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Different Girls

<h2>His Sister</h2> <h3 class="sc2">by Mary Applewhite Bacon</h3> "But you couldn't see me leave, mother, anyway, unless I was there to go." It was characteristic of the girl adjusting her new travelling-hat before the dim little looking-glass that, while her heart was beating with excitement which was strangely like grief, she could give herself at once to her stepmother's inquietude and turn it aside with a jest. Mrs. Morgan, arrested in her anxious movement towards the door, stood for a moment taking in the reasonableness of Stella's proposition, and then sank back to the edge of her chair. "The train gets here at two o'clock," she argued. Lindsay Cowart came into the room, his head bent over the satchel he had been mending. "You had better say good-by to Stella here at the house, mother," he suggested; "there's no use for you to walk down to the depot in the hot sun." And then he noticed that his stepmother had on her bonnet with the veil to it—she had married since his father's death and was again a widow,—and, in extreme disregard of the September heat, was dressed in the black worsted of a diagonal weave which she wore only on occasions which demanded some special tribute to their importance. She began smoothing out on her knees the black gloves which, in her nervous haste to be going, she had been holding squeezed in a tight ball in her left hand. "I can get there, I reckon," she answered with mild brevity, and as if the young man's words had barely grazed her consciousness. A moment later she went to the window and, with her back to Lindsay, poured the contents of a small leather purse into one hand and began to count them softly. He looked up again. "I am going to pay for Stella's ticket, mother. You must not do it," he said. She replaced the money immediately, but without impatience, and as acquiescing in his assumption of his sister's future. "You have done so much already," he apologized; but he knew that she was hurt, and chafed to feel that only the irrational thing on his part would have seemed to her the kind one. Stella turned from the verdict of the dim looking-glass upon her appearance to that of her brother's face. As she stood there in that moment of pause, she might have been the type of all innocent and budding life. The delicacy of floral bloom was in the fine texture of her skin, the purple of dewy violets in her soft eyes; and this new access of sadness, which was as yet hardly conscious of itself, had thrown over the natural gayety of her young girlhood something akin to the pathetic tenderness which veils the earth in the dawn of a summer morning. He felt it to be so, but dimly; and, young himself and already strained by the exactions of personal desires, he answered only the look of inquiry in her face,—"Will the merchants here never learn any taste in dry-goods?" Instantly he was sick with regret. Of what consequence was the too pronounced blue of her dress in comparison with the light of happiness in her dear face? How impossible for him to be here for even these few hours without running counter to some cherished illusion or dear habit of speech or manner. "I tell you it's time we were going," Mrs. Morgan appealed, her anxiety returning. "We have thirty-five minutes yet," Lindsay said, looking at his watch; but he gathered up the bags and umbrellas and followed as she moved ponderously to the door. Stella waited until they were out in the hall, and then looked around the room, a poignant tenderness in her eyes. There was nothing congruous between its shabby walls and cheap worn furniture and her own beautiful young life; but the heart establishes its own relations, and tears rose suddenly to her eyes and fell in quick succession. Even so brief a farewell was broken in upon by her stepmother's call, and pressing her wet cheek for a moment against the discolored door-facing, she hurried out to join her. Lindsay did not at first connect the unusual crowd in and around the little station with his sister's departure; but the young people at once formed a circle around her, into which one and another older person entered and retired again with about the same expressions of affectionate regret and good wishes. He had known them all so long! But, except for the growing up of the younger boys and girls during his five years of absence, they were to him still what they had been since he was a child, affecting him still with the old depressing sense of distance and dislike. The grammarless speech of the men, the black-rimmed nails of Stella's schoolmaster—a good classical scholar, but heedless as he was good-hearted,—jarred upon him, indeed, with the discomfort of a new experience. Upon his own slender, erect figure, clothed in poor but well-fitting garments, gentleman was written as plainly as in words, just as idealist was written on his forehead and the other features which thought had chiselled perhaps too finely for his years. The brightness had come back to Stella's face, and he could not but feel grateful to the men who had left their shops and dingy little stores to bid her good-by, and to the placid, kindly-faced