I.

Hamilton Gaites sat breakfasting by the window of a restaurant looking

out on Park Square, in Boston, at a table which he had chosen after

rejecting one on the Boylston Street side of the place because it was

too noisy, and another in the little open space, among evergreens in

tubs, between the front and rear, because it was too chilly. The wind

was east, but at his Park Square window it tempered the summer morning

air without being a draught; and he poured out his coffee with a content

in his circumstance and provision which he was apt to feel when he had

taken all the possible pains, even though the result was not perfect.

But now, he had real French bread, as good as he could have got in New

York, and the coffee was clear and bright. A growth of crisp green

watercress embowered a juicy steak, and in its shade, as it were, lay

two long slices of bacon, not stupidly broiled to a crisp, but

delicately pink, and exemplarily lean. Gaites had already had a

cantaloupe, whose spicy fragrance lingered in the air and mingled with

the robuster odors of the coffee, the steak, and the bacon.

He owned to being a fuss, but he contended that he was a cheerful fuss,

and when things went reasonably well with him, he was so. They were

going well with him now, not only in the small but in the large way. He

was sitting there before that capital breakfast in less than half an

hour after leaving the sleeping-car, where he had passed a very good

night, and he was setting out on his vacation, after very successful

work in the June term of court. He was in prime health; he had a good

conscience in leaving no interests behind him that could suffer in his

absence; and the smile that he bent upon the Italian waiter as he

retired, after putting down the breakfast, had some elements of a

benediction.

There was a good deal of Gaites's smile, when it was all on: he had a

generous mouth, full of handsome teeth, very white and even, which all

showed in his smile. His whole face took part in the smile, and it was a

charming face, long and rather quaintly narrow, of an amiable

aquilinity, and clean-shaven. His figure, tall and thin, comported well

with his style of visage, and at a given moment, when he suddenly rose

and leaned from the window, eagerly following something outside with his

eye, he had an alert movement that was very pleasant.

The thing outside which had caught, and which now kept, his eye as long

as he could see it, was a case in the shape of an upright piano, on the

end of a long, heavy-laden truck, making its way with a slow, jolting

progress among the carts, carriages, and street cars, out of the square

round the corner toward Boylston Street. On the sloping front of the

case was inscribed an address, which seemed to gaze at Gaites with the

eyes of the girl whom it named and placed, and to whom in the young

man's willing fancy it attributed a charming quality. Nothing, he felt,

could be more suggestive, more expressive of something shy, something

proud, something pure, something pastoral yet patrician, something

unaffected and yet _chic_, in an unknown personality, than the legend:

Miss Phyllis Desmond,

Lower Merritt,

New Hampshire.

Via S. B. & H. C. R. R.

Like most lawyers, he had a vein of romance, and this now opened in

pleasing conjectures concerning the girl. He knew just where Lower

Merritt was, and so well what it was like that a vision of its white

paint against the dark green curtain of the wooded heights around it

filled his sense as agreeably as so much white marble. There was the

cottage of some summer people well above the village level, among pines

and birches, and overlooking the foamiest rush of the Saco, to which he

instantly destined the piano of Phyllis Desmond. He had never known that

these people's name was Desmond, and he had certainly never supposed

that they had a daughter called Phyllis; but he divined these facts in

losing sight of the truck; and he imagined with as logical probability

that one of the little girls whom he used to see playing on the

hill-slope before the cottage had grown up into the young lady whose

name the piano bore. There was quite time enough for this

transformation; it was seven years since Gaites had run up into the

White Mountains for a month's rest after his last term in the Harvard

Law School, and before beginning work in the office of the law firm in

New York where he had got a clerkship, and where he had now a junior

partnership. The little girl was then just ten years old, and now, of

course, the young lady was seventeen, or would be when the piano reached

Lower Merritt, for it was clearly meant to arrive on her birthday; it

was a birthday-present and a surprise. He had always liked the way those

nice people let their children play about barefoot; it would be in

character with them to do a fond, pretty thing like that; and Gaites

smiled for pleasure in it, and then rather blushed in relating the brown

legs of the little girl, as he remembered seeing them in her races over

her father's lawn, to the dignified young lady she had now become.

He amused himself in mentally following the piano on its way to the Sea

Board & Hill Country R. R. freight-depot, which he was quite able to do

from a habit of Boston formed during his four years in the academic

course and his three years in the law-school at Harvard. He knew that it

would cross Boylston into Charles Street, and keep along that level to

Cambridge; then it would turn into McLane Street, and again into Lynde,

by this means avoiding the grades as much as possible, and arriving

through Causeway Street at the long, low freight-depot of the S. B. & H.

C., where it would be the first thing unloaded from the truck. It would

stand indefinitely on the outer platform; and then, when the men in

flat, narrow-peaked silk caps and grease-splotched overalls got round to

it, with an air of as much personal indifference as if they were mere

mechanical agencies, it would be pulled and pushed into the dimness of

the interior, cool, and pleasantly smelling of pine, and hemp, and

flour, and dried fruit, and coffee, and tar, and leather, and fish.

There it would abide, indefinitely again, till in the same large

impersonal way it was pulled and pushed out on the platform beside the

track, where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the

road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down

by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations,

from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails,

addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the

locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could

come to killing the brakeman without doing it.

Gaites witnessed the whole drama with an interest that held him

suspended between the gulps and morsels of his breakfast, and at times

quite arrested the processes of mastication and deglutition. That pretty

girl's name on the slope of the piano-case continued to look at him from

the end of the truck; it smiled at him from the outer platform of the

freight-house; it entreated him with a charming trepidation from the dim

interior; again it smiled on the inner platform; and then, from the

safety of the car, where the case found itself ensconced among freight

of a neat and agreeable character, the name had the effect of intrepidly

blowing him a kiss as the train-man slid the car doors together and

fastened them. He drew a long breath when the train had backed and

bumped down to the car, and the couplers had clashed together, and the

maniac, who had not been mashed in dropping the coupling-pin into its

socket, scrambled out from the wheels, and frantically worked his arms

to the potential homicide in the locomotive cab, and the train had

jolted forward on the beginning of its run.

