The rather flat notes of a man s voice float out into the clear air, singing the refrain of a popular music-hall ditty. There is something 
incongruous between the melody and the surroundings. It seems profane, indelicate, to bring this slangy, vulgar tune, and with it the mental picture of footlight flare and fantastic dance, into the lovely freshness of this perfect spring day. 

A woman sitting on a felled tree turns her head to meet its coming, and an expression flits across her face in which disgust and humorous appreciation are subtly blended. Her mind is nothing if not picturesque ; her busy brain, with all its capabilities choked by a thousand vagrant fancies, is always producing pictures and finding associations between the most unlikely objects. She has been reading a little sketch written in the daintiest language of a fountain scene in Tanagra, and her vivid imagination has made it real to her. The shm, graceful maids grouped around it filling their exquisitely-formed earthen jars, the dainty poise of their classic heads, and the flowing folds of their draperies have been actually present with her ; and now, — why, it is like the entrance of a half-typsy vagabond player bedizened in tawdry finery: the picture is blurred. She rests her head against the trunk of a pine-tree behind her, and awaits the singer. She is sitting on an incline in the midst of a wilderness of trees; some have blown down, some have been cut down, and the lopped branches lie about; moss and bracken and trailing bramble bushes, fir-cones, wild rose-bushes, and speckled red " fairy hats " fight for life in wild confusion. A disused quarry to the left is an ideal haunt of pike, and to the right a little river rushes along in haste to join a greater sister that is fighting a troubled way to the sea. A row of stepping-stones cross it, and if you were to stand on one you would see shoals of restless stone-loach ** beardies " darting from side to side. The tails of several ducks can be seen 
above the water, and the paddle of their balancing feet and the gurgling suction of their bills 
as they search for larvae can be heard distinctly 
between the hum of insect, twitter of bird, and 
rustle of stream and leaf. The singer has 
changed his lay to a whistle, and presently he 
comes down the path a cool, neat, gray-clad 
figure, with a fishing creel slung across his back, 
and a trout rod held on his shoulder. The air 
ceases abruptly, and his cold, gray eyes scan 
the seated figure with its gypsy ease of attitude, 
a scarlet shawl that has fallen from her shoulders 
forming an accentuative background to the slim 
roundness of her waist. 

Persistent study, coupled with a varied 
experience of the female animal, has given 
the owner of the said gray eyes some facility in 
classing her, although it has not supplied him 
with any definite data as to what any one of 
the species may do in a given circumstance. 
To put it in his own words, in answer to a 
friend who chaffed him on his untiring pursuit 
of women as an interesting problem, — 

** If a fellow has had much experience of his 
fellow-man he may divide him into types, and given a certain number of men and a certain 
number of circumstances, he is pretty safe on 
hitting on the hne of action each type will 
strike. 'T aint so with woman. You may always 
look out for the unexpected ; she generally 
upsets a fellow's calculations, and you are never 
safe in laying odds on her. Tell you what, old 
chappie, we may talk about superior intellect ; 
but if a woman was n't handicapped by her 
affection or need of it, the cleverest chap in 
Christendom would be just a bit of putty in her 
hands. I find them more fascinating as problems than anything going. Never let an opportunity slip to get new data — never ! " 

He did not now. He met the frank, unembarrassed gaze of eyes that would have looked 
with just the same bright inquiry at the advent 
of a hare or a toad, or any other object that 
might cross her path, and raised his hat with 
respectful courtesy, saying, in the drawling tone 
habitual with him, — 

'' I hope I am not trespassing? " 

" I can't say ; you may be ; so may I, but no 
one has ever told me so ! " 

A pause. His quick glance has noted the 
thick weddins^-rinc: on her slim brown hand and the flash of a diamond in its keeper. A 
lady decidedly. Fast? — perhaps. Original? — 
undoubtedly. Worth knowing? — rather. 

" I am looking for a trout stream, but the 
directions I got were rather vague; might 
I — " 

*' It 's straight ahead ; but you won't catch 
anything now, at least not here, — sun 's too 
glaring and water too low; a mile up you may 
in an hour's time." 

'* Oh, thanks awfully for the tip. You fish 
then?'* 

" Yes, sometimes." 

"Trout run big here?" (What odd eyes the 
woman has! kind of magnetic.) 

** No, seldom over a pound ; but they are 
very game." 

'' Rare good sport, is n't it, whipping a stream? 
There is so much besides the mere catching of 
fish ; the river and the trees and the quiet sets a 
fellow thinking ; kind of sermon ; makes a chap 
feel good, don't it? '* 

She smiles assentingly, and yet what the 
devil is she amused at, he queries mentally. 
An inspiration ! he acts upon it, and says 
eagerly,— 

'* I wonder — I don't half like to ask, but fishing puts people on a common footing, don't it? 
You knowing the stream, you know, would you 
tell me what are the best flies to use? " 

''I tie my own, but — " 

"Do you? How clever of you! Wish I 
could ; " and sitting down on the other end of 
the tree, he takes out his fly-book. *'But I 
interrupted you, you were going to say — " 

*^ Only," — stretching out her hand, of a perfect 
shape but decidedly brown, for the book, — " that 
you might give the local fly-tyer a trial ; he’ll 
tell you. Later on, end of next month, or perhaps later, you might try the oak-fly, — the natural fly, you know. A horn is the best thing to 
hold them in, they get out of anything else ; 
and put two on at a time." 

*' By Jove, I must try that dodge ! " 

He watches her as she handles his book and 
examines the contents critically, turning aside 
some with a glance, fingering others almost 
tenderly, holding them daintily, and noting the 
cock of wings and the hint of tinsel, with her 
head on one side, — a trick of hers, he thinks. 

*' Which do- you like most, wet or dry fly? " 
She is looking at some dry flies. 

" Oh," with that rare smile, ** at the time I 
swear by whichever happens to catch most fish, 

— perhaps really dry fly. I fancy most of these 
flies are better for Scotland or England. Up 
to this, March-brown has been the most killing 
thing. But you might try an * orange-grouse,' 

— that's always good here, — with perhaps a 
* hare's ear ' for a change, and put on a ' coachman ' for the evenings. My husband [he steals 
a side look at her] brought home some beauties 
yesterday evening." 

'' Lucky fellow ! " 

She returns the book. There is a tone in his 
voice as he says this that jars on her, sensitive 
as she is to every inflection of a voice, with an 
intuition that is almost second sight. She 
gathers up her shawl, — she has a cream-colored 
woollen gown on, and her skin looks duskily 
foreign by contrast. She is on her feet before 
he can regain his, and says, with a cool Httle 
bend of her head : " Good afternoon, I wish you 
a full basket ! " 

Before he can raise his cap she is down the 
slope, gliding with easy steps that have a strange 
grace, and then springing lightly from stone 
to stone across the stream. He feels small. 

snubbed someway ; and he sits down on the 
spot where she sat, and Hghting his pipe says, 
" Check ! " 

• •••••••• 

She is walking slowly up the garden path ; a 
man in his shirt-sleeves is stooping among the 
tender young peas; a bundle of stakes lies 
next him, and he whistles softly and all out of 
tune as he twines the little tendrils round each 
new support. She looks at his broad shoulders 
and narrow flanks ; his back is too long for great 
strength she thinks. He hears her step, and 
smiles up at her from under the shadow of his 
broad-leafed hat. 

*^ How do you feel now, old woman?'* 

** Beastly ! I Ve got that horrid qualmish feeling again. I can't get rid of it.'* 

He has spread his coat on the side of the 
path, and pats it for her to sit down. 

" What is it?" anxiously. " If you were a 
mare I 'd know what to do for you. Have a 
nip of whiskey? " 

He strides off without waiting for her reply, 
and comes back with it and a biscuit, kneels 
down and holds the glass to her hps. "Poor 
little woman, buck up ! You '11 see that’ll fix 
you. Then you go, by-and-by, and have a shy 
at the fish." 

She is about to say something, when a fresh 
qualm attacks her and she does not. He goes 
back to his tying. 

'* By Jove ! '' he says suddenly, "" I forgot ; got 
something to show you ! '* 

After a few minutes he returns, carrying a 
basket covered with a piece of sacking; a dishevelled-looking hen, with spread wings traihng 
and her breast bare from sitting on her eggs, 
screeches after him. He puts it carefully down 
and uncovers it, disclosing seven little balls of 
yellow fluff splashed with olive-green; they 
look up sideways with bright round eyes, and 
their little spoon-bills look disproportionately 
large. 

^* Are n't they beauties?" enthusiastically. 
*^ This one is just out," taking up an ^%^\ 
''mustn't let it get chilled; there is a chip out 
of it and a piece of hanging skin. Is n't it 
funny?" he asks, showing her how it is curled 
in the shell, with its paddles flattened and its 
bill breaking through the chip, and the slimy 
feathers sticking to its violet skin. 

She suppresses an exclamation of disgust, and looks at his fresh-tinted skin instead. He is covering basket, hen, and all. 

*^ How you love young things ! '' she says. 

" Some ! I had a filly once ; she turned out a 
'lovely mare! I cried when I had to sell her; I 
would n't have let any one in God's world mount 
her." 

** Yes, you would ! " 

"Who? " with a quick look of resentment. 

**Me!" 

" I would n't ! '' 

"What! you wouldn't?'' 

'' I would n't ! " 

*' I think you would if I wanted to ! " with a 
flash out of the tail of her eye. 

"No, I wouldn't!" 

" Then you would care more for her than for 
me. I would give you your choice," passion- 
ately, " her or me ! '* 

" What nonsense ! " 

" Maybe," concentrated ; " but it 's lucky she 
isn't here to make deadly sense of it." A 
humble-bee buzzes close to her ear, and she is 
roused to a sense of facts, and laughs to think 
how nearly they have quarrelled over a mare 
that was sold before she knew him. 

Some evenings later she is stretched motionless in a chair ; and yet she conveys an impression of restlessness, — a sensitively nervous per- 
son would feel it. She is gazing at her husband ; 
her brows are drawn together, and make three 
little lines. He is reading, reading quietly, 
without moving his eyes quickly from side to 
side of the page as she does when she reads, 
and he pulls away at a big pipe with steady 
enjoyment. Her eyes turn from him to the 
window, and follow the course of two clouds ; 
then they close for a few seconds, then open 
to watch him again. He looks up and smiles. 

** Finished your book? " 

There is a singular, soft monotony in his 
voice ; the organ with which she replies is 
capable of more varied expression. 

*' Yes, it is a book makes one think. It would 
be a greater book if he were not an Englishman ; 
he 's afraid of shocking the big middle class. 
You would n't care about it." 

" Finished your smoke? " 

" No, it went out ; too much fag to light up 
again ! No," protestingly, '* never you mind, 
old boy, why do you?" 

He has drawn his long length out of his chair, 
and kneeling down beside her guards a lighted 
match from the incoming evening air. She 
draws in the smoke contentedly, and her eyes 
smile back with a general vague tenderness. 

** Thank you, dear old man ! " 

'* Going out again? " Negative head-shake. 

"Back aching?" Affirmative nod, accompanied by a steadily aimed puff of smoke, 
that she has been carefully inhaling, into his 
eyes. 

'' Scamp ! Have your booties off? " 

** Oh, don't you bother ! Lizzie will do 
it." 

He has seized a foot from under the rocker, 
and sitting on his heels holds it on his knee, 
while he unlaces the boot ; then he loosens the 
stocking under her toes, and strokes her foot 
gently. ** Now the other ! " Then he drops 
both boots outside the door, and fetching a little 
pair of slippers, past their first smartness, from 
the bedroom, puts one on. He examines the 
left foot : it is a little swollen round the ankle, 
and he presses his broad fingers gently round it 
as one sees a man do to a horse with windgalls. 
Then he pulls the rocker nearer to his chair, and rests the slipperless foot on his thigh. He relights his pipe, takes up his book, and rubs 
softly from ankle to toes as he reads. 

She smokes, and watches him, diverting herself by imagining him in the hats of different 
periods. His is a delicate skinned face, with 
regular features ; the eyes are fine in color and 
shape, with the luminous clearness of a child's; 
his pointed beard is soft and curly. She looks 
at his hand, — a broad, strong hand with capable 
fingers ; the hand of a craftsman, a contradiction to the face with its distinguished delicacy. 
She holds her own up, with a cigarette poised 
between the first and second fingers, idly pleased 
with its beauty of form and delicate, nervous 
slightness. One speculation chases the other 
in her quick brain: odd questions as to race 
arise; she dives into theories as to the why and 
wherefore of their distinctive natures, and holds 
a mental debate in which she takes both sides 
of the question impartially. He has finished his 
pipe, laid down his book, and is gazing dreamily 
into space, with his eyes darkened by their long 
lashes and a look of tender melancholy in their 
clear depths. 

*' What are you thinking of? " There is a look of expectation in her quivering nervous 
little face. 

He turns to her, chafing her ankle again. *^ I 
was wondering if lob-worms would do for — " 

He stops : a strange look of disappointment 
flits across her face and is lost in an hysterical 
peal of laughter. 

" You are the best emotional check I ever 
knew," she gasps. 

He stares at her in utter bewilderment, and 
then a slow smile creeps to his eyes and curves 
the thin lips under his mustache, — a smile at 
her. ** You seem amused, Gypsy ! " 

She springs out of her chair, and takes book 
and pipe ; he follows the latter anxiously with 
his eyes until he sees it laid safely on the table. 
Then she perches herself, resting her knees 
against one of his legs, while she hooks her feet 
back under the other. 

** Now I am all up, don't I look small? " 

He smiles his slow smile. '* Yes, I believe 
you are made of gutta percha." 

She is stroking out all the lines in his face 
with the tip of her finger; then she runs it 
through his hair. He twists his head half 
impatiently ; she desists. 

** I divide all the people in the world/' she 
says, ** into those who like their hair played 
with, and those who don't. Having my hair 
brushed gives me more pleasure than anything 
else; it's delicious. I'd purr if I knew how. 
I notice," meditatively, *' I am never in sympathy with those who don't like it. I am with 
those who do ; I always get on with them." 

*' You are a queer little devil ! " 

" Am I ? I should n't have thought you would 
have found out I was the latter at all. I wish 
I were a man ! I believe if I were a man, I 'd 
be a disgrace to my family." 

*'Why?" 

** I 'd go on a jolly old spree ! " 

He laughs : ** Poor little woman ! is it so dull? " 

There is a gleam of deviltry in her eyes, 
and she whispers solemnly, — 

*' Begin with a D," and she traces imaginary 
letters across his forehead, and ending with a 
flick over his ear, says, " and that is the tail 
of the y ! " After a short silence she queries : 
** Are you fond of me ? " She is rubbing her 
chin up and down his face. 

'' Of course I am, don't you know it? " 

** Yes, perhaps I do," impatiently ; ** but I want to be told it. A woman does n't care a fig for 
a love as deep as the death-sea and as silent ; 
she wants something that tells her it in little 
waves all the time. It is n't the love, you 
know, it 's the being loved ; it is n't really the 
man, it*s his loving ! " 

*' By Jove, you 're a rum un ! " 

" I wish I was n't, then. I wish I was as 
commonplace as — You don't tell me any- 
thing about myself," a fierce little kiss; "you 
might, even if it were lies. Other men who 
cared for me told me things about my eyes, 
my hands, anything. I don't believe you notice." 

'' Yes I do, little one, only I think it." 

*' Yes, but I don't care a bit for your thinking ; 
if I can't see what 's in your head, what good is 
it to me? " 

** I wish I could understand you, dear ! " 

*' I wish to God you could ! Perhaps if you 
were badder and I were gooder we 'd meet half- 
way. You are an awfully good old chap ; it 's 
just men like you send women like me to the 
devil ! " 

" But you are good," kissing her, — "a real 
good chum ! You understand a fellow's weak 
points ; you don't blow him up if he gets on a 
bit. Why," enthusiastically, '' being married to 
you is like chumming with a chap ! Why,'* 
admiringly, '' do you remember before we were 
married, when I let that card fall out of my 
pocket? Why, I couldn't have told another 
girl about her ! she would n't have beheved that 
I was straight ; she 'd have thrown me over, and 
you sent her a quid because she was sick. You 
are a great little woman ! " 

*' Don't see it ! " she is biting his ear. ** Per- 
haps I was a man last time, and some hereditary memories are cropping up in this incarnation ! " 

He looks so utterly at sea that she must 
laugh again, and, kneeling up, shuts his eyes 
with kisses, and bites his chin and shakes it 
like a terrier in her strong little teeth. 

** You imp ! was there ever such a woman ! " 

Catching her wrists, he parts his knees and 
drops her on to the rug ; then perhaps the subtile 
magnetism that is in her affects him, for he 
stoops and snatches her up and carries her up 
and down, and then over to the window, and lets 
the fading light with its glimmer of moonshine 
play on her odd face with its tantalizing changes, 
and his eyes dilate and his color deepens as he crushes her soft httle body to him and 
carries her off to her room. 

Summer is waning, and the harvest is ripe 
for ingathering, and the voice of the reaping 
machine is loud in the land. She is stretched 
on her back on the short, heather-mixed moss 
at the side of a bog stream. Rod and creel are 
flung aside, and the wanton breeze with the 
breath of coolness it has gathered in its passage 
over the murky dykes of black bog-water is 
playing with the tail-fly, tossing it to and fro 
with a half threat to fasten it to a prickly spine 
of golden gorse. Bunches of bog-wool nod 
their fluffy heads, and through the myriad indefinite sounds comes the regular scrape of a 
strickle on the scythe of a reaper in a neighboring meadow. Overhead a flotilla of clouds is 
steering from the south in a northeasterly 
direction. Her eyes follow them, — old-time 
galleons, she thinks, with their wealth of snowy 
sail spread, riding breast to breast up a wide, blue 
fjord after victory. The sails of the last are roseflushed, with a silver edge. Someway she thinks 
of Cleopatra sailing down to meet Antony, and 
a great longing fills her soul to sail off somewhere too, — away from the daily need of dinner- 
getting and the recurring Monday with its 
washing, Hfe with its tame duties and virtuous 
monotony. She fancies herself in Arabia on 
the back of a swift steed ; flashing eyes set in 
dark faces surround her, and she can see the 
clouds of sand swirl, and feel the swing under 
her of his rushing stride; and her thoughts 
shape themselves into a wild song, — a song to 
her steed of flowing mane and satin skin, an uncouth rhythmical jingle with a feverish beat; a 
song to the untamed spirit that dwells in her. 
Then she fancies she is on the stage of an 
ancient theatre, out in the open air, with 
hundreds of faces upturned toward her. She 
is gauze-clad in a cobweb garment of wondrous 
tissue ; her arms are clasped by jewelled snakes, 
and one with quivering diamond fangs coils 
round her hips ; her hair floats loosely, and her 
feet are sandal-clad, and the delicate breath of 
vines and the salt freshness of an incoming sea 
seem to fill her nostrils. She bounds forward 
and dances, bends her lissome waist, and curves 
her slender arms, and gives to the soul of each 
man what he craves, be it good or evil. And 
she can feel now, lying here in the shade of Irish hills, with her head resting on her scarlet 
shawl and her eyes closed, the grand, intoxicating power of swaying all these human souls to 
wonder and applause. She can see herself with 
parted lips and panting, rounded breasts, and 
a dancing devil in each glowing eye, sway 
voluptuously to the wild music that rises, now 
slow, now fast, now deliriously wild, seductive, 
intoxicating, with a human note of passion in its 
strain. She can feel the answering shiver of 
emotion that quivers up to her from the dense 
audience, spellbound by the motion of her 
glancing feet; and she flies swifter and swifter, 
and lighter and lighter, till the very serpents 
seem alive with jewelled scintillations. One 
quivering, gleaming, daring bound, and she 
stands with outstretched arms and passion- 
filled eyes, poised on one slender foot, asking a 
supreme note to finish her dream of motion; 
and the men rise to a man and answer her, and 
cheer, cheer till the echoes shout from the surrounding hills and tumble wildly down the 
crags. 

The clouds have sailed away, leaving long 
feathery streaks in their wake. Her eyes have 
an inseeing look, and she is tremulous with excitement; she can hear yet that last grand 
shout, and the strain of that old-time music that 
she has never heard in this life of hers, save as 
an inner accompaniment to the memory of 
hidden things, born with her, not of this time. 

And her thoughts go to other women she has 
known, women good and bad, school friends, 
casual acquaintances, women workers, — joyless 
machines for grinding daily corn, unwilling 
maids grown old in the endeavor to get settled, 
patient wives who bear little ones to indifferent 
husbands until they wear out, — a long array. 
She busies herself with questioning. Have 
they, too, this thirst for excitement, for change, 
this restless craving for sun and love and motion? Stray words, half confidences, glimpses 
through soul-chinks of suppressed fires, actual 
outbreaks, domestic catastrophes, — how the 
ghosts dance in the cells of her memory ! And 
she laughs, laughs softly to herself, because the 
denseness of man, his chivalrous, conservative 
devotion to the female idea he has created, 
blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problems 
of her complex nature. " Ay,'* she mutters 
musingly, " the wisest of them can only say we 
are enigmas ; each one of them sets about solving the riddle of the ewigweibliche, — and well it 
is that the workings of our hearts are closed to 
them, that we are cunning enough or great 
enough to seem to be what they would have 
us, rather than be what we are. But few of 
them have had the insight to find out the key 
to our seeming contradictions, — the why a 
refined, physically fragile woman will mate with 
a brute, a mere male animal with primitive passions, and love him; the why strength and 
beauty appeal more often than the more subtly 
fine qualities of mind or heart ; the why women 
(and not the innocent ones) will condone sins 
that men find hard to forgive in their fellows. 
They have all overlooked the eternal wildness, the untamed primitive savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best woman. 
Deep in through ages of convention this primeval trait burns, — an untamable quantity that 
may be concealed but is never eradicated by 
culture, the keynote of woman's witchcraft and 
woman's strength. But it is there, sure enough, 
and each woman is conscious of it in her truth- 
telling hours of quiet self-scrutiny; and each 
woman in God's wide world will deny it, and 
each woman will help another to conceal it, — 
for the woman who tells the truth and is not a 
liar about these things is untrue to her sex and 
abhorrent to man, for he has fashioned a model 
on imaginary lines, and he has said, * So I 
would have you ! ' and every woman is an unconscious liar, for so man loves her. And when 
a Strindberg or a Nietzche arises and peers into 
the recesses of her nature and dissects her ruthlessly, the men shriek out louder than the 
women, because the truth is at all times unpalatable, and the gods they have set up are dear 
to them — '' 

** Dreaming, or speering into futurity? You 
have the look of a seer. I believe you are half 
a witch ! '* And he drops his gray-clad figure 
on the turf; he has dropped his drawl long 
ago in midsummer. 

"Is not every woman that? Let us hope 
I 'm for my friends a white one.'' 
" A- ah ! Have you many friends? " 
•' That is a query ! If you mean many correspondents, many persons who send me Christmas cards, or remember my birthday, or figure 
in my address book, — no." 

" Well, grant I don't mean that ! " 

'' Well, perhaps, yes. Scattered over the world, if my death were belled out, many 
women would give me a tear, and some a 
prayer; and many men would turn back a page 
in their memory and give me a kind thought, 
perhaps a regret, and go back to their work 
with a feeling of having lost something that 
they never possessed. I am a creature of moments. Women have told me that I came into 
their lives just when they needed me; men 
had no need to tell me, I felt it. People have 
needed me more than I them. I have given 
freely whatever they craved from me in the 
way of understanding or love ; I have touched 
sore places they showed me, and healed them, 

— but they never got at me. I have been for 
myself, and helped myself, and borne the burden of my own mistakes. Some have chafed 
at my self-sufficiency, and have called me fickle, 

— not understanding that they gave me noth- 
ing, and that when I had served them their 
moment was ended, and I was to pass on. I 
read people easily, I am written in black letter 
to most — " 

*' To your husband ? '* 

*' He," quickly, — " we will not speak of him ; 
it is not loyal." 

