 20 Every man has experienced how feelings which end in themselves and do not express themselves in action leave the heart debilitated. We get feeble and sickly in character when we feel keenly and cannot do the thing we feel. Robertson. In September the college papers announced that Professor Philip Ostrander had resigned the assistant geological chair in Harmouth University on account of an increasing delicacy of the lungs, in consequence of which his physicians had forbidden all brain labour and required a change of climate. It was understood that he would sail for Av next week to spend the winter in the south of France. His resignation was deeply regretted by the faculty and students. The academic year opened prosperously under the hands of Professor Brown, his successor. Professor Coben was expected to resign at the close of the winter term. Professor Ostrander was so feeble that he had not been present at the senior party kindly given by Mrs. President Hogarth at the usual time. He had been as deeply missed in the drawing-room as he would be in the classroom, both of which locations he eminently graced. Professor Brown was understood to be the man who had recently detected the precise difference between the frontal sinuses in the white and grisly bears. A brilliant career was predicted for him. Footnote. A contributor adds that he is also the discoverer of the left foremen of the third cervical vertebra of the first monkey who harmonized with the environment. It is needless to say that a freshman bears the entire responsibility of this grave statement. After the first strange chill was out of the lonely air, Avus was shocked to find her husband's absence a relief. He had become extremely irritable before he went away. The reaction from his college work and from his escapade with Barbara had added mortification to mortification, under which he weakened petulantly. Like all untuned natures he grew discordant under the friction of care and trouble. He became really so ill that Avus felt that not an hour should be lost in removing him from the immediate pressure of annoyances from which she could not shield him. It was she who passed lightly over the embarrassments and economies under which the projected journey must place the family. It was she who was sure they could get along till the lease of the house was out. It was she who was confident that rest would restore him and that a future would await him. It was she who remembered the draughts that lurked for him, shaded the sun that dazzled him, cured the headaches that tore him, went away to amuse the children when they fretted him. Philip must have the cream whip and the sherry and the canter across country and Europe. Although the nurse were dismissed and the seamstress abandoned and the rent paid, heaven help her, out of that locked studio to whose cold and disused walls she should creep by and by with barren brain and broken heart and stiffened fingers. Avus took the emergency in her own strong hand. She planned, she hoped, she commanded, she contrived. That intelligent self-surrender which is the supreme sign of strength expressed itself in her with the pictorial graciousness peculiar to her special gift. She brought the whole force of her professional training to bear upon the shade of dye which might renew a baby's cloak. She made the very shoes that Van wore in those days—poor little pathetic shoes, badly stitched, perhaps—but of exquisite colour and a temporary defiance to the family shoemaker. If only papa could have beef steak at breakfast, the omelette need not be in a nicked platter, and a flour or so on the table gave Van a swelling consciousness of hilarious domestic dissipation which obviated the gloom of absent luxuries. I am sorry to have burdened you with such petty economies," Philip had said one day. But he spoke with the polite reserve which had become habitual with him. He was always polite to his wife. He noticed her domestic ingenuities with approval. He said, "'We never thought you would turn out so comfortable a housekeeper, did we, Avus?' with an absent-minded smile. And then he asked her what she did with his passports, and if she had packed the Calesia bark, and where was the lecture on chalk which she thought he might have a chance to deliver in England?" Avus answered patiently. She thought Philip walked about like a frost-bitten man—a certain hardness in his nature, of which she could not be mistaken in fancying herself the especial object, developed itself in a delicate but freezing form, like the ice scenery upon a window. It was with profound intellectual confusion that she remembered his first kiss. Was this the man who had wooed and won her with an idealizing gentleness which made of his incarnate love a thing divine? To admit it seemed like a challenge to the doctrine of personal identity. One day, spurred by a momentary impulse to leave no overture of wifely forgiveness and yearning unoffered, of whose omission she might think afterwards with that scorching self-rebuke in which all shallow pride shrivels to the bitterest ashes, she crept up to him and began timidly. Philip, this poor old car-mind shawl that she used to like so much is pretty well faded out. Do you remember the night when we first came home, when I had it on? Yes, I remember, said Philip distinctly. We were very happy, Philip. Then? Yes. Sometimes I wonder, tremulously, if nothing in this world can ever make us feel so again. That, he said, regarding her with cool, distant eyes, is entirely out of the question. The man whose unapproachable tenderness had spared the life of a dumb bird because it trusted him, could say this to his wife. His voice had a fine grating sound. It made Avis think of the salute of icebergs meeting and passing in the dark. Yet we should see that, apparently Philip Ostrander was as unconscious of cruelty as the burnt-out crater is of the snow that has sifted down its sides. It was his temperament, he reasoned, to express himself as he felt, and he certainly did not feel to his wife as he did when they first married. He saw no occasion for dwelling upon an ardour which marriage must inevitably chill. Avis's good sense must perceive this. Why should they trouble themselves? The daily annoyances and anxieties which the bond between them compelled them to share were as much, he thought, as either of them could just bear now, without adding any finer, affectional subtleties to their burden. He wished with all his heart, he said, that it had been the necessary outgrowth of his nature to love with the poetic constancy natural to his wife. Events had proved that it was not. What then could he do? Ostrander pitied himself. He sincerely believed that he bore the heavier end of their mutual sorrow. And now he was gone. He had not indeed parted with his wife without emotion, but it was a perfectly silent one, like that of a man struggling with feelings ill-defined to himself. He had hung over his boy, and clung to him, choking. He was very fond of van. His departure left Avis free for a space to wrestle as she might with the inevitable reaction of the last few months. In the calm of her first solitary hour she was chastened to perceive how her married story had deepened and broadened. Nay, it seemed, created in her certain quivering human sympathies. Her great love, so hardly one, so lightly cherished, withdrew upon itself in a silence through which all the saddened lovers of the world seemed to glide without stretched hand and minister to her a mighty company. Especially her heart leaned out to all denied and deserted women, to all deceived and trustful creatures. A strange kinship, too solemn for any superficial cast of the nature to blight, seemed to bind her to them all, betrayed girls, abandoned wives, aged and neglected mothers, lived in her fancy with a new exacting claim. To the meanest thing that trod the earth, small in all else, but large enough to love and suffer, her strong heart stooped and said, Thou, Thou too, art my sister. Avis had been bred to the reticence not on characteristic of the New England religion among its more cultivated, or at least among its more studious possessors. She was one of those sincere and silent Christians with whom we must look more to the life than to the lip for the evidence of the faith that is in them. The professors had been a home in which the religious character of his child was taken for granted, like her sense of delicacy. She was expected to be a Christian woman precisely as she was expected to be a cultivated lady. In a matter of course, abundant speech was a superfluous weakness. She had escaped the grave or dangers of this training, but not its lifelong influences. It was inevitable that the tragedy of her married life should result in a temporary syncope of faith in which it was equally inevitable that she should support in perfect solitude. But to dwell upon this phase of her experience would seem to copy the rude fault of those biographers that break faith with the personal confidence of the dead who can no longer protest. With a terror for which I do not feel at liberty to find speech or language, Avis watched departing love shake the slow dust of his feet against her young life, with the dread which shook to the roots of belief she perceived that her own slighted tenderness had now begun to chill. That Philip should cease to love her. This could be born. There was a worse thing than that. All was hers while she yet loved him. She wrestled with her retreating affection as Jacob of old wrestled with the angel till break of day. She struggled with that which was greater and graver than the sweet ghost of a ruined home. She fought for her faith in all that makes life a privilege or death a joy. No argument for the immortality of the human soul seemed to her so triumphant as the faith and constancy of one single human love. Mamma, has papa gone to Jerusalem? No, my son. Mamma has told you a great many times where papa has gone. Jesus went to Jerusalem, said Van with a reproving smile, quite gentle and a little sad, as if his father had been caught in the emission of some vital religious duty. But after I got through crying I thought I'd like to have him go. I'd rather kiss you myself, mamma. I don't like another man to do it. I'll have a wife of my own when I get big enough he needn't think. There Van, that's enough for now. Don't you see I am very busy painting. I can't kiss little boys all day. Run away now. Van disappeared, not without something of the reluctance of a jealous lover drawing his first breath of bliss in the absence of his rival. Van's love for his mother was one of those select and serious passions which occasionally make the tie between son and mother an influence of complex power. She must be a woman of a rare maternal nature who will supersede in the heart of a man, the mother who is capable of inspiring in the boy a love of this controlling and sensitive kind. Scarcely had the pallet knife struck the cobalt to the Naples yellow when the studio door shivered, stirred, and started with a prolonged and inspiring creak. Van admitted his little nose on probation into the crack, and heaved a heart-breaking sigh. Mamma! Very sweetly. Now Philip is gone. I suppose I may call you Avis, main tie. Shut the door, Van. His pretty mamma had an unhappy habit of expecting to be obeyed, which was a source of serious disorder to Van's small system of philosophy. He shut the door in, nose and all, with a filial haste and emphasis, the immediate consequences of which fell heavily upon both parties in this little domestic tragedy. When the outcry is over and the sobbing has ceased and the tears are kissed away, and the solid little sinner lies soothed upon the cramped and forgiving arm, where is the strength and glory of the vision? Where are the leaping fingers that quivered to do its bidding in the fresh life of the winter morning hour? Run away again, Van. Mother must go to work now. Mamma! Faintly. I've sat down on something soft. I'm all blue in colors, mamma, and my sack behind. I didn't know it was your palette, mamma. I didn't mean to. Oh, I'd rather not. I'd like a share. Mamma! Presently from behind the locked door. I want a piece of punky pie. No more pumpkin pie to-day, Van, and you mustn't talk to mamma through the door any more. Oh! Well, mamma, a piece of punky pie will do. I've had the cherries. I've had twenty-free or nineteen canned cherries. Me and the baby eat them. I eat the cherries, and she eat the stones, mamma. I put them down her throat. She needn't have cried, I don't think, so I want a piece of punky pie. Silence succeeds. Mamma! Can't you kiss little boys all day? Not very dear little boys, mamma. Buy and buy, Van. Run to Julia now. Run and play with your little sister. But master Van stoutly maintained that he did not wish the society of his little sister. He thought his little sister had bumped her head. He should expect mamma would want to unlock the door and find out. If he had the muesalage bottle and papa's razor and the pretty purple ink and the kiss, he would go and find out and never come upstairs any more. Mamma! Buy and buy. Do you love my little sister best of me or me best of my little sister? I should think you'd rather let me in and tell me about that. Oh, mamma! Once more persuasively, I want to say my prayers. Tonight, Van, at bedtime. No, I want to say