. Even her gentleness had a kind of strategical character. Her foot fell upon the bruised clover with a martial rhythm. The whole force of her soul and body seemed to garrison itself. He began by telling her in a tone of proud humility that he had been too hasty yesterday, that though it was not possible that he could be mistaken in his own feeling as she would know if she knew him better, yet it was never easy for a man's imagination to employ itself upon the nature of a woman. And you, he said, with the lovers' ingenious gravity, are like no other woman, no other that I ever saw. I do not believe the world contains another. You perplex me like the Sphinx. You awe me like the Venus. You allure me like the Lorelei. I have dreamed of such women. I never saw one. I love you." He turned to her with a kind of solemn authority, as if in those three words all the swift, sweet arguments of his heart had so clearly culminated that it would be as impossible for her to combat them as it was to advance anything more compelling or convincing, as if he had said, the sky is blue fire, or the daisy turns to it, or the tide leans to the shore. He looked at her a little blindly, with half-fallen lids. There was a hazy radiance in his eyes, from the full force of which it was as if he shielded her. Dancing up with some unspoken protest on her lips, she seemed to feel this. She put her hand across her own eyes as if she had been dazzled. When a man loves a woman as I love you, he said quietly, he expects to be loved. He has a right to be. He must be. You do not know what you say, she cried. You don't know what you ask. I am not a woman to make you—to make any man happy. Even if I—ah, what?—even if you what?—rest here a minute in the shade and tell me. You shut your heart away from me. Let me stay here till I find it. Then you will stay forever," flashed the woman off her guard. He threw himself at her feet in the shadow of the stone wall, and across a little cordon of tall daisies that leaped uncrushed between them, looked over at her. Even if you—that does not matter now! It was nothing. Let that drop. Even if you what? Pray finish your sentence. You are incapable of small coquetries. If you do not finish your sentence, it must be that you really prefer me to finish it for you. No, no, I would rather finish it for myself. I meant to say that even if I loved you— And what then? Suppose—just suppose it—that you loved me. Suppose that all this spring, the feeling—you have called it artistic fervour—the sympathy—you have thought it friendliness—the sweetness—I believe you thought that had something to do with your father—all the glory that is common to life—all this delicate intoxication that has been between us two—man and woman—created by heaven—to love—to yield like other men and women. I will never yield like other women," cried Avis, quivering across the daisies. But suppose—he continued, his tone gaining in quiet insistence as hers lost strength and emotion—suppose that all this had meant that you loved me. Then I should be very sorry, she said tremulously. Why sorry? You compel me to repeat an unpleasant thing, she replied more faintly yet. I said, even supposing it were as you wish, I could never make you happy. I have the right to judge of that. I am neither a comfortless right, but I shall not overlook it, nor any other right you give me. I have given you none, none!" She rose in much agitation, and sweeping down the daisies turned from him. It were hard to say whether it were his eyes or his voice that had restrained her. Surely his touch had not fallen upon so much as the hem of her garment, but she stood swaying and uncertain, and then slowly, as if tender, compelling hands had drawn her, sank down against the wall again. Perhaps there was a momentary consciousness of weakness in this little act which stung her, for her whole mood seemed suddenly to gather and defend itself. Mr. Ostrander, she said, with a gentle distinctness, we are making a long and painful scene out of a matter which a dozen plain words will settle. Then, said he, let us speak the plain words. She sat for a moment with her face turned towards him in the attitude of one who waits for expected speech, but the young man, with his elbow in the daisies and his head upon his hand, lay watching her in a kind of trance. His eyes had gone quite dull and blind, as if the force of his repressed feeling had been an objective presence, like a midday sun. Turning, she saw this memorable look, for the first but not the last time in her life. Her resolution seemed to gather courage from it, and she said with increasing quietness, The plain word is that I do not, and I must not think of love, because the plain truth is, that I cannot accept the consequences of love as other women do. Oh, I see! I was a brute to make you say that, cried Ostrander impatiently. That blind look broke suddenly and scattered into an uncertain darting gleam, like a ball of quick silver crushed. You mean that you do not wish to marry? Certainly I mean that. But it was a little hard to be made to say it. Now it is said, I don't care, there is an end to it. It is not love, then, that you feel a disrespect for, but marriage. You prefer to marry art, I suppose," he said perplexedly. You are happier so? I feel no disrespect for either that I am conscious of, but surely I am happier as I am. That sensitive vein on her temple throbbed painfully. What did this man take her for? A twisted canvas, perhaps, or a marble antique, a torso, possibly, something mechanically constructed on the