*' Do not I understand you a little? " 

" You do not misunderstand me/* 

'' That is something." 

**It is much! '' 

*' Is it?" searching her face. "It is not one 
grain of sand in the desert that stretches between you and me, and you are as impenetrable 
as a sphinx at the end of it. This," passionately, 
*' is my moment, and what have you given me? " 

*' Perhaps less than other men I have known ; 
but you want less. You are a little like me, — 
you can stand alone; and yet," her voice is 
shaking, *' have I given you nothing?" 

He laughs, and she winces; and they sit 
silent, and they both feel as if the earth between 
them is laid with infinitesimal electric threads 
vibrating with a common pain. Her eyes are 
filled with tears that burn but don't fall; and 
she can see his some way through her closed 
lids, see their cool grayness troubled by sudden 
fire, and she rolls her handkerchief into a moist 
cambric ball between her cold palms. 

" You have given me something, something 
to carry away with me, — an infernal want. You 
ought to be satisfied : I am infernally miserable. You," nearer, '' have the most tantalizing 
mouth in the world when your lips tremble 
like that. I — What ! can you cry? You?'* 

** Yes, even I can cry ! " 

" You dear woman ! '* pause ; '' and I can't help 
you?*' 

" You can't help me ; no man can. Don't 
think it is because you are you I cry, but 
because you probe a little nearer into the real 
me that I feel so." 

*' Was it necessay to say that? " reproachfully ; 
" do you think I don't know it? I can't for the 
life of me think how you, with that free gypsy 
nature of yours, could bind yourself to a 
monotonous country life, with no excitement, 
no change. I wish I could offer you my yacht; 
do you like the sea?" 

'^ I love it; it answers one's moods." 

*' Well, let us play pretending, as the children 
say. Grant that I could, I would hang your 
cabin with your own colors, fill it with books 
(all those I have heard you say you care for), 
make it a nest as rare as the bird it would 
shelter. You would reign supreme. When your 
highness would deign to honor her servant, I 
would come and humor your every whim. If 
you were glad, you could clap your hands and 
order music, and we would dance on the white 
deck, and we would skim through the sunshine 
of Southern seas on a spice-scented breeze. 
You make me poetical. And if you were angry, 
you could vent your feelings on me, and I would 
give in and bow my head to your mood. And 
we would drop anchor, and stroll through 
strange cities, —go far inland and glean folklore out of the beaten track of everyday tourists ; 
and at night, when the harbor slept, we would 
sail out through the moonlight over silver seas. 
You are smiling, — you look so different when 
you smile; do you like my picture?" 

"Some of it!'* 

'* What not?" . 

" You ! " 

" Thank you." 

** You asked me. Can't you understand where 
the spell lies? It is the freedom, the freshness, 
the vague danger, the unknown that has a 
witchery for me, — ay, for every woman ! " 

*' Are you incapable of affection, then? " 

'' Of course not. I share," bitterly, " that 
crowning disability of my sex ; but not willingly, 
— I chafe under it. My God ! if it were not for 
that, we women would master the world ! I tell 
you, men would be no match for us ! At heart we 
care nothing for laws, nothing for systems ; all 
your elaborately reasoned codes for controling 
morals or man do not weigh a jot with us 
against an impulse, an instinct. We learn those 
things from you, — you tamed, amenable animals ; they are not natural to us. It is a wise disposition of Providence that this untamableness 
of ours is corrected by our affections. We forge 
our own chains in a moment of softness, and 
then," bitterly, '* we may as well wear them with 
a good grace. Perhaps many of our seeming 
contradictions are only the outward evidences 
of inward chafing. Bah! the qualities that go 
to make a Napoleon — superstition, want of 
honor, disregard of opinion, and the eternal I — 
are oftener to be found in a woman than a man. 
Lucky for the world, perhaps, that all these 
attributes weigh as nothing in the balance with 
the need to love, if she be a good woman ; to be 
loved, if she is of a coarser fibre." 

'* I never met any one like you; you are a 
strange woman ! " 

'' No, I am merely a truthful one. Women 
talk to me — why? I can't say ; but always they 
come, strip their hearts and souls naked, and let 
me see the hidden folds of their natures. The 
greatest tragedies I have ever read are child's 
play to those I have seen acted in the inner life 
of outwardly commonplace women. A woman 
must beware of speaking the truth to a man; 
he loves her the less for it. It is the elusive 
spirit in her, that he divines but cannot seize, 
that facinates and keeps him.'* 

There is a long silence; the sun is waning 
and the scythes are silent, and overhead the 
crows are circling, — a croaking, irregular army, 
homeward bound from a long day's pillage. 

She has made no sign, yet so subtilely is the 
air charged with her that he feels but a few 
moments remain to him. He goes over and 
kneels beside her, and fixes his eyes on her odd, 
dark face. They both tremble, yet neither 
speaks. His breath is coming quickly, and 
the bistre stains about her eyes seem to have 
deepened, perhaps by contrast, as she has paled. 

'' Look at me ! '' 

She turns her head right round and gazes 
straight into his face; a few drops of sweat 
glisten on his forehead. 

** You witch woman ! what am I to do with 
myself ? Is my moment ended? " 
" I think so." 

" Lord, what a mouth ! " 

"Don't! oh, don't!" 

** No, I won't. But do you mean it? Am I, 
who understand your every mood, your restless 
spirit, to vanish out of your Hfe? You can't 
mean it ! Listen ! — are you Hstening to me ? I 
can't see your face ; take down your hands. Go 
back over every chance meeting you and I have 
had together since I met you first by the river, 
and judge them fairly. To-day is Monday: 
Wednesday afternoon I shall pass your gate, 
and if — if my moment is ended, and you mean 
to send me away, to let me go with this weary 
aching — " 

** A-ah ! " she stretches out one brown hand 
appealingly, but he does not touch it. 

" Hang something white on the lilac bush ! " 

She gathers up creel and rod, and he takes 
her shawl, and wrapping it round her holds her 
a moment in it, and looks searchingly into her 
eyes, then stands back and raises his hat, and 
she glides away through the reedy grass. 

Wednesday morning she lies watching the 
clouds sail by. A late rose-spray nods into the 
open window, and the petals fall every time. 
A big bee buzzes in and fills the room with his 
bass note, and then dances out again. She can 
hear his footstep on the gravel. Presently he 
looks in over the half window, — 

'' Get up and come out, — 'twill do you good ; 
have a brisk walk ! " 

She shakes her head languidly, and he throws 
a great soft, dewy rose with sure aim on her 
breast. 

** Shall I go in and lift you out and put you, 
* nighty' and all, into your tub?" 

" No ! " impatiently. '* I '11 get up just 
now." 

The head disappears, and she rises wearily 
and gets through her dressing slowly, stopped 
every moment by a feeling of faintness. He 
finds her presently rocking slowly to and fro 
with closed eyes, and drops a leaf with three 
plums in it on to her lap. 

'* I have been watching four for the last week, 
but a bird, greedy beggar, got one this morning 
early : try them. Don't you mind, old girl, I '11 
pour out my own tea ! " 

She bites into one and tries to finish it, but 
cannot. ** You are a good old man ! " she says, 
and the tears come unbidden to her eyes, and 
trickle down her cheeks, dropping on to the 
plums, streaking their delicate bloom. 

He looks uneasily at her, but does n't know 
what to do ; and when he has finished his breakfast he stoops over her chair and strokes her 
hair, saying, as he leaves a kiss on the top of 
her head, ** Come out into the air, little woman ; 
do you a world of good ! '* 

And presently she hears the sharp thrust of 
his spade above the bee's hum, leaf rustle, and 
the myriad late summer sounds that thrill 
through the air. It irritates her almost to 
screaming point; there is a practical non-sympathy about it; she can distinguish the regular 
one, two, three, the thrust, interval, then pat, 
pat, on the upturned sod. To-day she wants 
some one, and her thoughts wander to, and she 
wonders what, the gray-eyed man who never 
misunderstands her, would say to her. Oh, she 
wants some one so badly to soothe her; and 
she yearns for the little mother who is twenty 
years under the daisies, — the little mother who 
is a faint memory strengthened by a daguerreotype in which she sits with silk-mittened hands 
primly crossed on the lap of her moire gown. 



A CROSS LINE. 4I 

a diamond brooch fastening the black-velvet 
ribbon crossed so stiffly over her lace collar, the 
shining tender eyes looking steadily out, and 
her hair In the fashion of fifty-six. How that 
spade dominates over every sound ! and what a 
sickening pain she has, an odd pain ; she never 
felt It before. Supposing she were to die, she 
tries to fancy how she would look ; they would 
be sure to plaster her curls down. He might 
be digging her grave — no, it Is the patch where 
the early peas grew, the peas that were eaten 
with the twelve weeks' ducklings: she remembers them, little fluffy golden balls with waxen 
bills, and such dainty paddles, — remembers 
holding an egg to her ear and listening to it 
cheep inside before even there was a chip in the 
shell. Strange how things come to life ! What ! 
she sits bolt upright and holds tightly to the 
chair, and a questioning, awesome look comes 
over her face ; and then the quick blood creeps 
up through her olive skin right up to her 
temples, and she buries her face in her hands 
and sits so a long time. 

The maid comes In and watches her curiously, 
and moves softly about. The look in her eyes 
is the look of a faithful dog, and she loves her 
with the same rare fidehty. She hesitates, then 
goes into the bedroom and stands thoughtfully, 
with her hands clasped over her breast. She is 
a tall, thin, flat-waisted woman, with misty blue 
eyes and a receding chin. Her hair is pretty. 
She turns as her mistress comes in, with an 
expectant look on her face. She has taken up 
a nightgown, but holds it idly. 

** Lizzie, had you ever a child? " 

The girl's long left hand is ringless ; yet she 
asks it with a quiet insistence, as if she knew 
what the answer would be, and her odd eyes 
read her face with an almost cruel steadiness. 
The girl flushes painfully, and then whitens; 
her very eyes seem to pale, and her under lip 
twitches as she jerks out huskily, — 

'* Yes ! " 

** What happened to it? '* 

'' It died, M'am." 

'' Poor thing ! Poor old Liz ! '* 

She pats the girl's hand softly, and the latter 
stands dumbly and looks down at both hands, 
as if fearful to break the wonder of a caress. 
She whispers hesitatingly, — 

** Have you — have you any little things 
left?'* 

And she laughs such a soft, cooing little 
laugh, like the chirring of a ring-dove, and 
nods shyly back in reply to the tall maid's 
questioning look. The latter goes out, and 
comes back with a flat, red-painted deal box, 
and unlocks it. It does not hold very much, 
and the tiny garments are not of costly material; but the two women pore over them as a 
gem collector over a rare stone. She has a 
glimpse of thick-crested paper as the girl unties 
a packet of letters, and looks away until she 
says tenderly, — 

" Look, M'am ! '' 

A little bit of hair inside a paper heart. It 
is almost white, so silky and so fine that it is 
more like a thread of bog-wool than a baby's 
hair ; and the mistress, who is a wife, puts her 
arms round the tall maid, who has never had 
more than a moral claim to the name, and 
kisses her in her quick way. 

The afternoon is drawing on ; she is kneeling 
before an open trunk, with flushed cheeks and 
sparkling eyes. A heap of unused, dainty lacetrimmed ribbon-decked cambric garments are 
scattered around her. She holds the soft, 
scented web to her cheek and smiles musingly; 
and then she rouses herself and sets to work, 
sorting out the finest, with the narrowest lace 
and tiniest ribbon, and puckers her swarthy 
brows, and measures lengths along her middle 
finger, and then gets slowly up, as if careful of 
herself as a precious thing, and half afraid. 

** Lizzie ! " 

'* Yes, M'am ! " 

" Was n't it lucky they were too fine for 
every day? They will be so pretty. Look at 
this one with the tiny Valenciennes edging. 
Why, one nightgown will make a dozen little 
shirts, — such elfin-shirts as they are too ; and 
Lizzie ! " 

*^Yes, M'am! " 

**Just hang it out on the lilac-bush, — mind, 
the lilac-bush ! " 

'' Yes, M'am ! '* 

" Or, Lizzie, wait: I '11 do it myself! " 

" When the spring-time comes ^ gentle Annie^ and the flowers are 
blossoming on the plhin I 
Lala, lala la, la, la, lallallalla, laly lal, lal, la, la, la, la, la. 
When the spring-time comes, gentle Annie ^ and the mocking-bird 

is singing on the tree ! '* 

** I don't believe that mocking-bird line belongs to the song at all, Lizzie ; you never do 
get a thing right ! " 

The words have a partly irritated, partly 
contemptuous tone, that seems oddly at variance with the size of the child who utters them. 
She is lying flat on her stomach on the floor, 
resting her elbows at each side of a book she is 
reading, holding her sharp chin in the palms of 
her hands, waving her skinny legs in unconscious time to the half tired, half feverish lilt of 
the nurse as she jogs the baby in time to the 
tune. She gazes, as she speaks, at the girl with 
a pair of unusually bright, penetrating eyes. 
This mocking-bird line never fails to annoy her. 

*' Troth, an if I cud get the young limb to 
slape I would n't care if 'twas mockin'-birds or 
torn cats ! " is the indifferent answer. 

Strange how some trivial thing will jog a 
link in a chain of association, and set it vibrating until it brings one face to face with scenes 
and people long forgotten in some prison cell 
in one's brain ; calling to new life a red-haired 
girl, with sherry-brown eyes, and a flat back, 
pacing a nursery floor in impatient endeavor 
to get a fractious child to sleep, — ay, her very 
voice and her persistent mixing of mocking- 
birds and spring-time. So muses the child twenty 
years after, as, past her first youth, with only 
the eyes and the smile unchanged, she lies on a 
bear-skin before the fire on a chilly evening in 
late spring, and goes over a recent experience. 
A half humorous smile, with a tinge of mockery 
in it, plays round her lips as she says, — 

** Twenty years ago. Queer how it should fit 
in after all that time ! 

*' Tell you how it was ? That is not very easy ; 
pathos may become bathos in the telling. Let 
me see. Of course it was chance, — or is there 



NOW SPRING HAS COME. 47 

any such thing as chance? Say fate, instead. 
The three old ladies who spin our destinies 
were in want of amusement, so they pitched 
on me. They sent their messenger to me in 
the guise of a paper-backed novel with a taking 
name. I was waiting in a shop for some papers 
I had ordered, when it struck me. I took it up. 
The author was unknown to me. I opened it 
at haphazard, and a line caught me. I read on. 
I was roused by the bookseller's suave voice, — 

** * That is a very bad book. Madam. One of 
the modern realistic school, a tendenz roman, I 
would not advise Madam to read it.' 

" ' A-ah, indeed ! ' 

** I laid it down and left the shop. But the 
words I had read kept dancing before me; I 
saw them written across the blue of the sky, 
in the sun streaks on the pavement, and the 
luminous delicacy of the Norwegian summer 
nights ; they were impressed on my brain in 
vivid color, glowing, blushing with ardor as 
they were. Weeks passed ; one afternoon, time 
hung heavily on my hands, and I sent for the 
book. I read all that afternoon ; let the telling 
words, the passionate pain, the hungry yearning, 
all the tragedy of a man's soul-strife with evil 
and destiny, sorrow and sin, bite into my 
sentient being. When the book was finished, 
I was consumed with a desire to see and know 
the author. I never reasoned that the whole 
struggle might be only an extraordinarily clever 
intuitive analysis of a possible experience. I 
accepted it as real, and I wanted to help this 
man. I longed to tell him in his loneliness that 
one human being, and that one a woman, had 
courage to help him. The abstract ego of the 
novel haunted me. I have a will of my own, 
so I set to work to find him. . It was not so 
easy. None of my acquaintances knew him, or 
of him ; he was a strange meteor ; and as the book 
was condemned by the orthodox, I had to feel 
my way cautiously. 

" Is n't it dreadful to think what slaves we are 
to custom? I wonder shall we ever be able to 
tell the truth, ever be able to live fearlessly 
according to our own light, to believe that what 
is right for us must be right ! It seems as if 
all the religions, all the advancement, all the 
culture of the past, has only been a forging of 
chains to cripple posterity, a laborious building up of moral and legal prisons based 
on false conceptions of sin and shame, to 
cramp men's minds and hearts and souls, not 
to speak of women's. What half creatures we 
are, we women! — hermaphrodite by force of 
circumstances, deformed results of a fight of 
centuries between physical suppression and 
natural impulse to fulfil our destiny. Every 
social revolution has told hardest on us : when 
a sacrifice was demanded, let woman make it. 
And yet there are men, and the best of them, 
who see all this, and would effect a change if 
they knew how. Why it came about? Because 
men manufactured an artificial morality ; made 
sins of things that were as clean in themselves 
as the pairing of birds on the wing ; crushed 
nature, robbed it of its beauty and meaning, 
and established a system that means war, and 
always war, because it is a struggle between 
instinctive truths and cultivated lies. Yes, I 
know I speak hotly; but my heart burns in me 
sometimes, and I hate myself. It 's a bad thing 
when a man or woman has a contempt for 
himself. There 's nothing like a good dose of 
love-fever (in other words, a waking to the fact 
that one is a higher animal, with a destiny to 
fulfil) to teach one self-knowledge, to give one 
a glimpse into the contradictory issues of one's 
so , individual nature. Study yourself, and what 
will you tind? Just what I did, — the weak, the 
inconsequent, the irresponsible. In one word, 
the untrue feminine is of man's making; while 
the strong, the natural, the true womanly is of 
God's making. It is easy to read as a primer ; 
but how change it? Go back to any poet! 

*' Well, at length an old bookseller I knew 
gave me surer information. My intuition was 
not at fault : the experiences were wrung from 
the man's soul. As the old superstition has it, 
a dagger dipped in a man's heart-blood will 
always strike home ; so no wonder they pierced 
me with their passion, despair, and brave endurance. What the old fellow wrote to him I 
know not, but I got an unconventional pretty 
letter from him, and it ended in our writing to 
each other. As my time to leave drew near, 
the desire to see him became overpowering. I 
could afford it; he could not. It ended in our 
arranging to meet at a little town on the coast. 

" It is strange how the idea of a person one 
has never seen can possess one as completely 
as this did me. I, whom, as you know, think 
as little of starting alone for, say, Mexico, as 
another woman of going to afternoon tea; who 
have trotted the globe without male assistance 
— felt as tremulously stirred as at confirmation 
day. There are days that stand out in the gallery of one's remembrances clean-painted as a 
Van Hooge, with a sharp clearness. 

^^ I slept on board, and early the next morning, 
it was Sunday, I stood on deck watching the 
coast as we glided through the water that danced 
in delicious September sunshine. I was happily 
expectant. At dinner hour we passed a fjord, 
a lovely deep-blue fjord, winding to our right 
as we passed, with the spire of a church just 
visible among the fir-trees round the bend. 
Boats of all kinds, from a smart cutter to a 
pram were coming out after the service. The 
white sails swelled as they caught the breeze, 
flapped as they tacked, hung listlessly a second, 
and then dashed with a swerve, like swift snowywinged birds, through the water. I had not 
troubled with church-going of late years. Why? 
Oh, speculation, weariness of soul that found no 
drop of consolation in religious observance, — 
maybe that might be the reason. But all those 
honest, simple folk in their Sunday bravery, fairhaired girls with their psalm-books wrapped up 
in their only silk kerchief, the ring of laughter 
echoing across the water, the magic of sun and 
sky, mountain and fjord, made me feel that I 
too was church-going, and I felt strangely 
happy. It is the off moments that we do not 
count as playing any part in our lives that are. 
after all, the best we have. I am afraid it would 
be impossible to make you see things as I felt 
them. 

" I went up to the hotel when I landed. I 
had the reputation of riches ; the hotel was at 
my service. I inquire for him, go down to my 
sitting-room, send him my card, and wait. I 
wait with an odd feeling that I am outside myself, watching myself as it were. I can see the 
very childishness of my figure, the too slight 
hips and bust, the flash of rings on my fingers, 
— they are pressed against my heart, for it is 
beating hatefully, — ay, the very expectant sidepoise of head is visible to me some way. It 
flashes across me as I stand that so might a 
slave wait for the coming of a new master, and 
I laugh at myself for my want-wit agitation. 
A knock. 

*'*Come in!' 

**The door opens, and I am satisfied. In the 
space of a second's gaze I meet what my soul 
has been waiting for, ah, how long! I think 
always. Have I lived before in some other 
life that no surprise touches me? — that it is 
just as if I am only meeting the embodiment of 
a disintegrated floating image that has often 
flashed before my consciousness, and flown 
before I could fix it? Has this man, or some 
psychical part of this man, been in touch with 
me before, or how is it ? I stand still and stretch 
out my hand ; I check an impulse to put out 
both, I feel so tremulously happy. I know 
before he speaks how his voice will sound, what 
his touch will be like before he clasps my hand. 
It is odd how the most important crisis of our 
lives often comes upon us in the most commonplace way. It is the fashion to decry love; 
yet the vehemence of the denials, the keenness 
of the weapons of satire and scepticism that 
are turned against it only prove its existence. 
As long as man is man and woman is woman, 
it will be to them at some time the sweetest and 
possibly the most -fatal interest in life to them. 
Thrust it aside for ambition or gain, slight it as 
you will, sooner or later it will have its revenge. 
I had felt no breath of it as maid, wife, or 
widow; my heart had been a free, wild, shy 
thing, jessed by my will. Sometimes, by way 
of experiment, I let it fly to some one for an 
hour, but always to call it back again to my 
own safe keeping. Now it left me. 

'*We sat and talked, — rather I talked, I 
think, and he listened. He said my going to 
see him even on literary grounds was eccentric ; 
but then it seemed I had a way of doing as I 
pleased without exciting much comment. How 
did he know that ? Oh, he had heard it ! Was 
I really going away? How tiresome it was, 
really awfully tiresome ! What was he like ? 
Well, an American bison or a lion. You might 
put his head among the rarest and handsomest 
heads in the world. Prejudiced in his favor? 
No, not a bit. His hands, for instance, are 
great laborer's hands, freckled too ; I don't like 
his gait either, — indeed, a dozen things. What we 
talked about ? Well, as I said, he listened mostly ; 
laughed with a great joyous boyish laugh, 
with a deep musical note in it. He has a deferential manner and a very caressing smile ; a 
trick, too, of throwing back his head and tossing his crest of hair. Why he laughed? Well, 
I suppose I made him. I told him all about 
myself; turned myself inside out, good and 
bad alike, as one might the pocket of an old 
gown; laughed at my own expense, hid nothing. An extraordinary thing to do, was it ? 
I suppose it was ; but the whole thing was 
rather unusual. He got up and walked about, 
sometimes he thrust his hands in his pockets 
and exclaimed, * The Deuce ! * etc. I fancy he 
learned a good deal about me in a few hours. 
You see it was not as if one were talking to a 
stranger ; it was as if one had met part of one's 
self one had lost for a long time, and was filling 
up the gaps made during the absence. You 
can't understand. I think we were both very 
happy. He admired — no, that is not the 
word ; he was taken with me, that is better. 
He said my hands were * as small as a child's; * 
the tablecloth was dark-red plush that made a 
good background. He pointed timidly, as a 
great shy boy might, to one of my rings ; you 
see they don't as a rule wear many rings up 
there; I suppose they gave an impression of 
wealth. * That one is very beautiful ! ' I 
laughed ; I was so glad my hands were pretty, 
— pretty hands last so much longer than a 
pretty face. I laughed too at his finger, it had 
such a deferential expression about it; and I 
called him a great child. I think we were both 
like two great children ; we had found a common interest to rejoice in, — we had found ourselves. Every moment was delightful ; we were 
making discoveries, finding we had had like 
experiences, — had both hungered, both known 
want, were both of an age ; we were both unconventional, and were shaking hands mentally 
all the time. I don't remember now what it 
was he said ; but I remember I was obliged to 
drop my head, and I felt I was smiling from 
sheer, delicious pleasure. He cried laughingly: 
* You say I am a great child, you are a child 
yourself when you smile ! ' 

** He was to have supper with me, and he went 
away for an hour. After he left I walked over 
to a long mirror and looked at myself. Tried 
to fancy how he saw me, — that might be different, you know. I had color, life, eyes like 
stars, trembling, smiling lips. There was something quivering, alert about me; I scarce knew 
myself Of course the same hips, figure, features were reflected there, — it was something 
shining through that struck me as foreign. Do 
you know what I did ? I danced all round the 
room. Shows what an idiot an old woman can 
be. By the way, he denied that I was old ; I 
was like a little girl, but a remarkable little 
girl; no wonder people always noticed me, as if 
I were a somebody. How did he know that? 
Oh, he had heard it, for that matter seen it too, 
at the pier. He knew the moment I stepped 
off the boat that it was I. Yes, people always 
stared at me, but how could he know? Ah! 
presentiment perhaps. So he was on the pier? 
Why did he not come and meet me? No legible 
answer, but a slow reddening up to the roots 
of his fair hair. I do not know quite how he 
conveyed it, but I had the sensation, a charming one, of being treated as a queen. 

