CHAPTER XXIV

At the gate of the cemetery he fled from the little company. Dr. Leonard

wanted to return to the city with him, but he shook off the talkative

dentist. He must escape all sense of participation in the affair. So he

made the long journey in the cable train, thinking disconnectedly in unison

with the banging, jolting, grinding of the car. The panorama of his one

short year in Chicago rose bit by bit into his mind: the hospital, the

rich, bizarre town, the society of thirsty, struggling souls, always

rushing madly hither and thither, his love for the woman he had just left,

and this final distracting event.

What if she had doubled the dose of the anodyne? Probably the fellow was

abusive. It might have been some shameful extremity that had forced upon

her this act in self-defence. But such a situation would have called for

violence, some swift blow. The man had died in insidious calm. He had

counselled it, believed in it. But not that _she_--the woman he

loved--should be brave with that desperate courage. Yet it was over now,

beyond sight and thought, and he loved her--yes, loved her more than if it

had not been so.

Once in town, he felt intolerably lonely, as a busy man who has had his

round of little duties in a busy world soon comes to feel when any jar has

put him out of his usual course. As he sauntered among the strange faces of

the city streets, looking out for a familiar being, he began to realize how

completely he had cut himself off from the ordinary routine of life. He was

as much a stranger as if he had been dropped into the bustling crowd for

the first time. He had sat in judgment, and the world would give a fig for

his judgments. A week ago he might have taken refuge in a dozen houses.

To-night he stood upon street corners and wistfully eyed the passing

stream.

He walked to the river aimlessly, and then walked back, examining the blank

faces of the people. He spied through the lowered window of a carriage

Brome Porter and Carson, going in the direction of the Northwestern

station. The carriage skirted the curb near him, but the occupants were

looking the other way. He recalled that Carson had been induced to leave

the famous portrait on exhibition at the Art Institute. Whenever in the

future he might care to refresh his mind with the vision of this epitome of

success, he had but to drop into the dusky building on the lake front and

have it all--with the comment of the great artist.

As he moved on his restless course, he thought of Porter and Carson, of

Polot, and then of many others, whose faces came out of the memories of the

past year. How many of them were "good fellows," human and kind and strong!

They fought the world's fight, and fought it fairly. Could more be expected

of man? Could he be made to curb his passion for gain, to efface himself,

to refuse to take what his strong right hand had the power to grasp?

Perhaps the world was arranged merely to get the best out of strong

animals.

He turned into a restaurant, where usually he could find a dozen people of

his acquaintance in the prosperous world. The place was crowded, but he

spied no one he had ever seen. Evidently the people who knew how to make

themselves comfortable had contrived to get out of this besieged city. They

were at the various country clubs, at Wheaton, Lake Forest, Lake Geneva,

Oconomowoc, keeping cool, while the general managers, the strikers, and the

troops fought out their differences. The menu was curtailed this evening.

"'Twon't be long, sir," the waiter explained, "'fore we'll have to kill

them cab horses as they done in Paris. Game and fruit and milk can't be

had."

But for the present the food was not of the famine order, and the noisy

crowd eat joyously, as if sure of enough, somehow, as long as they needed

it and had the money to pay. As Sommers was idling over his coffee, Swift,

a young fellow whom he had seen at the University Club, a college man

connected with one of the papers, sat down at his table, and chatted

busily.

"They telephoned from the stock yards that there was a big mob down there,"

he told Sommers. "I thought I'd go over and see if I couldn't get an extra

story out of it. Want to come along? It's about the last round of the

fight. The managers have got five thousand new men here already or on the

way. That will be the knock-out," he chatted briskly.

Sommers drifted along to the scene of the riot with the reporter, happier

in finding himself with some one, no matter who he might be. Swift talked

about the prospects of ending the strike. He regarded it as a reportorial

feast, and had natural regrets that such good material for lurid paragraphs

was to be cut off. As they passed through the Levee, he nodded to the

proprietors of the "places," with ostentatious familiarity. From the Levee

they took an electric car, which was crowded with officers and deputies

bound for the stock yards. The long thoroughfare lined with rotting wooden

houses and squalid brick saloons was alive with people that swarmed over

the roadbed like insects. A sweltering, fetid air veiled the distances.

Like a filthy kettle, the place stewed in its heat and dirt. Here lived the

men who had engaged in the foolish fight!

At a cross street the officers dropped off the car, and Swift and Sommers

followed them.

"Where's the fun?" the reporter asked the sergeant.

The officer pointed languidly toward a tangle of railroad tracks at one end

of the vast enclosure of the stock yards. They trudged on among the lines

of deserted cars in the fading glare of the July heat. The broad sides of

the packing houses, the lofty chimneys surrounded by thin grayish clouds,

the great warehouses of this slaughter yard of the world, drew nearer. All

at once a roar burst on their ears, and they came out from behind a line of

cars upon a stretch of track where a handful of soldiers were engaged in

pressing back a rabble of boys, women, and men. The rabble were teasing the

soldiers, as a mob of boys might tease a cat. Suddenly, as the officers and

deputies appeared, some one hurled a stone. In a moment the air was thick

with missiles, revolver shots followed, and then the handful of soldiers

formed in line with fixed bayonets.

Sommers heard in the midst of all the roar the piteous bellowing of cattle,

penned up in the cars. He saw a dark form stealing around the end of a car;

in a moment a light spurted out as if a match had been touched to kerosene;

there was a gleam of light, and the stock-car with its load of cattle was

wrapped in flames. The dark figure disappeared among the cars; Sommers

followed it. The chase was long and hot. From time to time the fleeing man

dodged behind a car, applied his torch, and hurried on. At last Sommers

overtook him, kneeling down beside a box car, and pouring oil upon a bunch

of rags. Sommers kicked the can out of reach and seized the man by the

collar. They struggled in the dark for a few moments. Then the man put his

hand to his pocket, saying,--

"I suppose you're a damned, sneaking deputy."

"Hold on, you drunken fool!" Sommers exclaimed. "It's lucky for you I am

not a deputy."

He could hear the mob as it came down the yards in the direction of the

burning cars.

"If you don't want to be locked up, come on with me."

The fellow obeyed, and they walked down through the lane of cars until they

reached a fence. Sommers forced his companion through a gap, and followed

him. Then the man began to run, and at the corner ran into a file of

soldiers, who were coming into the yards. Sommers turned up the street and

walked rapidly in the direction of the city. The first drops of a

thunder-shower that had been lowering over the city for hours were falling,

and they brought a pleasant coolness into the sultry atmosphere. That was

the end! The "riot" would be drowned out in half an hour.

The sense of overwhelming loneliness came back, and instinctively he turned

south in the direction of the cottage. From the loneliness of life, the

sultry squalor of the city, the abortive folly of the mob, he fled to the

one place that was still sweet in all this wilderness of men.

* * * * *

The cottage windows were dark when he arrived an hour later, but Alves met

him at the door.

"I have been waiting for you," she said calmly. "I knew you would come as

soon as you could."

"Didn't Miss M'Gann stay?" he asked remorsefully.

"I sent her away with Dr. Leonard. And our old Ducharme has gone out to one

of her doctor's services. She is getting queerer and queerer, but such a

good soul! What should I have done without her! You sent her to me," she

added tenderly.

They sat down by the open window within sound of the gentle, healing rain.

Sommers noticed that Alves had changed her dress from the black gown she

had worn in the afternoon to a colored summer dress. The room had been

rearranged, and all signs of the afternoon scene removed. It was as if she

willed to obliterate the past at once. How fast she lived!

Her manner was peaceful. She sat resting her head against a high-backed

chair, and her arms, bare from the elbow, fell limply by her side. She

seemed tired, merely, and content to rest in the sense of sweet relief.

"Alves," he cried, taking one of her hands and pressing the soft flesh in

his grip, "I could not stay away. I meant to--I did not mean to meet you

again here--but it was too lonely, too desolate everywhere."

"Why not here and at once?" she asked, with a shade of wonder in her voice.

"Haven't we had all the sorrow here? And why should we put off our joy? It

is so great to be happy to the full for once."

The very words seemed to have a savor for her.

"Are you happy?" he asked curiously.

"Why not! It's as if all that I could ever dream while I walked the hot

streets had come to me. It has come so fast that I cannot quite feel it

all. Some joy is standing outside, waiting its turn."

Smilingly she turned her face to his for response.

"What shall you do?" he asked.

"Do? I can't think _now_. There is so much time to think of that."

"But you can't stay here!" he exclaimed, with undue agitation.

"Not if you dislike it. But I feel differently. I found this refuge, and it

served me well. I have no need to leave it."

Sommers let her hand fall from his clasp, and rose to his feet.

"You must! You cannot stay here after--"

"As you wish. We will go away."

"But until we are married?"

"Married?" she repeated questioningly. "I hadn't thought of that."

After a moment she said hesitatingly:

"Do we have to be married? I mean have the ceremony, the oath, the rest of

it? I have been married. Now I want--love."

"Why, it is only natural--" the man protested.

"No, no, it is not natural. It may kill all this precious love. You may

come to hate me as I hated him, and then, then? No," she continued

passionately. "Let us not make a ceremony of this. It would be like the

other, and I should feel it so always. We will have love, just love, and

live so that it makes no difference. You cannot understand!"

Sommers knelt beside her chair.

"Love, love," he repeated. "You shall have it, Alves, as you will--the

delirium of love!"

"That is right," she whispered, trembling at his touch. "Talk to me like

that. Only more, more. Make my ears ring with it. Your words are so weak!"

"There are no words."