him quick this minute. If you'll let me in to say my prayers, I'll go straight down and see if Julia's got the cookies done. Love in the guise of religion, as ever since the world was young, carried the yielding day before him. With despair in her heart and the pellet fresh from its service as a cricket in her hand, Avis admits the little devotee. Drop upon his knees upon the drying-oil, In the unutterable background of that sack, Drops Van, and thus way lays the throne of grace. Oh, lord, please do not let boys tell lies and say he's got a jackknife and a pistol in his pocket when he hasn't either one, Which a boy did to Jack Rose and me this morning. Oh, lord, amen! Mamma! I think it was one of the Plimpton boys. Now will you kiss me, mamma? And so, and so, and so. What art can tell us how? Oh, golden winter morning, your coy heart has repulsed forever, and when from the depths of the house sweeps like a sigh upon the artist's nerves, that sound which all the woman in her shrinks to hear, the cry of a hurt baby, Avis with a sigh unlocks the studio door. There is the problem of ages in that speechless sigh. Van, all paint and patience, like a spaniel, lies curled upon the floor, with his lips against the studio door. The stout little lover, faithful in exile, has lain and kissed the threshold till he has kissed himself asleep. The rare tears filled Avis's eyes as she lifted him, and then Julia brought the baby, and the bump, and the brown paper. And there she was sitting, pinioned, with both children, patient and worn, with the bright colors of her paints around her, and the pictures with their mute faces to the wall, about the room. There is a hand organ, too, playing a dismal little tune somewhere down the street. When an impatient knock proceeded a nervous push to the unlatched door, and with the familiarity of art and age, her old master presented himself upon the scene. Frederick Maynard stood still. He did not immediately speak. He looked from child to child, from both to her, from her to the barren easel. The dismal hand organ below set up a discordant wail, the more pathetic for its discord, like all inharmonious things. The baby had pulled down Avis's pink neck-ribbon and her bright hair. The tears lay undried upon her cheek, whose color slowly stirred and scorched her lifted languid face. "'You see,' she said, trying to smile, "'how it is?' "'I am not here to see anything,' answered the drawing-master shortly. "'What have you done this week?' "'Nothing.' "'Last week? The week before?' "'Nothing at all. Only the sketch for the crayon that you see. And I have begun to give drawing-lessons to Chatti Hogarth. Mr. Maynard, once a visitor, came to Andrea Del Sarto's studio. It was after his marriage. He was dabbling away at some little thing. He looked up and said, "'Once I worked for eternity. Now I work for my kitchen.'" "'Confound the kitchen-work?' cried Maynard savagely. "'Kitchen-work, indeed. Crayon portraits, I should think. Drawing-lessons, if you dare. You! You! I am sixty years old. I have never got a picture into the exhibition but once. There was a quarrel among the directors, and one fellow put my landscape in, despite another, but I have never thought the less of the landscape. And here are you, with your sphinxes, and your sphinxes. Why, New York has gone wild over you in one week's time. Every studio in the city pricking up its ears, and the easel and the blender, and a duel over the picture to start with—they haven't blessed them for it. Drawing-lessons, indeed." "'Pray, tell me,' said Avis, going very pale, and putting the children down, lest her faint arms should drop them. "'Pray, explain exactly what you mean. I do not understand. I have never heard from the picture since you sent it to New York. Has anybody noticed? Will anybody buy my sphinx?' "'No,' said the drawing-master with a short laugh, "'I don't think anybody will buy the picture, just yet.' "'Not immediately, that is. The trouble is, you see.' "'I expected trouble,' sighed Avis patiently. "'I am used to that. Don't mind telling me. I don't mind.' "'Why, the only trouble is,' said Frederick Maynard, that the picture was caught up the second day out.' "'Cought up,' said Avis faintly. "'Engaged, bought, sold, paid for. The sphinx was sold before Gupeel had held it for forty-eight hours. Mind you, don't let Gupeel photograph it. You can't afford to photograph a fledgling. You have a future.' "'The easel says it is a work of pure imagination. The blender says it shows signs of haste.' "'The blender is right,' said Avis with returning breath and color. That child in the foreground—the Arab child looking at the sphinx with his finger on his lips, swearing her to silence—'Do you remember? I put in that child in one hour. It was that day.' She checked herself. Her husband himself should never know the story of that day. He would not understand. It would not have been to him as it was to her, coming down that morning, not a month after he had sailed, to find the done for those college debts. Avis had the blind horror and shame of most delicate women in the presence of a debt. Her stinging impulse had been to discharge this without telling Philip or her father. Upon the spot she drew up an order for the sale of some bonds of her own, upon whose proceeds the family were in part dependent for the coming year. Fortunately she had not to deal with stock or real estate, which the wife cannot sell without the husband's consent. Avis did not know this. She knew nothing except that she was grieved and shamed, and vaguely in need of money. She flew up to the studio, struck the great sphinx dumb with the uplifted finger of a child, and sent it desperately from her before the cool of her frenzy fell. "'You are to make no more portraits, you understand,' said Frederick Maynard, stumbling over van and narrowly escaping sitting on the baby as he went out. "'You'll never be a portrait painter. You must create. You cannot copy. That is what we lack in this country. We have no imagination. The sphinx is a creation. I told Goopie also when I took it on. He bowed politely, and now he comes asking for a photograph. You! You! Life is before you now. And I am sixty-three years old.'" But Avis put her hand in his with a patient, unresponsive smile. She looked very gentle in her falling hair. The children clung to her. The light lay gravely on the studio floor. She could hear the faint pulse of the sea, whose mighty heart beat between her and her husband, throbbing upon the frozen shore. The hand-organ in the street wailed on. "'Life is behind me, too,' she said gently. "'It was before my marriage that I painted the sphinx. Don't be too much disappointed in me, if there are never any more pictures. Oh, I shall try. But I do not hope. Do not think. We all have our lives to bear. If I, too, were sixty-three, perhaps—they're hush, my little girl. Perhaps I should not mind so much." It seems to me—interrupted the drawing-master, winking resolutely—that it can't be quite right for those children to look just as they do. Isn't there something a little peculiar in their expression? Van was ingeniously trying to cut his throat with the palette-knife, and it would have been impossible to accuse the baby of not trying to swallow the tube of Prussian blue. The year ran fleetly. Van was ailing a great deal that spring, and in the summer her father was ill. Thus, in the old, sad, subtle ways, Avis was exiled from the studio. She could not abandon herself to it without a feminine sense of guilt, under which women less tender may thrive callously, but at whose first touch she quivered with pain. She was stunned to find how her aspiration had emaciated during her married life. Household care had fed upon it like a disease. Sometimes she thought it an accusation to her misery, that still, straight forever through the famine of her lot, its heart beat on, like that of the nervous physique, which is first to yield, but last to die. Then she wished with all the wild, hot protest of her nature that the spirit of this gift with which God had created her, in a mood of awful, infinite irony it seemed, would return to him who gave it, that the dust of her days might descend to the dust in peace. She wished she were like other women, content to stitch and sing, to sweep and smile. She bowed her face on the soft hair of her children, but she could not forget that they had been bought with a great price. She thought of the husband whose love she had mislaid, and counted the cost of her marriage in the blood of her soul. Mama! I'm most damp and a little wet. Van, one sharp afternoon in September, said this hilariously. He and Waite had been to swim. They'd been to swim in the hog's head. Julia wouldn't put Waite in, but he got in. He got in, like thunder, while she went to tell of him. Then she came back and pulled him out. But there weren't any fishes in the hog's head, and he'd rather have his feet shang'd now. What was the matter, Mama? Oh, Lord! said Van, kneeling, swaddled in his mother's rose-coloured shoulder robe at his prayers that night. Oh, Lord! I know you've got a great many little boys to think of, but I hope you remember I've got a sore throat. And now it was the matter again, Mama. Something was always the matter, Van thought to-day. He wished there had never been any such day been born. Lo! echoed the heart of the mother, Let that day be darkness. Neither let the light shine upon it. As for that night, let darkness seize upon it. Lo! let that night be solitary. Let no joyful voice come therein. With the frosty dawn, the child lay very ill. Before another night, an acute form of pneumonia had developed itself. Sensitive from birth, the boy's lungs succumbed with only a frail struggle. For fifteen days and nights his mother hung over him in her strong, dumb way. Then perhaps she first understood the solemn depth of the tie, which, through all distance and all difference, all trial and all time, binds any two human creatures who have bestowed life upon a third. In this awful language of bereavement which God was setting her ignorant youth to learn, her own loss seemed to her but the alphabet of agony. Her heart yearned with unspoken and unspeakable throes over the father of her child. That this must be, that the lips of his first born should go cold without his good-by kiss, that Phillips somewhere wide across the world should that day be strolling and laughing in the sun, not knowing. This seemed to her the very sense and soul of her sorrow. She saw him go chatting with a group of sightseekers down a bright street, idling in a chapel at the mass, buying a ticket for the opera, twirling a lady's fan beneath a chandelier, praising the claret at the hotels, drumming with his finger to the music in the beer-garden, stopping at the toy-shop windows to decide what he would get for Van, writing notes, perhaps, to the little fellow. He wrote to Van a good deal. At that moment, while the boy struggled on her nervous arm to turn and say, Mamma, will papa come walking in? Someday, Van, some time. Will he come in at the front door, Mamma, to kiss his dear little boy? Oh my darling, some time, somewhere, yes. I thought I heard somebody at the front door, Mamma. It is the wind we hear, Van. Can't papa get home on the wind? Can't papa walk on the wings of the wind? God did. I thought papa could, Mamma. Mamma, do you love my little sister best of me, or me best? Best, oh best, that moment, Van, of all the empty world. CHAPTER XXI The wind was high about the house. Aunt Chloe and the professor had left her at last alone to sit and listen to it. The baby slept. The women had gone sobbing away. The window stood wide to the bitter dark in that room upstairs. The child's bed was straight and still. It was a wild night for the little fellow to be lying out there, his first night. Avis was almost sorry that night that they had lained him so near the sea, for the sea was high too, like the wind, and thundered heavily, even here sharp through the sheltered house. He had always been a wakeful baby, quick to start and shiver in his naps. She could not rid herself of the feeling that that noise would disturb him. The imperious mother's habit of three years and a half of nervous care was strong upon her. She could have dashed out and hushed the voice of the almighty deep lest it should wake the child. Made with this and a horde of the irrational impulses of solitary grief, Avis sought refuge in her first attempt to write to the boy's father. The arm upon which Van had lain with imperfect intervals of relief for fifteen days and nights, it had been only in one position that the child could breathe, refused to hold the pen. She wrote with her left hand, a faint and feeble cipher. She told him what there was to tell, sparing when she could, striking as she must. She begged him not to let this make any alteration in the plans which his state of health should suggest as wisest and best for them all. They who were left, they three. She hoped he would not allow any impetuous image of loneliness at home to hasten his return before the time which he had selected as desirable in itself, and urged upon him that a part or the whole of his second winter should be spent in those kinder climates which would perfect the growth of his now really grafted strength. Of herself and her own loss or law, she wrote but little. Of the solitude