'' But to go back. I sat or rather lay in an 
arm-chair at the window, and watched the water 
and the ships. It was getting dusk, the luminous dusk of the north, as if a soft transparent 
purple veil is being dropped gently over the 
world. The fjord was full of lights from the 
different crafts at anchor, and the heaven full of 
stars; and the longer one looked up there, the 
more one saw myriads of flimmering eyes of 
light, until one's brain seemed fullof their brightness, and one forgot one's body in gazing. Long 
silvery streaks glistened through the heaving 
water like the flash of feeding trout, and lads and 
lassies in boats rowed to and fro, and human 
vibration seemed to thrill from them, filling the 
atmosphere with man and woman. And the 
silken air caressed my face as the touch of cool, 
soft fingers. I had a feeling of perfect wellbeing ; one does not get many such moments 
in one's life, does one? I think I just was 
happy, rehearsing the hours that flew too 
quickly, recalling every look, tone, gesture, and 
smile. The jomfru came in to lay the table ; 
she knew me from a previous visit and began to 
talk ; but I wanted to be alone with my thoughts ; 
so I went upstairs, washed my hands and pufl*ed 
them with sweet smelling powder, and then 
when I went down again and sat and waited 
I clasped them up over my head to make 
them white. He came back, flung his hat on 
the sofa out of sheer boyish delight at being 
back, came over and stood and looked down at 
me, and I laughed up to him. If I were to talk 
until Doomsday, I could not make you understand what I cannot yet understand myself 

'* After supper, at which I sipped my tea 
and watched him, we sat at the window and 
looked out at the purple world. I had told him 
he might smoke. Well ? Well, we talked, and 
we talked when we were both silent; and he, I 
mean his thinking self, came to me; and I — 
well, I believe from the moment he came into 
the room, all the best of me went straight to 
him. The lights out in the harbor twinkled, a 
star fell, and I wished — well, wishes are foolish. 
I think he must have been watching my face, for 
when our eyes met, he smiled as if he understood. Sometimes he jumped up and stood 
rocking a chair backward and forward. He was 
sorry I was going away! Yes? Oh, we might 
meet again ! That might be difficult ! Indeed? 
I should have thought /le would be the last 
person in the world to say it was difficult to 
meet. He laughed at that, with a quick sidelong look he has, like a Finn dog, and said I 
was sharp, awfully sharp, as if he liked being 
caught. By the way, he occasionally used 
strong language ; said I must forgive him, he 
was n't very used to ladies' society. 

" At ten I said I would say good-night for 
conventionality's sake. He begged, humbly it 
struck me, for a little longer. I was to leave by 
the steamer at eight in the morning, would be 
down at seven ; he might come to me. Would 
I give him a portrait of myself ? Yes, I would 
get one specially done. As much in profile as 
possible, he thought that would be happier. 
Yes. He came to the top of the stairs with me, 
and when we bade good-night he took my hand 
and held it curiously as if it were something 
fearfully^ fragile, and stood and watched me 
down the corridor. And will you credit it? I 
felt inclined to run like an awkward little school- 
girl. I said prayers that night ; thanked God, 
I don't quite know what for, — I suppose I did 
then, — perhaps for being happy. I looked at 
my foreign self in the glass too, and when the 
light was out — Yes? — I did what you and 
every other woman might do, I cuddled my face 
to an imaginary face, rubbed my cheek to an 
imaginary cheek, whispered a God bless you ! 
and fell asleep. 

*' 1 was down before seven, paid my bill, and 
sat waiting, with the little tray, with its thick 
white cups and lumpy yellow cream, before me. 
He came, — such a glad man, with glad eyes, 
glad smile, and outstretched hands. And I, — 
I was so glad, too, that I could have shouted 
out for very joy of living. I might have been 
drinking some magic elixir instead of coffee. 

" * It is tiresome ! ' he said impatiently. 

"*What is tiresome? You have said that so 
often.' 

*' ' It is tiresome when a person one wants so 
badly to keep in the country is going out 
of it' 

" * Supposing I were to stay in it, you would 
probably be in one place and I in another. It 
is only a question of a little dearer postage ! * 

*' We both laughed at that. It takes such a 
little thing to make one laugh when one is 
happy. Then the steamer came in sight, and 
we walked down through the bright morning to 
the pier, and went on board. He stood silently; 
we only looked at each other. It did not then 
strike me as odd — it does now. The first bell 
rang ! I felt a chill steal over me. * It is tiresome, it is hateful ! ' His smile had flown ; and 
old deep lines and traces of past suffering I had 
not noticed before showed plainly. 

'' ' I will come back,' I said, ' when the winter 
is over ! ' 

'' ' Ay, but winter is long, or it used to be ! * 

** * No matter, I will come with the spring ! ' 

*' The second bell rang ! Ah, why can't we 
do as our hearts bid us? We have one short 
life, and It is spoiled by chains of our own 
forging in deference to narrow custom. I 
shivered. There was after all an autumn chill 
in the air. I hate the sound of a steamer bell 
now. . . . The third bell ! We turn, and I 
tighten my small fingers in his great hand, and 
I say good-by and God bless you ! Not from 
a purely religious conception of God, unless it 
be that God (and I think it does) means all that 
is good and beautiful, tender and best. I might 
have said, * The best I can think of befall you ! * 
A second later, and the streamer rail separates 
us ! I look into his soul through his eyes, and 
see it is sorry, regretful, — as sorry as I am glad 
it is so : he is sorry I am going from him, and 
in that short concentrated gaze his soul comes 
to me as I would have it come to me. 

" * When spring comes I ' I whisper as I lean 
over to him, while the steamer glides out. He 
follows it to the end of the pier, and stands 
there as long as we are in sight. If he had 
held out his arms and said, * Woman, stay with 
me ! ' I would, I fear, have jumped down and 
stayed. Didn't know anything about him? 
No, that is true, only that I had been waiting 
for something ever since I was old enough to 
have a want, and that he was that something; 
that I was nearly thirty when I found him, and 

— Life is short ! 

'* I was so glad, in spite of leaving him, that I 
believe I thought the sun shone differently. I 
almost asked some people on deck if they did 
not think that the day was quite the loveliest 
day ever dawned since the world was a world ; 
if there was not something peculiarly and 
singularly delicious in the very air? I found a 
quiet sofa, and lay with closed eyes, and lived 
it over again. 

" The rest is more difficult to tell you. I was 
insanely happy, then I was intensely miserable. 
I sent him my portrait and a letter, and counted 
the days and the hours to a reply. It came. 
I stole away to read all the warm meaning ill 
concealed under the words of it; slept with it 
under my pillow, carried it in my bosom, and 
answered it straight from my heart. Why try 
and tell you of the aftertime? I would not go 
through that winter again for anything in the 
world. Hope, fear, suspense, joy, despondency, 

— all the strongest feelings that can torture or 
wear out a heart were mine. I longed to be 
up on a high mountain alone with my dream. 


I wonder does a man ever realize the beauty- 
there is in a woman's thought of him ! What 
kind were the letters? Warm, passionate, yet 
with a reservatio mentalis that hurt me, but 
always with a ' When spring comes ! ' in them. 
It is amazing to what depths of folly a human 
being can descend ! I had his photograph on 
my table; I greeted it as a Russian peasant 
his household saint. It would be hard to 
find my match in idiocy. I felt a letter coming, 
and waited with strained ears and fever-racked 
nerves for the postman's knock. Do you know 
there is something touchingly pitiful in the way 
one finds out all the tender bits in a letter and 
re-reads them? I have kissed a thumb-mark 
on the paper ! Heavens, how the days dragged ! 
I was ill with yearning thought; night brought 
no rest but the comfort of being alone ; all the 
years of my life were not as long as that weary 
winter. Sleep fled, and nervous pain took its 
place. It was foolish, exceedingly foolish, 
because it was fatal to my looks. At the rare 
times I looked at myself I got a glimpse of a 
thin, waxen, yellow face with dark-ringed eyes, 
and I was certainly older looking. Thinking 
of it all dispassionately, I am inclined to think 

I was hysterical. How many of the follies and 
frailties of women are really due to hysterical 
rather than moral irresponsibility is a question. 
You see there is no time of sowing wild oats 
for women; we repress and repress, and then 
some day we stumble on the man who just 
satisfies our sexual and emotional nature, and 
then there is shipwreck of some sort. When 
we shall live larger and freer lives we shall be 
better balanced than we are now. If what I 
suffered is love, all I can say is I would not ask 
a better sample of conventional hell's pain. 
Hu-s-sh ! Very well, I won't say those things ! 

*' It is bad enough to be a fool and not to 
know it ; but to be a fool and feel with every 
fibre of your being, every shred of your understanding, that you are one, and that there is no 
help for it; that all your philosophy won't aid 
you ; that you are one great want, stilled a little 
by a letter, only to be haunted afresh by the 
personality of another creature, tortured with 
doubts and hurt by your loss of self-respect, — 
ah ! it was a long winter ! Then the New Year 
came and went, and time dragged slowly but 
surely, and at length the Almanacs said it was 
spring-time, and the girls at the street corners 
called, * Vilets, sweet vilets ! * and the milliners 
marked down guinea bonnets to I2s. lid., and 
I watched each token of its coming with a fearsome, joyous expectation — Go on? Ah, yes, 
I'll go on, — where was I? Oh, spring was 
coming, was n't it? I do not laugh as I used to, 
eh? How used I to laugh? I forget. Well, I 
won't laugh if it hurts you, dear, not even at 
myself. 

*' Well, once again, I was standing at a table 
in a hotel room, waiting. It is the simple 
things that are so hard to describe, and that 
are most complicated in their effects. I said 
again, ' Come in ! ' held fast to the table with 
my left hand and smiled, — to be accurate, began a smile. Spring is later up there ; perhaps 
some of the winter's frost was still in the 
atmosphere, for something froze it on my lips. 
I felt a curious stiffening in my face, and the 
touch of his hand did not thaw me. Feel 
happy? No; I was numb in one way, and yet 
keenly alive to impressions. I felt as if my 
nerve net was outside my skin, not under it, 
and that the exposure to the air and surround- 
ing influences made it intensely, acutely sensitive. I seemed to see with my sense of feeling 
as well as my sight. You know how in great 
cold you seem to burn your hand with an icy 
heat if you suddenly grasp a piece of iron? 
Well, I felt some way I was touched by glowing 
shivers : that sounds nonsense, but it expresses 
the feeling. Why? I don't know why: I was 
analyzing, being analyzed ; criticising, being critised. It was all so different, you see. Supposing you had just sipped a beaker of exhilarating, life-giving, rich wine with an exquisite 
bouquet, and a glow that steals through you and 
witches and warms you ; and suddenly, without 
your knowing how it happens, the draught is 
transformed into luke-warm water, or * Polly ' 
without the 'dash' in it! What did he say? 
Let me think. Oh, yes : I was wretchedly thin. 
Odd how things strike one. I once saw a representation of Holberg's Stundeslose in Copenhagen. One of the characters is an ancient 
housekeeper, with a long money-bag, who is, 
as they term it, * marriage-sick.' A match is 
arranged between her and a young spark in 
the village. The scene is this : while the monetary part of the affair is being arranged by the 
notary, etc., he says to her, — * Permit me to 
pass my hand over your bosom, mistress? ' She 
simpers; and I shall never forget the comical 
expression of dismay with which the suitor rolls 
his eyes and drops his jaw as he turns aside. 
I felt rather than saw the comprehensive look 
which accompanied his comment on my thinness, and that scene flashed across my inner 
vision. Odd, was it not? A sort of sympathetic after-comprehension. It was as if I, too, 
were having a hand passed across the flatness 
of my figure. 

** * Yes, I have got thin.' Silence. Had I 
been very ill? Yes, very! Was that why I 
was so pale? It was fearful, — not a tinge of 
warm color in my face ; one would be afraid to 
touch me. I felt as if I were being toted up : 
item, so much color ; item, so much flesh. Had 
I been worried? I had lost that buoyant childishness that was so attractive. Ah, yes, I had 
dwelt too much on a trouble I had. Did I sleep? 
Not much. That was foolish. I ought to eat 
plenty, too. I looked as if I did n't eat enough ; 
my eyes and cheeks were hollowed out. Ah, 
yes, no doubt I did look older than in autumn ! 
I was not contradicted. I would have told a 
little lie to spare a man's feelings. Men are 
perhaps more conscientious. 

** What else? I am rehearsing it all as best 
I can. Oh, my hands were altered ; he thought 
they were not so small, eh? Might be my 
wrists were less round, that made a difference. 
Did it .'* They certainly were larger, and not 
so white. Did he kiss me ? Oh, yes. You see 
I wanted to sift this thing thoroughly, to get 
clear into my head what ground I was standing on. So I let him. They were merely 
lip-kisses; his spirit did not come to mine, 
and I was simply analyzing them all the time. 
Did I not feel anything ? Yes, I did, — deeply 
hurt; ah, I can't say how they hurt me! 
They lacked everything a kiss, as the expression of the strongest, best feeling of a man 
and woman, ca7t hold. How do I know? My 
dear woman, have you never dreamt, felt, had 
intuitive experiences? I have. I am not sure 
that I had not a keen sense of the ludicrous 
side of the whole affair; that one portion of 
my soul was not having a laugh at the other's 
expense. I do not quite know what I had been 
expecting. 'T is true he had written me beautiful letters. You see he is too much of a word- 
artist to write anything else. 

** Treated me badly } No, I am not prepared 
to say that he did. I am glad he was too honest to hide his startled reahzation of the fact 
that autumn and spring are different seasons, 
and that one's feeHngs may undergo a change 
in a winter. I do not see why I should resent 
that. Why, it would be punishing him for 
having cared for me. To put it in his words : 
* I came as a strangely lovely dream into his 
life.' Probably the whole mistake lay in that. 
He thought of me as a dream lady, with dainty 
hands; idealized me, and wrote to the dream 
creature. When I came back in the flesh, he 
realized that I was a prosaic fact, with less 
charming hands, a tendency to leanness, and 
coming crow's feet. His look of dismayed 
awakening was simply delicious. 

** I wish I could catch and fasten the fleeting 
images that flit across my memory; you would 
grasp my mental attitude better. In the midst 
of all my pain, — I was sitting next him, and 
he was stroking my hand mechanically, — I 
noticed a glass case on the wall containing an 
Italian landscape, with ball-blue sky and pink 
lakes; pasteboard figures of Dutch-peasant 
build, with Zouave jackets, Tyrolese hats, and 
bandaged legs, figured in the foreground ; you 
wound it up, and the figures danced to a varsoviana. I was listening to him, and yet at the 
same time I caught myself imagining how he 
and I would look dressed like that, bobbing 
about to the old-fashioned tune. I could hardly 
keep from shrieking with laughter. He had a 
turn-down collar on : he ought always to wear 
unstarched linen, — it and his throat did n't fit. 
You cannot understand me .'* Dearest woman, 
I do not pretend to understand the thing 
myself. 

" Did we not talk about anything } Of course 
we did, — Tolstoi and his doctrine of celibacy; 
Ibsen's Hedda; Strindberg's view of the female 
animal, — and agreed that Friedrich Nietzche 
appealed to us immensely. You must make 
allowances. Here was a man passionately attached to his art, — his art, that he had been 
treating churlishly for months for the sake of a 
dream. The dream was out, and he feared her 
revenge. That is the one potent element of 
consolation for me. If one has made an idiot 
of one's self, it is at least self-consoling to have 
done so for a genius. He chose the better part, 
if you come to think of it. The man or woman 
who jeopardizes a great talent — be it of writing, painting, or acting — for marriage sake is 
bartering a precious birthright for a mess 
of pottage, mostly indifferent pottage. And 
even if it were excellent, it is bound to pall 
when one has it every day. There never was 
a marriage yet in which one was not a loser ; 
and it is generally the more gifted half who has 
to pay the heaviest toll. 

'' I believe he was intensely sorry for me. I 
asked him once, you know, half playfully, half 
maliciously, if he had meant something, something deliciously tender, — I quoted it out of 
one of his letters. He paled to his lips, closed 
his eyes for a second, and I saw drops of sweat 
break out on his forehead. I sprang up and 
turned aside his answer. I remember when I 
was a little child I never would pick flowers; 
I always fancied they felt it, and bled to death. 
I used to sneak behind, and gather up all those 
my playmates threw down on the road or fields, 
and put them, stalks down, into the water in 
the ditch or brook; even now I can't wear 
them. I did not wish to hurt him either; he 
could not help his passion-flower withering. I 
suppose it was written that my love should turn, 
like fairy gold, into withered leaves in my grasp. 

*' What, dear, — a white hair ? Oh, I saw 
several lately. How did it end ? Oh, he said 
that he was going away to glean material for 
a new book ; that he would burn my letters, — 
it was safer and wiser to burn letters. No, I 
did not ask him ; he volunteered it. He asked 
me, did I not think so ? I said yes. But is it 
not marvellous how dazzlingly swift our thoughts 
can travel, like light? While I was saying, 
* Yes, one often regretted not having burned 
letters ; receipts, receipts for bills, were really 
the only things of importance to keep,' I was 
thinking and crying inwardly over ray letters. 
Such letters ! — one only writes once like that, 
I think. All the perfume of the flowers I ever 
smelt, all the sun- glints on hill and sea, all the 
strains of music and light and love I had garnered from the glad, fresh, young years when 
I tossed cowslip balls in the meadows, were 
crystallized into love-words in those letters of 
mine. It seemed to me often that the words 
burnt with a white flame as I wrote them, and 
I was shy when I saw them written ; and he 
said, ^ I shall burn them ! ' much as you might 
say, * I shall take the trimming off that last 
summer hat of mine.' I did not like to think 
of his burning them, perhaps with his old washing-bills. Do you know, if I had a finger or 
toe cut off, I would n't like them to take it 
away ; I 'd like to bury it. A sort of feel, I 
suppose. 

** Well, we said good-by ! I felt as if I had 
a sponge with a lot of holes in it, instead of a 
heart, and that all the feeling had oozed away 
through them. He was glad to go, I think; he 
felt himself a brute I dare say, yet how could 
he help it? 

** Were you ever at the Scandinavian church 
in the Docks ? I went one Sunday after I came 
back. I like those blue-eyed, sea-faring folk ; 
and the priest wears a black gown and stiff ruff, 
like Luther of mixed renown. An apple-tree 
outside the open door was struggling to open 
its delicate pink blossoms; each petal had a 
tinge of soot, — it reminded me of the pretty 
cheeks of a grimy maid-of-all-work. I sat still ; 
a sunbeam came in and pierced Judas's heart, 
as he sat at his section of the Last Supper 
table, and it wrapped me up in a sun haze, so 
that all was misty around me. The sermon 
only struck my ear with a soothing, drowsy 
roll, something like the wave-note of the incurling sea in the Mediterranean, — a legato accompaniment to my thoughts; and I had a 
grand burial all by myself. I dug a deep 
grave, and laid all my dreams and foolish wishes 
and sweet hopes in it. A puff of wind rustled 
through the rigging of the ships, and set the 
flags with their yellow cross fluttering, and 
scattered a few of the tender blooms over it, 
and — ah, well ! it seems hard to realize now. 
Spring has gone ! 

*'Do you really think that crinolines will be 
worn?" 

Have you ever read out a joke that seemed 
excruciatingly funny, or repeated a line of 
poetry that struck you as being inexpressibly 
tender, and found that your listener was not 
impressed as you were? I have; and so it 
may be that this will bore you, though it was 
momentous enough to me. 

I had been up in Norway to receive a little 
legacy that fell to me; and though my summer 
visits were not infrequent, I had never been up 
there in mid-winter, at least not since I was a 
little child tobogganing with Hans Jorgen (Hans 
Jorgen Dahl is his full name), and that was 
long ago. We are connected. Hans Jorgen 
and I were both orphans, and a cousin (we 
called her aunt) was one of our guardians. He 
was her favorite ; and when an uncle on my 
mother's side (she was Cornish born ; my father, 
a ship captain, met her at Dartmouth) offered 
to take me, I think she was glad to let me go. 

I was a lanky girl of eleven, and Hans Jorgen 
and I were sweethearts. We were to be married 
some day, — we had arranged all that, — and 
he reminded me of it when I was going away, 
and gave me a silver perfume-box, with a gilt 
crown on top, that had belonged to his mother; 
and later when he was going to America he 
came to see me first. He w^as a long, freckled 
hobbledehoy, with just the same true eyes and 
shock head. I was, I thought, quite grown up. 
I had passed my '* intermediate," and was con- 
descending as girls are ; but I don't think it 
impressed Hans Jorgen much, for he gave me 
a little ring, turquoise forget-me-nots with 
enamelled leaves and a motto inside (a quaint 
old thing that belonged to a sainted aunt, they 
keep things a long time in Norway), and said 
he would send for me ; but of course I laughed 
at that. He has grown to be a great man out 
in Cincinnati, and waits always. I wrote later 
and told him I thought marriage a vocation, 
and I hadn't one for it; but Hans Jorgen 
took no notice, — just said he'd wait. He 
understands waiting, I '11 say that for Hans 
Jorgen. 

I have been alone now for five years, working away, though I was left enough to keep me 
before. Someway I have not the same glad- 
ness in my work of late years. Working for 
one's self seems a poor end, even if one puts by 
money. But this has little or nothing to do 
with the white elf, has it? 