"No, there is not one perfect one in all the thousands!" she uttered, with

a low cry. "And they are all alike--all used and common. But this,"--she

kissed him, drawing him closer to her beating heart. "This is you and all!"

Thus she taught him the fire of love--so quickly, so surely! From the vague

boyish beatitude had sprung this passion, like the opulent blossom out of

the infolding bosom of the plant. Her kiss had dissipated his horrid

suspicions. Her lips were bond and oath and sacrament.

That night they escaped the world with its fierce cross-purposes, its

checker-board scheme. The brutality of human success, the anguish of

strife,--what is it when man is shut within the chamber of his joy! Outside

the peaceful rain fell ceaselessly, quenching the flame and the smoke and

the passion of the city.

PART II

CHAPTER I

"Next week Monday is the tenth," Alves announced, glancing at the calendar

that hung beside the writing-table.

"Well?" Sommers answered. He was preparing to make the daily trip to the

post-office on the other side of Perota Lake.

"The Chicago schools open this year on the tenth," Alves continued slowly.

"What difference does that make?"

For reply Alves took from the drawer of the table the old leather purse

that was their bank. The mute action made Sommers smile, but he opened the

purse and counted the bills. Then he shoved them back into the purse, and

replaced it in the drawer.

"I don't know why I haven't heard about my horse," he mused.

"That would only put the day off another month or two," Alves answered. "We

have had our day of play--eight long good weeks. The golden-rod has been

out for nearly a month, and the geese have started south. We saw a flock

yesterday, you remember."

"But you aren't going back to the school!" Sommers protested. "Not to the

Everglade School."

"I got the notices last week. They haven't discharged me! Why not?" she

added sanely. "You know that it will be hard to build up a practice. And

Miss M'Gann wrote me that we could get a good room at the Keystone. That

won't be too far from the school."

"I had thought of returning to Marion, where my father practised," Sommers

suggested. "If we could only stay _here_, in this shanty three miles

from a biscuit!"

Alves smiled, and did not argue the point. They went to the shore where

their little flat-bottomed boat was drawn up. Perota Lake, on which the

tiny frame cottage stood, was a shallow, reedy pond, connecting by sluggish

brooks with a number of other lakes. The shore on this side of the lake was

a tangled thicket; the opposite shore rose in a gentle slope to fields of

sun-dried grain. The landscape was rich, peaceful, uneventful, with wide

spaces of sun and cloud and large broad Wisconsin fields. The fierce west

wind came cool and damp from the water. Sommers pulled out of the reedy

shore and headed for a neighboring lake. After rowing in silence for some

time, he rested on his oars.

"Why couldn't we stay here? That is what I want to do--to keep out of the

city with its horrible clatter of ambitions, to return to the soil, and

live like the primitive peasant without ambition."

The Wisconsin woman smiled sympathetically. She had grown strong and

firm-fleshed these summer weeks, sucking vitality from the warm soil.

"The land is all owned around here!" she laughed. "And they use herb

doctors or homeopaths. No, we should starve in the midst of harvests. There

is only one thing to do, to go back where we can earn a bit of bread."

Sommers started to row, but put down the oars again.

"Do _you_ want to go back?"

"I never think about it. It is so arranged," she answered simply. "Perhaps

it will not be always so."

"Which means that we may be more fortunate than our neighbors?"

"I don't know--why think? We have until Monday," and she leaned forward to

touch his hand.

Why think! That is what she had taught him. They had sloughed off Chicago

at the first, and from the day they arrived at Perota they had sunk into a

gentle, solitary routine. Sommers had been content to smoke his pipe, to

ruminate on nothings, to be idle with no strenuous summoning of his will.

There had been no perplexity, no revolt, no decision. Even the storm of

their love subdued itself to a settled warmth, like that of the insistent

summer sun. They had little enough to do with, but they were not aware of

their poverty. Alves had had a long training in economy, and with the

innate capability of the Wisconsin farmer's daughter, adjusted their little

so neatly to their lives that they scarcely thought of unfulfilled wants.

Now why, the man mused, must they break this? Why must they be forced back

into a world that they disliked, and that had no place for them? If he were

as capable as she, there would be no need. But society has discovered a

clever way of binding each man to his bench! While he brooded, Alves

watched the gentle hills, straw-colored with grain, and her eyes grew moist

at the pleasant sight. She glanced at him and smiled--the comprehending

smile of the mothers of men.

"You would not want it always."

They landed at the end of the lake; from there it was a short walk over the

dusty country road to the village. The cross-roads hamlet with its saloons

and post-office was still sleeping in midday lethargy. Alves pointed to the

unpainted, stuffy-looking houses.

"You would not like this."

At the post-office they met a young fellow wearing a cassock, a strangely

incongruous figure in the Wisconsin village. "Are you coming to vespers?"

the young priest asked. His brown, heavy face did not accord with the

clerical habit or with the thin clerical voice.

"I think so--for the last time," Alves answered.

"Guy Jones will be there. You remember Guy, Alves? He used to be quite

sweet on you in the old days when your brother was at the seminary."

"Yes, I remember Guy," Alves answered hurriedly. She seemed conscious of

Sommers's bored gaze. The young priest accompanied them along the dusty

road.

"Guy'll be glad to see you again. He's become quite a man out in Painted

Post, Nebraska--owns pretty much the whole place--"

"We shall be at vespers," Alves repeated, interrupting the talkative young

man.

When his cassock had disappeared up the dusty road between the fields of

corn, she added,

"And that, too, you would not like, nor Guy Jones."

After beaching the boat in front of the cottage they walked to the seminary

chapel by a little path through the meadows along the lake, then across a

wooded hill where the birds were singing multitudinously. The buildings of

the Perota Episcopal Seminary occupied the level plateau of a hill that lay

between two lakes. A broad avenue of elms and maples led to the rude stone

cloisters, one end of which was closed by the chapel. To Sommers the cheap

factory finish of the chapel and the ostentatious display of ritualism were

alike distasteful. The crude fervors of the boy priests were strangely out

of harmony with the environment. But Alves, to whom the place was full of

associations, liked the services. As they entered the cloisters, a tiny

bell was jangling, and the students were hurrying into the chapel, their

long cassocks lending a foreign air to the Wisconsin fields. Only one other

person was seated on the benches beneath the choir, a broad-faced young

American, whose keen black eyes rested upon Alves. She was absorbed in the

service, which was loudly intoned by the young priest. The candles, the

incense, the intoned familiar words, animated her. Sommers had often

wondered at the powerful influence this service exerted over her. To the

training received here as a child was due, perhaps, that blind wilfulness

of self-sacrifice which had first brought her to his notice.

"The remission and absolution of sins--" Alves was breathing heavily, her

lips murmuring the mighty words after the priest. Was there a sore hidden

in her soul? Did she crave some supernatural pardon for a desperate deed?

The memory of miserable suspicions flashed over him, and gravely, sadly, he

watched the quivering face by his side. If she sought relief now in the

exercise of her old faith, what would come as the years passed and heaped

up the burden of remorse!

* * * * *

The service ended, and the three lay participants sauntered into the

graveyard outside the west door. The setting sun flooded the aisle of the

little chapel, even to the cross on the altar. The tones of the organ

rolled out into the warm afternoon. The young man approached Alves with

extended hand.

"The boys told me I could find you here. It's real good to see you again.

Yes, I'm back to have a look at the old place. Wouldn't return to

_stay_ for worlds. It's a great place out there, where a man counts

for what he is. Won't you make me acquainted with your husband?"

Sommers felt instinctively the hesitation in Alves's manner. She turned to

him, however.

"Howard, this is my brother's old friend, Mr. Jones,--Dr. Sommers."

The young man shook hands with great warmth, and joined them in their walk

home, talking rapidly all the way. When he left the cottage, he extended a

cordial invitation to Sommers to establish himself in Painted Post. "We

want a good, live, hustling doctor, one that is up in all the modern school

theories," he explained.

After he had gone, they sat in silence, watching the deepening twilight in

the cool woods. The day, the season, the fair passion of life, seemed to

wane. Like the intimations of autumn that come in unknown ways, even in

August, surely in September, this accidental visitor brought the atmosphere

of change.

"The struggle begins, then, next Monday," Sommers remarked at last.

She kissed him for reply.

To love, to forget unpleasant thoughts, to love again, to refrain from an

ignoble strife--alas! that it could not be thus for a lifetime.

CHAPTER II

The Keystone Hotel was in full blast when the doctor and Alves returned

from Wisconsin. Miss M'Gann met them and introduced them to the large,

parlor-floor room she had engaged for them. The newcomers joined the

household that was taking the air on the stone steps of the hotel. The step

below Miss M'Gann's was held by a young man who seemed to share with Miss

M'Gann the social leadership of the Keystone. He was with the Baking Powder

Trust, he told Sommers. He was tall and fair, with reddish hair that massed

itself above his forehead in a shiny curl, and was supplemented by a waving

auburn mustache. His scrupulous dress, in the fashion of the foppish clerk,

gave an air of distinction to the circle on the steps. Most of this circle

were so average as scarcely to make an impression at first sight,--a few

young women who earned their livelihood in business offices, a few decayed,

middle-aged bachelors, a group of widows whose incomes fitted the rates of

the Keystone, and several families that had given up the struggle with

maids-of-all-work. One of these latter,--father, mother, and daughter--had

seats at table with Sommers and Alves. The father, a little, bald-headed

man with the air of a furtive mouse, had nothing to say; the mother was a

faded blond woman, who shopped every day with the daughter; the daughter,

who was sixteen, had the figure of a woman of twenty, and the assurance

born in hotels and boarding-houses. Her puffy rounded face, set in a thick

roll of blond hair, had the expression of a precocious doll. When she had

sounded Alves on the subject of silk waists, she relapsed into silence and

stared amiably at the doctor.