in which she bore the burden laid on two, she did not speak. Of her unshared fears, her unkissed tears, she could not tell. She was an unloved wife. She could not woo her husband. As she wrote, the wind went busying itself impetuously as a lawless thing, with the calm of the house. It beat upon the ear with a slow increasing throb, like the purpose of an advancing tide. At short intervals the roar up rose, as the third wave rises on the coast, and splashed upon the walls and roof. About the doors and windows, unpleasant sounds set in steadily, Avis tried to think that they were like the sobbing of the shingle on the shore. She could not, would not, must not think, wild night be so merciful as that, that she may not think what else the wind is like. She had finished and sealed the letter. She had sealed the letter and laid it down and was turning to step and see if her little daughter on the sofa by her side slept warm, when in the swelling of the storm the front door blew violently open. She sprang to shut it, latching the door of the room behind her. As she stepped into the hall the light went out. Rain blew in her face. She groped her way to the door pushing it feebly. Avis was so worn against the resistance of the wind, the solid oaken panel baffled her as if human hands had been behind it, if a human voice had called her. Avis. Swift as the superstitions that we would not, if we could, disown, flashed the memory of the little lover, calm out there in the discord of the elements, stealing up with brimming face to say, Mama! Now papa is gone, I suppose I may call you Avis. Avis could not have denied a genuine shock when stretching out her hands inch by inch along the wall and still defiant door they fell in the dead dark upon an arm of flesh and blood. Avis, what is the matter? Where is the light? Do let me in and shut this superhuman door. There have I frightened you? I thought you would know when you heard me speak. Do let us get out of this hideous dark. Philip! Oh, Philip! Yes, let us get out of the dark. Her own words appealed with an entreating significance to her own ears at that moment as they went groping together to the light. He had caught her in his nervous arms. That, she said to herself, was a matter of course. He first found the latch and staggered in. The room was warm and seemed to palpitate with light. The baby on the sofa slept peacefully. The books—it was his study—turned their familiar shoulders to him, and their open faces looked from the table where his wife's sealed letter lay. Writing to me, were you, Avis? He started on the purposeless instinct that leads one to open the unsealed letter that he will not read, as nature leads a dog to hide the bone that he does not want. Avis, in passing the table, hit the envelope with her drapery sleeve, and it fell into the wastebasket. Never mind, he said uneasily. What do we want of letters now? Then in the full light she saw how rain-beaten and haggard he was. Let me help you with your coat, Philip. Gently. And wait! Oh, how wet you are! Your slippers are just where you left them. I have let nobody touch them all this while. See? And the fire is warm. Like a child she led him. Like a child he submitted. She would not question him or chatter now. It was plain that something had befallen. But trouble could wait. Care was too old a friend not to be put by. He had come. Her husband had come back to her. He flung himself down in his old chair in his old way. His breath came short. He began at once. I was horribly sick in London. I've had two attacks of hemorrhage. There was no time to let you know. I got to Liverpool and took the first steamer. I was afraid I shouldn't get home. But you got home, Philip! Her voice snapped with a wiry cry. You are here! You are here! Thank God, yes. He laid his head back and closed his eyes wearily. When Avis stirred he put his hand to detain her. The colour came into her hollow face. Must you go? he asked softly. Only to see about supper for you, Philip. You are faint, you see. That is all. Decidedly. Only faint. A good hot supper and a long night's rest will set you right. She brought the words out so pathetically. A long night's rest. She who had not rested now for so many nights. That his attention was at once attracted to her appearance. He sat up, rousing with the nervous rapidity natural to him. Avis, how you look? Have you looked like that ever since I've been gone? We have had sickness in the house," she said quietly. Sickness? Where is Van? Van is asleep, Philip. After a well-nigh imperceptible pause. And the baby. Is that the little lady, that bundle on the sofa? Can you bring her to me, Avis? I am stronger now, stronger already. I want to kiss one of the children. I meant it should have been Van first. I thought about it in the cars. But never mind. I want to see the lassie. Let me see we named her after mother, didn't we? Does she look like any of us, Avis? Does she look like you? You didn't say when you wrote. You didn't say much about yourself. But I was glad to hear so much about the children. It did be good. Now let me see her. Let me see the baby. Avis brought the child so gently that she did not wake. She drew a chair up for she could not stand, and sat down beside her husband with the baby on her knee. As she did so, his unstrong voice went strolling on. How the wind does flog this house. I'm glad to be at home. Glad we're all safe under shelter together. It sounds as if there were a child shut out there crying to be let in. But our little folks are warm. Your hands treble, Avis. Are you quite well? Quite well. Only tired, Philip. Shall I see about the supper now? No, not now. I don't want supper. How the little thing has grown. Are you as fond of her, Avis, as you were of the boy? He used to say you were afraid you should love the girl better. Has van grown so I shan't know him? Little rascal! I've kept the tin-type you sent, sea in my wallet. I've carried it all about. I was sorry you couldn't afford a photograph. I showed it to some people in Paris, some ladies. They called him a beautiful boy. No, please, Avis, don't go. Indeed, I cannot eat. What has become of that little teapot we used to make tea in right here over the fire so long ago? The first year, don't you remember?" Half-fretfully, for Avis did not answer. When I used to come in tired from faculty meetings after everybody else was in bed, you used to make it kneeling by the fire on that cricket. I think it was a Japanese teapot. Is it broken? Can't we have that? If you want it, Philip, surely, I can find the teapot. Can you hold the baby, or shall I take her back? No, I'd rather hold her. Don't be gone long, will you? You can't think how it is to get home, how it looks, the fire, the books, and to see you moving about. You can't think what a fool it makes of me, laughing boyishly. No man knows what it will make of him till he has tried it, a whole year travelling alone, and to be sick among strangers. Oh, I thought I should never get back, nor see the children, nor—oh, it is so pleasant, so pleasant. And I am pretty weak yet. Don't laugh at me, when I've had the tea. But be sure you get that teapot. I shall be a man again. I'm nothing but a mass of nerves and seasickness and sore lungs just now. It was so cold on the steamer. When I've had the tea, I can see van, can't I? No, that was the cricket, this one. Move it a little. You used to kneel on this side. Yes, that is the very teapot. I wonder if it will taste as it used to. I don't see why nobody wrote me how thin you had grown. Oh, I'm so tired. It is so pleasant here, so pleasant. Thus he wandered on. Avis made the tea, and they drank it together. His eyes followed her. The child slept upon his knee. When the trunks come—I'm as bad as a child. I can't wait to show you what I've got for van. Do you remember how we could never wait with our Christmas presents, you and I, those first years? How we used to come skulking round to show them to each other beforehand, and how you laughed at me, but you were the worst yourself. There's a doll for the girl, but I stumbled on such an amazing French notion for him. I expect you'll never forgive me. It's a little fire-engine, Avis, really an exquisite toy. I don't know what he'll be setting us all on fire, little villain. There's something for you, too—somewhere. That's the only pleasant part of going away, getting ready to come home. A man never knows what his home's worth to him till he's turned his back on it. I got van a pilgrim's progress, too—the best copy I could find in all London. It took me three days to select that book. I want he should have something to remember his father by, that he'll value when he's a man, and I am— He broke off. It has been said that the soul which has always some influence over the muscles, has none over the blood. Avis supposed that she might betray, but had no conception of the fact that she emphasized the character of what she was enduring. Rings of blackness slowly enlarged upon her face, like the shadow of an advancing storm upon a writhing lake, but she sat with her head turned from him slightly, bent, like a Matadorosa, over the baby whom she had taken into her own arms. Better, Philip, now? She must say something. Oh, so much better—so much stronger. I don't know, but it will make a live man of me after all coming home. Really, Avis, I don't know, but that was all I needed. It's such a mistake this sending sick people for landering all over the world alone. A sick man wants his fireside, and his books, and familiar ways, and all his little silly selfish comforts, and not to have to take his slippers out of a trunk. Had a Japanese teapot, I believe—he rose, laughing hysterically—and someone to make the tea on a cricket by the fire, and his—come, Avis, now let us go up and see the boy. Are you quite strong enough yet, Philip? Yes, yes, yes—impatiently. Don't fret over me. I can't wait any longer. Take me to see Van at once. Are you sure, Philip, that it is best to wake Van to-night? He sleeps. Oh, soundly! She struggled for controlled speech, blindly beating about with the mad instinct of love, which would feign believe that to save time is to save suffering. But now she turned her face, and its mortal color swept upon him. Slowly then it extended itself to his own, as if they had stepped hand in hand, she leading, and he leaning, into a half-lit world. Avis, how many nights did you tell me you sat watching? I did not tell you, Philip. You flit about me like the shadow of a bird that I cannot see. You defy me. You escape me as the dying escaped the living. I have never seen you look so. It has been coming on a long time. Somebody should have told me. And here I am—a burden, a wreck, a broken-down fellow on your hands. It seems a hideous irony to fate to throw the care of a consumptive on such wasted hands. Let me look at them. Don't be afraid, I will not hold them longer than you like. If there were anything else to be done, anywhere we could go. I could fight hard for life, I think. That's half the battle, they say. It doesn't come natural to a man of my age to sit down and die like a weasel in a trap. If you had been with me in France, if I hadn't gone alone—but what's the use in dissecting old blunders? A blunder's a blunder, and done with it. Only we'll do better next time if we can. Hey, Avis. If there were an undertone of symbolism in his words, it was too slight, perhaps, to expect her to recognize it. He watched her with his blind gaze, but he watched her constantly. She was used to it in these days. Van used to watch her so after he'd been taken sick. There had been no scenes between Avis and her husband since he had come home. They were neither of them quite strong enough for that. They lived on and on, as those live who know that one touch of mutual recognition, nay, even of self-recognition of certain emotions, will bring down upon them a landslide of gnarled and knotted things, whose upheaval would tear the roots of soul and body. They cultivated that dullness to their own capacity of feeling, which, when thoroughly acquired, amounts to a sixth sense, and becomes an element of character more powerful than the feeling itself. The divergence between them had been too wide for them to resume that superficial comprehension of one another, and that crude standard of affection through which the initiatory phases of married life revolve. Avis did not think that her husband was going to die. But come life or death, come love or loathing, they should be honest with themselves, they too, to the heart's core now. She devoted herself to his invalid wants with the infinite tenderness as natural to her as her sweet and even breath, but he said to himself sometimes, she would do as much for her to dog. For her she moved about uncertainly. She seemed to herself like one who listens to the interlude in some nameless music, some long symphony whose chords strike all around the world. All the while she was conscious of crouching like a tigress to save his life. One day, as he went pacing the house, unfortunately, coming in now and then to lay the incoherent plans and hopes of disease before her, running to her with every sore mood as Van used to run with every scratch, wondering should he try Colorado, the South, California—that place in New Jersey that people called the niece of America. Electricity, mesmerism, inhalation, spiritualism, or