GLADYS A ROMANCE BY MARY GREENLEAF DARLING He is the half part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such a she; And she a fair divided excellence, Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. KING JOHN. FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STKEETS COPYRIGHT 1887 BY D LOTHROP COMPAKY A thing to walk with, hand in hand, Through the every-dayness of this work-day world, Baring its tender feet to every roughness, Yet letting not one heart-beat go astray From Beauty s law of plainness and content. . . . Such is true Love, which steals into the heart With feet as silent as the lightsome dawn That kisses smooth the rough brows of the dark, And hath its will thro blissful gentleness Not like a rocket which, with savage glare, Whirs suddenly up, then bursts, and leaves the night Painfully quivering on the dazed eyes A Love that shall be new and fresh each hour As is the golden mystery of sunset, Or the sweet coming of the evening star. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. CONTENTS. CHAPTER. PAGE. I. ON THE STEAMER ...... 7 II. GLADYS PAST 12 III. AN UNWELCOME SUITOR 25 IV. A NEW ROLE FOR GLADYS 44 V. GOLDEN SUMMER 53 VI. A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT 63 VII. GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES 87 VIII. AN ORDEAL BY FIRE 102 IX. MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE 119 ; X. A MODERN BARBARA 132 XL A MEETING 142 XII. A CITY OF THE DEAD 151 XIII. THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS .... 166 XIV. THE LITTLE RIFT 177 XV. FATHER AND SON 184 XVI. FILLING THE VOID 194 XVII. NEW LINKS 209 XVIII. LITTLE TOM .220 XIX. DIVIDED 231 XX. A FRIEND IN NEED 238 XXI. ONE WAY OF LOVE 250 XXII. A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR . 262 XXIII. NANCY S ROMANCE 277 XXIV. SURPRISED 290 XXV. LOVE S FULFILLING 294 GLADYS: A ROMANCE. CHAPTER I. ON THE STEAMER. "Youth at the prow, and Pleasure at the helm." WHAT, Doctor, is it you ? I am delighted ! I was not looking for any rational com panionship at this hour." The doctor paused in the rather blind groping of his way up the cabin stairs, first to scrutinize his welcomer, then, as recognition dawned upon his dazzled vision, to reply in a brusque tone quite at variance with his hearty grasp of the hand, " Nor would you have it now, my dear madam, if it depended on my own choice, or if professional claims would ever release one before bed-time ! But, what in the name of all that is sensible, are you doing here in the cabin at 11.30 P.M., when you might be asleep in your state-room ? " " Oh ! the girls, Madge and Gladys, could not 7 8 ON THE STEAMER. be induced to go before the train arrived, that they might see who were to be their fellow-passen gers on the steamer, and I, like the most indulgent of chaperons, as I am, sit up playing propriety." " I admire the way in which you perform your duty, then, " said Dr. Forbes, seating himself comfortably in the arm-chair beside the smiling, well-preserved matron of the world. " Where are the flock ? " " Out in the moonlight, under the safe conduct of Charles and Edith, or in and out of the cabin, as the whim takes them. I hear their voices now." And she glanced over her shoulder towards a chatting, laughing group of young men and girls, newly met in the middle of the cabin. The doctor s eye followed hers. " Yes, I see Miss Edith with her betrothed, and Miss Madge s round cheeks ; but who is that slender girl behind Gladys, did you say ? " "Yes; Gordon s child. Didn t you know ? He means to settle down at last, after all his wander ings, in the old Boston home, and introduce his daughter to society himself. She is fresh from a New York boarding-school, and is to spend this summer under my care." ON THE STEAMER. 9 "Humph!" said the doctor, with a shrug, "if the young lady is at all like her father, as I re member him, you will have no light addition to your cares. Young Gordon Lyman was a wild bird once, with a strong will of his own. I have not seen him for years." " Nor has any one," returned Mrs. Waterston, half-sadly. " He has never been able to settle at home since his marriage. First his wife s ill- health and taste for life abroad, then her death, and his own aversion to coming back to the closed house Gladys, I believe, knows something of every country but her own." " What sort of girl is she ? " asked the doctor abruptly, with the freedom of the household friend to whom are revealed all secrets, whether physi cal or moral. "A sweet child," replied the aunt warmly. " But here she comes. You shall judge her for yourself." "Well, mamma, we have found quite friends enough to repay us for sitting up, if that is any consolation to you," cried Margaret Waterston s blithe voice. " Here are the Cliffords, and they say Mr. Boylston s yacht, with Raymond Lindesay and IO ON THE STEAMER. a party of reading men, is already at Bar Harbor Oh, Dr. Forbes ! I am so glad to see you." Edith Waterston s greeting, though less hearty, was no less friendly than her sister s, and Gladys glanced shyly over her cousin s shoulder at the gray-haired, rather cynical-looking man who was welcomed so warmly. She was tall and slight, with a graceful figure, full of elasticity and vigor, and a delicate face flushed with a faint wild-rose tint, fair hair and sweet, dewy dark eyes. " I am glad to meet you, Miss Lyman, for your father was a friend of mine in his young days. Where is he now ? " " In Switzerland. I could not persuade him to come home before September, at the earliest. I have not seen him for nearly a year, and oh ! I do so long for his coming ! " "Take care, Doctor, you will make her home sick if you talk of papa !" said Madge. She spoke caressingly, however, and stole an arm round Gladys waist. Gladys half-laughed. " I am ashamed of my self," she said, lifting the brown eyes in which sudden tears had welled up, to the quizzical, kindly ON THE STEAMER. II face. " I have been much away from papa, too, when I was younger, but not of late years ; we have been always together." The sweet, tearful eyes, with the simple burst of emotion, quite won their way through the rough shell to the old doctor s kindly heart, and Gladys Lyman closed her state-room door that night on a staunch friend. CHAPTER II. GLADYS PAST. . . . . Those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain*light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing. WORDSWORTH. HOMESICKNESS cannot last long in an atmosphere of youth and merriment, with a smiling present and a hopeful future. Gladys, accordingly, was one of the blithest of the group assembled at early morning on the deck to watch the steamer s slow progress among islands and points of land on her way to Mt. Desert. Those were the old happy days when Eden railroads were not, and patient waiters for the steamboat s mid night start thought themselves no losers in the glow of the sunlit scenery. "No seasickness, I see," said the doctor, who, buttoned up in his ulster, was already pacing the deck as Gladys opened the little glass door. " Oh, no ! " The girl s cheeks and eyes were as GLADYS PAST. 13 bright as the morning. " But it seemed a waste of time to stay any longer in that close little state room. This is too beautiful to lose." One by one the little group gathered in a nook sheltered from the wind, the doctor eying them with a half-amused glance while they chatted and laughed, quite unconscious of his observation. Edith Waterston, being somewhat older than the others, was a little less free in her girlish enthu siasm. She sat apart with her betrothed, Charles Freeman, her quiet, incisive utterance coming in occasionally as a check on her younger sister s in domitable flow of spirits. Unfailingly gay and good-natured, Madge poured out questions, augu ries for the future, and rapturous exclamations at the scenery, all in a breath. "And Ned Boylston is there, you say? Now he is just suited to my capacity; but as for Mr. Lindesay there is a sort of suppressed clever ness about him which makes me quite tongue-tied in his presence. Gladys, however, hasn t yet had time to forget all she learned at school " He is not in the least alarming," said Anna Clifford, a self-possessed damsel with a cold, light- blue eye. 14 GLADYS PAST. " Perhaps not, if you attack him at the right point. Yet I never thought you so very abstruse, Anna or is cleverness contagious ? Don t look so very reproving, Edith ! Anna has no more ambition for being called a blue-stocking than I have." " No one supposed she had, Madge, but Mr. Lindesay is really entertaining, and by no means likely to confine his attention to blue-stockings." "Yes, I know," returned Madge hastily, "but who is there for little Gladys ? You know she is not out yet, Mr. Clifford, and I should like society to dawn on her through the medium of some one who, without being too alarming, could yet pres ent himself as one quite au fait with the gay * world." " There is Mr. Morgan Amory," said Anna, with a little sneering laugh which struck rather unpleasantly on the observant doctor s ear. "He is in his cottage, this summer, and has some new saddle-horses. They say he is on the lookout for a capital horsewoman as a riding companion, and, perhaps, a mistress for the cottage as well. Miss Lyman is new." Madge clasped her hands rapturously. GLADYS PAST. 1 5 " And she rides famously ! Gladys, my dear, if you could only get on his weak side ! Such an invaluable friend for you next winter! " " Oh ! I am too much of a novice for Mr. Amory," said Gladys, with an amused little laugh. " You forget that I am only a schoolgirl." " But, my dear, if he would only take you up, to begin with ! I ll make over all my own claims to saddle-horses and cottage on the spot." " Many thanks, dear Madge, but I m afraid he would enjoy the part you ve assigned him no more than I should." " Won t you accept of me as a substitute, Miss Lyman ? " said-young Clifford ; " I m a novice my self." " Yes, very gratefully, Mr. Clifford, for you will not stoop to pick me up, as I fear Mr. Amory would have to. I should not like that." " No," said Madge, her eager eyes fixed on the land they were passing, "it isn t easy to patron ize Gladys, I find, if she is an unfledged school girl, and I, a woman of the world. After one season in town I shall positively Oh, girls ! just look at that lovely little islet. I have half a mind to forego Bar Harbor on the spot, and just ask the 16 GLADYS PAST. captain to leave me here. What a place for a lodge in a vast wilderness ! " " In which you would be sighing for society before supper-time," said Edith, quietly. Very light prattle, surely, but not lost on the ear of the doctor, who was, from temperament, as well as the habit of his profession, a student of human nature. He turned, half-smiling, to look at Gladys as she made her laughing rejoinder to young Clifford, and quite agreed with Madge that patronage must be a difficult attitude to assume towards the young girl, novice though she might be. Simple as she obviously was, her bright eyes dancing with enjoyment of all around her, there was a quiet collectedness in her tone and manner, whether in answering Anna Clifford s cool sallies, or her brother s rather blundering eagerness to please alack of the fluttering excitement, char acteristic of the schoolgirl just launched on the world, which showed self-command and pleased the good doctor. " She has her nerves under control," he said to himself, " and will never lose her head as JVTadge might. But she comes by that by good rights." Yet it was not by inheritance, only, that Gladys GLADYS PAST. I/ had come to her power of self-control. Young and simple as she was, secluded and almost solitary as her life had hitherto been, the rapid changes in her surroundings had been a school of character. She was too young when she left it to remember the Boston home to which she was to return next winter, but as far back as her memory went, the frail, beautiful mother had been the centre of her father s solicitude and the moving-spring of their home. This was true literally as well as figura tively, for, at her slightest wish, seas and moun tains were crossed, and they found themselves in France, Italy or Switzerland. It was a sick fancy only ; Mr. Lyman knew, probably the invalid her self knew, that all change was hopeless. The one element of permanence in little Gladys changeful life was a thoroughly wise and sym pathetic governess. Mrs. Stanhope had been a school-friend of Mrs. Lyman s, and now, as a young widow, shared all their wanderings. Whether Gladys were left in French pension, German fam ily or Swiss clialet, Mrs. Stanhope was always with her, and, while her ready ear and tongue caught German or French accents, her governess laid the foundation of a thorough English education. 1 8 GLADYS PAST. In spite of her wanderings, the child was amus ingly loyal to home and to all the institutions of her country of which she had seen so little. Pro bably Mrs. Stanhope, who had an instinctive dread lest her foreign surroundings should influence the impressible child, had herself to thank for this. But she need not have feared ; Gladys was staunch in her attachments, even though her romantic imagination might have been largely answerable for forming them. There came one happy summer when they were all together in the beautiful Lake country. Gladys was fourteen or fifteen then, and beginning to give promise of beauty and grace that delighted her father. " I must teach her to ride," he said to his wife ; " I fancy she would sit well." And Gladys would have died rather than disappoint that hope. But, indeed, it did not require much effort on her part to realize it. She was absolutely fearless, and gifted with a sort of native ease and grace which enabled her to do readily all that she undertook. "Why, you little witch ! " said her father, after they had ridden a few times together : " there is positively nothing to teach you ! You sit your GLADYS PAST. 19 horse so that I am absolutely proud of you, and when you know how to leap, I think you will be perfect in horsemanship." " Do begin soon, papa," said Gladys delightedly. "You are not afraid, then ?" "Only the least little bit. I shall not be when you are ready to try me. How could I be if, as you say, you are proud of me ? " " You vain little minx, " said her father, laugh ing, "I must beware how I compliment you, I see. I would not have you conceited, Gladys, but I detest awkwardness in any one." " Papa," said Gladys, aggrieved, "truly I am not vain." " What then ? " he retorted, laughing still. " Only proud to think you are proud of me. Oh ! when you say that, I could not fail in anything." " Have my words such magic power, then ? Why ? " " Because I love you so," returned Gladys, with a quick rush of color to cheek and brow. "Really," said Mr. Lyman, when, half-touched, half-amused, he repeated the little dialogue to his wife, "she is an odd, impressible little mortal! We must keep an eye on her a few years hence, 2O GLADYS PAST. or that romantic element in her will be getting us into trouble. Perhaps it is only the love of power under the guise of impressibility, what do you think, Amy ? " " You should know better than I, Gordon. Gladys is so much more like you than me. She is not sentimental, surely ; there is far too much strength in her nature for that." It was a happy summer, but too soon over. Early in the autumn, even before the leaves and flowers had felt the change, Mrs. Lyman began to droop. The. happy rides and loving companion ship of parents and child were broken off on the instant. Mr. Lyman even reproached himself for too much absorption. They were on the wing directly for Mentone ; Gladys was left behind with her governess to spend a few more weeks in Eng land, then, if her mother should be better, to fol low and join them for a little before returning to London for another year of study. Mrs. Stanhope could not help admiring the proud self-command with which the girl bore the anguish of this uncer tainty. In the midst of scenes which often made her lip quiver with the memory of happy past days, she would not utter a word of complaint, lest Mrs. GLADYS PAST. 21 Stanhope should suffer with her, or fancy she was less happy in her company than in old times. "Dear girl! what a power of loving she has," thought the governess fondly. In her eyes Gladys was all but perfect. The uncertainty did not last long. A telegram came to Mrs. Stanhope with the brief announcement of Mrs. Lyman s death. "Break it to Gladys." There is something eloquent in the very brevity of a telegram. Mrs. Stanhope could imagine just the look of agony with which Mr. Lyman would have said the words, and turned away because he could not say more. But while she sat weeping and thinking how she should " break it to Gladys," the girl threw her arms around her and kissed her gently. " Dear Mrs. Stanhope, do not cry ! I can bear it ! I know what you are going to tell me. Mamma is very ill, or perhaps," as she saw the change in her governess s face, " perhaps she is already dead ? " Mrs. Stanhope silently bowed her head and Gladys sat for a long time quite still, the quiet tears dropping on her folded hands. Presently she started up like one who feels she must no longer yield to her own grief. 22 GLADYS PAST. " What does papa say ? Does he tell us to come ? " " He does not say one word of that, dear." " Then we will go to him ourselves he must not be left alone ! See ! will this telegram do to send ? And we will pack at once." It did not seem an impatience of grief, such as many young and bright natures feel, but complete absorption in the thought of another. They came upon Mr. Lyman sitting alone with his overwhelming sorrow, even before he had re membered that there was still something left to him. His first exclamation was almost one of dis pleasure : "Gladys ! You here! I did not send for you." " No, papa," said the girl, advancing firmly, though Mrs. Stanhope would have drawn back, "but I felt I must be with you you will let me stay ? " The tone was half-pleading, half-determined. Mr. Lyman said nothing more, and presently, as his daughter sat beside him, put one hand gently on hers. Society called Mr. Lyman a proud, somewhat cold and worldly man ; but his daughter, knowing GLADYS PAST. 23 how disinterested and tender had been his absorp tion in his wife, rightly guessed that his best had been given to her, and longed, as much as in her lay, to fill the void which her mother had left. Mrs. Lyman was buried at Mentone, and not a word was said about going home. At last Mrs. Stanhope, anxious for the welfare of her charge, hinted at the former plan of a winter in London. " Yes, Gladys must go, I suppose," he said, rousing himself from the abstraction which only Gladys herself had power to charm away ; " or it might be better for her to go home at once to America. I have always intended that she should finish her education in her own country." "Home ! oh ! " cried Gladys, her eyes beaming with joy, "are we really going home to America ? " He shook his head quickly. " Not yet. I am not ready to go. But you shall go if you wish it, Gladys." " I do not wish it till you are ready. One year of American education will do for me, won t it, Mrs. Stanhope ? We will spend the winter to gether in London, papa. You know you wished me to take drawing-lessons." She spoke with more confidence than she felt, clinging fondly to his hand. 24 GLADYS PAST. " That had not been my plan for myself," said Mr. Lyman, with a momentary half-smile, " but it shall be as you choose, Gladys," And she felt that her first victory had been gained. That, too, was a happy winter, in spite of its shadow of sadness. With the tact belonging to her strong affection, Gladys contrived to draw her father into interest in her own pursuits, revived his appreciative enjoyment of art by her own eagerness to see, and her untiring efforts to excel. It was through her influence that he began the collection of pictures for the Boston home which furnished him with a central interest all through the remaining years of his life. Together they haunted picture-galleries, art-museums, studios and art-shops till the tall, distinguished-looking man and the lovely girl began to be a beacon of hope to picture-dealers, and a cynosure to artists. Nor in these alone did Gladys excite admiration ; but this part of her history calls for a fresh chapter. CHAPTER III. AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. Like the swell of some sweet tune, Morning rises into noon, May glides onward into June. LONGFELLOW. IN the course of their art-rambles in London, they met and were often joined by a young man whom Mr. Lyman addressed as Willoughby, and with whom he seemed, in spite of the dispar ity of their ages, to stand on a pleasant footing of artistic sympathy. Since his wife s death Mr. Lyman had avoided all social intercourse, and neither given nor accepted invitations. He wrapped himself in a cloak of cold reserve, like one who dreaded the proffer of sympathy, and the world, repelled by his manner, dared not offer it. But about this young man there was a genial, simple frankness which would not be repelled, or, rather, which disarmed the suspicion of intrusion. Finding that Mr. Lyman was interested in picture hunting, he made himself useful to him in a thou- 2 5 26 AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. sand ways, entering into his pursuit of master pieces with as much eagerness as if the quest were his own, and falling quite naturally into the habit of coming frequently to the house. He was in London to pursue art, not as a means of livelihood, though it was his ostensible profession, but from love of the pursuit. "And really Charles Willoughby has no incon siderable talent," Mr. Lyman said to his daughter. " He invites us to his studio, Gladys." To the studio, in course of time, they went, Gladys delighted that anything could draw her father from his heart-broken seclusion, and over flowing with gratitude to the young man who had power to work the charm. She was sixteen that winter, and very lovely, with manners half-childlike in their frankness, half-womanly in their occasional shy reserve, but always simple and unconscious of self. Young Willoughby treated her with the hearty pleasant cordiality of manner natural to him, and she was speedily almost as much at ease with him as with her father or Mrs. Stanhope. It became quite a matter of course that he should be the third in their picture hunts or horseback rides. Then he began to help Gladys in her drawing, prais- AN UNWEL COME SUITOR. 2/ ing or criticising her efforts as a teacher might, while she received the praise or blame in quite the same spirit as a pupil. " Mr. Willoughby really thinks my foliage is improving, papa," or, " I wish I could ever make Mr. Willoughby think my skies tolerable ! " At last one day when they were all in the studio, the young artist, who had been watching Gladys as she rummaged about among the pictures, quite unconscious of his observation, asked Mr. Lyman, with a new hesitation in his manner, if he might paint her portrait. " Why, if you wish it, my dear fellow, although I should have thought it would be better to wait a few years. Girlhood, you know, is a variable period." Willoughby blushed slightly, smiled, and quoted a line or two of Longfellow s, " Standing with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet, Womanhood and childhood fleet," but repeated his request. " It shall be as you and Gladys agree, then," said Mr. Lyman, carelessly. " Would you like Mr. Willoughby to paint your portrait, my pet ? " "Better than anyone else," said Gladys, laugh- 28 AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. ingly, " if he likes to try. I am afraid it will be a little tiresome." The sittings at the studio were begun, and became a part of Mrs. Stanhope s and Gladys* bi-weekly duty ; the former, as the unoccupied third, often noticed and remarked upon the extra ordinary earnestness which the young man threw into his task. "But Gladys is a happy subject," she observed to Mr. Lyman ; " a few years hence, when she has been told that she is beautiful, she will hardly be so perfect, because so unconscious a model." "Very probably -not," Mr. Lyman replied. He was not to see the portrait until it was in- ished, but the day came sooner than he had a< ici- pated. Looking upon Gladys as an unformed Cviild, he had thought little about the matter ; but when he saw the portrait, surprise and delight quite over came his indifference. Willoughby had caught her very look and air ; it was a living, breathing Gladys ! "Why, my dear fellow ! " Mr. Lyman exclaimed, startled out of his usual nonchalance, " I had no idea you possessed such genius ! That is no por trait ! It is Gladys self! How you must have studied your .subject ! " AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. 2Q Willoughby colored slightly, but murmured some thing as he bent over his palette about "familiarity making it easy to catch the pose." " I should have thought it more beautiful than Gladys, at first sight," said Mr. Lyman, still ad vancing and retreating, connoisseur-wise, before the canvas. " I suppose I cannot judge of that so well as a stranger. To me Gladys is still a child, and though this is her very self, I should have said if it were not my own daughter s portrait, What a lovely woman ! You have not idealized it, Wil loughby ? " " Not the least in the world ! " said the young man, coloring more deeply; " this is only the first impression that Miss Lyman makes. In reality, she is far more beautiful than that ! " " I suppose you artists know best," said the father, with a pleased smile. " But I congratulate you on your success, my dear fellow, and I hope, though it is your chef-d oeuvre, that I may buy the portrait ? " " I hoped you might wish to take it," the artist replied. " Do you know," Gladys said, a few days after, in the hearing of her father and Mrs. Stanhope, 3O AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. " when we were in the studio, this afternoon, I came, in my exploring, on a duplicate of my portrait ! Why, what is this, Mr. Willoughby ? said I, do artists paint two copies of their sub jects ? For whom is this ? For myself, said Mr. Willoughby, and colored, quite as if he were ashamed of his vanity, though he explained very frankly that artists did like to keep copies of their best works. He popped the canvas away, though, behind two others, and I was half afraid to speak of it when you came back." Mr. Lyman smiled and forgot the matter, which Gladys treated as an odd and somewhat amusing piece of weakness, but on Mrs. Stanhope it made more impression. That summer was spent in Switzerland, and was to be the last before Gladys should return to America to spend one year in a New York board ing-school. " I think she needs the companionship of other girls," Mrs. Stanhope said ; " she has grown up quite apart from those of her own age. I can see no flaw in her ; she seems to me utterly free from the self-conceit she might easily have, since she is really so superior to most girls. Yet I do AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. 31 advise letting her measure herself with others ; the companionship will be good for her, if not the competition." " This is very disinterested advice of Mrs. Stan hope s, Gladys," said Mr. Lyman, as the girl entered the room, " but it is wise counsel as well." "Then you will come home too, papa ?" she asked wistfully. " No, my Gladys, not yet. I could not go back to the old home without you to brighten it for me. Another year, when you are ready to go into society, I will pledge myself, but not yet." " Am I to lose you both at once, then ? " the girl asked sorrowfully. "Not me, Gladys," said Mrs. Stanhope, trying to smile. "You know my old home is in New York, and though you will be at school, you will always have that refuge to run to." And Gladys, always ready to see the wisdom of any measure proposed by those she loved, bright ened, and resolved to enjoy this last summer to the full. She sat, one afternoon, on the hotel piazza, at Interlaken, her sketch-book before her, trying, most earnestly, to catch the lights and shadows 32 AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. on the mountains. A carriage had just set down two or three tourists at the door, and one, a young Englishman, raised his eyes quickly to the piazza above, where the girl stood leaning against the pillar. " I am afraid it is of no use ! " she said, slowly retreating backward to her seat, "I can hardly hope to catch it, I suppose." She had spoken to Mrs. Stanhope, who was, or had been, sitting just behind her; but it was a masculine voice which said, in reply : "Yet that is not bad very far from bad! A touch there and there !" and a masculine, sun-embrowned hand, picking up the charcoal which Gladys had dropped, added the touches. The voice was Charles Willoughby s genial tone, but the hand, unlike his, trembled. "Why, Mr. Willoughby !" cried Gladys, aston ished, " is it really you ? How did you know we were here? but of course you did not know it." " No ; only hoped it," said the young man, as he shook hands with Mrs. Stanhope, who stepped through the long French window at the sound of the voice. " I have been following you from one place to another." AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. 33 " Of course I ought not to feel so when he came purposely to join us," Gladys afterwards confided to her governess, " but I was half-vexed for a mo ment that this last summer with you and papa should be interrupted by anybody, even Mr. Wil- loughby ! But I suppose he can hardly be called an interruption, after all." For a few days he certainly was not. Mr. Lyman was fond of him, and the trio seemed to fall again into the pleasant London life, surroundings only excepted. They walked, drove, climbed mountains and sketched together, and Gladys, forgetting her momentary annoyance, was her own gay, sweet, unconstrained self again. With Mr. Charles Wil- loughby there was this difference only : that he was less talkative than usual, occasionally abstracted, and apparently unconscious of his own long preoc cupied lapses into silence. One of these had lasted an unusual time on a certain evening when Gladys had said good-night and gone to her room with Mrs. Stanhope, leaving the two on the piazza, smoking in the moonlight. Mr. Lyman was smoking, I should say ; Willoughby had been sitting so long with a cigar unlighted in his hand, that his companion, who had eyed him 34 AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. once or twice with some amusement, at last broke into a laugh, and laying his hand on the young man s shoulder, said jestingly : " May I ask you what is the matter with that cigar which you have been eying so critically these ten minutes past ? " The young man started. " I was not thinking of the cigar," he replied, in a half-annoyed tone ; " I have something serious to say to you, Mr. Lyman." "Oh! indeed?" returned the other, laughingly. " I should hardly have thought you had anything, however trifling, to say to me. But say on, my dear fellow. I do not pretend to much wisdom, but such as I have is at the service of my friends," "Mr. Lyman," said the young man abruptly, rising and standing so as to face his friend, " I wish to speak to you about your daughter. I know I shall surprise you, for you have probably never connected such a thought with our acquaintance, but the truth is I find I love her." Mr. Lyman was indeed surprised. He fell back in his chair, looking up at the young man who stood erect and earnest before him, and fairly gasped in his amazement. "Gladys! Why -~" recovering with a sort of AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. 35 relief from the shock of surprise " but Gladys is a child a baby ! " " Not quite that," said the young man. " Six teen is young, certainly, but not exactly a child." " I never heard anything so absurd in my life ! " cried Mr. Lyman, quite startled out of his usual polished address by the monstrosity of the idea. "The other day she was playing with dolls, and why, Willoughby, she goes to America to school in September ! " " Plans may be changed in view of changed cir cumstances," said the young man a little stiffly. " Your surprise is quite natural, Mr. Lyman, and I confess frankly, that until she was gone from London I did not fully know that I had learned to love her. Of course I am rational of course I am looking to the future rather than hoping for the present. But I thought it the only true and honorable course to speak to you first, and, as I have spoken from my heart and earnestly, I think I have a right to expect to be answered in the same spirit." His voice trembled a little, and Mr. Lyman, startled, amused, annoyed as he was, recognized the justice of the claim. 36 AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. " You are quite right," he said more gravely ; " I will try to meet you as you wish. May I ask if Gladys has any suspicion of your feeling for her?" " I think not. I wished to speak to you, if pos sible, before giving her any suspicion of it. For that reason I spoke to-night, fearing I could no longer conceal it from her." "Very right and manly," said Mr. Lyman, "and I believe I may take it upon myself to give my daughter s reply. She has not the least suspicion of your feeling for her, nor the faintest desire to feel the same for any one herself for three or four years to come." Young Willoughby, however, knit his brows, and replied to Mr. Lyman s calm assurance with something of the John Bull sullenness in his tone : " Excuse me, Mr. Lyman ; 1 cannot consider your answer as satisfactory to me as it evidently is to yourself. May I ask if there is anything objec tionable to you in the idea of such a match ? I am quite independent of my parents ; I have my uncle s fortune, and do not propose to interfere with my sisters portion, though the estate, as entailed, comes to me. If my fancy for an artist s life " AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. 37 " My dear Willoughby," cried Mr. Lyman, hold ing up an expostulatory ringer, " I have not a word to say about your prospects or your profession. Yourself, your family and your fortune are all satisfactory to me. The point is, that Gladys is too young to have such a subject broached to her at all." " Excuse me," said the persistent lover, " if I differ from you. I have already said that I was looking to the future rather than the present. Yet I cannot, in justice to my own heart, let her go away to a new country, with a whole new world opening before her, without saying a word for myself." " She knows nothing of any world," said Mr. Lyman hastily. " But what do you propose doing ? " " With your consent, saying a word of my feel ings to your daughter. Or, if you think it better, asking you to speak to her for me. I would not willingly startle her, as I have you, but I am trust ing to you very fully, Mr. Lyman." " You are, indeed," said Mr. Lyman, touched at last, in spite of his annoyance and perplexity, by the young man s manly, if mistaken earnestness, 38 AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. " I will think it over and speak for you. Believe me, that is the better course." Charles Willoughby said good-night at once, with a hearty pressure of the hand, and Mr. Lyman was left to pace the piazza for an hour in genuine perplexity. At first he thought of sending for Mrs. Stan hope and asking whether she, with her woman s quicker power of discernment, had suspected the state of the case, but he hesitated, feeling it dis loyalty to young Willoughby with whose secret he had been entrusted. So it happened that Gladys, coming downstairs next morning, all unconscious, was met by a grave, preoccupied face, instead of the usual half-playful morning salutation to which she was accustomed. " Come to me, Gladys. I have something im portant to say to you." " Nothing too serious, I hope, papa ? " And, standing by his side, she looked rather anxiously into his face with her clear brown eyes. There was something so childlike and innocent in the curves of the lovely rose-tinted face that Mr. Lyman s involuntarily relaxed into a smile. " No, nothing very serious, I hope. But get AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. 39 your hat, Gladys ; we will take a little walk be fore breakfast. I wish to speak to you alone." Relieved by his change of manner, the girl ran for her hat, and the two set out. Alone with Gladys, however, Mr. Lyman found himself in fresh embarrassment. How begin on such a sub ject with this very child unless as a jest, or how, in justice to Willoughby, treat it otherwise than seriously ? She broke the ice, however, by looking up into his face as she took his arm, and saying smilingly, "Now, papa, begin ; I am all ears." " Gladys," said Mr. Lyman, playing rather ner vously with his eyeglass, " what do you think of Mr. Willoughby?" "Think of him?" said Gladys merrily, "why, I did think it rather a bore that he should have come here just now, but I am getting used to it, and I do not mind very much. But what an odd question ! Mr. Willoughby is not any one new." " Only new in this capacity, I confess," said Mr. Lyman, with a smile. " My dear child, I wish you to listen to me seriously for a moment, for it is my duty to speak to you seriously. Do you think it would ever be possible for you to care for Mr. Willoughby not now, of course, because you 4O AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. are too young, but some years hence, perhaps, as as a girl might care for a lover ? " " How can I tell, papa? I could not think of him so, of course, unless unless he asked me himself. Why do you " She paused, seeing the peculiar expression of her father s face. " Why do I ask you such a question ? " Mr. Lyman repeated. " Because, my dear child, Mr. Willoughby wished it, and, young as you are, cannot be satisfied with any answer but your own. It was very honorable of him to speak to me first, although I confess it startled me somewhat to think that my little Gladys, who has not yet done with schoolbooks, should be thinking of lovers." " Indeed, papa, I am not thinking of them," said the girl, flushing with some indignation, like one who is unjustly accused. " I have never thought of Mr. Willoughby, or any one else, so ! Why did you not tell him so for me ? " " Because, my dear," said the father, heartily relieved by the girl s indignation, childish as it was, " Mr. Willoughby would take no answer but your own. It is no subject for anger, Gladys ; a <rood man s love is something to be grateful for. AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. 4! Mr. Willoughby is a very earnest, manly fellow, whose affection is worthy a woman s winning." " But I am not a woman yet," said Gladys, her lips still quivering. " It is very absurd of him to think of me so ! Please, papa, next time answer for me. You know quite well what I should say ! " "We will hope there will be no next time at present," said Mr. Lyman, smiling, " but if your mind is made up, you must write a line or two to tell him so. It will be pleasanter for you than seeing him." " Oh ! I could not see him," cried the girl dis tressfully. " All my comfort is spoiled now, and I did like him to draw and ride with ! " The tears rose to her eyes, but she dashed them proudly away. " What shall I write ? No ; you need not tell me. Give me your little pocket-book, please." And sitting down on the grass, she wrote while her father watched her, half-amused, half-touched by her distress. " I think that will do," she said, giving him the penciled leaf. " And I shall go upstairs, for I do not wish to see him at all." 42 AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. Her father glanced over the lines : DEAR MR. WILLOUGHBY : I am very sorry you did not believe what papa told you, for it is quite impossible that I should ever think of such a thing as you ask. Please do not think me ungrateful for all your kind help. I thank you very much, and hope you will believe me Your affectionate friend, GLADYS LYMAN. "Yes; that will do very well," said Mr. Lyman, rather surprised by the tone of the note. " That is quite a grown-up answer. Now, go in to Mrs. Stanhope, my dear little girl, and do not distress yourself any more about the matter." "The matter," however, caused Gladys a violent burst of grief when she poured it out to the sym pathetic ears of Mrs. Stanhope. " So absurd ! " said the girl, sobbing in indigna tion ; " why, Mrs. Stanhope, if I had cared for him, or wished him to care for me, I should not have gone to his studio or talked to him as I did. He should have known that." Mrs. Stanhope soothed her, and her sympathy went far in banishing the clouds from her pupil s horizon. " And yet," the governess owned to Mr. Lyman, later, " I was not so surprised as you, I confess. I AN UNWELCOME SUITOR. 43 have sometimes fancied, absurd as the idea seemed to us, in view of Gladys youth, that Mr. Wil- loughby was becoming interested in her. With all her childishness, Gladys is a woman in her dig nity and self-possession." " Little puss ! " said her father, laughing at the recollection of her proud indignation. "Where did she learn how to reject a lover so well ? Poor Willoughby went off without a shadow of hope left. I wonder if she will ask me, a few years hence, to refuse her unwelcome suitors for her ! But this is one reason the more, Mrs. Stanhope, for sending her to school." And into the new world of a girls boarding- school Gladys accordingly went. CHAPTER IV. A NEW R6LE FOR GLADYS. For naught that sets one heart at ease, And giveth happiness or peace, Is low-esteemed in her eyes. J. R. LOWELL. TO those who know its beauties, Mt. Desert is, indeed, a place of fascination, the charm of which brings one back again and again to its shores. " Indeed, papa," Gladys wrote, " I have de cided, after a fortnight s stay here, that it is waste of time for Americans to spend so many years of their lives in roaming over Europe, when here, on their own New England coast, there is such an Eden as this ! I have come back to my own country to fall in love with it at first sight. That may be, as Madge tells me, because I have come at once to the most beautiful spot in it, but, at all events, I cannot let you go abroad again until you have been here. 44 A NEW ROLE FOR GLADYS. 