Sommers arranged to hang his little celluloid sign, _Howard Sommers, M.

D., Physician and Surgeon_, beneath his window. The proprietor of the

Keystone thought it gave a desirable, professional air to the house. But

Webber, the young man in the Baking Powder Trust, was sceptical of its

commercial value to the doctor. Certainly the results from its appearance

were not ascertainable. Sommers had no patients. The region about the

Keystone was a part of the World's Fair territory, and had been greatly

overbuilt. It had shrunk in these stagnant months to one-tenth of its

possible population. There was, besides, an army of doctors, at least one

for every five families Sommers judged from the signs. They were for the

most part graduates of little, unknown medical schools or of drug stores.

Lindsay had once said that this quarter of the city was a nest of

charlatans. The two or three physicians of the regular school had private

hospitals, sanitariums, or other means of improving their business. Many of

the doctors used the drug stores as offices and places of rendezvous. Their

signs hung, one below another, from a long crane at the entrances of the

stores. It was an impartial, hospitable method of advertising one's

services. There was one such bulletin at the shop on the corner of the

neighboring avenue; the names were unfamiliar and foreign,--Jelly, Zarnshi,

Pasko, Lemenueville. Sommers suspected that their owners had taken to

themselves _noms de guerre_.

At first Sommers avoided these places, and got the few drugs he needed at a

well-known pharmacy in the city. He had an idea that matters would improve

when people returned from the country or the seashore. But these people did

not take long vacations. He had had but one case, the wife of a Swedish

janitor in a flat-building, and he had reason to believe that his services

had not pleased. Every morning, as Alves hurried to reach the Everglade

School, his self-reproach increased. He hated to think that she was in the

same treadmill in which he had found her. His failure was a matter of

pride, also; he began to suspect that the people in the house talked about

it. When Webber spoke to him of Dr. Jelly's success, he felt that the

Keystone people had been making comparisons. They were walking to the

railroad station after breakfast--the clerk on his way south to the baking

powder works; he, for a daily paper. The young clerk nodded to a

black-whiskered, sallow man, and said:

"He's Doc. Jelly, and has the biggest practice around here. He's thick with

the drug-store people,--has an interest in it, I have heard. I haven't seen

your sign over there. Why don't you hang it out?"

Sommers did not like to say that it was in bad professional form. After he

had left the friendly clerk, however, he walked over to the drug store and

made some inquiries in a general way. The place was a shameful pretence of

a prescription pharmacy. Cigars, toilet articles, and an immense soda-water

fountain took up three-fourths of the floor space. A few dusty bottles were

ranged on some varnished oak shelves; there was also a little closet at one

side, where the blotchy-faced young clerk retired to compound

prescriptions. The clerk hailed him affably, calling him by his name. He

seemed to know that Sommers used up-town pharmacies and had no practice;

and he, too, good-naturedly offered his advice.

"Goin' to settle in the neighborhood? Shall be glad to have your slab to

add to the collection." He pointed jocularly to the filigree-work of signs

that were pendent above the door.

"Well, I am not settled yet," Sommers replied, as easily as he could.

"Mostly homeopaths hereabouts," the clerk went on, rolling out a handful of

cigars for a purchaser to make his selection. "Makes no difference, I say;

any one with a diploma is welcome to hang out and try his chances with the

rest. But all these"--he waved the hand which held the cigars at the

signs--"are fine men. They do a rushin' business."

Sommers left the shop; he was not quite ready to do a "rushin' business"

and to advertise for it from the corner drug store. As he retreated the

clerk looked at him with a cynical smile. In the clerk's vernacular, he

wasn't "in the push," not "the popular choice."

These days Sommers had so little to do that he could meet Alves at the

close of the afternoon session. At first he had gone to the Everglade

School and waited while the pupils bustled out. He disliked seeing her in

the performance of her petty duties, giving commands and reproofs. The

principal and the teachers stared at them when they walked away from the

school, and he gathered that his appearance there was embarrassing to

Alves. So they came to have a rendezvous at the rear of a vacant lot not

far from the deserted cottage, which lifted its ill-favored roof above the

scrub oaks. Then they would traverse the familiar walks in and out of the

deserted streets.

When he told her of his conversation with Webber and the drug clerk's

remarks, she counselled unexpectedly:

"Why don't you do it? Miss M'Gann says they all do it in Chicago,--that is,

the doctors who aren't swells."

He smiled sadly at the idea that his holding aloof from this advertising

custom might be set down to his ambition of being a "swell doctor." The

method, however, seemed entirely proper to Alves, who hadn't the

professional prejudices, and whose experience with the world had taught her

to make the fight in any possible way, in any vulgar way that custom had

pointed out.

"Well, if you want me to," he conceded drearily.

"It isn't a great matter," she replied. "I don't _want_ you to do

anything that you don't feel like doing. Only," she sighed, "there's so

much opposition to married women's teaching, and we must live somehow."

"I'll do it to-morrow," Sommers replied quickly, stung by the unintentional

implication of the speech.

They walked to their favorite haunt on the lake shore, beneath the

crumbling walls of the little convent. During these hot September days this

spot had become the brightest place in their lives. They had come there to

find themselves, to avoid the world. They had talked and planned, had been

silent, had loved, and had rested. Today they watched the fiery sun sinking

in its bed of shining dust, and did not speak. Alves was unusually weary,

and he was sad over the decision he had just made, weakly, it seemed to

him. A good deal of the importance of his revolt against commercial

medicine disappeared. Lindsay tried oily, obsequious means of attracting

attention. He was to hang his sign from a corner store. Some dim idea of

the terrible spectre that haunts the days and nights of those without

capital or position confronted him. If he had never been rich, he had

always the means to give him time to look about, to select from a number of

opportunities. If he could manage to wait, even six months, some hospital

place might turn up. His old associates at Philadelphia would have him in

mind. He did not dare to write them of his necessity; even his friends

would be suspicious of his failure to gain a foothold in this hospitable,

liberal metropolis.

He rose at last to escape these gloomy thoughts. Alves followed him without

a word. He did not offer her his arm, as he was wont to do when they walked

out here beyond the paths where people came. She respected his mood, and

falling a step behind, followed the winding road that led around the ruined

Court of Honor to the esplanade. As they gained the road by a little

footpath in the sandy bank, a victoria approached them. The young woman who

occupied it glanced hastily at Sommers and half bowed, but he had turned

back to give Alves his hand. The carriage drove on past them, then stopped.

"That lady wishes to speak to you," Alves said.

"I think not," Sommers replied quickly, turning in the opposite direction.

As they walked away the carriage started, and when Alves looked around it

had already passed over the rough wooden bridge that crossed the lagoon.

"Was it some one you knew?" she asked indifferently.

"It was Miss Hitchcock," Sommers replied shortly. He told her something

about the Hitchcocks. "She was the first woman I knew in Chicago," he

concluded musingly. Alves looked at him with troubled eyes, and then was

silent. Territories unknown in her experience were beginning to reveal

themselves in the world of this man.

CHAPTER III

The next day Sommers applied at the drug store for permission to hang his

sign beneath the others. The question was referred to Jelly, who seemed to

be the silent partner in the business, and in a few days consent was given.

The little iron sign with gilt letters shone with startling freshness

beneath the larger ones above. But no immediate results were visible.

Sommers dropped into the store as nonchalantly as he could almost daily,

but there were no calls for him. He met Jelly, who looked him over coldly,

while he lopped over the glass show-case and smoked a bad cigar. Sommers

thought he detected a malicious grin on the clerk's face when Jelly

questioned him one day about his practice. The successful physician seemed

to sum him up in a final speech.

"What people want hereabouts is a practical, smart man. They don't take

much stock in schools or training; it's the _man_ they want."

Leaving the clear impression that the young doctor was not the man for

their money, he grasped his black bag and lounged out of the door, puffing

at his cigar and spitting as he went. The Keystone, also, did not find

Sommers the man they could rely upon. When the overfed daughter of the

family at his table was taken ill with a gastric fever, the anxious mamma

sent for Jelly. Webber took this occasion to give him advice. Apparently

his case was exciting sympathy in the hotel,--at least Miss M'Gann and the

clerk had consulted about it.

"You don't get acquainted with the folks," Webber explained. "You go and

shut yourself up in your room after every meal, instead of talking to

people and being sociable like the rest of us. And you haven't formed any

church connection. That helps a man, especially in your profession. You

ought to get connected with a good church, and go to the meetings and

church sociables. Join the young people's clubs and make yourself

agreeable. It don't make any difference how much you know in this world.

What people want is a good, open-hearted fellow, who meets 'em easily and

keeps in sight."

'In different circles, different customs,' thought Sommers. 'Lindsay

frequents dinners, and I must attend church sociables!'

"You and Mrs. Sommers hold yourselves apart," Webber went on with friendly

warmth, "as if you were too good for ordinary company. Now I know you don't

really think so at all. As soon as you break the ice, you will be all

right. There was Lemenueville. He started in here the right way, took to

the Presbyterian church, the fashionable one on Parkside Avenue, and made

himself agreeable. He's built up a splendid practice, right there in that

congregation!"

"Are there any good churches left?" Sommers inquired.

"Well, I shouldn't be bashful about cutting into the Presbyterian. You're

as good as Lemenueville."

Decidedly, Sommers thought, this simple society had its own social habits.