the prayer cure. She put down her work, her reluctant fingers took many nervous and extremely irregular stitches in those days, and said, Philip, suppose I decide this matter for you? I wish you would, he cried stopping short, the most humiliating aspect of sickness as the resolution it produces. A man's brain becomes a shuttlecock. Mine is sore what there is of it now with surging to and fro from plan to plan, and something we must do. I won't die without a tussle. Yet. It is out of the question, Philip. Quietly. You are dying, I mean. That we will not contemplate for a moment. But we will not risk a harm with winter just now. Shall you feel at rest to leave it to me, what we do, and how, and all about it? Shall you feel the confidence in my judgment what will be necessary to the success of any plan? I do not know how a man could have reason to feel more confidence, in any creature. He said, in a low voice, throwing himself on the lounge beside her. He was wondering with solemn shame what kind of a fellow he should have turned out, for instance, if he had been obliged to provide good judgment for two. At that moment he was thinking, perhaps for the first time quite distinctly, what a rock in the topography of a man's life, what a cornerstone of granite in a human home, is the nature of a strong wife. All that was strong in himself stood as column stands to column in proud comradeship to it. All that was weakest of him leaned upon her with increasing naturalness, as if upon some mysterious maternal power, as we all of us, soul of man and soul of woman, lean alike without dispute or shame upon the mammoth motherhood of nature. After a silence in which she too, perhaps, went her own way into unspoken and not unkindly reverie, they resumed their conversation gently. Then, Philip, if you leave it to me, we will go south. You've tried climate and solitude. Now we'll try climate and care. Very well, Avis, and the baby. Aunt Chloe will take the baby. Very well, Avis, do you propose to beg, borrow, or steal? Father and Aunt Chloe were anxious to help us, but she hesitated. Of course, Father and Aunt Chloe are very kind. I think, however, I will open a sanitarium as soon as we get—somewhere. I shall be quite able. He began to pace the room again with blind and bitter feet. But, Philip, it will not be necessary, I think. I forgot to tell you. While you were gone a piece of luck came to us. I sold the sphinx, and I have just arranged with Goupil. He is to photograph it. There is a demand for the picture. We shall have enough money through this winter. I thought, perhaps, I hoped you would like it better so. But she faltered. When he spoke, it was not for some minutes. He said in a low voice, Was it best for you—best for the picture—to let the photographs go? Not best for the picture, said Avis with her instinctive honesty. But best for me—best for us all now. And there is indeed nothing to regret. I shall not paint another picture—at present. Why not? Let us not talk about it, Philip. She whitened slowly about the mouth. I can't discuss it. But she collected herself at once, and when he began to chatter about the sanitarium, she listened with the patience which we lend so readily to the sick, blessed beyond all small or selfish joy if we may indulge at any cost the weakness which was once the thorn in the flesh of our days. But when she had left him alone presently, Ostrander sat with knotted brows. He was thinking about the Sphinx. Avis's success, mutilated though it was by care and trouble, nay most of all by his own failure, contrasted rather bitterly with his own drooping fortune. Was it possible for a man to be jealous of a woman, and that woman his own wife? The noble colour burned Ostrander's sunken face. Before I sink so low as that," he said, it'll be time for me to die. CHAPTER XXII Prince. Enough. The memory of the past must be raised. Mariah, are you a god? Cotspie. Delicate as the marriage of shades in a Florida shell is the tutelage which prepares the eye of the traveller for the soul of the Florida sun. They yielded themselves to it like children to a teacher. Solitude is a stern master, and will have from us all some form of surrender. Theirs, for they journeyed quite alone, taught them first and above all else what the anxious brain and wearied body and breaking heart most blindly buffet and most thirstily receive, the influence of atmosphere. It was to Avis one of those subtle experiences whose suave surprise lends a new outlook to the possible evolution of character from the probable novelty of scenery in the life which is to follow this, when from the narrow windows of the car she overtook the widening of the infinite southern heavens day by day. Upon the pallet of the sky relaxing nature spread her colours as the human artist does, deepening from the pallor to the flush. Their last northern sunset was cold, polished, and as perfect as a pearl. The first Virginia dawn unfolded like a T-rose leaf. Down through the great barrens the passion grew, eternal fire sat sentinel upon the low horizon of Carolina. Georgia took up the torch and ran with it, like a will of the wisp, from swamp to swamp, swift to the Everglades, where Florida kneeled in purple and scarlet, like a queen who was crowned in prayer. And the evening and the morning were the third day. Avis, half to her husband, more to herself, said this dreamily as they put the first foot upon the white hot sand. She was a little sorry when she had said it. The words bore her imagination captive at once into that powerful old Bible allegory, in which the love of married man and woman was found the last and greatest, as it was the most intricate of God's creative acts. She had no doubt that Philip's fancy was as swift as her own to go wandering—ah, how homelessly!—led by her chance words so, and that to him, as to her, the broad bosom of the St. John's River unveiled itself with a fantastic mockery, as the wave of the river of life may have flashed through parting boughs that the wind beat when exiled eyes over shamed and shrinking shoulders, yearned to Eden. For Philip's fancy was never dull, and in their early married days they had dwelt much in that delicate visionary world in which imaginative lovers find the keenest and the most permanent, because the most varied, stimulus to joy that human feeling knows. These little fables, phrases of their courtship and bridal years, rushed upon her memory that day, through the blazing hours of their sail down the river to the ancient city by the sea. Tricks of speech or eye or smile, daily embuscades of love, all the tactics of the heart that she had long forgotten, presented themselves to her thought persistently. Dead days stalked by her, as the dead trees stalked down the strange and silent shores. These whose dawn and twilight, whose midnight and whose noon, unfolded each new petal in the solemn flower of love. Scenes that she could have stunned herself into forgetting, emotions which she would have thought it incredible that she could revivify, pursued her. Her past arose with its grave-clothes on. Her buried tenderness confronted her with the awful immortality given to love, and to love alone, of all births bestowed upon the breathing soul. She had not thought ever to remember, even in heaven, where memory must be the shadow by which we read the dial of joy, hordes of these things that began to oversweep the defiance of her self-defensive calm. She felt a certain petulance with the surroundings which wrought this mood within her. She did not remember in any of her wanderings to have so quarreled with the introspective influence of travel. She reminds herself that she had not come to Florida to grow maudlin with drugged sentiment. Her thought stepped out like a disembodied spirit and took a survey of herself, as she sat there on that boat. A hollow-eyed woman passed her first youth, economically dressed, come thirteen hundred miles to nurse a consumptive husband, as was clearly her duty through the winter. She glanced about the boat, and wondered if they looked like the other married people there, she and Philip. Pale, fretful couples, fatigued with the dust, the jar, the heat, the homelessness of travel—fatigued above all, she thought, with each other, as if marriage had become to most of them an eternal evening party, in which each believes himself to be of all men most miserable, but gets him into his white gloves conscientiously, lest society strike him from her calling list. Like those two young people, for instance, on the after-deck near her, they could not be out of their twenties, poor things, yet clearly there was no longer any splendour in the grass or glory in the flower of life to them. She was the invalid, irritable, and a hard, ill-controlled coffer. He was tired out. Their children were with them, and hung about, crying for their dinner. The sick woman complained of everything, and wished they had never come to Florida. Her husband looked on, poor fellow, in the perfect silence in which the husband of a weak woman, unless he be the weaker of the two, learned to shelter both himself and her. They made a dull, realistic Dutch picture, sitting by themselves, miserably, on the hot deck. The very cinders on those people, deep from three days car-travel, seemed to avis somehow to accentuate the emphasis of their plain and disenchanted lot. She forgot that she and Philip were just as black. She wondered what Philip was thinking. He had strengthened, rather than weakened, with the effort of travelling, sitting out on the platform of the creeping cars in the wonderful Georgia weather, hour after hour, like a boy on his first journey, drinking down the froth of the sunlight as frozen men drink wine, chatting with the captain on the little boat, and laughing, she could hear him laugh. It struck her with a certain slight bitterness of which she was thoroughly ashamed, poor girl, as she sat there alone, that he could laugh like that. That he, too, was not driven by the floor to scenery into small, cynical visions of his neighbours, seeing all life and all love in the clode lorraine of their own darkened story. It did not occur to her just then that it was not easy to foretell where a fine influence, in particular a tropical influence, would drive her husband, in a state of mental isolation like this that had befallen them both, to the captain, perhaps, precisely, or to that very cross couple on the after-deck, whose little boy he was now leading away to the wheel-house so tenderly. Philip could be very tender when he would. God had never made a tenderer man. He brought the boy to her presently, a pleasant little fellow. The tears were still wet on the child's now radiant cheek. Avis stooped and kissed them away, as she would have brushed a speck from a flower. But when she lifted her face, her husband was watching her, and as their eyes met, both filled. The child ran back to his parents. He sat down beside her. He is about the size of—Yes, yes—said Avis quickly. And did you notice, Avis, a little something about the eyelashes? Some trick or turn? I thought him almost like at first. But nobody is like Van, I think. Avis, do you see what a miracle it is? How I bear this journey. Is there room for me here? I don't want to crowd you. We are going to get in late, the captain says. We shall see the sunset and the moon rise this first night in this solitary place." His voice sunk to a certain solemnity as he drew nearer to her, and they leaned over the deck-rail to watch the shadows gather on the water and the pathless shore. His face, too, as his wife borrowed a look at it in the struggling light, had settled into a solemn cast, like beautiful hardening clay. His sunken eye swept the long untrodden shores, the opaque water, the beckoning sky. This, then, was Florida, where he was to get well, or—what is it, Philip? Indefinable as the gradation by which the pall of the thickets melted to the blazonry above the forest tops, was the motion with which she stirred towards him. Uncertain as the leaning of the light upon the perturbed river, to whose heart no eye could see, was the impulse of the hand which he held, groping a little, for it darkened now, to hers. "'I was thinking,' he said, that we have never been in such a solitary place. You don't mind our watching the moon rise together. We haven't done such a silly thing—for so long.' He laughed rather nervously. But for her she did not trust herself to speak. On other hand the forest glided by, the awful forest in which no man trod. The river, like all things which seemed to enlarge as they become absorbent of light, broadened beneath the rising moon. The fine outline of the pine-frons and the blurred gray tendrils of the abundant moss made the sole change of accent in the level horizon, and this itself acquired a depressing quality, like that of a sweet but monotonous voice. Their little boat hung, the only sign of breathing life, pivoted in a trinity of isolation, a wilderness of water, forest, and sky. As the moon rode higher, the people on the deck hushed one by one, families gathered in silent groups, and the tired children slept. The woman who coughed so crossly had gone below. Instinctively, as they rounded into the desolate landing at Tokoi, Avis crept nearer to her husband. There was something of superstition perhaps in the repressed shudder with which