45 " Such a delightful time as I am having ! I don t know whether it is only in Mt. Desert, or everywhere in America, but it seems to me that the young people do enjoy life amazingly. The chaperons look after them, of course, and Aunty is always on duty, but it seems to me very much as if the young men and girls planned out the days for themselves, and the mothers and fathers fell into the plans as if they were the main thing in life. Perhaps it is always so in America. " Mt. Desert is the Paradise of Youth, Miss Gladys, Dr. Forbes said to me when I made some remark about the pleasant, easy way in which the young men and girls meet here. He is a funny, rather gruff old doctor, very caustic in his remarks, but very kind-hearted, I am sure, for Edith and Madge seem so fond of him. He spends his summers in a lovely cottage on the shore, and we see a great deal of him. As he knew you when you were a boy, he is particularly kind to me, and gives me queer descriptions notes of warning, he calls them about the vari ous people I meet. "Among the other men and boys, most of whom he pronounces harmless, or at best amus- 46 A NEW ROLE FOR GLADYS. ing for a fortnight, is a whole yacht full who are here, they say, for study, though we think they have come to an odd place for it. The yacht be longs to a certain Mr. Ned Boylston, a great friend of Cousin Madge s. He is quite young, not yet graduated, and is supposed to be studying very hard for his fall examinations. He does not look, certainly, as if his studies wore upon him, for a more good-natured, cheery, fun-loving, unintellect- ual mortal I never met. With him are three class mates, very much like him, all run off the same mould, Dr. Forbes says, with his smile and shrug of the shoulders, and Mr. Raymond Linde- say who is coaching the party, and who is not in the least like them. I was a little inclined to be afraid of him at first, for Madge holds him in holy horror as fearfully clever, but the other day, in coming down Green Mountain, we were thrown together from my walking with Dr. Forbes, who is very fond of his company, and I got over my awe. He is rather a strange fellow; a little proud and shy, but, when he talks, very interesting." Here the long schoolgirl letter changed its note, and the name of Raymond Lindesay did not again appear in Gladys pages, but not because its owner A NEW R6LE FOR GLADYS. 47 had ceased to interest her. Partly because she was younger than the other girls, partly because the hail-fellow-well-met manner of these Ameri can youths and maidens was, as yet, amusing rather than natural to her, Gladys held a little aloof from the college boys, and, however admired for her beauty, was viewed with a little shyness by them. She liked to seek refuge with the old doctor, and, from the protecting hedge of his thorniness, look out laughingly on the others. So in the descent of Green Mountain, Lindesay, walk ing quickly and lightly like a practised pedestrian, came on the pair, and gave the doctor his arm. "Where are your charges?" asked Dr. Forbes unthinkingly. " Off my hands for the present, thank Heaven ! " returned the young man rather testily. Then, as Gladys looked up, surprised by the petulant tone, and the doctor raised his bushy gray eyebrows quizzically, Lindesay colored. " Excuse my impatience. I did not mean to ask Am I my brother s keeper ? but sometimes I am more glad of play-time than study-hours ! " "The fault was mine, my dear fellow," said the doctor quietly. " I should have known myself 48 A NEW R6LE FOR GLADYS. where the shoe pinched. It is hard goading un willing horses, Lindesay." " It is not so much that," the young man replied ; " Boylston and the others are no worse than many I have coached. But I am rather ashamed to confess it I feel a little testy at times about goading at all. This is Nature s play-time, and a good place she has chosen for it. I should like, sometimes, to forget which side my bread is but tered, and play, too ! " "Ah! something has rubbed the wrong way," thought Dr. Forbes. But the fair-haired girl whose presence both had nearly forgotten, was the one to reply. "Are you ashamed of teaching?" she asked in a grave, sweet tone. " That is strange to me. I should be so proud of the ability ! " Raymond turned quickly, with a flush on his cheek. "Ashamed?" he echoed, half irritated, "but, yes, I was ashamed," he owned suddenly, at sight of the fair, candid face. " Now I am ashamed of being so ! " "That s right," said Gladys simply, and the pair, effectually introduced by the few sentences they had exchanged, looked curiously at each A NEW ROLE FOR GLADYS. 49 other across the intervening doctor. What Linde- say saw in Gladys we already know. What she saw in him was a tall, rather delicate-looking young man, spare, rather than slender, with fair auburn coloring, bright, keen dark eyes, and finely- cut mouth and chin, the former feature at once sensitive and sarcastic. " Bravo, little schoolgirl ! " said the doctor ap provingly. " I did not know you dared scold anybody ! But, after all, what this fellow needs scolding for is rather grinding the axe too hard than neglecting it. You need recreation, my boy. Why don t you take a hand in all this sail ing, dancing, rowing, horseback riding, tomfool ery, what not, that is always going on among the young people ? You haven t forgotten how since your college days or if you have, Boylston will teach you." Raymond shrugged his shoulders. " No ; I have not forgotten ; but but I should not suppose I hardly thought it in my line just now hardly thought it would be considered so, I mean." "Consideration be hanged!" said the doctor, dropping decorum in his vexation. " Conjuring 5O A NEW R6LE FOR GLADYS. up pique, spleen, pride and dyspepsia in this air ! Lindesay, I am ashamed of you ! It would take a whole troop of blue devils to put such no tions into Boylston s happy-go-lucky nature, I think ! Here, Miss Gladys, is a fellow who, to my certain recollection, is a first-rate oarsman, dancer and athlete, a favorite in the ball-room when he chooses to go there, and entertaining in small-talk when he condescends to it I hereby hand him over to you as Master of Ceremonies in the gay world of Mt. Desert. Tell him that you want to be entertained ; that you are a little new in this New World of ours, though quite at home in the Old World, and ask him to show you the way in it." " I shall be glad if he will do it," said Gladys, looking at him half-shyly from laughing eyes. " I shall be glad if I may try," returned the young man ; and for the rest of the walk, laying aside the constrained, half-bitter tone in which he had hitherto spoken, he launched into a stream of bright talk, so entertaining, so contagious, that Gladys forgot her reserve and became as gay as a bird. " Works to a charm ! " thought the old doctor A NEW ROLE FOR GLADYS. 5 1 as he trudged along, somewhat ruefully, behind the more agile and now completely absorbed pair. " I hope I have done nothing which the chaper ons would call imprudent. " " That is a more entertaining young man than I have ever met in America," said Gladys, in the demure, yet outspoken way which delighted the old doctor. " I am sure there is nothing the matter with him except what he fancies." " Exactly so, my dear. But Raymond Lindesay is proud sensitively, morbidly so and, because he is, his fancies are especially bad for him. He lost, two years ago, a father and the expectation of a fortune at the same moment ; more, he found that he had inherited debts and a name which was not so unblemished in honor as he had supposed. He gave up the career which he had planned, and threw himself, heart and soul, into paying off his father s old scores and leaving his memory as bright as might be. He has worked like a slave for his mother and sisters, and will do it, I fancy, all his life. A noble fellow, but one with a morbid streak I suppose some uncharita ble souls would call it egotism running through him. He was a prime favorite in society, and 52 A NEW R6LE FOR GLADYS. might be still, if he would let any one come within a mile of him. But he is proud and fanciful. You heard how he spoke of Boylston the most good-hearted boy alive ! " " What a pity ! " cried Gladys. " It is quite unworthy of him, isn t it ? He must be, he is such a fine character." " Well, get it out of him if you can," said the doctor, turning away from the hotel-steps with a little twinge of conscience. " Get him to join in as many picnics and hops as you can, and if you succeed, all the others will thank you." " I ll try," said Gladys heartily, and she ran up the steps, feeling as if life at Mt. Desert were more than ever interesting. CHAPTER V. "GOLDEN SUMMER." Have you seen but a bright lily grow, Before rude hands have touched it ? Have you marked but the fall of the snow, Before the soil hath smutched it ? BEN JONSON. NEXT morning dawned a rare day, full of golden sunshine, warm as July should be, but with a gentle breeze rippling the blue water, and making it kiss the pebbles with a sweeter murmur. Inland, the air was clear and the scent of the pines came out in the searching sunshine with aromatic fragrance ; but out beyond the little Porcupine Islands a soft pink haze hung, closing in like a sudden horizon round the Happy Isle. Gladys, walking along the lovely shore road with a merry party of girls and young men, over rocks and pebbles, through rustic stiles, and across the green lawns of charming cottages, stopped all at once under a great pine-tree. S3 54 "GOLDEN SUMMER. " Oh, Madge, leave me here for a while ! I really want to sketch." " On a sheet of birch bark with a thorn for a pencil ?" laughed Madge. " No; I have my sketch-book." " Oh, Miss Lyman, you are incorrigible ! " said young Clifford. "Always improving the shining hour till we drones are put to the blush ! " " I did not know their complexions admitted of that," said Gladys, with a twinkling dimple. "No; I m not so dreadfully industrious, Mr. Clif ford, but I should like to send papa that lovely little peep across the water." " Should I be very much in the way if I stayed, too ? " asked the youth. " I could hold the pen cils." "There s only one," said Gladys, "and I m afraid I should not be an entertaining companion if I were sketching. No, Mr Clifford, you will find it a great deal more amusing to walk on with the others. I will be quite ready when you come back, Madge." But Madge s red parasol, and young Boylston who was holding it over her head, were already far in advance. Gladys threw herself down under "GOLDEN SUMMER. 55 the great pine-tree, half-reproving herself for the satisfaction with which she watched poor Clifford s reluctantly retiring footsteps, but feeling dimly that his platitudes and laborious gallantry would have been a profanation of the summer morning. For a time she sat quite still, luxuriating in the deep shadow of the pine, the whisper of the waves as they broke on the tiny pebbled beach at the foot of the cliff, and the mingled breath of wood and sea. Then, drawing sketch-book and pencil from her pocket, she fell industriously to work. At first she was too much absorbed in her occupa tion to notice more than her immediate surround- ings, but presently, leaning farther forward in her study of the little islands, she spied, at the foot of the cliff, the straw hat of a young man. Some thing in his attitude as he lounged on the pebbles, turning the leaves of a book, made her look again. It was Raymond Lindesay. "Now, why," said Gladys to herself with a twinge of vexation that was almost laughable, "is he not walking with the others, or sailing with Mr. Marston and Henry Follen ? None of the party are studying, I know. Either of those things would be better for him than poring over 56 "GOLDEN SUMMER." a book. I suppose he persuaded himself that they did not want him ! " She watched him with growing concern and a naive sense of responsibility. The reader, all unconscious of the scrutiny, presently raised his hat, ran his fingers through his hair, sighed, and turned back with rather a listless air to the book. " I don t believe it interests him," said Gladys to herself, " and there is nothing worse for the mind than forced attention." With a sudden impulse of mischief she pulled a pine-cone from the branch nearest her, and let it fall on the straw hat ; then, much shocked by her own boldness, drew far back from the edge of the cliff. When she ventured to peep again, Lindesay had closed the book ; he lay stretched on the peb bles, idly playing with the pine-cone and watching the waves. Gladys worked busily at her sketch, glad that her unwonted bit of mischief had escaped detection, but wishing that he would come up and join her. Meanwhile, Lindesay, not in truth, as Gladys had divined, much interested in his book, had chanced, in raising his eyes, to spy the broad hat and busy fingers above, but, not catching sight of the face "GOLDEN SUMMER." 57 under the deep shade, had only turned back to the water with a half-annoyed " Impossible to be alone on this shore ! " Presently, however, another up ward glance revealed Gladys fair face and light curling locks under the broad brim just then opportunely raised for a gaze at the islands. He sprang to his feet with alacrity. " Good morning, Miss Lyman ! May I come up ? " " I am very glad you are coming at last," said Gladys demurely. " I think you have been sitting long enough with that book in your hand." " What, you have been watching me ? " with an amused laugh as he climbed up the bank, and threw himself on the grass beside her. " Oh, no ! sketching. But I saw you, and wished, wished " " What ? " asked Raymond curiously, as she hesi tated. " That you knew a little better what was good for you ! You work hard over those unstudious young men ; now, don t you know that when re cess comes, you ought to walk or sail or do any thing but read all alone ? " "Very likely," said the young man, not loath to 58 "GOLDEN SUMMER." argue the case with such an opponent, "but there are two things to be considered. First, the read ing must be done sometime, and secondly, solitude is a necessity when one s society is not in demand." " Mr. Lindesay ! " cried Gladys, suspending her pencil over the sketch and looking, in her eager ness, extraordinarily bright and earnest, " that, I am sure, is a morbid fancy ! You think you are shunned, and that makes your manner repellent. Just promise me that you will try for one week taking your share in whatever is doing, and I am sure you will find yourself welcomed. The fault is yours. Do promise me ! " "Willingly, if you ask so earnestly," said Linde say, looking smilingly into the eager face, "but why should you care ? " "Because," said Gladys, coloring, "Dr. Forbes says and I see for myself, too that you are doing yourself harm. But it will be different in the future," pleadingly, "for you have promised to amuse me. As for this book," she bent forward to take it from the grass where it lay, " Italian do you care so much to read that ? " "I must; that s all." "Must?" cried Gladys, with pretty disdain " GOLDEN SUMMER. 59 " Ought, perhaps, and so ought I to be reading it, I suppose, for I seldom do, and I do not read well, though I can speak it easily." " Can you ? " asked the young man with interest ; " I wish you would sometimes talk with me." " But I will," said Gladys, her eyes lighting up with sudden pleasure, "if only you will go about with us that we may have things to talk about. Promise, Mr. Lindesay it is a duty ! " "No duty" returned the young man, "but a pleasure to please you, so I promise, and will begin with the hop to-night. Now, Miss Lyman, de fine your use of the word duty." "It is a duty," said Gladys gravely, "to use all the talents one has and not to wrap any up in a napkin. If we have powers of entertaining, we are bound to use them." "I defy you to tell me why." "Wait until I try," said the girl, smiling, and coloring again, but with a pretty look of child-like earnestness in her face, as if she had been asked a hard question at school and were anxious not to fail. " It is a duty to others, of course, because it helps to make life happier and brighter ; and to ourselves, I think, because " 60 "GOLDEN SUMMER." "Because, from a point of worldly wisdom, it makes it easier for us to get on in the world. Oh ! if you fall back on policy, Miss Lyman, I may per haps agree with you." "I had no such thought in my mind at all," she answered eagerly. " I was going to say that for ourselves it is best because it helps to make us loved. Now that I have said it, it sounds like some goody saying in a book," reddening with vexation, "and not at all as I mean it, but at least you do not think it a bad or politic motive ? " " What, the wish to be loved ? No, you sweet child ! " said Lindesay impulsively, flushing a little the next moment at his own words ; but Gladys face had been irresistible. " I beg your pardon for my impertinence," he added. Gladys, too, had colored, but not with vexation. " I am not at all angry," she said simply. " I have no doubt I do seem a very silly child, espe cially when I try to lecture other people about life of which I know so little myself. Only I am clear in this one thing, Mr. Lindesay, that your way isn t the right one, and I am so glad you are willing to try mine. You promised to begin to night, remember." "GOLDEN SUMMER." 61 " It is a compact." The Italian book was not resumed, though the sketch was, and, when the walking party returned, and Lindesay as well as Gladys joined it, it was in such a different mood from usual a mood so overflowing with fun, and what Madge was pleased to call " nonsense talk," that she opened wide eyes of amazement, wondering, mentally, what "Gladys had done to help Mr. Lindesay off his stilts." Young Clifford, too, disposed, at first, to resent the usurpation of the post to which he had aspired, quickly mollified under the influence of Raymond s unwontedly affable mood, and showed himself the amiable, if not brilliant, youth he was. Nor was Madge s astonishment diminished by the experi ences of the "hop" that evening. " Really," she remarked to Edith, as she pre pared for bed, shaking each article vigorously as she took it off, and walking round and round the rather circumscribed space, " I begin now to under stand the meaning of the word regeneration ! Raymond Lindesay has opened my eyes. I don t mean that he has, to my knowledge, experienced religion. Edith, do you think one could make use of such a phrase as experiencing frivolity ? " 62 "GOLDEN SUMMER." " What are you talking of, Madge ? " " Of Gladys mysterious influence ; but I scarcely expected you to get hold of the clue ! " " Are you sure you have it yourself ? " " I m groping for it," returned Madge from the depths of her bureau drawer. CHAPTER VI. A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. All that I know Of a certain star Is, it can throw (Like the angled spar) 1 Now a dart of red, Now a dart of blue, Till my friends have said They would fain see, too, My star that dartles the red and the blue ! . . . What matter to me if their star is a world ? Mine has opened its soul to me ; therefore I love it. ROBERT BROWNING. AND Gladys will make the sixth you will go, of course ? " Madge turned to her cousin as she came out on the hotel piazza, to join the gay after-breakfast group of girls. " Perhaps so, when I know where." " Oh ! in a sail-boat to Sullivan, this af :ernoon it s the proper thing to go over to the silver mines, you know," replied Madge, always too much in a hurry to be very lucid in her explana- 63 64 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. tions. " It is Anna s party. She and Mr. Clifford, Mr. Pollen, and Mr. Boylston, who is quite at home on the water, are going, so you need not be afraid. You will go ?" " No, I think not," said Gladys, hesitating, and glancing at her elder cousin, who sat by with her embroidery. " Oh no ! I can t," with an air of relief, "it is my Italian afternoon." "Italian afternoon!" said Anna curiously, " why, who gives lessons here ?" and Edith looked up quickly from her work. " Not lessons, exactly," said Gladys, coloring a little under the publicity of the examination ; "Mr. Lindesay and I read and talk Italian together on Tuesday afternoons, and I would rather not go, thank you." " I scarcely think you need mind that, my dear," said Edith, in the quiet, incisive tone Gladys had learned to interpret as conveying a hint of inde corum to Madge, "if that is all. It can scarcely be a regular engagement, as we have not heard of it before, and it would be very easy to explain to Mr. Lindesay if explanation should be necessary." " And you needn t be afraid of mamma s object ing," said outspoken Madge, " though we must A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 65 start before she gets back from her excursion. As Anna is sister to one of the young men, it makes her a sort of chaperon, don t you see ? " " And there is always safety in numbers," said Anna, with the slight sneer Gladys disliked so much. "You will be much safer with us, I assure you, than if you kept your land engagement. Will is depending on your joining the party. You will say yes ? " " Since it seems to be already arranged," said Gladys, turning away with a shade of vexation on her fair face. " And I will make your excuses to Mr. Lindesay if I meet him on my way back," said Anna. " Come, Madge." The gay chatting group sauntered off along the shore, the light dresses and bright parasols glinting in and out among the trees, but Gladys still lin gered beside Edith. She was not apt to be so easily persuaded against her will, but something in her cousin s glance had seemed to convey a reproof, and Gladys, though all unconscious of ill-doing, had been too proud to persist in her purpose. Edith waited until the party were quite out of hearing and the piazza free from all possible eavesdroppers. 66 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. " Were you really afraid that mamma might not think it just the thing to go, Gladys ?" "I thought of it, but girls do so many things here that seem to me a little strange." " But, my dear," said Edith, with a superior smile, "that is just the reason why you may do them ! Of course one always does at Rome some what as the Romans do, and water parties among the girls and young men are every-day affairs at Bar Harbor, while no one reads Italian with Mr. Lindesay, Gladys." " There is surely nothing improper in that," said Gladys, flushing hotly. " It came about very nat urally, Edith, and I never thought to speak of it. I seem like a schoolgirl to Mr. Lindesay, I sup pose, and as I speak Italian, and he wished to learn to talk but I am sorry I mentioned it ! " " I am sure mamma will be very glad," replied Edith, sententiously. " Of course you did not think of it, my dear, but, in a place like this, one can t be too careful about exciting gossip." " I trust I never may, indeed ! " rejoined Gladys, turning into the house with a choking sensation in her throat. She took a book and strolled down on the bank within sight of the house, for she felt A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 6/ too indignant, just then, to remain placidly seated beside her cousin. It was not entirely for the dis appointment about the reading, oh, no ! though Tuesday afternoons had been very pleasant for the last six weeks. It was because Edith with her elder-sister air of propriety, and Anna, with her stare and laugh, had conspired to carry to Gladys mind a thought which had never before been there. To her Mr. Lindesay was, indeed, dif ferent from the other young men different in being older, more intellectual, superior in every way different, too, in being unhappy. Had not Dr. Forbes himself told her she must try to win him from that morbid shrinking into himself, and had she not been filled with happy pride that she had so far succeeded ? And now was all to be spoiled by foolish thoughts of self? The Italian reading had not formed the only sub ject of conversation, though it had been too great a pleasure to Lindesay to hear Gladys pure, musical tones for that to be thrown aside. Some pages of the Inferno always began the interview ; then talk naturally followed. Discussion of the great Florentine paved the way for other authors ; from individual preferences in reading to other personal 68 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. peculiarities or experiences was a short and easy transition. Gladys had been at first surprised to find how good a linguist Raymond was, then de lighted to see how easily he caught the liquid accents from her lips, and ho\v soon it seemed to be as natural to him as it was to herself to be talking Italian. Occasionally, too, after reading to her some passage from an English author, he would unconsciously fall back into the same language, and she would scarcely notice it. " I am afraid you thought me a very peevish animal the first time we met, Miss Lyman," he said, laughingly, one day. " Don t you remem ber?" for she looked at him in surprise, her pretty eyebrows raised. " The time when you lectured me about being ashamed of teaching ? " " Oh yes ! but I did not think you in the least peevish. I really wondered that any one should be sorry to have the opportunity for using a power." " And I," said Lindesay, with a half-sigh," was grumbling because that very necessity of teaching hampered me in other opportunities, or what might have been opportunities." " I understand a little better now," said Gladys, shyly. li 1 mean that Dr. Forbes has told me A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 69 something about you. Mr. Lindesay, you will tell me, please, if I speak of things that are distaste ful to you, but I have always looked at these mat ters so differently. I always thought that riches, not poverty, were hampering. I thought they prevented people from developing all the fine traits of character or talents they might possess by making things too easy." " It is so in a degree, I suppose," said Lindesay, thoughtfully. " Our best is always developed more fully for some struggle ; but there is another side to it. If a man be born poor, and has to hammer his way up, as it were, forging the satis faction of his tastes out of the hunger and thirst for knowledge that is in him, I have no doubt that he has all the finer mind, all the higher character for that wrestle with fortune. But if, on the other hand, one has begun in the lap of luxury, and come by inheritance to the tastes and yearnings of generations of ancestors bred in the bone, one might say then the struggle for the mere necessities of life comes hard. Then it is not only hampering it may be even belittling ay, demoralizing ! " He was speaking rather to himself than Gladys, /O A CHAJCCE RAY OF LIGHT. and with a bitterness of which he was probably unconscious. She listened intently, and the tears suddenly rose in her eyes. "That is true," she said, "I did not think of it so, and yet oh, Mr. Lindesay, riches are such an accident ! " " A happy accident," returned the young man, lightly, for the sight of Gladys earnest face and tearful eyes had recalled him, with a slight sensa tion of shame, to himself. " But do not take it so seriously, Miss Lyman. I am a very unmannerly, if not unmanly fellow to have put such thoughts into your head. Many a better man than I has come to his best in spite of everything that fate could do against him ! And then think of all the possibilities fortune may have in store for me ! " "What, for instance?" said the girl, fixing her eyes on him with an intent look of hopefulness which was very fascinating to the young man. " Oh ! some windfall in the form of a legacy, per haps, or shall we say a marriage with an heiress ? " Gladys shook her head emphatically, answering in the same light tone, " No, indeed ; that would be worse than anything ! That, I am sure, there is no danger of unless you should happen to be very much in love with an heiress and then " A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. /I " What then ? " " Then, of course, the fact of her being an heir ess would make no difference at all." " Exactly so," said Lindesay. " Yes, Miss Ly- man, that would, indeed, be worse than anything, but have no fears for me. One of these days I will give you some of my views on the subject of worldly marriages." And so the pair had re turned to the Inferno. Now all this had seemed to Gladys so natural, looking upon Lindesay as she had, hitherto, as an interesting character far removed from herself by age and experience, but if, as Edith had hinted, there were food for Bar Harbor gossip in their intercourse how very different it all became ! But Mrs. Stanhope s pupil was not prone to morbid self-consciousness, and long before Madge s summons from the piazza to " Come and put on her boating dress, for we must start right after dinner," Gladys was happily absorbed in her book, Raymond Lindesay forming only the background to a sunny present and a hopeful future. Nor could the sail to Sullivan be otherwise than a delight to a girl who revelled in blue skies, bright waves and sunshine, and the exhilaration of flying /2 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. before the wind in a light boat that danced like a feather on the water. Gladys was as animated as any of the party, and Anna Clifford, who had her own reasons for shrewd observation, might have been satisfied, for any appearance to the contrary, that her brother was an all-sufficing en tertainer. Sullivan was reached long before their expecta tions with such favoring conditions of wind and water. After a turn through the great parlor and wide piazzas, just now deserted by boarders with a tendency to after-dinner naps, and left to the possession of a few nurses and wakeful children, the mines naturally recurred to their thoughts, and the merry party drove off in an open wagon. What the prospect of ore from the Sullivan mines may be, or whether more silver is likely to be sunk or raised in the undertaking, it is not my purpose to state ; but, as Madge was of a nature to drain the cup of enjoyment to the dregs, and Anna, inclined to investigate everything thor oughly, it was already late when the party returned to the hotel. The piazza was filled now with chatterers or prom- enaders who looked in through the open windows A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 73 as the three fresh-looking girls in their pretty boat ing-suits strolled, with their flannel-shirted escorts, through the deserted parlor and grouped about the piano. " What a lovely girl that is in the green flannel suit and little Tyrolese hat ! " said a white-haired lady to a bearded gentleman, her son. " One of the Bar Harbor party, did you say ? Dear me ! what time do those young people expect to get back this evening ? How uneasy I should be if I were that girl s mother ! " " Be glad you are not ! " said her companion laughingly, with a careless glance over his shoulder at the occupants of the parlor. " Although if you were you would probably catch the prevailing tone of Bar Harbor chaperons and be sure that every thing would be all right in the end !" (Evidently this gentleman had made extensive studies in the " Summer School of Philosophy " some years in advance of the author of that clever little pencil satire.) " Don t give yourself a moment s uneasiness, mother," he repeated. "Take my word for it, that sail-boat will reach her destination safely." " Perhaps she may, but I really wish they would 74 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. start ! I must go and sit near the window and find out whether they are not talking of going I daresay they have no idea of the hour ! " "Very probably not, and they will not thank you for reminding them," said her son. Remon strance, however, was useless, and Gladys, seated on the piano stool, was suddenly aware of an anxious face on the fast-darkening background of the win dow frame, looking at her with friendly interest from a halo of black lace and white hair. " Oh ! it isn t half time to start yet," young Pollen was saying. " There will be a moon later. Won t you dance, Miss Lyman ? " " No, thank you, not here, I think. But I will play for you, if you like to dance." And the two couples were soon whirling about the room with the supreme disregard of all on-lookers peculiar to very young and buoyant Americans, peculiar espe cially, so Mr. Warner would tell us, at this particu lar stopping-place in "Their Pilgrimage." Will Clifford stood leaning on the piano, and trying at intervals to soften Gladys resolve of not dancing. "You have a long sail before you," said the watcher on the piazza, at last. " Perhaps your A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 75 friends do not know how late it is. Don t you think it would be better to sail without waiting for the moon ? Excuse my interference, my dear, but having daughters at home makes me interested in all young people." "Oh! thank you," said Gladys gratefully, drop ping her hands at once from the keys. " I don t believe they do know how late it is. Madge, we really ought to start ! " " It is growing dark very fast," added the anx ious Mentor, " and they tell me squalls are so fre quent in this locality." " What an old worry ! " said Madge, aside to her partner ; but the note of alarm had been sounded, and the six were speedily on the wing for the little pier where their boat was moored, Gladys completely winning the old lady s heart by her sweet voice and graceful words of thanks at parting. " I was sure," she said, in a tone of triumph as she rejoined her son, " that that lovely girl was not one of those wild Daisy Millers you are always telling me about ! But I shall expect to hear that that sail-boat has gone to the bottom ! " Meanwhile other anxious souls on the opposite 76 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. shore were beginning to awaken to the fact that it was growing dark, and a wild, somewhat gusty darkness, too, while nothing was heard or seen of the little " Ariel." Mrs. Waterston, shrouded in her shawl, peered, for the twentieth time, at least, from the piazza. " How could you let them go, Edith ? " she asked, again and again. "Dear mamma," replied the long-suffering daughter, " could I have prevented the party ? How many times Madge has gone on afternoon sails and come back safely ! " " Yes but Gladys " " I thought you agreed with me, that it was much better for her to go than to read, as she proposed, with - " Yes, I know I did. Oh dear ! what a care girls are ! I do particularly feel the responsibility of Gladys on your uncle s account, and what you told me this afternoon distresses me. Your uncle Gordon will hold me responsible for every ineli gible acquaintance." "Mamma," said her prudent daughter, in alarm, " do take care not to use such a word in connec tion with Mr. Lindesay to Gladys. Remember A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 77 what a child she is ; and I am sure she had no thought that there was anything unusual in the reading. She was quite indignant with me for hinting at such an idea." "Then why worry me so about it?" cried the poor inconsistent chaperon. " Why not let her read like a schoolgirl, since she is one? That would, surely, be better than letting her drown under our very eyes. Do, Edith, ask Charles to go down to the pier again and see if the boat is in.! " Nor were those on the hotel piazza, the only anxious hearts, though the possessors might be less voluble in pouring forth their plaints than Mrs. Waterston. It had been a long afternoon to Raymond Lindesay ; he had grown to look forward with anticipation to the Tuesday readings with the fresh, charming girl, to plan out little deviations from their usual course, and to speculate as to how Gladys would look when he should say thus and so, or what she would reply to this and that. So it had been a disappointment when Miss Clifford, passing him on the shore road with a pleasant " Good-morning ! " had turned back with a hasty : "Oh, Mr. Lindesay! I promised to tell you, if I should meet you, that Miss Lyman will not be able" 78 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. to read Italian with you this afternoon. We have persuaded her, sorely against her will, I assure you, to go on a sailing-party to Sullivan." " I trust she would not allow our engagement to prevent her from carrying out her wishes at any time," said Raymond a little stiffly. At heart he was vexed that the Italian reading should have been spoken of in public. " No ; but her heart seemed quite set on keeping the appointment with you what a charming child she is, by the way ! " said Anna, warmly. " Do you find her a promising pupil, Mr. Lindesay ? " " Really," said Raymond, still with a shade of annoyance in his tone, " I am rather the pupil than she. Miss Lyman speaks Italian perfectly, and I have been wholly the gainer, so far." " Indeed ! " Anna exclaimed with a sharp twinge of envy. " However, that is only natural since she is just out of the school-room. The novelty to her, I suppose, is the gayety which we older ones are getting the least bit tired of. So, by and by, when Miss Lyman finds something that really interests her, as all of us do, sooner or later, at Mt. Desert, don t forget what a delightful variety some pursuit a little more solid would be to us who have had our A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 79 share of the froth. Good-morning ! if you will not come in." And Anna turned into the gate of her father s cottage, leaving Raymond less inclined, after all, to be vexed than flattered. In some* sen sitive natures vanity is not the fibre least keenly alive to friction. When he returned to the yacht for the every day five o clock reading with his pupils, only Mars- ton and one other student were there. Tea-time came and went without the reappearance of Boyl- ston and Pollen ; but that, after all, was natural, since tea at the hotel was probably part of the programme. The two students strolled off to drop in, as usual, during the evening at some of the cottage door-step parties, and Raymond, left alone, with little inclination for indifferent calls, walked the deck of the yacht and studied the sky. The sun had gone down in a dark bank of cloud, flecked with angry streaks of red. " Squally night, sir," said one of the crew, touch ing his cap as he passed Raymond. "The little Ariel isn t in yet, is she?" he asked abruptly. "No, sir; Cap n Wilkins was down just now lookin out for her. Hope Mr. Boylston hasn t 8O A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. any ladies along to-night ? He ll have enough to do to keep the boat right side up." Lindesay, by no means reassured by this predic tion, hastened forthwith to the Waterstons hotel, not, indeed, with the idea of asking for the safety of Mrs. Waterston s niece and daughter, but of sat isfying himself, by less direct means, as to the amount of anxiety in the atmosphere. No questions, in truth, were necessary ; the sight of Charles Freeman returning from a fruitless sur vey, and the anxious inquiry from the piazza, " What, nothing yet ? " sufficed, and Lindesay returned to the yacht, with his mind made up, although, with characteristic reticence, he had not exchanged a word with any one as to his purpose. Hurrying below, he hastily collected all the shawls he could find, adding several ulsters a masculine bundle of wraps. " Harry," he said to the man who had spoken to him, an old hand who had been for some years in Boylston s employ, " I want you to get the tight est little sail-boat you know of, and come with me to look for Mr. Boylston. He has ladies with him, and they are so long getting in that I am afraid they may have had some accident." A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 8 1 "Ay, ay, sir," returned the man, betraying by his ready compliance what had been his own secret anxiety, for Boylston was heartily liked by his crew, as by every one who came within reach of his sunny geniality, "I know the very boat. You think you d best go, sir ? Me and Smith, the Fairy s skipper, could manage between us " But Raymond having, apparently, no doubts as to the necessity of his presence, Harry was speedily off in quest of his craft, and quarter of an hour later they were tossing along over the pitchy waves in the direction of Sullivan. The wind blew furiously, and the water, at that hour, had a particularly deserted look, all the sail-boats, steam-yachts and larger vessels being snugly at anchor. " Squally night, sir," said Smith, in his turn, and Lindesay felt an additional pang of anxiety. Their own little lantern shed but a narrow circle of light over the watery path, and this was made still less by the plunging of the boat as she rose and fell on the waves. Raymond bit his lip with impatience, their progress seemed so slow. " Do you see nothing ? " he shouted to Smith, in the teeth of the wind, which, with their vigor- 82 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. ous hauling of the ropes, made talking no easy matter. " Nary boat, sir ; " but, at the same instant, "Boat ahoy!" shouted Harry, and faintly over the dark water came a cry of distress. Ray mond s heart leaped to his mouth. "That s Boylston ! " he cried, and if Harry had hitherto had any doubts as to the efficiency of the tutor at the ropes, they were dispelled on the in stant. As they bore down upon the hardly-to-be- distinguished boat, Raymond was, assuredly, the third man in the right place. "Can you take us in ?" shouted Boylston from the sailless little cockle-shell ; " I ve ladies on board, and we ve lost our sail." "Ay, ay, sir!" roared Harry. "We ve come out just a-purpose." "What you, old fellow ? " came back Boylston s gleeful boyish tones. " Good for you ! " The dark figure stood up for a moment against the stormy sky, then, as the rope flung out by Harry was caught, and the little cockle-shell, with its lady passengers cowering in the bottom, became on a sudden distinctly visible close beside them, he added, heartily, A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 83 " You re a trump, Harry ? What we should have done without you " " Mr. Lindesay, sir, not me," said the man. " I d ha com^. quick enough, though, if I d known where. Ladies badly scared, sir ? " " I m afraid they ve good cause," said the young yachtsman ruefully, turning to help Raymond and Pollen, who were lifting the three girls from the dismantled boat. Anna regained her self-posses sion so soon as her foot touched the " Fairy s " floor, but Madge, always uncontrolled in her emotions, poured out the history of their frightful adventure, the darkness, the wind, the cracking of the sail, the all but inevitable capsizing of the boat, and the certainty that they would never have reached Bar Harbor alive, in tones equally divided between tears and laughter. " I m afraid you ll never trust yourself to my guidance again, Miss Madge," said Boylston, in a tone of chagrin. " Oh, hush, Madge ! " whispered Gladys, "don t you see that you make him feel worse ? Yes, we are very wet, thank you, Mr. Lindesay." Raymond had lifted Gladys last of all from the wrecked sail-boat, why, he did not know, unless <^4 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. because, by so doing, he could set her down safely in the " Fairy" himself instead of passing her on to Clifford who stood behind him. He held her even a moment longer than was necessary as he put his somewhat superfluous question, passing his hand anxiously over the dripping arm that rested on his shoulder. Gladys was very quiet, but she clung to the supporting arm gratefully, and there was a happy little tremor in her laugh ing reply. " I have wraps here," said Raymond, plunging into the heap of shawls and ulsters. At that moment Boylston s grip of the hand and hearty thanks, Anna s quiet, ladylike expressions of grati tude, and Madge s " See what it is to have one s wits about him ! " were alike distasteful. He wanted nothing but to satisfy himself that Gladys was warm and sheltered from the cutting wind, and, beyond that, cared little how long they might be in reaching Bar Harbor. " Don t be afraid of our taking cold ! " she laughed from the depths of shawls and ulsters in which he had wrapped her. " I have often been nearly as drenched by sudden showers in riding with papa, and salt water does one no harm." A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. 