women ranged along the settees against the wall and conversing in low tones about how she would be missed; but the noisy flock of young people, who with their chorus of expostulations, assurances, and prophecies seemed to make her one of themselves, filled him with strong displeasure. He knew how foolish it would be for him to show it, but he could get no further in his effort at concealment than a cold silence which was itself significant enough. A tall youth with bold and handsome features and a pretty girl in a showy red muslin ignored him altogether, with a pride which really quite overmatched his own; but the rest shrank back a little as he passed looking after the checks and tickets, either cutting short their sentences at his approach or missing the point of what they had to say. The train seemed to him long in coming. His stepmother moved to the end of the settee and made a place for him at her side. "Lindsay," she said, under cover of the talk and laughter, and speaking with some difficulty, "I hope you will be able to carry out all your plans for yourself and Stella; but while you're making the money, she will have to make the friends. Don't you ever interfere with her doing it. From what little I have seen of the world, it's going to take both to carry you through." His face flushed a little, but he recognized her faithfulness and did it honor. "That is true, mother, and I will remember what you say. But I have some friends," he added, in enforced self-vindication, "in Vaucluse if not here." A whistle sounded up the road. She caught his hand with a swift accession of tenderness towards his youth. "You've done the best you could, Lindsay," she said. "I wish you well, my son, I wish you well." There were tears in her eyes. George Morrow and the girl in red followed Stella into the car, not at all disconcerted at having to get off after the train was in motion. "Don't forget me, Stella," the girl called back. "Don't you ever forget Ida Brand!" There was a waving of hands and handkerchiefs from the little station, aglare in the early afternoon sun. A few moments later the train had rounded a curve, shutting the meagre village from sight, and, to Lindsay Cowart's thought, shutting it into a remote past as well. He arose and began rearranging their luggage. "Do you want these?" he inquired, holding up a bouquet of dahlias, scarlet sage, and purple petunias, and thinking of only one answer as possible. "I will take them," she said, as he stood waiting her formal consent to drop them from the car window. Her voice was quite as usual, but something in her face suggested to him that this going away from her childhood's home might be a different thing to her from what he had conceived it to be. He caught the touch of tender vindication in her manner as she untied the cheap red ribbon which held the flowers together and rearranged them into two bunches so that the jarring colors might no longer offend, and felt that the really natural thing for her to do was to weep, and that she only restrained her tears for his sake. Sixteen was so young! His heart grew warm and brotherly towards her youth and inexperience; but, after all, how infinitely better that she should have cause for this passing sorrow. He left her alone, but not for long. He was eager to talk with her of the plans about which he had been writing her the two years since he himself had been a student at Vaucluse, of the future which they should achieve together. It seemed to him only necessary for him to show her his point of view to have her adopt it as her own; and he believed, building on her buoyancy and responsiveness of disposition, that nothing he might propose would be beyond the scope of her courage. "It may be a little lonely for you at first," he told her. "There are only a handful of women students at the college, and all of them much older than you; but it is your studies at last that are the really important thing, and I will help you with them all I can. Mrs. Bancroft will have no other lodgers and there will be nothing to interrupt our work." "And the money, Lindsay?" she asked, a little anxiously. "What I have will carry us through this year. Next summer we can teach and make almost enough for the year after. The trustees are planning to establish a fellowship in Greek, and if they do and I can secure it—and Professor Wayland thinks I can,—that will make us safe the next two years until you are through." "And then?" He straightened up buoyantly. "Then your two years at Vassar and mine at Harvard, with some teaching thrown in along the way, of course. And then Europe—Greece—all the great things!" She smiled with him in his enthusiasm. "You are used to such bold thoughts. It is too high a flight for me all at once." "It will not be, a year from now," he declared, confidently. A silence fell between them, and the noise of the train made a pleasant accompaniment to his thoughts as he sketched in detail the work of the coming months. But always as a background to his hopes was that honorable social position which he meant eventually to achieve, the passion for which was a part of his Southern inheritance. Little as he had yet