If he did not take this well-meant advice, he must justify himself by his

own method. He made up his mind to go to the next meeting of the medical

society. His clothes were a trifle shabby, but as the meeting was in the

evening, he could go in his evening dress--drop in casually, as it were,

from an evening entertainment. That silly bit of pride, however, angered

him with himself. He went in his shabby everyday suit. The experience was

the most uncomfortable one he had had. The little groups of young doctors

did not open to him. They had almost forgotten him. Even his old colleagues

at the hospital scarcely recognized him, and when they did stop to chat

after the meeting, they examined him indifferently, as if they were making

notes. Lindsay had probably spread his story, with some imaginative

details. According to the popular tale Sommers had been "thrown down" by

Miss Hitchcock because he had mixed himself up with a married woman. Then

he had been discharged by Lindsay for the same reason, and had sunk, had

run away with the woman, and had come back to Chicago penniless. The woman

was supporting him, some one said. Enough of this pretty tale could be read

in the bearing of the men to make Sommers sorry that he had come, and

sorrier that he had come in the hope of bettering his condition. He slipped

out unobserved and walked the six miles back to the Keystone.

The fight was on; he was placed, as he had wished, without handicap; he

closed his jaws and summoned all his will to take the consequences. The

pity was that he had brought himself to make any concessions to the

obsequiousness of the world. As he passed down Michigan Avenue he overtook

a shabby laboring man, who begged of him. Sommers found out that he was a

striker, a fireman on the Illinois Central, who had lost his job by being

blacklisted after the strike. He had walked the streets since the middle of

July.

"You were a fool," Sommers remarked calmly, "to think that you and yours

could make any impression on the General Managers' Association. You have

had your lesson, and the next time you find yourself hanging on to the

world, no matter how, don't kick over the traces. There's a quarter. It's

more than I can afford to give, and I think you're a fool."

The man hesitated.

"I don't want none of your money," he growled at last. "If you had to work

for a living, you silk stocking--"

"Come, don't call me names. I am a fool, too. I am in the same boat. I'd

give a good deal for a job, any job to earn my living. I didn't say it

wasn't natural what you did, but it's against the facts, against the

facts."

The man stared, took the quarter, and dived into a cross street.

"I have lost twenty cents by walking home," Sommers reported to Alves, "but

I have realized--a few facts."

The following day, as Sommers was passing the drug store, the clerk

beckoned to him. A messenger had just come, asking for immediate help. A

woman was very ill--third house north on Parkside Avenue.

"There's your chance," the clerk grinned. "They're rich and Jelly's people.

He won't be back before two. Just show Dr. Sommers the way," he added, to

the servant who had brought the message.

Sommers had his doubts about going, for Jelly was an "eclectic" and

probably would refuse to consult with him. The matter seemed urgent,

however, and he followed the servant. The case, he found on examination,

was serious and at a critical stage. It was an affair of mismanaged

confinement. Jelly, Sommers could see, was brutally ignorant. The woman, if

she survived, would probably be an invalid for life. He did what he could

and remained in the house, waiting for Jelly, who would be sure to come.

About three the black-whiskered doctor arrived and hurried upstairs, his

sallow face scowling. Sommers explained what he had done, and suggested

that a certain operation was necessary at once to save matters at all.

Jelly interrupted him.

"See here, young feller, this is my case, and you're not wanted, nor your

advice. You can send your bill to me."

Sommers knew that he should bow and withdraw. Jelly was within his

professional rights, but the man's brutal ignorance maddened him, and he

spoke recklessly.

"A first-year interne could tell you the same thing. The woman has been

nearly killed, if you want to know the truth. And I don't know that I shall

leave you to complete the job."

"What are you going to do about it?" Jelly asked insolently.

Sommers paused. He was clearly in the wrong, professionally. There was not

a well-trained doctor in Chicago who would abet him in his act. But it

mattered little; his own desperate situation gave him a kind of freedom.

"I shall present the facts to her husband." He found the husband in the

room below and stated the case.

"What I am doing," he concluded, "is entirely unprofessional, but it's the

thing I should want any man to do for me. You needn't take my word, but

call up either Dr. Fitz or Dr. Sloper by telephone, and ask one of them to

come out at once. They are the best surgeons in the city. As to Dr. Jelly,

I prefer not to say anything, and I don't expect you to take my advice."

The husband was anxious and worried. All doctors seemed to him a game of

chance.

"She's always hankered after the Science people; but she kind of took to

Jelly, and our friends think an awful sight of him," he remarked

doubtfully.

"You are taking tremendous risks," Sommers urged.

"Well, I'll see Jelly."

Sommers waited until the man returned.

"Well, I guess it isn't so bad as you think. We'll wait a day or two, I

guess. I am obliged to you for your kindness."

Sommers made no reply and left the house. The only result of this affair

was that he found it disagreeable to call at the drug store. Besides, it

was useless; no practice had come from his assiduous attendance. Finally,

he saw one morning that his modest sign no longer waved from the pendent

ladder. He did not take the trouble to inquire why it had been removed.

* * * * *

The winter was wearing on,--the slow, penurious winter of exhaustion after

the acute fury of the spring and summer. These were hard times in earnest,

not with the excitement of failures and bankruptcies, but with the steady

grind of low wages, no employment, and general depression. The papers said

things would be better in the fall, when the republican candidates would be

elected. But it was a long time to wait for activity. Meanwhile the streets

down town were filled with hungry forms, the remnant of the World's Fair

mob swelled by the unemployed strikers. The city was poor, too. The school

funds were inadequate. The usual increase in salary could not be paid.

Instead, the board resolved to reduce the pay of the grade teachers, who

had the lowest wages. Alves received but forty dollars a month now, and had

been refused a night school for which she had applied.

When Alves timidly suggested that it would be cheaper for them to rent one

of the many empty cottages in the vast region south of the parks, he put

her off. That would be too much like the experience in the Ninety-first

Street cottage, and he fought against the idea. There were a few dollars

still left from the sale of his horse, his microscope, and other

possessions. A few dollars each week came in from some work he had found in

preparing plates for a professor of anatomy in the new university. Some

weeks he could almost pay his board without drawing from his capital. They

would hang on in this way.

Not that the Keystone Hotel was in itself very attractive. In spite of

Webber's advice, he and Alves found it hard to mix with the other "guests."

After they had been in the house several months, he fancied that the people

avoided them. The harmless trio left their table, and in place of them came

a succession of transient boarders. For a time he thought he was

oversensitive, inclined to suspect his neighbors of avoiding him. But one

evening Alves came into their room, where he was working at the anatomy

plates, her face flushed with an unusual distress.

"What reason have they?" Sommers asked, going directly to the heart of the

matter.

"None--unless Miss M'Gann has been talking carelessly. And she knows

nothing--"

"No, she knows nothing," the doctor replied, looking at Alves intently.

"And there is nothing to be known."

"We think not!" she exclaimed. "I am not so sure that an unpleasant story

couldn't be made."

"What do you mean?" he asked sharply.

"Why, the--my husband's condition--the death, our going away so quickly

afterward. There are elements there of a good-sized boarding-house

scandal."

"Yes, there are elements!" Sommers admitted, putting away his work. "We may

as well leave as soon as we can. You are right; we had better fight it out

alone."

"Yes, _alone_," she responded, with a glad note in her voice.

The next afternoon they looked at the cheap, flimsy cottages they passed in

their walk with more interest than ever. The only places they could afford

were far removed from the populous districts where patients live. They

would have to pay for heat, too, and though they could starve the body,

they could not freeze. So the matter was put off for the present, and they

drew into themselves more and more, leaving the Keystone people to chatter

as they willed.

CHAPTER IV

The great strike was fast being forgotten, as a cause argued and lost or

won as you looked at it. A commission was holding many meetings these

months, and going over the debris, taking voluminous testimony. It was said

to be prejudiced in favor of the strikers, but the victors cared little.

Its findings in the shape of a report would lie on the table in the halls

of Congress, neither house being so constituted that it could make any

political capital by taking the matter up. The Association of General

Managers had lapsed. It had been the banded association of power against

the banded association of labor. It had fought successfully. The issue was

proved: the strike was crushed, with the help of marshals, city police, and

troops. And with it the victors prophesied was crushed the sympathetic

strike forever. It had cost, to be sure, many millions in all, but it paid.

It was such a tremendous example!

The statistical side of passion was interesting and ironical. It gave the

matter the air of a family row: the next day the heads of the factions were

sitting down to make the inventory of broken glass, ruined furniture and

provisions. A principle had been preserved, people said, talking largely

and superficially, but the principle seemed elusive. The laborers, too, had

lost, more heavily in proportion to their ability to bear--millions in

wages, not to reckon the loss of manhood to those who were blacklisted for

participation in the fracas.

The Commission went into the Pullman affair, quite unwarrantedly, according

to the corporation, which was comfortably out of the mess. And there were

minor disputes over the injunctions against Debs, and a languid stirring of

dead bones in the newspapers. Every one was tired of the affair and willing

to let it drop, with its lesson for this party or that. Sommers, having

nothing more urgent to do, attended the meetings of the Commission and

listened eagerly to get some final truth about the matter. But it seemed to

him that both sides merely scratched the surface of the argument, and were

content with the superficial "lessons" thereby gained. What good could come

of the hearings? The country would get out of its doldrums sooner or later;

employment would be easy to find; wages would rise, a little; every one

would have his bellyful; and then, some years later, another wave of

depression would set in, the bitter strife would be repeated, both parties

unlessoned by this or any other experience. The world, at least this

civilization, belonged to the strong; the poor would remain weak and

foolish and treacherous.

It was whispered about on the first days of the hearing that an official of

the American Railway Union would take the stand and make disclosures. He

would show how the strike was finally ended, not by the law and the sword,

but by money. The official's name was Dresser, Sommers heard, and every day

he looked for him to take the stand. But the rumor passed away, and no

"revelations" by Dresser or any one else who knew the inner facts appeared.