she shrank from the innocent outline of the clumsy little train that waited for them. She was so tired that everything took a symbolic form to her. Her swift, outreaching sympathy gathered in all the other women who had trod this dreary shore before her, homeless, anxious, and care-worn, battling for a husband's life. It seemed as much of a wrench to the reason to believe that beyond that eternal forest an unseen sea could beat, as in our earthlier moments, it seems to the finest spirit among us that life can leap again beyond the everglades of death. As they cut their awed way through it, looking out from the wide doors of the rude car, Ostrander said, I am sure I never was in quite such a lonely place in all my life. Were you, Avis? Never, Philip. The simple question was lightly asked, the quiet answer quickly given, yet both fell silent as if their lips had learned the words of some grave and embarrassing confession. Avis trembled before her husband, sitting there in the dark car. He put his hand upon hers. It was the first time for a long while. Her pulse bounded so that he removed it. His wife was not a woman to be won lightly for the second time. Caresses could not transfigure for her the nature that had once defaulted to her. No hysteric feeling, warm to-day and chilled to-morrow, could restore to her the shores of reverence upon which her own unfathomable tenderness had surged. Integral and individual as her own must be the allegiance which would be found worthy to renew the exhausted tide of wedded joy. Thus he thought, with sad abundant pride, he would not have had it otherwise with her for their joy's sake. They, too, alone there, seemed to him to stand separate and strange, bringing a soul's sickness deeper than the body's hurt to the healing of this new and gentle land. When they had got into their hotel that night, he lay and watched her quite silently. He was, after all, more exhausted than he had thought. When she had ordered up his tea and dismissed the waiter, he asked her, too, to rest. She thanked him for his thoughtfulness, but moved about, busying herself for his comfort, in the little brightly lighted barren room. There was an open fireplace and a log of light wood burning in it. She stirred through the resinous red air in her gray dress and soft lace. She had not put on mourning for her boy. She knew that her husband was watching her, but she did not know what a sweet shyness was upon herself, upon her averted figure and unresponsive eyes. She came and sat down by him presently. The light wood faded quietly on the hearth. Their neighbor, the sick woman from the boat, was fretting faintly in the adjoining room. It seemed very still with them, and sheltered. Are you resting, Philip? Quite rested. And you? Are you content? Are you glad we came, this long distance, by ourselves? When we have heard from the baby we shall be quite content, Philip. There will be letters to-morrow, perhaps. How strange it is, Avis. Being together so, without the children, we have never travelled alone before like this, at least, since our wedding journey. How do you thought of that? Yes, Philip. After a pause. It is so pleasant to me. Do you like it, Avis? Shant you find it a terrible drag shot up with a whimsical sick-fellow for so many months? She lifted her face to check him for the idle question, and with it her strong warm hand. He bowed his head reverently, laying his pale cheek upon it. Her own flushed like a girl's, but she said nothing. Thus, still clinging to her, the sick man slept. Avis's hand grew numb. She did not move it. She sat on in the dark, for the fire died. The poor woman slept, too, in the next room. She heard the sounds of summer through the open window in the strange December air. In her married life she turned a noiseless leaf. Ostrander was not, without his full share of the prejudices common to men who have received, at whatever remote period in a life which has run counter to it, the education of the medical school. He had an array of opinions upon the sanitary effects and prospects of the state of Florida, with which he treated his wife, boyishly enough perhaps, as the wisdom of his selection seemed to make itself manifest in his own case. Avis heard him with relaxing eyes. As he gained in strength the tension of care loosened a little in herself. Nerve by nerve and muscle by muscle it seemed, her watchful body yielded to the absence of demand upon its resistance in the unassertant air. The poor girl was almost in as much need as he of the atmosphere in which sorrow seems an infringement of a newly discovered law, and care a crime against an hitherto unguest, but here unguarded and undiverted love. They settled themselves in a yellow, old kukina house. There were orange trees about it, kneeling with their amber lamps. The windows of their room looked to the warm brown water. Strange birds swayed by in the flushed air. Ostrander was excited by everything. He ran in and out like a child. He kept coming up to her and saying, Avis, don't you think we shall like it? When they had been there a day or two, he told her those people from the boat were of their fellow borders. Avis idly asked if he knew their names. Oh, yes, he said. It's a French name—Smith. Then when they had both laughed merrily, she wondered at the lifting of her heart. It reminded her of how it was on their wedding journey, when they found each other so amusing, and laughed or leapt so lightly to their happy lips. One day he drooped a little with a cold, or some of the slight hindrances which stay the motion of the spheres for the invalid and those who minister to him, and then he began to worry about the prospects of the family if he should fail, after all, to get up again. I should be surprised, said his wife in her quiet way, if I could not support this family whatever happened. If you fret yourself sick I certainly shall have to do it. Do you really think you could? he urged anxiously. It would be such a relief to think—to know. You could, if any woman could. It would be so different if you made it a point, if everything bent to it. Once you might have done anything you would. What a future you had, Avis, when I came in your way. I don't know how to make you believe—that I didn't mean to blight it all. I know, Philip. I know. But her breath began to shorten. It's a pretty hard thing, after all, when a man and woman have actually married not to let things go like the rest of the world, he said, looking up rather helplessly. But perhaps if I had helped you more—cared and planned—I don't see how it all came about. We didn't mean it to be so when we married, did we, Avis? She did not answer. Her thoughts rushed back through the veins of all those years, like driven blood. She put her hand to her throat. She felt choked as if with a physical congestion. A passion is a passion, be it of the intellect or of the heart. And a denied aspiration dies perhaps more dumbly, but nevertheless drearly than a denied love. Avis, have you minded so much? And I have been so absorbed and did not see. Why, my poor girl, why Avis? For Avis, taken unawares by his tenderness, hating herself for the weakness to which, in all their married life, her husband had never seen her yield before, burst into a paroxysm of the terrible tears which lie in wait to avenge themselves upon all opulent self-control. CHAPTER XXIII I ride from land to land, I sail from sea to sea, some day more kind I fate may find, some night kiss thee. SPANISH BALLAD The escaped, longer than the uncaptured emotion, stands at bay. Ostrander was conscious that it required very different elements of the nature to woo the bruised affection of the wife from those which had won the hard surrender of the maiden's love. The one thing might be done by the complexity, the other only by the force of character. With the unappeasable self-forget, born of the self-knowledge which only the nearest relations of life can create in us, he thought of that drooping calyx of reverence in his wife's heart, which all time might not now be long enough for the dew of his gathered and gathering fealty of feeling to refill. In his stronger moments he kneeled before his lost ideal of himself, as the select three kneeled upon the mount of transfiguration before a vanished god. In his weaker ones he tried to forget it. In the first he despaired of her. In the other he yearned for her. Her allegiance without her respect taunted him. Her tenderness without her trust shamed him. Ostrander's love for his wife had been the supreme fact of his life. In his expressive medical phrase he recognized it as one of the proximate principles of his soul. No other woman, or so he believed, could have commanded so long or reclaimed so autocratically the tissue of his elastic fancy. He was at a loss how to approach her gentle and devoted calm. He mourned his own crippled power to command in her that idealization which is the essential condition of the love that woman bears to man. Regret which had been sentiment at home was sentience in Florida. The sunlight fell in golden showers through which they trod a thirst. All the colors of life deepened in this prismatic land. They walked with joined hands, but averted faces. The splendor slept upon the warm strange water, upon the mosaic of shell-strewn sand, the green pulses of the orange leaves, the veiled crimson heart of the banana blossom, the bursting mood of the pomegranate. But neither saw that upon the cheek of the other the same glow lay. One day he said something carelessly enough about a beautiful Parisian whom he met at this time last year, and then, turning, he surprised the slow color climbing his wife's face. He came close to her at once and said with a certain gentle authority, Avis, look at me please. So that will do. Now listen. Once before when I spoke of people I had met he looked like that. It was the night I came back, sitting by the fire at home. Even then, that night. Grant me at least the justice of remembering that a man doesn't make a fool of himself in such a way, more than once, and believe that I had the brains to profit by a bitter lesson, if you cannot give me credit for the heart. Even if you cannot see, that other women, if you do not know— He turned, they were strolling on the beach, and perpetuously began to walk the other way. After a moment's hesitation she followed and overtook him. You forget, Philip, she said. How long a scar throbs in a woman's flesh. But indeed I've never meant to remind or taunt you about anything. I wish you would, he cried hotly. I wish you had. I think I should feel better if you would out with it and tell me what a contemptably weak fellow you thought me, if you would say the very worst. Oh, hush! said Avis and her rich maternal voice. She did not say there was no worst, that was not true. She only put her hand upon his arm, and spared him with strong silence. When he came to think it over, he blessed her for it with all his heart. He felt that he could not have borne to hear his wife say what he knew she had thought of him. On the other hand, he would have shrunk from a superficial tenderness, ignoring facts too keenly present in the minds of both, as from a kind of gruel adapted to invalids and children. Silence, more kindly and more intricately than any speech, he began to hope, would now interpret them to each other. He would strive to make himself worthy to use the deaf-mute alphabet of fine souls. He fancied that she leaned a little upon his arm in walking home that day. It was a bright day, and he had felt quite strong. They walked on the narrow seawall, where two only can tread a breast. She looked very young and girlish that day, in her palmetto hat and white linen dress. When they came in, the boarding-house dinnerbell was ringing, and the people in their light clothes collecting merrily. The little boy who looked like Van ran up with orange buds for Philip. The noon surged in across the veranda in a tide of light and heat. Unfamiliar tropical perfumes were in the air, and the December roses nodded at the windows. Avis had a confused, festal feeling, as if the people and the roses and the light and the child had waited for her and Philip to come in. She bade him go on without her, that he need not spend his strength to climb the stairs, and herself ran up lightly. She tossed the ribbons about in her drawer to choose a fresh one, a golden one, as near the shade of the sunlight as she could find. She held it against the shimmer on the wall, laughing, to try the match. She plunged her hands and face into the cool water. Her own eyes looked back to her from the glass, dewy and sweet, as she brushed the damp rings of her hair. "'Do I look still so young?' she thought. In the next room she could hear their neighbors with the French name. The sick woman was berating her husband bitterly. It was something about the soup. Avis turned round, standing alone there, and stretched her arms out solemnly as if she would urn through the solid wall to gather the poor creature in. Her heart cried out to those strange people, "'You! It is not too late for you. Save your love. Oh, save your married love.'" That was Christmas week. She and Philip went out and ransacked the little curiosity shops together to find something for the baby. There were three letters from Aunt Chloe that week, and the child was well. Their hearts lightened and the