85 " I m afraid your adventure will give you a dis taste for salt water," said Lindesay. " Oh, no ! It was our own fault for not starting sooner. Mr. Boylston was not to blame. But I would rather have stayed on shore this afternoon." She spoke simply and involuntarily, and Ray mond, remembering the engagement of the after noon, felt an exultant thrill of pleasure. He was not wanting in tact, however, and the question, " When shall we read again ? " followed, not directly, but some minutes later, as they were nearing the pier. " Not to-morrow," replied Gladys, " nor" - with a sudden change of tone " indeed, I do not know when, Mr. Lindesay. You must be very busy." The sudden note of trouble in the voice struck Lindesay s sensitive ear at once, but there was no time now for explanation. Charles Freeman was on the pier as their boat neared it, and, with his almost morbid dislike of thanks, Raymond turned off towards the yacht, leaving his praises to be sounded much more volubly than he could have desired, by Madge and the warm-hearted Boylston. " The reading would have been much better than such an adventure, Edith," whispered Mrs. Water- 86 A CHANCE RAY OF LIGHT. ston, pausing at her daughter s door on their way up-stairs to bed. " One cannot seem to do any thing uncourteous when he has put us under such obligations, but I would rather almost anything had happened." CHAPTER VII. GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls. TENNYSON. DR. FORBES sat in his study, writing a letter. A pretty little room it was, one long window looking out, from the high cliff on which the cottage was perched, over the water, and the other opening on a honeysuckle-wreathed piazza. The intervening spaces in the walls were filled with book-cases, their shelves overflowing with gravely-bound medical tomes, while papers and pamphlets lay scattered about in dire confusion. " Too pretty a room to be littered with doctor s books ! " thought Gladys as she peeped in through the open window that bright August morning. The doctor did not notice her for a while, being much absorbed in his own somewhat crabbed and whimsically characteristic handwriting, until, look ing up to consult his note-book and verify the 87 88 GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. description of a case which he was giving his cor respondent, his eyes caught sight of Gladys roguish face under her broad hat. " Ah, Miss Impertinence ! " he said, falling back in his arm-chair and taking a smiling survey of the blooming face under the wide brim, and the slender rounded figure in the dainty rose-sprinkled satine, " spying on a harmless old fellow in that saucy fashion ! Come in, if you have anything to say to me, but don t say it until I have finished this letter to my boy, for it must go by this morning s mail." " Your boy ! Do you mean your son, Dr. Forbes ? I did not know you were married." "Oh ! you fancied me too cross-grained to be any thing but an old bach, did you ? No, my dear, I had a wife and a houseful of children once, though Stephen is the only one left me now." " And where is he ? " "On the Continent, that paradise of doctors, as he has been, off and on, ever since he graduated as he will be, I suppose, so long as I am in active practice." " Why should that matter ? Is he a doctor too ? " "To the backbone!" replied his father, laugh- GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. 89 ing. " You ask why it matters ? Because he is too loyal to his old father to wish to settle near him and draw off his patients so long as he cares to practise himself." "Why should he expect to ? " Gladys asked, with girlish disdain. " Inevitable, my dear ! The first touch of his hand as he felt your pulse would clo it. He has the true doctor s hand, strong, gentle, life-giving ; mine is a dry chip in comparison." " I think you are quite mistaken," said the girl warmly, " and so is your son, if he imagines any such thing. I am sure my aunt would have no one but you, and neither will papa and I." " Pooh, child ! " said the doctor, " did you think I was in earnest ? No ; Steve is too simple a fellow to have any such egotistic thoughts. There are a thousand reasons for his staying where he is at present, and he would find a thousand more for flying off to China, the North Pole or anywhere else where he thought there was any help to be given or anything new to be learned. He is a sort of medical knight-errant. But now a ten- minutes truce to questions, Miss Gladys, or I shall not finish my letter in time for the mail." 90 GIRLHOOD 5 TROUBLES. The doctor s pen skated briskly over the paper, and Gladys, left to her own thoughts for enter tainment, gradually lost the laughing sparkle in her eyes, and sat looking unusually grave, even a little sad and troubled. In truth she had come out, not with the idea of seeking the old doctor, to whom she often paid flying visits, but because there was a secret weight pressing on her heart which air and sunshine seemed the best medicine to dispel. True to her forebodings, her aunt had taken alarm at Edith s representations, and approached the subject of the Italian readings timidly, indeed, but in a way infinitely distressing to poor little Gladys. " It would be the height of indelicacy, of course, my dear, to withdraw at once from any engage ment which you might have unthinkingly made and you will not be so imprudent again, will you, Gladys dear ? As I was saying, you must proceed now with the greatest delicacy and tact, especially as Mr. Lindesay s feelings are so over-sensitive, and we are under the deepest obligation to him. But I have perfect confidence in your discretion " Oh, Aunt Laura ! what can I say ? " cried poor GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. 91 Gladys, distressed by the picture thus conjured up, " how can I hurt any one s feelings so ? " " Hurt any one s feelings ! The very last thing I would have you do ! It will be the easiest thing in the world to manage. Just say how pleasant it would be to have some of the others read with you ; and do remember, Gladys, love, that it is always best to do things in a crowd, as it were. One avoids all particularity in that way, and there is no danger of one s name being coupled " Oh, please, Aunt Laura, don t say any more ! " cried Gladys, her face on fire. " I wasn t thinking of any such things when we began to read, and now all the pleasure is spoiled." And then as she started on her walk, the first sight that met her eyes was Raymond Lindesay s slender active figure coming towards her. She hesitated, half-wishing that she could run away ; then ashamed of the childish impulse, quickened her own steps and held out her hand in greeting, more cordially than she might otherwise have done, though her face flushed painfully. " What a morning ! " he said, seeming to notice nothing beside. "Just look at the sunbeams dancing on every dewdrop^ on every blade of grass ! 92 GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. No wonder Dante thought he had given the poor virtuous heathen comfort enough by putting the image of green grass under their feet." The allusion to Dante was somewhat unfortunate at that moment, but Gladys nerved herself and began, " Mr. Lindesay, I " But Lindesay seemed blind and deaf that morning. " Ruskin quotes that, do you remember ? " he went on quickly, still keeping his eyes fixed on the velvety* grass. " Let me see, how does he go on ? Gather a single blade of grass and examine for a minute, quietly, its narrow, sword-shaped strip of fluted green. Nothing as it seems there of notable goodness or beauty. A very little strength and a very little tallness, and a few delicate long lines meeting in a point not a perfect point, neither, but blunt and unfinished by no means a cred itable or apparently much-cared-for example of Nature s workmanship : made, as it seems, only to be trodden on to-day and to-morrow to be cast into the oven : and a little pale and hollow stalk, feeble and flaccid, leading down to the dull brown fibres He had stooped to gather a blade of grass as he spoke, and quoted with a smile, as if he were him self describing it. GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. 93 "Oh! do you know that?" exclaimed Gladys, quite at ease again. "How well I remember Mrs. Stanhope s reading it to me one morning when we were sketching in England ! I like that whole chapter on grass." " So do I, though Ruskin is often a little too fanciful for me. I am not artistic, you know. Something a little more terse and vigorous suits me better, whether in prose or poetry." And he murmured a bit of Emerson s "May Day," still apropos of the grass : " See every patriot oak-leaf throws His elfin length upon the snows, Not idle, since the leaf all day Draws to the spot the solar ray, Ere sunset quarrying inches down And half-way to the mosses brown ; While the grass beneath the rime Has hints of the propitious time, And upward pries and perforates Through the cold slab a thousand gates Till green lances, peering through, Nod happy in the welkin blue." " Not very appropriate for August, but perfect for a Mt. Desert May-day," he finished, with a smile. "Whew! how cold spring must be here! " If his object had been to put Gladys at ease, 94 GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. he had certainly succeeded ; she was quite her own dignified graceful little self again. " How I wish I could remember what I read as you do ! " she said, meeting his eyes bravely. " And, Mr. Lindesay, reading with you has been such a pleasure to me. Do you not think we might share it with some of the others ? I know of one or two who would appreciate it." " If you wish it, certainly," said Raymond, a lit tle startled by this bold advance into the enemy s camp, for his quick eye had discerned the trouble in Gladys face, and his keen sensitiveness had connected it with the hesitation of the night be fore about the deferred reading. "Are there so many Italian linguists among the young ladies at Bar Harbor, then ? " " I wasn t thinking of Italian exactly," said Gladys, coloring. " You know we have some times read English, too. If I tried, I might make that Italian novel we are translating interesting to the others, or you could, certainly, and anybody who cared at all for Italian would like the music of Dante." "Well, it shall be as you choose, of course," said Raymond, smothering his own chagrin. "As GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. 95 you say, there might be some who would enjoy it." He remembered Anna Clifford. "And such things always settle themselves in the end ; the disaffected drop off after one or two trials, and the class shrinks into its original elements. But you forget my personal share in the matter, my progress in Italian what is to become of that ? " " Oh ! " cried Gladys, her face flushing again in her eagerness to have the painful matter happily settled, "you have made progress, haven t you? Really, you speak so well I have been surprised." " Thank you," said Raymond lightly ; then, pausing a moment at Dr. Forbes gate, where Gladys made a determined stop, he held out his hand, forcing her eyes, as it were, to meet his. " You spoke, the other day, of my being too busy to read. My engagements, you know, are regular ones, and those are the easiest in the world to manage, but if anything comes up which you want to do, and there will be a great deal, don t feel obliged to keep a troublesome engagement." His eyes looked into hers so full of an expres sion which was quite new to her, a sort of deep comprehension and wistful tenderness, that Gladys was half startled, half perplexed. 96 GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. "Troublesome? Oh, no! oh, no!" she said, slowly, "I should never feel that." She turned up the garden path as she spoke, and, if the truth must be told, the eyes which met the old doctor s so laughingly a few minutes later, were just then filled with tears. Raymond stood watching her until she reached the house. " Poor little girl ! Dear little girl ! " he said to himself. "What have they been say ing to her ? " But there was no sadness in his face as he said it ; on the contrary, an unusually bright, almost an exultant expression played about his mouth and looked from his eyes as he walked away. All this had passed quickly through Gladys mind as she sat silently awaiting the end of the doctor s letter, till, impatient just then of her own restless thoughts, she opened the unfailing sketch-book, and looked about her for subjects. Her eye fell on a crayon head hanging over the doctor s writing-table. It was the portrait of a man of perhaps thirty ; a strong, good face, not handsome, certainly, Gladys thought ; but some thing in the steady, earnest expression of the eyes as they met hers, struck her fancy, and seemed to GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. 97 exercise a restful influence on her troubled mind. A few moments after, she was quite engrossed in trying to catch that- very look in her pencil likeness. " And now," wrote the doctor, " though I know the genus girl does not much interest you (un less, perhaps, I should add, she have need of a physician), I must appeal to your indulgence for once, and break off my letter sooner than I in tended, out of consideration for one of the sweet est, brightest specimens of girlhood I know, who has just dropped in to make me a call. She is Gordon Lyman s daughter, and, if I were not tired of holding out such inducements to you, I should advise you to return home in a hurry before this sweet little rosebud gets her petals a trifle too fully blown from flaunting in the world s garden. But what an old fool you will think me ! I am almost ready to acknowledge it myself, for trying such blandishments on a hardened subject like you." He folded and addressed the letter, smiling, then returning to the table, after giving it to the servant, he stooped over Gladys shoulder to look at her sketch. 98 GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. " Why, that is a coincidence ! " he exclaimed. " What do you think of that face, my dear ? " " I like it," said Gladys heartily, holding off her sketch at arms-length, and examining it critically; "not because it is handsome, you know, for it is not, but just for that downright heart-and- soul look it has in the eyes." "Ay! that is Stephen s strong point," said the father, pleased, in spite of Gladys frank admission. " Oh ! " a little abashed by the recollection, "is that your son ? I said he was not handsome, but one cannot tell much from a sketch like that. The face doesn t matter much in a man, of course." "Especially as there is quite enough of Stephen to make up for possible drawbacks in beauty of feature," smiled the father, "as you will say your self when you see him that is, if he ever does settle down at home, like his sober married con temporaries." " Then he is not married ? " "His work is his wife. Carlyle says some where, Blessed is the man who has found his work ; let him ask no other blessedness ; and Steve is so nearly of his mind that he will be GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. 99 satisfied, I think, with that state of single blessed ness all his life." " I remember Mr. Lindesay s saying," said Gladys, thoughtfully, touching her pencil portrait here and there, and dismissing the original from the conversation, " that that was one of Carlyle s truest sayings ; but there are not many people who do find their right work, I suppose, or who are able to devote themselves to it if they do. What a pity that is ! " " So Lindesay has been reading you Carlyle with personal foot-notes, has he ? " said the old doctor, with a glance from under his bushy eye brows.- " By the way, how does my prescription for him work ? How do you like him ? " " Every one likes him now, I think," Gladys replied guardedly. " Good ! I told you they would, and you ve succeeded bravely in drawing him out. They tell me he appeared last night in a new character as the rescuer of young ladies from a watery grave. How came you to be drawn into such a mad frolic as that, Miss Gladys ? " " I was over-persuaded," said Gladys, her color deepening at the recollection. IOO GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. " So-ho ! Well, don t let yourself be over- persuaded next time, my dear. Just go on your own straight course, which, ten to one, will be the right one. I don t preach independent action to every girl, mind, but I think you have a steadier head than most of the girls about you." " I begin to think" said Gladys, then hesitated so long that the good doctor grew impatient. "Well, what, my dear? " " I was only going to say that I thought it very hard for girls to be independent ; hard for them to know what it is right to do. They have to think so much of what other people will say " "They needn t," said the doctor emphatically. " Nine tenths of what people will say is bosh, take my word for it ; possibly it will never be said ! Just get that idea out of your head before you launch out into the world. But you are enig matical this morning, Miss Gladys. Tell me the whole story of this unlucky water-party : who over- persuaded you, and what did you fear people would say? / said if those six young people were not fine specimens of our American youth, there would be rheumatic fever after their ducking! Let me hear the story." GIRLHOOD S TROUBLES. IOI " I haven t time to tell it to-day," said Gladys, hurriedly closing her book as she glanced at the clock, " even if it were worth your hearing. Good-by for this morning, Dr. Forbes ! You see you should not have written such volumes to your son if you wanted me to talk to you." And, with an April flash of the brown eyes, she was out of the house and at the gate. The old doctor walked thoughtfully up and down the piazza., his hands folded behind him. "Girls! girls!" he muttered to himself. "I begin to think I know even less about them than my son Stephen ! Have I been making any mis chief, I wonder ? What sen.t that little witch off in such a hurry ? " CHAPTER VIII. AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. O, were thou in the cauld blast, On yonder lea, on yonder lea. My plaidie to the angry airt, I d shelter thee, I d shelter thee. ROBERT BURNS. AS Gladys neared the hotel, a gentleman, mounted on a beautiful saddle-horse, was talking with her cousin Madge, who stood on the steps, while a groom walked another round the carriage sweep at theide of the house. On this horse, a bright bay equipped with a side-saddle, Gladys cast longing eyes as she crossed the gravel path. " She is the gentlest creature in the world," the gentleman was saying. " Oh ! I am not at all afraid," Madge replied, "but I don t appreciate horseback riding as my sister or my cousin might. It seems a pity to waste a thorough-bred on me oh, Gladys ! I am so glad you have come Mr. Amory, my cousin, 102 AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. IO3 Miss Lyman." Gladys, raising her eyes with a lively recollection of Madge s "making over to her her share" in this gentleman s menage and saddle- horses, was somewhat surprised to see in him a handsome, rather distinguished-looking man, who bowed and spoke with a peculiarly unanimated, almost languid air, but with none of the supercili ousness she had expected from Madge s descrip tion of him. " Are you fond of riding ? " he asked, looking at her with a smile. Gladys eyes were dancing. " Oh, so fond ! And I have not ridden why, I have not even seen a horse since I came to America ! I have been at school in New York," she added, as if afraid of seeming to cast a slur on the American steed. " Do you care to see her put through her paces?" the gentleman asked, still with a smile, and a half-amused, half-pleased glance of attention at Gladys eager face. The groom, mounting and holding the blanket over his knee for a skirt, made the beautiful creature trot and canter about the grass-plot, ending with a flying leap over a five-railed fence into the pasture. "Oh ! if I might," cried Gladys ecstatically. IO4 AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. Mr. Amory looked inquiringly at Mrs. Water- ston, who stood with a group of other ladies sur veying the little exhibition from the piazza. "You would have no fears for your niece ? The animal is really perfectly safe, and I would prom ise not to carry her out of sight." " No, no fears at all with you, Mr. Amory," replied Mrs. Waterston graciously. " Gladys is an experienced horsewoman, I believe." There was time for some little explanatory conversation while Gladys was putting on her habit, and as she re-appeared, glowing like a rose in her girlish delight, Madge s eyes met hers with a most mischievous twinkle ; a " Didn t I tell you so?" expression; while Mr. Amory surveyed her with another of his quiet glances of pleased observation as he led her down the steps. If the girl had had any other thought except of her own ecstatic joy at finding herself once more on horseback, it might have been a little triumph for her vanity. Mr. Amory s new purchase could scarcely have found a more appreciative rider, and the whole lady household at least were there as witnesses of her grace and perfect control of the spirited animal. AN (XtDEAL BY FIRE. 1 05 " May I leap ? " she asked, looking back with a charming smile over her shoulder at her escort. " If you are sure of your seat ; but do pray be careful." Gladys only reply was a laugh as she gently urged the horse on towards the fence over which the two vaulted as if steed and rider had but one set of muscles as well as one will ; then, cantering round through the gate to join Mr. Amory, she said gayly, " Oh ! you must have no fears for me. I have ridden a great deal with papa abroad, and I feel as if I had not known what life was all this summer till now when I find myself on horseback again." " You are certainly at home there," said Mr. Amory, with more animation than he had yet shown ; "you must let me have the pleasure of rid ing often with you. Since Miss Edith has found such an attractive companion for life, I cannot count on her as I used to for riding." " It would be a very great pleasure to me," said Gladys, and it was not until Mr. Amory was riding off, the groom leading the bay behind him, that she remembered her aunt s inconsistency in ac cepting this invitation for her so cordially. IO6 AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. " I am glad you are to have such a pleasure, dear," she said caressingly, as they mounted the stairs. " You will probably see a great deal of Mr. Amory next winter, and there is no possible objection to your riding with him whenever you choose." " Alone? " asked the girl, half-rebellioiisly. " Oh no ! " said Mrs. Waterston, coloring slight ly, for there was something in Gladys tone which struck on her ear with a new sound, "there will be very few days when Charles and Edith will not be riding, too, and you will naturally form one party." Gladys perfectly understood the difference ex isting in her aunt s mind between the two cases, and speculated about it a little bitterly as she took off her habit, but did not make it any ground of objection to the rides which now became frequent, almost daily occurrences. In truth, it was a relief to her to be able to throw herself heartily into anything which she so completely enjoyed. A ray of daylight had been let in upon her girlish heart, first, indeed, by her aunt s warning, but far more by that look in Ray mond Lindesay s eyes, and the strange throb it AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. IO/ had called up in herself. Gladys shrank from in vestigating it, shrank, indeed, at this time from any deep or continued train of thought, avoided meeting Mr. Lindesay, unless with others, as sedu lously as Mrs. Waterston herself could have de sired, and gladly hailed anything which averted the danger. Often, too, she longed with scarcely controlled impatience for her father s coming. The readings were still continued, but they were now become general. No one present would have suspected Gladys of being the moving spring in their origin, for she was very silent, taking no part in the lively discussions in which Anna Clif ford delighted, and which drew out all Raymond s keen caustic humor and cultured intellect. "That is Anna s peculiar gift," Madge said, one day ; " she understands so perfectly how to bring out other people and make them show their best. She manages to get a sort of reflected lustre from any one for whom she will take the trouble to ex ert herself." " And she could scarcely have a gift, short of positive beauty, which would be more appreciated." Edith added. " No man with the slightest tinct ure of vanity, could fail to be influenced by it." IO8 AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. Very often it happened that Gladys herself was the missing one at the readings. The long golden afternoons seemed made for horseback riding. " I t old you she would find something at Bar Harbor exactly to her taste, before summer was over," Anna smilingly observed to Raymond. The rides were enjoyable in themselves, in dependently of the thoroughbred. Mr. Amory seemed to Gladys to have been everywhere, done everything and seen everything, so that he could scarcely fail to have something to talk about, the only wonder existing in her mind being that all he had seen and done seemed to awaken so little en thusiasm. " It can t be from any lack of appreciation, either," she said thoughtfully, " for he seems to me as cultured and refined as he looks. I sometimes wish he could be painted full length, and sent to some exhibition abroad as a portrait of the Ameri can gentleman." " But you know people who have seen and done everything are apt to be a little d/as/f" remarked Edith ; " when you ve been about more, Gladys, you will find that the Nil admirari* attitude is rather a fashionable one. It comes more or less AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. 109 naturally as one discovers that there is nothing new under the sun." " Oh ! I do hope it will never come to me," cried the girl, earnestly. " But I am sure there is no danger. And, Edith, I can imagine a man who might have seen and done as much as Mr. Amory, and yet, instead of growing blast, as you say, might grow more and more interested and enthusiastic. It must be like book knowledge, I think. Just the surface learning grows wearisome in time, perhaps, but when one gets into the heart of things "And yet, you mustn t criticise Mr. Amory, Gladys," interrupted Madge, "for I assure you he is positively animated when he is with you by com parison with his former self. Only yesterday he told Edith that it was actual delight to him to see your enjoyment in riding you gave him quite a new zest for life. " I am glad of that," rejoined Gladys, laugh ingly, "and, indeed, I do like him very much. He is as different as possible from the supercilious person I imagined when you girls talked about him." " We have been riding nearly every day," she wrote to Mrs. Stanhope, until last week when I IIO AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. managed to sprain my ankle badly. I hardly know how it happened, but, as we were riding do\vn one of the sudden steep plunges in the road, which was badly gullied by heavy rains, my horse which had always seemed very sure-footed before, suddenly slipped and fell. It took me so by sur prise that I did not try to save myself as I might have tried with a horse I felt less sure of, and Gypsy rolled over on her side, twisting my foot under her. "Mr. Amory was out of his saddle in a moment, looking terribly white I should never have sus pected him of being nervous ! and Charles and Edith who were riding a good way behind, as they usually do, came cantering up in the greatest fright. But there was really no cause for alarm. My ankle was only sprained from the twist, and poor Gypsy was more hurt, as well as more fright ened, than I. They put the side-saddle on Mr. Amory s horse, and he walked beside me all the way home, holding me on, which was entirely un necessary, as my wrists were not sprained, and I could manage a horse as well as ever. " Dr. Forbes tells me one must be very careful about sprains, and, as he is not apt to make a fuss AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. Ill over things, I am very obedient, and sit patiently by the window with my foot upon the lounge, not even trying to walk a step. But really, dear Mrs. Stanhope, I am glad to have a little time to think and be quiet before papa comes. Life here seems to hurry me on so fast, and one thing comes just on the heels of the other, till all the day is in a whirl ! Does it always seem so in society life, I wonder ? I do not mean that it shall be so with me, and, if papa can spare me after the Boston house is furnished, all except the little finishings that we shall like to keep adding all the time, I mean to come to you for a quiet visit before the whirl begins. I feel as if I were grown very much older this summer, and the thought of next winter does not alarm me now as it did when I bade you good-by in New York. How much I shall have to talk of with you ! " Here Madge entered, a basket of flowers in either hand. " For you, Gladys only look at the orchids ! Mr. Amory is gone to Boston to im prove the time while your ankle is getting well, he says ; I think he means to get another saddle- horse in place of poor Gypsy, for he declares he will never trust you on her again." 112 AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. "Nonsense! But, Madge, where did these wild flowers come from ? " " Oh ! Mr. Lindesay brought them for you. You know he is a great botanist, and I daresay there is a specimen here of every wild flower to be found in Mt. Desert." " If one walks far enough for them," said Gladys, taking the basket from Madge s hand. "And here are flowers that cannot be had for the walking. Now, Gladys, are you really in ear nest in wanting us all to go off on that excursion this afternoon ? I am afraid you will be lonely, for every soul in the hotel is off somewhere, I believe, and it will be so quiet that you can hear the grass grow." " No, no ; I don t want any of you to stay. I shall not need anything, and, if the quiet grows overpowering, I can take a nap." From her window Gladys watched the buck- board driven up to the door, and the party set forth, Madge regretfully waving her pocket-hand kerchief as they disappeared from sight. Other carriages came and went, until, as Madge had predicted, the hotel seemed utterly deserted, un less by the servants. AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. 113 Gladys finished her letter and lay back on the lounge, looking idly out. It was an intensely still afternoon, one of the soft, sultry, hazy days that often come in early September. The sails drifted sleepily over the smooth water, the insects chirped shrilly in the trees, the sun fell scorching on the dry grass, and in the air was a soft blue mist and a faint odor suggesting forest fires. Gladys lay dreamily with half-closed eyes, parting the ferns in her basket of wild flowers, and smiling to her self as she saw one and another delicate blossom which the old doctor had told her grew only in spots on the island. A graver expression played about the sweet mouth, then the long lashes grew dewy, and presently, as Gladys fell asleep, lulled by the chirping of the insects in the branches near her, a tell-tale tear dropped upon her pillow. How long she slept she did not know, but she awaked with a start of terror. There was nothing to be seen as she raised herself on her elbow, half- bewildered, to look from the window. She heard a shouting, excited, incoherent cries as if from a crowd of men and boys, but from the wing in which her room and Madge s lay, the wall of the main building quite shut off her view. And yet there 114 AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. was a nameless something in the air which made her heart throb wildly. She felt lonely, forsaken, almost as if she must cry for help. She stretched from the window as far as she could, and at the moment a red tongue of flame burst from the white wall beyond, and a hoarse cry rose from the crowd she could not see. Oh ! it was fire, and she was there alone and helpless. She cried " Help ! help ! " as loudly as she could, but no one heard her. Far off down the dusty road she saw some barefooted boys running towards the hotel, and crying "Fire!" in the joyous tone of street urchins at such times. She waved her handkerchief, but no one saw her. Another wild burst of flame from the projecting wall, and, made desperate with terror as she remembered that she must be cut off from the stairs, she seized both sides of the window-frame and dragged herself up on the sill. One shuddering look at the ground below, and then, all of a sudden, two strong arms surrounded her and drew her back into safety and protection. "Thank God!" said Raymond Lindesay s voice, and, with a little inarticulate cry, she turned and clung to him, hiding her face on his shoulder. AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. 115 For a moment he held her in his arms, soothing her with words she scarcely noticed at the time. It was too sweet to find the terrible loneliness all at once so far away. "Oh, I was frightened!" she exclaimed, trying to smile and drawing back on the pillows. "And you remembered I was alone ? You came for me ? " "Yes, yes," he said hurriedly. "I came to see. Don t talk of it now we must go, or try to go, at least. There is not a moment to be lost. You will trust yourself to me?" She looked up with a smile and rose at once, supporting herself on his arm. " No, no! not so." He tore a blanket from the bed, drenched it with water, and, shrouding her in it from head to foot, raised her gently in his arms. "Do not try to look," he said hoarsely; "there, hide your face so, and do not once let go your hold. You will not be afraid with me?" "I am afraid for you," she whispered, trembling, and hiding her face as he bade her. It was well she did not know what that fiery passage was. Along the narrow entries he sped, the air growing suffocatingly hot as they advanced, Il6 AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. pausing a moment at the stairs, up which the flames were already beginning to lick their way, faltering a moment as the angry tongues darted at his burden, then, pressing her closer to him as if to snatch her away, he leaped and stumbled down the last broken steps, and shot into the air outside, as from a very baptism of fire. The crowd of old men and boys feeble folk to fight such a foe were gathered round the main building, which, like most of the hotels in the place, was a perfect tinder-box of light wood, and flamed and crackled in the dry air like so much paper. The wing had caught fire last, and, for the moment, all eyes were too intent elsewhere to notice their exit. Raymond carried his burden to a grassy knoll at some distance and unwrapped the blanket with beating heart. " Yes, safe," said Gladys, almost laughing in the intense relief of the moment, at the sight of his white, scared face; "alive and breathing. But you Oh, Mr. Lindesay ! your hair is scorched and your very eyelashes burned off." Raymond put up his hand. "Well," he said lightly, " that is a holocaust I willingly assent to AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. II? since more precious things are unharmed. But I must go quickly and find some sort of conveyance, or you will be the centre of a sensation among the good people here. I am going to carry you to Dr. Forbes." " Hatless, trunkless, clothesless ! " said Gladys, half-laughing again in the reaction of her spirits. " Not for long, I trust. As soon as you have a roof over your head, I shall come back to see what can be saved from the wreck." " Oh, not again ! " cried Gladys, with a shudder. "Clothes are not worth the risk of a life." " But think of your aunt and cousins. I know too well what it is to be in suspense. But there will be no risk you need not fear for me. Now lean back against this tree, and rest your poor ankle. Remember that all fears are over, and you are safe and unhurt." " And you, as well," Gladys thought as she shut her eyes and leaned back obediently, feeling a happy peacefulness steal over her with the thought that all must surely be well now. So Raymond found her when he returned, chatting merrily with a ring of little urchins, who sur rounded her, attracted by the shout of one of Il8 AN ORDEAL BY FIRE. their number : " A woman ! a woman saved out of the fire ! " and rather disappointed that such a rara avis should look and speak like other people. She sat silently leaning back as they drove to the doctor s cottage, listening to the driver s eager account of the origin of the fire, a match dropped in the barn-loft by two half-tipsy hostlers, and unnoticed in the general desertion of the hotel till too late. But she felt too entirely at peace in the present to ask a question or give a thought to the future. CHAPTER IX. MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. My wind is turned to bitter north, That was so soft a south before ; My sky that shone so sunny bright, With foggy gloom is clouded o er. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. lUT does it seem to you natural that Gladys nerves should be so unstrung by the fire?" " Unstrung ? Why, think of the terrible strain of those few minutes when she was alone and helpless with death staring her in the face ! My dear Lyman, we men should have been the same in her place, though, for the matter of that, what do you mean by unstrung ? " Excited ; talking deliriously, as she has talked almost every night since I came ; seeming at times so restless and unlike herself, and then again, so completely prostrated. I scarcely know what to make of it ; Gladys has a good constitution and strong nerves." 119 I2O MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. "Don t ask too much of them, then," grumbled the doctor. " The sprained ankle is enough to account for prostration. Be easy, my good sir, and don t make unreasonable demands on Dame Nature." Mr. Lyman and the doctor were walking slowly back and forth on the piazza, of the hospitable cottage which had opened its doors and taken in all the Waterston party till Mr. Lyman should arrive, the deficient wardrobes receive some addi tions, and Gladys recover somewhat from the terrible strain she had undergone. Naturally or not, she had, certainly, been quite overcome after the first relief of escape was passed, and, espe cially since her father s arrival, had seemed very unlike herself, spending languid, spiritless days on the couch, tossing restlessly at night, and talking incessantly in her dreams. In spite, however, of the doctor s exhortations, Mr. Lyman could not be easy. Evidently to his mind there was an existing cause for this state of things which did not lie on the surface. His next question was an abrupt one : "What sort of fellow is this young Lindesay ? " " That, I think, must be apparent to the most MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. 121 cursory observer. A young man of fine mind, one who would inevitably make a brilliant position for himself in the world of intellect if he were not hampered and kept down by somewhat adverse circumstances. I am by no means sure that he may not do it yet, as fine minds do often triumph over circumstances. Noble natures do, to a dead certainty, but Raymond s is a little warped by kicking against the pricks." So the good doctor murmured on, rather to him self than his companion. " However, you have seen him," he added, rous ing himself. " How does he strike you ? " " Oh ! an original, attractive fellow," replied Mr. Lyman absently. "You speak of adverse circum stances. Now, what can I do for this young man ? Think what I owe him." " What have you thought of doing for him ? " queried the doctor, with a sharp side-glance. " I hardly know ; nothing seems adequate. You say he has a family of brothers and sisters depend ent on him. Might I not educate one of the boys send him through college ? " "There is but one boy whom Raymond thinks fitted to receive a classical education, and I know 122 MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. of friends who already have him in mind," said the doctor hastily, forming a resolution on the spot. " Hal Lindesay is a brilliant lad, and would do credit to any interest that might be used to push him forward. The other little fellow is at a public school, and will step right into business from the bottom of the ladder." "One of the daughters, then." "They are at present under the instruction of an excellent mother. By and by, perhaps " "But I should prefer doing something now," said Mr. Lyman impatiently. " Is there no way of approaching young Lindesay himself? He is very proud, I see, but " " As proud as Lucifer, and as ready to kindle as the matches named after him," returned the uncompromising doctor. " Oh no ! you can t do anything for Raymond individually. His tutor ing ends with this month. His course at the law school is finished, and he goes to New York to read in Joseph White s office." " I know him well," said Mr. Lyman eagerly. " I am glad Lindesay goes to New York." "Oh! you can t do anything for him there," said the doctor, still in the driest of all dry tones. MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. 123 " Promotion at the bar is slow, at best, but when it comes, Lindesay will owe it to his own talents, I fancy. He is sure to rise." " Then the young man has positively no wants that can be met ? " said Mr. Lyman, with a rather incredulous smile. " No wants ? Bless you, yes ! I should say that Raymond Lindesay, take him as he stands, was at this moment as aspiring a young man as any in these United States." " But are not his aspirations such as I can further ? " "That is precisely the question you must answer yourself, my dear sir," said the doctor, with very significant emphasis, and the keenest of glances. "You understand me, I see." "I am by no means sure that I do," said Mr. Lyman, knitting his brows. "Am I to infer do you mean " " I mean that I can t speak any more plainly," said Dr. Forbes quickly. "You have drawn your own inferences, as I saw before we began to talk, from your interview with Raymond. One thing, however, my dear Lyman, I must say ; I must make a clean breast of it to you. If there is any 124 MR - LYMAN S CHECKMATE. blame in the matter, it attaches to me. I forgot that girls are young women the moment they cease to be children, so, if the consequences of my forgetfulness are unwelcome to you, lay the blame on my imprudence." " Not at all, my dear doctor," said Mr. Lyman, with all his own suavity. " I lay the blame on no one on nothing but unfortunate juxtaposition. But do you mean " " I mean to say nothing more," said the doc tor stoutly. " Vcrbinn sapienti, Try this cigar, Lyman, and don t be uneasy about my little patient. There are no symptoms in the case that are not entirely accountable, I give you my word for it." The doctor was called away here, and Mr. Lyman, pacing slowly back and forth on the piazza, was left to ruminate on his own unwelcome reflections. It would have been hard to say precisely what had given rise to his uneasiness. When he and Lindesay had met, the cordiality and effusion had naturally been on his own side. On the young man s there had been a sort of shy, proud reserve, joined with a keen scrutiny which had struck him MR. LVMAN S CHECKMATE. 