principles of the highest art, content to gather the dust of her studio without a heartthrob, a fleshless, bloodless thing. A great impulse surged over her to rise and cry out to him, I am human! I am woman! I have had my dreams of love, like other women. But that was not a matter to chatter about. When she found the man who could both understand and reverence these dreams, but in her wildest vision she had only seen his face as we see the loved faces of the dead, sacred, safe, and snatched from her. God gave her the power to make a picture before he gave her the power to love a man. And this man, this, who had confused and agitated, nay, half-blinded her, with whom her nature found escape or surrender equally impossible, what should she do with him? She thought of him with a kind of tear which only a woman can understand, because he had come so near, but failed to come nearer to her, because he had startled her into putting her whole soul in arms which he had failed to conquer. She almost wished at that moment that she could have loved like other women, and that she could have loved him. That experience, at least, would have had the beauty of holiness. This bore the bruise of sacrilege. His thoughts, like a witch-hazel, seemed to follow and command the spring of hers, for just then he said abruptly, So then, if you loved me, you are sure you would not marry me. We might be so happy. Did you never think of that?" He drew a little nearer to her. Both the words and the motion had something of the nature of unconsciousness. The tall white daisies swayed delicately in the golden air between them. A woman never thinks, I never thought, of such a thing in such a way, said Avis with recoiling eyes. I beg your pardon. A man is so different. And you are so different from most women. But if you loved me, you would marry me all the same. You should be happy. You should paint. I should be proud to have you paint. I used to think I should be wretched with a gifted wife, all young men do, but you have taught me better. It would be the purpose. Do not think at the ravings of a lover if I say it would be the passion of my life to help you realize your dreams of success. Avis smiled sadly. But she said, with the evidence and the consciousness of feeling more deeply shaken than any he had yet seen. How can you know what my dreams are? Did I ever tell them to you? You are using a language that you do not understand. My ideals of art are those with which marriage is perfectly incompatible. Success, for a woman, means absolute surrender in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her. I do not say that this was meant to be so. I do not think we know what was meant for women. It is enough that it is so. God may have been in a just mood, but he was not an immersive one, when knowing that they were to be in the same world with men, he made women. But suppose, interrupted Ostrander, thrilling with hope and proportion as she fired with rebellion, suppose two people had been born to show that this need not be so. That would be very much like God on the whole to let the whole world suspect, if it dared not accuse him of injustice in a given course, and then spring the abounding mercy of it on us at the brink of faith's surrender. Suppose a man and woman had been made and led and drawn to one another, just to show that the tolerance of individuality, even the enthusiasm of superiority, could be a perfectly mutual thing. There may be such women in the world," said Avis. I have never seen such a man. Only lovers think it to be possible. Nothing could have disheartened him like the delicate tooth of perfectly unconscious satire biting through those last few words, not even her lapse into her wanted self-command, nor the sealed eyes which she was turning away from him to the restless sea. He understood, as perfectly as if she had said so, that the tide of an emotion stronger than he had ever witnessed in her, had turned and was setting out from him. He was only half-comforted when she added, in the calmer tone of one who brings a discussion to an inexorable close. I never said to any one what I have said to you to-day, if that is any pleasure to you, it will be none to me. I suppose, he said, after an oppressive silence, if I had been more of a man, a man of genius, for instance, I might have commanded your love by this time. Whatever my abilities are, they are untried. Your future is so far established. It is all so different from the way a man and woman usually meet. A man of my sort must seem to you so young. To your inspirational atmosphere, what a plodding dog a college tutor is. I suppose a gifted woman dreams of a great man. I shall never be a great man. But, with you, I might do some worthy work. I feel a unity in all aims, all hope, since I have known you. Life seems symmetrical and coherent and worthwhile. It does not always. I am a restless fellow. I am sure you will do worthy work," said Avus, with ringing earnestness. Sure, sure. Are you so sure? Thank you for that. I wish I were. And you mistake me, she continued eagerly, in what you said just now. I don't think I could love a great man if I tried. Why not? asked Ostrander, a faint smile encroaching upon the deepening pain of his face. I never asked myself why, any more than I asked myself why I thrilled to paint a picture, and suffer to so esteem. It is enough to feel such things, if you feel them as hard as I do. But I suppose it is the moral nature of a man and woman needs. I mean, I should need, to find great. At his noble, I think, to be a man, and