That was the last of the piano, and Gaites threw it off his mind, and

finished his breakfast at his leisure. He was going to spend his

vacation at Kent Harbor, where he knew some agreeable people, and where

he knew that a young man had many chances of a good time, even if he

were not the youngest kind of young man. He had spent two of his Harvard

vacations there, and he knew this at first hand. He could not and did

not expect to do so much two-ing on the rocks and up the river as he

used; the zest of that sort of thing was past, rather; but he had

brought his golf stockings with him, and a quiverful of the utensils of

the game, in obedience to a lady who had said there were golf-links at

Kent, and she knew a young lady who would teach him to play.

He was going to stop off at Burymouth, to see a friend, an old Harvard

man, and a mighty good fellow, who had rather surprised people by giving

up New York, and settling in the gentle old town on the Piscatamac. They

accounted for it as well as they could by his having married a Burymouth

girl; and since he had begun, most unexpectedly, to come forward in

literature, such of his friends as had seen him there said it was just

the place for him. Gaites had not yet seen him there, and he had a

romantic curiosity, the survival of an intensified friendship of their

Senior year, to do so. He got to thinking of this good fellow rather

vividly, when he had cleared his mind of Miss Desmond's piano, and he

did not see why he should not take an earlier train to Burymouth than he

had intended to take; and so he had them call him a coupé from the

restaurant, and he got into it as soon as he left the breakfast-table.

He gave the driver the authoritative address, "Sea Board Depot," and

left him to take his own way, after resisting a rather silly impulse to

bid him go through Charles Street.

The man drove up Beacon, and down Temple through Staniford, and

naturally Gaites saw nothing of Miss Desmond's piano, which had come

into his mind again in starting. He did not know the colonnaded

structure, with its stately _porte-cochère_, where his driver proposed

to leave him, instead of the formless brick box which he remembered as

the Sea Board Depot, and he insisted upon that when the fellow got down

to open the door.

"Ain't no Sibbod Dippo, now," the driver explained, contemptuously.

"Guess Union Dippo'll do, though;" and Gaites, a little overcome with

its splendor, found that it would. He faltered a moment in passing the

conductor and porter at the end of the Pullman car on his train, and

then decided that it would be ridiculous to take a seat in it for the

short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on

the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his

watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he

indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through

the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and

string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street

opening into it, as far as the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot. On the way

he bet himself five dollars that Miss Desmond's piano would not be

there, and lost; for at the moment he came up it was unloading from the

end of the truck which he had seen carrying it past the window of his

restaurant.

The fact amused him quite beyond the measure of anything intrinsically

humorous in it, and he staid watching the exertions of the heated

truckman and two silk-capped, sarcastic-faced freight-men, till the

piano was well on the platform. He was so intent upon it that his

interest seemed to communicate itself to a young girl coming from the

other quarter, with a suburban, cloth-sided, crewel-initialed bag in her

hand, as if she were going to a train. She paused in the stare she gave

the piano-case, and then slowed her pace with a look over her shoulder

after she got by. In this her eyes met his, and she blushed and hurried

on; but not so soon that he had not time to see she had a thin face of a

pathetic prettiness, gentle brown eyes with wistful brows, under

ordinary brown hair. She was rather little, and was dressed with a sort

of unaccented propriety, which was as far from distinction as it was

from pretension.

When Gaites got back to his car, a few minutes before the train was to

start, he found the seat where he had left his hand-bag and light

overcoat more than half full of a bulky lady, who looked stupidly up at

him, and did not move or attempt any excuse for crowding him from his

place. He had to walk the whole length of the car before he came to a

vacant seat. It was the last of the transverse seats, and at the moment

he dropped into it, the girl who had watched the unloading of the piano

with him passed him, and took the sidewise seat next the door.

She took it with a weary resignation which somehow made Gaites ashamed

of the haste with which he had pushed forward to the only good place,

and he felt as guilty of keeping her out of it as if he had known she

was following him. He kept a remorseful eye upon her as she arranged her

bag and umbrella about her, with some paper parcels which she must have

had sent to her at the station. She breathed quickly, as if from final

hurry, but somewhat also as if she were delicate; and tried to look as

if she did not know he was watching her. She had taken off one of her

gloves, and her hand, though little enough, showed an unexpected vigor

with reference to her face, and had a curious air of education.

When the train pulled out of the station into the clearer light, she

turned her face from him toward the forward window, and the corner of

her mouth, which her half-averted profile gave him, had a kind of

piteous droop which smote him to keener regret. Once it lifted in an

upward curve, and a gay light came into the corner of her eye; then the

mouth drooped again, and the light went out.

Gaites could bear it no longer; he rose and said, with a respectful bow:

"Won't you take my seat? That seems such a very inconvenient place for

you, with the door opening and shutting."

The girl turned her face promptly round and up, and answered, with a

flush in her thin cheek, but no embarrassment in her tone, "No, I thank

you. This will do quite well," and then she turned her face away as

before.

He had not meant his politeness for an overture to her acquaintance, but

he felt as justly snubbed as if he had; and he sank back into his seat

in some disorder. He tried to hide his confusion behind the newspaper he

opened between them; but from time to time he had a glimpse of her round

the side of it, and he saw that the hand which clutched her bag all the

while tightened upon it and then loosened nervously.