125 at once as peculiar, even before his anxiety about Gladys had made him suspect a reason for it. They had met several times before the yacht had left the island, and Mr. Lyman had been obliged to own to himself, with secret chagrin, that there was in Raymond much to attract a fancy less impressible than that of an inexperienced girl. Gladys name had scarcely been spoken between them. Raymond had barely suffered the briefest mention of his deed of heroism, and had turned aside all Mr. Lyman s delicate allusions to an "indebtedness which could never be repaid." But subtle signs are often more unmistakable than outspoken words, and the extremely unwel come character of Mr. Lyman s suspicions only served to intensify them. The yacht had sailed away now, and Raymond had accompanied his pupils to Cambridge. Nor had the parting with Gladys the only time they had seen each other since the fire been such as to excite the slightest remark even from the ob servant Edith who was present. Gladys had raised herself on her elbow as he approached her couch, and held out her hand with no more warmth of greeting than was natural and fitting 126 MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. towards one who had saved her life. There was barely a deeper flush on her cheek as he took her hand, and, for any words that were exchanged between them, they might have been mere pass ing acquaintances. "Papa tells me he has seen you," Gladys said. " Yes, several times, and he is kind enough to hope we shall meet in Boston." "Then you do not go at once to New York ? " " Not for several weeks. I have a good deal to occupy me in Cambridge before I finally leave it. But you are going to New York, they tell me." "Yes; to Mrs. Stanhope, for a little visit before winter begins. I had written to tell her I should come, on the day of the fire, and now the doctor thinks I had better go a little earlier than I had planned. But it will not be for long." "Let it be for thorough rest, then. You do not know yet how much strength is required for a young lady s campaign in the gay world." Gladys laughed, and held out her hand as he rose to go. " Good-by, then, and thank you a thousand times." There was a warm and friendly pressure of the hand, and so they parted. Truly a paucity of words, if words were all ! MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. I2/ The gay summer birds had all flitted from Bar Harbor now, and, so soon as Gladys was able to bear the journey, Mr. Lyman carried her on to New York for a fortnight of entire rest such as Mrs. Stanhope s familiar presence and tender care could best afford her. Her regrets at going before the refurnishing of the house were softened by the thought of the delightfully congenial occupation it would afford aunt Laura, and the promise that all the final embellishments should be left until her return. Her absence seemed to restore her, in her father s thoughts, to the position of a little schoolgirl, which she had occupied there all through the past year, and gradually his uneasi ness began to subside. Mr. Lindesay had called once at Mrs. Water- ston s house where her brother was staying, but had found no one at home. Mr. Lyman had written a note, saying on paper all that he had found himself unable to say face to face. To this note no reply had yet been received, but, so well do words at times supply the place of deeds, that Mr. Lyman almost felt as if his obligation were discharged, and the disagreeable recollection of it was already beginning to fade from his mind. 128 MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. On the morning before Gladys return, however, a thick letter, in unknown handwriting, met his eyes as he entered his study in the newly-opened old house. He broke the seal, and saw, with a peculiarly unpleasant sensation, the name of Raymond Lindesay at the bottom of the page. On the enclosed note which dropped from the envelope, there was no address, nor did it need any. The letter to himself began somewhat abruptly: You ask me if there is nothing you can do to further the inter ests of my family, adding, very kindly, that nothing you could do would discharge your sense of obligation to myself. In spite of the regret I have already expressed, that you should allow so needless a feeling to weigh upon you, I might have accepted your offer in behalf of my brother, since I would not willingly stand in his light. Happily, the kindness of an old friend renders it un necessary. I have no wishes for myself that could be met in the way you have in mind, for, however arrogant the claim I am about to make may appear to you, I beg you to believe that I do not base it on anything I have been happy enough to do for your daughter. If what I ask is unattainable, you will readily see that I can accept of nothing else at your hands. Briefly, then, I love her with all my heart and soul. As one s heart is not under the control of worldly wisdom, I do not offer any excuse for the feeling; but, as I well know how audacious such a passion must seem to you, I should scarcely have felt my self called upon to avow it, had I not dared to hope that she, too, loved me. I know perfectly well all that you would say to me, if we were talking face to face, of her youth, her ignorance of the world, my own inequality of fortune, my selfishness in seeking to bind her. I know it all, but it seems to me nothing before the simple MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. I2Q fact of the belief which I have just expressed. My fortunes may mend, and my love is at least generous enough to ask for no open recognition until she shall have seen the world, with the most un limited freedom to withdraw, if, after having seen it, her feelings should have changed. The one impossible thing seems to me silence, believing as I do, and I have, therefore, written a letter to your daughter, which you will read or not as you choose. So far I have spoken with confidence, but you know little of such a love as mine, if you do not know that its misgivings are at least equal to its boldness. It is possible that I may, after all, have been mistaken in my belief. As I well know what confidence and affection exists be tween Miss Lyman and yourself, I am willing to trust to your knowledge of her heart. If I have been blind, presumptuous, mad enough to fancy a thing which you know to be impossible, destroy this letter and do not send me any reply. It will be un necessary, for I shall understand only too well. But, if you have even a suspicion that I am right, I trust to your honor, however unwelcome my proposal may be, to let me have my answer from your daughter s own lips. RAYMOND LINDESAY. For some minutes after reading this letter, Mr. Lyman sat motionless, with his head on his hand. A thousand painful thoughts filled his mind. That letter appealed to his heart, as it must to the heart of any man who knew the depth of a true love : his belief that Gladys returned the feeling differed from Raymond s only as fears differ from hopes : he believed himself capable of any sacri fice of his personal wishes for her happiness, and yet was this for her happiness ? Mr. Lyman was a proud man ; that was an I3O MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. inheritance which had come down to him through several generations. The thought that his daugh ter, the one precious little scion of his race, should bear a name which had been tarnished by even a suspicion of dishonor, was intolerable to him. Difference of wealth, of social position, he told himself (and believed that he was sincere in saying so), he could have cheerfully put out of sight for Gladys sake, but this ! What dreams he had had for her ! How dear her beauty and fascination had been to him ! As he sat there, the years which had passed since her mother s death the only years in which he had fully known his child rose before him. He thought of their rides to gether, of the long expeditions in quest of pict ures, of Charles Willoughby s portrait, of her child ish indignation at his daring to fall in love with her. He could hear Gladys voice now : " Please, papa, if such a thing happens again, answer for me you know quite well what I should say ! " And had not the same thing happened again ? Why not ? How short a time had passed since then scarcely more than a year ! Was the child already a woman ? Was this so different an experi ence, and wherein did the difference lie ? MR. LYMAN S CHECKMATE. 13! Should he give her the letter? If his foolish fears had been groundless, what surer mode of refuting them ? But involuntarily he shrank from the thought of putting them to the test. He re membered the restless nights when he had watched so anxiously beside her ; he remembered the name which had come oftenest from her lips in her un conscious murmurings. No, he would not think of that, yet ; nothing need be decided to-night. He would wait. To morrow Gladys would return from New York ; he would observe her closely, and, if she showed any change, if he had any real tangible reason for the step, why, then At all events, he would wait, and, firm in that determination, at least, Mr. Ly- man dropped the letter into the most secret drawer of his study-table. CHAPTER X. A MODERN BARBARA. . . . What if I fail of my purpose here ? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, To dry one s eyes and laugh at a fall, And, baffled, get up to begin again, So the chase takes up one s life, that s all. ROBERT BROWNING. WHAT girl is there to whom her first sea son " out " is not a delight ? No girl, cer tainly, who is blessed with beauty, health and spirits such as Gladys Lyman possessed. She returned from New York in quite her normal condition, so blooming and beautiful that even an observer, who had not her father s bias towards favorable deci sion, might have concluded there could be no hidden thought preying on her mind, no secret longing gnawing at her heart. Weeks passed on, and balls, receptions and din ner parties succeeded each other in one unbroken round. If all life were not "in a whirl," as Gladys had feared, it was only because she had the secret 132 A MODERN BARBARA. 133 of keeping her head steady. But though, to all appearance, the gayest of the gay, courted, admired and flattered as scarcely any other girl was, there was something in Gladys which preserved her from intoxication. She enjoyed with all her heart, ac cepted the admiration and the homage with as much pleasure as any other young and beautiful girl, but remained throughout as simple and unspoiled as when we first met her on the Bar Harbor boat. Whether this were due to a quality of mind, or some saving sentiment of the heart, her father had not yet determined. True to his resolve, he had watched her intently ; at times there was a thoughtful expression on the brow, a shade of weariness about the mouth, a sigh when she was suddenly aroused from unusual silence, but these signs did not, of necessity, mean anything. She had, to a rare degree, the faculty of interesting herself absorbingly in whatever pur suit might occupy her at the moment, and no qual ity so completely baffles observation as this. Madge Waterston found her so absorbed one morning when, after wandering through the house in search of her, she tracked her at last to the room in the upper story which she had appro- 134 A MODERN BARBARA. priated as her studio. There she found her before her easel, clad in a blue linen blouse, and so en tirely lost in a charcoal study of her father, that she scarcely looked up at her cousin s entrance. " Just for all the world as if you had not been dancing till the small hours!" Madge exclaimed, in a half-aggrieved tone. "And I believe you will work as hard here at your pictures all winter as if you were the plainest wall-flower in the crowd ! " "What can that have to do with my painting? " Gladys exclaimed, with a merry burst of laughter. " A great deal, if you look at it in the right way. I believe in things being justly distributed in this world, and that a girl who has a right to look for the largest share of the attention and the bouquets, shouldn t try to usurp the public recognition of industry and talent which less fortunate girls fall back upon for consolation. My ideas are not high- toned/ as Edith often tells me, and very likely you don t know what I mean by this one, but I say it, nevertheless." " Yes, I understand what you mean," said Gladys, " and I half agree with you, too. But, Madge, the difference is that I don t look for public recog nition at all, but, when I paint, do it just for my A MODERN BARBARA. 135 own good and content. I don t believe, though, that the girls who have real talent do fall back on it for consolation as you say. They draw or play because they must, because they have the power and must use it, and, so far from being the second-best thing to them, it is the very highest. Now I have only a little bit of talent, and shall probably do less with it, even, than I might if it were not for the going into society which comes naturally in my way. But all the same I go on trying, because I really believe that every girl is happier for having some steady, quiet, sheet- anchor of an occupation, something which she can, at least, try for and work up to, if nobody ever sees what she attempts except herself. If the op portunity ever comes for her to use it, she has the power ; if it never does, she has had the help and satisfaction. That is my idea of woman s work." " Who would ever suspect her of being the belle of a ball-room ? " laughed Madge. " While I am out trying to recruit my looks after last night with a mouthful of fresh air, she is drawing and philos ophizing at the same time, and as blooming as ever in spite of it all ! Uncle Gordon, this will be a capital likeness of you." 136 A MODERN BARBARA. " Do you think so ? " said Gladys earnestly. " Now to me there is something about it that is not like papa lines about the mouth and eyes that I never noticed before. I was thinking of it as you came in." The conversation turned upon topics of girlish interest and gossip, and it was not till Madge s departure that Gladys, taking up her charcoal again, returned to her interrupted train of thought. " Yes," she said slowly, standing before the easel, and looking intently, first at the sketch, then at her father. " I do not like this as a pict ure of you, and yet it certainly is you as you have looked since I began it. There are lines here, and puckers there," emphasizing them with her charcoal, "which are not natural to you. If it were any one else, I should say, that person has something on his mind. Mr. Lyman s face un derwent an involuntary change. "I believe I will not try any more to-day," said the girl, and, laying down the charcoal, she came over to her father s chair, and seated herself on his knee, putting her arms lovingly round his neck. " But there is nothing that troubles you, is there ? You would tell me if there were ? " A MODERN BARBARA. 137 " I would tell you, certainly, if there were any thing that troubled me on my own account, my darling." " Do you mean that there is anything about me that troubles you ? " She looked at him searchingly, while a brighter rose flushed her cheek. " No, no, dear, not in the way you mean. But of course your future does occupy me a great deal. I want it to be the very brightest we can choose together." " It looks very bright, doesn t it ? " said the girl, with a smile. " People would say so if it is true that I may choose." Something in her tone belied the smile, and her father, looking intently in her face, exclaimed, "Why, Gladys, what is the matter? Are you not happy, my love ? " " Yes, usually," she replied, half-laughing, though she turned away her face. " But you are enjoying your winter, surely ? " "Very much; though I don t think it quite goes to the very heart of me. But this is silly talk. Papa, you talk of our choosing my future ; have you ever thought of making a choice ? " 138 A MODERN BARBARA. Mr. Lyman smiled. " Words are somewhat superfluous, I think, aren t they ? I have thought what I should like, certainly. I suppose you don t need any very explicit explanation, Gladys ? " " No ; I suppose not," said the girl, blushing, but speaking, nevertheless, with a grave simplicity and unconsciousness of self that was almost child like in its frankness. " Would that really make you so happy ? " " It would, certainly, but the question is rather of your happiness than mine. However, we have had quite enough psychological talk for the morn ing after a ball, so go and put on your habit, dear. You know we are to ride with Mr. Amory." This was no infrequent occurrence, for Mr. Amory s friendship with Mr. Lyman was scarcely less remarked than his admiration for his daugh ter. There was a similarity of individual taste and inherited prejudice between the older and the younger man which naturally drew them together, and, if Mr. Lyman had been asked to choose an ideal husband for Gladys, it is probable that his choice would have fallen on Morgan Amory. About most of the younger men in society there was a crudeness which often grated on his pol- A A MODERN BARBARA. 139 ished sensibilities, but Amory had passed that stage, and, if any prejudices existed in the father s mind in favor of qualities of the heart rather than culture and refinement, their deficiency was appar ently made up by the fact that Morgan Amory was, for the time being, as thoroughly and earn estly in love as it was in his nature to be. This was no secret in society. Already Gladys was beginning to be looked upon as, in some measure, appropriated, although it was not easy to discourage general attention when such a face was in question. No girl could have been unconscious of such marked admiration, but Gladys could not be said either to encourage or discourage it. That she liked Mr. Amory her father had no doubt, but whether she did more than this, a wiser than he would have found it hard to decide. The little talk between them in the studio had been the first serious approach to the subject, and whether it were to be regarded as giving ground for hope or for fears, Mr. Lyman was wholly un able to tell. As spring came on Gladys began to droop, and her father, always anxiously on the watch, at once appealed to her old friend, Dr. Forbes. I4O A MODERN BARBARA. " Do you think the winter has been too much for her?" " Oh, no ! though our American girls do live through half a lifetime in one season. But it is only skin-deep with Miss Gladys. No, the mis chief doesn t lie there." " Possibly I am over-anxious," said Mr. Lyman, who, ever since the summer, had had his own rea sons for dread of the keen-eyed doctor; "but her mother was so delicate ! Certainly no girl in society this winter has looked more blooming than Gladys." " Exactly. If Shakespeare had lived in the nineteenth century, he would never have written a line about green and yellow melancholy, or con cealment preying on her damask cheek. Our American girls may be impressible enough, but they are made of different fibre from that." " Do you think her depressed, then ? " asked the anxious father. " Would you advise my taking her to Europe for the summer ? " " Oh ! by all means ; though it is often an open question whether distance acts as a remedy or the reverse." Mr. Lyman was fain to be content with this reply, and the European trip was decided on. A MODERN BARBARA. 14! Mr. Amory followed a few weeks later, and, in the course of the summer, news came over the water of the engagement. " Nobody is in the least surprised," wrote Madge, "and I, certainly, have less cause to be so than any one else, for, if you remember, I selected Mr. Amory as your especial perquisite before you even reached Bar Harbor. But how strangely things do come about ! There is a rumor that Raymond Lindesay is engaged to Anna Clifford. It has been contradicted, to be sure, but, then, I often notice that rumor is only a little too early for the actual event. It was very easy to see, last summer, that she had it in view. Anna, you know, appre ciates brains very highly, knowing that her own family are rather scantily provided with them. As for Mr. Lindesay, no one, of course, could doubt what the attraction to him would be." CHAPTER XI. A MEETING. Must meeting be Never before we die ? Dear soul, not so ! For time doth keep for us some happy years, And God hath portioned us our smiles and tears. EDWIN ARNOLD. WHY, who is " " Surely you have not forgotten her ? That is Mrs. Morgan Amory with her husband. She is not so much changed since she was Miss Lyman; I believe people generally call her even more beautiful." And Anna Clifford looked sharply at Lindesay, as she spoke. " Very much more beautiful," he rejoined, quietly resuming the attitude from which he had started as he saw the couple entering the crowded drawing-room on one of Judge Clifford s reception nights. "Are they staying in New York, then ? " 142 A MEETING. 143 " For a short time only ; they are visiting Mrs. Stanhope. It is Gladys first appearance here since her marriage. What an air of long-suffering Mr. Amory does wear ! I wonder if a wife is as much of a bore to him as everything else in existence ! " As Anna stepped forward to receive the new comers, Lindesay disappeared, unremarked, through the doorway of the little conservatory. He felt as if a moment s preparation were a positive neces sity before he could meet her calmly and noncha lantly like any other guest of the evening. It was not easy to forget that long winter of dead silence, the days and weeks and months of expectancy fading at last into a merciful hope lessness. And he had been mistaken, after all ! That thought was the bitterest gall to his pride. He could have cursed his folly as he recalled the letter in which he had shown out his heart so openly. Her feeling had been pity only, a sweet child s pity which he had mistaken for the love she had awakened in him. And yet he could not hate her for it as he might have hated another woman. Never, it seemed, could the memory of those sweet, girlish tones and looks bring any- 144 A MEETING. thing but tenderness to his heart. Yet, when he fancied Mr. Lyman s contemptuous smile and careless shrug as he read the letter, the iron entered his very soul, and the softened mood turned again to bitterness. Then came the news of Gladys engagement. It was no surprise, certainly. He might have known that she was reserved for a cold, selfish worldling like Morgan Amory ; it was no surprise and, surely, no disappointment, but only from that day did Lindesay begin to think possible for himself an engagement which ambition might have suggested long before. What did it matter ? Love seemed a dream of the past. Why struggle on with a dreary present, when here at his elbow ease, and freedom from care, seemed waiting for him ? Why loiter ? What signified the relin quishing of one aspiration more than another ? And yet, even now, Anna Clifford was not his betrothed ; he almost felt to-night, as he looked at the lovely, well-remembered face, that she never would be. Gladys still stood talking with Anna, and glanc ing with a half-amused light in her eyes across the room at her husband. Anna s ill-natured con A MEETING. 145 jecture was quite groundless ; he was still far too much the lover for the bored expression to appear in his face when it was turned upon his wife ; but what well-bred individual could possibly wear more strongly the Nil admirari expression than he in general society ? He had just met and been stopped by a tower ing, broad-shouldered figure who was making his way as rapidly as the crowded rooms, his own stalwart proportions and the many friendly deten tions would allow, towards the door. " What ! you here, Amory ? " "Ah, Forbes ! I thought you on the other side." "On this side at last, though I am not station ary yet. Just now I am going South." Gladys heard the hearty, pleasant tones, but not the words ; then, as the speaker advanced to take leave of Anna, she caught a glance from a pair of bright, keen, earnest eyes that struck her as familiar. Where had she seen that face ? There was no time to ask at the moment, how ever, for, as Anna moved towards the stranger, a voice beside her said "Mrs. Amory!" and, turn ing, she found herself face to face with Raymond Lindesay. 146 A MEETING. It was no shock of surprise such as Raymond himself had felt in seeing her, for she had known, in coming to Judge Clifford s, that he must be there; and yet, as his eyes met hers, a momentary feeling of dizziness and faintness came over her. It was only the tone of the voice, the recollection that it brought to her mind of that summer day and the rescue from the fire. Involuntarily she glanced at his cheek. There were still the red scars left by the fiery breath of the flames, the more apparent now from his unusual pallor, and, at the sight, with a rush of grateful emotion, she held out her hands. "And so we meet at last almost like stran gers ! " he said. " Like strangers ? Oh no, indeed ! It is a long, long time, and all that has happened makes it seem even longer, but you could not be a stranger to me ! How could I ever forget you ? I never have forgotten." "I would gladly think you had," he replied, with a peculiar expression. " Forgetfulness, you know, is a perfectly legitimate excuse for silence." " Silence ? " she repeated, with a half-smile, " why, it would have been speaking across land and sea ! A MEETING. 147 I would so gladly have heard something of you. Pray believe, Mr. Lindesay, that there is no one in the world of whom I would more gladly hear happy tidings." She looked at him earnestly, as if surprised and perplexed by his strange manner. " Then you have heard no news of me ? " " Not until very lately ; and even now I do not know whether I may congratulate you." " It might be a little premature," he answered dryly. "Then your father never told you, Mrs. Amory, that he had heard from me ? " " You wrote to papa ? " "And to you." "To me?" Her color changed, and she grew so pale that Lindesay started forward, thinking that she was about to faint, and shocked at his own selfish thoughtlessness. But she made a movement of her hand to restrain him, and, recov ering herself with wonderful self-control, she paused a few minutes to collect her thoughts, and then spoke quite in her natural tone : "There has been some strange misunderstand ing, Mr. Lindesay. What it is we do not know, and perhaps we never shall know. All our circum- 148 A MEETING. stances have changed since then, and to look back on what is forever past, is never wise. But this, at least, I can say I could have said it all through these two years I think of you often and grate fully as a friend to whom I owe more than I can put into words, and your happiness will be as dear oh ! dearer to me than my own." She looked at him with an expression in her beautiful eyes which seemed to him scarcely less than angelic. They were standing in the little conservatory, into which he had led her for more air ; no one was there except themselves. For a moment he said nothing ; only took her hand and kissed it. " To me there will always be a difference for what I have heard to-night," he said at last. "Whatever you may hear of me in future, what ever step I may think it best to take, remember it will be with feelings very, very different for what I know now. God bless you ! " Nothing more was said between them except what any two friends meeting after a prolonged absence, might have said, and whatever excite ment Gladys may have felt, was postponed as we do sometimes postpone over-mastering emotion, A MEETING. 149 even in our most agitating moments until she was seated in the carriage beside her husband. The painful thought was not, indeed, so much of Lindesay since healthy minds seldom dwell long on what migJit have been as of the father whom she had almost adored, and who had so cruelly deceived her. She drew a long, deep sigh, putting her hand, with an involuntary movement for sym pathy, through her husband s arm. "I knew you would be over-tired, Gladys," he said, in a vexed tone. " What can be a greater bore than such a crowd as that ? " " Oh no ! I am not tired," she said, making an effort to speak brightly. " Tell me who that Go liath was, with whom you were talking when we first went in." "A classmate, Stephen Forbes." "What! our dear old doctor s son? Why, that accounts for it, of course ! " " For what ? " " Only for my thinking I had seen him some where. It was his likeness to the portrait over the doctor s study table. But I should like to know him, Morgan. Can you not bring him to see me? " I5O A MEETING. " He is rather a quixotic fellow, though there is a good deal that is fine in him. But he is only here on a flying visit. He told me he was going South, and I haven t a doubt it is to some of the yellow fever cities. However, I ll look him up if you wish. He has never been a stickler for eti quette, and I do not suppose he has ever heard of my marriage." Mr. Amory called the next day, accordingly, at Stephen Forbes hotel, but found that he had left that morning for Memphis. CHAPTER XII. A CITY OF THE DEAD. His heart The lowliest duties on itself did lay. WORDSWORTH. GOOD God ! What desolation ! " The exclamation might readily have risen to the lips of any man who, coming from populous Northern cities, had walked through the streets of Memphis in that terrible autumn of 1878. Grass- grown streets, strewn with lime, deserted shops, houses that looked like the abodes of death ; hun gry, crying children, forlorn, straying animals. No one was abroad for pleasure or profit, and only a few, physician, priest or Sister of Mercy, flitting from house to house in overworked response to urgent need. The exclamation might have been a prayer ; with Doctor Stephen Forbes it was, also, a yearning to help. He had returned from Europe during the sum mer and, before fully deciding whether or not to I $2 A CITY OF THE DEAD. settle in Boston, a cry of need had reached him from the disease-stricken city which had touched his heart, and brought him with all the energy of his sympathetic nature, and strong, active frame, at once to the spot. The call came from a college friend, a clergy man, who had been for some years in Memphis. "We are like a city of the dead," he wrote. " All who can go have left us, and the suffering among the poor people who remain, is enough to sicken the heart. There are, literally, too few to minister to the needs of body or soul. Priests and doctors are but mortal, and our physicians are beginning to give out and sink under the dis ease from sheer exhaustion and overwork. Many who have the fever are past curing, but soon there will be scarcely any left to tend those who might recover." And, at the word, Stephen Forbes came. For the past week, the railway trains had been crowded and the roads blocked with fugitives from the city. As he landed at the station the desolation was melancholy ; scarcely a soul was to be seen, and, impatient of delay, Stephen grasped his valise, and hurried along the street, casting quick, ob- A CITY OF THE DEAD. 153 servant glances to right and left, but meeting no one from whom to inquire his way. His fresh, vigorous bearing however attracted the attention of a ragged little fellow on the steps of a miserable house, and presently the child came running after him, looking up in his face confidingly, as children were wont to do. " Mister, come along o me, will yer ? " "Where, my boy?" said the doctor, stopping short and looking pitifully at the child s gaunt face. "In yonder," with a jerk of his head towards the house of which the door stood open. " Mam my s dyin , and the rest of us is awful hungry. Come ! " The doctor needed no second bidding, but, postponing for the present the meeting with his friend, he followed the informal summons that had come to him. Such a miserable house as his little ragged guide ushered him into ! A woman, in the last stages of fever, lay on the wretched bed, covered with tattered quilts and ragged bits of carpet. Round or under the bed were grouped two or three neglected little children, and a lean, hungry 154 A CITY O p THE DEAD. goat. There was no fire, no sign of food or medi cine. " Have you had no doctor for your mother ? " asked Stephen, with a heart-sick pang at the sight. " Yes ; he come two days ago, but maybe he hain t had time since, or maybe he s sick. I done what I could for mammy, but now Annie s sick, and there s nothin more to eat." "This is hunger, not illness," said the doctor, lifting the languid little form that lay across the foot of the miserable bed, and holding her tenderly against his broad breast. "Was there no one in the house who could help you, my boy ? " "Miss Rogers, done what she could, but now she s down sick, and there don t nobody come. Please, sir, if you d fetch a doctor to Annie." " I am a doctor myself, my little fellow," said Stephen, and forthwith, laying aside all other thoughts, he devoted himself, heart and soul, to the case before him, becoming, for the hour, phy sician, food-purveyor, and cook, all in one. There was little to be done for the poor mother, but much for the children, and Stephen did not leave the miserable home till he had seen the place as thoroughly purified as was possible, the children A CITY OF THE DEAD. 155 washed, fed, and removed from the sick-room to the care of a friendly neighbor, while a sweet-faced Sister of Mercy was installed to watch the dying woman, and send for him in case of any change for the better. As he left the house, the sun was going down in a fiery golden mass of clouds a gorgeous sunset which seemed almost a mockery of the woe in the wretched city. Stephen noticed it with a passing thought of the contrast. " But that is only our selfish way of looking at it," he said to himself, with a half-smile ; " in reality, sorrow would be harder to bear if Nature, too, put on mourning." He was in a better quarter of the city now, where there were rows of neat little houses, and gardens in which the unheeded flowers were blooming brightly. As he passed one of these, a colored man, with a telegram in his hand, ap proached him. " You look to be a stranger, sah," he said. " Mought you be a doctor ? " " Yes, my friend," was Stephen s hearty an swer, "are you in need of my help ? "Miss Sallie needs it bad," replied the man; "our old massa and missus is lying dead at home, 156 A CITY OF THE DEAD. and Massa Harry read that!" and he put the slip of paper in his hand. Stephen read : Father and mother are lying dead in the house, brother is dying. Send me some help. No money. SALLIE U. "I was goin to the Howards, sari," said the poor fellow. "Miss Sallie, she s all done gin out, and she sent me to fetch a nurse. But they re all mighty jubious about dis yere fever." He despatched the negro, with a reassuring word, for the undertaker, and approached the gate round which a crowd of negroes were hanging. "Two dead in there, Massa," said one excitedly, "and another crazy like. They want help bad." " I hope I may bring it," said Stephen, and, scattering the crowd with a hint of the danger in lingering there, he entered. A pretty young girl in mourning met him at the threshold. " Oh ! are you a doctor ? " she asked with some thing of the confidence Stephen s face and bearing never failed to inspire. " Yes. I met your servant by chance outside, and he told me you were in great trouble. What can I do for you ? " A CITY OF THE DEAD. 157 The question was answered when he reached the room to which she led the way. One corpse lay on the bed, another on the sofa, while, in the next room, a tall, powerful young man, in the delirious stages of the fever, was rocking himself back and forth, and struggling with the rough negro who strove to hold him in bed. "Poor child," said Stephen, "what a scene for you ! Had you no one to call on ? " " No one but our old Caesar," she answered tearfully, "and to-day I felt that I must send him for a doctor and the undertaker, for I did not dare leave my poor brother to go myself. But there are so many to go to, and all my money is gone. I do not know where I could have got help if you had not come." A few minutes were enough to calm the excited patient, for Stephen s strong grasp seemed to have a wonderfully quieting influence as well ; the rough negro was despatched for needful remedies, and Stephen stayed with the friendless young girl till all was quiet, the young man sunk into a sort of torpor, and the servant re turned with a nurse from the Relief Association. Then, giving her money for her present needs, 158 A CITY OF THE DEAD. and promising to see that the bodies of her parents were tenderly removed, he sent her with fatherly kindness from the room, attended himself to the last sad offices, and finally went on his interrupted way. He had nearly forgotten now that he was a stranger in the place, but, as he stepped into the darkening street, he remembered that he did not yet know his way to the Rectory. Suddenly his eye fell on a slight, spare form in the dress of a clergyman, coming out of another fever-stricken dwelling. He hurried after him with long strides, soon overtaking him. " So I ve fallen in with you in person, Louis!" " What ! Stephen, you already ? But I knew you would come ! " There was a warm and af fectionate greeting between the two so oddly contrasted in appearance, the clergyman s frail, delicate hand seeming to disappear altogether in the broad palm of the doctor who towered above him by head and shoulders. " I ve been here six hours already," said Stephen, looking at his watch, " and know something of the situation. But tell me all you can of the most needy. I am not a novice in fever cases." A CITY OF THE DEAD. 159 He listened attentively to the clergyman s story of suffering, jotting down in his note-book, as they went along, memoranda of the most urgent cases. "My night s work," he said, smiling; "it is a satisfaction to have it already cut out. But first I must see how you are lodged, Louis ; you do not waste much time or thought on yourself, I see by your face." They turned into the gate of the brick Rectory, standing in the shadow of the cathedral where Louis Sinclair and several brother priests lived and held daily services in the church, spending every avail able moment in attendance on the sick and dying. Sumptuous fare and lodging were, assuredly, no part of their thoughts ; the Rectory life was al most ascetic in its frugality, and, since the break ing out of the epidemic, none of the hours devoted to rest and refreshment had been regularly ob served. The doctor noted everything in the rather cheerless abode with his keen, quick eyes, ending with a survey of the slight form before him, and inwardly rejoiced at his coming, if only for the sake of those who would be under the same roof with him. I6O A CITY OF THE DEAD. There had been the warmest friendship between these two men all through their college days, nor, in their after life, widely as their paths had di verged, had they fallen out of each other s memory or affection. Stephen Forbes work was essen tially in the world, Louis Sinclair s, apart from it ; but in both there was the same true-hearted spirit of self-sacrifice and a generous comprehension of each other s inner nature which no outside differ ences had power to shake. A tower of strength Stephen might well have been called in those sad weeks. Busy days suc ceeded each other, spent in going from bedside to bedside, often beginning with an early round, pro vision basket on his arm, among those of his poor patients who needed food rather than medicine for whatever was to be done must be done with one s own hands ; broken nights followed, during which the hard bed at the Rectory was often untouched, yet through it all the doctor was always the same, calm, cheerful, energetic, sunny, animating nurses and brother physicians with his buoyant spirits and inevhaustible vitality, keeping a watchful eye, meantime, on the temporal needs of his spirit ual friends, and insisting, with his half-laughing A CITY OF THE DEAD. l6l boyish arbitrariness, on their keeping regular hours and living on more generous fare. "Doctors of the soul have need of strong bodies," he said. " It is quite a mistake to im agine the contrary." " You should have been one of us, Dr. Forbes," said one of the clergymen. "Well, our work is not so far apart, I trust, though yours is the harder, because the more ac tive a life is, the more it becomes self-supporting. But praying and working go together, in some measure, with us both, I believe." "One of our most untiring doctors is a woman," said Mr. Sinclair. " I am not surprised at that. When I remem ber the women I have seen in the medical schools abroad, I can readily believe anything of their courage and endurance. I have not met this one of whom you speak as yet, but for devotion and for titude one need not look beyond the Sisters of Mercy. What noble, unselfish, Christ-like lives ! " On the evening of that day, Dr. Stephen was hastening to the last of a long list of patients. It was rainy and damp, and the darkening streets were lighted by the piles of burning bedding l62 A CITY OF THE DEAD. before the stricken houses. Carts were driven by, loaded with rough wooden boxes, eight or nine sometimes in a cart. A nurse hurrying along in front of Stephen, stopped the driver of one of these to ask her way to a certain house. " But I ve got the man here in his coffin," said the driver, with a jerk of his whip over his shoulder towards the boxes. " All but the tenderest hearts grow callous in the midst of such dreadful scenes," thought the doctor, with a sigh. His own was very heavy as he entered the door of the house of which he was in search. It was a new patient, and he was very late in reaching her. As he looked in at the open bedroom door, he found he had been fore stalled. A little woman, dressed, not in the Sis ter s robe and black veil which had grown so famil iar to his eyes, but in ordinary street attire, was standing by the bedside of the sick person. She looked up as he entered, with a quick glance of surprise. There was a mutual start of recognition : " Dr. Martyn ! " "Dr. Forbes!" They shook hands cordially, but it was no time for personal inquiries. A CITY OF THE DEAD. 163 "I have been detained," said Stephen. "It is well the case fell into your hands." The little woman shook her head sadly, mur mured a few words in a low tone, motioning him to step nearer the bed ; then, as he bent over the patient, she gave a few clear, concise directions to the nurse in charge, and with a last glance at the unconscious head on the pillow, followed the doctor from the house. "No, there is no hope, I fear," she said, as they stepped out into the heavy air, which seemed refreshing after the fever-tainted atmosphere, "though I have learned that there is no trusting to signs in these fever cases. I think sometimes a patient is doing well, and before I can see him again he is dead. At another time I think there is cause for great alarm, and the patient recovers." " It can only be feeling one s way," said Ste phen, " but how much of our work is that ! You have been here, then, for some time ? " " All through the fever. Did you not know that Memphis was my home ? I came here at once after leaving Vienna, and have practised here ever since." " And you meet with recognition, I trust ? " 164 A CITY OF THE DEAD. Stephen asked, with interest. " You deserve it after your brave struggle abroad." " It comes slowly," she answered, with a quiet smile. "We do move slowly in our Southern cities, you know. But my lot is cast here, and, such as it is, poor Memphis shall have the best I can give her." "What she most needs," said Stephen, ener getically, " is enterprise, and thorough sub-soil drainage. What we are doing now is only a sop to Cerberus. I have no faith in any remedy till the root of the matter is reached ; we are only smothering it till then. Enterprise, I suppose, we should hardly look for after such a terrible visitation, unless there is a powerful lift from out side ; but that, please God, there shall be when I have seen this struggle through." " You mean to stay through it, then ? " said Dr. Martyn, her face brightening. "I couldn t leave," said Stephen simply. They walked on together, the doctor s stalwart figure towering above the little woman at his side, on whom he looked down with a friendly smile in the dark eyes which gave so much light and sweet ness to his face. Clara Martyn was small, but A CITY OF THE DEAD. 165 robust in frame, with quick, noiseless movements, a fresh color in her cheeks, a decided mouth, and a peculiar resolution in the low, clear tones, as well as in the motions of her firm, small hands- They parted at the gate of her home with a quiet, friendly pressure of the hand, that told of hearty sympathy and fellow-feeling ; and after this meet ing the work for each became lighter, because it was shared. CHAPTER XIII. THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. A noble army, men and boys, The matron and the maid, Around the Saviour s throne rejoice, In robes of light arrayed : They Climbed the steep ascent of heaven Through peril, toil and pain : O God ! to us may grace be given To follow in their train ! BISHOP HEBEK. SO the sultry September days wore on, and all in the fever-stricken city were looking with longing for the early frosts. But that was only a ray of hope, for each day the list of deaths was as long as ever. Coming home one Sunday evening, more slowly than usual, the only sign of weariness he ever showed, but not too tired or pre-occupied to greet every child or Sister he met with a kindly word or smile, Stephen only stopped to throw off his outside coat, and followed the handful of worship pers into the Cathedral, where the vesper service 1 66 THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. l6/ was just beginning. It had been a hard, sad day, and there was an unwonted weight pressing on his heart ; but as the doctor knelt and buried his face in his hands, something in the quiet of the church atmosphere stole over his troubled spirit with holy calm and sweetness. In the dim light his tall figure was scarcely visible as he knelt, but Louis Sinclair heard the deep, earnest tones in response, and felt the nearer to his friend. His own voice had faltered as he began, for he felt himself strangely weak and shaken that day, but the presence of the strong, tender, human heart seemed to bring the Divine love the nearer. In the light of that nearness nothing could look dark or strange, even though the path opening before him might be an untrodden one. ; Through love to light ! Oh, wonderful the way That leads from darkness to the perfect day ! ; Through love to light ! Through light, oh God, to Thee, Who art the Love ot Love, the Eternal Light of Light. " The peace of God which passeth all understand ing " As the last words died away, Stephen stood waiting for his friend till he came from the vestry, 1 68 THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. and walked with him the few steps to the house, his arm thrown lightly round his shoulders. " I shall not go out again for an hour," said Sinclair. " Call me when you go." " I am not going again to-night," said the doc tor quietly. " Come with me, dear fellow." " Then you think I have the fever ? " said Louis, with a quick glance at his friend s face. "I fear it," Stephen replied, "but I hope al ways." There was little hope, however, as Sinclair himself knew. The strength of his delicate frame had been long since exhausted, and nothing but the sense of need, with his own heroic resolution, had supported him so long. It was Stephen s first heavy grief since the death of his mother in his boyhood. He clung with all the warmth of a tender heart that has few near ties to his friend ships, which neither time nor distance weakened, and, with the physician s strong yearning to save, he felt that he could not lose this friend. "Keep up a good heart, dear boy," he whis pered, for Sinclair was conscious through it all. "That, of itself, will do much." Much, but not everything, as Sinclair knew. THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. 