to be great in goodness, to have faith and tenderness and truth and whiteness of soul. I should care much less for what was in a man's head than what was in his heart. And a great man is absorbed. He is not so apt to think of little things. He is too busy to be tender, I should say. But that is the way," said he, that men feel about women, not women about men. Is it," asked Avus, sighing, I do not know. I should think all women would feel so. But I have told you more than enough, Mr. Ostrander, of what I think and feel. It cannot help us any, and no man's love can be meant for me. Now that," he said musingly, is what I cannot quite understand. I never knew a woman in my life who could love a man so much, if she would. Pray forgive me. Ah, you do not, you dare not deny that. You would perjure your own nature if you tried. I would forbid that I perjure my own nature," answered Avus, beginning to grow pale. But as I live I should perjure it if I said to you today that I believed love and marriage were meant for me, and whatever it would be to me, this life that other women seem to be so happy in, this feeling that other women have to offer to the man they— She broke off abruptly. Her voice had fallen to an awestruck whisper. Her solemn reticence and reluctance before this experience, which she had been used to see women's enter upon both readily and irreverently, affected Ostrander as the flash of a new planet affects the astronomer, whose telescope misses today what it has discovered yesterday. He brought his dry hands together, and wrung them, a silent, eloquent gesture. "'Marriage,' said Avus, not assertedly, but only sadly, as if she were but recognizing some dreary universal truth like that of sin or misery or death, is a profession to a woman. And I have my work. I have my work.' But suppose, he suggested, that your future should fail to fulfill its present promise. Be patient with me. You cannot think I am capable of underrating that promise. As I see it, it is a splendid one. But fate is so false to genius. Perhaps most of all to women, as you say, a thousand things may baffle you. You dare the loss of what nineteen centuries of womanhood has hailed as the joy of its life. You dare the loss of home and love for—God forbid that I say an unproved, but as yet untried, power." "'At least,' she said, after a silence in which she had sat, not unmoved. Yes, at least I can dare. There is that in me which will not permit me not to dare. God gave it to me. Amen,' said the young man solemnly. Just then he could add no more. He had perhaps never thought till that moment that God really did give such things to women. How right she was about it! How true! How strong! His reverence for her grew with his sense of loss. His ardor deepened under her denial. He had always thought he should learn to hate a woman who had been too easily won. It seemed to him at that moment that he would rather be scorned by her than loved by any other creature in the world. "'May I not come another day,' he pleaded, for she had risen as she spoke, and carefully stepping around the daisy cordon turned her face towards her father's house. "'What could be gained?' said Avis sadly. "'We can neither of us spare the strength needed for our life's work. You or I, on scenes like this, they take strength. How tired you look!' She looked up at him with a sudden womanly quiver on her face and held out her hand. "'You won't mind it if I say that I shall miss you, or that I shall always like to know you are my friend,' she added timidly. "'And by and by, when all is different, and we could talk of other things, you will come back to me.' "'If ever I come back to you, it will be to stay,' said our stranded her under his breath. "'You will not get rid of me so easily if you beckon me back.' But he turned haggardly away, and leaping the wall with a mighty bound, strode off alone upon the beach. Avis stood as he had left her till he was out of sight. Then slowly, as if each nerve and muscle in her body yielded separately, sank down among the daisies, throwing her arms above her head, among their roots. She was worn with the strain of the last few days. She thrust her cheek down into the cool, clean earth, and let the grass close over her young head with a dull wish that it were closing for the last time. As she lay there, prone as a fallen karyatid, steps crushed the clovers. Ostrander had returned and stood again beside her. "'Pardon me,' he said deprecatingly, "'I have no right, but the right of my misery to intrude in this way. I thought she would have heard me. Do not stir. I have only come back to ask you a single question.' He parted the long grass that had closed above her, and looked down. She had sprung, half leaning on her elbow, and lifted her face, which gathered a chill from the dull green shadow in which she was. "'In your soul's name and mine,' he said, "'will you answer what I shall ask?' "'I will try,' she said solemnly. "'Tell me, then.' He proceeded with a dizzy feeling, wondering whether it were madness or inspiration that possessed him, and why a man must find in either an iron necessity like this that flogged him into speech. "'Tell me.' It is all you can do for me now, and I dare believe you would relieve the pain that you must inflict so far as you can. Tell me if I am the man you would have, might have, loved.' All her face and figure, which had been suffused while he spoke, with a beautiful compassion, grew tense. She flung out one bent elbow as if she had been warding off a blow. But she still said solemnly, "'For