Sommers learned them unexpectedly after the Commission had taken itself to

Washington to prepare its report.

It happened one evening at the Keystone Hotel. He had come in after dinner

and found Miss M'Gann in his room, calling upon Alves. She had brought

Dresser with her. He was well dressed, his hair was cut to a conventional

length, and he carried a silk hat--altogether a different person from the

slouchy, beery man who had grumbled at McNamara and Hills. Sommers's glance

must have said something of this, for Dresser began to explain,

"I've given up agitating--doesn't go, what with the courts granting

injunctions and the railroads throwing money about."

"Do you mean _that_ was why the strike collapsed?" Sommers asked

eagerly.

"Sure!" Dresser thundered heartily. "_I_ KNOW IT. Do you know where

the leaders are? Well, one of 'em has got the finest little ranch you ever

saw out in Montana. And another," he winked slowly and put his hand to his

pocket. "They were poor men when the strike began, and they aren't working

now for any dollar and a half a day."

"I don't believe it," Sommers replied promptly. "The managers had the

affair in hand, anyway."

Dresser protested loudly, and irritated by the doctor's scepticism began to

leak, to tell things he had seen, to show a little of the inside of the

labor counsels. He had evidently seen more than Sommers had believed

possible, and his active, ferreting mind had imagined still more. The two

women listened open-mouthed to his story of the strike, and feeling where

the sympathy lay Dresser spoke largely to them.

"You seem to have found something to do?" Sommers remarked significantly at

the close.

"I'm assistant editor of a paper," Dresser explained.

Sommers laughed. "Herr Most's old sheet?"

"_The Investor's Monthly_."

Sommers shrieked with laughter, and patted Dresser on the back. "Sammy,

you're a great man! I have never done you justice."

"The management has been changed," Dresser said gruffly. "They wanted a man

of education, not a mere reporter."

"Who owns it?"

"R. G. Carson has the controlling interest."

Sommers relapsed into laughter. "So this is your ranch in Montana?"

Dresser rose with an offended air.

"Oh! sit down, man. I am complimenting you. Haven't you a place as office

boy, compositor, or something for a needy friend?"

"I don't see what you're so funny about, doctor," Miss M'Gann expostulated.

"Spoiling the Philistines, you see," Dresser added, making an effort to

chime in with Sommers's irony.

They talked late. Webber, the stylish young clerk, dropped in, and the

conversation roamed over the universal topics of the day,--the hard times,

the position of the employee in a corporation, etc. The clerk in the Baking

Powder Trust was inclined to philosophical acceptance of present

conditions. Abstractly there might not be much justice for the poor, but

here in the new part of the country every man had his chance to be on top,

to become a capitalist. There was the manager of the B. P. T. He had begun

on ten dollars a week, but he had bided his time, bought stock in the

little mill where he started, and now that the consolidation was arranged,

he was in a fair way to become a rich man. To be rich, to have put yourself

outside the ranks of the precarious classes--that was the clerk's ambition.

Dresser was doubtful whether the good, energetic young clerk could repeat

in these days the experience of the manager of the B. P. T. The two women

took part in the argument, and finally Alves summed the matter up:

"If we could, all of us would be rich, and then we should feel like the

rich, and want to keep what we could. But as we have to labor hard for a

little joy, it's best to get the joy, as much as you can, and not fret over

the work."

* * * * *

Dresser found the Keystone so agreeable that he came there to live. The

doctor and Alves and Miss M'Gann with Webber and Dresser had a table to

themselves in the stuffy basement dining room. Miss M'Gann accepted

impartially the advances of both young men, attending church with one and

the theatre with the other. The five spent many evenings in Sommers's room,

discussing aimlessly social questions, while the doctor worked at the

anatomy slides. Dresser's debauch of revolt seemed to have sobered him. He

bought himself many new clothes, and as time went on, picked up social

relations in different parts of the city. He still talked sentimental

socialism, chiefly for the benefit of Alves, who regarded him as an

authority on economic questions, and whose instinctive sympathies were

touched by his theories. As the clothes became more numerous and better in

quality, he talked less about socialism and more about society. _The

Investor's Monthly_ interested him: he spoke of becoming its managing

editor, hinting at his influence with Carson; and when the doctor jeered,

Dresser offered him a position on the paper. Webber was openly envious of

Dresser's prosperity, which he set down to the account of a superior

education that had been denied him. When Dresser began to mention casually

the names of people whom the Baking Powder clerk had read about in the

newspapers, this envy increased. Dresser's evolution impressed Miss M'Gann

also; Sommers noticed that she was readier to accept Dresser's

condescending attentions than the devotion of the plodding clerk. Webber

was simple and vulgar, but he was sincere and good-hearted. He was striving

to get together a little money for a home. Sommers told Alves that she

should influence Miss M'Gann to accept the clerk, instead of beguiling

herself with the words of a talker.

"You are unfair to Sammy," Alves had replied, with some warmth. "She would

do very well to marry him; he is her superior."

Sommers gave Alves a look that troubled her, and said:

"Because the fellow is settling into an amiable Philistine? He will never

marry Jane M'Gann; it would hurt his prospects."

A few days later Dresser mentioned that he had met Miss Laura Lindsay, "the

daughter of your former partner, I believe."

"My former boss," Sommers corrected, looking at Alves with an amused smile.

He listened in ironical glee to Dresser's description of little Laura

Lindsay. Dresser thought her "a very advanced young woman, who had ideas, a

wide reader." She had asked him about Dr. Sommers and Alves.

"You had better not appear too intimate with us," Sommers advised. "Her

papa doesn't exactly approve of me."

When he had left the room, Sommers added: "He will marry Laura Lindsay. An

ideal match. He won't remain long in the Keystone, and I am glad of it. The

converted Philistine is the worst type!"

Alves held her own opinion. She should be sorry to lose Dresser from their

little circle. She permitted herself one remark,--"He is so much of a

gentleman."

"A gentleman!" Sommers exclaimed scornfully. "Are any of us gentlemen in

the American sense?"

It seemed probable, however, that Sommers and Alves would be the first to

leave the Keystone. Although the sultry June weather made them think

longingly of the idyllic days at Perota Lake, the journey to Wisconsin was

out of the question. Struggle as he might, Sommers was being forced to

realize that they must give up their modest position in the Keystone. And

one day the proprietor hinted broadly that she had other uses for their

room. They had been tolerated up to this point; but society, even the

Keystone form of society, found them too irregular for permanent

acceptance. And now it was impossible to move away from Chicago. They had

no money for the venture.

CHAPTER V

A change, even so small a change as from one boarding-house to another, is

caused by some definite force, some shock that overcomes the power of

inertia. The eleventh of June Sommers had gone to meet Alves at their usual

rendezvous in the thicket at the rear of Blue Grass Avenue. The sultry

afternoon had made him drowse, and when he awoke Alves was standing over

him, her hands tightening nervously.

"They have dropped you," he said, reading the news in her face.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak, until they had plodded down the

avenue for several blocks.

"Why did they do it!" she murmured rebelliously. "They gave me no reason.

It isn't because I teach badly. It isn't because of the married teachers'

talk: there are hundreds of married women in the schools who haven't been

dismissed."

"Well," Sommers responded soothingly, "I shouldn't hunt for a rational

reason for their act. They have merely hastened the step we were going to

take some day."

"What shall we do!" she gasped, overpowered by the visions her practical

mind conjured up. "We could just get along with my forty dollars, and

now--Oh! I've been like a weight about your neck. I have cut you off from

your world, the big world where successes are made!"

Her large eyes filled with pleading tears. She was generously minded to

take the burden of their fate upon herself.

"You seem to have been making most of the success," he responded lightly.

"The big world where Dresser is succeeding doesn't call me very hard. And

it's a pretty bad thing if a sound-bodied, well-educated doctor can't

support himself and a woman in this world," he added more gloomily. "I

_will_, if I have to get a job over there."

He jerked his head in the direction of the South Chicago steel works. But

the heavens seemed to repel his boast, for the usual cloud of smoke and

flame that hung night and day above the blast furnaces was replaced by a

brilliant, hard blue sky. The works were shut down. They had reached the

end of Blue Grass Avenue at the south line of the park. It was a spot of

semi-sylvan wildness that they were fond of. The carefully platted avenues

and streets were mere lines in the rough turf. A little runnel of water,

half ditch, half sewer, flowed beside the old plank walk.

They sat down to plan, to contrive in some way to get a shelter over their

heads. From the plank walk where they sat nothing was visible for blocks

around except a little stucco Grecian temple, one of those decorative

contrivances that served as ticket booths or soda-water booths at the

World's Fair. This one, larger and more pretentious than its fellows, had

been bought by some speculator, wheeled outside the park, and dumped on a

sandy knoll in this empty lot. It had an ambitious little portico with a

cluster of columns. One of them was torn open, revealing the simple anatomy

of its construction. The temple looked as if it might contain two rooms of

generous size. Strange little product of some western architect's

remembering pencil, it brought an air of distant shores and times, standing

here in the waste of the prairie, above the bright blue waters of the lake!

"That's the place for us!" Sommers exclaimed, gazing intently at the

time-stained temple. Alves looked at the building sceptically, for

woman-wise she conceived of only conventional abiding-places. But she

followed him submissively into the little stucco portico, and when he spoke

buoyantly of the possibilities of the place, of the superb view of park and

lake, her worn face gained color once more. The imitation bronze doors were

ajar, and they made a thorough examination of the interior. With a few

laths, some canvas, and a good cleaning, the place could be made

possible--for the summer.