Christiania is a singular city if one knows 
how to see under the surface, and I enjoyed 
my stay there greatly. The Hull boat was to 
sail at 4.30, and I had sent my things down 
early; for I was to dine at the Grand at two 
with a cousin, a typical Christiania man. It 
was a fine, clear day, and Karl Johann was 
thronged with folks. The band was playing in 
the park, and pretty girls and laughing students 
walked up and down. Every one who is any- 
body may generally be seen about that time. 
Henrik Ibsen — if you did not know him from 
his portrait, you would take him to be a prosperous merchant — was going home to dine; but 
Bjornstjerne Bjornson, in town just then, with 
his grand, leonine head, and the kind, keen eyes 
behind his glasses, was standing near the 
Storthing House with a group of politicians probably discussing the vexed question of separate 
consulship. In no city does one see such 
characteristic odd faces and such queerly cut 
clothes. The streets are full of students. The 
farmers* sons among them are easily recognized 
by their homespun, sometimes home-made, 
suits, their clever heads and intelligent faces; 
from them come the writers and brain-carriers 
of Norway. The Finns, too, have a distinctive 
type of head, and a something elusive in the 
expression of their changeful eyes ; but all, the 
town students too, of easier manners and 
slangier tongues, — all alike are going, as 
finances permit, to dine in restaurant or steamkitchen. I saw the memi for to-day posted up 
outside the door of the latter as I passed, — 
'' Rice porridge and salt meat soup, 6d.^' — and 
Hans Jorgen came back with a vivid picture of 
childhood days, when every family in the little 
coast-town where we lived had a fixed menu 
for every day in the week; and it was quite a 
distinction to have meat-balls on pickled- 
herring day, or ale soup when all the folks in 
town were cooking omelets with bacon. How 
he used to eat rice porridge in those days ! I 
can see him now put his heels together and 
give his awkward bow as he said, '' Tak for 
Maden tante 1 '* 

Well, we are sitting in the Grand Cafe after 
dinner, at a little table near the door, watching 
the people pass in and out. An ubiquitous 
*^ sample-count" from Berlin is measuring his wits 
with a young Norwegian merchant; he is standing green chartreuse. It pays to be generous 
even for a German, when you can oust honest 
Leeds cloth with German shoddy: at least, so 
my cousin says. He knows every one by sight, 
and points out all the celebrities to me. Suddenly he bows profoundly. I look round: a 
tall woman with very square shoulders, and 
gold-rimmed spectacles is passing us with two 
gentlemen. She is English, by her tailor-made 
gown and little shirt-front, and noticeable 
anywhere. 

" That lady," says my cousin, " is a compatriot of yours. She is a very fine person, a 
very learned lady; she has been looking up 
referats in the University Bibliothek. Professor 
Sturm — he is a good friend of me — did tell 
me. I forget her name; she is married. I 
suppose her husband he stay at home and keep 
the house ! " 

My cousin has just been refused by a young 
lady dentist, who says she is too comfortably 
off to change for a small housekeeping business ; 
so I excuse his sarcasm. 

We leave as the time draws on, and sleigh 
down to the steamer. I like the jingle of the 
bells, and I feel a little sad ; there is a witchery 
about the country that creeps into one and 
works like a love-philter, and if one has once 
lived up there, one never gets it out of one's 
blood again. I go on board, and lean over and 
watch the people ; there are a good many for 
winter time. The bell rings. Two sleighs drive 
up, and my compatriot and her friends appear; 
she shakes hands with them, and comes leisurely 
up the gang-way. The thought flits through 
me that she would cross it in just that cool way 
if she were facing death ; it is foolish, but most 
of our passing thoughts are just as inconsequent. 
She calls down a remembrance to some one in 
such pretty Norwegian, much prettier than 
mine, and then we swing round. Handkerchiefs wave in every hand. Never have I seen 
such persistent handkerchief-waving as at the 
departure of a boat in Norway ; it is a national 
characteristic. If you live at the mouth of a 
fjord, and go to the market-town at the head of 
it for your weekly supply of coffee beans, the 
population give you a *' send off" with fluttering kerchiefs ; it is as universal as the ** Thanks.'* 
Hans Jorgen says I am Anglicized, and only see 
the ridiculous side, forgetting the kind feehngs 
that prompt it. 

I find a strange pleasure in watching the 
rocks peep out under the snow, the children 
dragging their hand-sleds along the ice. All 
the little bits of winter life of which I get flying 
glimpses as we pass, bring back scenes grown 
dim in the years between. There is a mist 
ahead ; and when we pass Drobak cuddled like 
a dormouse for winter's sleep, I go below. A 
bright coal-fire burns in the open grate of the 
stove, and the '' Rollo" saloon looks very cosy. 
My compatriot is stretched in a big arm-chair 
reading. She is sitting comfortably with one 
leg crossed over the other, in the manner called 
shockingly unladylike of my early lessons in 
deportment. The flame flickers over the patent 
leather of her neat low-heeled boot, and strikes 
a spark from the pin in her tie. There is 
something manlike about her; I don't know 
where it lies, but it is there. Her hair curls in 
gray-flecked rings about her head ; it has not a 
cut look, seems rather to grow short naturally. 

She has a charming, tubbed look; of course 
every lady is alike clean, but some men and 
women have an individual look of sweet cleanness that is a beauty of itself. She feels my 
gaze, and looks up and smiles; she has a rare 
smile, — it shows her white teeth and softens 
her features. 

*^The fire is cosy, isn't it? I hope we shall 
have an easy passage, so that it can be kept in." 

I answer something in English. 

She has a trick of wrinkling her brows ; she 
does it now as she says, — 

** A-ah, I should have said you were Norsk, 
are you not really? Surely, you have a typical 
head, or eyes and hair at the least? *' 

** Half of me is Norsk, but I have lived a long 
time in England." 

*' Father of course ; case of ' there was a sailor 
loved a lass,* was it not? *' 

I smile an assent and add : *' I lost them both 
when I was very young." 

A reflective look steals over her face. It is 
stern in repose ; and as she seems lost in some 
train of thought of her own, I go to my cabin 
and lie down ; the rattling noises and the smell 
of paint make me feel ill. I do not go out 
again. I wake next morning with a sense of 
fear at the stillness ; there is no sound but a 
lapping wash of water at the side of the steamer, 
but it is delicious to lie quietly after the vibration of the screw and the sickening swing. I 
look at my watch, — seven o'clock. I cannot 
make out why there is such a silence, as we only 
stop at Christiansand long enough to take cargo 
and passengers. I dress and go out. The 
saloon is empty, but the fire is burning brightly. 
I go to the pantry and ask the stewardess when 
we arrived. Early, she says ; all the passengers 
for here are already gone on shore, and there is 
a thick fog outside; goodness knows how long 
we '11 be kept. I go to the top of the stairs and 
look out; the prospect is uninviting, and I come 
down again and turn over some books on the 
table, in Russian, I think. I feel sure they are 
hers. 

'' Good morning ! " comes her pleasant voice. 

How alert and bright-eyed she is ! it is a pick- 
me-up to look at her. 

" You did not appear last night ; not given in 
already, I hope ! '* 

She is kneeling on one knee before the fire, 
holding her palms to the glow ; and with her 
figure hidden in her loose, fur-lined coat, and 
the Hght showing up her strong face under the 
Httle tweed cap, she seems so Hke a clever-faced 
slight man that I feel I am conventionally guilty 
in talking so freely to her. She looks at me 
with a deliberate, critical air, and then springs 
up. 

*' Let me give you something for your head ! 
Stewardess, a wine-glass ! " 

I should not dream of remonstrance, not if 
she were to command me to drink sea-water; 
and I am not complaisant as a rule. 

When she comes back I swallow it bravelyi 
but I leave some powder in the glass ; she 
shakes her head, and I finish this too. We sat 
and talked, or at least she talked and I listened. 
^ I don't remember w^hat she said; I only know 
that she was making clear to me most of the 
things that had puzzled me for a long time, — 
questions that arise in silent hours, that one 
speculates over, and to which one finds no 
answer in text-books. How she knew just the 
subjects that worked in me I knew not ; some 
subtile intuitive sympathy, I suppose, enabled 
her to find it out. It was the same at breakfast ; 
she talked down to the level of the men present 
(of course they did not see that it might be 
possible for a woman to do that), and made it a 
very pleasant meal. 

It was in the evening — we had the saloon 
to ourselves — when she told me about the 
white elf. I had been talking of myself and of 
Hans Jorgen. 

'' I like your Mr. Hans Jorgen," she said ; *' he 
has a strong nature and knows what he wants ; 
there is reliability in him. They are rarer 
qualities than one thinks in men ; I have found 
through life that the average man is weaker 
than we are. It must be a good thing to have 
a stronger nature to lean to. I have never had 
that." 

There is a want in the tone of her voice as 
she ends, and I feel inclined to put out my hand 
and stroke hers, — she has beautiful long hands, 
— but I am afraid to do so. I query shyly, — 

*' Have you no little ones?" 

** Children, you mean? No, I am one of the 
barren ones ; they are less rare than they used 
to be. But I have a white elf at home, and that 
makes up for it. Shall I tell you how the elf 
came? Well, its mother is a connection of 
mine, and she hates me with an honest hatred; 
it is the only honest feeling I ever discovered 
in her. It vi^as about the time that she found 
the elf was to come that it broke out openly, 
but that was mere coincidence. How she 
detested me ! Those narrow, poor natures are 
capable of an intensity of feeling concentrated 
on one object that larger natures can scarcely 
measure. 

*'Now I shall tell you something strange. 
I do not pretend to understand it ; I may have 
my theory, but that is of no physiological value, 
— I only tell it to you. Well, all the time she 
was carrying the elf she was full of simmering 
hatred, and she wished me evil often enough ; 
one feels those things in an odd way. Why 
did she? Oh, that — that was a family affair, 
with perhaps a thread of jealousy mixed up in 
the knot. Well, one day the climax came, and 
much was said ; and I went away and married, 
and got ill, and the doctors said I would be 
childless. And in the mean time the little 
human soul — I thought about it so often — had 
fought its way out of the darkness. We 
childless women weave more fancies into the 
' mithering o' bairns ' than the actual mothers 
themselves ; the poetry of it is not spoiled by 
nettle-rash or chin-cough any more than our 
figures. I am a writer by profession — oh, you 
knew! No, hardly celebrated; but I put my 
little chips into the great mosaic as best I can. 
Positions are reversed ; they often are now-a-days. My husband stays at home, and grows 
good things to eat and pretty things to look 
at, and I go out and win bread and butter. It 
is a matter not of who has most brains, but 
whose brains are most salable. Fit in with 
the housekeeping? Oh, yes. I have a treasure, 
too, in Belinda. She is one of those women 
who must have something to love. She used 
to love cats, birds, dogs, anything. She is one 
bump of philo-progenitiveness ; but she hates 
men. She says : ' If one could only have a 
child, ma'm, without a husband or the disgrace ! 
ugh, the disgusting men ! ' Do you know, I 
think that is not an uncommon feeling among 
a certain number of women. I have often 
drawn her out on the subject; it struck me, 
because I have often found it in other women. 
I have known many, particularly older women, 
who would give anything in God's world to 
have a child of ' their own ' if it could be got, 
just as Belinda says, ' without the horrid man 
or the shame.' It seems congenital with some 
women to have deeply rooted in their innermost nature a smoldering enmity — ay, sometimes a physical disgust — to men. It is a kind 
of kin feeling to the race-dislike of white men 
to black. Perhaps it explains why woman, 
where her own feelings are not concerned, will 
always make common cause with woman against 
man. I have often thought about it. You 
should hear Belinda's * serve him right ' when 
some fellow comes to grief! I have a little of 
it myself [meditatively], but in a broader way, 
you know. I like to cut them out in their own 
province. 

**Well, the elf was born; and now comes the 
singular part of it. It was a wretched, frail 
little being, with a startling likeness to me. It 
was as if the evil the mother had washed me 
had worked on the child, and the constant 
thought of me stamped my features on its little 
face. I was working then on a Finland saga, 
and I do not know why it was, but the thought 
of that little being kept disturbing my work. 
It was worst in the afternoon time, when the 
house seemed quietest ; there is always a lull 
then, outside and inside. Have you ever noticed 

that? The birds hush their singing, and the 
work is done. BeHnda used to sit sewing in 
the kitchen, and the words of a hymn she used 
to Hit in half tones — something about joy bells 
ringing, children singing — floated in to me, and 
the very tick-tock of the old clock sounded 
hke the rocking of wooden cradles. It made 
me think sometimes that it would be pleasant to 
hear small, pattering feet and the call of voices 
through the silent house; and I suppose it 
acted as an irritant on my imaginative faculty, 
for the whole room seemed filled with the 
spirits of Httle children. They seemed to 
dance round me with uncertain, lightsome 
steps, waving tiny, pink, dimpled hands, shaking 
sunny, flossy curls, and haunting me with their 
great innocent child-eyes, filled with the unconscious sadness and the infinite questioning 
that is oftenest seen in the gaze of children. I 
used to fancy something stirred in me, and the 
spirits of unborn little ones never to come to 
life in me troubled me. I was probably overworked at the time. How we women digress ! 
I am telling you more about myself than my 
white elf. 

** Well, trouble came to their home, and I 
went and offered to take it. It was an odd little 
thing, and when I looked at it I could see how 
like we were. My glasses dimmed somehow, 
and a lump kept rising in my throat, when it 
smiled up out of its great eyes and held out 
two bits of hands like shrivelled white roseleaves. Such a tiny scrap it was ! it was not 
bigger, she said, than a baby of eleven months. 
I suppose they can tell that as I can the 
date of a dialect ; but I am getting wiser," with 
an emotional softening of her face, and quite a 
proud look. ^' A child is like one of those wonderful runic alphabets ; the signs are simple, but 
the lore they contain is marvellous. ^ She is very 
like you,' said the mother ; * hold her.' She 
was only beginning to walk. I did. You never 
saw such elfin ears, with strands of silk floss 
ringing round them, and the quaintest, darlingest 
wrinkles in its forehead, two long, and one short, 
just as I have " — putting her head forward for me 
to see. ** The other children were strong, and 
the one on the road she hoped would be 
healthy. So I took it there and then, ' clothes 
and baby, cradle and all.' Yes, I have a collection of nursery rhymes from many nations ; 
I was going to put them in a book, but I say 
them to the elf now. 

*' I wired to my husband. You should have 
seen me going home. I was so nervous, — I 
was not half as nervous when I read my paper 
(it was rather a celebrated paper, perhaps you 
heard of it) to the Royal Geographical Society; 
it was on Esquimaux marriage songs, and the 
analogy between them and the Song of Solo- 
mon. She was so light, and so wrapped up, 
and my pince-7iez kept dropping off when I 
stooped over her (I got spectacles after that) ; 
and I used to fancy I had dropped her out of 
the wrappings, and peep under the shawl to 
make sure [with a sick shiver], to find her suck- 
ing her thumb. And I nearly passed my station ; 
and then a valuable book — indeed, it is really 
a case of Mss., and almost unique — I had bor- 
rowed for reference, with some trouble, could 
not be found, and my husband roared }vith 
laughter when it turned up in the cradle. 
Belinda was at the gate anxious to take her, 
and he said I did not know how to hold her, — 
that I was holding her like a book of notes at 
a lecture ; and so I gave her to Belinda. I think 
the poor little thing found it all strange, and 
when she puckered up her face and thrust out 
her under lip, and two great tears jumped off 
her lashes, we all felt ready for hanging. But 
Belinda, though she does n't know one language, 
not even her own, for she sows her Ks broad- 
cast and picks them up at hazard, — she can 
talk to a baby. I am so glad for that reason 
she is bigger now. I couldn't manage it: I 
could not reason out any system they go on 
in baby talk. I tried mixing up the tenses, but 
somehow it was n't right. My husband says it 
is not more odd than salmon taking a fly that 
is certainly like nothing they ever see in nature. 
Anyway it answered splendidly. Belinda used 
to say (I made a note of some of them): ' Did-sum was denn? Oo did ! Was ums de prettiest 
itta sweetums denn? Oo was. An' did um put 
'em in a nasty shawl an' joggle 'em in an ole 
puff-puff? Um did ; was a shame ! Hitchy cum, 
hitchy cum, hitchy cum hi. Chinaman no likey 
me ! ' This always made her laugh, though in 
what connection the Chinaman came in I never 
could fathom. I was a little jealous of Belinda, 
but she knew how to undress her. George, 
that 's my husband's name, said the bath-water 
was too hot, and that the proper way to test it 
was to put one's elbow in. Belinda laughed ; 
but I must confess it did feel too hot when 
I tried it that way : but how did he know ? 
I got her such pretty clothes ! I was going 
to buy a pragtbind of Nietzsche, but that 
must wait. George made her a cot with her 
name carved on the head of it; such a pretty 
one ! " 

** Did you find she made a change in your 
Hves? " I asked. 

*' Oh, did n't she ! Children are such funny 
things. I stole away to have a look at her 
later on, and did not hear him come after me. 
She looked so sweet, and she was smiling in 
her sleep. I believe the Irish peasantry say 
that an angel is whispering when a baby does 
that. I had given up all belief myself, except 
the belief in a Creator who is working out some 
system that is too infinite for our finite minds 
to grasp. If one looks round with seeing eyes, 
one can't help thinking that after a run of 
eighteen hundred and ninety-three years Chris- 
tianity is not very consoling in its results. But 
at that moment, kneeling next the cradle, I felt 
a strange, solemn feeling stealing over me : one 
is conscious of the same effect in a grand 
cathedral filled with the peal of organ music 
and soaring voices. It was as if all the old, 
sweet, untroubled child-belief came back for a 
spell, and I wondered if far back in the Nazarene 
village Mary ever knelt and watched the Christchild sleep ; and the legend of how he was often 
seen to weep but never to smile came back to 
me, and I think the sorrow I felt as I thought 
was an act of contrition and faith. I could not 
teach a child scepticism ; so I remembered my 
husband prayed, and I resolved to ask him to 
teach her. You see [half hesitatingly] I have 
more brains, or at least more intellectuality, 
than my husband ; and in that case one is apt 
to undervalue simpler, perhaps greater, qualities. 
That came home to me, and I began to cry, I 
don't know why; and he lifted me up, and 
I think I said something of the kind to him. 
We got nearer to each other someway. He said 
it was unlucky to cry over a child. 

*'It made such a difference in the evenings! 
I used to hurry home, — I was on the staff of 
the ' World's Review ' just then ; and it was so 
jolly to see the quaint little phiz smile up when 
I went in. 

'' Belinda was quite jealous of George. She 
said * Master worritted in an' out, an' interfered 
with everything ; she never seen a man as knew 
SO much about babies, not for one as never 'ad 
none of 'is own. Wot if he did n't go to Parkins 
hisself, an' say as how she was to have the milk 
of one cow, an' mind not mix it ! ' I wish you 
could have seen the insinuating distrust on 
Belinda's face. I laughed. I believe we were 
all getting too serious ; I know I felt years 
younger. I told George that it was really 
suspicious : how did he acquire such a stock of 
baby lore? /hadn't any. It was all very well 
to say * Aunt Mary's kids.' I should never be 
surprised if I saw a Zwazi woman appear with a 
lot of tawny pickaninnies in tow. George was 
shocked ! I often shock him. 

**She began to walk as soon as she got 
stronger. I never saw such an inquisitive mite. 
I had to rearrange all my bookshelves, change 
* Le Nu de Rabelais' (after Garnier, you know) 
and several others from the lower shelves to 
the top ones. One can't be so Bohemian when 
there is a little white soul like that playing 
about, can one? When we are alone, she always 
comes in to say her prayers and good-night. 
Larry Moore of the ' Vulture,' — he is one of 
the most wickedly amusing of men ; prides himself on being^;^ de siecle (don't you detest that 
word?) or nothing; raves about Degas, and is a 
worshipper of the decadent school of verse; 
quotes Verlaine, you know, — ^well, he came in 
one evening on his way to some music hall. 
She 's a whimsical little thing, not without 
incipient coquetry either, — well, she would say 
them to him. If you can imagine a masher of 
the Jan van Beer type bending his head to hear 
a child in a white * nighty ' lisping prayers, you 
have an idea of the picture. She kissed him 
good-night too (she never would before), and 
he must have forgotten his engagement, for he 
stayed with us to supper. She rules us all with 
a touch of her little hands, and I fancy we are all 
the better for it. Would you like to see her? " 

She hands me a medallion, with a beautiful 
painted head in it. I can't say she is a pretty 
child, — a weird, elf-like thing, with questioning, 
wistful eyes, and masses of dark hair, — and yet 
as I look the little face draws me to it, and 
makes a kind of yearning in me, strikes me with 
a ** fairy blast," perhaps. 

The journey was all too short, and when we 
got to Hull she saw me to my train. It was odd 
to see the quiet way in which she got everything 
she wanted. She put me into the carriage, got 
me a foot-warmer and a magazine, kissed me, and 
said as she held my hand, — 

" The world is small ; we run in circles ; perhaps we shall meet again. In any case I wish 
you a white elf.'* 

I was sorry to part with her ; I felt richer than 
before I knew her. I fancy she goes about the 
world giving graciously from her richer nature 
to the poorer endowed folk she meets on her 
way. 

Often since that night I have rounded my 
arm and bowed down my face, and fancied I 
had a little human elf cuddled to my breast. 

I am very busy just now getting everything 
ready ; I had so much to buy. I don't like 
confessing it even to myself, but down in the 
bottom of my deepest trunk I have laid a parcel 
of things, — such pretty, tiny things. I saw 
them at a sale ; I could n't resist them, they 
were so cheap. Even if one does n't want the 
things, it seems a sin to let them go. Besides, 
there may be some poor woman out in Cincinnati. I wrote to Hans Jorgen, you know, back 
in spring, and — Du storer Gud ! there is 
Hans Jorgen coming across the street! 

Early-Spring, 1893. 
The book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden, 
and ends — with Revelations. — Oscar Wilde. 

Yes, most fellows' book of life may be said to 
begin at the chapter where woman comes in: 
mine did. She came in years ago, when I was 
a raw undergraduate. With the sober thought 
of retrospective analysis, I may say she was 
not all my fancy painted her ; indeed, now that 
I come to think of it, there was no fancy about 
the vermeil of her cheeks, rather an artificial 
reality. She had her bower in the bar of the 
Golden Boar, and I was madly in love with 
her, seriously intent on lawful wedlock. Luckily 
for me she threw me over for a neighboring 
pork butcher; but at the time I took it hardly, 
and it made me sex shy. I was a very poor 
man in those days : one feels one's griefs more 
keenly then ; one has n't the wherewithal to 
buy distraction. Besides, ladies snubbed me 
rather on the rare occasions I met them. Later 
I fell in for a legacy, the forerunner of several ; 
indeed, I may say I am beastly rich. My tastes 
are simple too, and I have n't any poor relations : 
I believe they are of great assistance in getting 
rid of superfluous capital; wish I had some! 

It was after the legacy that women discovered 
my attractions. They found that there was 
something superb in my plainness (before they 
said ugliness), something after the style of the 
late Victor Emanuel, something infinitely more 
striking than mere ordinary beauty. At least 
so Harding told me his sister said, and she had 
the reputation of being a clever girl. Being an 
only child I never had the opportunity other 
fellows had of studying the undress side of 
women through familiar intercourse, say with 
sisters. Their most ordinary belongings were 
sacred to me. I had, I used to be told, ridiculous, high-flown notions about them (by the 
way I modified those considerably on closer 
acquaintance) : I ought to study them ; nothing 
like a woman for developing a fellow. So I 
laid in a stock of books in different languages, 
mostly novels, in which woman played titleroles, in order to get up some definite data 
before venturing among them. I can't say I 
derived much benefit from this course. There 
seemed to be as great a diversity of opinion 
about the female species as, let us say, about 
the salmonidae. My friend Ponsonby Smith, 
who is one of the oldest fly-fishers in the three 
kingdoms, said to me once : — 

'' Take my word for it, there are only four 
true salmo, — the salar, the trutta, the fario, 
the ferox; all the rest are just varieties, subgenuses of the above, — stick to that. Some 
writing fellow divided all the women into gooduns and bad-uns ; but as a conscientious stickler 
for truth, I must say that both in trout as in 
women I have found myself faced with most 
puzzling varieties, that were a tantalizing blending of several qualities." 