participated in any interests outside his daily tasks, he had perceived in the old college town its deeply grained traditions of birth and custom, perceived and respected them, and discounted the more their absence in the sorry village he had left. Sometime when he should assail it, the exclusiveness of his new environment might beat him back cruelly, but thus far it existed for him only as a barrier to what was ultimately precious and desirable. One day the gates would open at his touch, and he and the sister of his heart should enter their rightful heritage. The afternoon waned. He pointed outside the car window. "See how different all this is from the part of the State which we have left," he said. "The landscape is still rural, but what mellowness it has; because it has been enriched by a larger, more generous human life. One can imagine what this whole section must have been in those old days, before the coming of war and desolation. And Vaucluse was the flower, the centre of it all!" His eye kindled. "Some day external prosperity will return, and then Vaucluse and her ideals will be needed more than ever; it is she who must hold in check the commercial spirit, and dominate, as she has always done, the material with the intellectual." There was a noble emotion in his face, reflecting itself in the younger countenance beside his own. Poor, young, unknown, their hearts thrilled with pride in their State, with the possibility that they also should give to her of their best when the opportunity should be theirs. "It is a wonderful old town," Lindsay went on again. "Even Wayland says so,—our Greek professor, you know." His voice thrilled with the devotion of the hero-worshipper as he spoke the name. "He is a Harvard man, and has seen the best of everything, and even he has felt the charm of the place; he told me so. You will feel it, too. It is just as if the little town and the college together had preserved in amber all that was finest in our Southern life. And now to think you and I are to share in all its riches!" His early consecration to such a purpose, the toil and sacrifice by which it had been achieved, came movingly before her; yet, mingled with her pride in him, something within her pleaded for the things which he rated so low. "It used to be hard for you at home, Lindsay," she said, softly. "Yes, it was hard." His face flushed. "I never really lived till I left there. I was like an animal caught in a net, like a man struggling for air. You can't know what it is to me now to be with people who are thinking of something else than of how to make a few dollars in a miserable country store." "But they were good people in Bowersville, Lindsay," she urged, with gentle loyalty. "I am sure they were, if you say so," he agreed. "But at any rate we are done with it all now." He laid his hand over hers. "At last I am going to take you into our own dear world." It was, after all, a very small world as to its actual dimensions, but to the brother it had the largeness of opportunity, and to Stella it seemed infinitely complex. She found security at first only in following minutely the programme which Lindsay had laid out for her. It was his own as well, and simple enough. Study was the supreme thing; exercise came in as a necessity, pleasure only as the rarest incident. She took all things cheerfully, after her nature, but after two or three months the color began to go from her cheeks, the elasticity from her step; nor was her class standing, though creditable, quite what her brother had expected it to be. Wayland detained him one day in his class-room. "Do you think your sister is quite happy here, Cowart?" he asked. The boy thrilled, as he always did at any special evidence of interest from such a source, but he had never put this particular question to himself and had no reply at hand. "I have never thought this absolute surrender to books the wisest thing for you," Wayland went on; "but for your sister it is impossible. She was formed for companionship, for happiness, not for the isolation of the scholar. Why did you not put her into one of the girls' schools of the State, where she would have had associations more suited to her years?" he asked, bluntly. Lindsay could scarcely believe that he was listening to the young professor whose scholarly attainments seemed to him the sum of what was most desirable in life. "Our girls' colleges are very superficial," he answered; "and even if they were not, she could get no Greek in any of them." "My dear boy," Wayland said, "the amount of Greek which your sister knows or doesn't know will always be a very unimportant matter; she has things that are so infinitely more valuable to give to the world. And deserves so much better things for herself," he added, drawing together his texts for the next recitation. Lindsay returned to Mrs. Bancroft's quiet, old-fashioned house in a sort of daze. "Stella," he said, "do you think you enter enough into the social side of our college life?" "No," she answered. "But I think neither of us does." "Well, leave me out of the count. If I get through my Junior year as I ought, I am obliged to grind; and when there is any time left, I