"That's four months," Sommers remarked. "And that is a long time for poor

people to look ahead."

The same evening they hunted up the owner and made their terms, and the

next day prepared to move from the Keystone. They had some regrets over

leaving the Keystone Hotel. The last month Sommers had had one or two

cases. The episode with Dr. Jelly had finally redounded to his credit, for

the woman had died at Jelly's private hospital, and the nurse who had

overheard the dispute between the two doctors had gossiped. The first

swallow of success, however, was not enough to warrant any expenditure for

office rent. He must make some arrangement with a drug store near the

temple, where he could receive calls.

They invited Miss M'Gann, Webber, and Dresser to take supper with them

their first Sunday in the temple. Alves had arranged a little kitchen in

one corner of the smaller of the two rooms. This room received the pompous

name of "the laboratory"; the other room--a kind of hall into which the

portico opened--was bedroom and general living room.

"We will throw open the temple doors," she explained to Sommers, "and have

supper on the portico between the pillars."

From that point the lake could be seen, a steely blue line on the horizon.

But it rained on Sunday, and the visitors arrived so bedraggled by the

storm that their feast seemed doomed. Sommers produced a bottle of Scotch

whiskey, and they warmed and cheered themselves. The Baking Powder clerk

grew loquacious first. The Baking Powder Trust was to be reorganized, he

told them, as soon as good times came. There was to be a new trust, twice

as big as the present one, capitalized for millions and millions. The

chemist of the concern had told him that Carson was engineering the affair.

The stock of the present company would be worth double, perhaps three times

as much as at present. He confided the fact that he had put all his savings

into the stock of the present company at its greatly depressed present

value. The company was not paying dividends; he had bought at forty. His

air of financial success, of shrewd speculative insight impressed them all.

Miss M'Gann evidently knew all about this; she smiled as if the world were

a pretty good place.

Dresser, too, had his boast. He had finally been given charge of _The

Investor's Monthly_, which had absorbed the _La Salle Street

Indicator_. The policy of the papers was to be changed: they were to be

conservative, but not critical, and conducted in the interests of capital

which was building up the country after its financial panic.

"In the prospective return of good times many new interests will seek

public patronage," he explained to the company. "A new era will dawn--the

era of business combinations, of gigantic cooperative enterprises."

"Vulgarly known as trusts," Sommers interjected. "And your paper is going

to boom Carson's companies. Well, well, that's pretty good for Debs's

ex-secretary!"

"You must understand that people of education change their views," Dresser

retorted uncomfortably. "I have had a long talk with Mr. Carson about the

policy of the paper. He doesn't wish to interfere, not in the least, merely

advises on a general line of policy agreeable to him and his associates,

who, I may say, are very heavily engaged in Chicago enterprises. We are

interested at present in the traction companies which are seeking

extensions of their franchises."

"He's joined the silk-hat brigade," Webber scoffed. "The Keystone ain't

good enough for him any longer. He's going north to be within call of his

friends."

"How is Laura Lindsay?" Sommers asked.

"I saw her last night, and I met Mr. Brome Porter and young Polot, too."

"Did you tell 'em where you were going to-night?" Sommers asked, rather

bitterly.

"Say, Howard," Dresser replied, pushing back his chair and resting one arm

confidentially on the table, "you must have been a great chump. You had a

soft thing of it at Lindsay's--"

"I suppose Miss Laura has discussed it with you. I didn't like the set

quite as well as you seem to."

"Well, it's no use making enemies, when you can have 'em for friends just

as easily as not," Dresser retorted, with an air of superior worldly

wisdom.

* * * * *

Miss M'Gann had drawn Alves out of the talk among the men, and they sat by

themselves on the lower step of the temple.

"I saw Dr. Leonard the other day at a meeting of the Cymbals Society," Miss

M'Gann told Alves. "He asked where you were."

"I hope he'll come to see us."

Miss M'Gann looked at the men and lowered her voice.

"I think he knows what was the reason for dismissing you. He wouldn't tell

me; but if I see him again, I am going to get it out of him."

"Why, what did he say?" Alves asked.

"Nothing much. Only he asked very particularly about you and the doctor;

about what kind of man the doctor was, and just when you were married and

where."

Alves moved nervously.

"Where were you married, Alves?" Miss M'Gann pursued anxiously. "Here or in

Wisconsin? You were so dreadfully queer about it all."

"We were not married," Alves replied, in a quiet voice, "at least not in a

church, with a ceremony and all that. I didn't want it, and we didn't think

it necessary."

The younger woman gasped.

"Alves! I'd never think it of you--you two so quiet and so like ordinary

folks!"

"We are like other people, only we aren't tied to each other by a halter.

He can go when he likes," Alves retorted. "I want him to go," she added

fiercely, "just as soon as he finds he doesn't love me enough."

"Um," Miss M'Gann answered. "Lucky you haven't any children. That's where

the rub comes."

Alves straightened herself with a little haughtiness.

"It wouldn't make any difference to _him_. He would do right by them

if he had them."

"I don't see how he could, at present," Miss M'Gann proceeded, with severe

logic. "It's all very well so long as things go easily. _But_ I had

rather have the ring."

After a little silence, she continued: "It must have had something to do

with that, I guess, your being dropped. Did any one know?"

"I never said anything about it," Alves replied coldly. She would have

liked to add an entreaty, for his sake, that Miss M'Gann keep this secret.

But her pride prevented her.

"That Ducharme woman must have been talking," Miss M'Gann proceeded

acutely. "I saw her around last year, looking seedy, as if she drank."

"Possibly," Alves assented, "though she didn't know anything."

"Well, my advice to you is to make that right just as soon as ever you can.

He's willing?"

"I should never let him," Alves exclaimed vehemently; "least of all now!"

"Well, I suppose folks must live their own way. But you don't catch me

taking a man in that easy fashion, so that he can get out when he wants

to."

Alves tried to change the subject, but her admission had so startled her

friend that the usual gossip was impossible. When the visitors rose to go,

Sommers proposed showing them the way back by a wagon road that led to the

improved part of the park, across the deserted Court of Honor. He and Alves

accompanied them as far as the northern limits of the park. The rain clouds

were gone, and a cold, clear sky had taken their place. On their return

along the esplanade beside the lake Sommers chatted in an easy frame of

mind.

"I guess Webber will get Miss M'Gann, and I am glad of it. Dresser wouldn't

do anything more than fool with her. He will get on now; those promoters

and capitalists are finding him a clever tool. They will keep him steady.

It isn't the fear of the Lord that will keep men like Dresser in line; it's

the fear of their neighbors' opinions and of an empty stomach!"

"Don't you--wish you had a chance like his?" Alves asked timidly.

The young doctor laughed aloud.

"You don't know me yet. It isn't that I don't want to. It's because I

_can't_--no glory to me. But, Alves, we are all right. I can get

enough in one way or another to keep the temple over our heads, and I can

work now. I have something in view; it won't be just chasing about the

streets."

This reference to his own work both pleased and saddened her. The

biologist, who had befriended him before, had given him some work in his

laboratory. The work was not well paid, but the association with the

students, which aroused his intellectual appetites, had given him a new

spur. What saddened her was that it was all entirely beyond her sphere of

influence, of usefulness to him. Living, as they should, in an almost

savage isolation, she dreaded his absorption in anything apart from her.

There were other reliefs, consolations, and hopes than those she held. He

was slipping away into a silent region--man's peculiar world--of thought

and dream and speculation, an intangible, ideal, remote, unloving world.

Some day she would knock at his heart and find it occupied.

She leaned heavily upon his arm, loath to have his footsteps so firm, his

head so erect, his eyes so far away, his voice so silent.

"You are not sorry," she murmured, ashamed of iterating this foolish

question, that demanded one answer--an answer never wholly satisfying.

"For what?" he asked, interrupting his thought and glancing out into the

black waters.

"For me--for all this fight for life alone away from the people who are

succeeding, for grinding along unrecognized--"

He stopped and kissed her gently, striving to quiet her excited mood.

"For if you did, I would put myself _there_, in the water beside the

piers," she cried.

He smiled at her passionate threat, as at the words of an emotional child.

Underneath his gentleness, his kindness, his loving ways, she felt this

trace of scepticism. He did not bother his head with what was beginning to

wring her soul. In a few minutes she spoke again:

"Miss M'Gann thinks Dr. Leonard knows why I was dismissed. Mrs. Ducharme,

she said, had been hanging about the Everglade School district. I remember

having seen her several times."

Sommers dropped her arm and strode forward.

"What did _she_ know?" he asked harshly.

"I don't see how she could know anything except suspicions. You know she

was queer and a great talker."

Sommers's face worked. He was about to speak when Alves went on.

"I told Jane we had never been married; she asked me _where_ we were

married. I suppose I ought not to have told her. I didn't want to."

"It is of no importance," Sommers answered. "It's our own business, anyway;

but it makes no difference as we live now whether she knows it or not."

"I am glad you feel so," Alves replied with relief. Then in a few moments

she added, "I was afraid she might tell people; it might get to your old

friends."

Sommers replied in the same even tone,

"Well? and what can they do about it?"

"I wonder what a woman like Miss Hitchcock thinks about such

matters,--about us, if she knew."

"She would not think. She would avoid the matter as she would a case of

drunkenness."

The arm within his trembled. She said nothing more until they reached the

little portico. She paused there, leaning against one of the crumbling

columns, looking out into the night. From the distance beyond the great

pier that stretched into the lake came the red glare of the lighthouse.