stress of anxiety to which the happiest earthly parentage must bow an aching shoulder yielded kindly for them. It meant and sickness, peril and separation, slipped by them in the golden weather, with the suggestion of the solemn sweetness with which care may seem to elude rather than escape us in heaven. Ostrander said, "'I believe I am going to get well.'" On Christmas Eve they started out to the little churchyard beyond the city gates, whose impressive ruin, cut against the setting sun, said to both that of which neither spoke. They sat down by one of the graves, a child's grave, nameless and deserted. "'See, Philip,' said Avus, in a low voice. The mounds here are strewn with shells instead of the flowers that one sees elsewhere, but this poor little fellow has none. I will go and find some." She wandered off alone, while he sat and watched her from his solitary place. The light fell fast. The massive face of Fort Marion darkened down upon the little beach where she strolled in sweet searching attitudes that lent so much gentleness to the courageous contours of her figure. It was almost dark when she came back to say, "'I could only find a few poor little dull things, but they will do.' She stooped and laid the shells in the form of a cross, according to the custom of the quiet place upon the grave. I am sure it was a little boy,' she said. Then, for it darkened steadily, they went in silence home. Just before they reached the house, Ostrander said abruptly, "'Avis, all the time you were on that beach. I saw the boy.' "'The child from the churchyard,' asked Avus, smiling, to humor a sick man's fancy, but wishing that she had not left him so long in that malarial place. "'No. Van. I didn't mean to tell you, but I think I had better. I saw Van quite distinctly.' "'Are you sick, Philip?' asked Avus, stopping short. "'Perfectly well. Not so well this winter. And I never had one of these optical illusions before in all my life. My mother used to have them, and they tell some amazing stories about my grandfather's last sickness. I have often wanted to experience a touch of the thing, to see what it is like. It is very strange.' "'What was it like?' asked Avus a little uneasily, but walking on. She drew her hand a trifle closer through his arm, and joined her fingers upon it. She used to walk with him in that way, now long since. "'He came out of the water,' said Ostrander, and ran along the beach. He had his little Christmas stocking in his hand. You did not see him. And he pulled at your dress.' Involuntarily, Avus cried out, "'There was a certain terrible realism in her husband's quiet words, and the curious scientific interest of his tone. Then you turned round, and he took hold of your hand. I saw him put one of the shells in his stocking. He had on that little blue sack Aunt Chloe gave him, with white buttons. Then he ran along again, and waded into the water. I saw him quite plainly. He—what did he do, Philip?' asked Avus in a voice of awe, for Philip paused. He beckoned to me. He beckoned to me twice. Then you came up the slope, and when I looked again he was gone. Positively for the moment my breath came hard, and I was a little faint and sick when you found me. There is some nervous enaction of the retina. I had one such case in the hospital before I graduated. I believe I'll read up a little on it to-night." "'Avis, do you know I haven't coughed once for three whole days? It was on Christmas that he sat abruptly, coming out from Mass in the grey cathedral into which they had wandered. If I die before you do, don't expect me to chatter about what I'm thinking, on my deathbed I mean. It won't be my way. I know what I believe. And you know, and I don't believe anything quite so thoroughly, as that, if I get into the other life on any grounds I shall take somehow a pretty fresh start. I need it, God knows. More of a start than I'm likely to get here now. Sometimes I wonder if he'll take the trouble to make over such a half-moulded fellow. I don't know whether I'm worth it upon my soul." "'Now,' he added, I couldn't have said that a month ago, when I really thought I was going to die. How amazingly natural good luck is! I am as used to getting well as if I had never been sick." But when they had come home, he turned to her rather sadly. An ailing man talked so much about himself, as if people could care. His wife did not answer for the moment. Then she crept up and put her hand upon his hair, passing it to and fro. He remembered the first time she ever did this, one winter day before they were married, when his head was reeling with pain, and how Aunt Chloe came in, and just how Avis looked, standing over him, shamed and sweet. He wondered if she remembered too. He thought what a subtle bond is the bare community of memory given to those who pass their lives together. How eternal is the vicinity we give to the soul that we suffer to share our memorable joy, or grief, or peril. Impulsively he put his hand out, and drew his wife down upon the arm of the chair. But he felt her tremble, and so released her. She stood for a moment uncertain. He did not touch her again, and neither spoke. All the brilliant ingenuity of Ostrander's nature drooped before the task of wooing an estranged wife. He got up awkwardly, and said that Smith baby was crying again. And then he and Avis sat down at separate windows, with their faces to the sultry Christmas night. But after this he fell into a low, discouraged state. He suffered a brief attack of pleurisy, and complained of the shortness of his breath. He maintained that the air disagreed with him, and that they should move at once. Mr. Smith expressed a desire to join them, on the ground that Mrs. Smith found her hands cold in Augustine. The little party wandered up and down the river, as floored a party's will, subject only to the caprices of its invalids, touching here and there for a day or so, at hotels or sanitariums, as the restless fancy took them, and absorbed in the exhaustive and enlivening discussion of fogs and fever. After a week or more of this, Avis induced her husband, who was growing scarcely paler than herself, to bring it to an end. You're right, he said faintly. It is killing us both. We will spend the winter at the next landing." This happened to be Pilatka. Here, therefore, they yielded their search for the impossible, and by windows that scanned the great river, drew breath, and missed the sea. Mr. Smith drew breath and halted, too. Mrs. Smith was sensitive to the alligators, and was of opinion that another night on board boat would strike to the pneumogastric nerve. Here, Ostrander fell first into calm, then lethargy, then energy. The new year blossomed unguardedly. He submitted himself to the regal weather. In the fine quality of the cooler season he gained daily. He ceased to cough. He chatted with the other recuperating invalids about the hotels and shore, bringing home magic tales of the healing geni in the flower-burdened air. He found a Massachusetts college boy with a bronchial cough, sick with grief at dropping behind his class. He began to tutor him a little in his Greek. Avis saw that he colored with pleasure when the hour came for the lesson. The poor fellow was overwhelmed with the pathetic joy to be doing a man's work again. When the professor wrote from Harmouth, one day, that he had heard of an opening in a western college, which his son-in-law's complete recovery might throw in his way, he said excitedly, Father is very good. But really, Avis, I don't know what we can do better than that. We might start a boarding school in Florida, or if that wouldn't work, the sanitarium would. Avis, painting orange blossoms for Aunt Chloe, said only, We will see, Philip. She could no more have quarreled just then with the characteristic effervescence of his returning strength than she could have revised and annotated her little boy's prayers. She had so long stood, strained, staring death out of countenance for Philip's sake that his very weakness had grown sacred to her, as the faults of Lazarus may have become to the tender eyes of Mary. With that superlative vagueness through which we see the exceptions taken by another to our own force of character, Ostrander was perhaps conscious of this. One night in January there befell a warm and wonderful moon, which impelled all the unresting stream of tourist life into the open air. Ostrander was especially stimulated by the stir, the chatter, the scented wind, the southern sky. He begged Avis to go with him, away, he said, from all these people, for a row upon the river. He would manch the boat himself at first. She said nothing. It was her delicate touch that the limits of his strength should come as a discovery to the invalid rather than a dogma from the nurse. In a few minutes he yielded the oars to her with a sigh. She took them in silence, and in silence they rose and fell upon the bright resistant current. Avis, as she rode, turned her face to the forest, whose peaks of blackness rose on either hand. The river pierced them like a bright defile, narrowing as they entered it. She thought how the light lay on the sea, beating beyond over there at the left, deep miles across the untrodden tangle, where the long bar leaned out that makes the entrance to the St. Augustine Harbour, one of the most perilous feats known to the navigators of the American coast. She and Philip seemed shut in here, and secure on the patient river. Perhaps some poor sailor yonder on the unseen sea came at that moment, daring his fate, the most cruel that the mariner's chart can know, the resistance of shifting sand. They were safe, they too. She leaned over to look into the stream. She blessed its passionless contracted current. She had called the St. John's River Humdrum sometimes by daylight, a tame story, nothing to be done with it but follow it to the tiresome end. Now it stretched, transfigured, and electric. The sky seemed to stoop with the undue burden of its stars. The moon hung high, and the water rose a little under the warm wind. A few boats only quivered in sight, so few as to express rather than relieve the fantasmal solitude of the place. Their coloured skippers cut like ebony carving about the rigging. Indistinct voices drifted from them, and sunk again, as Avis and her husband beat up the narrowing shores alone. She beached the boat presently. They met no one and walked silently upon the coarse white sand, close to the water's edge. Avis said, This river is like that old book of caroves about the soul. It seems to be a story without an end. He sat down after a little while, for his capricious strength flagged. Avis wandered up and down, dim as a nearer upon the shore. He could hear the grains of sand crackle beneath her feet. There were now no sails in sight upon the uneasy current. Between the forest on this hand and the forest on that, the river lay desolate. The dead trees upon its banks wore winding sheets of moss. They stretched their bows across the separating stream. Those that stood shoulder to shoulder interlocked branches in a manner in which it was impossible not to see a pathetic and at the same time grim likeness to human gestures. In the half-lights sky and shore and river alike grew fluent and foreign. Till whether one walked upon the stream or sailed upon the sand or sank upon the clouds, the true and fancy wondered with a kind of happy terror such as that soul might feel which first escaped the body on a moonlit night. It was a spot to drive the lonely from each other and to draw the loving near. Ostrander's figure, where he sat solitary, melted and formed in the gray uncertainties of the air. As his wife stood, turning hither and thither, she was not sure where she had left him. He seemed to have vanished from her. She turned back with beating heart. He watched her coming through the unreal light. The moon was full in his face. With his head upon his bent, thin wrist, he sat with lifted eyes. She sat down beside him. They could not see the lights of the little town. They were quite alone in this visionary place. Without speech and without touch, Avis was made aware that the moment had become a crisis for them both. She dared not look at her husband. It seemed to her that one careless breath now would completely disorder herself control. Whether she should go flinging her arms above her head and leaping down that unsubstantial shore resistant of him, or whether she should spend herself upon him with a storm of long repressed feeling which she was scathingly conscious would not facilitate that intelligent comprehension of one another in which she believed that their sole hope of future happiness must lie. This five-year's wife, acquainted with bereavements, worn with care, and flayed by anxiety, could not trust herself to guess. Avis said her husband suddenly, we won't have any scene or bother about it, but there is something I want to say to you. Very well, Philip. Gently. I don't know that it's any use, either, to talk about it. Mused, Philip, uncertainly. Most things are better let alone between people who—I wonder if you think a man's worst is the real of him, Avis. There, hush, don't try to answer such a question. It doesn't deserve an answer. But what I want to say is this. It does seem to me that there must have been something in me worth loving, or you wouldn't have cared for me in the first place. Things might