169 "There is work waiting for me, Steve," he mur mured. " Mine here, I know, is done." Stephen stood looking at him sadly. Should he be so ready to lay down his own life ? Should he feel so surely that there was work for him to do elsewhere ? He bent over the pillow and lifted the sufferer into an easier position, with the strong man s touch that was, at the same time, as tender as a woman s. Just at the moment a summons came for him, brought by a messenger from Dr. Martyn. "I cannot come to-night," said the doctor res olutely. " That case is doing passably well, and I am needed here." But the sick man s quick ear had caught the low murmur at the door. "Go, Stephen," he said faintly, "there maybe hope there, while here, you know besides, you leave me in good hands " And he looked affec tionately at the brother priest who stood by his bed. The doctor hesitated for a moment, then stooped over the bed, and kissed his friend s forehead with a childlike fervor very touching in the great strong man. I/O THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. "God bless you, dear old boy!" he said softly> and followed the messenger without another word. The house was one in which a poor Swedish girl had been lying ill for a week, alone and friend less, scarcely able to speak the most broken Eng lish, but so touchingly grateful, in her conscious moments, for their care that both doctors had labored with all their hearts to save her. That day it had seemed as if she might mend, but Dr. Martyn was still sitting by the bedside, anxiously watching for Stephen s coming. He entered in silence, for his heart was too full for words, and bent over the sick girl s pillow. " It is the crisis," he said, with a touch of the sharpness of his grief in the tone. "Nothing is needed here but careful watching, and knowl edge to seize the right moment." "That is why I sent for you," said Dr. Martyn gently ; " I could not be sure of myself any longer." Something in her voice dispelled the unwonted selfishness of private sorrow in Stephen s heart, and he turned quickly to look at his fellow-worker. " Why, courage, Doctor ! " he said cheerily, grasp ing her hand. " You are not giving out, surely ? " But the touch of the burning hand brought a THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. I /I change into his face. " It is not a moment too soon," he said gravely. "I will see you home at once." "Do you think I do not know enough to doctor myself in the first stages?" she answered, with a brave smile ; "and I shall not go home. Mrs. Seavey offers me a room here you know hers is one of the few families we have pulled through and she will be a great help. So you can stay with poor Louisa, without having your mind torn in two directions at once." It would have been too much to say that his mind was not torn with anguish for his friend, and anxiety for his fellow-worker ; but no one who had seen him at Louisa s bedside would have suspected it. Morning came and found the Swedish girl out of danger; Louis, as his friend thought with a swelling heart, was past all danger, too, and it only remained to devote all his energies to the brave little woman who had worked so nobly for others. Clara Martyn had a strong will, and the firm conviction that there was still work for her to do in the world, and that did wonders. "I shall get well now," she said brightly, after 1/2 THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. two painful weeks of suspense were over. " I have felt all along that I should recover. I owe a great deal to you, however." "And to your own resolution. I mean, how ever, that you should owe much more to me, if you will put your case in my hands." "How so?" said Clara, flushing slightly. " I mean to pronounce your expatriation," replied Stephen, trying to speak playfully, though he kept his eyes on her face. " I mean to send you North." Dr. Martyn turned her face to the wall with an impulse, which, in most women, would have ended in a burst of tears. "You know, of course, that you cannot stay here with any idea of working at present?" said Stephen gently. "It is hard," said Clara, in a faint voice. "Yes, hard, I know doubly hard that you who have laid aside so bravely all thoughts which to most women constitute the joy of life, and thrown yourself so heartily into your profession " I have done no more than hundreds of other physicians," said Dr. Martyn, in a brusque tone, "no more than you, yourself." THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. 1 73 " Perhaps not in the abstract, yet sacrifice of domestic happiness seems more magnanimous in a woman. For myself, I can honestly say that I have never yet been able to imagine the being who could offer me greater attractions than my profession " "It is not impossible to combine marriage with a professional life, is it?" Clara rejoined, dryly. "Not impossible, that is, for a man " "Oh! surely not," said Stephen, with a half- laugh, and boyish blush. "But I " "Have only never met your fair divided excel lence. And yet I have always thought you the very type of the half of a blessed man." 1 "Half of a blessed man?" echoed the doctor with a puzzled air; "oh!" with a frank laugh, " I am sadly rusty in my Shakespeare, am I not ? Well, possibly I may live to be finished by such a she, but I can wait the time. How in the world did we get to my affairs, though? I was talking of yours." "Must I go ?" asked Clara, in an altered voice. " My friend, yes ; but not, I hope and believe, to give up working. Perhaps you may even work to better advantage elsewhere, though I know 1/4 THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. well how hard it is for you to go. Nothing could excite readier sympathy at the North than the words of some one who had been on the spot. May I write to Boston that you will come ? " " I will do as you think best," she answered, without looking up. " Memphis is only dear to me now on account of what she has suffered. I would gladly see my poor people through their trouble but I must not think of that, and you will be here. Tell me what I can do in your city." " One of my bravest fellow-workers brings you this letter," Stephen wrote to his father. " I am sure there is work for her to do in Boston. You share my views about the need of thoroughly qual ified women doctors she is one of those. If her services could be secured as resident physician in the hospital for poor women which you have so much at heart, its success would be assured. We were fellow-students abroad, and are wholly in sympathy. " I will tell you a story of her heroism, for, though you may think that quality will be wasted in your hospital, it illustrates, too, her womanliness, which will have full play there. It was in the darkest THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. 1/5 time of the panic, when even strong men seemed turned to cowards, and thought of little except of saving their own lives cowardice does make such brutes of us sometimes ! Outside the city an orphan asylum had been established in charge of the Sisters of Mercy, and one day Dr. Martyn was going out to it, with a score of poor little waifs, left fatherless and motherless by the fever. Half-way out on the forlorn country road, they encountered a mob of desperate-looking men, whose homes were in the neighborhood of the Asylum, and who were frantic enough in their fright to believe that they might escape the pes tilence if the Asylum could be abolished. At least, they declared no more orphans should be brought there. So they surrounded the wagons, seizing the heads of the mules, brandishing cud gels, firing stones, and swearing that the children should not be carried a step farther. The wagon ers were thoroughly frightened and prepared to fly, leaving the children to the tender mercies of the mob. But Dr. Martyn, the only woman pres ent except the Sister who told me the story, sprang upon one of the seats, and addressed the rough men in clear, brave tones, low, but steady. THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS. " Men/ she said, have you children of your own who may come in their turn to need the pro tection of strangers, and will you deny to these poor little ones the shelter of such a home as is left to them ? I will not think it of you. Some of you, at least, will help me ! * " The men paused, abashed by her courage, and ashamed of their brutality. Some slunk away, and the others formed themselves into an escort for the defenceless children, who reached the Asylum in safety. " I have no more time to write, for head and heart are pledged to these poor suffering souls. Do not expect to see me till it is all over, dear father, but have no anxiety for me. I wish that others were as well able to bear the strain as I." * True, not of a doctor, but of a Sister of Mercy, who died at her post in Mem phis. September, 1878. CHAPTER XIV. THE LITTLE RIFT. Unfaith in aught is want of faith in -all. TENNYSON. THERE was no concealment about Gladys Amory, reserved as her nature might be. It would have been impossible for her to hide her new knowledge from her father. Silence would only have widened the breach between them, which, she bitterly felt, the shock of disappoint ment had opened. " I met Mr. Lindesay in New York," she said quietly, the first time she saw her father after her return. " He told me what I had not known be fore, that he had written to us both on leaving Boston." Mr. Lyman started and changed color. In spite of her own sense of injustice, Gladys was touched to the heart by the evident confusion in his usually calm, self-possessed manner. "I I have the letter still," he faltered, "but, 177 1/ THE LITTLE RIFT. Gladys, believe me, I thought I was acting for your best happiness in not giving it to you. Do you not remember when Charles Willoughby "Dear papa," said his daughter, bending as she stood beside him, to kiss his forehead, "I did not ask the question to upbraid you. What you did was done for what you thought my happiness, no doubt. But oh ! there is such danger in being too ready to assume the responsibility of a happi ness of which we cannot judge. But by-gones are by-gones. I only speak of it because I cannot bear the separation that silence seems to make between us. Give me the letter and we will never mention it again." He put it silently into her hand, feeling, even more bitterly than she, that the separation of which she spoke could not be wholly averted even by the most forgiving affection. Gladys did not open it till she was alone. " I do not speak of the differences between us," Raymond had written. " With some men they might act as a barrier ; with some women, I my self, should feel them so. With you I do not, for I am sure you know that what I love in you is none of your outside advantages. I believe you THE LITTLE RIFT. feel with me, that love looks beyond all externals, and that, in giving you my heart, I give something that outweighs them all. I need not tell you, surely, that my whole heart is yours. " I have explained all to your father. I do not ask for everything now I am not so bold as that. Often, indeed, I am very faint-hearted. I ask only for the right to love you, and the hope that by and by you may find that you can love me. Is that too much to ask ? " Yes, by-gones were by-gones, yet, as she read, Gladys could not keep back the tears from her eyes, could not altogether restrain the wonder that a human hand should have had the power to change her fate so cruelly. To that extenuating plea of her father s in regard to Charles Willough- by, she had been unable to say a word. Perhaps she knew no more than he when or how had come the change in her from childhood to womanhood ; but that feeling towards Raymond Lindesay, begin ning in the girlish longing to draw him out of his unhappiness, and first revealed to her own shrink ing consciousness by her aunt s words, had been the awakening. But how had come the change which had made ISO THE LITTLE RIFT. her Morgan Amory s wife after that winter of secret pain and disillusion ? She had not accepted him from pique ; she had not pretended to herself that he realized in her eyes the ideal of which her girlish fancy had dreamed. She had simply come to believe, after the galling pangs of self -reproach ful mortification were past, that such an ideal love as hers had never existed, perhaps never could exist, except in the romantic brain of an inexpe rienced girl. She liked Mr. Amory extremely ; he pleased her artistic sense, and there was no flesh-and-blood rival for him to displace. If she could be all in all to him, as he told her, if she could gratify, in marrying him, the dearest wish of her father s heart, why should she hesitate ? With more experience of the world, more knowl edge of her own heart, she might have hesitated, since to give less than all one is capable of, is treason to the very idea of love ; but she was very young, and her girlish pride had been sorely wounded. And now did the revelation which had come to her so unexpectedly make her feel that she had committed a fatal mistake ? If it did, she did not show it in the usual way. At the same moment THE LITTLE RIFT. l8l with the thrill of joy that she had not been de ceived in Raymond, came also a glow of loyalty towards her husband, an inner resolve that she would be more than ever faithful to the duty which she had pledged herself to fulfil. It was this that had occupied her mind, far more than vain regrets, as she burned the letter, and closed forever that episode of her youth. Several years had passed since then, and how had the pledge been redeemed ? Just where is the line where disappointment begins to be ac knowledged and recognized ? Perhaps it never is so, consciously ; perhaps it is only felt in its silent results, the slow damping down of hope, the cessa tion of expectation, the gradual surrender of en deavor. There was nothing tangible in Morgan Amory to disappoint. He was always the same polished, cultured gentleman, usually spoken of as a model of domestic virtues, and " so proud of his beauti ful wife ! " So he was, fond and proud of her as of all that belonged to him, his pictures, his library, his horses, his greenhouses. While the newness of possession lasted, there was somewhat more than this ; but nothing was long new to Mr. Amory l82 THE LITTLE RIFT. All became a matter of course so very soon, like his daily lounge at the club, his afternoon drive, their appearance together in society during the season, his punctilious presence at the morning service on Sundays : all this was taken for granted could anything more be asked ? It was somewhat like the way in which he had met his wife, when, after reading Raymond Linde- say s letter, she had gone up to him, clasped her hands round his arm in her mute pledge of devo tion, and looked up at him earnestly, with half- tearful eyes. " Has anything happened ? " Morgan Amory asked in concern. " Nothing to tell, I believe," she answered, " but I felt I thought " " You felt nervous and unlike yourself ? Yes, of course, very naturally ! Come and drive with me, and the fresh air will do you good. Don t think of anything agitating, my dear Gladys ; it is so very unnecessary." That charge was something which Mrs. Amory never seemed to need from her husband now. To all casual beholders she was as unruffled, almost as indifferent as he ; and even her father secretly THE LITTLE RIFT. 183 thought that Gladys was become more of the ordi nary society woman than he had imagined possible in her girlhood. There were few, indeed, who saw her in any other light ; of these were the old doctor, towards whom she still kept the half-playful, affectionate manner of her girlish days ; her class of Sunday school pupils, young girls who adored her with the passionate devotion of lovers, and who poured out their hearts to her, sure of being met and under stood ; a little artist friend, Isabel Lindesay, whose talent she fostered in every way that money, personal help and suggestion and appreciative criticism could ; and her children, whom she idol ized with a passionate love rare even in mothers. There were two, as beautiful as cherubs ; little Tom, three years old, and the baby, Amy. CHAPTER XV. FATHER AND SON. A heart at leisure from itself To soothe and sympathize. ANNA L. WARING. I LOOK upon it as a most providential illness, Stephen; not interesting lumbago has not even an interesting sound but I cheerfully sub mit to occasional twinges and a rickety gait, for the sake of preserving you from embarking your fortunes for life in the Mississippi basin." So spoke the old doctor, as he sat in his study easy-chair, regarding, with a rather rueful twist of his bushy-browed visage, his colossal son who stood before him with his back to the fire. " For life ? My dear father, haven t I already told you that the South does not present the con ditions for the home of a Northern man ? I never even remotely considered the possibility of staying there longer than I did. Of course I stayed 184 FATHER AND SON. 185 through the year after the fever, as any one would, foreseeing a return, in degree, of the epidemic ; and it was scarcely in human nature to turn one s back on Memphis and a project we had so much at heart as the drainage until that was fairly under way. So another year went by. But as to your illness my coming a few months earlier than I otherwise should, was not worth the ache of your little finger ! " " Now don t take away the solace of my martyr dom ! I tell you it was the only hope I had of inducing you to settle quietly at home, since I have given up all idea of marriage for you." "Ah ! you ve given that up, have you ?" said the son, throwing back his head with a boyish laugh. " I thought you clung to the hope with a tenacity that was altogether disproportioned to the object." "Matrimony," observed the doctor, "is a simple matter of self-defence ; a safeguard against perse cution for clergymen and physicians." "I have never found it a necessity," said Dr. Stephen indifferently. "Ah! you have much to learn. You have never before been placed in the position of a family physician in fashionable society. I should I 86 FATHER AND SON. have succumbed to persecution very soon if I had not had the good fortune to be married before I began practice." " And I doubt whether you married my mother as a means of self-defence." "Ah ! your mother was an exception," said the old doctor, with a sudden softening of his rugged face. "Exceptions don t apply to ordinary cases." "By the way," said Stephen, presently, "you once made a pathetic appeal to me, I remember, in behalf of Mr. Lyman s daughter. What has become of that paragon of yours ? " "What! don t you know? She has been Morgan Amory s wife these three or four years." "Amory? Then I must have just missed see ing her. I remember I met him at a New York reception on my way to Memphis. But Morgan Amory!" in a tone of disgust, "and you recom mended me to try my fortune with her ? What a fatuous old match-maker you are ! " " Why, what is the matter with Morgan Amory ?" " Nothing more than a deficiency in the cardiac region, perhaps," smiled the son, "and I should think the woman whose ideal of a husband he FATHER AND SON. l8/ could satisfy, must be suffering from the same lack." "Ah ! but there was a reason for that, I suspect," said the old doctor, with some eagerness. " I have always considered that Gladys heart quite as warm an one as your own, by the way was caught on the rebound from another direction." " Indeed ! " said Stephen absently. " That alters the case, of course." He had taken up a book from the table as he spoke, and was turning over the leaves. Obviously, the subject had no manner of interest for him, and the old doctor, smothering a slight feeling of disappointment, since it must be confessed that he had acquired in his profession a relish for glimpses behind the scenes, threw himself back in his arm-chair, and sat regarding his son. Three years of exposure to Southern climate and struggle with Southern epidemic had made him look older, certainly : the broad-shouldered figure was as robust as ever, but there were heavy lines in the face, and touches of gray here and there in the hair beyond what belonged to his thirty-seven years. The face had a rather grave, absorbed ex pression, except when something appealed to his 1 88 FATHER AND SON. sympathy or kindled his interest, and then there was a quick flash of animation, or a beautiful smile that shone out from eye and lip at once. Such a look flashed over it now. " Good ! " he said, rising, and bending over his father s chair, to point out something in the book he held. "Now I heartily agree with that." "The system of medical education be gins where it should end ; it feeds the tree through the leaves and branches instead of through the roots ; physiology itself is taught unphysiologi- cally. The conventional, hereditary orthodox style is for the student to take systematic text-books and go through them systematically from begin ning to end, reserving study at the bedside for the middle and later years of his study. . . . Psy chology and experience require that this should be reversed ; the first years of the medical student s life should be given to the bedside, the laboratory and dissecting-room, and the principles of syste matic instruction should be kept for the last years, and then used very sparingly." "Very true," said the old doctor. "Object teaching, instead of text-books, is the cry of the age, and those of us oldsters who are wise, give in FATHER AND SON. 189 to it at once without more ado. You will have an opportunity to put your theories in practice with your classes of students, and I expect that to make amends to you for the distasteful business I am bringing on you." "And that is ?" "All dancing attendance on fine ladies, and humoring their pampered nerves." " I shall do little enough of that, I assure you. There couldn t be greater unkindness to a patient." " Unfeeling fellow ! In my opinion there are no diseases to compare with those of the nervous system." " And I agree with you. There are no suffer ings to be compared with those, and, when we have learned to treat them with success, there will be nothing left to do. But we were not speaking of diseases, were we ? Those, I am sure, you never tried, to reach by humoring. But don t trouble your blessed old head any more about the shoul ders on which your active practice has descended for the time being, and don t forget that you are my first patient. For you, I prescribe total absti nence from anything except the imparting of your valuable advice in consultation, and literary labor FATHER AND SON. in the medical line. But we are curtailing office hours." He passed his broad hand caressingly over his father s gray hair, and betook himself to the office. There were several patients already in the recep tion room as he entered ; two or three ladies who might, perhaps, fall within the category of patients mentioned by his father, and a thin, hollow-cheeked young man. The first of these occupied very little of the busy doctor s time, for though his manner could not be otherwise than cordial and friendly, and his mode of listening sympathetic, there was some thing in his air which forbade all lingering on a topic even one so fascinating to some people as their own weak nerves or wretched ill health. He listened attentively, questioned minutely, entering the replies carefully in his note-book, wrote a pre scription or did not write one, as the case might be, said " Come to me again a week from this time, or, if there should be urgent need, send for me," and bowed the patient out, with a pleasant smile, to turn his attention to the next. At last it was the young man s turn. " Now what can I do for you ? " the doctor FATHER AND SON. IQI asked, in a friendly tone, shutting the door and coming close to the youth, whose sad eyes and hollow cheeks told their own story. " I came to ask what you could do for me," he answered moodily. " What is a fellow to do when he can t breathe in this raw air, and is too poor to stop working and go elsewhere ? " Dr. Stephen did not answer for a while, but gave his whole attention to his stethoscope, sounding the diseased lungs carefully, but showing no signs of the result to the anxious eyes fixed upon him. Then he fell back a pace or two, and regarded the patient with a cheery expression. " Do ? He is to go off for a vacation while the raw air lasts the winter and early spring in Florida would be best and return to his work a new man, let us trust." "All you doctors are alike !" said the young fel low bitterly. "Go to Florida go to the moon ! You think it is enough to say Go, and never stop to think how a man is to do it ! You might as well say Fly to me/" "There is a great deal of fallacy, I grant you, in medical advice," said Stephen pleasantly. He had seated himself at his table, with his back to the 192 FATHER AND SON. patient, and wrote for a few minutes. Then, turn ing round in the arm-chair, he added, "Try this prescription, however; then, if you do not see any ground for thinking it benefits you, come back to me." He handed him the prescription enclosed in an envelope, gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder, and bowed him out like the rest. The youth had shut the door with feelings which, had the interests at stake been less vital, might have been called sulky. As it was, the poor fellow glanced angrily up over his shoulder at the office window, muttering "Yes, all alike! If a man s pocket is well lined, there s an end to his his feelings, I believe ! Go to Florida to a man whose daily bread depends on his working here ! And that is the sort of advice that puts a doctor at the head of his profession, I suppose!" He had walked some steps before he thought of looking at the enclosed prescription. Then he drew it from the envelope, glanced at it, still with the same bitter expression, stopped short on the sidewalk, and uttered a half-articulate exclamation. It was a check folded round a card, on which were written the names of several popular resorts in Florida. "Whew!" said the poor young man, coloring FATHER AND SON. I 93 furiously, in spite of his pallor, and, turning on the instant, he hurried back to the doctor s. The room had filled during his interview, and he sat, fidgeting nervously under his embarrass ment and suspense, until Stephen entered. His quick eye caught sight of the young man at once, and he advanced towards him. But as the youth arose with an agitated " What can I say, doctor ? I " He cut him short by saying in a curt, business like tone, which the pleasant twinkle in his eyes belied, " Nothing at present, if you please, my friend ! I have an imperative engagement imme diately after office hours. Follow my directions faithfully, and let me see you again." And he was gone, leaving the discomfited patient to his own reflections. CHAPTER XVI. FILLING THE* VOID. Not like to like, but like in difference. , Yet in the long years liker must they grow ; The man be more of woman, she of man. TENNYSON. DR. STEPHEN FORBES and Mrs. Amory were not long in meeting, but the acquaint ance did not, at first, ripen beyond the ceremonious stages. Stephen s interest did not lie in the direc tion of society women (except, indeed, so far as his profession demanded) and as such he classed Gladys. Beyond noting the fact that she seemed more cold and inanimate in manner than he should have sup posed natural in one of her physique, he did not give her a thought. " I don t think he will ever be as popular as the old doctor," said Madge, now a plump, happy- faced young matron, as easy in temperament as her husband, Edward Boylston, and as outspoken 194 FILLING THE VOID. IQ5 as in the days of her girlhood. " He is not ex pansive enough for a family physician." Gladys laughed. " That is rather an inappropriate word, I allow, but you know what I mean. Charlie tells me the medical -students are wild about him, but, if Ned or the baby were ailing, I know that I should regret the dear old chatty doctor. I know, of old, that his bark is v/orse than his bite, while I have no experience of these lofty abstractions." One morning Gladys had driven from her home to one of the most dreary, poverty-stricken wards of the city, and, dismissing her carriage, plunged on foot into some of the narrow courts and alleys, filled with tenement houses and teeming with squalid misery. These were the early days of " Associated Char ities," and rich and poor were beginning to come together in the effort to solve the problem of en lightened relief. "Not alms, but a friend," seemed, if fitly followed, a hopeful watchword, and Gladys, to whom it appealed on a very tender point of sym pathy, was trying it faithfully with two families, often disheartened by the apparent lack of result, often inclined to relax in her efforts to uplift, and 196 FILLING THE VOID. say, pitifully, " Poor creatures ! what else could be looked for in such wretched surroundings ? Should we not all be the same ? " yet trying patiently still with the earnestness that was the groundwork of her nature. She had turned into a poor little alley, with gaunt, sunless houses on either side, children pad dling in the black stagnant pools that settled among the sunken paving-stones, and sickening odors coming from the open doors of the over crowded houses. As she paused on the steps of one of these before climbing the stairs, a window in the upper story was thrown open, and a man s voice a cultured voice, too, with a familiar ring in it called something which, at first, she did not hear. She looked up, but only saw a hand on the window-sash. " I said, don t come into the house, and leave the court at once ! " repeated the voice. She stood a moment, hesitating whether or not to obey the brusque mandate, when her dress was pulled from behind, and she found herself con fronted by a bright-faced little fellow, one of the numerous progeny of "her families." "The big doctor says Go home, Missis, " said FILLING THE VOID. the urchin. " Some in the house has scarlet fever, but don t you be afeared of me. I ain t been near em." " The big doctor ? " repeated Gladys. " Yes ; him that comes so often. I donno his name, but he s a real nice one. He was here most all last night." Gladys walked slowly away, yielding rather reluctantly to the necessity of the case, and draw ing from the shrewd little urchin as she went, all possible information in regard to the domestic affairs of her proteges, Late in the next afternoon she was standing before her easel, trying earnestly to get a satis factory likeness of little Tom, whom she had coaxed to quiescence by the charge to keep the Scotch terrier still. He sat upright, with glowing cheeks, on the crimson rug she had spread for him, his eyes fixed intently on the poor animal, whom he was almost suffocating with the tight clasp of his chubby arms. Gradually, however, the arms relaxed their hold, the curly head sank lower and lower until it rested on the dog s back, and Tom fell fast asleep, the only condition in which he was ever known to be long still. Gladys worked 198 FILLING THE VOID. eagerly to improve the favorable opportunity, lending but half an ear to the lively rattle of her cousin Madge, who sat beside her. Fooisteps passed the door on their way to the picture gallery, which was on the same landing. "Morgan is taking Doctor Stephen Forbes to see his new purchase, I suppose," said Madge, glancing through the open door as they passed. "And, by the way, Gladys, I quite take back what I said the other day about him. So far, at least, as children are concerned, he is quite attentive enough to please the fondest mamma. Sallie s teeth have worried her so much lately that I sent for him. So far from being indifferent, one would have thought that the child was his sole patient, while she " " I have brought Dr. Forbes to make his apolo gies, Gladys," said her husband s measured tones at the door, " though for what I do not know. May we come in ? " " Certainly, if you will let me go on with my work," said Gladys, looking up with a bright smile, a n cl pointing to the little picture on the floor ; " I cannot afford to lose that ! " She looked so full of animation and loving pride, FILLING THE VOID. 199 so different from the cold, conventional beauty of the ball-room whom he had hitherto seen, that she seemed to Stephen a different woman. They ad vanced towards her through the long room, the doctor s stalwart figure completely dwarfing Mor gan Amory s elegant slimness ; but as his eye fell on the bright rug, with the sleeping cherub lying on it, he stopped and bent down to look at the little fellow more closely, exclaiming in a tone of the heartiest admiration, "Oh ! what a boy." Nothing could have delighted both parents more than the simplicity of the tribute, for if there were one thing in this world that never palled upon his father s outworn fancy, it was little Tom, and the fact that others should recognize him as a unique, seemed to him only his due. The two gentlemen stood silent for a while beside Gladys as she worked, lips parted and cheeks flushed in her eagerness to finish her charcoal sketch before the child should wake. Stephen glanced at her, half- amused, then round the walls of the room, lined with pictures or studies in various stages of prog ress. " Mrs. Amory is an artist, con amore" said her husband, somewhat pompously, following the 2OO FILLING THE VOID. glance. " Indeed, she works over her canvas far more than I approve for a mere pastime." " I have never looked upon it as that, exactly, you know, Morgan," said Gladys, with a smiling shake of the head. " Have you ever exhibited anything ? " asked the doctor, who was slowly walking about the room, surveying the pictures, his hands behind him and a look of pleased surprise growing on his face. " No, never." " Not, surely, from any doubt of the worthiness of your work ? " Mr. Amory bowed, as if the implied compliment were a personal one. " And Dr. Forbes is a judge of pictures, I find," he said blandly. " No, it is a mere amateur pur suit, Doctor, and that is why I find fault with the ardor that Mrs. Amory bestows upon it." " But you know," said Gladys, pausing with up lifted charcoal, " it is impossible for me to work in any other way. I should lose all interest in anything that I considered a mere pastime. I never do expect any work of mine to be exhibited, thank you, Dr. Forbes, but I work like an artist rather than an amateur, because it is the only way FILLING THE VOID. 2OI in which I can make my criticism or appreciation of value to a young friend of mine, who will, I hope, be an artist one day." " Oh ! Gladys puts so much conscience into every thing she does," said Madge, with a comical air of desperation. " It is one of her idiosyncrasies. Even those weary Associated Charities of hers how she labors over those poor people ! To my uninitiated mind it would be so much easier to give the poor souls a new suit of clothes all round and a handful of money apiece, and let them fend for themselves." " A great deal easier ! " laughed Gladys, while Stephen looked somewhat quizzically embarrassed at this sudden reminder of his forgotten apology. " Does that work interest you so much ? " he asked, with one of his kindly glances at Gladys. " Yes, very deeply." " And will you let me apologize for my abrupt warning the other day ? " said the doctor, a boyish red overspreading his manly face ; " that was what I came for. I was afraid you would come upstairs, and I could not warn you face to face just then." "Then it was you?" returned Gladys smilingly. "I quite understood at least with a little help 2O2 FILLING THE VOID. from Mike Flaherty. But, Dr. Forbes, may I ask you Just here, however, little Tom, awakened by the voices, raised his head, and the dog, overjoyed at his release, darted behind the friendly shelter of Gladys skirts. The child sat upright, rubbing his eyes with a half-indignant protest against sleepi ness, and staring at Stephen who stood beside his mother. " Well, my boy," said the doctor, " will you come and make friends ? " And Tom, in unwonted graciousness to a stran ger, held out his arms, exclaiming " Up high ! " The child shouted with glee as Stephen tossed him up in his strong arms, then perched himself contentedly on his knee and wound his watch- chain round his chubby fingers, smiling up, mean while, into the strange face above him. " Just like Sallie," observed Mrs. Madge. " How do you contrive to make children so fond of you, Doctor ? " " No magic about it, I suspect," smiled Stephen, putting an arm round the child, " only a response to a previous attraction." " It is an excellent gift for a physician ; the FILLING THE VOID. 2O3 only reason why I ever thought I should prefer a woman doctor is because women are usually less formidable to children and, by the way," said Madge, her thoughts skipping from one thing to another with all the old agility, " what do you think of women doctors ? " " Think ? Why, I think there is a wide field for them, certainly, if they have the patience and strength of nerve requisite for the profession. But your question is rather a broad one, Mrs. Boylston. Are you asking my opinion of them as a class, or of the demand for them ? " " Well, it is a subject that seems to take up a good deal of people s attention just now," replied Madge, whose tongue was apt to be somewhat vaguely glib about the last new "craze." " I sup pose you have read Dr. Breen s Practice or don t you read novels?" " I have read that." " But I hope you don t agree with Mr. Howells - I mean I hope you don t think such a wretch edly morbid, weak creature as Grace Breen a fair type of all women doctors ? " " Most certainly not. In point of fact, a woman like Dr. Breen could never have studied the medi- 2O4 FILLING THE VOID. cal profession at all. Her lack of nerve would have told at her first entrance into a dissecting room, and her irresolution would have made her turn back at the first shadow of responsibility." " I m so glad to hear you say that ! " cried Madge. " I have always had an idea that medical men were most unjust to women doctors." " Not to thoroughly trained ones, I am sure. But it has been my good fortune to meet such." "Why, Madge," said Gladys, who had been silently putting the finishing touches to her sketch, and glancing, now and then, with a mother s radi ant smile, at little Tom, " I never before heard you so eloquent on the subject of women doctors." " Because my theories never before had a person behind them, my dear ! You know we ladies are said always to espouse a cause for the sake of some individual representative of it, Doctor. I happened, the other day, to visit that hospital for women at the South End, and there I saw a little woman who was my very ideal of a woman physi cian. My conversion was instantaneous. I seemed to realize on the spot the comfort, the relief, that those poor creatures must feel in being under the care of a woman like themselves. Why, half the FILLING THE VOID. suffering, seemed lifted off at once I could be eloquent on the subject if I chose ! You must both see Dr. Martyn." " I have long known her," said Stephen quietly. " Oh ! of course. Your father has been so in terested in that hospital, and just now you are filling his place." "Our acquaintance dates back much farther than that to our student days abroad, in fact. She is one of the bravest women I ever knew, and if you want an epitome of what, in my opinion, a qualified woman doctor may be, Mrs. Boylston, I can t do better than advise you to make Dr. Martyn s acquaintance." " But what," pursued Madge, " is your idea of marriage for professional women ? I believe that, after all, is the touchstone of magnanimity in a man s views of women s work. One hears the cry so often Oh ! there can be no seriousness in a woman s profession, because as soon as she marries, she will drop it. What do you say on that sub ject, Doctor ? " "Why, there, you know, is just where I feel my ignorance," said Stephen merrily. " I should say, however, in looking at the medical profession for 2O6 FILLING THE VOID. women, that it must be a question of alternatives for them. If marriage stands in the balance, they must weigh their profession against it, and see which they will relinquish. I don t plead guilty to any want of magnanimity in the matter, Mrs. Boylston it seems to me merely the necessity of the case. Commonly, I think you will find that the woman has considered the subject at the out set, and set marriage aside before entering heartily on the preparation for her profession ; it is not the only fate for women here in Massachusetts, you know ! And even if it be allowed that woman s work is liable, at any time, to be set aside, let us hope that, like Mrs. Amory, the worker may find the idea of doing anything for mere pastime so repugnant to her ideal, that the work, while it does go on, will be as masterly as if it were to last for a lifetime." " I do nof think I ever heard of a married woman doctor," said Madge thoughtfully. " Grace Breen doesn t count, for it took much less dis couraging circumstances than marriage to put her out of heart with her work. I must examine Dr. Martyn on the subject when I know her a little better." FILLING THE VOID. 2O/ Mr. Amory, who had for some time been chaf ing under a topic wholly alien to his sympathies, now interposed by carrying Stephen off to the smoking-room, but he left a favorable impression behind him. " I had no idea that he had any interests out side of his profession," Mr. Amory remarked later, " and there can be no more tiresome com pany than a man with a hobby. But he has really an unusually good eye for a picture. I shall be glad to see him often." The presence of one s physician, Mr. Amory re flected, is less onerous than that of one s clergy man, as requiring no special effort on the part of the host in toning up to a given elevation, real or imaginary. The two men were most unlike, cer tainly, but there was a pleasant bonhomie about Stephen that seemed to adapt itself to all men. He grew rather interested in comparing Mr. Amory and his father-in-law, the two types of manhood with whom Mrs. Amory might be supposed to be most familiar, and which might possibly account for certain peculiarities in her, that he fancied foreign to her nature. There was a certain likeness between them, but, 2O8 FILLING THE VOID. while Mr. Amory s interest seemed to be confined to persons and things as relating to himself ex clusively, Mr. Lyman s egotism took a wider sweep and looked at society not so much from the self- centred standpoint as through the prejudices of long descent or unblemished standing. Both were, in a measure, selfish men, but Mr. Lyman s type of selfishness seemed less narrow than that of his son-in-law. Gladys treated him always with beau tiful tenderness and consideration; almost as if she wished to make amends to him for something ; yet, strange to say, he never seemed completely at ease with her, but rather as if he were laboring to rein state himself in some position in her esteem which he felt himself to have forfeited. CHAPTER XVII. NEW LINKS. . . . Life means, be sure, Both heart and head both active, both complete, And both in earnest. MRS BROWNING. THE doctor overtook Mrs. Amory one day as she was slowly walking down Beacon Hill, looking thoughtfully out over the brick-built slope and the leafless feathery twigs of the tree-tops to the golden water and the bright winter sunset beyond. There was a shade of sadness on her face which it never wore in society, or in the home life in which Stephen was beginning to know her best. With her children she was always radiantly, almost girl ishly bright and sunny. Unconsciously, Stephen had become observant of Mrs. Amory s changes of expression, and he noted this before they had walked the length of two blocks. " Have you seen anything of your families lately ? 