feel that I must have it for reading in the library. But it needn't be so with you. Didn't an invitation come to you for the reception Friday evening?" Her face grew wistful. "I don't care to go to things, Lindsay, unless you will go with me," she said. Nevertheless, he had his way, and when once she made it possible, opportunities for social pleasures poured in upon her. As Wayland had said, she was formed for friendship, for joy; and that which was her own came to her unsought. She was by nature too simple and sweet to be spoiled by the attention she received; the danger perhaps was the less because she missed in it all the comradeship of her brother, without which in her eyes the best things lost something of their charm. It was not merely personal ambition which kept him at his books; the passion of the scholar was upon him and made him count all moments lost that were spent away from them. Sometimes Stella sought him as he pored over them alone, and putting her arm shyly about him, would beg that he would go with her for a walk, or a ride on the river; but almost always his answer was the same: "I am so busy, Stella dear; if you knew how much I have to do you would not even ask me." There was one interruption, indeed, which the young student never refused. Sometimes their Greek professor dropped in at Mrs. Bancroft's to bring or to ask for a book; sometimes, with the lovely coming of the spring, he would join them as they were leaving the college grounds, and lead them away into some of the woodland walks, rich in wild flowers, that environed the little town. Such hours seemed to both brother and sister to have a flavor, a brightness, quite beyond what ordinary life could give. Wayland, too, must have found in them his own share of pleasure, for he made them more frequent as the months went by. <hr /> It was in the early spring of her second year at Vaucluse that the accident occurred. The poor lad who had taken her out in the boat was almost beside himself with grief and remorse. "We had enjoyed the afternoon so much," he said, trying to tell how it had happened. "I thought I had never seen her so happy, so gay,—but you know she was that always. It was nearly sunset, and I remember how she spoke of the light as we saw it through the open spaces of the woods and as it slanted across the water. Farther down the river the yellow jasmine was beginning to open. A beech-tree that leaned out over the water was hung with it. She wanted some, and I guided the boat under the branches. I meant to get it for her myself, but she was reaching up after it almost before I knew it. The bough that had the finest blossoms on it was just beyond her reach, and while I steadied the boat, she pulled it towards her by one of the vines hanging from it. She must have put too much weight on it— "It all happened so quickly. I called to her to be careful, but while I was saying the words the vine snapped and she fell back with such force that the boat tipped, and in a second we were both in the water. I knew I could not swim, but I hoped that the water so near the bank would be shallow; and it was, but there was a deep hole under the roots of the tree." He could get no further. Poor lad! the wonder was that he had not been drowned himself. A negro ploughing in the field near by saw the accident and ran to his help, catching him as he was sinking for the third time. Stella never rose after she went down; her clothing had been entangled in the roots of the beech. Sorrow for the young life cut off so untimely was deep and universal, and sought to manifest itself in tender ministrations to the brother so cruelly bereaved. But Lindsay shrank from all offices of sympathy, and except for seeking now and then Wayland's silent companionship, bore his grief alone. The college was too poor to establish the fellowship in Greek, but the adjunct professor in mathematics resigned, and young Cowart was elected to his place, with the proviso that he give two months further study to the subject in the summer school of some university. Wayland decided which by taking him back with him to Cambridge, where he showed the boy an admirable friendship. Lindsay applied himself to his special studies with the utmost diligence. It was impossible, moreover, that his new surroundings should not appeal to his tastes in many directions; but in spite of his response to these larger opportunities, his friend discerned that the wound which the young man kept so carefully hidden had not, after all these weeks, begun even slightly to heal. Late on an August night, impelled as he often was to share the solitude which Lindsay affected, he sought him at his lodgings, and not finding him, followed what he knew was a favorite walk with the boy, and came upon him half hidden under the shadows of an elm in the woods that skirted Mount Auburn. "I thought you might be here," he said, taking the place that Lindsay made for him on the seat. Many words were never necessary between them. The moon was full and the sky cloudless, and for some time they sat in silence, yielding to the tranquil loveliness of the scene and to that inner experience of the soul brooding over each, and