I then resolved to study them on my own 
account. I pursued the Eternal Feminine in a 
spirit of purely scientific investigation. I knew 
you 'd laugh sceptically at that, but it 's a fact. 
I was impartial in my selection of subjects for 
observation, — French, German, Spanish, as well 
as the home product. Nothing in petticoats escaped me. I devoted myself to the freshest 
ingenue as well as the experienced widow of 
three departed; and I may as well confess 
that the more I saw of her the less I understood her. But I think they understood me. 
They refused to take me ati serieux. When 
they were n't fleecing me, they were interested 
in the state of my soul (I preferred the former) ; 
but all humbugged me equally, so I gave them 
up. I took to rod and gun instead, /r^ salute 
animcB ; it's decidedly safer. I have scoured 
every country in the globe; indeed, I can say 
that I have shot and fished in woods and 
waters where no other white man, perhaps, 
ever dropped a beast or played a fish before. 
There is no life like the life of a free wanderer, 
and no lore like the lore one gleans in the 
great book of Nature; but one must have 
freed one's spirit from the taint of the town 
before one can even read the alphabet of its 
mystic meaning. 

What has this to do with the glove? True, 
not much ; and yet it has a connection — it 
accounts for me. 

Well, for twelve years I have followed the 
impulses of the wandering spirit that dwells 
in me. I have seen the sun rise in Finland, 
and gild the Devil's Knuckles as he sank behind 
the Drachensberg. I have caught the barba 
and the gamer yellow-fish in the Vaal River, 
taken muskelunge and black-bass in Canada, 
thrown a fly over guapote and cavallo in Central 
American lakes, and choked the monster eels 
of the Mauritius with a cunningly faked-up 
duckling. But I have been shy as a chub at 
the shadow of a woman. 

Well, it happened last year I came back 
on business, — another confounded legacy; end 
of June too, just as I was off to Finland. But 
Messrs. Thimble and Rigg, the highly respectable firm who look after my affairs, represented 
that I owed it to others, whom I kept out 
of their share of the legacy, to stay near town 
till affairs were wound up. They told me, 
with a view to reconcile me perhaps, of a trout 
stream with a decent inn near it, — an^ unknown 
stream in Kent. It seems a junior member 
of the firm is an angler; at least he sometimes 
catches pike or perch in the Medway, some 
way from the stream where the trout rise in 
audacious security from artificial lures. I 
stipulated for a clerk to come down with any 
papers to be signed, and started at once for 
Victoria. I decline to tell the name of my 
find, firstly because the trout are the gamest 
little fish that ever rose to fly, and run to a 
good two pounds ; secondly, I have paid for 
all the rooms in the inn for the next year, 
and I want it to myself. The glove is lying 
on the table next me as I write. If it is n't in 
my breast-pocket or under my pillow, it is 
some place where I can see it. It has a delicate 
gray body (Suede, I think they call it), with 
a whipping of silver round the top and a 
darker gray-silk tag to fasten it. It is marked 
inside, and has a delicious scent about it, — 
to keep off moths, I suppose; naphthaline is 
better. It reminds me of a ** silver-sedge " 
tied on a ten hook. 

I startled the good landlady of the little inn 
(there is no village, fortunately) when I arrived, 
with the only porter of the tiny station, laden 
with traps. She hesitated about a private sittingroom ; but eventually we compromised matters, 
as I was willing to share it with the other visitor. 
I got into knickerbockers at once, collared a 
boy to get me worms and minnow for the 
morrow; and as I felt too lazy to unpack 
tackle, I just sat in the shiny arm-chair (made 
comfortable by the successive sitting of former 
occupants) at the open window, and looked 
out. The river (not the trout stream) winds 
to the right, and the trees cast trembling 
shadows into its clear depths; the red tiles 
of a farm roof show between the beeches, and 
break the monotony of blue sky background. 
A dusty wagoner is slaking his thirst with 
a tankard of ale. I am conscious of the strange 
lonely feeling that a visit to England always 
gives me. Away in strange lands, even in 
solitary places, one does n't feel it somehow, — 
one is filled with the hunter's lust, bent on 
a "kill;'* but at home in the quiet country, 
with the smoke curling up from some fireside, 
the mowers busy laying the hay in swaths, 
the children tumbling under the trees in the 
orchards, and a girl singing as she spreads 
the clothes on the sweetbrier hedge, — amid 
a scene quick with home sights and sounds, 
a strange lack creeps in and makes itself felt 
in a dull, aching way. Oddly enough, too, I 
had a sense of uneasiness, a ** something going 
to happen." I had often experienced it when 
out alone in a great forest, or on an unknown 
lake ; and it always meant '* ware danger " of 
some kind. But why should I feel it here? 
Yet I did, and I could n't shake it off. I took 
to examining the room. It was a common-place 
one of the usual type. But there was a workbasket on the table, a dainty thing, lined with 
blue satin. There was a bit of lace stretched 
over shiny blue linen, with the needle sticking 
in it, — such fairy work, like cobwebs seen from 
below, spun from a branch against a background 
of sky. A gold thimble too, with initials, — not 
the landlady's, I know. What pretty things, 
too, in the basket ! — a pair of scissors, a capital 
shape for fly-making ; a little file, and some floss 
silk and tinsel, the identical color I want for a 
new fly I have in my head, one that will be a demon to kill, — the *' northern devil" I mean to 
call him. Some one looks in behind me, and a 
light step passes upstairs. I drop the basket, I 
don't know why. There are some reviews near 
it. I take up one, and am soon buried in an 
article on Tasmanian fauna. It is strange, but 
whenever I do know anything about a subject, I 
always find these writing fellows either entirely 
ignorant or damned wrong. 

After supper, I took a stroll to see the river. 
It was a silver-gray evening, with just the last 
lemon and pink streaks of the sunset staining 
the sky. There had been a shower, and someway the smell of the dust after rain mingled 
with the mignonette in the garden brought 
back vanished scenes of small-boyhood, when 
I caught minnows in a bottle, and dreamt of 
a shilling rod as happiness unattainable. I 
turned aside from the road in accordance with 
directions, and walked toward the stream. 
Holloa ! some one before me, — what a bore ! 
The angler is hidden by an elder-bush, but I 
can see the fly drop delicately, artistically, on 
the water. Fishing up the stream, too ! There is 
a bit of broken water there, and the midges 
dance in myriads; a silver gleam, and the line 
spins out, and the fly falls just in the right place. 
It is growing dusk, but the fellow is an adept at 
quick, fine casting. I wonder what fly he has 
on, why he 's going to try down stream now ! I 
hurry forward, and as I near him I swerve to 
the left out of the way. S-s-s-s ! a sudden sting 
in the lobe of my ear. '' Hey ! " I cry, as I 
find I am caught ; the tail-fly is fast in it. A 
slight, gray-clad woman holding the rod lays it 
carefully down and comes toward me through 
the gathering dusk. My first impulse is to 
snap the gut and take to my heels; but I am 
held by something less tangible but far more 
powerful than the grip of the Limerick hook in 
my ear. 

*' I am very sorry ! " she says in a voice that 
matched the evening, it was so quiet and soft; 
'' but it was exceedingly stupid of you to come 
behind like that." 

" I did n't think you threw such a long line; 
I thought I was safe,'* I stammered. 

** Hold this ! " she says, giving me a diminutive fly-book, out of which she has taken a pair 
of scissors. I obey meekly. She snips the gut. 

** Have you a sharp knife? If I strip the hook 
you can push it through; it is lucky it isn't in 
the cartilage." 

I suppose I am an awful idiot, but I only 
handed her the knife, and she proceeded as 
calmly as if stripping a hook in a man's ear 
were an every-day occurrence. Her gown is of 
some soft gray stuff, and her gray-leather belt 
is silver clasped. Her hands are soft and cool 
and steady, but there is a rarely disturbing 
thrill in their gentle touch. The thought flashed 
through my mind that I had just missed that — 
a woman's voluntary tender touch, not a paid 
caress — all my life. 

*' Now you can push it through yourself; I 
hope it won't hurt much." 

Taking the hook, I push it through, and a 
drop of blood follows it. ^' Oh ! " she cries, 
but I assure her it is nothing, and stick the 
hook surreptitiously in my coat sleeve. Then 
we both laugh, and I look at her for the first 
time. She has a very white forehead, with 
little tendrils of hair blowing round it under 
her gray cap ; her eyes are gray (I did n't see 
that then, — I only saw they were steady, 
smiling eyes, that matched her mouth). Such 
a mouth ! the most maddening mouth a man 
ever longed to kiss, above a too pointed chin, 
soft as a child's; indeed, the whole face looks 
soft in the misty light. 

" I am sorry I spoilt your sport ! " I say. 

" Oh, that don't matter, it 's time to stop. I 
got two brace, one a beauty." 

She is winding in her line, and I look in her 
basket; they are beauties, one two-pounder, 
the rest running from a half to a pound. 

'' What fly } " 

'' Yellow dun took that one; but your assail- 
ant was a partridge spider." 

I sling her basket over my shoulder; she 
takes it as a matter of course, and we retrace 
our steps. I feel curiously happy as we walk 
toward the road ; there is a novel delight in 
her nearness. The feel of woman work^ subtilely 
and strangely in me; the rustle of her skirt as 
it brushes the black-heads in the meadow-grass, 
and the delicate perfume, partly violets, partly 
herself, that comes to me with each of her 
movements, is a rare pleasure. I am hardly 
surprised when she turns into the garden of 
the inn ; I think I knew from the first that she 
would. 

*' Better bathe that ear of yours, and put a 
few drops of carbolic in the water." She takes 
the basket as she says it, and goes into the 
kitchen. 

I hurry over this, and go into the little sittingroom. There is a tray, with a glass of milk 
and some oaten cakes, upon the table. I am 
too disturbed to sit down ; I stand at the window and watch the bats flitter in the gathering 
moonlight, and Hsten with quivering nerves for 
her step ; perhaps she will send for the tray, 
and not come after all. What a fool I am to 
be disturbed by a gray-clad witch with a tantalizing mouth ! That comes of loafing about 
doing nothing. I mentally darn the old fool 
who saved her money instead of spending it. 

Why the devil should I be bothered? I don't 
want it anyhow. She comes in as I fume, and 
I forget everything at her entrance. I push 
the arm-chair toward the table, and she sinks 
quietly into it, pulling the tray nearer. She 
has a wedding ring on ; but somehow it never 
strikes me to wonder if she is married or a 
widow, or who she may be. I am content to 
watch her break her biscuit : she has the prettiest hands, and a trick of separating her last 
fingers when she takes hold of anything : they 
remind me of white orchids I saw somewhere. 
She led me to talk, — about Africa, I think. I 
liked to watch her eyes glow deeply in the 
shadow and then catch light as she bent forward to say something in her quick responsive 
way. 

"Long ago when I was a girl," she said 
once. 

*'Long ago? "I echo incredulously, — "not 
surely?" 

" Ah, but yes ; you have n't seen me in the 
daylight," with a soft little laugh. " Do you 
know what the gypsies say? 'Never judge a 
woman or a ribbon by candle-light' They 
might have said moonlight equally well." 

She rises as she speaks, and I feel an over- 
powering wish to have her put out her hand. 
But she does not; she only takes the work- 
basket and a book, and says *' good-night " with 
an inclination of her little head. 

I go over and stand next her chair ; I don't 
like to sit in it, but I like to put my hand where 
her head leant, and fancy, if she were there, 
how she would look up. 

I woke next morning with a curious sense of 
pleasurable excitement; I whistled from very 
lightness of heart as I dressed. When I got 
down I found the landlady clearing away her 
breakfast things; I felt disappointed, and resolved to be down earlier in future. I did n't 
feel inclined to try the minnow ; I put them in 
a tub in the yard, and tried to read and listen 
for her step. I dined alone ; the day dragged 
terribly. I did not like to ask about her ; I 
had a notion she might not like it. I spent the 
evening on the river; I might have filled a 
good basket, but I let the beggars rest: after 
all, I had caught fish enough to stock all the 
rivers in Great Britain ; there are other things 
than trout in the world. I sit and smoke a pipe 
where she caught me last night. If I half close 
my eyes I can see hers, and her mouth in the 
smoke : that is one of the curious charms of 
baccy, — it helps to reproduce brain pictures. 
After a bit, I think perhaps she has left. I get 
quite feverish at the thought, and hasten back. 
I must ask. I look up at the window as I pass ; 
there is surely a gleam of white. I throw down 
my traps and hasten up. She is leaning with 
her arms on the window-ledge, staring out into 
the gloom. I could swear I caught a suppressed sob as I entered. I cough, and she 
turns quickly and bows slightly. A bonnet and 
gloves and lace affair and a lot of papers are 
lying on the table. I am awfully afraid she 
is going. I say, — 

** Please don't let me drive you away, it is so 
early yet. I half expected to see you on the 
river." 

** Nothing so pleasant. I have been up in 
town [the tears have certainly got into her 
voice] all day ; it was so hot and dusty. I am 
tired out." 

The little servant brings in the lamp and a 
tray, with a bottle of lemonade. ** Mistress 
hasn't any lemons, 'm; will this do?" 

** Yes," she says wearily, she is shading her 
eyes with her hand ; ** anything, I am fearfully 
thirsty." 

*' Let me concoct you a drink instead. I have 
lemons and ice and things; my man sent me 
down supplies to-day ; I leave him in town. I 
am rather a dab at drinks ; learnt it from the 
Yankees : about the only thing I did learn from 
them I care to remember. Susan ! " 

The little maid helps me to get the materials, 
and she watches me quietly. When I give it to 
her she takes it with a smile (she has been crying) that is an ample thank-you. She looks 
quite old ; something more than tiredness called 
up those lines in her face. 

Well, ten days passed. Sometimes we met at 
breakfast, sometimes at supper ; sometimes we 
fished together, or sat in the straggling orchard 
and talked ; she neither avoided me nor sought 
me. She is the most charming mixture of 
child and woman I ever met ; she is a dual 
creature. Now, I never met that in a man. 
When she is here, without getting a letter in 
the morning or going to town, she seems like a 
girl ; she runs about in her gray gown and little 
cap, and laughs, and seems to throw off all 
thought like an irresponsible child ; she is eager 
to fish, or pick cherries and eat them daintily, 
or sit under the trees and talk. But when 
she goes to town (I notice she always goes when 
she gets a lawyer's letter ; there is no mistaking the envelope) she comes home tired and 
haggard-looking, an old woman of thirty-five. 
I wonder why. It takes her, even with her 
elasticity of temperament, nearly a day to get 
young again. I hate her to go to town ; it is 
extraordinary how I miss her ! I can't recall, 
when she is absent, her saying anything very 
wonderful ; but she converses all the time. She 
has a gracious way of filling the place with her- 
self; there is an entertaining quality in her very 
presence. We had one rainy afternoon ; she 
tied me some flies (I shan't use any of them). I 
watched the lights in her hair as she moved, — 
it is quite golden in some places ; and she has a 
tiny mole near her left ear, and another on her 
left wrist. On the eleventh day she got a letter ; 
but she did n't go to town, she stayed up in 
her room all day. Twenty times I felt inclined 
to send her a line, but I had no excuse. I 
heard the landlady say as I passed the kitchen 
window, "Poor dear! I'm sorry to lose her!'' 

Lose her? I should think not. It has come to 
this 'with me, that I don't care to face any- 
future without her ; and yet I know nothing 
about her, not even if she is a free woman. I 
shall find that out the next time I see her. In 
the evening I catch a glimpse of her gown in 
the orchard, and I follow her. We sit down 
near the river. Her left hand is lying gloveless 
next me in the grass. 

*' Do you think from what you have seen of 
me that I would ask a question out of any mere 
impertinent curiosity?" 

She starts. '^ No, I do not!" 

I take up her hand and touch the ring. " Tell 
me, does this bind you to any one?" 

I am conscious of a buzzing in my ears and 
a dancing blur of water and sky and trees, as 
I wait — it seems to me an hour — for her reply. 
I felt the same sensation once before, when I got 
drawn into some rapids and had an awfully 
narrow shave ; but of that another time. 

The voice is shaking. ** I am not legally 
bound to any one, at least; but why do you 
ask? " She looks me square in the face as she 
speaks, with a touch of haughtiness I never saw 
in her before. 

Perhaps the great reHef I feel, the sense of 
joy at knowing she is free, speaks out of my 
face ; for hers flushes and she drops her eyes, 
her lips tremble. I don't look at her again, but 
I can see her all the same. After a while she 
says, — 

'' I half intended to tell you something about 
myself this evening, now I must. Let us go 
in ; I shall come down to the sitting-room after 
your supper.*' 

She takes a long look at the river and the inn, 
as if fixing the place in her memory ; it strikes 
me with a chill that there is a good-by in her 
gaze. Her eyes rest on me a moment as they 
come back; there is a sad look in their gray 
clearness. She swings her little gray gloves 
in her hand as we walk back. I can hear 
her walking up and down overhead; how 
tired she will be, and how slowly the time 
goes ! I am standing at one side of the window when she enters ; she stands at the other, 
leaning her head against the shutter, with her 
hands clasped before her. I can hear my own 
heart beating, and I fancy hers, through the 
stillness; the suspense is fearful. At length 
she says, — 
** You have been a long time out of England, 
you don't read the papers? " 

** No." A pause ; I believe my heart is beat- 
ing inside my head. 

'' You asked me if I was a free woman. I 
don't pretend to misunderstand why you asked 
me. I am not a beautiful woman, I never was ; 
but there must be something about me — there 
is in some women, * essential femininity ' per- 
haps — that appeals to all men. What I read 
in your eyes I have seen in many men's before ; 
but before God I never tried to rouse it. To- 
day [with a sob] I can say I am free ; yesterday 
morning I could not. Yesterday my husband 
gained his case, and divorced me ! " * 

She closes her eyes and draws in her under-lip 
to stop its quivering. I want to take her in 
my arms but I am afraid to. 

" I did not ask you any more than if you 
were free ! " 

'' No ; but I am afraid you don't quite take 
in the meaning. I did not divorce my husband, 
he divorced me; he got a decree nisi. Do you 
understand now? [She is speaking with difficulty.] Do you know what that implies? " 

I can't stand her face any longer. I take her 
hands, they are icy cold, and hold them 
tightly. 

** Yes, I know what it implies ; that is, I know 
the legal and social conclusion to be drawn 
from it, if that is what you mean. But I never 
asked you for that information. I have nothing 
to do with your past; you did not exist for me 
before the day we met on the river. I take 
you from that day, and I ask you to marry 
me.'* 

I feel her tremble, and her hands get suddenly 
warm. She turns her head and looks at me 
long and searchingly; then she says, — 

" Sit down, I want to say something ! ** 

I obey, and she comes and stands next the 
chair. I can't help it, I reach up my arm ; but 
she puts it gently down. 

" No, you must listen without touching me. 
I shall go back to the window. I don't want to 
influence you a bit by any personal magnetism 
I possess ; I want you to listen. I have told 
you he divorced me. The co-respondent was 
an old friend, a friend of my childhood, of my 
girlhood. He died just after the first application was made, luckily for me ; he would have 
considered my honor before my happiness. / 
did not defend the case ; it was n't likely — ah, 
if you knew all ! He proved his case ; given 
clever counsel, willing witnesses to whom you 
make it worth while, and no defence, divorce is 
always attainable even in England. But remember, I figure as an adulteress in every 
English-speaking paper. If you buy last week's 
evening papers — do you remember the day I 
was in town? " I nod. '^ You will see a sketch 
of me in that day's ; some one, perhaps he, must 
have given it ; it was from an old photograph. 
I bought one at Victoria as I came out; it is 
funny [with an hysterical laugh] to buy a 
caricature of one's own poor face at a news- 
stall. Yet in spite of that I have felt glad. 
The point for you is that I made no defence to 
the world ; and [with a lifting of her head] I 
will make no apology, no explanation, no denial 
to you, now nor ever. I am very desolate, and 
your attention came very warm to me ; but I 
don't love you. Perhaps I could learn to [with 
a rush of color] for what you have said tonight; and it is because of that I tell you to 
weigh what this means. Later, when your care 
for me will grow into habit, you may chafe at 
my past ; it is 'from that I would save you." 

I hold out my hands, and she comes and 
puts them aside, and takes me by the beard 
and turns up my face and scans it earnestly. 
She must have been deceived a good deal. I 
let her do as she pleases; it is the wisest way 
with women, and it is good to have her touch 
me in that way. She seems satisfied. She 
stands leaning against the arm of the chair 
and says, — 

** I must learn first to think of myself as 
a free woman again ; it almost seems wrong 
to-day to talk like this. Can you understand 
that feeling?" 

I nod assent. 

** Next time I must be sure, and you must be 
sure," she lays her fingers on my mouth as I 
am about to protest, " S-sh ! You shall have a 
year to think; if you repeat then what you 
have said to-day, I shall give you your answer. 
You must not try to find me ; I have money. 
If I am living I will come here to you ; if I am 
dead you will be told of it. In the year between I shall look upon myself as belonging to 
you, and fender an account if you wish of every 
hour. You will not be influenced by me in 
any way, and you will be able to reason it 
out calmly. If you think better of it, don't 
come." 

I feel there would be no use trying to move 
her; I simply kiss her hands and say, — 

'' As you will, dear woman ; I shall be here." 

We don't say any more ; she sits down on a 
footstool with her head against my knee, and I 
just smooth it. When the clocks strike ten 
through the house, she rises, and I stand up. 
I see that she has been crying quietly, — poor, 
lonely, little soul ! I lift her off her feet and 
kiss her, and stammer out my sorrow at losing 
her, and she is gone. 

Next morning the little maid brought me an 
envelope from the lady who left by the first 
train. It held a little gray glove. That is why 
I carry it always, and why I haunt the inn and 
never leave it for longer than a week ; why I 
sit and dream in the old chair that has a ghost 
of her presence always, dream of the spring 
to come with the May-fly on the wing, and the 
young summer when midges dance, and the 
trout are growing fastidious ; when she will 
come to me across the meadow grass, through 
the silver haze, as she did before, — come 
with her gray eyes shining to exchange herself 
for her little gray glove. 

It was a simple, pretty little frame, such as you 
may buy at any sale cheaply; its ribbed wood, 
aspinalled white, with an inner frame of pale- 
blue plush ; its one noticeable feature that it 
was empty. And yet it stood on the middle of 
the bedroom mantelboard. 

It was not a luxurious room ; none of the 
furniture matched. It was a typical boardinghouse bedroom. 

Any one preserving the child habit of endowing inanimate objects with human attributes 
might fancy that the flickering flames of the 
fire took a pleasure in bringing into relief the 
bright bits in its dinginess ; for they played 
over the silver-backed brushes and the cut-glass 
perfume bottles on the dressing-table, flicked 
the bright beads on the toes of coquettish small 
shoes and the steel clasps of a travelling bag 
in the corner, imparting a casual air of comfort 
such as the touch of certain dainty women 
lends to a common room. 

A woman enters, — a woman wondrously soft 
and swift in all her movements. She seems to 
reach a place without your seeing how ; no 
motion of elbow or knee betrays her. Her 
fingers glide swiftly down the buttons of her 
gown ; in a second she has freed herself from 
its ensheathing; garment after garment falls 
from her, until she stands almost free. She 
gets into nightdress and loose woollen dressing-gown, and slips her naked feet into fur-lined 
slippers, with a movement that is somehow the 
expression of an intense nervous relief from a 
thrall. Everything she does is done so swiftly 
that you see the result rather than the working 
out of each action. 

She sinks into a chair before the fire, and 
clasping her hands behind her head, peers into 
the glowing embers. The firelight, lower than 
her face, touches it cruelly ; picks out and accentuates as remorselessly as a rival woman the 
autographs past emotions have traced on its 
surface ; deepens the hollows of her delicate 
thoughtful temples and the double furrow between her clever irregular eyebrows. Her face 
is more characteristic than beautiful. Nine 
men would pass it, the tenth sell his immortal 
soul for it. The chin is strong, the curve of 
jaw determined ; there is a httle full place under 
the chin's sharp point. The eyes tell you little ; 
they are keen and inquiring, and probe others' 
thoughts rather than reveal their own. The 
whole face is one of pecuHar strength and selfreliance. The mouth is its contradiction ; the 
passionate curve of the upper lip with its mobile 
corners, and the tender little under lip that 
shelters timidly under it, are encouraging 
promises against its strength. 