have been worse," he added, lifting his head a little. And all that—these elements of character that you love to real, they're not dead. If you would think of this sometimes," he said, rather pitifully. He looked up across the uncertain shadow that her tall figure cast between them. His wife had risen, and stood over him with streaming eyes and choking speech. That very intelligent comprehension of one another seemed no nearer to her than ever. Was it possible, after all, that people might be happy just to love one another without understanding anything about it? I cannot seem to make up my mind to bear it," said Philip Bostrander, not without dignity. That my wife should not respect me enough to love me. Then, in the unreal light, she stooped to him, crying out, pathetically. But what she said, or if she said any words, neither he nor herself could at that moment tell. He held up his hands. In the unreal light it seemed to him as if she bent from a great height to restore to him the married kiss which he had lost. But he did not, or he dared not, draw her to his level. The moon waned and they went home. The river was deserted, the wind was high, but the current bore them powerfully on. Avis rode sturdily, and they did not talk. The lights of the little town nodded to welcome them. On either hand the kneeling moon slowly veiled the colossal face of the wilderness. They talked a little when they had come home, in that small surface mood to which the deepest wedded romance lies so near, as to whether she had rode too far, and if he had taken cold, and why Mrs. Smith did not cough to-night, and if the evening mail had come, and how Aunt Chloe had the baby well asleep by this time, little Lassie, their baby thirteen hundred miles away, and how she would have grown when they got home, and if she would know them, and what they should take her. But Ostrander watched his wife with restless eyes. How resolute her rich motions about the half-lit room. He was growing half impatient with this motherly kind of affection she gave him. It was no comfort to him that he knew it was the best that he deserved. Beside her quarried loyalty, his own frailer instincts had never seemed to him smaller and sadder than they did that night. Never before had he perceived the spiritual dignity of constancy. Perhaps, since it is precisely in proportion to the loftiness of a truth that personal humility is requisite to its apprehension, he had never before distrusted himself sufficiently to perceive it. Her love, he thought, like the statues of Angelo, had been struck out at the beginning from the holy marble, his, like the work of lesser sculptors, from the experimental clay. Shall I light the lamps? she said at last. Don't you like it better as it is? he asked doubtfully. Perhaps so, yes. Do you want anything, Philip? Is it time for your medicine? There I have not run for your glass of milk. Let me call Jeff. Please not ring, now. Can't you sit and rest a little? You must be very tired. Just as you like, Philip. She stood in the centre of the dim room, uncertain for that moment. The light from the unlatched door fell in. The halls were deserted and still. Outside, in the peculiarly dense and appalling shadows that follow the foliage of orange trees upon a moonlit night, the white flowers hung wearily. I have been such a care, he said tremulously through the dark, for so long. You have borne so much, Avis, and so patiently. Now I'm getting well. Don't you think I'm fit to take my share of things? Oh, come here and let us talk about it. Come, my poor girl, my poor girl! Don't you know how tired you are? Perhaps it was the words. Perhaps it was the tone. Change and sickness had not jarred the quality of Ostrander's rare voice. It affected his wife just then like those strains of music which a heavy heart is more hurt than healed to hear. A torrent of memory overtook her. Bound emotions began to struggle in it. All the repressed suffering of a woman to whom it has been given to carry her husband's nature, as she has lifted that of her children, through a lonely and laborious married life, seemed to come sweeping over her, wave upon wave, in a tide to which she could see no end. He expected that she would come up and take his face between her hands. Call him her poor boy, perhaps, in that maternal way of hers from which he knew at that moment his manhood would revolt, and what would happen next he could not possibly foretell. But, like a fascinated girl to her lover, Avis, in the dim room, turned and crept to him. His starved arms shook as they closed about her. He prayed that only his ideal of himself might touch his wife at that moment. She put up her hand to his cheek in her old way. Oh, I am so tired. Tired out. Tired out. Don't talk to me. Oh, there is nothing to say. It was a good while, pulling along alone, and I thought you did not care. The Story of Avis by Elizabeth Stewart-Felps Chapter 24 Tis most true, two souls, let them suffer the gall of hazard so they grow together, will never sink. John Fletcher Discords quenched by meeting harmonies die in the large and charitable air, and all our rarer, truer, better self, that better self, shall live. George Elliot They seem to themselves now to have become the discoverers of the State of Florida. Above them widened new heavens, below them a new earth leaped. Lonely and odd as lovers, they wandered about the forests and the shore. He was boyish about having her with him. She shared his walks, his drives, his sails. He drooped if they were parted for an hour. His breath and color deepened. His recovery presented itself to them as a foregone conclusion. He talked a good deal, more often of their future, sometimes of all that they had put behind them. He would come up excitedly and say, If we don't make it work at the West, Avis, what then? Shall you be contented to come back here? You and I could be happy here forever, couldn't we? And we could educate the girl ourselves. Then she would listen, smiling, and put up her hand, and say nothing. She liked better to let him talk and go dreaming. And he, reverently turning his cheek, still hollow as it was, upon her palm, would slide intently on. If his health gave way again at the West—but of course he meant to try it faithfully—that was understood. If the climate proved too irritating or the classroom drudgery, but he thought he should know better how to manage that another time—still it was a comfort to know that, if worst came to worst, they could return and start the sanitarium or the boarding school. It would be quite practicable to find a suitable housekeeper. Avis should not be exhausted by that. Or, if that failed, there was the orange business. He was convinced that there was room for a large orange grove even here, and farther up the river a little northern pluck would work a miracle any day. They might do worse than to take to orange culture, though he preferred his profession in itself considered. He thought, too, would be a pleasanter life for her. He wanted, above all, to make it a little easier for her now. Ostrander did not notice how scanty were his wife's answers to all this. Her smile was so rich, her surrendered hand so voluble. As for Avis, she heard him without annoyance or dispute. She would have been uneasy if Philip had undergone a transformation, like a hero in a novel, in which his weaknesses were sublimated and his faults idealized beyond her recognition. She would have distressed at a grand metamorphosis as in itself but another form of a capricious and curious self-delusion. It seemed to her the great triumph of her life that she could love her husband just as God had made him. And that Philip, being Philip, could come leaning in this pathetic way upon her love, the sure strained love of five married years, this seemed to her just then more a prophecy than a fulfilment of hope. After all, what was this one world, to souls which had been joined together by any tissues too firm for the attrition of time to tear, at best a root beneath a forest of experience? Perhaps, she thought, those married men and women were better fitted than they knew for the permanent character of a spiritual form of society, who, at the end of one life, passed together, could intelligently desire to renew the relation in a second. When he talked of herself and her work, her reserve deepened. He spoke much of both. It was Avis, when you get to painting—or Avis, one thing I mean to make sure of, that you shall be hampered no longer in your own plans—or why have you done nothing new this winter, Avis? Or, now all goes well with us, dear, we shall see you famous? She said, Yes, Philip. Why argue the matter? She knew how that would be, and she could not have said she didn't care. She did not cheat her clear nature by telling herself or him that she found in her married lot vicarious atonement for what she had missed. A human gift is a rebellious prisoner, and she was made human before she was made woman. That she thought had mattered less to her than it did once, all this lost and unqueled life. They had saved the life of life. They had saved their wedded love. The rest could be born. One day she could not ride with him, there being a burden of home letters and little accumulating feminine tasks which she performed less nervously alone. It was the morning, too, for a spelling lesson that she gave their waiter in the boarding-house, a handsome mulatto-boy to whom both had taken a fancy whenever the state of Jeff's intellect or dining-room permitted. They compromised, for she did not like Philip to go alone, upon the company of their neighbor Smith. Smith was down on the wharf, and he would find him if she wished, and they would ride a little toward the swamps, and return when they were hungry. He held her hand and chatted a good deal about it. He had taken a slight cold for a day or two past, and clung to her, quickly depressed, with more than usual dependence. It was—Avis, don't say long downstairs. Coming back soon, Avis, would you just as leave sit here? I can't see you there by the window. This morning, when he had gone as far as the gate, he came back. She was standing on the veranda, as it happened, quite alone, in her light dress and the low dark outline of her hair. He came back and kissed her again, and said she must not miss him. She watched him walking down the narrow road, the road like a river of sand. He turned and nodded to her. The wind struck his bright hair. He looked flashing and fresh to her, as if she saw him for the first time in her life. He drew her with that subtle fascination which nature takes a fitful delight in bestowing upon some creatures, as a substitute for strength, perhaps, shall we say, as an index of undeveloped strength. Avis followed him with a girl's blush and a wife's eyes. Her heart went to meet that Indian summer of married life, which after the rain settles down upon the purple air. It was towards noon that having put her morning's work behind her, she went downstairs to find the boy Jeff. On the landing she met, with his baby in his arms and his boy at his coattails, and his wife calling to him to come back and shut the door, the patient form of Mr. Smith. She stopped to say, Did you not meet my husband this morning? with an unconscious change of color. Oh, yes, said Mr. Smith, and I wanted to go with him. He had a pretty marsh pony. He's a fine rider, your husband. But, you see, Mrs. Smith has had a bad night. She says it's the worst she's had, and the baby's got the colic, and the girl eat too much breakfast, and the boy—let me see what is the matter with the boy. Oh, yes, the boy chopped off the end of his finger with a hatchet. But maybe if the nurse hadn't had the sick headache I might have brought it about. added Mr. Smith, with a pensive and powerful effort of the imagination. Mrs. Ostrander went on and gave Jeff his lesson. Philip would be in to dinner, she hoped, since he had gone alone, or he might have easily found company among the sporting men about the hotel. He did not come home to dinner. But this was not unusual. Often they had ridden till late in the afternoon, returning with the breeze, which set in from the river. He saying, as they jogged along in the happy weather, how glad I am, you came. She settled herself restlessly to some long neglected sketches. It was difficult to remember when she had passed an afternoon alone before. She sat in the strange silence with flushed cheeks. Mrs. Smith, in the next room, had brightened a little, and her husband could be heard gallantly telling her how well she looked. The people began to collect in the parlor and on the verandas. Jeff came up to ask if Mr. Ostrander's dinner should be kept hot any longer, his main argument being that, as they wanted the oven for the supper, Mr. Ostrander must have dined with the gentleman. The shaded room began to cool about her. It was time to open the blinds to the breeze from the bay. It was time for the sensitive shadow of the jasmine to deepen across the tea-rose tree, and the sharp edges of the orange leaves to grow blunt in the eye that was strained with peering across them to the empty road. It was time for Philip Ostrander to come home. Steps upon the sand. Manly steps enough, impetuous and ringing, as of one who hurried up to say, Did I frighten you getting back so late? The jaunty hotel waiter looks up as he goes by. The