more inscrutable than the fathomless vault above them. "I suppose we shall never get used to a midnight that is still and at the same time lustrous, as this is to-night," Wayland said. "The sense of its uniqueness is as fresh whenever it is spread before us as if we had never seen it before." It was but a part of what he meant. He was thinking how sorrow, the wide sense of personal loss, was in some way like the pervasiveness, the voiceless speech, of this shadowed radiance around them. He drew a little nearer the relaxed and slender figure beside his own. "It is of her you are thinking, Lindsay," he said, gently, and mentioning for the first time the young man's loss. "All that you see seems saturated with her memory. I think it will always be so—scenes of exceptional beauty, moments of high emotion, will always bring her back." The boy's response came with difficulty: "Perhaps so. I do not know. I think the thought of her is always with me." "If so, it should be for strength, for comfort," his friend pleaded. "She herself brought only gladness wherever she came." There was something unusual in his voice, something that for a moment raised a vague questioning in Lindsay's mind; but absorbed as he was in his own sadness, it eluded his feeble inquiry. To what Wayland had said he could make no reply. "Perhaps it is the apparent waste of a life so beautiful that seems to you so intolerable—" He felt the strong man's impulse to arrest an irrational grief, and groped for the assurance he desired. "Yet, Lindsay, we know things are not wasted; not in the natural world, not in the world of the spirit." But on the last words his voice lapsed miserably, and he half rose to go. Lindsay caught his arm and drew him back. "Don't go yet," he said, brokenly. "I know you think it would help me if I would talk about—Stella; if I should tell it all out to you. I thank you for being willing to listen. Perhaps it will help me." He paused, seeking for some words in which to express the sense of poverty which scourged him. Of all who had loved his sister, he himself was left poorest! Others had taken freely of her friendship, had delighted themselves in her face, her words, her smile, had all these things for memories. He had been separated from her, in part by the hard conditions of their youth, and at the last, when they had been together, by his own will. Oh, what had been her inner life during these last two years, when it had gone on beside his own, while he was too busy to attend? But the self-reproach was too bitter for utterance to even the kindest of friends. "I thought I could tell you," he said at last, "but I can't. Oh, Professor Wayland," he cried, "there is an element in my grief that is peculiar to itself, that no one else in sorrow ever had!" "I think every mourner on earth would say that, Lindsay." Again the younger man discerned the approach of a mystery, but again he left it unchallenged. The professor rose to his feet. "Good night," he said; "unless you will go back with me. Even with such moonlight as this, one must sleep." He had dropped to that kind level of the commonplace by which we spare ourselves and one another. <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "'Where the love light never, never dies,'" </div> </div> The boy's voice ringing out blithely through the drip and dampness of the winter evening marked his winding route across the college grounds. Lindsay Cowart, busy at his study table, listened without definite effort and placed the singer as the lad newly come from the country. He could have identified any other of the Vaucluse students by connections as slight—Marchman by his whistling, tender, elusive sounds, flute notes sublimated, heard only when the night was late and the campus still; others by tricks of voice, fragments of laughter, by their footfalls, even, on the narrow brick walk below his study window. Such the easy proficiency of affection. Attention to the lad's singing suddenly was lifted above the subconscious. The simple melody had entangled itself in some forgotten association of the professor's boyhood, seeking to marshal which before him, he received the full force of the single line sung in direct ear-shot. Like the tune, the words also became a challenge; pricked through the unregarded heaviness in which he was plying his familiar task, and demanded that he should name its cause. For him the love light of his marriage had been dead so long! No, not dead; nothing so dignified, so tragic. Burnt down, smoldered; suffocated by the hateful dust of the commonplace. There was a touch of contempt in the effort with which he dismissed the matter from his mind and turned back to his work. And yet, he stopped a moment longer to think, for him life without the light of love fell so far below its best achievement! The front of his desk was covered with the papers in mathematics over which he had spent his evenings for more than a week. Most of them had been corrected and graded, with the somewhat full comment or elucidation here and there which had made his progress slow. He examined a half-dozen more, and then in sheer mental revolt against the subject, slipped them under the