The paleness of some strong feeling tinges 
her face ; a slight trembling runs through her 
frame. Her inner soul-struggle is acting as a 
strong developing fluid upon a highly sensitized 
plate; anger, scorn, pity, contempt chase one 
another like shadows across her face. Her eyes 
rest upon the empty frame, and the plain 
white space becomes alive to her. Her mind's 
eye fills it with a picture it once held in its 
dainty embrace, — a rare head among the rarest 
heads of men, with its crest of hair tossed back 
from the great brow, its proud poise and the 
impress of grand, confident, compelling genius 
that reveals itself, one scarce knows how; with 
the brute possibility of an untamed, natural man 
lurking about the mouth and powerful throat. 
She feels the subduing smile of eyes that never 
failed to make her weak as a child under their 
gaze, and tame as a hungry bird. She stretches 
out her hands with a pitiful little movement, and 
then, remembering, lets them drop, and locks 
them until the knuckles stand out whitely. She 
shuts her eyes, and one tear after the other 
starts from beneath her lids, trickles down her 
cheeks, and drops with a splash into her lap. 
She does not sob, only cries quietly ; and she 
sees, as if she held the letter in her hand, the 
words that decided her fate : — 

" You love me ; I know it, you other half of me. You 
want me to complete your life, as I you, you good, 
sweet woman ; you slight, weak thing, with your strong 
will and your grand, great heart ; you witch, with a soul 
of clean white fire. I kiss your hands, — such little 
hands ! I never saw the like ; slim child-hands, with a 
touch as cool and as soft as a snow-flake ! You dear 
one, come to me ; I want you, now, always. Be with 
me, work with me, share with me, live with me, 
my equal as a creature ; above me, as my queen of 
women ! I love you, I worship you ; but you know 
my views. I cannot, I will not bind myself to you by 
any legal or religious tie. I must be free and unfettered to follow that which I believe right for me. If 
you come to me in all trust, I can and will give myself 
to you in all good faith, — yours as much as you will, 
forever ! I will kneel to you ; why should I always 
desire to kneel to you ? It is not that I stand in awe 
of you, or that I ever feel a need to kneel at all ; but 
always to you, and to you alone. Come ! I will 
crouch at your feet and swear myself to you ! '^ 

And she had replied ** No ! " and in her loneliness of spirit married him who seemed to need 
her most out of those who admired her. 

The door opens, and he comes in. He looks 
inquiringly at her, touches her hair half hesitatingly, and then stands with his hands thrust in 
his pockets and gnaws his mustache. 

** Are you angry, little woman? '* 

'' No," very quietly ; '' why should I be? " 

She closes her eyes again, and after five 
minutes* silence he begins to undress. He does 
it very slowly, looking perplexedly at her. When 
he has finished, he stands with his back to the 
fire, an unlovely object in sleeping suit. 

** Would you like to read her letter ? '* 

She shakes her head. 

'^ I suppose I ought to have sent her back her 
letters before, you know. She had n't heard I 
was married." 

"Yes," she interjects, "it would have been 
better to start with a clean bill ; but why talk 
about it?" 

He looks at her awhile, then gets into bed 
and watches her from behind the pages of the 
" Field." It seems unusually quiet. His watch 
that he has left in his waistcoat pocket, thrown 
across the back of a chair, seems to fill the 
whole room with a nervous tick. 

He tosses the paper on to the floor. She 
looks up as it falls, rises, turns off the gas-jet, 
sinks back into her old position, and stares into 
the fire. He gets up, goes over, and kneels 
down next her. 

" I am awfully sorry you are put out, old girl. 
I saw you were when I answered you like that ; 
but I could n't help feeling a bit cut up, you 
know. She wrote such an awfully nice letter, 
you know, w^ished — " 

" You all sorts of happiness," with a snap, 
"and hopes you'll meet in a better world? " 

He rises to his feet and stares at her in 
dumb amazement. How could she know? 
She smiles with a touch of malicious satisfaction, as she sees the effect of her chance shot. 

" It 's a pity, is n't it, that you both have to 
wait so long?" 

He imagines he sees light, and blunders 
ahead Hke an honest man. 

** I would n't have sent those things back now 
if I had thought you cared. By Jove, it never 
entered my head that you 'd be jealous ! '* 

"Jealous?" She is on her feet like a red 
white flash. ''I, jealous of her?" Each word 
is emphasized. ** I couldn't be jealous of her, 
Nur die Diimmen sind bescheiden ! Why, the 
girl is n't fit to tie my shoe-strings ! " 

This is too much ; he feels he must protest. 

** You don't know her," feebly. " She is an 
awfully nice girl ! " 

*VNice girl!" I don't doubt it; and she will 
be an awfully nice woman, and under each 
and every circumstance of life she will behave 
like an awfully nice person. Jealous ! Do you 
think I cried because I was jealous? Good 
God, no ! I cried because I was sorry, fearfully sorry, for myself. She " — with a fine thin 
contempt — " would have suited you better than 
I. Jealous ! no, only sorry. Sorry because 
any nice average girl of her type, who would 
model her frocks out of the * Lady's Pictorial,' 
gush over that dear Mr. Irving, paint milkingstools, try poker-work, or any other fashionable fad, would have done you just as well. 
And I " — with a catch of voice — '* with a great 
man might have made a great woman ; and now 
those who know and understand me [bitterly] 
think of me as a great failure." 

She finishes wearily ; the fire dies out of 
eyes and voice. She adds half aloud, as if to 
herself, — 

*^ I don't think I quite realized this until I 
saw how you took that letter. I was watching 
your face as you read it ; and the fact that you 
could put her on the same level, that if it had 
not been for a mistake she would have suited 
you as well, made me realize, don't you see? 
that I would have done some one else better! " 

He is looking at her in utter bewilderment, 
and she smiles as she notes his expression ; she 
touches his cheek gently, and leans her head 
against his arm. 

"There it's all right, boy! Don't mind me. 
I have a bit of a complex nature; you couldn't 
understand me if you tried to, and better not 
try ! " " 

She has slipped, while speaking, her warm 
bare foot out of her slipper, and is rubbing it 
gently over his chilled ones. 

*' You are cold, better go back to bed ; I shall 
go too ! " 

She stands a moment quietly as he turns to 
obey, and then takes the frame, and kneeling 
down puts it gently into the hollowed red heart 
of the fire. It crackles crisply, and little 
tongues of flame shoot up; and she gets into 
bed by their light. 

When the fire has burnt out, and he is sleeping like a child with his curly head on her 
breast, she falls asleep too, and dreams that she 
is sitting on a fiery globe rolling away into space ; 
that her head is wedged in a huge frame, the 
top of her head touches its top, the sides its 
sides, and it keeps growing larger and larger, 
and her head with it, until she seems to be 
sitting inside her own head, and the inside is 
one vast hollow. 

There has been a mighty storm; it has been 
raging for two days, — a storm in which the 
demon of drink has reigned like a sinister god 
in the big white house, and the frightened 
women have cowered away, driven before the 
hot blast of the breath upon which curses 
danced, and the blaze of ire in the lurid eyes of 
the master. Only the pale little mistress has 
stood unmoved through the whirlwind of his 
passion. Who knows? Maybe that roused 
him to higher, madder paroxysms of impotent 
rage; for he abuses her most when he loves 
her most, — a way man has, he being a creature 
of higher understanding. 

All yesterday the bells jangled, until one by 
one a violent jerk snapped the connecting wire, 
and hurled them with a last echoing crash on 
the hall floor. The serving-men kept out of it, 
as men do. The horses cowered to the sides of 
their boxes, and set their hind legs hard, and 
pointed their ears when they heard his hahing 
step. The great hounds shrank shiveringly 
into their boxes, and refused to come forth at 
his threatening call ; and when he lashed their 
houses in his rage they winced at each blow, 
and showed their fangs when he turned away. 

Night brought little rest, for lamps and candles were lit in every room. Champagne re- 
placed brandy ; then brandy, champagne ; and 
then both mingled in one glass. And in measure as the liquid fire was tossed down the poor 
parched throat, the brain grew clearer ; the 
intellect, with its Rabelaisque fertility of diseased imagining, keener ; the sting the tongue 
carried more adder-like, and the ingenuity of 
its blasphemies more devilish. The tired women 
crept to bed at midnight, to start in their sleep 
at the hoot of every night-owl, the flitter of 
every bat, and the whistle of every passing 
steamer, — all save the little mistress of the 
great house, with its stores of linen and silver, 
its flower-filled garden, its farmyard with lowing 
sleek kine, its meadows in prime heart heavy 
with the sweetness of red clover, its line of 
brown nets pegged down to catch the incoming 
eager salmon at the mouth of the fjord, and the 
wood with its peaceful nooks of cool green and 
its winding paths, with their brown carpet of 
last year's pine-needles and fir-cones. She sits 
wearily in her low chair, with her thin hands 
clasped on her sharp knees and her shawl 
drawn round her shoulders, for in spite of the 
fire the first hour of the morning sends its chill 
breath into the room. He is lying on the sofa 
talking to himself, emphasizing his words with 
his heavy stick. A table with decanters and 
glasses stands next him. 

" Women ! ay, women ! man's curse. At the 
end of the race they beat us always. We get 
one soft spot with our mother's milk, and well 
they know it, well they know it. What a man 
I would have been [a rising growl] if it had n't 
been for women ! Do you hear, you white- 
faced spawn? Yes, I mean it. God! when I 
look back — But [chuckling] I paid them out, 
the brutes ! " 

And curse follows curse, and worse than that; 
as from the lips of the stepdaughter in the fairy 
tale, the words that drop from his lips are the 
toads and vipers of filth. 

" If one could forget ! There was one, one 
long ago, — I might have spared her ; she 
pleaded hard against me. Why do I think of 
her to-night? It is years, years ago. Ah, but 
I was big and beautiful in those days ! She, 
she was an innocent little thing. I fascinated 
her like a snake, and I can see her eyes. They 
were blue, with long lashes. I can see them noWy 
curse them ! She and the child, gibbering idiots 
both! Oh [groan], curses on you for a devil, 
to plague me thus ! Keep away ! I say, keep 
away ! How the ghosts dance about the room ! 
There is another one I had forgotten. Light 
more candles, more ! [a shriek] more ! I say, 
all round the room ! make a damn wake of it ! " 

Mutter, mutter, — a sourdine epic of Hades. 
She closes her eyes. The stick whirls past her, 
striking a vase off a table near her ; she gets 
up, hands it to him without a word. He hiccoughs and laughs ; and then he heaves one 
sob, and cries bitterly, with the great tears 
gushing forth in jets. She picks up his hand- 
kerchief and puts it into his hand, and he looks 
at her with a piteous softening of his wild eyes ; 
and he says quietly, hiccoughing all the while 
like a child tired after a fit of passion, — for 
man in all his passions has a little of the inconsequent child ; it is only woman who si'ns with 
clear seeing, — 

** I am a brute, I know it; but you don't 
know what it is to see the ghosts of sins stirring 
in a man's soul like maggots in a dead rat. 
And the children, that is the worst of all. Oh, 
God ! my poor little girls ! What will become 
of them? Oh, oh!" 

" But you settled for them ! " soothing with 
her weary voice. " But you settled for them 
all right!" 

"Oh, yes, the money 's all right; oh. Lord, 
yes ! I settled, I settled," with the reiteration of 
drunken gravity, *^ I settled that. But the 
mother was a brute, a heartless brute ; and she 
was a lady too, ay, in her own right. And she 
never asked a word about them, not one word ; 
it was I, I, poor disreputable brute, that put 
them to nurse, and I loathed her for it. Ah, 
if you women knew^ what a hold simple good- 
ness has on us ! I met her once, I had one at 
each hand ; I used to go to see them. Oh, they 
don't know, they don't know, God forbid ! and 
she lay back in her victoria and looked at us, 
curse her! She has children now, legitimate 
ones, and my little girls don't know I 'm alive. 
Oh, my poor little girls ! They are so pretty ! 
Mind you bury that locket with me; don't open 
it ! Yes, yes, I know ; don't think I don't trust 
you, — only woman I ever trusted in the world. 
But I 'm afraid for them : curse this water in 
my eyes [sob] ; don't you imagine I 'm crying, 
I 'm not ! It 's whiskey, pure, unadulterated 
[hiccough] whiskey; but I can't help thinking 
of them. The others, ay. Lord ! how many 
others ? I don't care about them, I settled for 
them; they weren't ladies ^ they'll get on well 
enough ; but these my pretty little ones, I 'm 
afraid for them, afraid for them ! I, who spared 
no man's daughter, how can I tell if some brute 
won't hurt mine? Oh, God! oh, God! how 
can they be good with such a father and such 
a mother? " 

He drinks as he speaks, and pours out in 
grief and rage a wild torrent of prayers and 
curses. 

'* Ay, verily, it 's reaping the whirlwind ! How 
the faces crowd round ! they always come with 
the gray morning light, — women's faces, girls' 
faces, child-girls' faces — oh, damn you ! hide 
me from them ! hold me tight and keep them 
away ! put your arms right round me ! you are 
clean, a clean little thing, — they can't come 
through you." 

And she holds the throbbing head in her 
arms, and hides the wild eyes in her breast, 
and she feels as if there is a rustle of trailing 
skirts about her, and waving hair and a feel of 
women ; and then he tears himself out of her 
clasp, and she falls, bruising herself sorely ; and 
he throws over the table, with a shatter of 
falling glass, and bounds up the stairs, snatching a riding-whip out of the hall ; and he beats 
its gold head into jagged shreds of glitter on 
the maids' door, and shouts to them to rise and 
come down. He '11 show them he is master in 
his own house ! He has eaten nothing all day, 
— no, nor for many days ! down at once, or 
he '11 know why, and cook, cook his dinner and 
light fires, — yes, fires everywhere ! What does 
he pay them for, lazy sluts ! what does he keep 
house for? 

And so, man, the master mind of creation, 
asserts his authority, and the maids troop down, 
heavy-eyed and stupid with sleep ; and bake 
and roast, and giggle hysterically under their 
breaths, and tell stories of other masters they 
have served, and goings on, and grind fresh 
coffee-beans, and have white bread and lump 
sugar and cold fowl, for there is no one to say 
them nay, and the larders are full of good 
things ; and only the pale little mistress knows 
how near the grand place is drawing to 
bankruptcy. 

Morning came, and the table was decked 
and the dinner served, and taken out again 
untasted ; and another storm simmered all 
through the sunny forenoon, to burst like a 
hurricane over the house at noon. 

The kitchen is empty and the fire has gone 
out; a wreck of crockery shows where the 
storm raged worst. The girls flew before the 
thunder of voice and flash of whip ; the Swedish 
gardener left his birthright of song untouched, 
and followed them : he is skylarking with them 
now up in the great loft; they have pulled up 
the ladder, and are pelting one another with 
last year's hay. The cow-girl, a wench from 
Hittedal, lured the cattle and goats and longlegged heifer calves deeper into the woods 
with her quaint Lokke song, calling, — 

"Come, sweet breath, come cowslip, come rich milk, 
Aa lukelei aa lura, lura, luralai ! " 

Only the housemaid, who is consumptive, and 
who stays for the Httle mistress's sake, her own 
days in the land being numbered, has taken 
her Bible up to the lookout in the wood, and 
laid it open on the stone table. She is crushing 
the Linnae, as she kneels, into a fragrant incense, 
rocking to and fro to the somber rhythm of 
the last book of Ecclesiastes. 

And the master of them all is sitting exhausted in his big chair, and Marie Larsen and 
he are doing battle. She came on the scene 
just as the grand retreat was sounded, and took 
the enemy by stratagem. She lifted the little 
mistress bodily up, and carried her upstairs, 
leaving him, as she puts it, " to ramp like a bull 
of Basan below." She lays her on her bed, 
takes off her shoes, pulls down the blind, and 
pours out some drops out of a little blue bottle 
she carries in her pocket, talking as she might 
to a child : " There, Tulla, take naptha drops, 
very good drops ; you go sleep, good sleep ; 
Marie mind him, Marie not afraid," and with a 
final pat she goes down. He is laughing between his oaths at the stampede of petticoats, 
and he holds out his arms when she comes in. 
She is a little square woman, between fifty 
and sixty, with a ruby button of a nose, hair, 
that oil and age has robbed of its brilliant red, 
drawn smoothly back into a tight screw at the 
back of her broad head. Her eyes are a fishy 
green gray, the left eyelid droops; when she 
thinks you are not looking, a sly elusive gleam 
brightens them, her pursed lips loosen, and if 
you happen to see it, you think that there may 
be something after all in the stories the gossips 
whisper of Marie Larsen. Her dress is exquisitely neat, her apron snowy. No one in 
the district can make such a supreme of fish as 
Marie ; no one can beat her at roasting a capercailzie and serving it with sour cream sauce, or 
brew such caudles and possets for a lying-in, or 
bake such meats for a funeral feast. And what 
if there be an old-time tale of a brat accidentally 
smothered? And what if the Amtmanden 
(superior magistrate), he who had the sickly 
wife, did send Marie to Germany to learn 
cooking? Well, he had money to spare, and 
was always freehanded. And if Nils Pettersen 
did write home and say that he saw her in 
Hamburg at a trade — well, other than cooking, 
sure Nils Pettersen was a bit of a liar anyhow, 
and good cooking covers a multitude of frailties. 

And if her nose was red and her breath smelt of 
cloves, who could say they ever saw her buy a 
bottle of akavit, — and that was more than could 
be said of all the other temperance leaguers. 
She had a nice cottage, with marigolds and 
curly-mint and none-so-prettys nodding down 
the garden paths ; and if you went inside it was 
very respectable, and you could not fail to 
notice the large brass-bound Bible on a crochetsquare on top of the mahogany chest of drawers, 
with a sprig of palm marking the gospel of the 
previous Sunday. And no one answered the 
responses more loudly, or confessed more openly 
at revival times, or quoted Scripture more aptly 
to the confusion of a neighbor than Jomfru 
Marie Larsen. And then she had seen life too, 
and told them round the oven in winter over a 
cup of good coffee "tales that were human," 
just to warn them what risks they might run if 
they should be tempted to stray to the ungodly 
cities of the wicked world outside. 

She stands and smiles at him. "Arcades 
ambo ! Blackguards both ! '* quotes he, pointing to a glass. She pours him out a measure 
and blinks, and fills a wine-glass with raw spirit 
for herself, and clinks glasses and sips like a 
connoisseur; and then she takes out her knitting and sets the needles flying. So they sit 
awhile ; his last grand charge has taxed him, 
but the quiet maddens him. 

" Where 's the Frue? '* he asks, " the Frue? " 

She lays her head sideways on her hand and 
closes her eyes, saying in English: "No can 
have Fruen ; she sick, no can have her; be good, 
Marie tell you a tale." 

She gets up and shuts the doors ; he roars at 
her and tries to rise, but his knees fail him ; he 
sinks back into the chair and begins to swear. 
She knits away, and commences in Norwegian 
a sing-song recitative like the drowsy buzz of a 
fly on a pane. 

" Yesterday we had a bazaar, a bazaar in the 
school-house, — a bazaar for the poor black 
heathens in Africa, for the poor black heathens 
lost in the darkness of unbelief, and ignorant of 
the saving of the Lamb. Oh, it was a blessed 
work ! " 

A savage roar from him ; but she goes on 
unheeding with her narrative: — 

** And there were tables, with lots of things to 
be sold ; and there were tables with refreshments ; 
and there were wreaths and flags upon the walls, 
and godly texts and paper roses, yellow and 
red." 

She draws out each word to spin the yarn 
longer, and he curses her for a Jezebel and 
foams with rage, and she sips her cognac with a 
deeper droop of eyelid and slower click of needle, 
and proceeds with her tale : — 

" And we had hymns, and the kapelan [curate] 
played the harmonium ; and then he held a little 
edifying discourse, and the school children sang, 
and Marie had to hand round refreshments, and 
oh it was a rousing day ! And there was 
Frue ^ Magistrate Holmsen, and Frue Assessor 
Schwartz, and Frue Custom-House Chiefs lady 
and her sister Froken Dase, she of the long 
nose and pinched waist, and her engaged the 
Candidat. And there was Frue Doctor Barthelsen, and Frue General-Dealer Steen and daughter, with a high frill to hide the evils in her 
neck, and Frue Insurance Agent — *' 

She dodges a glass adroitly, and raises her 

- The title " Frue " is properly borne by the wives of officials, but all the professional men's wives bear it. " Madam " 
is used by the small shopkeepers or lower burgher class, but 
the distinction is dying out. A Frue's daughter is Froken ; 
Madam's Jeomfrue. 
voice to drown his shriek of what the merry 
devil she means. 

** Insurance Agent Hansen, and the Kaptein 
of the 'Sea Guir — S-s-s, you be quiet, 
Marie tell you tale. There was M'am Sorensen 
and fat M'am Larsen, — she 's going to have 
her twelfth, and Larsen only third mate, — and 
M'am Johnsen and all the young gentlemen 
and ladies, and oh it was a glorious sight ! " 

She starts a key higher, for he is purple with 
fury and exertion, — 

*' And, and we had coffee two-pence a cup, 
and chocolade [with a long-drawn stress on the 
* lade '] and Brus-selzers and lemonade and fruit 
juice and temperance beer — No, no ! you be 
quiet, Marie tell tale ! " 

He is struggling till the veins stand in cords 
to get out of his chair, but in vain ; he points to 
his glass in desperation. She refills it and her 
own. 

*' Yes, temperance beer, a penny a glass ; and 
we had white bread and brown bread and currant 
buns and Berlin kringels and ginger-nuts and little 
cakes with hundreds and thousands on top ! 
And oh it was grand ! " 

She is yelling louder and louder, and he is 
swearing deeper, and the battle shows no signs 
of ceasing. 

" And then we sold all sorts of things, and 
drew numbers, and had a lucky bag; and Hans 
Jacobsen played on the melodeon ; and missionary Hansen told us about the poor blacks and 
all his blessed work, and how the Lord guided 
his footsteps through the sandy wastes, and how 
he baptized a chief and all his wives in the 
waters of faith. And Nils Pettersen says they 
took out more raw alcohol and spent gun-powder and spoilt cotton goods than the fear of God ; 
and that the ' Bird o' Faith ' cleared one hundred 
per cent on her freight. But Nils Pettersen was 
always a liar ; and oh it was a blessed thing to 
do all that for the heathen blacks ! And then 
the kapelan spoke again, a touching discourse ! " 

And she refills her glass, dodging his stick 
and watching him out of the tail of her eye as 
she turns the heel of her stocking, and repeats 
the whole of the sermon. His vocabulary is 
exhausted, and he is inventing the weirdest 
oaths, hurling them forth, a deep accompaniment to her shriller sermon, with its sanctimonious sing-song tune and unctuous phrasing ; for 
she is, perhaps unwittingly, mimicking the kapelan to the life. He is getting tired and drowsy, 
the cognac is rising to her head, and even a 
kapelan s sermon must draw to a close ; and as a 
mother will change her lullaby into a quick 
hushoo, and pat mechanically with a drowsy nod 
as the child drops to sleep, so Marie puts her 
knitting tidily into her apron pocket, and folding 
her withered old hands breaks into a hymn. He 
opens his eyes languidly, and protests feebly 
with a last damn ; but Marie has exorcised the 
devil this time. His jaw drops, and muttering 
softly, he falls into heavy sleep ; and she sings 
on, till her head too droops on her breast, and 
her quavering old woman's voice dies away in 
an abortive allelujah ! 