209 2IO NEW LINKS. I have not been in that region since the epidemic was over." " And I have just come from there. Dr. Forbes, do you never feel disheartened when you are brought into contact with that class ? Does it not seem to you as if all you could do were but the most wretched playing with this problem of riches and poverty ? " " Why, no," said the doctor cheerfully. " You know that the errand on which we doctors go makes us forget all that. Disease and recovery are a good deal alike under all conditions, and that occupies us so much that there is no room for question whether or not we are doing our best in the case under our hands. We must be doing that if we are doctors at all. But I understand you, Mrs. Amory. The relation of the rich and poor in great cities is certainly the hardest problem of all to solve." " I wish we could abolish the distinctions of rich and poor ! " Gladys exclaimed almost passionately. "What, you are an anarchist, Mrs. Amory? Abolish the distinctions between labor and capital, that is their cry, you know. Believe me, that could not be done. There is no such sharp distinction ; NEW LINKS. 21 I every laborer becomes himself a capitalist so soon as he has twenty-five cents to spend, and a dinner to buy. Labor stands for whatever money will pur chase, and when will money be abolished ? Neither can the rich man be set so wholly apart from his poorer brother; we are all mutually dependent, and, if the distinctions of property were swept away to morrow, there would be rich men and poor men before sunset. But I must not turn your heartfelt wish into a lecture on labor and capital. I under stand your perplexity ; we are coming now to no bler and higher views of charity. A little money or a little coal is an easy thing to give ; but to give out of one s higher possessions, intelligence, cult ure or character, taxes the individual powers. I had thought, however, that you were taking up the question in just that way. Are you not trying to do too much, making too many demands on your life, which has such varied calls?" " My life ? Oh ! " said Gladys sadly, "my life is never full." The doctor glanced quickly at her, with his keen look of inquiry. What was this void which she seemed to feel so deeply, setting its seal even on he,r face in the midst of everything that the world 212 NEW LINKS. would call all-sufficing ? Involuntarily, he remem bered his father s hint. Had there been truth in that, and was that the cause of this aching sense of emptiness ? " Not full ?" he echoed, with a shade of protest in the surprise of his tone. " What, with your children, your artistic gifts ? " " I did not mean in that way," said Gladys, shak ing her head. " My life is full of blessings and privileges, ; the question is, What do I make of my opportunities ? Do I do anybody any real good, or make myself necessary to any one ? " Stephen Forbes was a very simple and sincere man. His habit was to say little, but if occasion arose for a word, he did not pause to weigh it in the scales. He spoke what came into his mind with frankness that was even blunt. " That is not the vital question," he said quietly. "That is only a refined form of selfishness." "Do you think so?" said Gladys, glancing at him m surprise. She did not speak in displeasure, however, but humbly. " I mean," said Stephen, less brusquely, " that if we earnestly try to do our best in any work, we need not so much trouble ourselves about our own NEW LINKS. 213 part in it. We may let it stand for what it is worth, and be content, even if we do not seem, individually, to be, as you say, necessary to any one. Excuse my freedom in speaking shall I tell you one very excellent way of being of use to some one ? " " I wish you would," said Gladys gratefully. " You have heard me speak of the hospital for poor women, in which Dr. Martyn is resident physician. It is always full, and when one patient recovers enough to leave, her place is filled at once by another poor creature who has been waiting her chance. We would so gladly have more free beds." " And I would so gladly give the money for one. Thank you, Dr. Forbes ! You laugh, but it is really kindness to tell me where to give money most wisely. That kind of charity does not tax my capacities as the other does. I look upon it as a species of indulgence." " But don t be satisfied with my recommenda tion," said the doctor, turning so that he could see the brightened face. " Go and see the place for yourself. I think you will like Dr. Martyn." In fact, the opportunity thus afforded for the 214 NEW LINKS. acquaintance had been in his thoughts quite as much as the benefaction to the hospital. That a society woman should occupy his thoughts at all was an anomaly, but since it was so, consciously or other wise, it is a fact that Dr. Stephen often considered the probable effect of certain interests or occupa tions on Mrs. Amory. " Come in, won t you ? " said Gladys at the door. "Tom speaks of you so often. You quite won his heart by your treatment of the measles. A doctor who combines stories with physic is irre sistible ! " Stephen accepted the invitation, nothing loath to see the bright-eyed cherub who met his mother at the nursery door with, " Tom sick, mamma ! Send for that nice big man ! " " Oh ! you cunning rogue," cried Gladys, throw ing off her furs and catching the little fellow in her arms. " Tom is a humbug ! Well, put your head down on mamma s shoulder, poor sick boy, and hide your eyes. We ll count one hundred and then perhaps we may see that nice big man. The two stood with closed eyes, Gladys slowly counting aloud a pretty tableau as the doctor crept noiselessly upstairs. Then at the word " one NEW LINKS. 215 hundred ! " the curly head was raised from Gladys shoulder and the little face looked up with wide- open expectant blue eyes. Oh ! the shout of glee when he saw the tall figure appearing as if by magic, the bound from his mother s clasp, and the warm soft little arms thrown round Stephen s neck ! The baby in her nurse s arms crowed and laughed in sympathy ; it would be long before the sound of the sweet little voices died away on the doctor s ear ! The hospital stood on one of the wide sunny streets at the South End -- a cheerful-looking place, with plants blooming in the windows, and a peaceful air of repose in the airy rooms with their small white beds, suggestive of anything rather than scenes of suffering. There were even many cheerful faces among the patient ones on the pillows, and all brightened in the presence of the little doctor, who moved quietly about, serene and smiling, and carried sunshine wherever she went. Gladys and her cousin Madge were frequent visi tors at the hospital, the latter chiefly because Dr. Martyn was her last new hobby, while with Gladys it had become a very real and vivid interest. This 2l6 NEW LINKS. interest had not ceased with the bestowal of the fund for the free bed ; a candidate for her syrru pathies had appeared in the occupant, a poor seamstress who had broken down under the strain of long-continued stitching, and, from interest in her case, Mrs. Amory had grown to feel interest in all. Not the least attractive feature was Dr. Martyn herself, between whom and Gladys there was a strong mutual drawing together. Clara Martyn s trained eye had acquired a habit of analysing people as she did cases. She made a mental diagnosis, said nothing, but silently noted it down in her own mind for future reference. "She is a case of arrested development," she said to herself as she studied Gladys. " She has suffered in some way from a chilling atmosphere. She has a nature that, under sunny, genial skies, would have thrown out shoots in all directions, like a generous blossoming vine, but since they were blighted, many of the poor tendrils have been forced back on themselves. I wonder if she can have made a happy marriage ? " Madge was less discreetly silent in her wonder as to her new friend s past life. "Do tell us," she said one day, "what first in- NEW LINKS. 217 duced you to be a doctor. You must have been very young when you began to study ; were there no sacrifices to be made when you took up the profession ? " Madge s curiosity was so smiling and good-na tured that it could not offend, even though it might be wanting in entire delicacy. " None that -weighed with me," Clara replied serenely. " The first incentive, Mrs. Boylston, was the fact that I had seen, as a child, so much suffering during the yellow fever seasons in my native city, Memphis, that I learned early to long to struggle with the disease. When my parents died of it, my mind was made up. I went abroad to study, and came home just in time to grapple with the enemy." " And be worsted ! " said Gladys sympatheti cally. "Oh no!" said the little doctor calmly, "not worsted since the epidemic has ceased there, though I might not have been on the spot in per son to see the triumph. It doesn t matter who gains a cause if the cause be gained. I did what I could." " But," continued Madge, " when you began to 218 NEW LINKS. study did you never dream, as most young girls do, of marriage ? " "Perhaps I did," said Clara, smiling, "but the dream faded very soon. I had an intense reality before me instead of a dream all the hard work and study, the difficulties and the delights of the medical profession. The idea of a perfect mar riage looked a very shadowy dream beside that, for I had seldom seen it in actual life, and any mar riage less than perfect would have been impossible to me." Gladys winced. "But suppose it should present itself now," pursued Madge, " should you feel obliged to give up your calling ? " " It is very unlikely that it ever will," replied Clara, with just a shade of impatience in her tone. " We doctors have to concern ourselves with realities, my dear Mrs. Boylston. At present I think of my work here and my poor women ; by and by I shall probably go back to Memphis." "And leave the work here ? " asked Gladys, in surprise. " Leave so many people who love you and depend on you ?" " Not while they need me, certainly. But there NEW LINKS. 219 will be others to fill the post here, and others there, too, whom I can serve. Work is impersonal, dear Mrs. Amory all the best work, that is, whether it be preaching, teaching or healing done for the work s sake, not for the individual, or for our own personal share in it. It should be like the rain and the sunshine, falling on all alike." " You agree with Doctor Stephen Forbes," said Gladys, with a faint smile. " He said something of the same kind to me. I fancy I make too much of the personal part of it." " He was right," said Clara, turning away abruptly. " That motive is a great quicksand for swallowing up human happiness." Something in this talk had aroused Madge s active fancy to speculation, for she said thought fully, on their homeward drive, "The only ideal marriage for an enthusiastic woman doctor would be a professional one, of course and nothing could be more natural, either ! " CHAPTER XVIII. LITTLE TOM. There is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb is there ! LONGFELLOW. MORGAN, I wish you would not take Tom out with you when you drive those spirited horses. They need all your attention and the child is too young to be left to himself. The least lurch might throw him out." "That is absurd, my dear Gladys ; the horses are perfectly well-trained. Tom is no baby, and I en joy having him with me." " But it makes me very uneasy ; I would much rather not have him go." "Oh! as you please," said Mr. Amory coldly, and he left the room with the half-indifferent, half- sullen expression which was the nearest approach to anger that he ever showed. " Tom go with papa ! " said the little fellow, pressing his face against the pane and looking out 220 LITTLE TOM. 221 wistfully at the horses pawing the ground in front of the house. " Not to-day, my pet. By and by, when Tom is a man like papa." The sound of her own words lingered in her ear as they stood watching the carriage roll away. " A man like papa ! " would Tom ever be that ? Would the little loving, eager nature ever harden into that cold, narrow type of manhood ? " God grant he never may! " Gladys pressed her lips to her darling s golden head, and half shuddered at her own silent prayer. She bade him good-by to day with even more caresses than usual ; the clasp of the little clinging arms seemed sweeter than ever. She felt them still as she was driven slowly out over the Milldam road, where the bare branches of the wind-bent trees were beginning to show the faint yellowish tinge of early spring. It was a mild, April day ; the sunbeams fell, bright and warm, on the miry roads, with here and there a lingering patch of snow. The air was soft and warm, and the birds sang joyously from the leaf less branches as the city streets were left behind. Gradually, the soreness at her heart died away, and nothing was left but the sweetness of her little 222 LITTLE TOM. child s caress. Oh, the blessing of motherhood ! Life cannot be otherwise than full of promise to any one who has a child s future before her ! Nor could the present be called dark, spite of its limi tations and secret disappointments. There was nothing new in the fact that husband and wife went on their separate ways. So long as Gladys satisfied the claims which he held due to society, her husband made no other demands on her time. She was welcome to fill it with any interests she might choose, and, under the ever-widening in fluence of these interests, the sweet face was be ginning to lose its languor and to regain much of its girlish brightness. Some two hours later, Doctor Stephen Forbes, reining up in front of his house, found a man wait ing anxiously for him on the sidewalk. "Don t get out, sir, please," he said, laying a hand on the dasher of the buggy. " Come as quick as ever you can, for Heaven s sake, to Mr. Amory s ! I thought you d never get back ! " Stephen, glancing at the man s face, saw that it was working with agitation. He took him in and turned the buggy without another word. LITTLE TOM. 223 " Do you know what has happened ? " he asked, at last, when they were half-way up the hill. " I can t say, sir it s an accident. Mr. Amory s horses ran away and you ll see ! " They were at the door now, and the man sprang to the horse s head, as if afraid of being asked more questions. The doctor hurried in. Strong man as he was, his knees trembled under him with the uncertainty and suspense, and the quick beat ing of his own heart. An accident? which was the sufferer, Morgan Amory or his wife ? A white-faced figure met him before he was half way up the stairs. "Thank God, you are come at last, Forbes ! " Stephen scarcely recognized Morgan Amory s voice in the agonized tones, as he grasped his strong hand with fingers that trembled convul sively. "Is she much injured?-" the doctor half-whis pered. " She ? She does not even know of it. Oh Ste phen, it s my boy ! " They stood in the nursery looking down at the little form, stretched half on the bed, half across the sobbing nurse s knee. There was a crimson 224 LITTLE TOM. gash on the temple. The baby hands hung, waxen and lifeless, from the woman s lap. "What can you do for him?" gasped the poor father, tightening his grasp of Stephen s arm. "Do?" exclaimed the doctor in a choking voice, "nothing! My poor Amory, what can I do ? The child is dead ! " There was a stir in the hall below, a fresh, sweet voice, a light, springing step on the stair. " She is come back ! " cried the wretched hus band in a voice of agony. " I cannot meet her Stephen, you will tell her for me ! " He was gone from the room before Stephen could utter a word, and he heard the sound of the key as it was turned in the lock. " Lay the child on the bed," said the doctor to the weeping woman, " and cover his face. I will go and meet her. Do not let her hear you sob if you can help it." He spoke so quietly that the woman s agitation was calmed at once, and she followed his directions without a sound ; but in his own heart there was a deadly anguish. That moment when he stood wait ing for Gladys at the top of the stairs, was the bit terest of his life. LITTLE TOM. 225 She came up with the same light, elastic step. Would she never reach him ? Sne glanced up, smilingly, at the tall figure on the landing. " What, you have been looking in on my chicks in my absence, Doctor?" she cried gayly. Then as she reached his side, and saw the deadly pallor of his bronzed face, a change came over her own, and she laid her hand on his arm in affectionate anxiety. " What has happened ? My friend, you are ill ! Tell me what I can do for you." " For me ? Oh ! " said Stephen in a choked whis per, "/can do nothing for you! Poor mother God give you his own strength and comfort ! " She did not say a word at first, but lay, quite still and white, in the strong arms that upheld her. " Do not be afraid. I shall not faint," she said at last, lifting her head. " Tell me slowly and clearly what has happened." He told her, as calmly as he could, what he had learned from the nurse s sobbing whispers, and the poor father s conscience-stricken anguish. He spoke as quietly as he could, but his breast heaved with the emotion he struggled to repress, and the rare man s tears welled slowly up from his eyes. 226 LITTLE TOM. " And you loved my little Tom so much ? " said Gladys pitifully, looking at him with a tearless gaze. " God bless you for it ! Now let me go to him." " One moment," he said gently, detaining her. " You will not look at him ? " " I will do anything you say," she answered, speaking in a hushed voice that went to his very heart. "I am very calm, you see. You shall come with me if you wish." She let him take her hand and lead her into the room from which all had stolen away. The little figure lay on the bed, the face covered, and the waxen dimpled hands folded on the breast. Gladys knelt beside the bed and kissed the little hands, still with dry eyes. " My little Tom !" she said softly. "No, Doctor, you need not fear ! I do not need to see his face I shall never lose it from before my eyes." There was the sound of a door opening on the other side of the nursery. Gladys started. " It is your husband," said Stephen, looking anx iously at her. "Will you not go to him ? " "My husband?" she repeated in a hard voice, unlike her own. " And he came back for the child LITTLE TOM. 22/ after I was gone ! Oh, God forgive him ! I never can." She hid her face in the pillow beside which she was kneeling. Stephsn stood for a moment, irresolute. " Will you not go to your husband, Mrs. Amory ? " he asked again, bending over her, " I feel anxious about him and I must go, but you are needed quite as much as I." " Yes, go," she answered coldly, still keeping her face averted. " Go, but do not ask me to come." And Stephen went sadly away. There are no secrets in such hours from the physician : he may read all hearts if he will, and, if his own be a tender one, he pays dearly for the bitter privilege. To Stephen s loyal, deep-hearted nature, the alienation between husband and wife at that supreme moment of grief brought a crush ing sense of misery that wrung his very soul. It was easier to minister to Mr. Amory s sorrow than to Gladys . The cold, formal man was quite broken down ; he wept for his boy in a passion of grief that was all the more painful to witness for the remorse mingled with it, clinging to Stephen as if there were some soothing power in his strong, friendly arm. The doctor did not leave him until 228 LITTLE TOM. he had dropped into an uneasy sleep, worn out by the violence of his grief. Gladys was still kneeling where he had left her, her face buried in the pillow. Stephen stood silently beside her, his heart full of sympathy which he was powerless to express. Suddenly a thought came to him and he left the room. A moment after, Gladys heard a faint baby murmur, and, look ing up, saw little Amy in the doctor s arms, rub bing her soft cheek against his, and cooing her satisfaction in baby fashion. She held out her arms with a sudden burst of tears. " Oh, my little girl ! I had forgotten her ! Give her to me my one little child ! " Those were tears that Stephen did not wish to check. He stole out of the nursery and walked for a long hour up and down the hall, waiting, though for what he hardly knew. At last she came softly out and laid her hand again on his arm. "I can go to him now," she said gently, "and you need not be afraid to leave me. Thank you, my true-hearted friend, for your reminder." "I spoke for your own sake," said Stephen, LITTLE TOM. 22Q under his breath. He went silently downstairs, feeling that there was no more need for his pres ence. "Best not take these things too much to heart." The old doctor had been silently watching his son, who sat opposite him sunk down in his arm chair, his chin on his breast, wrapt in a moody reverie, and so abstracted that he did not even know he was silent. They were sitting together in the smoking-room as they usually did for a cosey after-dinner hour of chat, perhaps the pleasantest time in the day to both, for there was the heartiest sympathy and affection between father and son with enough unlikeness to make the discussion of the day s occupations fresh and racy. Stephen started, pushing back his heavy hair from his forehead with a gesture habitual to him. " If one begins by making a private burden of the ills of humanity," said the doctor, whose tender old heart had been bleeding for Gladys all the evening, " we doctors should be buried fathoms deep ! Who knows what evils that child may have missed by having his pure little life cut short so early ! " 23O LITTLE TOM. "No doubt that is one way of looking at it, of course. But the other side is one at which I can never learn to look coolly. Only an accident ! A child thrown out of a carriage against a stone ! Call it an accident yes, but what a reckless, wanton waste of life ! " "Well, my boy," said the old doctor, throwing himself back in his chair with a sigh, "there is no way of getting over it unless you take to Stoic philosophy. I ve tried that myself as a means of self-defence against other people s troubles, but I m afraid you re not enough of a humbug for it, and I can t conscientiously recommend it to you, for, to tell the truth, it never did me much good." Stephen smiled absently, and, rising, brought a light for his father s cigar. He did not himself smoke that evening, but walked thoughtfully up and down the room, his arms behind his back and a heavy cloud on his brow. He looked haggard and overworked as his father had never before seen him ; but, when the office-bell rang, he started to the door as if it were a welcome sound. " Stephen s an intense sort of fellow," said the old doctor when he was left to himself. " That child s loss has hit him in a tender spot, I believe ! " CHAPTER XIX. DIVIDED. .... Soul from soul estranged. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. MR. AMORY was a changed man after his child s death ; he did not, indeed, abandon any of his old pursuits, and, after his recovery from the fit of illness and prostration that followed the terrible shock, appeared in his old haunts wearing an icy mask of calmness, and never mentioning Tom s name. But he looked gray and worn in the face, and the younger generation of men began to say that " Morgan Amory showed his age at last." With Gladys it was different ; it seemed as if the tender thoughts of her little boy had softened away the unnatural hardness which those nearest her had noticed after the first year of her married life, and had restored the old, loving sweetness of her girlhood. She was unspeakably patient and tender with her husband, though he shrank notice- 231 232 DIVIDED. ably in her presence, seeming to dread nothing so much as the possibility of her mentioning their boy. Neither could he bear to look at little Amy, but if he happened to come in when she was in her mother s arms, would turn abruptly and leave the room without a word. " If the man ever had a heart," said the old doctor testily, " it is framed and hung up in the dining-room with his family pedigree ! That isn t grief for his child it is disappointment in the loss of his heir ! " Stephen said nothing, but was seen so often in public with Amory that it excited remark. When summer came, Mr. Amory briefly declared his intention of going abroad. " I do not care if I never see the place at Bar Harbor again," he said to his wife, " but you had better take Amy there, Gladys." " Would you rather not have me go with you ? " she asked the tone, indeed, had implied it very plainly. " It would not be best to take Amy with us, of course, but Mrs. Stanhope would come and take care of her for me, and at Bar Harbor she would be so near our doctors that I should not trouble you with nervousness about her." DIVIDED. 233 " It is quite unnecessary for you to leave her ; besides, your father has offered to go with me." " Oh ! my dear, I am glad to go with him," Mr. Lyman said, in response to his daughter s thanks. " I would willingly do more for you, Gladys, if it were in my power." He looked at her so wistfully as he spoke, strok ing her rippled golden hair, that she knew he was thinking of the old injustice for which he had never ceased to reproach himself how bitterly, since he had observed the un congeniality of her married life, Gladys would never know ! "I have no special plans for the summer, and you know that Morgan and I have many interests in common. I doubt if he could find a more toler able companion if he must have any one." "Must?" repeated Gladys in surprise. " Yes ; it would be most unwise for him to go alone. Since Stephen Forbes discovered his ten dency to heart trouble, I notice he always has his eye on him." Gladys said nothing at the moment, great as the shock of surprise must have been, .not wishing her father to know that he had betrayed what Stephen had chosen to keep from her, but, when 234 DIVIDED. she next saw the latter, she spoke of it very quietly. " I am sorry it should have come to your knowl edge," said Stephen, with a doctor s annoyance over needless forecast of possibilities. " I hoped it never might. It was quite uncalled-for." " You know me too well to be afraid of my bor rowing anxiety ; and," she added, turning away with tearful eyes, " it will make me doubly grate ful to you for recalling me to myself on that dread ful day." So the husband and wife parted, if that can be called separation which is measured by space. There are some pairs, alas ! who are no nearer each other when side by side than if the Atlantic rolled between ! " At Lausanne, Switzerland, 3ist ult, suddenly, Morgan Amory of Boston, 40 years." Anna Lindesay read the paragraph aloud at the dinner-table, with an exclamation of surprise, the day after her return to town from her summer quarters. " So Gladys is a widow," she added, throwing DIVIDED. 235 down the paper, and looking across the table at her husband, who showed no surprise, " and I suppose she is not yet twenty-five. You don t show the smallest interest, Raymond, but I suppose you knew it before." "Yes ; I read it at the office." " So exactly like you ! You never seem to think I have a particle of sympathy or interest in other people s sorrows ! However, this can hardly be called a sorrow, I imagine. A young and beauti ful widow is not usually long inconsolable, espe cially if her widowhood leaves her in such com fortable circumstances as this bereavement un doubtedly does." " The property does not go to Mrs. Amory, but to the child," said Raymond laconically. " Why, how do you know ? Oh, from the will, of course ! I suppose it was altered when Mr. Amory went abroad. But I wonder at that ! Isa bel says that after the little boy died, the father could never bear the sight of the other child." " Isabel abuses Mrs. Amory s kindness to her and her intimacy in the household," said Lindesay, knitting his brows, " or you take undue advantage of her love of talking, Anna. I thought I had 236 DIVIDED. requested you before never to question her on the subject." "The Amorys domestic affairs are no secret," retorted Anna angrily; "but you can never bear the least word in disparagement of that goddess, Raymond ! " " I have not the least desire to hear her men tioned in any way whatever, my dear Anna." " I never shall understand why, if you admired her so much, you did not take advantage of her evident partiality for you when she was a girl at Bar Harbor," pursued Anna unheedingly. " I never saw anything more apparent in my life ! Whatever she may have married Morgan Amory for, it cer tainly was not for love." " Expediency is the moving spring in more mar riages than is usually supposed," was his reply. The color flushed into Anna s cheek, but as she glanced sharply across the table her husband s eyes were fixed on the paper she had dropped, and she wisely left the repartee on her tongue unspoken. " This can hardly be called a sorrow for Gladys," Anna had said in her half-sneering tone. Not as sorrows are usually reckoned, certainly ; yet, viewed in another light, it was the crown of sorrows. DIVIDED. 237 "If I had only " Gladys whispered, as if un consciously, the first time Stephen saw her after the tidings of Mr. Amory s death. "Only what?" he repeated gently, bending forward to catch the half-uttered words. " If I had only loved him ! " she said with a groan. " You cannot understand that feeling, my friend, but " " Believe me, I perfectly understand," the doctor said, very earnestly, CHAPTER XX. A FRIEND IX NEED. The shadow of a great rock in a weary land. ISAIAH xxxii. 2. NO, my dear Siren, you must not try to tempt me away. I would gladly come to you for a rest if I went to any one, but, in the first place, I don t need any, and if I did, my rest is in work ing here. However, I thank you for wishing it." And Dr. Martyn put her arm round Gladys waist, kissing her with affectionate warmth for which one would hardly have looked in the cool, business-like little doctor, whose demonstrative- ness, like her nerves, might have been supposed under entire control. " Yes, I know what you would say - " Rest is not quitting the busy career, Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere ! " said Gladys, "and I have not the least wish to urge you to neglect your duties, Clara. But you do 238 A FRIEND IN NEED. 239 really overwork sometimes. You are quite losing your color, I notice lately. I have often heard you say that you had the utmost confidence in Miss Smith s judgment." " No nurse can take the place of a physician," said Clara promptly. "The nurse may be hands, or even head in rare instances, but it s an affair of the heart with the doctor, Gladys." "Very true, but Dr. Stephen is there so con stantly that you could hardly be missed if, for a fortnight, you should not sleep under the roof. Come to me for that time, and then, if all goes well, let me take you away for a little change of air and scene, and you will return quite another being. It is a duty that you owe to yourself, Clara." "No, my dear," said her friend firmly, "don t urge it. I shall not leave the hospital unless for very pressing needs, until I go for good, and just now I should be very unwilling to lay the whole burden of responsibility on Dr. Stephen. I must learn to do without his advice for a season, and leaving all to him would be a poor beginning." "Why, what do you mean ? " exclaimed Gladys, with a sudden change of expression. " Do with out him how ? " 24O A FRIEND IN NEED. Her friend looked at her earnestly for a moment. J " I mean only that he is going abroad again in a few weeks. Did you not know it ? " she asked quietly. " No," said Gladys, the startled color returning to her cheek. " I should hardly have supposed he would leave his father again." " Oh ! the old doctor is anxious to have him go. He is quite well himself now, he says, and Stephen needs rest and change. It may be only for a time." " How inconsistent you are, Dr. Martyn ! " said Gladys, with a touch of playfulness. " A moment ago you were advocating steady work as the only rest for doctors ! " " I was speaking only for myself." " And I think Dr. Stephen looks better able to bear a long strain than you." " Temperaments are different," Clara replied. " He puts far more nerve-force into his work than I, and so feels the strain more. That is what we must judge power of endurance by, rather than bone and muscle. He is a much more intense person than I." Gladys said nothing, but probably Pr. Martyn A FRIEND IN NEED. 24! was answering a look in her face when she said quickly, " I know him better than you do, Gladys." " You have known him longer, certainly," Gladys replied. " But it seems to me impossible " She checked herself and left the sentence unfinished, but Clara saw by the lingering twilight of the early spring that the tears had risen in her brown eyes. She was sitting alone in the parlor that evening, after her good-night visit to Amy s nursery. The lamp, over the globe of which a crimson paper shade had been thrown, shed a faint rosy light through the room, but Gladys was sitting at a dis tance from it, her hands lying idly in her lap. A sweet spring fragrance of violets, stealing in from the little conservatory, filled the air, a dim atmos phere of warmth and luxuriance in which Stephen Forbes, as he entered, could scarcely see the graceful head drooping against the cushions of the deep arm-chair in which she sat. " Is that you, Dr. Stephen ? " she asked, rising. " I was just thinking of you." Stephen fancied a sound of tears in her voice, but her face was only dimly visible in the half light. " Let us sit here," she said, detaining his 242 A FRIEND IN* NEED. hand a moment in her soft clasp, " unless you dis like the dimness ? " " Not at all for myself, though I hope you do not often indulge in it when you are alone." " Dr. Martyn tells me," she began abruptly, " that you are going away." " Yes," said Stephen, with a half-sigh, " but for a time only, I trust. It seems best for several rea sons, now that I have no further uneasiness on my father s account." " I hope you have not been overworking ? " " No, oh no ! I do not go for any reason of that kind." Stephen spoke in a laconic fashion, habit ual to him when anything was pressing on his mind. " You must not feel any anxiety about Amy in my absence," he added, rousing himself and bend ing forward. " She is perfectly well now, and my father will watch her as carefully as I should." Gladys was silent. " You know he has even a prior claim to that little patient of mine," said the doctor, wondering that she did not speak. "I am afraid I am very selfish," she burst out suddenly, " but, indeed, I feel as if I could not spare you." A FRIEND IN NEED. 243 " I have been so glad to serve you," he replied in a low tone. " Ah, it has been no common service ! When I look back on this year of my life, I often ask my self what I should have done without you. How often I have thanked you in my heart for your silent sympathy ! Oh ! there are times in our lives when nothing but the help and support of a strong, wise friend can save us from despair, and you have been that tower of strength to me ! " "Thank you," said Stephen, still in the same deep tone. " I do not speak of your saving my little Amy, though I cannot yet look back on those dreadful days and long winter nights of anxiety without shuddering I am speaking of myself and my own reliance on you. You know my old feel ing of affection and confidence towards your father, so you will think it no treason to him, but, Dr. Stephen, I have come to depend on you. You have been with me in all my troubles, and when I think of another alarm of diphtheria without you to look to " " You are borrowing trouble now," said Stephen, gently checking her. 244 A FRIEND IN NEED. " Yes ; but you must often hear such forebod ings. A doctor who has saved the life of a child is no common friend to the mother, but it was my little Tom s love for you that first made me She could say no more for her tears, but pressed the strong, tender hand that rested on the arm of her chair. Stephen rose and stood beside her, looking down upon her from his full height with a strangely- moved expression. Then he stooped and said : " Can I really have been so much to you ? " " Not to me alone, I suppose," said Gladys, smil ing through her tears, " but I am trying to excuse myself in your eyes for my selfishness. It is utter selfishness, of course, to depend so much on another. Sooner or later one must bear the bur den of one s griefs and anxieties alone." " Not if you will let me always share them with you." The doctor s deep tones trembled, and Gladys, looking up in surprise at the unusual break in his voice, met his earnest eyes fixed upon her with a new expression. She half-rose, with a sudden premonition of what was coming, but he went on, quickly, A FRIEND IN NEED. 245 " For I will not go if you tell me to stay. You speak of what I have done for you I trust that would have been the same for any one, but you surely you must know how dear all that concerns you is to me ! I thought of going only because I did not feel that I could be near you longer and remain silent. Now I have spoken. Do you think do you mean that you can really trust yourself to me ? " Gladys looked up for a moment into the face above her, every line of which was softened with the yearning tenderness that thrilled in his voice, and spoke from the very attitude of the tall figure, as he bent towards her. She met the eyes for a moment of sorrowful surprise, then covered her face silently with her hands. There was a moment s stillness in the room ; it seemed an hour. Then the hand whose touch she knew so well was laid on hers, as they covered her face, and the doctor said gently, in almost his usual tone, " My dear, you need not speak. I see how it is the fault was mine. Believe me, I came with no thought of saying to you what was in my heart, and, though your sweet reliance on me has drawn 246 A FRIEND IN NEED. it from me sooner than I meant, I am the only one to blame in the matter. Do not grieve about it, and be sure you do not lose the friend whom you have valued, because he has told you that you have been to him dearer than a friend ! " He pressed his hand again upon her clasped hands, and then she heard his firm step going to wards the door. "Oh ! " she cried, starting to her feet, "do not go yet ! You do not understand stay a few mo ments and let me tell you." "Better not now it is late. Good-night," and he turned back at the door with just the old kindly smile and nod. Gladys, left alone, remained for a while with her head bowed on her hands. It had been an utter shock to her. In her mind she went back to the clays before Stephen s first coming. She felt again the cold chill that had gradually settled down upon her in the first year of her married life, as she came to realize that she and her husband could never be more to each other than they were - nay, that in spite of every effort she might make, they were drifting wider and wider apart. She remembered the pang of disappointment it had given her to A FRIEXD IN NEED. 247 think that the father, whom she had almost wor shipped, should have been guilty of any conceal ment or deceit towards her. The old trust could never return, however deep the filial tenderness might be. She remembered the feeling with which she had asked herself, as day after day passed by, filled with nothing deeper than ease and surface enjoyment, "Can this be all of life?" She re membered the struggle she had made to fill her own life with something more serious, the bitter feeling that, in that effort, she would be quite with out sympathy. It was no wonder if a shade of morbidness had fallen upon her and mingled even with her passionate affection for her children. She had needed a sunny, Denial nature and a friendly hand to help her out of the slough into which she was falling, and that aid had come from Stephen Forbes. She had felt instinctively, from the day when they had met in her studio, that he understood her and her efforts, that he divined, oh ! very much that must be forever unspoken even to the closest household friend. How wisely he had helped her and drawn her out of herself! How he had grieved in her great sorrow, and yet, even at that moment, shielded her from the danger of self-reproach ! 