rubber bands with others of their kind and dropped the neat packages out of his sight into one of the drawers of the desk. Wayland's book on Greece, the fruit of eighteen months' sojourn there, had come through the mail on the same day when the calculus papers had been handed in, and he had read it through at once, not to be teased intolerably by its invitation. He had mastered the text, avid through the long winter night, but he picked it up again now, and for a little while studied the sumptuous illustrations. How long Wayland had been away from Vaucluse, how much of enrichment had come to him in the years since he had left! He himself might have gone also, to larger opportunities—he had chosen to remain, held by a sentiment! The professor closed the book with a little sigh, and taking it to a small shelf on the opposite side of the room, stood it with a half-dozen others worthy of such association. Returning, he got together before him the few Greek authors habitually in hand's reach, whether handled or not, and from a compartment of his desk took out several sheets of manuscript, metrical translations from favorite passages in the tragedists or the short poems of the Anthology. Like the rest of the Vaucluse professors—a mere handful they were,—he was straitened by the hard exactions of class-room work, and the book which he hoped sometime to publish grew slowly. How far he was in actual miles from the men who were getting their thoughts into print, how much farther in environment! Things which to them were the commonplaces of a scholar's life were to him impossible luxuries; few even of their books found their way to his shelves. At least the original sources of inspiration were his, and sometimes he felt that his verses were not without spirit, flavor. He took up a little volume of Theocritus, which opened easily at the Seventh Idyl, and began to read aloud. Half-way through the poem the door opened and his wife entered. He did not immediately adjust himself to the interruption, and she remained standing a few moments in the centre of the room. "Thank you; I believe I will be seated," she said, the sarcasm in her words carefully excluded from her voice. He wondered that she should find interest in so sorry a game. "I thought you felt enough at home in here to sit down without being asked," he said, rising, and trying to speak lightly. She took the rocking-chair he brought for her and leaned back in it without speaking. Her maroon-colored evening gown suggested that whoever planned it had been somewhat straitened by economy, but it did well by her rich complexion and creditable figure. Her features were creditable too, the dark hair a little too heavy, perhaps, and the expression, defined as it is apt to be when one is thirty-five, not wholly satisfying. In truth, the countenance, like the gown, suffered a little from economy, a sparseness of the things one loves best in a woman's face. Half the sensitiveness belonging to her husband's eyes and mouth would have made her beautiful. "It is a pity the Barkers have such a bad night for their party," Cowart said. "The reception is at the Fieldings';" and again he felt himself rebuked. "I'm afraid I didn't think much about the matter after you told me the Dillinghams were coming by for you in their carriage. Fortunately neither family holds us college people to very strict social account." "They have their virtues, even if they are so vulgar as to be rich." "Why, I believe I had just been thinking, before you came in, that it is only the rich who have any virtues at all." He managed to speak genially, but the consciousness that she was waiting for him to make conversation, as she had waited for the chair, stiffened upon him like frost. He cast about for something to say, but the one interest which he would have preferred to keep to himself was all that presented itself to his grasp. "I have often thought," he suggested, "that if only we were in sight of the Gulf, our landscape in early summer might not be very unlike that of ancient Greece." She looked at him a little blankly, and he drew one of his books nearer and began turning its leaves. "I thought you were correcting your mathematics papers." "I am, or have been; but I am reading Theocritus, too." "Well, I don't see anything in a day like this to make anybody think of summer. The dampness goes to your very marrow." "It isn't the day; it's the poetry. That's the good of there being poetry." She skipped his parenthesis. "And you keep this room as cold as a vault." Not faultfinding, but a somewhat irritating concern for his comfort was in the complaint. She went to the hearth and in her efficient way shook down the ashes from the grate and heaped it with coal. A cabinet photograph of a girl in her early teens, which had the appearance of having just been put there, was supported against a slender glass vase. Mrs. Cowart took it up and examined it critically. "I don't think this picture does Arnoldina justice," she said. "One of the eyes seems to droop a little, and the mouth looks sad. Arnoldina never did look sad." They were on common ground now, and he could speak without constraint. "I hadn't observed