And the motes dance in the golden bar of a 
waning sun-ray that pierces the room and 
crosses the motionless figures ; and above stairs 
the little mistress is wrapped in rare, delicious, 
dreamless slumber. And I like to think that 
the recording angel registered that sleep to the 
credit of Jomfrue Marie Larsen ! 

It is a sunny afternoon in mid-summer. A 
phaeton drawn by a pair of sturdy gray 
Stavanger horses, whose dainty heads and the 
mark of Saint Olav's thumb on their throats tell 
their race, is dashing along at a break-neck 
pace. The whip curls over them, and the 
vehicle sways a little to one side. Two great 
hounds bound along on the right of it. 

A strip of blue Qord and a background of 
dark mountains, with the cool ice-kisses of the 
snow queen still resting on their dusky heads, 
can be seen at intervals through the fir and 
pine trees. A squirrel scrambles up a rowan- 
tree, and a cattle-bell tingles far in the woods. 
Nature has ever a discordant note in its 
symphony. A little brown bird is fluttering in 
helpless, terrified jerks ; it emits, as it rises and 
falls, a sharp sound between a chirp and a 
squeak. A hawk is swooping over it : a poise — 
a dip — a few feathers float with the breeze, and 
hawk soars up with its prey in its claws. 

The red-brown eyes that gleam out of the 
small, sallow face of the woman who sits on 
the left side of the phaeton close for a second ; 
the delicate nostrils quiver, the lips tighten over 
a sigh; then the lids rise again, the eyes 'are 
darker, the pupils have a trick of dilating; a 
smile subtle in meaning, for much of mocking 
pain and bitterness is expressed in its brief 
passage, flits across her face. 

A savage jerk ! the horses stop. 

" Kiss me ! " says the man who is driving. 
His voice is harsh, and the eyes that scan her face 
have a lurid light in them ; and as he speaks a 
smell of spirit mingles with the smell of the 
pine chips. Her lips tighten still more; she 
turns to obey. She has to rise up a little ; he is 
very tall. His nose is powerful like a hawk's 
beak, and his beard is stirred by the breeze, 
and his eyes peer out from under their fringe of 
black lashes with a cruel, passionate gleam. She 
almost touches his face, but falls back from a 
rough shove : — 

*' No ! keep your kiss and be damned to you ! '' 

A savage whoop, the whip curls out and the
reins jerk, and the quivering horses that know 
the voice too well dash on ; and the hounds 
that have felt the whip-cord sting, as the 
strike of a snake on their flanks, bay savagely 
as they join in the race. 

On the right of the narrow, winding road a 
great lake lies hundreds of feet below; the 
wheel is not half a foot from the edge, and the 
vehicle jolts and leans that way, and the lash 
coils round and flicks her cheek, and leaves a 
sorry sting, — and she never winces at it, but her 
small hands clinch, and her lips part, and the 
red light flashes in her eyes, and something akin 
to exultant expectation steals over the thin 
small face as they court death each wheel-turn 
in their mad career. 

The stable-door opens, and the horses turn 
their heads. She — it is she — goes and passes 
her fingers gently over the swollen stripes that 
make little ridges in the close-clipped hair. 
Once she lays her cheek caressingly upon a 
cruel furrow, and whispers, ^* Poor little Ola ! if I 
had only governed my face better, you would 
not have been so punished ! " and Ola turns 
his satiny muzzle, softer than the daintiest 
lady's breast, and rubs it against her, to coax 
for the apples that always follow. She goes 
from one to the other, and cooes to them, and 
rubs her chin against their soft noses ; and when 
the stripes are very bad her jaws set, and one 
can see the mark of the teeth through her thin 
cheeks. 

*' Come here ! I want some brandy ! . . . 
Now put the glass down and come back. 
What's that mark on your cheek?*' 

** Only the whip touched me." 

" And you were too damned proud to say so, 
eh? By the way, I saw some gypsies in the 
park. Johann can do the translating, they are 
coming here to play. One of them is a thundering fine girl ; I 'd Hke to — What ! what 's 
that you said?" 

" I did not make any remark ! " a fine scorn 
trembles about her pale lips, and her face is a 
shade grayer. 

A pause. 

" Where are your rings? " 

" Upstairs." 

" Go and fetch them ! Blast it ! I don't buy 
you rings to leave them upstairs." 

She comes back with them on, and he takes 
up the slim fingers laden with jewelled bands, 
spreads them out on his palm, then closes his 
thumb and finger round her wrist, and laughs 
a rasping laugh. 

" Did any mortal man ever see such a hand? 
You witch ! with eyes that probe into a fellow's 
soul, and shame him and fear nothing! " and he 
tightens his grip, and she winces at his roughness. ** There [with a softening of voice], did I 
hurt you, you poor little thing, you queer little 
womany? Come closer [with fierce, impatient 
tenderness] ; put down your little old head, a 
head like a snipe, on my breast ! There, great 
God, I 'm very fond of you ! '* A tremor runs 
through his voice. ** You queer little thing ! 
You are no beauty, but you creep in, and I, I 
love every inch of you. I 'd kiss the ground 
under your feet, I know every turn of your little 
body, the slope of your shoulders, — I that 
always liked women to have square shoulders ! 
— the swing of your hips when you walk. Hips ! 
ha, ha! you have n't got any, you scrap! And 
yet, by the Lord, I'd lick you like a dog 
[slower, with emphasis] ! Knd. you don't care for 
me ! You obey me, no matter what I ask." 

He IS holding her face against his breast, and 
stroking her head with clumsy touch. *' You 
wait on me, — ay, no slave better, — and yet I 
can't get at you, near you ; that little soul of 
yours is as free as if I hadn't bought you, as 
if I did n't own you, as if you were not my 
chattel, my thing to do what I please with — do 
you hear [with fury] — to degrade, to — to 
treat as I please ? No, you are not afraid, you 
little white-faced thing ; you obey because you 
are strong enough to endure, not because you 
fear me. And I know it; don't you think I don't 
see it ! You pity me, great God ! pity me, — me 
that could whistle any woman to heel ! Yes, you 
pity me with all that great heart of yours 
because I am just a great, weak, helpless, 
drunken beast, a poor wreck ! " And the tears 
jump out of his eyes, eyes that are limpid and 
blue and unspoiled ; and he sobs out : ** Kiss 
me ! take my head in your arms ! I am a brute, 
an infernal brute, but I 'm awfully fond of you, 
you queer little gypsy, with your big heart and 
your damnable will ! I ! I ! I who hated women 
like poison, who always treated them as such, — 
I could cry when I look at you, like a great 
puling boy, because your spirit is out of my 
grasp. Smooth my head ! no other little hand 
in the world has such a touch as yours. I 'd 
know it among a thousand, my poor little 
thing ! Don't ever leave me ! promise even 
if I go mad, promise you '11 stay ! Get a man 
to mind me, but stay, won't you? Stay ! " 

'' I '11 stay." 

*' Did any Christian man ever have such an 
atom for a wife? I believe you are a gypsy; 
your hair curls at the ends Hke a live thing, 
and there are red lights in its black, and your 
eyes have a flash in them at times and a look 
as if you were off in other lands ! Oh, oh ! 
get me a little brandy, quick, quick ! " 

Merrily twang the guitars, and the tambourines rattle as they are swung aloft by slender 
curving wrists. The wild cries of a Zingari 
dance ring out. Black eyes gleam, and brown 
skins shine under orange and scarlet kerchiefs. 
The grace of panthers and the charm of wild, 
untamed, natural things is revealed in every 
movement. Color, vivacity, dirt, and rhythm. 

Wild the music, wilder the dance ; and he sits 
in his chair on the veranda, the clean, clear air 
and the fresh breeze blowing in from the sea, 
stirring the white hairs in the curls at his 
temples, and Hstens and looks with no eye or 
ear for aught of its beauty, — only a ribald jest 
as their petticoats rise, or their bosoms quiver 
in the fling of the dance. And she, with a 
crimson shawl drawn round her spare shoulders 
and a splash of color in her thin cheeks, holds 
one hand tightly pressed over her breast — to 
still what? What does the music rouse inside 
that frail frame? What parts her lips and causes 
her eyes to glisten and the thin nostrils to quiver? 
Is there aught in common between that slight 
figure, with its jewelled hands and its too heavy 
silken gown, and those tattered healthy Zingari 
vagabonds? Who knows? 

The whole tribe are gathered round him, 
begging and screaming with one voice, and he 
throws silver lavishly to them, and thrusts his 
hand with a coarse jest into the open bodice of 
the girl nearest him. A brown hand goes to the 
knife of a swarthy youth with gold rings in his 
ears ; but at a few strange words from the oldest 
woman in the group the girl steps back, and 
with the quickness of lightning the hag takes 
her place and answers his jest in his own tongue. 
The girl looks curiously, pityingly, respectfully 
at the other girl : she is a little more than a girl 
as she stands dumbly by during all this scene. 
Eye seeks eye, sympathy meets sympathy. 
What affinity is between these two creatures? 

"Kan de rokra Romany?" she asks, with a 
smile that visits her face as the ghost of a 
vanished beauty ; and her voice is sweetly soft 
as she asks it. A flash of eye, a hurried backward word thrown to the old woman who joins 
them on hearing it She stands between, with a 
smile at their wonder, and she holds out her 
hand, and one slim ivory-tinted hand rests palm 
upward in a no less slim but browner one. The 
old woman peers into the lines and crosses, and 
as she scans them a look of wonder creeps up 
to her usually inscrutable face. She exchanges 
words in an undertone with the gypsy girl at 
her side. 

" I speak Romany too, Deya ! An evil fate, 
isn't it, mother?" 

** A mole on your cheek, and a free Romany 
heart in your breast, your spirit fights to be free 
as the Romany chai. Seven suns rise and seven 
moons, and the flag is half mast, and the cage 
opens and the bird — " 

An impatient curse cuts short her words, and 
they turn to him. 

"Here>you old Jezebel! Send these vaga- 
bonds of yours down there; there's plenty to 
eat" 

The servants are bearing beer and food to the 
lawn. 

'' Shall I go blind? I dare say you know as 
much as those infernal doctors, eh? " 

*' No ; your eyes, and pretty eyes they are, 
and many a soul they 've lost, they '11 last your 
time, my lord ! I see a journey to England ; it 
lies before you, and no return. Seven times the 
moon will rise, and the Romanies go to the 
South, but the bird—" 

*^ Get to blazes out of this ! Help me in, 
ducky; oh, damn it, be quick! Get me some 
brandy, quick, quick! not all brandy, a little 
milk in it ! " 

The moon is high in the heavens, and the sea 
is running into the creek with a silver sheen on 
its back ; the blinds are drawn up in the four 
windows of the bedroom, and the northern night 
is like unto day disguised in a domino of silvergray crape. 

He is sleeping. She is standing motionless 
at the window. The red of her dressing-gown 
and the moonlight make her face look more 
ghostlike, as she leans her head wearily against 
the window-frame. She is gazing seaward ; a 
steamer has just passed, and the beacon in the 
lighthouse on Jomfru-land gleams like a great 
bright eye. In how many dreary vigils has it 
not greeted her and seemed to say : " Courage ! 
I too am watching ; you are not alone ! '* 

At the end of the wood two tents are pitched, 
and she can see two figures outlined against the 
white palings, — the Romany girl and the youth 
with the gold ear-rings. He is holding her in 
his arms. The dog-chains rattle now and then ; 
something brown and stealthy creeps about the 
duck-house ; the white mists in the marshy bit 
of meadow lying next the creek dance like 
spirits, and beckon to her with shadowy arms, 
and a faint yellow streak appears in the east. 
How many more nights must she stand alone, 
and watch the morning herald a new day of 
bondage? 

She moves noiselessly away, and goes into 
the dressing-room, and walks over to the mirror. 
She shakes her dusky elf-locks round her face, 
and catching up a yellow scarf lying on a chair 
winds it round her head, and then peers at herself in the glass. A deft twist turns down the 
white frills of her nightgown ; she has a gold 
chain round her neck, and she laughs a childish, 
noiseless laugh at her own image. *' How 
strangely my eyes gleam, and what a gypsy I 
look ! No one would know, no one would 
dream of it. I would soon get brown ! *' and 
she looks wistfully out toward the camp again. 
" In an hour they will go. A heap of fern to 
lie on, scant fare, and weary feet; but the 
freedom, ah, the freedom ! The woods with 
their wealth of shy, wild things, and the mountains that make one yearn to soar up over their 
heights to the worlds above ! Free to follow 
the beck of one's spirit, a-ah to dream of it ! " 
and the red light glows in her eyes again. 
They have an inward look; what visions do they 
see? The small thin face is transformed, the 
lips are softer, one quick emotion chases the 
other across it, the eyes glisten and darken 
deeply, and the copper threads shine in her 
swart hair. What is she going to do, what 
resolve is she making? 

A muttered groan, a stir in the bed rouses 
her, and throwing aside the scarf she glides 
swiftly to his side. She stands and looks down. 

What a magnificent head it is, and how repellant ! The tossed black locks with their silver 
streaks lie scattered on the pillow. The ear 
suggests vigorous animalism, the nose is powerful, the broad forehead shines whitely, and the 
long lashes curl upward as those of a child. 
The sensual-lipped mouth with its cruel lines 
shows more cruel as the head is thrown back. 
She looks at it steadily; no line escapes her, — 
looks from it to the hands, nerveless, white; the 
long, thin thumbs have a hateful expression, 
and the backs are short with an ugly joining to 
the wTists. He stirs, and a lewd word escapes 
his lips. She shudders ! Again her eyes wander out with an appealing look (to whom do 
they appeal, — to part of herself, to some God 
of convention?) toward the camp. They are 
stirring; she can see the Finn dog run to and 
fro. She steps away ; irresolution is expressed 
in her face ; her head is thrust forward, her 
fingers spread out unconsciously. She glances 
across the floor; some shelves are to be nailed 
up, one of them is leant against the wardrobe 
. door. As she hesitates, she notices that the 
shadow of it and the half-closed door throws a 
long cross almost to her feet. She folds her 
hands involuntarily : a whimper from the bed, a 
frightened call, — 

*' Come to me! Where are you? Don't 
leave me a second ! oh, God ! don't leave me ! 
What's that there? Give me a drop of brandy ! 
quick, oh quick ! Kneel down, dearie, close, 
close to me ; lay your little old cheek against 
mine, and say a little prayer, — no psalm business, just one out of your own httle head [sob] 
to suit a poor devil like me ! '* 

The sun is saying good-morning to the 
moon ; she is wan from watching. The birds 
are awake, but the man still sleeps; and the 
little red-gowned figure crouched at the bedside, her left hand, with its heavy gold band, 
clasped lightly in his, is sleeping too. A half-dried tear is held in the dark hollow under the 
closed eyes; the nose looks pinched in the 
morning light, and a gray-green shadow stains 
mouth and chin, but a smile plays round the 
dry lips. 

The caravan is winding slowly round the 
cuj've of the road, and three plump geese are 
stowed inside. The Romany lass is humming 
a song, — a song about love and dance and 
song, — and the soul of the sleeping girl floats 
along at her side in a dream of freedom. She 
of the song looks up : ** Six moons will rise, then 
you will be free ! " she mutters to herself as she 
passes on ; and the sun mounts higher, and the 
shadow of the cross is lightening with the coming dawn — who knows ? 

On right and left with flight of light. 

How whirled the hills, the trees, the bowers ! 
With light-like flight, on left and right, 

How spun the hamlets, towns, and towers 1 
Dost quail ? The moon is fair to see ; 

Hurrah ! the Dead ride recklessly ! 
Beloved ! Dost dread the shrouded dead ? 

" Ah, let the dead repose ! " she said. 

James Clarence Mangan : Anthology, 

It is a sunshine Sabbath morning. The sea 
quivers under an armor of silver scales, and 
laps, laps with a laugh as it runs into the creek. 
The sails of the ships glisten whiter than any 
snow. The sun distils the scent from the 
clove carnations and the sweetbrier leaves, and 
coaxes the pungent resin through the cracks 
in the bark, until the air is heavy with a smell 
that would cease to be perfume, were it not 
filtered through the salt ooze of the incoming 
sea-breeze that flutters the flags on the tall 
white poles, and tempers the ardor of the 
young year's sun. 

The kariol bearing the specialist whose skill 
is of no avail in the face of a pressing call from 
the great god Death, has just wound round the 
pine-wood in a whirl of dust. The dogs, unbound, lie on the back veranda, with their 
black snouts resting on their forepaws, and 
they watch him depart without a growl; they 
have not barked for days past, nor chased the 
plucky badger, nor yapped impatiently as the 
cheeky squirrels flirted through the branches. 
Even beggars have come and, gone without a 
snarling protest; but all last night they howled 
and bayed and cowered together as if they could 
see the passage of invisible guests. A peculiar 
stillness seems to brood over the great place. 
The maids are sitting in their gowns of Sunday 
black, with open psalm-books on their laps; 
they are listening and w^hispering with the disturbance of expectancy. 

The housekeeper is talking to the leech 
woman, quaint survival of older days, whose 
business in life is to keep the slimy suckers 
lively and apply them. She looks as if she fed 
them between times on herself, so bony and 
colorless a creature is she. They are negotiating the last ghastly offices that may soon be 
needed, speculating as to the changes and their 
effect on the village. The vicar, she tells, is 
about to make the departing life the text of his 
sermon ; every one in the district is coming to 
hear it. Why not? A sermon of warning, 
with a smack of the Pharisee in it ; a '* Lord, I 
thank Thee I am not like unto this man " note, 
especially if you know the publican in question, 
cannot fail to be attractive; it has an up-to- 
date interest that the parable of the far-away- 
time sinner necessarily lacks. 

Upstairs the cow-girl is crouching like a 
faithful dog outside his bedroom door; she is 
listening to the murmured Latin service of the 
mass that comes from inside. The windows of 
the room are wide open, and the sea stretches 
away and melts into the horizon in an infinity 
of blue and silver. He is lying still on the ebb 
of his last tide, and when his eyes open they 
wander from the little priest before the extemporized altar, to the bowed head of the woman 
kneeling beside him. 

" Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum ! " intones 
the priest. 

" Et cum spiritu tuo ! " she utters in response, in dead, dull tones; and when she 
chimes the little silver bell she does it in a 
mechanical way, and all the time he holds her 
one hand to his breast. When the mass is read 
and the extreme unction administered, the little 
priest reads the prayers for the dying. He 
listens attentively, and she listens too, with eyes 
dry as horn, and tightened lips. She scarcely 
hears what he reads : — 

'' My feet have gone astray in the paths of 
vanity and sin, now let me walk in the way of 
Thy commandments. . . . Forgive me, O Lord, 
all the sins which I have committed by my 
disordered steps — " 

** * Steps ! * that means feet; * eyes seen vanities,' that means sight; * tongue hath in many 
ways offended,* speech. Why, he is going 
through all the seven senses, or is it seven, or 
five?*' She must give him the envelope with 
the check in it before he leaves. She has n't 
a black frock, not one ; he liked her in colors, 
light girlish colors, with a silken waist-band to 
match. Must she wire for a coffin ? What a 
beast she is to think like this ! But how can 
she help it? Her tear-bags — what is their 
right name, lachrymal glands ? — are exhausted, 
even her lashes have thinned; yet she never 
shed a tear, at least only inwardly, with a 
choke. 

He sobs, and she looks up; the tears are 
trickling down his cheeks ; she puts up her free 
hand and wipes them off gently. 

*'To Thee I resign my heart! Into Thy 
hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit ! " reads 
the priest in broken English ; and when the, 
from its point of view, beautiful prayer has 
drawn to a solemn close, the man sobs out in 
genuine, heartfelt conviction with a force of 
epithet that is habit not irreverence, — 

" That is a damn nice prayer ! I was always 
afraid of death, always [with a sob] a coward ; 
but when it comes to the point, that vanishes 
too!" 

And the boyish priest purses his check 
and takes it with him, and leaves his blessing 
instead, and follows in the wake of the town 
doctor. 

" Send Johann to me, dearums ; let me get 
dressed ; I '11 have a try to die in the sunshine. 
Get your own little bed carried down to the 
veranda, and your own little white pillow, — 
mind, the one you put your head on last, — and 
lend them to me for this turn." 

And so the maids take it down, and she 
stands at the head of the stairs as they carry- 
it, two at the head, and two at the foot ; and 
as she hears their cautious backward steps and 
the rest at the turn, she fancies it sounds Hke 
the bearing out of a coffin. And then he 
follows slowly out, leaning on his big stick, 
and his beard divides into patches and shows 
the purplish skin, and his breathing is labored, 
but he steps more firmly than he has done 
for a long time past. And he leans on her 
frail shoulders, and when they reach the diningroom he calls in the maids and the men who 
serve him, and bids them charge their glasses ; 
and he thanks them, and says he is sorry for 
all the trouble he has given them, and shakes 
hands with each one, and they courtesy and 
say " Skaal ! " a salutation when drinking, and 
troop out crying. They are mostly women, 
and women forgive easily and forget every- 
thing — to a man! Only the cow-girl stops 
behind, crouched near the door, crying, " O-ah, 
o-ah ! " And he fills his own glass with champagne and sips it; but nature sets a limit to 
the alcohol a man may absorb, and he has 
passed it. He cannot get it down ; so he lays 
his hand on her head and smooths it gently, 
and says : — 

'' Your luck, little one, your very good luck ! 
Oh, my poor little one, I am afraid for you ! I 
ought to have — well, it 's no good regretting; " 
and with a last flame of the old fierce fire he 
cries, *' I have had my last drink, and no man 
shall drink after me ; " and he shivers the glass 
against the wall, and purple shadows, the 
'' skreigh " of another dawn, chase one another 
over his swollen face, and he leans heavily on 
her and says faintly, ** Lay me down, I am 
tired ! '' 

When they reach the veranda, the leaves of 
the virgin-vine are strewn in dancing shadow- 
leaves and fluttering tendrils at their feet. He 
looks at them and mutters, ** Shadows — only 
shadows ! " 

Suddenly he searches her face intently and 
asks, "Is there no hope, little one, — none?'* 
He reads the answer in her wistful eyes. 
**When? Don't you be afraid to tell me, — 
when did he say? " 

** Inside twenty-four hours." 

There is a long silence, and the shadow-leaves 
dance, and the bees whirl buzzing past, and the 
strong young life of midsummer mocks dissolution in a subtle, arrogant way. 

** One good clean year, one clean year, one 
year's home for a finish ! Just as I learnt to 
know what it meant, to leave it all ! It 's hard 
to look on a day Hke this [sob], and know that 
to-morrow I rot. A long life as lives go, and 
nothing to show for it ! Well, I always wanted 
to die in the sunshine, with the birds singing, 
and, since I knew you, with you near me, — oh, 
my dear, my poor, dear little one ! " 

He reels, and she clutches him; but he 
steadies himself by a supreme effort, and says 
through his ground teeth: "Now I am going to 
say good-by to the world, and, by God ! I '11 say 
it standing. I have had good days in it, — wild, 
glad days, drunk with the lust of love and wine ; 
but I never saw good or beauty in it till you 
showed me how. Oh, oh, oh 1 Let no man 
write my epitaph ! '* 

He stands leaning on her shoulders, looking 
sea-ward, drinking his fill of sun and sea, — sea 
that was a rapture to him, that he loved as the 
greatest and strongest and crudest thing he 
knew ; the only thing that responded to the wild 
moods in his soul, and struck a rushing strain 
of song in his stormy heart that made him rejoice 
with a fierce deHght. The tears fall and splash 
on her hands, and then she helps him to lie 
down ; and she feels his feet, and they bring hot 
bottles, for they are getting cold, and he lies 
with his eyes closed. The village doctor comes 
and goes ; but nothing can be done, the sands 
are running out fast. *' If the Lord be merciful 
[the sermon is working in him] He will take 
him before morning, otherwise he will suffer 
much,*' he whispers to her. She does not an- 
swer, only kneels silently at his side, and he 
holds her hand. There is a strange smell that 
has a chill uncleanness in its breath about 
them. 