your soul's sake and mine, you are the man I will not love.' It was not long—possibly it might have been a week or ten days—after the completion of the portrait. When one evening, as Avis came in rather wearily from the studio, she found Aunt Chloe beckoning mysteriously to her from the piazza's steps. Aunt Chloe had on the purple and wood-coloured garden-gown that she had bought at a harmoth bankrupt sale, since three cents a yard was a saving worthy the attention of any woman who handled money often enough to know the value of it, and the difference would exactly get one-and-a-half of those religious motos so pretty in the soldier's hospital. Aunt Chloe beckoning on the piazza behind the wood-bine, bloomed like a large and rather stumpy pansy. Avis remembered the pattern of that calico, and remembered the outline that the wood-bine mercifully dropped upon it, for years after it had gone to adorn some Georgia-freed woman of an undoubtedly deserving, but it is to be hoped not an aesthetic cast of mind. I wanted to see you, my dear," said Aunt Chloe, about the lemon cream. Can you step into the pantry a minute? There just tasted, will you? Too much sugar? I thought so. For a woman who cannot cook, you are the most faultless taster I ever knew. Thank you. I wonder if you'll shut the door. It blows the cream. That will do. If you've got the paint off your hand, suppose you skim a little for your father's berries. Your father is quite put about to-night," added Aunt Chloe, who seldom dropped into the expressive old Vermont phrase, unless the harm of anxieties were overkeen. So that was it. Of course it had not been the lemon cream. Since Aunt Chloe had sadly, but as she hoped, resignedly and finally admitted the glaring culinary deficiencies of Avis's nature, these pantry matinees had been rare. Avis asked rather listlessly what was the matter with father this time. Was it the sophomore hazing, or the senior rush, the dangerously lax position taken by the theological chair? Or had somebody taken the liberty to differ from him about the non-ego? Poor father. His nervous irritability grew upon him a little. Yes, said Aunt Chloe, I think it does. We must watch him more carefully. We must see that he has kept amused and exercised. This was said in the tone which Aunt Chloe always adopted in discussing the time-honored subject, the tone usual with the women of a literary man's family, one of calm and gentle superiority to a race of beings and to a class of weaknesses which must be tolerated, but might not be cured or improved. Aunt Chloe said he must be kept amused and exercised exactly as if she had been speaking of a fine terrier or blooded racer, for whose physical nurture she was professionally though affectionately responsible. I wonder, went on Aunt Chloe with placid irrelevance, why be none of us gave Mr. Ostrander his title? His title? This held the skimmer suspended at a rash angle over a plate of bread-cake. Yes, his medical title. You know he graduated somewhere in medicine, but I believe he found it distasteful or injurious. I think it was injurious to his health. And I should know more of thought of him as a doctor than I should have thought of him as a—a porpoise, said Aunt Chloe, finding her imagination suddenly bankrupt of scientific similes. But now he must needs go into the army, it comes into play. It shows the great usefulness of a liberal education, I suppose, but your father is just as much worked up about it. You are dribbling the cream on the bread-cake. Your father says the country needs superior young men to preserve the tone of her colleges as much as she does at the front just now. And he says there is a plethora of surgeons. Ah! Mr. Ostrander was such a pet with him. What have you done with the skimmer? And the worst of it is. Well, said Abus, what is the worst of it? Before Aunt Chloe had suddenly set her sentence away to cool in the ice-chest into which she had dived bodily on one of those mysterious domestic inspirations which Abus had long since ceased attempting to fathom. Aunt Chloe's face and shoulders had quite disappeared, but the back of the pansy gown presented a broad and impressive front, if I may be allowed, the expression. Abus's eyes traced the pattern up and down. There seemed to be nothing but a brown palm leaf and a purple stripe in all the world. You were saying, Aunt Chloe, the worst of it was— The berries are withered, said Aunt Chloe, slowly exhuming herself from the refrigerator. Oh, yes, the worst of it is about the professorship. Mr. Ostrander received the call last night, and this morning he enlisted for three months. That is what has put her father out so. I told him, if the young man was worth anything, he was worth there waiting for. But he said three months was long enough to kill a man, and that he liked to see a young fellow have a mind and stick to it. Now if you'll call Julia, we'll have these picked over. The next day Coy and Barbara came over to beg some of Aunt Chloe's flowers to send out to camp. Wither, they said, Mr. Ostrander was going in an hour. The next night the professor laid a letter upon Abus's plate at tea, from which when she opened it, there dropped out a check, drawn in Philip Ostrander's name upon the Harmouth Bank. It was enclosed in a letter sheet, on which was written only, in the penciled camp-scrawl which so quickly takes on something of the sacredness of death. I have made it payable to your father's order, thinking it may be more convenient or agreeable for you to cash. Nothing more. It was the price of the portrait.