248 A FRIEND IN NEED. How her boy had loved him, and how he had labored with almost superhuman skill to save her little girl! That he was her devoted friend, that she relied upon him with a trust and faith she gave to no other human being, she knew, but that he should love her was a thing she had never dreamed of, and that she should love him seemed an im possibility. Love, she knew it well, was like a mighty tempest, seizing on the heart by storm, shaking the whole being to its inmost depths. No less a love than that should be given to Stephen Forbes. She rose at last from her chair, shaking off her reverie, drew her desk to the light and began to write the letter which rea ched Stephen in the morning. MY DEAR FRIEND: You left me so quickly this evening that I could not say to you what I wished, and I cannot allow it to remain unsaid. That you surprised me beyond expression I need not tell you, but that you should blame yourself for what you said to me would make me very unhappy. Dear Dr. Stephen, if reverence and trust and friendship more deep and tender than I can put into words, were love, my whole heart would be yours. But that is not love. Love comes, we do not know_ how or why, at once and unmistakably; it is something we cannot reason about, and that does not wait to be discovered. But nothing else can be a substitute, and to fancy that it can is a sore .mistake. A FRIEND IN NEED. 249 I can have no secrets from you, dear friend ; I owe you the full est and deepest confidence. Such a mistake, you know, I once made, and such a love I think I once knew. That no trace of it now remains does not alter the case. It showed me, at least, of what my heart was capable, and I would never be guilty of offer ing you less than my uttermost. I need not remind you of your promise that this should make no difference in the friendship which is my greatest happiness. You are too noble and unselfish for such a possibility to exist. Most truly your friend, GLADYS AMORY. Stephen s reply came at once. The clear, strong handwriting was so like him : MY DEAR FRIEND: I thank you for your confidence. Love comes to us in all ways, whether late or early in life, whether by storm or by gradual revelation matters little so that it be pure and unselfish. I trust that mine is so, and God forbid that it should be the means of your losing any help or support which it has been my blessing and privilege to afford you. Your friend, STEPHEN FORBES. CHAPTER XXI. ONE WAY OF LOVE. If there be any one can take my place And make you happy whom I grieve to grieve, Think not that I can grudge it, but believe I do commend you to that nobler grace, That readier wit than mine, that sweeter face. CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI. THERE was to be a consultation at Dr. Mar- tyn s hospital, in which Dr. Stephen was senior physician. The case was that of a poor girl whose chance for life depended solely on the success of an operation, so difficult and dangerous that to hazard it seemed almost more than the hair-breadth chance would justify. But Dr. Mar- tyn was very sanguine ; with her, the hope of life seemed to mean everything. The group had closed about the bed on which the poor, unconscious form was lying ; the other doctors, young men of more or less experience, had said their word for or against the trial. Ste phen was bending over the pillovf, while the other 250 ONE WAY OF LOVE. 25! men followed his movements with intensity of interest varying according to the temperament of each. Clara fixed her eyes, sparkling with eager ness, on his face, and while the color mounted to her cheek, she watched him as breathlessly as if her life, not that of her poor patient, depended on his fiat. He moved slowly and deliberately, his grave, intent expression losing nothing of its com posure under the eager eyes. Finally, he gave a long, pitiful look at the waxen face, the eyelids sunken and blue-circled in the ether sleep, and straightened himself with an unconscious sigh : "I say, No." There was a murmur of voices such as usually follows a breathless pause, but, while Stephen gave his reasons in clear, decided response to the ques tions or remarks of the others, Clara said not a word. She was bitterly disappointed ; the more that she had felt so sure that his counsel would be to try in spite of the fearful odds. It was not until the group about the bed was dispersing that she found voice to say apart to Stephen, "May I speak a word with you before you go?" "Certainly ; I will wait for you downstairs." It was some minutes before she was at leisure 252 ONE WAY OF LOVE. to follow him into the little room which she called her "den," a tiny sanctum where the busy brain and hands and the much-taxed sympathies occa sionally found a brief lull of repose. In spite of its tininess it was a pretty little nook ; the only spot in the hospital that bore the impress of the woman s individual tastes. Here stood her Daven port desk and her favorite books, and, since Gladys had made the hospital one of her haunts, many little added touches of luxury had crept into it. Curtains of a shade in harmony with the carpet draped the window, an embroidered fire-screen stood in the corner, several fine engravings had made their appearance on the walls, and, as to-day, flowers often adorned the table. As Clara crossed the hall and stood at the door, the doctor, looking out of all proportion with his surroundings, was bending over the vase which Gladys had filled that morning with fresh violets. At the sound of her step he turned quickly, and came towards her, holding out his hand. " I disappointed you," he said at once, meeting her eyes with his friendly gaze. " Yes," said Clara frankly. " I am sorry, but, my dear Doctor, it was un ONE WAY OF LOVE. 2 53 avoidable. " The girl would almost surely not have lived." "She will surely die now," Dr. Martyn replied. " The operation might have given her a bare chance for life." " I cannot think we should have been justified in making the trial," said Stephen firmly. Clara was silent, but there was a tremulous movement about the corners of her mouth as if something that rose to her lips remained unsaid. " You are not satisfied, I see," said Stephen, looking earnestly at her. " What is it, Dr. Martyn ? You usually have confidence in my judgment." " I have indeed," said Clara, averting her eyes. " Then why not now ? " " Do you wish me to say frankly why I am dis* satisfied ? " " Surely I do." "Then I will tell you," said the little woman, lifting her eyes bravely to the face so far above hers ; " I did not feel that that decision was spoken quite in your usual tone of mind. You were not quite yourself. If you had been, I think you would have agreed with me in taking the risk t though I grant you it was a fearful one." 254 XE W AY OF LOVE. " I do not think I quite understand you. In what way am I not myself ? " " I think you are putting more of a strain upon yourself than you are able to bear. You think because your shoulders have always carried easily so much of others burdens, that this one added touch will not matter. You do not show it out wardly you think you do not feel it, but but under that pressure, you do not look at things so hopefully and brightly as you used. It is inevi table that it should be so." Dr. Stephen made a turn about the tiny room. " Can that be true ? " he cried. He stood for a moment looking thoughtfully down at her, then said very quietly, " At least I understand you." " And I have not offended you ? " For the first time she failed to meet his eyes with her clear, fearless gaze. He gave her small hand a hearty pressure. " That, I think, would be impossible. So far from it that I thank you for your friendly warning. Moreover, I believe you are right." " I am sure that I am," she answered* calmly. " What do you propose to do ? " " That I cannot tell as yet. For the present I ONE WAY OF LOVE. 255 shall keep your admonition in mind. Good-night f " " Would you be willing to trust a great deal to me?" said Dr. Martyn, too preoccupied with her own thoughts to heed the good-night. " Assuredly I should ! I have no possible rea son for thinking that you are not yourself." He said it smilingly. " Oh ! don t jest about it," she cried, as if the tone had given her pain. " Indeed, I was not speaking in that way ! " They parted like trusted friends and comrades, but, as the door closed upon Stephen, the little doctor rested her arms on her desk, pillowed her head on her arms, and sat so for a long time, with her face hidden. Could it have been for a woman s reason that, when she did raise her head, her eyes looked less clear and bright than usual ? One of the nurses who came to the door, stood looking in at her in surprise for a moment, then stole noiselessly away. " The doctor s all struck up about poor Harriet," she confided to one of the other attendants ; " I don t think I ever knew her to feel so bad." The next day a note came to Dr. Stephen from Mrs. Amory : 256 ONE WAY OF LOVE. MY DEAR FRIEND: I wish to ask your advice about a plan which has been proposed to me for the summer. Dr. Martyn has generously offered to go away with me, putting aside her own wish of remaining at the hospi tal. I think it will be better for herself, of course, but it is entirely for my sake that she goes. You will see that this plan quite relieves me from the anxiety of which I spoke to you, and I shall only ask you to recommend to us some quiet mountain place where \ve can be by ourselves, and be sure of finding pure dry air for Amy. I am the more glad of this arrangement because it gives me the opportunity of begging you to follow out the plan you had formed for yourself when I selfishly asked you to stay on my account. I am ashamed of myself. I had no right to burden with my cares one who owes so much of his time and thought to others, and who spares so little for himself. Will you forget the request, though not the feeling of deep trust and confidence that prompted it, and forgive your friend, GLADYS AMORY? The key to this note was an interview between Mrs. Amory and her friend, Clara Martyn, on the afternoon of the consultation at the hospital. She came in hurriedly, as she sometimes did at the close of her busy days, looking so fagged and overworked that Gladys was full of affectionate solicitude in her welcome. " No, don t pet me ! " said the little doctor brusquely, turning away her head. " I don t feel amiable this afternoon ! " " You may be as unamiable here as you like," said her friend, putting a cushion behind her head, taking off her hat, and passing her cool hand over ONE WAY OF LOVE. 257 the tired brow. " It will only confirm me in my belief that you need rest and change. But I for get that that is a sealed subject ! " " Would you like to have me go away with you for the summer ? " asked Clara abruptly. Gladys opened her eyes in amused surprise. " Would I like it ? Is not that the very thing that I have been urging, and you persistently re fusing ? But for the whole summer ! I had not asked so much as that. I could not let you make such a sacrifice of your wishes for me." " I could arrange it. An opportunity has offered for leaving my work in efficient hands, and I have other plans for myself in the autumn. No, don t thank me too much ! " as Gladys, disturbed by her unusual manner, knelt beside her chair. " There is no occasion I don t do it wholly on your ac count ! There, don t look at me in that way you are a sweet, beautiful creature, Gladys, but you are as cold as a stone ! " " I ? " cried Gladys. Her face had grown quite pale, and she drew back from the arm-chair beside which she still knelt. " What do you mean, Clara ? I scarcely know what to make of you this after noon ! " 258 ONE WAY OF LOVE. " You speak of my making sacrifices ! " cried Dr. Martyn, who seemed, indeed, in the rare fit of anger which had so incomprehensibly seized upon her, a wholly different being, "and you surfer others to make them without knowing with out giving it a thought ! " The color rushed back in a crimson tide over Gladys pale face. " You make strange accusations against me to day," she said very quietly; "of whom are you speaking, Clara ? " " What ! " said her friend, still at white heat of passion, " do you not know that Stephen Forbes is staying here solely because you told him that you could not spare him ? " "I I told him that I scarcely felt as if I could spare him, certainly. But he said there was now no reason for his going." The conscious color had not left Gladys cheek ; her head drooped a little under her friend s indignant eyes. "And that is a woman s idea of friendship!" cried Dr. Martyn bitterly. " That is a woman s generosity ! Ah ! I am sometimes ashamed of my sex." ONE WAY OF LOVE. 259 " You surely have no cause to be ashamed of me," said Gladys coldly. " I speak frankly, Clara, for you leave me no choice in the matter. If you are upbraiding me because I will not dishonor a noble man by giving him half a heart, I can only say that your reproaches are cruelly unjust. I could act in no other way than I did, and no true friend of his would wish it." " And do you suppose I would urge it ? " blazed the little doctor, whose Southern blood was assert ing itself at last, in spite of the discipline of years, and the well-trained calmness of her exterior. " Oh ! it is not that I am upbraiding in you. You do not understand no, you do not even see what is before your very eyes ! Do you not know that for months he has been bearing your trials and anxieties, making them doubly his own because he loves you, and, for your sake^those whom you love, and now when you take from him, as he thinks, all hope, you will still keep him chained to the spot with no chance to recover himself and take up his work again from a fresh point of view ? " Gladys was silent, but she had again become pale. " You think," pursued her friend, unheeding her 26O ONE WAY OF LOVE. face, " that because he does not show it outwardly he does not feel it. Ah ! we who look at him with other eyes can see where he suffers. It weighs upon him professionally, if in no other way. I have seen it already, and others will feel it in spite of every effort on his part. It is that I cannot bear to think of. You have no right to hurt him there ! " " Clara, I do not understand you." Gladys voice faltered, and she kept her eyes fixed on the doc tor s excited face. "No, you do not understand you have no con ception of a love like that a love that would suffer everything, never thinking of itself, never asking if what it received were an adequate return for what it gave! Oh! there are such noble feelings love that asks nothing but the happiness of its object love that suffers only in that other s pain love that does not-hold itself worthy " Oh, Clara ! " cried Gladys. She had risen from her knees and now threw her arms round her friend, pressing her to her heart. " I am over-excited," said Dr. Martyn, making a violent effort to control herself. She spoke in her professional tone, raising her head from Gladys shoulder as she uttered the words and laying her ONE WAY OF LOVE. 26l finger on her own pulse. Gladys sat watching her anxiously. For a moment there was such a silence that the ticking of the clock on the mantel became distinctly audible. " My dear," said the little doctor presently, in her usual quiet tones, " I am afraid I have made you angry. I beg your pardon I do not often lose control of myself." " Angry ? Oh no ! no ! " " And now I am going home," said Clara, re turning her friend s embrace with equal warmth. "There is not a word more to be said except that, if you like my proposal, you had better write to Dr. Stephen, tell him of it, and ask him to choose a place among the mountains for us. You will not care to take Amy to the sea." The calm, clear-cut, decided face was as com posed as ever, and the excited girl who had poured out her heart in such passionate worcfs a few mo ments before, seemed the creature of a dream. She was so fresh in Gladys memory, however, that the quiet, business-like little note to Dr. Stephen was written with tearful eyes. CHAPTER XXII. A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. Let us own, the sharpest smart Which human patience may endure Pays light for that which leaves the heart More generous, dignified, and pure. COVENTRY PATMORE. THE place suggested by Dr. Stephen was a large New Hampshire farmhouse, standing some miles distant from one of the little mountain villages, and a delightfully long drive from rail ways and other inroads of civilization. " It is not a boarding house, and you will not find Mr. Wheeler and his wife in the least affected by the fever for fleecing summer boarders. I learned to know the place and people as long ago as when I was a medical student on a vacation tramp through the mountains, and it has changed very little since then. The air is elixir, and you will both enjoy it heartily, for neither of you know anything of that phase of life." Dr. Stephen spoke with his usual hearty tone, 262 A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. 263 and pleasant smile, and might have been arranging for the summer of the most indifferent patient on his list. For himself, he was going abroad. " I m glad you ve reconsidered that plan," said his father, "and, as you ve filled my place so long, I ll do my best now to rattle round in yours ! " Dr. Forbes would have jested on the scaffold, so it is no wonder if his silent anxious observation of his son s feelings none of which had escaped his keen old eyes found relief in a joke. The mountain expedition was, indeed, .a delight ful novelty to both. Gladys childhood, spent in foreign travel, and her early married life passed in a conventional summer resort, had prevented her from knowing anything of the rural simplicity of New England life, while to the Southern-bred Clara Martyn the very name of the White Mount ains brought a delightful sense of freshness and exhilaration. Independence was, certainly, not new to her, but the companionship of her own party, and freedom from all professional cares except friendly ones, was something " refreshingly uncommon," as she smilingly remarked when they were seated in the cars. The jaunt, too, seemed to be regarded as an event by the intimate friends 264 A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. of both, for one and another appeared at the station to wish them God speed, or promise to look in upon them in the course of their summer wander ings. " Do you know," Madge Boylston remarked thoughtfully to her husband as they drove home from the Eastern depot, " I have a theory about this summer trip of theirs ? " " No ; have you ? " said Ned easily, well-schooled by this time in his wife s theories. " Yes about Dr. Martyn, I mean. There is some sort of understanding between her and Dr. Stephen, Ned ! I have seen it for a long time. They have both shown it very plainly all winter, but why they don t come together " Well ? " said her husband, for here the theorist made a long pause. " Ned, did you hear what Dr. Stephen said to her, just as the train was about to start ? " " Not I. Did you ? " " Why, I couldn t help it as we were all stand ing together by the car window. It was just as they shook hands And may I hope you will he began. Oh, of course I shall ! she interrupted with the greatest energy, and if I should say, A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. 265 Come ? I ll wait for that time, he answered, with a peculiar expression, and just there the train started. Do you mean to say you did not hear that and see the way in which he looked at her?" "Not I," said Ned; "I thought that, like most other men, he had eyes for no one but Gladys which seemed to me, under the circumstances, very excusable ! " " If I were not Gladys cousin." returned his J wife in high good-humor, " I should resent that speech ! How blind you men all are ! " As the friends left the cars at Plymouth, they were greeted by a fresh breeze, which, in compar ison with the heated atmosphere of the train," seemed like the very breath of life. A three- seated red wagon with a canvas cover, stood in waiting among the many stages and baggage carts, and a sturdy-looking, gray-haired man, with a face tanned almost to the color of leather, and a twinkle in his gray eyes enlivening an otherwise solemn visage, advanced to meet them as they ascended the high steps from the railroad. He glanced from Gladys tall, black-draped figure to the nurse and baby, then, a little doubtfully, at Clara. " Is this Mr. Wheeler ? " said Gladys, advancing 266 A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. i with a smile, " and have you driven over to meet Mrs. Amory and her party ? " "Oh! you re her?" said the gray-haired man, with an air of relief, " I was lookin for He murmured something unintelligible, helping the ladies, meanwhile, to mount the high wagon. "Take the middle seat, marm, and you ll ride easy. Much baggage ? I ve fetched a cart along." " A good deal, but I ll see to that," said Clara, starting down the platform with alacrity, and leav ing Mr. Wheeler still staring, rather helplessly, at the party in the wagon. Trunks, boxes of books or sketching materials, hammocks, rubber bath tub, baby-wagon, and all the attendant parapher nalia of city travellers being promptly bestowed upon the cart, under Clara s energetic superin tendence, Mr. Wheeler gathered up the reins and turned his horses heads homewards. High green hills surrounded them on every side, rising into dim blue mountains in the distance ; the yellow road wound up among these hills as far as the eye could see, between green fields, sweet with hay-cocks, or sudden solemn walls of pine- woods breathing out aromatic odors on the sunny road. Now and then they passed a lonely farm- A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. 26/ house looking out over a grand sweep of upland country, but, except for the passing wagons, whose occupants nodded a friendly " Good-day, Deacon," to their driver, the picturesque solitude seemed unbroken by human life. The horses went on at good speed, tugging bravely up the hills, or grind ing out discordant music from the brake as they dashed down the rare descents, and the friends, revived by the sweet air, began to chat merrily over their summer plans, secretly amused, mean while, by the odd, keen glances of interest which Mr. Wheeler threw over his shoulder at them in the intervals of urging on his horses. Finally, as they were going slowly up a particularly steep hill, he loosened the reins on his knee, and, hitching completely round, said, in a low, confidential tone to Gladys : " Where s the doctor ? " "Doctor Stephen Forbes?" said Gladys, remem bering the acquaintance. " We left him in Bos ton, just ready to sail for Europe." " Oh, him yes ! " said Mr. Wheeler. " I meant the other Dr. Martyn. I expected him along with you." "Why, I m Dr, Martyn myself 1" cried Clara. 268 A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. "I want to know !" said the farmer slowly, with a deliberate survey of Clara from head to foot. " Why, I s posed you was I thought you d wear "You were not looking for a woman?" said Clara, interposing merrily to relieve the good man s embarrassment. " No wonder, if Dr. Forbes did not tell you." "He jes said you was friends of his," replied Mr. Wheeler, "and I thought why, when I saw you fust, I didn t know what to think ! Git up ! " His shoulders began slowly to shake, and, under cover of a vigorous thwack on the sides of his horses, he exploded in a loud guffaw, a fit of laughter in which he was heartily joined by the two friends. "Wai, I reckon you re smart, anyway!" he ob served, with a final contemplation of Clara. The silent enjoyment of the joke lasted until the roof of a square white house, standing under the brow of a range of hills, and flanked by the gables of a huge barn, came in sight. Then he spoke again for the first time. "There s the Farm," he said, with a jerk of his whip, and the horses, at the welcome sight, re- A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. 269 doubled their speed, climbing the last ascent eagerly, with outstretched necks and straining muscles. The house was one of those generous, roomy, old-fashioned structures, white-painted and shuttered, with wide, many-windowed fronts sug gesting the square rooms within, that marked the abode of the well-to-do farmer all through New England half a century ago. They are rarer in New Hampshire than in Maine and Massachusetts, the stony soil keeping a tight-fisted grip on the hard-earned dollars, and frowning on all accumula tion of wealth, whether in crops or capital. But this old homestead seemed to have been reared in a favored spot ; the pastures about it were smil ingly green, with only a scanty sprinkling of the native rock, while the ploughed fields showed a richer soil than they had yet passed in their drive. On the rising slope behind stood clumps of sugar- maples, and dark pine-woods shut in the enclosure on either side. Only one house, a farm of more modest pretensions, was in sight. The green painted door stood open, showing a wide, low-ceiled hall running through the house, and on the broad stone step stood Mrs. Wheeler, and her daughter, a shy, pretty country girl of rosy- 27O A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. cheeked eighteen. The former was of the lank, sallow type common among New England farmers wives ; she spoke in a plaintive monotone, some what amusingly in contrast with her rapid move ments and the volubility of her utterance, as she welcomed them with awkward kindliness. "Well, I never!" she ejaculated, in response to her husband s introduction of Dr. Martyn, " I never thought but you was an old college chum of our young doctor it comes sort of natural to call him so yet, though he s gettin well along now. He never said nothin to show, and I s posed you come along with Mrs. Amory to look after the little girl, who was sort of ailin , he said. Thinks I, it ll be handy to have him in the house if Zekle should have a rheumaticky turn, or if I should be laid up with one of my sufferin spells and I never asked a question ! " Clara suggested that, in spite of her sex, she might be useful in these emergencies. "Well, I declare, I don t know why not and so that is the little girl ? Pretty dear ! she doesn t look very rugged. The mother is as handsome as a pictur is it long since she buried her hus band?" this in a confidential aside to Clara, as A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. 2/1 they ascended the broad, low-stepped staircase to their rooms. A hair-cloth sofa stood on the land ing, and on either side were great square, sunny rooms, with high, black wooden mantels, and many- paned windows, letting in a glorious view of the wide, billowy landscape, and the blue range beyond. "Yes; it is a pretty country," said Mrs. Wheeler, throwing the shutters wide open and looking out complacently on their broad acres. " Some folks say the Lord has prospered us beyond our neigh bors. The farm does lie in a rich streak of land, I know, but that isn t all there is to it. Some of our own folks has farms right alongside Zekle s brother Charles, in that yeller house you passed on the road but they never made out to get along very well ! " She threw a sharp glance at her daughter who stood bashfully in the corner, and paused for breath. "You have known Doctor Stephen Forbes along time, I believe?" said Gladys, with the winning sweetness of tone that never failed to captivate all who came near her. " He spoke of you all very warmly, and said he was here years ago." " Oh, he ! " said Mrs. Wheeler, with a short laugh, expressive of unspeakable appreciation 2/2 A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. " Yes, he came here fust, years ago. He was walkin through the mountains with a lot of young doctors he wasn t so fleshy then to look at as he is now. He stopped here for a fortnight, and it seemed as if he couldn t make enough of the place. Know him ! Oh ! we re not likely to forget him here, I tell you, though we don t see him very often. He don t seem to change much between whiles, though, if he does look older." "Then he has been here lately?" " Bless you, only last week ! He fetched a lot of rugs and things ; " Mrs. Wheeler indicated the Turkey rugs spread here and there over the straw matting which Gladys had already noticed with wondering eyes. " I s pose he wanted to make it look kind of homelike to you city folks, and thinks I they must be partickler friends ! Well, Dr. Stephen, says I, I ll do my very best by em, as I would by any friends of yours, and they must take us as they find us. We re plain folks, but we re hearty, and I hope they ll feel to home. But here I am talkin you to death, and you fit to drop, I daresay ! " And the good dame bustled downstairs, carrying the pretty Nancy in her train. " Why, you didn t suppose these were indig- A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. 2/3 enous to New Hampshire soil, did you?" said Clara, pointing to the rugs, as their hostess closed the door. " I noticed them the moment we came in, and, when I spied those books, I had no further doubts as to the source from which they came." She pointed to a little what-not in the corner, covered with books in suspiciously new bindings. Gladys bent to examine them, opening at the fly leaf of the first she took up, on which " Stephen Forbes" was written in the well-known hand: Fronde s "Carlyle," Emerson s "Nature," Miss Woolson s " Anne," Mrs. Browning, the last " No Name " novel, Longfellow, Philip Gilbert Hamer- ton s " Painter s Camp." " Just the books, old and new, that we have left out of our box of summer reading," commented Clara, "and a pretty good selection for a busy doctor ! What a treat I shall have here in lazy reading ! Well, Gladys, I will leave you and Amy to your toilette and go to my own quarters across the hall. Isn t it a charming old country abode ? " Downstairs it seemed quite as attractive to the city-bred eyes. There was a homely " settin -room," as Mrs. Wheeler termed it, on one side of the front door, the great open fireplace full of sugges- 2/4 A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. tions of winter comfort. Hardy flowers peeped in at the windows, and a tall old-fashioned clock ticked away the sunny hours in the corner. Out of it opened the great kitchen, with heavy rafters overhead, dresser and corner cupboards, and the brick oven before which Mrs. Wheeler seemed to be forever officiating as priestess. The little par lor on the other side of the hall was less attractive, as it contained the family aspirations in the direc tion of modern furniture,- a Brussels carpet, a parlor organ and a Franklin stove. Then came the dining-room, consecrated to the use of the guests, and beyond a cool perspective of milk-room and pantry with yellow-painted floors. Outside, a little vine-wreathed " stoop " afforded a snug re treat for hammocks or lounging chairs, and an en chanting peep of the far-away snow-capped mount ains closed the view. " We were a large family once," said Mrs. Wheeler, as she displayed her household gods. " I ve raised seven children, but they re all scat tered now married, or one thing and another, so there s no one left but father and Nancy and me. George and James are in Vermont, stock-raising, and nothin would do for Ben but goin out West. A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. 2/5 Cerinthy and Susan are married, and Ezra well, he s to Brunswick at college. You tell em about Ezra, father." " He always was a great hand for books," began Mr. Wheeler, in the slow ponderous tones which contrasted amusingly with his wife s rapid utter ance, " ever since he was that high. I remember when Dr. Stephen fust came here on his student tramp ; the little fellow set there in the corner on the settle, porin away over somethin he d got hold of, and never stirred when the other boys got round to hear the gentlemen talk. Presently the doctor went up to him and put his hand on his shoulder and asked, in that hearty fashion of his jes as he speaks now What book have you there, my boy? Plutarch s Lives, sir, says Ezra, never lookin up, and it s jes splendid! There warn t any very good schoolin for the boys then, without they quit home altogether, and I couldn t spare em off the farm for that. But Dr. Stephen took such a fancy to Ezra while he was here, questionin him about his studies and that, that he persuaded me to let him go to Concord and board with a sister of wife s, so as he could attend school there. Well, he stayed there a good 276 A BREATH OF MOUNTAIN AIR. long spell, and the doctor, he kep up his interest in the boy fust and last, writin to him and advisin him about books. By- n-by Ezra got to teachin himself, and stuck to it till the fust thing I knew he told me he was goin to college ! I hadn t a word to say ag in it Ezra d hoed his own row right along, though I donno as he d have got the fust start if it hadn t been for the young doctor. Ses he, I do believe in a boy follerin out his own tastes, ses he, and most of us needs a little push to start off with. He s shouldered up Ezra all through, and it wouldn t be any great of a surprise to me if I saw the lad a Bowdoin professor before I died ! He s the stuff they make em of. Oh yes, marm, you ve come to the right place to hear about the young doctor if he s a friend of yourn no mistake about that ! " CHAPTER XXIII. NANCY S ROMANCE. Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. SHAKESPEARE. THAT was an idyllic summer to the two friends. Their simple life at the farm did not furnish much material for correspondence, cer tainly, but there was the charm of unrestraint and novelty to them both, while everything seemed to have the flavor of the bracing mountain air. They rambled in the fields and sat in the pine groves ; took long country walks and returned with mar vellous appetites for Mrs. Wheeler s unrivalled cookery ; drove off with the old farmer on mount ain excursions in uncompromising buckboards and returned, well -jolted, but in buoyant spirits. Gladys lost her look of sadness, and Dr. Martyn her care-worn expression, while little Amy began to grow as sturdy, brown and rosy as the tow- headed youngsters they passed on the road. "And 277 278 NANCY S ROMANCE. so peaked as she looked when you come ! " Mrs. Wheeler would ejaculate admiringly. " I don t be lieve she ll need no great physickin after all, Doctor ! " Clara had quite established her professional claim in the eyes of her hosts now, despite the disappointment in her sex. "Opportunity," as she said, "had favored her." One July day as they sat in the "stoop," Clara reading aloud, Gladys embroidering from a bunch of wild flowers resting on the piazza rail in front of her, " She does drop the buttercups and daisies on the cloth so life-like you might almost pull em," as Mrs. Wheeler re marked a voice called from the kitchen, " Doctor, would you jes step this way a minute ? " "Yes, Mr. Wheeler, I ll come." There was something in the sturdy voice that sounded to Clara s practised ear a little weak and faint. Gladys, absorbed in her work, did not no tice it. The old farmer sat in the corner of the kitchen settle, as he had come in from the hay-field, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and his broad- brimmed hat over his eyes. With one hand he was supporting his left wrist, across which was a fright- NANCY S ROMANCE. 2/9 ful gash. The blood gushed from the wound in a quick, hot stream, and the ruddy tan cheeks were white and livid. " I donno as you ll make out," he said, holding out the wrist to her with a pale smile. "It s a kind of dangerous place to cut. How I managed to do it with my scythe I couldn t tell you, but the fust thing I knew well, wife s out, and Nancy s upstairs, and I m glad of it, too. Ses I, it s lucky we have a doctor on hand -do you think you can kind o splice it ? " He looked at Clara a little doubt fully under his bushy gray eyebrows, as if half ex pecting her to turn faint or scream, woman-fashion. But she was equal to the emergency. She stepped to the foot of the stairs, called softly to Nancy to bring her the green leather case on the table, held the wounded wrist in her firm, gentle grasp till the girl arrived, checked the terrified exclamation on her lips with one reassuring look, and a quiet " Give me some hot water from that kettle, please, Nancy;" adjusted the ligatures with quick, dexterous movements of her small hands, and bandaged the arm with linen from Mrs. Wheeler s stores, never once changing color dur ing the process. 280 NANCY S ROMANCE. "Wai, I vum ! " said the old farmer who had watched her, throughout, with jaws grimly set in pain, but with so keen an interest in the operation that it acted like an antidote. " I reckon you know your trade, after all ! I never see any wo man handier n you air, nor yet any feller with more grit!" And, with this tribute to Clara s skill feebly uttered, the sturdy old man fainted away for the first and only time in his life. " This is the sort of thing that makes me wish women had more muscular strength," said Clara, regarding him ruefully. "Which way are the men mowing, Nancy ? I must leave you with your father and call one of them to help us." "They re away down in the far lot, but I ll call Cousin Charley he s nearer," said Nancy, blush ing. The summons produced a tall, broad-shouldered young fellow, blue-eyed and fair-haired, with whose aid the old farmer was transported to his room where he remained a close prisoner, sorely against his will, all through haying time. This was the first appearance on the scene of Cousin Charley, otherwise Charles Wheeler, junior, the eldest son of Mr. Wheeler s unthrifty NANCY S ROMANCE. 281 brother, and, as the summer boarders were not long in discovering, an unwelcome suitor of pretty Nancy s. The country damsel had an intense admiration for Gladys, whose graceful beauty always attracted young girls. She brought her little offerings of flowers or ferns, watched her, spell-bound, as she drew or embroidered, expressed by her devotion to Amy what she was too shy to show to her mother, and was overwhelmed with gratitude when Mrs. Amory offered to teach her some bit of fancy- work, or asked for the recipe of some particularly successful dish. One evening, Gladys was sitting alone in the moonlight on the little piazza. She was musing very deeply over something, and a half-sad, half- wistful expression was fast settling on her face, when a low murmur of voices behind her roused her from her reverie. They came through the window of the milk-room where Nancy was often busy at that hour, and, thinking Clara might be with her, Gladys went in too, glad to escape from her own thoughts. But Dr. Martyn was not there ; a young man stood leaning against the wall beside Nancy s table covered with milk pans. 282 NANCY S ROMANCE. " Come in, marm," he said, as Gladys drew back, "I m going. Well, good-by, then, Nancy." He spoke in a short, half-defiant tone, scarcely looking at the girl, bowed somewhat bashfully to Gladys, and turned away from the door. " Oh ! he s gone, " cried Nancy distressfully. " He s gone away vexed with me ! Oh Mrs. Amory ! what shall I do ? " She dropped down on the stool beside the milk-pans, buried her face in her apron and began to sob. "What is the matter?" said Gladys, laying her hand kindly on the heaving young shoulder. "Tell me all about it ! That was your Cousin Charles, was it not ? Why is he angry with you ? " " He s no cause, I m sure," said Nancy, between the sobs. "He knows I d never he knows it s the same as a promise he oughtn t to look for that when father and mother " It was hard to make out the story through the tearful gasps, so Gladys stroked the bright young head soothingly, sat down beside the girl with an arm around her waist, and waited patiently till Nancy should be moved to bestow her confidence. Nothing could have had a more potent charm than Mrs. Amory s caresses, and the weeping maiden NANCY S ROMANCE. 283 was soon ready enough to pour out her tale to her sympathizing ears. " He s called me his little wife ever since I could speak plain," said Nancy bashfully, " but since we began to grow up, father and mother have shown him pretty plain that they didn t like it. It isn t that they ve anything against Charley himself, but Uncle Charles and Aunt Jane aren t a bit fore handed, and father says Charley ll turn out a chip of the old block. It ain t right to say so, for Charley s never had a chance to show out yet, and things at Uncle Charles are so shif less there s no use tryin . But Charley s kind of proud, and he and father ain t very soft-spoken to each other. Now the younger boys have grown up enough to work on the farm, and Cousin Charley says he s goin off out West to try his luck for himself. Ben my brother Ben out in Colorado has a ranch, and he s sent for him they were always great friends so Charley s goin . And, seein it s so far and he to be gone so long, it seems nat ural, I s pose, to ask for a promise. I told him I couldn t give that exactly, but he might know it was just the same. He said "here Nancy s tears broke out afresh. 284 NANCY S ROMANCE. "And he said ?" repeated Gladys. " That I didn t know how a feller felt goin off so far with a kind of a drag at his heart all the time, thinkin that, while he was workin for us both, some one else might step in and take his chance. Of course that s ridicklous Charley knows as well as I do that I wouldn t look at any body else, even if there was anybody in this lone some place to look at !"- here, for a moment, Nancy smiled through her tears, "but men are different, I s pose, and nothin else will suit Charley but a reg lar promise. I darsn t give it and make father angry with us both, and, if I speak about it, he s that set in his way that it ll make him all the harder against Charley. But, oh ! Mrs. Amory, won t you speak for me? father and mother both just think the world of you." " I will, certainly, Nancy, if you will tell me what to say." Gladys drew the girl nearer to her, touched by the self-forgetful earnestness of the round, rosy young face. "Tell them," whispered Nancy, her head droop ing a little, "that promise or no promise don t make any real odds. That my heart is Charley s now just as much as if we were standin up before NANCY S ROMANCE. 