Sommers had gone in and was preparing the room for the night. She could

hear him whistle as he walked to and fro, carrying out dishes, arranging

the chairs and tables. He maintained an even mood, took the accidents of

his fate as calmly as one could, and was always gentle. He had some well of

happiness hidden to her. She went in, took off her cloak, and prepared to

undress. His clothes, the nicety he preserved about personal matters, had

taught her much of him. Her clothes had always been common, of the

wholesale world; he had had his luxuries, his refinements, his individual

tastes. Gradually, as his more expensive clothes had worn out, he had

replaced them with machine-made articles of cheap manufacture. His

belongings were like hers now. She was bringing him a little closer to her

in such ways,--food and lodging and raiment. But not in thought and being.

Behind those deep-set eyes passed a world of thought, of conjecture and

theory and belief, that rarely expressed itself outwardly.

She let down her hair and began to take off her plain, unlovely clothes.

Thus she approached the common human basis, the nakedness and simplicity of

life. Her eyes lingered thoughtfully on her body; she touched herself as

she unbuttoned, unlaced, cast aside the armor of convention and daily life.

"Howard!" she cried imperiously. He stopped his whistling and looked at her

and smiled.

"Do you like me, Howard?" She blushed at the childishness of her eager

question. But she demanded the expected answer with the insistence of

unsatisfied love. And when he failed to reply at the moment, surprised by

her mood, she knelt by his chair and grasped his knees.

"Isn't it _all_ that you want, just the temple and me? Am I not enough

to make up for the world and success and pleasure? I can make you love, and

when you love you do not think."

She rose and faced him with gleaming eyes, stretching out her bare arms,

deploying her whole woman's strength and beauty in mute appeal.

"Why do you ask?" he demanded, troubled.

"O Howard, you do not feel the mist that creeps in between us, though we

are close together. Sometimes I think you are farther away than even in the

old times, when I first saw you at the hospital. You think, think, and I

can't get at your thought. Why is it so?"

He yielded to her entreating arms and eyes, as he had so often before in

like moments, when the need to put aside the consciousness of existence, of

the world as it appears, had come to one of them or both. Yet it seemed

that this love was like some potent spirit, whose irresistible power waned,

sank, each time demanding a larger draught of joy, a more delirious tension

of the nerves.

"Nothing makes any difference," he answered. "I was born and lived for

this."

She had charmed the evil mood, and for the time her heart was satisfied.

But when she lay by his side at night her arm stole about his, as if to

clutch him, fearful lest in the empty reaches of sleep he might escape,

lest his errant man's thoughts and desires might abandon her for the usual

avenues of life. Long after he had fallen into the regular sleep of night,

she lay awake by his side, her eyes glittering with passion and defeat.

Even in these limits of life, when the whole world was banned, it seemed

impossible to hold undisturbed one's joy. In the loneliest island of the

human sea it would be thus--division and ultimate isolation.

CHAPTER VI

The summer burned itself out, and the autumn winds pierced the rotten staff

walls of the temple. They were no nearer to moving into better quarters

than they had been in the spring. The days had come when there was little

food, and the last precarious dollar had been spent. They lived on the edge

of defeat, and such an existence to earnest people is sombre.

Finally the tide turned. The manager of a large manufacturing plant in

Burnside, one of the little factory hamlets south of the city, asked

Sommers to take charge of an epidemic of typhoid that had broken out among

the operatives. The regular physician of the corporation had proved

incompetent, and the annual visitation of the disease threatened to be

unprecedented. Sommers spent his days and nights in Burnside for several

weeks. When he had time to think, he wondered why the manager employed him.

If the Hitchcocks had been in the city, he should have suspected that they

had a hand in the matter. But he remembered having seen in a newspaper some

months before that the Hitchcocks were leaving for Europe. He did not

trouble himself greatly, however, over the source of the gift, thankful

enough for the respite, and for the chance of renewed activity. When the

time for settlement came, the manager liberally increased the amount of the

doctor's modest bill. The check for three hundred dollars seemed a very

substantial bulwark against distress, and the promise of the company's

medical work after the new year was even more hopeful. Alves was eager to

move from the dilapidated temple to an apartment where Sommers could have a

suitable office. But Sommers objected, partly from prudential reasons,

partly from fear that unpleasant things might happen to Alves, should they

come again where people could talk. And then, to Alves's perplexity, he

developed strange ideas about money getting.

"The physician should receive the very minimum of pay possible for his

existence," he told her once, when she talked of the increase in his

income. "He works in the dark, and he is in luck if he happens to do any

good. In waging his battle with mysterious nature, he only unfits himself

by seeking gain. In the same way, to a lesser degree, the law and the

ministry should not be gainful professions. When the question of personal

gain and advancement comes in, the frail human being succumbs to

selfishness, and then to error. Like the artist, the doctor, the lawyer,

the clergyman, the teacher should be content to minister to human needs.

The professions should be great monastic orders, reserved for those who

have the strength to renounce ease and luxury and power."

The only tangible comfort that Alves derived from this unusually didactic

speech was the assurance that he would not be drawn away from her. She

bowed to his conception, and sought to help him. While he was attending the

cases in Burnside, she did some work as nurse. Beginning casually to help

on an urgent case, she went on to other cases, training herself, learning

to take his place wherever she could. She thought to come closer to him in

this way, but she suspected that he understood her motive, that her work

did not seem quite sincere to him. She was looking for payment in love.

When she was not engaged in nursing, she was more often alone than she had

been the year before. The Keystone people visited the temple rarely. Miss

M'Gann seemed always a little constrained, when Alves met her, and Dresser

was living on the North Side. One December morning, when Alves was alone,

she noticed a carriage coming slowly down the unfinished avenue. It stopped

a little distance from the temple, and a woman got out. After giving the

coachman an order, she took the foot-path that Alves and Sommers had worn.

Alves came out to the portico to meet the stranger, who hastened her

leisurely pace on catching sight of a person in the temple. At the foot of

the rickety steps the stranger stopped.

"You are Miss Hitchcock," Alves said quickly. "Won't you come in?"

"How did you know!" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed, and added without waiting for

a reply: "Let's sit here on the steps--the sun is so warm and nice. I've

been a long time in coming to see you," her voice rippled on cordially,

while Alves watched her. "But we've been out of the city so much of the

time,--California, North Carolina, and abroad."

Alves nodded. The young woman's ease of manner and luxurious dress

intimidated her. She sat down on the step above Miss Hitchcock, and she had

the air of examining the other woman without committing herself.

"But, how did you know me?" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed, with a little laugh

of satisfaction.

"Dr. Sommers has told me about you."

"Did he! He didn't tell any one of his marriage." The bluntness of the

speech was relieved by the confidential manner in which Miss Hitchcock

leaned forward to the other woman.

"It was sudden," Alves replied coolly.

"I know! But _we_, my father and I, had a right to feel hurt. We knew

him so well, and we should have liked to know you."

"Thank you."

"But we had no cards--you disappeared--hid yourselves--and you turn up in

this unique place! It's only by chance that I've found you now."

"We didn't send out cards. We are such simple people that we don't

expect--"

Miss Hitchcock blushed at the challenge, and interrupted to save the speech

from its final ungraciousness.

"Of course, but we are different. We have always been so interested in Dr.

Sommers. He was such a promising man."

Alves made no effort to reply. She resented Miss Hitchcock's efforts to

reach her, and withdrew into her shell. This young woman with her attendant

brougham belonged to the world that she liked to feel Sommers had renounced

for her sake. She disliked the world for that reason.

"Is he doing well?" Miss Hitchcock asked bluntly. "He was so brilliant in

his studies and at the hospital! I was sorry that he left, that he felt he

ought to start for himself. He had a good many theories and ideals. We

didn't agree,"--she smiled winningly at the grave woman, "but I have had

time to understand somewhat--only I couldn't, I can't believe that my

father and his friends are _all_ wrong." Miss Hitchcock rushed on

heedlessly, to Alves's perplexity; she seemed desperately eager to

establish some kind of possible understanding between them. But this cold,

mature woman, in her plain dress, repelled her. She could not prevent

herself from thinking thoughts that were unworthy of her.

Why had he done it! What had this woman to give that the women of her set

could not equal and more than equal? The atmosphere of her brougham, of her

costly gown and pretty hat contrasted harshly with the dingy temple and

dead weeds of the waste land. Dr. Lindsay had said much, and insinuated

more, about the entanglement that had ruined the promising young surgeon.

Was it this woman's sensual power--she rejected the idea on the instant.

Dr. Sommers was not that kind, in spite of anything that Lindsay might say.

She could not understand it--his devotion to this woman, his giving up his

chances. It was all a part of some scheme beyond her power to grasp fully.

"I want to know you," she said at last, after an awkward silence. "Won't

you let me?"

Alves leaned slightly forward, and spoke slowly.

"You are very kind, but I don't see any good in it. We don't belong to your

world, and you would show him all the time what he has to get along

without. Not that he wouldn't do it again," she added proudly, noticing the

girl's lowered gaze. "I don't think that he would like to have me say that

he had given up anything. But he's got his way to make, _here_, and it

is harder work than you imagine."

"I don't see, then, why you refuse to let me--his old friends--help him."

Miss Hitchcock spoke impatiently. She was beginning to feel angry with this

impassive woman, who was probably ignorant of the havoc she had done.

"He doesn't want any help!" Alves retorted. "We are not starving now.

_I_ can help him. I will help him and be enough for him. He gave it up

for me."

"Can you get him friends and practice?" Miss Hitchcock asked sharply. "Can

you make it possible for him to do the best work, and stand high in his

profession? Will you help him to the place where he can make the most of

himself, and not sell his soul for bread?"