The people pass by on the road above and 
peer down through the palings. The maids 
give audience to inquisitive or interested callers 
at the back. The housekeeper is busy at the 
linen press, sorting out sheets and things that 
may be needed ; and as she moves about with 
noiseless tread, and folds and lays aside, she 
mentally remodels her wardrobe. If she take 
out the flower in her black summer hat, and put 
in some curled tips, it will serve nicely. Mis- 
tress will surely bring her a dress from England, 
and the merino they hang the rooms with (she 
will get it cut the proper lengths) will do for 
the maids. Uf! that nasty wine gave her a 
headache ; she will get some fresh beans roasted, 
and have a good cup with fresh cream, — that 
will do her good. How Gudrun [the cow- 
girl] takes on ! He was a devil to serve, but 
there were advantages, — ay, many pickings 
that would not fall to one's share in a better 
regulated Christian household, not to speak of 
the distinct comfort of having a mistress whose 
time is taken up elsewhere. Poor thing ! Well, 
it's best for her; she has money, she'll marry 
again. But tJiat Gudrun ! it is odd. Why should 
she carry on so? Or could there be a reason? 
He always took great notice of Gudrun ; she 
used to laugh and grin and go on when he went 
out in the yard, and never was afraid ; and then 
there was that anonymous letter the mistress 
got. Uf! Men folk, God save us! Even with 
a leg in the grave it 's hard to trust them ! 
There 's no smoke without fire, that 's sure. 
There, that 's all ready. " Well ! what is it? " 

This to the second housemaid. She is a fat 
girl, with a restless twitch about her mouth and 
half-closed eye-lids, that curl upward at the 
outer corners. One gets the impression some- 
how that her soKd physique is but a mask to 
cover an emotional soul with a dangerous sense 
of humor. 

" The Bible reader, Morten Ring, wants to 
know if he may read for a while, now that the 
Popish priest has gone and left the dying 
sinner without any one to direct his thoughts 
heavenward.'* 

There is an imitative note in her voice, and a 
mocking gleam shoots from her eyes. 

"Uf! is he here again? That's the third 
time. Mistress told him no before, and strong 
enough too ; I should think that ought to have 
been more than enough for him." 

" Yes, but he says the whole village thinks it 
shocking, and he is like sent up, and that you 
might put it to her ! " 

** Indeed, then I won't ! When I did last time, 
she told me to tell him to go down to the 
weighing place on the wharf and ring a bell, 
and call the population together, and read out 
to them all the places in the Bible that refer to 
hypocrisy, lying, and scandal, the sins of adul- 
tery, fornication, and the begetting of bastards ; 
that she 'd be willing to pay him treble his fee 
for the charity of it, they need it so much. It 
might teach them to begin at home and let 
other folks alone." 

" Shall I tell him that? " eagerly. 

*^Are you mad? No, tell him Mistress is 
reading herself, and ask him to stay and have a 
good cup of coffee and sweet rusks. I want to 
get the truth out of him about the magistrate's 
girl's illness ; he was up there, and I don't be- 
lieve a sniff in her sprained foot — " 

And down below the rose-buds opened into 
roses, and nodded with the effrontery of assured 
beauty to the sun-god ; and the birds hushed 
them for their noon siesta; and he lay with 
shut eyes and held her hand tightly ; and some- 
times he spoke to her, and sometimes he mut- 
tered to himself (she caught the words) a line 
of his favorite Mangan : — 

" Sleep ! no more the dupe of hopes and schemes, 
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow ! 

Curious anticlimax to thy dreams 
Twenty golden years ago ! " 

The odd unpleasant smell seems to hang 
about them as if too heavy to diffuse itself in 
the thin, clear air ; the smell of cow-sheds that 
clings to the cow-girl's clothes is perfume to it. 

It attracted the flies, and they gathered like 
swarming bees on the window-panes and door- 
posts, and buzzed and hummed and stung like 
Bushmen carousing over a find of dead meat ; 
and they crept over the bed and stuck in his 
hair, and she tried to keep them off his face ; 
and when one of them crawled up her own 
with tickling, clinging feet, she paled and shud- 
dered. The cow-girl stepped out of her clogs, 
and went into the drawing-room and brought 
out a gayly painted palm-leaf fan, and stationing 
herself at the head of the bed set it in motion. 
His breathing is getting labored, and at times 
an ugly flush crosses his face. Once when it 
is deeper than usual, the girl cries, — 

*' O Lord God ! Lord God ! " 

He hears her and looks up. ** Ah, Gudrun, 
is that you? Good girl, good girl ! '* 

She sinks on to her knees, and moans and 
rocks herself; and then she looks at his closed 
eyes and says to her: ^* Mistress, may I? It 
can't harm you ! " 

She nods her head wearily; she is fanning 
awkwardly with her left hand, and she says with 
her tired, tender voice: ^* Gudrun wants to say 
good-by, dear ! '* 

He opens his eyes, and for a moment the 
charm of his rare smile returns. The girl stoops 
and leaves a kiss upon his forehead, and then 
rushes away and flings herself down on the 
long lush grass, that is never cut, under a big 
chestnut-tree. 

He looks at her and lifts her hand to his lips : 
*' Always a big heart, always a great little 
woman [with a groan] ! and now I am to lose 
you, and it is the best thing could happen to 
you. Ay, there's the sting, — leave you to 
some brute, that is my punishment. O little 
one ! don't you think too hardly of me," he 
talks with effort ; " I meant to be better than 
I was to you. You '11 never find another man 
love you as I did; remember that, and forget 
all the rest if you can. You have forgotten all, 
I might have known you would ! Where am I 
drifting to? No man ever came back to say. 
Do you believe in hell [eagerly ], do you believe 
in it?" 

She looks at him pityingly, with a flash of 
past energy in the lift of her head, and a curl of 
scorn on her pale lips : *^ The hell of the priests 
or parson? No, I do not. Is that worrying 
you? Don't you let it, old man, don't you let 
it! Wherever you are going, whatever after 
existence your poor troubled soul is fighting 
its way to, it is not to their hell! " 

The girl has come back and taken up her 
former position, and fans steadily, for the flies 
are gathering in greater numbers every hour. 
The veranda seems airless and close, and un- 
canny with unseen things; the doctor comes 
and goes ; the servants peep out, and the hours 
seem to hold many hours in their embrace. 
She seems to live all her life over again. Things 
she has forgotten completely come vividly back 
to her. An old Maori man, who used to sell 
sweet potatoes and quaint ring-shells for 'nap- 
kin rings to the Pakeha lady in Tauranga Bay, 
floats before her inward vision as tangible as if 
he were next her ; and a soldier servant, she 
can hear his voice, he used to sing as he pipe- 
clayed, — 

** But kaipoi te waipero, Kaipoi te waiena ; 
For Rangatira Sal, Bob Walker sold his pal, 
But he 's now at the bottom o' the harbor ! " 

Why did the stupid chorus come back to her 
now; what chink of brain did it lie in all these 
years? Oh what a brute she is and how callous ! She ought to read prayers, or say 
things ; in a few hours it will be too late ever 
to say a word more. She finds herself beating 
time with her foot to a jig tune, a bizarre ac- 
companiment to the words ** too late." She 
would give all she possesses to cry, yet she 
cannot ; and so the day wears on. 

Later on she bends her head to him and 
asks : " Are you dozing or are you thinking ? 
What are you thinking of ? '* 

He smiles. " Of zoo, dearums, of zoo ! " 

** Have you said your prayers? Shall I read 
you any ? " 

" Finished them long ago ! I am just wait- 
ing; lying thinking of you, dearie, thinking of 
you. Happier than ever I was since I left off 
* taw in the lay ' and pegging tops." 

Her question was a concession to a past reli- 
gious conscience; she feels as she puts it that 
as for herself, if she would die as she sits there, 
she would not trouble to pray ; it would be 
well to drift out. 

There is another weary hour's silence ; then 
he looks up at her and shivers slightly, and 
tightens his clasp of her hand. ** Kiss me, 
duckums, kiss me ! Now lay your little old 
phiz on the pillow close to mine, you dearest 
and best in the world ! Close, close to mine/' 

The wind is changing, and the sun hides 
his face decently behind a great white cloud. 
There is a hoarse rattle in his throat, and his 
breathing is difficult. The doctor comes and 
stands quietly behind her ; the crowd at the 
gate above gets denser ; the servants huddle 
together in the dining-room and cry. The 
Swedish gardener pats them all in turn, but 
most gently the fat housemaid. A sudden blast 
of wind blows a strand of her hair loose and it 
touches his lips, and he mutters, " My little 
one ! " She lifts her face and looks at him ; a 
strange purple color vibration is waving over 
his face, and she calls affrightedly, — 

" Dear, oh dear man, look at me ! Can you 
see me, do you know me ? " 

He lifts his heavy lids and looks at her 
steadily with half-dead eyes, and says with 
stiff, barely articulate speech : ** Of course I 
do, my dearie ! I *m all rig — " 

She feels his fingers close more tightly over 
hers, — once, twice, — then relax; his chin falls, 
and the doctor passes his hand over his eyelids 
and puts a handkerchief to his lips; and the 
cow-girl drops with a cry to the ground and 
throws her apron over her head ; and at the 
gate above a child calls " Mammy ! '* in fright- 
ened tones ; and the lad who has been sitting 
up on the slope at the foot of the flag-staff 
slides the Union Jack half-mast; and the big 
white house is without a master. 



She is sitting in an old garden, a retired place 
in the village, right on the fjord. They have 
driven her down there away from the house 
that seems haunted by his spirit, infected with 
the loathsome odor of rapid dissolution that 
nothing can overcome, that seems to ooze out 
and taint the very flowers. And then the myr- 
iad flies that crawl and creep, as if sick or 
drunk, over everything, and make one loathe 
and turn from the very sight of food and drink, 
for dread of where they have been ; make one 
long to scream hysterically to drown their hate- 
ful buzzing, and rush away and plunge into the 
sea, — were it not that it too seems to whisper 
in undertones of dead men and lost sweethearts, 
drowned mariners with swollen gray-green faces 
and tangled locks floating hke sea-sedge behind 
them, as they toss on the swift undercurrents 
beneath its treacherous smiHng surface. 

It is with her, sitting there, as it is with most 
men, that when numbed in mind and heart by 
some great trouble her senses are more aHve 
to outward sounds and scenes. It is as if when 
one's inner self is working with some emotion, 
wrestling with some potential moral enemy, cry- 
ing out under the crucifixion of some soul- 
passion, eyes and ears, and above all sense of 
smell, are busy receiving impressions and stor- 
ing them up, as a phonograph records a sound, 
to reproduce them with absolute fidelity if any 
of the senses be touched in the same way by 
the subtile connection between perfume and 
memory. She will, in all time to come, never 
forget that old garden. She is rocking uncon- 
sciously to and fro. Her thoughts, and the 
emotions belonging to them, cross one another 
rapidly, flash past as the landscape seen from a 
mail train, so that she cannot fasten any of 
them. The weary vigils of many months, the 
details of days and hours, are ticked off as the 
events on a tape. The look in his eyes, press 
of his fingers ; the quiet face with the awful look 
of peace; the rapid changes to a thing to be 
hidden away as swiftly as hands can coffin it; 
the clasped fingers, never to be lifted in tender 
caress or angry gesture ; the future to face 
without even the rough protection of his pas- 
sionate, wayward affection ; — all these conflict- 
ing images and reasonings dash through her 
brain, and yet not a detail of her surroundings 
escapes her, — the strips of blue fjord, with the 
pilot boats with their numbered sails in the 
immediate foreground, and the prams turned 
bottom up on the miniature wharf for a fresh 
coat of paint ; the dip of the white sail of a 
pleasure-boat in the distance, and the gleam of 
the scarlet cap of a girl steering; bright flecks 
on the black-green shadows of the trees in the 
near background, that stand out distinctly from 
the misty blue of the distant mountains, misty 
with the purple light that only clothes the 
northern heights. 

Not a detail of the quaint garden escapes her. 
It is a garden of surprises. Fruit-trees from 
strange lands, dwarf shrubs of foreign birth, 
curious shells gathered on the beach of far-away 
islands, flourish promiscuously with indigenous 
plants. A painted lady (the figure-head of 
some effete sailing-craft), who has cloven the 
storms through many seas with her mighty 
breasts, and commanded the rising waves with 
her upraised hand, and faced the storm with a 
smile ghastly in its wooden fixity, has come 
here to rest. She leans next to an old sun-dial 
in the shade of an ancient lilac-bush. The 
sense of beauty, and the bump of utility of suc- 
cessive owners, is manifested at every turn. The 
even drills of potatoes are disturbed by the 
tombstone of a favorite dog ; a plaster Mercury, 
and a shrub, cut in the form of a bulgy tea-pot, 
spoil the symmetry of a bed of carrots ; straw- 
berries carrying their ripe, red fruit right 
bravely fill the background of one bed, and a 
tangled profusion of pinks, pansies, and gilly- 
flowers, forget-me-nots, and fragrant lavender 
spikes have a long straight line of leeks running 
amid their sweet irregularity as a pungent line 
in a dainty sheaf of verse. She is conscious of 
a vague pleasure as she notes these things, and 
a sort of wondering pity at the pathos of her 
own quiet figure. She fingers her black cash- 
mere gown and the heavy silk fringe of her 
shawl. She never wore a shawl before ; they 
had nothing else black. Her mother used to 
wear a shawl, a white Indian silk with raised  
flowers. Her shoulders sloped too, like Eu- 
genie's. Funny to wear a shawl like an old 
lady! She has a bag with money, papers, 
certificate of death for the customs. What a 
nuisance all these formalities are ! '' Lum turn, 
te tum, te tum," — the dead march in Saul ! no, 
she mustn't hum that. She remembers once in 
the long ago, before the flood, her flood, she 
had a sweetheart, a boy officer, — she wonders 
did he get fat ; they always chaffed and said he 
would. Once she was humming it, when he 
stopped her saying, '' Oh, don't! when any one 
hums that, a poor soldier dies somewhere." 
Superstition, of course; but she won't hum 
it, all the same, just for the old sake's sake. 
Why should she kill a soldier? She used 
to like all soldiers. " Tum tum ! " Is she 
going mad? How does one go mad? 

She turns her head in relief at an approach- 
ing step. The little doctor stands bowing, hat 
in hand. She notices that he is wearing his 
dress-suit, and adds mentally, *' They wear dress 
clothes on solemn occasions, christenings, wed- 
dings, funerals. Why, of course it 's the funeral ! " 
She even smiles at the conjunction of a swallow- 
tail with elastic side-leather boots with high 



AN EBB TIDE. 1 85 

heels. His trousers too must have been made 
before he grew stout; they ruck up at the 
knees, and show the end Hne of his under- 
drawers quite plainly. She feels inclined to 
laugh. She hasn't really laughed for a long 
time; well, why shouldn't she laugh? 

" Will Fruen come now? " he queries. 

There is a subtile blending of the soothing 
professional tone he uses to lady patients and 
the gravity befitting a solemn occasion. 

She takes up her bag, gathers her shawl 
mechanically into graceful folds over her arms, 
and follows him. They go up through the 
wood, past the poor-house, to a side entrance. 
She notices as she looks down over the town 
that the flags are all half-way down the staffs, 
and that the village is crowded with folk ; and 
that outside the house there are groups of 
black-coated men, like ants crawling about a 
white stone, she thinks. The little housekeeper 
meets her at the door ; the other girls are cry- 
ing. She bows to people without recognizing 
them. Then there is a tramping of feet, and 
some one leads her out; the bell is tolling up 
from the church, and she sees that they have 
covered the gray cobs with black palls, and 
attached a black canopy to the cart, and out- 
lined the spokes of the wheels with fir needles, 
and smothered the rest of it with branches and 
flowers, wreaths and crosses, and harps and 
lyres: he hated music too! The coffin — what 
an ugly black thing, with an exaggerated 
stomach and garished silver ornaments ! — is 
resting upon the Union Jack. A crowd of faces 
that she does not know meets her. She places 
herself behind the cart, and the maids follow 
her, and all the dogs gather round her, but 
never growl once as they move on; and the 
crowd follows. She can see the green road; 
they have covered it according to custom with 
branches of fir and pine, — a green river, a 
grass-green river, winding to the left. And the 
sea, the sea he loved, — it seems to her that 
there is a cadence of pity in the eternal note of 
its quiet sadness. How tired her feet are ! It 's 
quite half a mile yet. She has no ankles, how 
funny ! Just stilts made of her will. She trips. 
The cow-girl pushes past the housekeeper, and 
watches her steps. 

'* Lord God, how stony-faced she is ! " whispers 
the doctor's wife, ^* and she never cried once." 

It is a long way, she keeps thinking. Where
are they going, anyway? Oh, yes, to the tug, 
— the tug that is to bear them away on a 
glorious lonely death-ride, out of the sunny 
fjord to the glistening sea, away to where the 
rainbow ends. At the end of the rainbow 
you '11 find a pot of gold I But, first, they must 
pass through the wide wooden gate ; it is open. 
What is that they say about a wide wooden gate? 
No, it's about a road, — it's the wide road 
that leads to destruction. They have decked 
the gate with green too, — the gate through 
which the children used to peer with inquisitive, 
frightened child-eyes, up to the house where 
the wicked man dwelt. How they used to 
scamper away with half-real, half-acted terror 
at a cry of, " The man is coming ! " — the man 
who was a bogie-man to them, a name with 
which to threaten them when naughty, about 
whom their elders told dreadful tales in sub- 
dued voices. She remembers this, and smiles 
half sadly to s;ee as they reach the narrow street 
how the children swarm to meet his coming. 
There is no school to-day, and they get under 
the horses' hoofs, and crowd round the car, and 
point with dirty, chubby fore-fingers, and clasp 
hands, and cluster together in groups of twos 
and threes, and gaze with awe-struck eyes, and 
whisper, and follow. And one whispers to his 
comrades how he once got a drive and a silver 
piece from '' the man," and another how he gave 
little Tulla a piece of cake. And she thinks of 
the train that danced in the wake of the pied 
piper, and of his own little ones who know him 
not. Perhaps they are dancing and laughing to- 
day, — to-day, when the father who gave them no 
name is being borne along to the tuneful patter 
of little feet that are not of his kith nor his kin. 
She seems to feel that that thing in the coffin 
is not he. He is walking next her, laughing 
with the rare humor of his best moments; 
chuckling at the grand funeral they are giving 
him, — him the bad man, of whom they had 
nought but evil to say. How hard it is to go 
down hill slowly ! She tells herself that later on 
in the ages to come, when the little ones here 
have gone to their last homes as withered elders, 
the tales of the bogie-man of their child-days 
may have grown into a saga of a wild Angle- 
man with great wealth, who landed and made 
himself a home on their coast, and drank and 
caroused and bought the strangest things ; who 
took mad sails in a boat ri^^ht into the teeth of 
coming gales that the pilots feared to brave, 
when the white-crested horses leaped high over 
the rocks, and the sea-dragons roared below, 
and the gray mews shrieked shrill warnings to 
the fishers to hasten them home ; who turned 
the night into day, and took wild hag-rides with 
his baying and galloping horses at midnight, 
and used to crack his whip and urge them on 
with exultant oaths, and never let his little wife 
out of his sight, but call for her if he missed her 
till the woods rang with her name. 

They reach the wharf. The tug '' Bully-boy," 
with black funnel and hissing steam, is lying 
taut to the pier. Her head is really spinning. 
How stupid those eight men are ! they have n't 
backed the horses enough. Hats off! They 
lay him on the deck ; they have put the old flag 
under him and piled the posies on top. She 
pats the dogs and bids them stay, and lets the 
women kiss her, and w^alks up the plank : one 
plank ! surely there should be four, — 

" For thee it is that I dree such pain 
As when wounded even a plank will ; 
My bosom is pierced, is rent in twain, 
That thine may ever bide tranquil, 

May ever remain 
Henceforward untroubled and tranquil." 



igo KEYNOTES. 

No, that 's not the verse : she can't get it. " I 
heard four planks fall down with a saddening 
echo? — with a hollow echo?" She stands by 
the side of the coffin and gazes quietly at the 
crowd, — looks at the men with their uplifted 
hats, at the black-draped horses (Puck is biting 
OUa in the neck), at the children, and the group 
of dogs ; and all the staring eyes seem to melt 
into one monster multi-colored eye, that pierces 
her through and through. Can't they see she 
is hollow, — the fools? 

They loosen the hawser and cry " All right ! " 
and '^ Bully-boy " swings round, and they steam 
sea-ward, and she sits and dreams, and the tug 
dances and splutters and fusses through the 
sunlit sea, past fjord mouths and hamlets, and 
boats with singing children and yapping dogs ; 
and she never thinks of the future, nor of the 
steamer she is to meet at the city, nor makes 
any plan, — simply sits and lets her fancies run 
riot through her tired brain ; sits under a canopy 
of clear air, and listens to the strange conceits 
that arise in her thinking self. She is a Viking's 
bond-maid of olden days; she hid on his bark 
while they built up his funeral pyre and laid the 
old warrior down. She watched them touch 
the flaming pine-knot to his fiery mausoleum. 
and set him adrift to the strain of a fierce, exult- 
ant chant of victory, to sail out on his last voy- 
age for a handigrips with the grim foe Death. 
Ay, he too was a primitive man, with the pri- 
meval passions of untamed nature surging up 
and eating their way to his soul's core, as rest- 
less breakers hollow a place on the coast ; and 
now he is going to rest. 

The sun sinks in a superb, audacious blending 
of hues ; orange and scarlet, pink and blue, and 
lemon-yellow streaks with splotches of intensest 
purple are hurled from a palette of fire in a 
frenzy of color. The fishers pause and look 
curiously at the silent little figure keeping vigil 
next the flower-decked coffin, as she passes them 
in the pearl-mists of the summer night, — pearl- 
mists that wrap her in a chilly shroud ; and she 
fancies that spirit hands spread the canopy of 
starred blue over them as they glide on ; and 
the moon peers down and nods to her, and 
another moon runs sea-ward on a shining silver 
river ; and the foam in their wake ripples to- 
gether like frothing diamond chips ; and the 
dew falls on the withering flowers, and bathes 
her pale face and moistens her dry lips ; and the 
night breeze sings sadly to the thrumming of 
unseen harps, and soothes her troubled spirit 
with -tender whisperings that only the stricken 
in soul can catch in snatches from the spirit of 
nature. The 'boy takes the wheel, and the cap- 
tain brews her some coffee. They have forgot- 
ten at the house, in their care for the funeral, to 
provide her with food or rugs. She is too 
deliciously weary (there is no new effort either 
to make, unless she chooses) to care. When 
he brings it to her she swallows it gratefully, and 
follows him to the stuffy little cabin, and lies 
down as he suggests, with her head on a pilot 
coat, and he covers her tenderly with another : 
she is so small and frail it takes but little. 
Somehow it smells '' homey," with its mingled 
odor of tobacco and brine and man, and touches 
her chilled, lone soul like the honest clasp of a 
warm human hand, with a promise of rest and 
shelter to come ; and under its homely spell she 
falls asleep. 

And so these two poor human souls, tossed 
together for good or ill for a brief space, sleep 
their last together through the summer night. 
He, to no mortal awakening ; she, perchance, to 
a brighter dawn. 

THE END.