285 the minister this minute, and if father could wish me to say Yes to any other feller with such a feel- in as that in my heart, he ain t the man I thought him! tell him oh, Mrs. Amory ! " the blushes overspread Nancy s face and neck, "don t ask me to say any more. If you know what love is and of course you do just put it into words for me better than I can do it ! " She turned away her face, and Gladys felt the color mounting in her own cheeks. " And you are so sure you love him, Nancy ? " she asked, with a gentle caress. Nancy turned her eyes for a moment on the questioner, but the look was enough, and Gladys needed no other answer. That evening, when the girl had gone upstairs, Gladys went into the kitchen where the old couple spent their evenings unless especially invited to join their boarders. It was a pleasant place for any one ; the wood-fire still smouldered on the hearth with a reluctant brightness, as if loath to leave the cheery kitchen in darkness. Little danc ing reflections twinkled in every dish on the dress er, gleamed back from the polished table, and from Mrs. Wheeler s bright knitting-needles, and lighted 286 NANCY S ROMANCE. up the old farmer s rugged face as he sat in the chimney-corner, ruminating over his pipe. He rose as they entered, knocking out the ashes, and Mrs. Wheeler hastened to dust two already spot less chairs. " But won t you set in the other room ? Zekle s pipe is a little strong here, maybe." " Never mind the pipe ; let us sit here, Mrs. Wheeler. It is a pleasure to be in your kitchen once in a while, and I have a word to say to you and Mr. Wheeler." " I hope everythin s satisfactory to you, marm, and the doctor?" began their host, still on his feet. "Yes, indeed, we are thoroughly happy and com fortable. But sit down, Mr. Wheeler, I want to say a word about Nancy. She has been telling me a little to-night of her own affairs." " Nancy s too free with her tongue," said her mother. "You d ought to tell her so." " She only answered my questions, and you know I am very much interested in your pretty daughter." The mother looked gratified, and even the iron- gray eyebrows smoothed a little. "She tells me," began Gladys, and Nancy s little love-confession was repeated in more silvery NANCY S ROMANCE. 287 accents, and more graceful words, perhaps, but cer tainly in no more convincing rhetoric than the girl herself had employed. " I know you want to do the best you can for your daughter," Gladys concluded, while the old couple listened in silence. " I know you fear that this young man may not give her as comfortable a home as she has here with you, but you know one cannot choose for one s children. I am sure you have no fault to find with the young man himself remember you have never given him a fair trial yet, and you would wish to do that, surely?" " I s pose every one d ought to have that," the old farmer acceded, a tittle reluctantly. "And if he is to have it now just look back on your own youth and tell me, Mr. Wheeler if he is to have it, ought he to go off with that drag at his heart ? " Gladys unconsciously repeated Nan cy s expression, " that uncertainty whether or not he is to work with the feeling that it is for her ? " "Wai, no, marm, perhaps not, if he is to start fair. Nor yet I hain t got nothin agen Charley himself, as you say. But, like father, like son, you know, and I d be sorry to see my girl in a house like Jane s." 288 NANCY S ROMANCE. " Besides the spur you will give him by your trust," said Gladys, pursuing the advantage, "he will have your son Ken to steady and encourage him. He has done well ? " "Yes, Ben s smart," said the father, softening. " He s steady and he s sure." " Then you will talk it over with the young couple and let your nephew speak for himself?" said Gladys, rising, and looking at the old man with her most persuasive smile. " I see you know, as well as I do, that Nancy will never think of any one else ! " " I reckon you re about right there, marm," he assented, with a grim smile ; " Nancy s soft- spoken, but she s sot. Wai, seein it s you and the doctor, I ll sleep on it, and see what the boy has to say for himself in the mornin ." " And we re much obliged to you, Mrs. Amory," Mrs. Wheeler hastened to add, in her plaintive monotone, evidently relieved by the loophole of happiness thus left open for Nancy. They took their lamps from the shelf in the hall, and went- slowly upstairs to their rooms. " Oh Gladys ! " said Clara, laying her hand on her friend s shoulder as they paused a moment on NANCY S ROMANCE. 289 the landing to say good-night. There was a whole volume, unsaid, in her tone. A lovely shell-like pink stole over Gladys fair cheek. " Don t be too ready to judge harshly, Clara," she said gently, in reply to the unspoken reproach. "Ah! you do understand," Clara said, half to herself, as she closed her door. A thought came across her of Stephen s blunt, half-boyish protest against the "fair divided excellence," with whom as she had hoped for his " completing," he might yet meet. " I must tell her that, too," she said, and though she smiled, the tears rose in her eyes. CHAPTER XXIV. SURPRISED. It comes, the beautiful, the free, The crown of all humanity. LONGFELLOW. MORE than one letter had been exchanged between the two doctors since their part ing. Several times Gladys had seen an envelope addressed to " Dr. C. Martyn," in the firm, clear- cut characters, and had asked, in a somewhat studiously careless tone, if there were any news from Dr. Stephen. " Chiefly professional news," Clara would reply, or, a day or two later, " I am writing to Dr. Stephen, Gladys ; shall I say anything for you ? " "Tell him about Amy, you know, and say how happy I am in the change and thank him, of course, for suggesting the place." " Oh yes ! I shall say all that, of course." One day in late August, when the ferns were beginning to show straw-colored fronds here and there among the green, and Amy, pattering about on her own sturdy little feet, to shout with glee 290 SURPRISED. 291 over the bright red berries on the partridge vines, the two friends were sitting together in the pine- grove with books and work. It was a lovely sun shiny day, summer sunshine still, though a gay branch here and there among the maples reminded one that summer was over. A breeze, just dashed with the breath of autumn, rustled the pines over their heads now and then, or wafted a bright leaf to their feet. " Ah ! summer is over," said Gladys. " We must be going soon." " No, not yet," said Clara, almost pleadingly. " I am like a schoolgirl who can t bear the thought of having holidays over ! This has been a lovely time to us both." " Yes," said her friend warmly, " I should hardly know how to get on without you now, I believe. It is well you are so near me in Boston, though the hospital is a formidable rival." " Oh, if that were all ! " And Clara sighed. " What more is there ? There is to be no other change ? " " None that I am ready to talk of, yet. But you remember I said I had other plans for the autumn." " I suppose I know what you mean," said Gladys SURPRISED. sorrowfully. " Oh, Clara ! do you really think it is your duty to go ? " " My wish, you mean," said the little doctor firmly. "Yes, I really do but we will not talk of it now, nor do I wish to go yet, unless you are homesick. Stay till October indeed, I really wish it." "Then I do as well." " By the way," said Clara suddenly, as she took up the book she had dropped, " I did not tell you, did I, that Dr. Stephen sails on the eighteenth of September? " " No," said Gladys, with a slight start. " Indeed, I thought he had no idea of coming at present." "The time was uncertain when he left home," replied Clara, without looking up. She turned over the leaves of the volume she held, a little collection of poems which they had found among the books in Gladys chamber. " This is a little thing of H. H. s, " she said, and began to read " Oh Love is weak Which counts the answers and the gains, Weighs all the losses and the pains, And eagerly each fond word drains A joy to seek. SURPRISED. 293 " When Love is strong, It never tarries to take heed, Or know if its return exceed Its gift ; in its sweet haste no greed, No strifes belong. " It hardly asks If it be loved at all ; to take So barren seems, when it can make Such bliss, for the beloved sake, Of bitter tasks. " Its ecstasy Could find hard death so beauteous, It sees through tears how Christ loved us, And speaks, in saying I love thus, No blasphemy. " So much we miss If love is weak, so much we gain If love is strong " Here a white hand was laid on the page. "Don t read that, Clara ! " said Gladys, and, looking up, Dr. Martyn saw that the tears had risen in her eyes. " It reminds me no, no more poetry, please ! I believe I am not in the vein to-day." They went in soon after, and Clara, sitting down at her desk, read over a letter which she had writ ten to England. She read it with a thoughtful face, looked up at her friend musingly, then added one word to what she had already written. It was : "Come!" CHAPTER XXV. "LOVE S FULFILLING." If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love s sake only. MRS. BROWNING. A WILD little stream dashed down from the hills a mile from the house, its brown waters foaming and turning white as it leaped through the rocky channel. A dusty little wood-path, turning off from the road, led up to a saw-mill, standing on the bank, while all about the cleared space in the woods, lay piles of fragrant, newly-sawn boards, drying in the sunshine. The rocks just below the dam were a favorite haunt of the friends, for there was a charming peep up the stream of the deep silent dam overhung with cool green shade from the birches, the foaming cascade below, and far up the hills, thick woods, divided by the silver thread of the merry little rivulet. Here Gladys was sitting, a few days before their departure, finishing a sketch which she had begun 294 "LOVES FULFILLING. 2Q5 in the summer. Dr. Martyn had driven some miles farther on, with the old farmer, to see a sick child, and, except for the whir of the mill, and the dis tant prattle of little Amy hunting for wood treas ures with her nurse, she was sitting in unbroken solitude. " Don t be in any hurry to come back for us ! " she called, as the wagon started. " The foliage is so different since we were here that I shall find enough to do. It will be like a new sketch." An hour might have passed, but Gladys pencil was still busy, when a man s step crackling on the underbrush, and the merry little ripple of Amy s talk in glad outpouring to a new-comer, roused her from her work. " What, back already ! " she exclaimed, without turning round. " I am not half ready for you ! " " I hoped I had not come too soon," said the voice in reply, but the tones were very different from Mr. Wheeler s. She turned quickly, starting to her feet with the suddenness of the surprise as Stephen Forbes came from the woods behind her. The glad color rushed to her cheeks, fading away as quickly, and the hand which she held out to him slightly trembled. 296 "LOVE S FULFILLING." Stephen stood looking down at her for a moment, while he held her hand in his. " I have startled you. I should not have come upon you so suddenly, but they told me you were all here, and I came on at once." He spoke in his usual quiet, pleasant tones, but a happy light shone out from the eyes that looked at her so earnestly. " We did not know you were coming here, though Dr. Martyn told me you had sailed. Or," the color mounting again to her cheek as she saw the ex pression of his face, " or did she know of it? " " I do not think it will surprise her to find me here," said Stephen quietly. He sat down with her on the fallen log from which she had started at his coming, looking in her radiantly beautiful face with the protecting tenderness that could not fail to calm all flutter of the nerves. But, oh ! not for worlds would he have missed the involuntary revela tion of that slight tremor ! They were sitting side by side, talking in quiet, friendly fashion when the old farmer drove up with Clara, and, whether the meeting were unlooked-for or not, nothing could have been heartier than the greeting on all sides. "LOVES FULFILLING. 2Q7 Mr. Wheeler eyed them in his ruminating fash ion as they returned through the woods to the roadside where Stephen had left his buggy. " I ll take Mrs. Amory and the nurse in the wagon," said the old farmer eagerly, and with an indescribable twinkle of his eyes towards Gladys, "if you two doctors will jes drive along ahead." Then, as the dusty buggy-top bobbed up and down the road in front of them, the good man turned ponderously towards Mrs. Amory, and said, with a slow smile overspreading his tanned visage, " Now I want to know ! I never had the fust idee ! " It was a pleasant evening : the simple country people with their hearty welcome of the treasured guest, Stephen with his easy, kindly adaptation to all sides of human nature, Clara, with unwonted animation of talk and repartee, made a lively at mosphere. Gladys was very silent, but there was a happy brightness in her eyes which quite covered the lack of words. " How you do notice everything Doctor ! " Mrs. Wheeler remarked when the others had gone up stairs, and Stephen asked in his hearty, friendly fashion if he should congratulate Nancy. "What ever made you think she was engaged ? " 298 "LOVE S FULFILLING." "Oh! I don t know," with a smile. "You know we doctors get in the habit of noticing little things, and, when I was here last, I happened to observe well, to spare Miss Nancy s blushes, I will only say that I thought matters had taken a more favor able turn since then." " To think of you re bein a bachelor, and takin notice of such things ! " remarked Mrs. Wheeler, with uplifted eyes. " Not that Nancy d be en gaged now if it hadn t been for Mrs. Amory. She took a fancy to the girl and spoke a word for Charley that went right to father s heart. She seemed to know just what a hankerin feelin that poor feller was carryin away with him. Well, I suppose enough men have been in love with her, poor souls ! but it s odd to me that she should know just how they felt about it." The doctor smiled, but said nothing. It was, perhaps, in consequence of Mr. Wheeler s surpris ingly shrewd discovery and the confidence made thereupon to his wife, that, on the next morning, the little household seemed to have pressing affairs demanding their presence anywhere rather than on the porch where the doctor sat in the hammock talking; to Clara. Mrs. Wheeler shut herself into "LOVE S FULFILLING." 299 the remote regions of the dairy, calling loudly for Nancy s aid ; her husband, after fidgeting nervously about the farm-yard and eying Gladys, who stood at a window dangerously near the professional pair, holding her little girl on the sill, drew near and bashfully asked if he might show her that clump of maples where he got his finest sugar. "Maybe they re not much to look at," he ob served, his anxious face growing radiant with relief as Gladys assented, and, taking the child by the hand, followed him up the slope, " but there s a purty view from the hill, and I mightn t think of it agen before you go I donno as I ever did think of it before, either." Then, as they were now out of hearing from the house, he added, lowering his voice to a gruff, con fidential whisper, " I hope I didn t put you out, marm ? I reckoned the two doctors d find enough to say till you come back." Gladys smiled, amused by the old man s sly ex pression. " No, I am glad to go, Mr. Wheeler. I should be sorry to miss any of the pretty spots here, for I shall always look back on our summer in this place as one of the happiest of my life." " We ll be proud to see you back any time you 3QO "LOVE S FULFILLING." and the doctor, both," said Mr. Wheeler heartily. " And, as for Nancy, she d give her eyes to hear you say you d come next summer." " It is hard to make plans so long beforehand," replied Gladys. " There may be many changes for us all before that time." " Wai, yes, that s so," said the old farmer, with a chuckle and a glance at the piazza., "and some of em isn t hard to see comin ." The outlook proved so pretty that Gladys lin gered there with little Amy after Mr. Wheeler, delighted with the success of his strategy, had gone back to the farm-yard. The trees, fast-thin ning as they were, hid the house from sight, but there was a lovely view of the intervale on the other side of the road, and a soft blue mist lying low on the mountains. The squirrels ran fear lessly up and down the trees about her, or darted across the green moss carpet under her feet, and the shrill tap of the woodpecker resounded through the grove. There was a depth of quiet happiness in Gladys heart that made the intense solitude grateful. She stooped and lifted her little girl in her arms, covering her dimpled cheeks with kisses. "Darling," she said, "would you be happy, too ?" "LOVES FULFILLING. 3OI A voice beside her broke the stillness, but this time she did not start, though the approaching footsteps had made no sound on the soft moss. " So Mr. Wheeler deserted you, after luring you up to the sugar-maples," said Stephen merrily. " It was a ruse," said Gladys, smiling, "did you not suspect it ? He fancied me in the way of your professional talk with Clara." " Clearsighted farmer ! " said the doctor, in the same tone. Then, more gravely, " Dr. Martyn has been telling me that she is to return to Memphis this autumn. It was no surprise to me, for I knew she felt that was her field so soon as she could leave her hospital work in safe hands, but I had not thought of her going so soon." " I cannot bear to think of it," said Gladys. " She does not look upon it as a sacrifice," said the doctor cheerfully. "She feels that she owes her time and talents to her birthplace, and, warm as is her affection for her Northern friends, she will have no heart-ache when she leaves us. There is such joy in doing a work for which one is fitted as she is for hers, that it leaves no room for per sonal attachments or regrets. We shall miss her far more than she will us." 3O2 " LOVE S FULFILLING. " Do you think so ? " said Gladys, with a sigh. " Ah ! Clara is a noble woman. But there are few people who really know her she does not wear her heart on her sleeve." " No one can know her better or appreciate her more than I," said Stephen. He looked, a little wonderingly, at Gladys tearful eyes. She was still holding Amy in her arms as they walked on slowly through the trees. " Give me the child," said the doctor, stopping short, and speaking with a shade of his profes sional authority. " She is too heavy for you to carry. Will you leave your mother, little one ? " "Oh! she is glad to go to you," said Gladys, as the child smilingly leaned towards the out stretched arms. There was something in the ex pression of Gladys beautiful upturned face that made the lover s heart throb. " Dearest, will you come now ? " he whispered ; and the next moment the strong arms were folded around both mother and child. " It is not," said Gladys, raising her head so that she could look into her lover s eyes, as they sit "LOVE S FULFILLING." 303 side by side on a mossy rock, " it is not because you love me, Stephen ; it is not because I fancy that my love can be so much to you, or only because it is sweet to feel that my life will never again be lonely, wrapped round with your tenderness and care. There is no other reason but that I have come to the knowledge that I do love you with all my heart and soul ! " " Dear, why do you tell me that so earnestly ? " he asked. " Only because it is new to myself only because I have but lately learned to know that love is not quite what I once fancied it. It is not the blind rush of passion that seizes on our hearts, and carries us we scarcely know where. It may be and that is far better the slow, steady growth out of a deep knowledge of each other. I said I could give you nothing less than my uttermost oh, Stephen ! will you take me with my past, and believe that what I give you now is my best ?" " My darling," said Stephen earnestly, " I am not one to look back to the past, and vex your heart and my own with uneasy questionings. I am no jealous or suspicious lover. Believe me, I take what you give me with the deepest and fullest 304 "LOVES FULFILLING. trust. I do not ask to know just what its degree may be, and, as I have never known myself before what love is, I have no scale of comparison by which to measure it. Enough that you love me, Gladys no woman, remember, ever did that before ! " And the knowledge that this was so far from the truth, was the only shadow on Gladys happiness ! Young Folks Illustrated Quartos. "TO de Awake Volume Z. Quarto, boards, 1.75. GQ d literature and art have been put into this volume. Henry Bacov s paper about Rosa Bonheur, the great painter of horse* and 1 jns, and Steffeck s painung of Queen Louise with Kaiser Willu m would do credit to any Art publication. Chit Chat for Boys and Girls. Quarto, boards, 75 cts. A v jlume of selected pieces upon every conceivable subject. As a distinctive feature it devotes considerable space to Home Life at.d Spor s and Pastimes. Good Cheer for Boys and Girls. Short stories, sketches, poems, bits of history, biography natural history. Our Little Men and Women for 1888. Quarto, boards, 1.50. No boys and girls who have this book can be ignorant beyond their years of history, natural history, foreign sights or the good times of other boys and girls. Baby land for 1888. Quarto, boards, 75 cts. Finger, plays, cricket stories, Tales told by a Cat and scores of jingles and pictures. Large print and easy words. Colored fcontispiece. Kings and Queens at Home. By Frances A. Hum- phrey. Quarto, boards, 50 cts. Short-story accounts of living royal personages. Queen Victoria at Home. By Frances A. Humphrey. Quarto, boards, 50 cts. Peu picture of a noble woman It will aid in educating the heart oy presenting the domestic side of the queen s character. Stories about Favorite Authors. By Frances A. Humphrey. Quarto, boards, 50 cts. Little literature lessons for little boys and girls. Child Lore. Edited by Clara Doty Bates. Quarto, clotk, tinted edges, 2.25; boards, 1.50. More than 50,000 copies sold. The most successful quarto for children. Illustrated Stories for Young Folks. Young Folks Cyclopedia of Stories. Quarto, cloth, 3.00. Contains in one large book the following stories with many illus trations : Five Little Peppers, Two Young Homesteaders, Royal Lpwrie s Last Year at St. Olaves, The Dogberry Bunch, Young Rick, Nan the New-Fashioned Girl, Good-f or- Nothing Polly and The Cooking Club of Tu-Whit Hollow. What the Seven Did ; or, the Doings of the Wordswortk Club. By Margaret Sidney. Quarto, boards, 1.75. The Seven are little girl neighbors who meet once a week at their several homes. They helped others and improved them selves. Me and My Dolls. By L. T. Meade. Quarto, 50 cts. A family history. Some of the dolls have had queer adventures. Twelve full-page illustrations by Margaret Johnson. Little Wanderers in Bo-Peep s World. Quartc boards, double lithograph covers, 50 cts. Polly and the Children. By Margaret Sidney. Boards quarto, 50 cts. The story of a funny parrot and two changing children. The parrot has surprising adventures at the children s party and wear* a medal after the fire. Five Little Peppers. By Margaret Sidney, izmo, 1.50. Story of five little children of a fond, faithful and capable mamsie." Full cf young life and family talk. Sell Series. 10 vols., boards, double lithographed covers, quarto. Rocky Fork, Old Caravan Days, The Dogberry Bunch, by Mary H. Catherwood; The Story of Honor Bright and Royal Low rie s Last Year at St. Olaves, by Charles R. Talbot ; Their Club and Ours, by John Preston True; From the Hudson to the Neva, bv David Ker; The Silver City, by Fred A. Ober ; Two ifoung Homesteaders, by Theodora Jenness; The Cooking Club of Tu-whit Hollow, by Ella Farraan. Cats Arabian Nights. By Abby Morton Diai. Quarto, clo;h, 1.75 ; board*, 1.25. The wonderful cat story of cat stories told by Pussyanita that aved the lives of all the cats. Helpful Books for Young Folks Danger Signals. By Rev. F. E. Clark, President :* the United Society of Christian Endeavor. 121110, cloth, 75 cti. The enemies of youth from the business man s standpoint The substance of a series of addresses delivered two or thre* years ago in one of the Boston churches. Marion Harland s Cookery for Beginners, izma. rellum cloth, 75 cts. The untrained housekeeper needs such directions as will not confuse and discourage her. Marion Harland makes her book simple and practical enough to meet this demand. Bible Stories. By Laurie Loring. 410, boards, 35 cts. Very short stories wiih pictures. The Creation, Noah and the Dove, Samuel, Joseph, Elijah, the Christ Child, the Good Shep herd, Peter, etc. The Magic Pear. Oblong, 8vo, boards, 75 cts. Twelve outline drawing lessons with directions for the amuse ment of little folks. They are genuine pencil puzzles for untaught fingers. A pear gives shape to a dozen animal pictures. What O ClOCk Jingles. By Margaret Johnson. Ob- iong, 8vo, boards, 75 cts. Twelve little counting lessons. Pretty rhymes for small chil dren. Twenty-seven artistic illustrations by the author. Ways for Boys to Make and Do Things. 60 cts. Eight papers by as many different authors, on subjects that in terest boys. A book to delight active boys and to inspire lazy ones. Our Young Folks at Home. 410, boards, r.co. A collection of illustrated prose stories by American authors and artists. It is sure to make friends among children of all ages Colored frontispiece. Peep of Day Series. 3 vols., i.zoeach. Peep of Dny, Line upon Line, Precept upon Precept Scr. monettes for the children, so cleverly preached that the children will not grow sleepy. Home Primer. Boards, square, 8vo, 50 cts. A book for the little ones to learn to read in before they are oW Bough to be sent off to school. 100 illustrations. Natural History. Stories and Pictures of Wild Animals. By Ann F. Cumham. Quarto, boards, 75 cts. Big letters, big pictures and easy stories of elephants, lions, tigers, lynxes, jaguars, bears and many others. Life and Habits of "Wild Animals. Quarto, cloth, 1.50. The very best book young folks cnn have if they are at a!l in- terested in Natural History. If they are not yet interested it will make them so. Illustrated from designs by Joseph Wolf. Children s Out-Door Neighbor?. By Mrs. A. E. Aridersen-Maskell. j volumes, i2mo, cloth, each i.oo. Three instructive and interesting books : Children with Animals, Children with Birds, Children with Fishes. The author has the happy faculty of interesting boys and girls in the wonderful neigh bors around them and that without introducing anything which is not borne out by the knowledge of learned men. Some Animal Pets. By Mrs. Oliver Howard. Quarto, boards, 35 cts. The experiences of a Colorado family with young, wild and tame animals. It is one of the pleasantest animal books we have met in many a day. Well thought, well written, well pictured, the book itself, apart from its contents, is attractive. I ull page pictures. Tiny Follr in lied and Blaclr. Quarto, boards, 35 cts. The tiny folk are ants and they make as interesting a study as human folk perhaps more interesting in the opinion of some. The book gives a full and graphic description of their many wise and curious ways how they work, how they harvest their grain, how they milk their cows, etc. It will teach the children to keep eyes and ears open. My Land and Water Friends. By Mary E. Bam- ford. Seventy illustrations by Bridgruan. Quarto, cloth, 1.50. The frog opens the book with a "talk" about himself, in the course of which rn tells us all about the changes through which he passes before he arrives at perfect froghood. Then th grass hopper talks and is followed by others, each giving his view ol We from his own individual standpoint. A QUEER LITTLE PRINCESS. B> Frances Ew>n. 111. Boston : D. Lothrop Co. Price $1.50. This unique and altogether charming story will be read and re-read in thousands of homes, and with in creasing interest and delight. The princess is q little American girl who has been named Henrietta, but who has been called by her pet name from babyhood, and it still clings to her at the age of seven. She is sensitive, truth-loving, graceful and ingenuous, a counterpart in character to "lit tle Lord Fauntleroy," and, of course, is the idol of the household. Her mother is dead, and she lives with her grandmother in a large and pleasant house with broad grounds where she can play and be happy from morning until night. All children insensibly try to copy after a character whom they Admire, and the "princess" is so skilfully and attractively drawn that she will be adored by every little reader. The influence of the story will be felt in every home where there are children, where the girls will try to emulate the little heroine, and the boys will make an effort to be as manly, truth ful, and self-sustaining as Dick. A very strongly drawn character of the story is Aunt Minerva, whose crustiness and prejudices are destroyed and broken down under the combined influence of the two children. There are touches of pathos scat tered here and there through the book, but the general atmosphere is clear and sunny. The story Is beautifluly illustrated by Bridgman, and may b et down as the iuvenile book of the season. KELP. By "Willis Boyd Allen. Pine Cone Serie*. Boston : D. Lothrop Co. Price 1.00. Mr. Allen has never written a more delightful story than this, the fourth volume in the famous Pine Conq Series. It takes a jolly party of young campers from Boston down to the Isles of Shoals for a fortnight, and describes the various ways in which the members enjoy themselves during that happy time. The first day is spent at the Appleclore House. The second sees the party safely en camped on Star Island, the girls in the one soli tary cabin on the island, which has been especially cleared up for them, and the boys m their tent. They are all old friends of the reader, Tom and Bess Percival, Pet Sibley, Bert and Susie Martin and Nan Burton, all of whom have played parts in the preceding volumes of the series. They crowd into these two weeks an amount of enjoyment possible only to young people of souud healtb, perfect freedom from care, and who are in per fect sympathy and harmony with one anothei Appleclore, where the older members of the Perci- ral family are staying, is only a mile away, so that it Is an easy matter any day to sail across ; excur sions are made to outlying points, Mingo. Star and White Islands; and some of the trips are spiced with genuine danger. They have the op portunity of witnessing a storm while in camp, and of feeling it, too. No one who has ever seen a storm off this group of islands with its long Itretches of reefs and ledges, will be apt to forget It. The author must have himself gone through some of the experiences he describes, to hare painted them so accurately and vividly. The tory is capitally illustrated. ACROSS LOTS. By Horace Lunt. Boston : I). Lothrop Co. Price $1.25. The fact that John Burroughs lias written an introduction to this col lection of essays of outdoor life in the country is sufficient guarantee of its literary value without a word from the reviewer. Mr. Lunt is a genuine lover of nature, and the fields and woods inspire him to the utterance of many charming things in its praise. He writes of the delights of country life; he tells us of the habits of the birds and animals; of the wild flowers and grasses, of the changing aspect of the seasons, and of the myriad things which make the country a paradise for those who are in harmony with her. The volume Is worthy a place on the same shelf with Burroughs. GLIMPSES OF CHEAT FIELDS. By Rev. J. A. Hall. Boston: I) Lothrop Co. Price $ 1.25. The author of this volume takes a decided stand dgainst the doctrines of evolution, and the mate rialism to which they must inevitably lead. He appeals to science to show the falsity of certain of their assumptions, and to sustain his own views, which are to the effect that there must of a necessity be a divine Creator, and that man, in stead of being evolved through countless ages from and through countless reptilian and animal forms, was specially created and endowed with tfie faculties he possesses. The argument is logi cal and strong, and successfully attacks some of the points in the evolutionary theory which it* iisciples have thought secure. MONTEAGLE. By Pansy. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price 75 cents. Both girls and boys will find this story of Pansy s pleasant and profit able reading. Dilly West is a character whom the first will find it an excellent thing to intimate, and boys will find in Hart Hammond a noble, manly, fellow who walks for a time dangerously near temptation, but escapes through providential in fluences, not the least of which is the steady devotion to duty of the young girl, who becomes an unconscious power of good. A DOZEN OF THEM. By Pansy. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price 60 cents. A Sunday- school story, written i~ Pansy s best vein, and having for its hero a twelve-year-old boy who has been thrown upon the world by the death of his parents, and who has no one left to look after him but a sister a little older, whose time is fully occupied in the milliner s shop where she is em ployed. Joe, for that is the boy s name, finds a place to work at a farmhouse where there is a small private school. His sister makes him promise to learn by heart a verse of Scripture every month. It is a task at first, but he is a boy of his word, and he fulfills his promise, with what results the reader of the story will find out. It is an excellent book for the Sunday-school. AT HOME AXD ABROAD. Stories from The Pansy Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price, $1.00. A score of short stories which originally appeared in the delightful magazine, The Pansy, have been here brought together in collected form with the Illustrations which originally accompanied them. They are from the pens of various authors, and re bright, instructive and entertaining. ABOUT GIANTS. By Isabel Smithson. Boston t D. Lothrop Company. Price 60 cents. In this little volume Miss Smithson has gathered together many curious and interesting facts relating to real giants, or people who have grown to an ex traordinary size. She does not believe that thera was ever a race of giants, but that those who are go-called are exceptional cases, due to some freak of nature. Among those described are Cutter, the Irish giant, who was eight feet tall, Tony I ayne, whose height exceeded seven feet, and Chang, the Chinese giant, who was on exhibition in this country a few years ago. The volume contains not only accounts of giants, but also of dwarfs, and is illustrated. AMERICAN AUTHORS. By Amanda B. Harris. Boston: D. Lothrop Company. Price $1.00. This Is one of the books we can heartily commend to young readers, not only for its interest, but for the information it contains. All lovers of books have a natural curiosity to kr.ovv something about their writers, and the better the books, the keener the curiosity. Miss Harris 1ms written the various chapters of the volume with a full appreciation of this fact. She tells us about the earlier group of American writers, Irving, Cooper, Prescott, Emer son, and Hawthorne, all of whom are gone, and also of some of those who came later, among them the Gary sisters, Thoreau, Lowell, Helen Hunt, Donald G. Mitchell and others. Miss Har ris has a happy way of imparting information, and the boys and girls into whose hands this littJ book may fall will find it p leasant reading. Ax OCEAN TRAMP. By Philip D. Heywood. Il lustrated. Boston : P. Lothrop Company. Price $1.25. We have seen nothing for a long time more realistically descriptive of life at sea than this little book of Mr. Heywood s. It is not a story in the general acceptance of the term, but a plain matter-of-fact narrative of the experiences of a country boy of seventeen, who ran away from home to go to sea, and who after an adventurous life of a dozen years came back to find his parents dead, the remainder of the family scattered, and the old homestead in ruins. One cannot help feel ing that it is a record of genuine experience, so naturally do the incidents follow one another, and so skilfully are they wrought together. The Gladiator, on board which the young adventurer ships for his first voyage, sails from New York for China, under a captain who has very decided ideas of discipline, and after a stormy voyage round Cape Horn is shipwrecked on an island ia Carshine group. Both captain and mate and some of the crew were lost, and the remainder after a stay of several weeks are taken off by a German steamer and carried to Hong Kong. From Hong Kong our author makes his way to Shanghai, where, by a lucky chance, he gets a position in the custom house, and remains there several months. Losing his position by the death of his patron he once more returns to sea life, has an adventure with Chinese pirates, and on one occasion, on a vessel loaded with coolies, takes part in a desperate fight between the ship s crew and the dangerous pas sengers. The book is brim full of adventure, and is evidently written by one thoroughly conversant with the life he depicts and the places he describe*. It is well illustrated. THE ART OF LIVING. From the Writings of Samuel Smilss. With Introduction by the ven erable Dr. I eabocly of Harvard University, and Biographical Sketch by the editor, Carrie Adelaide Cooke. Bos oil : D. Lothrop Company. Price 01.00. Samuel Sn lies is the Benjamin Franklin of Eng land. His sayings have a similar terseness, apt ness and f ore i ; they are directed to p -actical ends r like Franklin s; they have the advantage of being nearer our th ic and therefore more directly related to subjects ipon which practical wisdom is of practical use Success in life is his subject all through, The Art of Living ; a; d he confesses on the very first page that " happin jss consists in the enjoyment of little pleasures sea .tered along the common path of life, which in the sager search for some great and ex citing joy we are apt to overlook. It finds delisrht in the perf 01 mance of common duties faithfully and honorabl/ fulfilled." Let the reac er go back to that quotation again and consider how contrary it is to the spirit that under lies the busim ses that are nowadays tempting meii to sudden fortune, torturing with disappointments nearly all wh> yield, and burdening the successful beyond their endurance, shortening lives and mak ing them wea ry and most of them empty. Is it worth wkile to join the mad rush for the lottery ; or tc take the old road to slow success ? This book of the chosen thoughts of a rare phil osopher leads to contentment as well as wisdom ; for, when we choose the less brilliant course be cause we are sure it is the best one, we have the toct eomplet j and lasting repose from anxiety. TILTING AT WINDMILLS : A Story of the Blue Grass Country. By Emma M. Connelly. Boston : D. Lothrop Company. 12mo, 1.50. NOT since the days of " A Fool s Errand " has so strong and so characteristic a " border novel " been brought to the attention of the public as is now presented by Miss Connelly in this book which she so aptly terms Tilting at Windmills." Indeed, it is questionable whether Judge Tourgee s famous book touched so deftly and yet so practically the real phases of the reconstruction period and the interminable antagonisms of race and section. The self-suflicient Boston man, a capital fellow at heait, but tinged with the traditions and envi ronments of his Puritan ancestry and conditions, coming into his strange heritage in Kentucky at the close of the civil war, seeks to change by in stant .manipulation all the equally strong and deep- rooted traditions and environments of Blue Grasa society. His ruthless conscience will allow of no com promise, and the people whom he seeks to prose lyte alike misunderstand his motives and spurn his proffered assistance. Presumed errors are materialized and partial evils are magnified. Allerton tilts at windmills and with the customary Quixotic results. He is, seemingly, unhorsed in every encounter. Miss Connelly s work in this, her first novel, will make readers anxious to hear from her again and it will certainly create, both in her own and other States, a strong desire to see her next forthcoming work announced by the same publishers in one of their new series her " Story of the State of KM*- tacky." THE NORTHERN CROSS. By Willi& Boyd Allen. 111. Pine Cone Series. Boston : D. Lothrop Com pany. Price $1.00. In this breezy and thoroughly healthy story of a boy s life at school the author proves his right to a foremost place among the writers of juvenile literature in this country. The story is local, tbr- scene being laid in and about the Boston Latin School, from which institution the author was a graduate. It is, in fact, largely a record of his own experiences, and some of his descriptions of characters and incidents are as ac curate as photographs. We are glad that he has put down that prince of schoolmasters, Dr. Francis Gardner, " in his habit as he lived," so that future generations of Latin School boys will know some thing of his personality ; and so with Mr. Emer son, whose reputation as a teacher and gentleman was equal to that of Dr. Gardner himself. We dare say many of the classmates of the author will "ecognize many of the funny incidents which make up a portion of the narrative, as well as the actors in them. Exhibition day, the prize drill on the Common and scenes in the schoolroom are de scribed with infinite relish, and there isn t a boy anywhere with a bit of boy feeling about him that will not enjoy the book from cover to cover. It forms one of the Pine Cone series, and readers of the preceding volumes will find some old acquaint ances in its pages. The family Flights, by Edward Everett Hale and Susan Hale, are a series of book journeys through the several countries with eyes and ears wide open, old eyes and young eyes, and ears The books are full of pictures, and fuller of knowl edge not only of what is going on but what has gone on ever since book-making began, and fuller jet of brightness and interest. You see the old as old ; but you see it ; you see where it was and the marks it left. You see the new with eyes made sharper by knowledge of what has gone on in the world. In other words these books amount to some thing like going through these places with a trav eling-companion who knows all about them and their histories. They are written and pictured for boys and girls : but there is nothing to hinder the old folks going along. Will you go? Family Flight through FrMce, Germany, Norway and Switzerland. 405 pages. Family Flight over Egypt and Syria. 388 pages. Family Flight through Spain. 360 pages. Family Flight around Home (which means about Boston* - 366 pages. Family Flight through Mexico. 300 pages. Each 8vo, boards, $1.75 ; cloth, $2.25. One of the most effective means of exciting and satisfying zeal for knowledge of the world we have in books. A good book for young folks is Ned Mel bourne s Mission, not too good to have a spice of life and adventure, but with that indirect influence for good thinking and good doing that is more potent than a sermon to young people. Ned Melbourne s Mission. 12mo, cloth, $1.50. Date Due 1TEO IN U.S. CAT. NO. 24 161 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000 546 098 5