These questions fell like taunts upon the silent woman. She seemed to feel

beneath them the boast, 'I could have done all that, and much more!' These

words were like the rest of this fashionable young woman--her carriage, her

clothes, her big house, her freshness of person--all that she did not have.

Alves retorted:

"He won't let any one push him, I know. What he wants, he will be glad to

get by himself. And," she added passionately, "I will help him. If I stand

in his way,--and he can't do what he wants to do,--I will take myself out

of his life."

Boast for boast, and the older woman's passionate words seemed to ring the

stronger. They looked at each other defiantly. At last Miss Hitchcock

pulled her wrap about her, and rose to go. A final wave of regret, of

yearning not to be thrust out in this way from these lives made her say:

"I am sorry you couldn't have let me be a little friendly. I wanted to have

you to dinner,"--she smiled at the dull practicality of her idea; "but I

suppose you won't come."

"He may do as he likes," Alves said, in a more conciliatory manner.

"But he can't!" the girl smiled back good-humoredly. "One doesn't go to

dinner without one's wife, especially when one's wife doesn't like the

hostess."

Alves laughed at the frank speech. She might have liked this eager, fresh

young woman, who took things with such dash and buoyancy, if she could have

known her on even terms. As they stood facing each other, a challenge on

Miss Hitchcock's face, Alves noticed the doctor's figure in the road

beyond.

"I think that is Dr. Sommers coming. He can answer your question for

himself."

Sommers was approaching from Blue Grass Avenue; his eyes were turned in the

direction of the lake, so that he did not see the women on the steps of the

temple until Miss Hitchcock turned and held out her hand. Then he started,

perceptibly enough to make Alves's lips tighten once more.

"I have been calling on your wife," Miss Hitchcock explained, talking fast.

"But she doesn't like me, won't ask me to come again."

"We shall be very glad to see you," Alves interposed quickly. "But I make

no calls."

Miss Hitchcock declined to sit down, and Sommers accompanied her to the

waiting carriage. Alves watched them. Miss Hitchcock seemed to be talking

very fast, and her head was turned toward his face.

Miss Hitchcock was answering Sommers's inquiries about Colonel and Mrs.

Hitchcock. The latter had died over a year ago, and Colonel Hitchcock had

been in poor health.

"He has some bitter disappointments," Miss Hitchcock said gravely. "His

useful, honorable, unselfish life is closing sadly. We have travelled a

good deal; we have just come back from Algiers. It is good to be back in

Chicago!"

"I have noticed that the Chicagoan repeats that formula, no matter how much

he roams. He seems to travel merely to experience the bliss of returning to

the human factory."

"It isn't a factory to me. It is home," she replied simply.

"So it is to us, now. We are earning our right to stay within its gates."

"Are things--going better?" Miss Hitchcock asked hesitatingly. She scanned

the doctor's face, as if to read in the grave lines the record of the year.

"We are alive and clothed," he replied tranquilly.

"What a frightful way to put it!"

"The lowest terms--and not very different from others." His eye rested upon

the glossy horses and the spotless victoria.

"No!" Miss Hitchcock answered dispiritedly. "But I _won't_ think of it

that way. I am coming to see you again, if I may?"

"You were very good to look us up," he answered evasively.

They lingered, speaking slowly, as if loath to part in this superficial

manner. He told her of his employment in Burnside, and remarked slowly,

"I wonder who could have put the manager on my track."

"I wonder," she repeated, looking past him.

"You see I didn't start quite at the scratch," he added, his face relaxing

into a smile.

"I shouldn't quarrel about _that_ handicap."

"No, I am not as ready to quarrel as I once was."

Her face had the eager expression of interest and vitality that he

remembered. She seemed to have something more that she wanted to say, but

she simply held out her hand, with a warm "good-by," and stepped into the

carriage.

When he returned to the temple, Alves was busy getting their dinner. She

paused, and glancing at Sommers remarked, "How beautiful she is!"

"She is a good woman. She ought to marry," he responded.

"Why?"

"Because she is so sound and fine at bottom."

"You were glad to see her again."

"Did I show it unduly?"

"I knew you were, and she knows it."

When he looked at her a few moments later, her eyes were moist.

CHAPTER VII

"Pshaw! pshaw!" Dr. Leonard exclaimed, in a coaxing tone. "I'm

disappointed, Alves. 'Tain't natural. I mean to see _him_ and show him

what harm it is."

"No, no, don't speak of it again, at least to _him_," Alves pleaded

anxiously. "He would do that, or anything, if he thought I wanted it. I

_don't_ want it, I tell you; I'm happier as it is."

"S'pose there are children?" the old dentist asked, in a convincing tone.

"I hope there never will be."

"Now, that shows how wrong you are, how fussed up--why, what's marriage for

if it ain't for children? I guess I've had as hard a struggle as most to

keep head to the tide, but I couldn't spare the children. Now, I'll get our

minister to do the job. You and the doctor come out next Sunday to my

house, and after the evening service we'll slip over to the church and make

it all right."

Alves smiled at the earnest kindness of the old dentist, but shook her head

firmly. Dr. Leonard gathered up his overcoat and silk hat, but seemed loath

to go. He peered out of the windows that Sommers had put into the big doors

of the temple.

"It's like your living out here in this ramshackle old chicken-coop, when

you might have a tidy flat on Paulina Street; and the doctor could have a

desk in my office next door to his old boss." Dr. Leonard spoke testily,

and Alves laid her hand soothingly on his arm.

"I guess we aren't made to be like other people."

"You won't have any happiness so long as you defy God's law."

"Did I have any when I lived according to it?"

The dentist, at the end of his arguments, turned the door-knob.

"Some day, Alves, _he_ will reproach you justly for what you've done."

"I shall be dead before that day."

"I've no patience with you, talking of death and hoping you'll never have

children."

The old dentist stumbled out into the portico, and, without further words,

trudged down the road. Alves lingered in the open door in spite of the

intense cold, and watched him, with an unwonted feeling of loneliness. The

few people that touched her solitary life seemed to draw back, repelled by

something unusual, unsafe in her and her situation. Why was she so

obstinate about this trivial matter of a ceremony that counted for so much

with most people? At first her refusal had been a sentiment, merely, an

instinctive, unreasoned decision. Now, however, there were stronger causes:

she would not consent to tie his hands, to make him realize the

irrevocableness of his step. Time might come when...

And why had she so stoutly denied a wish for children? These days her

thoughts went back often to her dead child--the child of the man she had

married. Preston's share in the child was so unimportant now! To the mother

belonged the child. Perhaps it was meant to be so in order that something

might come to fill the empty places of a woman's heart. If she had

children, what difference would that ignorance of the man she loved, that

division from him, make? The man had his work, his ideas--the children of

his soul; and the woman had the children of her body. Each went his way and

worked his life into the fabric of the world. Love! Love was but an

episode, an accident of the few blossoming years of life. To woman there

was the gift of children, and to man the gift of labor. She wondered if

this feeling would increase as the years passed. Would she think more and

more of the child she had had, the other man's child? And less of him whom

she loved?

"Trying to make an icicle of yourself?" a jovial voice called out; the next

moment Dresser came up the steps. The portico shook as he stamped his feet.

He wore a fur-lined coat, and carried a pair of skates. His face, which had

grown perceptibly fuller since his connection with _The Investor's

Monthly_, was red with cold.

"The ice on the lake is first-rate, Alves, and I skated up the shore to see

if I could get you for a spin."

"I am glad you came," Alves said, with new life. "I was kind of lonely and

blue, and the doctor is off on a case the other side of nowhere."

"Just the time," responded Dresser, who seemed to have the good luck at

present of making "right connections."

They skated down the lagoon to the blackened Court of Honor, through this

little pond, around the dismantled figure of Chicago, out into the open

lake beside the long pier. The ice was black and without a scratch. They

dashed on toward the centre of the lake, Alves laughing in pure exultation

over the sport. They had left far behind the few skaters that had ventured

beyond the lagoon, and taking hands they flew for a mile down the shore.

Then Alves proposed that they should go back to the temple for a cup of

tea. The wind was up, beating around the long, black pier behind them, and

when they turned, they caught it full in the face. Alves, excited by the

tussle, bent to the task with a powerful swing; Dresser skated fast behind

her. As they neared the long pier, instead of turning in toward the

esplanade, Alves struck out into the lake to round the obstruction and

enter the yacht pool beyond. Dresser kept the pace with difficulty. As she

neared the end of the pier, she gave a little cry; Dresser saw her leap,

then heard a warning shout,

"Look out--the pool!" As he scuttled away from the oily water where the

drifts opened, he saw Alves clinging to the rim of ice on the piles.

"Don't be afraid," she called back. "I can crawl under the pier and get up

on the cross-bars. Go on to the shore."

While he protested she vanished, and in a minute he saw her reappear above,

waving her hand to him. She took off her skates leisurely, wrung out her

skirt, and walked along the pier. He skated up as close as he could,

stammering his admiration and fears. When he reached the shore, she was

already running down the path to the temple. He followed more leisurely,

and found her, in a dry skirt, stirring up the fire in the stove.

"That was a close call," he gasped admiringly, throwing his skates into the

corner.

"Wasn't it fine?" she laughed. "I'd like days and days of that--flying

ahead, with a hurricane behind."

She shovelled some coal into the ugly little stove, and gayly set about

preparing tea. Dresser had never seen her so strong and light-hearted as

she was this afternoon. They made tea and toasted crackers, chaffing each

other and chattering like boy and girl. After their meal Dresser lit his

pipe and crouched down by the warm stove.

"I wish you were like this oftener," he murmured admiringly. "Gay and ready

for anything!"