light flares on the big seal-ring he wears. He has a red sea-bean upon his watch-guard. He lifts his hat to the quadrune cook, who is opening oysters in the orange-grove below. Steps upon the sand. He will be sure to watch the windows through the opening in the clump of fig-trees. By leaning out across the ledge a trifle, not too far because the guava-bow sweeps up, one can see him turning. How poetic is this southern light upon long sacks and hair! And in a man a smile is rare, like this for which a woman waits, with color spent and breath in leash, and head bent low to listen, her cheek upon her two hands stretched palm to palm. Why will the tourists go to walk upon this street? It is the hour for the veranda and the shore, the forest, and the yacht. Impossible to understand why anybody should want to wade across the sand. She leans upon his arm with a pretty color, a superficial thing, overdressed and simpering. How can a woman love a man who carries his cane like that? His gloves are too light. There is a blue heron's wing upon her bonnet. They whisper together. They laugh and nod. The orange tree casts a long shadow over the fence, through which they pass, leaning and still. They do not note the length of the shadow. They do not care if it grows late. Steps upon the sand. It yields slowly to a weary foot, overtast perhaps in wandering about the marshes, who are trifle-lamed upon these awkward stirrups. He will limp up to the gate. It will be a minute's work to bound from the window, to clear the stairs, the veranda, the yard, to stand panting and strong. He will lean upon her shoulder as he did in the meadow once at home on a September noon. He will stoop and say, was I gone too long? The old woman was a slave. She cringes as she walks. Her head is bent well nigh at right angles from her shoulders. Her turban is made of the McGregor plaid. Her fingers are yellow. The third knuckle on the left hand is mutilated. It is a sickly sight. The child with her is an octaroon. She has blue eyes and ties her hair with a lavender ribbon. The child says it is supper-time. One must be very strong and happy to watch these people. Steps upon the sand. Ah, there! How dull is fear! What a dotard is anxiety! Of course he would ride the pony-horse! They are short, clean steps, very clear and pleasant for a marsh-tacky's foot. It is not wise to look any longer through the rift between the fig-tree and the guava. To wait a little for a relief from over-pressure with the gentler and the gladder-way, the pony will come shying to the gate, a little obstinate, wanting to get to the stable, bruising the rider's leaping foot gently against the fence. She will wait and meet him at the landing. There are so many people down below. As he stoopes, he will laugh a little, touching her beneath the chin. Her lips, already stirring, say, You shall never go alone again. The sportsman rides well. The young fellow is fitted with white gloves. He is fresh from a hunting trip up the Ocala or the lakes. He is in a hurry for a civilized supper. His horse is white, too, and he rides fast. There is a shower behind them. Horse and rider bound before it. Children, unseen behind the guava-trees, cry that it is thundering. The air blackens down upon the river. The little yachts take in their sails. The surf stretches out its arms. The wind gets him to his solemn feet. The orange blossoms break and blow in, beating about the darkening room. In the confusion the supper bell rings shrilly, and the people on the veranda scatter, laughing from the rain. Better let her go, said Mr. Smith. He couldn't petrify her to stay at home, sir, said Jeff. Jeff had learned that word in the spelling lesson that morning. He had not had an opportunity to use it in good society before. Jeff was very fond of Mrs. Ostrander. He felt that it would be a comfort to her, under these anxious circumstances, that he should acquaint the other borders with some evidence of his proficiency under her educational attentions. For similar reasons he stopped and said distinctly, Mrs. Ostrander, I don't wish to be personal, but have you got a postage stamp? By that time all the borders were upon the veranda to see them start. Jeff felt a little jealous of Mr. Smith. One driver, at least a driver who could spell petrify, was enough for any lady. And that they should meet Mr. Ostrander directly. Every border in the house was well agreed. It was agreed, however, that Mrs. Ostrander would feel relieved to start and find herself well upon the way to ward her husband, who was later than an invalid had better be upon a stormy night. It was still raining lightly, but the restless clouds gave promise of a moon, whenever they should yield the wild field to which Avis uplifted her young face. The scant lamps of the town dwindled, nodding like old acquaintances to the passer. Knots of brightly dressed tourists flashed by. The faces of the great hotels and little shops turned their blazing brows away. Avis was perfectly familiar with her husband's usual haunts, and she directed her course at once toward the heart of the swamp. She sat quite still. The two men talked in low tones, as if in the presence of a sick person. Once Jeff tried to draw her into conversation. He said, Miss Ostrander, what I want to know is, how you don't go spell Agamemnon? Jeff thought this would be a comfort to her. He prided himself upon the delicacy of his comprehension of Mrs. Ostrander. He did not know a boy in the hotels who had so handsome a lady, and he knew a good many boys who had ate at a table the winter through. In his heart Jeff was much out of patience with Mr. Ostrander. He expected to find that he had taken too much. That and consumption were the only things which ever happened to Northern gentlemen in Pilatka. Don't you think, suggested Mr. Smith, hesitating, that I had better first take out the horse and reconnoitre a little. Jeff will stay and take care of you. Avis turned her face towards him in the faint, perturbed light. She did not speak. Drive on, Jeff, said Mr. Smith, with a sigh. It was now between eight and nine o'clock. The moon, as they entered the nave of the forest, came climbing into sight uncertainly, like a woman tripping on her robe. The beaten clouds sank towards the river, which it was no longer possible to see. Faintly, as a spent breath, as they rode in between the pines, Avis fancied that she heard the invisible waves upon the invisible shore. It seemed at first supernaturally dark within the woods. Optical illusions flared for a few moments before her eyes. She saw words stamp themselves and melt upon the air, and when she would read them, they were the words which Dante saw upon the lips of hell. This excitement subsided as soon as she had accustomed her eyes to the shadow. She had been there once before, with Philip, upon a brighter night, but they had not ventured far. He feared the malaria from the swamps. Her courage grew more rational as the great beauty of the wilderness closed in about them. The moon was now clear, and the light leaned in, sweet and sane, upon the gently resistant shadow. As they advanced, sickening odours stole up, beyond the patrol of cedars the swamp lay skulking. It would soon be necessary to conduct their search on foot. As they stood calling, the mockingbirds began to answer them. Jeff wished he could see her face. He came up and touched her on the sleeve. He felt that Mr. Smith could not be expected to understand the necessities of the occasion. Mr. Smith had not put the chair up to the table three times a day for those two. The mulatto's yellow jaws began to work. Oh, Miss Ostrander, I got him now. I done got him on the way before we tied the horse. I got Agamemnon right easy in my mind at last. Ha-ag-ag-a-gee-ag-ee! But Agamemnon was too much for poor Jeff, and choked him mercilessly in the swallowing. Jeff shrunk back. He thought she would have been so pleased. He might as well let Mr. Smith comfort her now. But Mr. Smith fell back a little, too. Mrs. Ostrander gently pushed him by and took the lead in silence, beating down the Spanish bayonet which tore her feet. In the moonlit opening the purple poison from the swamp had a clean color, like brown snow. Her slight figure seemed to wrestle with the dumb, unwilling darkness as she bent into it. Dawn comes with the reverent and delicate touch of a lover to the Florida waste. That night his arms stole with what seemed a special gentleness about her heart. It had been such a peaceful and womanly night. There had been no wind or rain, no blindness and no horror. It was quite warm, too. Even a sick man might breathe the air and safety. Avis had not tottered for an instant in her resolute hope. She should find him. God was merciful. As the moon dipped a strange, shrill bird awoke and chirped, and slept again. Gliding creatures began to stir and skulk away, like evil thoughts before clean eyes or terror before joy. The lamp black of the distant shadows leaned to purple. The near undergrowth grew gray. Looking to the sky one saw that it changed color, like a cheek. Suddenly then the tops of the pines yielded, and each green needle fired. The fine outline of the cedars revealed itself sinuously, like a truscant screens of old gold wire. The loath moss stirred and showed bluish white. The wild oranges seemed to tremble, like conscious creatures to whom the sun was plighted first. The rose curlews moved tall, slender and haughty. They looked less like birds than breathing roses. Avis, looking up, saw one rise, glad as a departing soul, and hover, burning to be gone upon the air. Below him the light stole but slowly to the level where a human face might lie expectant of it. She pushed her way into the thicket, spreading her hands out, it was still so dark there. As she did so, she was conscious of being confronted by a close pair of gentle, puzzled eyes. She stopped short, and flung her hands before her face. Jeff! she cried. It is the Marsh pony. The light was now deepening fast, and the two men instinctively and authoritatively drew the woman back. From the moment of finding the horse, she had begun to tremble, and when they spoke to her, she obeyed. As they beat about the opening, Jeff looked back over his shoulder. The mists of the damp place returned red and rich, and through them he saw that she had fallen on her knees. She looked like one bathed in a scarlet flood. Then the live oak bow swept in between them, and Jeff, for he could not see, went stumbling on. The white man and the mulatto looked at each other. Sir! said Jeff, lifting his head after a silence. I've set the chair for him for most two months, and there was the writing and the spelling as she was so good. She would suspect me to be the man of us, too, to tell her. It ain't your fault, sir, that you can't be looked to understand her feelings, sir, so well. She had risen from her knees when he had met her. She made no sound, but staggered. She still had her hands before her eyes. Jeff came up. He touched her, cringing, on the sleeve. Oh, Miss Ostrander, dear! He didn't take too much. He only took a bleeding. And he says we was to break it to you easy, and that he's glad to see you, ma'am, and has been done expecting you, and that you're not to mind. And, oh, Miss Ostrander, now I think if you was to stop a minute, just easy where you stand, and spell a little, it would clear your mind out. He don't look so bad as some does, but if you was just to stop before you seize him, it's only just behind the live oak yonder. Miss Ostrander, dear. The daybreak sought them out gently. In the pathless forest whose solemn purpose no man knew, they clung to one another, and thanked God. He had been merciful. Care and change had done their worst. Beaten life had given challenge to their love. They could bear the incident of death. In that hour they were less grieved because they must be parted than blessed because they loved each other. She had found him lying quite peacefully, expecting her. As she knelt, gathering his head upon her breast, the sun arose upon the wilderness. In the splendor he looked young to her, and a future in his face returned her gaze. He felt her arm and her warm breath, and smiled boyishly. It is hard to believe that a man can die here, he said. He turned his cheek, and hers touched it. He asked her not to move. He had not suffered much, he said, nor long. And he felt sure she would come. He had not doubted for a moment. It was a pretty long night, but he knew she was not far. Once he thought he heard her. And the pony wandered off. It was more lonely after the pony went. But she must not mind. It had been warm and bright, and it had not been hard. Nothing had been hard. But the chance, if she had been too late, that would have been pretty hard. But he knew that she would come. Then he asked her to lift him a little more upon her arm, and if he tired her too much. After that he seemed to sleep lightly. He appelled his face as if he drank her abundant breath. When he awoke, he said, Avis, do you remember, once, how you said that she would like to die? Hush, my darling. Yes. Love, if I ask it, will you kiss my breath away? When I speak again, will you kiss me on the lips? Oh, my darling. Oh, my darling. Yes. Avis. When she lifted her face, the rose curlew hung overhead, palpitating with joy. The two men had long since withdrawn into the forest. End of Chapter 24