that it looked sad. She seems somehow to have got a good deal older since September." "She is maturing, of course." All a mother's pride and approbation, were in the reserve of the speech. To have put more definitely her estimate of the sweet young face would have been a clumsy thing in comparison. Lindsay's countenance lighted up. He arose, and standing by his wife, looked over her shoulder as she held the photograph to the light. "Do you know, Gertrude," he said, "there is something in her face that reminds me of Stella?" "I don't know that I see it," she answered, indifferently, replacing the photograph and returning to her chair. The purpose which had brought her to the room rose to her face. "I stopped at the warehouse this afternoon," she said, "and had a talk with father. Jamieson really goes to Mobile—the first of next month. The place is open to you if you want it." "But, Gertrude, how should I possibly want it?" he expostulated. "You would be a member of the firm. You might as well be making money as the rest of them." He offered no comment. "It is not now like it was when you were made professor. The town has become a commercial centre and its educational interests have declined. The professors will always have their social position, of course, but they cannot hope for anything more." "It is not merely Vaucluse, but the South, that is passing into this phase. But economic independence has become a necessity. When once it is achieved, our people will turn to higher things." "Not soon enough to benefit you and me." "Probably not." "Then why waste your talents on the college, when the best years of your life are still before you?" "I am not teaching for money, Gertrude." He hated putting into the bald phrase his consecration to his ideals for the young men of his State; he hated putting it into words at all; but something in his voice told her that the argument was finished. There was a sound of carriage wheels on the drive. He arose and began to assist her with her wraps. "It is too bad for you to be dependent on even such nice escorts as the Dillinghams are," he solaced, recovering himself. "We college folk are a sorry lot." But when she was gone, the mood for composition which an hour before had seemed so near had escaped him, and he put away his books and manuscript, standing for a while, a little chilled in mind and body, before the grate and looking at the photograph on the mantel. While he did so the haunting likeness he had seen grew more distinct and by degrees another face overspread that of his young daughter, the face of the sister he had loved and lost. With a sudden impulse he crossed the room to an old-fashioned mahogany secretary, opened its slanting lid, and unlocking with some difficulty a small inner drawer, returned with it to his desk. Several packages of letters tied with faded ribbon filled the small receptacle, but they struck upon him with the strangeness of something utterly forgotten. The pieces of ribbon had once held for him each its own association of time or place; now he could only remember, looking down upon them with tender gaze, that they had been Stella's, worn in her hair, or at her throat or waist. Simple and inexpensive he saw they were. Arnoldina would not have looked at them. Overcoming something of reluctance, he took one of the packages from its place. It contained the letters he had found in her writing-table after her death, most of them written after she had come to Vaucluse by her stepmother and the friends she had left in the village. He knew there was nothing in any of them she would have withheld from him; in reading them he was merely taking back something from the vanished years which, if not looked at now, would perish utterly from earth. How affecting they were—these utterances of true and humble hearts, written to one equally true and good! His youth and hers in the remote country village rose before him; not now, as once, pinched and narrow, but as salutary, even gracious. He could but feel how changed his standards had become since then, how different his measure of the great and the small of life. Suddenly, as he was thus borne back into the past, the old sorrow sprang upon him, and he bowed before it. The old bitter cry which he had been able to utter to no human consoler swept once more to his lips: "Oh, Stella, Stella, you died before I really knew you; your brother, who should have known and loved you best! And now it is too late, too late." He sent out as of old his voiceless call to one afar off, in some land where her whiteness, her budding soul, had found their rightful place; but even as he did so, his thought of her seemed to be growing clearer. From that far, reverenced, but unimagined sphere she was coming back to the range of his apprehension, to comradeship in the life which they once had shared together. He trembled with the hope of a fuller attainment, lifting his bowed head and taking another package of the letters from their place. Her letters! He had begged them of her friends in his desperate sense of ignorance, his longing to make good something of all that he had lost in those last two years of her life. What an innocent life it was that was spread before him; and how young,—oh, how young! And it was a happy life. He was astonished, after all his self-reproach, to realize how happy; to find himself smiling with her in some girlish drollery such as used to come so readily to her lips. He could detect, too, how the note of gladness, how her whole life, indeed, had grown richer in the larger existence of Vaucluse. At last he could be comforted that, however it had ended, it was he who had made it hers. He had been feeding eagerly, too eagerly, and under the pressure of emotion was constrained to rise and walk the floor, sinking at last into his armchair and gazing with unseeing eyes upon the ruddy coals in the grate. That lovely life, which he had thought could never in its completeness be his, was rebuilt before his vision from the materials which she herself had left. What he had believed to be loss, bitter, unspeakable even to himself, had in these few hours of the night become wealth. His quickened thought moved on from plane to plane. He scanned the present conditions of his life, and saw with clarified vision how good they were. What it was given him to do for his students, at least what he was trying to do for them; the preciousness of their regard; the long friendship with his colleagues; the associations with the little community in which his lot was cast, limited in some directions as they might be; the fair demesne of Greek literature in which his feet were so much at home; his own literary gift, even if a slender one; his dear, dear child. And Gertrude? Under the invigoration of his mood a situation which had long seemed unamenable to change resolved itself into new and simpler proportions. The worthier aspects of his home life, the finer traits of his wife's character, stood before him as proofs of what might yet be. His memory had kept no record of the fact that when in the first year of his youthful sorrow, sick for comfort and believing her all tenderness, he had married her, to find her impatient of his grief, nor of the many times since when she had appeared almost wilfully blind to his ideals and purposes. His judgment held only this, that she had never understood him. For this he had seldom blamed her; but to-night he blamed himself. Instead of shrinking away sensitively, keeping the vital part of his life to himself and making what he could of it alone, he should have set himself steadily to create a place for it in her understanding and sympathy. Was not a perfect married love worth the minor sacrifices as well as the supreme surrender from which he believed that neither of them would have shrunk? He returned to his desk and began to rearrange the contents of the little drawer. Among them was a small sandalwood box which had been their mother's, and which Stella had prized with special fondness. He had never opened it since her death, but as he lifted it now the frail clasp gave way, the lid fell back, and the contents slipped upon the desk. They were few: a ring, a thin gold locket containing the miniatures of their father and mother, a small tintype of himself taken when he first left home, and two or three notes addressed in a handwriting which he recognized as Wayland's. He replaced them with reverent touch, turning away even in thought from what he had never meant to see. By and by he heard in the distance the roll of carriages returning from the Fieldings' reception. He replenished the fire generously, found a long cloak in the closet at the end of the hall, and waited the sound of wheels before his own door. "The rain has grown heavier," he said, drawing the cloak around his wife as she descended from the carriage. Something in his manner seemed to envelop her. He brought her into the study and seated her before the fire. She had expected to find the house silent; the glow and warmth of the room were grateful after the chill and darkness outside, her husband's presence after that vague sense of futility which the evening's gayety had left upon her. "I suppose I ought to tell you about the party," she said, a little wearily; "but if you don't mind, I will wait till breakfast. Everybody was there, of course, and it was all very fine, as we all knew it would be. I hope you've enjoyed your Latin poets more." "They are Greek, dear," he said. "I have been making translations from some of them now and then. Some day we will take a day off and then I'll read them to you. But neither the party nor the poets to-night. See, it is almost two o'clock." "I knew it must be late. But you look as fresh as a child that has just waked from sleep." "Perhaps I have just waked." They rose to go up-stairs. "I will go in front and make a light in our room while you turn off the gas in the hall." He paused for a moment after she had gone out and turned to a page in the Greek Anthology for a single stanza. Shelley's translation was written in pencil beside it: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled; Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus giving New splendor to the dead. </div> </div> <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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